Reconstructing Gandhi

1

Reconstructing Ghandi M.K.

By Thomas Albert Fox

This peculiar approach to a constructive criticism of M K Gandhi as being an idea potent bears

on the notion of feeling what you think. In this mode, of feeling what is thought, Fox constructs

21 stanzas of English poetry to reconstruct M K Gandhi and to deconstruct his beatification. In

the course of overtaking the modern Gandhi myth Fox produces poetry to explain ‘heris’1

explanatory endnotes, and in this navigates to an over-viewing position which takes account of C

S Lewis’:

Perhaps you have imagined that this humility in the saints is a pious illusion at which

God smiles. That is a most dangerous error. It is theoretically dangerous, because it

makes you identify a virtue (i.e., a perfection) with an illusion (i.e., an imperfection),

which must be nonsense. It is practically dangerous because it encourages a man to

mistake his first insights into his own corruption for the first beginnings of a halo round

his own silly head. No, depend upon it; when the saints say that they - even they - are

vile, they are recording truth with scientific accuracy. (C.S. Lewis, “The Problem of

Pain”, Geoffrey Biles, The Centenary Press, 1940. P55-56).

Lewis, whose platitudinous essence is hidden beneath prosaic complexity, epitomises M K

Gandhi’s prosaic appeal to the complexity of Hindu pietism as a way of hiding his naked

ambition for power. Both head for a fall, which they adeptly convert to salvation.

Indeed, the costs of accounting for pious illusion and its concomitant self-delusion seem

unaccountably uneconomical in prose, thus Fox turns to poetry for their efficient comprehension.

The poetic logic of the Foxian poem demands taking grammatical and semantic ambiguities to

their remorseless conclusion. Take, for example, verse 1 when the shift from Gandhi’s back to his

Master’s makes them one and the same (joined back to back, and thus facing in opposite

directions) – in presenting such, the poem is asking what does Fox mean by such incorporation of

the British Empire with Gandhi? Of course, Verse 1 is up to more than simply this element

alone, complex though it is in itself. The 21 verses cannot be understood in their wider domain

except in recital when the close construction of the orally possible tells you how to say what it

means (which is to say, it says what it means). Fox’s endnotes are designed to expand the

contextual sphere in which recital of the poem can openly air it’s meaning as a whole. They are

not a guide to identifying in detail its manifold poetic devices and the individual threads of

meanings entering the overall weave whose texture of meaning is felt. Thus, the footnotes are

not by any means exhaustive, although the occasional pun is pointed out, such as “dire” in verse

2, simply as a means of illustrating such threads, by drawing one to the surface. In the end it is

the poem that explains its notes.

Inscription2: 3Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Mah Atma4, 1869-1948.

51.

Mah Atma Gandhi the perfect spinner

Spun his yarn to weave the sackcloth

That served to clothe his naked wrath

Which itched and scratched the Master’s backs

Till mere discomfort made them face the facts

As they watched their Empire turn to ash

The thing that once produced a deal of cash

And proved itself a monstrous winner

Yet ended up condemned a sinner

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2.

Yes, dire6 the sin against the rising fear

That put the Empire in the line of fire

Whose trail of blood led to its pyre

A pile of wrongs from heaven sent

So up in flames the Empire went

And that great spirit fanned the flames

While all around they made their claims

Upon the Empire’s funeral bier

And found its flames could only sear

3.

To the rear the blistering fingers raise

Their points to prove the present load

Was by that defunct Empire sowed

That ploughed the land and kept apart

The seeds that grew to break its heart

For in these faults the deadly hatreds lie

That writhe and turn into the hue and cry

Of hunters and some bloody craze

In pursuit of all those different ways

4.

In the wound he’d rubbed the salt

Until it swole and burst with pain

And spread its hurt a poisonous bane

Infecting heads throughout the land

Who shook the golden oaken gland7

Whose throat with such excretion stuck

And lost for words while Nazis struck

The wounded Empire as it fought

By vice of moral thought was caught

5.8

And so it seemed the vice meant well

For its ends seemed simply good

Though finally much misunderstood

Somehow twisted and turned to ill

When that dear friend brought it to heel

And all its goodness was withdrawn

To leave the Fakir9 a potential pawn

For an endgame played in hell

With no one left to tell the tale

6.

Between the open throat and naked heel

The screw of moral force was turned

And squeezed and squeezed until it burned

The fingers of those in its grasp

‘Til all were held within the moral clasp

That closed the book upon the Empire’s rule

And from its Crown it lost the Jewel

That had so glistered in the deal

When all was held beneath the Empire’s seal

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7.

For to the Fakir naked power accrued

As every starving seemed his last

For to death he took his every fast

And no one knew if he’d survive

Yet every time he came out live

Even when he should have died

Yet no one thought that he had lied

Who’d be so crude this to conclude

For by a spirit high he was imbued

8.

And no one missed him on his cloud

Nor in detention was he missed

For by attention he was kissed

So into life his message sprang

And as a holy cowbell rang

Across the country far and wide

To bring the people to his side

And there they stayed an Hindu crowd

To mob him as he thought aloud

9.

And to dear Adolf he sent a friendly thought10

On how the British heeled the human race

But he would beat them from their place

With kindly works and passive acts

So in the end they’d face the facts

That for the Empire to hold sway

No solution11 could find the way

For though the Empire was much at fault

Some ideas could come to nought

10.

And thus the Fakir’s passive soul

Found comfort in the Empire’s arms

And all his life seemed full of charms

For in its shadow he held fast

To all the forms his God might caste12

But in that shade they lay subdued

A dark substratum of the coming feud

Yet that Fakir viewed the future toll

Small price to get his open goal

11.

But when two great rivers in confluence came

Turbulence threw up the froth and scum13

In which all good men were overcome

But underneath the Fakir ran pure

As if his influence would be the cure

But all that surfaced was full of hate

For it was the erring people’s fate

To find they were themselves to blame

For playing out their bloody game

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12.

Playing that game gave a penalty shot

But you were held in Krishna’s arms

That image made of multiple charms

Who fought a good fight with magic spells

‘Til in the end the Empire quells

And cedes its powers to the naked threat

Of the Fakir’s dead certain bet

But there was never any plot

To put the Fakir on the spot

13.

And so his fate came through the crowd

Perversely split by an Hindu creep

Whose violent act made the whole world weep

Though death in time is the end of man

Yet from that hand the come-death span14

And through the world it ran its thread

To tie its people in tears that bled

So with their blood they loudly vowed

As one to keep him high upon a cloud

14.

And in his fire he rose as smoke

Until he reached stupendous heights

Far above the common fights

So on the people he looked down

As they trampled on the crown

In the name of human rights

That blazed the way for Hindu rites

Until on blood they could but choke

And hide beneath their Sanskrit cloak

15.

Thus the Fakir’s mahatmahood15

Became the spirit fuelling fire

Whose burning duty was to aspire

To rise above all earthly needs

By producing burning deeds

That to the Hindu’s hearts are clutched

But seem so hot they can’t be touched

Yet in pure fire they raised the good

Into a world misunderstood

16.16

In iron cast though founded ill

From out the furnace burning bright

Its temper drawn and doused in bloody fight

Who could know what hand or eye

Had framed the writing in the sky

That foretold the blaze of hate

Waiting in the wings of fate

Whose bitter casting was the kill

Made in the heat of Krishna’s will

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17.

And Allahu Akbar17 could not rest

For he lay well beyond his grave

To cure the poisons his people crave18

For in religions they were ever sunk

Believing in the most amazing bunk

But to himself he kept the spoken

Before it crept upon him broken

Which with his eyes he could not wrest

Though they were drawn at his behest19

18

So though his writ spread far and wide

He in fields of irreflection went20

To find out what his people meant

There he took the spoken in his ear

By which he knew that he must fear

The way beliefs were deeply bred

As something he should truly dread

For they were mixed with poisonous pride

Whose hatreds poured from side to side

19.

But Muslim eyes were cast right down

To see their perfect Alcoran

Becoming subject to an Hindu plan

And in that chaos they foresaw

The Prophet’s words would surely pall

And all their powers would be lost

But they must rule at any cost

So they beat their pathway to renown

And split with naked swords the crown

20.

Yet hear those old words whispered from the past21

The ones that passed from mouth to ear

Without a trace for many a year

Until they fell to priestly hands

As words whose writ wove cursive strands

That seemed to suture the wounds of Man

And deemed the future course he ran

Bound him fast until the last

Unless he’d find himself outcaste22

21.

Once outside the total scheme of things

Where nothing keeps you in your place

And you have left the Hindu race

There all your turning world is stopped

While from your circle you are dropped

To fall forever without trace

From that well known state of grace

For of time’s chariot23 your great Lord sings

Of world enough for Vishnu’s wings

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1 The neologism ‘heris’ (her &/or his), and other such, has been persistently used by Fox throughout his

works to highlight the need to extricate gender from the pores of the English language. That this

pronominal neologism is cumbersome and unseemly in extremis is obvious, so why does Fox persist in

encumbering the sweat of his prose with it? It is the removal of genderised language rather than the 2014

Facebook option of multiplying the genderisation of language in order to pursue the acquisition of crude

profits by providing a marketing segmentisation service to sellers of goods and services.

Fox treats the need for such removal as not merely derived in issues to do with ‘natural’ male

versus female conflict, most commonly taken up by feminists and persisted by chauvinists (usually through

inheritances of authoritarian twaddle inherent to most religions), but can be seen in the context of shifting

social mores governing orientation in terms of sexual appetites and gratification. Of greater significance is

not only the incipient loss of socially defined distinction in the ‘cybennial’ between the functions of male and

female biology in humankind, but too the psychological inculcation of pre-conceived gender behaviours

associated with biological feature in the mix of the gender of mind. In this there is a concomitant declining

need to carry the socio-economic overhead of the present sexual apparatus of humankind as it is becoming

increasing procreatively redundant and decreasingly susceptible to the persuasions of sexual appetite

delivering the biological coitus as necessary to the proliferation of human solar sensoria.

The “&” in this amplification of ‘heris’ reflects the fact of human-being being not immutably male

“or” female, but that there is an increasingly significant section of humankind which is neither exclusively

(permanently) male nor female; indeed, such hermaphroditic (transgendered) humanity seems likely to

burgeon, building on the established, if sometimes historically perversely performed, celibate tendency. Fox

uses ‘heris’ to post the awkward way in which current English language is sprawled across the face of

‘cybennial’ post-postmodern ‘reality’ in this regard by, amongst other things, the intransigent gender

assumptions of its everyday grammatical forms.

Fox’s concern with social pre-construction of a tri- genderized (her, his, its) world by the everyday

use of English grammar, in common with many world languages, was much in ‘heris’ mind when writing

“The Charred Lord” (in the late 1960s) using such grammar arbitrarily to represent the epicene as being

human and not an ‘it’. This led him then to use the basic gender specific words, particularly “he” and “she”,

arbitrarily interchangeable throughout the poem as a temporary solution to the epicene desideratum.

However, the logic of Fox’s ‘heris’ seems to require not only ‘shehe’ and such, but if logical precision

is followed then ‘herisit’ too, but this would be to pro-nominate an inanimate ‘itness’ when it is to the mere

humanity of a solar sensorium that Fox is confined. In this mere humanity surely there forms not only the

he the she the it, but also the middlesex, the psychologically &/or biologically undecided, human and

therefore not ‘its’. A challenge indeed to find such a grammatical quartet to cover expression of such a

foursome. Perhaps, the multiplication of difference should be avoided. Of course, the clumsiness of

combining the genderised pronominals to achieve extrication of mere bi-gender from the pores of the

English language is hardly felicitous or indeed convenient; but Fox is reluctant to take the Shavian step

toward fully fledged obscurity and an irreverence for antiquity, sensitive that the heroic, if unhappy mortal,

Dr Johnson might have taken such resort as mere caprice. However, the Chinese solution of Wang Yuande

in coining a new “godly” pronoun: 祂 (tā), may be a way forward (see note in regard to “The Charred Lord”).

It follows that a Fox is either Reynard or Vixen, or neither. 2 This poem is a member of Fox’s series of poems entitled “Inscriptions” written to encapsulate the

celebrities upon whom ‘heris’ poetic attention has focussed from time to time. 3 Generally, the standard hagiography that has burgeoned on Gandhi as saintly, non-violent vegetarian etc

is eschewed by this poem, which addresses his life and influence from the point of view of his contribution to

the precipitate destruction of the rule of a benign imperial power and its substitution by two nuclear powers

in a permanent, dangerous state of confrontation, while both run themselves riddled through with insoluble

inter-communal conflicts cut, drawn and quartered on the shards of abysmal religious sects posturing as

cultural assets, and all sunk in a quagmire of corruption. The hagiographical perspective on Gandhi

culminates in the exceptionally fine 1982 film “Gandhi” directed by Richard Attenborough which

convincingly embeds Gandhi as that legendary figure of Hindu perfection: wise, vegetarian, ascetic and

ahimsa (translated by Fox as: “passive resistance”, but by others often as “non-violence”; Fox is putting it

that passive resistance in its practical application is not non-violent). Gandhi’s Hinduism clearly promotes

amongst its multifarious threads a form of Christian ethos highly attractive to disaffected grumblers

against its several establishment structures bound here and there throughout the Occident, but without the

binds of the usual theological trappings upon which the Christian illusion is mounted and magnified.

Fox notes the prefatory observation of K. R. Sundararajan in regard to Hindu spiritualism and the

notion of ahimsā:

Gandhi advanced ahimsā as a mode of battle - Truth’s own battle, satyāgraha - to right the wrongs

in the social and political order in every concrete situation, since for Gandhi “right is Truth.” For

Gandhi, “right” belongs to the realm of ends as well as the domain of means. The means employed

must be right as much as the end itself. According to Arapura, Gandhi’s ahimsā spirituality is of

dynamic nature-of righting things in the world through “militant” action. The militancy involved

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here is stated by Gandhi in the following manner: “Although [the satyāgrahi] must love the

wrongdoer, he must never submit to his wrong or injustice, but oppose it with all his might, and

must patiently and without resentment suffer all the hardships to which the wrongdoer may

subject him in punishment for his opposition.” Such spirituality of ahimsā (and truth) is for

Gandhi the very essence of struggle for independence, which is spirituality at work in the form of

service (sevā). (K. R. Sundararajan, “Hindu Spirituality: Postclassical and Modern”, edited K. R.

Sundararajan and Bithika Mukerji, SCM Press 1997, pxxx).

Fox connects, in a somewhat casuistic fashion, perhaps of appeal to the Indian mind, Gandhi’s “mode of

battle” with sneya as given by Arapura:

Ahimsā is the negative of himsā, a noun formed from the verb hims, which is itself derived from the

root han. This verb has a wide range of meanings, including “injure,” “harm,” “kill,” “destroy,” as

well as “commit an act of violence.” In the Vedas the compound word himsā-karman (himsā-act)

designates injury, harm destruction, or death brought about by magical rites, which are condemned

as sinful. But these rites too are of the generic nature of sacrifice (yāga) though antithetical to the

good sacrifices for which the term jajna is exclusively reserved. The latter are calculated to

promote earthly well-being (abhyudaya) as well as eternal felicity (nihsreya). Sabara, the great

commentator on the text of aphorisms bearing on Vedic rites, the Mīmāmsā-Sūtra, distinguishes

between the good sacrifices and the bad ones (1.1.2). The bad ones are called sneya, intended to do

harm to one’s enemies or other victims. The good ones are of the nature of dharma, being in accord

with Supreme Reality and hence good, expressed by the term artha, bearing both senses. The

sneya ones are opposite to the dharma and to the artha, and therefore called anartha, basically

meaning “discordant with [Supreme] Reality.” (John G Arapura, “The Spirituality of Ahimsā

(Nonviolence): Traditional and Gandhian”, in “Hindu Spirituality: Postclassical and Modern”,

edited K. R. Sundararajan and Bithika Mukerji, SCM Press 1997, p393).

Underlying ahimsā is Han and in this regard ahimsā as non-violence embraces the doing of spiritual

violence. Gandhi’s sneya is to distinguish physical violence from spiritual violence. Thus, his attack on the

British being an application of ahimsā rests on the technicality that doing violence in the spiritual

battlefield as a mode of battle is being merely spiritually violent and that does not count as violence. That it

necessarily follows that as spiritual violence inevitably produces physical violence then deliberate passive

resistance is consequentially violence; which is to say, as being a predictable consequence, ahimsā is in itself

an act of physical as well as spiritual violence. It is better to be violent, said Gandhi shortly before his

assassination in 1948, than to conflate passivity and impotence with satyagraha (truth seeking).

As to the damaging atavism of Gandhi’s promotion of a reversion to an idealised village life and so

on, Adams observed with considerable justice:

To the public, Gandhi is better known from Richard Attenborough’s adulatory Gandhi rather than

Feroz Abbas Khan’s film Gandhi My Father, which described his troubled relationship with his

family. If Gandhi is any kind of role model, it is not as husband and father. He behaved worst

toward [his wife] Kasturba, badly towards his sons and not always well towards his friends and

supporters, but wonderfully towards people he did not know, and with an outflowing of

spontaneous benevolence towards those toiling masses he would never know in person. (Jad

Adams, “Gandhi: Naked Ambition”, Quercus, 2010, 2011, p280).

In the end the culmination of Attenborough’s extraordinary cinematic skill, the social advantages of

adulation, and the financial advantages of ingratiation, serve to produce a Gandhi avatar which enables the

canonization of the sanctimonious M K Gandhi with the ultimate Western accolade of ‘Saint’, or as by

Hindus, Mah Atma.

Fox treats of the common narrow Indian perspective on Churchill and British Imperial rule as

given typically by Gopal. This reflects the usual degree of Indian ignorance, incomprehension and self-

righteous revisionism, so conveniently inherited from Gandhi’s undigested experience of English education,

qualification, and the society of the late Victorian era. Indeed, his very success in qualifying as an English

lawyer (though turning out in practice almost useless in any proceeding) speaks volumes as to his own

ignorance of the British Imperial system. Thus confined too Gopal writes that:

In February 1943 Gandhi started a fast for twenty-one days. Churchill approved of the Viceroy’s

decision not to release Gandhi and prepared for Gandhi’s possible death in detention. The British

government was moving forward victoriously on the war fronts and this ‘not the time to crawl

before a miserable little old man who had always been our enemy’. Gandhi managed to survive the

fast and the deadlock continued. That summer in Washington, when Phillips, Roosevelt’s

representative in India, saw Churchill with the President’s encouragement and observed that

Indians wanted power in the central government, Churchill exploded. ‘My answer to you is: Take

India if that is what you want! Take it by all means! But I warn you that if I open the door a crack

there will be the greatest blood-bath in all history; yes, blood-bath in all history. Mark my words, I

prophesied the present war, and prophesy the blood-bath.’ Wavell [from whom Churchill was

disaffected, but nevertheless appointed him to the Viceroyalty], meeting Churchill before taking up

the Viceroyalty as Linlithgow’s successor, felt that while Churchill knew nothing about the

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problem, he ‘hates India and everything to do with it’. (Sarvepalli Gopal, “Churchill and India”, in

“Churchill”, edited by Robert Blake and Wm. Roger Louis, OUP, 1993, p464).

That Churchill was proved by events to be right does not seem at all comprehended by Gopal in his essay,

although quoting the ‘offending’ lines himself!

Adams indicates that Gandhi’s compensation for his indigestion and failure as a lawyer, manifested

itself and sat in his obsession with vegetarianism and its wide and forceful evangelical application to the

vitality life:

Part of the preservation of vital force in [Arnold] Hill’s view was in refraining from sex, except

specifically for procreation. Sex [according to Hills] ‘has been given for its own special purposes,

and for no other. It may not be abused for pleasure; it may not be indulged for passion.’ It was at

the [London] Vegetarian Society (and Hill’s tracts in The Vegetarian) that Gandhi first encountered

this doctrine of extreme puritanism with regard to sex, a principle that was not present in his

family’s Hinduism. Even more extreme was another belief of Hills that celibacy should be

maintained even after marriage, so-called ‘chastity within the marriage bond’; this was to form a

mainstay of Gandhi’s organisation of his own model societies in later life. (ibid, Jad Adams, p33).

Nevertheless, Adams gives great weight to Gandhi’s remarkable sense that ultimately truth for him “…

may be a delusion and a snare. If so, I must realise it myself. I have risked perdition before now. Let this

be reality if it has to be.” So Gandhi turned out to be all too human after all, knowing only the truth known

to any fellow being, which is the truth that does the trick for him, but not going so far as to play it upon

himself. 4 Mahatma: the commonest understanding is that given by Attenborough as “Hindi for ‘great soul’”,

(“Gandhi: In My Own Words”, selected by Richard Attenborough, Hodder and Stoughton, 2002, p108). Fox

puts it “Mah Atma”: Important (Big) Spirit; which is to intimate Gandhi’s achievement of (self) importance

through his self-sacrificial posture, by which he gathered to himself and his political aims the Guru

syndrome, and powers drawn from the multifarious threads of Hinduism’s spiritual complexity, to which his

legal orientation had a natural affinity. 5 The English structure of the poem is drawn of the classic nine line Elizabethan Spenserian Stanza, though

the rhyme scheme is peculiar to Fox and designed to give effect to an opening line transmitting to a closing

couplet which completes the conveyance of the essential idea(s) of each stanza as they proceed by couplets

through the middle. Spenser’s 1552 rhyme scheme construct embodies and shapes the movement of his

narrative as story, rather than as Fox whose rhyme scheme provides movement to carry a process of ideas.

Nevertheless, the stanza form declares that it is an English poem about M K Gandhi. Peculiar though the

poetic (lack of) punctuation may seem, and unusual throughout the prose notes, it operates its own (Foxian)

logic in both spheres. The poem is punctuated orally. The prose on Victorian principles when writers were

unafraid of long sentences, while the extra parenthetic stops and commas are a logical fad of Fox’s. 6 This pun is severe and refers to that “monstrous act”, as Churchill (Minister for War) put it to Parliament

in 1919 shortly after Dyer’s punitive action. This “monstrous” action taken in the aftermath of the First

World War, referred to Brigadier General Reginald Dyer, a soldier of considerable service, ordering the

firing upon a crowd of many thousands protesting at Amritsar. Many men, women and children were killed

in punitive fire under Dyer’s direct control. Dyer was at once a hero as saviour of the British in India,

saving them from another murderous uprising by nipping it in the bud, and as the villain perpetrator of an

atrocity unheard of in the whole history of the British administration of India, according to Herbert

Asquith, ex-Prime Minister, and others in 1919. Interestingly Ferguson reported that:

Just as in Ireland, the hard line initially had support. O’Dwyer [Lt. Governor of Punjab 1912-19,

assassinated aged 75 by vengeful Indian, London 1940] endorsed Dyer’s action. His superior

officers quickly found fresh work for him to do in Afghanistan. Some local Sikhs even made him an

Honorary Sikh in a ceremony at the Golden Temple, likening him to ‘Nikalseyan’ Sahib’ (John

Nicholson, the legendary hero of the 1857 Mutiny). (Niall Ferguson, “Empire: How Britain Made

the Modern World”, Allen Lane 2003, p327).

Thus, Dyer at Amritsar 1919 proved an hero to the Indian Sikhs, and the Daily Mail, while even yet his

unsettled ghost in the form of an unnamed 20th century British SAS Officer haunts, with Indira Gandhi’s,

the murderous corridors of fire carved through the simmering, ever shifting atmospheres of India’s

ungovernable cults and religious tracts. Dyer, dubbed the Butcher of Amritsar, fell foul of the Indian and

British ethos held in common and succinctly put by Adams:

The British Committee of the Indian National Congress was founded in July 1889 but Gandhi does

not seem to have attended any of its meetings; he did though attend meetings of the London India

Society that discussed ‘political, social and literary subjects relating to India’ and acted to acquaint

the public in England of Indian opinion ‘on all important questions that might arise from time to

time’. The society had been set up by Naoroji in 1865 so it was a mature institution by the time

Gandhi attended its meetings. Naoroji visualised the constitutional progress of India through just

and fair administration of the British, guided by their sense of fair play. It was a position that took

at face value the Liberal project of enlightened rule. When India was not well governed, Naoroji

criticised it as ‘unrighteous and un-British’. (Adams ibid p32)

9

In this regard it is salutary to note, as Brown points out, the rather startling statistic of British ‘rule’ in

India that:

In 1921 the total European population of India was just under 157,000, of whom 45,000 were

women. The men included c.60,000 troops and under 22,000 in government service. By 1929 the

number of Europeans in the top echelon of civilian government, the Indian Civil Service (ICS), was

894. Financial and manpower constraints pushed the British to construct a style of Imperial

governance that relied very heavily on Indians. (Judith M Brown, “India”, in The Oxford History of

the British Empire: The Twentieth Century”, edited by Judith M Brown and Wm. Roger Louis,

OUP, 1999, p423).

This was an India one third under the old Princedoms, but come under a singular governance; which is to

say, unpartitioned, no Pakistan(s), and seeped eastwards into Burma. It was then one domain (country) if

very complicated, and such complication deceptively reduced to the perspective of the fearful dreams of

white women as dished up by such as Forster’s egregious passage, a work now somewhat trammelled by

recent 21st century revelations of a social pathology of Indian gang rape; which is to say, many men violently

mounting a single wounded woman even unto her death. This is likely to have been, a long standing

historical phenomenon socially silenced. Such appalling acts are likely to have been widely perpetrated,

with seeming impunity for the men, and suffered by women in silence: silenced by the socially

manufactured disgrace and dishonour which lie as devastating consequences of the ‘culpability’ of women

who have allowed themselves to be so horribly (permanently) spoiled. The obsession not only with ‘Truth’,

but with sex appears peculiar not merely to Gandhi’s experimentalism, but seems an unavoidable off-shoot

of asceticism arising from the male drive for sex being much suppressed and disfigured. Sexual violence

was culturally enabled by the habitual subjugation of women dominated by males under Hindu and Muslim

religious and social regulation.

India, as part of the British imperial project, was a culturally complex entity that ‘somehow’ got

formed into a confused state. It had become a country’ governed under the encroachments of British

commercial interests, spiced with a philanthropy peculiarly British, and the formation of an administrative

structure for tax collection, the application of justice, the investment of sanitation and health, and the

installation of railways, roads and telegraphic communications. Indeed, all this in a country (or “Dream-

State”) much as described (contemporaneously) by Hegel in 1821:

When the Europeans became acquainted with India, they found a multitude of petty kingdoms, at

whose head were Mohammedan and Indian princes. There was an order of things very nearly

approaching feudal organization; and the kingdoms in question were divided into districts, having

governors Mohammedans, or people of the warrior caste of Hindus. The business of these

governors consisted in collecting taxes and carrying on wars; and they thus formed a kind of

aristocracy, the prince’s council of state. But only as far as their princes are feared and excite fear,

have they any power; and no obedience is rendered them but by force. As long as the prince does

not want money, he has troops; and neighbouring princes, if they are inferior to him in force, are

often obliged to pay taxes, but which are yielded only on compulsion. The whole state of things,

therefore, is not that of repose, but of continual struggle; while moreover nothing is developed or

furthered. It is the struggle of an energetic will on the part of this or that prince against a feebler

one; the history of reigning dynasties, but not of peoples; a series of perpetually varying intrigues

and revolts – not indeed of subjects against rulers, but of a prince’s son, for instance, against his

father; of brothers, uncles and nephews in contest with each other; and of functionaries against

their master. It might be believed that, though the Europeans found such a state of things, this

was the result of the dissolution of earlier superior organizations. It might, for instance, be

supposed that the period of Mogul supremacy was one of prosperity and splendour, and of a

political condition in which India was not distracted religiously and politically by foreign

conquerors. But the historical tracts and lineaments which accidentally present themselves in

poetical descriptions and legends, bearing upon the period in question, always point to the same

divided condition – the result of war and of instability of political relations; while contrary

representations may be easily recognised as a dream or a mere fantasy. This state of things is the

natural result of that conception of Hindu life which has been exhibited, and the condition which it

necessitates. The wars of the sects of the Brahmins and Buddhists. Of the devotees of Vishnu and

Siva, also contributed their quota to this confusion. There is indeed, a common character pervading

the whole of India; but its several states present at the same time the greatest variety; so that in

one Indian state we meet with the greatest effeminacy – in another, on the contrary, we find

prodigious vigour and savage barbarity. (Georg Wilhem Friedrich Hegel, “The Philosophy of

History: The Oriental World”, translated T M Knox, University of Chicago 1952, - Encyclopædia

Britannica 1989, p232).

Hegel’s 1821 perspective stretches appropriately over the next one hundred years into the Europe of the

First World War disaster and thence into 1920s and 30s, and its descent into Nazi darkness. However,

Hegel’s 1821 serves as a pivot about which the British genius revolved in the pursuit of its self-interest,

status and power to manage, manipulate and exploit this very alien “Dream-State” (as Hegel put it, p233) in

10

a realisation of its Indian imperial governance. This governance can be said to have run in practical terms

for ultimately nearly two hundred years, from Plassey 1757-1947, although there was effectively four

hundred and fifty years of close involvement, 1600-1947. Until all was lost in that darkness where Britain

itself was economically crushed beneath the weight of two European world wars. Hegel’s comparison of

secular China with an India “… revelling in the most extravagant maze through all natural and spiritual

forms” is fascinating in observing “Hindu political existence presents us with a people, but no state”; and

continuing, he put it that: “whatever may be called a relic of political life in India, is a despotism without a

principle, without any rule of morality and religion.” (ibid p230). Confusing indeed that which the British

by 1821 attempted to overlay with a benign governance designed to tend ultimately to its own benefit in

benefiting India.

The schism between the India of 1821 and the British of 2013, stretched between the great staging

posts of 1858 and 1947, seems complete with the ‘apology’ of the British Prime Minister David Cameron for

Dyer’s “monstrous act”. This, during a visit in 2013 to drum up business with India, being contemptuously

muddled or muddied by the Indian President’s aspersion of corruption in regard to an helicopter contract

with a British-Italian consortium, this from the head of one of the most corrupt states in the world, and

probably linked with a corrupt replacement of the contract with another and better paying source, or to the

minor political expediency of cancelling what turned out to be an official luxury, while at the same time

affording him the pleasure of humiliating with impunity the Prime Minister of India’s former imperial

power; a power that still provided aid to India’s deeply neglected rural poor. Though the British aid was

referred to as “peanuts” by India’s President, the peanuts are set in the context of India being the largest

recipient in total of foreign aid as assistance to a population divided into a preposterously wealthy segment

sat upon massive poverty, shouldering an arsenal of nuclear arms, a major space programme and an huge

military allocation.

The British Empire, much maligned by those whose interests were and are served by detraction, or

those whose natural tendency is to the snide, or indeed those whose desire is to sit with cosy consciences,

can be seen in a more historically objective manner. This is to treat of it conceptually in terms of an

experiment in international government. Ferguson concludes that while:

In short, what the British Empire proved is that empire is a form of international government that

can work – and not just for the benefit of the ruling power. It sought to globalize not just an

economic but a legal and ultimately a political system too.

He goes on to observe that running the world without the Empire “cannot be adjudged and unqualified

success”. It is to the economic gains of globalization (which was definitively already in play in the scope of

the British free-trade Empire) and to the impoverishing effect of political fragmentation. Ferguson gathers

statistical data on per capita GDP and on the distribution of the number of nation states over time in the

twentieth century which illustrate his thesis as to the economic negativity of the political fragmentation

flowing from the dismemberment of the British Empire in particular and the imperial project generally:

On the eve of the First World War, imperialism had reduced the number of independent countries

in the world to fifty nine. But since the advent of decolonization there have been sustained

increases in that number. In 1946 there were seventy four independent countries; in 1950, eighty

nine. By 1995 the number was 192, with the two biggest increases coming in the 1960s (mainly

Africa, where twenty five new states were formed between 1960 and 1964) and the 1990s (mainly

Eastern European, as the Soviet Empire disintegrated). And many of the new states are tiny. No

fewer than fifty have less than 500,000 inhabitants. There are two disadvantages to this political

fragmentation. Small countries are often formed as a result of civil war within an earlier multi-

ethnic polity – the most common form of conflict since 1945. That in itself is economically

disruptive. In addition, they can be economically inefficient even in peacetime, too small to justify

all the paraphernalia of statehood they insist on decking themselves out in: border posts,

bureaucracies, and the rest. Political fissiparity – the fragmentation of states – and its attendant

economic costs have been among the principal sources of instability in the post-war world. (Niall

Ferguson, “Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World”, Allen Lane 2003, p361-362).

It is in this context that Fox reconstructs, in the retrospective, the British perspective of 1924, immediately

post the appalling trauma of the First World War. It is surely revealing of a powerful, if self interested,

humanity underpinning the imperial administration. This after a disastrous war at which heart lay Kaiser

Wilhem II’s juvenile aspirations and psychological deficiencies laid upon the ‘unification’ of the independent

Germanic states masterminded by the Prussian mentality of Bismarck. The Kaiser’s gross hatred of Jews

(antisemitism), setting them up with ‘The Communists’ as culpable for the ‘stab in the back’ that lost

Germany the war, though ‘undefeated on the field of battle’. This big lie, which was to serve Hitler well in

the 1920s, is revealing of the weak minded nature of The Kaiser’s character; a character determined upon a

Bismarckian extension of German hegemony across Europe: literally a European empire. Although much

debilitated by this war, British Imperial administration took upon itself considerable and imaginative

responsibilities. A reading of Gunn’s superb survey in twelve volumes encompassing the imperial world of

the British Empire is salutary as it stood (still standing) in 1924. Gunn observed as to its then timing that:

11

The time seemed appropriate for such a survey. The Empire had emerged victorious from the

greatest of wars. The Dominions which had contributed so magnificently to the victory had sprung,

as it were, at a bound not only into the consciousness and acknowledged status of full and equal

nationhood with the Mother country, but also into definite recognition by Foreign Powers as great

and growing World-Forces. (Hugh Gunn – General Editor, “”The British Empire: A Survey in 12

Volumes- each self-contained, 1924, Collins, British Books Limited, piv).

The volume on the health problems of the Empire offers a valuable insight into the extraordinary strength

and humanity of the British administration in terms of the degree to which it could then detail its activities

and its vision of ‘world health’. In regard to India and the outlook for the future this volume observed as to

the practical distinction to be made between the research into tropical diseases and medicine conducted at,

especially, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and its practical delivery:

Not only has research on tropical medicine and hygiene been actively and most successfully

prosecuted in the tropics themselves, but the tropics are heirs to the knowledge gained in

laboratories elsewhere, such knowledge can as a rule be readily applied. It is otherwise with

education. At best this is a slow process, and in the case of many native populations the ground

has to be prepared before any seeds of sanitary knowledge can be sown. It is useless to preach the

practice of the open window at night to a West Indian negro who lives in terror of “duppies,” just as

it is wellnigh hopeless to expect some Hindu to grasp the significance of the germ theory of

communicable disease while he remains saturated with superstitions and worships strange deities

from whom he believes sickness and death emanate. It is the lack of education in the tropics which

makes the outlook there so different from that in a country like England, for an awakened public

health conscience and a sound public opinion are essential for the advance of preventative

medicine. In our many tropical possessions little more can be expected from the public than

passive acquiescence in the proposals of government; in some, more especially where isolation has

led to a fatal feeling of complacency “we are the people and wisdom shall die with us,” an active

opposition is only too common. (Andrew Balfour and Henry Harold Scott, “Health Problems of the

Empire: Past, Present and Future”, 1924, Collins, British Books Limited, p366-367).

The authors produced then what remains an excellent survey in terms of world health matters even today.

They open with a fine chapter on “The Evolution of a Health Conscience”. Their work on “Some Imperial

Burdens”, to do with “The Drug Habit” and Alcoholism” remains exemplary and relevant in the 21st

Century; and indeed to the ‘legalization’ debates as they presently run in both Britain, Europe more widely,

the USA and Canada.

7 Harper gives: 1690s, from French glande (Old French glandre, 13c.), from Latin glandula "gland of the

throat, tonsil," diminutive of glans (genitive glandis) "acorn, nut; acorn-shaped ball," from PIE root *gwele-

"acorn" (cf. Greek balanos, Armenian kalin, Old Church Slavonic zelodi "acorn;" Lithuanian gile "oak").

Earlier English form was glandula (c.1400). Taken Jan 14: http://etymonline.com 8 This references Fox’s, 1987: “Hitler, Adolf 1889-1945 (Who’s Whose)”.

Just who is whose

When the populace choose

To set the weak

Above the meek

and

By their demand

The loudspeakers command

Attention spans

Of pop star fans

those

Who are bleating

For taking a beating

When sheep attack

A close knit pack

of

The blaring beasts

With their baring of breasts

Massing at feasts

Beneath high priests

with

Tongues in their hands

12

Manipulating glands

Taking their parts

Steeling their hearts

so

Only a whore

On the crosses they bore

With twisted ends

Could make amends

now

I’ve got it straight

As a laser of hate

Crossing their minds

With light that binds

them

Quick as a wink

Much faster than you think

Just in a blink

Right to the brink

and

In the flash of his flair

He was suddenly there

Turning to a tomb

Your own living room

where

In the flair of his flash

He’s suddenly here

In your own living room

Mouth of your tomb

Open

Where blind you stare

And stumble all you dare

Kiss crossed with light

Imagined sight

but

Couldn’t you see

That the kiss was dicey

An awkward touch

A mouth too much

with

Its words and tunes

Prancing to bands of goons

Playing the fools

With ready tools

there

Rising to the bait

Of ever more to hate

Pouting poncing

Pouncing & denouncing

in

To the very breach

With basic signs of speech

Ever pressing

With their guessing

13

and

Arms raised fingers pointing

As if anointing

With every shout

Another lout

though

No no not even I

Could possibly deny

The peepall’s voice

Had found its choice

now

Beneath the hood

Aren’t you feeling good

For all of your pains

The Swastika reigns

and

and …

Your prancing hope

Inside its hood

Drops dancing

At the end of its rope

where

Misunderstood

You come to no good

Note: Among other things, the poem makes painful play with lebensraum and the ”Overman” ‘peepall’

aspect over-looking a Foxian ‘democrassy’, and ends on the bitter irony of the Hindu svastika and its

‘auspicion’ of well-being (a symbol used by no less than Rudyard Kipling to convey good wishes to friends).

It is the perversion of Nietzsche’s Overman, the corruption of the rationale of the will to live, the will to

survive, and of the will to power, being its necessary concomitant, enabling such will to preserve life

through power; which, according to Fox, is the life that corrupts the willing. It is a Wille perversely

transmitted from Schopenhauer through Hegel and Nietzsche to that extremely intelligent, devious,

cunning, politician, but appalling twister of philosophy, Adolf Hitler. It is a bitter irony that it was the

violence of Hitler’s Nazi aggression that finally debilitated the material and human resources of the British

Empire and spun its moral compass so dizzyingly that it was so weakened and morally confused that it

could not resist “that naked fakir” and his merciless campaign of resource absorption and moral vilification.

In the end it could no longer maintain a civilized administrative order sufficient to continue to contain the

endemic confusion of a continent whipping itself into the rapid descent of division and furious demagoguery. 9 Fakir pronounced fake-ee-er and defined SOED:

1 also (arch.) faquir. E17.

[ORIGIN Arabic faqīr poor (man), partly through French faquir. Sense 2 alt. of faker by popular

etym.]

1 A Muslim (or loosely. Hindu) religious mendicant or ascetic. E17.

2 = FAKER. US. L19. 10 In 1940 Gandhi wrote to his Dear Friend, in spite of Hitler’s 1923, published 1925-26, “Mein Kampf” (My

Struggle), by which he explicitly expressed his obsessive perpetuation of Kaiser Wilhem II’s hatred of “The

Jews”, who were as a race, according to the Kaiser’s (& Hitler’s) twisted conception, substantially culpable

for Germany losing the First World War. In spite of Hitler’s overt wider contempt of lesser races such as

those of the Orient, and Hitler’s adoption of this thesis as a form of race hatred, Gandhi wrote to him thus:

As at Wardha, December 24, 1940: DEAR FRIEND,

That I address you as a friend is no formality. I own no foes. My business in life has been

for the past 33 years to enlist the friendship of the whole of humanity by befriending mankind,

irrespective of race, colour or creed. I hope you will have the time and desire to know how a good portion of humanity who have

view living under the influence of that doctrine of universal friendship view your action. We have

14

no doubt about your bravery or devotion to your fatherland, nor do we believe that you are the

monster described by your opponents. But your own writings and pronouncements and those of

your friends and admirers leave no room for doubt that many of your acts are monstrous and

unbecoming of human dignity, especially in the estimation of men like me who believe in universal

friendliness. Such are your humiliation of Czechoslovakia, the rape of Poland and the swallowing

of Denmark. I am aware that your view of life regards such spoliations as virtuous acts. But we

have been taught from childhood to regard them as acts degrading humanity. Hence we cannot

possibly wish success to your arms. But ours is a unique position. We resist British Imperialism no less than Nazism. If there

is a difference, it is in degree. One-fifth of the human race has been brought under the British heel

by means that will not bear scrutiny. Our resistance to it does not mean harm to the British

people. We seek to convert them, not to defeat them on the battle-field. Ours is an unarmed revolt

against the British rule. But whether we convert them or not, we are determined to make their

rule impossible by non-violent non-co-operation. It is a method in its nature indefensible. It is

based on the knowledge that no spoliator can compass his end without a certain degree of co-

operation, willing or compulsory, of the victim. Our rulers may have our land and bodies but not

our souls. They can have the former only by complete destruction of every Indian—man, woman

and child. That all may not rise to that degree of heroism and that a fair amount of frightfulness

can bend the back of revolt is true but the argument would be beside the point. For, if a fair

number of men and women be found in India who would be prepared without any ill will against

the spoliators to lay down their lives rather than bend the knee to them, they would have shown

the way to freedom from the tyranny of violence. I ask you to believe me when I say that you will

find an unexpected number of such men and women in India. They have been having that training

for the past 20 years. We have been trying for the past half a century to throw off the British rule. The

movement of independence has been never so strong as now. The most powerful political

organization, I mean the Indian National Congress, is trying to achieve this end. We have attained

a very fair measure of success through non-violent effort. We were groping for the right means to

combat the most organized violence in the world which the British power represents. You have

challenged it. It remains to be seen which is the better organized, the German or the British. We

know what the British heel means for us and the non-European races of the world. But we would

never wish to end the British rule with German aid. We have found in non-violence a force which,

if organized, can without doubt match itself against a combination of all the most violent forces in

the world. In non-violent technique, as I have said, there is no such thing as defeat. It is all ‘do or

die’ without killing or hurting. It can be used practically without money and obviously without the

aid of science of destruction which you have brought to such perfection. It is a marvel to me that

you do not see that it is nobody’s monopoly. If not the British, some other power will certainly

improve upon your method and beat you with your own weapon. You are leaving no legacy to your

people of which they would feel proud. They cannot take pride in a recital of cruel deed, however

skilfully planned. I, therefore, appeal to you in the name of humanity to stop the war. You will

lose nothing by referring all the matters of dispute between you and Great Britain to an

international tribunal of your joint choice. If you attain success in the war, it will not prove that

you were in the right. It will only prove that your power of destruction was greater. Whereas an

award by an impartial tribunal will show as far as it is humanly possible which party was in the

right. You know that not long ago I made an appeal to every Briton to accept my method of non-

violent resistance. I did it because the British know me as a friend though a rebel. I am a stranger

to you and your people. I have not the courage to make you the appeal I made to every Briton. Not

that it would not apply to you with the same force as to the British. But my present proposal is

much simple because much more practical and familiar. During this season when the hearts of the peoples of Europe yearn for peace, we have

suspended even our own peaceful struggle. Is it too much to ask you to make an effort for peace

during a time which may mean nothing to you personally but which must mean much to the

millions of Europeans whose dumb cry for peace I hear, for my ears are attended to hearing the

dumb millions? I had intended to address a joint appeal to you and Signor Mussolini, whom I had

the privilege of meeting when I was in Rome during my visit to England as a delegate to the Round

Table Conference. I hope that he will take this as addressed to him also with the necessary

changes. I am, Your sincere friend, M. K. GANDHI Taken January 14 from: http://mkgandhi.org/letters/hitler_ltr1.htm

Gandhi blindly, naively pursued this moral blunder in spite of Hitler’s clear declaration that:

15

However, miserable the inhabitants of India may live under the British they will certainly be no

better off if the British go … If we took India the Indians would certainly not be enthusiastic and

they’d not be slow to regret the good old days of English rule. (Niall Ferguson, “Empire: How

Britain Made the Modern World”, Allen Lane 2003, p327).

Further, Ferguson reported that Hitler had in 1937 explained to Britain’s Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax

that:

… the way to deal with Indian Nationalism was simple: ‘Shoot Gandhi, and if that does not suffice

to reduce them to submission, shoot a dozen leading members of Congress; and if that does not

suffice, shoot 200 and so on until order is established.’ (Ibid p239).

Perhaps, extrapolating Hitler’s “and so on” should have been more carefully noted. He had in any case

conceived that India was the “pivot” of the British world Empire and that it was:

Childish to assume that in England the importance of the Indian Empire for the British world

union is not appreciated. And it is a sad proof of refusal to take a lesson from the World War and to

realize the determination of the Anglo-Saxon character when people imagine that England would

let India go. It also proves the complete ignorance prevailing in Germany as to the methods by

which the British administer that Empire. England will never lose India unless she gives way to

racial confusion [decomposition] in her machinery of administration or unless she is forced to do so

by the sword of a powerful enemy. Indian risings will never be successful. We Germans know well

enough by experience how hard it is to force England’s hand. Apart from all this, I, speaking as a

German, would far rather see India under British domination than that of any other nation. (Adolf

Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, The Paternoster Library, Oct 1933 shortened version, p259).

Such placatory sentiments had surely a longer term deceptive strategic purpose. 11 For the British Empire there was finally no solution. 12 Hegel’s observation on the nature of Indian caste is illuminating:

Every caste has its especial duties and rights. Duties and rights, therefore, are not recognised as

pertaining to mankind generally, but as those of a particular caste. While we say, “Bravery is a

virtue,” the Hindus say, on the contrary, “Bravery is the virtue of the Kshattriyas.” Humanity

generally, human duty and human feeling do not manifest themselves; we find only duties assigned

to the several castes. Everything is petrified into these distinctions, and over this petrification a

capricious destiny holds sway. Morality and human dignity are unknown; evil passions have their

full swing; the spirit wanders in a dream-world, and the highest state is annihilation. (Georg

Wilhem Friedrich Hegel, “The Philosophy of History: The Oriental World”, translated T M Knox,

University of Chicago 1952, - Encyclopædia Britannica, 1989, p224)

In considering the spiritual foundations of caste Post takes the risk of stating its basic arrangement clearly:

Caste refers to a hierarchical classification of people in India whereby they are know to themselves

and to others. While the living phenomenon of caste is awesomely complex in its distinctions and

implications for human activity, it is identified within the texts held sacred by most Hindus as

consisting essentially of four main divisions, who are from best to worst Brāhmin, Ksatriya, Vaisya,

and Sūdra. The first three of these are called twice born castes and are “caste” proper. Chandālās

and the untouchables are sometimes considered castes and to be continuous with Sūdras, but in

ChU [Chandogya Upanisad], for example, they are treated as less than some types of animals. The

social division is described and prescribed in a large set of texts, written roughly between the fifth

century B.C. and the fifth century A.D., called dharmasūtra(s), which have the character of legal

codes. (Kenneth H Post, “Spiritual Foundations of Caste”, in “Hindu Spirituality: Vedas through

Vedanta”, edited Krishna Sivaraman, SCM Press 1989, p89).

He points out that such dharmasūtraic laying out of social order is a type of political thought, however the

underlying reason for such thought amounts to political philosophy. He goes on to put it that necessary

knowledge of Vedantaic scripture to be fundamental to obtaining spiritual power, whose concomitant is

earthly power. The Vedas are Apaurusheya (superhuman, not man made) rules of divine not human

source, which Fox takes thus to be arbitrary rules. These Vedantaic sayings (rules) are said not to rely on

human reasoning because of:

The impossibility of human reason determining right action and hence right social order thus has

at least three causes. 1) Whatever exists now is based on the results of a beginningless series of

actions by beginningless entities all of which have a just outcome, but this set of results arises not

from the immediate past but from a set of unknowable previous births. 2) What is right or wrong

varies with the circumstances so much that right or wrong cannot be deduced or extrapolated from

one correct action to the next. Equal justice under the law is not only impossible, but law cannot be

regulated by precedents as each case is necessarily unique. 3) Human opinion is so diverse that

reason is powerless to reach any accurate assessment of it. Political philosophy under these

circumstances is a futile activity. Reason is powerless to explain political order, and consequently

the foundation for human beings of political order must be ignorance. (Ibid, Kenneth H Post, p93).

16

In this, only knowledge of the Vedas, the non-human sayings of the Vedas, drawn out by those in-the-know

(having Brahma), have validity in human affairs. Hegel, in terms of the oriental realm, and India in

particular, observed of the nature of a society of an Hindu form that:

The world view of this first realm [the oriental] is substantial, without inward division, and it

arises in natural communities patriarchically governed. According to this view, the mundane form

of government is theocratic, the ruler is also a high priest of God himself; constitution and

legislation are at the same time religion, while religious and moral commands, or usages rather,

are at the same time natural and positive law. In the magnificence of this régime as a whole,

individual personality loses its rights and perishes; the external world of nature is either directly

divine or else God’s ornament, and the history of the actual is poetry. Distinctions are developed in

customs, government, and state on many sides, and in default of laws and amidst the simplicity of

manners, they become, unwieldy, diffuse, and superstitious ceremonies, the accidents of personal

power and arbitrary rule, and class differences become crystallized into hereditary castes. Hence in

the Oriental state nothing is fixed, and what is stable is fossilized; it lives therefore only in an

outward movement which becomes in the end an elemental fury and desolation. Its inner calm is

merely the calm of non-political life and immersion in feebleness and exhaustion. (Georg Wilhem

Friedrich Hegel, “Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”, 1820, translated T M Knox, OUP 1952, para 355. 1,

p220).

It is to the closed caste that Hegel’s condemnation is focussed. All formal human association is to some

degree of a caste character, but it is when such become crystallized, ossified, that the human spirit is

corrupted and its freedom horribly by confined; such caste-ing is fundamentally dysfunctional to the natural

curiosity of humankind, which is, in turn, an end to progress (indeed, such an end being its end). Of course,

the question is begged as to the ultimate purpose of humankind; and the occidental philosopher, being

unable to find the answer, though an answer is often grabbed, transposes ‘heris’ intellectual roamings for

the wanderings of the Guru, the peripatetic for the stasis of the lotus, it is as if yet Hegel’s “Geist” overlooks. 13 This is taken from an essay Gandhi wrote:

Today the Hindus and the Muslims are clinging to the husk of religion. They have gone mad. But I

hope that all this is froth, that all this scum has come to the surface, as happens when the waters

of two rivers meet. Everything appears muddy on top and underneath is crystal clear and calm.

The scum goes to the sea of itself, and the rivers mingle and flow clear and pure.

Taken Jan 14 from: http://www.gitananda.org/hinduism/mahatma-gandhi-on-hinduism.html 14 See Bhagavad Gita II, 32 and Oppenheimer’s quote ref The Nuclear Bomb, Trinity success, Manhattan

Project. Note also “span” and etym. 15 This is a term invented (as far as Fox knows) by V S Naipaul in relation to his depiction of Gandhi’s

“successor” Vinoba Bhave living a life of pious idleness derived in the withering away of the Gandhian ideal,

but observing that:

It is what Gandhianism was long ago reduced to by the mahatmahood: religious ecstasy and

religious self-display, a juggling with nothing, a liberation from constructive thought and political

burdens. True freedom and true piety are still seen to lie in withdrawal from the difficult world.

He goes on further:

Gandhi swept through India, but he left it without an ideology. He awakened the holy land; his

mahatmahood returned it to archaism; he made his worshipers vain.

(V S Naipaul, “India: A Wounded Civilization”, Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1977, p172-173). 16 This stanza references William Blake’s “The Tyger”, 1794. 17 Allahu Akbar is the conventional exclamatory plaudit affirming “God is Great”, which is loudly uttered at

the least excuse throughout Islam (The Ummah) to ensure Allah is kept fully aware of the ever continuing

submission of the faithful, and the applicable Muslim religious establishment can rest confident in the

exercise of its power over the weak minded.

The same work [Din Ilahi – Divine Faith] begins with what looks like the standard Muslim

invocation Allahu Akbar! (‘God is Great!’). But given the coincidence of the emperor’s name, it

could also be read as the blasphemous ‘Akbar is God’. The emperor claimed, even when the same

phrase began appearing on coinage, that no unorthodox meaning was intended. But given that he

was assuming other religious prerogatives, including what some regarded as a doctrinal authority

amounting to infallibility, and given the announcement of a new chronology to be known as the

‘Divine Era’ and to begin from his own accession, his disclaimer must be suspect.

It certainly seemed so to his critics. To the orthodox, to the Ulema of whom Akbar was

especially dismissive, indeed to all but royal sycophants, it looked as if Islam was under threat.

(John Keay, “India: A History”, Vol II, 2000, Folio Society, 2003, p365). 18 In this Wood, say, can be taken into account in quoting Abul Fazl’s [Akbar’s 16th century biographer]

description of the fanatical hatreds running between Hindus and Muslims which:

… must be taken at face value: deep dissensions had been caused by the high-handed and

intolerant ways of many Muslim rulers and nobles, their hostility towards the native religions, the

17

inequitable taxing of non-Muslims, and their forced conversions. The danger Akbar saw was that

religion would become, as Salman Rushdie later put it, a “poison in India’s blood’.

(Michael Wood, “The Story of India”, BBC Books, undated, p196).

Indeed, the atheist Salman Rushdie, still hounded by Islamic fatwa, in his celebrated second novel, a work

that touched poetically, but at enormous length, on the untouchable chaos of India in its immediate post

colonial period, observed, as he “… tumbled out of the basket of invisibility into the shadow of the mosque

…”, and where he touched on the disputatious problems of the “magicians’ ghetto”, that:

Fire-eaters and sword-swallowers applauded the guerrilla tactics of the Naxilite movement; while

mesmerists and walkers-on hot-coals espoused Namboodiripad’s manifesto (neither Muscovite nor

Pekinese) and deplored the Naxilites’ violence. There were Trotskyist tendencies among card-

sharpers, and even a Communism-through-the-ballot- box movement amongst the moderate

members of the ventriloquist section. I had entered a milieu in which, while religious and

regionalist bigotry were wholly absent, our ancient national gift for fissiparousness had found new

outlets. Picture Singh [snake-charmer, umbrella possessor, and patriarch of the Ghetto] told me,

sorrowfully, that during the 1971 general election a bizarre murder had resulted from a quarrel

between a Naxilite fire-eater and a Moscow-line conjurer who, incensed by the former’s views, had

attempted to draw a pistol from his magic hat; but no sooner had the weapon been produced than

the supporter of Ho Chi Minh had scorched his opponent to death in a burst of terrifying flame.

(Salman Rushdie, “Midnight’s Children, 1981, Alfred A Knopf, p508). 19 Keay has it that Akbar was an unlettered (dyslexic) genius; Fox takes it that his dyslexic world view freed

him brilliantly from enslavement to the scriptural powers harboured by the Ulema and the Vizier class. 20 This is taking up Keay’s reference to Abu’l-Fazl who noted that c1562CE Akbar at the age of only

nineteen “exhibited’ sublime justice’”, and that about this time:

… he began to show an unconventional interest in his subjects and their beliefs. ‘He sought for

truth amongst the dust-stained denizens of the field of irreflection and consorted with every sort of

wearers of patched garments such as jogis, sanyasis and qalanders, and other solitary sitters in the

dust and insouciant recluses.’ (John Keay, “India: A History”, Vol II, 2000, Folio Society, 2003,

p359).

Akbar’s pursuit of the multitudinous plurality of religions, even including Portuguese Christianity, led him

to preside over “a veritable bazaar of disputing divines”, as Keay put it. He had realised that such divisions

where like shards cutting apart his his rule. He thus tried to create a common faith by producing a work of

‘Divine Faith’ centred on himself and devising a greatness of Godlike proportions by conflating its

authorship with his own name Allahu Akbar; such eponymic blasphemy was quickly taken by the Ulema as

a threat to Islam itself (see note above). 21 The origin of the Vedas was oral, was smrti, a transcendent sourceless remembering of the

beginninglessness of being. They gathered their validity by thus not being man-made. The Rg Veda, the

most ancient knowledge, was the least negotiable remembrance, given rāstrī, in speech, the queen of the

gods, remembered (smrti) out of the great darkness of a lightless indefinite deep:

There was neither Non-existence nor Existence,

Nor was there the Earth or Sky beyond,

What was the covering, whence, and at whose shelter,

Was there the primal Water with depth unfathomed?

Death was not then, nor was there Immortality,

There was no sign of day and night,

That One in the breathless space breathed on its own,

Apart from that there was nothing whatever.

(Rajenda P Pandeya, “The Vision of the Vedic Seer”, in “Hindu Spirituality: Vedas through Vedanta”, edited

Krishna Sivaraman, SCM Press 1989, p10-11). In this the “One” seems as the OT Hebrew God of Genesis:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void;

and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the

waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was

good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness

he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a

firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made

the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which

were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening

and the morning were the second day. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered

together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land

Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

And, perhaps unbeknownst to Hegel, his own concept of “Geist” and the Vedantaic One touch as they turn at

their common circumferences. Hegel’s Geist is helpfully explicated by Singer, eschewing Popper’s

misreading, thus:

18

Hegel was driven by an extraordinary optimism about the prospects of overcoming conflict between

human beings, and hence of bringing about a rational and harmonious community. The roots of

this optimistic view lie in his metaphysics, and especially in his concept of Geist. This German

word can be rendered in English, according to context, either as ‘spirit’ or as ‘mind’. In the former

sense it can have religious connotations; in the second it is the normal word used to describe the

mental or intellectual side of our being, as distinct from the physical. Because the German term

covers both these meanings, Hegel is able to use it in a way that suggests an overarching collective

Mind that is an active force throughout history, and of which all individual minds-that is, all

human beings, considered in their mental aspect-are a part.

(Peter Singer’s entry on Hegel in “The Oxford Companion to Philosophy”, edited Ted Honderich, 2nd

Edition, 2005, p368). 22 Fox has treated as significant throughout this poem the distinction between the (twice born) outcaste and

the born casteless (the untouchable), and its persistence as a deeply discriminatory social wound in spite of

its 1950 abolishment by the Indian government. It is to the obversity of untouchability being in effect a

caste rather than in the technical sense as being without caste which is to be somehow as disquieting as

Pessoa’s:

Now and then something happens in me, and when it does it usually happens suddenly, a terrible

weariness with life imposes itself on all other feelings, a weariness so terrible as to defy all remedy.

Suicide seems too uncertain and death, even if one assumes it guarantees oblivion, merely

insignificant. What this wariness aspires to is not simply to cease to exist – which might or might

not be possible – but, far more horrifying, far deeper than that, it wants never to have existed at

all, and that, of course, cannot be.

I have caught occasional hints of something similar to this ambition (which outdoes in

negativity even the void itself) in the often confused speculations of the Indians. But either they

lack the keenness of feeling that would enable them to explain what they think or the acuity of

thought to feel what they feel. (Fernando Pessoa, “The Book of Disquiet”, 1931, translated

Margaret Jull Costa, Serpent’s Tail 1991, 139 [211], p136).

Pessoa’s sense of the not-having-existed attempts to touch on the untouchable. Unlike the untouchable, the

uncaste, the outcaste did once exist, as in the case of the cast out Gandhi. In this Fox has noted Adams’

slightly amusing report of Gandhi being outcaste by his caste, the Modh Bania, for proposing in 1888 to go

abroad to London:

The head man [of the community] swore at him [Gandhi] and declared, ‘This boy shall be treated as

an outcaste from today. Whoever helps him or goes to see him off at the dock shall be punishable

with a fine.’

With Gandhi now an outcaste, and others who supported him threatened with the same,

the young man’s situation was precarious. ‘Even the chosen few who had supported me through

thick and thin left me alone,’ he said. He became more anxious than ever to sail, in case some other

problem impeded him. This was prescient, for when he found a ship and asked his brother-in-law

for the money that had been left in his safekeeping for Gandhi, the brother-in-law refused. He said

he could not afford to lose caste – he must not help Gandhi to travel. Gandhi solved this religious

impasse by asking a friend to loan him the money for his passage and for clothes. His brother-in-

law repaid the loan, thereby not helping Gandhi directly, and religious purity was inviolate. (Ibid

Adams, p22).

Upon his return as a ‘successful’ English educated lawyer, he was quickly re-admitted to the caste as a

potentially valuable asset, crass hypocrisy being a great strength of the system itself. In any case, it seems

that Gandhi’s early religious strictures on caste gradually shifted from adherence to repudiation, becoming

sympathetic to the integration of castes with the casteless (the untouchables) as to an whole humanity.

Such repudiation rests historically on such movements as the way of the Siddhas, those who have

obtained to the spiritual state of siddhi, realization, success, attainment, final liberation; which is to say,

fulfilled in the psychic plane. According to Ganapathy, the Siddhas are contemptuous of the concept of caste

and have actively treated against it:

Some of the songs of the Siddhas are against the superiority of the higher castes. In many of their

poems they have adduced arguments to show the illogical basis of the caste system. Casteism is

perpetuated through the theory of re-birth, and the common person believes that those who do

right actions in this birth are reborn in a higher caste in the next birth. (T N Ganapathy, “The Way

of the Siddhas”, in “Hindu Spirituality: Vedas through Vedanta”, edited Krishna Sivaraman, SCM

Press 1989, p238).

The Siddhas deny rebirth and thus casteism is thrown out.

It is surprising that of the more than one thousand pages of the highly learned SCB series “World

Spirituality” and the two volumes dedicated to the spirituality of the Hindu there is no mention of the

extraordinarily egregious social norm, cast in discriminatory iron, of the non-caste of untouchability. This

in spite of the fact that it remains an active issue, even in such an apparently well integrated and long

19

standing Indian immigrant community in England, is evidence of the depth to which it is seared (seered)

into the social consciousness of the Hindu. 23 In addition to the complex Hinduistic weave which is involved with Krishna’s chariot and Vishnu’s wings

of ultimate being, Fox draws on the post 1600 English MP for Hull Andrew Marvel and his: “Time’s wingèd

chariot hurrying near”. Brought into play are indeed rubies found by the Indian Ganges’ side, while by the

tide of Humber the English sit dull; while yet in all there is the death of time, Krishna’s powerful weapon

that kills without exertion of violence by one upon another. Marvell’s c1650 poem “To his Coy Mistress”

runs sex through the spiritual sphere that was so often penetrated by Gandhi’s predilections.