Is Sanjay Subhramanyam the ghost of Vasco da Gama?

Like me, Sanjay Subhramanyam, the author of ‘Is Indian Civilization a Myth?- is a middle aged Tam Bram of repellent aspect and ludicrously half-baked views . Still, notwithstanding such epigenetic drawbacks, his ancestral heritage also included an evolving, Neurath’s raft type, concept of territories where it was permissible to sojourn or settle without loss of caste- i.e. injury to the Manes & thus hysteresis related harm to the commonweal- as opposed to other territories where the matter was either doubtful or definitely reckless. The same was true for Kashmiri Kauls, Bengali Babus, Jalandhari Joshis and so on. Essentially, India has developed immunity to the idiocy of hereditary Brahmins & aleatory Shramans. We are welcome to emigrate- Mother Ind will thank us for it- but forbidden to appease the Ancestors solely by recycling witless shite in our new abode because to do so would be to become a Mephistophelian Cross Roads demon offering Faustian pacts to that new Oikumene’s  Credentialist Academy or crapulous Shatter zone.

Taken together, Bhraminical notions of permissible settlement areas and peripatetic fora for prattling shite, generated a ‘ship of Theseus’ like notion of Indian Civilization that a plurality of Pan Indian Castes autonomously subscribed to and sustained for millennia.

Unfortunately, Sanju Baba doesn’t believe that Civilizations can be like the ship of Theseus- i.e. something which abides though all its components are swapped out and replaced- rather he is the Vasco da Gama of a very different type of Ship- something which passes for Scholarship but which is actually a ghostly caravel out of ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ or some other such Disneyland attraction, by a meretricious recourse to which, History professors discharge their child-minding duties at American Colleges.
The shameful aspect of it is that Sanju isn’t actually a proper, Kal Penn type, stoner American Sophomore but a P.G. Woodhouse reading desi transplant. In other words, the fellow started off as a feeble & four eyed Gussie Fink-Nottle same as the rest of us.
Suppose Sanju Baba had asked his granny- ‘Pati, what is Indian Civilization? Is it a myth? Did the British invent it? Or was it the Turukas? Kindly enlighten me due to I iz writing a book on the topic.’

 What would Sanju’s granny have replied?

I don’t know but my guess is something like- ‘Shave your face you disgusting little poddiyan! Only 5 years old but already putting on such airs and graces is it? Remember the song ‘not everybody with mustache is Bharati, not every beardie is Tagore.’ As for your question re. Indian civilization- it is not a Myth, or Noble Lie, but a Convention- i.e. a David Lewis type solution to a Co-ordination problem which has persisted and been propagated by our own ancestors for about 2000 years- give or take.’

Sanju Baba, no doubt, would have replied ‘It is not convincing to speak of an Indian Civilization that had been perfected by the Gupta era. Clearly something which hasn’t been perfected can’t be a Schelling focal point because …urm… well I’m actually an Economist so I know about these things.’

Granny’s riposte would be- ‘Fuck you know from Econ you worthless bearded retard? It’s when things aren’t ‘perfect, homeostatic, closed systems’ that Co-ordination problems gain salience in a manner which generates the notion of a broader mechanism design univocity- i.e. a reverse ‘Zomia’ of ‘Governability’ –  or Civilizational unity, underlying what is local and particular. Since you are Indian, belong to the Brahmin caste, and are emic to Indian Civilization, it follows that it would be a singular act of filial impiety, a nihilistic act of epistemic vandalism, to pretend that Indian civilization is a myth invented by acharabrashta Nehruvians or anti-casteist Nativist nut-jobs and that India is merely a collection of demon haunted cross-roads, from which all purely primrose paths lead to Hell, and not at all the cohesive ‘karma bhumi’ where the fire walk of rituals faithfully performed- a duty owed your Manes- repairs a collective Ethos and restores the possibility of Cosmic apocatastasis.’

Sanju replies- ‘But, Granny, some White people who have said the same thing! So they must be wrong coz they iz White and don’t take oil bath or eat thairr shadam.’

Granny- ‘Nonsense. White people don’t say anything sensible at all. Even if they do- you just kindly ignore them & wobble your head & say ‘India phery hot!’ till they go away. All Whiteys are either demons or Mleccha evil-doers- for whose destruction Vishnu takes misleading incarnations like Vamana, Buddha, Gandhi etc- and, unless deluded by the Kalki of Eco-Feminism- they will try to entice you either  to become a Christian and eat beef or else to grow a stinking great beard and smoke beedis and pretend to be some horrible sort of JNU jhollawallah constantly eating Gobi Manchurian at some foul smelling dhaba rather than properly tucking into thairr shadam. Mind it kindly. Aiyayo.’

Sanju- ‘But, Pati, my own researches have revealed that several centuries after the arrival of Vasco da Gama on Indian shores, there was no single dominant idea of India in writings by Westerners: several contradictory views existed depending on whether one wrote from Madurai or Agra, whether one was Protestant or Catholic, whether one knew Persian or Sanskrit, and so on. However, by the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a new homogeneity can be found in views of what India was. This picture, produced by Western Orientalists and their Indian assistants, tended to focus on Sanskrit as the true source of Indian culture (demoting Persian in the process), and there was also a search for an Indian Golden Age. Minority voices contested this view, but they were few and far between. Indian popular culture was also largely set aside in favor of an obsession with high culture.’

Granny- ‘What did you expect? Ignorant White people talked different types of ignorant nonsense about India. Once some money was spent on finding out the truth- well, if not the truth, then formulating a colligationally coherent Research Program- then, naturally, by reason of a textual availability bias, Sanskrit learning and ‘Margi’ High Culture predominated in shaping their idea of India, the same way that the Renaissance restored Greek learning as the fountainhead of their idea of European Christendom. 
BTW, Persian was on its way out already because the meta-metaphorhicity of sabak-e-hindi shite exponentially increased semiotic slippage away from both Sanity and Islam’s Arabic roots.
 ‘The bottom line is nothing sinister or indeed surprising happened to the idea of India whether emic or etic. Textual availability bias created Schelling focal points for the underlying colligational Co-ordination problem and so capacitance diversity got Canalised in a convergently Baldwinian manner.
‘Still, that’s not to say White people aint totally shit- don’t marry a fucking Mleccha Mem Sahib, hear me, boy? She might mistake you for a rational human being rather than a typical Tambram idiot who requires being whacked on the head with a rolling pin from time to time. Anyway, we’ve got a great big, bearded, bharat natyam dancing, Sumo wrestler of a Freak Show attraction already lined up for you to marry- provided you settle down to writing Code- but, okay, re. White historians- sure, they may have improved a bit once they got Indian assistants. BUT what’s important is NOBODY FUCKING CARED! Historians are shit, have zero power and also they are shit and did I mention they were totally fucking shit? I did? Well then. 
‘Anyway, the British Queen- Mountbatten as he was known- slyly fucked off back to Blighty long before you were born. So just ignore them stupid cunt-face White Historians and concentrate on writing Code. Have regular oil bath. Eat only thairr shadam. & shave your fucking face you fucking retard! You think they’ll give you a Green Card to Yemrika if you look like Osama fucking Laden you worthless shithead? ‘

Sanju- ‘But, Pati, isn’t it It is remarkable that both Indian reformers and neo-traditionalists of the 19th century bought into this view, and a strange complicity came to exist between these two apparently opposed strands?’
Granny- ‘Nonsense. It isn’t remarkable at all. What you say is true of all colligational availability cascades which yield Credentialist rents.’
Sanju- ‘But isn’t it a fact that the epoch from the 12th to the 18th centuries was portrayed in dark hues, and if some felt Westernisation was the antidote to the malady, others proposed a return to the real roots of Indian civilisation?
Granny- You stupid fuckwit, don’t you understand that between the 12th and 18th Century Islam was burgeoning on the sub-continent? What did you expect rent-seeking Christian & Hindu writers to do? Say “Islam is way cool. Let’s all convert?’ How could they say that and still draw a rent as exponents of their own Religion with a claim to obligatory passage point status within the State’s interessement mechanism for Soft Power? Don’t forget, this was before the Saudis got all them petro-dollars.
Sanju- Still, Pati, you have to admit, something very sinister was going on. What was this pristine culture to which a return was proposed? Carnatic music played on the violin (an 18th-century import from Europe), or dances performed to the texts of Kshetrayya that came precisely from this period!
Granny- ‘Fuck off. Kindly read the Jaimini Mimamsa Sutra you fucking acharabrashta Smarta poddiyan. Substitutability is constructive of Essence. Without it, there is no Intentionality- i.e. no Yagnya, no Apurvata, no karma kanda.
‘Culture can not have the quality of being ‘pristine’ without there having been extensive Ship of Theseus style substitution. Otherwise it is not Culture but Noumenal Nature- a totally different bag, you worthless jhollawallah cunt. 
‘BTW Kshetrayya- whose biopic you watched on Doordarshan in the Seventies- died in the Seventeenth Century. How fucking ignorant and deracinated are you actually?’
Sanju- But, Pati, in north India, ultra-purists insisted that Dhrupad should be favoured over Khayal, and invented a bogus Vedic genealogy for the former, forgetting that it was heavily influenced by Mughal court culture.
Granny- Really? The Dagars forgot Mughal court culture? Suck my dick you worthless piece of shit!
Sanju- ‘ As for devotional religion such as we know it today in India, most of it is the product of the period from the 14th century onwards, whether in Maharashtra, Punjab or Bengal.’

Granny, ‘OMG! Do you really not understand that stuff from the 15th century is gonna be based on stuff from the 14th and so on? Okay, you iz a Tambram- i.e. a fuckwit by definition. But even the stupidest drunkard of a Tambram retard knows that Tamils didn’t invent Bhakti and then export it to the Bhaiyyas up North.. It’s there in the Rg Veda. North Indian Riti poetry goes to a whole heap of trouble integrating Bhakti with Purva Mimamsa & Sankhya & so on. Read Tulsi you worthless shit. He’s got a better sense of humor than P.G. Woodhouse- God of the Indglish speaking Tambram- keep that in mind and, babe, that fucking two lota maryada bhakta U.P bhaiyya, like he will jus’ blow your mind- no kidding. Aiyayo’.
Sanju- ‘Yes, well, the truth is horrible British Whiteys only got to rule over India and make us wear chaddi rather than go commando due to some White historian wrote a book which showed that Brits were so nice and Indians really liked them and I wanna be a White man, Pati! Do you think if I just let my beard overgrown my face and body and, like, it turns white, people will take me for a white Dorai?’
Granny- ‘Taking the last part of your question first- the beard don’t fool nobody. Talcum powder is the way to go. As for that shite about British historians forcing us to wear chaddi- Fuck off. White historians wrote shite which nobody read. They had no power.  Some Brits in India made money and used that money in a corrupt manner to get the British Navy and Army and so on to make them yet richer.  So long as the money train kept rolling- India was British. When it stopped the Brits did a corrupt deal with the Indian power elite and slyly fucked off.  What some fuckwit wrote, whether or not it was published or found its way into some dusty archive, is fucking irrelevant.
‘The truth is, Sanju Baba, you’re just as fucking stupid as Ranajit Guha! You think there was some big conspiracy just coz some White shitheads wrote some crap and some Indian shitheads, mainly Bongs, wrote similar shite. I told you already. Fuck history- only shitheads write it and fucking Right Wing Hindutva nutjob bloggers get worked up over it- just concentrate on writing Computer Code and get a proper job with INFOSYS. Don’t let them fob you off with a Professorship or a History Prize or a Beard Support Grant or something of that sort. Incidentally, your notion of what ‘pristine culture’ ought to look like is totally fucked in the head. Don’t you understand, the fact that proto-R.S.S types were peeing upstream from your own fucking bathing ghat means that you have been doing tarpana with their urine? All that time spent wanking in the library book-stacks and the Carnatic violin is all you could come up with? Fuck is wrong with you?’

Sanju- ‘R.S.S Svayamsevaks are oppressing me!  I wanted to dedicate myself to English only and write Cricket stories like P.G. Woodhouse. By their occult practices, the khaki- knickerwallahs made me learn Hindi and Urdu and Persian and Arabic and other such Mleccha languages! All them fucking Chitpavans are just a bunch of crypto-Turukas, if not half-caste Whiteys! 
‘I have been grossly polluted, Aiyayo! Gimme my oil bath and thairr shadam! I must perform prayaschitam! : if cultural cleansing is to start in India, we might begin by returning the khaki shorts of the R.S.S to their place of origin.’

Granny- ‘But khaki shorts were invented in India. What? You think the Europeans wore khaki shorts previously? In any case, last thing we need is them RSS gerontocrats parading around in the nuddy. Chee, chee dirty boy kindly evict that owl which has taken up residence in your beard. OMG! It isn’t an owl at all! It’s Teesta Setalvad! Heeeeeelp!’ 

Sanjay Subhramanyam- ‘Ha ha ha ha! I yam the ghost of Vasco da Gama. Ha ha ha ha! I will eat the brains of Pres. Obama! Ha ha ha ha!’

Ramachandra Guha’s admonition to the Indglish Speaking Classes

Make Magic your sole Study now in Science we so have sinned

& Say, not Vande Mataram, but ‘Hail to Mother Ind!’

That for Gandhi & for Nehru the Governess she hired

Still has lessons for us tho’ Mary Poppins has retired

Ranajit Guha & the barzakh of Bliss

Okay, I was wrong to write disrespectfully of Ranajit Sir. He’s 90 and a sweet guy with a lovely wife and still drinks a glass of red wine now and then and, what’s more, has gone back to writing in Bengali which, gotta say, is an absolute rasgulla of a language.
Still, because of the Zizekian Aufhebungsverstag of the Hegelian Sorites of the Gramscian deconstruction of the Post Kristevan Chora- like d’uh! as if you didn’t know– I am obliged to insist that it is only my own fond re-imagining of him as the Blue Angel of Vienna’s Gurtel Road Red Light District which, like, totally sublates any ’empirico-critical’ (i.e. relationist rather than privilegedly substantivist) depiction of him coz the only possible merit of that stripe of shite is that it might militate against some Univocal, Pedantic, and utterly rent arbitraging Bourgeois, conception of  a Static, Parmenidian, ‘inter-subjective Reality’.

Anyroad, just thought I’d get that of my chest ‘fore chowing down, or vomiting over, the subject of this post- viz. how the Akhbari conception of barzakh, as an isthmus which unites what it divides, radically changes our reception of Guha’s latest book- in which the Hegelian ‘limit’ is all that stands in the way of Ranajit’s becoming unanimous with, his hero, Ramram Basu and, Ramram Basu with Ramram’s hero, Bharatchandra Ray and how, like, the true, prayerful, Bliss of dynamic Anandamangalam is revealed to be Universal History’s playing holi or rasa lila with Ind’s peasantry, which- to fuckwit ex-pats, like yours truly- is as the Goddess Annapurna, whose rice we still relish more than caviare or truffles.

Guha commences his short book by rehearsing the utterly egregious argument that, by Hegel’s efforts-
‘World-history became synonymous with “Reason in History.” This is a view of history that allows all the concreteness to be drained out of the phenomena which constitute the world and its historicality. How such abstraction is brought about by the logic of Aufhebung, that is, “the act of superseding” whereby “denial and preservation, i.e., affirmation, are bound together,” has been demonstrated by Marx in some of his commentaries on Hegelian texts.
‘He shows, for instance, that, in Hegel’s ‘Elements of the Philosophy of Right’, the superseding of Civil law  equals Morality,  the superseding of Morality equals the Family, the superseding of Family equals Civil Society, the superseding of Civil society equals the State, the the superseding of the State equals World History.’
At this point, let us pause and ask whether to our modern understanding, this view of Hegel has any utility. Yes, you might answer. It adds to a data-set confirming our apriori intuition that Continental fuckwit Professors have always been fuckwits and fucking unclean Continental types to boot. But, what if Hegel was just a Careerist who would have said anything to fill up his lecture hall? In that case Hegel is the solution of a co-ordination problem for the shitheads of his time. That’s interesting because we have a lot of information about shit-headery on the Continent at precisely Hegel’s time, so there’s a big data set going begging here which is gonna help us with our theory of Schelling focal point selection- which is undoubtedly really really important to Econ, Linguistics, Math, Philosophy (think Lewis on Conventions), etc
My own take on Hegel, based on a salutary and impartial ignorance of his writings and milieu, is that it’s a blind- i.e. avaricious- groping towards what we would now call a Homotopy Type theory and gained salience for that reason- i.e. its a dark Heraclitean fire prefiguring the glint in the eye of a Research Program still far from puberty.
Another way of approaching Hegel is to think of Reception as Canalisation and Expression as Capacitance diversity such that the guy is really speaking about a theory of where to site Waterwheels and turbines so they generate the most ‘profit’.
On neither view- which cash out as each other by cellular automata theory- does Hegel, to our present understanding, throw away information (if he did, fuck him, move on) and present us with a view of history that ‘allows all the concreteness to be drained out of the phenomena which constitute the world and its historicality’- as Guha says. The fact is one type of Hegelianism, Muller’s for example, is a sort of slingshot argument that only one big (I think, non-cognitivist) fact exists. Marx’s ‘humbug of a Baronised Yankee’, Benjamin Thompson a.k.a  Count Rumford, whose experimental work helped the theory of thermodynamics, actually, albeit indirectly, contributes a non-mischievous sort of neo-Hegelianism which resurfaces in Lefty discourse despite the best efforts of Marx and Engels and other such Frost Giants committed to freezing up the Social Landscape.
For India, of course, Marx did what Manu no longer could. But don’t blame the fucking White Man for it.  Boulding, Haldane- lots of smart people came to India and were blown away by the beauty and human potential of our Poor. They knew the Math and tried to warn us against our own Gandhian or Gramscian or Guhaian fuckwits. Like we’d listen to Mlecchas when we have Marxists of our own!

Anyroad, getting back to Guha, he continues-
‘The outcome of this serial Aufhebung is to displace these entities from “their actual existence” and transform each of them into a philosophical concept so that, says Marx, my true religious existence is my existence in the philosophy of religion; my true political existence is my existence in the philosophy of law; my true natural existence, my existence in the philosophy of nature; my true artistic existence, existence in the philosophy of art; my true human existence, my existence in philosophy. Likewise the true existence of religion, the state, nature, art, is the philosophy of religion, of nature, of the state and of art. By the same token, historicality as the true historical existence of man in the world is converted by the act of superseding into philosophy of history and the concreteness of the human past made to yield to the concept of World-history. Which is why that concept and the uses to which it has been put in Hegel’s philosophy of history will engage us in the argument developed in these pages.’

So, Guha is not writing about Hegel as yielding information on focal point evolution w.r.t the notion of World-History as the limit of a Research Program in Ethics- no! not at all! why should he? He emigrated from India in 1959, dude. Indians, Hindus- take me for example- are forbidden to continue thinking or reading the moment they ‘cross the black water’, else they lose caste. Indeed, their thinking must become a caricature of the stupid availability cascades prevalent in their grand-father’s time.
Thus, Guha isn’t interested in Hegel but in the shite written by a slanderous fuck-wit of a drunken journalist and failed Economist- i.e. someone scarcely less scurrilous or more sober than yours truly- who fucking died forty years before he was born (I’m still alive- physically, that is. Morally- not so much.)

‘Aufhebung amounts to the “transcending of a conceptual entity,” as Marx points out in his reading of a parallel series from the Encyclopaedia where each term transcends the one that has gone before.
“Thus, private property as a concept is transcended in the concept of morality,” and so forth, until the last term, absolute knowledge, emerges hierarchically as the highest in which all the others are dissolved and affirmed at the same time.’
Is Guha right? Well, sure, why not? It may be that a Research Program in History or Philosophy or Logic or whatever the fuck it was Hegel was up to, always has the terminus that its first promoter or auteur, wants it to have. So Hilbert’s program must have the terminus Hilbert thought it would. I suppose there’s a way to save this notion. My own R.P of meta-metaphoricity & ontological dysphoria might, for all I know, militate to that same end. But if I knew, I wouldn’t do it. Why run a program if you already know the output? What’s the fucking point? Why not just say ‘Hegel was a fucking racist cunt’ and be done with it?
Maybe that’s what Guha is doing, but in an ultra-polite Bhadralok manner-
‘In much the same way, the order of supersession in the aforementioned series taken from the Philosophy of Right culminates in the transcendence of World-history by the concept of God or Geist, as it is made clear not only in that text but in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History as well. Transcendence entails, in this last instance, a claim to superior morality in favor of World-history. The latter, constructed transcendentally into a providential design, “can be seen as a theodicy, a justification of the ways of God,” according to Hegel himself. And “what we call God” is, to put it in his own words, “goodness, not just as a general idea but also as an effective force.” Thus World-history, “the plan of providence,” acquires an aura of moral sanctity by definition, while the state, a key link in the chain of supersessions and the agency that promotes such a plan as the “concrete manifestation” of “the ethical whole,” comes to “constitute ethical life” itself. It is in this way that World-history managed to reach the high moral ground climbing on the back of philosophy. The latter, for its part, has proved itself truly to be a child of the Age of Imperialism. Going by Plutarch’s story about that meeting between Diogenes and Alexander in Corinth, there was a time when philosophers were eager to keep their distance from world conquerors. Not so in the post-Columbian
era when it would be possible for one of its most distinguished thinkers (sic!)to write ‘world history moves on a higher plane than that to which morality properly belongs. . . . The deeds of the great men who are the individuals of world history . . . appear justified not only in their inner significance . . . but also in a secular sense. But from this latter point of view, no representations should be made against world-historical deeds and those who perform them by moral circles to which such individuals do not belong.'”
Guha, Sir, if Hegel is ‘one of the most distinguished thinkers’ in this field and he is a stupid racist cunt then why are we fucking still talking about this field? The Berlin Wall fell. Nobody is interested in fucking Hegel or Marx or Lenin or Stalin or Mao. Fuck ’em- they’re as dead as Queen Anne . Why critique them? What’s the point?
Guha answers-
‘Our critique, which stands at the limit of World-history, has no compunction whatsoever in ignoring this advice (i.e. the Great Man theory of History) . From the point of view of those left out of World-history this advice amounts to condoning precisely such “world-historical deeds”—the rape of continents, the destruction of cultures, the poisoning of the environment—as helped “the great men who [were] the individuals of world history” to build empires and trap their subject populations in what the pseudo-historical language of imperialism could describe as Prehistory.’
Fuck me, Guha Sahib! That’s the point of your critique? You’re really saying that your worthless books help us do something we can do for ourselves far more easily- viz. saying rape is bad, o.k? genocide is real bad, o.k? fucking up the environment really aint cool, o.k? Fuck is wrong with you, Guha Sahib?
How fucking stupid do you think we are actually? If we don’t read your shite we won’t know that genocide is bad? Really? Go fuck yourself you worthless cunt. Or sodomize Amartya Sen. Same difference really.
What is wrong with you Bengali mules?
My guess is that you people stopped going, as kids, to the village Mullah, to learn Persian and Arabic. But that immediately cuts you off from the demotic, that is democratic, Baul, minstrel tradition. Thus your ‘Romantic’ rebellion wasn’t Romantic at all but a forced retreat to a blinkered Scholasticism upon which European Theory could engraft itself in a manner doubly mischievous.
To see why, think for a moment of the Hegelian ‘limit’ as Ibn Arabi’s barzakh or Abhinava’s Antarabhaava– this immediately changes your reception of Riti poetry and thus Ramram Basu.
So what if doing so doesn’t profit you in terms of providing a recipe for yet another worthless book?
 ‘Chetana ham bhikkhave kamam vadami. ‘ Only intentions matter for all that matters is matters 
of the heart- whether you call it History or Hysteresis or, as Tagore tells us, Death’s cardiac diastole and casual-all-too-casual healing touch


What concerned you was ‘the representation of the colonial past held in thrall by a narrowly defined politics of Statism’ and thus the inadequacy of your brand of historiography.
The good news is that you were and are a shit-head. Your brand of historiography is just a wank. Nobody cares about it- at least nobody who matters, i.e. nobody with a heart.
Pace in Requiem, goo-ha, write more of your shite. Leave it to people like me to actually take the trouble to go and take a dump on the doorstep of every Louvre (what? It sounds like ‘loo’)  and fart in the crowded lift of…urm…can’t think what, but I sure can describe my fart. Which, ultimately, is all the historiographer can do.


You write- If limit, as defined by Aristotle, is “the first thing outside which there is nothing to be found and the first thing inside which everything is to be found,” its function in the title may be understood as a signal of our attempt to explore the space beyond World-history.’
Urm, no. You are talking shite. Nobody, in Europe, since Cauchy, defines Limit like that. It’s stupid to do so. 
In Islam, the concept of barzakh- but also a pervasive, ‘Sufi’,  relationist soteriology- think Ahmed Ghazzali’s love dialectic between the ‘master and slave’, Mahmud & Ayaz- fucking gets rid of sorites type problems in a thoroughly modern manner.
Why write shite of this stripe?-
‘In other words, we shall try and think World-history in  Historicality and the Prose of the World terms of what is unthinkable within its boundaries. ‘
Something is unthinkable within some boundary? Says who? Bhratrhari? No. Vasubandhu? No. Kumarajiva? Nope.  Uttara Mimamsa shitheads like Kumarila or Prabhakara? Fuck no. Some navya nyaya shithead from Nabadwip? Not likely mate. Fuck is wrong with you?

‘In this attempt to probe the limit of historical thinking we follow Wittgenstein. Why? He was a shithead.  Brouwer, Kleene, Heytig etc. contributed to Math. Fuck,Witless-stein ever did? ‘To draw a limit to thought, he says, “we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought”). Fuck off! To fence off my garden, I’ve got to stand in your garden? An Astronaut travelling at the speed of light who returns to his starting point has to have known what lay outside Einstein’s universe? We can’t have a quantitative prediction of dark matter coz we can’t interact with it? These are well known results from the time, Goo-ha, when you were in your prime- i.e. younger, more sober, less ignorant, than I am now. Why do you write this impredicative shite? Humility a la Godel’s theorem? But, Kripke gave the workaround for that when you were 40. Why follow Witless-stein when you have Kripkenstein?
‘Accordingly, in our move towards a thinking of historicality as what cannot be thought, we shall set out from that side of World-history “inside which everything is to be found,” taking the concept of “people without history” for our point of departure.
So, there we have it. First you define World History as that which no actual concrete being or collective of beings can belong to- i.e. all people are outside History- then you say there is a concept of some peoples as ‘without history’ in the sense of not having been already fulminated by ‘World-History’, and then say you are going to think what you have already unilaterally decided can’t be thunk.
Why, Guha, why?
You don’t think English speaking Bengalis aren’t worthless enough as it is? You think your entire class should meet the fate of H.N.Ghoshal in Burma? Was that why you thought Charu Mazumdar was a Messiah, you worthless Nihil-bari, not even Naxalbari, cunt?
It is you, goo-ha, who says India hasn’t a history- not fucking Hegel who was simply ignorant.
Why?
So you and your ilk could pretend to be Commies and gain kudos in the West while getting laid and getting paid by pretending to be something cool like Black Panthers, though actually Brown Pandas fattening on the exorcism of the very evils you incarnate.

Let us now turn to the way you vomit on Ramram Basu- a Persianized, Brahmin hating Kayastha – whose great achievements you ignore choosing instead to concentrate on that one work of his which alone exposes him to criticism by reason of his  execrable prose style.
However, Ramram only wrote that terrible book because he was paid to do so by William Carey- the ‘cobbler-savant’- a Missionary who had to pretend to be an indigo manufacturing businessman, otherwise John Company would have deported him. Incidentally, Carey was a Dissenter. There is no Historical Evidence that John Company harbored enemies of the Established Church.
J’accuse, you Guha Sabib of belittling the great Ramram under pretense of praising him. Instead of putting forth evidence that Ramram wasn’t just a great Historiographer but a man of truly Secular and Feminist views (interesting himself in the plight of child widows), you chose to emphasise his servitude to some low caste mochee from Blighty who wrote this about our hero-

Carey is clearly stating here that not only was Ramram  a true SECULARIST converting to  any and every Religion as occasion required, he also held MARXIST views re. free distribution of his semen to young widows as well as militantly championing advanced an FEMINIST program as is shown by his procuring abortions for young widows he had seduced. 
Yet you ignore this glowing testimonial from Dr. Carey in favor of this-
‘I got Ram Boshu [Ramram Basu] to compose a history of one of their kings, the first prose book ever written in the Bengali language; which we are . . . printing.’
In other words, Carey had become a publisher and like all publishers was talking up his product.
‘Here, according to Carey, was a double first for an Indian language—the very first instance of its historiography and that of its prose—both Historicality and the Prose of the World achieved under the aegis of colonialism, for it was the missionary acting for the Company’s government who “got” the native to write the book that he did’.
Are you fucking illiterate as well as mental Guha you cunt? Please explain to me how a guy who quit the Anglican Church- a fucking Dissenter- could be a “Missionary acting for the Company’s Govt’ ? if there is any proof of this, you worthless cunt, you should have published it and gained acclaim not as a fucking Subaltern but a Field Marshall of English Historiography.

You are lying and you know you are lying. Amartya Sen, like you, when caught out in a lie by a White Man, takes the same suave Babu recourse to meiosis.
“However, the claim is somewhat exaggerated. (what a reasonable little Babu it is!) He (that is Rev. William Carey) was right to speak of Basu’s work as the first Western-style historical narrative in Bangla, but not as “the first prose book ever written in the Bengali language.”
Guha is wrong.  If Ramram is writing history so is Bharatchandra, so is Hemachandra- the fact that there are poetic interpolations doesn’t change anything. Macaulay’s oeuvre includes the (not actually pornographic) ‘Great Lays of Ancient Rome’- so what? His book still qualify as belles lettres, as does Ghalib’s Mihr-e-Nimroz.
Why does Guha say something so fucking stupid? The answer is he is hypontized by the poetic, not alethic, phrase ‘the prose of this world.’ Does he have a theory demarcating prose and poetry? Nope. He is a Babu shithead as egregious as Aurobindo.
Guha continues-
‘Yet the importance of this error is hard to overestimate.’ Guha, you cunt, the error is yours entirely. But why speak of ‘overestimating’ it?  It is beyond Human Capacity to overestimate your Babu fuckwittery.
‘It illustrates the connection between history and prose (what? the notion that History is Carmen solutum? But, you cunt, Carmen Solutum is still poetry, even in Bangla, as Madhusudhan proved) that had come to be taken for granted, by that time, in the West (really? Did the Irish Aisling poets really take it for granted? Maybe they weren’t truly ‘Western’. You worthless fuck, you talk of the ‘subaltern’ and you write in English- a country you fucking immigrated to in 1959- and yet you think the vast majority of the peoples of these islands are just ‘not Western’?. You must know the story of Dwarkanath & the Welsh Eistedfodd- so why, goo-ha why?)
‘Indeed, we have in Carey’s description not only a record of what he found so exciting about the work commissioned by him. A publisher pretends to be excited about his shite product- really? That’s what your fucking ‘Historiography’ takes as primary Evidence? You are shit, goo-ha, and ha ha you fucking piece of goo.
 ‘More important, it allows us to see how by the end of the Age of Enlightenment two of the most powerful movements of contemporary Europe—one in politics and the other in thought, that is, the drive for overseas expansion and the passion for history—happened to intersect in an apparently small detail of South Asian life. How fucking stupid are you goo-ha ha? Portugal gets global ‘at the end of the Age of Enlightenment?’  That’s how you read Camoens? Fuck off, Bengali mule!
 Long before the first modernist historian of Bengal was to sit down to write his narrative in prose, the latter had already been assimilated to a global process of historicization. For, since Columbus, Europe had been obsessively engaged (really? Since Columbus was it? Fuck off you stupid fuckwit- Columbus really does not represent any fucking epistemic trauma and dawning of a intellectual Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. How fucking ignorant are you actually- you worthless Bengali cunt?) voyages of self-discovery (sic!) requiring it to try and match the coordinates of intercontinental space by those of universal time—geography by history. This exercise relied on a new mathesis of comparison. A new mathesis, that too of comparison? Come on, goo-ha ha, don’t be shy tell us what that old mathesis of comparison was why don’t you?
‘Climates and habitats, customs and polities, belief systems and phonic systems of the most diverse kinds were all collected and displayed side by side on epistemic spreadsheets to be measured and calculated for their worth on a civilizational scale standardized in the West.
Nonsense. If this were true there would have been no debate re. whether Confucian China was not naturaliter Christian. Fuck off, you lying hypocritical cunt who pretends to be more ignorant than you undoubtedly are by reason of your ability to play the ‘Me just a poor Nigger’ card in the West.
‘Since civilization stood for progress in time, the scale itself was identified with history enriching its concept with discriminations and differentials it had not known before. Really? Whites didn’t think Blacks scary before or, indeed, vice versa? Exactly how fucking stupid are you, worthless cunt?
Language was one of those spreadsheets of knowledge at which European science and imagination were incessantly at work for four hundred years between the Discovery of America and the Scramble
for Africa. Now you’re just making things up to show you aint senile. Spreadsheets indeed! But even before the formation of comparative linguistics as a special field of studies a delicate but clear distinction between poetry and prose had emerged from this exercise. Poetry was assigned
priority on the temporal scale. For fucking ontogenetic reasons you big baby. Correspondingly, the status it gained on the scale of values was that of the originary and the primordial’. How did it do that?Surely you must know- big fat liar? Why dont you tell us goo-ha ha?
‘Neither the sanctity associated with the former nor the mystic (sic) of the latter applied to prose. Subsequent and younger, its time was regarded as that of the everyday world and its values as mundane and modern.’

So, to sum up, goo ha ha believes that Prose is like the younger brother of Poetry and it got weighed in the scales of Values held by some Mermaid or Norn and other such witless worthless shite.

Goo ha ha and his subaltern shit-eaters do interpolate a little History into their mythological fantasies and poetastering flights. But, goo ha ha and the rest of you goo-khavan worthless shit eating cunts, what you do aint Historiography. It’s just passing the begging bowl round coz you is so fucking and unfortunately ‘subaltern’- i.e. not White, not Worthwhile, and but Brown in the sense of being Shite.

Guha says, about Ramram Bose- a guy paid by a White Man to NOT write poetry-
‘To put it another way, a particular manner of thinking about the past has perhaps been inflated into a genre—vyakti into jati.Vyakti into Jati? Fuck is wrong with you, worthless Bengalis cunt? Are you really so fucking ignorant as to think ‘vyakti’ means ‘individual’ and ‘jati’ means Universal in the manner you suggest? Perhaps you really think that what the West always regarded as Shite- viz Scholastic cunt-queefery- is actually some sort of Universal Law of Cognition.  Okay, from Russell there is a direct line to Homotopy Type Theory. But, there is nothing else. In particular, there is as nothing to your invocation of a vakti/jati syzygy anymore than there is anything to Amartya Sen’s nyaya/niti syzygy. You fuckwit ignorant Careetist expats are just making things up out of whole cloth. This is what you write, worthless cunt-
‘The work of Ramram Basu, mere gravel that stops World-history in its globalizing track, incites us to break out of this generic containment and join historicality on the other side of the border ‘
Really? Gravel stops anything in its tracks? No. Gravel is used to pave permanent ways- Autobahns,  Guha you fucking worthless cunt. You say a great working class English dude, William Carey, was actually a  secret agent of fucking Imperialism avant la lettre.  You say the book he commissioned from Ramram, which he stipulated ought to be in prose, caused him to gush a little.  Yet, this Ramram, a Hindu like me, is supposed to… what? ‘stop World-history in its globalizing tracks? How? Why?
Goo-ha ha, this sort of rhetoric is cool if you are a chauvinist Missionary or corrupt Godman- you are now posing as both- worthless cunt- saying the equivalent of ‘When our sister Dorcas held fast against the temptation of Satan to, like, buy her baby some milk rather than give me all her earnings- Globalized Evil was stopped in its tracks!’ 
Fuck is wrong with you goo-ha ha? Being the son of a fucking zamindar? Fuck off. 

‘In order to do so (i.e. ‘join historicality on the other side of the border’ coz like you’re pregnant with its baby and, I dunno, David Cameron & Obama & Manmohan are all actually ADOLF HITLER) it will help, first, to inquire what kind of containment it is and how it works. But you already told us it is generic so why would it help to first inquire what kind of containment it is? As for the question of how containment works… urm… it’s containment right? So it works like all containment does- i.e. by creating barriers. If it does not, it aint containment. It is written large over Hegel’s texts- nonsense, you read it into Hegel’s texts because you are a worthless, deeply ignorant, fuckwit– paradoxically, by the liberal use made of two of the most inclusive phrases one can think of namely, prose of the world and prose of history. —these are the most inclusive phrases you can think of? Really? You aint really thinking very hard are you, cunt? Worthless Bengali Mule. Prose of the World- that sound inclusive to anybody? Prose of History- that sound inclusive? No. History is shite spouted by cunt faced Teachers and dickhead Professors. History aint inclusive. It’s boring shite. That’s why nobody knows it- including gu-ha ha.
 World and history: taken together, they add up to a space big enough, one would have thought, to house all of historicality. Oh! So that is the sort of thought you have is it? World and History together adding up to something real big? What then do Apples and Oranges add up to you worthless Bengali cunt? Fruit salad? No. It’s got to be something way more meaningless than that coz u r shite u worthless Bong.
‘But that did not happen: several continents and their populations were still left out of history. Very careless of History, I’m sure, but does that prove malice?.  To understand why, let us consider how in this usage prose relates to world and history. Linked by a semblance of uniformity, prose here stands both for a condition of language and a condition of being. WOW! YOU ARE TOTALLY BLOWING MY MIND!  Do you actually believe that language began in song and that everybody talked blank verse in Miltonic times? Fuck is wrong with you worthless Bengali shithead? The frequent and surprisingly fluid traffic  (why surprising? when is communication a traffic other than fluid?) between the two is characteristic of much of Hegel’s writings on history and accounts, to an extent, for some of their turns and twists. Rubbish. The guy was an ignorant cunt- just like you goo ha ha.
Why don’t you, fucking Bengali Mule that you are, just give up the pretense of having a brain and just go back to your true status as a ‘sugar loving parrot’ squawking  this sort of shite?-

‘The twofold prose (i.e. as representing a condition of language and being) belongs to a hierarchy of stages in Spirit’s progress towards self-realization in history. No it doesn’t. You know it doesn’t Why are you telling such stupid lies? You are Bengali. You must know some Math, some fucking Phil. What is the fibration here such that, out of a dialethia, a fucking partial ordering neverhteless arises?Guha, you cunt, either you know more than any fucking living Math maven or YOU ARE A CORRUPT, MERETRICIOUS, SOCIO-FUCKING-PATHIC, LYING SHITHEAD MORE VIRULENT IN WITLESS ALETHIC VANDALISM THAN ANY SHAMAN OR BRAHMIN OR MISSIONARY OR MARXIST OR WHATEVER THE FUCK BHADRALOK CUNTS LIKE YOU NOW CALL YOURSEVELVES.
‘To start, in ascending order, with the prose of the world, it signals the end of the primordial unity celebrated by poetry since the beginning of time. In that undifferentiated universe nature had been conspicuously lacking in mediation between “life in general” and the living individual. The division
of genus into species and of species into individuals made no difference in this regard. Unable to break away from their originary bonding with the earth and its environment, all such “moments of simple
determinateness” would be absorbed in “the process of Becoming merely as a contingent movement.” For, as Hegel reminds us, “organic Nature has no history.” By contrast, “Spirit is time,” and the
prose of the world heralds the advent of consciousness—“the middle term between universal Spirit and its individuality or sense-consciousness.”
The latter mediated in its own turn by the “structured shapes”that consciousness assumes as “a self-systematizing whole of the life of the Spirit,” realizes “its objective existence as world-history.”
‘The twofold prose belongs to a hierarchy of stages in Spirit’s progress towards self-realization in history. To start, in ascending order, with the prose of the world, it signals the end of the primordial unity celebrated by poetry since the beginning of time. In that undifferentiated universe nature had been conspicuously lacking in media Historicality and the Prose of the World tion between “life in general” and the living individual. The division of genus into species and of species into individuals made no difference in this regard. Unable to break away from their originary bonding with the earth and its environment, all such “moments of simple determinateness” would be absorbed in “the process of Becoming merely as a contingent movement.” For, as Hegel reminds us, “organic Nature has no history.” By contrast, “Spirit is time,” and the prose of the world heralds the advent of consciousness—“the middle term between universal Spirit and its individuality or sense-consciousness.”
The latter mediated in its own turn by the “structured shapes” that consciousness assumes as “a self-systematizing whole of the life of the Spirit,” realizes “its objective existence as world-history.”

I’m not kidding. The fuckwit really wrote this shite.
Siddhanta- Guha is a guy with a nice wife and he’s fucking 90 for fuck’s sake. He writes shit BUT only because HIS SUBJECT IS SHIT.
 He don’t need a relationist barzakh of bliss. He’s got something better. Munafiqat. Hypocrisy.
Telling stupid lies over a very long period pays off.
Mind it kindly.

Ramachandra Guha on Pluralism in China & India

What is ‘Pluralism’? Essentially it means the peaceful but separate co-existence, as in a salad bowl, not a melting pot, within a unitary polity, of different ”user defined’ ethnic, linguistic, occupational or confessional groups. If these groups are defined by statute or a formal power-sharing agreement, then what we have is consociationalism.
However, for large societies with multiple overlapping identity categories, it is unlikely that any statutory provision or agreement of this sort could be achieved and sustained for any length of time save by a dynamics of elite accommodation so extensive and all consuming as to constitute what is in effect a separate Governing class engaged in Rotten Borough Politics. In this case, Pluralism re-emerges only in the form of an elite discourse matching reified notions of social collectives to, what are conjectured to be, the empirical facts of the case.
1) Such Plurarilism could be said to arise on the basis of communities occupying different geographical or ecological niches & thus not competing directly with each other or creating a Social Gradient for Tardean imitation or Girardian confilict.
Here, according to the elite’s theory, Pluralism is imperilled if a geographical area becomes attractive to immigrants from other areas or else is found to possess some natural resource yielding a rent, thus sparking rivalry  between groups, or else if an ecological niche is contested or comes to be seen as either exploitative or repugnant.
In the last case, for the Muslim League, the Hindus were identified with exploitative Banias (businessmen) who, Jinnah said, were able to buy out Muslim businesses when the proprietor died because Muslim inheritance law (except that of Jinnah’s own natal Khoja or Bohra sects which followed Hindu custom) broke up the Estate thus imposing a check on the continuity of the underlying business. Iqbal, though mentioning the Muslim belief that the Bania was sucking their blood, laid greater emphasis on his conviction that Islam provided a firmer foundation for Socialism. He believed Nehru was bound to fail because the Caste Hindus would rebel against him.
Burma also acted to reduce Pluralism of this type,  which the British Civil Servant, Furnivall, had delineated, by getting rid of minorities involved in trade and finance on the avowed basis of a Socialist belief in the essentially parasitic nature of such activities.
Within India, it is notable that, in Bihar, Hindu Debtors of Afghan usurers used the opportunity of Partition to get rid of that particular ecological niche in exactly the same way that Muslim majority areas got rid of their Hindu bania and zamindar (landlord) class. Interestingly, the Pakistanis imposed a ban on Hindu scavengers (i.e. the guys who did the dirty work) fleeing the new country along with the farmers, businessmen and professionals who competed with dominant Muslim castes.
Generally speaking, in India, dominant localized castes or ethnicities have been able to either get rid of ‘niche’ Pluralism or else to extract a rent from it for the indigenous, localized, power elite. In non-niche activities, obviously,  the dominant group drives out the weaker by fair or foul means till a sort of Kaldor equilibrium is achieved and minority participation yields, at the margin, as much external benefit to the majority as private benefit to the person from the minority.
Similarly, ‘repugnancy market’  niches have either been eliminated or forced to pay a rent- sometimes by increasing the underlying nuisance or criminality in question.
2) Alternatively, the elite may cognize Pluralism as arising from different communities coming under different legal, normative or other jurisdictions- e.g. the Ottoman ‘Millat’ systems- which might also be based on extra-territorial Power, either of a foreign State, or a Religious Pontiff, or that of Organized Crime.  This type of Pluralism can be camouflaged by Coalition Politics or else can exist on the basis of a Pragmatic Sanction by the National Security State.
3) There can also be an theory of Pluralism on the basis of an Elite valorisation of Diversity or Pluritropic collective meta-preference underpinned perhaps by an Economic ideology or theory that such policies yield a sort of Tiebout manorial rent- this is a route to stealing a march on rival Polities and getting wealthier as a community.
4)  Finally, there can be a demotic Pluralism supposedly arising on a purely Ethical basis and gaining a sort of sullen acquiescence from the Masses by dint of continual chiding by soi-disant Great Men valorized by the bien pensant intelligentsia- i.e. lies and hypocrisy spouted by thinly disguised racial chauvinists or paid apologists for the regime.

Which last brings us to Ramachandra Guha- perhaps the most vapid and widely read contemporary Indian historian- who has published an essay in Caravan Magazine on a recent Conference he attended in China focused on fostering Diversity and Pluralism and only committing genocide on Minorities when there’s really nothing good on TV and, anyway, the troops need the exercise.

He makes a number of claims which, I imagine, might not be a catalogue of wishful thinking peculiar to himself but  actually quite wide-spread amongst the moronic Magazine (as opposed to Blog) reading public. I think it is worthwhile to list these claims and examine whether they bear any relation to Reality and if not, why not.

Regarding China, Guha writes
1)  ‘In the early years of Communist rule, there was no political diversity, since China was ruled by a single Party.’
Guha’s statement makes sense if, in Politics, you begin with something undifferentiated which then shows variation  and, in the absence of repression, gives rise to diversity. In the case of China, Guha believes the Chinese Communist Party was homogeneous at the point when it eliminated all rivals and established its hegemony. Is this true? The answer, put simply, is no. All sorts of disparate elements had united under the banner of the Communist Party, more especially because of the severe strains put on China by Warlordism and Famine and, of course, Japanese aggression such that people had to pick sides from a narrowing menu. Thus the Communist Party, at its moment of triumph was more diverse than it subsequently became. Evolution is just as much about canalisation as it is about capacitance diversity. Even multi-party systems see canalisation and convergence on long standing issues while diversity may flourish in new areas of interest- arising out of technological changes or demographic shifts or a variation in Globalising forces. Even in these areas, cananlisation and convergence operate to thin out phenotypal diversity.
2)  ‘But (in the early years of Communist rule in China) even talk of cultural diversity was not encouraged. Regardless of one’s ethnic or linguistic background, all citizens were commanded to commit themselves to the strengthening of the Chinese state and the construction of an economic basis for socialism.’
If Guha is right, then the first thing the Chinese would have done when they, with the acquiescence of Nehru, claimed sovereignty over Tibet, would have been to demand that the Tibetans hand over resources to the Center and also eliminate their own bourgeoisie. This did not happen. The Chinese subsidized Tibet and enriched its middle class who used the money to, for example, send their kids to English Medium Schools and Colleges in Darjeeling and Calcutta. Similarly, in Inner Mongolia and Manchuria, the new regime rather aimed to conciliate than to crush and to take delight in diversity- thus sending a signal to Ulan Bator & Pynongyang- rather than seek to impose uniformity. Sinkiang however posed a double threat- its economy had been integrated into the Soviet sphere but an Islamic and Pan Turkic threat potential in the region could destabilize both Communist giants. In other words, heavy handed Chinese policies were double-edged in that they were pushing out the Soviets but also unleashing Red Terror.  Land Reform affecting Waqfs (Land held by Religious Trusts) wasn’t necessarily unpopular so it was really massive Government sponsored Han immigration which presented an existential threat to the Uighurs. Ultimately, when China broke with the Soviets, in 1962, a hundred thousand Uighurs fled along with Soviet personnel.
However, where no strategic interest was at stake, China in the 50’s was anxious to appear Pluralist. Minority areas were exempt from Collectivization- save where it had the political objective of crushing their spirit of Independence and destroying their capacity to rebel- just as, at a later time, they were exempt from the One Child policy.
 In 1958, the right to leave the Collective was taken away from the Han Chinese.  To sweeten the blow, fantastic claims of impending mass plenty were circulated. Under the slogan ‘to eat meat is glorious’, farm animals were slaughtered and for a brief while peasants ate so much rich food in the new Communal canteens that they suffered indigestion. Had Mao’s ‘great leap forward’ succeeded- i.e. if it really had been possible for the Han Chinese majority to grow ten times as much food on the same piece of ground while simultaneously producing millions of metric tonnes of high grade steel in their backyard furnaces, then perhaps the minorities could have been pampered to very surfeit. It was not to be. The failure of Magical Socialism meant that scapegoats had to be found- Rightists, ‘Class enemies’, feudal elements and, of course, the Minorities who were seen as being governed by precisely these elements and also as being too immature and under-developed to ever rid themselves of these evils. Thus only massive Han immigration could help them rise above their mental bondage.
No doubt, very harsh measures were taken against Minorities  in the Sixties and Seventies. But, by then, the whole country was a prison camp and so, contra Guha, it was a reversal of the early policy of which Wikipedeia has this to say-
Chinese Communist understanding of minorities had been heavily influenced by the Soviet models of Joseph Stalin. The Soviet’s definition of minorities did not map cleanly onto this Chinese historical understanding. Stalinist thinking about minorities was that a nation was made up of those with a common language, historical culture, and territory. Each nation of these people then had the theoretical right to secede from a proposed federated government.^[7] This differed from the previous way of thinking mainly in that instead of defining all those under imperial rule as Chinese, the nation (as defined as a space upon which power is projected) and ethnicity (the identity of the governed) were now separate; being under central rule no longer automatically meant being defined as Chinese. The Stalinist model as applied to China gave rise to the autonomous regions in China; these areas were thought to be their own nations that had theoretical autonomy from the central government.^[8]

To determine how many of these nations existed within China after the revolution of 1949, a team of social scientists were assembled to enumerate the various ethnic nations. The problem that they immediately ran into was that there were many areas of China in which villages in one valley considered themselves to have a separate identity and culture from those one valley over.^[11] According each village the status of nation would be absurd and would lead to the nonsensical result of filling the National People’s Congress with delegates all representing individual villages. In response, the social scientists attempted to construct coherent groupings of minorities using language as the main criterion for differentiation. This led to a result in which villages that had very different cultural practices and histories were lumped under the same ethnic name. The Zhuang is one such example; the ethnic group largely served as a catch-all collection of various hill villages in Guangxi province.^[12]

The actual census taking of who was and was not a minority further eroded the neat differentiating lines the social scientists had drawn up. Individual ethnic status was often awarded based on family tree histories. If one had a father (other mother, for ethnic groups that were considered matrilineal) that had a surname considered to belong to a particular ethnic group, then one was awarded the coveted minority status. This had the result that villages that had previously thought of themselves as homogenous and essentially Han were now divided between those with ethnic identity and those without.^[13]

The team of social scientists that assembled the list of all the ethnic groups also described what they considered to be the key differentiating attributes between each group, including dress, music, and language. The center then used this list of attributes to select representatives of each group to perform on television and radio in an attempt to reinforce the government’s narrative of China as a multi-ethnic state.^[14] Particularly popular were more exoticised practices of minority groups – the claim of multi-ethnicity would not look strong if the minorities performed essentially the same rituals and songs as the Han. Many of those labeled as specific minorities were thus presented with images and representations of “their people” in the media that bore no relationship to the music, clothing, and other practices they themselves enacted in their own daily lives.

However, as China opened up and reformed post-1979, many Han acquired enough money to begin to travel. One of the favorite travel experiences of the wealthy was visits to minority areas, to see the purportedly exotic rituals of the minority peoples.^[15][16] Responding to this interest, many minority entrepreneurs, despite themselves perhaps never having grown up practicing the dances, rituals, or songs themselves, began to cater to these tourists by performing acts similar to what was on the media. In this way, the groups of people named Zhuang or other named minorities have begun to have more in common with their fellow co-ethnics, as they have adopted similar self-conceptions in response to the economic demand of consumers for their performances.

After the breakup of Yugoslavia and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, there was a shift in official conceptions of minorities in China: rather than defining them as “nationalities”, they became “ethnic groups”. The difference between “nationality” and “ethnicity”, as Uradyn Erden-Bulag describes it, is that the former treats the minorities of China as societies with “a fully functional division of labor”, history, and territory, while the latter treats minorities as a “category” and focuses on their maintenance of boundaries and their self-definition in relation to the majority group. These changes are reflected in uses of the term minzu and its translations. The official journal Minzu Tuanjie changed its English name from Nationality Unity to Ethnic Unity in 1995. Similarly, the Central University for Nationalities changed its name to Minzu University of China. Scholars began to prefer the term zuqun (族群) overminzu.^[17]

The Wikipedia article is misleading on several counts. In 1949, China rejected the Soviet Model and opted for a ‘unitary state with multiple Nationalities’- thus secession was never on the menu and, moreover, the irredentist aspirations of a Nationality were inherited by the Unitary State- thus giving China a claim over the territory of its neighbors which could not otherwise arise. Furthermore, tight control of Education, and the fact that all Higher Education was only in Chinese, meant that there was a disconnect between ideological protestations and the reality of two-tier assimilation endowing second class status even on minorities well within China’s borders. The Manchus, however, tended to do better than average educationally and economically but the price paid was forgetting their own language.
 Potentially seditious nationalities- Uyghurs and Tibetans- on the other hand, were brutally treated, every effort being made to crush their spirit and bring every facet of their life under surveillance and official control. Finally, between 1968 and 1975, the culminating years of the Cultural Revolution, the very notion of minority status or differentiated nationality was rejected and traditional languages, scripts, customs,costumes, music, even medical practices, were banned as ‘reactionary’. Henceforth, there would be no pretense of pampering the Minorities- they were to be dominated and ‘re-educated’ if not butchered outright.

Guha, however, has a different take on what happened. Nobody’s spirit was crushed. No genocide occurred. Not at all. It was just their new Masters were not properly encouraging of the Minorities, gushing praise and patting them on the back if they  managed to tie their own shoe-laces and giving them a big gold star for drawing a nice picture of a cat in Trigonometry class.

Thus, Guha tells us

3) ‘The discouragement of minority aspirations led willy-nilly to a deepening of Han hegemony. This created discontent, especially among the Uyghurs and Tibetans, peoples with sophisticated written cultures and a proud sense of their religious heritage.’ 
Hitler’s discouragement of Jewish and Gypsy aspirations led willy-nilly to a deepening of S.S hegemony in the Concentration Camps. This created discontent, especially amongst the Jews being gassed in Belsen because they were people with a sophisticated written culture and a proud sense of their religious heritage.  

Guha writes-‘In the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics in 2008, both Tibet and Xinjiang witnessed violent clashes between local people and security forces. Now, some scholars, and even some party officials, had begun reflecting on the costs of imposing cultural uniformity on an extremely diverse nation.

The Fuzhou conference was held in a building guarded by a statue of Confucius, a thinker once berated by Mao but now making an impressive comeback in China. The meeting had some 25 participants. There were four Germans, and one Indian. The rest were all Chinese. They included university professors, party officials, and NGO workers. About half were Han in origin, but—given the theme of the conference—ethnic minorities such as the Tibetans, the Yi, and the Mongols were also represented.

In other words, no previously independent or autonomous ethnicity in China experienced Oppression, Genocide or had been rendered powerless or a cowed minority within its own homeland such that, as a matter of official policy, immigrant Han Chinese enjoyed wealth and privilege while the indigenous people suffered poverty and degradation. Still, those minorities were so resentful that their cultural aspirations were not being fulfilled that they created violent mayhem during the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. The Chinese Army and Police were totally at a loss. They went to give some nice teddy bears and sweeties to those violent minorities but received a terrible thrashing. What, oh what, are we going to do? Minorities are so angry and continually beating us and setting fire to things. How to placate them? Answer- let some German (!) N.G.O organize a Conference and invite Guha and some 10 people from minorities and another 10 from the Han majority and really discuss this matter and work out a solution. After all, we should show some consideration and humane feeling for those poor fellows in the Secret Police and Army who are constantly being raped and killed and pitilessly set alight by those Minorities who are so angry that everybody is not learning Uyghur or Tibetan while they themselves are having to learn Chinese and English and Maths and so on so as to get ahead in the world. It is a matter of great sensitivity.

Now let us turn to Guha’s central thesis-

‘Diversity’ is a social condition; ‘pluralism’ is a political programme. China is almost as diverse as India, but infinitely less plural. For in India, the diversity of languages, religions, and political ideologies has been encouraged since the birth of the nation-state. India is a multi-party democracy based on universal adult franchise. The Indian Constitution does not privilege a single religion. And it encourages each province to administer itself in the language of its choice.

Firstly, let us look at what it means to say ‘Diversity is a social condition’- what meaning is being given to the word ‘Social’ in this sentence? Is it that there is nothing in the way people interact with each others which militates for canalisation- i.e. there is no homogenizing force, like Tarde’s ‘law of imitation’, at work in Social processes – and that, on the contrary, people just go on becoming more and more different from each other? If so, something very sinister is going on under the rubric of Globalisation. A few months ago I found myself dancing in a silly way and adopting ‘Gangnam style’ as a catchphrase. Why? It’s because I’ve recently bought a Korean 3D tv and tablet computer. Globalised Capitalism is brainwashing me through secret electromagnetic waves emanating from my TV and tablet.  This is Cultural RAPE! I should be singing Tyagaraja’s kirtis not ‘Gangnam style’ & ‘Ato fato Gentleman’. Where oh where is the Mahatma Gandhi or Pundit Nehru to protect me from being deflowered by them evil Koreans and their Satanic technology? How is my Diversity to be preserved? Who will defend the Pluralism I represent?
Guha, no doubt, knows the answer- but he won’t tell us. In fact there is a whole lot of things he is meanly keeping to himself.
An ordinary bloke like me thinks to himself- ‘Even if Platonic as opposed to Revealed  Preferences really are Pluritropic and tend to infinite Diversity is it really the case that individuals face no Schelling type co-ordination problems? Was David Lewis on Conventions totally wrong? In the Economic realm,  can it really be that no externalities arise or public good provision is required or mechanism design becomes necessary such that the essence of Social interaction tends to reduce and canalise Diversity? If so, Minorities are themselves not stable. Within a couple of generations, the only minority would be Ann Rand’s individual and Mrs. Thatcher’s dictum ‘no such thing as Society’ would bear the unmistakable ring of Gospel Truth.
Is Guha, a guy with a PhD, writing in June 2013, really making such a claim? Why? Is he a closet Randian cross-dressing randi pretending to be a nice Nehruvian bien pensant Uncle?
Even if this is so, Guha has either to commit to a ‘Great Man’ theory of Capitalist praxeology or else he has to explain how there can there be any Economics, any Politics, any non-empty domain of the Social, if there is indeed nothing militating for the canalisation of Preference Diversity such that it has the Goldilocks property of being ‘not too little, not too much’? Has Guha discovered some mistake in the mathematics of Graciella Chichilnisky? Has he really uncovered some alternative to the theories of Darwin and Baldwin and Hamilton and Price and John Maynard Smith explaining how things co-evolve? If so, Modesty be damned, he should tell us rather than leaving us blindly groping in the dark.

What about Guha’s dictum that ‘pluralism is a political program’. Does it, in fact, mean anything? In this context- no. The Chinese Communist Party could have gone either way on Linguistic pluralism. Indeed, remembering their relationship with the Panchen Lama & Prince Shianouk, even Political Pluralism of a theocratic or monarchical type was not beyond the scope of that supremely pragmatic Nation.
We know for a fact that they can do Econo-Legal Regime pluralism- the case of Hong Kong- and it is entirely possible that they could have embraced ‘Browderism’ back in 1950 and permitted at least the cosmetic appearance of multi-partyism on the then contemporary Mexican model. Thus we see ‘pluralism’- whether Economic or Linguistic or whatever- is not a program but a political instrumentality.

What about Guha’s notion that ‘China is almost as diverse as India’. That must be true, surely? Let’s see. 92% of the Chinese population is Han Chinese. There is a lot of diversity in spoken language- some drift based, some cladistic- but the written language, as solving a co-ordination problem, has not suffered this infirmity for over two and a half millenia. Thus we can say that the Han Chinese are a group closed under written communication. What about India?  Even an extreme Hindutva type would have to accept that at best 30 % of the current population is sufficiently ‘Sanskritized’ to even potentially have a similar type of closure property. In other words one Han Chinese can communicate everything in his mental universe to another on the opposite end of the country without straying outside the boundaries of the common written language and stock of associations save with respect the subject of the communication. Thus if 2 Han Chinese are talking about Pentecostal Christianity or Quantum Mechanics then they are going out of their common language only with respect to that specific subject. A Punjabi Hindu communicating with a Tamil Hindu, on the other hand, will constantly find himself going outside the Sanskritic circle, even on issues arising from a common orthopraxy, because he is appealing to genealogically Islamic ideas, practices and institutions, long assimilated by his people to which the Tamil has no similar unproblematic access. My own, no doubt ludicrous, attempt to engage with Ibn Arabi’s concept of ‘barzakh’ in Ghalib’s poetry constantly throws this unpleasant fact in my ugly Hindutva face. What keeps me going is that my alterity is not Islam but that North Indian Hindu, like Tufta, for whom Ghalib has tenderness.

Anyway, for what it’s worth,  my own unscholarly estimate is that, loosely speaking, Han China has 90 percent hermeneutic circle closure- ‘Hindu’ India, maybe 30 per cent.

So what? History shows us that State Formation and Secular Politics have little to do with cultural or ethnic homogeneity- the appearance of which arises spontaneously as a solution to underlying co-ordination problems for the realm of the ‘Social’- and everything to do with coalition stability and mechanism design. Even on the abstract plane- questions such as ‘what is the optimal currency area?’ and, going forward, ‘what is the external economy optimizing golden path’ tend to trump Romantic notions of an Organic Community or ‘Moral Economy’ or ‘Symbolic Ecology’.

The answer, for Guha, turns out to be that though ‘Diversity as a Social Condition’ does not have any importance, still it contributes something dramatic to the backdrop of what is truly important, nay magical!, which is how the actions of Great Men totally change History coz they just are so goddam special that’s all.

Guha writes- Indian pluralism is a modern phenomenon, forged in the crucible of colonialism. There was no ‘Indian nation’ until the British came. It was they who unified the territory that the Republic now claims and controls. The unity the rulers brought about was artificial, and accidental—until the national movement gave the people of what was now ‘British India’ a common political and (in time) moral purpose.

Indian pluralism, such as it is, is the product of the hard work and conscious choices of many individuals and many organisations. I suppose if one had to single out one of each, it would be Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and the Indian National Congress. Gandhi began expanding his horizons early. His best friend in school was a Muslim. As a young law student in London he mostly hung about with heterodox Christians. When he came back to India he acquired a Jain scholar as his preceptor. blah blah blah

Is Guha utterly mad? He says that some force from outside can artificially draw lines on the map and rule over it in a manner that ‘unifies it’. So much so, that, quite spontaneously, individuals and organizations can arise who turn that artificiality into something not artificial at all. In other words, any artificial creation can turn into a ‘proper’, not artificial, Nation State. All that is needed is some yeasting agent which does not have to be deliberately introduced but is just freely floating about in the air. Once it gets embedded, it ‘works hard’ and makes ‘conscious choices’- and, it so happens, one choice it can make is called ‘pluralism’. If it opts for that choice then the now no longer artificial Nation State created by some foreigner will turn out to be ‘Plural’. Otherwise, it won’t.

Does Indian history confirm this view? Did the British conquer or otherwise acquire dominance over territory in the Indian sub-continent entirely ‘against the grain’, so to speak, of existing collectives? Or, was it rather the case, that their expansion was almost entirely subject to Market and Meta-Market (i.e. mechanism design) type kinetics and potentialities? Was British Imperialism a project created by some British King or Great Man? Is that its genealogy?
Let us look at the evidence. The British were in India for over a hundred years as traders before something surprising happened- Clive abandons the Clerk’s quill for the Conquistador’s sword and scores a succession of amazing victories- which the British power elite had neither planned nor were prepared to commit resources to till it became a fait accompli and the money power of the ‘Nabobs’ became a ‘tail that wags the dog’.
Why speak of India as encountering Western Colonialism? That virus was engineered in Desi laboratories and, once unleashed from its test-tube, the first systematic protest against its evils is evidenced in the writings and speeches of British patriots like Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Richard Sheridan, who, with matchless eloquence if not Analytical rigor, expose the double threat it posed to both Britain and India.
Guha writes as though a Commercial Enterprise of a deeply corrupt and rent seeking type could create a Nation State entirely by its predatory dealings and greed driven Sociopathy. Do the facts support this belief?
Did John Company exercise a hegemony utterly independent of existing collectives? Was there ever, in the history of its operations in India, a signal nomological break such that we can say- this is something wholly foreign and imposed by the canon and bayonet? The answer is- no and no. Firstly, John Company had to respect existing customary and religious laws and administer that Law in their own courts till such a time that a critical mass was achieved and the project of Codification increased, not decreased, their legitimacy and salience. Secondly, the Brits had to adopt and adapt the vernacular languages and knowledge systems in all matters where something new was not being created. Thirdly, after formal annexation to Empire,  Servants of the Crown had to continually re-draw those ‘lines on the map’ in accordance with the interests and sentiments of dominant classes in each region. 

Even the yeast that supposedly floats around freely in the air which has the magic property of turning any arbitrary collection of people and territory into a ‘proper’ Nation State- even that yeast, it turns out, is something the British had to foster and seek to regulate. 

Guha tells us that Gandhi had a lot of friends from outside his own sub-caste and community. So did Jinnah. Gandhian yeasting drove Jinnah and Iqbal and so on in one direction and Jinnah and Iqbal’s yeasting drove the Indian National Congress the other way. It oughtn’t to have mattered if the State had retained its solvency and therefore salience as the obligatory passage point of every interessement strategy. But, the War had virtually bankrupted Britain. It had also bankrupted the political potential of the bien pensant National bourgeoisie. 

Field Marshall Wavell, as Viceroy, tells Whitehall bluntly that it was no longer a case of ‘Top-Down’ conspiracy- easily settled by arresting a few seditionary lawyers- but, rather, the beginnings of a full-scale  ‘Bottom-Up’ insurrection which can’t be checked and must inevitably flush the British out of India. He proposes an evacuation of the White population starting from the South and East and towards the North West for ultimate rescue by the Navy or else an overland journey to the ports of the Levant.

Guha tells us a different story. Why? Clearly he is a far better soldier and military strategist than Wavell who was an arrant coward. Indeed, it is widely known, that the British army does not engage in combat- they prefer to play with dolls. Wavell, because he burst into tears most often, was promoted to high office. Guha knows the inside story. When he visits England, the S.A.S all go and hide under the Queen Mother’s bed. They refuse to come out till he has left the country.

But, Guha is full of such surprises. He tells us- ‘Life in the diaspora gave Gandhi an understanding of the social and cultural heterogeneity of India that he would never have acquired had he worked in Rajkot or even in Bombay.’ In other words, South Africa was more heterogenous than India. Now, if Gandhi had merged his political campaign in South Africa with those of the Chinese, the Coloureds, the Zulus, the Xhosa, the Trade Unions and so on, then Guha would have a point. But Gandhi explicitly says that his Satyagraha did not merge with the similar agitation of the Chinese. He makes no mention of the leader of the Coloureds and forged no close contact, despite geographical proximity, with Christianized Africans engaged in a similar enterprise. Even within the Gujerati community, his strange views proved polarizing. A leading Muslim merchant writes to Jinnah asking him to come over and help the Muslims. Gandhi’s plan will pauperize them while giving the Hindu hawkers an advantage. Later, in India, when Gandhi meets Jinnah he stresses the latter’s religious identity. He’d have been better off staying in Rajkot where his behavior at least had the excuse of being fostered by small town mentality, not to say rustic imbecility. Yet, the myth of the Mahatma depended crucially on the notion that he’d achieved something tremendous in South Africa and could do the same in India. Gokhale, it is true, knew different. He warned that there was less to Gandhi’s achievement than was claimed and that negotiation ought not to be entrusted to him. But, Gokhale died. Why does Guha pretend that a Gandhi who remained in Rajkot could have become the leader of the Congress? What could he possibly have achieved there, or claim to have achieved there, which could endow him with charisma? As for the issue of heterogeneity- the fact is, the only thing which wrung concessions out of Smuts was the revolt of the working class Indians. Yes, Gandhi placed himself at the head of this moment- but if he hadn’t done so, some other Indian lawyer or para-legal would have been happy to oblige. Since the I.N.C and individual capitalists like Dorabji Tata were happy to provide support and funds, they could claim credit for the victory of the workers. Gokhale and C.F. Andrews would have a template for interessement over similar agitations in India with a view to gradualist legislative and parliamentary reform without any need for Khilafat or Khaddar or other such nonsense. In that case, India gets Universal Suffrage and full Provincial Autonomy in 1930. No big drama, Muslims see that they get undivided Bengal and Punjab- the two jewels in the Crown and suddenly Partition is against their interests. Dalits see that things like Temple Entry actually change their status- they are not a ‘concession’ based on the Saintliness of the Mahatma which they have to earn again and again by giving up customary items in their diet and ‘Sanskritizing’ themselves. Ambedkar’s talents aren’t wasted- he’s put in charge of the Monetary Policy Committee. There is no split between him and the pragmatic leaders like the young Jagjivan Ram.

 But perhaps we have strayed too far down the road of counterfactuals. Returning to Guha’s article we find he writes- When Gandhi finally came back home and joined politics, he pushed the Congress towards an open recognition and avowal of this diversity. The party units were reorganised on linguistic lines. The party committed itself to the maintenance of religious harmony and to making women and low castes equal citizens in (and of) the nation.

Is Guha seriously suggesting that Gandhi didn’t jump on any existing bandwagon- be it Khilafat or Swaraj? What has that to do with ‘open recognition and avowal of diversity?’ Was there anyone at all in India who did not understand that men are different from women, Hindus have a different Religion from Muslims, Tamils don’t speak the same language as Kashmiris? Perhaps, they knew it but thought it was some terrible secret they had to keep. Then Gandhi comes back from South Africa and says ‘Guess what guys? Women don’t have the same kind of pee pee as us men. It used to be a deadly secret, but now, thanks to Satyagraha, we can at last openly recognize and avow that there is diversity in the matter of pee pees. Similarly, them Tamils aren’t actually gargling or clearing their throats- they are speaking a different language. We  can openly avow that now, because Satyagraha is so splendid.’ Did Gandhi really turn up from South Africa with these sorts of insights? Was he really the motive force in reorganizing the party on ‘linguistic lines’ (which did not actually happen in many parts of India)? Was there any contemporary party which did not pay lip service to minority protection and womens’ rights and so on? In any case, is there any evidence that the outcome would have been different if any Party had written something different in its manifesto? Did elite politics, or bien pensant discussion really shape anything? Take the Modi-Lee agreement- arguably it pushes Japan down the militaristic path, thus contributing to the fall of the British Empire in Burma and India. But, did elite politics and bien pensant intellectuals- or pseudo-intellectuals, like Nehru- have any say in it whatsoever? No. Nehru’s misgivings went for nothing. Churchill’s protests won him obloquy. When money talks, even the most bloated wind-bags find themselves abruptly punctured.

Guha’s view of Indian pluralism
Guha  makes three claims 

1) that Indian ‘pluralism’ was something ‘hard fought’ and that Gandhi should get the lion’s share of credit 

2) that Universal Suffrage wasn’t inevitable and Nehru pushed it through. 

3) that linguistic pluralism was a precondition of India’s unity and survival. 

Let us look at the facts
1) Did any indigenous Indian force have the power to suppress Pluralism more than has actually happened? Could Nehru, or anybody else, really have imposed Hindi on non-Hindi states? Think about it for a second. Suppose the Govt. imposes the language and people protest. The Police and then the Army are sent in. Why should they not seize power for themselves? The Politicians would be marginalized. Sooner or later the Generals will take over. Even if the P.M is completely stupid and tries this option, the political class as a whole will revolt. Why? Popular unrest  means power goes to the Police, who can extract a rent previously accruing to politicians- but the Police, too, are nervous that the Army will step in. Once that happens, the Police lose even their existing rents and, like the Politicians, get marginalized. But the Army knows it can’t rule the whole country by force- its recruitment is too narrowly based and rebel areas can be supplied by Sea- so it will have to depend on the Navy. But why should the Navy accept a subordinate role? It can get a fiscal advantage by controlling maritime trade and gain a countervailing power to extract rents.
Such considerations mean the whole thing is a non-starter. Support will melt away from a P.M who tries any monkey-tricks. So, the truth is, the battle for securing Pluralism was not ‘hard fought’. There was no battle- just some disorganized retreat in the face of demand for linguistic states and ‘bhumiputra’ reservations and even ethnic cleansing of non-dominants. The truth is, Mahatma Gandhi made no unique contribution- save that of endorsing Khilafat as being something even a Kaffir should morally support thus legitimizing the notion that a Plural state is ‘dar ul harb’ according to some higher Moral Law.

2) Ceylon got universal suffrage in 1931 because Sidney Webb put in strong minority protection and in any case the elite were Loyalist. Could India really have continued with restricted franchise even after the main reason for it- viz. avoiding Partition- had disappeared? Is Guha serious? There may have nut-jobs who wanted restrictive franchise. They would have been laughed out of office and then beaten and chased out of the country if they tried such a monkey-trick. Guha does not get that India is Democratic because that gives the existing power-elite the legitimacy to raise taxes. The moment democracy is suspended, though a ‘rent’ can be extracted, it is not sustainable. Everybody will prefer to bribe for a short term purpose rather than pay the tax to stay legal. If India could export enough teak or oil or just rely on Aid, then okay one could put off elections for a few years. But, after that, the house of cards will collapse.

3) Linguistic pluralism was a battle won before Independence, though the integration of Princely states only became possible with the departure of the Brits. After that, the Govt. conceded, not promoted, Linguistic States created so ‘outsiders’ didn’t take sarkari jobs from the sons of the soil. Nothing at all to do with what Nehru thought or some Professor said. Guha does not seem to understand that if China is a single party state it is because that Party became an Army which conquered the country and killed off all opposition. Even once in power, it still kills anyone, including its own members, who pose a challenge. Minority aspirations have a lot to do with not being killed and rendered even further subservient to the newly established ethnic Han immigrant majority or dominant class in their own ancestral homeland.
There were and are plenty of Parties in India which have no truck with Pluralism even at the National level. My own Iyer Liberation Front demands the immediate reconquest of Ireland- our ancestral home- and like everybody buying me a Guinness with Jameson chaser and singing Val Doonican songs. Except Subramaniyam Swamy. Just fucking kill him. And don’t forget to murli Mahohar Joshi while you’re at it. 

With such an obviously sensible program, why, you may ask, is the Iyer Liberation Front, like other similar anti-Pluralist outfits, languishing in the doldrums? The answer is we don’t have the strength, the cohesiveness, and are in any case too cowardly and corrupt, to enforce our will. 

It would be a different matter if we could hit upon an ‘incentive compatible’ coalition that would burgeon and grow till strong enough to take over the country. But, by then, it would be Pluricentric and convergent to pretty much the same trajectory as what obtains.

What, finally, is the point of Guha’s article? Does he really believe what he himself writes? Can he really so systematically confuse the causes of Powerlessness with the effects of Public Policy?

Perhaps, there is some inscrutable Mandarin purpose or esoteric Qingtan ‘Pure Conversation’ aspect to his essay which we are simply too stupid to grasp. Or, perhaps, the truth is simpler. The Emperor is not merely and quite deliberately naked but also frenziedly masturbating and spunking copiously in our faces precisely because we continue to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that his limbs are in fact decorously sheathed in Professorial tweeds and it is with a tobacco pipe in his hands, not a turgid penis, that he gesticulates at us delinquents cowering in the back row of that Gandhi-Nehru Lecture Hall which, indeed, is vaster than the World and more deadly than Death.

Guha’s Law- Criminals better Lawmakers than Lawyers

  Has Ramachandra Guha discovered a new law of Historiography? Or does everybody already know that the lawyer to criminal ratio in Parliament is inversely correlated with the rate of Economic growth?
‘India’s first Lok Sabha, or Parliament, had a very high number of lawyers. A large proportion of its members were from the upper castes and were English speakers. Over the decades, however, Parliament has become more socially inclusive, its members drawn from a much broader range of castes and classes. Other changes have been less salutary—as in the greater number of criminals who enter its portals, and the increasing disruptions to its proceedings. In the 1950s, the Indian Parliament was a theater of intelligent and spirited debate. Now speakers are shouted down by their rivals, microphones and chairs are sometimes flung around, and walk-outs are frequent. “In the noise and disorder generated in Parliament over [allegations of] scandalous misconduct by someone somewhere,” observes Béteille, “it becomes difficult to decide on the merits of the individual case. But the long-term effect of continuous discord and disorder within Parliament is an erosion of public trust in the institution itself.”
(Ramachandra Guha in the New Republic)

   The Hindu rate of growth was legislated into existence by high minded lawyers who respected each other’s intelligence and integrity so much that they were able to set aside their petty differences in order to gang rape the Economy. 
  Since the Police and the Civil Service and the financiers of the Political Parties were highly effective in preventing Laws being applied, voters ditched the lawyers- they cut out the middle-man- in favor of Criminals with effective countervailing power – i.e. the ability to kill policemen and Civil Servants and to bribe Judges and Jail Superintendents and so on.
  This destabilized Indian Democracy which in turn meant that the Indian Economy could pick up its bra and panties and start sprinting away in the hope of becoming a second China. 
  Unfortunately some high minded lawyers and other ‘Civil Society’ hooligans have caught the Indian Economy and are dragging her back to Indian Democracy which is now claiming that its izzat was looted by this callous Pinki Pramanik and only marriage with the rapist can restore its honor.
  Personally, I blame Mamta Bannerjee. That boy aint right.

Guha and the thinkers and makers of modern India.

Ramachandra Guha’s book on 19 ‘thinkers and makers of modern India’ is out and seems to have been well received.
I find it puzzling. I’d have thought, the people whose ideas and actions might still be relevant to modern India would have been those possessed of superior rationally and maturity and independence of character rather than mere publicity mongers who abandoned even such see-through intellectual garments as Indian modesty requires, in their headlong rush to jump on every bandwagon or head up any passing mob.
Prior to Independence none of the people mentioned in this book had much power and, perhaps for that very reason, little motive or leisure to think rather than simply strike attitudes. Since the British were brokers of both Power and Knowledge rather than hegemonic monopolists of both- though India could boast its exiles, it was not the case that its exiles competed at the level of pure thought and analysis.

Keynes, in his book on Indian monetary policy, drew attention to a special sort of narrowness that arises from having knowledge only of India and England, that too only at the level of leader-writer Punditry. It is noteworthy that already, at that point in time, there were Indians with a larger vision- however, their failure to synthesize an intelligentsia with a wider horizon than that of the hacks and windbags the British had insisted on engendering meant that Thought, as a shaping force, remained a dead letter- though no doubt it might ricochet unpredictably at rarefied levels of policy framing (a necessary and sufficient qualification for participation in which, the British considered, was an impartial Mandarin ignorance of both empirical conditions in the market and the manner in which public institutions actually implemented policy).

This is not to say there was no dialogue between specialists in different fields. On the contrary, there was a sort of lowest common denominator dialogue such that the Scientist might abruptly claim that the latest radio-carbon results prove that the Vedas were written before the formation of the mountains, or a former President of India, an old Socialist, suddenly start quoting some Ananda Margi nutjob, an Econ Lecturer at some Mid West Community College, who predicted that the Western Economy would collapse in 1990 or something equally silly.
Of course, the President in question had already seen to it that his own children were all ‘well-settled’ in the U.S and thus his satisfaction in contemplating the downfall of the West was of a purely Philosophical sort.

Yet, India has had thinkers and shapers. Our administrators and  lawyers, even journalists and historians were, if anything, a cut above what one might expect in such a poor country. Who were they? Well, for a lot of ‘Indglish’ speakers they were Mummy and Daddy and Uncle and Aunty and Granny and Grandad and so on.
But- in so far as they thought and acted in a manner promoting the commonweal- were they not mere imitators of the British, Macaulay’s Babu class?
To answer this question, we might begin by asking the question- what features does India have which do not flow, in a purely mechanical faction, from the fact that it was ruled by the British and that it’s intelligentsia had some exposure to thoughts expressed in the English language?
What institutions, or adaptions of institutions, make independent India different, rather than inferior merely, to the probable trajectory it would otherwise have taken?
Well, we might start off with concepts and programs unique to India- Ahimsa (ghastly failure), khaddar (a bad joke), Panchsheel (hilarious till the Chinese bloodied our nose), Swadesi (apparently some Burmese nutjob actually implemented this as ‘Buddhist Economics’, greatly to Schumacher’s delight, thus setting back his country by 80 years), Sampoorna kranti (which meant replacing Indira Gandhi with Raj Narain!) and, of course, the grandest success of them all- viz. Bhoodan which culminated in Bihardhan- i.e. the redistribution of land by the voluntary action and consent of the land-lords which resulted in the whole state of Bihar (or at least 97%) being donated to ….urm dunno…but it was what Vinobha Bhave wanted and he had vowed not to leave Bihar till it happened and then it happened and so he finally did leave Bihar and…urm…that really shaped modern India and represented like truly visionary thinking because everybody else thought it was impossible BUT only the Indians actually tried it and thus PROVED …that they can’t think or shape events worth shit.
What of Women and doing away with feudalism and stuff like that? The China got rid of ‘foot-binding’ in half a generation, India completely did away with things like child-marriage and ban on svagotra marriage and the tyranny of khap panchayats and so on way back in …urm, except we didn’t at all.
The Koreans get rid of untouchability and caste and land-lordism and poor hygiene in the villages and so on- all in the space of what? ten years? fifteen years? In India, Ambedkar converts to Buddhism, though he knew it was the most successful exporter of the concept of Untouchability in history, and… well… urm… the good news is that not only will the Caste system be constitutionally preserved but everybody wants to be classed as ‘backwards’ if not outright retarded..  
True, every nation has a bunch of wind-bags gassing on about democracy and ‘wimmin’s’ rights and so on. But, not every nation has had democracy for over 60 years with more or less Left wing Govts in power both at the Center and the States. The inescapable conclusion we must draw is that either
a) thinkers and shapers of the sort Guha celebrates had shit-for-brains and zero practical ability
b) thousands of Indians have shown an unexampled genius as thinkers and shapers in ensuring that the thoughts and schemes of the wind-bag do-goodniks ended up frustrating their own ends.

I suppose another possibility exists- viz. Guha’s brand of caramel centered historiography is an exercise in meaningless pi-jaw of a sort that we, at this time of crisis when the clash of civilizations of the environmental greenhouse gasses of the collapse of the global capitalist system and like I’m sure those fucking Germans will soon go all Nazi and start invading Poland again and like check out that Narendra Modi dude- what if his beard reaches Ayatollah proportions?- and isn’t Arundhati Roy silly because in these illiberal times I will defend to the death something or the other and free speech and human rights and like that old song of Amitabh Kumar says ‘Hum ko pyaar chahiye’- ‘All I wants is Love’ and, guess what, I’m doing another fucking big book on guess who- yup, Gandhi- coz that always sells.

But what was original in Gandhi? Hunger strikes? That was borrowed from the Suffragettes and it had already failed. Non-Cooperation, Rent strikes and so on. The Irish had been there, done that and, on balance, won their historic struggle albeit by an own goal. Yes, I suppose Gandhi was doing something novel in supporting Khilafat. But it was novel because it was silly.

More broadly, if we leave aside programs initiated or catalyzed by the British- including ex-I.C.S liberals like Hulme, Wedderburn and Cotton and so on- what are we left with?

Guha includes Jinnah perhaps because his ‘hostage-theory’ (whereby Indians won’t kill Muslims for fear Pakistanis might retaliate against Hindus) was as hilarious and purely Indian as Gandhi’s hunger strikes. But both refer to an absence of thought and were destructive rather than constructive of the inheritance from the Raj.

It is a great criticism of Guha’s book that he does not mention truly great men and original thinkers like Tanguturi Prakasam who, as C.M of Madras Presidency, proposed the destruction of the textile mills so that they might be replaced by Khaddar. This led to clashes with the Communists whom he locked up- surely the only occasion when that was the wrong thing to do.

Thinkers and Shapers? I praise the wreckers and the mindless bribe-takers. It is they who, between them, have kept India going and salvaged for it such relicts of modernity as the Raj bequeathed it.

The odd thing is that there are plenty of good writers and policy-makers- Judges, Doctors, Engineers, School Inspectors and so on- who weren’t the sort of futile numskulls Guha lists. What they tended to avoid was single valued solutions to complex socio-economic problems. In Economics, we have Tinbergen’s rule- the number of policy instruments must equal the number of policy objectives. Any ideologue who thinks otherwise- for e.g that women’s education /micro-finance or whatever  is a panacea- is either a careerist or  a nutjob or both.

Guha is looking for non-Marxists nutjobs because there is some other Guha who has cornered the market in talking up Marxist nutjobs.
Yet Guha is taken seriously.
Why?

Ramachandra Guha on the demise of the bilingual intellectual

Last year Ramachandra Guha rehashed an essay on the demise of the bilingual intellectual in India.
Guha does not claim to be, properly speaking, bilingual and thus his essay throws no direct light on his own mysterious intellectual demise many years ago.
Guha spends some time quoting the always hilarious Mahatma who thought Raja Rajmohan Roy would have been a better intellectual if he hadn’t known English! Guha does not mention that Gandhi was not, and never claimed to be, an intellectual- you see, Gandhi had studied English and thus, by his own argument, was fucked in the head- as his public career amply demonstrated. However, Gandhi did not claim to be an intellectual. He thought God talked to him coz like he’d given up sex and was sleeping with his nieces to correct their sleeping posture and that made him a ‘Mahatma’ rather than a ‘Maha pervert.’
Tagore, whom Guha quotes as an example of an bilingual intellectual, was an artist and hereditary Guru not a thinker and certainly nothing so declasse as an ‘intellectual’.
Ranade, Gokhale and the Servants of India could have developed into public intellectuals doing research on economics and sociology and so on but their heart wasn’t really in it. They just wanted those insufferable Goras to fuck off back to Blighty and if Gandhian voodoo or Khilafat voodoo or the German submarines or the Jap bombers or whatever secured that goal then they too were quite happy to drop the intellectual pose.
Ambedkar had first class intellectual credentials but his was a lone voice. Well there were plenty of others like him but what to do? India is like that only- no?
Guha goes on about Rajaji- again NOT an intellectual- NOT an expert on Hindu Mimamsa or even Jurisprudence come to that- NOT an economist, not an I.R guy- and why is Rajaji relevant? Well he wrote books for kids which his daughter or grand-daughter or somebody translated into Hindi which is important because…urm… well, like Rajaji wrote it in simple Telugu or Tamil or something and it was translated into simple English and…. urm… well that’s intellectual right? Menaka Gandhi wrote an encyclopedia of children’s names- so she’s an intellectual. Jade Goody wrote an autobiography- so she’s an intellectual coz people who write books are intellectuals- that’s the test, right? Y’know, like Jeffery Archer and … urm P.G Woodhouse and like some other guy was a librarian or something and this other poor bastard had the misfortune to earn his bread as a Prof. of Eng Lit and so, like, he must have been an intellectual right? And Ram Manohar Lohia had a German PhD- like that’s a recommendation!- and so the fact that what he liked doing was camping in some rural backwater where he could kid himself that the people he was meeting were more mentally slothful and deluded than himself- he was definitely an intellectual, right?
Guha thinks J.P Narayan- who sold hair straightener to Negroes to get his Wobbly American Socialist credentials- was smart, well, the fucker did impress Arthur Koestler thus proving he was fucked in the head long before the full unfolding of his sheer silliness could work its full complement of mischief on the Indian polity.
Intellectuals gotta use their fucking intellect! And when they find out they are wrong they got to use their intellect some more to find out why they were wrong. If they get to communicate this to a wider public- then they’re public intellectuals, rather than Media whores.
Nobody Guha mentions used their intellect to this effect or to this end. Their strong suit was their passionate commitment to some holier than thou pi jaw shite, or doctrinaire lets-kill-everybody shite. Well that’s not entirely true. There is also the provincial navel gazer who becomes a visiting professor in America and whose writing is defensive rather than crepuscular, if not straight forwardly of the Emperor’s new clothes variety.
Guha doesn’t mention Acharya Kosambi- coz he was like RElIGIOUS? And that’s not intellectual at all. The Marxist Kosambi also doesn’t get a mention coz… urm… well he actually discovered something in Maths or Stats or something so he’s like TECHNICAL guy & not an intellectual. As for critics like Prof. S.R Faruqi or the numberless poets who write in two or more languages- urm well they’re like LITERATURE guys and that’s not intellectual right?
Jagdish Chandra Bose? Scientist. Doesn’t count if a scientist publishes in English and then writes novels, essays or whatever in one or more Indian language coz like SCIENCE guys aint intellectuals right?
Subramaniyam Swamy? Intelligent, thus the very reverse of ‘intellectual’. Indeed, not loving any Indian language well enough to also write in it, is a necessary though not sufficient condition for the sheer silliness that only our ‘public intellectuals’ preen themselves on.
In one respect Guha has a point- imagine Gayatri Spivak or Amartya Sen writing their shite in Bengali- would Spivak get away with saying ‘India is named after Rama’s younger brother’ (Critique of Post Colonial Reason) or Sen get away with his specious nyaya/niti distinction or his silliness about the Bhagvad Gita? Well actually, in Bengali, maybe they would get away with it. (Contra Guha, under the Commies, if any Indian language can now be called ‘subaltern’ it is not Malyalam or Kannada or Tamil but Bengali). Perhaps, if Sen had been writing in Bengali, he wouldn’t have gone off on the wrong track. Spivak, on the other hand, was always beyond redemption.
Guha mentions a lot of people who have written books and who occupy academic positions. They’re intellectuals surely? No. What isn’t belles lettres is just the working of Gresham’s Law as applied to publishing whereby the blurb- ‘the author graduated from X and held such and such senior position or won such and such Literary consolation prize for being a benighted darkie.’- pre-empts the text.
Guha does not know what an intellectual is coz it is not clear that he ever even tried to be one. Being a writer and a columnist and making speeches was so much easier, provided the effort to really think was never made.
His article about the rise and demise of the bilingual intellectual is hilarious for overlooking the one obvious fact. Thought isn’t about language. Not any more. Not now we got Mathematics. Not now Science is univocal at the global level.
The importance of language as providing a basis for wage and service provision discrimination is undermined by Globalized free trade- what people want is access to ‘Globish‘ for their kids- not English per se. In any case, the hyper trophy of Academic specialization had already led to over publication in the ‘Globish’ sub-dialect for peer consumption- i.e. a lot of intellectual activity is occurring outside literary language properly so called.
One reason why people started turning away from vernacular literature was because, by the 70’s, Dalit, Modernist and Revolutionary literature was concerned with lowering rather than raising the social horizon of the reader. At one time, the way you got ahead in life was by reading novels, newspaper articles, listening to the speeches of leaders etc. so as to improve your vocabulary, syntax, accent and so on. After 1970, all that changed.
Does it matter?
No.
Language does not matter. If it did, Paninian Sanskrit would be an impossibility- nothing could have been written in it.

In truth, the task of the intellectual never had very much to do with language- even in linguistics and hermeneutics. Maths can capture some of what the intellectual is doing- and the reason intellectual activity is now divorced from language is coz technology makes it much easier to number crunch and thus evaluate positive theories rather than invest simply in attitudinizing and pi-jaw.
Granted people like Guha are still able to make a living by peddling that shit. But they aint intellectuals- just a careerist claque hired for by the Balzacian prostitutes strutting the Comic Opera stage of Public life.
Did India produce actual real life intellectuals? Guys who had original thoughts and who worked them up into a system and sought to validate them empirically so as to give policy prescription a more productive basis than paranoid polemics and careerist claptrap?
Yes, actually India did, does and will continue to do so. Caste and dialect and which fucking school you went to don’t come into it. Sorry but there it is.
Does India have public intellectuals? Yes- crap ones. So does America. So does England. On the Continent, of course, things get a lot worse. They’re all a bunch of evil, twisted, bastards.

What is striking in everything Guha writes is how much of it one already knows and how large a proportion of that is irrelevantly cited. The point about doing research is uncovering relevant stuff that aint common knowledge and using that new information to put forward a more thought provoking model. In Mimamsa, apoorvata is a condition for meaning. That’s right, you’ve got to have something new to say to qualify as being capable of using language meaningfully. But that means you need an inquiring mind- to have alternative, competing, models thronging in your mental background so that you can evaluate and assimilate new stuff you turn up when researching a topic.
Language, here is the obstacle not the instrument which is why bright guys like A.K Ramanujan, B.K Matilal- is Purushottama Bilimoria intelligent? dunno, but let’s include him as a courtesy- ended up having nothing worth saying in their own languages.

Since India teaches nothing if not the conviction that language is the soul’s anus- there is no fundamental problem in which any district of India has not produced a ‘son of the soil’ with something valuable from which all can learn . Equally, no district of India is devoid of substantial resources and instruments of coersion to bury all original or meaningful thought under Guha-style meretricious tripe.