Shunya's Notes

Revisiting the Idea of India — Part 2

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily.)

A two-part review of The Indian Ideology by Perry Anderson. Part 1 is here. The review appeared as "No Saints or Miracles" in the Himal Southasian print quarterly 'Are we sure about India?' (January 2013), and is reproduced with permission [this version is slightly modified].

Perhaps no single event has had a greater impact on the politics of modern South Asia than Partition, which created the nation-states of India and Pakistan, and later Bangladesh. The genocide it triggered forced the migration of 12-18 million people, the largest in world history, a million deaths, and a poisoned well of politics in the region. What were its causes? Which key players deserve more blame than others? Could it have been averted? Not only do perceptions differ sharply but most Partition narratives are steeped in nationalist posturing, demonization, and layers of taboo.

Last year, for instance, Jaswant Singh, a leader of the Indian right-wing party BJP and former defense and foreign minister of India, caused a storm with his biography of Jinnah. In it Singh assigned greater blame for Partition to Nehru and even praised Jinnah for his sundry qualities. No BJP official attended the book launch, after which Singh was summarily expelled from the BJP and his book banned in Gujarat. So while emotions still run high on the topic, it’s also true that at least among scholars today, Singh’s interpretation has gained ground. Yet few historians have offered a sharper account of it than Perry Anderson, who humanises many icons of Indian nationalism, restoring to them their rightful share of human follies.

One such icon is Nehru, a disciple of Gandhi with a crippling psychological dependence on him, but whose ‘intellectual development [was] not arrested by intense religious belief’. Nehru, a Brahmin, was born into a higher social class than Gandhi, a Bania. Nehru was not religious, had extramarital affairs, and ‘had acquired notions of independence and socialism Gandhi did not share’. That said, Nehru’s ‘advantages yielded less than might be thought’ and he ‘seems to have learned very little at Cambridge’, becoming ‘a competent orator’ but never acquiring ‘a modicum of literary taste.’ The Discovery of India, ‘a steam bath of Schwärmerei’ with a ‘Barbara Cartland streak’, reveals ‘not just Nehru’s lack of formal scholarship and addiction to romantic myth, but something deeper ... a capacity for self-deception with far-reaching political consequences.’ He combined qualities like ‘hard work, ambition, charm, some ruthlessness’ with ‘others that were developmentally ambiguous: petulance, violent outbursts of temper, vanity.’

Of Bonobos and Men

Primatologist Frans de Waal has a new book, The Bonobo and the Atheist. Below is an excerpt from an early review in the New Republic (click photo for the Amazon listing; the Publisher's Weekly blurb is here).

Those familiar with de Waal’s previous books ... will recognize many of the same arguments resurfacing here, including the idea that human morality has biological origins. “Fairness and justice are … best looked at as ancient capacities. They derive from the need to preserve harmony in the face of resource competition.” De Waal uses the bonobo—a peaceful, sex-loving primate who may be as closely related to us, or more closely related, than the more Machiavellian chimpanzee—to attack the prevailing notion of human nature as selfish and violent, and that we are constantly battling to suppress our terrible “animal nature.” “Everything science has learned in the past few decades argues against this pessimistic view that morality is a thin veneer over a nasty human nature.”

What’s new here is that de Waal wades directly into the atheism-versus-religion debate, which he claims is often mistakenly cast as a science-versus-religion debate. He argues that a biologically evolved “bottom-up” morality obviates the need for the “top-down” morality imposed by religion. And yet, he sees science (and himself) as aligned with secular humanism, which is not necessarily anti-religion. He would like to see the influence of religion fade, but acknowledges that a moral code is not all religion provides: “The question is not so much whether religion is true or false, but how it shapes our lives, and what might possibly take its place.”

More here. Read more about the book and an excellent interview with de Waal here. Also see a review on NPR.

'River of Faith' meets Amazon

Folks, it turns out that River of Faith has done well, amassing 27K views on YouTube in its first 3 weeks [and 75K at the end of 6 weeks]. Which means it has even bested a whole lot of cat videos! Furthermore, I've been persuaded to offer it on Amazon.com for those who like DVDs, including institutions. Check out the DVD cover below (sans barcode and DVD logo). This should be up on Amazon in early April and ready to ship within days (I'll announce in a comment when it is). Also, for the first but hopefully not last time, a magazine introduced me last week as "a documentary filmmaker". Watch out, you documentary filmmakers! :)

The Kumbh Mela, 2013

NEW: River of Faith, a new documentary film about the Kumbh Mela 2013 by Namit Arora (56 minutes).

Last week I attended the greatest of the Hindu pilgrimage festivals, the Kumbh Mela, a riverside religious fair that takes place at the confluence of the Ganga, the Yamuna, and the mythical Saraswati. Bathing in the river during the Kumbh Mela is considered a meritorious act, cleansing body and soul, and it attracts tens of millions over 6-8 weeks, making it the largest gathering of humans on the planet for a single event. A hundred million might attend the 2013 event that opened on Jan 14 with about ten million in attendance, including me and Usha. Click on any photo below to see a lot more of my photos (with captions) from the Mela's opening days. Next month, I also intend to put out a travel essay and a video documentary on the Kumbh Mela, including many interesting interviews with naga sadhus.

Curator of a Hollowed Conscience

Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal on the great short story writer, Saadat Hasan Manto, whose birth centenary was celebrated this year.

Saadat Hasan Manto ... once remarked that any attempt to fathom the murderous hatred that erupted with such devastating effect at the time of the British retreat from the subcontinent had to begin with an exploration of human nature itself.

For the master of the Urdu short story this was not a value judgment. It was a statement of what he had come to believe after keen observation and extended introspection. Shaken by the repercussions of the decision to break up the unity of the subcontinent, Manto wondered if people who only recently were friends, neighbours and compatriots had lost all sense of their humanity. He too was a human being, ‘the same human being who raped mankind, who indulged in killing' and had ‘all those weaknesses and qualities that other human beings have.' Yet human depravity, however pervasive and deplorable, could not kill all sense of humanity. With faith in that kind of humanity, Manto wrote riveting short stories about the human tragedy of 1947 that are internationally acknowledged for representing the plight of displaced and terrorised humanity with exemplary impartiality and empathy.

More here.

Style & Plot in Murakami's 1Q84, A Review — Part 1

By R Alexander

Haruki Murakami writes short stories and big novels where weird things take on strange importance:  a disappearing cat leads to a detective type adventure, ears are erotic, jazz and classical music beckons and have magically transformative properties, abandoned wells harbor mysteries. Metaphysics as meaning seems to loom over his work. With each book he writes and as the books get longer, greater and greater claims are made concerning their importance. His latest work, 1Q84, is being called his magnum opus, and a great work of world literature. The book is so long, in fact, that Random House hired two translators, Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel, to work on it simultaneously so they could get it to press in a reasonable time. 

1Q84 mainly concerns two people living in Tokyo in 1984 who, early in the novel, find themselves in a parallel or alternate universe. The novel’s title refers to one of the character's name for the alternate universe.  The “Q,” in 1Q84, stands for "question,” and there is apparently a sonic play on “Q” and “9” in the original Japanese, similar, I suppose to the orthographic play on or resemblance between the figures for “q” and “9” in English. 

Aside from this little play on “Q” and “9” in the title, however, Murakami’s prose style remains straightforwardly realistic. No GV Desani-style linguistic or cultural tom-foolery here. Murakami is well known for being the Japanese translator of Raymond Carver and F Scott Fitzgerald, and these influences, Carver’s in particular, are not hidden. In1Q84, Murakami does not depart from his characteristic style and themes. 

1Q84’s two protagonists are Tengo Kawana and Aomame. Tengo, a math teacher and would-be fiction writer, crosses paths with the assassin Aomame, during an investigation into a religious cult. The story’s action takes off when Tengo collaborates with a former cult member, a character called Fuka-Eri, in writing a novella that exposes the cult’s sexual rituals which involve paedophilia. The name of the novella is Air Chrysalis, and much of 1Q84 involves the collaborative writing of Air Chrysalis and the cult’s subsequent hunt for Tengo and Fuka-Eri and later also the hunt  for Aomame, who assassinates the cult leader and goes into hiding separately. But this hardly gives the real sense of the work. While the plot generally follows the outline of a straightforward thriller, Murakami’s baroque inventiveness twists the story into the bizarre. It is not simply that the book is set in a world that has two moons in the sky, where Japan has become a kind of police state, and where other “mirror universe” trappings appear, but there are the weird things that happen. The religious cult, for example, is based around a charismatic leader and his connection to “The Little People,” a troop of vaguely menacing Leprechaun-like entities who emerge, the first time we see them, from a dead dog’s mouth and who manipulate people and events.

Revisiting the Idea of India — Part 1

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily.)

A two-part review of The Indian Ideology by Perry Anderson. Part 2 is here. The review appeared as "No Saints or Miracles" in the Himal Southasian print quarterly 'Are we sure about India?' (January 2013), and is reproduced with permission [this version is slightly modified].

‘Nations without a past are contradictions in terms,’ wrote Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm. Precursors to every modern nation are stories about its past and the present — stories full of invention, exclusion, and exaggeration — which help forge a ‘national consciousness’. Historians, wrote Hobsbawm, have ‘always been mixed up in politics’ and are ‘an essential component of nationalism’. They participate in shaping a nation’s mythos and self-perception. In his vivid analogy, ‘Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.’ The more nationalist a historian, he held, the weaker his bid to be taken seriously as a historian.

But not all historians are equally complicit. Some are deeply skeptical of the dominant national histories and claims of nationhood. ‘Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation,’ wrote the scholar Ernst Renan. The skeptical historian may see value in nationalism, but she always sees a pressing need to inspect and critique its claims, assumptions, omissions, myths, and heroes. Scrutiny may reveal that a ‘cherished tradition’ is neither cherished, nor a tradition; likewise for supposedly ancient origins and customs, traits and virtues, arts and culture, and other qualities of life and mind said to define the essence of a nation and its people. This approach is especially common among Marxist historians (their analytical orientation defines the genre, not their views on communism). The best of them know that there is no ultimately objective history, but who yet seek to write history from below and attempt to expose the actual conditions of social life, including the divisions, conflicts and oppressions that plague any nation.

This, then, is the vantage point of Marxist historian Perry Anderson’s magnificent and lucid new work, The Indian Ideology. What does the title refer to? In his own words, it ‘is another way of describing what is more popularly known as "The Idea of India", which celebrates the democratic stability, multi-cultural unity, and impartial secularity of the Indian state as a national miracle.’ Anderson offers a critique of this idea.

Nationalism in India arose in the 19th century. A native elite, responding to British colonialism, began articulating a consciousness based on a new idea of India. Until then, despite civilizational continuities, the Subcontinent had no sense of itself as ‘India’, no national feeling based on a shared identity. Rival political units and ethnic groups abounded, divided by language, faith, caste, geography, history, and more. There was no historical awareness of the ancient empires of Mauryas or Guptas, or that the Buddha was Indian. This and much more of the Indian past would emerge via European scholarship, profoundly shaping ‘Hinduism’ and Hindu self-knowledge. Anderson surveys the rise of Indian nationalism and offers sharp vignettes of the minds and matters that drove Gandhi, Jinnah, Nehru, Bose, Ambedkar, Mountbatten and others. His analysis of the forces that led to Partition is astute and provocative. He assesses the performance of the independent nation-state and subjects Indian intellectuals to a withering critique for what he diagnoses as their comfort with ‘the Indian ideology’. Though not without shortcomings, Anderson has given us a masterwork of critical synthesis — trenchant, original, and bold — that should fuel discussion and debate for years ahead.  

Partition: Recovering Sylhet

For some time now, I've been digging into the partition of India: Urvashi Butalia's excellent, The Other Side of Silence on the experience of the women, children, and Dalits of Punjab (I hope to do a review soon), Remembering Partition by Gyanendra Pandey and Jan Breman, The Partition of India by Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh, and Stern Reckoning by GD Khosla (most partisan of this lot). I also recently saw the movies Tamas and The Train to Pakistan (both on YouTube) and plan to watch Silent Waters soon. While much new scholarship has appeared in recent years on the partition of Punjab and Bengal, little is known about "the third site of Partition — colonial Assam, and particularly the region of Sylhet." A friend pointed me to this article in Himal that has more on Partition historiography and the experience of Sylhet.

Sixty-five years after Partition, the scholarship that event generates is varied and contested. Now more than ever before, writers and researchers are questioning the heavy focus on Punjab and Bengal at the expense of the third site of Partition – colonial Assam, and particularly the region of Sylhet, which elected to join East Pakistan in a 1947 referendum. The history of Sylhet opens up new complexities beyond the typical discourse that sees Partition as primarily a matter of religious communalism.

The study of Partition’s more narrowly regional dimensions is a recent development. The first Partition historians – Michael Edwardes, Penderel Moon, David Page, V P Menon, G D Khosla, and others – focused on decolonisation and the high politics of the division of India, with a core focus on Punjab. Punjab had captured the popular imagination because of the enormity of Partition violence there, which completely clouded this first phase of scholarship. The 1960s saw another spurt of Partition studies, including debates on the emergence of communalism, and also the publication of the memoirs of many key political players with a hand in the events of 1947. Still, the main focus remained on Partition in the Indian west. Meanwhile, nationalistic scholars in India engaged in glorifying the new state and eulogising the post-Partition leadership. Little emerged on Partition’s impact in areas distant from the ‘core’ of north India and Punjab; Partition became a largely Punjabi experience and not, as it actually was, a story of both east and west India. Even until recently, many professional historians who have contributed immensely to the study of Partition – Mushirul Hasan, Ian Talbot, Stanley Wolpert, David Gilmartin, Alok Bhalla, Anita Inder Singh, Ravinder Kumar – have been loath to engage with the Partition experience in the east.

I also discovered 1947partitionarchive.org, where I came across this harrowing "eyewitness account" by Major Jagjit Singh.

The Indian Ideology

I recently drew attention to a remarkable set of essays on Indian history by Perry Anderson, which brim with sharp and novel insights. They have provoked a strong response from the Indian intelligentsia, both in support and in protest. The essays have just been published in India as "The Indian Ideology" available from Three Essays Collective. Here is the book description (I've just ordered my copy):

Today, the Indian state claims to embody the values of a stable political democracy, a harmonious territorial unity, and a steadfast religious impartiality. Even many of those critical of the inequalities of Indian society underwrite such claims. But how far do they correspond to the realities of the Union? If they do not do so, is that simply because of the fate of circumstance, or the recent misconduct of its rulers?

The Indian Ideology suggests that the roots of the current ills of the Republic go much deeper, historically. They lie, it argues, in the way the struggle for independence culminated in the transfer of power from British rule to Congress in a divided subcontinent, not least in the roles played by Gandhi as the great architect of the movement, and Nehru as his appointed successor, in the catastrophe of Partition. Only a honest reckoning with that disaster, Perry Anderson argues, offers an understanding of what has gone wrong with the Republic since Independence.

The ‘Idea of India’, widely diffused not only in the official establishment, but more broadly in mainstream intellectual life, side-steps or suppresses many of these uncomfortable realities, past and present. For its own reasons, much of the left has yet to challenge the upshot: what has come to be the neo-Nehruvian consensus of the time. The Indian Ideology, revisiting the events of over a century in the light of how millions of Indians fare in the Republic today, suggests another way of looking at the country. Marx, urging his contemporaries to ‘face with sober senses their real conditions of life’, furnishes an example of how that might be done.

An interview with Anderson has appeared in Outlook India. Asked to summarize the book, this is what he said:

You could say that, very roughly, it advances five main arguments that run counter to conventional wisdom in India today. Firstly, that the idea of a subcontinental unity stretching back six thousand years is a myth. Secondly,  that Gandhi’s injection of religion into the national movement was ultimately a disaster for it. Thirdly, that primary responsibility for Partition lay not with the Raj, but Congress. Fourthly, that Nehru’s legacy to Republic was far more ambiguous than his admirers will admit. Lastly, that Indian democracy is not contradicted by caste inequality, but rather enabled by it. This is a crude summary. Obviously, in each case, much more is said than this.

When Einstein Met Tagore

An enchanting conversation between Einstein and Tagore, which concludes with Einstein saying, "Then I am more religious than you are!"

EINSTEIN: Truth, then, or Beauty is not independent of Man?

TAGORE: No.

EINSTEIN: If there would be no human beings any more, the Apollo of Belvedere would no longer be beautiful.

TAGORE: No.

EINSTEIN: I agree with regard to this conception of Beauty, but not with regard to Truth.

TAGORE: Why not? Truth is realized through man.

EINSTEIN: I cannot prove that my conception is right, but that is my religion.

TAGORE: Beauty is in the ideal of perfect harmony which is in the Universal Being; Truth the perfect comprehension of the Universal Mind. We individuals approach it through our own mistakes and blunders, through our accumulated experiences, through our illumined consciousness — how, otherwise, can we know Truth?

Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar - the Movie

Last night I saw an absorbing film made in 1999 on the life and times of BR Ambedkar that is now on YouTube (in English, 3 hrs). It provides a good biographical sketch of an extraordinary and inspiring man who prevailed over some breathtaking odds. This movie shows why in terms of sheer intellect, critical scholarship, and humanistic vision, Ambedkar was head and shoulders above the better known leaders of the Indian nationalist pantheon, including Gandhi and Nehru. The movie also won several National Film Awards in 1999.

Also check out the 20 Aug, 2012 issue of Outlook India magazine that is dedicated to analyzing Ambedkar and his legacy.

God and the Ivory Tower

Scott Atran on how science should approach religion, esp. in an age where religious faith continues to grow around the world (hint: not how the so-called New Atheists do it). The excerpt below will surprise those who think religion is the leading cause of conflict in human history.

Moreover, the chief complaint against religion -- that it is history's prime instigator of intergroup conflict -- does not withstand scrutiny. Religious issues motivate only a small minority of recorded wars. The Encyclopedia of Wars surveyed 1,763 violent conflicts across history; only 123 (7 percent) were religious. A BBC-sponsored "God and War" audit, which evaluated major conflicts over 3,500 years and rated them on a 0-to-5 scale for religious motivation (Punic Wars = 0, Crusades = 5), found that more than 60 percent had no religious motivation. Less than 7 percent earned a rating greater than 3. There was little religious motivation for the internecine Russian and Chinese conflicts or the world wars responsible for history's most lethal century of international bloodshed.

Indeed, inclusive concepts such as "humanity" arguably emerged with the rise of universal religions. Sociologist Rodney Stark reveals that early Christianity became the Roman Empire's majority religion not through conquest, but through a social process grounded in trust. Repeated acts of altruism, such as caring for non-Christians during epidemics, facilitated the expansion of social networks that were invested in the religion. Likewise, studies by behavioral economist Joseph Henrich and colleagues on contemporary foragers, farmers, and herders show that professing a world religion is correlated with greater fairness toward passing strangers. This research helps explain what's going on in sub-Saharan Africa, where Islam is spreading rapidly. In Rwanda, for example, people began converting to Islam in droves after Muslims systematically risked their lives to protect Christians and animists from genocide when few others cared.

More here.

American Rodeo

Anthropologically interesting (depressing?) clips from a rodeo competition I saw in Jackson, Wyoming earlier this week, where rodeo is the official state sport, patriotism and Jesus rule, and the free and the brave gather to make a sport out of dominating frightened animals.

This was my first rodeo and in terms of animal cruelty, it seemed to me much less egregious than what happens in many other rodeo events nationwide. While partly true (is it because, owing to Yellowstone NP, Jackson caters to an audience from all over the country and the world?), I realize now that my ignorance too had led me to this assessment. For instance, I was told at the event that every bucking horse is an "unbroken horse" behaving naturally when a rider gets on. That's not true. These horses buck wildly because a strap is tightened around their flanks and they try to get rid of this irritant. That's why the horse keeps bucking until the strap is released, long after it has thrown off the cowboy. Alongside, spurs are driven into its shoulders and electric prods are often used to aggravate it at the start. Not pretty. Some of the worst abuse though happens to terrified calves.

On Eating Animals

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

In a Montana slaughterhouse some years ago, a Black Angus cow awaiting execution suddenly went berserk, jumped a five-foot fence, and escaped. She ran through the streets for hours, dodging cops, animal control officers, cars, trucks, and a train. Cornered near the Missouri river, the frightened animal jumped into its icy waters and made it across, where a tranquilizer gun brought her down. Her "daring escape" stole the hearts of the locals, some of whom had even cheered her on. The story got international media coverage. Telephone polls were held, calls demanding her freedom poured into local TV stations. Sensing the public mood, the slaughterhouse manager "granted clemency" to the "brave cow". Now called Molly, she was sent to a nearby farm to live out her days grazing under open skies—which warmed the cockles of many a heart.

Cattle trying to escape slaughterhouses are not uncommon. Few of their stories end happily though. In Omaha some years ago, six cows escaped at once. Five were quickly recaptured; one kept running until Omaha police cornered her in an alley and pumped her with bullets. The cow, bellowing miserably and hobbling like a drunk for a few seconds, collapsed and died on the street in a pool of blood. This brought howls of protest, some from folks who had witnessed the killing. They called the police’s handling inhumane and needlessly cruel.

It is tempting to see these commiserating folks as animal lovers—and that's how they likely see themselves—until one remembers what they eat for dinner. A typical slaughterhouse in America kills over a thousand Mollys a day—lined up, shot in the head, and often cut-open and bled while still conscious, an end no less cruel and full of bellowing—all because Americans keep buying neatly-packaged slices of their corpses in supermarkets. Raised unnaturally and inhumanely, over a million protesting birds and mammals are violently killed in the U.S. every hour (that's 300 per second!). Is it then unreasonable to say that nearly all meat-eaters in America participate quite directly in a cycle of suffering and cruelty of staggering scale?

Yet the idea persists that Americans love animals, largely because of their love and concern for a class of animals called "pets" (and other "cute animals" like dolphins, polar bears, and pandas). Most Americans have had at least one pet at some point in their lives. Most see their pets as extensions of their families, photograph them, swap stories about them, buy them gifts and treats, spend money on their sicknesses, support taxes to build shelters for them, and mourn their deaths. Yet, the question continues to rankle, as Elizabeth Kolbert put it:

"How is it that Americans, so solicitous of the animals they keep as pets, are so indifferent toward the ones they cook for dinner? The answer cannot lie in the beasts themselves. Pigs, after all, are quite companionable, and dogs are said to be delicious."[1]

What might explain this odd behavior? From humankind's long community with farm animals, how has it come to this?

Jinasena on God the Creator

In 9th century CE India, a Jain teacher called Jinasena composed a work called Mahapurana. The following is a quote from it.

Some foolish men declare that [a] Creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised, and should be rejected. If god created the world, where was he before creation? If you say he was transcendent then, and needed no support, where is he now? No single being had the skill to make the world—for how can an immaterial god create that which is material? How could god have made the world without any raw material? If you say he made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression. If you declare that the raw material arose naturally you fall into another fallacy, for the whole universe might thus have been its own creator, and have risen equally naturally. If god created the world by an act of will, without any raw material, then it is just his will made nothing else and who will believe this silly stuff? If he is ever perfect, and complete, how could the will to create have arisen in him? If, on the other hand, he is not perfect, he could no more create the universe than a potter could. If he is formless, actionless, and all-embracing, how could he have created the world? Such a soul, devoid of all modality, would have no desire to create anything. If you say that he created to no purpose, because it was his nature to do so then god is pointless. If he created in some kind of sport, it was the sport of a foolish child, leading to trouble. If he created out of love for living things and [in his] need of them he made the world, why did he not make creation wholly blissful, free from misfortune? Thus the doctrine that the world was created by god makes no sense at all.

One thing led to another, as it often does on the web, and I ended up ordering Primal Myths: Creation Myths Around the World.

Krauss on the Universe

Physicist Lawrence Krauss has a new book, A Universe from Nothing. I happen to like Krauss and have seen some of his lectures. He is brilliant, entertaining, and good at distilling cosmology for non-specialists (and the emerging picture of the cosmos is incredibly mind-bending). In his role as a science educator, I've also seen him as smarter on religion than the better known neo-atheists like Dawkins and Harris (which admittedly is not saying much, and Krauss seems to have gotten worse).

It was the book's subtitle, however, that really caught my attention: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing. This is what Krauss has set out to explain—surely one of the greatest mysteries of all time, and perhaps the ultimate question in metaphysics. Can Krauss be serious, I thought? Then I read David Albert's excellent review and I'm persuaded that we are no closer to answering that question than we were before this book, and I am really stunned that Krauss thinks he is answering it. Another reviewer has supplied what may be a more accurate subtitle: "How It Is That There Happens to Be This Something rather than Some Other Something." Sure, this is not sexy but at least it's not false marketing. Here is Albert's review:

Lawrence M. Krauss, a well-known cosmologist and prolific popular-science writer, apparently means to announce to the world, in this new book, that the laws of quantum mechanics have in them the makings of a thoroughly scientific and adamantly secular explanation of why there is something rather than nothing. Period. Case closed. End of story. I kid you not. Look at the subtitle. Look at how Richard Dawkins sums it up in his afterword: “Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages. If ‘On the Origin of Species’ was biology’s deadliest blow to super­naturalism, we may come to see ‘A Universe From Nothing’ as the equivalent from cosmology. The title means exactly what it says. And what it says is ­devastating.”

Well, let’s see. ... Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from? Krauss is more or less upfront, as it turns out, about not having a clue about that. He acknowledges (albeit in a parenthesis, and just a few pages before the end of the book) that every­thing he has been talking about simply takes the basic principles of quantum mechanics for granted. “I have no idea if this notion can be usefully dispensed with,” he writes, “or at least I don’t know of any productive work in this regard.” And what if he did know of some productive work in that regard? What if he were in a position to announce, for instance, that the truth of the quantum-mechanical laws can be traced back to the fact that the world has some other, deeper property X? Wouldn’t we still be in a position to ask why X rather than Y? And is there a last such question? Is there some point at which the possibility of asking any further such questions somehow definitively comes to an end? How would that work? What would that be like?

More here.  Also see this interview in which Robert Wright brilliantly and relentlessly grills Krauss on the facile claim in the book's subtitle.

Doniger on Contemporary Indian Prudishness

A key feature of Hindu society today is its powerful strain of sexual prudery. Hindu conservatives see nothing wrong with it of course, and consider it the very essence of Hinduism. They usually blame "phoren" influences for the loosening sexual mores in their midst. Meanwhile, the liberals argue the reverse, and point to a remarkable Hindu past that produced open-minded texts like the Kama Sutra and the erotic temple sculptures of Khajuraho and Konark. They scratch their heads and wonder how this shift happened, and usually blame it on later historical interventions, such as the conservatism of the Muslim ruling elite and the puritanical Protestantism of Europeans.

In this engaging talk (20 mins), Wendy Doniger pokes holes in these simple narratives. She argues that the Europeans, when excavating the Hindu past, possessed the colonizer's lens of scholarship, which has profoundly shaped modern Hindu self-knowledge. The Anglicized Hindus, as I've written elsewhere, began understanding themselves and their culture "through the eyes of the colonizer—using the latter’s concepts, categories, and judgments." Doniger speaks of two prominent ideals in the history of the Hindus, the erotic and the ascetic, that have long coexisted despite being in tension. She notes that while the British oozed Victorian Virtues, Hinduism too had a long and indigenous strain of prudery that predates European colonization. Not surprisingly, this strain got valorized in colonial times, helping create a more standardized "Hinduism" based on the European idea of "religion", at the heart of which they placed the most austere spiritual texts like the Bhagavad Gita, demoting other strands of folk spirituality. Listen to her full argument, and to her Q&A exchange later with Lawrence Cohen.

As Though We Were Immortal

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

Some travel impressions prompted by the living and the dead of Varanasi, India.

In early 2006, I was on a train to Varanasi when my mother called from Jaipur. Terrorists had just hit Varanasi with explosions at multiple sites, including at the train station; many had died. Since I was going there as a tourist, she urged me to postpone the trip and get off earlier. I was traveling with my partner and two white American friends, both on their first visit to India. They seemed rattled enough and I worried about their safety. What if Hindu-Muslim riots broke out? We were ten nighttime hours away from Varanasi, so we had to decide fast.

The reality of the event sunk in further when an NDTV reporter and her camera crew got on the train. With time to kill, she began quizzing tired and bemused passengers about their take on the news. And she did so in an overexcited style that seemed to dominate live reporting in India. When she thrust the mic at me, I could only mutter something about my worry for my companions.

I persuaded my fellow travelers to continue. The terrorists had already done their deed; Varanasi was likely the safest place to visit now. Worst case, we could stay holed up in our hotel. Truth be told, I was also drawn to this unbidden frisson of travel. When we arrived in the morning, we found a part of the train station cordoned off by the police. I could see blotches of red on the ground. The driver of the taxi we took into town had witnessed the explosions: flying body parts, screams, the ensuing melee. He had helped take the injured to the hospital. But our decision to not abort our journey turned out to be a good one—the city remained calm and we moved around freely. I felt proud of my fellow citizens for being so mature about the situation. It was my first time in Varanasi as an adult, and the place did not disappoint.

BBC Series on the Ganga

Here is an excellent BBC documentary, Ganges, on the river's Himalayan birth and descent, its journey through the plains, and its end in the Bay of Bengal in what is the largest river delta in the world. The series focuses on the natural history and human life along the river's course. The three episodes embedded below (one hour each) are: (1) Daughter of the Mountains, (2) River of Life, (3) Waterland. One critique I have is that by concentrating the most beautiful and the rarest nature and wildlife footage, the series encourages the highly misguided impression that the environment along the river's course is robust and thriving.

Addendum to My Gita Essay

For many motivated readers, a favorite strategy for deflecting criticism of Krishna's dubious advice to Arjuna is to argue that, based on the events in the Mahabharata, the justification for the war is absolutely clear (in comments, one person saw it on par with the Allied case against Hitler!). I responded to this point in part 2 of my essay (Part 1, Part 2) but it's worth drawing attention to it again:

Some defend the Gita by saying that the Kauravas’ bad behavior made the war unavoidable and eminently justified. Perhaps, but that’s not the point. The point is about the quality of the arguments Krishna uses to persuade Arjuna to fight. If the best moral justifications for the war purportedly exist outside the Gita, and some of the worst inside it, what have we left? Given all the bad faith reasoning and the starkly instrumental view of human life in the Gita, which many saw through even in ancient times, what makes the Gita a work of wisdom? Why not get the Gita off its exalted pedestal in our minds and let it be an uncelebrated episode in the Mahabharata—an artful plot element in an epic work of literature?

However, the case for "just war" is not at all clear in the Mahabharata. It's debatable—and not black and white—which is exactly what makes the Mahabharata great. For starters, the standard rules of succession were inadequate for the situation at hand: Dhritarashtra is blind, so his younger brother, Pandu, is made the king. But then Pandu lands a curse and retreats to the forest with his two wives, leaving Dhritarashtra to rule instead. Yudhisthira is the oldest son in the family but he and the other four Pandavas are not really fathered by Pandu (due to his curse), rather Pandu's two wives find some "divine" lovers in the forest (!), raising questions about the royal Kuru lineage of the Pandavas. Nor did Pandu rule anytime during Yudhisthira's life. So as the first son of the long reigning and elder brother Dhritarashtra—who in his heart wants his son to be the king—doesn't Duryodhana, a warrior as skilled as any and an able administrator, have a claim to succession as well? I mean a reasonable case can be made, right?

Meanwhile Duryodhana's ambition grows and he wants the entire kingdom for the Kauravas, not just the better half of the Kuru kingdom that he will inherit. He loathes the Pandavas, partly because he saw them as uppity and mean to him in their youth, as princes are wont to be. So as an adult, Duryodhana is scheming and vicious to the Pandavas. But he can be kind to others, such as to the low-caste Karna. "Birth is obscure," he said, "and men are like rivers whose origins are often unknown." So while the Kauravas are not all-bad (it's worth noting that the elders, respected by both sides, end up supporting them, however reluctantly), the Pandavas are not all-good. The Pandavas spurn and insult Karna based on his caste; Arjuna's pride leads to Eklavya chopping off his thumb—and his hopes and livelihood. Draupadi taunts Duryodhana and his father's blindness. And why does Yudhisthira get so little flak for gambling and losing everything twice, including his half of the Kuru kingdom (after being forgiven the first time, he is foolish enough to play again), even wagering his own wife's body? What kind of man does that? Can we trust his judgment again with a kingdom? (And this when his real father is none other than the Lord of Judgment, Dharma.)

Is it any less obscene that while the Gita's Krishna goads Arjuna to fight the supposedly evil Kauravas, he has asked his own Yadava army to fight on the Kaurava side—because he wants to be seen as neutral! Countless foot soldiers get killed—pawns in the dharmic imperatives of big men, which we are so eager to applaud. The Pandavas, too, break the protocols of war and we rationalize it, why? Further, was it, or was it not, in the public-interest to continue the 13 years of Kaurava rule? These are all legitimate readings, befitting great literature. I think people are too often blinded by their instinct to defend the side "God" is on, or they are too easily seduced by simple narratives of good vs. evil. Anyhow, that's my take this evening.
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Image: Screen grab from Peter Brook's Mahabharata showing (L->R) Bhisma, Gandhari, Dhritarashtra, and Drona.

The Bhagavad Gita Revisited - Part 2

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

Why the Bhagavad Gita is an overrated text with a deplorable morality at its core. This is part two of a two-part critique (Part 1 is the appetizer with the Gita’s historical and literary context. This is the main course with the textual critique).
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The Bhagavad Gita, less than one percent of the sprawling Mahabharata, contains 700 verses in 18 chapters. It opens with Arjuna’s crisis on the battlefield, right before the start of the Great War. Turning to his friend and charioteer, Arjuna cries out,

‘O Krishna, I see my own relations here anxious to fight, and my limbs grow weak; my mouth is dry, my body shakes, and my hair is standing on end. My skin burns, and the bow Gandiva has slipped from my hand; my mind seems to be whirling.’

Arjuna is one of the bravest warriors alive and this visceral physical response, it is amply clear, is not due to performance anxiety, or fear of injury or death. Rather, it arises from Arjuna’s grave doubts over whether he is doing the right thing. He and his Pandava brothers wanted a minimally fair share of their material inheritance, but the devious, stubborn, and unjust Kauravas rebuffed them repeatedly. Though his cause is righteous enough, Arjuna now feels that the ends do not justify the means. He continues,

‘O Krishna, I have no desire for victory, or for a kingdom or pleasures. Of what use is a kingdom or pleasure or even life, if those for whose sake we desire these things—teachers, fathers, sons, grandfathers, uncles, in-laws, grandsons and others with family ties—are engaging in this battle, renouncing their wealth and their lives? Even if they were to kill me, I would not want to kill them, not even to become ruler of the three worlds. How much less for the earth alone? … We are prepared to kill our own relations out of greed for the pleasures of a kingdom. Better for me if the [Kauravas] were to attack me in battle and kill me unarmed and unresisting.’

Who among us can fail to be moved by Arjuna’s anguish? Hopelessly confused, Arjuna pleads with Lord Krishna to show him the way. Krishna obliges, taking on the role of a teacher to help Arjuna figure out the right course of action, which Krishna believes is to fight this war. The wisdom of the Gita—and the claim that it remains a relevant guide to our inner battlefield—is inseparable from Krishna’s advice to Arjuna. So to evaluate the Gita, we need to evaluate the arguments Krishna uses to persuade Arjuna to fight. How good are these arguments?

I’m aware that my reading of the Gita—like every other reading of it—is subjective and selective; I know that there are other ways of reading it. I’ve approached the Gita as expository literature, using the same yardsticks of truth and beauty that I take to other literary texts. I agree with Eknath Easwaran, an admirer and well-known translator of the Gita, when he says, ‘To understand the Gita, it is important to look beneath the surface of its injunctions and see the mental state involved.’ I’ve tried to do the same. I know that the Gita is not ‘mere literature’ to millions of Hindus, including many of my family and friends. It is also sacred scripture, guide to practical wisdom, source of personal and social identity, cultural and national pride, and more. My intention is not to offend but this book review will likely unsettle many; a few will respond in angry and defensive ways. May they find in the Gita the wisdom to forgive my indiscretions.

Thapar on Indian History

An engaging conversation with historian Romila Thapar on some aspects of ancient Indian history, its distortion by colonial scholars, tussles between the post-independence secular and Hindutva camps, and how the past and the present continue to shape each other in India.

The Bhagavad Gita Revisited - Part 1

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

Why the Bhagavad Gita is an overrated text with a deplorable morality at its core. This is part one of a two-part critique. (Part 1 is the appetizer with the Gita’s historical and literary context. Part 2 is the main course with the textual critique).
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In mid-first millennium BCE, a great spiritual awakening was underway in areas around the middle Ganga. People were moving away from the old Vedic religion—which revolved around rituals, animal sacrifices, and nature gods—to more abstract, inner-directed, and contemplative ideas. They now asked about the nature of the self and consciousness, thought and perception. They asked if virtue and vice were absolute or mere social conventions. Personal spiritual quests, aided by meditation and renunciation of material gain, had slowly gathered pace. From this churn arose new ideas like karma and dharma, non-dualism, and the unity of an individual’s soul (atman) with the universal soul (Brahman)—all pivotal ideas in Hinduism.

Some of these innovations in thought soon made their way into the texts we now know as the Upanishads, setting them qualitatively apart from the earlier Vedas. All of this occurred in the context of great sociopolitical and economic changes, marked by the rise of cities, trade and commerce, social mobility, public debates, new institutions of state, and even some early republics. This was also the world of the Buddha, Mahavira, and Carvaka.

The Great War of Yore

By this time, versions of a Mahabharata story had been circulating for centuries. Perhaps inspired by a war that took place c. 950 BCE around modern Delhi (the date is tentative), the story, through oral transmission, took on a life of its own. In The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009), Wendy Doniger writes that the earliest bards who told the Mahabharata story came from a caste of charioteers, who served as drivers, confidantes, and bodyguards to the Kshatriya warrior-castes. While on military campaigns, they recited stories around campfires. (No wonder God is a charioteer in the epic! Even Karna is raised by a charioteer.) In later ages and in times of peace, many bards took their performance art to lay audiences in villages and folk festivals. The story also came to be recited during royal sacrifices, where the Brahmins slowly took over its delivery and evolution, eventually writing it down in Sanskrit. Its "final form" dates from 300 BCE-300 CE and ranges from 75K to 100K verses, seven to ten times the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. (Read an outline of the story here.)

Our Animals, Ourselves

A very interesting piece by my friend Justin E. H. Smith on our shared history with animals and how it has changed over time.

... Our adult humanity consists in cutting off ties of community with animals, ceasing, as Lévi-Strauss put it, to think with them. When on occasion adults begin again to think about animals, if not with them, it is to assess whether animals deserve the status of rights-bearers. Animal rights, should there be such things, are now thought to flow from neurophysiological features and behavioral aptitudes: recognizing oneself in the mirror, running through mazes, stacking blocks to reach a banana.

But what is forgotten here is that the animals are being tested for re-admission to a community from which they were previously expelled, and not because they were judged to lack the minimum requirements for the granting of rights. They were expelled because they are hairy brutes, and we learned to be ashamed of thinking of them as our kin. This shame only increased when Darwin confirmed our kinship, thus telling us something Paleolithic hunters already knew full well. Morality doubled up its effort to preserve a distinction that seemed to be slipping away. Since the 19th century, science has colluded with morality, always allowing some trivial marker of human uniqueness or other to function as a token for entry into the privileged moral universe of human beings. "They don't have syntax, so we can eat them," is how Richard Sorabji brilliantly reduces this collusion to absurdity.

And is there a better video to pair this with than Frans de Waal's lecture on what science tells us about our shared morality with animals?

 

Finally, "What sort of thoughts can animals have? Tim Crane discusses the intriguing issue of what apes and monkeys are capable of thinking about in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast." (Via 3QD)

Another Pakistan

Christopher Lydon, host of Radio Open Source, has just done a valuable series of interviews with South Asians, nearly all Pakistanis. Called Another Pakistan, the people he speaks to about the state of the region include novelists, artists, singers, journalists, historians, activists, and others. Though they all seem to come from the region's English-speaking upper crust, a lot of their perspectives and many-layered stories still find little or no room in the cramped narrative of Pakistan in the West, including on the pivotal role of the Partition in shaping so many of the pathologies in the region. The interviews run for many hours but a condensed two-hour version with selections from the longer interviews is a good place to start (I'm just starting to work my way through some others).

One interview I enjoyed for the most part was with Ashis Nandy. He “has just made his own study, in 1500 interviews, of the wounds of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan — among the searing and decisive memories of his own boyhood in Calcutta. The snippet that leaps out at him now is that 40 percent of his sample called up stories of themselves and others being helped through that orgy of blood and death by “somebody from the other side.” In no other genocide, Nandy says, can he find a comparable measure of mercy. “There is that part of the story, too,” he is saying. “That is South Asia.” Click below to listen (via 3QD).