A ringside view of the knowledge circus
Do India’s universities and centres of higher learning know what they are talking about when they use the term “sustainable development”? I have long assumed they do not. Simply because the organisation which created and popularised the term, the United Nations (and its various agencies), has not in any meaningful way examined the terms “development” and “sustainable”.
It has been over 50 years since they came to be introduced into major languages, but this has not been done either by the UN and its agencies, or by the great host of allied organisations which altogether make up the multilateral circuit.
I state this not as an armchair pundit, but because of many years of field experience that have, at many times, had to do with either “development” or “sustainable” or “sustainable development”. This field experience has been in the areas of rural development, environment and ecology, health and sanitation, cultural heritage and handicrafts, agriculture and food, water.
What I have seen, from the time I was a young adult in India, has been undevelopment, maldevelopment and unsustainable in every way possible. And, since 2012 as part of my engagement with Unesco’s culture section, the same in every single country in Asia that I visited. For the most part, what the very large majority of populations in Asia (and I presume in the African and South American continents) and also in Europe and North America live inside, are variations of undevelopment and unsustainable.
Yet here we are, six years short of 2030, which has been written in as the terminal year for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and its Agenda 2030 programme. India’s universities have – so far as I can see – adopted the cosmetics and optics of this programme with gusto. What it means to university faculty I cannot imagine. Perhaps a chance to be sent off to some absurdly titled conference somewhere in Asia or, even better, USA or Europe. Perhaps a chance to submit a case study on the SDGs to one of the UN’s hundreds of “high level panel” on something or the other related to the SDGs.
What I now relate is a close encounter with how one of India’s learning centres has adopted the “sustainable development” gospel. I have enough reason to believe that what I relate here does not describe an infrequent instance. It was some ten years ago that I first learnt of “mock UN” programmes being held in colleges and universities (schools even) all over India. The adoption has become widespread.
In early February I had a message from a New Delhi-based foundation about an upcoming conference on ‘IKS and SDGs’. This acronym, IKS, stands for Indian Knowledge Systems, and we have been seeing a good bit of activity on this subject during the last three or four years about it. But this is the first time I was hearing of a meeting to discuss Indian knowledge systems and the UN sustainable development goals.
Here is their description for “an international conference on Indian Knowledge Systems for achieving Sustainable Development Goals”.
The first paragraph: “Indian Knowledge Systems have a strong foundation in Indian culture, philosophy, and spirituality and have evolved through thousands of years. Sustainability on the other hand is emerging as a key theme for research in almost all fields of research in contemporary era. The United Nations has defined 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the present International Conference focuses on tracks across all these fields related to Indian Knowledge Systems. This Conference will provide platform to the researchers, academicians and institutions where they can present and discuss varied opinions and research works in the domain of Indian Knowledge Systems for achieving Sustainable Development Goals and their relevance in modern times.”
Overlooking the repetitive elements, what this immediately presents is the UN ownership of the SDGs, goes on to say that it will focus on work on the SDGs as they relate to Indian knowledge systems (IKS), and therefore how IKS can be of service to the SDGs.
The second paragraph: “This International Conference will deliberate the linkages between Indian Knowledge Systems and 17 Sustainable Development Goals that aims to identify and prove importance of those Indian knowledge practices which are indispensable for entire humanity and environment in modern times as well as provide a road map for future deliberations and research.”
It isn’t at all clear what this means. Links between IKS and SDGs, importance of IKS, how IKS can be used in future, is what I interpret it to be.
The third paragraph: “This International Conference aims to offer an opportunity to exchange new advancements in the area of listed themes and subthemes for further speedy progress in sustainability and opens new doors for networking and initiating the bilateral and multilateral interdisciplinary research in areas of mutual interests for achieving the sustainable development goals (SDGs).”
More repetitive unclarity.
Nonetheless I wrote to the conference organisers: “I learnt about the conference you have organised, on Indian Knowledge Systems and the UN Sustainable Development Goals, only now. I won’t at this late juncture be able to offer a paper on the subject, however I would like to keep in touch with you and the Centre for Spiritualism and Human Enrichment should you continue to pursue the subject.”
“My reason for asking so is the experience I have, for the last 13 years with Unesco Asia-Pacific as one of its experts on living heritage (which has much to do with knowledge systems). And prior to that in the same overall theme of knowledge systems, as adviser to the Centre for Environment Education Himalaya, and the National Agriculture Innovation Project (under the Ministry of Agriculture).”
I expected that, if at all I am replied to, the organising institution would ask me to explain how my experience contributed to its conference theme. A reply did come back the same day: “Thank you so much for showing your interest. You may send your Abstract and Key words in 300 words on any dimension of Indian Knowledge System of your choice.”
Perhaps the organisers were over-burdened with administrative and teaching work and could not spare the time to ask the question I thought they should. I went ahead with an abstract that telegraphed as clearly as I could the intent of my proposed paper.
This was my abstract:
“The formalisation of the idea of sustainable development has, in many ways, preceded by several decades any attempt at formalising ideas about traditional knowledge. Yet, while ‘development’ ceased to be examined only in a narrow economic sense, to then become subordinate first to human development and then to sustainable development, traditional knowledge experienced no such perceptual transformation over the same period. I posit, in this paper, that this is so because systems of traditional knowledge – which includes Indian knowledge systems – exist as living heritage practices brought into our era from earlier eras (some ancient). In contrast, ‘sustainable development’ and its allied concepts have no such pedigree.”
“As 2030 draws nearer, this having been fixed by the United Nations as the terminal year for all manner of efforts that relate to activities which today are deemed to fulfil criteria for both ‘sustainable’ and ‘development’, we see traditional knowledge systems being drafted into this specific service. The central question however – of whether there is the implicit connection assumed between traditional knowledge and sustainable development – has remained unasked as the pace quickens towards 2030. I explain that rather than an investment (of practical and intellectual effort) in safeguarding traditional knowledge systems, the eagerness to draft them into the service of the Sustainable Development Goals is misplaced and potentially damaging to the continued viability of knowledge systems overall, including Indian knowledge systems.”
I thought that this would test them. I have more than ample field evidence to support my assertions. It would be a measure of their academic openness, I reasoned, if they accepted an abstract like this one as an indicator of the paper to follow, because what I was signalling to them was the insubstantial basis for their conference itself.
On 19 February an email arrived to tell me my abstract had been accepted, that I should upload it somewhere on the conference website, doing which would give me a ‘conference identity number’ that I would have to use when uploading my full paper. Encouraging, but I had expected at least a query or two.
On 26 February I completed my full paper, uploaded the file to the conference website and informed the organisers. Soon after, I received an email thanking me for uploading the paper and asking me to complete the registration process – that is, registration to attend the conference. On 27 February, I wrote back: “Thank you for accepting my paper. Concerning registration and the registration fee, I was not going to be able to attend the conference as for personal reasons I am unable to travel. I can transfer to you a token registration fee. But – please note – only a token. Do let me know what is suitable.”
By that time, the conference organisers were listing the titles of the papers received. I found them not a little bizarre: ‘Political awareness and political participation: an Indian retortion to colonial mindset and western perspective’, ‘Enhancing employee productivity: lessons of Swami Vivekananda for corporates’, ‘Healthcare economics in the Indian context: a comprehensive exploration of historical development and future trajectory’, ‘Immutable gender differences, ethical aspects at priority: assessing next generation impacts’, ‘Decoding the dharma of leadership: unveiling the management principles embedded in Indian mythology’, ‘Reviving shakti: unraveling the synergy of Indian knowledge systems in fostering gender equality and women’s empowerment’.
To my email, there was no reply nor has there been one since. The conference was held on the 2nd and 3rd of March. With a lead time of less than a month, I would not have been able to attend it. My intention was to make an attempt to help one of India’s IKS centres understand that there are several views about what they call IKS and what the UN calls SDGs that are quite different from what they are accustomed to, and that I had the necessary experience to explain it all.
But there is silence from the organisers. Considering all that I have seen take place – from my limited vantage point outside the margins of academics and administration – in the area of Indian Knowledge Systems, there is both a prescribed narrative about them and an orthodoxy to how they are dealt with. Just like there are for the SDGs. Isn’t that curious?
Habermas on Israel
Two news reports that have to do with Israel signal a most important development. They speak of the stance taken by Jürgen Habermas, a contemporary European philosopher, and three of his colleagues, on the matter of Israel’s action against the Hamas terrorist atrocities and the upsurge of anti-semitism.
The reports are to be found in the Jewish Post & News, “One of Germany’s most storied political theorists has issued a statement supporting Israel’s military response to the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, decrying as well the surge of antisemitism in Germany during the intervening period” and in The Algemeiner, ” ‘The current situation, created by the cruel attack by Hamas and Israel’s response to it, has led to a cascade of moral and political statements and demonstrations,’ Jürgen Habermas observed in the statement published on Monday on the website Normative Orders, which is devoted to philosophy and social theory.”
Who is Jürgen Habermas?
An enormously important voice, statesmanlike. From the philosophical standpoint, perhaps even oracular. Habermas is today 94 years old and, as described eloquently by Fernando Vallespín in his profile (published barely a week ago in El Pais, the Spanish newspaper), “In Germany, Habermas is as solid a national icon as the Brandenburg Gate … a restless adventure marked by an alchemy and intellectual flexibility that allowed him to integrate elements from others into his own theory, helping him achieve those ends.”
As a prominent voice in postwar Germany, Habermas participated in the major intellectual debates in the country. In 1953 he confronted Martin Heidegger over the latter’s rediscovered Nazi sympathies. In 1977 Habermas protested against curbs on civil liberties in domestic, anti-terrorist legislation, and in 1985–87 he participated in theso-called “historians’ debate” on the nature and extent of German war guilt by denouncing what he regarded as historical revisionism of Germany’s Nazi past.
Lending considerable weight to the joint statement are the other co-signers of the letter, published by the research centre, Normative Orders, at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. They are Nicole Deitelhoff, Chair for International Relations and Theories of Global Order, Rainer Forst, Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy and Klaus Günther, Professor of Legal Theory, Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure Law.
“The current situation created by Hamas‘ extreme atrocity and Israel’s response to it has led to a cascade of moral and political statements and protests,” states the letter. “We believe that amidst all the conflicting views being expressed, there are some principles that should not be disputed. They are the basis of a rightly understood solidarity with Israel and Jews in Germany.”
In her introduction to the book, ‘Jürgen Habermas, Key Concepts‘ (Routledge, 2014), Barbara Fultner has written: “Jürgen Habermas is without a doubt the most important German philosopher living today and one of the most important social theorists in the world. Heir to the founders of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, his is one of the first names that come to mind at the mention of critical theory. His influence, like theirs, extends across the social sciences and humanities. Moreover, he has lived the life of a public intellectual par excellence, contributing on a regular basis to the editorial pages of major newspapers and engaging in public dialogue with other major figures ranging from Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Richard Rorty to then Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. He is a deeply systematic thinker and a consummate synthesizer, bringing together concepts from sociology, Marxist theory and continental as well as analytic philosophy: a fact that makes his work often challenging to read.”
In “The Postnational Constellation, Political Essays‘ (Polity Press, 2001), Habermas observed, “It is a paradoxical situation. We perceive the trends toward a postnational constellation as a list of political challenges only because we still describe them from the familiar perspective of the nation-state. But the more aware of this situation we become, the more our democratic self-confidence is shaken; a confidence that is necessary if conflicts are to be perceived as challenges, as problems awaiting a political solution.”
When we consider what Israel faces, in Gaza with the terrorist group Hamas, on its northern border with Lebanon and Hezbollah, from afar, such as Yemen and the Houthi long-range missiles, the daily invective from Turkey, the manic sabre-rattling by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of Iran, then these musings of Habermas – now 22 years old – become aptly contemporary.
Chroniclers of systematic destruction
Between 1955 and 1958, Leon Poliakov and Joseph Wulf published, in German, three volumes of documents on National Socialist perpetrators. Léon Poliakov (1910–1997) founded a centre for research on the Holocaust in France, the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (CDJC, Centre for Contemporary Jewish Documentation), a historical commission to document the crimes against French Jews. Today, it is part of the Mémorial de la Shoah, the central Holocaust memorial site in France.
He also published extensively on the subject of Nazi perpetrators. Poliakov acted as an expert-advisor to the French delegation during the Nuremberg trials. In his function as the director for research at the CDJC, he explored the systematic destruction of Jews. His publication ‘Le Bréviaire de la haine. Le IIIe Reich et les Juifs‘ (Breviary of Hate. The Third Reich and the Jews) in 1952 offered one of the first comprehensive studies of the Holocaust.
Joseph Wulf (1912–1974) published the first documentary works on the Holocaust in German. He confronted German society with the crimes. From 1955 until his suicide in 1974, Joseph Wulf lived in Berlin. He researched the history of the Holocaust and the culture of the destroyed Polish Jewry. In his publications, Wulf focused on German sources to better educate German society about the crimes committed in their name. He named the perpetrators in various sectors of society, which was met with great resistance in German post-war society.
‘Das Dritte Reich und die Juden‘ (The Third Reich and the Jews) was the first joint publication of Poliakov and Wulf about Nazism, in 1955. One year later, they published ‘Das Dritte Reich und seine Diener‘ (The Third Reich and Its Servants), and in 1959, ‘Das Dritte Reich und seine Denker‘ (The Third Reich and Its Thinkers).
George L. Mosse (1918–1999) has been described as one of the 20th century’s most provocatively original historians. Best known for his work on the origins of fascism, he dealt with modern European social, cultural, and political history. Mosse’s work helped impel research into new fields including new cultural history, the comparative study of fascism, the history of racism and antisemitism, the study of bourgeois respectability, the aesthetics of nationalism, modern Jewish history, and the history of gender and sexuality. Themes that Mosse did much to advance now occupy a prominent place in the historical scholarship of modern Europe.
In his article on the three books by Poliakov and Wulf, in the journal ‘Commentary’, published in August 1960, Mosse wrote: “These weighty volumes of documents show us how little we have, as yet, penetrated to the core of National Socialism. Historians have concentrated on the political and sociological side of the movement to the virtual exclusion of its ideology. Yet one cannot read through these volumes without being impressed by the all-pervasiveness of the ideological appeal, and without seeing that the Jewish question was; unmistakably, central to this ideology.”
“Indeed, the authors apologize for the fact that even in those volumes not specifically concerned with the Jews, so many documents seem to deal with their fate. But there is no need for such an apology, the less so since the majority of the documents deal with the war years. What had always been central to National Socialist thought then became an obsession, not only in the mind of Hitler but within the whole apparatus of party and state. Racialism, discussed in these volumes with an almost monotonous sameness, is the clue without which National Socialism remains forever inexplicable.”
These paragraphs which follow are taken from the introductory chapter of ‘Das Dritte Reich und die Juden‘ (The Third Reich and the Jews) . The German original text is followed by the translation.
Das in der vorliegenden Dokumentensammlung behandelte Thema weist einige besonders hervorstechende Charaktermale auf. Im wesentlichen umfassen sie den Komplex, der unter der Bezeichnung „Endlösung der Judenfrage“ bekanntgeworden ist. Die annähernde Zahl der Vergasten und auf andere Weise Ermordeten ist bekannt. Auch über die zu diesem Zweck vom hitleristischen Verwaltungsapparat aufgezogene Maschinerie ist man ziemlich genau unterrichtet.
“The subject dealt with in the present collection of documents has some particularly salient features. Essentially, they comprise the complex that has become known as the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”. The approximate number of those gassed and murdered in other ways is known. The machinery set up for this purpose by the Hitlerite administrative apparatus is also fairly well known.”
Aber wie kam es zu dieser ausschlaggebenden Entscheidung? Ist es richtig, wenn einige Erzählungen oder Hinweise die Vermutung erlauben, daß Goebbels und Heydrich die Triebfedern dieses Unternehmens waren, während Heinrich Himmler den kategorischen Befehl des Führers erst nach heftigem Widerstreben ausführte? Welche Beamten und Verwaltungsangestellten wurden davon in Kenntnis gesetzt? Auch heute noch — 10 Jahre nach den Ereignissen — besitzt der Geschichtsschreiber hierüber keine einzige verläßliche Unterlage, ganz in dem Sinne wie Himmler selbst einmal sagte: „Es ist ein Ruhmesblatt unserer Geschichte, aber es wird niemals beschrieben sein.“
“But how did this decisive decision come about? Is it correct if some narratives or indications allow the assumption that Goebbels and Heydrich were the driving forces of this enterprise, while Heinrich Himmler carried out the categorical order of the Führer only after fierce resistance? Which officials and administrators were informed of this? Even today – 10 years after the events – the historian does not possess a single reliable document about this, quite in the sense as Himmler himself once said: “It is a glorious page in our history, but it will never be described.” “
Ohne den entsprechenden Abstand ist in diesem Falle eine Geschichtsschreibung besonders schwierig und heikel. Doch kommt noch ein weiteres erschwerendes Moment hinzu. Eine jüdische Feder — und wenn sie noch so gewissenhaft sein will — muß, in die undankbare Rolle des Anklägers gezwungen, Gefahr laufen, den rechten Ton zu verfehlen oder an den beiden gleicherweise gefährlichen Klippen scheitern, daß sich der Historiker erstens jeglichen —• wenn auch verständlichen — Ressentiments zu enthalten hat und zweitens übermenschliche „wissenschaftliche“ Objektivität besitzen muß, die jedem angesichts von 6 Millionen Leichen — einem Drittel des gesamten jüdischen Volkes — schwerfallen dürfte.
“Without the appropriate distance, a historiography in this case is particularly difficult and delicate. But there is another complicating factor. A Jewish pen – however conscientious it may wish to be – forced into the thankless role of accuser, must run the risk of missing the right note or failing on the two equally dangerous cliffs that the historian must, first, refrain from any — albeit understandable — resentment and, secondly must possess superhuman “scientific” objectivity, which should be difficult for anyone in the face of 6 million corpses – one third of the entire Jewish people.”
Aus diesem Grunde wurde die einzig vollkommen neutrale und vorurteilslose Form einer Sammlung von Dokumenten und unbeeinflußbaren Zeugenaussagen — sie stammen größtenteils aus den Archiven des Dritten Reiches selbst — gewählt.
“For this reason the only completely neutral and unprejudiced form of a collection of documents and uninfluential testimonies – most of them coming from the archives of the Third Reich itself – was chosen.”
Dadurch erübrigt es sich, den schmerzlichen, als „kollektive Schuldfrage” bereits in die Geschichte eingegangenen Fragenkomplex zu erörtern. Ohne nochmals auf dieses Thema zurückzukommen, möchten wir uns hier mit folgender Bemerkung begnügen: ln allen zivilisierten Ländern sind zwischen 1945 und 1955 zahlreiche Werke erschienen; Juden und Nichtjuden haben sich mit dem in der Geschichte unserer Zivilisation neuen Komplex des industrialisierten Mordens an Männern, Frauen und Kindern befaßt, denen nichts anderes zum Vorwurf gemacht wurde, als daß sie in diesem und nicht in jenem Bett geboren waren…
Yellow cloth badge in the shape of a six-pointed Star of David with black stiching around the edge. The star outline is formed from two overlapping, dyed triangles and has Dutch text in the center. Dated 1940-45. Photo credit, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection.
“This makes it unnecessary to discuss the painful complex of questions that has already gone down in history as the “collective guilt question”. Without returning to this subject, we would like to content ourselves here with the following remark: ln all civilized countries between 1945 and 1955 numerous works have appeared; Jews and non-Jews have dealt with the complex, new in the history of our civilization, of the industrialized murder of men, women and children, who were not blamed for anything other than that they were born in this bed and not in that one…”
Ausgerechnet im pedantischen Deutschland ist dieses Thema — außer in einigen Schriften ganz allgemeiner Art — bisher keiner einzigen ernsthaften Untersuchung gewürdigt worden. Weshalb ein solches Mißverhältnis? Ist denn nicht das Wissen davon, was geschah und wie es geschah, einem Stillschweigen vorzuziehen, welches verschiedene, unter Umständen sich sogar widersprechende Beweggründe haben könnte?
“In pedantic Germany, of all places, this subject has not been the subject of a single serious study, except in a few writings of a very general nature. Why such a disproportion? Is not the knowledge of what happened and how it happened preferable to silence, which could have various, possibly even contradictory motives?”
Dem Außenstehenden will erscheinen, als sei gerade das Gewissen der untadeligsten und kultiviertesten Deutschen am meisten durch jene Verbrechen belastet, an denen sie selbst keinerlei Anteil hatten; Verbrechen jedoch, die in ihrem Namen, im Namen des gesamten deutschen Volkes, begangen wurden… Wenn nun auch die strikte Verneinung (in unseren Tagen leider nur allzu häufig!) keinesfalls eine Lösung darstellt, so ist zurückhaltendes Schweigen bestimmt erst recht keine.
“To the outsider it would seem that the conscience of the most blameless and cultivated Germans is most burdened by those crimes in which they themselves had no part; crimes, however, which were committed in their name, in the name of the entire German people…. If strict denial (unfortunately all too common in our days!) is by no means a solution, restrained silence certainly is not.”
Wenn die vorliegende Studie zur Zerstreuung nicht gerechtfertigten Unbehagens, zur besseren Erkenntnis der Zusammenhänge und zu ihrem Bewußtwerden beitragen und eine sorgfältige Nachforschung anregen würde, ist die Arbeit der Herausgeber dieses Buches nicht umsonst gewesen.
“If the present study would contribute to the dispersion of unjustified uneasiness, to the better realization of the connections and to their becoming conscious and would stimulate a careful investigation, the work of the editors of this book would not have been in vain.”
The groves of bloodthirsty academe
Next only to the shock from the barbarity of the attacks on the day of 7 October 2023, has been the cold-blooded complicity of academics in explaining away, if not outright justifying, Hamas terrorism.
I learnt this first-hand during the fortnight after 7 October. For several years I have been a subscriber to a well-known email list, whose subject is described as network cultures, in which are discussed media, art, the digital world, and the perceptions that surround these. On it, academics from Europe and the USA often take issue with cultural theorists and artists.
On 8 October a post titled ‘Silence on Palestine’ appeared on the list and attracted comment: “The Palestinians have been pushed into a position of having very little choice” and “When a Palestinian fights for their freedom they are automatically a terrorist” and even “In a perfect world Hamas would sit in the Knesset and discuss problems”.
Nowhere was there the most elementary recognition of the demonic attack upon those attending the music festival and upon families in the kibbutzes being terrorist action, nor that Hamas is officially held to be a terrorist organisation by both the European Union and the USA.
Sickened by this position, which was the overall line adopted by writer after writer, I registered opposition by pointing out that “Hamas is a terrorist organisation, there is no other way to see it. Hamas is a creation of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been described as “the world’s incubator of modern Islamic terrorism” and for 35 years Hamas has brought bloody violence against Israelis and Palestinians.”
The responses that swiftly crowded in reeked of intifada propaganda. “Comparing the behaviours one can easily label the IDF as a terrorist organization”, “Israel, under the influence of its war party, has become an apartheid state”, “The threat to Israel comes from their own apartheid policies, and from the support they receive for those policies”.
Just as disconcerting, I found, were the retreats into the ivory tower – “Commercial media outlets and considerably commercial social media are means to prohibit solidarity” – and the allegations that I am commissioned to express what I did – “Your charges sound like AIPAC talking points” (the AIPAC is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee)” and “You must be quoting Israeli press releases and conveniently omit all the Israeli violations of international law”.
And so it went on for 12 days. In every correspondence I began by repeating that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, repeated the death toll, the hostages, and their rocket fire. Then the wretchedness of Gaza in stark contrast to the hundreds of millions of dollars that have flowed in as assistance and aid, the antecedents of the use of violence against Israelis and Jews in the origin of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), the threat by Hezbollah and its sponsors, the rising incidents of anti-Jew hatred and intimidation in Europe and North America, the nauseating ‘celebrations’ in western cities about the 7 October attack.
It made no difference. I was called an Israeli “bot” and as supplying a “blatantly misleading and a very callous reading of history”. This is what confronts us today, the unhinged leftism that has taken hold of universities in the ‘west’ (and just as important, in their partner institutions in the ‘east’, which means fast-developing Asia, and India). This is the strident activism that resorts to moral equivalence between a terror federation and professional defence forces, that howls for ‘proportionality’ but for one side only.
Not European left politicians, not American leftist professors and their ‘woke’ acolytes, nor their critical race theory and cancel culture networks – now with Asian characteristics – have condemned the Hamas atrocities. This is the nihilist cancer that needs rooting out.
The persistent fiction of independent India
Today morning, tens of millions of schoolchildren all over India were ordered to attend what is called flag hoisting. The national flag of India is run up a flagpole set in front of, or near, many thousands of schools, and a group of school functionaries pull a rope that sets the flag up atop the pole. The national anthem is played, several speeches are delivered, often including one or two (if the schoolchildren have ill luck) by a local political bigwig or member of the state assembly. The students may present a skit or two, in which they have been drilled during the preceding weeks, and then they disperse.
This has been the pattern to which Independence Day in India is marked and celebrated for as long as I remember. When the television era began, the live telecast of the indepdence day parade in New Delhi became a much looked forward to event. The parade has had the same ingredients for decades. Contingents from the three armed forces march, various sorts of wheeled and motorised weaponry drives slowly past, the President of India and as many members of Parliament as can be mustered sit in the VIP boxes to desultorily watch the parade. A number of what are called ‘floats’, tableaux mounted on lorries, are driven past, apparently representing the states of India or some theme.
And so it has gone, year after miserable year. The fiction of freedom is renewed annually by the independence day parade, which long ago became a collective ritual choreographed and managed. Like many invented rituals, this one applies a cosmetic veneer. Perhaps in the 1970s and 1980s, there were still Indians who saw the ritual for what it is, and who were aware of the forces that encircled what was presented to all of us as the “sovereign republic of India”.
Today I see very little indeed of that awareness remaining. The great mass of the Indian middle class has been distracted from such reflection by the baubles of “development” (‘vikas’ in Hindi) which has become an end in itself, and which is given any meaning that suits the Indian agents of those encircling forces. If – so the fiction goes – the last remnant of the colonial power whcih had ruled India withdrew on 14 August 1947, then we should, in a matter of no more than two generations, have had a country very different – very different indeed – from the one we see today called India.
What have we today in this colonised territory called India?
On India and democracy
The Journal of Democracy, which is published for the National Endowment for Democracy in the USA by Johns Hopkins University Press, has included in its July 2023 issue a symposium titled, ‘Is India still a democracy?’ The five articles together offer any observer of India a mostly balanced view of the current political state of the country. I found the group of articles (and the introductory editorial) compelling enough reading.
While not intending this posting to be a review of the journal’s symposium, I found some passages from each article worth unpacking and examining. The introductory editorial states that “India’s politics have been far more open, competitive, and democratic than one would expect from a country with its low level of socio-economic development and its high degree of ethnolinguistic diversity” and that “Narendra Modi, who since capturing the government in 2014” has “engaged in what is by some accounts a wholesale dismantling of the democratic institutions, norms, and practices that made India such a miracle.”
There are two assumptions these rest on. One is that India’s politics between 1977 (the end of the ‘Emergency’) and until 2014 (when the BJP-Modi first term began) was proceeding along acceptable lines. Two, that democratic institutions are crumbling since 2014. I think both these assumptions I cannot agree with, as a resident of India, and also because they are contradicted by the arguments made in two if not three of the papers in this symposium.
The editorial goes on state that what we are seeing is “a frontal assault on the world’s largest democracy, in the service of a majoritarian, ethnonationalist project that seeks to root out all forms of difference and impose a stultifying conformity on India’s hitherto-vibrant political and social fabric”. These are difficult terms to employ – majoritarian and ethnonationalist – and I daresay that the ordinary Indian voter would find them incomprehensible. Because the Indian voter, ever since the first general elections in 1951-52, has voted and still votes based on what he imagines has been promised.
This is the essentially immature character of representational democracy in India, which has not changed over 70 years, and whose immaturity has very cleverly been exploited by the BJP since 2014 (but also during the early 1990s), and equally cleverly by the Indian National Congress and various national and regional political parties and groupings throughout the decades of independence.
The first article is ‘Why India’s Democracy Is Dying’ by Maya Tudor, which could be read as her own examination of the question she asks: “So has India really departed the shores of democracy? And if so, is India’s transition into hybrid regime reversible? The answer to both questions is yes.”
A passage that helps the structure of her article is the one in which she enumerates five institutions that are central to a country’s designation as democratic. The five are: (1) elections for the chief executive and legislature (“first and most important”), (2) the presence of genuine political competition (“countries where individuals have the right to vote in elections, but where incumbents make it difficult for the opposition to organize are not generally considered democracies”), (3) governmental autonomy from other forces (“such as powerful military elites”) that can halt or wholly subvert democratic elections, (4) civil liberties, (5) executive checks (“what prevents an elected head of government from declaring l’état, c’est moi”).
An useful list. Employing it I see that No 2 has been missing or is ineffectual since 2014, my verdict for No 3 would be no, the government is not at all autonomous, not because of a military elite but certainly because of powerful indigenous corporate interests (veteran India-watchers will not have failed to note the meteoric rise in the fortunes of the corporate houses of Ambani and Adani since 2014).
No 4, civil liberties, deserves a symposium of its own, no doubt. It has become temptingly convenient to state that civil liberties in India has become more constrained in India since 2014 because of what the editors have described as “ethnonationalism”, but more experienced India-watchers can very well argue that the western concept of civil liberties could hardly take root in a country whose constitution reads as if it was written by a police constable, as Tripurdaman Singh so aptly points out in the second article.
No 5, executive checks, have certainly all but vanished. Perhaps the first stage of executive checks is operable in Parliament itself, through the Parliamentary standing committees, which both monitor and evaluate the workings of government. From my own experience of working with the central government machinery, I found that during the two terms of the UPA-Manmohan Singh government (2005-09 and 2009-14) the standing committees went about their work, conducted some very well known public consultations (such as the one of GM seed and crop, and another on a vaccination programme), and their reports carried weight. Over the last five or six years, I cannot recall a single such committee having completed its task in the manner it is expected to. But then, this has as much also to do with a key point made in Vineeta Yadav’s article.
‘The Authoritarian Roots of India’s Democracy’ by Tripurdaman Singh, the second article, flows from his argument that “Step after step has been and is being taken that tends toward … an inevitable authoritarianism interspersed with democracy”.
Singh explains that this authoritarianism interspersed with what I would put as the simulation of democratic motions “could not be done without securing the state that was to do it”. Secure the state from what and for whom? The ‘for whom’ part is more easily identified – “attempts to solve social questions through political action”. What this leads to, he says, is “invariably antithetical to freedom”, substantial restrictions of civic freedoms and the “licensing of coercive state power to redress socio-economic inequities (and arguably even to regulate social identities)”.
This regulation of identity is an important point, which I will try to expand upon in a later comment. But Singh makes a connection here that deserves a lot more attention than it usually gets, and that is the connection between socio-economic aspirations (more than inequities, I would say) and identity (but identity rather different from the identity associated with ethnonationalism).
“India’s constitution enables and underpins a vast armoury of coercive laws that it places at the executive’s disposal, and creates a political structure dedicated to promoting executive power”. This is I would say a most important insight. It cuts to the core of the question: who is India’s constitution for? He relates how Somnath Lahiri, a Communist member of the Constituent Assembly, described the fundamental-rights provisions as having “been framed from the point of view of a police constable” and goes on to relate how Lahiri taunted leaders of the Congress party in the Constituent Assembly, saying that they wanted even more power than the British government.
That is a taunt whose truth has echoed through 16 Lok Sabhas and into the 17th. “Every government, to the extent that it can command a substantive majority in the legislature, has ruthlessly used state force to push its agenda for social transformation and promote its version of state security. Yesterday it was Indira Gandhi, today it is Narendra Modi. Tomorrow may bring someone else.” In saying so, Singh buries the notion that apparently different political ideologies bring about different approaches to governance and therefore to the practice of democracy.
The third article by Sumit Ganguly is ‘Modi’s Undeclared Emergency’ wherein he says, “Beginning in 2019, however, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi started his second term in office with an overwhelming parliamentary majority, his government launched a steady attack on civil liberties, personal rights, and free speech across India without issuing any such proclamation or going through any constitutional channels, even for the sake of appearance”.
This assertion, while popular, has less substance than it seems to have. My point is not to dilute the real danger that Ganguly describes, but to draw attention to the fact that several well-known instances of social activists and their struggle with government is not representative of the general state of civil liberties and free speech in India. From 2013, when it became very likely that Modi was going to be the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, a raft of new online media publications began to be launched. These gained substantial readership and very shortly began to be quoted by western media.
Ganguly continues: “The government has not been content to limit its harassment to political opponents. It has also exploited legal means to harry any critics in the media, both domestic and foreign. Such incidents are too numerous to catalogue.” Indeed it has been well known in India that to fall afoul of the powerful and politically well-connected is to invite personal disaster and bankruptcy. This has been so throughout the career of Congress as the ruling party, of coalition formations, and since 2014 of the BJP. It is even more so in states, where regional political parties are even more brazen in attacking and silencing political (or any other kind of) opposition.
‘The Exaggerated Death of Indian Democracy’ is the fourth article. In this, author Rahul Verma brings out early what I think is an important point: “..a review of public-opinion surveys will give a clearer picture of how Indian citizens perceive their democracy to be functioning and whether they are worried about the country’s direction. Only then can we say whether Indian democracy is truly in peril”. What does the Indian voter think about, and how does he express what he thinks about using the means available? This, to paraphrase Verma, is what a significant amount of punditry on India often misses.
Verma writes about two such surveys. “More than 60 percent of Indians surveyed for Pew Research Center’s 2020 report on democratic values and satisfaction said they were satisfied with how democracy was working in the country” and “In 2022, the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) and the CVoter Foundation conducted a survey of more than five-thousand Indians that asked respondents whether they thought India had become more or less democratic in the last ten years. Almost half the respondents (about 48 percent) said that the state of democracy in India has improved in the last decade, and only a quarter said that it has declined (28 percent)”.
These findings may appear counter-intuitive before the general thrust of this symposium, but they can perhaps be better explained by those within India compared to those outside it. What does the average Indian who votes think democracy is? India has during the 20th century (before 1947 too) been a land through which slogans reverberated. ‘Quit India’ was one, during the freedom movement. During the Indira years there was “garibi hatao” (remove poverty) and “jai jawan, jai kisan” (hail soldier, hail farmer), followed by the famous Twenty Point Programme, the forerunner of much larger, much more expensive and grandiose “development schemes” that later governments would invent.
This is what democracy came to mean for a large portion of the Indian citizenry, who wanted to put poverty behind them, find steady income, raise a standard of living that well into the late 1970s was precarious, and assure their children of education. The Indian apparatus known as democracy brought some of it and promised the rest. That’s what interested the voter far more than the five necessary institutions listed by Maya Tudor or the attacks on them outlined by Sumit Ganguly.
In ‘Why India’s Political Elites Are to Blame’ by Vineeta Yadav, the fifth article, I find a signal of how much for granted the elected representative has taken the voter’s gullibility. Yadav examines “Indian elites’ design and use of Parliament, the courts, and election commissions as well as state agencies”. She finds that “The quality of parliamentary representation worsened significantly after 2013… a positive long-term trend of rising numbers of lower-caste MPs and cabinet members reversed in 2014, while the share of MPs with criminal charges against them (from all parties) increased from 24 percent in 2004 to 43 percent in 2019”.
This alone reduces the weighty question upon which this symposium is based to a single trenchant question: what sort of democracy tolerates a doubling in the number of criminals elected? Little wonder then that “Parliament also continued its long-term decline as an institution of policy deliberation, legislation, and executive oversight. The total number of parliamentary sittings has decreased steadily, from a high of 464 days during 1980–84 (the first post-Emergency five-year-term government) to 332 in 2004–2009, 357 in 2009–14, and, finally, just 328 days in 2014–19. The current post-2019 parliament is on its way to having the shortest term of any yet.”
Well of course. Those who have business empires to run (whatever their legitimacy) can’t be bothered hanging around in Parliament, and even more so in state assemblies. This is how the “majority” of the BJP, as mentioned by Tripurdaman Singh, must be understood. India has long been burdened by what is usually described as the criminalisation of politics. I think it is fair to say that since 2014, with the active encouragement of all political parties and fronts and groupings, that the criminal character of Indian politics has deepened and widened.
These are a few views about salient points I found in the five articles. As a collection, I find that the authors have neglected two quite important aspects of India’s democracy. The first is the administrative cadres and their responsibilities. The functioning of governance and administrative machinery is as much an essential part of a democracy as are the observance of the integrity of its institutions. Yet this is the class – a super-class of administrators – which still wears the spurs and wields the crop just as the colonial administrators of the Raj era did.
Not a month goes by without a news report from somewhere in the country that describes a senior administrator grossly abusing his or her office, abusing and mistreating subordinates, harassing district citizens, writing out arbitrary “orders” that emerge not out of a responsive system but to favour interests, of administrators found with assets that far exceed what their salaries could have purchased. What we see from within the country therefore is the rapid criminalisation from the political realm of the administrative circles.
That also helps explain why executive oversight mechanisms exist on paper only. During the 1980-84 Parliament there were 56 short-notice questions and 85 discussions. During 2014-19 there were 8 and 5. Since 2014 the unacceptable practice of passing bills without a quorum has continued. The Union Budget, an annual exercise which even in the 1980s would occupy hours upon hours of discussion, cross-examination and wrangling, has for the last three years been passed almost no sooner than the budget proposals are presented.
The second is what I would call the monetisation of “vikas” (which is taken nowadays to mean ‘development’, but development of a myopic and material sort, for example, national highways, SEZs, new airports, new trains, more “multi-specialty hospitals”, in short anything that is large and visible nd new). It was present during the Congress-UPA terms (Manmohan Singh promoted it and P Chidambaram orchestrated its roll-out) and continued with greater vigour after 2014.
What the pursuit of “vikas” has done is to lock the Indian voter into a feudal relationship with a proximate politician and his enablers in administration. The escape from poverty took place in the last generation, or the one previous to the last. Now India has the world’s largest middle class (the population overtook that of China this year, according to the UN) and that middle class is being geared towards quickly accumulating and quickly spending.
Their concern with the efficacy and responsiveness of democratic institutions is a quantity which surveys are hard put to plumb. Horrific accidents and mishaps – such as three train collision in the state of Odisha in early June, which took the lives of more than 300 and severely injured hundreds more – are tut-tutted about and then the pursuit of “vikas” returns. The electorate pays little attention if at all any to the fact, concerning the railways, that over 100,000 posts in the Indian Railways (including those dedicated to safety) have been unfilled.
Looming above the debris on all sides is the cult of Modi. For several years now the Press Information Bureau, which is the cell in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting that distributes government press communiques, has showcased Modi (there really is no other way to put it) as the omnipotent ruler. Nine out of ten photographs it issues are of Modi, it has special sections for his speeches and his puerile, stilted ‘meet the people’ engagements. But the Modi cult infests states too. Everything from a new government school block in some out-of-the-way district to a new dockyard is inaugurated and “dedicated to the nation” by Modi.
Far more sinister is what has taken place behind the Modi silver screen. The Prime Minister’s Office was enlarged during 2014-19 and more so after 2019, and is today the size of a medium-sized ministry, with 52 senior officials (in the 1980s there was a single principal secretary). Its bloating is directly proportional to the entirely unconstitutional centralisation of power that the PMO now represents. Many line ministry decisions are taken here instead and, having been taken, are relayed to ministries as “prime minister’s orders”. On this basis, what India and Indians are experiencing since 2019 more visibly, is a dictatorial chief executive. The India of 2023 is ruled by edict, not at all by anything that can be considered democratic.
ET phone home
This should have been on the front pages of the world’s newspapers two weeks ago. It is the most important news ever printed since the term ‘news’ was invented, and since we had what we call media.
And that news, very simply, is that crafts of non-human origin (extra-terrestrial or unknown) have been seen, filmed, recorded and captured. A website called The Debrief released its report on the subject on 5 June.
The opening paragraph dives right in: “A former intelligence official turned whistleblower has given Congress and the Intelligence Community Inspector General extensive classified information about deeply covert programs that he says possess retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin.”
Two days ago, a video presented by Tucker Carlson – American television commentator until recently with Fox News – deals with the subject in depth. The video is 43 minutes long and lists out the evidence, which is quite iron-clad.
What has emerged from the video is that what are called UFOs have been tracked by American military intelligence services “for at least 70 years and it turns out that actually yes these things have been shot down and crashed in the US, government has the wreckage and it’s being held by defense contractors Raytheon, Lockheed which are big independent companies but they work for the US government they’re really part of the Department of Defense”.
How and why has “the news story of the millennium” been kept off newspaper front pages and prime time news?
Why are thousands of millionaires leaving India?
India is going to become a US$ 5 trillion economy in a few years. India is losing US$ millionaires at a rate of several thousand every year. Can these statements both be true? I think not.
But first, where did the US$ 5 trillion economic meme come from? That’s difficult to say nowadays, because of the ways in which government public relations (PR) amplifies what international finance capital says, and what it says is often based on what politicians utter, and what they utter is based on what advice (from international finance capital) they’re given.
The US$ 5 trillion meme has been circulating for certainly two years, if not a little longer, so far as I recall. Like many pronouncements by the Government of India, it probably has its origin in some report by one of the multilateral lending agencies, was picked up by a government propagandist, and was well spun. Whatever its origin, you can read more about this particular meme here, here, here and here.
As for the second statement, two days ago this is the headline that caught my eye: “6,500 Indian millionaires expected to move abroad in 2023″. The publication that posted this, New India Abroad, appears to be USA-based.
The accompanying text read: “The Henley Private Wealth Migration Report 2023 envisages that India is expected to witness an outflow of approximately 6,500 high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) this year. The report, published on June 13, 2023, by Henley & Partners, an investment migration consultancy based in London, ranks India as the second-highest country in terms of HNWI outflow, with China leading the list.”
It turns out that Henley has made a business out of monitoring and assessing the lives and times of the world’s rich and very rich. Whatever its methods, they appear to be taken very seriously indeed by the legion of wealth and investment advisers whose clients are the global wealthy.
This is what the Henley Private Wealth Migration Report 2023 (released on 13 June) has to say.
The UK is expected to see a net outflow of 3,200 high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) in 2023 — higher than the projected 3,000 net loss for Russia, according to the Henley Private Wealth Migration Report 2023, which tracks wealth and investment migration trends worldwide. This will make the UK the third-biggest loser of millionaires globally after China (net loss of 13,500) and India (net loss of 6,500). Perhaps most notably, the UK’s anticipated HNWI flight is double that of last year, when it saw a net exodus of 1,600 millionaires.
The report explains the latest net inflows and outflows of dollar millionaires (namely, the difference between the number of HNWIs with investable wealth of USD 1 million or more who relocate to and the number who emigrate from a country) as projected by global wealth intelligence firm New World Wealth, which has been tracking wealth migration trends for over a decade. The HNWI migration figures focus only on HNWIs who have truly moved — namely, who stay in their new country more than six months a year.
Here’s what the report says about India: “Although the second-biggest loser globally, India’s net exit numbers are predicted to drop to 6,500 in 2023 compared to last year (7,500).” A consultant to a private wealth management firm quoted in the report had this to say about why Indian high net worth individuals are leaving the country: “Prohibitive tax legislation coupled with convoluted, complex rules relating to outbound remittances that are open to misinterpretation and abuse, are but a few issues that have triggered the trend of investment migration from India”.
Based on the trend over the last decade as observed by Henley and various other firms which monitor the movement of considerable wealth, India’s dollar millionaires have been moving out of the country at a good clip for several years. Should the 2023 forecast be fulfilled, then during the 2022-24 period some 14,000 millionaires will have left India with their investible monies. Those monies are at least US$ 14 billion, which is about 1,100 billion Indian rupees (INR, or 110,000 crore rupees). At a very rough estimate, India’s HNWIs have sent some US$ 50 billion out of the country over 10 years, which coincides directly with the two terms of the BJP government.
So much then for what the current government (now in its second term which ends in 2024) has been claiming since 2014 about India’s “ease of doing business” being among the best in the world.
Where are wealthy Indians who have quit and are quitting India moving to? “Dubai and Singapore remain preferred destinations for wealthy Indian families. The former, also known as the ‘5th City of India’, is particularly attractive for its government-administered global investor ‘Golden Visa’ programme, favourable tax environment, robust business ecosystem, and safe, peaceful environment.” Portugal has also been a recipient of significant wealth from the Indian diaspora.
Firms such as Henley, which have made it their business to minutely observe the movements and habits of the world’s wealthy for well over a decade, say as plainly as can be that an increasing outflow of millionaires often points to a drop in confidence in a country as HNWIs are usually the first to exit and vote with their feet when circumstances deteriorate. “Affluent families are extremely mobile, and their transnational movements can provide an early warning signal in terms of a country’s economic outlook and future country trends,” observes Henley.
The UN agency for ill health and sexual deviancy
Update: A report dated 19 May 2023 on The People’s Voice website has this to say: “Ask yourself why the United Nations, a globalist body with a clearly defined agenda, needs to get involved – unless they are trying to change something very fundamental about how humanity has always gone about things. Which is exactly what they are doing. Sexualizing kids is an official goal of UN Agenda 2030 and they are becoming increasingly flagrant in pursuing this goal.”
Who does the United Nations health agency, the World Health Organization (WHO), actually work for? Of course it works for the multinational pharmaceutical and drug corporations. That was clear enough even before half the WHO’s operating budget was provided by the global pharma corporations (and their allied foundations). In more recent years, the share of the WHO budget provided by the industry is reported to have crossed 70%. But who else does the WHO serve?
That question must be levelled immediately and directly at the WHO top brass in its Geneva, Switzerland, head office by the WHO member states, and it must also be directed to the heads of WHO country offices. The agency has now gone squarely into a zone of deviancy and child sexual predation.
Under the guise of sexual education guidance in UK and Wales, the WHO has stated that children under the age of four – that’s four years old – should “ask questions about sexuality” and should “explore gender identities”. The WHO statements are contained in a report whose audience is intended to be policy-makers not only in the UK but all over Europe.
The WHO supports providing information to children under the age of four about “enjoyment and pleasure when touching one’s own body, early childhood masturbation”! The completely deranged and outright deviant agency has also said children should learn skills to “gain an awareness of gender identity” and moreover that children aged between four and six years old should “talk about sexual matters” and “consolidate their gender identity”.
In Wales, the Tory shadow minister for education said the WHO needs to “rescind the advice immediately” and called for the Welsh government to “distance themselves” from the “frankly disturbing” WHO guidance. She told British press: “We must stop this pushing of harmful gender ideology into sex education in Wales and the UK, with immediate effect.” Chalk one up for the small tribe of sensible politicians in UK and Europe. No chance – not a bit – of the same happening in India.
A campaign group called Safe Schools Alliance in the UK had recently warned: “We find it extremely concerning that the UN and WHO are promoting an approach that is experimental, unscientific, and appears to be aligned to the work of unethical individuals and organisations, including those promoting the acceptance of paedophilia.”
It was only about two months ago that two other UN agencies had released a report whose aim it is to provide an agenda to decriminalise all “consensual” sexual activity, even between adults and minors, which is a serious crime in many countries. While couched in “human rights” and “trans rights” jargon, the report advocates steps that if taken would effectively make pedophilia legal.
The report was titled ‘The 8 March Principles for a Human Rights-Based Approach to Criminal Law Proscribing Conduct Associated with Sex, Reproduction, Drug Use, HIV, Homelessness and Poverty’ and was written by “international legal experts” working for the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), along with UNAIDS and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
Notes for an intellectual itinerary
At what point should you, can you, begin applying the brush strokes that will one day become your own intellectual itinerary? But – you may ask – what is such a thing, and why is it even needed? It is, so far as I have been able to shape its meaning for myself, a record of one’s ideas and practice.
The practice part of it is important because, I firmly hold, one must make a determined effort to make your ideas manifest, certainly those ideas that can be given form and function only in the material plane, our ‘bhuloka’. If for example you have constructed in your mind the form of a more fuel-efficient ‘chulha’, then you must make your drawings, build your prototypes out of suitable material, test them with real fuel and real cooking vessels, and then go back and redraw the form, and test again, and so on.
This cyclical iteration of forming an idea (or even borrowing one; no matter what you have been told, there have been few original ideas since the dawn of the 20th century), refining it, testing it, revising it, has as much to do with those ideas that remain in the abstract sphere, as it does with those that are meant for our material existence. Intellectual itineraries, at least the ones that I have encountered, have had perhaps a bit more to do with the abstract and less with the material.
But that is perhaps because I encountered the term first through the writings of historians and cultural theorists, whose musings and cogitations occur only in that immense universe populated with ideas and their offspring, some as old as creation, others less old but still ancient, still others from recent centuries, and others yet that took form only two or three generations ago.
It was thanks to Immanuel Wallerstein that I first encountered the term. Wallerstein (1930-2019) gave the name to that course of study to which his own is tied, world systems research, and he was described either as a sociologist or as an economic historian or both. For a number of years, Wallerstein (an American) headed a centre named after the French historian Fernand Braudel (1902-85) who was the predecessor world systems historian of very considerable note, and who had also written for himself (and his legion of students) his own intellectual itinerary. It was Braudel who was known for having written “the biography of capitalism”, which then became the study of “world systems”.
So much for the two historians. The other two had very much to do with culture. One was Egon Friedell (1878-1938) who was Austrian, and had been described variously as a polymath, historian, philosopher, journalist, critic, theatrist. Friedell is best known for his sparkling ‘The Cultural History of the Modern Age’ and – as all genuine souls who practised genuine journalism did – Friedell too had written (but had not explicitly called it so) his intellectual itinerary.
Two was Umberto Eco (1932-2016), the Italian semiologist who became famous the world over not for his mastery of an arcane art but for his historical novels, for it was ‘Il nome della rosa’ (The Name of the Rose) followed by ‘Il pendolo di Foucault’ (Foucault’s Pendulum) which quickly turned Eco into a household name.
How did Friedell and Eco write, or describe, each their intellectual itineraries? Not in any document that can be identified as such, but in fact through the maintaining of a thread of continuity and self-reference that ran through their bodies of work. When in the later years of their careers, they spoke about this to interviewers or long-time students (whose accounts of their conversations added to the record) Friedell and Eco drew attention to this thread of continuity, and halted at knots (as it were) in those threads which can be described as milestones in plainspeech but are more akin to, I would say, the crossing of portals of a particular kind.
What of our own place, if not quite our own time? Then I should look at K M Munshi (1887-1971) and R C Majumdar (1888-1980) as having intellectual itineraries that are, naturally, bristling with detail. Munshi, as the founder of the Bharatiya Vidua Bhavan, was the general authority overseeing the publication, one after another of the volumes that make up the Bhavan’s ‘History and Culture of the Indian People’ (there are eleven), written by a group of more than sixty scholars under the general editorship of Majumdar.
They were then collaborators on this monumental project and that being so, several periods in the intellectual itinerary of each coincided, as we would have seen had either committed to paper such an itinerary. Both were far too occupied to do so, but I mention them as examples of very lengthy itineraries which began at an early age, firmly grounded in a conviction that only became stronger as the years passed.
If through the agency of a collected works of a man the thread of an intellectual itinerary is to be espied, then that of Sri Aurobindo’s (1872-1950) dwarfs lesser mortals. The three phases of his life can well be taken as the three eras of Aurobindo’s extraordinary itinerary: the formative stage with his education and early administrative work, the active (superactive rather) nationalist phase when he set Bengal and India alight with his writing in Bande Mataram, and then the longest, the spiritual phase when his uniquely evolved powers of concentration and reflection produced the great texts written in Pondicherry.
The question that would naturally arise is: must the exercise of recording and describing an intellectual itinerary be only for intellectuals (and non-intellectual specialists with superior cranial horsepower)? Certainly not. The regular exercise of fabricating and maintaining such an itinerary has, I believe, considerably more import for the non-intellectuals of our societies than the intellectuals, the artists, the celebrated professionals, the well-known public figures. And that is because the direct daily personal contact that the state transport bus conductor, the insurance claims clerk, the parking attendant, the retail shop check-out counter girl, is of a far more elemental and personal quality.
For what is of use when employing the method is the recording of the influences upon one – the theoretical constructs and the ways in which they have been applied in everyday life; the teachings and learnings, some delivered through the channels of formal education, others because of a particular environment of employment; the pressures of professional peer groups, and ditto with social groups, and academic groups; the excursions into one or several spiritual by-lanes; the dalliances with (or full-time dives into) politics or activism or artistic pursuits.
The biographical genre of literature – which in the literary tradition of the Western world goes back a millennium-and-a-half, when the lives of saintly persons were committed to text – developed further during the reformation and counter-reformation periods in Europe, the 16th and 17th centuries, when opposing camps portrayed their heroes and rebels with either fulsome praise or base slander.
It went through a metamorphosis of sorts during the scientific and industrial revolutions, when spiritual heroes were exchanged for experts in the material arts. Whatever the personage, the formal biography was indeed a book-length description – made book length because of the inclusion of anecdote and memoirs and situational detail – of an individual’s intellectual itinerary, but written by someone else, often from a later time or era.
In our time (by which I mean what older adults such as myself could well call the requiem for the reading habit, and which young adults might call the Instagram profile) the role of a biographer for an itinerary worth documenting has been replaced by the internet, that soulless and sterile recording medium that archives every email, every online document, every video, every meme, every contact database, every browser history.
Nowadays, one’s intellectual itinerary is a public project. Your reception of any idea, and theorem, any particular course of praxis or action, has a date or a date range, that has been stored ‘in the cloud’. Your employment of these – in your professional or artistic or sportsmanly or public life – is in the same way recorded, tagged, dated and stored. In the very near future, artificial intelligence will be tasked with being your biographer, and indeed biographies by the hundred thousand could be constructed overnight.
With a fate like this looming for the great majority of the world’s population that owns and uses even a single device that is connected to the internet, my advice is to note down for yourself (and your descendants) your own intellectual itinerary. Try longhand, with pen and paper. It is an exercise whose worth is nearly forgotten, for doing so requires compositional skills that are all too obviously missing from the very great majority of the so-called literate peoples of the world, and which will be beyond the reach of even the most vaunted artificial intelligence for years to come.
Shaktichakra, the wheel of energies 