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. 

 

Sanjay Subhramanyam's Granta interview

 Granta has the following interview with Sanjay Subhramanyam- the brother of India's Foreign Minister. Strangely, at one time, Sanju was considered the brainier of the two. That was because nobody actually read his books. 

Editor:

What modern Indian literature made an impression in your youth?

None. People like me and Sanju read Enid Blyton.  

Did someone like R.K. Narayan matter to you? Did you develop any relationship to the Tamil intellectual world?

Sanju would have been about six or seven years old when the anti-Hindi movement in Tamil Nadu led to Congress being replaced by the anti-Brahmin DMK. Tambrams began thinking of settling in the North or even emigrating. 

RK Narayan was ahead of the curve in that he wrote for the paper associated with the anti-Brahmin Justice Party.

... The fear that haunts many people is of a genuine linguistic impoverishment, when groups in search of social and economic mobility will let go of their grasp of their mother tongues, fail to properly enter the Anglosphere, and remain in a kind of linguistic limbo or no man’s land.

In some states there is resentment that even second or third generation immigrants aren't learning the State language. What if our own urban youth follow this fashion? 

I hope this proves an exaggerated fear, though it is a legitimate one. These were issues that the post-independence modernizers failed to grapple with adequately.

Different States had different approaches and different success rates in spreading literacy. The Central Government did enter the educational field but its impact was limited. 

Editor:

Were they too concerned about further cracks and break-aways from the nation under construction

linguistic reorganization of the States went through. 

or was it more the inertia of a largely English-speaking bureaucracy that they were inheriting?

Bureaucrats played second fiddle to politicians. In any case, all civil servants learn the language of the State in which they serve. 

Did they have other options?

No. A Democracy can't impose a single language on a vast population.  

Subrahmanyam:

There were certainly no easy options, and still are none, but the matter required sustained political and intellectual engagement.

It required resources which Socialist India lacked.  

Certainly not the iron fist used in the Soviet Union to impose Russification and Cyrillization. In the first two decades after Independence, the southern states were probably not given enough of a voice in these discussions, as many of the dominant politicians on the national stage came from the ‘Hindi belt’.

Sadly Tamil politicians like Kamraj & Bhaktavatsalam were pro-Hindi. But Rajaji too had tried to make Hindi compulsory in schools when he formed a Ministry in Madras in 1937. This gave great impetus to what would become the DMK which took power in Tamil Nadu towards the end of the Sixties. Indira Gandhi had been careful to conciliate them and they supported her after she split from Congress. Kamraj's political career was finished.

After Nehru’s death, there were the violent anti-Hindi agitations and the invention in 1968 of what came to be called the ‘three-language formula’ – a national educational policy that mandated students learn English, Hindi, and one regional language – which was in turn perceived as asymmetric in the burdens it placed. In sum, the question remains a sort of open sore, albeit not the only one.

It didn't greatly matter. The problem facing most students was that the English teacher didn't know English. After the failure of Gandhi's 'Wardha Scheme' (Nai Talim), the Central Government became wary of the education issue. That's why the useless Maulana Azad was put in charge of it in the Fifties. 

Editor:

You were too young for the first major dosage of Maoism injected into Indian intellectuals, peasants, and tribals in the 1960s.

Would Mao & Ayub Khan arm and train the Naxals in the Siliguri gap? If the Chinese invaded and conquered Bengal they would reward their sycophants. The other question was whether the CPML could replace the CPM. The answer was no. If you shell out a little money, people will come forward to slit the throats of the Naxals.  

Nevertheless, at an intellectual level, especially in your field of history, the prominent presence of Marxists is unmistakable.

Indira Gandhi supported the Leftist historians and they ruled the roost from the Seventies onward.  

What was the source of the appeal of Marxism to Indian intellectual elites in the 1950s and 1960s and later?

Most people believed that Stalin had turned Russia into an industrial and scientific giant in the space of a generation. Could India achieve the same thing? Probably not. Still, why not pretend otherwise?

Subrahmanyam:

India was not that different in this respect from many other parts of the non-Western world, where Marxism was very appealing in the middle decades of the twentieth century, whether in Turkey, Japan, or Latin America. Further, after 1947, there was no sustained repression against Marxist intellectuals, as happened elsewhere.

The more militant ones were punished. Stalin himself advised the Indian Communists to ally with 'progressive forces' to achieve land reform. Since Communists had been doing quite well in elections in the Thirties, in some States, it made sense to follow the 'Browder thesis' and seek to take power through the ballot box. In 1957, the Left came to power in Kerala- this was hailed as the first time Communism had prevailed by democratic means.  

They were even able to assert themselves and become a kind of lobby, supporting and promoting each other, until a major factional struggle broke out, which it did in the 1960s.

Because of the Sino-Soviet split.  

The appeal of Marxism was of course its claim to unsentimental rigor, its concern for real social change, where the Congress by the 1950s had begun to lose credibility, even among its erstwhile supporters.

Congress had shown that it could do a worse job of running the country than the Brits. The Commies should be given a chance to show that they are even shittier than Congress.  

Eventually, the establishment Marxists allied to the Soviet Union’s line were outflanked on the left by the Maoists with their more radical agenda, but they still remained important.

The CPM prevailed over the 'Maoist' Naxals.  

There were also disparate groups of intellectuals who claimed to be ‘liberals’, but as the analyses by Ram Guha and Chris Bayly have shown, this is a term that is very difficult to make clear sense of in the Indian context.

It is easy enough. Either you are for free-markets or you aren't.  Rajaji's Swatantra party stands out as being for the free-market. But it was seen as reactionary and out of touch. A currency crisis forced Indira Gandhi to devalue & bend the knee to IMF 'structural adjustment'. This was deeply unpopular and was one reason the country moved to the Left. It must be said, the Vietnam war was another factor. The US seemed to be propping up all sorts of corrupt Dictators while the Left was on the side of the toiling masses in those countries. 

Some liberals were in favor of a free market and for less state intervention, while others were just ecumenical in their intellectual tastes,

they were culturally liberal & opposed to some orthodox practices.  

so that ‘liberal’ came to mean someone who was in her/his own view not doctrinaire.

There was little enthusiasm for the thing.  After all, the British Liberal party had declined greatly. 

The difficulty that the Marxists faced was that along with some remarkably creative minds like the great ancient historian D.D. Kosambi,

he was a mathematician 

or Ranajit Guha,

too stupid to get a PhD 

or Susobhan and Sumit Sarkar,

sound enough scholars connected to the Communist party.  

they also attracted many people who were extremely rigid, repetitive, and doctrinaire, and this became even more evident when they were the ones to call the shots in the institutional landscape.

Only the very stupid studied history. The even stupider taught it.  

Editor:

But there must be something more exceptional about the Indian situation.

It was a Democracy. Communist parties could come to power by winning elections. Also, the Soviet Union was a strong friend of India.  

Marxism made more headway in India than it did in many other former British colonies. The conditions seem to have been more propitious for its reception than, say, Pakistan with its larger, more formidable land-owning class.

Islam has good reason to hate Communism. Still, the State was happy to use some Communist intellectuals for its own purposes.  

Is part of the reason that the Congress, with its acquiescence toward landlords,

Mao himself had to be nice to landlords and 'kulaks'. They alone had the food surplus to feed his men. It is easy to say 'get rid of landlords. Get rid of caste.' but the result would be a power vacuum in the districts. Sooner or later, gangs of various types will fight each other for control.  

left itself vulnerable to criticism about persistent caste inequalities and the like?

Different castes could form their own parties and seek to build alliances so as to win elections and take power.  

Subrahmanyam:

From a certain point of view, the resentments created by Pakistan’s class structure should have helped the Marxists, except that by the late 1950s there was already a US-backed Army rule.

The crackdown on the Commies had occurred earlier.  To be fair, most Leftists were sound enough patriots. 

In India, while there was periodic repression, it was more limited, and the communist parties found a place in the system but at the price of a great deal of compromise.

They had to stop pretending they could win an armed struggle.  

They may have had a social and economic agenda, but their leadership was very much drawn from the upper castes. And in the case of West Bengal, over several decades of rule, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) became a machine for the distribution of patronage and thoroughly entrenched in a corrupt rural politics.

The CPM did do a certain amount of land-reform. About 2.3 million acres were redistributed. Hilariously, about 13 'surplus'  acres were taken from the widow of Charu Mazumdar (leader of the Naxals).  

Leaving aside the Maoists, who are not concerned with governing, the two other main parties have gradually been ‘normalized’. Concerns about caste-based inequality are now carried mainly by other parties.

Those 'concerns' are a license to loot the state.  

Editor:

You have recently written with reserved respect of the founder of Subaltern Studies, Ranajit Guha,

at one time people thought he was close to the big-shots in Moscow. He had attended a Communist Youth Conference in Paris after the war which was organised by the man who would become head of the KGB. 

a shadowy yet central figure in the writing of Indian history. But how do you judge the collective over time and as a whole?

People from 'backward' and Scheduled tribes and castes were becoming Chief Ministers at precisely the time when these cretins were pretending that the 'subaltern' can't speak.  

Why do Guha’s incisive raids on historiography — lucid, cutting, brimming with insight no matter how one judges them ultimately — appear so much stronger than later contributions of Subaltern Studies?

Guha was writing nonsense. He thought that the 'European Enlightenment' had a single theory of property. It didn't. It was aware that there were many different types of property regime. Sometimes they coexisted in the same District.  

What happened along the way?

Everybody emigrated. Their students were stupid and mad. Having to read dissertations written by imbeciles is no fun even if you are an imbecile yourself.  

Editor:

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has now been in power for more than a decade. Do you think there is anything like a right-wing intellectual milieu in the country?

Smart people aren't intellectual. Intellectuals aren't smart. 

Subrahmanyam:

There are relatively few historians, sociologists or anthropologists of quality in India today

or elsewhere.  

who both have genuine scholarly stature, and openly sympathize with the BJP. To be sure, there are now such people like Sanjeev Sanyal

an economist and former Banker 

who have penetrated the market for popular history and biography with some degree of success. But this is easy enough with the backing of trade presses and their marketing machinery, even if one writes slapdash and derivative books.

rather than stupid nonsense. 

Editor:

Writing about Indian liberalism has become an academic cottage industry. Some, like Christopher Bayly, have argued that it exercised ‘hegemony’ over Indian thought from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth.

Indian liberals were liberal. Indian conservatives were conservative. The Viceroyalty of Ripon was the high water mark of liberalism. But Ripon's attempt to 'devolve' more power to local authorities failed. District Collectors simply filled the Council with yes-men. 

 Liberalism could not take root at the grassroots level. Religion, on the other hand, did enable 'mass contact'.  Caste and language too were important. Nobody really cared if one or two barrister joined the Viceroy's Council. 

But weren’t other ways of thinking in the country more important than this relatively small kernel?

Yes. Religion was way more important.  Sanju won't admit this obvious fact. 

Subrahmanyam:

Intellectual history in India, and the history of political thought more particularly, is still a fledgling field.

Nope. We know all about it. There really isn't very much to it.  

Bayly and Ram Guha were amongst those who gave it a real push,

Bayly, maybe. Guha- no. He had a 'great man' theory of history. Edward Shils, the American Sociologist, did some quite extensive field-work but few Indians read his work. On the other hand, many relied on Marcus Franda's book on the Naxals. I may mention, the French philosopher Bernard Henri Levi came to India and then Bangladesh because he was enthused by the story of a heroic Maoist movement in rural Bengal. He was chucked out of Bangladesh after published an interview with a Maoist who derided Sheikh Mujib as the tool of Moscow. Pakistan's Yayha Khan was close to Beijing and thus should have been allowed to massacre Bengalis.  

and now there have been other contributions, by historians as well as philosophers and literary scholars. But the difficulty remains the focus on a narrow band of Indian thinkers who mostly wrote in English. And even these are often treated superficially. I wa s quite surprised to see how badly Bayly misunderstood someone like K.M. Panikkar, a

brilliant historian and writer who rose high in the politics of the Princely states before becoming a diplomat 

gadfly and mercenary who became a strange sort of Nehruvian ideologue.

No. He wrote well and was interesting to read but he wasn't an ideologue.  Some in the Indian security establishment- perhaps Sanju's own daddy- thought he had been soft on China. 

What is obviously needed is a set of studies of different regional traditions on the one hand, and a debate on the adequacy of categories like ‘reformers’, ‘conservatives’, ‘liberals’ and ‘secularists’ on the other.

There is no need to waste more time on this. There are negative returns to this sort of mindless 'research'.  

Editor:

For the past few decades India has been remarkably stable compared to its neighbors, where there have been either dramatic regime changes and collapses or ongoing instability.

India has always been stable- even during 'Quit India' the Government prevailed though the enemy was at the gate.  

What kind of effect do you think this stability has had on Indian intellectual and literary culture?

There wasn't very much of it and what there was was boring shite.  

Subrahmanyam:

There has not been any drastic regime change in India comparable to Pakistan or Bangladesh, or a civil war as has happened in Sri Lanka with the Tamil separatist movement. There is no doubt that such changes and upheavals have had a major effect on cultural life in those countries. Meanwhile in India, even though national elections have been regularly held every five years since 1999, the political changes have been more subtle and their effects on intellectual and literary culture have been harder to discern. One turning point was

Rahul's refusing to take over as PM and lead his party to victory in 2014. The result was that 'Hindutva' nationalism has taken over from Nehruvian 'Secular Socialism'.  

the emergence of the BJP as the dominant national party in 2014, a position it continues to hold.

Thanks to Modi. The big surprise is that the BJP has won a big majority in West Bengal. The intellectual climate has changed even in Calcutta. 

This has led to the withdrawal of state patronage to many groups and individuals on the intellectual and cultural scene who had been important in earlier periods of Congress dominance, though some have cleverly navigated the transition.

They hadn't been important. They had been sleeping peacefully while cosseted by the government.  

This has gone hand in hand with the dismantling of some key educational institutions, including universities.

They couldn't be made any shittier.  

Paradoxically, one effect of this has been to reduce the importance of Delhi as a pole, in relation to many of the regional centres.

Delhi is much more affluent now and has acquired a distinct identity. The rise of the AAP party showed that the 'common man' now had much higher aspirations.  

At the same time, the obvious growth in religious and communitarian tensions

they are much less than they were in 1947. Why pretend otherwise?  

has meant an expansion of subjects considered to be taboo, which are not addressed because of self-censorship.

Do you want some jihadis to turn up and chop your hand off? No? Then shut the fuck up.  

The media, both in print and electronic, has particularly been affected by this, though there are some refreshing new trends like the rise of political stand-up comedy.

The CM of Punjab is a comedian.  

Some participants and observers now hope that new sources of cultural and intellectual patronage will emerge, for example from the newly rich in the corporate world. But nothing guarantees either the good taste or the sound ethical orientation of such actors. If anything, my experience with them tells me to be very skeptical.

The newly rich want to get richer. That means investing in STEM subjects and skills training not wasting money on stupid historians.  

Editor:

Historically, a great deal of what became Indian literary culture flowed from Bengal.

Then Bengalis took over from the Brits and wrecked the place. 

When one turns to contemporary India and power, it’s unmistakable how much flows out of Gujarat.

The Arya Samaj was founded by a Gujarati. Parsis are Gujarati. Both Jinnah & Nehru's daughter married Parsis. Jinnah's descendants are Parsis not Muslims.  

Not only the leader of the country but also two of its wealthiest businessmen.

There are plenty of very wealthy Parsi businessmen- e.g. Jinnah's descendants. 

It seems like no accident that Gujaratis occupy a unique place in the Indian state and business. How do you account for this recent resurgence or prominence of Gujaratis in modern Indian society or has it just always been there, starting with Gandhi himself?

Starting with Dayanand Saraswati.  

Subrahmanyam:

Not only Gandhi but Jinnah was from Gujarat, and Gujaratis played a key role in the emergence of Bombay (Mumbai) as India’s leading metropolis in the second half of the nineteenth century. Earlier, between about 1400 and 1800, Gujarat was in many ways a key hub of Indian Ocean commerce, with Gujaratis playing a trading role from the Red Sea and East Africa, to Java and south-eastern China.

Gandhi himself says that his own 'banyan' class helped finance the expansion of the East India Company.  

The Gujarati intellectual and religious tradition was also quite unique, combining orthodox and heterodox forms of Islam, with Hinduism, Jainism and Zoroastrianism.

They all shared a strong work-ethic. Moreover, they believed that character was the true source of wealth. This promoted 'high trust' business networks.  

During the period of the British Empire, the Gujarati diaspora spread further, and in the second half of the twentieth century, they came to settle in increasing numbers in the UK and US. Perhaps because of their reputation as astute business people, the intellectual and cultural role of Gujaratis has been neglected,

but not their religious role. The Swaminarayan movement is Gujarati. Some of the best temples around the world are run by them.  

leaving aside the Parsis (or Zoroastrians). In recent decades, the region’s reputation has also been marred by important incidents of religious violence such as the pogrom carried out against Muslims in 2002.

After Muslims massacred Hindu pilgrims.  

In any event, we know Bengal’s intellectual prominence after 1860 was not based on any corresponding economic prosperity.

Calcutta continued to flourish. The University of Calcutta, set up in 1857, aimed for excellence and did in fact create a large class of graduates with broad intellectual and aesthetic tastes. It must be said, the Bengali 'bhadralok' retain this to this day- though they may be living far away from Bengal.  

It remains to be seen if Gujarat’s economic surge will have an intellectual counterpart.

i.e. will Gujarat produce a class of over-credentialized cretins who demand that the country destroy its economy and surrender to Pakistan?  The answer is- no. Don't be silly. 

Editor:

How would you characterize or describe Indian capitalism today?

There is too little of it in some of the most densely populated parts of the country.  

Someone like Amartya Sen lobs praise at earlier generations of capitalists, such as the Tata family, who – like the Carnegies – build scientific institutes and ‘gave back’ to Indian society. The new capitalists like Gautam Adani

are Hindu. Hindus are very evil.  

seem different, but also perfectly compatible with the Hindutva program of the BJP. Has a break of any kind transpired?

Subrahmanyam:

I have an abiding interest in the long history of capitalism in India, in its many manifestations and from early modern times onwards. The Tatas were very good at managing their public image and papering over some of the more unsavory aspects of their history, with regard to the opium trade or financing British colonial expeditions.

The Parsis rose thanks to the British. What is remarkable is that some Parsis took the lead in Nationalist politics. One reason for this may have been police indifference to Muslim violence targeting Parsi neighbourhoods. Often, the cause of the attack was some article published by a Parsi intellectual.  

But they did provide a certain model of philanthropy and personal frugality, which was then adopted by members of groups like Infosys, as distinct from the ostentatious vulgarity of the Ambanis, for example. 

Even worse is the rise of the middle class more particularly if they are Hindu. Also, why has Modi not surrendered to Pakistan and converted to Islam? Is it because Gujarat has failed to produce a class of intellectuals?  

The real problem of the last three or four decades has been the explosion of the dollar billionaire class (of whom there are now nearly three hundred), who often practice versions of pretty open crony capitalism.

This was the case in Nehru's India- or Jyoti Basu's Bengal.  

Of course, this happened elsewhere too, as David Cannadine’s study of Andrew Mellon in the US shows

Which Indian businessman was appointed Finance Minister? TTK. But that was under Nehru.  

The real question is whether it will be possible to produce a capitalism with a real emphasis on smaller entrepreneurs, and markets that are competitive rather than manipulated and monopolized by Indian ‘robber barons’.

In other words, Sanju wants a capitalism in which the capitalist has no fucking capital and thus can't gain economies of scope and scale.  

The issue also remains whether this is a process in which participation will go beyond the usual suspects, which is to say the mercantile castes and Brahmins.

Patels are agriculturists. So are Jat Sikhs. They seem to do very well in business.  

Some significant counterexamples do exist of course. I note that some analysts are still optimistic about this ‘trickle-down’, as works on India’s ‘new capitalists’ suggest. However, the jury is still out.

The jury ran away when they discovered that nobody would pay them. 

Editor:

When one listens to the BJP home minister Amit Shah talk about the greatest threats facing India, it can sometimes be difficult to tell whether he and the rest of the BJP think it’s Naxalites, Khalistan supporters, farmers, human rights activists and western NGOs, or Pakistan.

It is Pakistan. Them guys have nukes.  

Then there is the matter of trying to maneuver between the US and China.

The US has told India to fuck off. It has to find a modus vivendi with China.  

What do you think the greatest strategic dangers to India actually are?

Pakistan. They are bound to try some stupid shit. 

Subrahmanyam:

As Tzvetan Todorov wrote in his book The Fear of Barbarians (2008), many forms of nationalism generate paranoia, and see enemies everywhere, both within and without.

Communist paranoia is worse. Todorov was Bulgarian.  

To me, one can translate this into a different language. There is obviously concern on the part of the Indian state that with a form of accelerated economic growth that is accompanied by widening inequalities, various sizeable groups of disenfranchised people – whether the urban poor, or marginal peasants and footloose rural labor, or tribals whose lands have been expropriated – will want better political representation and living conditions.

Such people aren't 'disenfranchised'. They have the vote and know how to use it to get 'last mile delivery' of essential items.  

These struggles could turn violent in India, as elsewhere.

What would be the point? Killing the golden goose means no more golden eggs which can be sold to finance the welfare system.  

That is undoubtedly a long-term threat to the viability of the political system as it stands, and it needs more than band-aids as a response.

What it doesn't need is advise from a cretin.  

On the external front, the focus has been on threats from Pakistan and China for decades now. But it has turned out that in the short to medium term, the real ‘rogue’ polity is the US, which cannot be counted on as an ally either by India, or even by Europe, or Japan.

India had hoped that something would come of the 'Quad'- i.e. a naval alliance against China. 

The emergent new world order of which my father – the defense strategist K. Subrahmanyam – wrote, in the years before his passing in 2011, seems hopelessly optimistic now. India will have to brace itself for a rough ride, but so will the rest of the world.

Indeed. India will have to defund non-STEM subjects and focus on imparting work-skills. It will need to create more and more Marshallian industrial districts capable of doing their own R&D. Raise general purpose productivity and supply becomes more elastic. But you also have to fix the Justice system so total factor productivity can rise. This is stuff Sanjeev Sanyal understands. Sanju, sadly, has wasted his life. If you can't understand the present, you can't understand the past.