“I shall speak of ghost, of flame, and of ashes”
– Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question
It is not easy to write about the scholar and activist Mahesh Raut without sorrow and rage. Raut was a fellow of Prime Minister’s Rural Development programme; it has been five years since he was arrested on June 6, 2018. He is the youngest prisoner in the Bhima Koregaon case, currently awaiting the mercy of the judiciary for bail in Taloja central jail. His health has been deteriorating in prison. The evidence presented in the Bhima Koregaon case was found to be spurious and was planted onto the computer of another accused activist Rona Wilson.
It will be imprudent and immoral to write about Mahesh Raut without recalling the circumstances which have been keeping him prison, and above all it would usher in the evil of cowardice. These very circumstances are now articulating the macabre events unfolding in the tribal areas of Manipur which augur what may spread soon to different corners of India; the atrocities against the lower caste people and Adivasi (tribal) people which are recurring across the country; the simmering hate campaign against Muslims in Haryana which are reaching the neighbouring states (given, as Khalid Anis Ansari showed, that the Muslims who are killed in pogroms are mostly lower caste); and the moronisation of the education system in India.
The Bhima Koregaon case, in which Raut has been incarcerated, is related to the very origins of the upper caste supremacist RSS (National Self Service Corps) which is rooted in the anxieties of the Brahmins in the face of the political mobilisations of the lower caste majority in the 19th century in Maharashtra. Peshwa Brahmins were the oppressors of the lower caste people in Maharashtra, as Joti Rao Phule wrote:
“The poor subjects, according to the Bhat rulers were specially created (by God) to serve the Bhat Peshwas and their caste-men as helots”.
In January 1818, an army comprising of Dalit soldiers defeated the Brahmin Peshwa army, and the East India Company created a pillar to memorialise the soldiers who died in that battle. Especially since Ambedkar and his followers gathered around the pillar in 1927, it became a locus of the lower caste political mobilisation. In 2018, the memorial event was called “anti-national”, which stands for against Brahmin interest, by Akhil Bharatiya Brahmin Mahasangh (All India Brahmin Congress). The event was disrupted by a mob led by upper caste supremacist groups and was marred by the riot which followed. The very first FIR filed in this case named Sambhaji Bhide, a former RSS worker. This man is highly regarded by the major political parties.
Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan, Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution: On Caste and Politics, Edited & introduced by Maël Montévil, Hurst Publishers (UK) and Oxford University Press (US), 2024.
In the 19th century, the power of Brahmins began to wane in proportion to the modern colonial reforms which included unprecedented recruitment of the lower caste people in the army, their right to employment, and the caste disabilities removal act of 1850. But above all, these reforms created the opportunity for receiving modern education through the military schools. Phule would reiterate that before colonial rule the deprivation of education or enforced ignorance kept the lower caste people in ritualised slavery:
“The Aryan Brahmins forbade the Shudras to take education, which was the root-cause of their wretched condition.”
This degradation and depravation are part of the denigrate-dominate function, which is the principle of the “Aryan doctrine”.
The significance of Bhima Koregaon is not just the memorialisation of the event in which the lower caste people defeated the upper caste army. It symbolises the promise that through modernity – the assertion that the present can be the origin for a better world without any sanction of the past – the lower caste people across religions can rise together and raise a new and egalitarian world from the ruins of the “Aryan doctrine”.
Raut was neither an organiser of this memorialising in 2018 event nor a participant in it. His real crime was that he educated those who were forbidden to receive education and thus were held “to the (meanest) level of the beasts (of the field)”. Raut was working among the Adivasi (the original inhabitants or tribal people) and educating them about their constitutional rights and human rights – “Raut has worked extensively to strengthen gram sabhas [village councils], guiding them on how they can safeguard their own rights over forest produce and their land”. His arrest compels us to ask of the meaning of the relation between the India and the Adivasi people.
The relationship of upper caste supremacists of today towards the Adivasi people are not that different from that of the “Aryans” who arrived in the subcontinent millennia ago. It is mediated by “the denigrate-dominate function”. In the already racialising casteist texts of the “Aryans” the Adivasi people are often described as forest-dwelling bloody-thirsty demons. The subjugation and at the same time the distancing of the Adivasi people abound in the Mahabharata – the killing of Hidimba (who may have been the god of a pre-“Aryan” civilisation as evidenced by his continuing presence in the Himalayas), the mutilation of the tribal boy Ekalavya, the burning of forests, and the sacrifice of the tribal warrior Ghatotkacha. The evidence for these ancient interactions exist within the Vedic language which borrowed terms for geographical features from Adivasi languages.
When the RSS stubbornly refers to the Adivasi people as “Vana vasi” (forest dwellers) the ancient denigrating meaning is invoked. The killings and humiliations of the Adivasi people receive little media attention, since that would challenge the upper caste supremacist idea of India as the land of the “Aryans” of northern India who have the right to enforce their social codes, language, and oppressor narratives upon the rest of India.
The BJP and most other political parties including the Congress have continued their relation to the Adivasi people through the ancient denigrate-dominate function. They have never encouraged critical, theoretical and jurisprudential discussions on the relation between the modern constitution of India and the rights of the Adivasi people. If one cares to look, there is extraordinary suffering, state sponsored or directed oppression, and exploitation taking place in the Adivasi lands distributed across India. Through all institutions which they control, the upper castes maintain the denigrate-dominate function.
In July a man named Pravesh Shukla urinated on the face of an Adivasi man in the state of Madhya Pradesh, a BJP ruled state in which such crimes are not the exception. In 2018 an Adivasi man was beaten to death by a mob in Kerala for stealing food. Last year, an Adivasi was killed in Rajasthan for the crime of drawing water. In the state of Jharkhand, 122 Adivasi people were arrested and kept in prison for five years under false charges of terrorism, and they were released in July 2022 by a court which observed that:
“No evidence or statements recorded by the prosecution was able to establish that the accused were members of the Naxal wing and was involved in the crime. No arms or ammunition seized by the police were proved to be found from the accused.”
Upper-caste supremacy transcends political party boundaries and the majority lower caste people and those who work from the lower caste majority position can often be beaten, humiliated, killed or imprisoned at ease. Mahesh Raut certainly violated the ancient norms of the “Aryan doctrine” when he brought education to the lower caste people and the Adivasi people.
In India, we have never engaged in a sustained discussion on the meaning of education although some of the most important leaders of politics before 1947 were concerned with it. These days, we mostly discuss education in the most deplorable terms, that is, of having to defend the reservation given to the lower caste majority in educational institutions. These discussions are often puerile and occasionally vulgar in the mainstream media, as seen on the issue of the reservation provisions for the lower caste Muslims and Christians who constitute the majority of these groups. It reveals a ‘miraculous’ situation where the lower caste majority are being oppressed by the upper caste minority, and yet the minority people find it their right to grant reservations to the majority as if it were an undeserved pittance.
There are two opposing tendencies with respect to education in India – the lower caste majority position and the upper caste supremacist position across religions including Islam, Sikhism and Christianity. The latter seeks to deprive the lower caste majority of education and academic positions in the educational institutions of India, as evident in the upper caste (mostly Brahmin) membership of the recently created NCERT committee which has been entrusted with “investigating in” what the lower caste majority (of all religions) should learn in schools.
M. K. Gandhi stands for the latter position on education. Gandhi wrote about giving education to the peasants (who are not Brahmins):
“What do you propose to do by giving him a knowledge of letters? Will you add an inch to his happiness? Do you wish to make him discontented with his cottage or his lot? And even if you want to do that, he will not need such an education.”
Further Gandhi argued in favour of the “traditional” Brahminical education, “Our ancient school system is enough”.
The terms “discontent” and “unrest” in Gandhi are complex and we have dealt with it elsewhere. Gandhi found that “just as the state between sleep and awakening must be considered to be necessary, so may the present unrest in India be considered a necessary and therefore, a proper state” and “Unrest is, in reality, discontent”. Then, discontent is the state which precedes the fight for freedom, which is the meaning of politics. For Gandhi, political unrest is a necessity but only for a few since his views on education reveal that he wanted the lower caste majority to remain asleep while the upper caste minority decided the lower caste majority’s destinies. Hence, he wished to reserve the power of discontent, and the education in necessary discontent, for the upper caste minority.
On the other hand, the intellectual leaders of the lower caste majority had always argued for the egalitarianism of the restlessness or the unrest of thought which precedes all creations of freedom and the fights for freedom. Today, when the unity between postcolonial and decolonial academic project and upper caste supremacism (which masks itself as Hindu majoritarianism) is asserting itself through the imposition of Hindi, and the upper caste codes of diet, we should meditate on Joti Rao Phule’s text on unrest, discontent, modern education and the effects of colonial rule who said that God himself “has sent the English to our country to end the Brahmin’s proscription of education for the Shudras and Atishudras and to empower them […] the newly educated Shudras and Atishudras will establish their own state and, like the Americans, will govern it themselves” (p107, The Third Eye and Other Works: Mahatma Phule’s Writings on Education, Orient Blackswan, New Delhi, 2023). Narayana Guru in Kerala had demanded that the lower caste majority become the masters of English language and modern knowledge systems.
Later, B. R. Ambedkar, the most educated politician in Indian history said something similar, “if you give education to the lowest strata of Indian Society which is interested in blowing up the Caste System, the Caste System will be blown up”. Indian politics since the 19th century had been nothing other than the battle of these two positions – the lower caste majority position and the upper caste minority position – across religions. The educational imperators of the upper caste minority are trying desperately to prevent another beginning from out of a “blown up” caste system. Rather, we are witnessing a pretend politics which lives on the time borrowed from a deferred revolution.
The conflict between these two tendencies of education articulated the political awakenings in the many university campuses. It began in 2015 with the ban imposed by the central government on the lower caste majority education project Ambedkar-Periyar Study Circle, which since then has sprung up in other campuses. Eventually these movements were diverted into upper caste discourses on nationalism. While the television networks debated the difference between “Hindu” and “Hinduness” (Hindutva) the crushing of these intellectual currents continued away from attention. Today, intellectual acts are themselves forced into a certain intellectual insurgency through the terms such as “urban naxal”, “urban Maoist”, “Khan market gang” and so on.
But then we must begin to think what it means to pursue and share education today such that we ourselves come to excel at intellectual insurgency. In the Kantian sense education is the training of the faculty which allows us to encounter the world under un-anticipatable circumstance, it is a preparation for the obscure. For Kant, it is founded on courage – the opposite of which is being cultivated by the bands of cowards – to think without the crutches of religion and superstitions. That is, education never finishes, for it creates humanity anew each time someone’s thought breaks boundaries.
Education in that sense also discards the ends (telos) or goals which are external to it, and imposed on it. Education generates its own ends and opposes the imposition of ends and goals from outside it. These endogenous ends of education threaten fascisms. For example, the imposition of the ends (telos) of Hindi language and upper caste supremacism (Hindu nationalism) for the Indian union enforces the goals of the minority upper caste of northern India upon shockingly diverse and divergent cultures which exist in the Indian subcontinent. Instead, education can create new collective faculties to attune to one another as if one were harmonising, deviating, and creating new tonal relations in a concert.
And that brings us to the other important component of education. In order to play a musical instrument one must train one’s fingers (for example, a piano or a fiddle) to reach the correct positions so that the intended notes are heard. For playing alongside the many instruments and many kinds of tonal cultures such as raga and scales, one must master the musical instrument and the theory. In politics, the equivalent of praxis and theory is organisation and the knowledge of constitution and political theory. When someone joins any political organisation whatsoever with the goal of being trained in political praxis, but without surrendering to the ends imposed by that organisation, it is equivalent to training the fingers to play the piano.
However, an intellectual insurgency must keep knowledge alive the way Fahrenheit 451 taught us, through external and internal memories. More importantly, intellectual insurgency is learning to read poetically (more than what is said by the letters) and critically (by asking why those words were written, and from which position). Today this training and intellectual insurgency can be conducted through the sharing of science and humanities text books, video lessons, social media, blogs, and the creation of websites. There are many academics and intellectuals in India who would join and teach for the gatherings of learners forced into the underground of education. Intellectual insurgency is generosity and egalitarianism at work (energeia).
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
The present regime is run by the political offspring of an organisation led by barely educated Brahmins, and several of these political leaders have either questionable or scant literacy. The present regime has removed evolutionary biology and the periodic table from 9th and 10th classes from schools, whereas these items should have been introduced much earlier. This regime has also removed portions on Mughal history, caste oppression, and the 2002 pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat when Modi was the chief minister.
We can anticipate what is coming through the newly constituted upper caste NCERT committee from the example of Modi’s Gujarat. In 2004, the students in Gujarat were already reading chapters titled ”Hitler, the Supremo” and ”Internal Achievements of Nazis”. The textbook goes on to say that Hitler “lent dignity and prestige to the German government” and “instilled the spirit of adventure in the common people.” The concern of an intellectual insurgency should be that the vegetarianism of Hitler and the instilled “spirit of adventure” which resulted in millions of deaths should not be repeated as farce in India.
However, the composition of the NCERT committee, which was earlier led by the likes of Romila Thapar, now forebodes the same “spirit of adventure” continuous with Nazi Germany and Gujarat since 2002. It includes a Tamil Brahmin praise poet of Modi. The inclusion of Sudha Murthy, the “pure” vegetarian Brahmin who happens to be the wife of a billionaire and the mother in law of the current British prime minister should be worrying. For Murthy is also “a member of the Board of PM CARES Fund Trust”, which is a constitutionally dubious “non-state” organisation that received “Rs 2,913.6 crore between 2019-20 and 2021-22” from government run companies. In November 2022, Murthy prostrated before Sambhaji Bhide (the former RSS worker named in the first FIR filed in the Bhima Koregaon case) and took his blessings in public.
Also read: An Anthology of Anti-Caste Essays and the Question of Who Gets to Kill Whom
The word “insurgency” is often used to refer to the refusal by people to obey orders and to recognise authority. For example, the call for a “total revolution” by Jaya Prakash Narayan in the 1970s which was heeded by the RSS was in effect a political insurrection. It remained short of what Marx, in The Poverty of Philosophy, called “total revolution” – “a struggle of class against class, a struggle which carried to its highest expression”.
The philosophical concept of insurgency is related to but distinct from the statist notion. Insurgency comes from the Latin roots “in”, “sub” and “rego”. “Rego” meant “to correct”, “to make something right”, and also “rules” and regulations in the way in Descartes used it “Regulae ad directionem ingenii” (Rules for the direction of imagination).
Philosophically insurgency means to rise up or to raise from below in order to constitute new Regulae, or to create another beginning.
Epilogue: Without Melancholy
The text above was composed in August 2023, and revised in October, as per the demands of the book’s editor Maël Montévil, to make sure that it remained up to date as far as possible. Not much had changed in the incarcerated life of Mahesh Raut in October, nor is there anything significant to be supplemented now.
However, we know little about the health and the inner life of a most promising young man who has been condemned by the casteist canard of judicial process and the more or less casteist public sphere which has made him ahoratos (ἀόρατος, unseen). On 27 September 2023, a supreme court bench “comprising Justices Aniruddha Bose and Bela M Trivedi” stayed the bail order of the Bombay High Court – “The stay was granted by the top court after NIA challenged the September 21, 2023, order of the Bombay High Court granting bail to Raut”.
Raut had sought bail to visit his home in Gadchiroli – a town surrounded by forests and villages – when his grandmother died. The NIA court denied him bail on 5 June 2024, again. His bail plea will come up before the supreme court again very soon on 21 June. The court has asked Raut’s council, “Funeral was on May 26 so what ceremonies are left? You have not given any details as to when they would be”; and from it we should reckon the moral character of the society we have come to be over the last ten years.
There is no doubt to us about Mahesh Raut: he is brave, he has that extraordinary courage that is needed to begin again. But in the past few days since its electoral loss, the BJP, which has subsequently formed a precarious coalition, has been trying to intimidate and distract the people with certain irrational manoeuvrings. There is a surprising tone of post-election fearmongering coming from several well-intentioned voices in the country and abroad. What new levels of fear could be scalped in a system which confined Rohith Vemula to the Velivada, killed Father Stan Swamy in prison, incarcerated scores of journalists, students, activists, and nearly 65% of whose prisoners are SC, ST, and OBC as per NCRB? Apocalyptic responses never help, and moreover they do no harm either. For it is the people of this country who have shown through their struggles and their exercise of their democratic rights that the tiger is still made of paper. This country shall not fall to upper caste supremacism (and its latest iteration Hindu nationalism) so long as we listen to the individuals of whom we hear less than we ought to – Mahesh Raut, Chandrashekhar Azad Ravan, Khalid Anis Ansari, J. Reghu, Gajendran Ayyathurai, Sudha Bharadwaj – and so long as the majority lower caste people continue their struggles.
For those who have been sharing their fears in public and those who are afraid, there is a Spinozist lesson to be learnt from Raut. Spinoza wrote in his Ethics,
Whenever the mind imagines those things which lessen or limit the body’s power of action, it endeavours as much as possible to recollect what excludes the existence of these things. (Proposition 13)
For Spinoza, fear and that which causes fear reduces our power to act. Joy on the other hand is that which increases our faculties. The corollary is that the mind as such has the tendency to remain in itself a power, a faculty, and hence it is “averse” to that which causes fear; that is, in order to be, the mind must shed fear. Fear, in Spinoza’s political theory takes a lot of work to create and then to sustain it, and hence it cannot last a long while. Fascism, the politics of fears, is brittle for this very reason. Love is the opposite of fear; love corresponds to the feeling of joy, which in turn augments our faculties.
We should be like Raut and practice a certain improvised Spinozist proposition – to love is to let that which one loves develop newer faculties and joyfully witness it coming to be otherwise than, and more than, what it is. Mahesh Raut scored 99.79% in the state common entrance test (CET) for law with the aid of books from the prison library on 3 May; he is courageous, and he loves.
The above is an excerpt from Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution: On Caste and Politics, edited and introduced by Maël Montévil. A new epilogue has been added and adapted for this excerpt.
Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi are philosophers based in the Subcontinent.
