Toward a Philosophy of Revolution: Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan on Caste and Politics in India — by Waseem Malik

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t is rare for a book released into the vast sea of publishing to wield the explosive potential of shattering people’s habituated ways of seeing the world on the one hand, while blasting open possibilities of reconceiving everything in a new way on the other. The collection of essays titled Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution: On Caste and Politics (2024) by philosophers Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan is a book that seeks to pry open the possibility of radically rethinking India – its society and politics – from the jaws of the hustlers of the ‘India racket’ (postcolonial theory, upper caste liberalism, ‘decolonial’ YouTubers of the ‘Organization’). The book is a philosophical reflection on and response to the appalling political situation in the Union of India^[1] and across the world. Yet, they do not write like philosophers or academics^[2]: that is, in a deflationary style, always undercounting the dead and the butchered of the damned of the earth in the interests of ‘objectivity’^[3] and ‘neutrality’. No, they write with rage and hurl thunderbolts – to paraphrase the great Robespierre.

According to the editor of the collection, Maël Montévil, both Mohan and Dwivedi belong to the tradition or the ‘bastard family’ of deconstruction. They have developed their joint philosophical project through dialogue with their interlocutors, Bernard Stiegler and Jean-Luc Nancy. Outside India, Dwivedi and Mohan have come to be known as ‘post-deconstructive’ thinkers. In India though, they seem to be relatively unknown^[4]. The essays in the collection are animated by the egalitarian political desire of — in Montévil’s words — “the lower caste majority position” (p. 1). They seek to develop a ‘revolutionary’ interpretation of Indian society^[5] and politics through the authors’ conceptual system. Deleuze and Guattari have taught us that the task of philosophy is the invention of concepts^[6] and in Dwivedi and Mohan’s work we see the deployment, en acte as it were, of a novel philosophical architectonic for seizing hold of different events and themes pertaining to the most urgent questions and problems facing people in India^[7]. At the same time, the collection of essays should also be seen as a readable entry point into the philosophical oeuvre of its authors. Although most of the essays, interviews, and encomia that constitute the book are timely interventions in the backdrop of an ever unfolding concatenation of political events — the rise of Modi, anti-CAA protests, Covid-19 pandemic — they have a timelessness about them appropriate to philosophy proper.

Dwivedi and Mohan offer a trenchant analysis of the genesis and metastasis of ‘Hindu nationalism’, which is framed, at the core, as an explicit upper caste supremacist movement, self-consciously articulated by the leaders of the ‘twice-born’ as a response to the anti-caste mobilizations across the subcontinent in 19th and 20th centuries. Hindu nationalism is seen as a project of ideological mystification that forecloses insight into the fundamental antagonism of Indian society, i.e., caste domination. The basic thesis of the book, running like a ‘sacred thread’ across the essays and interviews, is this: The real fault line of Indian society is caste and in order to obfuscate the immanent contradictions of caste internal to the so-called ‘Hindu majority’, people belonging to the religious minorities are routinely butchered and brutalized through organized pogroms, massacres, and spectacular lynchings. The figure of the Muslim, then, becomes the screen upon which the discontents of the ‘Hindu society’^[8] are projected and the Muslim body becomes the ground that absorbs its surplus violence. Thus, Muslims and Dalits, both, are oppressed and exploited by the existing configurations of power in India. In general, Dalits and other lower caste people are subjected to everyday forms of violence and humiliation that the caste society has perfected over millennia. Yet, this violence is routinely and vehemently disavowed in the public sphere. Muslims, on the other hand, are subjected to spectacular forms of violence and cruelty: mob lynchings, pogroms, and destruction of property. Significantly, the grotesque violence against Muslims is proudly and publicly avowed (garv se kaho. . .)^[9]. The rest of the essay would attempt to offer a thorougher reading of the book as I engage with some of the more compelling essays of the collection.

The first essay introduces the concept of ceremonial society by way of attempting to grasp the essence of a society under fascism. It reflects on the relationship between ceremoniality, speech, writing, and the new. Ceremonies are concerned with ‘faithful repetition’ and they loathe deviations. Similarly, ceremonial societies deploy their material and symbolic resources for the conservation and repetition of the social and cultural logics that underpin them. They underscore the specificity of ceremonial society by reflecting on the use of quotation marks. Quotation marks are used to set off an older statement from a new one. In other words, they are deployed for the functions of distinction and distanciation. By using quotation marks, the author may distance herself from the statements and traditions of the past. For Dwivedi and Mohan, “these punctuation marks are an institution which sets off the past from the future” (p. 14). Thus, the practice of quoting, as an institution of modernity, introduces a cut between the past and the future. It affirms the openness of the future and the possibility of the new.

The dialectic between quoted statements and original statements is the dialectic between the old and the new, the past and the future. Modernity itself is seen by the authors as the game for finding the ideal ratio between past and future and the old and the new separated by quotation marks. The writer is seen as ‘the heroic figure of modernity’ as the act of writing subjects the world to a certain aggression and surges forth toward the unknown and the unwritten by writing new statements. There is an intimate link between the new and the modern. They write, “The writer is also a revolutionary in language. Revolution is the modern theater of politics where a cut with the past is made in a single event. Hence, modernity is obsessed with scientific, literary, and philosophical revolutions” (p. 15).

The authors underscore the complex ways in which quotes are deployed and quoting as a practice is used in various domains. They give the example of an academic who uses quotes to mention the statements from which she secedes in the history of the discipline. Here, then, is the potentiality of language, actualized by the institutions of quotation and citation, that inspires terror in the ceremonial society: the ability of statements to secede from ceremoniality and ritual power. The ceremonial society aspires for the pure recitation of the past. Therefore, the enforcers of ceremoniality demand from writers and speakers obedient recitation rather than academic citation. The ceremonial society seeks to institute a time without writers and without the aggressive use of language that hurls us forth into the unknown future. It is a society of total repetition that forecloses the future. It is precisely what fascism is: the suspension of our statements toward the future.

The obverse of the suppression of new statements is the forced recitation of ceremonial slogans, chants, and mantras by the ‘holy mobs’ — we know who they are. The right of free speech — the right of not to be penalized for daring to produce new statements — also includes the right not to be forced to speak. It is the right to silence, the right not to be forced to chant the slogans against our will and principles. They write, “In India, we are now beginning to fight for our right not to speak the words that are against our conscience, such as declaring our allegiance through slogans and songs for a fair-skinned upper caste housewife swathed in silk and gold, who loves to straddle wildlife and lust for real estate all the way from Iran to the Philippines” (p. 16). As new statements are suspended and people are compelled to chant ‘certified’ slogans, “we watch language seceding from us with the tranquility of an animal that is being eaten alive” (p. 17).

To break out of the captivity of the ceremonial society into which it locks everyone, we need to recover the aggression of language that the figure of the writer represents. For the authors, writing qua writing is an act of aggression toward the stasis of the ceremonial society and act of (genuine) writing brings a new style of aggression into language. “The measure of a writer,” they write, “is the terror she inspires in the ceremonial orders of power” (p. 18). As the holy mobs of fascists descend into the streets and murder people for the crime of existing, “we are in need of all our writers, the writer in all of us. We are in need of lightning strikes. So that we can write, grinding our teeth: Back off!” (p. 19).

One of the most important texts in the collection is the essay titled ‘Hidden by Hindu’. It articulates the basic problematic of life in the subcontinent that has overdetermined the recurrent crises of its sociality and politics for more than a century now. It is a reiteration and continuation of their argument in the essay ‘The Hindu Hoax’ published in the Caravan magazine in 2021. It also explicates the proposition around which Dwivedi and Mohan’s politics of radical egalitarianism revolve. They problematize the carefully curated contemporary image of India as the land of Hindu religion, yoga, and peace, with Gandhi as its mascot. The image of India’s ‘beautiful forevers’ hides a different and disturbing reality: the three millennia old oppression and exploitation of the majority of the people inhabiting the land called India, that have been assigned to ‘lower castes’, by a minority that has designated itself as ‘upper caste’. The ratio of lower caste to upper caste population in India is roughly 9 to 1. In other words, nearly 90% of people in India belong to the lower castes (ex-untouchables, Shudras, and indigenous tribal people). The ‘twice-born’ upper castes only constitute roughly 10% of the population. This, then, is the fundamental political fact of Indian society: the ceaseless and entrenched oppression and exploitation of 90% by the 10%. (It is, of course, a rough estimate, because there has been no caste census in India since 1931.)

The basic thesis of the essay is that Hinduism, far from being ancient, is the most recent of religions. It was invented between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although different cognates of the word ‘Hindu’ have been around for quite a while, ‘Hinduism’ as a coherent religious system that enfolds within itself all the non-Muslim and non-Christain peoples within it is a modern invention. All the way back in 6th century BC, the Achamaenid Persians used the term ‘Hindu’ to designate the geographical area around the river Indus (also called ‘Sindhu’) in the north-western region of the subcontinent. Alexander’s army designated the region as ‘Indus’. The modern name of the country ‘India’ derives from it^[10]. The Arabic rendering of ‘Indus’ is ‘Al Hind’. From this, the term ‘Hindu’ derives as a loose designation for the non-Muslim and non-Christain inhabitants of Al Hind and regions beyond it. It was Indologists and colonial administrators in the 19th century who first began to deploy the term in a loosely consistent fashion to refer to the people of the whole subcontinent, including Muslims, whom they would sometimes call as ‘Hindu Muslims’. On rare occasions, they would deploy the term ‘Hindu’ to speak about the customs of the upper castes, especially Brahmins.

The authors’ claim must not be misinterpreted to mean that the texts, myths, and law codes that constitute the Brahminical canon did not exist before the 19th century. The point, however, is that the Brahminical canon was precisely that — Brahminical. As a theological and metaphysical system, it existed only for the ‘twice-born’. The shudras and the avarnas — congenitally ‘impure’ — were excluded from the theology of the ‘twice-born’ as well as their temples. In fact, “for millennia, a great wall stood between the world of the upper caste minority and the lower caste majority. Through this wall, certain limited transactions advantageous to the upper castes are allowed, including the manual labor of the lower castes for the upper castes and the transfer of excreta of the upper castes towards the lower castes” (p. 23).

How, then, did the signifier ‘Hindu’ metamorphose from being the designation of diverse groups of people inhabiting a vast geographical region, who had varied customs and religious practices and who were divided into hierarchical and strictly endogamous castes, into the term signifying a unified religion? In other words, how and why was ‘Hinduism’ invented? For Dwivedi and Mohan, the motivation behind the invention of ‘Hinduism’ is clear: the conservation and eternalization of ancient social hierarchies under modern political conditions. It is only when we consider the most glaring and obdurate fact of the subcontinental history — the only invariant of ‘Indian’ society across millennia has been the caste order — that we can grasp the project of the construction of ‘Hinduism’ as the defense of the millennial upper caste privileges against the ‘democracy to come’ (la démocratie à venir).

For millennia, the upper castes had monopolized the means of wealth, knowledge, and violence in the societies of the subcontinent^[11] they dominated, irrespective of the nature of political regimes. Although the ‘twice-born’ had always been a ruling minority, it was only with the introduction of the technology of census by the British colonial state in the 19th century that revealed definitively the colossal population differential between the lower caste majority and the upper caste minority. In fact, at the beginning of the census operations, the colonial officers encountered a bewildering multiplicity of religious beliefs and jatis^[12]. Of course, there was a degree of clarity about the religious denominations of Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Parsis. However, people who did not identify with the aforementioned religions couldn’t be classified without complications. This population consisted of groups of people who adhered to various local religions — usually referred to as ‘sects’ and ‘cults’ — like Shakta, Shaivism, Vaishnavism, Lingayat, etc. Also, people at the time did not make a clean separation between caste and religion: they would often report both their caste and religion as, say, Brahmin. It is understandable as caste encompasses an individual's life-world. It is the individual’s dharma. It shapes one’s modes of worship, labor, and the nature of one’s social relations. In fact, the Census of India Report of 1921 noted that “No Indian is familiar with the term ‘Hindu’ as applied to his religion”.

Dwivedi and Mohan maintain that the leaders of the upper castes recognized the threat posed to their position as an elite minority and proceeded to institute ‘social reforms’, such as temple entry programs for the lower castes. Of course, the symbolic reforms left unchanged the material infrastructure of caste domination — land ownership, access to resources, and the upper caste monopolization of political power, etc. Indeed, according to the authors, this was the raison d’etre of the upper caste project of social reform in the subcontinent. In other words, the project of social reform sought to invent a new Hindu religion as a means of conserving the institution of caste. At the same time, the fabrication of a false majority, coupled with the administrative unification of the subcontinent under the Raj, threatened to reduce the Muslims of South Asia into a permanent minority. In fact, the social reforms and the construction of a Hindu majority must also be seen as politics of foreclosure: they foreclosed the possibility of emancipation of the peoples of the subcontinent opened up by modernity which, in turn, was introduced in South Asia through the colonial encounter.

For the authors, the fabrication of a false majority instituted a false problem in the Indian political field: the antagonism between Hindu majority and Muslim minority. The antagonism, then, was projected onto the past and rendered eternal through an ‘ancestral’ reading of the history of the subcontinent. Dwivedi and Mohan maintain that the upshot of the institution of this pseudo problematic into the political field of the subcontinent was the Partition. It also overdetermined the political discourse of India in the post-colonial era that positions Pakistan as the external enemy and the minoritized Muslims of India (and its appendages) as the internal enemy. The false problem of Indian politics is seen by the authors as a ‘nationalized deflection’ in which intellectuals of all stripes – liberal, left, and right – participate. It also undergirds the politics of ‘Indic secularism’ that defines secularism in terms of the timeless Hindu tolerance of the Muslim Other. In reality, as Perry Anderson has noted, Indian secularism is coterminous with the politics of Hindu confessionalism^[13]. The intellectuals of both the right and the left (Hindu Right and Hindu Lite) are held to be equally invested in perpetuating the pseudo-problematic of the Indian political field, i.e., the eternal and irrepressible antagonism between the Hindu majority and the Muslim minority. It serves to mystify and suppress the real contradiction of social and political life in India: the millennia long and continuing oppression and exploitation of the lower caste majority by the upper caste minority.

Dwivedi and Mohan’s thesis of the ‘Hindu hoax’ is complemented with the proposal of a new philosophy of history that critiques the ancestral model of historiography (p. 93). The usual mode of historiography is based on the positing of a hypostatized ‘common ancestor’ as ground of the identity of a people or a culture. The assumption of the common ancestor is the engine of racializing a people. The authors contrast it with an anastatic model of historiography that doesn’t ground common life in a common ancestor. Instead, it bastardizes history. The histories of forms of life are constituted by mixing of people, knowledges, and techniques. There are no pure origins in history.

They also propose a distinction between two kinds of historical objects: looming objects and ersatz objects. Dwivedi and Mohan derive the concept of the looming object from the history of navigation. The looming objects gather the world around them in an epoch. In order to get a sense of the looming objects, one might try to imagine the world today without the internet. The authors are especially interested in two salient looming objects that have been fundamental to the history of the subcontinent: religion and racism. They must be understood in order to grasp that what appears as a single religion across time is, in fact, a series of new arrangements designed to conserve the caste order. In the case of the invention and institutionalization of Hindu religion, the new discursive and institutional arrangements have served to reinforce the ancient system of caste — the oldest and most durable form of racism in human history.

The authors maintain that they are (non-)historians of the history shunned by professional historians of India and their writings about the invention of Hinduism contains an implicit critique of the historiographical silence institutionalized by the dominant renderings of India’s past by its professional and court historians. History, for Dwivedi and Mohan, explicates the temporal logic of social forms. In other words, it explains “why a society is constituted in a particular way and why it should continue to be that way” (p. 94). History, insofar as it is conceived through the ancestral model of historiography, tasks itself with excavating — nay, inventing — ‘usable pasts’ for the masters of order. It means that history is always threatened by the terrifying possibility of degenerating into ideology and, thus, becoming an instrument of domination in the hands of political regimes. Therefore, the hidden assumptions and historiographical silences underpinning (ancestral) histories must be articulated in order to comprehend and challenge their social and political implications. Nonetheless, the fate of history is not reduced only to the service of regimes of domination. Historiography can also open up a range of emancipatory possibilities by reconceiving the visions of the past dominated by ancestral spirits. They write, “Historiography has a role  to play in breaking the regularities and orders of days, so long as it is theoretically distinguished from the historical perspectives of the oppressor” (p. 95).

History as a science (wissenschaft) emerged during the long Enlightenment out of the ancient arts of chronicle-writing, storytelling, and mythmaking^[14]. It was Kant, and in his wake Hegel and Marx, who first turned the philosophical gaze toward the problem of history and endeavored to lay the theoretical groundwork for the field. In the absence of a robust theoretical field, historical objects and their relations could not be recognized, and history would seem to be… just one fucking thing after another. For example, without the conceptual architectonic of historical materialism, the history of the transitions of modes of production and the emergence of capitalism would appear to be a confused jumble. Similarly, in the absence of the field of political theory, a history of politics would be impossible beyond simply the chronicles of kings and generals.

Thus, the possibility of political history is grounded in the constitution of an objective field of components in relation with each other: territory, state, population, religion, government, wars, administration and regulation of violence, etc. And the history of a political system, as of any other system, is an explanation of the relations of components with each other. Dwivedi and Mohan introduce the concept of comprehending law as the force which orders the relations of components with each other and regulates their intensities. For them, “That which comprehends the components in their relations (according to componential laws) is never itself a component” (p. 96). The problem of politics, the authors claim, is the seizure of a system by one of its components. The component which seizes the system turns itself into its comprehending law and it always leads to stasis, i.e., the deformation and exhaustion of all other components of the system.

“Stasis,” then, “is a form of evil which happens when something necessary is being blocked” (p. 313). A political system falls into stasis when, say, the military, which is a component of the system, seizes hold of it and elevates itself to be its comprehending law (e.g., Pakistan). In India, the stasis is three millennia old: The upper caste minority positions and interprets itself as the comprehending law of the society and see the eternalization of the caste order as the only acceptable end in politics. The obverse of stasis is the promise of democracy to come: a political order not seized by one of its components. The enduring success of the upper castes across the millennia has been their ability to present their self-interests as the only matters of interest of society as such. The contemporary form of this misrecognition is Hindu nationalism^[15]. Because the interests of the upper castes are systematically misrecognized as the interests of the social totality, the fields of history and archeology in India are centered around the upper caste thematics of ‘Aryan’, ‘Vedas’, Sanskrit texts, and the myths of dominance of the Aryans over the older inhabitants of the subcontinent. In other words, history and archeology in India are predisposed toward upper caste myth-making.

Historiography of and in the subcontinent is entangled with the questions of religion, blood, lineage, and caste^[16]. In order to underscore and comprehend the stakes in the histories of religions, castes/races, and their componential relations across time, the authors introduce the distinction between looming objects and ersatz objects. Looming objects gather social systems around them and determine the form of their comprehending laws. The philosophers insist that looming objects appear in various forms: material objects, invented tools, symbolic forms, etc. They write, “These objects such as ships, taxation, agriculture, writing, racisms, religions, armies, the accountant, misogyny, horses are capable of gathering towards themselves nearly everything which were the concerns of their dominant epochs” (p. 98). Therefore, these objects are frequently deployed in ordering societies and they loom over the componential relations of the elements constituting social totalities. “The looming object can cause a change in the comprehending laws of society as much when it enters as when it exits a society” (p. 98). For instance, the coupling of horse with chariot transformed the existing human settlements of the steppes and, then, much of the land below it through the ‘arrival’ of the Indo-Aryans about three thousand years ago. In the subcontinent, the memory of the destruction of civilizations and the subjugation of local populations through the denigrate-dominate function^[17] is retained in the texts of Brahminical social code from 1500 BC and other upper caste myths. For Dwivedi and Mohan, the memory of the triumph of the ‘Aryans’ still orders the sociality of the subcontinent and forecloses the possibility of emancipatory politics. Similarly, the steel ax introduced in the South American societies by the conquistadors decimated the existing societies. On the other hand, Dwivedi and Mohan call ersatz objects those things that do not determine the comprehending law of a social system. The functions of ersatz objects are exchangeable: for example, the introduction into the rest of the world of tomatoes from South America replaced other objects used for souring function in most kitchens. The introduction of tomatoes, however, did not transform the ‘comprehending laws’ of the societies of the rest of the world.

The authors focus on two looming objects and their relations in history — religion and racism. History of religion is thought to be especially important insofar as histories of objects go. It is crucial to our understanding of the historiographical excavations and inventions of ‘usable’ pasts — usable for ordering sociality and administering violence in the present. Often, the assumptions of historiographies of religions are governed by the political investments of people and the institutions they are situated in and, thereby, the historical discourse produced becomes a machine for the racialization of peoples. The most salient contemporary example of the racializing disposition of historiography of religion can be seen in the new histories of Islam governed by the logic of Islamophobia. At the same time, the histories of religion often claim to gather within themselves the totality of an epoch and end up becoming teleological: in other words, a suspension of the contingency of the past and the openness of the future. Furthermore, “histories of religions gather the variations of religions from time to time and from place to place by assuming that the ‘meaning’ of religion is understood and this is how the apparitions of ‘common ancestors’ arise” (p. 100). An example of the fascination of theologized historiography with the figure of the ‘common ancestor’ is the attempt, rooted in antisemitism, in 18th and 19th centuries of tracing all European culture and religion (i.e., Christianity) to the ‘Aryan’ ancestor.

Dwivedi and Mohan argue that the classical model of historiography is geared toward the aim of conserving the myth of the common ancestor. Hence, they refer to it as the ancestral model. They cite the example of the historiography of the ‘Greek exception’ and its role in the construction of the modern European identity: that is, something like a Europe was constituted by the projection of common ancestor from which Europe derived a depth of time — the pseudo-memory of an ancient origin — and, therefore, a racializable identity. In fact, across the 19th century, the common ancestor in the European imagination wavered between the ancestral Greek and the ancestral Aryan. The Aryan myth undergirded the northern European project the Nazis endeavored to realize through total war and genocide, as the Aryan ancestors demand nothing less than the total purification of blood and race. Today, Fortress Europe is underpinned by the myth of the ‘Greek exception’ — the ancient Greeks were us and we are the ancient Greeks. However, before the ancient Greeks were retroactively recuperated into Fortress Europe, they lived in the ancient Mediterranean world and shared good, ideas, loves, and strife with the peoples contagious with them — the Egyptians, North Africans, etc.

Against the ancestral model, Dwivedi and Mohan counterpose the anastatic model of historiography. ‘Anastasis’ is that which leads a system (society, economy, organism, etc.) out of stasis, i.e., the seizure of a complex system by one of its components such that its development is arrested. By way of an example of stasis in a system, one may think of the capture of contemporary democratic systems by the power of capital. The ancestral model of historiography contributes to prolonging the stasis of social and political systems by tethering people to common ancestors. The authors contend that, “The ancestral model presupposes a certain exception, a sudden birth with little to correspond to an umbilical cord. The object or period may have remained entirely unaware of this designation, as with the ancient Greeks who did not know they were ‘the Greek exception’ giving birth to a project named Europe which was distant in space and time” (p. 102). The anastatic model, on the other hand, seeks to end the reign of common ancestors and domineering ethno-spirits. It deconstructs the ancestrality of ancestors and seeks to demonstrate the constitutive impurity of all origins. And, therefore, it creates the possibility of breaking open the ceremonial order of societies governed by ancestors. The anastatic model of historiography restores to history the openness, uncertainty, and contingency proper to all human past, while the ancestral model conserves the image of a common ancestor across all changes. The ancestral model of historiography always tells a story of decline: from the ideal Greek polis, the Aryavarta, the Successorship of the Rightly Guided, etc. And the politics deriving from ancestral historiography seek to resurrect the pure past in spectacular instantiations. The invention of Europe through the reference to the Greek exception as well as the Aryan ancestor and the invention of Hinduism through the invocation of the Aryan archetype rely on ancestral historiography. In fact, historically, these two processes are entwined insofar as there was an extensive exchange of ideas between European philologists and ‘twice-born’ Indian scholars across the 19th century. In Europe, the ancestral reading of the past expels the Jews and the Arabs from authentic Europeanness, while in India it subsumes the lower caste majority into the fold of the Eternal Religion and at the same time minoritizes Muslims.

The ancestral histories of the subcontinent reproduce and legitimize the ‘Aryan doctrine’ that underpins the caste order. The Aryan doctrine designates a set of dogmas about the origins of northern Europeans, Iranians, and ‘twice-born’ Indians. They are thought to have descended from a ‘superior’ Aryan race that lay at the foundation of everything good that human civilization has to offer. For Dwivedi and Mohan, the Aryan doctrine is the sacred thread running through seemingly disparate intellectual and political projects in India. The concept also helps them in articulating the ideology of racialized apartheid that undergirds the caste order. In the caste order, the ‘essence’ and destiny of each individual is pre-determined by birth and descent. The caste system rank orders society in terms of endogamous groups of differing degrees of purity. The ‘purity’ of a caste determines its degree of freedom and the power to determine its general conditions of life and to enforce other conditions of life upon others who are less pure. The authors maintain that for thousands of years, “the pyramidal social institution has remained in place with regional variations and minor mutations, beginning with the arrival on the subcontinent of the people who called themselves ‘Aryan’ (noble, superior) and denigrated the indigenous inhabitants as dasa (slave), anasa (barbaric, ugly), and mlechha (impure, untouchable)” (p. 33).

The caste order secures and reinforces upper caste supremacy by organizing and reproducing inherited inequalities. They insist, contra Dumont, that caste order is maintained primarily through massive physical and psychic violence rather than the consent of the despised castes. The order of caste is understood as a form of hypophysics — that which consecrates the value of a thing within or inside it, rather than separately attributable to it. For Dwivedi and Mohan, hypophysics robs a thing from being/becoming other than what it is deemed to be by the hypophysical system. The hypophysics of caste is un-dis-lodgeable since within the metaphysical universe of caste order the value of persons is transmitted at the level of nature (i.e., organically rather than through artifice). In other words, the value of a person is unchangeable since it is contingent on birth: i.e., the superiority of a Brahmin and the inferiority of the ‘untouchable’ is intrinsic to their being.

For Dwivedi and Mohan, there is a continuity between the upper-caste program of the invention of Hinduism and the far-right political project of Hindutva. Both projects are invested in the eternalization of the caste order, even as they make overtures to the lower caste majority. In fact, the invention of an organic Hindu majority could only be based on a hypophysics of descent and superiority of birth. The Muslims of the subcontinent in the new Hindu imaginary are seen as either outsiders or traitors who have betrayed their Indic faiths by converting to an Abrahamic faith. The opposition between ‘Indic’ and ‘Abrahamic’ in India today is analogous to the older racist opposition of ‘Aryan’ and ‘Semitic’. The ‘foreignness’, the mleccha origins of Muslims are loudly proclaimed by upper caste supremacists to mask the foreign origins of the Aryans. Like any other ideological project, the Aryan doctrine runs into contradictions, since the modern nation states are founded, in principle at least, on the concept of oneness of a people inhabiting a geographical territory based on descent from common ancestors. The upper castes, on the one hand, seek to maintain their separate and ‘pure’ origins by invoking their Aryan forebears. At the same time, they also find it necessary to lay claim to being the original inhabitants of the subcontinent^[18]. Therefore, in India today, there are two kinds of foreign origins: the mleccha origins of Muslims and the pure Aryan origins of the ‘twice-born’^[19].

Dwivedi and Mohan take the academic projects of postcoloniality and decoloniality to task for providing theoretical justification for the Aryan doctrine and a politics built on a false insider-outsider logic. They use the portmanteau word de-post-colonial to denote both postcolonial and decolonial theories together, insisting that their internal differences are just quibbles. The de-post-colonial academic program and upper caste supremacism are animated by the same principle: the notion of purity, which the authors maintain is the hypophysical core of the Aryan doctrine. Both projects are hostile to contact, impurity, and contamination, and therefore, to actual history and culture which is always the site of mixtures, impurities, and bastardizations.

The authors insist that the postcolonial and decolonial academic projects in India must not be seen as separate from the upper caste supremacist political project of dominating both lower caste majority and the religious minorities through the category of ‘Hindu’. They declare that, “Postcolonial theory approaches the nominal, legal, moral, textual, and historical sites by defining them as the sites of the colonial entombment of the originary past of the upper caste people” (p. 39). The position necessitates a speculative reconstruction of the past before it was contaminated by colonialism, since it is held as an axiom that the colonial encounter restructured the knowledge of and our ability to know India. Dwivedi and Mohan call it the speculative archaeology of the de-post-colonial project. The speculative archaeology of the postcolonial theory presupposes an upper caste idyllic a priori, in which the lower caste people figure only as an amorphous mass. The flip side of this theoretical stance is that the actual sites of historical past are deemed to be impure and, thus, for the political wing of the ‘decolonial’ program, fit to be demolished. For Mohan and Dwivedi, the original sin of postcolonial theory is this: it assigns intellectual and moral legitimacy to the speculatively identified (or rather, invented) traces of the upper caste past. The discourse of  the idyllic a priori opens up a moral and cognitive space to the Hindu nationalists for refounding the idyll that never was.The decolonial project then asserts its right to demolish the sites of contamination and impurity and erect new monuments for mythical god-kings through baptisms of fire and blood. The speculative construction of an idyllic a priori also naturally leads to the search for scapegoats held responsible for destroying it. And since the logic of blood and race governs the weltanschauung of caste society, the blame is assigned, transgenerationally, to the Muslims of India, who are thought to share the racial and spiritual essence of the Turkic kings presumed to have breached the fortresses of idyllic purity^[20].

Isaiah Berlin’s celebrated essay ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’ takes its title from a fragment attributed to the Ancient Greek poet, Archilocus: a fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Although the book doesn’t tell is everything about India^[21], Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan do attempt to drive home to the reader the one big thing: the key to understanding the regimes of violence, subjugation, and humiliation that characterize India. The horrendous pogroms and mob lynchings of Muslims can be made sense of only if they are situated in the political project of conserving caste through the tools of an newly-invented religion and nationhood grounded in it. In fact, I venture to submit that Muslims in India today are in the process of becoming the lowest and the most despised caste in India: everything that has anything to do with the cultural and political life of Muslims is pathologized — faith, attire, food, worship, business, voting, not voting, living, breathing, everything. The book affords us the cognitive and theoretical tools for grasping the link between the exploitation of Dalits and Bahujans and the oppression and persecution of Muslims. It is only by thinking through the constitutive link between these two phenomena that we can even begin to imagine a future in which all the oppressed communities and subjugated nationalities in the subcontinent are emancipated.

Coda

At this point, the review essay is becoming unwieldy and I have to end it through an act of will, even though I have not said everything I want to say about our book. I consciously use the possessive determiner because I have come to think of it as the authors’ gift to all us who are suffocating beneath regimes of perverse order sustained by violence, deception, and hoaxes. Underneath the rage that courses through the pages of the book, there is love — for the damned of the earth, for despised masses of the subcontinent, for the fragile animal that is man. For me, then, the process of engaging with the book, annotating it, trying to think it through as I went about my daily routine, and writing this essay was also an act of reciprocation of the authors’ love. Of course we do not have to agree with everything they say to admire the authors’ courage: it is not so much about what they have said, but that they have said it.

Notes:

^[1] The ‘conditions’ in India are so bad that writing ‘Union of India’ instead of India (or, now, Bharat) might be thought of as a ‘radical’ gesture. Soon, perhaps, the name India would be junked as insufficiently ‘Indic’.

^[2] Or ‘academic philosophers’ who eschew their vocation of corrupting the youth and cursing the gods of the polis and become, in Mohan’s words, ‘praise poets’.

^[3] As Fanon said, the ‘objectivity’ of the oppressor is always stacked up against the oppressed. And, yes, there are oppressors and oppressed in the world: suck on that, Jordan Peterson!

^[4] If you can’t recoup them, ignore them.

^[5] Or, societies stacked on top of one another?

^[6] Might it not also be the invention of new ways of deploying old concepts?

^[7] Although, I believe, the concepts could also be used fruitfully to understand the situation of the peoples under India.

^[8] It is nothing other than the order of caste.

^[9] The analytic binary of ‘quotidian’ and ‘spectacular’ violence must be understood only as a rough heuristic. In practice, both Muslims and Dalits in India are subjected to both quotidian and spectacular forms of violence as matters of course and matters of strategy. The real difference is the intended audience of the spectacle of violence: in the case of a lynch mob destroying the body of a Muslim man, the intended audience is national.

^[10] Although it might soon be illegal to refer to it as ‘India’ as the name itself is ‘un-Indic’.

^[11] Thinking of the subcontinent as a unified society throughout millennia reproduces the methodological nationalism that plagues a lot of non-academic as well as academic writing on the topic and contributes to the suppression of the rights of the subjugated nationalities of the subcontinent.

^[12] Jatis are ‘castes within castes’. There are only four varnas and thousands of jatis in India. The concrete life-world of a person is determined by their jati. In order to grasp the social and political life of caste in India, one has to understand how different jatis cooperate with and compete against each other in social, political, and economic domains.

^[13] Anderson, P. (2012). The Indian ideology. Three Essays Collective.

^[14] In a sense, historiography has still not been able to fully overcome its roots in myth. It is yet to become itself.

^[15] There is only one nationalism in India and that is Hindu nationalism, which is always about blood, race, and ancestry.

^[16] The question of caste is also necessarily a question of race, because caste is always about blood, lineage, and ancestry, and the order of caste is the oldest and longest surviving system of racism in the history of the world.

^[17] For Dwivedi and Mohan’s denigrate-dominate function is a strategy of self-designated supremacy that allows the upper caste supremacists to dominate the lower caste majority by denigrating their forms of life.

^[18] The ‘Out of India’ thesis is one of the ways through which the upper caste ideologues try to resolve the contradiction. Perhaps the most hilarious articulation of the ‘Out of India’ thesis comes from B. G. Tilak.

^[19] Interestingly, on Pakistani TV, Hasan Nisar often denigrates the masses of the country for their shudra and untouchable origins.

^[20] In the imaginaria of Indian ideologues, the invasions of the subcontinent by Muslim Turks are read as the incontrovertible proof of the inherent pathology of Islam and, therefore, Muslims. At the same time, the pre-Islamic incursions and invasions of the subcontinent by the Central Asian steppe peoples are treated as matters of course and the Ur-invasion, that locked in place the destiny of the peoples of South Asia more than three millennia back, is passed over in silence. Unspoken also are the endless wars between the various ‘Hindu’ (read upper caste) kingdoms across millennia. This ancestral reading of history relies on the assumption of an Ur-staat that is supposed to have characterized the subcontinent for millennia. The Hindu nationalist name for it is Akhand Bharat. Yet the assumption of the Indian Ur-staat is not only limited to the ideologues of Hindu nationalism. It is also shared by both liberal and Marxist historiography of India and structures the historical common sense of the masses schooled in the Indian ideology.

^[21] There is no ‘Book of All Books’ that could tell us everything about everything…or everything about anything, really.