Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution: On Caste and Politics by Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan is an anthology of their political and theoretical writings, skilfully edited and presented by philosopher of science Maël Montévil. My review refers to the British edition of the book. The essays and interviews reveal the gradual failure of India’s political and government institutions, as well as its media and society, under the dominance of the far-right. The authors refer to this process as “upper caste supremacism.”
The introductions and the well-organised glossary of philosophical terms at the end of the book also describe the history of the authors’ development of egalitarian philosophical-political thought. Ultimately, the book offers a new program of theoretical commitment to an egalitarian and emancipatory politics that everyone can develop for themselves: its politics is pedagogical. The cover, with its blue flags and raised fists, was specially designed by renowned artist Siddhesh Gautam and captures the anti-caste spirit of the book.
Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan,
Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution: On Caste and Politics,
C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd. (11 April 2024)
Many chapters of the book are original versions of essays published in magazines such as The Wire, Le Monde, Indian Express, Outlook magazine, Libération, The News Click, etc. This anthology features several unpublished essays and interviews, some of them for the first time in English. These unpublished texts have been shared among friends, which is not unusual among the authors. Dwivedi and Mohan do not follow the capitalist and bureaucratic norms of hiding their ideas and claiming ownership of their texts, even in certain situations where they should. Instead, they offer their contributions as, in their own words, “servants of the lower caste in politics.” The author royalties from this book, in their entirety, have been transferred in advance to various social justice, equality and free speech charities.
Critics rarely have the opportunity to interpret a book like this at the moment of its early reception. By “a book like this ” I mean that this book is singular. british philospher Robert Bernasconi remarked that people around the world should “listen and learn” from it. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has described the book as “required reading for anyone who wants to understand the precipice toward which our entire world is heading.”
I will first tell the story of how these chapters of the book came to be. Then I will describe the structure of the book and what it aims to achieve. I will then outline the central theses of the work to show how it can be used as a theoretical organon. The book is like a package that comes with components, functions and the instruction manual. We have to put it together. This aspect is Montévil’s editorial brilliance. Once assembled, the machine that we get through the introductions, annotations and the glossary is nothing less than an anti-caste political program or a manifesto only comparable to the little book of Marx and Engels.
The essays previously published in The Wire are in the nature of reactions to political events. The book traces the process of “upper caste supremacism” through political developments and the erosion of democratic and constitutional institutions over the last 10 years in India. The authors refer to them as “pathologies” of a deep illness in our caste-driven “ceremonial society.” The essays reflect and highlight events led by lower caste mobilisations, such as the 2015-16 university protests arising from IIT Madras; cow vigilantism and lynchings of Dalits and Muslims by Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh affiliates; the 2018 anti-Dalit riots in Bhima-Koregaon; the arrests of young activists like Mahesh Raut, Chandrashekhar Azad Ravan and Disha Ravi; the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in 2019; the devastating impact of the pandemic in 2020; and the death of Father Stan Swamy in prison. On some level, the chapters also read as odes to the heroes of the coming revolution.
In these chapters, events are repeatedly placed in the historical context in which they have meaning. Essays on mob lynching titled Who Gets to Kill Whom in the Union of India and The Meaning of Crimes Against Muslim in India situate the culture of riots and pogroms from India’s Congress-dominated political era to the present. The long history of hostility towards conversion is described in The Terror That Is Man. The secret role of postcolonial theory in the ‘Hindu nationalist’ phase of upper caste supremacy is exposed in Sex and the Postcolonial Family Values and The Macabre Measure of Dalit-Bahujan Mobilization.
Other essays deal with the development of journalism and the media, federalism and electoral politics, and the role of police and investigative agencies. The reader will often notice that the authors of this book use the term ‘meaning’ to diagnose the pathologies of contemporary politics. ‘Meaning’ indicates that they are getting to the essence of the matter in a purely philosophical sense in order to set free the political imagination.
The most important thing about the book, then, is the theoretical framework from which these meanings and responses are formed. In Who Gets to Kill Whom, the fundamental question of politics and the moral life is highlighted and forms the framework from which the authors respond and invite the reader to join this meditation: We all have a duty to protect our own lives. They write: “Without the field of political theory, a history of politics would seem confusing” (p. 95). This book outlines a theoretical field for politics in India and demonstrates what this field reveals as the truth about politics through certain historical examinations.
The singular voice that speaks in these pages is also the work of a poetic force in the writings of Mohan and Dwivedi. Most of the essays are written in a prose that makes complex ideas accessible to non-academic readers.
Therefore, I follow Bernasconi, who says: ” Not since the days of Sartre has philosophy addressed political issues with the directness and clarity that Dwivedi and Mohan bring to their exposure of the caste system”. I would add that they are also in the tradition of Sartre, Fanon and Simone Weil, since Mohan and Dwivedi, as philosophers, address politics directly, without the elitist conservatism that has infected philosophy. This frankness is only possible in philosophy; they leave nothing ‘hidden’ (another word that is repeated throughout the book) by showing where distinctions are hidden and where deceptions or hoaxes are constructed. I previously wrote a long essay in an academic setting about this political aspect of their work and the philosophical frameworks and intuitions that underpin it.
One of the familiar schemas for understanding politics in India is developed in greater theoretical detail in this book in chapters such as ‘Aryan Doctrine’, ‘Hidden by the Hindus’ and ‘Democracy and Revolution’. It was also elaborated and argued in historical detail in an article I co-authored with Dwivedi and Mohan, published in Caravan magazine. This schema shows that the real political majority in India are the lower castes, not only because they are the demographic majority, but because they are the majority that has suffered the historical injustice of caste oppression for three millennia.
Religious polarisation and other dominant debates – as the authors and the editor say, both in Savarna and in the white public sphere – have obscured and marginalised the currents of political claims, literary and cultural histories and lower caste organisations of the Dalit Bahujan people. The authors argue that a truly emancipatory politics is only possible if 1) the reality of historical injustice is accepted, 2) corrective measures are taken in the political and social life of India, and 3) democracy is honestly understood as the struggle for the freedom of all “people without exception“: a formulation the authors adopt from P. C. Joshi, one of the early leaders of the communist movement in India.
Reading this book reminded me of American novelist Tony Morrison’s response to a white interviewer’s question about when Morrison would begin writing about white people. Morrison pointed out that this question was simply racist because it assumed that the “mainstream” or centre of the world was the white man’s world. This book is also, as the authors theoretically maintain, an unabashedly unconventional, that is, non-Savarna, but boldly anti-caste, reflection on Indian politics.
I now come to my final points relating to the theses of this book. It is difficult to complete this task in a short space without some rough edges because the authors are philosophers who have a complex system in the last instance. Dwivedi and Mohan belong, as Montévil points out in his introduction, “to the tradition or ‘the bastard family’ of deconstruction […] That is how Dwivedi and Mohan have come to be known outside of India – as the philosophical heirs to a tradition which begins at least from Husserl” (p. 1).
The book contains some very theoretical essays, especially Looming Objects and the Ancestral Model of Historiography, which outlines the author’s approach to history, offering a new theoretical tool for understanding historiographical work in a country like India. In India, history is written and discussed as either deviations from or developments of certain “common ancestors”, including caste, religion, “Aryan doctrine”, colonial disruption, etc. In the ancestral model, historiography serves primarily to preserve the common themes, identities, and objects of dominant ancestry. The essay on the historian Romila Thapar included in this book is a more accessible schematization of what an anti-ancestral model of historiography should be: they call it “being modern.”
Of course, this book does not follow this “ancestral model” of history. Now, if I tread where the authors do not, the histories of 20th century India see the common ancestry of the Indian subcontinent in the people who occupied the Gangetic plains, and exclude or limit the histories of the Northeast India and South India to the margins.
The chapter ‘The ‘Aryan Doctrine’ and the De-post-Colonial’ offers a simpler and more direct explanation of the concept underlying both caste oppression and racial discrimination and its continuing influence on academic fields such as postcolonial theory and the historiography of philosophy. This particular essay can serve as an introduction to Dwivedi’s very long academic article titled ‘The Evasive Racism of Caste and the Homological Power of the ‘Aryan” Doctrine’”published in a special issue on caste in the journal Critical Philosophy of Race – a rare academic occurrence since most of the articles in this special issue were written by Dalit-Bahujan scholars. Furthermore, the issue of caste has also become profitable for scholars of the savanna.
At this point, it is my duty to point out an important fact that is not adequately covered in this book. Today, it is very difficult to discuss, write and organize around caste oppression and egalitarian political norms without falling under the iron fist of the state. At the same time, these debates are controlled and even suppressed in the mainstream. This has now led to a dangerous situation for India and Indian politics as caste oppression is mostly studied, archived and discussed in white Western academic forums. There is a danger that the most central issue of Indian politics – the annihilation of caste – will be controlled by a few whites. Indians should consider the misery in West Asia and Africa which is owing to this very process.
In this atmosphere, I must say that this is a book that all those Indians who advocate democratic projects of freedom and equality in India can be proud of. This book is proudly Indian philosophy. The chapter titles themselves hint at the many genres of thought (manifesto, training ground, intellectual insurgency, great intolerance, courage to begin) that can lead to a different, more egalitarian future. They proclaim a rejection of defeatism in the face of the self-declared victory of the “Hindu Rashtra.” The term “training ground,” for example, is a subversion of Immanuel Kant’s concept of “enlightenment” (p. 4).
The word “revolution” in particular resonates boldly in the book, as Montévil summarizes: “an absolute commitment to democracy as a political necessity and revolution as a democratic necessity to protect democracies from being taken over by anti-democratic interests by using those very democratic institutions”.
J. Reghu is a political thinker and prolific intellectual based out of Kerala. His academic and research publications have been on caste, re-appraisal of colonial period, and Narayana Guru which have appeared with Routledge and Oxford University Press. He has lectured at Manchester University and Indiana University. He is the author of several books and he is also a translator. Currently he is completing a book length study on the intellectual milieu Narayana Guru.
