hinduwoman

Victorialis,
many Hindus would say they are not against the varna system but against the caste system. In theory Varna system is based not on birth but on conduct and merit; so when Gandhi said he would not oppose Brahmins he was saying we need ideal Brahmins to keep society intact.
Yes, Tagore opposed Gandhi on this basis.

If we are critiquing Gandhi's notion of ahimsa we shall have to do it from the Indian persepective. The Indians who opposed his notion of total non-violence based themselves on Hinduism also.

Godse, Gandhi's killer is not a loony. He held that Gandhi betrayed India by agreeing to the partition. In fact Gandhi had become quiet unpopular and I think his murder endowed him with a halo of marytrdom which he would not have gained afterwards.

You do not know it but Gandhi told the refugees fleeing from Pakistan that they should have stayed back in their homeland and accepted whatever their muslim brothers did to them --- a number of Hindus today dislike him for that reason.

hinduwoman

Amit,
Hinduism as a whole is culture, but it also contains significant religious components. Religion is simply defined as , "belief in superhuman controlling power, especially in a personal god or gods entitled to obedience and worship". Religion always thus contains component of superstition/supernatural which is not true of culture. As I said earlier Hinduism does lay out two basic parameters: (1) There is an eternal Soul, (2) All religions are 'true'. That is why the Gita synthesized every philosophical doctrine and customs in use (including Sankhya) but left out Carvakas.
Culture and religion are not always easy to distinguish, but it can be done. I regard Mahabharata to be brilliant, a story of the whole human race in fact --- I accept it as a part of my culture. But when someone believes that the gods actually existed and things happened in the epic as described then it becomes a religious text.

As for Hinduttva, it is not about hindu religion as such, ie. having to believe that the gods are real or Vedas are apaureshiya. Savarkar defined it as: '
Hindutva is a purely political movement. It is an attempt to define a Hindu nation.

victorialis

welcome back, hinduwoman.

If I understand what you've said about caste-vs-varna, the ideal Brahmins in the varna system could come from any part of society; they would be exemplars, role models (merit and conduct). It would not matter if they were brahmin by lineage or not -- except that they would not have the priestly training, and so could not serve as the social repository of sacred functions.

I begin to see why you say the ultimate dharma is very hard to talk about. Context is everything -- and everything has a context.

I also see your point about Godse. It was fine for MKG to choose asceticism for himself; anyone may make that choice. But if MKG seriously recommended to Hindus who were children, students or householders that they should abruptly leap into renunciate-mode when faced with violence, well... that is absurd indeed, and seems entirely insupportable within hinduism.

However, I have another cognitive problem. I ask the following respectfully:

When is murder not the mark of a loony? Is it sane when done for politics?

Perhaps I am splitting hairs here. I had the idea that Godse took the thing upon himself. But it almost doesn't matter whether he made a fully private decision to act or was "driven to it" by others; surely it is safe to say that most of the Hindus who were disaffected with MKG did not actually want him killed... ?

By that reasoning I arrived at the conclusion that Godse was an individual who was willing to act outside normal social bounds; his act cannot be positively, responsibly construed as an embodiment of popular will. Where am I going wrong with this?

I think you're quite right about the martyrdom. If MKG was that politically unsophisticated, then his influence was already spent -- whether westerners, who admire his "Christlike" qualities, can accept that fact or not.

Savarkar's words (in your subsequent post) are quite stirring.

Amit Misra

So we're the blind leading the blind when it comes to economics. I probably understand less of economics, but I'd answer your question about stagnating capital in the affirmative. Lets a take wide detour to Gandhi. Gandhi's economic model of self-sufficient villages minimises the role of capital in economic activity. to all intents and purposes, capital can bl** well stagnate as long as consumer needs are addressed by low-capital cost, labour intensive production and distribution within a restricted area. Gandhian economics does not seem to address urbanised or urbanising society, however. the spinning wheel certainly was ubiquitous in rural Punjab and parts of UP in the 19th century. it died an ignominous death in the hands of gandhi's followers who set up a "Khadi and Village Industries Board" to compete with capital-intensive, mechanised production of fibre. And we, the urban elite Indians, just didn't want or need homespun when factory-made cloth could be had for much less. In retrospect, one can agonise over whether Indians were unworthy of an alternative economic model, or whether the said model was unworthy of the aspirations of the urban Indian elite. I'd say that the alternative model was much more sustainable in the long term, but vulnerable to sabotage in the short-term. So here, you have an instance of vested interests getting what they want in the short term. I refrain from comment about alternative models as proposed by Marx et al, primarily because I haven't read about them!

Amit Misra

I really don't know whether labour's virtue is a given, but I get an uncomfortable feeling that we're mixing up our categories again! The labourer is either virtuous or not; labour movements are either good for the labourer or designed to further the interests of the leaders of the movement; the British Labour Party is a poor joke, but Capital is a different kettle of fish. It does not behave. Capitalists behave benignantly or malevolently, &c, &c...
Let me hasten to add that this bit of pedantry would have been uncalled for, had it not been for my perception that Labour is more sinned against than sinning. What, after all, does laissez faire teach us about Firefighters, say? They want a 40% wage hike. You think its not justified. They go on strike. You realise that you want them on the job. Both of you settle for a 20% wage hike for the firefighter. What would you have happen instead? A caricature Victorialis leans languidly from a rose-bedecked balcony, watching starving firefighters battle infernos and realises that they could do with a 10% wage hike. The firefighter touches his cap and bows respectfully, and societal harmony is preserved intact.
(So now you know why people like hinduwoman who deign to talk to me end up disliking me!)

hinduwoman

Victorialis, I agree that political assassination is as reprehensible as ordinary murders, and that most Indians who disliked him did not really want to kill him (though they might have been glad that he was dead).

The problem is Gandhi had been built up to such an icon that any criticism was met by horror. Gandhi did great things and undoubtedly united the masses which no one else could have done. But whether the philosophy he preached and his actions did more good than harm --- that is very much in the air.
Interestingly Jinnah --- accepting that he was a politican and opportunist --- had an intersting take on him: before Gandhi came there were only nationalist Indians; after Gandhi came there were Hindu and muslim politics.


Yeah, Savarkar was extremely charismatic --- that was half the problem. The other half was that his statements do contain some grains of truth about Muslim intolerance for other faiths.
Frankly I have often felt that Savarkar is what Muhammad would have been in Indian conditions. Savarkar did not quiet advocate the slaughter of all non-Hindus or discrmination in the way Islam does, but basically he was a warleader who liked a homogenous society and was willing to indulge in violence to gain his ends.

hinduwoman

Amit our disagreement is on certain points about Hinduism, Hinduttva and minority. It has nothing to do with economics as such.
Like you I am a novice in the field; the only basic law I can see is what Mulk Raj Anand said, "There are only two castes in the world, the rich and the poor"; the rich exploit the poor and the poor try to become rich. That has always been true from the most ancient times. [shrug]

As for liberalisation, I still don't know whether it has been ultimately good or bad for the poor.

victorialis

Amit, emerging with difficulty from my languor amidst the roses , I could say a lot more about the firefighters; but I'm aware that I've already diverted this thread several times. Perhaps hinduwoman will continue to patiently scroll past all this.

Suffice to say that what lost the firefighters my sympathy was their refusal to accept (or even attend) the arbitration to which they'd previously agreed, combined with willingness to strike during those times when the public felt most vulnerable (holidays). I saw no honour in such strategy; in fact, I saw it as a tacit admission that they really did not wish to be part of the solution.

This is why "Old Labour" was unelectable. New Labour knows this. New Labour also knows its own constituency is what makes reform of the public services impossible; they began admitting obliquely last week that they won't be delivering on what they promised. I've been enjoying watching them squirm. Any movement that cannot take Yes for an answer is in real trouble -- it's always been the contention of the left that they're kept out of power; and now, in power, they can do no better.

Capital (investable resources) does behave, in that it goes where the opportunity is -- under liberalised conditions. Are you really saying that investment should be compelled to remain within arbitrary political or economic boundaries? Would such compulsion, do you think, transform nonviable business models into viable ones?

Here is a contrariwise example: the dotcom debacle. Private capital, great and small, absolutely flung itself at those businesses, on poor or nonexistent advice -- which is now being characterised as something very like compulsion ("my broker told me to do it! let's sue him!"). Resources went steadily down the drain, illustrating the limits of unalloyed enthusiasm as a performance metric.

Would political enthusiasm perform any better economically than simple greed? Supporting examples are few and small-scale, while examples to the contrary are many and large-scale.

I am sorry to hear that you can even consider the homespun model as a question of Indian worthiness. That worthiness is a given, incontestable. Would the adoption of a surface uniformity like that of Mao's China (everyone in Mao jackets) have been an improvement to Indian life? Surely not. Mao's destructive impact on Chinese cultural heritage is painful to contemplate; its full extent may never be known.

If you have not read Marx, you've done your critical faculties a great service. It's significant that Marx's political following developed and emerged into activism well in advance of the publication of Kapital (1920), and that he never did publish a full statement of his thought. Why complicate matters with thorough exposition, when an active following already exists on the strength of an oversimplified Manifesto?

Several generations of political activists have grimly operated under conditions in which no one can bring themselves to admit that Marx makes little sense, despite Engels' best efforts. Marx substitutes emphasis and repetition for logic, and his most vociferous followers do likewise. Marx was vindicated in some of his predictions, but his prescriptives have been disastrous, in more ways than may be immediately apparent... painful as that undoubtedly is for those who have devoted their lives to social justice in his name.

A genuine and active concern for the poor cannot be successfully wedded to a readiness to waste resources out of passionate anger. It's no better and no more moral than greed.

victorialis

hinduwoman, after I asked about Godse, I came across another idea that makes your response a bit clearer to me.

Hinduism (I am reading in Billington) has no moral absolutes: there are no proscriptions or imperatives in dharma -- certain types of behaviour are cautioned against (a warning to the unwary), but not forbidden. Appropriate behaviour varies with social role and stage of life, and norms are supplied by tradition and social cohesion.

It seems that ample room for personal interpretation is more or less built into Hinduism, unlike western ethical systems, in which personal interpretations of justice are viewed as private deviance (malign or otherwise).

If this is accurate, then my question about murder and looniness was actually beside the point; and Gandhi's ability to unite the masses, then, was functionally inappropriate. He was advocating an explicit and specific dharma, which I gather is precisely what dharma is not.

Might that also have been Savarkar's undoing?

I ask this wondering if hinduttva can overcome the same limitation. Those who were unite-able by Gandhi thereby gained an entree into political life that they previously lacked. Once this was achieved, there was no further explicit purpose to the unity and it returned to pluralism.

On liberalisation and the poor:
(available to the perspicacious at www.Economist.com/surveys)

victorialis

here's the complete URL for the above excerpt:

http://www.economist.com/surveys/sho...issue=20030628

But I recommend the previous URL as well. These surveys are very accessible to the interested layman, as is the entire publication.