Faisal Devji

Political thought in action : the Bhagavad Gita and modern India

List of contributors Acknowledgements Introduction Shruti Kapila and Faisal Devji 1. India, the Bhagavad Gita and the world C. A. Bayly 2. The transnational Gita Mishka Sinha 3. The transfiguration of duty in Aurobindos Essays on the Gita Andrew Sartori 4. Gandhis Gita and politics as such Dipesh Chakrabarty and Rochona Majumdar 5. Gandhi on democracy, politics and the ethics of everyday life Uday S. Mehta 6. Morality in the shadow of politics Faisal Devji 7. Ambedkars inheritances Aishwary Kumar 8. Rethinking knowledge with action: V. D. Savarkar, the Bhagavad Gita, and histories of warfare Vinayak Chaturvedi 9. A history of violence Shruti Kapila Index.

Communities of Violence

Violence is a word seemingly meant for theorizing, being as abstract and thus as capacious as any category can be. And indeed the history of its use has only confirmed the all-encompassing character of violence, which can now name almost any kind of action or affect: physical, psychological, and even ideological. And yet this term is also deployed to name the most distinctive and visceral forms of cruelty and suffering, such that it is difficult to treat it merely as another abstract category. Shifting uncomfortably between the particularity of pain and the generality of an intellectual category, violence has until recently been ill served by scholarship. The necessities of justice, for example, have meant that violence is rarely the subject of law in its own right, but used only as a euphemism for some degree of murder or charge of battery. And since historians are especially seduced by legal terminology, perhaps because they have traditionally described and justified power, their efforts to mimic the law by finding some party responsible for something have tended not to deal productively with violence.

MORALITY IN THE SHADOW OF POLITICS

Having put an end to his first great movement of non-cooperation following the First World War, Gandhi sat down to learn the lessons of this early experiment in mass politics. In 1926 he went on to impart these lessons to his fellow workers in the Sabarmati Ashram by way of a series of lectures on the Bhagavad Gita. Gandhi was interested in exploring the relations between violence and non-violence, which he thought were so intimate that one could very easily turn into the other. Seeking out the Archimedean point that made such a turning possible, the Mahatma had occasion to criticize any ethics that would divide good from evil on the basis of a moral calculus. How, he asked, was an ethics possible that recognized the intractability of ignorance and compulsion? Any ethical system that relied upon knowledge and choice, he thought, was either deluded or true only for a very small elite. A common ethics, then, had to be one which recognized ignorance and compulsion not negatively, as posing limits to moral life, but rather in the form of positive virtues like duty and obedience. Gandhis commentary on the Gita was therefore an attempt to think about moral action in the context of ignorance and compulsion, which he did by focusing on the integrity of the act itself divested of the idealism lent it by any moral calculus.

Politics after Al-Qaeda

One of the consequences of Al-Qaeda’s terrorism has been its blurring of the distinction between national and international politics, both of which have lost a great deal of their former autonomy by serving as hosts for a set of new global concerns and practices. The Global War on Terror can be seen as an effort to externalize Al-Qaeda’s global threat by internationalizing it in a conventional war, and thus reinforcing both the autonomy of international politics and its separation from that of a national variety. More than a conservative move to protect the international order, however, the War on Terror was also an ambitious attempt to remake global politics in the wake of the Cold War. But despite the transformations it has wrought, the War on Terror failed to create either a new global order or even a new global politics.

The Mutiny to Come

The Indian Mutiny of 1857 was by far the most serious anticolonial insurrection of the nineteenth century and is generally held to constitute the last great act of traditional resistance to British rule. This essay is concerned with delineating another vision of the mutiny’s modernity than the one retailed by colonial and nationalist writers. It was neither the unity of India in any political sense, nor its division in any religious one, that the revolt brought to light, but rather an empire of distinctions where the native was not set against the alien but existed alongside it within a moral compact. And if much of this moral compact was drawn from tradition, its hesitant achievement during the rebellion of 1857 had unexpected consequences for India’s modernity. These became evident in the next period of anti-British mobilization across northern India, Gandhi’s movement of noncooperation that began with his defense of the caliphate in 1919. The extraordinary similarity of themes and arguments between these two events must give us pause for thought, even if we do not link them in any causal fashion. Whether it is the sacrifices made by one religious group for another or the practice of noncooperation itself, such elements appear to have been reincarnated from one historical moment to the next. For it was in the mutiny that these factors were transformed out of traditional recognition and made into the stuff of Indian modernity, destabilizing nationalist verities even as they made the nation itself possible in Gandhi’s spiritualization of politics.

Guest Editors' Letter: Itineraries of Self-Rule

In the 2006 Bollywood hit Lage raho Munna Bhai (Carry on Munna Bhai), a petty gangster named Munna is visited by the specter of Gandhi, who advises him on winning the affections of a radio announcer by deploying the tactics of love and nonviolence. In the process Munna comes to realize the virtues of satyagraha, or truthforce, and abandons his thuggish ways. Provoking a revival of interest in the Mahatma among a younger generation of Indians, the film also signaled their unwillingness to identify Gandhi as a historical figure. For despite the comedy’s many references to India’s independence movement, the Mahatma who appeared to Munna Bhai explicitly rejected his memorialization by the state, which has made his image ubiquitous in the form of statuary, portraits, and even the rupee. Fleeing from official desires to embalm him, Gandhi, like all specters, refuses to remain in his own time. Lage raho Munna Bhai represents only one example of a revival of interest in Gandhi among scholars, artists, and activists of all kinds, for whom his thinking seems to offer new entry points for contemporary dilemmas, whether about popular revolution, war, the environment, or global capitalism. Indeed, Gandhi even offers intellectual sustenance to those who would alter the nature of politics itself in our time. And this might be so because the Mahatma’s practices of nonviolence were never bonded to traditional forms of organization such as political parties or states, which in many respects seem inadequate to the problems posed by contemporary politics. Indeed, for Gandhi, the term swaraj, which was often translated as “political independence” or “home rule,” became meaningful and fertile in its strictest translation as “selfrule” or “selfmastery.” The swaraj that Gandhi struggled to attain challenged the distinction between individual and collective and thus was available to anyone at any time without any recourse to some historical or ideological telos.

THE BHAGAVAD GITA AND MODERN THOUGHT: INTRODUCTION

In a recent essay the agent provocateur and philosopher Slavoj Žižek remarked that the Bhagavad Gita represented the perfect philosophy for post-capitalist society. By no means the first reaction to this text, this is only the most recent and arguably most controversial understanding of the philosophical content of the Gita, whose previous commentators have ranged from Nietzsche to Hitler. Less controversially, the modern composer Phillip Glass opened his opera Satyagraha with a dramatization of the discourse between Krishna and Arjuna that forms the Gitas content as a plea for a humanist politics. Though the text does not offer limitless possibilities for interpretation, what is certain is that the Gita has acquired an iconic status in modern times as a set of reflections on ethics, war, justice, freedom and action.

Book Review: Iqbal Singh Sevea, The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal:

Iqbal Singh Sevea, The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 234.

Made in India History without the State

In his unprecedented study of history as consciousness and discipline in modern India, The Calling of History, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that this history has never been properly institutionalized. He explores the tense relations between academic and popular histories in the career of Jadunath Sarkar and shows how Mughal history in his wake has had to abjure ideas and subjectivity as a result of this constitutive tension. Devji’s comments follow up this point by looking at the way in which Sarkar’s apparently biased and old-fashioned focus on character, and so religion and ideas in general, allowed him a kind of intimacy with his sources and society that his successors lack. How, in other words, might the Indian historian’s concern with secular writing end up in a parochial dead end?

Tracking Islam in the archive

The materials in this collection are so rich that it is difficult to survey them. Instead what I decided to do is to look at the way in which two large narratives about Islam emerged from my entirely subjective and even random search through the South Asia Archive (henceforth the Archive). When entering ‘Islam’ as a category in the search engine, I was interested to note that most of the items called up referred in one way or another to PanIslamism as a political movement, with many fewer entries for Islam as a theological phenomenon of a classically Orientalist kind. Also curious was the fact that rather than being opposed by European and Indian writers to the Empire, Pan-Islamism was in fact seen as being entwined and indeed intimate with it. Such, for instance, is the case of the chapter on Pan-Islamism in a 1916 volume titled Nationality and Empire: A Running Study of Some Current Indian Problems. It is almost as if these writers saw Pan-Islamism as imperialism’s mirror image, and even as its product in some sense, with the threat it supposedly posed emerging out of the global character of this Empire itself. Such negative evaluations of Pan-Islamism were matched by positive ones in which the British Empire was in fact seen as the world’s greatest ‘Muhammadan Empire’, so that it isn’t clear which one models itself on the other. Mushir Kidwai’s celebrated book of 1908, Pan-Islamism, provides a good example of this view. Both Muslim and Christian writers appear to have been intent on demonstrating that given its huge Muslim population, primarily in India, the British Empire could claim to have more of the Prophet’s followers as its subjects than its Ottoman counterpart. This was particularly important from the late nineteenth century, with the Ottomans trying to project themselves as a caliphate that called upon the attention if not loyalty of Muslims worldwide. The emphasis in British texts on the numbers of Muslims within the Empire, then, seems not only to have countered the political–theological claims of the Ottomans with a demographic and potentially democratic one, but in doing so also set the precedent for the importance of numbers in the history of Muslim politics. Given the character of Britain’s world empire, the English discourse on Islam was politically as well as conceptually shaped by India, which was not only recognized from the nineteenth century as possessing the world’s largest Muslim population, but was also of far greater importance to Britain than the Middle East. Until her partition and independence in 1947, then, India defined the Middle East’s role in British political and intellectual life, not only because the latter stood on the route between Britain and the Raj, but, more importantly, because India served as a military base and the source of troops used to control large parts of Asia, Africa and, increasingly, even Europe. After 1947 and