Courtesy: PTI
Ashoak Upadhyay
But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing…
And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering be- tween life and death, writhing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished.
Behind me, I heard the same man asking:
“For God’s sake, where is God?”
And from within me, I heard a voice answer:
“Where He is? This is where—hanging here from this gallows… ” (Elie Wiesel. The Night: 65).
–“It’s no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society” J. Krishnamurthy
–“Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue ––Francois de la Rouchefoucald
Ashoak Upadhyay
S
even years before Charles Darwin published his epochal “Origin of the Species” in 1859, an English philosopher put forth his own theories on human evolution best summed up in what became his contribution to the lexicon of an expanding terrain of dubious distinction, ranging from eugenics to laissez-faire capitalism. “Survival of the Fittest” is in popular imagination attributed to Charles Darwin but it was Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) who coined it as a metaphor capturing the spirit of his philosophy. So when Darwin’s theories of natural evolution among the species hit the stands, Spencer was one of its most enthusiastic supporters because they seemed to confirm his ‘organicist’ beliefs in the survival of the fittest humans under an environment best left to judge who should live and who should not. Thus he polemicized against various social welfare policies including those Poor Laws extant since Elizabethan times up for amendment and the subject of contemporary debates in the British Parliament. Here he is:
“All legislation which assists the people in the satisfaction of their natural wants—which provides a fund for their maintenance in illness and old age, educates their children, takes care of their religious instruction, looks after their bodily health, or in any other way does for them what they may be fairly expected to do for themselves, arises from a radically wrong understanding of human existence. It wholly neglects the condition of man’s earthly being, and altogether loses sight of one of the great and universal laws of creation …”
Holidaying in Scotland at the time with friends, Andrew Carnegie from across the Atlantic and one of America’s lading capitalists was asked which author he would like to have as company if stranded on an island: one had said Shakespeare, another Dante. Carnegie rooted for Spencer. This was not surprising because the capitalist-baron felt a personal liberation reading the English philosopher and Darwin’s theories which he of course mistakenly conflated as one applicable to human life: even though Darwin had said no such thing. Reading Darwin the naturalist and Spencer the philosopher-polemicist and pioneer of social Darwinism had a dramatic effect on Carnegie. His description of that effect reads almost like an epiphany:
“I remember that light came as in a flood and all was clear,” Carnegie wrote. “Not only had I got rid of theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution. ‘All is well since all grows better’ became my motto, my true source of comfort.”1
Echoing Spencer, the steel baron’s words resonated around the capitalist boardrooms of the time Carnegie would say: “The concentration of capital is a necessity for meeting the demands of our day, and as such should not be looked at askance, but be encouraged,” Carnegie wrote, literally paraphrasing Spencer. “There is nothing detrimental to human society in it, but much that is, or is bound soon to become, beneficial.” This was all that Carnegie picked up from Spencer disagreeing with his opposition to any charities or philanthropic works for which both he and other capitalist-barons would become known for.2 No matter. Spencer had given American capitalism and the world of capital in general a foundation on which to build an epistemology that would spread around the world in the century now dawning.
“Survival of the fittest” became the ghost in the machine of capital and all modern societies. It segued into an emergent discourse of the Nation-State, handmaiden of capitalism and both of which would define and ground colonial and imperialist expansion and empire-building not just as territorial conquests with the flag and gunboats but with Spencerian-laced discourses; knowledge systems that placed the human species on a ladder of achievement as measures of ‘fitness’. Thus the ‘natives’ would become ‘savage’, ‘mongoloid’ ‘negroid,’ primitive peoples soon to be advantaged and blessed as the white man’s burden.
And what was the burden’s song? That the natives would, under the benevolent sophistications and discourses of the coloniser’s twin advantages, History and the Modern-State resting on a bedrock of capitalism at some time or other, in a rather dim future, rise to a level of Progress from their current, ‘savage’ state. Not just savage, but weak, effete, malicious, members of back-stabbers, warring communities incapable of creating forms of governance such as those ruling over them, victims of ruthless murderous kings and emperors in the ‘Dark’ ages. On the scale of human evolution, social Darwinism, the colonized was no different from the poor and wretched in London’s slums. What they needed to simply stay alive was the benevolent hand of capital and the modern state.
And the hand of a ‘civilizing religion’, a civic religion elaborated by Dilip Simeon in his essay as a religion concerned with its utility rather than with its adherence to truth helped immensely creating that ontology of subjugation grounded in the absorption by the native of a set of beliefs focusing on the liberating qualities of a civic religion (such as Christianity as received on this subcontinent), a utopian vision of a modern Nation-State guaranteeing and safeguarding a national identity and nationalism and of course capitalism as inevitable alternatives to India’s cumulative backwardness.
Through imperial fiat and a steady stream of demonization Indians were taught to reject whatever had held India together for millennia: its composite culture; its ability to live with equal differences of faith and lifestyles, its nation of communities as Tagore called it and its flourishing economy that exported all over the world—till the advent of colonialism. History became the handmaiden of this enterprise to get the Indian to accept the colonial discourse of Progress through the Nation-State, a blind belief in science and modernity and crucially, a belief however muted or unspoken in the Spencerian idea of fitness. If Indians had to be strong they had to shed their weaknesses that lay not just in physiognomic shortcomings but in cultural-normative value systems located in the village and distributed among million gods and goddesses and in oral tradition, all very primitive really. Self-definition had to be reworked to acquire self-worth. And many educated Indians turned the only direction they could, because they had been psyched to do so. They looked towards Europe. A Europe fast modernizing into Nation-States on the debris of crumbling medieval empires and technology driven genocidal wars.
One of these was Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1833-1966). An atheist, dismissive of Hindu rituals he propounded a nationalism inspired by European ideals of the Nation-State as expressed most passionately by Guisippe Mazzini whom Savarkar admired. A freedom fighter in his early years, Savarkar gave his concept of nationalism an ethnicised grounding, adopting and reinventing in 1923 a term Brahmabandhav Upadhyay had coined—‘Hindutva’. The reinterpretation was critical and path-breaking. Upadhyay (1861-1907) following the tradition of the Young Bengal Group, felt Hinduism had become weak and effete, “Hindus were the carriers of an overly diverse religion…and to that extent , were an ill-formed , sleep-wallking crypto-natiion that had not actualized its possibilities.” (Nandy:29) This self-contempt was inflected with admiration for Christianity and Islam. Bengal’s reform movements were an outcome of this sentiment of self-hatred and a resurgence of Hindu pride through its masculinisation.
Savarkar coupled “Hindutva” to his belief in a patriarchal nationalism, As Ashis Nandy points out, an early “maudlin nationalism” had given way to an aggressive one in which he ended up “reconceptualising India as a fatherland.” But he was also an abrasive rationalist and political realist. The pathologies underlining Upadhyay’s Hindutva suited his brand of ethno-nationalism perfectly
Savarkar professed “…absolute uncritical faith in the modern state and its secular imperatives. . Probably more than any other leader at the time, Savarkar was in awe of Europe’s achievements in the area of nation-building and state-formation..” The “basic categories of of Savarkar’s political ideology—nation, national state, nationality and nationalism—remained aggressively European.” (Nandy:20). And this Eurocentrism flowed into other perspectives on a Hindu-ness he wanted to transform:
“For Savarkar, the sphere of politics could only be occupied by rational, secular and scientific thought.
Ironically, the man who spent his life preaching the need to ‘Hinudize’ the political sphere detested the presence of piety/religiosity in politics…
“In Savarkar’s eyes, Gandhi represented everything that was wrong with Hinuduism, with its ‘effeminacy’ and its ‘mystical’ and ‘irrational’ approach…it was his life’s mission to provide a counter-politics to that of Gandhi, thereby fashioning a Hinduism that stressed history, science, reason and masculinity.” {Aparna Devare in Nandy: 25}
Post-Independence, Hindutva was to side-step Savarkar’s atheism and flesh out his ethno-nationalism with a brand of Hinduism that would appear at first glance a contradiction and heresy to the founding father. But an increasingly aggressive display of Hindu rituals as public spectacle attempted to overcome the pathologies embodied in the original conception of Hindutva. Over the decades and especially after the 1980s, the RSS would inflect Hindutva with a version of Hinduism at odds with traditional Hinduism, turning an ancient faith into elements of a ‘civic religion’ to serve the Nation-State and its ideological concerns. From being a faith (beset with its own contradictions to be sure) Hinduism is an ideology posing as religion. In that sense it attempts to answer the accumulated self-hatreds Hindus have felt at the effeminacy of their faith, its denigration by a theocratic religion Islam and Christianity. As Vinay Lal points out, the answer for them lies in “Temple Hinduism” an aggressive masculinized display of religion in hostile opposition to perceived enemies and critically and tragically, in opposition to its capacity to live and let live. Margaret Chatterjee put this idea beautifully as absorption and distance: an unwritten behavioral (not theorizing) code of assimilation and thus-far-no-further (Chatterjee: 2009: 41) allowed a highly differentiated Hinduism to sustain itself and guard its self-worth for centuries, pluralistically—till the British came along.
Savarkar was the extreme end of a spectrum of young political minds that looked to the West for a secular salvation based on those tropes he endorsed; nationalism, Nation-state, national identity reason and science such that the latter become over time a belief system or scientism, a secularism that denied faiths their place in any public discourse (leaving Hinduism and Islam to the fundamentalists) and of course the legacies of a Eurocentric belief in History as a vehicle for the advancement of a backward nation towards a future that was to become a mirror of Europe’s past.
Not surprising then that Nehru dismissed Gandhi’s ideas for post-Independent India: “The essence of what I have said is that man should rest content with what are his real needs and become self- sufficient. If he does not have this control he cannot save himself.”
Gandhi was asking for simplicity of the village, not the real village but a village of his dreams “The village of my dreams is still in my mind. After all every man lives in the world of his dreams. My ideal village will contain intelligent human beings.”
But Nehru was having none of this dreaming. A rationalist, adherent of scientific temper he rooted for heavy industries, a modernity that reflected what the aspiring middle class sired on the history of western growth miracles, too wanted. The village was the site of backwardness that had to be fled from, left behind as a bad dream, a sign of not just oppression but of oppressive stillness and stagnation, of superstition and antediluvian practices.
A consensus emerged: India was to have a national identity coalesced into and guaranteed by the Nation-State, armies and a programme of urbanization based on heavy industrialisation and the exploitation of resources, of the transformation of the rural life into an arm of the urban or itself urbanized; the peasant had to give way to a new class of agrarian-capitalists. Capitalism had to reign supreme even if for the first forty years it was reined in with regulations that could be got round by greasing palms. A society based on scarcity served the affluent and privileged generously.
And the ethno-nationalists bided their time in the wings.
In 1991 the first snips in the web of illusion that the mixed economy was not a capitalist one could be heard as the Congress-led government brought their scissors to Nehruvian democratic socialism. Not before time the secularist web too came in for a pull-down as the RSS bared its fangs with organized violence and hatreds. Over the next two decades, two simultaneous processes would set into motion: the emergence of militant Hindutva and an increasingly bare-faced capitalism. The high watermarks of those processes are now evident in the project to build the Ram temple at Ayodhya, that would mark the crowning glory of Hindutva’s victory over pluralist faiths and on the other hand the ‘reforms’ in the labour laws that in effect will strip the weakest of the laboring classes, of any vestige of dignity.
It is at this point that the ‘hidden in plain sight’ reveals itself; the unholy alliance between ethno-nationalism and capitalism whose joint enterprise harkens to that Specerian vision of the ‘survival of the fittest’. The weak in this case, like it was for the social Darwinists, the Nazis and the white supremacists are fluid categories across defined abyssal lines, contingent on the level of pathologies existing at any point of time about the Other. Race, ethnicity gender and economic status define their status on the social Darwinist ladder. At times such as these, all these elements could be combined into one common Other: Muslims that are migrant workers, Covid-19 prone, unemployed, illiterate, denizens of filthy villages or slums, unable to pay for their train journeys back home, willing death on railway tracks, tired of living and scared of dying as Paul Robeson sang in his great song Ole Man River.
In the meantime capitalism shows itself to be its heartless worst. Need defines the behavior of the capitalist including that of the owners of the media, underwriting the exalted scripts that hold up a mirror to the other estates, executive, Legislature, Judiciary and capital. But whose need? Not of the needy’s; the market’s, to be read as ‘bottom lines’. Spencer’s ghost stalks the land hand in hand with the arch-Europeanized ethnonationalist, Savarkar. The past shadows the present and foretells the future. The weak shall be weeded out.
Language will play its role with words twisted to mean what the master wills. Language will no longer be a storehouse of memory, culture heritage but a communication of whatever the the masters desires it to convey.
Not too long ago the Prime Minster coined a new phrase, “”Atmanirbar Bharat” that seemed to recall the Nehruvian idea of self-reliance or with Gandhi’s idea of self-sufficiency. Think about it a little more than its verbal resonance with those stalwarts of national consciousness and you could see the performance of pure gesture. A government whose entire economic philosophy rests on giving away natural resources to big capital by easing environmental laws, labour protection laws through ordinances, a government that pursues digitalization to the delight of Big Tech firms by demonetizing the basic units of currency the unorganized live by could hardly become the crusaders of self-reliance.
The dramaturgy of the pure gesture may work to gloss over more sinister realties of hegemonic discourses. That seems obvious enough; you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows ss Bob Dylan sang. The theatrics reveal the importance of the pure gesture as an end. It joins the arsenal of weapons used to create a Spectacle of governance that perpetuates power by trivializing it’s appearances. The pure gesture is a consumable. Just like official concern about migrant workers that comes after ruthless apathy and neglect, the most shocking in post-Independence India.
But language matters. Even the language of the masters carries its own traditions and often the users help us connect the dots if we wish to. Consider the use of the ‘War’ metaphor by the Prime Minster. It was used by him to urge us to wage war on the pandemic. He exhorted students earlier to become ‘exam warriors.’ The army and the act of war is valorized in public sentiments that almost verge on policy to carry war into the enemy territory. Metaphors that carry significations of plunder and pillage as acts of revenge. The nation salutes soldiers; is asked to cry for the martyrs but not the farmers and peasants who take their own lives in despair. Death is valorized as an act of redemption only when its an outcome of violence against another human being. The metaphor of war essentialises the discourse of violence as the main instrument of an ethno-nationalism. This discourse demands strength, discipline, rationality, obedience, social distancing from the weak, the dirty and unwashed that include migrant workers who mindlessly sleep on railway tracks, deal in cash instead of a card swipe.
And come to think of it: what could the latest resurrection of ‘self-reliance’ mean other than a shout to the weak and vulnerable: Stand Up On Your Own! No laws to protect you against the rapaciousness of capital; the lynch mobs. “Shape up or ship out’ The smiling ghost of Herbert Spencer haunts the corridors of power and boardrooms in this unrighteous republic.
But the weak and vulnerable, sleepwalkers unable to actualize opportunities– the shame of the narcissistic urban Hindu-Savarna self–will not oblige and vanish into the History books as backwardness overcome through the strength of capital and ethnic cleaning. This land is their land too. So are the languages that express their traditions and cultures of a belonging that will endure even among the ruins of desecrations.
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Notes --Wiesel, Elie: Night. A New Translated by Marion Wiesel. Hill and Wang. New York 2006 1.https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/carnegie-herbert-spencer/ 1. Ibid. --Section on Savarkar sourced from Ashis Nandy: Reginmes of Narcissism, Regimes of Despair. Oxford University Press. New Delhi 2013 --Margaret Chatterjee: Inter-religious Communication. Promilla and Co. Publishers. New Delhi. 2009.
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