Fundamental Issues

Rajiv Malhotra's Note(hereafter RMN) offers ten points for a discussion. I should say at the outset that I am not representing FOILin any institutional sense - nor is Rajiv an institutional representative of Dharma!

I take Rajiv on his word that his note is sincere. I too don't want to enter the world of personal diatribe. Ifirst came to hear of Rajiv's work with the Infinity Foundation a few years ago, and over time I have readmany of his essays published on the web.

I was disheartened with Rajiv's comments published on H-Asia about Indian and South Asian Studies. To think ofour scholarship as "branding" India is incorrect: we are not in the business of marketing anation-state. That is the job of the Ambassador of India, not of a scholar who studies the region or thecountry. I was equally chagrined by the term "India-bashing." I consider myself a patriot who hasworked for most of his adult life within India and in the Diaspora to promote the well-being of Indianpeoples. I "bash" those who disregard the liberty and opportunity of the vast mass of Indians -which means that I often write in a partisan fashion against the rulers of the country.

To equate a critique of the BJP-led or Congress-led government in power with "India-bashing" isquite the same as the way pro-Zionists label any criticism of Israel as "Anti-Semitism." I amuncomfortable with rhetoric such as this, and I would like us to leave such sloganeering out of ourconversation. There are some genuine issues that can be discussed, but this should be done in a rational andreasonable way.

I would like, at a later time, to discuss the issue of funding, and of "NRI philanthropy" to UScolleges. This is an important issue, one that has excised many of us since the Hinduja fiasco and recentlyover the debate on HR 3077 (to transform Title VI). Let us save that for the future.

I accepted Rajiv's invitation to a dialogue because I think that while there is a lot that divides us, thereis also sufficient ground for us to hold a conversation. I do not believe that political differences shouldlead to the demonization of those whom we don't agree with. On the contrary, politics is disagreements thathave to be aired, and fought over. This is a good opportunity to fight over our first principles and ourmethods of analysis. I welcome that.

Following RMN, I offer my own thoughts as a list. The first list is meant to clear the ground set by Rajiv. Ibelieve that there is much that needs to be refuted in his original note, and that is what I have done.Following that, I have offered a way forward for our discussion.

1. The Straw Man

A "straw man" is a veteran of political arguments. You need only report an argument as that ofyour opposition, make sure it is a distortion and often weaker than that they actually hold, and then tear itdown. When RMN represents the "Left" it generally pulls the Straw Man out of the hat. Let me takefour examples of the Straw Man, among several:

a. Marxist Grand Narrative (no. 7)
RMN treats the Left as if there is one Brain Trust that comes up with a Theory that is then repeated by theshock troops across the world, over time. There is neither a singular "Left" nor is there one"Marxist Grand Narrative." The institutional weakness of the Left in general is because of thetendency to argue over analysis of the current situation and then dispute political strategy. There is no Leftversion of the Sangh Parivar, no United Front that lasts.

What is an institutional weakness, however, is an ideological and intellectual strength: Marxism is its ownbest critic. Marxists are always in debate and dispute. One of the old saws of Marxism, is that Marx would besurprised to find himself in the camp. For an introduction to the disputes, I recommend the multiple volumeMain Currents of Marxism, written by the conservative Leszek Kolakowski, or else, Perry Anderson's Inthe Tracks of Historical Materialism.

Furthermore, Marxism remains open to interrogation of its foundational concepts through interactions withnew disciplines and areas of inquiry: Socialist Feminism (see the 2002 volume The Socialist FeministProject edited by Nancy Holstrom for Monthly Review Press, or else the vibrant essays by Himani Banerjee's2001 monograph from Tulika, Inventing Subjects: hegemony, patriarchy and colonialism); PsychoanalyticMarxism (see the entire oeuvre of Slavoj Zizek, and his many interlocutors); Eco-Marxism (see John BellamyFoster's many books, and the essays by Archana Prasad that will be soon published by LeftWord Books, India);Rethought Marxism (the group around the journal Rethinking Marxism, but mainly the work of JulieGibson-Graham), and other trends offer a vision of Marxism's ability to dialogue with other disciplines andvisions and reshape its central categories.

So, when RMN speaks of the Left, it is often in passive voice (see, no. 1, "entirely new frameworksare not appearing"), with no referent to any specific trend or tendency within the Marxist tradition.

b. "A thorough destruction of the old" (no. 3)

RMN claims that the Left wants "a thorough destruction of the old and rebuilding of an imagined newoften guided by a teleology." Is that so? What Left, and where?

For a generation, Marxist historians studied ancient history and produced for us a series of books that arecrucial to our grasp of the Indian past. They show us how our traditions have always been contested, and howthe working people in the ancient world lived and struggled, and how they often won changes. D. D. Kosambi, R.S. Sharma, R. Thapar and others studied the past in order to understand its impact on our present.

The Marxist understanding of the past draws from a very cogent line from Marx, "The tradition of alldead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." What he perhaps meant is that youcan't simply pretend, as many modernists did in his time, that you can walk away from the past - you have toengage with it and struggle with it to guide a new society out of it.

Those of us who study caste for instance, are interested in its lineage into the past, as well as how itwas re-cast during colonialism and into the new nation-state. Our work on caste is not to "destroy theold," but to understand how social organization worked and works, how it enables life for some anddisables it for others, and then how it can be transformed so as to give liberty to all. I recommendSuvira Jaiswal's extraordinary Caste: Origin, Function and Dimensions of Change (Manohar, 1998).

c. Indian Tradition

RMN's nos. 9 and 10 on yoga and the Indian Classics assume that we on the Left have an allergy to Indiantradition, that we don't want the classics or yoga to be taught in the classroom. I don't know or haven't readstatements from any Marxist or Left historian who has said such a thing.

Who does RMN have in mind when it makes the comment that "Indian leftists seem to continue theMacaulay trend of despising the Indian Classics"? We all read the classics and some of us do yoga - wehave nothing against these practices. When I teach my ancient India class each year, we always read selectionsfrom the Vedas, generally something from Kalidasa, always extracts from the various Epics, and parts ofthe literature on the body (whether the Kama Sutra or else Caraka Samitha). One can't teachabout South Asia without an engagement with the classics.

Do we "despise the Indian Classics"? No. Do we teach them to cheerlead about the Indian past? No.Our engagement with the Indian classics is as rigorous and critical as our engagement with the classicalliterature from anywhere in the world. I recommend the following, relatively randomly selected, books thatengage critically and sympathetically with classical age: Uma Chakravarti, The Social Dimensions of EarlyBuddhism (Oxford, 1987), Brajadulal Chattopadhyay, The Making of Early Medieval India (Oxford,1997), B. N. S. Yadava, Society and Culture in Northern India in the Twelfth Century (Allahabad, 1974).

Because Professor Romila Thapar has come in for some egregious attacks by the Hindutva circles in the US, Iwould like to underscore the importance not only of her many earlier books, but of the absolutely wonderfulreconstruction of Kalidasa in her Sakuntala: texts, readings, histories (Kali for Women, 2002). I alsorecommend the neglected work of Rahul Sankrityayan - you could start with his Sahitya Academy winning book,Madhya Asia Ka Itihas (1958).

On yoga, I don't have any notion why a Marxist would oppose its entry into the lives of the young - it isas good as physical training, or any other calisthenics taught in schools. I have not come across anythingthat indicates that Marxists or others wanted to ban yoga because it is "anti-secular" (no. 9).

Many of us do have a problem with the way in which the "East" is adopted by people in advancedindustrial states as a salve for their alienation, where the "East" becomes one-dimensional andwithout its contradictions. My critique of Deepak Chopra and the distortions of ayurveda in the New Age Worldis available in Karma of Brown Folk (2000) in a chapter entitled "Sly Babas and Other Gurus."

d. "Essentializing Hindus as perpetrators for all the current problems" (no. 3).

The Left of which I am a part does not speak of "Hindus" as the perpetrators of our problems.When I excoriate the forces that conduct pogroms in India, I am always careful to write of those who areeither ideologically driven or institutionally linked to Hindutva.

Hindutva is not Hinduism, and it will never be so. It is a secular political ideology initiated by V.D.Savarkar and developed by his followers in the RSS and the Sangh Parivar that makes a cynical use ofreligion and "race" to organize people against religious minorities and its own politicalopposition. We always maintain a clear distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva, between those who find theirspiritual solace and moral compass in a tradition, and those who want to make mayhem based on a seculardistortion of tradition. If there is any "essentializing" done it is of the followers of Hindutva,not of Hindus in general.

In addition, I don't feel that the Left of which I am a part finds "Hindus" or even Hindutva toblame for "all the current problems." Many of us are foes of neoliberalism (in political terms, thisincludes the Congress), of imperialism, and of all manner of religious sectarianisms (especially the rise ofglobal jihadis, such as al-Qaida).

The principle contradiction in our time, as far as most of us on the Left see it, is between imperialismand the rest, between those who benefit from the American Empire (including many Indian and NRI elites) andthe rest of humanity. The rise of Hindutva, in my opinion, should be seen in light of the neoliberal epoch, atheme that I explore at length in my latest book (Namaste Sharon: Hindutva and Sharonism under US hegemony,LeftWord Books, 2003) - you will see from the title that Hindutva is not the perpetrator of "all thecurrent problems."

e. "The Left has failed to see Religious Multinationals in the same light" (no. 4).

I appreciate your distinction between individuals and institutions, between the lives of ordinary IndianChristians and Muslims, and the wiles of organized churches and mosques, of the Vatican and the Madrassas.That is a crucial distinction not made by many of those who have written books in opposition to Christianityin India: Arun Shourie's 1998 Missionaries in India mainly confines itself to the colonial period, butit too has an impatience toward those who are Christians, while N. S. Rajaram's 1999 Christiantiy'sCollapsing Empire and Its Designs in India is openly venomous toward Indian Christians.

Those who conducted the pogroms against the Christians in Dangs, Gujarat, in 1999 did not share RMN'scarefulness to make the distinction between institutions and individuals. The Bajrang Dal walked the streetsin Dangs with this slogan, "There is a noise in the streets, That the Christians are thieves. Hindusrise, Christians run, Whoever gets in our way/Will be ground to dust." (for more on this, see HumanRights Watch, Politics By Other Means: Attacks Against Christians in Gujarat, September 1999).

The Left that I live within is not opposed to religion, but we tend to believe that religion must remainoutside politics, that religion must not enter the matters of the state. Obviously this is a very trickyformula and it is prone to all sorts of interpretations and misunderstandings. I do not concern myself withthe religion of people or with conversion: if people are unhappy in a faith, they have every right and everyliberty to convert to another.

I was disheartened by the tenor of the letters to India Abroad on the conversion of Bobby Jindal. Itotally opposed his gubernatorial candidacy on political not personal grounds: his own conversion botheredmany NRIs who, I'm tempted to say, have been influenced by this casual anti-Christian tendency promoted byHindutva.

Of course, I worry when religion is distorted into use for secular purposes - which is why I opposeHindutva, the Evangelical Right in the US, the Orthodox Right that influences Israeli politics, and it iscertainly why the Left has been and continues to be fundamentally against Islamic fundamentalism. Keep in mindthat the fundamentalists have as much, perhaps more animus against secular forces than other religious ones,because we disagree with the very foundation of their belief system - the Left suffered at their hands in mostof the Arab lands, and certainly in Afghanistan.

We oppose all fundamentalisms, but we do not join hands to forbid conversion. The Pope's statement in 1999during his visit to India was offensive and many said so: the Vatican and the Evangelicals ruse of conversionis to be condemned, but their role in India is not as significant to me as their role in the US, for instance.For more on this, please click here..

I hope we can dispense with the "straw man" and go forward with a mode of discussion that keepsclose to the text, to the actual arguments made by different sides in a debate.

2. Historical Revision

As I said above, the Marxist tradition has always been about openness to historical revision, to reasoneddebate about the historical archive and what one is able to surmise from it about the past. The generousdebate over the question of the transition from feudalism to capitalism within English history is an exampleof academic Marxism's openness to material, method and debate over the narrative of history (known as theBrenner Debate, after the interchanges in Past and Present over the work of Robert Brenner, now atUCLA); and in the Indian context, the dispute over the question of an "Indian feudalism" revealsmuch the same kind of openness to transformation and revision of the narratives that operate (the main playerswere Harbans Mukhia and R. S. Sharma, and the debate has been published in Journal of Peasant Studies,1981).

Indian Marxists have not been unaware of the lack of a genuine, original debate among historians -Kosambi's comment, "The outstanding characteristic of a backward bourgeoisie, the desire to profitwithout labor or grasp without technique, is reflected in the superficial 'research' so common in India,"exemplifies the desire for research and debate, and for historical revision when the material and the theorymerit it. Rigidity is not something that is inherent in Marxism; it is rather the refuge of mediocrity.

So, when no. 5, asks "Are Leftists willing to accept that there may well be legitimate revisions of(Indian and non-Indian) by non-leftists, in ways that contradict the 'sequence of history' mandated by leftistideology?" I can only answer, yes. What is erroneous in RMN is the presupposition of rigidity and thecharge of a "mandated" version of history. The field of South Asian history is vibrant, charged withinterventions from environmental history, labor history, feminist history, religious history, and the historyof peoples who had been held in the margins (adivasis, dalits, etc). This rich scholarship has trulytransformed the narrative of Indian history as taught in many colleges and schools - I, for one, have torevise my Indian history syllabus annually.

The new work on ancient India, on gender relations for instance, has made even the distant past open torevision - it is a good time to be a South Asian historian. I recommend that readers go and look at the recentpublications from Permanent Black, Oxford University Press, Manohar Books, Kali for Women, Tulika and othersuch major publishers of South Asian history to get a sense of the actual histories written by contemporaryhistorians - many of whom are not from South Asia, but whose grasp of South Asian history is exemplary.

3. On Patriotism

Is the Left, as RNM alleges, "against Indian nationhood"? I want to ignore the charge that theLeft has an "uncritical loyalty to western idioms and politics," because the very notion of"nationhood" at one level is quite classically "western" or at least modern. So, if we canset aside the logical inconsistency here between the supposed disregard for "nationhood" and theloyalty to "western idioms and politics," let's deal with the question of patriotism and the IndianLeft.