Identity Politics in India by Professor Makarand R. Paranjape

okay thanks for making it all the way out to my land from the edge of the world so execute us to my pages welcome you actually meant to be the first in our series on Asian posted by which I mean territory and with name is the locals and cultural project director we have and we're very very fortunate to have broken whether our macarons are originated from tomorrow you will see changes are CLE from always we have to join a fantasy and first of all improving I won't you just given bottle site starting community both of your responses of professor function current events that a trivia which is focused by the ending more crops and prettier thanks goes out to our excellent Dharmendra's or if you like the silent operator V ideas in difficult routes whether noted for the rock emerging people intellectuals journalists writers resolve to exchange media about the authority geography in Iran be eternal and calmly project so it's very much people go for a better time and insulin and fashion are educated people to join quickly eruption and when I click wait for the authorities like those given the records of the individual and quality you might experience so politics or target sexual and if Israel intellectual interest and equity is quite normal and I forgive you I'll be that far if the array of publications we have over 40 books 175 cm in paper is how many parental English essentially mysteries in school language literature culture study Jania immunity he was educated after impedance College and later has be able to annoy in urbana-champaign in the United States where he is master than octave silence among his recent books are cultural politics in month India LaVette and half the life of Martin family and reading media colonialism national culture and the afterlife option in Indian English authorities often focus on critical for our engineer has promised six five iterations and world of fiction as long in latest creative writing our trans-fat injure and the normal body offering in essay books include sorry good song diverse honda contacted via and he promised biomedicine and push and developers prefer country has held a number of with ignition in grave teas in Asia North America Europe as well I want to be always cheating yes actually if you first help either the operating section I have written 30 on online also find a solution for Ganges listen to me he don't touch automatic condition it's really you know the original branch in relationship in caution that participated target yes master and so crunchy the table upon American casualties those who will simply destroyed socialite reforms advantage rules button head articulate through the language of culture the feelings and experiences be some a systematic fashion itself to prom she is an unusual organic elections to speak to the obscure precepts of folk rhythm of conference for their respective 8:30 political see here intellectuals represent excluded social groups of society are in fact countries which were to be so exited from size promotions but you can have discussion they draw ugly intellectuals I determine how a particular public intellectual is logically in the new Satan jdhermann and he talks our public intellectuals as those whose work cases from Norway from ivory tower and the common room if there are people who address the broader concerns of society and I need for yet we're all going into well beautiful sort of mutually to myself and especially discussion and we incorporated public my preoccupation with our inequality so originated it had it sorted in some thinking now in doing only very quickly here I've been teaching other levels in lower and subjective muscles and also impressionable or for many exact and such forms of violence for its products you arrive but on the whole the deeper issues we say that you try to be in surprise while identity is elevated to inform a politics and global recognition not much is said about power and how they are often an attempt at deluding oneself allowed the failure to recognize it is coming battle with revenge absolutes will constantly excluded from this identity politics behave themselves to call their own horrible expression blames and interpret throughout Western world are important demonstration of that project it has been affecting India to where a thousandth of a second essay coming to much sharper voters to be imposed on an agent Miller with the Culkin fashion which is normally played in penguin in question Christian world my originally was gravity when I began to work in the cop discrimination law issue in in Britain and I began to see how the very secular said construct scoffs religious and other identity and then pizza is one not rather than formulating from the adequately metal or solving them on with innocence and increases but then examining the debates in your own caucus religion gender what we called shriller therapy this may be computer in fact that they are rather important than indigenous ways unsigned human interaction and impacted by the early pops and the continuing influence of Western principles as a way of informing counter understand Indian Ocean if you refer to the blurb which we authorized to this talk whether one examines the output of the media intelligentsia we Murphy student legal system politician identity political Indian educators it permits discussion of societal problems see reaction that monetary is unable to approach let alone folder without first invoking my lady depressed chiefly about cars religion generally in terms of Education probably issue that there : correlation and problem-solving remain advanced supervision at work me too evening important so what is the pressure designs on RNC politics the neighboring factors related to elected the exponential growth ratifying spot in what way with quality your tailor specific form what can be done about my mind into which in LPS reporter and what role can interpretation can going on in attrition health and traditional route for an alternative effects on personal identity they were also leading to water alternative political and practice profitable interface rather with presentation I think we hope to address a question and he said they also want to learn from audience responses to them a clue as to his position vegetative permission to revert to an object is found in one of his recent articles very very female firefighter mania where 400 of them if anything we need to get out of infinitely stress in general the cops religious or achieved an understanding of historical and social phenomena identity politics has run its course or we could be more harm than good this does not imply that we be able to the holidays you considering everyone identical or life super setting difference without making is the basis different reasons ask that you listen to a more more pungent family so how haven't you in the game way but I think I've hand over straight to to YouTube it was made by that media and more rich you think thank you so much dr. Shah and will he delighted and honored to be here and I take my cue from Prakash PI and would like to thank not only mr. Harry Curran word lomani but the entire Indic book club family I should call it it's growing for this opportunity in fact this is the first of a series of talks I'm supposed to be giving on this tour with one tomorrow on on Gandhi's education philosophy and then I saw this big hop across the big pond and end up in a rather major gnome should I say redneck part of the United States and it goes on so I'm a bit you know trying to juggle these different talks in my head but as you heard from Prakash ye the move I'm going to make today is really to at the very outset distinguish between politics of identity and identity politics the latter with which I proposed to begin is a specific form of political activism based on highlighting the identity of a group usually one that has been oppressed or marginalized the politics of identity on the other hand is a broader notion concerning how the will to power shapes the identity of an individual or group normally we assume that our identity is something that is given to us or something they're born with but I wish to suggest that in the very construction of identities there is a political process it is in a sense of political act which bind them binds and implicates us in a larger Drive now I want to this latter part you know where I talk about not so much identity politics but the politics of identities where I want to draw on a lot of Indian thinking because again to follow prakash price q and to give the game away I think that the Indic civilization has really focused on the question of who we are in you know in a profound and sustained fashion the question of what the sells means in that sense it's a very sad centric civilization I like to call it it's not geocentric as several Abrahamic cultures are it's not geocentric as the Chinese are they're very pragmatic nor is it anthropocentric as in a sense post-renaissance humanistic modernity tends to be but so this self centers them where does it take us when it comes to identity politics is a larger you might even call it metaphysical or ontological question I want to ask along with the political question and the sociological question of identity politics or even the legal question and before I came here I was actually talking about this and I was a bit concerned because this is a law school and even in India you know it is this political legal social empowerment side of identity politics that is always highlighted and has in a sense called some of the difficulties we face in India today and the other side of it this the politics of identity of trying to understand who we are it's something that people hardly go into so I want to sort of bridge these two as it were you know universes of meaning and see if there is a way to connect them in an enabling way which is what you got in that little quotation of mine from one of my recent columns which was on a sort of Indian revolutionary of a woman there were two sisters in fact bina and Kalyani gasps who both went to jail and but you know they did they were associated with the initial insanity founded by sherlynda and his brother Birendra and it was a deeply spiritual organization at one level so these are the in a sense the interesting aspects of both identity politics and the politics of identity in India which are somewhat missing elsewhere but anyhow as I said let's look at the normal sense of identity politics which is hardly a very strong and vibrant upsurge in the second half of the 20th century in the West we saw the rise of second wave feminism civil rights the civil rights movement gay lesbian differently enabled agitations for empowerment and so on recent times identity politics has also been seen as one of the chief avenues of self-assertion of ethnic minorities such as despotic communities immigrants and including you might even say the various forms of religion fundamentalism jihadism in different parts of the West which also get the tag of identity politics in India we saw echoes of such movements from the 70s with the Dalit Panther movement and subsequently the struggles of several disenfranchised groups for greater power within the system including our devotees you might even see the Maoist agitation which is in our ongoing one and supposedly a very serious threat to the Indian state as well as to the society as a part of this broader self-assertion and one of the key aspects of identity politics is to use those very aspects of the group's identity which are the source of its marginalization such as race color ethnicity caste religion sexual preference and so on to define the group thereby toning the source of victimhood into a demand for justice it is also interesting to observe that in certain societies such as China or to a lesser extent in Japan we see really hardly any parallels to this rise of identity politics as a legitimate means of political aspiration in China for example the struggles of Tibetans of the Eagles are regarded as illegal and illegitimate they are not seen as a valid source of empowerment or self assertion and there are really no legal safeguards for people who do not subscribe to the dominant ethnic or or linguistic or other notions of defining what it means to be Chinese now no doubt identity politics has been a very powerful tool for the empowerment of the oppressed but it has also resulted especially in India in in great social divisive Ness and also hatred and violence of various kind already mentioned jihadist terrorism which can be seen as an example the Mujahideen themselves being warriors of God that's what the word really means and now to focus and more on India of course I I wanted to you know talk a little bit about higher education since I'm and higher education and what identity politics has done to our delivery of excellence in especially humanities and Social Sciences and then I wanted to also bring in the U P elections which are seen as water as a great watershed in India you know very recent where the BJP won convincingly and yogi Adityanath is now the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh which is a very large state in India since 200 million people and if it were an independent country it would be the seventh largest country in the world now so they said be the world jiu-jitsu of identity politics is to turn your disadvantage into an advantage and if you think about what happened in India if you look at dr. BR Ambedkar he considered you know caste to be a source of exclusion and lack and so he thought of limited reservation for a certain amount of time for those who were socially disadvantaged but when you had the Mundell Commission God began to see be seen as a resource not a lack so today what's going on is that many dominant communities want to call themselves backward so there is a movement towards backward ization in India in order to extract benefits from the state for example the Jarts in Haryana and Delhi who are very strong community both numerically and in terms of the caste hierarchy they are demanding to be given the legal status of being backwards to get porters and reservation in jobs as well as in educational institutions similarly in Maharashtra the dominant community the Marathas who have been the ruling class for a very long time also are agitating to be called backward and in Gujarat I see some friends from Gujarat the Patels were a dominant community one to be given reservation and hardik patel is challenging as it were the political status quo by asking for reservations so and in in Rajasthan the Brahmins want to be declared the backward community and they are actually very very disempowered economically and they are extremely poor in Rajasthan particularly so in other words you've got you've got you've got a paradox when it comes to identity politics that the center is vacated and everyone wants to rush to the margins and there's a competition to be more backward than the other in order to derive the benefits of the state and we must remember that in India what we call identity politics does not take the form of affirmative action it actually takes the form of quotas so in interval a layer University which is a central university that is funded by the central government we have entrance exams that his admissions are based supposedly entirely on merit but in other words there's a blind you the computer scrambles your identity and you know there is a panel which creates the exams what those who want to get in so I teach in the Center for English Studies and we have 30 places for our Emmy and we have more than 3,500 applicants who write the entrance test but we mean we actually come up with four merit lists so there are four different categories under which people get admitted so there is the Scheduled Caste category then there's the schedule tribe category so said you can't get about you might say 15% of the admission quota it's a quota that's one thing it's not affirmative action it's a quarter you must admit that many and then sheduled Tribes get seven and a half percent so sometimes this half becomes the complication you know because the human being can't be happy human being right and then there is another quarter for Other Backward community here it's not gas that's called communities or BC this are came up after the Mundell Commission under the fourth category for physically handicapped now you see this is politically incorrect you have to see differently enabled but the government hasn't relabeled the quota it's still called pH but because physically handicapped doesn't sound nice you nobody said it it is a pH so you can then that the general quota general means anybody who has none of these but if somebody from one of these makes it in the general Quarter then then that slot is vacated for someone from that community or caste I don't know if I'm making any sense but if you don't get it I don't blame you it is a conundrum it is a conundrum and I can explain it later so everything is done in this fashion out of 100 you know so 50 go and roughly 50 go to the general 22 and a half percent go to OBC and then another 22 and a half 15 plus seven and a half go to schedule gosh I do Drive so and then this is actually carried out for faculty recruitment recruitment for for promotions even for housing except in housing if you are the more underprivileged or the you know the greater your advantage and in addition to this in Jane you have something called backward points you know there are percentiles and quartiles given suppose you come from Buster which is the place of the Great Mouse search that you read about then you're supposed to get backward points for being from that area but there are many such places where you can get backward point and in addition if you are a woman then you get another five backward points but the result that in my discipline about 95 percent of our students are women so does curtly we have only one or two boys so when other than the academic council I was the chair of my center twice and that was up for another time and I just gave it up I give it to somebody else who was possibly more enthusiastic than I for you know more interested in administration and I need the point that you were applying this backward points you know extra points for women which would be very good in the biotechnology but in several subjects in humanities and Social Sciences it's actually counterproductive because the people who are getting in are from the same so to speak privileged colleges in the General Court I at least and in the other quarters even you know in the schedule - schedule tribe it's only when in students who are getting in so at least scrap this extra quota for women for my discipline and be they refused and today je vais proudly tells everyone that we have more women students with 55% women students to 45% neil students so that that makes us very very obviously you know proactive in gender justice but now the result of all this political correctness is that our students are getting increasingly incompetent especially in the humanities and social sciences the reason for this is that they hardly read you know the basic text in the discipline and you know most of their you know promotions and jobs and earlier their visitation are based on some politically correct position or the other so that when students come to us and I mean for example I taught the search methodology I've been in Janey for about 17 years or degrees about 16 years I thought the only compulsory course which is an answer course in my department which was a search methodology so we would I would ask students okay what do you want to work on and they would never usually they would never start with an author or a bunch of texts but they would usually start with a political statement that I want to work on the marginalization of nagas you know this is how the political I mean this is how the research topics get framed in India you know and then they look for text or theories to justify a political statement with which they've already begun and so I would often ask them and eventually I were very unpopular and I stopped teaching this course just to tell you and I'm very relieved because it was a very great burden on me because it was the only compulsory course and I had a hard time actually passing some of these students and then I became very unpopular because I do a lot of reading and writing and and teaching I held it and she teaching is not compulsory in JNU rather should I say attending classes is not completely optional so you can not attend a single class and get a degree in JNU yes I'm not kidding there is no statutory attendance requirement but the result that several people may I mean and it's very difficult to fail also because the grading system there's great inflation as everywhere in the world but if you fail somebody and if they don't do any work by Grieg now I'm teaching a course in which there's one student who's only come to one class in our course and then I need them do lots of work because I think if you want to do a PhD or MPhil you have to turn in a piece of writing you know every every week or every other week and now this student this is an ensign class I'm teaching and out of eat assignments of which one was a term paper and the course is over I mean the last year of class was writing last week she has turned in only one assignment and that was she got a fail grade on that so now I don't know how she's going to pass and going to make me even more unpopular it would seem but all I'm saying so finally I gave up teaching this course because you know the what happens is there's a shorthand with the substitution of actual thinking and reading instead of that you come up with these politically correct statements of statements that concern identity politics and you're supposed to get a degree you're supposed to go through your entire education and then eventually get a job as well and ingenuous is ranked the number one Central University in India we just got a prize from the President of India and in a way it is true because our students are indeed very bright and you know if they were properly inspired they would do a lot of good work but I've seen that our students the they stay the more depressed again because there's no climate there's no ecosystem that promotes excellence the ecosystem promotes different forms of political mobilization for which you get rewarded academically as well which again seems to be a very dangerous correlation so that what happened to higher education in India that there is a dumbing down and the best of our students get exported they go abroad where they work very hard indeed you know because there's no free lunch laughs you know and and in genial hostels per month the cost is like it's less than one pound to live in JNU a food is subsidized and the fees are also about three pounds or four pounds a year and they've never changed so you basically get free education in south of South Delhi where land costs are almost as high as London so many students stay for ten years are living you know practically for free they do jobs and they never leave the campus so it's the land of lotus-eaters to some extent and then if I talk about this of course I am going to become even more unpopular but Virginia is not the only place most of our universities in India are places where you have this kind of political agitation and identity politics going on most of the time and the degrees that we give out and you know the teachers we are training we are a PhD Factory in a sense Jane you and these people go into each everywhere else and then they replicate they reproduce this form of political correctness or identity politics for real academics so what happens is that many middle-class people in their children don't get into good institutions because of so much preservation especially in IITs and medical college so they send their children abroad where it costs fifty sixty thousand you know dollars to educate you to a child of maybe forty thousand pounds so it costs but I mean I think Indians are spending ten billion dollars a year to educate their children abroad for and in ten billion dollars you could fund five hundred J in use so what's really going on in higher education is that our universities are going down the tube because most of the times especially in humanities and Social Sciences all that people do is do identity politics political correctness they don't learn very much and and so the university go down and and then there's no admission because the very few seats available for the general quota so the the people can afford it them their children abroad and lots of money spent on that so and and many of the people in India who promote this kind of identity politics as a substitute for academic excellence have that patrons in the West so it's it's a win-win situation that you export your children abroad they become paid students your own universities get to get you know worse and worse and and and then the third third kind of side to this vicious triangle is that there's a mushrooming of private universities in India many of them are not properly regulated at all and they also charge very high fees so there is privatization which is both direct issues and unregulated on the one hand then there is the Central Universities which has the best teachers and the best facilities even now in the best reputations they become you know dens of parasitism and because the fees have been frozen for years and if you increase the fee by 50 pounds of five pounds then there's a huge agitation and then everybody goes on strike so you lose half the semester has gone like in Jane you I don't think for the last several years I remember the semester going you know from the beginning to the end without some disruption or the other and you know those of you who teach you know when there's a big gap in the middle of your course you know when people come back they look dazed and they say Oh what we'll be talking about Jane Austen where did I hear that name you know because they've gone off somewhere so by the time they come back it's very hard to reconnect and pick up the thread so this is the disruptive or the derangement of Indian higher education and a lot of this is because of this form of identity politics and now let me come to what's happened in in Anu P so you know Bruno Bruno Latour was interviewed last year I mean I wanted to mention two things to sort of make my customers gesture to major Western intellectuals at the start I wanted to bring in a very nice article but it's a bit of skill but Terry Eagleton is one of the top critics you know in my subject in English he wrote an article in common wheel which came out last year where where he he really talks about you know I just had a little quotation for you from there so he he talks about it's called the hubris of culture and the limits of identity politics it came out and just about a year fifteen people 2016 where you know he talks about the limits of identity politics how its run its course and he's saying that so-called identity politics I'm quoting him are not remarkable for the self-critical spirit and he identifies identity politics with post colonialism and he says anti-colonialism had some revolutionary possibility as we all know a Marxist leading Marxist critic and so he thought that he his argument is that during the colonial period there was a a political charge in in anti-colonialism which is missing in the post-colonial period because post colonialism has been more or less hijacked or you served by identity politics which is not very self-critical so this this is his argument and in a way I tend to agree with this so that's the problem with in a sense identity politics even in India that people who are proponents do not they're not self-critical they don't question themselves and this includes all kinds of agitators you know whether these are Dalek agitators OBC agitators people fighting for the LGBT rights and you know I would call them two and a half wave feminists in India because they're not sure whether they're in third wave or the second wave yet they're somewhere in between and all other types of people who are also trying to jump onto this and we're going to declare themselves marginalized as I would say people such as the charts and the / tails and the Murata's were dominant community if you just look at land ownership and other parameters of dominance how many Chief Minister's they throw up and these people want to be called called backward now you know so it's not very such critical or self-reflexive so this was Terry Eagleton and now what Bruno Latour says that I and he says he he he talks about somebody asked them about the challenges of identity politics in India and and he makes a distinction between identity politics versus pragmatist politics and here I think that what we see in yupi is not so much identity politics but but a kind of pragmatics where you know UT elections were usually decided between the Boden's Hammad party and the Samajwadi Party both of which were proponents of identity politics Bowden Samaj Party was the party of the Dalits and the Samajwadi Party was the party of the udders and power used to shift from one to the other usually you know now what happened is the Hindu consolidation with some people may call identity politics of another kind this all the Left liberals and secularists call it that which they consider more dangerous than the other kind but I think that what's happened in UT is the idea that it's not as if you know the the privileges and the pelf of power just shifts from one group to the other but that the pie can be enlarged in that you know everyone can get their slice so for me this is this is a market shift because the earlier model was invested in backwardness and scarcity so the point is you grab power so that your Lord can get something when they are in power but now that's not the idea the idea is that there are possibilities of growth where you know different groups can be benefited I mean not just one group so I think that is what though he didn't mean it in that context bruno latour meant by you know pragmatist politics as as opposed to identity politics and I think that generally Modi seems to represent and be it in that sense is the opposite going back to the colonial point that you need that identity politics of this sort had its roots in the colonial period where the British were the first one to have senses and numerically you know divided communities and then that was the source of the competitive politics of vote banks whereas earlier you know people have had overlapping and multiple identities and it wasn't that you could only be this or that and and so that divide and rule model divided Emperor was probably used for the different minority Arian coalition which Congress led and the the secular elite had this policy of constantly dividing the Hindoo worth bank I mean not letting the Hindus be become a vote bank so that you could cobble together a minority Aryan majority but but what has now happened is that the so to speak Hindu genie has been released from the bottle and it's not going to go back in quite the same way so the Hindu consolidation means that there is the divisive politics of saying that the lists are not Hindus and Sikhs are not Hindus and India nobody really a Hindu anymore that is not working rather you see this huge consolidation so the same logic has been applied in a majoritarian fashion as opposed to minority Arian fashion but paradoxically this also goes against this idea kind of the you know division where you know you could say that only yarders which are part the OBC sliver of being the spectrum on the ballot which is another section of the end of spectrum are going to benefit the very fact of a majoritarian coalition means that all sections of the Hindus are supposed to benefit which goes against the earlier kind of assertions that we saw any of now I'm going to shift to the second part of of what I wanted to say and then in the end very quickly see if I can you know bridge the two to the other now Indian reflections on the meaning of identity hinge on Who am I what it means to be a self not just oneself but be self and if you if you think about all the Maharaja's in definition they're all based on equations such as cut promisee or Umbra masking or iam Atma Brahma oppinion and Brahma so I'll come to this in a moment but if you if you go back to the etymology of the word identity then it really you know means the state or condition of being the same identity means the state of condition of being the same but the question of the same as of what now ordinarily the word implies the same as oneself but then Who am I becomes the question but when you see same as oneself isn't there a duality implied you know I'm the same as myself in there are two selves and I am that I am remember two statements from the Bible by the way Richard if I defines what what that entity is what you call divinity but I think a lot of Indian metaphysics has been about trying to bridge this duality you know and sadhana or the other bases of spiritual practice is to get beyond that dualism and apparently only knowledged in the break you form a teacher a follower of Shankara but if you go back at that to be etymology of identity goes back to the French word identity which was back to Latin identity us and to Latin it is you know and Edom itself has the same system could rule as either okay which means this done be done and the modern word item goes back to that word you know item means you know the same this particular thing so in other words the the real question is you know the relationship between Homme I and a done which means this I mean this can mean all of this you see everything so what what is a hum and what is a done is is the metaphysics of identity if you want to put it in a nutshell from the Indian philosophical point of view and now I'll just because I think I'm losing a lot of people and getting that sense here that I'm now hearing off into an area that people all understand this worldly politics how things are empowered and all that the how is knowing the nature of ultimate reality empowering these are questions and that people can ask but I think Indians have been even Greeks were interested in knowledge which was non-utilitarian not merely utilitarian but solid di re ma ke and so forth we can come back to that but I just wanted to provide my little bridge and then maybe maybe we can have a question and answer but I want to read one little thing from Shankara okey according to Shankara ignorance is based on a misunderstanding and the misunderstanding refers to the first person pronoun I with questions such as Who am I or with sentences such as I am this or this is mine mama Eden one tries to create oneself with one's body with other physical forms with communities with characteristics that one associates with oneself psychologically emotional conditions and in this manner I is granted in existence which it cannot have or can have only when it is identified with whatever is considered the supreme reality so according to Shankara everything else is superimposition of Gaza which is therefore erroneous and the only way of liberation is true Vidia of the guiana of the congruence of atman and brahman so only the statement iron Brahmin can be right all other statements are falsifiable and false I am this body I am this mind intellect and I'm so insist on I was born in such-and-such a time I'm going to die don't know when but surely soon or some years later whatever all these statements according to Shankara are only partially true and a similar explanation is is offered very interestingly by Diana and Saraswathi swung against audacity the founder of Arya Samaj and his commentaries only he shall open assured in which he explains that both Adam and odda that is other you see the word other and other info add us in Sanskrit are linked so it done this and other that are pouring on so Poornima the poornamidham poornaath poornam majestically so this is complete and that is complete and you add completeness to completeness of completeness and you subtract completeness from completeness and you still have completeness so both this that is whatever this is and that all of you Dao I Dow is an interesting book by a booga so the point I will come to that in one second but the point is this is also complete linearly indivisible and so is that so basically the good news is all of you are perfect and eternal and infinite and without beginning and without end and lead-up of the Stardust from which the galaxies were born and of infinite power and potential and not limited by caste creed community identity religion nation and so on and so forth that is the good news of advaitha and now so the real question is as I was asking can these to be bridge the political and social and only struggles our own identity and the metaphysical and spiritual and so forth which often is identified with the wisdom of India and and I think I think that that Gandhi gives us a clue among others how this may be done but you know so it's very interesting I wanted to just tell you as an aside three sets of three books which are very interesting so there's a book I am dau by Boober where he says that our relationship that each other should not be eyes that because when you see I that you can do terrible things you we make the other person you know an object it should be I though and that should be a mirror of the relationship between man and God neither Jewish theologian right because God is always Dow in Judaism you know a very intimate i thou so he says relations between human being should be modelled on I Dow and and then and then there was a very interesting book by Ram Chandra Gandhi who was Gandhiji grandson and a very good you know I think one of the great Indian contemporary philosophers he's no more he wrote a book called I am thou very said at the White House the truth of India I am though so it's not I and thou so from I that you've got I and ow but then remove I says I am thou which is to say that this is the self self relationship it's not self that and not even self other this census so why should I be nice to you not because of some radical sense of responsibility for the other but because it sent self yourself and so am i and if you can raise your consciousness higher or whatever lower whatever you like but these are just many sense of self self it's not that I am need this self I am this self and this self and that says protection and then it was another book by a great mystic called nisargadatta maharaj where he says I am that so he's completely reversing boobers eyes that by thing on that as well I'm not only Gao it basically what he sings I'm the table as well I'm the table and the chair and that does been so so matter is also full of consciousness he doesn't stop at other subject so this is my aside okay but now I want to link the two and the link is very interesting for me this whole identity politics can be redeemed and saved as it were from these ill effects that we've already talked about which are resulted in so much chaos and and and partisanship and divisive nets as well as at times violence and its effects on indian university system of already mentioned because what Gandhiji tries to do is to find the link between Farraj and sorrow there so Raj is my own so to speak liberation but it can also be a political word for independence but it's more than that Viraj means self rule but yourself rule means rule of that self the higher self right so Suraj is based on self restraint as well not just resistance to power and authority so in other words we are unequal in power well whatever it is you know economic my military might then Swaraj means restraint and if someone's trying to dominate you it means resistance so it's not that you're powerful then you go and start you know bullying and harassing everybody and as just because you've got we've got power now and you were deprived so where art is not easy a matter at individual or at the connected level but I think Gandhiji talked about this and he said you know Viraj consists if you want to earth for Arjun it'll be of community of highly evolved individuals which don't need you know policing by the state you know surveillance what Foucault and others have been talking about the panopticon ideological state apparatus you know so much television the brainwashing that goes on to turn you into consumers and so forth but the highly evolved individuals will always be looking out for one another and and you know in that sense like Marx the state itself was wither away or become minimal and when when Modi gave the slogan maximum governance minimum government that's what he meant I'm not sure they're really doing it but deter Gandhi an idea and finally this servo they're an unco they are that means that unto this last Gandhi translated Ruskin's book and he said the society can only be measured as measured by how the most backward of the wretched or the underprivileged how how are they being treated so Swaraj must result in forward and this is the link between this whole non-dualistic as I said metaphysics of identity that I was talking about which is I think a great Indian gift and it's Universal it's not sectarian in my opinion and the identity politics as we normally understand it on the ground which is the empowerment of disadvantaged groups so if you can bring these two together that I think one can feed into the other you know that the the amelioration of of the underprivileged is actually facilitated by the kind of radical transformation which Gandhi thought in which Indian spirituality or metaphysics has been advocating for such a long time thank you so much thank you [Applause]

Channel: QMULSchoolofLaw

Views: 15,627

Rating: 4.8426967 out of 5

Keywords: QMUL, Law, Queen Mary, India, caste, Identity politics

Id: 0nV4tvCxBec

Length: 56min 23sec (3383 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 17 2017