 Friends, it's wonderful to have amongst us Akhil Bilgrammi, the Sidney Morgan Besser professor at Columbia University, and a close and for a very long period a friend of Samath. Akhil, as many of you would know, has been developing for some time now a left critique of liberalism, which is both novel as well as wide-ranging. A lot of the things which he has published, whether it is on the alternative renaissance, whether it is on alienation, whether it's on early marks, are really work which more or less add up to this theme of developing a fairly comprehensive and novel left critique of liberalism. And in a sense, his work on Gandhi really falls into that kind of a pattern. He sees Gandhi as belonging to a tradition, or locates Gandhi within a tradition, which stretches from Gerard Winstanley, the communist thinker in the English Revolution, the period of the English Revolution, to early marks, to Rosa Luxemburg, and so on. So that it's really a long tradition in which he locates Gandhi. And you can see that actually that way of reading Gandhi runs contrary both to the traditional Marxist reading of Gandhi, of which EMS Nambu Dripal's The Mahatma and the Ism is the classic exposition, as well as some of the writings on Gandhi that you find these days in progressive Dalit writings, and so on. So Akeel has been, along with a few others, including Irfan Sabin, others who gave the first lecture in this series, part of a certain tradition of looking at Gandhi from the left, which is quite different from the other ways that Gandhi has been looked at, which are, if you like, at the moment, the more dominant ways within the left. So it's with great pleasure that I really invite Akeel to give this lecture and to provide an exposition of how he sees Gandhi within this tradition. Akeel. There is a great and natural tendency to think that Hind Swaraj represents the reactionary Gandhi, who opposed modernity, a position from which he slowly backpedaled over the next few decades, as he allowed the experience of the long anti-colonial struggle he led to educate him towards more progressive ideas and ideals. I said this is a natural reading of Gandhi, but it's not a reading that shows much sympathy for or comprehension of his deepest intellectual and political motives. It is reading which, from the very outset, rules out the possibility that one might interpret his anti-modernism as itself being progressive. It might seem that there's something startling, something almost paradoxical about using the word progressive as I just have in that last sentence. After all, the whole point of the contrast between reactionary and progressive derives from an ideal of progress in which the past is overcome in one's modernity, and to heart back to it would be reaction, while to embrace one's modernity is to be progressive. How then can a stance of anti-modernity be said to be progressive without paradox? But this seeming paradox is amicably resolved if I replaced all occurrences of the word progressive in what I've said so far with the word radical. I don't mean radical in the very general sense of vehement repudiation of conventional thinking. Even fascism is radical in that highly general sense. I mean rather radical in the quite usual specific sense that left wing commentary intends to self-describe its own conception of politics. But which it often then muddles by equating that politics with what it describes as progressive politics, thereby ruling out from the outset, as I said, that one can be both anti-modernist and radical in this more specific sense that the left aspires to be. So to put it in a word, I'm asking, is there a left wing or radical Gandhi in the anti-modern Gandhi? And I'm casting doubt on the more natural but unsympathetic reading, which asserts that there's a left wing Gandhi despite the anti-modern Gandhi. One dialectic one that I've pursued, by which one might pursue this question, I've just posed, about the radical possibilities in Gandhi's anti-modernism, is to find continuities between Gandhi's opposition to features of European, or what he sometimes called Western, modernity, and the opposition in the early modern period, as Prabhat was disguising, by radicals in Europe, particularly England, which is my focus, to what they presciently foresaw as the alarming direction in which their incipient modernity was heading. Their alarms about that direction turned out to be entirely justified, given the passage in Europe from its early to its late modernity that history has recorded. In other words, their voices, the dissenting voices of a radical opposition in, say, 17th century England, lost out in history. And if Gandhi in Hind Swaraj was in some core sense, expressing a counterpart alarm, almost three centuries later, an alarm about an incipient modernity in India, heading in the lamentable direction that the early dissenters had foreseen, a direction being imposed on it by its colonial masters, then a plausible way to press on with this dialectic is to read Hind Swaraj as being written under the shrewd perception by its author, that in 1909 when he wrote it, he thought India was at just the crossroads that Europe was in early modernity. What I'm proposing, therefore, is a genealogical grounding of his radicalism in the radicalism of an earlier period in the land of his colonial masters, so as to set up a very specific historical dialectic within which to argue that what seems anti-modern in his thought would not seem so if we kept this dialectic firmly in our sights. In general, that elements with affinities to the radical dissenting ideas voiced in the early modern period should appear to us as anti-modern is due to a conference of two closely related factors. First, our tendency to think of the path from early to late modernity as a teleological inevitability and consequently second from the perspective of our lateness to stamp out the significance and the substantial presence of the dissenting voices in the earlier period which lost out in the arena of social and political and intellectual conflicts of those times. These two factors conspire to make it seem as if any assertion of some of the radical ideas to be found in early modern dissenting traditions. At a date as late as, for instance, 1909 when Gandhi wrote in Suraj, necessarily occupies a stubbornly reactionary position, something they would not seem to do if we viewed the teleology as uncompulsory as Gandhi certainly did. And if we kept fully in view, in our view of the past, the power and pregnant possibilities that those dissenting ideas possessed despite their having lost out. If it were possible to use the expression early modern as an entirely innocuous description of a period of time in Europe with no built in implications of describing only those antecedents that would unfold into the developments of late modernity, the radicalism of that period might give us a sense of the possibilities that Gandhi still held out for in the India of the early 20th century, which as I said, he took to be at the sort of cusp that Europe was in in the early modern period. So to repeat the crucial dialectical point, I'm sorry, at the risk of causing tedium, that we should see the stance as anti-modern rather than as the radical ideas they were with a serious potential for preempting in India in the early part of the 20th century, the path in political economy and aspects of political governance that had developed over the modern period in Europe is only because the directional certainties of an assumed teleology that have the effect of writing out of history the great significance that dissenting voices had at the earlier time, leaving the impression only of those antecedents that make our own conditions seem inevitable for our time. How to correct this tendency in us by elaborating this dialectical reversal of it is the chief preoccupation of this lecture. In past work, I've pursued this line of thought by working with a very specific question within intellectual history, the question whether what political philosophers and political economists widely considered a rational development in the history of politics and political economy is indeed rational. I will not repeat the details of that work here, but I will have to give just for two or three minutes at least a schematic summary of the argument in order to turn to the points I do want to raise about Gandhi's deep and sometimes quite hysterical anxieties regarding modernity. In the broad contours of my argument, I had started with Amartya Sen's by now widely cited response to the protest against the dispossession of peasantry, dispossession of peasantry in recent years in India. The remark that in India, that India in order to come into modernity would unfortunately simply have to go through the pain that England went through in order to create its London's and Manchester's. I probed what underlies this assumption that countries like India must go through what their erstwhile colonial masters did. An assumption which is very widespread, Sen was only articulating a tacit conventional assumption. And I argued further that in Sen's case, it was not based on some sort of commitment to iron laws of history that are sometimes attributed to Marx. Sen Sen is writing within a liberal tradition of thought, he appeals not to the notion of necessity as such iron laws were proposing, but rather to a notion of rationality. In other words, it is not by historical inevitability that India must go through what England went through, but rather because what England went through was rational, its erstwhile colonies ought to do so. That is a quite different position, though as we know in a tradition that primarily owes to Hegel, rationality and necessity cannot be entirely kept separate either. The obvious and celebrated initial location I had argued of that liberal claim to rationality of what England went through was the argument in John Locke's chapter on property in the second treatise on government. That was essentially a contractualist argument from Pareto improvement over the state of nature, whereby the privatization of the commons that came with the enclosures, he that too carried out by brute force, was literally rationalized, i.e. rendered rational by the thought experiment of a social contract in which all commoners were said to be better off than they were in the state of nature if some of them privatized the land and the rest were hired by them as wage labor to work on the land. As is well known, some years before Locke's treatise, there was widespread protest against the enclosures by popular religion, a range of Puritan Christian sects resisting the high Anglican orthodoxy which had aligned itself with the commercial classes keen to transform mere agrarian living into what we would now call agribusiness. These groups, the diggers, the radical levelers, not all the levelers, the radical levelers and a variety of others, memorably studied by Christopher Hill and other historians of that period, were appealing to ideals of communal and collective cultivation of the commons. So in my extended argument, I had anachronistically ventriloquized onto their lips a response to Locke. I say anachronistically because as I said, they predated Locke, which was essentially a response to Locke from opportunity cost. The radical dissenters could be attributed, I said, the thought, yes, Locke would be right to say that the commoners who were hired to work for wages in the social contract were indeed better off than they were in the state of nature, but they're not better off than they would have been had the commons not been privatized in the first place and if there had been a collective cultivation of the commons. I then argued that a great deal of the driving, conceptual and ideological backdrop to liberal political economy over the next few centuries may be seen as a sustained response to this counterclaim from opportunity cost. The claimers I've presented is a counterfactual claim and the counterfactual is based on one central premise. A refusal of privatization that presupposes the cogency of an alternative ideal of the collective cultivation of the commons. It is this cogency that became the target of attack by a fundamental outlook of modern political economy which in the mid 20th century was summed up in a celebrated paper entitled The Tragedy of the Commons. It is an outlook primarily expressing a certain view of the nature of human rationality. It is the ideal of rationality and the mentality or outlook that it expressed that Gandhi was constantly opposing from different angles, taking on all its ill effects on modernity. The particular paper I mentioned by Garrett Hardin, Tragedy of the Commons, elaborates the outlook in game theoretic terms in the form of a multi-person prisoner's dilemma. This is merely a formalization of a widespread outlook which sends remark is basically taking for granted. I won't repeat the elaboration here but its main thrust is to argue that no individual commoner could rationally commit to the cooperation that is entailed by a collective cultivation of the commons. Rationality requires each commoner to think that though it is certainly true that if all commoners cooperated, everybody would gain, there's the constant anxiety, and this is crucial, there's the constant anxiety, what if I cooperated and others did not? If one is thinking rationally, this anxiety is said, has no answer to soothe it, such as the situation of a multi-person prisoner's dilemma. So each commoner, if he's rational, refuses cooperation which in turn would of course entail the destruction of the commons, that is the tragedy, and therefore a better bit than its collective cultivation is the privatization of the commons. That is the game theoretic updating of luck. Gandhi's entire conception of Ashram life repeatedly expressed exactly the opposite view of rationality, and in my philosophical gloss on that view I had argued that Gandhi was providing a whole basis for saying that the qualms about the requisite cooperation expressed in the anxiety, what if I cooperated and others did not, that is so central to the epistemological outlook of a liberal political economy is itself that question, what if I cooperated and others didn't, is itself a deep going manifestation of the alienation that characterizes modern society. The finessing of this alienation was absolutely central to Gandhi's anti-modernism since he attributed such alienation entirely to the modern period. In this I had said he was Marx's intellectual partner, though unlike Marx who came to his ideas from a remarkable lifelong diagnostic study of modern industrial capital, Gandhi who lived and struggled in a quite different historical and social context sought the sources of an unalienated life in the same social and cultural field as his early modern precedents, the folk and spiritual traditions of popular religion. It is simply not possible to come to grips with the remarkable effectiveness of Gandhi's methods of mobilization, deploying the ideas that he did without understanding how much he was tapping the social outlooks of popular religion in India. The idea that he could abandon this fundamental source of his effectiveness for a more modern ground for anti-imperialism such as the loyally set of constitutional demands for Indian self-governance and eventual independence as many of its other colleagues aspire to or for the terror-based tactics of the insurgent anti-imperialists or for the more purely class-based formulations that sought to mobilize the masses is to simply miss the point of what was unique about Gandhi's strength and conviction. In fact, there's every reason to think that the mobilization of the 1930s, that targeted not the British but were more purely class-struggles by tenants and sharecroppers against their overlords on which Gandhi and the Congress often did not have control would not have emerged without the dynamism of the Khilafat movement whose reach extended to Kisans and quite generally the Gandhian non-cooperation of an earlier period, movements which by contrast with the more purely class-struggle mixed anti-imperialism, present consciousness and popular religion in a way that only Gandhi's mobilizational innovations could have devised. I will return to this point about popular religion when I take up some of the more controversial points about anti-modernism at the very end. Let me first raise a question about this dialectic that I've set up. In order to come to grips with Gandhi's anti-modernism as kelling a form of radicalism, which is of a piece with the radicalism of the Erdi Malin period in England, when Amartya Sen made his remark, whose uncritical assumptions about rationality have been skeptically addressing, other critics made an empirical criticism rather than the philosophical one I've just been making, an empirical criticism that seems so obviously right that it is surprising that Sen had not seen it. That's for instance Prabhupada Naik pointed out that the historical analogy that Sen makes is historically quite inexact. Since in England, those dispossessed by primitive accumulation migrated in very large numbers to other parts of the temperate belt, whereas there is no place for the dispossessed of Bengal or Chhattisgarh or wherever else to go, except to the slums of the already cluttered cities within their own national borders. In other words, the primitive accumulation in Europe led to the diffusion of capitalism to other parts of the world, whereas in India, given the restrictions on the mobility of labour, all it has led to is the further pushing of people into destitution. This point, this criticism, gives us a chance of Sen, gives us a chance to explore something that has significance for why Gandhi thought that the developments of the modern period in Europe were besides the point for countries in India. In Marx's 27th chapter of Capital and in the classical accounts that derive from it, primitive accumulation is seen as the curse of frequently brutal extermination of communities of a pre-capitalist form as a result of the deracination of petty producers from their means of production, who then morph into a proletariat, either in the form of metropolitan industrial labourers and their families, or as a reserve army. These classical accounts, though they observe the cursive and brutal nature of this destruction of pre-capitalist communities, are nevertheless also presented as their transformation into a new class formation in which the old hierarchical oppressive features of social life are undermined, even if they are replaced by the newly minted oppressive features tied to the specifically exploitative and alienation-inducing conditions that metropolitan capital imposes on industrial labour. In the extensive commentary on Gandhi, people tend to focus on his occasionally articulated normative stance that the worst aspects of pre-capitalist communities, the socially conservative primordial ties with their oppressive hierarchies, ought to be, that's why it's normative, ought to be addressed, this is Gandhi's normative stance, those oppressive features ought to be addressed, Gandhi thought, without the destruction of pre-capitalist communities and without the transformation into these new class formations. Gandhi often said something like that. Now, however we assess that normative stance in Gandhi, what I want to focus on instead is not this normative stance he took, I don't want to focus on the normative stance and assess it. What I want to focus on instead is something more purely descriptive that he might well have presciently foreseen which puts into doubt the universal applicability of a vision that is found in canonical accounts of primitive accumulation grounded in Marx. So I don't want us to be distracted by whether he was right or not in thinking that those pre-capitalist communities should not be morphed into something else, to a new class formation. What I want to focus on instead is something more purely descriptive that he might well have presciently foreseen which puts into doubt the universal applicability of a vision that is found in the canonical accounts of primitive accumulation grounded in Marx. The question that we might ask is whether this is falling upon Putnaik's criticism, Sen. The question that we might ask is whether what motivated Gandhi's normative stance, whatever we think of the stance itself, is an instinct that the conditions of large agrarian societies of the colonized regions of the south are not exactly the ground on which or to which the classical accounts of primitive accumulation apply. To explore this, let us ask a counterfactual question. What would have happened, let us ask, if the millions of dispossessed peasants who migrated to the settler colonies of the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the hundreds of thousands of peasants who were mobilized to their death in the recurring European wars of the succeeding centuries? What of the thousands of deaths and famines and epidemics in Europe in the 19th century? What if all these massive numbers of peasants had lived and stayed sedentary in European society? In other words, served, survived as remnants of the pre-capitalist past, but outside the domain of capitalist production? On what terms would they have been described as an element of capital's present and yet as its external outside? Would they have overcome the oppressive hierarchical features owing to primordial ties? So really I'm asking whether Gandhi might have taken his normative stance whether or not we agree with it. Because of a canny understanding that in colonial and post-colonial capitalism the colonized lands were the factual version of something that was merely the counterfactual in Europe as I just presented it. As a result, though the industrial growth economy would be premised on primitive accumulation because it needs land for industry, mining, urban settlements, roads, railways, bridges, etc. just as it also needs new consumers for industrial products, Gandhi understood well that it cannot absorb the displaced millions as industrial labor or even as a reserve army sometimes. The population is literally redundant to the growth economy. In terms of its own economic outlook and trajectory it has a matter of utter indifference what happens to these millions. And so since the conditions for the industrial transformation of a large agrarian economy like India had not been created by colonial capitalism and its post-colonial legacy, primitive accumulation would not lead to the emergence of a relatively liberated even if differently subjugated industrial labor and instead even industrial laborers would continue to be enmeshed in ties of what looked like pre-capitalist community. Something we see everywhere in urban India today and the politics of identity that surfaces not just in rural but in metropolitan India as well. As sociologists have repeatedly observed communal riots occur predominantly in cities a symptom of the pre-capitalist community's metropolitan survival. As I said, I'm taking no position on whether Gandhi was right to take the normative stance he did on the matter of how he ought to overcome the oppressive hierarchical social features of pre-capitalist community without the destruction of those communities and their transformation into new class formation. Taking no stand on that. I'm only suggesting that the normative stance may have been expressive of an instinct that colonialism depended on something factual in the colonies even though it may have been merely counterfactual in Europe as I presented the counterfactual a little while ago. Therefore, Gandhi's anti-modernism reflected in his resistance to the destruction of pre-capitalist communities was not just a moralist's position it was not just a moralist's position but rather a stance that was driven by and contextualized by an instinctive understanding that colonial capitalism had not and would not create the conditions for the industrial transformation of large agrarian countries like India and thus an understanding that the effects of imperialism by their nature relied on the colonized world not possessing the transformative conditions that existed in European capitalism and its diffusionary spread. Part of the burden of my argument about Gandhi's anti-modernism being itself a form of radicalism is precisely the refusal to seem as a moralist and a philosopher independent of his anti-imperialism but rather constantly informed by his anti-imperialism. In fact, I think we can go so far as to say that from what Gandhi had glimpsed modernity and capitalism in the colonialism he experienced at the time he wrote in Suraj he could not possibly even have developed the hopes illusory in the end as we know expressed in the policies pursued in the Keynesian period in the countries of the North later on. Those policies and the hopes of a prospective constraining of capital only came into view in very special circumstances in a post-war context. For Gandhi, given the knowledge of capitalism that he acquired through the colonial experience nothing of that sort could redeem it from what he experienced. In fact, as he goes on to say I think it's in the light of that that we should go on to understand the other more specific things that he says which sound so excessive to us that it was not even redeemed by the development of railways which he explicitly saw as nothing but an instrument to connect the hinterland to the ports for the gains sought by his colonial masters not even by the professionalization of the concept of law in the person of lawyers which he explicitly saw as the commodification and debasement of the idea of justice not even the manifest advantages of modern medicine and drugs which he explicitly declared had brought just as many ill effects to the body as those they had cured and in fact failed to acknowledge that cure itself was much more than a restoring of physical function but also a restoring of an equilibrium of emotions and meanings and peace of mind. I'll return to some of the shill excesses of this letter, anti-modernism I've been describing before I close but before I do let me say something about my deployment of the term radical in describing Gandhi's anti-modernism. It might seem that this use of the term radical means precious little or perhaps I should say it would mean something merely precious if a certain kind of objection that is of some currency and in my experience of some insistence is not addressed. The objection is that the dialectical relation I've drawn between the radicalism I've claimed for Gandhi's reactiveness to the outlooks of modernity and the prescient radical dissenting voices of early modern Europe precisely because that harks back to a lost and distant past are an exercise in nostalgia. That's the objection. From the point of view of this skepticism the radicalism of the early modern period which may have had its possibilities for politics in a past time because it lost out could only have a taste for revivalist status at the time that Gandhi was writing and ever since because the plain fact is that those possibilities of the early modern period were never realized in subsequent modernity and political economy by now has advanced in directions in which the very thought of those ideals being realized is a nostalgic illusion. Before I begin addressing this line of objection a contrast is saying that in the face of such frequent sneering about nostalgia I almost always feel an intense irritation because it is most often to be found on the lips and pens of complacent people. Such people need to be reminded that the most creative efforts of the Renaissance were very likely dismissed by similarly frequent sneering on the part of medieval scholastics as a nostalgia for a bygone classical age. The fact is that the complacence from which this quorum is expressed is actually often not innocent. What people choose to be complacent about and what they therefore choose to be dismissive as nostalgic about is rather selective and the selectivity is driven by ideological considerations. Charges of nostalgia are a cousin of a phenomenon which we might call the it's too late phenomenon. If something is too late to reverse it's nostalgic to wish to reverse it. It's too late to return to 1967 borders in Israel. There have been far too many settlements over the last few decades. It's just one among any number of complacencies regarding present conditions that one can cite. But notice that no one ever said during the decades long Cold War it's too late. The Soviet Union is here and in a large part of the world private capital is simply a thing of the past. It would be nostalgic to aspire to return to it there. Instead, they unrelentingly put pressure even the pressure of untold violence in Southeast Asia and Latin America on any socialist experiment, whatever it's false decade after decade till virtually every such experiment fell apart. Thus, crimes about nostalgia of what is and isn't too late are made not only from the point of view of complacence but a complacence driven by ideological points of view with deliberate selectivity. Now, motives apart how shall we assess the charge of nostalgia brought against all efforts to associate criticism of capital with criticism as in Gandhi of the outlooks of modernity that is inflicted by the effects of capital on our minds and our cultures. Let me approach the subject by returning to such an outlook underlying liberal political economy that I had described earlier. I had said of such an outlook that the notion of alienation that Gandhi sought to overcome is the alienation of a social world in which an individual is prone by rationality, nothing less to ask what if I cooperated and others didn't. Gandhi's idea of an unalienated social world one that he sought to implement in ashram life but also thought was present in many other local contexts was a world in which that apparently rational anxiety would not occur to anyone. As I said, his notion of an unalienated life was not a moralistic critique of self-interest. It was rather an epistemological silence or preempting of a question that comes to mind, what if I cooperated with a certain conception of rationality. It was a silencing of a question. Can this Gandhian ideal of an unalienated life be convicted of a nostalgic hankering for a pre-modern social outlook? Gandhi's stubborn refusal to be dissuaded by all such dismissals of his position is based I think on a very insightful claim on his part that not just the prospect of but the reality of such unalienatedness is everywhere available, not in some outlook of the remote past but in the quotidian present. I emphasize both quotidian and present quite deliberately. To understand this claim of his I think we have to invoke the notion of a frame which I will borrow from the theoretical vocabulary of psychologists. Psychologists often talk of something they call the frame problem. Human subjects often find themselves thinking in two different frames. Because these frames are sealed off from each other we may have thoughts or responses to the world that were they in the same frame would be felt as being contradictory by the subject. But being in different frames they are not. The inconsistency in the thoughts and responses is therefore not felt by the subject. Let me give you a very, very simple and personal example to illustrate this. My mother-in-law is a conservative Republican. On one of her visits I had to pick her up from the airport in New York and drive her home. On the route from the airport to my home on the Upper West Side near Columbia University one has to traverse the slums of Harlem. My mother-in-law driving past the homeless poverty of the denizens of Harlem was genuinely upset by what she saw. More than once she repeated with heartfelt compassion this is simply terrible. Something has to be done about these conditions that the people are living in here. I was pleased about this. We arrived home. She being a New England Yankee. I fixed her a martini and for an old colonial such as myself a Scotch and soda. Over these drinks I asked her Dorothy, your response to what you saw in Harlem was wonderful. So do you think there should be public expenditure to improve the conditions that you saw? She looked at me with horror. Are you mad? Absolutely not. As I said this is the simplest of examples of what psychologists call the frame problem. In one frame Dorothy Rubin expressed real humanity. It was the quotidian frame of a subject responding directly to what she perceived in the world around her. In the other frame, no doubt a frame shaped by courses she took in economics in her American school, her response was quite inconsistent with the other response. Except that it was not inconsistent within her psychology. Because these two frames are sealed off from one another and from the subjective point of view there's consistency only within a frame not across frames. What made Gandhi impervious to charges of nostalgia about an unalienated existence is that he was convinced that there are many quotidian contexts in the present, not just in a bygone past in which we are completely unalienated. Let us take his understanding of unalienatedness as I expanded it. One sign of unalienatedness I said was in the question what if I paid the cost of cooperation and others did not, never so much as occurring to one. There are many contexts for instance in everyday Ashram life he said that such a question would never occur to one. Or we might say it would never occur to a father at least most fathers to ask such a question of his daughter what if I cooperated and she didn't. But in the very same people there are frames again frequently shaped by the sort of education provided by the zeitgeist of capitalist modernity that he was repudiating where that question does have and drives one's thinking and behavior and one has no awareness that one is being inconsistent because each response is in a distinct insulated frame. But his point was that the form of frame in which one's responses are unalienated is frequently possessed by subjects of society here and now. Not just societies of past to which he was nostalgically appealing. And it was his conception of a humane politics that we first need to remove the boundaries between these frames creating a unified frame so that people first come to realize their inconsistencies and then to publicly educate people into the importance of scaling up the sorts of response that were expressed in the quotidian frame to criticize and revise the sorts of response that occurred in the other frame more relevant to the domain where social principles and policies are articulated. For Marx the sort of humane politics was to be found in the solidarities that the military had forged in their revolutionary struggles. For Gandhi it was to be an extension of the outlooks forged in Arsham life and in the pluralist practices of popular religions all of which he brought to bear in a variety of movements he led and mobilized during the long freedom struggle. That differential politics, Marx and Gandhi, was inevitable given the different historical context about which they wrote and as well as the different political positions they took. Though radical was not a revolutionary socialist. But my point is that the radicalism in Gandhi was quite of a piece with Marx regards the moral psychology that lay behind their politics the ideas and ideals of seeking to overcome alienation induced by capitalist modernity. It is this anti-modernism in which his radicalism lies. Okay, now I turn finally with some trepidation to the feature of his anti-modernism that titillates everybody his occasional appeal to traditional superstition and myth to make a moral and political point. I do so not with a view to defending him at all but to steer people who disdain him for it to understand how much more sophisticated it was than it might initially seem. It is fine to criticize a philosopher who may be wrong but you have to first get right what it is that you think is wrong. Let's take the most spectacular example of this occasional tendency in Gandhi his deliberately provocative public assertion that the Bihar earthquake was a divine admonishment to us all for our complicity in the sin of untouchability a mythical theological lesson as it were in the attribution of collective responsibility. As you know it sent Tagore into heights of denunciation. Amartya Sen bent my ear over a seemingly interminable high-table dinner repeating Tagore's criticism at new heights of indignation. The chief criticism seems to be that he should not have been feeding as he did with that assertion the worst aspects of tradition and superstition in India since that is precisely what keeps us back from advancing into modernity. So let's look in a little more detail at the exchanges on the subject both private and public including with Tagore himself. In these exchanges Gandhi was sometimes told why don't you just say that you meant your assertion to be a metaphor. Gandhi blithely responded let it be a metaphor but there's no other way for me to put it. Consider that response. There's an insight in it that is worth recording even if in the end you side with Tagore and not Gandhi. An apt metaphor Gandhi was suggesting cannot be paraphrased away into literal statements. All theoretical linguists would agree on this point. A good metaphor is not paraphrasable away without some loss of meaning but if that is so it cannot merely be a point about language. It is a point about the world or about reality as well. That there is an aspect which is a point which says there's an aspect of fragment of reality that cannot be expressed by anything but that metaphor. That's just the other side of saying that the metaphor is unparaphrasable. The idea that a metaphor is unparaphrasable is a point about language but that point about language has a metaphysical counterpart about reality which is that there's an aspect of reality that cannot be expressed by anything but that metaphor. That's just the other side of the unparaphrasability of metaphor. That is what Gandhi was insisting on. Now of course there is no doubt that at least for all of us in this room Gandhi's assertion about the earthquake was saying something which you've taken literally rather than as a metaphorical attribution of collective responsibility is utterly false. There's no room for doubt about that for people sitting in this room but the fact is that almost all metaphors taken literally are false. Juliet is the sun said Romeo. Juliet is not the sun. In fact the only true metaphor that I've ever come across is no man is an island. Almost all metaphors are false. So far we are all square then. Gandhi was as off-being as Shakespeare but Shakespeare does not provoke Amartya Sen to heights of denunciation. So the point must be that some metaphors even if they get the point across as nothing else can are inappropriate for social and political reasons. As I said in a traditional society one must not be feeding the tendency to superstition. But Gandhi explicitly said to Tagore, I'm quoting, I'm not speaking to scientists and to scientifically educated urban elites. I'm speaking to the ordinary illiterate masses among our people to convey something in a social matter of the utmost importance. If I was speaking to scientists I would certainly say something different on this matter. So a question arises. Is this just the familiar relativism of different cultures? A traditional folk and spiritual culture of popular religion that Gandhi was constantly tapping as I pointed out earlier and a modern scientific culture? That is to say is it just the standard relativism about truth whereby what is true in the culture of popular religion is false in the culture shaped by scientific knowledge? I don't believe that that is what Gandhi's response, what underlies Gandhi's response to Tagore at all. You might think that I'm just projecting this onto Gandhi because of my own, I will admit it, emphatically anti-relativist views. But I'm not doing that. What Gandhi's suggesting here is not that familiar and implausible relativism at all. The relativism that says that truth itself is relative to a culture. But he's rather expressing a much deeper and more fascinating question. The question, why is it that something that is viewed as a truth in some cultures can only be viewed, sorry, why is it that something that is viewed literally as a truth in some cultures can only be viewed as a metaphor in another? One can surely show Gandhi the sympathetic courtesy of acknowledging that he is in the end asking Tagore to think about this deeper question even if one rightly refuses to follow the more familiar relativist in allying many assertions of the sort within the culture of popular religion, the prestige of truth. Thank you very much.