Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra
There's a common underlying desiccating unity in the subconscious mind of the Indian left and Indian right, building off of a great stagnation shared by both traditions. One obvious thing they share is an empty morbid obsession with history.
I meant a low-level bland historicism where all answers are oriented to the past in an endless litigation and relitigation of history. Political philosophy has a basic concern with historical questions but barely ever advances though this alone.
https://x.com/i/status/2070499099561152981
RSS has broadly modernist attitude towards nation and society, but its biggest failure in education and creation of self-sustaining system of ideas is a result of its attitude towards knowledge - traditionalism now increasingly fortified by postmodern tactics. I'll explain:
The traditional attitude to knowledge treats it as a mostly inherited, not created, hence to be preserved and transmitted. The novelty is only in new interpretation which further sanctifies recieved knowledge in new vocabulary and context. The goal of knowledge in traditional attitude is to orient people, to give them the right mode of socialisation, right container of thought. The validation of knowledge is through authority, which can be anything ranging from sacred text to elders, to custom. The modern attitude to knowledge considers it as a tool of mastery and expansion of the human factor (in its scientific sense, search for demonstrable truth). Hence new knowledge must always be created, new ways of using existing knowledge must continuously be found. In modern attitude, knowledge is developmental and future-oriented and innovation is prioritised. Since there must be a way to create and validate new knowledge, hence the need for robust institutional forms that can specialise and be scaled.
In contrast, the postmodern attitude to knowledge is that of fragmentation (in its superior form, useful plurality). The purpose of knowledge becomes expression or critique and deconstruction of a more powerful knowledge. Dominated by ideas of narratives and discour ses. A real problem here is that this is more than just 'bad choices'. RSS is tasked with a project of providing ideological coherence to a society which had little history of this and a range of centrifugal forces only temporarily dulled by nation-making. The end result of this lack of monopoly and only low-level socializing tools like Shakhas at its disposal is a brittle ideological umbrella that can mobilize emotion at scale but never instituonalize knowledge.
https://x.com/i/status/1958858887509287414
RSS' general conservatism hides the fact that birth of RSS was not a continuation but a radical rupture in Hindu society. The enlightened people at its helm cobbled existing exhausted raw material into something vital and new, an idea fit for 20th century. But we are no more in that century. And RSS struggles with every single piece of 21st century challenge. The ascendance of BJP, which is the most imaginative and expansive part of the Parivar, only hides the increasing exhaustion and irrelevance at the heart of the Sangh. Among the more disturbing things, the attitude of RSS to knowledge (which increasingly in our time is not about education but the root attitude to the foundation of future itself) is increasingly degenerative and obscurantist. RSS is not a research institute obviously. But does it not claim leadership of society? Does it not put its people in places where their attitude to knowledge matters? Does RSS not create (consciously and subconsciously) a certain attitude through its own training?
https://x.com/i/status/2071114802769109274
Sayana’s interpretation of ancient Vedic words is full of errors because everything had to fit in with his model that the Vedic hymns were only ritualistic expressions of an ancient age. How to recover the original meaning of Vedic words that are no longer in use?
Sri Aurobindo returned to a foundational principle of Indic linguistics. That each Beeja Dhvani or seed source had its own psychological impact and guna or quality. In a sense this approach had been used earlier by Yaska. But Yaska had only elaborated a few difficult words, not all. Yaska also noted that the hidden meaning of the Veda was spiritual. And the meaning could be recovered by one who had had the spiritual realisation.
https://x.com/i/status/2071108437295947791
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