Theorie Communiste states:

Communisation and communism are things of the future, but we should speak about them in the present – that is the wager of this review. Communisation is prefigured in the present struggles every time the proletariat comes up against its own existence as a class, in its action as a class against capital – i.e. within the relation of exploitation and in the very course of those struggles.2

Here, in the Delhi uprising, the proletariat surely comes up against its own existence as a class. But “action as a class against capital” does not hold up. The “relation of exploitation” was not directly problematised in the actions of the proletariat. They seemed to have found some other way. The “relation of exploitation” was subjectively superseded as the proletariat in Delhi went beyond any narrowly conceived notion of the “working class” or worker identity — in tune with TC’s proposition on negation of autonomy and self-organisation as “working class”, but also where the proletariat is negating itself. The modus operandi however doest not fit TC’s approach. This supersession worked by way of the proletariat appearing on the other side as a national level political player with the national flag constantly in hand. Affirmative and rather shrill slogans like Jai Bhim and Bharat Mata ki Jai alongside Inquilab Zindabad dominated while there was less of the usual progressive slogans denouncing capitalism, fascism, patriarchy or imperialism.

The 2025 riots/movement/uprising in Indonesia saw working class “lady ojols” and delivery boys holding the national flag, a combination of viral “brave pink” and “hero green”.3

The proletariat in Delhi owned up the nation, acting as the true claimants and proprietors and declared that the government has no right over the nation. They outbid the government and in fact all mainstream political parties in claiming the nation – even as in their actions, in their activity at the protest, they acted every bit as the proletariat. Being the proletariat (as a term ambiently inclusive of both production and social reproduction), but not the worker. In other words, not the worker which reduces its identity to being positively defined as the working class and thereby determined by capital as such, which refuses to see that the class relation is an external constraint.

Noida workers who were part of the 13 April 2026 riot or protest would have joined the Delhi uprising, as the proletariat, given that they are now treating their wage relation as an external constraint — something of course they had done even at the time of their own protest. While fighting for the wage, they had treated the class relation itself (or the process of valorisation of capital through necessary labour or labour-power) as an external constraint, refusing to double down on their worker identity. Now there is not even a wage which they are fighting for even though the struggle for the wage is still an important register of struggle. In that sense, the Delhi uprising remains as much in the framework of “debt” as of the “wage”.4

It is in this sense that the proletariat dissolves itself towards becoming the nation. TC very much proposes this dissolution but it is the part about the nation which would be troubling.

Claiming the nation is part of the proletariat laying a claim on everything. Claiming the world, or as Marx said, the proletariat has “a world to win”. The nation, being part of the world, then cannot remain outside the bounds of what the proletariat can claim. Here is a claim on nation in what we can perhaps call a proletarian mode. This proletarian mode would resonate with the “communising measures” TC has in mind which would usher in “the unity of the proletariat”. These “won’t be different from the unification of humanity, i.e. from its creation as the ensemble of relations which individuals establish between themselves in their singularity”. The ‘nation’ can be treated as precisely the place-holder for such an ensemble of relations. And here some readers might recall the kind of community, living-together of communism that Jean-Luc Nancy had in mind, which he tried to capture in the term compearance, co-appearance. Compearance consists of being-in-common, being singular-plural. The title of his essay conveys a lot: The Compearance: From the Existence of "Communism" to the Community of "Existence".5

Surplus labour as the correlate of this proletariat in movement, here acts as the saviour of necessary labour, a false promise, even as surplus and necessary labours together negate themselves.

“Political composition” was every bit more important than the “technical composition”. The “relation of exploitation” is sought to be challenged not however by remaining “within the relation of exploitation”, not even directly challenging this relation as the proletariat here attempts the same breach into the citadel of necessary labour by way of political composition, by way of politics. Thus from this perspective, the operating procedure following from TC’s approach would tantamount to clipping the wings of the proletariat. This is a lesson from the Delhi uprising.

TC writes:

In the course of revolutionary struggle, the abolition of the state, of exchange, of the division of labour, of any kind of property, the extension of free-giving as the unification of human activity – in a word, the abolition of classes – are ‘measures’ that abolish capital, imposed by the very necessities of struggle against the capitalist class. Revolution is communisation.

Communisation accrues from all the “measures” TC points out and more. But, again, it is not clear why the proletariat should subjectively focus on abolishing capital. The process of abolishing capital seems to assume a rather empiricist mode in TC, a kind of revolutionary economism, which the Delhi uprising seems to swerve away from.

The point being that the proletariat acts as a far bigger political player here and it cannot deign to “only” focus on abolishing capital. The focus here is on the political regime of the day and the proletariat has already and fantastically assumed the role of a temporary hegemon, a kind of a vanguard destroying the populist chain of equivalence and as the vanguard of the populist People to which the latter willingly submits. The CJP-Left protest must then submit to the uprising.

The entire oppositional political forces too must now submit. But they will do so not in the name of the proletariat or the lower classes or the underclass. They will do so in the name of “our children”, “students”, “youth” – even though everybody says that the “anti-socials” have “entered” the movement and are turning it in an extreme direction. The leaders of the movement constantly disown the bad elements and claim to speak only on behalf of “our students” and “youth”.

Student and youth now become categories that will keep surplus labour wedded to necessary labour. The promise of upward mobility, that the wage will fortify their material conditions, seeks to keep them secure as a class. It seeks to obfuscate the fact that necessary labour itself is constantly squeezed out by capital and hence wage and jobs are by definition insecure and precarious. Thus TC rightly highlights that the wage relation is actually illegitimate, that it does not make sense from the vantage point of capital, unlike in an earlier Fordist period. It is as though keeping this in mind the proletariat in Delhi sought to negate this assumption of being a class with a secure wage. It is as though the proletarian unity itself is premised on the demise of necessary labour, where, as TC rightly points out, wage is an illegitimate demand.

TC explains that “the wage demand is (as) structurally illegitimate in this period of the capitalist mode of production and not only as counter to the maximum valorisation of capital”. Further:

The explosive connection between the crisis of the wage relation and the illegitimacy of wage demands, which is at the core of the present moment, brings an end to any alternative, whether in the form of activism (the direct action movement) or radical democratism.

It is true that “the very fact of acting as a class appears as an external constraint, a limit to overcome”. So TC is right when he says:

Revolution is communisation; it does not have communism as a project and result, but as its very content. It is the content of the revolution to come that struggles announce – in this cycle of struggles – each time that the very fact of acting as a class appears as an external constraint, a limit to overcome.

“Acting as a class” is here seen as part of an external constraint, an extension of capital, hence there is nothing here for the working class to affirm, to, as it were, double down on its “working class” identity. This is completely fine and in fact this expresses a key aspect of the Delhi movement.

But treating “acting as a class” as an external constraint need not ipso facto occur as part of a narrowly conceived struggle against capital. Pushing for “a limit to overcome” takes place in a broader canvas.

For here, the proletariat acts as though it has already overcome this limit, if not from the very beginning, then soon after. The proletariat acts in confidence and treats a large part of the communisation as fait accompli – one can even say that it is entitled. It acts on a sense of entitlement, given a situation when it has blackmailed the rest of the mainstream upper middle classes into tagging behind it.

That what is normally treated as a “radical fringe” can hijack a mainstream movement is rare and to many might sound like a right-wing tune to sing. But here the hijacking is the sweet spot everyone loves.

What precipitated this unique scenario was partly the fact that now the government has betrayed its own mainstream supporters, which then allows a much more radical force to assume charge. In a way, the mainstream has been coopted by the revolutionary forces. And we know exactly when the movement took this turn. One, on the 19th July, when Sonam Wangchuk was taken away by the police and kept away from even his family members. Second, the buildup after the 20th July police violence.

The problem is not about “direct access to the wage”, as Joshua Clover imagines it.6 It is not about seggregation or how one section of the working population is not given full access to employability and the wage. Clover’s riot prime turns the question of capital and class into one of “racialised bodies”. His analysis must be kept restricted to immigrant labour in the West, who, it is true, will not be able to claim the nation the way the underclass could do in India and Indonesia. Clover seems to be basically addressing the problem of multiculturalism and diversity in the West so in that sense his understanding of Theorie Communiste is not the best.

Negating wage relation

Otherwise in a lot of senses, the Delhi uprising constituted the kind of class unity TC has in mind. Where the different factions of the proletariat must come together in a way which dissolves the positive affirmation of the worker identity that TC is against. The kind of “proletarian unity” that was the Delhi uprising involved a lot of instances of negation, indeed, of self-negation of each of the components and constituents. What stood out was the lack of demands – the demand for the resignation of the Education Minister stayed till the end, but more like a light background without being critical to the unfolding events, where the demand for the Prime Minister Modi’s resignation was voiced. In fact, the movement was so full of a forward surge that no demand seemed enough, acting as a prop for something more, something higher. Raising the stakes was the primary impetus. Thus when the movement is withdrawn after the government gave in, it felt like in its success the movement was cut short. The sky was the limit, an atmosphere of ascension and severance gripped the movement and each participant.

So when TC emphasizes on the break with the wage relation, with “the wage condition and struggle for demands”, it looks immediately familiar. Writes TC:

Class unity can no longer constitute itself on the basis of the wage condition and struggle for demands, as a precondition of its revolutionary activity.

Then he adds:

The unity of the proletariat can no longer be anything other than the activity in which it abolishes itself by abolishing all that divides it. It is a fraction of the proletariat which, going beyond the character of its struggle as a struggle for demands, will take communising measures and will then initiate the unification of the proletariat which won’t be different from the unification of humanity, i.e. from its creation as the ensemble of relations which individuals establish between themselves in their singularity.

“Each abolishing itself by abolishing all that divides it” – we surely can view the protests in these terms as it went forward into an uprising.

In Delhi, you had girls who worked as trainees in lower class beauty parlours, “gym boys”, often also gym trainers from in and around the city’s suburbs, a lot of gig workers, delivery boys, the sons and daughters of maids and laboring class men. Then of course there are nurses, students, industrial training institute students, and a whole swathe of middle class guys. You also had those belonging to the Sikh religious institutions, called nihangs, who are mostly lower class men. Yet one would find many of them dressed as Superman or Batman. Everyone was in ascension mode, levitational mode, displaying supreme confidence and “we have already arrived” attitude.

Here the point about overcoming self-organisation becomes important. TC elucidates his point through an example from Argentina:

In Argentina, people self-organise like Mosconi’s unemployed, like Bruckman’s workers, slum-residents…, but in this sort of self-organisation people are confronted immediately by that which they are, which in struggle becomes that which has to be overcome. That self-organisation is a general limit to be overcome is revealed in conflicts between self-organised sectors.

What is crucial here is: “that which they are, which in struggle becomes that which has to be overcome”. Thus he then points out:

Unification is impossible without being precisely the abolition of self-organisation, without the possibility that the claimant, the Zanon-worker or the squatter can be claimant, Zanon-worker or squatter. Either there is unification, after which there is the abolition even of what is self-organisable, or there is self-organisation, after which unification is a dream which is lost in the conflicts implied by the diversity of situations.

Here the focus is on “the abolition of self-organisation”, “the abolition even of what is self-organisable”. Unification here means “the abolition even of what is self-organisable”. Also one can look at the following document for more on self-organisation and its dissolution.7

Thus in doing so, the Delhi proletariat actively posited the class relation with capital as an external constraint, positioning itself towards the dissolution of the wage relation. Again, TC highlighted:

The action of the proletariat in the current crisis is paving the way for the production of class belonging as an external constraint at its most intimate level—i.e. in the wage relation.

This allows the proletariat to present the valorization of capital through labour-power as a pure coercion, class identity as a pure extension of capital, with little by way of proletarian self-affirmation. Then TC writes:

For the proletariat, to make de­mands and to come up against its own existence as a class as the limit of its action are no longer mutually exclusive.

He then reminds us of the “double disconnection” or the rift:

Now, the rifts in the action of the class (between reproducing itself as a class of this mode of production, and putting itself into question) exist in the course of most conflicts.

Wage or debt

What we find here is that the proletariat immediately put the class relation on notice. Being proletariat would involve dissolving the wage relation itself. Unlike in 1974-75 in India, this time the movement against the government does not involve putting the focus on wage increases through working class self-organisation and autonomy. Such a thing happened during the great railways strike of May 1974 which led to the massive repression unleashed by Indira Gandhi as a rehearsal of the impending Emergency (1975-77).

This coheres with TC’s proposition that the wage demand is illegitimate for capital today. Not wage, but debt is more important. That is why here is a mobilization of self-negation across the different zones.

Thus the only response can be dissolution of the wage relation itself. During 1974, the wage demand was not illegitimate, something which was clear from the way in which the reproduction of labour-power itself was provisioned by capital and the state (railway colonies for housing, hospitals, schools, etc.). The wage relation was instrumental in the overall logic of the system at the time.

Self-organisation

So the Delhi riots can be read as oriented towards reversing what TC calls, “Self-organisation everywhere, revolution nowhere”.^[3]

The Delhi uprising, the gathering made clear that the proletariat as a class exist only vis-à-vis capital – that is, the class identity cannot be over-emphasised. Writes TC:

What we are as a class is immediately nothing other than our relation to capital. This “recognition” will in fact be a practical knowledge, in the conflict, not of the class for itself, but of capital.^[4]

He furthers reveals the problem with affirming class identity:

To recognise itself as a class won’t be a “return to itself” but a total extroversion through its self-recognition as a category of the capitalist mode of production.

There is no “return to itself”. What takes place is a process of “total extroversion through its self-recognition as a category of the capitalist mode of production”.

In an essay on Theorie Communiste, Ray Brassier writes:

Communization decouples negation from affirmation (in which regard it is profoundly anti-Nietzschean). It overthrows negation’s subordination to the positive.8

Our finding from the Delhi Uprising is that proletarian self-affirmation can go hand in hand without at all contravening TC’s emphasis on negation of class identity. Abnegation of class autonomy or self-organisation, treating class relation as an external constraint – these, as we saw, can be consistent with a particular kind of proletarian self-affirmation. TC’s anti-Nietzschean focus on negation then does not seem to necessarily rule out a particular kind of proletarian unity, even if it oriented towards negating the wage relation. A particular kind of affirmation is possible, one which we need not necessarily call “self-affirmation” but a nonself-affirmation.

Terms like riot, strike, riot prime, or even uprising does not however fully convey the sense of what was going on. For let us not forget that the movement (including both the protest and the uprising, if they can be separated like that) was withdrawn when it was rapidly gaining height. The crescendo was awaited by one and all and that evening was supposed to have seen the biggest turnout so far. The uprising was headed towards something bigger, maybe an insurrection. The ascension was too sharp and steady to contain or even fathom.

Thus the proletariat abnegating its class identity, going beyond the separation between the domains of production and social reproduction, necessary labour and surplus labour, treating the class relation as an external constraint of capital — all these are analytically important moments that go onto constitute the edifice of the uprising and possibly an insurrection, but these must be placed in the midst of the wider and general crisis of the system, of capitalism and the state and of political parties and media narratives, that was unmistakeable.

And here I would just recall a story which I think many of us are familiar with or which exists in different cultures in different forms.

This is the story of The Shoemaker and the Elves. It is a very simple story, in fact, more like a tale or an easy fable.

The elves, in our case, are none but those who came in later and turned the protests into pure gold.

And the shoemaker and his wife are none but those in the original protest site who underwent so much suffering and proved their mettle. They displayed a lot of resolve and determination which touched a chord among the people.

Thus the elves had to visit them. And what a visit it was!

Let us recount the story here.

The shoemaker and his wife were having a hard time. It so happens that one day in the morning when the shoemaker comes to open his workplace, he finds that somebody had already cut the leather and made a beautiful pair of shoes. He sells them and earns some money. This continues for some time until the shoemaker and his wife get a life of some comfort.

And then:

One evening shortly before Christmas, just before going to bed, and having already cut out a number of shoes, the shoemaker said to his wife, “Why don’t we stay up tonight and see who is giving us this helping hand.”

His wife agreed to this and lit a candle. Then they hid themselves behind some clothes that were hanging in a corner of the room. At midnight two cute little naked men appeared. Sitting down at the workbench, they picked up the cut-out pieces and worked so unbelievably quickly and nimbly that the amazed shoemaker could not take his eyes from them. They did not stop until they had finished everything. They placed the completed shoes on the workbench, then quickly ran away.

So we can see. The elves are poor, extremely creative and generous. Their work soon makes the shoemaker and his wife very prosperous and happy.

When you risk it all and are not afraid of death, then a divine intervention saves you and changes everything. The elves stand for that. Nothing will ever be the same again. Those who missed being there savouring the moment will listen to the stories with wonderment, for a long time to come.

The elves will however go away very soon. A pathos seems inevitable, as all good things must come to an end. In any case, they are “not needed” anymore. Now the CJP and the other political formations will go to town and the market with a new found political capital.

Next time, the elves will not show up for them, as they did for the shoemaker and his wife.

As you move away from the main dais and the venue at Jantar Mantar, the nature of the protest changes. Closer to the barricades, the protestors are undergoing a severance and ascension.

Things have gone theological.

Indeed, the most crucial detachment of protesters have reached and are inhabiting fifth, sixth or perhaps ninth state of consciousness. Some insane ascension is at work. At the top they have dissolved all barriers and categories. Hindu-Muslim unity is now achieved without saying anything about communal harmony or preaching love and brotherhood. Here is “Hindu-Muslim unity” which seeks to dissolve each of the three terms, opening us towards an unknown.

One has not heard of the power of FOMO at such a peak: viral reels of friends from across the border saying that they cannot stop watching the protest reels and how they wish they could attend too.

How is that possible? What explains this power of the protests?

Recall the story in Sikh scriptures where Guru Nanak meets past gurus like Kabir and perhaps even Prophet Mohammad. What we might call time travel takes place through ascension (called merging of light with light, in the scriptures).

Protests are supposed to be about citizens demanding rights from the government, but here the protest is about expression. Not creative expression of, say, an artist. For the artist is also performing, “being creative”, putting his thoughts. It is a traversal through his mind.

But here, in the protests, it is about collectively expressing “who we are”.

Here the protesters are saying: We are everything, You are nothing.

In fact, it goes to the extent of actually challenging the very power of the government, treating the government as illegitimate. Government as illegitimate power. It did not start that way though.

First, there was a “normal” protest. We are speaking to you. You whom we trusted have betrayed us. You are a vested interest. We are talking to you. You must listen to us because we have put you there. You have violated the laws. You have violated the Constitution. You have violated the trust that we have reposed in you.

Such a protest is still going on inside, in the main venue and the dais where big leaders come and address.

Things changed after the 20th July.

From such a protest mostly led by the education pedigreed sections, now we have mostly the feral underclass not really addressing the powers that be, not really addressing the government, but declaring, we are here. “We are here”. And this is who we are. You are nothing. We are everything. This is the declaration without a demand which can be fulfilled and brought to a closure.

What stands out is the sheer non-reference to anything transactional or of the nature of even a demand for justice. No legal or constitutional or concrete economic demands are put out that can be fulfilled and see a closure.

The “demand”, if you can still use this already archaic protest language, shifts from the resignation of the education minister, to the resignation of Modi himself. And the highest representatives of the government are being pulled down. You, the government, came to power through legitimate elections, yes. But now we exercise a kind of “right to recall”.

What we find here is the penchant for the most maximalist demand, which, in being unamenable to any closure, points towards an unknown which can instil concern, fear, perturbation, but also jubilation and an adventurist streak. That “empty space” of the unknown is presently occupied by profuse and rambunctious articulations, memes or just plain gesticulations, dancing and “having fun”. Protest as having fun (“bakchodi”).

Thus the expression of “this is who we are”, “We are everything” has entered into a self-feeding, self-referential loop of extreme virality and levitation.

The protestors are not expressing fear of police brutality. They seem to have gone beyond the dimension of bodily precarity. They seem to be dissolving fear by almost inviting harm.

Police excess is already anticipated and miraculously neutralised. Real police violence itself has been treated as nothing more than a meme. Real violence served by the state itself is now relegated to nothing but images that the algorithms can be fed with.

A policeman runs to attack protestors. That scene on video becomes something which you will recall only as a subway surfer beat. Now police brutality cannot be seen except as a social media post. You cannot now unsee or un-hear subway surfer in a police action.

We all know of the protestor facing police batons, yelling “come beat me, come beat me”. A scholar commented that he wants to understand it as an example of a Gandhian Satyagrahi practising non-violence and suffering. Well why not. But then there is no role of truth here, unless the world of memes is where truth lies today. The protestor who declares that his is a “protest as bakchodi” will feel violated if he is pushed towards solemn ideas of truth. At most, we can say that this is satyagraha (grasping truth through inner churning, suffering) in an age of the post-truth alternative universe. How is that possible?

State power is intentionally “misread” as nothing and powerless. State surveillance itself is treated as powerless.

Autonomous of every real concern, beyond the fear of harm coming their way, we are forced to put the word real in inverted commas. “Real”. Hence what we find is the protest as a site of an ascension, urdagati, al-miraj.

Surely this is not Amartya Sen’s argumentative Indian, who is still to be found inside the main venue and dais. In a lot of senses, this is beyond reason, beyond dialogue. It is not a speaking self. It is a self in collective ascension. One need not however pathologise by calling it a delirious self.

In a way, they have aestheticized and algorithmicised the state and its power. Reduced it to images and material just for memes.

Modi himself has been taken and repurposed and regurgitated. As, for example, a woman looking for a 56-inch bra. His 56-inch chest bravado is just a meme trope.

This entire repurposing of everything into a crescendo of music and dance are kind of an upward levitational virality.

Here is something spotless, beyond blemish. So, unaware of the impending ultimate fall, which might, going forward, take place, and that unawareness itself is its power.

The real is turned into a viral image feeding the release of a collective mind ascending a crescendo of sorts at Jantar Mantar.

I earlier said that the larva is slowly evolving and something is born. The night of July 20 never ended.

By the night of July 22, the separation and distillation is unmistakable and clear to anyone. Two worlds are forming, albeit undeniably connected and integral so far. The familiar protest at the old venue. The protest we are familiar with. And now the “protest as bakchodi”. This is not “protest” they say half smiling, this is “bakchodi”. Modi has taken panga with the wrong guys, they openly declare. The literati can call it “protest as mischief” but all the while seeking to intensify the fight and go on till one does not know where.

One is reminded here of the Hong Kong protestors who used to say, “be like water”. And that is exactly the case here.

The one is inside, the other (“be like water”) is outside, directly facing the police and the barricades. The one is the official protest with a pedigree and manifesto. The latter is open ended and evolving, fast and furious. Inside they sing Faiz or recite Dinkar. Outside they play tracks from video games like Subway Surfer. You are free to look for the good old IPTA songs still heard within the lefty student huddles.

Outside you will notice a bit too many gym boys as they now want to test themselves in a fight with the police. Outside they are turning fighting the police attacks into an interesting challenge, while inside they are planning to file a petition against police violence in the courts.

Outside the choicest swear and cuss words are deployed against the government, while inside the pedigreed ones continue in polite satire.

Outside it is not easy to find a slogan which is not politically incorrect. But this is politically incorrect without knowing what is the correct one is. Hence we cannot actually call it that. And this is where the categories of the literati fall short.

And yet the delivery is virtuoso, lucid and flowy. You know these guys are having fun. Food is now distributed under the banner of Modi’s terawi (13th day funeral feast). Eating the food is no longer the same and adds to the protest.

Another group of boisterous boys are having fun. They are putting up a show. Tear gas balls are turned into nothing fearful as they are now items for batting in cricket. They draw huge applause from the equally boisterous circle around them.

All this while the crowd is also pushing on the barricades, leading to a night time lathis charge and tear gas shelling.

I am told that in Mumbai protestors have repurposed the Norway football team’s rowing chant into a Resign, Resign refrain. On social media it is captioned, Viking row but make it revolutionary. Again, goes viral.

To get to the pedigreed protest site, police now have to walk through these virtuoso protesters who are egging to fight the police on Subway Surfer beats.

Bang on Parliament Street, protesters sit just looking eye to eye at the police who are in full armour, helmets and batons. In a comic relief, one protester stands up and waves the hand fan towards the police suggesting a kind gesture of sending them cool air in the heat. The crowd cheers and applauds.

Jai Bhim is the most preferred slogan mostly deployed as a battle cry. But there is no Jai Samvidhan. Bharat Mata ki Jai is another favourite. Only in low energy moments do you hear Inquilab Zindabad. There is also a real life Mahatma Gandhi roaming around, chatting with the guys.

For those of you, the literati, looking for a pedigreed catchphrase, call these folks Frantz Fanon’s lumpen proletariat if you like. You will also want to pigeonhole and contain them by saying that these are ones who voted Modi to power. I would prefer to call them simply virtuoso, being like water and so deft at giving a slip to the police, in contrast to the virtuous pedigreed ones.

The most revealing is: who is managing the inside venue and the teeming masses of people around the main dais. These are again these “anonymous” virtuosos. Pedigrees are, as usual, chattering away from the pulpit while the worker bees are doing an amazing job. The Municipal authorities have stopped collecting garbage — adding to the resentment against the government. As packaged food and bottled water continuously lands up through Zomato and Swiggy the empty and dirty plastic and cardboard boxes are piling up.

In continuity with this virtuoso milieu, now we have coaching institute teachers giving a physics self-help class on how to handle tear gas shells. This is, if you like, the connection now with the original NEET paper leak and the demand for Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation. Turning coaching institutes into incubators of the art of virtuoso protest: there is so much going on in this normally unthinkable convergence.

The question is: can the virtuouso protestors develop a leadership of their own or will the pedigreed protesters finally end up disappointing the former? The forms and modes of virtuoso protest have so much in common with what we saw in the Noida worker riots and the ones in oil refineries of Panipat and Singrauli, particularly the very niche use of social media.

Recall: the dais at the anti-CAA protests at Shaheen Bagh combined the pedigreed and the virtuoso, with the former dominating. And yet the working class elements from the Jamia police attacks are recounting that experience at the Parliament Street. Not the civil society or activist narrative about Shaheen Bagh, but they are recalling their own bodily involvement in those encounters and making the right connections.

The virtuoso feral underclasses clearly do not prefer forms, symbols and figures borrowed from literature and the arts. They draw on and play with images and music. Their preferred mode is the meme, mimic and copy, but add your own to it. Modi’s terawi is I guess very exemplary, and so is what they the many iterations they have done with the Modi-Meloni meet.

This is the modern tale.

Benjamin used to talk about the role the fable played in the older society and artisanal life. The tale and story in the time of the artisans would be embedded in the people from the region and the objects and things around. You had to have local life and knowledge to really enjoy the tale.

Today, the meme and slam is the equivalent of the old fable. Turn the same thing around, repurpose it. You work not on your imagination and utopian thoughts but what is immediately around you and where the narration makes sense only with reference to specific humans, places, things and events.

I am reminded of Mizoguchi wanting to burn the Temple of the Golden Pavilion. All his life he had grown up hearing of the beauty and splendour of the temple. Then when his father is quite old and he thinks there is not much time, he takes his son Mizoguchi to meet the head of the Temple. Then when the head dies, Mizoguchi joins the order of the temple.

Mizoguchi starts thinking that for beauty to be really appreciated it should not be embodied or let’s say institutionalised. He thinks aloud and brings up an analogy:

“the custom of the world to remove one’s old household utensils each year before the advent of Spring and to throw them into the alley; and this is known as the house-sweeping. In the same way, every hundred years men must undergo the disasters of the Tsukumogami.”

With these thoughts, Mizoguchi then zeros down on his desire to burn down the Golden Temple, so dear to him. He says,

Thus my deed would open the eyes of men to the disasters of the Tsukumogami and save them from those disasters. By my deed I should thrust the world in which the Golden Temple existed into a world where it did not exist. The meaning of the world would surely change.

The more I thought about it, the more cheerful I became, The end and downfall of the world—of that world which now surrounded me and lay before my eyes-were not far off. The rays of the setting sun lay across the land. The Golden Temple was shining in their light, and the world that contained the Golden Temple was assuredly slipping away moment by moment, like sand trickling between one’s fingers.

Then he imagines the effect of burning the Temple. How country officials, the station master, the policeman would then respond.

When the Golden Temple has been burned down—yes, when the Golden Temple has been burned, the world of these fellows will be transformed, the golden rule of their lives will be turned upside down, their train timetables will be thrown into utter confusion, their laws will be without effect.

20th July gives birth to many Mizoguchis. From aspirations about good governance and efficient functioning of the exam system without leaks, the protests went on the Mizoguchi way. As I had noted yesterday: “The middle class ideology of “students” and “youth” who want to simply acquire “education” for a secure “future” seemed to no longer explain the direction the protests took as the day progressed”.

But none could get there without a shocker, a traumatic encounter. Not a coming of age but its precise opposite which can only happen through a break, a rupture.

So let us stop being polite. The 20th July protest was a rude shock for many. A much needed traumatic encounter in a world which has vilified trauma. One where the participants “willingly” take the step towards an unsafe space, towards danger, away from the shibboleths of aspirational mobility.

Consider this viral reel. In anguish and a sense of betrayal, a protestor-participant said that after seeing what went on, she no longer wants to be a civil services officer. She does not want to become an IPS officer. Are we supposed to sympathise with her and denounce police excess? Should we be in haste to make sure that our “young” should not ever go through such an experience and take a resolve and decision like that?

We are reminded of the character Veer in Premchand’s Nasha. Veer gets a shocker and is rudely jolted out of his affliction and attachments (nasha). Undoing the Tsukumogami, undoing the nasha, is precisely what 20th July stands for. The proverbial small town lower class and lower caste boy need not necessarily want to seek upward mobility through the system. Otherwise there would not have been the booing of Chandrasekhar Azad at Parliament Street that day by members of the crowd pushing into the barricades.

But there are those who warmly embraced the traumatic encounter and happily got rid of the Tsukumogami or nasha in a flash. Many, and surely not all, in the protests acquired the soft changeability of a larva or caterpillar. I am not sure though if there are some caterpillars that change shape and form in the course of a day and emerge as a full grown beautiful butterfly, having burnt their temples and universities along the way.

Surely many humans called students and youth on 20 July evolved and transformed into a mode of clarity and undoing of their nasha.

But this country is steeped into the middle class aspirational nasha. No wonder coming of age stories and movies do really well in India. The 20th July protests was officially about reinforcing the attachments of this aspirational middle class but slowly by and by the protests veered into another territory, another zone. This is what I tried to show in my earlier intervention.

Against the intentions of its leaders, 20 July then ended up being not really about coming-of-age but reversing it. As though the “students” and “youth” were promised an “inspirational” coming of age movie and instead made to suffer an apocalyptic movie like Fight Club or the Joker. Promised Three Idiots with the scenic spots of lakes in Ladakh (uber aspirational), but instead made to go through a gritty grimy Govind Nihalani’s Aghaat or even Dewaar and of course Premchand’s Nasha.

20 July showed the way, albeit narrow and tortured, to a zero point insisting on throwing off all the inspirational shackles one has acquired and have been carrying them heavily. An immanent work of undoing interpellation and identification is under way. And finally being able to touch base, figure out the “belief before belief” which sustains the order of law, market and capital. The CJP officially is about the Law. Making the Law transparent, accountable, fair. But the protests point towards providing us a peek view of the mythic violence which founds the Law and the constitutional order. From exchange, equivalence and value to the destruction of value. Time and value must be isolated. There is a line here which connects Marx, Derrida and Baudrillard.

From wanting to be a law officer to completely rejecting that. From good governance to radical change. From transactional relationship of acquiring education by selling one’s “future” to challenging the entire system. Such are the pathways that can be deciphered.

Invariably, the vultures are out to leech on the power and energy of the 20th July protests. Somehow the new possibilities must be blocked and value accretion must take place. The first right to leech belongs to the political parties in the opposition. They have suddenly gotten to the task of restoring faith in the rule of law and exchange, of transaction, of selling the present for a “future”. They want to now reverse the reversal effected by the 20th July. They want to restore faith in the aspirational market ideology. They want to bring back “order”.

Mizoguchi was a stutterer. When he was young, he always felt humiliated. His time never came. But when he could, when he rose up and joined the order of the temple, what does he do? We know what he did.

The girl who refused to now join the civil services: where will she be next? Where is she headed? Surely many will try to make sure the confidence in the system is “restored”, so that people like her would not “give up”. The opposition leaders are there for that. They want a better NTA, a better exam without leaks, they will ensure that unlike the ruling party and the government, if they come to power, they will ensure “good governance”, “transparency” and “justice”. What a nasha!

And yet what happened in Delhi on 20 July will always contain a line like that.

Or even better: sporadic fighting continued, and so did the internet shutdown.

Indeed what Delhi saw yesterday was something unique. In the course of the day, the protest changed shape and acquired new forms. An amoeba-like formation with many heads, as streams of protestors swirled around in different directions even as they all somehow converged. One protestor talked about surfing in the crowd.

Not what it started with, but what it ended with, becomes crucial. The protest had a scheduled start time: 9 am. The ending was split into myriad fronts and threads. Right into the night, throngs of protestors were supposed to be still huddled in the backlanes and corners in a wide radius.

Nothing could have prepared the protestors for what was to unfold. The mass at every step and every passing hour revealed something new. Even jaded old Opposition MPs in Parliament later used the term “organic mass”.

The leaderless protest scenario here turned to be the best thing to have happened. For the gathering soon achieved its own inner momentum, energy and an unpredictable direction.

After these protests, GenZ will most likely not just focus on its education and “future” that are often just code words for “career”. They would instead go and watch the Battle of Algiers and change the meaning of binge-watching on Netflix What am I talking about? For those who do not already know, Lutyens Delhi saw pitched battles between police and protesters that recall scenes from that movie.

We are fed rehashed stories from the classics as Christopher Nolan is doing with Homer’s Odyssey. It is time to elevate yesterday’s brush with danger, reality and police to our wider thought-process, imagination and yes even the educated youth’s binge watching culture, consuming cultural artefacts in a daze. Swirling around here was the spectres of the pitched battles that the working classes fought recently in Noida.

Many thought that here was a crowd abandoned by the leaders. The dais had no galaxy of speakers keeping the throbbing crowd together. Chandrasekhar Azad appeared around 12 or so at the Parliament Street. He was constantly challenged by the crowd which wanted to break the barricades. Leaders, venerable MPs and Opposition leaders would pale in front of the swirling power of the crowd. So it had to happen that either leaders had to take an exit, like what Azad eventually did, or they had to join the swirl as Samajwadi leader Dimple Yadav so wisely did.

What was unfolding was much bigger than the CJP leaders or any of the other leaders like Chandrasekhar Azad who was on the spot. So much so that leaders and the police started coordinating efforts to manage and control. At the Parliament Street gathering around 1 pm, the crowd broke into a spontaneous, jab jab Modi darta hai, police ko aage karta hai(“whenever Modi is scared, he uses the police”). This slogan was now directed at Azad who was hosting the police officers on the makeshift dais to address the gathering. Azad realised his faux pas and quickly backtracked.

Someone at the spot told me that Azad played the role of a “safety-valve”. Without him playing manager and leveraging his popularity and trust, the crowd would have surely moved into the barricades one more time and pushed towards the Parliament. Earlier, during the time of the first lathi charge, a barricade or two had already fallen. Social media footage of this episode are widely circulating now, with most comments one-sidedly praising Azad. The footage one should look for however is the one where members of the crowd tried to boo Azad with the slogan above.

When things seemed to have quietened a bit at the original venue and at the Parliament Street, and even as one gathering formed in front of Kerala House, somewhere another scene was forming. This was slightly later, some say after the original protest venue with its camps and dais were brutally broken and smashed by the police and one girl came under the police boots on her chest.

A raw cat and mouse chase, a street battle broke out in Connaught Place, Janpath, till as far as Paharganj long after the protest officially ended and most people and the media thought they were done for the day. Lutyens Delhi was designed by British town planners to prevent such pitched battles, to prevent any break of law and order and peace. And yet that proved ineffective.

It also turned out that not everyone who sustained injuries went home or to the hospital. Right at the Panchuian Road T-point in Connaught Place, a man of some 35 years age put on display his back to the crowd showing the marks of police brutality on his body. Poorer youth and locals who had nothing to do with the protest also joined in. The main artery was blocked for almost two hours, creating huge traffic jams. For a good length of time, police were nowhere to be seen. People stuck in the traffic did not fight with the protestors to get the traffic going. They waited patiently, there again sending a silent message to the powers that be.

The police had by now already used lathis and tear gas at the Janpath and Sansad Marg T-points. By the time it spread to the Panchkuian T-point, they had run out of tear gas shells. Then when the police finally arrived, they went after whoever looked poor. Well dressed onlookers were spared. A group of men were chased right into the huge H&M store in Connaught Place. Comments were heard that these are not the educated youth, that these are not legitimate protesters. Indeed, they looked like local working class youth from the Paharganj bylanes. Here the fissure had taken a general form of class and caste divides. The Real was cracking out into the open.

The demand for Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation suddenly seemed to have hidden so many other fissures that are more enduring and constitutive of society. The “grievances” about NEET paper leak, NTA and the exam system now suddenly felt connected to more sedimented fissures. Class 12 students Sarthak Sidhant, Vedant Shrivastava, and Nisarga might find that the corruption they exposed in the CBSE is only the tip of the iceberg.

The police apparatus was in tatters. Delhi police never looked so downcast. The police administration was completely unnnerved, overwhelmed not as much by numbers or force but lack of a principle or insight into the behaviour and logic of the crowd. This explains why the police could not stop the regrouping at the original protest site, where the dharna has resumed itself. By late night on the 20th the dharna was back in full swing, and continues.

Yesterday was a master class on the logistics of undoing the control of the state apparatus, beginning with the most elementary space of appearance of a political gathering in a road or a street. Lutyens Delhi suddenly lost its in-built defences against a law and order breakdown embedded in its colonial DNA, architecture and planning. The wide and long streets and boulevards specifically designed to prevent the escalation of any break in law and order somehow served the battling protestors.

Someone rightly said, if you control the streets you control the system. Frederick Engels once wrote about the interrelationship between urban city planning and the power of the bourgeoisie and the state.

Or think of Aime Cesaire who regarded the Holocaust under Nazism as inseparable from the model of black slavery in the colonial plantation and city planning. Or recount Frantz Fanon’s comments on the city in Algeria divided between the colonial quarters and where the natives live.

Pitched battles by radical forces in the heart of the metropolis reminds us of the Bombay Textile Mill strike of 1983. Places like Parel and Dadar dotted with both textile mills as also at a slight distance the sprawling residences of the owner class and big industrialists, witnessed major urban class warfare. One can also recall Black Lives Matter protests in the big cities in the United States. I am reminded of the London Riots of 2011 with pitched battles between police and black youth. Mind you, very recently in April the capital saw worker riots in Noida.

Many have asked where are the workers and gig workers, the most oppressed, in yesterday’s protests. This question goes to the heart of the matter. And yet, as these protests morphed and changed shape throughout the day, those like the workers and the oppressed came to the fore in different ways. The middle class ideology of “students” and “youth” who want to simply acquire “education” for a secure “future” seemed to no longer explain the direction the protests took as the day progressed.

Spilling into Janpath and Connaught Place, we saw precisely that happening. The leaderless amoeba-like mass was in fact not leaderless, if you look at it from inside. This “resolves” the anarchist vs. vanguardist tension by leaving the possibilities in either direction open — not just formally open but in terms of the movement of subterranean forces.

The modern posh city loves over-exposing itself, with glittering shop facades of transparent glass, as though it is your own extension. Yesterday as the protests evolved and spread, the shutters went down, the high-street’s eagerness to over-expose and seduce suddenly vanished. Rusty iron shutters came down. The crowd was no longer binging on the fetish of commodities. The normalcy of a real battle was restored.

Till just a week back we were living in a different mindspace. That was a mindspace which made possible the following call from the dais of the Cockroach Janta Party. Sonam Wangchuk invited students and educational institutions to treat July 20 as a day of experiential political science under the National Education Policy (NEP). He asked schools, colleges, and universities to view the democratic march to Parliament as a live classroom for learning how democracy works.

Let us hope such thinking can be put in its rightful place and not allowed to resurface.

What is also familiar is these activists and lawyers then read out the law to the state, to the state authorities, to the police, the government, to the ruling party, to the home minister, saying that “look, you’re violating the Constitution which you are bound to uphold”. Or that, “you are violating your own laws”. The Constitution, for example, allows us this kind of right to dissent and in fact protects our freedom of speech and expression.

They will also read out Supreme Court rulings which hold that even professing radical beliefs falls within permissible right to dissent.

When the name of Father Stan Swamy comes here, it is most often with regard to how he was not even allowed a sipper or a straw for drinking water.

Again we are told that the prison manuals allow it, the laws of the country allow it, and yet Father Stan Swamy is deprived of his basic rights and liberties.

When, however, I looked at Father Stan Swamy’s poems from prison, a very different picture emerged. These are poems written just as he was taken to Taloja jail, that is, around October-December 2020.

We get a sense of the feelings, sentiments and imagination that Father Stan Swamy is immersed in at the time.

He is not at all invested in the efforts of activists and lawyers at exposing the repressive character of the state and the government. He seems to be at a good distance from the advice of the lawyers who are all too eager to move the court for defending his many rights and liberties.

Father Stan Swamy does not present himself as the aggrieved individual. He might have grievances against the state but that is not what moves him. He is not measuring his life in terms of the calculus of constitutional rights and liberties denied or affirmed. He is way beyond being a subject and citizen of the law and constitution. He in fact, places himself outside the purview of this standard activist framework.

He clearly finds it as a very limiting and constricted frame. He places himself somewhere else, in a wider field of possibilities. He is able to, as the saying goes, see a world in a grain of sand.

He cannot be appealing to the law, which is itself a given thing, one which functions within a given jurisdiction.

Father Stan Swamy enters prison in Taloja jail and becomes part of the life there. He directly relates to the life lived in prison: the communality, the collective life, interpersonal relations there. He is immediately present to the life in the prison. He is far in excess of both the injury the state wanted to inflict on him and the succour defence lawyers promise him.

He has escaped the law (both as given by the state and interpreted by his defence lawyers), just as the Pathalgadi Movement escapes the law and its jurisdiction over the land and forest of the adivasis.

The exceptional violence of the state in fact allows Father Stan Swamy to access the exceptional state at the other end – one where a new form of life beyond the law and constitution is being pre-figured and in fact already lived, already founded. Here he finds himself close to what Walter Benjamin calls the proletariat’s search for a real state of exception in opposition to the state of exception of the existing state.

Prison life is both the most concentrated form of the law and state power in its most bare exception, with no room for appeal. But that is also where one can peek into the other side, the world beyond this one, the world one is seeking. We have a zone of indistinction here which Swamy inhabits and speaks from.

In his poem, Prison life, a great leveller, Father Stan Swamy is clearly having a sense of entering that other world. He so easily escapes the trappings of the state’s exceptional violence. At the same time, he is in fact unreachable, inaccessible to his lawyers who want to protect him from that exceptional violence. Thus, he opens the poem by invoking the image of a gate that he is passing through.

Here is his poem.

Inside the daunting prison gates

All belongings taken away

But for the bare essentials

“You” comes first

“I” comes after

“We” is the air one breathes

Nothing is mine

Nothing is yours

Everything is ours

No leftover food thrown away

All shared with the birds of the air

They fly in, have their fill and happily fly out

Sorry to see so many young faces

Asked them: “Why are you here?”

They told it all, not mincing words

From each as per capacity

To each as per need

Is what socialism all about

Lo, this commonality is wrought by compulsion

If only all humans would embrace it freely and willingly

All would truly become children of Mother Earth.

What is remarkable is that he breaks with one of the most common forms of expression found in poems written in prison. He completely reverses the standard reference to the image of the birds in the sky.

Many poets refer to the sky and birds to express the yearning for freedom. Father Stan Swamy is not imagining such freedom which could be rather individualistic and self-centred. Rather he sees the bird join in the communal life within the prison. Not out of the prison, but “birds of the air fly in”, fly into the prison. There is hardly a trace of affect or affectation here as he is very self-effacing, without any pretentious remainder, without a hint of self-righteousness.

He brings our focus on such “trivia” as leftover food. “No leftover food thrown away” – for a sentence like this to find its way into a poem is absolutely remarkable.

Now all of this “trivia” go onto making socialism.

The socialism is not just in “from each as per capacity; to each as per need”. That would be like an official definition of socialism, some kind of an egalitarian distribution policy with no life in it. Father Stan Swamy finds socialism in “they told it all, not mincing words”. This is remarkable.

Father Stan Swamy emerges as a figure rather rare in politics today. He completely overturns the legal fetishism of the “save democracy”, “save constitution” drives of opposition politics which seems to have specialised in the art of moving round and round in circles and feeling great about it.

Father Stan Swamy has in fact hit on the Achilles heel of the state, no matter how authoritarian. He has shown that if the exception to the normal functioning of the law is integral to precisely this “normal functioning” – say with regard to the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), then this exception in fact can paradoxically become the harbinger of a politics which will dissolve and challenge both the normal functioning as well as this exceptional violence of the legal state. This challenge has to be in terms of a new form of life which will germinate precisely where this exceptional violence attains to its outer limits. The poem, “Prison life, the great leveller”, takes us into those outer limits.

Prison life is where the UAPA dumps its “victims”. Father Stan Swamy however completely turns around this situation beyond the law, beyond constitutional rights and liberties. He points to a space beyond set jurisdictions.

The space in the outer limits of the UAPA defines the new politics full of possibilities. However, the progressive movement of the country is fixated in working within the normal workings of the law and constitution. Opposition to the UAPA has become an alibi for wallowing in the worst kind of self-aggrandizing politics. The more you dig into the constitution, the more you make appeals to the constitutional courts, the more you strengthen democracy – this is what they believe in. It is as though they never read Kafka’s parable of the countryman seeking entry through the gate of law — or, worse, they read it as a to-do manual.

Father Stan Swamy forces us to revise our deeply held shibboleths. Five years since his death in custody we must listen to his message. We must see what he has tried to show us, beyond the law. He has gestured towards what Walter Benjamin would call the narrow gate through which the messiah could enter any time. It will necessarily be a weak voice, as the power consists in its “weakness”.

“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” This is an oft repeated quote popularly attributed to the Zen masters. We are told that this was the ninth-century Chinese Buddhist monk Linji Yixuan’s advice to his disciples.

Carrying an element of kitsch, it is sometimes proposed as the essence of the Zen and Buddhist teaching, or wisdom. A strong dash of irony and satire is unmistakeable.

But what if, without a shred of irony and purely through a kind of an “objective” working of market forces as the spontaneous bureaucracy or totalitarianism of our times, such buddhas are getting killed all the time. Some of it might be because of enlightened but wrong-headed radicals who somehow have a prior baggage against saints and prophets.

A saint appears but is not noticed. Or, not even noticed, maybe killed.

Just today I was talking to someone about the Catholic Church possibly initiating the process of canonization and beatification of Father Stan Swamy. I find an essay by Kancha Ilaiah where he says that Father Stan is a saint for the adivasis, shudras and Dalits.

Gaddar might be held high by radicals as a revolutionary, a Dalit singer and what not. But he might be more than that. In his life, perhaps we have all the elements that might produce a saint in our post modern times, or in the “time that remains”. In keeping with the apocalyptic times, the time of the Anthropocene, I am reminded of an expression used by Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World.

1

Life is meant for just living and does not reveal itself fully as long as it lasts. It is in death that the life lived is really known for what it is.

That is so true of Gaddar. He was already a legend, but now his death has shown him to be far greater than what anybody could have anticipated.

A legend excels in one or two fields and achieves great, almost unparalleled artistry or expertise. Gaddar goes beyond this. Already in 1990 the mainstream media had extolled him as “the war-ship of the people”, praja-yuddha nauka, Gaddar sublimated into the movement of the masses.

2.

Look at what Kalekuri Prasad had written about Gaddar.

When he (Gaddar), due to heavy repression during the Telugu Desam party regime, was forced to go underground, the people living in the lowest layers of society along with some other lovers of his song pined for him, i.e., his song.

Song! My song, where are you? How did you disappear from our eyes and melt in the crescent moon? For the sweetness of the breast milk that is disseminated by the song, for the affection of mother’s lap that is ingrained in the song, for the anger and anguish of a people’s warrior that is reflected in the song, for the confidence that the song gives.

They pined for the song that helped them cope with anything in times of crisis, the song that stood for lamentation, for provocation, for encouragement. For the sense of security in hard times that his song invokes in the hearts of the masses, the whole world wailed, shed tears, wandered in search of him in every nook and corner of the earth. He is not seen, but his song is heard everywhere, in the forests, in the dalit colonies, in the tribal habitations – everywhere his song reverberated.

Read again. Kalekuri’s choice of metaphors are both precise and extraordinary. He says that Gaddar’s songs are disseminating the sweetness of breast milk, or the affection of mother’s lap.

I wonder if any singer or poet’s work can be regarded as so vital and organic for the well-being of the broads masses of people. It is a lifeline for the suffering masses. It is life-giving. Hearing Gaddar sing about the labouring Dalit woman Lachumamma, his mother, became a transformative experience, a balm for the oppressed. The masses — and in fact broad sections of mainstream society — were deeply touched by these extremely soulful songs and music. Gaddar wove a tapestry of feelings around oppression that seemed to sharpen our vision of life, opening up new realisations. Some were stirred deep within and wanted to join his path of revolutionary activity.

But now, he has gone underground. “He is not seen”. “He has gone underground”. And so: “People pine for him, for his song”.

What on earth is the underground? What is the underground, into which Gaddar has disappeared? Has he with the red flag gone to be part of the people of the mud and the soil, the snake-people, the adivasis and nagvanshis led by Namuci who are at war with the people of the sky led by Indra? We know that Gaddar sings about the adivasistruggle, invoking the stories of Sammakka and Saralamma from the Koya tribe. The underground does look like the continuation of an ancient battle, the Rig Vedic daśarājñá yuddha. Gaddar’s songs might have replaced the “ancestors” with the glorious martyrs from the people’s war, and yet the continuity is unmistakeable.

Indeed, we find that in Gaddar’s universe class struggle, labour and production are inseparable from the soil, the mud, the matti chetulu, hands that turn the soil into food. Caste oppression captured at the level of the labouring hand in the soil precludes representation or mediation for “rights” by an elite. A revolutionary uprising and the people’s war would bypass such mediation.

Not just Gaddar’s songs and performance, but his figure itself is crucial. To see him, and hear him. It is him, Gaddar: “the whole world wailed, shed tears, wandered in search of him in every nook and corner of the earth”. Also, it has much to do with the fact that Gaddar’s songs were not heard on a music device — they were performed direct and live, among the masses in the town and village, in the velivada.

People started identifying with Gaddar — not just his songs. His body sacred with police bullets — one bullet mysteriously lodged inside forever, corporeally blessed.

No wonder, as Kalekuri writes, one cannot go to sleep without listening to Gaddar’s songs. One cannot go to sleep without playing his songs in your mind. One can go to sleep only knowing that you have Gaddar’s song, you have Gaddar by your side, Gaddar with his sacralised body in this world.

3.

Look at another poet addressing the people who are pining for Gaddar. Not just the people, but even the birds (koel) are pining for Gaddar and his song. The poet address the koel bird.

Jamedari koel

You can’t sleep without listening to brother Gaddar’s song?

He is not lost, your eyes can’t rest?

Don’t shed tears, Jamedari koel.

4.

Then I heard an anecdote from a friend. They were travelling in a taxi. In the conversation, Gaddar’s house was mentioned as they were in that neighbourhood. The driver overheard and immediately stopped the car. He left the car and the passengers, went up to Gaddar’s house and just stood in front. Seeing what? Just looking towards the house, as though deriving some secret inspiration — the sweetness of the mother. He wonders and confirms it to himself: “Yes it is the same Gaddar, the one who sings Lachummama and Dalita Pullalmma”. Here is where he lives.

5.

Gaddar alone could talk to the Gods. In a stuti to Lord Shiva, he invokes the injustice through fake encounters — of how our youth are getting killed by the police in fake encounters. He brings Lord Shiva’s attention to the extra-judicial “encounters” in Manala where the red-flagged warriors of the nagvanshis were killed.

We know of his relation to Lord Shiva. It is said that when Gaddar was a child he had seen his father angry for being kept out of the temples by the Brahmins. So the father made his own temple for Lord Shiva. Gaddar carried this lesson all his life.

He visited the Sri Yadadri temple in Bhongir in 2017, to conduct abhishekham on Lord Shiva. When talking to a journalist at the temple he invokes Antonio Gramsci’s teaching. Gaddar is proposing “spiritual democracy”. Only someone like Gaddar could pull off the feat of invoking Lord Shiva’s connection with nagvanshi and asura traditions while emphasising the Gramscian need for proletarian culture or the need to fight bourgeois hegemony. He proposed spiritual democracy in his song marking the celebrations of the 1000th anniversary of Shri Ramanujacharya near Hyderabad in Feb 2022. The highpoint was the inauguration of the statue of Ramanujacharya by Narendra Modi.

6.

As with all saints, Gaddar is a wanderer. He is a shramana. He wandered into the farthest reaches of Telangana. He is said to have performed all over the place. When he was in Mumbai he meets another great revolutionary singer, Vilas Ghogre. Mumbai’s Avahaan Natya Manch and Kabir Kala Manch take inspiration from both Gaddar and Ghogre.

Wherever saints go, a community forms around them.

With Gaddar, the community is formed like the cocoon woven by the silk worm of his soulful songs — it is brought into being in its immediacy. The figure of Gaddar jumping, hopping, dancing, the sudden jerky movements, yelling, a sudden press by one foot, a pause and then slow release — it is as though the revolution, often underground, is openly re-enacted for the masses to collectively affirm and own up as theirs. The community emerges in this cohesion both corporeal and soulful, in action and moving — yet always on the edge as martyrs fall, victory is near at hand, something real is at stake.

The underground is living and thriving — and the promise it carries gets realised through Gaddar. The revolution in turn gets its vital life breath through the body and song of Gaddar. Not always spectacular, for it could be just Gaddar singing a song addressed to a policeman who gets killed. A comradely conversation with the policeman. Here is art as an affirmation of the real movement, often microscopic and granular, of the revolution.

7.

Like a Buddhist arahant, Gaddar’s life does not produce any karmic accumulation. His political journey complicates the distinction between himsa and ahimsa, violence and non-violence. He unpacks a core orthodoxy of Indian political thought. Unlike radical Bhakti saints who could defy the caste order only through devotion to a Higher God, or a nirguni Anhad Naad, Gaddar can do away with all attachment to Self, or to Anhad Naad. He is a saint who redefines sainthood.

Buddhism works within the horizon of nibbana, which means total extinction, blowing out. It would be utterly preposterous to claim that Gaddar attained nibbana. And yet that is the horizon in which it seems we can look at his life. He does seem to come close to being the one who, in most people’s eyes, truly extinguished himself -- and in truly extinguishing himself, he has escaped the causal laws of pratitya samutpada. There are no karmic traces, hence he has, in dying, escaped the cycle of birth and rebirth. He has freed himself. Is that not the Way the Wheel of Dhamma is turned? Is that not what the Buddha did? The turning of the wheel of dhamma, dhammachakkapabbatana, is the revolution as we find in Buddha’s universe.

What Gaddar delivered, what he is, cannot be partitioned or boxed within either Ambedkarisim or Marxism or Buddhism. The contingencies of his life and work created a unique assemblage, such that he was all of those -- and more. Much of Gaddar’s life is about responding to situations as they develop, a way to cope with situations in which he found himself. Particularly given that a “normal life” after a stint in the underground is never easy. His “political positions” must not be seen as positive affirmations or prescriptive. Hence, if he wants to contest in parliamentary elections it is difficult to say whether he now believes in the parliamentary path and prescribes it as the preferred path of social change, or it is a choice he has made for himself, for his life at that moment — or it is a combination of both. An existential response and a political understanding must not be confused, more so in the life of a Dalit activist. We saw something similar with regard to Namdeo Dhasal’s dalliance with the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra.

8.

Kalekuri Prasad had said that he would like to see Gaddar in the line of Buddha, Kabir, Jotiba Phule and Dr. Ambedkar. Wanting to remain within the “rational framework”, Prof. P. Keshava Kumar once proposed that we can think of him as a Mahakavi. Kancha Ilaiah sees him as a great Dalit icon in the footsteps of Ambedkar.

Gaddar clearly looks like someone for whom people will build statues or maybe a shrine, a dargah, where folks from all walks of life will congregate in large numbers. This is a likely possibility. Dalits and others will sing gathas and abhangas there and fan out with the message in all four corners. Like the great poet Amir Khusrau, whose shrine in Delhi is visited by scores of people. Or, Nizamuddin Aulia who is so well known for challenging the hukumat and the taj — he still inspires millions in the Indian subcontinent. Nizamuddin is a warship of people from a long time ago, but as contemporary as ever.

We have a parallel with the atheist Black Panther Party (BPP) and its relation to the great church-going musician John Coltrane. Coltrane became famous with his song “Alabama” on the killing of four black children by the KKK in 1963. A Church came up in the name of Coltrane, with the blessings of the BPP. That was the canonisation which gave us Saint John Coltrane patronised by the BPP.

Nobody will agree with all parts of Gaddar’s life and journey, yet each one will have our own reasons to love him. We already saw a glimpse of that in his funeral which was joined by every likely shade of human, if not every political shade.

As we saw, the mainstream media had already declared him in 1990s as the praja yuddha nauka, the warship of the people. And that too at the height of his association with the Maoist movement.

It is possible that Gaddar is just picked up by a blockbuster movie, which will then turn him into an icon of the entertainment industry. Academics will likely research on his life and write books and hold seminars. There will be an attempt to portray him as an individual hero or icon underplaying the revolutionary movement and the Jan Natya Mandali. Maybe his dalliance with Gods and temples will be used to present him into a global Hindutva icon who really cared for social justice. The power of the entertainment industry cannot be underestimated. None of this can be ruled out.

9.

Like saints do, Gaddar could see more than just “exploitation” and “oppression” among Dalits and the poor. He could experience and see their abjection, misery and suffering — only to instil in them a will to rise up. The “sweetness of the breast milk” is what they need and only Gaddar could provide them that. He touched and stirred the feelings and emotions of the Dalit masses and turned them into a collective consciousness. It is not about spiritual transcendence beyond caste and gender hierarchies, as in the Bhakti movement of radical shudra saints like Tukaram, Chokhamela, Ravidas. It is more like a spiritual transference of the masses into the revolution, and the revolution into the masses, which could happen in and through the body, words, and dreams of Gaddar. The masses inhabit and dwell (vihara) in Gaddar’s dreams in his deepest sleep. For only Gaddar can share them all with the masses.

Here Bhakti is necessarily transformed; even Sufi is transformed. For Gaddar, Bhakti would not be about devotion, but participation, co-habitation into a political collective with a will to struggle against sovereign violence. This is a long-suppressed meaning of Bhakti, one which is in consonance with anattā or anatman, the no-soul doctrine of Buddhism. Bhakti saints including radicals like Tukaram and Chokhamela were stuck in the path of spiritual transcendence, claiming equality for all by gaining a rightful place in the eyes of the Lord. This is how Tukaram claims oneness with Vithoba, God. Says Tukaram:

When salt is dissolved in water, what is it that remains distinct?

I have thus become one in joy with thee [Vithoba, God] and have lost myself in thee.

The Varkari sampradaya or community of equals proposed by Tukaram stands in contrast with what Gaddar’s community, the praja yuddha nauka. For it is only when Bhakti is put on the anvil of Buddhist anatta (no-soul) that we get the kind of collective brought about by Gaddar as praja yuddha nauka. Gaddar stands for a churning of historico-traditional categories. Now the earth people, the asuras and nagvanshis can in their rebellion escape the closeted frameworks of the radical Bhakti saints.

Gaddar’s community would not be just another sampradaya, panth or jati or sect (like varkari, ravidasi) but had a much more universal reach in the context of global capitalist, feudal and imperialist relations. This opens the door towards something like the commune of communism.

10.

Look at the contrast: the Indian communist movement produced impressive poets, shayars, and cultural activists. They were mostly associated with the IPTA. While there were brilliant exceptions, most of them seem to be stricken by a middle class revolutionary romanticism, melancholic, with an unhappy consciousness. Gaddar and Jan Natya Mandali stand out as an embodiment of a living revolutionary movement directly connected to the proletarian, Dalit masses. The scholar Brahma Prakash points out: “The Jan Natya Mandali is perhaps the first leftist political theatre troupe in India that broke the hierarchy of the middle class in political theatre”. This is partly reflected in the forms of expression it chose that are found among the Dalit communities: e. g., Golla Suddulu, Oggukatha, Dappu.

When the man who sings Lachummama, sings “Inquilab, Inquilab, Inquilab” or “lal salaam, lal salaam”, it takes things to the next level. Social oppression is tracked down to its virulent form in sovereign state power — Gaddar instils the will in Lachummama to fight at that level.

On the other hand, think of the path not taken. Gaddar could as well have gone the other way, the easy way.

Once he broke with the Party membership, Gaddar could have gone the way of the deracinated artist, doing avant garde stuff. He could have joined the whole jing bang of virtue signalling radical intellectuals hollering on social media. He instead chose to remain in the domain of the popular masses which would involve religiosity and other traditional attachments. This is what gives us Gaddar who sings in praise of Lord Shiva and visiting temples while invoking Gramsci. That the high priests of political correctness will completely detest this is only to be expected.

Gaddar also does not position himself like the rationalists who too are very deracinated and keep a safe distance from the mass-popular domain. They fight superstition only to tom-tom their own priestly superiority.

I had once an occasion to engage with the mass-popular domain with regard to the Muslim masses and their anger against Salman Rushdie. The secular-rationalist elite pontificate that Muslim masses should rather focus on improving their economic and social condition and not really get involved into opposing “freedom of speech” and “artistic freedom”. The masses are supposed to be just good for hankering after economic benefits and hence not qualified to comment on art and freedom. They are treated like “those enemies of freedom”, which was the satirical title of my essay.

11.

Now the elephant in the room.

Gaddar calls the Maoist party his mother. Many tried reminding him that he has differences with the Party. Many tried to prod him to be more harsh on the Party. His reply: mother and child keep quarrelling and fighting, don’t they? He only reinforced the status of the Party as his mother. The Party’s fundamental role in the making of Gaddar seems to be so happily acknowledged by Gaddar himself — a relation which cannot be broken.

What does it then make the Party? A divine force? Transcendental?

We can turn to one revolutionary Marxist, Walter Benjamin, who was a friend of Bertolt Brecht. In 1940, he is fleeing the fascists, he is fleeing the Nazis. At that time he wrote his Theses on the Philosophy of History. He pointed out that historical materialism must enlist the services of theology. Historical materialism without theology is directionless and powerless. It is in this conjunction that “the constructive principle” emerges, one which will blast open the continuum of history, ending the reign of empty homogeneous time, towards communism.

Theology addresses the question of the past and, in our case, the historical oppression of caste — the question of the past which progressive left politics overlooks. I have, in an earlier essay, tried to critique progressive politics as invested in the project of futurism — the same futurism which gave us fascism and Nazism. Progressive politics and revisionism are ultimately the advanced detachments of capital.

That is why Marx places class struggle within the broad horizon of historical oppression. He proposes that the emancipation of the proletariat is inseparable from the emancipation of humanity as a whole. One must be careful in understanding this proposition. The point is not that the proletariat will liberate all other sections of society, as the privileged agent. No. Instead, it means that the emancipation of the proletariat is inseparably connected to the emancipation of humanity as a whole that. To paraphrase Benjamin, we can say that the class struggle is nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather that of liberated grandchildren. In a word, it is about “changing the past” in order to liberate the future.

From this it follows that the historical emancipation of the Dalits cannot be separated from the class struggle. Such a formulation is germane to Marxism in the Indian context.

Gaddar’s trajectory and wanderings across ideologically distinct registers therefore seem to be in consonance with a particular unfolding of the deeper implications of Marx’s teachings. Not that it is immediately obvious or something which Gaddar himself intended. Whether Gaddar himself consciously thought in this manner, whether he consciously adhered to revolutionary Marxism, is not the point.

The class struggle heralded by his songs is nourished by the image of Lachummama, his Marxism is nourished by the image of Buddhism’s struggle against Brahmanism, his Marxism and love for the red flag is nourished by the image of Lord Shiva and Shri Ramanuacharya. The ancient dāśarājña yuddha seems to underpin the class struggle. Gaddar’s life uniquely straddles across these registers and somehow makes them speak to each other.

Perhaps Benjamin’s conception of historical materialism which enlists the services of theology is exemplified inGaddar. Again we must be careful here. It might not be proper to say that it is exemplified by Gaddar.

12.

People called Benjamin a mystic. We are tempted to call Gaddar “our saint”. Not without hesitation though.

For immediately we want to ask: should we jettison even the radical saint tradition in favour of something more earth-like, more closer to the soil, something more along the lines of Namuci, the asura, something thoroughly non-transcendental, in consonance with matti chetulu, breaking with both nirguni and Sufi? For Gaddar is both saintly and unsaintly, transcendental and immanent. We can call him the Saint of Naxalbari, in the name of ancestors as well as martyrs.

Or perhaps, following Malcolm X, we should just call him Gaddar X, the seeker. The kind of seeker (sadhu) Kabir invokes in his dohas. A true seeker.

_{Earlier published in Bahujan Keratalu Magazine, Hyderabad, Oct 2023.}

Now only a strange law of efficacy works. The lightest touch should deliver the maximum impact and hopefully, the thing called “change”, if not transformation.

The time of belabouring is over. Now it is all fast and furious. And effortless. Changing a repressive regime. A dream come true which brooks no analysis, no self-reflection. What is finally achieved, accomplished is all that was supposed to happen. No gap exists between “ought” and “is”. What is, is what it is.

§

A small act. Just put a cockroach sticker on your bicycle, bike or car. And move on. Without saying anything, you’ve said a lot.

So here is something which is so, so light and so cutting, so impactful. It doesn’t bog you down with anything heavy.

You might be a speck in the mimetic swarm. And yet it feels like you are doing this out of your free will and free volition.

An entire political programme in a lullaby. You take what looks like a red pill and yet indulge in the immersive happiness of the blue pill.

You can simultaneously be part of it, and also always opt out of it.

We can remain who we are. We are all cockroaches. I am a cockroach. And yet there is no metamorphosis, allowing a safe distance, a separation. Nothing is in the flesh.

The cockroach is a metaphor. I am “cosplaying”, something which Kafka and Gregor Samsa would not understand. From now on, cockroaches will seem like a copy of this “cockroach”. Jean Baudrillard’s “copy of a copy of a copy” is at work here.

The horror of a human turning into a cockroach is gone, since now the real cockroaches have been sanitised for ever. The cockroaches living in the dark, dingy spaces will forever appear to be a copy of this simulation.

It just lets you act on something which we all collectively long desired for, but we were stuck in one thing or the other. It felt like we are unable to go the whole way. But now the sky is the limit.

It is open ended. Nobody is explaining you anything, just a symbol to attach to, to kind of serenade yourself into.

The effect of just getting serenaded is like a breeze. Whoever it touches, is part of it.

No heavy words like commitment or ideology. No burden of having to analyse the deep structures of class, caste, and the character of the state or anything like that. None of that. I heard some radicals wanted the CJP to include demands like “ban the RSS” and “Repeal AFSPA”. Throwing pearls at swine. How silly!

You are not subscribed to anything, and yet you are somebody else now.

You just said you are a cockroach. Nothing more.

There is no past baggage. No sins of the past that you must hedge your bets or defend against. So you can be pure and virgin, without having to change anything about yourself. Always a clean slate, a tabula rasa. And you know you are here just this one time, because things were really going out of hand.

You don’t have to check your privilege or you don’t have to do any confession. You don’t have to kind of cut yourself off from whatever you’re doing so far.

So this thing is tremendously liberating.

Whatever grievance you have is just the thing which should motivate you. You can remain in your own station and yet be able to engage in “outreach” and even “solidarity”. A student suffering the leaked NEET exam can now connect with workers and farmers and retired army personnel fighting for their pension.

Theorists of populism like Ernesto Laclau would perhaps call this “equivalence”. What a word. For Marx too can be approached through precisely this term, contra Laclau.

Nobody loses their individual autonomy. But they still have all the advantages of a wide ecosystem.

Since it feels like people from across the entire social body, across classes and castes and genders and regions, have been mobilised, it takes on the character of an ecosystem, a groundswell, a swarm, a widely spread wave.

This is just absolutely brilliant.

§

Now think of this. You are in the middle of an oppressive heat in Delhi in the summer. And then there is rumbling in the sky, the clouds start appearing and then you are fully anticipating a massive downpour to cool the weather. Ultimately, what do you get? Some sprinkling of raindrops here and there. The weather now turns worse, what is called muggy weather. Disappointment invariably sets in.

But next time again when the sky starts thundering you surely forget the last disappointment. Inevitably.

Thus it is that this sweet lullaby has so often ended in an eerie silence in the past. But so what?

Do we not know that all of this is forgotten? That they are rightly forgotten? For, otherwise, what is there to look forward to?

So then we are very well primed to move in the loop, to go through what 15 or 20 years ago we went through.

And now the question, which one is so pitiable in asking: why is the loop getting repeated? Why is the pattern repeated?

The AAP functionaries are themselves asking: how can they not repeat their mistakes from the past? Abhishek Dipte’s old tweets posing this question is doing the rounds.

We are moving within a loop and I think that’s where we need to ask. Why do we allow us to do that?

§

But then the moment you pose this question, you are already doomed. You are an outcaste.

You are a party pooper. You have spoiled the party.

You are old and useless.

You think you are the awakened one. Good riddance.

At best, you can ask: can you please put a woman in your committee, to make it more representative. Or a trans person. Please do not embarrass us so much, for we want to join you!

Rahul Gandhi is the awakened one. His party and government was torn in shambles during an earlier episode of this loop in 2011-14. He has lost everything and has been traumatised for life. And yet he dare not speak against it. For all you know, he is perhaps still looking for a way back into the loop. He might wish for there to be no embarrassment if he comes back to join the loop.

Similarly, many who burnt their fingers last time, some of them really badly, are wondering how to position themselves to the loop, a ka the Great Democratic Upsurge of the Cockroach.

Nietzsche in his Genealogy of Morals, uses the term the “pathos of distance”. Those in the herd will not allow you any distance, as you are bound to mimetically follow and give in to the contagion. With this loop at work, one wonders if even Nietzsche would have fallen for this contagion!

Dear Nietzsche, WE are all suffering from the pathos of not being able to maintain the distance. Or maybe, we are enjoying. Enjoying the blue pill which comes here as the red one.

Zion is supposed to be the alternative to, and escape from, the Matrix. Only till you discover that it is not. But then again what is Zion without the Matrix. What is Begumpura without the Matrix.

Also, the copy of a copy of a copy has long been our authentic condition, hasn’t it? When Christ appeared for real, the Grand Inquisitor could not but send him away. Here then let us celebrate the lullaby of abandoning the real Gods!

I remember once watching a dialogue between Jean Luc Godard and Woody Allen. I clearly remember the thought that crossed my mind: American pop seeking depth and validation from a living, exuberant French art. It was a strenuous conversation to watch and listen.

That way, anything can be a metaphor, symbol, or meme and one is free to take it wherever one wants to. That is why the insistence on Kafka is intriguing. In the process, a rich and enduring archetype of the cockroach has been captured by the flaccid and the asinine, the fatuous and the banal.

An archetype is not just being deployed. It is being sanitized as though trying to please some “focus group” or a particular eco-system of closed minds.

There is horror in Kafka’s character Gregor Samsa becoming a cockroach. Kafka was not trying to convince the world about social justice, drawing attention to the condition of the marginalised and so on. He was highlighting a point of breakdown, not just of politics and government, but of the social itself. The cockroach brings in the horror and dread, with elements of the dark. Surely, this has strong elements of the absurd.

Being cockroach is highly corporeal and in the flesh. Thinking in terms of a genre, we can here recall how Frantz Fanon draws attention to the “muscular tension” in the body of the colonised subject. Decolonisation is in the flesh.

This is not about someone being compared to, or being placed at the level of a “lowly”cockroach. One suspects this is what the Chief Justice is doing and activists want to stop at that, as they have got enough ammo in their kitty. But Kafka is taking you somewhere else.

Here, it is about a person “literally” turning into an insect. That is why: metamorphosis, where one changes into something. The human-insect separation is questioned.

For Kafka, separation would be very facile as it would be just a “humanist” way to objectify and commodity (the insect). The separation of human and animal, human and insect is a premise which would open the way towards setting up the terms for relations of equivalence. The next step would be put a price tag.

Without the metamorphosis, the cockroach for example will be an object of study in the lab – in which case there is no horror. It could be the cockroach which we find in the kitchen. There are numerous ads for the anti-cockroach sprays which treats the cockroach as an irritant in the house. In other words, all these encounters are premised on a formal separation.

What Kafka does is to make the separation impossible. You are the cockroach. You have metamorphosed and the cockroach is you. This stalls the terms of the relation. This is the breakdown. This is the horror. A horror which points to the unknown stain in society as we know it.

In his famous work Eroticism, Georges Bataille rejects the logic of separation and in the same breath points out that “the desire to produce at cut prices is niggardly and human”.

He is of course drawing a connection between separation and the accumulation drive. That is why he proposes a dissolution of “discontinuous individuality”, marking an end to separation. He writes:

If the union of two lovers comes about through love, it involves the idea of death, murder or suicide ... [a] continuous violation of discontinuous individuality ... the orifices, gulfs and abysses whereby beings are absorbed into continuity, somehow assimilates it to death.

The impossibility of a relationship such that life and death now assimilates into the nothingness of death – such is the way in which one philosophically challenges market relations of exchange, of putting a price, and so on.

Hope we have got some sense of Kafka’s cockroach.

Indeed, Iran’s Islamic Revolution is not just the name of the political regime, but of a rich and novel social, cultural and political life it has spawned. Yes, Iran’s deep and long civilization plays a role, but it is the practice in the present which endows everything with a radical charge. This is exceptional.

While many countries are challenging the United States (and by extension Israel, if not the West) in the field of geopolitics, international law and military power, Iran seems to unwittingly and compulsively carry this forward into the field of social, cultural and political life. Iran offers a big dosage of cultural and intellectual challenge to the West (and indeed to various notions of the “Arab world”, the East and “Global South”). When American society is itself internally riven by questions of “family values”, gender, sexuality (Roe v. Wade, the woke vs. conservative) Iran’s society might be what more astute observers might seek answers from.

Iran surely is not a model to be emulated. Far from it. But there many inner stirrings and strivings in its belly that are rather rare in today’s world. An idealistic “authoritarianism” with enough dogmas of its own, for sure, but also paradoxically pushing for praxis on the outer limits, towards new worlds.

Iran is the name of a different way of life and inner churning now raised to the level of a war machine. Not just geopolitical ambition, but a prior “choice” with regard to a mode of social and cultural life seems to strengthen the sinews of Iran’s anti-imperialism. Let us take resort to an exaggerated imagination. It is as though Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time has suddenly become inseparable from Lenin’s What is to be Done. More to the point, an impossible scenario of Lenin emerging from within Proust’s toil through the minutiae of life. More to the point for Iran, the deep and immersive Shia spirituality of Nahj-al Balagha (The Peak of Eloquence) somehow articulates or at least sits alongside the theocratic jurisprudence of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Velayat-e Faqıh (the doctrine of Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist).1

Here is a different and unique relationship between a particular kind of ordinary everyday life and a hot war fought in the high skies, mountains and the sea. What indeed explains this impossible tenacity of Iranians in this war is that they seem to be dreaming a different dream. They are living a dream which we do not have access to.

And here we have to give it to Michel Foucault who in the midst of the 1978 revolutionary upheaval precisely posed the question: what is the dream that the Iranian people are dreaming?2 He sensed that it is through their dream that one must enter and come to the empirics of the unfolding scenario of political change that Iranians were clamouring for.

Thus it is that, while far less powerful, and small, Iran might be striking at the American Dream itself and not just the geopolitical objectives of US-Israeli imperialism or what remains of it.

Iran today comes to us as the name through which we know that maybe we are on the cusp of the exhaustion of the American Dream and the endless fascination the world displayed towards it. We already know of the impressive career of the famed American efficiency which had even taken the tall communist leader Vladimir Lenin in its sweep. Part of the story of the ongoing war is that the Arab states still seem wedded to the American Dream. But that seem to be unravelling under the assault of Iran, both military and cultural. The significance of the present war in Iran cannot therefore be underestimated as it goes beyond the immediate goals and objectives that are discussed day in and day out by commentators and pundits.

Life of piety (taqwa)

I propose that we must at least provisionally develop a theory of Iranian exceptionalism today, which is, at one level, simply a way for us to be able to make sense of the world.

Immediately we can see the following. China and Russia might have challenged the “Western” model of political liberalism and democracy but it is only Iran which illumines, as it has taken this further by also challenging social liberalism.

Iran seems to offer a way of life, which we can call a life of revolutionary piety. I am reminded of Saba Mahmood’s book called the Politics of Piety: Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (2011).3 Her ethnographic fieldwork is among women in the mosques of Cairo in Egypt, but the notion of piety is very much applicable to post-revolutionary Iran.

However, most of the debates on piety in the academia, including Mahmood’s, are oriented towards critiquing “western” models of women’s agency rather than presenting us straightforward accounts of social life of piety, which is what Iran offers us. Iran is positively invested in weaving the tapestry of such a life rather than just the negative project of critiquing the “West”. Autonomous and separate from the dominant models on offer and mimicked by almost one and all. Iran’s life of piety is not limited to the social in any case, but one where the social spawns its own form of political life.

Taking a break from academia, we can focus on the work of Allama Iqbal who is a major influence on the Islamic Revolution. We find that the modern notion of piety (taqwa) or an interiorized subjectivity as part of a political project of liberation in Iran, has a lot to do with the vision of Iqbal who is a major inspiration for the Islamic Revolution. Ayatollah Khamenei held Iqbal in high regard, and considered the latter’s notion of khudi (selfhood) as central to the Islamic revolution. Rejecting Mulla Sadr’s notion of wujud (existence) which seemed to privilege existence over essence, as we find in the existentialist school, Khamenei understands Iqbal as keeping the focus on the individual self and the transformations it can undergo through an active relation to the Prophet.

Presenting a paper on Iqbal in 1986 in Tehran, Khameinei stated:

Iqbal envisioned a philosophical concept of khudi, yet it was not purely theoretical. He conceived it as a social and human principle, enveloped in a philosophical framework to resonate with people’s minds. Essentially, khudi is self-awareness, recognition of one’s personal identity and dignity—both individually and communally.4

One can see how closely khudi comes to the notion of piety. In a different address to the laity, Khamenei would explain the meaning of piety:

There is a fundamental point in the Quran and I would like to remind you of it. When people think of taqwa in their minds, they think of prayer, fasting, worship, remembrance and supplication. All these maybe parts of taqwa but none of them define its true meaning.

Taqwa means being watchful over oneself. Taqwa means that the person knows what one is doing and chooses every action consciously, with will, thought and decision. Like a person riding a well-trained horse, holding the reins firmly in his hands and knowing exactly where he wants to go. This is what taqwa means. Islam wants from us to actualise our inner potential.

Nor does one need to be necessarily naïve here. Iran’s revolutionary piety does indulge in more than its fair share of massive and oppressive hyperreal imagery in the way they selectively recall and deploy the mythic, for example, the Battle of Karbala, with Khamenei the Supreme Leader portrayed as Hussain, saving Karbala from the Yazids. The mythic or the mytho-poetic itself is not a problem as it subsists among a people’s culture and memory. Indeed, what is a people without its myths and tales, and often, its religion. What becomes problematic is who, when and how it gets deployed, valorized and towards what end. Nor is it an issue with religion as such, but rather with the clergy as another structure of power. For example, the Shia versus Sunni divide seems largely driven by the clergy on both sides. But then again, what is religion without the clergy, Pope, Church, Shankaracharya?

Anthropology as politics

Piety must also be understood in relation to the life of things and objects, the human relationship to the nonhuman world.

I am struck by a book on the life of the object in revolutionary Iran, called Revolution of Things: The Islamism and Post-Islamism of Objects in Tehran, by Sefat Kusha.5 We know of the Internet of Things. Here is the spiritualism of things and objects, the Islamism of objects and things. Without going into the merits of the book, it is clear that the world of objects, place, space, and consumer goods and indeed the urban and the rural form not just a system of signification and meaning, but exude the political.

In his The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger developed the notion of unconcealment.6 Heidegger showed how Van Gogh’s peasant boots revealed (unconcealed) the world of the peasant, who walks in these boots on the earth. The world of objects in Iran can similarly be unconcealed to reveal a world and a being. Interestingly, one of the major influences in Iranian cultural life during the time of the Revolution and before that has been Heidegger. Ali Shariati himself drew a lot from Heidegger.

Piety must not be thought of in isolation from our relation to objects and things. I am reminded of a similar scenario which emerged in the Soviet Union in the 1920s when it is faced with the question of revolutionary culture in everyday life. The work of a whole swathe of Russian avant garde artists and Soviet commissars come to mind. In 1925, Boris Arvatov wrote Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing.7 He considered the social consumption of objects and things as crucial to the revolutionary process and that “without directly studying them it is impossible to grasp culturally the style of society as a whole”. He held that “a person’s cultural type is created by all of his material surroundings, just as a society’s cultural style is created by all of its material construction”.

Life lived in its minutiae feeds onto the field of politics. Liberalism’s problem of representation and delegation, how the demos can possibly be what legitimates state sovereign power, how to make that leap from the individual to the citizenry or the electorate is resolved here without ever formulating the problem as such.

For in Iran it is never the problem of “relating” or “connecting”, “integrating” the different parts (the social, cultural, economic, political, religion and faith) as they all seem to exist as one whole. From here, I can hear voices already smelling totalitarianism in the word “whole”. I hear them saying that, well, is that not what totalitarianism is all about, is that not, precisely, theocracy as against democracy which is full of the interplay and spaces between the different parts that never comprise one whole or one repressive block, one totality.

But as we know the issue is never technical, never about “how the parts related to the whole”. It is really about the inner human tissue at work, regardless of whether it leads to a glue which sticks the parts into a whole, or, whether, glueless, they remain independent, autonomous parts, disparate and adrift. The inner human tissue tying the one and untying the other is really what is crucial. Piety and the selfhood of khudi have got something right for the majority of ordinary Iranians. The sweet spot of life and politics is not just on the side of democracy and liberalism, but also on the other side. At the very least.

Any understanding of Iran must then work its “way up”, as it were, from the cultural and social to the political rather than down. Anthropology would be the discipline of choice to understand the Islamic regime rather than political theory alone.

Not without a reason then that Saba Mahmood’s work on piety too is classified in the field of anthropology. With Iran, anthropology becomes the basis for politics. The very conception of politics undergoes a change.

Obedience as moral intuition

All of this makes the regime internally tight and well-knit, where distinction between ruler and the ruled, masses and the regime seem to lose political significance. To add to that, a culture of sacrifice and martyrdom acts as the great levelers. The only way the leader is “higher” than the masses is not only because of greater riches or greater intelligence or capacity, but because of greater sacrifice. The current Supreme Leader comes from a family who just recently sacrificed a few of its members, including his father the former Supreme Leader. I am talking of Mojtaba Khamenei. Now you can imagine how difficult it will be for dissenters to be seen going against Mojtaba Khameinei.

Dissent loses its aura and value. The usual narrative about democracy and dissent, dissent as the life-blood of a robust democracy, now sound like self-serving paeans peddled by vested interests. Nader Rahimi (2026) points out that, in Iran, “obedience is experienced as moral intuition rather than contingent political choice.” And further adds: “Through a dense network of religious institutions, ritual practices, and managed historical memory, political power is rendered sacred, dissent morally suspect, and compliance endowed with spiritual significance.”8 Let that sink in. Obedience is moral intuition means that dissent in the usual sense we understand might appear as morally suspect. However, moral intuition itself might contain elements of dissent, a notion of dissent that admits of no easy “agency” pleasing to the always excited performative self of liberal democracies. Indeed, irony and satire might find a place in moral intuition as agency, something which might impel Richard Rorty’s quest for irony to seek greener pastures outside of the liberal framework.

We now perhaps get a sense why the Iranian regime can readily appear as a totalizing system, with no room for dissenters. No wonder many dissenters do not seem to see any space for their activism or role in bringing change, and that the only way the regime can be predicted to fall is either external aggression or an internal implosion for reasons rather difficult to figure out, or where it might fall under its own weight, something like the unbearable weight of infinite martyrdom. This brings us close to the demands and aspiration of a section of the Iranian people, whom Yashar Darolshafa calls the “second people”. Siyavash Shahabi explains that “the second people” are:

those who welcome the fall of the Islamic Republic through war and foreign intervention. This part of society, especially after the repeated defeat of protest movements, has come to the conclusion that there is no internal path left for overthrowing the regime. So if an external force appears ready to do what the people could not, it should be welcomed, even if the price is destruction, civilian deaths, and the collapse of social life.9

Hijab: the struggle within

One can say that Iqbal’s philosophical ideas of khudi and revolutionary piety are fine, but what about moral policing of women.

I recently found a protest writing called Wind in my Hair: My Fight for Freedom in Iran. The writer is Masih Alinejad protesting against the Islamist regime in Iran. Clearly the reference is to the imposition of the hijab on women and the moral policing. To feel the wind in one’s hair — is a powerful expression of protest. That the protest can be expressed in such a seemingly everyday experience of life, tells a lot about the way the regime works. Not just the regime but life under the regime.

But here we must be careful. There is not only life “under” the regime, but also life which exists in harmony with the regime, life which makes the regime possible, life which desires the regime, spontaneously generates the principles of the regime from within itself. Surely, it is a travesty to only privilege the life supposedly repressed by the regime, make it visible, and forget about life which spawns the “regime”, coterminous with the regime.

Alinejad wants us to forget that the real struggle in Iran today is between the life of revolutionary piety and the life which wants to violate or oppose revolutionary piety. Both sides are composed of women. This means that women in Iran are not one homogeneous category, and they are obviously subject to all kinds of class and gender divides. Anti-regime activists want to overlook or invisibilise this struggle and want to one-sidedly focus on the repressive moral policing by the regime. That is such a travesty. Surely, women who live a life of piety too might be challenging Iranian regime in many different ways. We want to hear more of that.

One can condemn the present Iranian regime on several fronts but it surely qualifies to be part of the larger search for new worlds beyond what is given to us. At the end of the day it is not about Iran either. The question is: can we even conceive of a world, a life, a politics, culture, economy outside of what we now experience as the dominant model which often goes under the rubric “West” or “western” but which in fact is widely dispersed into the global, eastern, African, Asian, etc. Iran keeps the space open for us to be able to pose this question. This is a big achievement in terms of historical openings and closures. At one level, then, it does not matter whether the present rulers of Iran are good or bad, vile or good-intentioned, power hungry or noble-minded revolutionaries.

Anti-imperialism in Iran might still be based on a specific national capitalism and is surely not free from capital accumulation which involves a parasitic relationship to proletarian self-activity. Revolutionary piety might be only a way in which a particular kind of political regime can legitimise its rule and, more than that, the specific form of capital accumulation. And yet in trying to foster a different social and cultural life and also fighting the West militarily and geopolitically, Iran points to many lines in the sand that stands out for a way to think about not just anti-colonialism in an abstract statist or geopolitical sense, but one which takes us to life and living.

Iran seems to still manage to ask: what is the good life? Or, rather, what is the proper life, the right life? The latter has more than a dash of the clerical or the religious, which would appear as immediately oppressive to postmodern minds. But do we not find the space here to pivot towards the life of piety as we find in the accounts of say Julia Kristeva in her Teresa, My Love, or Giorgio Agamben’s in The Highest Poverty?10 I think we do find such a space. Keep in mind the subtitle of the latter book: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life.11

Iran surely offers much more than the cynical and impoverished “anti-West” or “anti-imperialism” on offer from many of the BRICS countries, be it Russia, China, South Africa, Brazil or India. The “anti-imperialism” of a Cuba or Venezuela and also their socialism does have some good points, but does not inspire and uplift. Iran stands out. It offers a richness of culture, thought and practice, a boon for both the poet and the military man. With an “authoritarianism” like that, who can ever want a “democracy”!

Iran is in many ways the outer limit of the world today. It allows us to pose certain first principles with a renewed freshness. Iran allows us to effect the work of a Heideggerian unconcealment of the highly ossified and calcified world we are living in today.

The scene: Vijay, dock worker, looking out of the window

…. So the movie Deewar is important for all these reasons.[1] I can’t even describe all the reasons why it is an important film.

From the film we know that Vijay is a worker in the Bombay docks. And then he is picked up by Dabar, smuggler, gangster, a mafia kind of guy. Dabar smuggles gold from Dubai. Vijay is picked up from the road when he is on his way to work in the morning.

Dabar-saab‘s car comes…, a long swanky car. And Vijay is taken in, boards. In that scene (in his posh house), Dabar says how the other gang led by Samant is doing all these criminal activities. So Dabar then asks Vijay: can you carry out this task?

Vijay then looks out of the window. What does he see?

He sees his mother, back from the earlier days walking with himself (as a kid) and his brother Ravi, both little kids.

Why it feels misplaced to judge Vijay?

Now he sees that – good enough. But we know that, soon enough, Vijay is going to be complete part of the smuggling networks. And he is angry with these smuggler guys. He does not like them – he always maintains a distance from them. If not a moral distance then … he is always keeping them at a distance. He knows that this money, this smuggling is not something to be proud of – and yet he becomes totally part of it. And then he buys the big house for his mother – he becomes a don, one of them, one of them.

So we want to wonder: he is the hero of the film. We the audience love him, applauding for his dialogues… But why dont we judge him for going to the other side, why dont we shame him for being part of the criminal gangs. Why do we instead feel ‘yes it is good, he is giving it to these guys’. Like when he has these dialogues, sharp repartees, say as soon as he sits in the car with Dabar. Dabar says, “mujhe apna dost hi samjho“. Vijay replies ‘like a’ don: “doston ke naam bhi hotey hain“.

And then so many other dialogues where he is giving it. You feel very happy.

Of course he is delivering razor sharp replies and dialogues – but he is still part of those gangs. But we still do not judge him for that, we still love him. And even he does not seem to fall in his own eyes. Maybe later he kind of falls in his own eyes when he is doing something ‘illegal’. His brother Ravi the police officer will make him feel that he is doing something illegal.

But the problem is not that he is doing something illegal. The problem is something else. He is the son of a worker, one who is evidently a left-wing workers leader. He could not be partaking of this even if it is legal. Even by becoming a legal man, he cannot (should not) be part of these companies and all – given his background, given that he constantly thinks about his mother as worker, and he constantly thinks about his father as a working class leader.

But nowhere does this come and disturb our appreciation of him.

Why do you think that happens?

One is of course these nice, nice dialogues he delivers – so that even when he is part of it, he is still giving it to them. He is still not succumbed. It feels like he has somewhere preserved his moral standing. But that is not enough.

How does we understand this? Our own complicity, the audience’s complicity in it… This is one question I want you to consider.

Enter the realm of consumption, money, gold!

From my notes, I can tell you that we do not feel that he is a sell-out.

One reason it could happen this way, with our full complicity, is because the… Imagine a counter-factual scenario where he had done the opposite – imagine he had taken offence at Dabar’s proposal, thinking “I had myself been a worker, I know how bad these people are, how exploitative and so on”. Vijay knows this. Interestingly, he is picked up by Dabar right on his way to work, so he is fresh out of it, being a worker. It is not that he has to recollect the harsh conditions of workers from an earlier past – no, he is fresh in it. He arrives at Dabar’s place in his work uniform, with his badge on.

And yet he is shown to immediately succumb to the money.

Oh no but maybe we cannot say that he succumbs to the money. He has experienced a lot of hardship in life. So he just knows that this is the way, money-grabbing, smuggling etc: no other ‘decent’ option! He must now be the ‘bad guy’.

But then he has always been a bad guy. As a kid, he throws a stone at the labour contractor who was mistreating his mother.

The problem with he being part of smuggling is not that he has become a bad guy: no, not at all. Since of course he was always a bad guy, he has always had it rough.

The problem is that now he is the bad guy, in a different way: by placing himself on the other side. We are not saying that he should be a good guy. That is anyways so boring. Why should he be a good guy – that is so boring!

That is not the point.

The point is: why should being a bad guy and violating the law necessarily mean standing with the smugglers and capitalists and be part of exploiting networks… He is a bad guy – and we love him for that. He does not go to the temple – the audience appreciates that.

But now there is a difference. What it means to be bad, now changes. He joins criminal gangs – but we are talking about criminal, not in the sense that they violate the law, that it is illegal. Criminal in the sense that they are part of networks of exploitation, controlling and beating up workers. Even legally one can be an exploiter – we cannot forget this point, something which underlines Marx’s description of the logic of capital.

No self-respect of any kind. Only puts up an angry face. Is that good enough?

‘Labour’ vs. ‘Labour-power’

But then, to go back to the counterfactual scenario, If he had taken offence and walked out on Dabar’s offer, if he had walked back out, then where would he be walking back to? Ok we can say he is walking back to his workers, back to his comrades. Here is the theoretically pertinent question: Who is this worker he would be going back to – this is when we need to keep in mind the distinction we made between labour and labour-power.

The labour that we know in say the labour used in the theory of factors of production, the labour for which Marx says the wages are already fixed from before the process of production kicks in, the labour as we find in ‘labour unions’ or ‘trade unions’: what Marx in Grundisse calls objectified labour.[2][This is labour as given, as equivalent to a definite amount of work, not the ‘capacity of labour’, not labour-power, which would be open-ended, and hence the repository of endless value-generation.]

[To be kept in mind: Wages are paid to ‘labour’, or rather, for labour. But what is actually taken, appropriated or utilised in the production process is the capacity of labour, or labour-power, not labour as such, not objectified labour. Also see the endnote]

So Vijay would be going back to that kind of ‘labour’. But Vijay taking such a step would completely miss the point. Because the money that is staring at Vijay, the money that Dabar is throwing at Vijay, the money that is circulating or the gold that is coming from Dubai (this is at the level of consumption, or say smuggled transistors, radios, electronics good). All this is happening at the level of consumption, exchange of commodities and the commodity-form.[3] More specifically, here we are encountering the ‘act of exchange’ [whose importance in Marx is dwelt upon by Alfred Sohn-Rethel][4].

Vijay is getting exposed to this realm, now definitely away from the realm of production.

But this realm of money, of value contained in it – the value as the social dimension, the social – this value he is able to see, to partake of it, he is going to get a share of this value, directly (that is what it means to be a smuggler: you have direct unmediated claim over this share). Now compare this to the labour which is the objectified labour, not labour-power: now there is a disjunction.

Let us explain: Since the value of which he will now partake is not coming from the kind of labour which he would experience as labour as a separate group of people, identified as such, as labourers, as labour of the ‘labour union’, which is an identitarian concept. But it is coming from labour-power, from abstract labour, from labour-time, from socially necessary labour time. We can say that it is time which has become money/value.

This has important implications: For to the audience as much as to Vijay, this ill-gotten wealth does not seem to be in any obvious way connected to the workers as we directly see them as a group or identity. The abstraction of time has entered. There seems to be no connection – at least in Vijay’s mind and in the mind of the audience – between this realm of money/consumption/value, and labour in this sense. [Marx’s categories allows us to the see how this gap, dichotomy is internally generated by the logic of capital – a gap which Vijay life traverses, straddles not without considerable heartburn and suffering.]

Now in the essay by Zizek we saw the idea of the commodity-form.[5] Here the act of exchange – let us note where Vijay is going with smuggling networks money and all: this is the realm of consumption, not production; a quantity of money will have a corresponding claim on a portion of value, on commodities, consumption is exchange of goods, etc – hence we must focus on the act of exchange then…

* As we noted before, one is not talking about objectified labour, or a fixed quantity of labour, which is producing value. It is the socially necessary labour time which determines value.

* But, secondly, moving beyond this, we will see through an understanding of the commodity form, that it is the act of exchange which is instrumental in making sure that the socially necessary labour time does indeed produce value. [It is like saying that exchange and consumption controls the possibility of value being generated through production.]

II

Practical solipsism: Marx’s commodity-form

Why, what happens in the act of exchange?

There are two things that happen in the act of exchange.

One, and you will see that in the essay, when you are exchanging your eyes are on the use you can make of the commodity. So your immediate consciousness is like ‘ok I am buying this thing, and it has this use value, this use for me’. And then you buy it, there is an exchange [of two unlike things]. But in the act of doing that exchange you have also made it sure that two things have exchanged because they are alike in some way, that is, they have equivalent value. This is what makes exchange of otherwise dissimilar things possible. But that equivalence that you have brought about through the act of exchangedefines this notion of the equivalence of value. Your act has effectuated that equivalence of value.

Your consciousness is at variance with this value-equivalence process, since your focus is only on the useful aspects of the commodities. That is why the value-equivalence part, which is the social part, in the sense of the value which is derived from socially necessary labour time, from abstract labour which in turn is part of the ‘total social labour’ – in that sense it is ‘social’. Now this social is an abstraction (which is established) in and through the act of exchange.[6]That is why we read that the abstraction in the commodity exchange is not an abstraction which is coming from thought. It is an abstraction external to thought, [as Sohn-Rethel so often emphasises].

How can abstraction be external to thought? Isn’t abstraction always about thought? We think of ideas and maybe beliefs as abstract, abstracting from the real, and so on. But here you have a situation where there is abstraction, which is generated in, as it were, an actual physiological act.

Now the consciousness of the individual is, as we find in the Zizek essay, called practical solipsism. You are a practical solipsist, since you focus only on the immediate useful aspect of the commodity [thereby facilitating exchange]. The abstraction is where the social enters the picture.

Let me repeat this: why does the social come here? What does it mean to say the social enters the picture through ‘the exchange of equivalents’?

Ok let us say: We do not exchange air with freely available water or something. Such an exchange would have only use values, but no value since it is not socially produced. Now you get a sense of what value we are talking about (and, also, what social we are talking about), as against the use value.

So our consciousness is always working at the level of the use that the commodity is going to give us whereas the equivalence (effected through the act of exchange) is derived from the socially necessary labour time, abstract labour which is a part of total social labour… In fact, it is not from the socially necessary labour time as the basis, a kind of a substratum, that value is derived (generated). It is just the other way round: that is precisely what Marx is trying to say.

Fetishism not extraneous

Let us clarify: That it is the form, the commodity-form which is the key here [that is, key to the ability of the production process to produce value]. So it is not like you have first labour from which value is derived. No. It is from value that you have the value of labour…

That is why those like Zizek are saying that for Marx it is not about “oh you know this is all a spectacle, all consumption, this is all a commodity kind of a scene, all these things kept in this beautiful mall, and hence that we should rather talk about the real conditions of production from where the poor labourers have worked and so let us go into that – let us be a ‘good Marxist’, and so on…”. No, that is absolutely not it. That is not Marx.

That is not how value-generation takes place. Rather it is the commodity form, the quality that the commodity acquires which appears as though it is the quality of that thing whereas it is socially derived. What is the effect of the larger social relations, of social relations, of collective production, now appears as though it is the quality of the thing only. [Imagine a new launch car bedecked and exhibited in the centre of a big posh showroom, gleaming lights, with shiny models hugging it, and so on…] That is what we call the fetishistic powers of the commodity.

But beware: the fetishistic power of the commodity is not an extraneous thing with no critical value (as though it is just a foam which we must always cut through to arrive at the real scene of production and ‘labour’). No, it has tremendous critical import [consumption cannot be treated as separate from production]. It is what allows us to define the commodity-form. And so we know that these fetishistic powers have a connection with the real abstraction in the act of exchange that we are talking about.

If such is the case, then it does not make sense for Vijay to ‘go back’ to labour. As in, why should he go back to labour in the labour union sense? Since, in any case, labour in this sense is not the form (the modality) in which it has gone in into the value-process, into the smuggled money and the gold from Dubai. That labour is, to use the right terminology, what are calling socially necessary labour time, capacity of labour, not labour in the sense given in the theory of factors of production.

Sweat and perfume

But apart from that, more crucially, the value which is ‘discovered’ at the level of consumption, at the level of value: that is what allows the socially necessary labour time to have value in the first place. So we do not go FROM labour TO the value of the commodity. There is no causal connection. I was about to say, it runs the other way, from commodity to labour - that would be incorrect too, another extreme... Rather, it is about defining the form [which ‘contains’ in it both value and labour, consumption/exchange and production in as it were ‘one whole’].

Ok if it is getting complicated, let us try to put a handle to this [through the example of sweat and perfume].

There is no kind of substrate of something solid like hard labour which backs up, provides the basis to the entire value chain (of course here we cannot forget that even abstract labour does ultimately derive from the real living human labourer, so in that sense again it is solid, a finite human being there…)…

Like some people say, ok this perfume is so nice to smell, but you must be able to smell the sweat of the workers in this perfume. It is the other way round: the sweat of the workers gets valorised because you have the nice smell of the perfume. Because if you are normally a Marxist, a jnu marxist, then you will say, yes… you have to find the smell of the workers’ sweat in the perfume. Then we say no, not at all, if you were to talk of the relationship of labour and capital in the commodity-form, then maybe thats not the way to go about it, dear jnu marxist…!!

The way to go about is to say well, you know, the fact that the jnu marxist valorises the sweat of the labourer is because this perfume [as a commodity] has that value which then allows that labour, which means that this labour is no longer the ‘labour’ from the theory of factors of production, to be valorised.

Vijay, again

So our poor Vijay: now we sympathise with him. For what can Vijay do now? He is already in the smuggling network. Going back to his labour community is not an option. I mean he can go, but that will be only some kind of labour unionism, a kind of a jnu marxist approach. That is the approach of turning labour [working class] into another identity, another group competing for rights and share of resources – locking labour in its place. He will end up trying to equate fighting for labour rights with the fight challenging capitalism.

So what do you want Vijay to do now?

You want him to go and bomb these places?![7] Or, people commit suicide. Workers get thrown out of jobs, they kill themselves. That is what happened with some Kingfisher employees, and did we hear something similar about Jet Airways. The network is bigger. Marx is telling you that.

So if he walked out of Dabar’s offer, then what…

Vijay approach is to make the most of the situation. He wants to make money from both smugglers, use the enemity of the smuggling networks and scoot away with both the gold and the reward he was promised by Dabar for fetching the gold.

So what you see is that, you see, money – there is a section in the Zizek article – where he talks of money. Money is just a coin, just paper. But why do we think it has value? Of course he says that since it has the stamp of a central authority like a central bank, it is what he calls the Symbolic. But if you were to think of money in the sense of value then one thing is for sure in our discussion that it is not coming from objectified labour, or a quantified amount of labour, but from labour-time – time becomes very important.

III

Time, Time

But do you know the importance of time? We will get little bit speculative. So you use raw materials, labour and other things to produce something, and through exchange, through the market it has value… But as you know capital is trying to use as less raw materials, as less labour as possible. Basically cut down the cost of production.

But imagine a scenario where cost of production is zero, but yet you want to generate value. But at the limit what is it that will still be expended? We say that the ultimate capitalist utopia is to do away with labour in toto and yet generate value. That is one. But now we are saying that, not just labour, not even raw materials (or rather no ‘expenditure’). Baithe baithe kamana, haram ka paisa… And yet something will still be expended, which is not in anybody’s hands, anyone’s control…

Time! Yes.

Time feels like the bottomline truth of existence, of life. It feels like a metaphysical transcendental truth, absolutely given…

Looks like capitalism wants to approach that limit case. It has already done away with labour as the work of labour. From there it has kind of left it and said we can make it approach the limit case. If we can use the labour power, if we can control the capacity of labour, then we can extract amounts of work according to the state of technology, capital’s requirements and so on – and that also without violating workers rights, contracts, salary, hours of work agreed upon from before with the worker.

Rights are provided to the workers. They are citizens. It is not a horrific scenario for the workers. [It is an Eden of rights.] It is a nice world, full of freedom, choice and what have you, and now in April 2019, about to the choose the next government… Very empowered… These are proud citizens. Do not think they are some bechara people – nor did Marx assume so.

Here is, if you like, the device or trick: ‘capacity of labour’ means that we can now cut to the bones, pare it down to as much as possible to a time scenario. Labour will be as close as possible to time itself, so that time itself will become, as it were, the begetter of value. The way Facebook makes money which depends, even if indirectly, on the amount of users – what the users give Facebook is not hard labour, chopping wood… but time (or attention). The more the time given by users the more or higher ad companies would be inclined to pay.

Vijay throw a bomb?

If this is the case, then our Vijay is not going to see the money and the gold from Dubai AND think about his workers getting exploited to the bones! [Even though he could have… Let us say, there is no causal or structural necessity to it.]

Because the workers’ labour is labour which has undergone so much transformation. There are too many steps there… It is not that you start with the workers’ labour and go step by step, higher and higher to finally arrive at the spaces of hyper-consumption and value. To repeat: The realm of consumption and the act of exchange, the real abstraction, are crucial to the socially necessary labour time being able to produce value.

You can say then that instead Vijay should just go and throw a bomb in the heart of the spectacle! You can also say that he should go and prepare for a revolution, whatever that means. He can neither simply go back to the workers nor be part of the smuggling networks: from our viewpoint here.

You know of the notion of spectacle – Guy Debord.[8] So Vijay spends time at the bar, near the swimming pool. Swimming pool at a five star hotel: what kind of a space is that? Hyper-consumption, lifestyle space… As it were, the commodity form will now connect this space with the dock-workers: this is possible with Marx’s ideas now.

Vijay’s mother: or how Law displaces the class struggle

We will come back later to Vijay’s mother.

The mother is not happy with the huge bungalow the son has bought. She is not objecting to the bungalow since that bungalow is connected one way or another to the sweat of the workers, workers like her husband. That is not reason she gives. That could have been the reason for the rejection. But no. Well that is Javed Akhtar’s progressive stand…! Because they do 786 – Hindu-Muslim bhai-bhai – and they are happy they are progressive enough! Secularism upholded, communalism derided – very good. Now we can do anything!

Her objection is two-fold. She does not like her son to mess up with the wrong guys. Second is that she thinks he is doing something illegal. Law comes in as this cipher, as the bastard mediation – taking things to a stupid level, oh how can do you this, it is all illegal… As though if it was legal, it was all fine. Surplus value is legal. Nowhere did Marx say that surplus value is illegal. In fact, the entire point of Marx is that it is legal. The labourer Marx calls ‘free labourer’. The labourer is a rights-endowed citizen. So it is a totally legal thing.

And it is not even that the legal process of the extraction of surplus value can be kind of bettered, beautified, you can make certain changes in the law, and make it better for the worker, what are called redistribution policies – like give more to the farmers, give more to the dalits, to the minorities, to the workers, to women. Marx is not going in this direction. He is not really for redistribution.

In fact, we can say that Marx is not even for egalitarianism!!

There was this recent debate between Zizek and Peterson and Peterson says that the problem with Marxism is that it focuses on equality as an absolute goal. How can you have equality for all, since there are differences, people have differential capacities and abilities, so of course people will differential incomes… Zizek counters well, but unfortunately does not develop the point. But he does point out that Marx actually is not for egalitarianism – that is your wrong understanding. Which is true…

Because egalitarianism, equality will again lead you back to that non-Marxist notion of labour upheld by bourgeois economics. Because then with such a notion of labour, you will end up having to ask ‘who should have how much share, how much should go for capital, how much for labour, … thats redistribution’. Then again you are never really entering the production process – upholding the invisibility of the production process and hypervisibility of consumption and the spectacle. You are never really considering the process of production of value. Classless society in that sense can totally have ‘inequality’ – that can be safely inferred from Marx.

Vijay’s mother will not give such a critique. She sentimentalises, “Beta kanoon…, yeh nahin kar sakte ho”, etc. Ravi the police officer also gets sentimental about law: “bhai aap jo kar rahe ho….”. Ravi is also the son of the same father. In fact, Ravi in that scene in the night where he is filling up the application for jobs… He remembers his father saying “jab tak sabhi ko rahene ka ghar… nahin hoga tab tak nahi subah nahi ayega”… Uff!

Now: how will that new dawn come about, through the baton of the police?!

Law interjects and displaces the basic class struggle between capital and labour and makes the division into what is legal and what is illegal. That is what the movie does. In that sense, it is a reactionary movie. It is a right-wing movie. But it is left-wing in the Indian sense, of being secular – just put a Muslim, a Dalit there. Now also, a woman there. In today’s ‘gender-sensitive’ variation, maybe there will be mother will say, but what is life, I also want go on a vacation, or something like that. Why should I only serve my husband, and I am serving the sons now…. Then you will have a multiplex-oriented experimental counter-cultural movie to be made by Anurag Kashyap! Deewar 2 or 3…

Let us also take another scene. I think this is in smuggler Samant’s office. There are those bundles of money on the glass table. The camera takes a shot from beneath the glass. Then one thinks maybe there will some reflection from Vijay, that well I know what this money is all about, that it comes from the sweat of workers labour and so on… But no he doesn’t. He will not go in that direction at all.

So what kind of an ‘angry young man’ that we are talking about! Then it is left to the mother to be the critic. She at least rejects the crass temptation. She says I am not going to go and stay there. She takes recourse to the law and still that seems quite respectable.

Family and the Law, police

There are of course these basic values, like old world values – we should not steal, we should not lie, be honest etc. But we want to know: why do these values fall in line with the Law? Why couldn’t these basic values be mobilised against her younger son, against Ravi the police officer? “When your father was facing all these injustices, where was your law, Ravi?” Do we hear that from the mother? Why should it be Vijay only saying that? Poor Vijay. Vijay is also handling too much.

In Godfather III, where Michael Corleone’s wife is saying, you useless fellow you gave me so much hardship… – this is Godfather III – you never took care of me, you never took care of the family. Then Michael, who is a mafia guy, a don, but now he is a respectable man in New York who is about to give a lot of money to the Vatican – that respectable. Reminds one of Haji Mastan who was later much respectable and moving in the highest echelons in Mumbai. So when the wife challenges Michael, he bursts out saying, “on the contrary, all of my life I was fighting to save my family, you, my children”.

Now in a way that was true. The other dons would have finished off Michael’s family. So he had to do something about it. In fact, he ends up killing his own brother. He can say, “would the police, the law, have defended my familiy, if I were to give up being a don?”

Vijay has a similar approach: what good is the police? I think this is in the scene in the bungalow with his mother and then Ravi comes in. And also during the scene under the bridge, the place where the “mere pas maa hai” dialogue takes place. Also Vijay here tries to belittle Ravi by saying that “mere paas gadhi hai, bungala hai… tere pas kya hai!” Now here to me it feels unfair to have Vijay say such things – he does not look like a guy who would be so low to make such empty boasts. I am a little sentimental here. It is a little unfair on the part of the script-writer. Do you think, from the overall character of Vijay, he would actually say that? It does not fit. This dialogue demeans Vijay. There is something going on there…

IV

Can the value-process (or ‘capitalism’?) be directly experienced?

Some conceptual questions to think about:

In the process of value generation according to Marx, we have the following:

Commodity form, process of real abstraction, and then the exchange of equivalents and the generation of value which is the social process (or the ‘social’ of capital) through which the commodity is produced, even though the commodity seems to have fetishistic powers as though the commodity does not get value through the social process of production.

If all this is true, then, and that is a problem for Vijay also – this way of value generation Marx tells us about – is there any way to directly or sensorily experience it? Ok we call this abstraction ‘real abstraction’ (does ‘real’ mean we can experience or observe it directly?).

Let us consider say the process of capital accumulation. Say the way capitalism keeps producing, keeps producing… millions of mobile phones, millions of laptops, plastic, everything – even though the environment and the conditions of life on earth are getting destroyed…. Yet this process does not stop.

So definitely we do not even need to read Marx. We know there is some kind of an abstract (‘uncontrollable’) logic at work, ‘unstoppable’. Marx of course conceptually breaks down this logic and shows – look, this is what is going on inside this monstrous accumulation process. It is like blindly running into danger. That is what ‘humanity’ is doing on earth. And there is no stopping it. We are told that some very rich, powerful people are planning to, if there is a destruction of the earth, go to outer space. In science fiction movies we see that: in outer space some really rich people live and on earth all the humans will be here, the ‘higher humans’ would shift out.

The point is: is there any way to experience this process first hand? Like feudal oppression you know it is there – you get beaten up or something… In slavery you are literally chained. But here we have rights, freedom with a fair share of fun and frolic – everything is there!

So the value-generation process where value begets value, where money as an abstract quantity immediately territorialises another value-generation mechanism[9]. It is like you blow a bubble. The bubble is coming from here, like you know the soap bubble thing sold on the streets. But bubble goes up, and it produces another bubble – in the meantime you find that there is no supply of soap water. Now one bubble leads to the other, to another, another….That is the value generation we are talking about[10]. It has become a spectacle (a tamasha), it is going on and on. That is what Marx is telling.

There, in that bubble, is labour there? Yes. But it is labour as capacity of labour only.

But of course, as I was telling you, the ultimate utopia is that the only thing expended is time. Because that cannot be stopped. Can we stop time? Can we do anything which does not involve the passing of time? In that sense, time is the ultimate limit. Time is God. Nothing beyond it.

You can destroy the earth, have Holocausts, use all the nuclear weapons available in each country, destroy life and all. But ‘time’, what is ‘time’? It keeps passing.

If that is how it is, then look at labour. Labour has now become time, labour-time.

If it is an abstract process, we cannot experience it directly. Our guy Vijay. We cannot blame Vijay. Early on in the movie, we can see that he can experience the tyranny faced by his mother at the construction site. And he reacted to it by throwing a stone at the oppressive man. Vijay reacted to the tyranny of the goondas of Samant who were extorting money from workers. But this other tyranny we are identifying here – what tyranny is this?

So that is one question we want to raise?

So cant be too unfair to Vijay.

In a way, what Vijay is doing… Vijay’s life is one of traversing this commodity form.

So we must go back to the notion of commodity form. I know you guys are keen to throw silly and not very silly, very intelligent questions, to throw at me.

The commodity form: we have already explained it through Deewar. Ah also look at the title of the film Deewar, the Wall. There is a fight between two brothers, a wall. Where are they taking us with this! Just a fight between two brothers!

So we take a break now.[11]

[1] Deewar is seen as presaging the time of the Emergency in India (1975-77). But this is commonplace. Better to read Deewar as chronicling the finer social aspects that led to the emergence of the Shiv Sena and the decline of communist working class politics in Mumbai. It chronicles the journey of class struggle in its lived, experiential and gritty aspects involving worker, smuggler, family, police, crime and so on. That Haji Mastan is from the minority Muslim community is also significant.

[2] The objectified labour is that which the worker gives capital as part of the wage contract: this is the official deal. But what gets passed on to capital (as it were, unofficially, with no returns to the worker), what is called the capacity of labour or labour-power or living labour, is potentially generative of larger value than the value or wage fixed for objectified labour. Writes Marx: “The worker therefore sells labour as a simple, predetermined exchange value, determined by a previous process – he sells labour itself as objectified labour; i.e. he sells labour only in so far as it already objectifies a definite amount of labour, hence in so far as its equivalent is already measured, given; capital buys it as living labour, as the general productive force of wealth; activity which increases wealth” (Grundrisse, Notebook III, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch06.htm)

[3] ‘Commodity-form’ is a term Marx uses in Capital Vol. 1.

[4] Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology, London, 1978.

[5] Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, London, 1989.

[6] It is as though the agents were, behind their backs, even as their consciousness is focused on the ‘practical’ useful aspects, through their acts of exchange, defining a social, a social which then is repressed, pushed underground. This disavowed social is the ‘real abstraction’, the real process of the production of value. The disavowed character, this never visible, never acknowledged character of the social is therefore abstract – even though very real, as real as social production. It is real since it acquires the value-dimension through the acts of individual agents in the way they relate to each other in the exchange of commodities. The term used by Marx to understand all of this is the commodity-form.

[7] This would give us something like a surrealist path to terror.

[8] Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle.

[9] For money and capital as ‘a pure quantity’ effecting territorialisation and de-territorialisation, see Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus.

[10] Of course this would mean only focusing on ‘real subsumption’ process and not on ‘formal subsumption’. Or that we are focusing only on ‘free labour’ and not on ‘unfree labour’ – as though there is not always unfree labour or formal subsumption underlying any value generation process based supposedly purely on free labour. These are important questions that we are unable to address here. Related to it is of course the question of primitive accumulation and colonial surplus which feeds into capital’s value-generation process. Questions of race and caste would be pertinent. Here we are focusing only on the core theoretical apparatus of the commodity-form in Marx.

[11] One overall question we have raised here, of wider significance, is this: why is there no moral compunction associated with deserting the class struggle. And why it feels totally right, this way! This is where we need to focus closely on the significance of the distinction Marx makes between labour and labour-power – what perceptive Marxists (like Louis Althusser and Mario Tronti) have called Marx’s single most important discovery, and what places him apart from other non-Marxist socialist advocates of labour. With the notion of labour-power or the capacity of labour, which is what goes into the process of production of surplus value, now there is no identitarian ‘labour’ any more – does this mean that there is no labour ‘to go back to’, hence no traitor to the class, or to the class struggle? We know of traitors to the nation, to the community. But looks like there can be no traitor to the class struggle? It is very suggestive then that Stalin invoked instead the notion of ‘enemy of the people’. Vijay cannot be judged for ‘very good reasons’, something which follows from the very logic of capital, from the real abstraction and fetishism it internally generates.

Particularly, in India, different traditions have given a very high place to the ascetic life or ascetic ideal. Nietzsche will invoke the Indian traditions too.

Nietzsche of course does not uphold the ascetic ideal but mercilessly attacks it. For him this ideal aligns with slave morality.

For Nietzsche this ascetic life includes also a life in science, scientists, atheists and materialists, who pursue truth, who value truth.

Most scholars would want to understand the ascetic life in terms of the spiritual, the sublime and the Unknown. What is interesting is that Nietzsche wants to understands it as part of the instinct of self-preservation. He understands it in relation to life. Indeed, the ascetic ideal is a bit like an objective necessity for evolutionary purposes — in fact, “a high-order necessity”:

There must be a high-order necessity which makes this species hostile to life always grow again and flourish — it must be in the interest of life itself not to have such a type of self- contradiction die out.

In his The Genealogy of Morals, we are told that the ascetic seems to uphold the contradiction, the absurdity, of “life against life”. A self-contradiction: where you have a mode of life which denies life only in order to still persist in life, continue, uphold and maintain life. So we have this bizarre scenario:

“this ascetic priest, this apparent enemy of life, this denier — precisely he is among the greatest conserving and yes-creating forces of life.”

Nietzsche says that there is a “gap” which the ascetic ideal seeks to fill up. There is a gap between life and the NO that the ascetic says to life.

The No he says to life brings to light, as if by magic, an abundance of tender Yeses; even when he wounds himself, this master of destruction, of self-destruction — the very wound itself afterward compels him to live.

The ascetic ideal is therefore a modality of the instinct of self-preservation (contrary to what the practitioners of this ideal believe in — “therefore the opposite of what those who reverence this ideal believe”).

The life here is however an eclipsed and exhausted life:

the ascetic ideal springs from the protective instinct of a degenerating life which tries by all means to sustain itself and to fight for its existence; it indicates a partial physiological obstruction and exhaustion against which the deepest instincts of life, which have remained intact, continually struggle with new expedients and devices. The ascetic ideal is such an expedient….

The ascetic ideal is the struggle “against disgust with life, against exhaustion, against the desire for the “end””. And with what does one do this struggle? Nietzsche again turns to “life”, when he answers: “the deepest instincts of life, which have remained intact.”

Here is the paradox: “the ascetic ideal is an artifice for the preservation of life”. Now “artifice” and “life” might normally contradict each other, cancel each other — artifice is always distant from the fullness of life and yet that is the point Nietzsche is making. Even when the fullness of life has almost completely disappeared, here is a state where the “deepest instincts of life” would have survived….

Now let us just note here as a preliminary observation that Buddha turns Nietzsche’s conception of the acetic ideal on its head.

For Buddhism, the “ascetic ideal”, if you want to call it that, is not the reversal of “the desire for the ‘end’”, but its calm embrace! Buddha, as it were, pushes on the ascetic ideal to eliminate the “gap” which Nietzsche talks about — such that the “ascetic ideal” is now the end turned into a desire.

Buddha’s notion of the nibbana makes this clear.

Nibbana is the total and final extinction — it is not the attainment of Enlightenment. As Rahula Walpola explains, “There is no such thing as 'entering into Nirvana after death’.” He explains further:

There is a word parinibbuto used to denote the death of the Buddha or an Arahant who has realized Nirvana, but it does not mean 'entering into Nirvana'. Parinibbuto simply means 'fully passed away', 'fully blown out' or 'fully extinct', because the Buddha or an Arahant has no re-existence after his death.

It will be clearer if we bring in another point. And that is that Nietzsche’s notion of the ascetic ideal is in fact closer to the Brahminical ideal of asceticism rather than the Buddhist.

For what Brahminism does is to convert force into power, forces into a social ideology, into power.1 That is, life or life-force is mediated in such a way in Brahminism that social power retains the “natural” legitimacy of nature as life-force even though it is fully part of culture. Power presents itself as force.

Nietzsche is of course extremely sensitive to the conversion of force into power, even though he uses different terms. For example, take his emphasis on how the ascetic ideal came to rule over people:

this ideal acquired such power and ruled over men as imperiously as we find it in history, especially wherever the civilization and taming of man has been carried through….

He locates the power in the “sickliness” of man under the rule of the ascetic ideal. He points to the great internal friction, that great internal tension, where the desire to live, to continue living, thriving, ruling and multiplying must now contradictorily co-exist with the drive towards self-diminution, abnegation. Nietzsche powerfully captures this aspect:

The ascetic priest is the incarnate desire to be different, to be in a different place, and indeed this desire at its greatest extreme, its distinctive fervor and passion; but precisely this power of his desire is the chain that holds him captive so that he becomes a tool for the creation of more favorable conditions for being here and being man — it is precisely this power that enables him to persuade to existence the whole herd of the ill-constituted, disgruntled, underprivileged, unfortunate, and all who suffer of themselves, by instinctively going before them as their shepherd.

The “incarnate desire to be different, to be in a different place” — here we have a more precise formulation of the ascetic ideal, that which gives it the power and the drive. That is why, “this power of his desire” is “the chain that holds him captive”.

Here is an account then of how force, “the deepest instincts of life”, is turned into power — how “an artifice for the preservation of life” is generated, an artifice which is yet close to life.

While Buddhism blocks this process of conversion of force into power, Brahminism precisely allows this conversion while always remaining within the domain of force — that is, always pretending an agnosticism towards ideology and power.

Thus this power-generating force, in order to maintain the agnosticism, must develop a conception adequate to it. Brahminism is the name of a social power which wants to ontologically be seen as belonging to the domain of the passive, of the ascetic, the Unknown even as it actively structures and regulates society. It is as though culture’s break with nature must always be presented as though on the side of nature. Philosophically, such a notion is already to be found in the Upanishads. The Mandukya Upanishad develops this concept of the highest state of consciousness as emanating from the deepest of passive states, the susupta, which is the dreamless sleep.

On the other hand, the great Buddhist text, the Mahasattipathana Sutta, teaches how force can be destroyed through the power and practices of the monk’s body and mind. That is, force is not to develop into power. The “contradiction of life against life” is resolved in a different way.

This is where we find that we must revise Nietzsche’s statement that “the ascetic ideal is an artifice for the preservation of life”. If we take the word “artifice” as the key word here, then we know that Nietzsche is focusing on how the ascetic life is another way of duplicitously concentrating power in the ascetic priest.

In the light of Buddhism, we must now revise Nietzsche’s phrase “the ascetic ideal is an artifice for the preservation of life”. For now we must say: “the ascetic ideal is the method for leading a life without vasana, without the accumulation of vasana or karma”. In the Bhagavad Gita, we see a perversion if you like of the Buddhist ideal — Arjuna’s is supposed to be rising above vasana, attachment and brotherly love, only to attain to a “higher purpose”, higher karma. The sublimity of karmic yoga, of being the vehicle of a higher purpose, of the Unknown, the Renunciation of the Earthly attachments, does not in any way mean a life without vasana.

The Bhagavad Gita seems to completely permit the conversion of force into power, the ascetic ideal as the accumulation of power for Arjuna, renunciation as a modality of power.

Yet it must be said that the Buddhist account of the removal of vasana, the end to all karmic accumulation, of what is the teaching of parinibutto, the end to the ceasing and becoming, does include precisely the practice and method of working with an Ineffable Self. In that sense, Buddhism does allow for a dialectical notion of the self, a self which while trying to abhor all trishna, in fact, must work towards that end by mobilising, deploying, appeasing trishna itself. Buddhism allows for a minimal self, or a minimally dialectical self — that being a core element in the doctrine of no-self, anatta.2

Given that the Buddhist ascetic ideal is free of vasana, free of the ascetic priest’s “incarnate desire” which is the basis of his power, it is possible that Nietzsche would find the Buddhist notion, properly understood, much more acceptable. But then Buddhism would not allow the short-circuit to the Superman!

We will here call attention to what is actually a conflation of Marxism with the socio-economic, the reduction of Marxism to the “socio-economic”. This has led to many casualties, apart from a basic flaw in Kosambi’s work.

One such casualty has been Kosambi’s rather impoverished response to S. A. Dange’s work on India’s ancient Vedic society.

Let me risk stating Dange’s basic proposition in one line: In the Vedic world, “Brahman” stood for the commune, while “yajna” stood for its collective mode of production.2 Dange is here trying to argue in favour of his thesis that primitive communism existed in India during the time of the Rig Veda. Kosambi rejects both the thesis as well as the way Dange goes about proving it through a discussion and exegesis of Vedic texts.

My argument is that Kosambi is misplaced in his assessment of Dange. While Dange might have got his scholarly details wrong, the broad direction of his research was highly laudable and opens the way for a very productive Marxist engagement with ancient Indian history, culture, economy, mythology and religion.

Kosambi misses an important aspect. At the time, and perhaps even today, most “serious engagement” on India’s past or its mythological heritage was focused on jnana kanda, or jnana yoga. Karma-kanda was regarded as almost synonymous with chicanery or just mechanical rituals and meaningless mantras — assuredly, a way for the cunning Brahmin to fool the oppressed castes. From Vivekananda to Aurobindo, Gandhi to Radhakrishnan, the focus was on the high-minded but very sterile spirituality of jnana marga. Advaita philosophy was a product of that.

Rig Veda itself was treated as though it had to be rescued from Sayanacharya’s “materialistic” interpretation. Hence Aurobindo would then want to spiritualise and aestheticise the Rig Vedic verses.3 Any reference to a real object or thing had to be metaphorically explained. The rejection of karma kanda in the name of rejecting “materialism” or “senseless rituals” went hand in hand with the extolment of the jnana marg. Even Kosambi himself decided to focus his attention on Bhagavad Gita, the ur-text of jnana marga, albeit in order to unpack its “socio-economic” aspects. Yet he is unable to escape the above presuppositions and orbit of modern reflexive Brahminism.

Dange’s intervention to open up the Rig Veda and read it for a wider public without the pretentious high-mindedness of jnana marga is therefore a major break with orthodoxy, a leap of imagination, even if he got many details and specifics wrong.

Dange’s work taking us to the Vedas allows us to come out of the entire “Tilak vs. Gandhi”, “Karma-yoga vs. Jnana Yoga”, “Action vs. Renunciation”, “Pravritti marg vs. Nivritti marg” rut in which Indian philosophy was stuck.

On the other hand, the secularists were stuck on the question of Nirgun vs. Sagun, Kabir vs. Tulsidas. (Gajanan Muktibodh, the Marxist among the “Marxists”, being that rare exception who looked for a way beyond Nirgun and Sagun, Kabir and Tulsidas.4)

In such an atmosphere, Dange opened for us the question of the material basis of Indian society, by so “faithfully” reading Indian civilisation’s founding document in a way which flew in the face of the high pundits of Advaita and Vedantic philosophy. Karma-kanda is rejected as “materialistic” by Aurobindo and if Sayana’s interpretation of Rig Veda is “materialistic” then perhaps karma-kanda has not been properly understood by the Marxists like Kosambi — that perhaps the rejection of “senseless rituals” betrays a Brahminical arrogance of the jnana marga.

Just for the record, senseless rituals could be studied from a Marxist perspective, as we see in the work of Louis Althusser.5 As we know, Althusser gives the example of kneeling down to say a prayer. So even if “yajna”, which Dange proposes should be taken up as standing for the “mode of production” of the commune, is reduced to mere senseless rituals, we cannot forget that the latter must be understood in relation to Brahminical beliefs or Brahminical ideology. Or it is possible that the “yajna” spontaneously generates “beliefs” or “ideology” that are communistic.

II

Let us turn to the specifics of Kosambi’s argument.

Dange titled his work as “India: From Primitive Communism to Slavery”, published in 1947.6 Kosambi writes his review soon after in 1948, titled “Marxism and Ancient Indian Culture”, published in the well-known Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute.7

After using some choice epithets to downgrade Dange’s work, Kosambi goes on to point out that the thesis of primitive communism might not even apply to the Aryans in India since, right at the outset, their entrance in the subcontinent is marked by their destruction of an advanced civilisation like the Indus Valley Civilisation. He writes:

Our Aryans did not succeed to power without destroying the older civilization, and we must therefore look for the effects of this destruction upon the conquerors as well as the conquered (p. 275).

A society which destroys an older civilisation surely cannot be regarded as being a (primitive) communist society. And surely no one can disagree with Kosambi on this point. To presume that Dange would think otherwise on such a basic point does not sound right.

Here however we cannot forget that whether the Aryans destroyed the Indus Valley Civilisation or there were some other factors for the same, is an ongoing debate — and surely, Dange’s work cannot be judged just on the basis of getting this fact right.

According to Kosambi, if the caste system and the state already existed during the old Vedic period, then there can be no basis for Dange to characterise that period as “primitive communism”. Kosambi is very much on point in arguing that division of labour is not necessary for caste, or some other form of oppression preceding it, to exist. Even without division of labour, certain forms of oppression might have existed in Vedic society. Kosambi points to the relation of the Aryans with the dasyus, which is one of oppression. This relation of domination is the source of the word varna, which means colour. He draws attention to “the formation of the Sūdra caste, into which a large portion of the Dasyus were thrust”. Thus even before varna, caste, a form of social hierarchy was already at work — something which Dange fails to recognise.

So, for Kosambi, Dange is wrong in considering that primitive communism existed in Vedic society.

Again, another point Kosambi makes is that slavery did not exist in India at the time. In fact, the emergence of varna displaced the potential for the development of slavery. He states: “The formation of the Sūdra caste, into which a large portion of the Dasyus were thrust, prevented the development of real slavery in India”.

Kosambi’s conclusion: Dange's very title is wrong, for his sources contain neither primitive communism nor slavery.

Then Kosambi goes on to argue that Dange tries to locate matriarchy in the wrong place, in the wrong time period. Matriarchy which could have provided a basis for Dange’s thesis of primitive communism is also now denied by Kosambi.

Kosambi points to Dange’s poor scholarly standard: “poor documentation, habit of passing off secondary references unverified (and unverifiable ), poor grasp of the material, and absence of logic in interpretation”. All in all, Kosambi is extremely dismissive of Dange’s work, treating it as worthless and completely pointless. He in fact ridicules Dange. Very rare it is to find a reviewer so self-assured about the vacuity of another author’s work.

As though taking cue from the master, Romila Thapar also disparages Dange’s work as a mechanical imitation of European models. She writes:

An attempt was made by S A Dange, in his book, India: From Primitive Communism to Slavery, to argue for a slaved-based economy for the ancient past. Kosambi’s critique of the book pointed out the flaws in the recon- struction of etymologies as also in the use of sources and others that followed from conforming mechanically to a given view of what was thought to be the historical materialism of Marx. Attempting to fit the evidence to a particular framework showed a lack of analytical thinking. For Kosambi, analytical thinking was a primary requirement especially in considering variant forms within a Marxist framework. Marxism he said was not a substitute for thinking.8

For Thapar, it is enough to refer to Kosambi’s “critique of the book”, feeling no need to directly engage with it. Kosambi and Thapar together put the final seal on the fate of Dange’s intervention. We are all now supposed to just follow suit.

III

And yet we know that Kosambi, not to speak of Thapar, does not tell us anything about Dange’s novel and path-breaking orientation. Dange does display some wooden-headed dogmatic thinking in trying to imagine that India must also be seen to have passed through “primitive communism”. If you hold him to account on that score alone then you can surely score good brownie points and earn the reputation of being a “critical scholar”.

But Dange is not wrong in finding some form of communism or the commons in Vedic society. Very good minds in India who have nothing to do with Marxism or with what Thapar calls “mechanical” thinking, have on their own discovered some form of “samyavad” in Vedic society. Swami Agnivesh comes to mind. Dange might be wrong in the specifics but he is pointing in the right direction.

Consider this: the inner logic of Vedic rituals, yajna and mantra point to a mode of production and reproduction based on the destruction of surplus.

The question of surplus destruction is of concern to other scholars too. Marcel Mauss’s work on the potlatch is well-known. In his Given Time, Derrida refers to “the zero or infinite speed of the circle”. Then he refers to how “the gift is annulled in the economic odyssey of the circle”.9 We know of Bataille’s work on the destruction of surplus or excess, in one case, among the Aztecs.10 Sacrifice or the burning at the fire, in the yajna, is also zero or the infinite speed of the circle and it does not admit of surplus accumulation. One can even add here that Buddhism’s opposition to “human sacrifice” or “animal sacrifice” (say in the aswamedha yajna) might be marking, and legitimising, the transition from surplus-free to surplus-accumulating society. Buddhism’s progressive credentials can now be put to test in a novel light, once we allow a serious engagement with the Rig Veda.

It is well known for example that in Vedic society, there were communal Gods. The sectarian Gods are a later development. Gods and humans are in constant interchange, struggle, conflict and cooperation in Vedic society. It is common for example to find that the Gods are being chased by Agni and they come and seek refuge in humans. But humans are in turn consumed by fire — Agni is then chased away by humans and finally it is absorbed in the baked rice which is what goes into the fire (yajna), thereby completing the cycle.

Scholars like Roberto Calasso and Dipak Bhattacharya have shown that humans and Gods have common proprietorship in Vedic society.11 And yet it is again to be admitted that Dange might be misplaced in looking for the commune in the yajna or in Brahman itself. But that some form of “the commons” seem integral to the inner logic of Vedic society seems undeniable. Making this point need not amount to, as Thapar imagines, “conforming mechanically to a given view of what was thought to be the historical materialism of Marx”. For all you know, the Europeans might have taken the idea of primitive communism as an early “stage” from the ancients, not excluding the Vedic people!

Aryan people killed and oppressed non-Aryans or Anarya, dasyus, shudras, as we find in the account of the Dashrajna-yuddha in the Rig Veda. Hence there is no commons at this level. When we talk of the commons we have to keep in mind that one is referring to the inner logic and constitution of Vedic society.

Here is what is most embarrassing for Kosambi. In some of his writings, Kosambi’s own findings about Vedic society offer precisely the kind of evidence that Dange was seeking for his own argument. This is clearly something which Dange himself could not carry out with the kind of precision and academic rigour of Kosambi. Take for example instances where Kosambi points to the destruction of surplus produce in ancient India. He writes, “some of the Panjab tribes…. burned the surplus rather than barter it in trade” (p. 85).12 More to the point, Kosambi highlights the most relevant aspect of the yajna. First he points out that “sacred books deal overwhelmingly with yajna blood sacrifices”. Then he goes on to say that “such monstrous unlimited ritual killing proves that the society had begun to exhaust its means of subsistence” (p. 87). Kosambi is critical of sacrifice, and he takes a rather humanist-liberal stance on the destruction of surplus.

Kosambi provides evidence about the destruction of surplus accumulation, both in avoiding exchange in barter and through ritual killing. This means that he himself is providing evidence of the non-emergence of a ruling class, caste elite or the formation of state in Vedic society. He is in fact substantiating the point Dange is struggling to provide evidence for. Surely, this can be read as strengthening Dange’s central proposition about Vedic society — not necessarily his rather doctrinaire thesis that primitive communism existed at the time but the overall point about a zero-accumulation society.

IV

It is surprising then why Kosambi would be so unrelenting in dismissing Dange. Apart from what looks like sectarian attitude towards Dange, it might emanate from his approach. For it is clear from the above quotes what sense he makes of Vedic society’s refusal to engage in surplus accumulation. He tends to think that the lack of surplus accumulation is just about the backwardness of Vedic society. He projects today’s dominant ethos of the accumulationist drive as the norm from which ancient society must be evaluated and judged. Hence he is unable to understand Vedic society in its own terms. He is not interested in understanding Vedic society in terms of of its internal logic, as a whole society with its own internal criteria of good and bad. Indeed, Thapar’s charge of the mechanical application of the stagist theory of history can be labelled on Kosambi — and indeed on Thapar!

Dange for all his other shortcomings wants to understand Vedic society for what it was, rather than viewing it in terms of our present criteria and yardstick.

Here is a world where man is in awe of the natural world and its powers, but not in fear. Where man is directly playing with the powers and mysteries of the universe, directly playing with them, in an endless game of hide and seek, win and loss, one time the God, other time human, as devas and the danavs.

Action, Karma, is its own frame of reference and is not subservient to appeasing some other Unknown or Otherworldly force, the Transcendental Unknown of the Bhagavad Gita. Renunciation is not yet a thing in the Rig Veda. Rig Veda can be said to be pre-Axial, if we understand Axiality in the sense attributed to it by Karl Jaspers in his work on the philosophy of history.13 That Dange somewhere tries to reach out and explicate this pre-Axialic Vedic world without the later inflections of Buddhism, Upanishadic Brahiminism and Vedantism is a major advance in the possibilities opened up in the historiography of ancient India.

Karma, action is without vasana. There is no karmic accumulation which will decide what happens to you after death. What you do here remains here, rises and ends here. Action is not internally split. Unlike in the post-Vedic period, action does not fear its own attachment and desire, which now is demoted to some kind of an underbelly, the unconscious. This also means that there is no notion of seeking moksha, liberation from this worldly existence. The cycle of birth and re-birth does not apply. Bhakti, devotion to the sectarian God, does not make sense. There is no personal God to be appeased. Paap and punya, or the carry-over from the past lives, is not known.

Vedic world is very this-worldly even as the other-worldly dimension is not diminished in any way and exists in all its splendour. Seeking moksha from earthly life is not the highest good. The highest good is simply “to live a hundred autumns” and “to see the sun longer”, as the Rig Veda says.

That does not mean that Vedic world is not “spiritual”. It means that spirituality is not to be opposed to materiality — they exist in mutual interpenetration, like the unity and struggle of opposites. Wendy Doniger is not wrong when she writes about the Vedic world, that:

“It does become evident that rather than characterise the ritual world as worldly, one might do better to characterise the non-ritual world as sacred” (The Rig Veda, p. 229).14

V

Kosambi thinks like a positivist. He argues that some form of state or some form of class differentiation might have existed in Vedic society — he looks for certain “features” that would “prove” that primitive communism does not apply to Vedic society. He does not however wish to think of Vedic society, including these “features” in terms of their overall articulation, in terms of their inner logic. He does not ask what is the essential logic of reproduction and production in which these elements are drawn into. For example, when Marx talks about capitalist accumulation he does not mean that there are no elements of feudal relations or even slavery somewhere in global capitalism. Discovery of such “elements” would not falsify the thesis of capitalism.

Dange does not delve so much into the “socio-economic” dimension of the Rig Veda. But that is because he has chosen his focus to be the idealist form which the socio-economic takes. This point can also be made by turning the tables on Kosambi’s essay on the Bhagavad Gita.

Kosambi’s approach to the Gita completely overlooks an appreciation of the characters and figures or the chief protagonists. For while you might conduct an excellent socio-economic analysis of the Gita, you would not want to forget that the Gita is above all about two characters, Krishna and Arjuna. The dialogue between the two is what one encounters when one approaches the Gita — and this is what stays with the reader and the listener. For that matter, the Gita also contains a strong critique of certain Vedic practices, rejecting the practices of sacrifice and Vedic yajna. The Gita is a jnana marga critique of Rig Veda. The findings about the socio-economic aspects of the Gita must be understood in terms of the form in which the Gita immediately appears when we read or listen to it.

Dange’s approach to the Vedic society or to the Vedic texts proceeds from a focus on the form of appearance, that is, what the texts from the time are saying, the self-image of the age as presented by the actors themselves. It is in conjunction with this aspect that the socio-economic relations must be grasped. Marx too in Capital starts with an analysis not of labour processes, not of the underlying base or production system, but the form of appearance of the underlying social relations, viz., the form of the commodity and commodity fetishism.15 After all, for long-disappeared ancient societies sometimes the most well preserved remains we have are the utterances of the bards, stories, songs and other writings. That is an added reason why the form of appearance must be taken seriously.

Kosambi’s partiality is of course quite understandable and in fact has a positive side to it. It can partly be accounted for by Kosambi’s otherwise highly commendable emphasis on archaeological evidence in history writing — hence, why rely on forms of appearances or the self-image of the age. However, in the case of the Rig Vedic period, with scant archaeological evidence, with hardly any extant ruins or debris, the texts and the self-image of the age are what we mostly have. There again Dange’s approach retains its validity.

Thus, anyone who reads Kosambi’s essay on the Gita does not feel prepared in anyway to address the kind of views on the Gita by say Gandhi, Tilak or Aurobindo. Kosambi’s method does not tell us, or even pose the question, as to why the dialogues in the Gita took the shape or form it did, given the kind of socio-economic relations at work. Why did those socio-economic relations articulate themselves in the kind of conception of karma or of moral precepts on killing, brotherhood, and responsibility that we find in the Gita.

Kosambi’s focus on the archaeological and evidence-based history writing is of course well understood. He was, from this perspective, consciously trying to avoid the kind of “idealist” understanding which takes the text and the scriptures at face value. This is a great contribution. But that does not mean that any focus on text, outer appearance or self-image is ipso facto idealist or non-Marxist. Dange surely did not deserve the hostile treatment Kosambi metes out.

VI

Apart from Dange, very few scholars devoted attention to the Rig Vedic society itself. Most scholars in India tend to study the Vedas in order to prove or disprove their position in hot-button debates on Aryan migration, or whether Aryans/Brahmins are foreign invaders. Soon such discussions end up repeating generic ideas about a Golden Age in the past, or a caste horror for the shudras. Today, lot of these “debates” feed into the culture wars and post-truth battles on the internet and social media.

What is missing is any attempt to understand Vedic society from the inside, its inner constitutive principle. Rahul Sankrityayan was perhaps an exception, an outlier, in devoting a lot of attention on Vedic society, in particular, the Rig Veda. Swami Agnivesh too made attempts to connect socialism with the Rig Vedic society.

Of course, by the Vedic society we mean that which pertains to the earliest of hymns in the Rig Veda, which would exclude the 10th mandala which, most scholars agree is a later addition.16 The 10th Mandala contains the all-important Purusha Sukta, which is taken to be the religious basis of the caste/varna system.  Without this Mandala, considering it was a later addition, we again would be open to considering the possibility of a far more benign social mode of living in the early Vedic times. Again, this lends credence to Dange’s overall research orientation of a communal mode as the inner principle of social life during the early Vedic time — even if his attempt to specifically establish the “existence” of “primitive communism” was both misplaced and avoidable.

If Dange’s thesis is even broadly true then we might have to consider the possibility of a Vedic critique of both Brahminism and Buddhism. Kosambi could have  taken the cue and carried the research in this direction, which had the possibility of  inaugurating new horizons for historical materialism based on Indian realities. This would provide an alternative to the sterile “Charvaka materialism” which Indian leftists celebrate a bit too much. Instead, Kosambi gets caught up in nitpicking on Dange.

The entertainment industry has found in the BFIW an excellent way to weave a story and win eyeballs — and make a lot of money. The 2019 TV series, “Made in Heaven” directed by Zoya Akhtar, exploits this to the hilt.

Made in Heaven is the name of a company you can hire in order to organise weddings. They want to get contracts for big fat weddings. Destination weddings, weddings in exotic locales, old monuments, royal havelis, and what not. All of this of course caters to the very rich. The story is narrated through the happenings and intrigues of characters in this company.

But, sorry, no easy potshots here — that “oh this film is only about rich people’s problems”. Nope. You cannot guilt-trip the movie-makers. You cannot virtue-signal here — since the movie itself is full of virtue-signalling. Virtue-signalling its way to riches. Social justice, gender justice, LGBTI+ justice, environmental justice, climate justice — all these thrive and flourish. A splendid job indeed!

You might then surmise that there is an elephant in the room — that it skirts the issue of “class justice” and “class inequality”. Lo and behold, it does address them, too! It addresses them sincerely enough to gladden many left-wing hearts. And yet this is where the plot starts to unravel. It couldn’t have been otherwise. Inability to handle class, or the follies of handling class, despite “good intentions”. This is the real story of Made in Heaven. They could have best avoided it altogether and made a politically incorrect film and it would have immensely gladdened my sectarian “left-wing” heart. But they insist on their folly. One wonders why?

But the answer is not difficult.

For you must keep in mind that this is a woke film — its makers are FULLY AWAKENED to the concerns of social justice. The film serenades us with its politically correct attitude towards the marginalised, the poor, the lower middle class and sexual minorities. You get far more doses of “social justice” and “progressive politics” than you had ever bargained for in a mainstream highest grossing film.

Something else is going on than just being about “rich people’s problems” — something, shall we say, more twisted? Dense and layered, knotted and convoluted. Spectacular and fetishistic. Exciting and watchable.

In a curious blurring of clearly defined roles, the wedding company owners and their staff have to work quite closely with the wedding families who have hired them. This is where the film weaves the story. The marrying couple and their parents want the planners to know what kind of wedding they really want, the dresses to be worn, the drinks to be served, the venue, and all the detail. There is so much exchange and personal interaction that the planners soon figure out the internal dynamics of the families, internal intrigues, hypocrisies and even “who is cheating on whom”. The planners from the lower classes get a rare, almost voyeuristic peek into the lives of the super rich.

The audience knows the story from the perspective of the wedding planners. But it is also the story of the life of these planners. Their own life and aspirations are interspersed with each of the weddings that they get a contract for. Now that is a lot of material for the story to easily cover many, many episodes and seasons.

The story so far (two Seasons) is propelled by two lead protagonists, Tara and Karan, co-owners of the wedding company. Karan’s homosexual relations are explored in great detail. They are interesting characters, a curious mix of social justice seekers and hustlers craving for money and more money. They should not be confused with either activists or business people in the usual sense, and are in fact portrayed as individuals chasing their dreams and aspirations like everybody else.

Tara at times fits into the straw woman virtuously seeking justice imagined in a Gender Course 101, but is actually a real-life gritty hustler trying to find a quick way to money and the high life. Emancipation through hustling, if you like. A hustler who is not even half as talented or clever as, say, Anna Delvey. If scams are all the rage for Generation Hustle, here is one aided and abetted by Tara’s mother.

Tara's mother constantly pushes her on that soulless path. The mother-daughter duo might empathise with Rosa Parks — or so it seems — but their primary role model would be another mother-daughter duo: Kim Kardashian and her mother Kris Jenner. And that is the mother-daughter duo of the release-your-sex-tape-to-money-and-power fame. Gaming sleazy patriarchy by deploying the power of money and easy fame.

Tara and her super-rich boyfriend Adil’s sex tape which goes public is a key component of the story. Did it just go public or did she make it go public? The film will keep the audience hanging on that suspense for a long while.

In any case, did the sex tape catapult Tara’s career and allow her to instantly scam her way across the class divide? Is this the gender and class intersectionality academics have been trying to figure out, and always failed? Hypocrisy and a certain dirty realism are worn like a badge of honour, often in the name of social justice. Surely, it is not the kind of dirty realism which Fredric Jameson finds worth delving into in his exegesis of Raymond Chandler’s novels.

Woke zeitgeist

Let us say this about the zeitgeist of our times: that we are living in a time when the King has gone woke. I mean, even the King, the monarchy, supposedly the most feudal, medieval, archaic institution! Monarchy now comes from the future. Monarchy has abandoned the past.

Monarchy is progressive.

For Monarchy can rebrand itself as Celebrity — and Celebrity, in particular Hollywood Celebrity, is full of Virtue. Celebrity must keep signalling the right causes, the right virtues otherwise they too are under threat. An unknown power or spirit (zeit-Geist) will finish them off.

A section of the British royalty calls out Monarchy as racist and wants to live the politically correct life of the Hollywood Celebrity. Also: Jeff Bezos (Amazon) refuses to support All Lives Matter (angering conservatives) and extends his support for Black Lives Matter. Wow, right? But why and how this indulgence in progressive politics should help him expand his business empire is food for thought. Nobody’s guess and everybody’s food for thought.

If political virtue (read, political correctness) is so amply stacked up on the side of the richie rich classes, from Monarchy to Celebrity, then what stops our own Big Fat Indian Wedding (BFIW) signifying wealth, class, glitz and glamour to make hay when the sun shines?

Thus Glory to Mother India and her illustrious children!

It is difficult to say which is which: whether BFIW has embraced wokery or wokery has embraced BFIW, finding a natural home.

Here is the formula: BFIW plus LGBTQIA+. Like some strange alchemical combination, it produces enormous amount of Indian family’s shaadi drama — drawing huge eyeballs to push the show high on the charts.

Let us now get serious and turn to one of the many elephants in the room, the question of class, or class divide in the series. Promise: no references to Karl Marx.

Tara’s Way to Heaven

When cut to the chase all the song and dance around social justice comes down to the following let’s say “guiding thought” of the Series. When the really rich who lead the life of royalty condemn racism — “oh, that is racist, mom, how can you do this?” — anti-racism somehow seems so acceptable to all. Anti-racism, anti-sexism now appear so attractive and cool. The racist/sexist poor are now supposed to lap it up, immediately adopt the politically correct stance, in a flash!

Then we will soon enter a world free of all forms of discrimination, won’t we?

Here, the attempt to “end all forms of discrimination” subtextually condemns the poor as the den of vice and meanness.

It is in the character of Tara, coming from a lower middle class family living in downmarket Delhi neighbourhood now married into a rich family, that we find the go-getter gender warrior who cannot but reinscribe the class divide, in trying to sleazily overcome it — or rather, be on the right side of it.

But soon she finds out the truth about the ways of the world. For a change, she has now come to visit her family in the old neighbourhood. “You of course do not like white bread sandwich, and desi chai, right?” Her sister tells her in a slightly chiding tone. Her sister is living a modest life with her husband and kid.

Tara visits Princess Grooming Academy where she, many years ago, took training in the manners and etiquettes of the rich. Now there is a fresh batch of girls undergoing the training with whom Tara comes face to face.

Tara must give them advice. The girls really want to hear her. Does she have good news about what is in store for them as they seek to fulfil their aspirations in the big bad world?

Tara makes a kind of a confession that she has lost herself in trying to be a “successful woman”. “I ran so far away from my old life that l lost myself in the process”.

She then leaves the hall. Walking down the stairs, she breaks down, unable to control herself. She cannot walk.

It is clear that it is not even possible to articulate class grievance, to vocalise it, share it. She is alone in this. She is choking on her misery without being able to place her finger on any “discrimination”, “injury” or “hurt” as such. She is facing something which eludes capture. She remembers how at that party (the get-together in her husband’s house) nobody discriminated against her but she simply felt excluded — the feeling of not belonging there.

The “gender gap” was there to be bridged, but the “class gap” simply does not show up as such to be bridged, and yet holds so much sway. Here is a different kind of “perpetual state of emergency” which is not self-transparent, not easily decoded.

But Tara has gone so far in betrayal of her class, in being a class traitor, that she cannot now come back. There is no coming back to her life in the parental home. At some point, her family too shifts positions and starts living in the posh apartment given by her rich husband, now ex-husband.

And yet the film insists on treating class discrimination as part of the same series of discrimination based on gender, race and religion, class as another form of discrimination. What the film does not understand is this: The scene of Tara breaking down on the stairs is more of a “class scene”, than the ones purportedly exposing the “classist” and discriminatory outbursts of Adil.

The film is full of moments exposing “class discrimination”. The rich are full of hypocrisy. They would support the fight for decriminalising homosexuality. But they are classist, like Adil, Tara’s rich husband. Tara and Karan too behave in classist ways.

What the film forgets is this: exposing the hypocrisy of the rich, is, paradoxically, the way the class divides or class per se get reinscribed and legitimised, not weakened. It is as though we are functioning under a secret law: that class divides must be sustained, reinscribed, just so that we can all be part of the struggle against “all forms of discrimination”.

Here is the thing, which the film as well as the wider discrimination discourse wilfully forgets.

The crucial difference is that class discrimination is not a cognisable offence. Karan can go to a court of law and seek redress or seek to amend the law to decriminalise homosexuality. He can launch a campaign, go on TV and talk about justice. But Karan or Tara do not have such recourse when it comes to class or “class discrimination”. Adil’s classist outbursts insulting Tara are called out, but there cannot be legal recourse out of it. The only thing possible, within the limits set by the film and this discourse, is for Tara to choke in her suffering silently. And like Tara, Jazz and many others are suffering in the same way. 

In fact, the irony is Karan suffers not only because society is unable to accept him as a gay person, but also because of his inability to cross the class boundary. He is never monetarily secure and is always in debt. This situation put him in the same boat as Tara, even though he comes from a well-to-do family. Their friendship and trust make for several touching moments. But Karan too cannot articulate his class position, cannot frankly reveal “not having money” even to his gay partners and even to Tara. Tara and Karan cannot accept their being poor, cannot talk about it, even as they confabulate about not tolerating any kind of discrimination around them.

So the film’s attempts to still “address” class by showing these instances of class discrimination misses the point. The specificity of class is overlooked.

In fact, the only recourse when it comes to class is to steal.

Jazz steals from the company’s credit card. She buys an expensive dress, thinking she can later return it back to the shop and get refund — the owners, Karan and Tara, will never find out. She is caught. Punishment is immediate. She is fired (and taken back later). Tara is accused of being a gold-digger in marrying Adil. The charge is of course of illicitly trying to bridge the class divide. She is like a thief. In the case of another couple, the groom is accused of being a gold digger.

Deadlock of class: Titanic, Parasite, Nadeem

But what happens if the focus is not just on class discrimination, as in the film, but on class divide itself, on “class” itself? What happens when the specificity of class is indeed recognised?

Tragedy. Or even death and destruction. The example is, as Slavoj Zizek has showed us, the Titanic, the all time great romantic movie. The Titanic’s storyline must be seen in a reverse movement. It is only since the quick end to the romance due to sinking and death was already known, that the story could be crafted around a romance across class divides. That way, one already knew that one could avoid the full implications of the romance trying to bridge the  class divide — the sinking tragedy interjects and saves the day for the story. 

Unless of course you metaphorically read the sinking, death and destruction as a stand-in for what would have unfolded in the romance if the Titanic were not to sink and everyone reached their destination safely. Could the boy have adjusted in the girl’s wealthy manor? Would she have eloped to live in his lower class apartment? Or would the “safe arrival home” only have spelt disaster for the romance?

Think for a moment what happens if you focus on the class divide from the viewpoint not of the upwardly mobile social climbers like Tara and Karan but of Nadeem. Nadeem is a motor mechanic living in an underground garage. He is not part of the aspirational middle class selling their souls in the market. He is extremely marginal in the story, and is mostly like a prop for the character of Jazz. And yet, going by what Jazz tells Kabir, Nadeem might be the only non-pseudo character (genuine person) in the film.

But if Nadeem were to be brought to the centre of the film what would we get? You get some idea of this if you turn to Bong Joon-Ho’s excellent movie Parasite. We know of the man in the dungeon in the film whose appearance takes us away to the inner depths and scary intensities. Here you encounter the dreadfully immobilising effect of confronting class. The audience is forced to deal with the insurmountability of the class divide, thereby again leading to the violence, killing and dissolution of the entire frame and plot of the story as it was building till that point. It is a point of unravelling. Much like the Titanic’s tragic end in death, the Parasite too cannot avoid a dissolution of its own kind.

Foregrounding Nadeem’s character does not however mean getting him to be on the same glamorous trajectory of Tara or Karan. The audience can never know Nadeem in the way you would know about Karan — there can be no story of his search for who is really deep down, his self-exploration, where, for example, society would be seen as not allowing him to explore himself freely. The unknowability of Nadeem must remain that way. This is something Bong Joon-Ho understood very well with regards to the man in the dungeon and that is the power of the Parasite story. The deadlock, intransigence, immobilising power of class — that is a social register which cannot unfold into the story of the individual’s discovery of the self or inner desires. We can call it the pyschic non-space of class.

With Nadeem as a possible exception, “Made in Heaven” characters seem to be the product of practising Foucaultian parrhesia without, however, even a semblance of Deleuzean depth and intensity — giving us nothing but the “Californian cult of the self” which Foucault was critical of. What we get is the classic “neoliberal self”, with political correctness coming free with it.

Foucault wrote, “Sade is the one who actually liberated desire from subordination to the truth, in which it had always been caught in our civilization.” But then when you truly liberate desire from truth, it might involve the liberation from desire itself — a kind of ascetic confrontation with death or liberation. It is about not allowing the neoliberal economy of desire to suture the class divide.

On a broader canvas, we must be able to see that the film is a good example of how the discrimination discourse pursues an agenda of shaming traditional society into submission, making way for the penetration of capital — reconfiguring society from the inside in the image of capital. Throwing a long list of “discriminations” at its face, winning over the youth to this side of the aspirational class divide, after of course proper grooming and training. In the name of gender justice, target the women first, for do they not need saving first? Tara is the embodiment of this project. Tara inhabits all these moments. Will Jazz be blind to all this and simply follow Tara’s tragic path? Can Jazz never be with Nadeem, particularly given that she actually finds him genuine, truthful and is also attracted to him?

Traditional communities and families with their oppressive norms and customs can be collaborators with big capital and the powers that be, but they create problems for futuristic big capital to internally restructure human life [Example: Jagat Seth, the bania, might collaborate with British colonialism (Robert Clive) against an Indian Nawab, but he keeps his caste and family hierarchy safe from the “foreign influence”.] Such a restructuring would involve a Matrix-like colonisation and control of social communication, sexual-reproductive processes, and modes of sociality — algorithmic pastoral power being one component of this process.

This restructuring and “total” subjugation of the vey modes of sociality and human life seem to be the reason why the “fight against all forms of discrimination” is promoted by big capital (bi pharma, big tech…). This can be called the rhizomatic (Deleuze), democratic materialist (Badiou) colonisation of life, with capital too changing its own form. From here to the BFIW and Bollywood tamasha might seem like a stretch — but not really. The BFIW in “Made in Heaven” has already interceded by draping itself in the trope of the need to fight all forms of discrimination.

Tara choking

Let us read the film against its grain and revisit the scene where Tara is addressing the girls of her old neighbourhood in the Princess Grooming Academy.

Tara says that one must never give away your deepest identity, of who you are. It is your “inner identity” which is most important and that is what gives you confidence in life.

“I ran so far away from my old life that l lost myself in the process.

Keep grooming yourself to your satisfaction. Table manners, etiquette, English language, clothes, make-up. But your identity, who you are deep inside you, never let go of it. Please!”

Tara’s focus on “your identity, who you are deep inside you” cuts many layers.

Tara connects class with the deepest level of her identity. Normally class is reduced to just an income differential or not having money, being poor. But here class is so layered and seems to affect the unconscious attachments, having to do with our deepest and normally disavowed identity. Not to forget that even to talk about “class identity” would be a contradiction in terms to the extent that class is a social relation, whereas identity often carries the sense of “your own self”, body, and what-you-freely-identify-as.

Normally gender and sexuality are regarded as really having to do with your body, with your most fundamental sense of who you are. But now class too seems to be of fundamental significance as to “who you are deep inside”.

In fact, it feels like as though gender discrimination (not gender identity or fluidity) is outer — you can go to the court of law and get redress. You can get your family and friends, members of society to rally on the issue. Decriminalisation of homosexuality is in fact the theme of the series. Much moments of sorrow, oppression, hope and joy can happen around the fight against gender and sexual discrimination. But when it comes to class it is all too deep, disarticulated, isolating and suffocatingly lonely, as though a deep shame is attached to the aspiration to cross class boundaries. There is no coming out story here, even as you might find great relief in doing that. Tara’s life is a testament to that.

Class does not exist

It is not that one cannot transcend class divide. Of course you can. Do we not know of tons of rags-to-riches stories? 

It is not about your own position, where you are placed — on the rags-side or the riches-side. It is not about getting recognised for who you are, or of fighting oppressive norms. With gender discrimination, you can theoretically imagine an end to it such that everyone can achieve freedom and liberation. With class, that is not possible. To end “class discrimination” in a proper sense would involve the end of society as we know it. Class is ingrained in the present order. It is in that sense not something we can fight the way you fight particular wrongs, discrimination and injustices.

Class works in a way which includes its own invisibilisation. The film is subject to this logic, obviously. The invisibilisation in the film works through the attempt to box or fore-fit class into “class discrimination”, as yet another form of discrimination alongside gender or sexual discrimination, which must be addressed — in a chain or series.

But it cannot be boxed like that.

Precisely where they imagine that something cannot be about class, it might be really about class. Indeed, the famous dialogue, “Mere paas maa hai”, from Deewar, could be about class!

In the present film, for example, Karan’s campaign on decriminalising homsexuality could have been a good one for showcasing class. Particularly since it is a Delhi-based film, the audience is left wondering how Karan would react to “lower class” transgenders, hijras who are at the traffic red lights — Karan is shown always driving around Delhi and is difficult to imagine such an encounter not taking place.

Or take another instance. The Dwarka girl, Jazz, makes an advance on Karan not knowing that he is  homosexual. Here the class aspiration seems to be at work, for soon after Karan telling her that she is homosexual, she moves on instantly — there is no emotion, no feelings, no awkwardness in their further interaction. The romantic attachment is completely non-existent.

With Tara, when the amount of money involved is really huge she would advise one of the female characters that she should go for the money rather than love — the class thing is in fact constantly at work but there is no naming it as such. It does not stand out as a particular instance, in its nature not to stand out that way.

And yet the reality of the class divide, beyond the trope of class discrimination, rises to the surface, in spite of the orientation of the film to invisibilise it, in scenes like that of Tara choking on her feelings, alone, on the stairs.

How the rich laugh

In a video on YouTube, Jim Carrey is asked what changed after he became rich and famous. He answers that, what changed is the way he laughs. Being an actor, he then goes on to show how he laughed earlier as a nobody and how he laughs now as a rich and powerful man. So who is the real Jim Carrey — one associated with the earlier laugh or the present one? Well, both. This only means that class is a social relation, yet it intimately defines who you are.

The way you laugh might be an outer personality trait, your behaviour, and not related to “who you really are” — but we know from Tara that it could be your deepest identity. How the deepest identity is related to the outer behavioural trait with which class, status and power are most easily related is an open question. We can do well to recall a line from Macbeth: "There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face." There is no art to find the construction of a social relation in your deepest identity — we only know that they are connected, without knowing how exactly. It is a unknown known.

So how does Adil laugh?

If the Parasite kind of take on class, involving a violent dissolution, is a bit too off-putting for a feel-good flick, then the film could do this: focus on how Adil laughs, or how his mother grieves. How does the rich grieve?

But then what do you do with Nadeem? For Nadeem alone among the characters can force us to look into the abyss of class. And, as Nietzsche said, if you look long into the abyss, the abyss will look back at you. That might be the path to dissolution or revolution. We can even say: class is the name for dissolution or revolution. But this formulation of class is already given by Marx — if only Marxists and others really understood Marx. Didn’t Marx already in his Communist Manifesto point out on how the history of the class struggle is about either the revolutionary reconstitution of society or the ruin of the contending classes? In a different sense, the same doppelganger is repeated by Rosa Luxemburg when she gave the call, “Socialism or Barbarism”. Surely, a version of it would apply with equal or perhaps greater force today.

Escaping from this doppelganger, avoiding the recognition that such is the “choice” in front of us, is precisely what it means to avoid looking into the abyss. For it is live, living abyss, reactive and one which will pull you in — an unbearable gaze. The man in the dungeon in Parasite, right?

So why not just glide over it like the aspirational middle class characters, why not just sideline Nadeem or just paint him in. What better way to do that than through the spectacle of the Big Fat Indian Wedding, wedded to all the politically correct fights against discrimination!

In his Story of Your Life, Ted Chiang famously tells us that we should not look for meaning in freedom. Nor is there meaning in coercion.

Your future is already set, fixed, determined from before. And yet you might be free.

A sure knowledge of the future, the future already determined, is no longer incompatible with free will.

In this “new” world, you will enact chronology, create the future even as it does not really depend on you or your actions.

Call it a paradox if you will: Fate is given. Yet your gesture towards it is “effective”.

You are free!

Of course, as we know, in the story an alien object has landed on earth. These are the alien heptapods.

“The heptapods are neither free nor bound as we understand those concepts; they don't act according to their will, nor are they helpless automatons. What distinguishes the heptapods' mode of awareness is not just that their actions coincide with history's events; it is also that their motives coincide with history's purposes. They act to create the future, to enact chronology”.1

If actions coincide with history’s events then do they not lose their autonomy and singularity? If motives coincide with history’s purposes, in what sense are human motives really any different from what is anyways going to take place? Now this sounds like a dystopic world in which humans are subsumed in the machine. Well, not really.

Let us shift focus and turn to some recent developments in India.

Massive chunks of epic history from India’s past are today presented in front of a huge mass of semi-anonymous people, who will edit and legislate, and in fact, decide on it. The epics, Ramayana and the Mahabharata, are presented by media producers in a movie form and then in a matter of hours the troll army will decide its fate. In another context, it could be hordes of other trolls who could decide the future of the writer Salman Rushdie and legislate over Islamic tenets.

There is no point critiquing the troll army, which commentators think is nothing but the mob of right-wing thugs, an assessment which to me looks more like a comment on the commentators.

The troll army, I dare say, is basically what has become today of the people or the new public. They can be seen as the advanced detachment or vanguard of the “digital swarm”. In terms of their relation with the productive apparatus, this swarm seems to overlap, in form and essence, with the precariat. Post-neoliberal labour force increasingly weak and precarious on the economic front now seems to enjoy the contentment and confidence of a religious or cultural salvation as they battle it out against the “enemies of the nation”, as cheerleaders of the deep state’s crusade against plots and conspiracies against Bharat. Those who have bought into this salvation might however still participate in “economic struggles”. The dynamics of what liberals call “right-wing trolls” are indeed fascinating.

And here perhaps one can and should keep the “people” distinct from the more elitist sounding “demos”. Such a usage is also consistent with the writings from the ancient Greeks about the demos in Athens. Surely we are here not going in the direction of the mob-fascism relationship sought with great dedication by Hannah Arendt.2 And admittedly, the reader will notice a sub-textual critique of Arendt’s perspective here.

What else is the troll army other than the most radical democratic voice — the voice of the people — that we can imagine, under the given conditions?

I would not have been inspired to reflect on this if it was not for a new additional aspect recently come to light.

The troll army or the sacred people is not just sitting to legislate on the production of epic history but is also sure-footedly working on its own self-image. Not just directed outwardly, other-directed, say towards the perceived “enemy” perceived as a thorn in the flesh of the organic whole of the beautiful community. But now it has turned inwards, towards itself, trying to clarify its own self-image. From being viscerally other-directed to being self-directed.

What we encounter here is an internal fissure within the army — one which has a lot to do with its concern for self-representation.

Would a “right-wing violent, nationalistic, misogynistic, theocratic outfit” (could be the KKK, Proud Boys, or QAnon in the American context) really care about representation and perception as though it too wants to be a party to playing the democratic game?

Now this is a solid new development in the evolution of the troll army. The troll army displays a self-reflexivity which belies many aspects of Byung-Chul Han’s theory about the swarm.3 It is true that “digital communication enables instantaneous, impulsive reaction, meant to express and stir up outrage on the spot”. Yet, we are able to find here distance, gap, internal fissure and its traversal in the constitution of the digital space — and also the dimension of representation and self-portrayal.

This is what we saw in the entire affair around the 2023 film Adipurush (Origin Man).

Here is what we saw: The makers of the film are votaries of Hindutva. The viewers or supporters are also supposed to be the votaries of the Hindutva. But the viewers find the film offensive even though it is, according to the film-maker, very much in consonance with Hindutva.

This is not usual fare.

The troll army took offence at their portrayal as uncouth and rough. Dialogues made colloquial keeping in mind popular level of consciousness, verge towards the offensive and low taste. Lord Hanuman is speaking in street lingo, taporia — giving you the aporia of the taporia! The makers of the film (particularly Manoj Mutashir, the scriptwriter) seem to be saying in their defence that this is all in tune with the actual level of the targeted audience. The attempt was, it seems, to present the great Hindu culture in a popular form so that the masses can readily embrace it.

Here was the ultimate winning Hindutva move to be lapped up by the Hindutva troll army. And yet it badly boomerangs. The troll army has started to pounce and tear apart their own gurus.

So this seems to a case where the Hindutva troll army are offended at their portrayal. While they might indulge in offensive, vulgar and low-level behaviour, they are not actually that. Actions do not define character.

At one level this might be a case of the troll army social base looking for middle class respectability — at the same time, they are also demonstrating that they are not a pliant bunch who can be taken for a ride by powerful media producers. We can perhaps be reminded here of the swarms of fans in Tamil politics who would prostrate themselves in front of their hero. At the same time however they are extremely entitled. Writes S. V. Srinivas, with regard to the “MGR phenomenon": “The fan is so invested in the image that he feels entitled to be its guardian, ensuring that the star himself does not digress from it”.4 What MSS Pandian called an image-trap is then both a trap as well as something like an enabling vehicle, that through which the fans express themselves and their desires.5

Here we see a fine case of what Ted Chiang calls “enacting the future”.

The future will happen as it will. And yet you are allowed to make it happen, you will enact it, even though your actions are superfluous to what will happen. The residual or the minimal self is at work.6 This minimal self is what remains or what distinguishes (in order not to be pessimistic, a sense evoked by the word “remains”) humans from the machines, humans from AI.

The trolls through their actions redirected the algorithms and their emotive-affective agglomeration in big data. They have just legislated on a huge chunk of Indian history and culture. They have “weighed decisively” on the relation of the past with the present and the future. And yet the trolls are nothing — they are merely “views”, “engagement”, “likes” — mostly “dislikes” or angry emojis in this case. This “something and nothing” is the way the enactment of the future takes place. The minimal self is something and nothing, the human in the human-machine.

We just looked at how the human-machine relation unfolds today with respect to the new public, the trolls and the swarm. The minimal self provides the sense of agency to the troll army even though they are really placed quite low in the social hierarchy — as low as what Hilary Clinton once called the “deplorables". This makes them feel that their “voice” is “heard”. Those enemies of freedom find a voice. They can truly (no pun intended) attack Salman Rushdie without ever reading the Satanic Verses, a situation I had occasion to reflect on in an earlier essay.7 In that occasion, the sophisticated liberal artistic elite had a face-off with the ignorant, fundamentalist masses, the enemies of freedom — our liberators.

But I want to turn to another sense of this minimal self enacting chronology, oxymoronically creating the pre-decided future. I have in mind the reflections of Jean-Luc Nancy about his heart transplant. The continuation of his life ensured by the intrusion into his body meant that he is now living a life which is synonymous with the working the machine. Is it now his life, a human life, or simply a machinic reproduction? Or is “he” or “it” a human-machine assemblage?

Nancy:

Less than twenty years before, transplants were not done, and certainly not with recourse to cyclosporine which protects against rejection of the grafted organ. Twenty years hence, it is certain to be a matter of another kind of transplant, by other means. Here personal contingency crosses with contingency in the history of technology. Had I lived earlier I would be dead; later, I would be surviving in a different manner. But “I" always finds itself caught in the battlements and gaps of technical possibilities.8

When Nancy says ““I" always finds itself caught in the battlements and gaps of technical possibilities” we know that he is pointing towards the minimal self.

The human is free, in spite of the machinic life, in spite of AI. Can we also say that the human is free because of the machines and AI. Maybe not. But we can surely say: human freedom cannot be imagined, in fact, should not be imagined, as free in itself, but instead with regard to the machine and AI. Just as humans always took nature as both given and that against which human agency would be measured, similarly today we have the second nature of machines and AI. Or rather it is the third nature, we have to admit, in deference to Hegel’s notion of second nature.

The third nature is surely not just a new iteration of the old second nature — surely it is connected to capital in the sense of what Marx called “general intellect”. And yet the temptation to focus on the supposed subsumption of human agency in the machine, the subjugation of humans by machines, as the supreme characteristic does not seem to take us very far — at the very least, it might actually immobilise human agency leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy. In particular, the digitally-lumpenised mass of the precariat which often speaks through their vanguardist troll army with its feral relationship to the regurgitation of epic history, is not a mere cog in the AI-powered capitalist wheel. Like the muscle-and-machine interrelationship of the industrial proletariat, we can imagine a troll-army-and-algorithmic-power interrelationship of the post-AI precariat.

The “troll-army-and-algorithmic-power interrelationship of the post-AI precariat” is in fact not merely an inane or asinine interrelationship. It is in fact the point of contradiction constitutive of the new forms of capital. Lenin once identified the weakest link in the chain of imperialism. That was on the eve of the Revolution in May 1917. A small pamphlet stirred up an entire perspective on strategy.

If an iron chain is needed to hold a weight, say, of 100 puds, what would happen if we replaced one of its links by a wooden one?

The chain would break.

No matter how strong and intact all the other links are, if the wooden link breaks the whole chain will burst. The same is true in politics.9

The minimal self powered by the monstrous collectivity of the precariat swarm led by the troll army is enacting the future which is — truth be told — already given to them. The heptapodic freedom might be afflicted by what Byung-Chul Han calls the “shitstorm”, the instantaneity of the digital gnawing away the prospect of any real and meaningful human action, not to speak of radical change. Yet, as we saw above, the troll army does display tremendous self-reflexivity and internal tension, re-channeling, upending and reversing algorithmic flows and machinic logics.

This is not to deny that this self-reflexivity and agency itself operates according to the speed and velocity of the “instantaneous” digital. If only the vanguardist role of the troll army could be presented as “progressive” if not downright “revolutionary”, many of the critics of the present technological order would find themselves less nostalgic about an earlier era. J-L Nancy might have seen things a tad bit differently. For a start, at the bland sociological level, I would say think of the distinction between the precariat TikTokers and the elite Instagrammers.

The precariat troll army is perhaps the proverbial ghost in the machine, a powerful agency inseparable from and perhaps internal to the subtle operations of the AI and the algorithms. The minimal self, the minimal form of political subjectivity, would be seen to be in consonance with Ted Chiang’s thesis regarding the enactment of chronology and the future.

Welcome to the Desert of the Real for the troll army of the precariat-swarm shall liberate us!

As is said, paralokino'bhâvât paralokàbhavah:

“There is no other-world because of the absence of any other-worldly being (i.e., the transmigrating self).” (Ramkrishna Bhattacharya).1

This is the basic position of rejection of other-worlds (parloka) — that nothing remains after death. Then in the Buddhist tracts you have Ajita Kesakambalin whose perspective of ucchedavada will declare that nothing exists after death, that there is no “soul” which outlasts the earthly body. The position of deha-vada is also included in this. The Buddhist tracts highlight these materialist positions not in agreement. They do so in order to clarify the Buddha’s disagreement with these schools of materialism.

These are materialist “positions” or “standpoints” that we can claim to find in ancient India. No doubt about that, as there is enough evidence for the same.

And yet such positions might be just that, that is, “positions”, abstract theoretical positions propounded by a deracinated Brahmin elite who were often willing to uphold the Vedas as revealed knowledge! Such kinds of materialist thought might have been very distant from — and in fact could have been opposed to — the social life of the vast majority of people. The existence of a factional “secularist elite” among the ruling classes cannot be ruled out.

This means that the materialist thought process emanating from the lived productive life of the masses might not have been the ones often hastily or lazily included under the rubric of “materialism in ancient India”. The habit of conflating the good and the bad materialisms under one roof creates enormous problems. That Karl Marx distinguished his own materialism from Feuerbachian materialism might then be highly relevant here — that you do not just covetously seek all materialisms or materialist positions, but in fact want to see how One Divides into Two within it. Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya seems to have painfully missed this aspect in his work, even though he repeatedly professes to uphold the Marxist approach.

For us, then, it is not completely irrelevant that most of the Charvakas were Brahmins. Many were Brahmin pundits at the royal court, fighting battles specific to their subject-position. Johannes Bronkhurst points out that the proponents of Charvaka like Jayarasi (Bhatta Sri Jayarasi Deva), Bhatta Udbhatta, Aviddhakarṇa and Bhāvivikta were Brahmins.2 Bhattacharya and Bronkhorst have shown that the Charvaka Brahmins were not so keen on challenging the authority and sanctity of the Vedas. And that it was much later that the Charvakas started being regarded as opposing the Vedas.3

That way, Kancha Ilaiah is not off the mark when he states:

Even the Charvaka and Lokayata schools do not reflect the Shudra ideological, socio-spiritual and political ideas. In Charvaka and Lokayata schools also there was not much discourse around production.

Even if these schools are not specifically anti-Shudra, Ilaiah’s larger point about their abstraction from production relations is an important one.

Charvaka materialism seems like a position one section of the Brahmin elite had taken vis-a-vis another section, a philosophical stance arising out of an intra-elite scholarly dispute. So what explains the tendency to always regard these schools as inexorably standing as a radical challenge to power, and being on the side of the asuras and dasyus? We notice this tendency in Chattopadhyaya. He seeks to accomplish this by placing Tantric traditions and traditions of mother-right and fertility worship on the side of a materialism otherwise ensconced in the elite quarters.

Scholars tend to assume that a progressive stance challenging Brahminical power automatically follows from positions advocating rationalism or materialism, the rejection of God and other idealist categories.4 A materialist position rejecting idealist categories is supposed to be closer to the “spontaneous” life of ordinary folks. This is, however, one of the most dubious assumptions afflicting many a materialist philosopher.

Buddha as we can see from the texts in the Pali Canon was aware of this fallacy. Hence he maintains a good distance from the Charvaka and Lokayatas. In fact, Buddha distanced his teachings from Ajita Kesakambalin, Makkhali Gosala and Sañjaya Belatthaputta who famously evaded the question on “the fruits of the contemplative life”. Note: Does this not remind us of Marx’s critique of Feuerbach’s materialism, Marx’s rejection of certain forms of (undialectical) materialism as in fact a form of idealism?

But what happens if you take a materialist position like that of Ajita Kesakambalin or the Charvakas and Lokayatas and then try to somehow prove that they emanated from the social life of the masses, or that they were pro-Shudra. It will be disastrous.

It is not difficult to understand the temptation to carry out such a force-fitting exercise partly since it is true that the early Vedic and non-Aryan modes of life (like that of the asuras) do exude what could be interpreted as “primitive materialism” or “proto-materialism”. So this makes you think that you have the licence to connect the modes of life with the otherwise abstract materialist positions. However neither of these modes of life are actually coterminus with Charvaka philosophy propounded by an avant garde elite in the Brahmin, post-Upanishadic high cultures that emerged much later than the early Vedic period.

Hence a less careful scholar would tend to treat the Charvaka kind of abstract materialist positions as emanating from the lived reality of the early Vedic and non-Aryan modes of life. Note: It is like trying to force fit Marx’s historical materialism with Feuerbach’s materialism.

Is this what is going on in Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya’s work on ancient Indian materialism? Here we will look at his Lokayata: A Study in Ancient Indian Materialism (1959).5

II

Citing Marxist scholarly writings, Chattopadhyaya wants to be able to show that the Lokayata is “deeply rooted in the lives of the masses”, that it “had never been a philosophy preached by a few individuals”. He keeps using populist terms like “masses” or “people” — the “philosophy of the people”. He writes, “Lokayata is a philosophy of the people”. He resorts very often to such populist generalities.

But who are these people in historical terms? He is unable to really find them.

The first Chapter has a promising title called the “Asura View”. One feels slightly assured that he has now identified the asuras. One expects that we are going to see a full engagement with the asuras. But as it turns out he suppresses the Asura as a people, race or clan, and seeks to ahistorically distil out only their “views”, the “Asura view”. It looks like he is interested in people or masses in the abstract but not in their historical specificity.

Chattopadhyaya writes:

By sophists and sceptics we understand certain individual philosophers whereas it may be that Lokayata had never been a philosophy preached by a few individuals. In all probability, it was a body of beliefs and practices, deeply rooted in the lives of the masses and at the same time hostile to the Brahmanical doctrines (p. 36).

Here he tries to present the Lokayata as not related to just a few individuals, or a deracinated elite, but actual working masses: “deeply rooted in the lives of the masses”. This is fine. And it does look like he will locate the people in their historical specificity, as when he writes:

The Lokayata-views, in all presumption, were the views of those people that were despised as daityas and asuras in the Brahmanical sources. But who were these people? (p. 42).

When he mentions the daityas and asuras and then goes on to ask “but who were these people?”, it looks like he will now delve into their actual social life, production relations and the material base — and then maybe prove Ilaiah wrong.

Instead we find that he spends a disproportionate amount of time in trying to engage with the rather obscure thesis that the asuras were related to the ancient Sumerians. Or to the Iranians. He keeps invoking S. N Dasgupta’s work on this question. He makes too much of the otherwise well trodden hypothesis that the asuras have much to do with the Iranian ahura.

We read lines that take us further away from engagement with the Indian social formation:

Dasgupta's assumption that the Lokayata deha-vada was originally a corollary to the belief underlying the Sumerian custom of adorning the dead cannot be readily accepted (p. 55).

It is very surprising that it takes him so long to finally mention that maybe the tribal folks in India could be the descendants of the asuras. He states:

The asura-tribe still surviving in Central India, according to some, could have been the asuras of ancient Indian literature (p. 56).

Then he goes on to quote some authority who tells him that these might be “the asuras living in Chota Nagpur”. Or they could be “the asura builders of those ancient embankments still found in the Mirzapur district”.

Why, in this context, ancient Sumeria should figure so much more than Chota Nagpur or Mirzapur is not obvious.

Finally, after having arrived closer to the ground in Chotanagpur and Mirzapur, he again slips away, refusing to stay on with the Indian social formation as it impinges on the asuras. He again flips back to a reflection on how the asuras might still have something to do with ancient Sumeria:

This diversity of views concerning the asuras at least shows that the problem is not a simple one and as such we cannot smoothly identify them with the ancient Sumerians (p. 57).

Refuting Dasgupta on this point seems not very relevant for this chapter whose focus is supposed to be on the mode of productive life of the asura people, and yet Chattopadhyaya does precisely the former.

But even when he again comes closer home, he finds another alibi to escape into scholarly obscure works rather than the history of a living people who very much exist in India as we speak. He slips into the obscure annals of the ancient Indus Valley Civilisation in search of asuras:

Among these bewildering multiplicity of references to the asuras, it may be useful for our present purpose to concentrate on one type of suggestion that appears to he quite prominent. The suggestion is that at least in a large number of cases the word asuras referred to the builders of the Indus Valley Civilisation (p. 57).

Why the multiplicity of references to the asuras should be considered “bewildering” is not clear at all. Earlier he notes that “the term (asuras) was not used in any uniform sense at all”. This need not have been any reason for him to tie himself in knots of philological nuance. Chattopadhayaya could have as well recognised that the asuras are a living people and not just an artefact in scholarly debates.

If he had just looked around he would have discovered that India comprised of people who identify themselves as asuras, or at least as the descendants of those considered asuras and daityas. Those like Phule, Rahul Sankrityayana and Ambedkar had already established that the asuras, daityas, nagvanshis were a living people in India. Rahul Sankrityayana actually traversed great distances on foot in order to find and live among those primitive tribes, be they asuras or kiratas.

But when Chattopadhyaya engages with the social life of tribals in India, he tends to presuppose a very problematic and automatic continuity between the high traditions of Charvaka materialism perhaps unfolding in courtly settings and the quotidian practices of say female fertility worship among say the Oraons or the Santhals. In his engagement with Tantrism he delves into practices that are based on the divinities of the earth and other fertility based chthonic cults. That would have been totally fine. In fact, this is an important area that would help sober down high-flying searches for suitable “philosophical outlooks” and “worldviews”. His account of the Durga Puja in Bengal is very helpful. But then trying to tether them to the sanitised world of philosophical materialism would have needed a different register of inquiry.

Disregarding the internal coherence of the asuras and dasyus as a people, Chattopadhyaya ends up cherry picking practices that he thinks are direct unmediated worship of earth, soil, nature and female fertility — practices that he wants to classify as “proto-materialism” in a way which seems more oriented towards sanitised philosophical debates rather than grounded Marxist research.

III

The problem is that Chattopadhyaya seems to be thinking that those who claim to be descendants of the asuras and nagavansis must be regarded as remnants of the past who will soon be wiped off the face of history through progress and development!
A real living society or people is for him nothing but “relics of such primitive or tribal society”. He refers to “one specific feature of this tribal survival, viz. mother-right”. He also uses a scary term which could be neoliberal in today’s terminology: “incomplete de-tribalisation”.

Let us read the passage:

The primitive society has always persisted here (India) along with and by the side of the advanced and civilised society, as it is in fact persisting even today. Secondly, relics of such primitive or tribal society have always strongly characterised the social fabric of India — ancient, modern and medieval. It is, as I have called it, a case of incomplete de-tribalisation, a point which I have attempted to illustrate with the following: the ethnic composition, the village communities, the caste organisation and the customary laws (p. xix).

In fact, there was no need to imagine that materialism is necessarily primitive. If say the Mahars of Maharashtra or the Nagvanshi Gonds of Central India today who identify as nagvanshis were to practice such a “materialism” then why should one keep classifying it as a remnant or only “primitive”. For Chattopadhyaya these are the “views” of those who if found living today must be understood as only a relic or survival, archaic and anachronistic — hence not worthy of any sustained engagement.

Chattopadhyaya is so keen on relegating the “primitive materialism” into the chronological primitive that he would even go to the extent of arguing that the Lokayatas were materialist since they did not “yet” have the idealist categories. If only the idealist categories were available then they would not be materialist! What kind of a serendipitous materialism Chattopadhyaya is banking on, I wonder.

Consider this:

It is not difficult to see that in such a scheme of thought there is no place whatsoever for anything that may attribute primacy to the spirit. In fact the earlier receptacles for the notion of the primacy of the spirit — the conceptions of God, Soul and the Öther-World — are conspicuously absent from all these. Thus, with all the ignorance about nature as well as the human body, human consciousness at this stage remains yet to he emancipated from the world and proceed to the formation of the spiritualistic or idealistic world-outlook. This is not materialism in the mature sense; nevertheless, in the sense of an instinctive acceptance of the primacy of the material human body and the material earth on which it lives, it can be characterised as some form of primitive proto-materialism.

Chattopadhyaya’s focus is on the supposed absence of idealist categories, or what he calls the absence of the “receptacles for the notion of the primacy of the spirit”. Without such categories and receptacles, he contends, human consciousness at this stage remains yet to be emancipated from the world — so you end up in “an instinctive acceptance of the primacy of the material human body and the material earth on which it lives”. Materialism is depicted as the product of a thought process which yet lacked the idealist categories, the categories and concepts that would make idealism possible. But wasn’t materialism in Chattopadhyaya’s own account supposed to be coterminus with the material conditions of life — a reflection at the level of concepts of the real conditions of existence. There is a move away from some of the basic tenets of the Marxist method.

Immediately we can see that this is a far cry from Chattopadhyaya’s own thesis that Lokayata or Charvaka materialism must be understood in terms of the material conditions of the existence of the life of the people. Chattopadhyaya’s engages in many such idealist slippages. We need not go over all of them.

IV

Finally, on the question of materialism, those who call themselves Marxists seem to have tragically missed Marx’s insight in his Theses on Feuerbach (1845). Chattopadhyaya could have done better to have kept it in mind. He would then have been perhaps more careful and discerning in putting his stamp of approval on any and all that looked like materialism to him. Simply to judge historical materialism and Feuerbachian philosophical materialism as both just materialism is not the right thing to do.

Let us then end by recalling Marx’s first thesis which says so much. Here it is:

The main defect of all hitherto-existing materialism — that of Feuerbach included — is that the Object [der Gegenstand], actuality, sensuousness, are conceived only in the form of the object [Objekts], or of contemplation [Anschauung], but not as human sensuous activity, practice [Praxis], not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active side, in opposition to materialism, was developed by idealism — but only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects [Objekte], differentiated from thought-objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective [gegenständliche] activity. In The Essence of Christianity[Das Wesen des Christenthums], he therefore regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice [Praxis]is conceived and defined only in its dirty-Jewish form of appearance [Erscheinungsform]^[1]. Hence he does not grasp the significance of ‘revolutionary’, of ‘practical-critical’, activity.

Thank you.

If only we could hold on to them... Sometimes we manage to hold on to some, even as so much of the rest just slip by.

Salvador Dali took this very seriously and experimented about it.

Dali used a device which would wake him up as he was about to fall asleep:

When he decided to take a nap on his chair after a long day of thinking about liquid watches and swans reflected in elephants (themes in his paintings) he would take a bunch of keys in his hand, place it on the edge of his chair and nod off in a light sleep. There was a metal tray on the floor and when he would really fall asleep, the keys would fall out of his hand, hit the tray with a loud noise and wake him up.

It was too much to allow those precious ideas slip away into nothingness. Dali took what he called “pre-sleep” seriously.

Very evocatively, he recounts the embryonic posture we all take as we prepare to fall asleep, to get into the temporary nirvana of sleep:

“my definitive posture as a sleeper must be of a rigorous exactitude. It is necessary, for instance, that my little toe be more to the left, or to the right, that my upper lip be almost imperceptibly pressed to my pillow, in order that the god of sleep, Morpheus, shall have the right to seize me, to possess me completely”

Sleep itself is like “a monster on crutches”, as we see in his 1937 painting Sleep.

Dali wrote later:

"I have often imagined the monster of sleep as a heavy, giant head with a tapering body held up by the crutches of reality. When the crutches break we have the sensation of falling."

You notice the crutches in the painting. Sleep is imagined as a figure on crutches. Dali of course wants sleep without crutches — a full embrace of sleep, dreams, the unconscious. He is critical of Parisian aristocrats who need a thousand crutches, even in sleep!

As for the moment of actually falling asleep, it seems difficult to be aware of it. That is why it is a 'fall', for there is a void on the other side, an abyss, a dream-world, over which your conscious mind has no control. Dali was fascinated by the unconscious and hence for him it was not just pre-sleep but sleep itself which is where the real possibilities lay.

II

The ancients in India imagined sleep itself as tremendously productive — not just sleep but the profoundest and deepest of all sleeps, what is called susupta.

It is the Upanishads that imagine the “fall” into sleep, falling asleep, in a more playful way, converting the 'fall' into a 'rise'. Like the hopping of a frog, we are supposed to hop from waking to sleep, sleep to dream, and dream-sleep to deep sleep. It is from a frog (manduk) that the Mandukya Upanishad therefore derives its name, according to Madhavacharya, 13th century dvaita (dualist) philosopher. The seer is Lord Varuna appearing from the water (sea) like a frog.

Sleep is a 'rise', taking you to heights of thought and consciousness beyond what is possible during waking. The half-asleep state Dali tried to hold on to, is already so rich and precious — imagine how it would be if one were to go all the way to dream sleep and dream-less sleep!

Recall that the Bible treats of sleep as the domain of truth, a kind of interface with Jesus. Jesus watches over you in sleep, as though you are fully in Jesus while asleep. “I lie down and sleep; I wake again, because the LORD sustains me” (Psalm 3:5). Other verses tell us that the Lord gives us sleep, and gives us truth in sleep.

The Mandukya takes us into the different states of the sleep world, differentiating and specifying. The  deeper the sleep (the more fundamentally you are cut off from the 'real world', from your waking hours), the more likely that you are most 'active', creative and hence arriving at fundamental insights, deep knowledge. To such an extent is deepest (dreamless) sleep the most creative and concentrated form of consciousness, that is, the Consciousness of all consciousnesses, that dream-sleep, which is the least deep, can be counted on the side of the waking state.

I know this goes against common perception. We need to just keep in mind that while asleep, dream is our connection to the waking state. Dream-sleep is taken to fall on the side of sleep as much on the side of waking state — it keeps alive our connection to the waking state.

Dream-sleep is as much distant from the Consciousness of all consciousnesses, the supposed point of highest creativity, creativity in the utter “passivity” of deep sleep, as the waking state. How is that so?

Well, in the waking state, our senses are directed towards the world around us, outward-directed, while in the dream state we are internally-directed, directed by our own projections. The dream state is of course sleep, but it is full of desires, rejections, acceptance, feelings, and 'activity'. In waking state, gross objects (sthul) are consumed. In dream subtle objects (suksma) are consumed.

The frog hops on between different states. Waking (jagrat) and dream (swapna) states can be seen as the first two stages: the third and higher stage is deep sleep, dreamless sleep, susupta.

Says the Mandukya:

"That is the state of deep sleep (susupta) wherein the sleeper does not desire any objects nor does he see any dream. This is prajna, a mass of pure, undifferentiated consciousness, full of bliss, enjoying, living on bliss. This prajna is the gateway to the other kinds of consciousness, the waking state and the dreaming state."

In the susupta state there are no dreams whatsoever, no desire. It is just sleep. It is cessation, without sensation, without thought. Just breathing, involuntary breathing, like an existent-nonexistent spirit. This is the human or the self (you, I) as a prajna-ghana, undifferentiated mass of consciousness.

Hence it is said of prajna-ghana:

"This is lord (ishvara) of all; this is the knower of all; this is the inner controller (antaryamin); this is the source (yoni) of all; indeed the origin as well as the end of all beings".

Consciousness in our waking state arises because of the potentiality contained in the prajna-ghana. It is the product of the generative powers of the latter. What we have is a potential consciousness — potential, since it is not directed in any direction, not even inwardly, as in a dream, at the subconscious instinctual level. In not being anything, not directed towards any object, desire or idea, conscious or unconscious, it seems to be potentially everything, the antaryamin. It is like the source, a pure, 'empty' capacity, not already consumed, not limited by a directedness or a purpose. It's scope is universal.

Off the cuff, we might note: The great difference with Freud’s notion of the unconscious is that here the unconscious is not activity in the sense of the dream-work. In Freud, as we know, the unconscious is not a substrate or something which pre-exists the ego-superego complex. It is not a “state”. It is not something which has priority over the ego-superego, the waking state. The unconscious is inseparable from a dynamic activity, a kind of a reconfiguration and rearticulation of what Freud calls the materials of the dream, the dream-elements related to the primary process.

Not through dream-work, not free association, but a kind of a passively generative state is how the prajna-ghana of the susupta state would almost in an alchemical fashion be related to the waking or dream states.

III

This is not all, though. For susupta and prajna ghana, as it turns out, mark only the third stage, and is still not the highest stage. Prajna ghana might be pure undifferentiated consciousness, but that is not good enough and in fact does share some affinity with the waking state.

Surprised?

In a Commentary, Gaudapadacharya (the teacher of the teacher of Adi Shankaracharya) tells us that the prajna-ghana is pure consciousness but it is caused! That is, it is not all that 'pure'.

It is not the One.

It is caused since it is not all-knowing, it is steeped in avidya, maya, in sleep. And yet in not being directed and purposeful, it is without effect, hence 'pure', a pure capacity. It is what provides the wherewithal ('the gateway') to the waking and dream states. It is the Lord without fully escaping the chain of cause and effect. Compare this to the fourth and the highest stage, the turiya state, which is completely outside of cause and effect, which is not asleep, which is the Brahman.

Prajna ghana dies with the body — it is like culmination point of the highest pure or undifferentiated state attainable from the side of the jagrat-nidra-susupta constellation. Hence it is subject to cause and effect, even if not perhaps to the determinations of time and space.

On the other hand, the prajna ghana and the turiya states however share one feature: they have both broken with any kind of duality.

Now to suggest that prajna ghana which is connected to the causal world, which is also a state in which you and I, ordinary mortals enter (every night?), can share a feature with the idea of the Brahman, the atman and the Om — does it reek of a dilution of the Advaita, of the sacred principles of Brahminism? Some say it does.

Hence, a “Buddhist hand” is suspected in the interpretation of Gaudapadacharya. In fact, some even hold that Gaupadacharya might have been a Buddhist after all! (Unless of course you come up with formalistic answers like “Gaudapadacharya was not Buddhist because he accepted the authority of the Vedas”.)

IV

Let us only note the idea of pure, homogeneous consciousness during susupta as the Lord of All, as the basis of all that we do in the waking and dream states. This means that sleep is not a waste of time, it is not secondary to the waking, but is what infuses the latter with real creativity and consciousness.

This uncharacterised, pure consciousness is ready to shoot in any direction, travel uncharted territory and carve new paths. It comes down to saying, if you want revolutionary innovation, sleep, get into susupta state. Dali got this partly right in attempting to hold on to the creativity flash associated with sleep, which of course he could only only grasp at the stage of “pre-sleep”. Now we have big companies that want workers to do precisely that, get into deep sleep, or rather 'productive sleep' — do not just work but also sleep. Is that how market-disruptive innovations are discovered? Sleep Entrepreneurs are now active in Silicon Valley, investing into 'sleep space': “Sleep is the new status symbol”. But sleep might be the new work in the widest sense of the term, in the most philosophical sense.

Best thing to do with 'knowledge workers' is not to enforce work or bar absenteeism. Instead encourage absenteeism, and discourage presenteeism. Let them rest, let them engage in leisure, and who knows they might come up with great ideas for 'product innovation' and disruptive marketing strategies! If nothing works you have sleep apps and sleep programmes like Sleepio.

In its pure idealism, the Mandukya Upanishad allows us to grasp the most elementary aspects of material productivity in the idealist movements of capital.

Let us say: Mandukya Upanishad or the Alchemy of Capital.

With nervousness.

Gandhi must have felt weak in his knees when it came to the Buddha. It did not help that Tagore declared:

“At Gandhi's call all India blossomed forth to new greatness, just as once before, in earlier times, when [the] Buddha proclaimed the truth of fellow feeling and compassion among all living creatures.”

After all, to be declared the new Buddha in a land defined since a millennium as the land of the Buddha, does not sit easily on anyone’s shoulders — not even Mahatma Gandhi’s. It is understandable.

First off, you can readily see that it would be preposterous if not downright disingenuous for Gandhi to try to assimilate Buddha within his Ramrajya or the Sanatani Hindu fold — which is what he would anyways surreptitiously do. Ramrajya even in the best and most expansive Gandhian interpretation would seem too puny and parochial for Buddha to be force-fitted into. This would be grossly unfair and jarring an act.

Or, Gandhi had to move in to openly exclude the Buddha as not “good enough” to fit into the Sanatani Hindu fold or in the proposed Ram Rajya. That would, however, not be Buddha’s loss but Gandhi’s. Buddha is too big and significant to be kept out of any Gandhian project. How could Gandhi practice ahimsa and karuna without holding Buddha close to his heart?

The only option was to revise the supposed Ram Rajya or the meaning of Santani Hindu to openly include Buddha’s radical teachings. That would, however, completely derail Gandhi’s outlook as we know it.

Hence Gandhi was in a quandary. With Buddha he was between a rock and a hard place. Nor would chicanery or a sleight of hand work.

It was Ambedkar not Gandhi who was put on the defensive during the Poona Pact imbroglio. Gandhi was used to putting his detractors on the backfoot, making them feel weak in front of him. Yet deep down he seemed less sure of himself when it came to the Buddha.

But first things first.

Salvaging the Buddha?

As we know, Gandhi has a very radical and dynamic conception of God. Gandhi thinks of "God as ceaseless activity... God is continuously in action without resting for a single moment.... He must express Himself in every small act of His votary". Gandhi loved to quote Akha, a medieval Gujarati saint who says: "Even as the thread spins out so be your life. Do what you may and receive the grace of Hari". Eminent scholars tell us that this is an 'immanent' conception of God or Hari, rather than a 'transcendent' or top-down conception.

Unfortunately, this nuance does not enrich Gandhi's engagement with the Buddha. For example, in Lectures on the Gita (Chapter 2), he tries to show that the Buddha did believe in the existence of God: "A number of learned men have shown that the Buddha did not teach a doctrine denying the existence of God". Gandhi can be given a long rope here, since one can argue that Buddha was not an atheist but more like a non-theist, a non-believer rather than a disbeliever. However, combined with his anatmavad, this non-theism is a very strong one, close to atheism, or something even more rigorous and substantive than the denialism of atheism!

Gandhi makes another move taking him further away from Buddha. For, in the same paragraph, he goes on to state that "there is no reason for supposing that there is a distinction between the nirvana mentioned by Lord Buddha and the nirvana of the Gita". Really? One can see that Gandhi is making a highly untenable proposition. Gandhi moves in highly contentious territory here without really delving into the specificity of the Buddhist notion of nibbana.

Interestingly, in conflating Buddhist nibbana with the nirvana in the Gita, Gandhi rather oddly thinks that he is doing a service to the teachings of the Buddha! Gandhi is concerned that since the Buddhist nirvana (nibbana) means 'extinction', it can slide into nihilism. So he wants to establish that this “Nirvana is not like the black, dead peace of the grave, but the living peace, the living happiness of a soul which is conscious of itself, and conscious of having found its own abode in the heart of the Eternal" (Young India, 1927).

Gandhi avoids a real engagement with the specifically Buddhist theory of nirvana-as-extinction, which is nibbana. If only he had engaged at some depth he would have seen that Buddha’s theory of anatta was not really about declaring “there is no self” or even about asserting to “there is self” — it was not about making declaratory statements in either direction for that would again lead to metaphysics even if one were to “declare” that there is no self. The story of Buddha’s dialogue with Vacchagotta in the Samyukta Nikaya makes that clear.1 Buddha maintains silence and refuses to provide an answer to bhikkus who were asking him if he actually believed that there is no self. That is, Buddha's supposed nihilism of no-self and no-soul has a particular depth which Gandhi seemed to have overlooked.

Gandhi displays a lot of “good intention” in wanting to salvage nibbana so that it does not slip into nihilism. He otherwise keeps extolling the Buddha’s teaching. But it all seems so preposterous and very disingenuous, almost facetious. For what if the Buddhist doctrine of nirvana actually does not need “its own abode in the heart of the Eternal”, as Gandhi imagines. Gandhi does not address this. Instead he offers himself to fight the imagined detractors or falsifiers of Buddhism and save the latter from an imagined nihilism (as understood again by Gandhi).

Gandhi does not want to consider the possibility that even in the sense of 'shunyata', emptiness or nihilism, Buddhism can in fact tremendously contribute towards a morally responsible world. He closes himself off. One reason for this could have been his over-investment in attempting to establish Buddhism's continuity with Hinduism, or at least with his brand of Sanatani Hinduism. He seemed to be under a secret compulsion, perhaps against his own wish, to define everything within an expansive, pluralist sanatani Hindu tradition. He was nervous about not being able to bring Buddha under this umbrella.

Self-purification

Let us take Gandhi's idea of self-purification and self-suffering (tapas), which is most central to his approach. Immediately, we notice the sharp divergence from the Buddha for whom the self (and not just the 'ego') itself is an illusion. We cannot then avoid the question: What does it mean to purify something like the self which is itself illusory, impermanent, and the source of dukkha? Does this not mark a fundamental divergence between Buddha and Gandhi?

For Gandhi, the self should undergo suffering, tapas, for it to be steeled into a moral agent, the satyagrahi. Tapas, forbearance, self-suffering is part of the practice which makes the individual free of fear and hatred. The moral failings of others could be now seen in an undistorted manner, making way for a true and immanent relation between humans in society so that we do not end up demanding 'an eye for an eye' making the world go blind.

Gandhi talks about true knowledge as always knowledge of the self. "Learning is knowledge of what it is worth knowing about. The only things worth knowing about in the atman. True knowledge is thus knowledge of the self" (Letter to students, CW, 19, p. 199).

In contrast, Buddha wants to eliminate the self, for the self can never be a moral agent since it is itself what stands in the way of Reality. The self is part of what is called prapancos, a dogmatic obsession. The saintly self practicing self-purification (atman-shuddhi) arrogates to itself a mediatory role, creating a division in society between those who have attained to the higher moral self and those who haven't.

Ahimsa, satyagraha, tapas in Gandhi redoubles the self, re-inscribes it, as a moral self. Gandhi sees the self as internally differentiated, such that the practice of self-purification can work to chisel out a morally responsible self, the satyagrahi. This internal differentiation is clear also when he tells us about how bhakti leads to the realisation of atman: there is atman and there is another atman which is closer to self-realisation. "The true meaning of bhakti is search for the atman. When the atman realises itself, bhakti is transformed into jnana" (CW, 13, p. 191).

The atman is always in the midst of a relating with others, or with the other. It is the most heartfelt part of the self, when one is touched in one's inner recess, when moved in a very subtle, but extremely heartfelt manner. It is the awareness of the moral atmosphere. It is not the point where knowledge converges with the self, where the anvil of experience gives rise to abstract knowledge: no, instead, it is the point where the self touches/converges with the moral atmosphere. The 'universal' here is the moral atmosphere, what in Emerson is the Compensation. The satyagrahi is one whose self is such a Self.

In Buddha, on the other hand, ahimsa and karuna arises out of the elimination of the self, which is “a recognition of the fact of no-self”. Nibbana as extinction is 'accepting' this fact, but this 'recognition' and 'accepting' is not at a purely formal level of knowledge or even awareness. It is not about 'knowing' this and being in harmony with the causal flow of life and death, disciplining our desires and restraining ourselves, but of being an atapi (one engaged in tapas) in order to exit this world of birth and re-birth.

The Mahasatipatthana Sutta tells us about the bhikku's ardent effort (tapas) directed towards realising that the four elements — body (kaya), feeling (vedana), mind (citta), and dhamma) — that constitute the self are all, ultimately, vibrations. Tapas and mindfulness make sure that these vibrations ultimately go extinct.

Hence it is properly speaking highly misplaced to say that the Buddha 'entered into nibbana', or that someone 'attained nibbana', which assumes no extinction of the self — attainment implies not an extinction possibly an inflation. The correct term is parinibutto, full passing away, full extinction, which is what happened with the Buddha’s nibbana.

It is not purification of the self, but the extinction of the self which will then lead us to not just give up our attachments to the bad things, to the flesh, but also give up attachments to the moral ideals and asceticism. That is why Buddha is against asceticism, the idea of tapas or burning/suffering as the mortification of the flesh. This is also why Buddha's Path is called the Middle Way, avoiding the extremes of self-indulgence and asceticism.