Trying to be 'Progressive'

How tolerant a person is ultimately a question of how successful he/she is in disguising the limits to his/her own (proclaimed) 'tolerance'. Take the famous example of Voltaire who had applauded the Rialto, the exchange-market at Venice, for bringing under its financial aegis Jews, Catholics, Turks, and the huge anonymous heap referred to as the 'infidels'. From several perspectives, that is genuinely a tolerant atmosphere : here, if anywhere, is one place where the Turk will not be massacred by the Catholic. However, is even this environment tolerant enough? One must note in this context that Voltaire himself was not an atheist but a 'Deist' : a 'Deist' was someone who believed that there was one Supreme power which the different historical religions approached in their own unique ways. One might therefore wonder : would Voltaire have tolerated an atheist at the Rialto? Or an anti-Deist, a proto-Marxist, a proto-anarchist, a proto-nihilist?

Here are some more questions, then. What about someone who claims, for whatever reasons, that the Rialto is a nest of infernal powers? Would such a person be tolerated in Venice? And if this is a case not of one individual but say a group which claims, again for either 'religious' or 'non-religious' (such as proto-Marxist) reasons, that the Rialto must be razed to the ground, what would become of such a group? This is especially problematic if this group claims that there is a direct and logical connection between some of its central beliefs (say, that wealth must be evenly distributed in society) and its proclaimed intention to destroy the Rialto. Shall this group be compelled to give up such central beliefs?

Voltaire's alleged solution to the question of tolerating 'other-ness' has not died with him. Even today we still seem to believe that it is all a matter of extending socio-economic benefits to people whom we believe are unhappy, juvenile, deviant, reactionary, or simply stupid. If such benefits trickle down to these groups and they 'catch up with us', they shall become integrated into the 'mainstream', and all will be well. Consequently, several questions go unasked, and here is just a random sampling of some of them :

(a) What if a certain group claims, for whatever reasons, that the accumulation of wealth is a definite evil from which its members must stay away from? And, consequently, that they must stay away from the 'nation-building' process? Shall this group be forced to give up this view?

(b) Is the 'mainstream' to be defined in statistical terms, so that the reason why we think that we folks who believe in socio-economic 'progress' belong to this mainstream is simply because there are more of 'us' than 'them' who do not believe in such progress? The problem, of course, is that nobody really has, to the best of my knowledge, carried out such a statistical survey. If that were to be done, it would seem that it is far from being a unanimous matter even in the 'West', the very bastion of all 'development' theories, that such 'progress' is viewed as (a) a reality, (b) universally applicable to all parts of the world, and (c) an undiluted good.

(c) Even if all groups seem to believe, apparently at least, that socio-economic progress is a good thing, and also benefit from it, the reasons why they hold this belief may be fundamentally divergent from one another. Two people may seem to agree that X is a good thing, but this apparent agreement might conceal a much deeper disagreement; it does not imply that they also agree on why they think that X is indeed good. Therefore, both a devout Hindu and a secular atheist can work in the same multi-national firm in a suburb of Paris, and in most cases, their fundamental difference in world-views will not affect at all their financial dealings with their clients. Nevertheless, there might be important differences in the reasons why they work in that same firm. The Hindu could be working there to earn money which he wishes to send home to a right-wing party which will stand for his 'Hindu-ness', and the atheist because she wishes to go skiing in Switzerland the next winter. Though, superficially, their diverging world-views make no proximate difference to their clients, this divergence does ultimately have repercussions in a world that is gradually becoming more and more inter-connected (though whether this inter-connection has been for good or evil is yet another debate).

(d) A too facile connection is usually made between 'modernity' and 'socio-economic progress', as if the one logically (and inevitably) leads to the other. The point, however, usually obscured by the proclamation of the messianic gospel of the 'march of modernity', is that there are several ways of being 'modern', and that 'modernity' itself is not as homogenous as one might have been led to believe. Several Islamist groups have networks that closely resemble multi-national corporations, make use of some of the most sophisticated ('modern') technology in the ('global') market, and believe in 'progress' too. Except, of course, that they define the key term 'progress' in a very different manner. From their perspective, to tie 'progress' down to 'socio-economic growth' is too narrow a definition of that term. Socio-economic growth, rather, is to be understood only as a tool to lead one to the much grander future of the establishment of the perfect rule of God (and the latter alone is to be understood as 'progress'). Now we may not agree with this definition of 'progress', but neither can we brush away this view as 'anti-modern' when we see a group, making use of every possible bit of 'modern' technology under our very noses, putting forward this definition.

So will the 'progressive' (how difficult it has become not to use this word!) extension of socio-economic benefits to more and more people give rise to the 'heavenly city' on earth? This progress, as a matter of fact, will not even get off the ground unless the voices of those people are heard, respected, and responded to who claim that such benefits, no matter how useful they proximately may be, are ultimately pointless. In other words, theirs is a challenge to the notion that 'basic needs' must first be satisfied. The problem with this notion is, of course, that there seems to be no universal consensus on what these 'basic needs' are.

Perhaps, food is one such need. That is clear enough as an indisputable fact, until one goes on to ask the more important question : How much of this food? A Hindu ascetic in the lower Himalayas, a starving refugee in Somalia, and a German businesswoman in New York will all agree that food is a 'basic need', but will sharply disagree with one another over how much of food one needs, and what amount of it is to be universally declared as being 'basic'. Perhaps we may agree on settling down at the 'lowest common denominator'. Even so, who shall decide what this is? Whose dietary requirements are to be set up as the 'measuring dole'?

Nevertheless, we may agree that it is possible in principle, more or less, by appointing a medical team to come to a certain consensus, in terms of units such as calories, on the minimum amount of food that the human body requires to survive as a biological organism. When it comes to other 'basic needs' such as shelter, one faces similar problems, but these too can be solved at some minimum level. The discussion now shifts to a somewhat different, and more intricate, question : Who decides what is to be included in and what is to be excluded from this list of 'basic needs'?

(a) Is financial security a 'basic need'? Perhaps so, but what then of the billions of Catholic and Buddhist monks and nuns who live happily without experiencing such a need, and who, in fact, might very well argue that this is not, in fact, a basic need? 'Take no thought for the morrow', should be, they might say, the motto for everyone.

(b) Is emotional security a 'basic need'? Again, perhaps so, but what then of the billions of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jaina mendicants roaming throughout the countryside who might argue that far from being a basic need, the need for such security is precisely one of the fundamental evils of our unenlightened existence?

(c) Is 'individual liberty' a basic need? Once again, perhaps it is, but this time we shall have to confront Marxist thinkers of various stripes who will argue that the much-proclaimed individual liberty of capitalist societies is a sham; and various Islamist thinkers who will claim that the alleged liberty that 'Western' women enjoy leads them, in fact, to a greater bondage where they live in accordance with the ever-changing norms of what is 'fashionable' (read : 'acceptable to the masculine gaze').

My intention, in all of these, is not to deny, of course, that there are billions of people, even as I write, who are dying of starvation and thirst, and the first thing to be done about these people is to give them some food to eat and some water to drink, irrespective of seemingly pointless argumentation over how much food/water this should be. The point, however, is that once we are talking not about immediate starvation/thirst relief but about framing more universal and generally applicable 'basic needs policies' it is important not to forget that it is difficult to detach the notion of 'basic needs' from the respective world-view (religious/secular/atheistic/Marxist, and so on) within which it is embedded.

Am I then saying that people in different world-views have different 'basic needs'? In one sense, yes. What may have established itself as a 'basic need' in one world-view (say the Internet, a television, or a cell-phone in Western Europe), may be a luxury in another (especially if we remind ourselves that 'even' today only one out of every ten people in the world have made a phone call), a mild curiosity in a third, a hindrance to 'progress' in a fourth, and a positive evil in a fifth.

This is the reason why it is so difficult to associate the notion of 'progress' with one specific form of growth (whether it is economic, cultural, educational, or whatever). From an Islamic, Christian or Buddhist perspective, for example, the routine connection (made especially in the 'West', and now also the 'East' which has taken up some of these economic views of the 'West') of progress with socio-economic 'development' may be seen at best, as a necessary clarion-call to remove the ills of poverty, hunger and thirst, and at worst, a form of myopia that overlooks the 'broader picture' and disguises the 'true starvation'. My intention in this context is not to defend the internal consistency, coherence, or plausibility of such 'broader pictures' or to expound on the nature of this 'true starvation', but to point out that unless the voices of people who live, move, and have their being within such pictures and suffer (or, claim to suffer) from such starvation are taken into account, the definition(s) of progress in terms of socio-economic growth will continue to be viewed, if not with a detached suspicion then, with positive scorn in large swathes of the world. And these are precisely those swathes which have not remained untouched by modernity; indeed, they have accepted some aspects of it, digested, assimilated, and come to grips with them.

The Possibility of Atheism

Is atheism possible? This seems, in a sense, an absurd question to ask when one is surrounded by so many people who define themselves as atheists. The basic question, however, is this : What is a-theism? The most common definition of atheism is the rejection of any belief in the existence of a supra-spatiotemporal entity. In my opinion, however, this definition does not go far enough. To be a 'true' atheist, I submit, one would have to say : 'Absolutely everything in this world is completely and utterly meaningless and pointless'.

Does such an atheist exist? It is logically impossible for such a person to go on living. Only someone who is two seconds away from committing suicide would count, according to my definition, as an atheist. In other words, atheism, as I understand this term, is the rejection of all 'meaning' whatsoever. True atheism, in other words, is synonymous with nihilism. Most atheists, however, try their best to stop half-way down their slide on the slippery slope of nihilism. So they invent 'meaning' in activities such as the family, politics, painting, literature, music, poetry, trekking, emailing, blogging, rowing, film-making, speech-writing, and so on and on, and such activities thereby become a 'pseudo-God' for them.

A lot depends, of course, on how we define words. If 'God' is defined as 'the source of meaning', then the only consistent atheist is that nihilist who is on the brink of suicide. All other so-called atheists still cling to some source of (invented) meaning or the other, whether it is the family or sports or music, and are themselves yet to truly come to grips with the possibility that there might not be any 'meaning' to our existence, the possibility that they are so fond of accusing religious believers of denying.

In a (fundamental!) sense, then, I am a 'fundamentalist'. By this term, I refer to my conviction that there are only two logically consistent ways of being 'human'. Either you are a religious believer, or you are a nihilist (and, consequently, two seconds away from suicide). It is for this reason that I find myself strongly drawn towards the world of classical Upanisadic Hinduism, the mediaeval world of Roman Catholic Christianity, and the current world of Islamist Saudi Arabia. For all their vices, these worlds appeal to me because they are based on my central conviction : either you believe in God or you become a nihilist (and commit suicide); there can be no via media, no middle position between these two. If 'God' is dead, then absolutely everything is meaningless too.

I myself, however, am neither 'religious' nor 'nihilist'. Perhaps that is why I must try so hard every day to keep up the pretence of being 'human', try to carefully disguise my 'fundamentalism' in an Academic world which does not 'tolerate' any such 'intolerant' views in its 'naked public square' which it oversees. I must perhaps go on living in spite of what I believe, and in spite of even not knowing what that 'must' means.

What is Metaphysics?

Breaking up that word into 'meta' and 'physics', Metaphysics is any study that takes you beyond 'physics'. Except that the 'physics' in question comes from the Greek physis which involved a somewhat wider domain of knowledge than is encompassed today by that term. Nevertheless, how does one 'go beyond physics'?

One way of doing this is to think in terms of questioning the axioms that lie at the basis of our beliefs. Here is a dialogue between A and B :

A : I want to go away from London.

B : Why?

A : Because it is too crowded, and I do not feel good here.

B : Why?

A : Because I do not feel that I have enough 'space' for myself, and I wish to be in a place where I can roam around freely.

B : Why?

A : So that I can be happy.

B : But why? Why do you want to be happy?

Snap. The line snaps under the weight of that final question. Perhaps, then, that question is 'metaphysical'.

Here is another conversation.

A : The computer I am typing on right now exists.

B : Why?

A : Because the million parts that it is comprised of exist.

B : Why?

A : Because the subatomic particles that constitute each of these parts exist.

B : Why?

A : Because something exists. The world we live in is something, and it exists. Hence something exists.

B : But why? Why does anything exist at all? Why could there not have been simply absolute nothingness?

Another snap. Perhaps the primary aim of the 'metaphysical' is not so much to answer 'questions' (assuming that they can even be formulated) but to produce a sense of awe when faced by such questions. For some people, this may very well be a sign that someone has sunk into irrationality and has shrunk away from the frontiers of thought. For others, though, this may be a humble acknowledgement that when one has arrived at the very horizons within which thought is possible, one should perhaps learn to speak through silence. This is not, however, to still the mind into a numbing inactivity; indeed, it is to realise/fulfil its true potential which is activated only after it has arrived at, and accepted, the boundaries of its thought.

It takes but a school education to learn that there is, perhaps, nothing like the joy of receiving a 'straight' answer to a 'straight' question. It might, however, be necessary to go through a painful process of unlearning to know that even after all such 'straight' answers have been tabulated, the most interesting questions are the 'non-straight' ones.

Living behind the veil

What is Appearance and what is Reality? Perhaps the best way to start off is by reading through the millions of books that have been written on this topic? Perhaps the alleged distinction between the two is itself an appearance? Perhaps appearance itself is real? Perhaps whatever is real is only apparently so?Perhaps the mind is trapped in a web of words, a web that it was born into and cannot now unweave?

Or perhaps, as an afterthought, why even bother asking these questions? Are these not the symptoms of a delirious mind suffering from metaphysics?

The power of pink

It is so good that one of the templates for these blogs is in pink. Pink used to be one of my favourite colours early on in my childhood. It was only much later that I came to know about the association of 'feminity' with the colour pink. Which makes me wonder how certain notions/associations are 'invented/constructed'. If a Martian were to be brought down to earth 'one fine morning', he/she (but is there gender among Martians?) might fail to see any 'logically necessary' connection between feminity and the pink colour. But then, perhaps, one can stay closer at home : a Trobriand Islander, a Tibetan or a Papua New Guinean too might not recognise any such connection.

Having said though, a more fundamental question comes up : is there anything at all which is not invented/constructed by us human beings?If gender associations (such as those of 'mercy/sentimentality' with 'feminity' and 'aggressiveness/rationality' with 'masculinity') are 'constructions', shall we say the same about all world-views that have been proposed so far? Are Marxism, theism, atheism, feminism, ecologism, Romanticism, nihilism, Islam, Buddhism and so on 'constructions' as well? Clearly, there is more to be said on this, and I shall return to this point in the next post.

Why do people quarrel?

But of course, the definitive answer to this question, if such an answer can possibly be given, will run into thousands of volumes, detailing all possible reasons why people do quarrel. So for example, they quarrel over land, water, food, property, privileges, status, and so on. Such reasons I shall leave to the economists and the sociologists to tabulate, discuss, and write about (and, in the process, quarrel over!). For myself, suffering as I do from the disease of abstraction, the reasons for people quarrelling that I find interesting lie somewhere else. Here is one : people quarrel because they disagree with one another over their perceptions of the 'depth' and/or the 'shallowness' of objects/people. This can be easily observed in numerous contexts. One of the first impressions that we develop of other people (whether or not we are willing to accept this) is that of their depth/shallowness; one of the commonest appreciations/criticisms of a movie/concert/play that we have been to is that it is either deep or shallow; one of the easiest ways to stop thinking more about a specific person or a world-view is to stick a quantitative figure to its depth or shallowness, and so on.

There are, of course, people who try to get around this in interesting ways. Here is a favourite ploy : 'The distinction between depth and shallowness is meaningless. Everything around us is equally deep or equally shallow.' And this, I must admit, is indeed a breath of fresh air into a room overcrowded with cynics trying to stamp objects or persons with measures of depth/shallowness. But this will not really do beyond a certain point. Is everything really equally deep or equally shallow? Do we actually base our lives on that assumption of 'equality'? Do we not set up, implicitly or explicitly, 'gradations' of equality or depth so that we say that Person/View A is more deep/shallow or less deep/shallow than Person/View B? Another reply, then : 'It is all relative. Whether something/someone is deep or shallow is relative.' Again, a good reminder that depth/shallowness cannot be weighed like a loaf of bread or a mass of butter on a scale. But once again, this reply raises some interesting questions. Firstly, depth/shallowness may be relative, but one would want to know in that case what they are relative to. One of the classic examples of 'bad science' is the invocation of Einstein's Special theory of Relativity in physics to buttress one's 'relativistic' arguments in cultural theory. The term 'Relativity' as used by Einstein is completely incommensurable with the term 'relativism' as it is understood by some cultural theorists who claim that people belonging to 'other' religious/socio-cultural traditions are trapped within their indigenous world-views. Is it true that a certain group of people, say the Azande tribe in Africa, is so distinct from us Europeans that we cannot understand anything of what their beliefs/practices are like? Suppose this is indeed true. It would mean that we Europeans accept the proposition X such that X : Europeans cannot understand anything about the Azande. What would that imply? It would imply that there is at least one thing, namely X, which we Europeans do know about the Azande!Therefore, to say that the beliefs/practices of the Azande are so opaque to us that we cannot make any statement whatsoever regarding the Azande is a self-contradictory claim. Now to argue in this manner does not necessarily mean that we have to accept the other end of the 'universal versus particular' spectrum, and say that there are timelessly valid universal criteria of 'rationality' that can be applied across the board. Whether or not such criteria exist that are broadly accepted by different socio-cultural traditions is a matter that I must leave to students of social anthropology.

Nevertheless, the basic point in this context is that perceptions of depth/shallowness take place relative to a certain background of beliefs/practices. As long as we share this background, we not only do make, but even should make, our perceptions of depth/shallowness. To many people brought up on a diet of post-modern jargon centred around the sensitive question of 'toleration', this would sound a highly 'totalitarian' (not to mention, 'masculine') statement. And yet, strangely enough, it is precisely such people who very often loudly proclaim the right of the individual to have an opinion, the freedom of anti/religious choice, the universal sanctity of human life, the right to (political) dissent, and so on. I am yet to hear a theorist of post-modernism say that the right to express one's opinion or to choose one's religion is an idiosyncratic right that is 'relative' only to West European society; it is usually assumed that all human beings, of both genders, all over the world, in all possible cultures and societies, should enjoy such rights. And what would such a 'universalist' claim be, if not a form of 'modernity' in disguise? If such 'human rights' are indeed relative to the socio-historical specificities of European civilisation, post-modernism would not be able to declare their universal validity. It would then imply that burning widows on a funeral pyre is 'right' in Hindu cultures but 'wrong' in non-Hindu cultures; beating wives is 'right' in patriarchal societies, and 'wrong' in non-patriarchal ones (that is, if any such society exists at all!); and that there is simply nothing anyone can do about it.

I do not know any post-modernist who is willing to accept such conclusions. Many people today seem to believe that they should not 'judge' things/people; that 'everything is relative' and that the matter should be left at that. And, in most cases, rightly so, for there are often so many hidden/submerged layers within a human person that in order to judge him/her one must first bring these layers to light, and this is a process that might sometimes take a life-time. Therefore, the statement 'do not judge people/things' should be taken as a salutary warning against jumping to conclusions about the perceived or alleged value/worth of people/things. When, however, it degenerates into an empty slogan it becomes potentially misleading for it then implies that every possible view in the conceptual universe/s that we dwell in is equally valuable. It is most clear that even 'post-modernist' people who swear by that slogan cannot hold this to be the final word on the matter. I take it that not many post-modernists would be ready to regard Colonialism and Patriarchy as two world-views that are acceptable to them. If not, it would imply that there are at least two world-views that even a post-modernist has to reject and, consequenty, hold as being shallow. That is, it is impossible even for a post-modernist to claim that s/he has transcended the depth/shallowness duality. To remain a post-modernist, s/he has to maintain that there is something 'shallow' about modernity and something 'deep' about his/her post-modernity. In short, then, post-modernism may turn out to be a bad tool to use if one wants to declare that 'everything is relative'. To repeat : everything may be relative, but everything is relative to what?

Do we understand the "Other"?

One can come up with all sorts of 'grand theories', unfashionable as they may be in today's academia, in response to this question. So, for example, one can invoke the authority of the long-forgotten Hegel (poor Him!) and say that 'dialectalism' is of the very essence of human existence. That is, we define ourselves in opposition to the Other. In this sense, we almost need the Other for our own self-understanding. Robinson Crusoe, for example, on his remote island was a no-body until he met his Man Friday. Things can, and have, of course, take a more ominous turn than this rather benign example can suggest. For centuries the colonial powers of Europe defined themselves in opposition to the Orient that they 'constructed', pinned down onto a drawing board, sliced up into precise rectangles, and carved in accordance with their imperialistic designs. The process, by the way, has not come to an end even today, and perhaps, unless once accepts Hegel's word that this 'dialectalism' will come to a 'totalising' Conclusion within human history, this process will perhaps never end."Orientalism", that is, the conglomeration of 'European'/'Western' discourses through which the 'East' was reified as a malleable object that can be dissected in the manner that a dead frog is sliced up under a microscope has been going for a long time, and continues even today through the 'Western' association of the 'essence of India' with the Taj Mahal, the Himalayas, Swami Vivekananda, 'spiritualism', meditation, the Royal Bengal Tiger, yoga and so on.

What is equally surprising, however, is the fact that so many so-called 'modernised Asians' have decided to pay back the "Orientalists" the same compliment of reifying entire civilisations. It is repeated ad nauseam in texts stemming from various parts of Asia that the 'East' is 'spiritual' and that the 'West' is "inherently morally bankrupt" and "materialistic". This pattern of reverse type-casting can perhaps be called 'Occidentalism', in which the 'Orient' decides to freeze the 'West' into a set of fixed characteristics (in truth, associated only with a certain historical time-slice) that are believed to be the quintessence of 'Western civilisation.'Thus a process of 'dialectalism' is set up between two gigantic entities one called the 'West' and the other the 'East'. This can be truly called a 'ballet of bloodless categories' for what is thereby forgotten is that neither the 'West' nor the 'East' is a monolithic entity; both of them are, in fact, deeply fragmented from within, and both of them have, so to speak, their repressed intimate strangers, their back-yard unspoken voices. To begin with the case of the 'East', a standard stereotype is that 'Eastern' civilisations value the Society over the Individual. And indeed, there is more than a grain of truth in this observation; 'human rights' as pertraining to the individual never really existed in many classical 'Eastern' societies. And yet, as some Indologists and sociologists have pointed out, many of the crucial socio-religious changes in classical India were actually initiated by people who stood outside the traditional fourfold scheme of caste-and-station (varnasrama). Similarly, in China the social ethic of Confucianism struggled side by side with the 'anarchist' tendencies of the Taoists; indeed, it is said that one reason why classical Buddhism never set its feet firmly on Chinese soil was the implicit 'individualism' that goes with Buddhist thought. On the other hand, 'Western' societies for all their vaunted individualism have suffered chronically from bouts of collectivist thought, for instance under the Nazis, the Fascists and the Communists. One has to read through contemporary press reports to see the 'West' routinely appealing to the collectivity of its citizens against the perceived threat of the post-colonial 'East'. The metaphor of the 'barbarian at the Gates' is of ancient Roman military history, and is as much alive in the current world as it was during the time of Emperors Valerian and Decius, and all other Roman generals who struggled against the Vandals, the Franks, and the Ostrogoths. For all that the association of the 'West' with 'Individualism' is worth, most 'Westerners' would still rather regard themselves (pace 'post-modernity'!) as a part of the 'American/European' collectivity, and not as a 'solitary atom flitting about in a meaningless sea of anonymity'.

To say, therefore, that people quarrel because some are from the 'East' and others are from the 'West' is simply to indulge oneself in dangerous rhetoric. If this were to be taken as a literal truth, it would imply that no European has ever managed to understand anything of the classical religious-philosophical-political 'Eastern' texts, and also that 'Easterners' should give up once and for all their love of Plato, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Gibbon, Keats, Shelley, Gauss, Comte, Heisenberg and so on. Just two counter-examples to mess up this (allegedly) clear picture. Firstly, for all the accusations of 'Orientalism' that have been levelled at (some) European Indological scholars, I remain convinced that some of the most solid scholarship in the domains of Sanskrit literature has actually been produced by these (German/French/Dutch) scholars who spent their entire life-times toiling away in remote dusty libraries. Secondly, a student of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, once remarked that the greatest interpreter of her mentor's thought was actually an Indian philosopher, J. L. Mohanty. To be sure, these are two random examples, but such examples can be easily multiplied by anyone who has devoted some time and careful thought to the various dimensions of the Europe-India encounter over the last two hundred years. To paint an entire body of careful and steady scholarship with the black brush of 'Orientalism' is misguided and irresponsible (and this in spite of, I repeat, all the alleged vices of 'Orientalist' scholars).

In short, I have put forward some considerations to challenge the wide-spread assumption that two monolithics entities, one called the 'East' and the other called the 'West', are locked together in a mortal combat until the 'end of times'. It is ironical that some 'Western' people who believe in the above statement actually happen to be those who have made a quite patient study of 'Eastern' civilisations (otherwise, how would they have even known what it means to be 'Eastern', and how 'Eastern-ness' contrasts with 'Western-ness'?), and many 'Eastern' people who swear by it have actually been educated in 'secular' institutions with strong 'Western' influences (otherwise, where would they have picked up the vocabulary of 'modernity/post-modernity', made trite through repetition, that they are armed to the teeth with?). It is almost as if their own socio-cultural backgrounds were a living disproof of what they otherwise claim to profess!Let me conclude with one specific example to illustrate the above points. The RSS-BJP combine in Indian politics is fond of taunting (Indian) Marxists as the 'children of Karl Marx', and (Indian) secularists as the 'children of the European Jawaharlal Nehru'. Two replies in this context would perhaps be pertinent :(1) Perhaps so, but in that case members of the RSS-BJP combine are the 'children of John Mill'. John Mill, to refresh your memories, was the writer of a very influential history of India which was read by aspiring British candidates to the Indian Civil Services throughout the colonial era. Among the many 'Orientalist myths' that Mill propagated (and bequeathed to his intellectual descendants) through that book was this one : Hindus are intrinsically passive, Muslims are inherently aggressive, and their respective 'world-views' are so radically opposed that it is impossible for Hindus and Muslims to live together. Therefore, when members of the RSS-BJP combine repeat that Hindus are in danger within their own nation because of their 'submissive' nature, and are in the threat of being overpowered by the 'militaristic' Muslims, they are simply being excellent children of an imperialist called John Mill whose views they should have consigned by now to the safety of eternal oblivion. Instead of the oft-repeated claim that the 'secularised' Indians are holding onto their 'colonial heritage', it would seem that it is, in fact, members of the RSS-BJP combine who are still suffering from a debilitating case of 'colonial hang-over.'(2) Perhaps so, but 'so what'? Is it being implied that there is a logically necessary connection between these two statements : (i) 'A world-view/proposition/statement, ABC, has originated in the 'West'' and (ii) 'ABC must therefore be false'? Underlying much of the rhetoric of the RSS-BJP is the belief (which is usually not argued for) that the mere fact that a belief is 'Western' is necessary, sufficient and conclusive reason for rejecting it. That sounds strange to me, for I seriously doubt that an Australian woman would claim that she refuses accept the law of (universal!) gravitation merely because it was established by a (male!) Englishman in the 17th century, a Mongolian that he refuses to accept Einstein's theories merely because he was a German Jew, a Chinese that he would not obey Chairman Mao merely because Mao follows the teachings of a European called Marx, a Jamaican that she would not read Shakespeare's Macbeth merely because that play is set within a specific historical context, and so on and on.

The basic point, then, is this : what we are really interested in here is the validity of truth-claims that people make, and not, to put it bluntly, what their personal food-habits, favourite football club, or cultural idiosyncracies are like.If 'Marxism' and 'European secularism' cannot be applied to the Indian context without appropriate 'translation' (and this is what, incidentally, I myself believe), let us accept this and see to what extent such 'translations' are possible. To throw them to the dustbin of discarded views merely because Marx happened to be born in Europe and merely because Nehru was educated in Cambridge (and, for that matter, merely because 'Hinduism' originated in India) is to make nonsense of the importance and the necessity of the hard and painstaking labour of justifying claims that are conflicting and, often, mutually opposed to one another.In short, even in these two cases, 'Marxism' and 'European secularism' are not world-views which cannot be transplanted onto Indian soil. (Once again, of course, in the process one must pay due care to the specificities of the Indian socio-cultural-religious-economic contexts.) To say that they are intrinsically opposed to the 'essence of India' is already to have committed the fallacy of reifying entire civilisations, and to have accepted, on the authority of John Mill, that there is something so 'essentially' distinctive of 'India' that we must believe that 'India' is a static pristine entity whose (socio-cultural) boundaries are fixed, once and for all.