“Vinay Bhals article on Gandhi is not just interesting and Bold, but also by its challenging tone opens new avenues for discussions and revaluation of ones own intimate stance regarding various modes through which we come to interpret and understand our time.
Although I completely agree with most of the points she raised esp. regarding Globalization, Gender, Ngo’s etc. I do not agree with her basic epistemic premise and unquestioned fore conclusions through which she puts to claim various reasons to re-reconsider the project of modernity. I also feel that her analysis of Nandy and the Subaltern group is purely rhetorical and thus doesn’t do full justice towards them as she gives a too literal reading of their projects and forgets or completely overlooks their other strategic readings.”“To begin with, Bhal begins her rhetorical leveling with all the usual flair expected of modern critical theorist, and like an infernal rhetorical engine presences the “blind alley” and lays bare “The ramifications of getting stuck in a blind alley”
To put it another way- Bhal is talking about a “Value Neutral Position” through and by which one presences a blind alley, (as if she has known/seen the much elusive “enlightened alley” from where enlightened reason grounds and orients its critique, a space which Bhal never spills out or makes explicit.).
The point is that Bhal is speaking about the “Unfinished project of Modernity” a kind of emancipation of history from outside history; as if such a position exists. Bhal is dead certain that such a position exist from where she can not only Identify the fallen and sinners,(which she does) but also is able to lay the foundations from where this original sin could be corrected for good.

But for a time being let us take a step back and understand what exactly this “Unfinished project of Modernity” is.
This unfinished rational project began some 500 plus years back to be precise with the sailing of Columbus with his “Oculus Mundi” “The eye of the world”, in search for a new trade route to India and China and from there began the great adventure of the Knights of Modernity marching (colonizing the earth) as the spirit of history. These knights laid the first grounds of rationalizing project (which Bhal presences) when they claimed they were acting for the benefit of the Amercan-Indians and thus began the process of brainwashing, hacking, killing, mutilating or enslaving them.

Six years later Vasco Da Gama landed in Calicut, Southern India bringing Occidentosis the “The Plague of the west” unleashing 504 years of devastation and destruction and the dehumanization of the world from which the world has yet to see the day.

The way this dehumanization proceeds through the technological mode of disclosure is a different story altogether, what Interests us here is the continual dehumanizing of various life-worlds and as a prominent Gandhian has said -the way the “world has been divided primarily between those who work on the machine and those who don’t or between those who gain by the existence of the machine and those who loose everything because of it”

When Columbus landed on new Indies (The extreme eastern frontier of India as he though and believed for the rest of his life) he carried along with him not just religious and cultural Icons of Europe, but also a mental geography that included an anthropology of barbarism, a technique of mapping “The Other”
Copernicus and Columbus are often heralded as luminaries of the Renaissance, where as the American-Indians (red-Indians as they are popularly known) today seem to even lack a name of their own.
But what gets overlooked in the mystification and bewitchment of (Systematic engineered modern enlightenment) is that, this civilizing mission they began operated through a dubious technique of mapping the world of “the other” where their (the European man) fears got personified as and with “the other”. The “Other” is a rational projection which operates by systematically distorting the other and thus privileging oneself. This self privileging once grounded automatically leads to the threshold what today is known as the rhetoric’s of “Erasure”, a colonizing process that operates by systematic mapping the other as inferior, ignorant, inefficient, lazy, undeveloped and superstitious.

Another factor never touched by scholars and historians is the mystical and religious traditions through which the Christian Europe gave them and their knights the right to intervene into the lives of others and assimilate or eliminate the other in the interest of the betterment of the other.
Today our internalized Columbuses continue to intervene with narratives of progress with its rationalized procedures and thus play havoc with cultures, religions and economy.

What Bhal ignores in her rhetoric’s of modernity is specifically those things Gandhians and others like him brought to light in his/their careful disclosure of Gandhi’s insight into the destructive impact of this very rationality called modernity that today orders and orients everything.
What she (Bhal) also ignores in her challenge, is Gandhi’s understanding of Lokvidya (practical, traditional wisdom) and that such a Lokvidya already carries within it all the possibility of social critique, a place from where one can resist and fight systematic distortions”.

Further Extracts: (and hope to complete the essay soon but till then enjoy these extracts)

“For me Gandhis Insights open up a new window; a unique and, nonviolent way of encountering the earth and life and this is where societalcritique should be grounded in its orientation towards future…. Embedded in such a orientation is the insight that “every culture has its own paradigm and model of progress and that development of technology should be suited to the character of such paradigm and model.” The choice for him was not between a traditional technique and a modern technique; it is between different traditions of technology. That is because no technology is neutral: it carries with it a total way of looking at and living with nature, people and things.
It is time to take note that the western model of growth; which has lead us to a pointless existence and death, today seeks to justify itself through a model of culture and ideology which carries within it the germ of death:”

“Predictably, the western model of growth is characterized by blind production of more and more, faster And faster, no matter what: things useful, useless or even lethal (for instance armaments). Such growth’ in the West is possible only by plundering the rest of the world. The ‘growth’ began with the genocide of American Indians, continued with the trade of African slaves, and in Asia with the opium war and the Atomicbomb on Hiroshima…….This growth lead in the 1980, to the starvation death of fifty-five million human beings in the so called underdeveloped countries (because their traditional means to cope was destroyed by narrations of progress) and the same year that the west politics of armaments has ended in placing four tones’ of explosives on the head of each individual of the planet.”……“It is a murderous illusion to talk of development and under-developed countries; in reality there are only the sick-with their blind economic growth but with a underdeveloped culture, wisdom and faith-which in turn breeds violence and pointless lives, incapable of proposing and realizing human ends. The deceived countries are those made to believe that their future lies in imitation the sick countries.” ……….“ The principle obstacle to the necessary change is that the west after four centuries of unshared domination during which it has exercised a disastrous impact on the planet, imposes not only its economic, political and military ‘order’, but also the form of culture and history which justifies it, as the historical trajectory followed by the west was the only possible one, exemplary and universal…..The west has confiscated the universal. Starting from there it pretends to place all others on its own trajectory (a country is considered more developed the more it resembles this trajectory)

Gandhi saw this very clearly, his effort was not to repudiate or reject the western culture in its entirety but to relativize it, is of major importance for the fate of this planet……..Gandhi never refused social change, but was clear not to confound modernity and social change with this trajectory (Westernization.) and as I said “The choice for him was not between a traditional technique and a modern technique; it was between different traditions of technology. That is because no technology is neutral: it carries with it a total way of looking at and living with nature, other people and future…….It is time to take note that the western model of growth; which has lead us to a pointless existence and death, seeks to justify itself through a model of culture and ideology which carries within it the germ of death:”
It is no news that this culture thrives on the death worlds. That is, its growth and spread is rooted in an explicit understanding that who so ever welds and controls this technocratic knowledge rules the earth and that all previous modes of ethnocentric technologies are no match to its power. Who so ever masters it is lord to unlimited progress; and that, bio or political power is exponentially related to the growth in the enterprising expertise in manipulating and controlling this technology.

“Gandhi questioned the error of the technique for technique’ which leads the technocrats to impose on the ‘profane’ a system founded on the implicit postulate: ‘all that is technologically possible is necessary and desirable’-which leads us to the actual impasses of armaments and hunger; to technocratic medicine which treats illness as one repairs a truck, without participation of the ill person; to the psychoanalyst who believes himself ‘emancipated in order to place himself above the patient; to the Marxist politician who firmly believes himself sized of the absolute truth, the more so rejecting the spontaneity of the masses; to the ‘liberal’ economist who has proclaimed for two centuries, despite all evidence and all disasters, that ‘if each pursues his personal interest, the general interest will be secured’, the basic principle of individualism in the jungle of capital which transforms so easily into the totalitarianism of the termites.
(which seems to be quickly eating away Earth and all life support systems)”

“Unfortunately for the Third World countries, history is not going to repeat itself in precisely the same manner as it did for the west.
A few commendable coincidences that culminated in the inauguration of Industrial Revolution; newly grown geo-political importance of sea-routes during the pre-aeroplane era; intervention and reordering of earth, people and cultures on the basis of their raw material and market-potentialities; circumstances favourable for empire-building by naval powers; practicability of sustaining domestic economy on the strength of exploitation of colonies, all these circumstances are not going to be repeated for the benefit of the Third World countries. The prosperity of the white nations was build upon the foundations which will not be available now to the non-white countries. Hence, the futility of a blind and unquestioned imitation of western ideals, and accepting the western paradigm as a model per se.
Thus every culture should rely and develop its own paradigm and model of progress and that ‘development of technology’ should be suited to the character of such paradigm and model.”

related posts: Gandhi and the Jihad
Birdy Num Num and the Problem of Hindu Muslim violence.
Why does religion refuses to go away?