Is Violence Always Unethical?

As nation-states struggle to maintain their legitimacy in the eyes of their citizen-subjects, violence brews everywhere today. The old social arrangements supporting states unravel rapidly. In this post-modern world, however, we still retain the old fictions about well-ordered states built on national self-determination and linguistic unity (though these have been more myth than reality in the postcolonial world anyway!). Violence, we believe, is antithetical to socio-political order, the moral fabric of society, and the individual conscience. Are we always right though?

Given my philosophical training in the Western European canon, I could quite easily refer to “just war” theories from Aquinas to Michael Walzer. Or pacifism in the very Christian ways that we recognize from the New Testament via St. Francis of Assisi to Immanuel Kant. But there is nothing new to be said there. So I want to step somewhat out of my comfort zone and make an argument grounded in a certain South Asian tradition that dates to the age of Mahabharata. I am, of course, neither a textualist nor a specialist on ancient India, but rely heavily on past Indological and historical scholarship. I wish, nonetheless, to excavate some general theses on violence in the Mahabharata and its socio-historical context. This agenda seems to me to be quite consistent with the spirit of that epic poem, which says: “Poets have told it before, and are telling it now, and will tell it again. What is here is also found elsewhere, but what is not found here is found nowhere else.”

The Mahabharata, as many of you know, is a story of war and fratricide. Its composition took place over a number of centuries that saw the rise of competing and collaborating mahajanapadas (proto-states or “kingdoms”) in the plains of northern India and the consequent tensions between brahminical (priestly) and kshatriya (warrior) ideals of social order. Because the final form of the Mahabharata took shape in an age of dissent and ferment, best represented by the rise of Buddhist and Jaina sects, the epic can also be read as a debate between the orthodox and the heterodox in which attitudes to violence are central. Indeed, war and violence lie at the heart of the poem. In the opening scene of the Mahabharata, the king Janmejaya avenges the death of his father by a snake-bite by performing a startling sacrifice of snakes. Whereas these slithery creatures of the underworld are generally venerated or appeased, the king decides to undertake the most brutal violence against them as a species. This anti-sacrifice, one not sanctioned by the scriptures or tradition (or even completed actually!), provides the starting point after which the many-sided narrative of the epic unfolds. Violence, darkness and inauspiciousness are thus ever-present in this worldly narrative as they are in our world.

Ahimsa: A Moral Philosophy of Limits?

The Mahabharata, after starting on such a terrifying note of inauspicious violence, repeatedly notes that ahimsa is the greatest moral precept for mankind, its highest dharma. For recent interpreters led by M.K. Gandhi, ahimsa or non-violence is the central theme of the epic. They point to Yuddhishthira’s renunciation of the kingdom he won through war at the end of the epic. War and violence, they say with Yuddhisthira, are ultimately futile, whatever may be its ends and whoever may be its practitioners. While this is a fairly commonplace reading in India today, is it justified?

In the first place, there is ambiguity in the very meaning of the word ahimsa. The verb root han-can mean either “to hit or strike” or “to kill or murder.” But abstaining from hitting or striking is very different from abstaining from killing or murder. Furthermore, ahimsa, at least for the brahminical elite, did not extend to the sacrifice of animals. Among the cruelest forms of violence, the sacrifice of a horse by suffocation/strangling could thus be justified as ritual appeasement or bribery of the gods to buy temporal peace. It is not himsa (murder or killing). Although these animal sacrifices did become key targets for anti-brahminical sects from the 4^th century BC, it is worth noting that animals continued to be eaten, albeit perhaps with lesser intensity. Asoka’s edicts tell his subjects to treat their domestic animals with kindness, but he doesn’t advocate vegetarianism. Male goats, sheep and cattle are specifically cited as animals that can be eaten or sacrificed by householders. The menu in his own royal kitchen prominently noted peacock and deer. And what about humans? Asoka’s declarations of ahimsa in Rock Edict XIII occur only after he had conquered whatever there existed to be conquered, and had effectively attained the Later Vedic ideal of the chakravartin(universal) emperor. He can still threaten the “forest tribes of his empire” by saying that “he has power even in his remorse, and he asks them to repent, lest they be killed.” Any blanket utopian statement against violence is, therefore, undercut by words and deeds alike.

But if complete abstinence from violence is much too utopian for us worldly souls, are the arguments favoring violence persuasive? The natural world, the Arthashatra says nearly two millennia before Hobbes, is all about matsya nyaya (“the law of fishes”), by which smaller fish get swallowed up by bigger fish in the sea. This may be a justification for kingship by danda(punishment), but Arjuna in the Mahabharata recognizes in it, more generally, the inevitability of violence in human affairs: “People honor most the gods who are killers. Rudra is a killer, and so are Skanda, Indra, Agni, Varuna, Yama. I don’t see anyone living in the world with ahimsa. Even ascetics cannot stay alive without killing.” Similarly, Rama, accused of foul-play in killing the monkey Bali, argues in his defence: “Even sages go hunting.” It is even argued against the Buddhist, Jaina and Ajivika sects that ahimsa itself might entail violence against the (bodily )self, most spectacularly in the form of self-sacrifice. Even “rice and barley…scream soundlessly” when they become food for humans. Agriculture, after all, is violence (himsa) because it kills not only plants, but also many animals and insects in the fields. In modern parlance, agriculture is (and has always been since its origin in the Neolithic age) an ecologically-destructive activity. Grains, fruits, and vegetables, remarks the wise meatseller Dharmavyadha to the sage Kaushika, contain life forms, which die when we consume them. He concludes, “I don’t see a single person in this world who lives by ahimsa” for “life preys on life” for survival.

But surely it is not being suggested that violence is desirable because it is inevitable. That seems much too far-fetched. A particularly poignant passage may be found in the opening book, the Adi Parva, describing the burning of the vast Khandava forest by Arjuna, Krishna and Agni: “Creatures by the thousands screamed in terror, and were scorched; some embraced their sons or mothers or fathers, unable to leave them. Everywhere creatures writhed on the ground, with burning wings, eyes, and paws.” The war books in the Mahabharata also offer similar graphic descriptions of gore, mutilation, death, and destruction that certainly do not commend violence. How then can we reconcile the conflicting opinions about violence in human affairs? I suggest considering ahimsa not as a doctrine of non-violence in the utopian sense, but as a moral philosophy of limits. Non-violence is always the ideal for us, but some amount of violence is an inescapable part of the human condition. Or else we couldn’t live at all. For some, this reality may inspire a lifestyle choice such as vegetarianism or membership of a religion such as Jainism, but these are not the only ethically-defensible options available to us. Sometimes, violence may even be necessary, for which reason the Pandavas go to war against their cousins and kinsmen. In sum, violence may not be desirable and complete abstinence from violence may be impossible for living beings, but what is possible is a kind of moral limit to minimize the violence around us. It is, therefore, not so much about whether there can be non-violence, but how much and what kinds ought to be permissible in a decent society.

Violence in Politics and Society

Violence is inherent in politics and society because, as the Arthashatra and Mahabharata argue, the king (or state) rules by danda (force/punishment). That violent state of affairs is deemed a lesser evil in comparison with the greater evil of anarchy or matsya nyaya. By no means did this view go uncontested. The Mahabharata includes these words of a dissident brahmin: “The barley is the people and the deer is the royal power; thus the people are food for the royal power, and so the one who has royal power eats the people.” A bit later, we are treated to a subaltern parody of the ritual copulation between queens and horses in the ashvamedha yagna (horse sacrifice): “‘The little female bird rocks back and forth as he thrusts the penis into the slit.’ Now, that bird is really the people, for the people rock back and forth at the thrust of the royal power, and the slit is the people, and the penis is the royal power, which presses against the people; and so the one who has royal power is hurtful to the people.” The Buddha as political philosopher, too, railed in vain against the encroaching imperial kingdoms and defended republican government as superior by virtue of being more people-friendly and consensus-based. But the unjust violence of the statist status quo nonetheless weighed heavily on the minds and bodies of most of society.

Is this not also true in our own times? Are we also not held ransom by specious arguments against anarchy? Or by brazen justifications of state violence against ordinary folks? Aren’t democracy and freedom just as much elite hocus-pocus in states today as the raja dharma that legitimized monarchies in ancient India? Why do the violence of states and elites appear cloaked in high-minded statements, whereas the naked violence of the subordinated is deemed illegitimate? Why is it deemed acceptable to bomb and murder thousands of men, women, children and animals in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, but the death of a few hundred rich people on 9/11 or 26/11 is instantly condemned as terrorism? Why is the naked plunder of natural resources in the tribal areas of South Asia today regarded as legitimate in the name of “development,” but the defensive violence of tribal communities delegitimized as “Maoist”? Why, in other words, do some forms of particularly brutal violence, namely those in favor of the statist status quo, override the lesser defensive violence of the weak and the wretched?

The primary conclusion I draw here is that we simply don’t live in decent societies in which the majority can live peacefully. In India today, this is most certainly the case. The six decades of neo-colonial loot in Middle India, Kashmir, and the Northeast suggest that these regions, much like the Pandavas, have tried and failed to receive what is rightfully theirs. The Pandavas, dispossessed by their cousins, asked for merely five villages to avoid the horrors of war, but they were refused. The similarities with the situation today are eerie. As violence and insubordination break out all over the subcontinent, might the moral justification for such acts be akin to that for the great war of the Mahabharata? But is the violence of the dispossessed still justified? Should we not feel queasy about defending violence even when the ends seem virtuous? We may not live in decent societies, but will taking up arms against the status quo not taint some forever even if their aims are attained?

These are very difficult questions to answer today as they were in the age of epic poetry. But the Mahabharata provides a “coded” answer to this dilemma. That code is to be found in the story of Ashvathama’s vengeance against the Pandavas for killing his father (their guru) by trickery. Although the actual murderer Drishtadyumna is the primary object of his revenge, Ashvathama deems all the Pandavas to be culpable and complicit, including the near-perfect Yudhishthira for his famous half-truth. His dialogue with Kripacharya before seeking vengeance is rather revealing. Kripa blames Duryodhana’s “greedy and thoughtless” ways for causing the war in the first place. “Always wicked, knowing no patience, he ignored the counsel of friends; and now, when things have turned too bad for him, regrets that he didn’t. We too, following his misdeeds, are now in this grievous trouble.” But Ashvathama is hell-bent on revenge and wishes to attack the Pandava camp in the darkness of the night. This, Kripa reminds him, would violate the kshatriya moral code and be adharma (unrighteous), but it matters little to someone who feels as wronged as Ashwathama. “The Pandavas,” he contends, “had on the battlefield already shattered dharma into a hundred pieces.”

As he approaches the Pandava camp, he is met by a mysteriously large figure against whom he seems powerless. Ashvathama says, “I’m just not able to make out who this mysterious figure really is. It seems certain that it is my own wicked mind that I see before me in that form…The fool who wants to do violence to another, against every safe admonition, does violence to himself by his own hands.” But in a curious twist, he is assisted by the god Shiva, often represented as Time (kaala) in Sanskrit literature, who enters his body and equips him with a divine sword. There appears, therefore, to be divine mandate for Ashvathama’s revenge; Time itself appears to empathize with the young man’s grievances against the Pandavas. One by one, Drishtadyumna and his brothers are slain in cold blood. The Pandavas escape death only because they have camped elsewhere that night. Thereafter, we are told that Ashvathama fired a “destructive weapon” at the “Pandava wombs” to destroy them, an act that is highly suggestive of sexual violence. He is then cursed by the god Krishna: “In all civilized opinion, you are considered a coward; given to evil deeds again and again; a child-murderer. You are cursed. For three thousand years from now, you will drift on the earth, with no one to talk with, and live in places lonely and abandoned. Your body will have the foul smell of flowing pus, wracked with every disease known. You will live in places where no human beings live.”

Although charged with divine energy and weapons and assisted by Time, Ashvathama thus ends up ostracized and banished from society. Despite his just grievance against the Pandavas, there is considerable ambivalence over his violent means: Shiva/Time (Destroyer of Injustice and Wickedness) favors him but Krishna/Vishnu (Preserver of the Three Worlds of Classical Hinduism) curses him. The narrator pronounces no final verdict on Ashvathama: his vengeance is justified to an extent, but he can no longer live like a free citizen in the postwar polity. In this sense, Ashvathama ends up as the mirror-image of the sacrificial animal, who must die but is not deemed to be killed or murdered. If the sacrificial beast is killed but remains within the domain of ahimsa, Ashvathama lives but must reside outside the domain of ahimsa, the foundation of decent society.

It should be noted here that the tale of Ashvathama’s vengeance is not too dissimilar structurally to the Pandavas’ own travails. This is the coded message in the narrative structure. Dispossessed unjustly of their kingdom, the Pandavas are scorned, cheated and exiled. That great adharma, which is similar to that suffered by Ashvathama, is sought to be reversed through the Great War of the Mahabharata. Although their violence is justified, as Krishna argues in the Gita, it is so only in a qualified sense. Killing men, women, children, and animals cannot be regarded by any society as a legitimate activity, whatever the cause or motivation. The crestfallen Yuddhisthira is thus left to lament: “Victorious, we are defeated.” His nagging doubts about the legitimacy of war and violence now take over. He is unable to enjoy the spoils of victory. He cannot become the maryad purushottam (ideal man) Rama as in the older epic poem. Nor can he create a ramarajya for his subjects after a fratricidal war. When the Pandavas leave the palace at Hastinapura for the Himalayas, it is merely the final symbol of their defeat in victory. Like Ashvathama, they too might be seen as exiled or cursed to wander far away from society, outside the domain of ahimsa or the moral philosophy of limits to violence.

This is a handy lesson to be learned in our times. When we recognize the morality of violent social protest against the domination of states, empires, and elites, we should also recognize that such violence can never be moral in an unqualified sense. This is not an ex-nihilo argument, but one that is rooted in everyday reality. Violence against a great evil or a greater violence may well be justified in ethical terms, and it may even lead to the creation of a more just society (as in the Mahabharata). But even these ethically-acceptable forms of violence cannot be within the domain of ahimsa as long as it lacks limits. And the nature of war makes it very difficult indeed to impose limits or restraints on one’s acts of violence. Caught between brutal oppression and limitless violence in vengeance, it is certainly a very difficult predicament. Not to revolt against oppression is to acquiesce in one’s subordination, but revolt also is hardly bereft of blemishes. This predicament can be resolved only if those perpetuating ethically-acceptable violence are removed from the body politic. They may do so voluntarily such as Yudhisthira and his brothers or be cursed like Ashvathama. But they cannot remain as before in any decent society that is to remain free from further violence.

What might it mean though to be “removed from the body politic” in a practical sense? It is useful here to consider my earlier remark that the likes of Ashvathama are the mirror-images of sacrificial animals that die without being killed. A kind of social death is implied here: being killed without being sacrificed. Readers of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer will see a close connection here. The non-sacrificial deaths, social or physical, are the very basis of sovereignty. They preserve and justify the social order, including society’s sense of what is morally right and wrong, decent and indecent. This is, of course, the very principle enshrined in contemporary techniques of suicide bombing. The non-sacrificial deaths of suicide bombers complement the social order they wish to shape for the future. These young men (or women, as the case may be) cannot be reabsorbed into society. Their fate cannot be anything but Promethean, cursed forever to social death far away from society. This is, paradoxically, how the individual conscience and the moral fabric of society are reconciled in theory as well as practice. For any decent society must be governed by a moral philosophy that limits violence, that is, ahimsa. Violence beyond limits may be warranted at times, but the existence of its practitioners within society can never be acceptable.

P.S. I shall be delighted if someone wishes to disagree with me, either in terms of my overall argument or the specifics therein. At the very least, any such initiative should, I think, stimulate greater thought on the growing violence in our world and the ethics of such violence. Nonetheless, I think my argument dispenses adequately enough notions of pacifism that have come to be linked with morality and ethics, especially in the South Asian context.

So What's Right About Rights???

In the past couple of days, a number of people have expressed surprise over my opposition to the North Atlantic liberal rhetoric of universal human rights, articulated forcefully in President Obama's recent townhall meeting in China. I regard this kind of rhetoric as typical of the kind of cultural hegemony exercised by North Atlantic liberals over contemporary thought. It unites, curiously enough, both the center and the right in the US. As such, the ideological justification for Obama's statements is identical to that used by his predecessor to invade Iraq and spread liberal democracy in the Middle East. Moreover, much of US political science "scholarship" (if that's the right word here!) seeks to defend precisely that ruling ideology and its hegemonic status in the realm of ideas. This post seeks to advance my own agenda to discredit this false doctrine at every opportunity, and to expose the conceit and stupidity that it cleverly conceals.

At the outset, however, let me put out two disclaimers. First, I don't wish to defend any vague culturalist notion of Asian values or African-ness to criticize the hegemonic discourse of rights. Second, although the moral reasoning and semantics at work in this global discourse are poorly worked out, I readily acknowledge that all proponents of universal human rights need not have sinister motives.

So what's right (or wrong) about rights then? The answer, I believe, lies in probing the origins of contemporary rights discourse in the social contract theories of early modern Europe, most notably those of Hobbes and Locke. These brilliant men, who lived in an age of social ferment and religious violence, sought to produce a secular justification for what has come to be known as the modern state. By doing so, they hoped that differences of opinion regarding religious doctrine, the causa prima of the wars of religion, could be reconciled under the paramountcy of a secular, impartial authority. To achieve this laudable goal, they produced a fictional narrative based on an Edenic state of nature, in which all men and women were endowed by God with perfect liberty or rights, so much so that they could freely impinge on each other's rights. It hardly needs pointing out that this rationalization of the Book of Genesis, particularly the Garden of Eden story, is only superficially secular since anything else couldn't have been acceptance then. At any rate, Hobbes and Locke reasoned that men and women sought to escape the primeval state of nature by giving up certain God-given rights to erect an authority above them and thus preserve security, order, and peace. Doing so entailed a Biblical-style covenant or a "social contract" in which the duties of the sovereign and the rights of subjects were clearly articulated. (To be fair, both Hobbes and Locke argued that, if the contract were ever broken by the sovereign, subjects could rightfully rebel and replace it with a new one after drawing up a new contract.)

As the secularization of Western society produced apace over the next couple of centuries, social contract theories lost their theological moorings and simply became liberal justifications for the status quo. By the early 19th century, one finds the greatest theorist of modern liberalism, John Stuart Mill, calling for the state to be a benevolent despotism to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. Mill's state was no longer an impartial umpire, but a calculating maximizer of utility in society. There was no longer the theoretical possibility of rebelling and redrawing a contract in the manner suggested by Hobbes and Locke. Most ironically, therefore, the language of liberalism had come to serve the conservative status quo represented by the dominance of the state.

This ironic conservatism is particularly apparent when the language of rights came to be used as an excuse for imperialism, most notably by J.S. Mill himself. Those outside the North Atlantic world were treated as simply inferior on a scale of civilization, and thus, in need of emancipation externally. A number of scholars, most notably Uday Mehta and Jennifer Pitts, have called this phenomenon "imperial liberalism." Undoubtedly, these secularized "liberal" theories found eager takers among collaborators in colonized societies who saw them, for good reason too, as terrific opportunities for personal advancement and upward social mobility. Quite obviously, however, most of the world remained unconvinced about the liberalism of their colonizers who claimed to be defending their rights against Oriental and African despotisms. There is no "cultural" resistance here; globally, people just don't attribute good intentions to their oppressors! The grandiose talk of rights in the ex-colonial world is forever tainted for that reason. A very thin veil indeed to cloak the underlying will to power.

Today, we can justifiably ask whether a secular doctrine of rights makes any sense. Logically, it is "nonsense on stilts," in Bentham's words. How can I claim a priori to possess rights when, in fact, I am campaigning to incorporate those very rights for women, minorities, refugees or whichever oppressed/marginalized group into the law books? It makes no sense. Either I have the rights already or I wish to have them in future. Both cannot be simultaneously true. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this logical confusion in today's rights discourse is due to the loss of its original theological underpinnings. As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, "rights exist [a priori] as much as unicorns do."

But that is not all. There is an inherent conservatism in contemporary rights discourse, owing to its tendency to justify power and domination, which seeks to undermine the older, pre-modern sense of fighting for rights. In this sense, rights are things to be won after sustained struggles in a given society, and once they're won and enter the books of law, the state is then obliged to respect them. In other words, rights are always negotiated between the rulers and the ruled. The regime type doesn't matter. The competing pursuits of legitimacy and liberty are to be found universally. The origins of the state are irrelevant. No fictional or Biblical story is needed in the manner of Hobbes and Locke. In the most secular or worldly sense, every ruler, democratic, oligarchic or kingly, must negotiate the terms of his/its legitimate authority with his/its subjects. Constitutions and laws reflect the outcomes of those negotiations, though only the vigilance of subjects to keep the ruler to his/its word.

It follows, therefore, that insofar as there is no world state or global authority with which men and women can negotiate their liberties in exchange for legitimacy, the notion of universal rights is devoid of meaning. Therefore, to say, as Obama did, that the ideals of the American republic are in fact universal is a meaningless speech act whose illocutionary force is nonetheless likely to irk Chinese authorities. Perhaps that is only to be expected in the complicated real politik between the two largest global powers today. The Chinese tell the Americans to raise interest rates and be thrifty; the Americans tell the Chinese to stop fixing their currency exchange rates. The game goes on. And perhaps, so it should. But it should not be obscured by mindless talk about universal human rights and the like. Let's just cut the crap and be a bit clear-sighted, can we?

To sum up, the secularization of rights talk have stripped it of any logical sense today. Likewise, universal human rights, as represented in the UN Charter, are meaningless speech acts. The latent purpose of these pseudo-liberal speech acts is, however, often to produce post-hoc justifications of tyranny domestically or abroad. Modern imperialism essentially depends on such pseudo-liberal talk, and even though the age of empires is formally over, a kind of inertia leads the old mentalities and rhetoric to linger on past their expiry dates. The rhetoric of democratization in US policymaking and academic circles provides the finest example of this inertia. There is, however, a proper way to talk about rights in the past or present. That is, as concessions sought by subjects from the ruler/state in the form of laws. Social movements seeking the emancipation of subjugated or oppressed groups (the poor, women, sexual, cultural and religious minorities, etc) seek to do precisely that. These are quests for dignity that entail much struggle and heartbreak for the protagonists and their allies. To the extent that states or state-like authorities have existed throughout human history and look poised to continue, it is pointless to imagine otherwise. Rights do not, therefore, exist a priori or universally, but in specific contexts in which power is sought to be appropriated by ordinary men and women after protracted struggles, if necessary with the barrel of the gun.

William Dalrymple's Search for the Sacred in Contemporary India

On a recent train journey from Ranchi to Delhi, as a shrill cacophony ended my power nap, I looked around me in disgust. The culprit turned out to be a thin, bespectacled girl holding an engineering textbook in her hand and loudly berating her father for not buying a bottle of mineral water before boarding the train. She couldn't have been more than twenty. Her father looked apologetic, almost sheepish, for the boorish behavior of his daughter. She scolded him in English: "Why you din't bring thee botal, Papa? Now we will be thurrrsty till the dinner, no?" He responded gently in Hindi, "Galati ho gayi bete. Thodi der mein hi khareed lenge." The English didn't relent. Its loud attack on Hindi continued unabated for most of our waking hours on the journey. At some point, my fellow travelers and I overheard that Ms. Loudmouth was seeking admission in some colleges in North Delhi. Just before we arrived at Delhi, a gentlemen sitting opposite me summarized the problem nicely: "Bihar ke baahar pehli baar aa rahi hai. Magar bolti hai jaise ki vilaayat se aayi hai."

William Dalrymple's new book Nine Lives addresses precisely these children of Macaulay in modern India. These unfortunates, bastard children of colonialism as they are, may be found chasing some mirage of Western-style modernity in colleges and universities, offices and malls, cafes and cinemas. Yet they are blind to the peculiar kind of non-Western modernity they are crafting. Towards received tradition, they are downright condescending. The countryside can be dismissed altogether, in the words of Aravind Adiga, as the Darkness. The Light is ostensibly somewhere in the United States. Yet they're stuck, often irrevocably, in India. Their fate is thus akin to the proverbial washerman's dog, forever wandering between its home and its master's workplace. When Dalrymple speaks to these pye-dogs in metropolitan India, he is urging them to take a peek at how religious traditions are being preserved painstakingly by some social groups, overturned by others in dissent and resistance, or re-cast in novel forms that blend the old and the new. All of these engagements with religious traditions, Dalrymple believes, occur in rural India, so he is interested in staging a dialogue of sorts between the so-called "Two Indias."

There is something particularly noble-minded about Dalrymple's latest venture. He genuinely believes in the need for dialogue between the past and the present, which he appears to equate -- erroneously, like so many metropolitan Indians -- with the rural and urban. Make no mistake: here is genuine hope that the alienated present of Macaulay's half-caste children can be somehow invigorated by an earthy dose of the sacred from the four corners of the subcontinent. The stories themselves are moving narratives of some very special yet surprisingly ordinary people. We meet Prasannamati Mataji, a Jain nun who struggles to come to terms with the loss of her female companion of twenty years; Hari Das, a Dalit jail warden who is regarded in Kannur as a deity for the three months every year during which he becomes a theyyam dancer; Rani Bai, who perpetuates the ancient devdasi tradition in Saundatti only to succumb, along with her two teenage daughters, to the deadly HIV; Mohan Bhopa, an unlettered bard whose family has preserved, against all odds, the great Rajasthani medieval poem The Epic of Pabuji in a unique audio-visual form; Lal Peri, the mojahir defender of the famous Sufi shrine of Shahbaaz Qalander in Sehwan; Tashi Passang, the Buddhist monk who has spent a lifetime atoning for his decision to take up arms in defense of his faith and country; Srikanda Stpathy, heir to the great bronze-casting tradition of the Cholas; Manisha Ma Bhairavi, the devotee of the goddess Tara, who oversees a non-imagined community of Tantric dissidents in a cremation ground a couple of hours away from Kolkata; and three wandering Baul minstrels in search of the divine within human bodies and hearts on the banks of the Ajoy river in West Bengal.

In acquainting his readers with these nine lives, Dalrymple intends to convey more than simply exotic tales about exotic people and places. He is interested to grasp the diversity of religious beliefs and practices in the localities and regions of South Asia. This diversity is entirely at odds with the uniform, Protestanized packages of Hinduism and Islam that are broadcast via modern media across the subcontinent. For the metropolitan Indian, Ramayana is associated far too easily with Ramanand Sagar's magnum opus rather than the many, mini versions of the epic poem across the land (and beyond in Southeast Asia). For these readers, the implied audience of the book, learning about the varieties of religious experience in South Asia will, one hopes, act as an entry-point into the accommodative pluralist traditions of the region.

Accommodation and pluralism are, of course, possible only if we are willing and able to enter the personal worlds of Dalrymple's protagonists and see things from their respective vantage points. Shifting from one to the other, it may be thus possible not merely to appreciate each story as charming or emotive, but also to accept difference (or heterogeneity, if you prefer) in a radical metaphysical sense: there are so many legitimate ways to apprehend the complexity of human realities that it is ultimately futile to be attached too deeply to one's own preferred way of seeing and being in the world. This kind of metaphysical pluralism, which one also finds in Chaucer's Canterbury's Tales with its panoramic view of the social worlds of the three estates of 14th century England, transcends the fake secular-religious divide that characterizes modernist writings on the subject. It is rooted in uncertainty, doubt and skepticism rather than the certainties sought by dogma and dead habit. Although based on reason, it posits no false dichotomy between reason and the emotions, but displays a willingness to view reason itself as heterogeneous. Its politics is, therefore, liberal in the true sense of the word, that is, committed to independent thinking, tolerance, and freedom from tyranny.

But is this how Dalrymple's intended audience sees it? On the evidence of the comments on the back flap of the book and at the book launch, it appears not. All four comments on the back flap refer primarily to the author's writing style and his abilities as a storyteller. Ravi Singh of Penguin, India, introduced WD as a modern-day Chaucer. The October 5 review in the Financial Times praised WD as "India's literary "Orientalist," interpreting its historical intricacies for a generation of international readers." A friend Prakash (name changed) informed me, in contrast, that Dalrymple had succumbed to the kind of Orientalism that drew Westerners to exotic places and people, especially their bizarre religious, aesthetic and sexual practices. Another friend Padmini (name changed) averred that Dalrymple's stories sounded "cute" but no one could possibly take the "ravings of illiterate villagers" seriously. Other anonymous members of Delhi's chatterati simply swooned and swayed to the beats of the theyyam dancers, the mystical songs of the Bauls, and a marvelously original rendition of thevaram hymns associated with the Tamil saints of yore. There is no doubt in my mind that very few of WD's readers will actually follow him in his search for the sacred in contemporary India. The pye-dogs shall scavenge for nourishment elsewhere.

To some extent, Dalrymple ought to bear the blame for this state of affairs. His stories may be well-written (though poorly-edited), but they are not well-contextualized. Firstly, the Kiplingesque view that the real India lies outside its cities is rather problematic. It may have been useful to explore, for instance, how new migrants to the metro cities, young people in rapidly-urbanizing small towns, and call-center employees incorporate the sacred into their lives. But Dalrymple deems these groups either too secular/modern or plainly uninteresting. Whatever the reason, the absence of urban narratives is jarring in a book exploring the sacred in an age of rapid socioeconomic change. Let us not forget that the Canterbury Tales were themselves written in a similar age of great social ferment in which the most prominent outcome was the rise of the urban bourgeoisie and the gradual eclipse of the diversity of folk Catholic practices across Europe. And despite their rustic appearance, the Tales offer a fascinating glimpse into the wider social conflicts of 14th century England, including those developing between the country and the city. Could something similar have been attempted by WD?

Secondly, it is worth pointing out, contra Dalrymple's stories, that the contexts of "popular religion" are not always radical, pro-poor or some postmodern avatar of class struggle. This is an error that he shares with much of the Subaltern Studies school of history-writing in South Asia. There are myriad uses of popular religious idioms for political ends, at least some of which are purely elitist and/or conservative ones. Most forms of theologico-political expressions in the countryside, today or a century ago, represent a complex interbraiding of elite and popular interests that ought not to be seen in a cockeyed manner as simply subaltern politics. Consider, for instance, Dalit politics in Maharashtra or UP today. There are specific empirical reasons why the subordinated classes are attracted to caste-based resistance in some cases, while in others, they seek to ally with hegemonic Hindutva interests. The explanations in each case must emerge from an understanding of local and regional contexts, particularly how "elite" and "popular" are constituted in each context. Chaucer himself was alert to this point: John Wycliffe's heretical Lollards thus appear alongside the chivalric order of knights and the monastic traditions of the clergy. Might WD have missed a trick here?

Finally, Dalrymple has this unsettling habit of casting timeless oppositions between the mystic and the mullah, the syncretic and the orthodox, the oral and the written, the subaltern and the elite. There are, of course, instances where he corrects this bad habit by noting the interrelationships between the Little and Great Traditions (how the great Sufi mystic-poet Rumi gained fame as a maulana in Konya, or how the seemingly heterodox devdasi and Baul traditions are but tributaries of the great river of Hinduism). But these are exceptions that prove the general rule of structural oppositions. In the story of Lal Peri, these oppositions are most disagreeable because they imagine a sharp distinction between Sufism and what Dalrymple calls "Orthodox Islam." This is the same dichotomy that WD had proposed in his previous work, The Last Mughal, to distinguish between the religious beliefs of Bahadur Shah Zafar from those he labeled simply as fanatics and fundamentalists. It is, in fact, no more than a sophisticated, or at least well-intentioned, version of the Good Muslim-Bad Muslim distinction criticized justly by Mahmood Mamdani. There is simply no eternal or structural opposition by which “good guys” such as Rumi, Dara Shukoh and Lal Peri can be opposed to today’s “baddies,” all of whom are, according to Dalrymple, funded by Saudi Wahhabis and their South Asian admirers. What needs explanation is why, at this point in history, the sufi shrines of Sindh and elsewhere have come under threat from those who regard the veneration of saints as idolatry. WD is thus a victim of what is essentially an error of historical method here. In any case, very little in human affairs is timeless.

Similarly, it is incorrect to imagine a sharp contrast between the materialist philosophies guiding Tantra practices and mainstream Hinduism in Bengal. One the one hand, the materialism underlying Tantra has historical roots stretching back to identifiable brahminical texts such as the Barhaspataya-sutras of the late centuries BC. On the other hand, WD’s two stories on Bengal display no awareness of Vaishnavism as the dominant mystical tradition in the lower reaches of the Gangetic valley. In a single paragraph, he presents a simplified account of how medieval Saivite and mother goddess cults were upstaged by upper-caste reformers and Christian missionaries from the 19^th century onwards. This thumbnail narrative of Bengal’s religious history over the last millennium is, to put it bluntly, factually incorrect. Nonetheless, this is not the space to detail the sorts of accommodations by which various cults transcending the orthodox-heterodox divide came to cohabit the floodplains, forests and mangrove swamps of Bengal. What is relevant here is that the stories of Manisha Ma and the three Bauls, like that of Lal Peri, could have been contextualized far more accurately than WD in fact does. And the heterodox-orthodox divide WD finds on his travels is meaningful more in the context of post-1970s Bengal than in some eternal sense.

To sum up, William Dalrymple sets out with Chaucer-like ambitions, as he notes on the very first page, but ultimately falls short in fulfilling those ambitions. It is somewhat like a fast bowler huffing and puffing on his run-up all the way from the boundary only to deliver a medium-paced ball at the end of it. Part of the problem is poor contextualization, or more accurately, an unresolved tension between the short-story form, ethnographic travel writing, and historical research. The rest is a combination of critical gaps or omissions in the narrative and a general disinclination among the metropolitan chatterati in India and abroad to engage meaningfully with the sacred. However one may choose to view the matter, Dalrymple promises much, but delivers less than what one might have expected. The problem lies as much with the author as with his implied audience. We may be as far away as possible from Chaucer. But there is every likelihood that someone soon will escape the limitations of Nine Lives and produce an outstanding work of scholarship or literature on the same theme. I’m not a betting man, but I’d put my money on fiction, the postcolonial novel to be precise.

The Seminar Mode of Production: A Critique

Economic categories are only the theoretical expressions, the abstractions of the social relations of production...Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist. The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with the material productivity, produce also principles, ideas, and categories, in conformity with their social relations. Thus the ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express. (Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Chapter Two: "The Metaphysics of Political Economy")

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. (Karl Marx, 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy)

Introduction

I begin with my favorite lines from Marx's corpus of writings in order to set the tone for my argument here. This argument concerns what I call the "seminar mode of production," which, I believe, ought to be seen as a set of economic and social relations that are associated with particular forms of consciousness in our world today. This mode of production may be observed primarily in universities and research centers, but its influence is not merely confined to these peripheries of modern society. Indeed, insofar as a university degree is widely considered a necessity by middle and upper classes worldwide, the influence of the university, and by extension, of the seminar mode of production, may be seen everywhere. This mode of production, therefore, along with the social relations of production associated with it, is the object of critique in this post.

So what exactly is the "seminar mode of production"? It is the sum of the productive forces and social relations that exist between administrators, donors/funders, professors and students in the contemporary world, whose perpetuation depends, in the final analysis, on performing erudition in the physical setting of a seminar room. This definition needs to be parsed a bit. Note three key elements here, each of which will be elaborated upon subsequently.

1. The seminar functions as the crucial setting in which erudition is expected to be performed by students and professors alike. Secondary performances of erudition (by-products?) such as published articles, edited volumes and books, reviewed by peers, are also derived from the same productive relations established within the university. Performance, however, does not necessarily imply feigning erudition since it is quite possible that some performances are genuinely good.

2. The seminar is nestled in the framework of the university, which has increasingly being seen in the postwar era as a knowledge factory to be managed and run by professional administrators. As I shall explain below, this is a fairly recent development in the institutional history of the university, characterized as it is by medieval norms and rituals even today. In other words, what we are witnessing nowadays is the fruition of a post-WWII process of incorporating academia into the larger social relations established under the capitalist mode of production, albeit in a somewhat peculiar way.

3. The production of "knowledge" in seminars across the modern university system occurs parallel to the formation of particular kinds of consciousness among students and professors. These forms of consciousness, as I shall argue, are essentially apolitical, despite appearances to the contrary, and geared to the preservation of bourgeois society and its interests. Moreover, these forms of consciousness (note the plural!) may be associated with distinct socio-cultural processes, most notably (a) co-option into existing power structures of some claiming to represent the subordinated classes, (b) a stable supply of skilled workers for the labor force, whose intrinsically petty bourgeois nature favors preserving the status quo above all else, and (c) the rise of a global neo-brahminical elitism that values higher education degrees as markers of social distinction despite the irony of "subalterns" acting strategically as objects of research.

The Performance of Erudition

By erudition, I mean literally e(x)-rudis or the Latin root for the expulsion of rudeness in personal manners, primarily by the acquisition of what is commonly known as “polish.” In the seminar room, “polish” is typically demonstrated by a combination of everyday strategies: dropping names of famous individuals both alive and dead, references to fashionable theories and tools to suggest a deep familiarity with these, and/or appeals to the rhetoric of science (hypotheses, data, sampling, testing, etc). Jointly or severally, these strategies are used regularly by students and professors across seminar rooms to demonstrate proof of erudition to other participants gathered therein. Taken together, they constitute a collective performance of erudition in the seminar setting.

This collective performance, in fact, lies at the heart of the seminar mode of production. Indeed, the success or failure of productive forces may be judged on the basis of these performances. This holds true not only for students who are graded on their performances, but also for professors, who are evaluated by universities on the basis of their performances of erudition. These evaluations of performance create distinctions of note between students (an “A” student is regarded as different from a “C” student) and professors (a full professor is viewed differently from a junior faculty member). The distinctions created thus are not restricted to classroom settings because students with higher grades end up being hired in better-paid jobs or attending better graduate schools. Likewise, professors promoted to higher ranks of the pecking order enjoy substantive social and material privileges not enjoyed by those below them. Socio-cultural distinctions thus reinforce and are reinforced by material ones.

Of course, performances are not only oral. Performances in written form, such as papers, reports and the like, are just as vital in demonstrating erudition in the seminar setting. In written as well as oral performances of erudition, it is not always possible to distinguish between “genuine” and “fake” though it is possible to separate better from worse performances according to established criteria. Occasionally, I have found it possible to expose a student or faculty presenter (yes, this is true!) at a seminar who has referred to, say, Foucault without actually reading the primary texts. But in most cases, it is exceedingly difficult to tell whether someone quoting Foucault has actually read the relevant texts or has simply faked erudition by reading a few pages of summary online. Faking erudition in this manner is anything but uncommon in seminars. Students do it routinely at both undergraduate and graduate levels. But what is less known is that faculty members do it only slightly less frequently, albeit in more sophisticated or “polished” ways. Usually, professors do so by using the rhetoric of science to cloak their research findings, or by claiming authority based on their privileged access to a particular text or context. Both rhetorical strategies are persuasive enough for most audiences, and erudition can be performed easily under such circumstances.

The emphasis on performance has an obvious casualty: learning. There is no guarantee that the dialogues between student and teacher or between peers lead to a genuine understanding of the topic at hand in a seminar setting. In most cases, the objects of performance are discarded much like fancy dresses as soon as the student (or professor) exits the seminar room. A peer who took a graduate seminar with me in African Politics, therefore, found it easy to make a number of carefully-orchestrated statements on North Atlantic racism hampering serious scholarship on politics and society in Africa. Yet the same student told me outside the classroom on the very same day that she considered Africa as a continent to be “beyond repair” because she deemed its inhabitants to be too corrupt and lazy in general. One can come up with dozens of similar examples after even the slightest acquaintance with the performance-based regime of the seminar room. What is noteworthy is this: whether the student has actually internalized or imbibed what is read and discussed is not deemed as relevant as performing erudition, whether authentic or fake. This, as I shall argue next, is only to be expected in the knowledge factory or the higher education industry, the common names for learning and scholarship regimes in the contemporary world.

The Knowledge Factory

The knowledge factory is, in many ways, akin to a sausage factory. A delivery line of sausage-like products are produced periodically in fixed quantities under clearly-defined quality criteria. These sausage-like students are then absorbed into the capitalist economy based on pre-existing job descriptions and selection criteria. It is a wonderful system, of course, devised in the United States over the post-WWII era to meet the growing demand for goods and services by an expanding “affluent society.” By the early Sixties, the rudiments of the current system were in place. College graduates began to be churned out in large numbers by the assembly line of the knowledge factory. As demand for commodities grew over the past fifty years, the demand for skilled labor rose correspondingly, and the university system came to be streamlined to meet these labor demands. Of course, as the demand for college students grew, so too did the demand for teachers. Accordingly, the number of graduate programs and doctoral degrees rose exponentially over the postwar era. Since quality control of sausages and students is vital to the success of a capitalist economy, the descendants of Puritans sought to “professionalize” various disciplines, generally by making gratuitous use of the rhetoric of science, which is, of course, the religion of our secular age. And thus it came to pass that administrators, managers, and clerks came to find a comfortable home in the university.

The potted history I have just described may be regarded as a brief account of the absorption of academia into the capitalist economy. It seeks to explain why economists, for instance, have come to acquire so much prestige in the corporate sector. Or why economics has become a default standard for the other social sciences, which have striven fruitlessly to “mathematize” or quantify their research despite their actual results being closer to those of astrologers and numerologists than to those of real scientists. Or why those in the natural sciences have focused their energies on devising technologies of different sorts that are socially and ecologically wasteful instead of producing ecologically-sustainable technologies that serve communities and preserve natural resources. The transformation is hard to appreciate today because one is tempted to believe that it was always so. But it wasn’t. That is exactly why it is important to understand the socio-historical changes over the past two generations, alongside an appreciation of the underlying material basis of these changes.

However, the transformation is a peculiar one, certainly not identical to that occurring outside the academic groves. Being a medieval institution, the university could never have undergone an easy transition to modernity. It was elitist, even aristocratic, in its very substance, not merely in the paraphernalia of scepters, robes, gowns and caps. The very structure of academia has always been true to its feudal origins that sought to make numerous marks of distinction within the professoriate as well as the student body. The feudal order also sought to keep out, in the words of a former adviser, the “riff-raff.” To participate in the modern world without becoming an anachronism did indeed seem to be a great challenge to Western universities in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. No less an authority than Adam Smith suggested that lecturers at Edinburgh ought to be financed by their students instead of being funded publicly, ostensibly to weed out outdated and unfashionable subjects not demanded by the student body. One can imagine how the protectionist racket that is academia must have reacted to Smith’s maverick suggestion. Those were difficult times for the aristocrats in Western European universities (though not in the securely racist, aristocratic milieu of New England universities at the time). By the early 19^th century, however, the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie had kissed and made up, a union symbolized definitively by the Great Reform Act of 1832. The compromise ironically involved inventing new forms of snobbery that could be blended imaginatively with older forms. British and French universities ended up creating a new class of pseudo-aristocrats at home and in the colonies abroad. In Victorian Britain, one could certainly buy one’s way to becoming a peer or a civil servant in the East, but universities provided the surest and most secure means to climb up the social ladder and thus, to perform “erudition” in its etymological sense of expelling rudeness.

Those neat pseudo-aristocratic arrangements were nonetheless rend asunder by the two world wars. In WWI, for instance, it is estimated that roughly a third of Oxford’s graduates departed the earthly realm without encashing their privileges of education. Furthermore, the geopolitical shift across the Atlantic had effectively ended the heyday of the traditional Western European university. Oxford and Cambridge were merely vestiges of the Old World in the new scheme of things. Still, Neo-Gothic spires and gargoyles continued to provide solace to cultural conservatives and snobs in the United States. Medieval markers of privilege could be conveniently accommodated within the knowledge factory in order to keep alive the pretense of a continuous Western tradition. Consequently, status and prestige are still determined by medieval norms and rituals even in an overwhelmingly capitalist world. Tenure, that great aristocratic vestige, thus continues to sit uneasily with the modern capitalist dictum of hire-and-fire. And minorities, women, and the subordinated classes of society continue to be poorly represented in universities. In retrospect, none of this is actually paradoxical: modernity depends fundamentally on the strategic use of traditional idioms and icons, and capitalism too needs institutions that transform wealth into status and power. The social relations appropriate to the seminar mode of production are thus somewhat different from the idealized Marxian abstraction of capitalism. The social relations corresponding to the seminar mode accommodate the pre-modern within the modern, the feudal within the capitalist, and the aristocratic within the bourgeois. This is because the university produces not only sausage-like students, but also cultural capital that enhances status and power. The knowledge factory is, in this sense, also a producer of aristocratic badges that awards considerable privileges to their wearers.

Forms of Consciousness and the Social Dynamics in Bourgeois Society

If the university today were merely a knowledge factory in which workers and their apprentices performed erudition, it might have been a fairly innocuous affair. In fact, it is not. The production of “knowledge” in the seminar mode gives rise to particular forms of consciousness among students and professors that are fundamentally apolitical, despite appearances to the contrary, to the extent that they seek to preserve bourgeois society and interests, that is, the status quo. There are three forms of consciousness that deserve to be highlighted. Firstly, there is the worldview of the privileged minority or the “creamy layer” as middle-class Indians call these determined seekers of upward social mobility. In this worldview, education is an input in the production of erudition, literally the expulsion of rudeness, which provides new avenues for employment, wealth, power and status. First-generation college-goers feature in this group as do racial minorities in the United States. What is most interesting is that these minority seekers of privilege actually believe the dominant elite mythology of sophistication, at least outwardly, and act as if it were true. The logic here is pragmatic: the status quo is certain to remain, so it’s best to make peace with the powers-that-be and grab a piece of the power-status-wealth pie.

Secondly, there is the weltanschauung of the plain-vanilla petty bourgeois students, who arguably are the most numerous on any university campus. For these types, education is a “given,” since their parents and grandparents most likely partook of it en route to careers as professionals in the service sector of the economy. These are the men and women who, in due course, comprise the core of the capitalist workforce in any country. Like all young people, petty bourgeois students too are attracted to pop radicalism, usually expressed in the form of peace marches, tree-hugging, anti-war protests, and so on. These are low-risk declarations of their moderately radical temperaments. More intrepid adventurers, of course, choose to volunteer at soup kitchens and churches or even to travel abroad as Peace Corps volunteers. Learning a foreign language, usually a European one, or studying abroad for a semester in a suitably exotic location are fairly common for this type of student. It is not so much that the petty bourgeois types lack a sense of adventure or genuine intellectual interests, but that their worldview is fundamentally limited by an everyday conservatism inherited from their parents and by their own mediocrity that makes every course and every assignment challenging. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge sounds quaint; radical politics seems outrageously risky; public service can be no more than an occasional hobby. In the final analysis, therefore, courses end up being about grades more than intellectual interests, education ends up being a mere cog in the wheel that preserves (or slightly enhances) social status and privilege, and the route from the seminar room leads firmly to the corporate desks of our modern-day Bob Cratchits and Bartlebys.

Finally, there is the oddest of the three forms of consciousness produced and sustained by the modern university system, the neo-brahmnical. It enjoys the greatest prestige because it is the preserve of those who “beat the system.” Professors and students alike share this neo-brahminical consciousness, mainly because the better, brighter students appear to mimic their teachers in the most sincere manner. In this milieu where the feudal/aristocratic is blended smoothly with the modern/capitalist, higher education is recognized principally as a means of acquiring cultural capital, not as an input in the production of erudition. Often, this recognition is linked to the privileged backgrounds of students, who consider themselves to be high-status creatures already, albeit in search of the right kinds of gloss. These kinds of gloss are material, verbal and rhetorical. In material terms, gloss takes the form of the latest and most fashionable gadgetry, cosmetics and clothing, preferably from brands such as Apple, Sephora and Neiman Marcus. In verbal terms, it means an accent that is free from plebeian sounds, pronunciation that is free from colloquial influences, and diction that is free from grammatical errors. In rhetorical terms, it means posturing as champions of the downtrodden and oppressed; forcefully employing the language of rights to side with causes such as genocide in Darfur, sweatshops in Asia, and animal rights; acquiring a vocabulary that readily references academic terms such as “subaltern,” “indigenous peoples,” “deconstruction,” and “social construct.” Dressing and owning certain articles, speaking in a certain way, and using a well-defined set of jargon words are, therefore, the surest means of asserting one’s superiority over others in this “game.” The social relations of production pertinent to the seminar mode entail precisely such markers of sociocultural distinction that definitively define high and low in the university system. These Bourdieusian distinctions exist in the student body on every campus, but interestingly enough, similar markers of differences are to be found among the professoriate too (comparing the average senior and junior professors around you should drive home the point forcefully!). This status game is neo-brahminical since cultural rather than economic capital is its basic currency though the game as a whole is supported by the capitalist economy (thus the prefix “neo-”). The cynical and ironic uses of the underprivileged and their legitimate needs are, of course, intrinsic to the neo-brahminical status game, which is, in its highest form, an elite competition to establish oneself as a supreme do-gooder without actually doing any good. In other words, a form of politics that is actually anti-politics insofar as claiming, without authorization or authenticity, to speak for the subaltern ultimately neglects, even mocks, any attempt by subalterns to speak and act as meaningful agents of social change.

It is not difficult to appreciate that these three forms of consciousness associated with privileged minorities, the petty bourgeoisie and the neo-brahmins are linked to three distinct sociocultural processes in the North Atlantic world. The privileged minority consciousness leads to a gradual co-option into existing power structures of those claiming to represent traditionally-subordinated groups on the basis of their ascriptive identities. The petty bourgeois worldview leads to a steady supply of skilled workers into the capitalist workforce due to the limited talents and ambitions of this population. Lastly, the neo-brahminical consciousness leads to higher education continuing to be a means of gaining cultural capital, status and prestige through the strategic use of high-minded rhetoric concerning the oppressed and the suffering, and the subsidization of traditional privileges by the capitalist economy.

Each of these three social processes, it must be understood, buttresses and reinforces the other. The co-option of privileged minorities into power structures supports the status quo, whether in the capitalist economy or in the university system, by preventing radical pressures from below to rise to a boil. The steady supply of petty bourgeois workers into the service sector is the engine of growth and/or stability in the capitalist economy, which thereby makes it possible to write off the costs of co-opting privileged minorities and supporting the neo-brahminical status game. And the neo-brahminical emphasis on cultural rather than economic capital legitimizes the entire capitalist system by invoking an imaginary, unbroken elite tradition of Western civilization. There is thus a neat complementarity to these three seemingly distinct forms of consciousness and social processes that owe their origins to the seminar mode of production.

Conclusion

In a functionalist vein, one might be tempted to argue that the seminar mode of production nourishes a social system that is stable, self-regulating, and internally coherent. Such a perspective, however, neglects the considerable imperfections in the social relations of production established within the knowledge factory itself and its relationship to the wider capitalist system. Within the university system, one ought to acknowledge the presence of a limited set of dissenters and heretics who do not toe the line defined by the authorities. Their everyday conduct is transgressive in subtle and not-so-subtle ways though open confrontation is hardly a prudent option for either students or professors. These transgressors may choose to use the grading system subversively to reward genuine learning rather than mere performance; to enable students to partake of the sheer joy of reading poetry, understanding how the past illuminates the present, or making scientific discoveries rather than to preoccupy themselves with jobs or jargon; and, to avail of the advantages of experiential learning to silently challenge received wisdom, and perhaps even the seminar mode itself. In sum, we are not in The Matrix, and it is quite possible for teachers and students to be subversive/ transgressive in covert and less overt ways. Whether they do so or not, in fact, thus becomes a matter of individual choice that we should not wish away via a structurally over-determined explanation.

Just as there are crevices for dissent, subversion and transgression within the knowledge factory, so too are there contradictions in the relationship between the knowledge factory and the capitalist economy. The overproduction of doctoral students relative to available jobs in the humanities and social sciences is one symptom of these contradictions. Another symptom is the growing joblessness of college graduates in depressed economic conditions. Yet the most obvious symptom of the uneasy place of the seminar mode of production in the capitalist economy is the commonplace notion that universities are ivory towers that promote outdated or other-worldly thinking ill-suited to the needs of contemporary capitalism. This is a rather amusing notion when one considers the tortured history of a medieval institution trying to reform itself in the modern world. After all, the modern university or knowledge factory owes its existence to private and public capital, and in turn, keeps the wheels of the capitalist economy moving by releasing a steady supply of inputs for productive activities.

The contradictory, awkward relationship between the knowledge factory and the capitalist economy also point to a larger malaise within contemporary capitalism itself. This has, of course, been revealed most dramatically over the past couple of years in the form of a protracted economic depression worldwide. The causes of this depression are essentially structural, as the likes of Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and David Harvey point out repeatedly. The hyper-speculation that generated super-profits to sustain and expand the financial sector does not correspond to any actual productive activities or production that is measurable in terms of GDP or GNP. Anyone familiar with the economic history of the North Atlantic world over the past three decades is familiar with the astonishingly low levels of national income growth and the structural need for “bubbles” of speculation to temporarily forget the structural crisis at hand. The collusion between the knowledge factory and the global financial sector has been well-documented and justly criticized in recent months. But it isn’t stated often enough that particular theories and models emanating from the quiet groves of academia were, in fact, responsible for the unseemly rush to collude with the financial sector, and subsequently, to bring about the worst economic crisis in the postwar era. The delicate underbelly of the golden goose has now been gently slit open. It is only a matter of time before the creature, gasping for breath at the moment, dies and the golden eggs of the capitalist economy cease to be laid. Whenever that auspicious hour arrives, we shall see the end of the unholy nexus between financial speculators and their economics-trained numerologists/astrologers. In the short run, there is thus much to be hopeful: on the horizon is a wholesale renegotiation of the social relations of production in the capitalist economy as well as in the knowledge factory. How exactly these future developments will affect the seminar mode of production is anyone’s guess, but I, for one, am confident that snobs, prudes, and wannabe feudal lords will not vanish into thin air like the hard-earned salaries of so many capitalist workers. The medieval past thus seeps into the post-modern future in insidious ways long after it has outlived its usefulness.

Has One-Day Cricket Suddenly Become Meaningless?

To answer the question briefly, the answer is "yes." But this is so not because of some apparent deficiencies in the ODI format or because the players and the viewing public suddenly find it boring. The truth is that one-day cricket has seen its stock plummet since the inaugural T20 World Cup in 2007 because cricket's administrators have now identified a new cash-cow to replace the older one. From 1975 to 2007, one-day cricket happened to be the biggest money-spinner in the sport, and administrators basically maxed out on ODIs during this period. Subcontinental teams profited the most: between 1996 and 2006, South Asian teams routinely played an incredible 40-50 ODIs each year. Millions of dollars, especially in television rights, became the norm for international cricket, especially in the subcontinent.

All that, however, changed after India won the inaugural edition of the T20 World Cup in South Africa. Lalit Modi, who had earlier ridiculed the T20 concept, now became its top cheerleader with his IPL concept. Whereas the 2007 World Cup had raised USD 239 million, the latest edition of the IPL in 2009 raked in a whopping USD 2.16 billion, or nearly ten times the value of the leading ODI tournament in the world. With the likelihood of more IPL-like tournaments in England, Australia, and South Africa, economic logic dictates that the lucrative T20 format supplant the older ODIs as the leading money-spinner in the game. ODIs will, therefore, be scrapped altogether or replaced by a format that embeds the virtues of T20 cricket in the traditional structure of Tests (each team playing two innings of 20-25 overs each).

The logic of lucre certainly makes sense. But what is interesting is that no one is putting matters quite so bluntly. Commentators and players try to be diplomatic when they offer circuitous explanations for why one-dayers no longer excite. We are told that the middle overs of ODIs are "slow"; that many ODIs are one-sided affairs rather than close contests; that the toss can give an unfair advantage to one team in many countries. But curiously, no one complained about these apparent deficiencies for 32 long years between 1975 and 2007. To my mind, it's time to call a spade a spade rather than a bloody shovel. It's time people were honest about why T20 is winning out over one-dayers. Let's admit that it's got to do with moolah alone, and nothing else. The general public merely follows the latest fashion statement in the cricket industry, so simply generating media hype brings in millions nowadays. That's precisely where Lalit Modi & Co. come in. When the bania rules and sport becomes cheap entertainment, one can be assured that inferior products will be "chosen" by idiot consumers in the limited market of goods made available to them.

Why is Dravid back in the ODI team?

I have no idea why Rahul Dravid has returned to the ODI team for the Sri Lanka series and the Champions Trophy. The man last played for India two years ago, and was dropped by the then selectors who did not see him in their plans for the 2011 World Cup. No one doubted either his ability or his record then and now. But Dravid’s return comes on the back of some appallingly poor batting by some of the young guns against well-directed short-pitched bowling in England during the World T20 competition. But if Suresh Raina (still in the squad) and Rohit Sharma (finally dumped) cannot play fast, rising balls directed at their bodies, then shouldn’t they be sent to work in the nets against bowling machines as well as the likes of Ishant and Zaheer? And if it’s possible to recall Dravid, why not consider the younger and equally competent VVS Laxman? Or better still, some of the younger players who can actually play the short ball well, say, Virat Kohli or Manish Pandey?

The decision to recall discarded players past their best-by date suggests muddled thinking. Dravid will definitely not play in the 2011 World Cup, so he should not be considered for a one-off series just because it’s in South Africa. If only past records in South Africa are to be considered at the time of selection, why not also consider Sourav Ganguly next time? After all, his ODI record in that country is better than most of his countrymen. Or for that matter, why not consider the current chairman of selectors, Krishnamachari Srikkanth? He played the short stuff rather well: remember him cutting Michael Holding and pulling Andy Roberts in the 1983 World Cup final? Might he not be able to tackle Dale Steyn, Mitchell Johnson and others with equal aplomb, albeit in his mid-fifties?