27. November 11 '2021
“[In] characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says.” — Wilfred Sellars, ‘Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind’, 1956
During the dark days of the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic that swept through Indian cities and villages in the early months of 2021, killing hundreds of thousands, a remarkable contradiction burbled to fore. The body of the State—the archipelago of its institutions, the behemoth army of its official functionaries, and its elaborate processes—was present and yet invisible. Citizens bemoaned the absence of governance. Meanwhile, the body of the Indian citizen was absent as life form and yet visible in hospitals, roadsides, crematoriums and, on occasions, afloat in river as corpses. Most Indians huddled in their homes and the prowess of the famously disputatious Indian who protests and pushes back against the State was suddenly rendered impotent. Major demonstrations in parts of Delhi were grudgingly wound down as the virus swept through human bodies and the body politic. Indian democracy which has, over the past century, acquired its shape and substance thanks to a careful, sustained, and organized usage of representations—from placards to memes, from rhetoric to rallies—was suddenly denied its most powerful tool for spectacle-making: the human body. The very same that immolates itself for caste reservations and embraces a tree to prevent logging. Guy Debord, the French thinker, wrote: “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles”. When the spectacle ceased to be, what was to become of politics, of democracy, of our political life? The pandemic, amid all the carnage, did one remarkable service: it revealed the innards of Indian institutions to the wider public—its inefficiencies, at first, as well as its abilities to coordinate and execute monumental programs—and in turn offered us a epistemic break unlike any in our history to rethink India’s present and presence in the world.
For a few weeks during the pandemic, that permanent bloodsport of Indian public life—politics—gave way to something more fundamental and unexpected. Everybody scrambled to accumulate resources to save the human body; or—to borrow from the words of Giorgio Agamben, the Italian philosopher—we were forced to leap over a chasm from the world of bios (‘politically qualified life’) and crawl our way to save zoe (‘bare life’). The virus had stripped the thin veneer of sociability on which our civilizational conceits thrived. We may seek moksha while living inside the carapace of dharma and experiencing the many joys of kama, but at that hour, in order to rescue, revive and restore ourselves—as individuals and as a society—a great clamor for resources, or artha, arose.
Which resource was deemed as important and necessary was often a function of who was doing the clamoring. The doctors and nurses understandably asked for medical gowns, oxygen tanks and other paraphernalia, while the rest of us sought to stock up on food, cash, everyday medicines, and so on. Even the dead, or rather the relatives of the dead, clamored for funeral pyre wood, space in the crematoriums and graveyards. The world of humans had suddenly transmogrified into something unrecognizable. Economic transactions—in whose names siblings and families, firms and corporations, markets and cities come together and break apart—had ceased to be. The most important artha was the air we breathe—air, uncontaminated by the virus and our fears—which was nowhere to be found. What was valuable yesterday, and a store of wealth for future generations, was suddenly emptied out of its value and in its stead, men and women wandered in search of hospital beds, oxygen tanks, and when all else had failed, they sought an opportunity to die with some dignity. The idea of wealth had metamorphosed from the all-too-familiar to something less tangible and even obscure. ‘Health is wealth’—that old dictum suddenly acquired a renewed luster and burnish. But before long, even this mothballed truth began to smell of cliche: healthy men and women had been sequestered in confined spaces for days-on end and their minds were wrought by paroxysms of anxiety, despair, and loneliness.
Those among us who are worse off in our societies had other material and existential anxieties in the form of lost employment, diminished savings, rental and mortgage arrears, and more fundamentally and unconscionably, an endemic hunger stalked the homes of many. What constituted as wealth—which is traditionally seen as a repository of resources which we can rely on to trade with each other and smooth inter-temporal consumption—was suddenly revealed to be not what it is. The idea of ‘wealth’ began to acquire an existential patina. During the pandemic, when all kinds of labor markets came to a standstill, and with the closure of labor markets, even that most ancient source of economic value—the labor potential embodied in a human body—had no buyer to bid for. When a society is no longer able to provide a market for human labor in exchange for goods—our understanding of ‘wealth’ suddenly slips into an economic singularity, in which all theories enter but never return. Yet, at the same time, even as we read about rising poverty, stories of hunger, and even the stunting of Indian heights over the past decade—the equity, the bond, and even the cryptocurrency markets frothed and provided many Indians with more wealth than they could know of what to do in a lifetime. What we saw in the starkest possible sense is an India in which ‘wealth’ could no longer be reduced to a simple metric. We could wax eloquently about ‘arthashastra’ even as, for those few weeks, we could no longer agree on a consensus on what constitutes ‘wealth’ or ‘artha’?
It is a time-honored philosophical puzzle to ask ‘what is Dharma’ to which, beginning with the Rg Veda in Book 8, the answer offered has been:
‘yasya dvibarhaso brhat
saho daadhara rodasi
girimr ajram apah svar vrsatvana’
This is translated by Joel Brereton and Stephanie Jamison in their landmark translation as,
‘Him, the double lofty,
whose lofty power holds fast the two world-halves,
the mountains and plains,
the waters and sun,
through his bullishness’
Dharma, among its oldest meanings, referred to the act of preventing the world from falling into chaos. Before the Gods performed this act of separation, all was mixed up into an unrecognizable whole. Chaos reigned everywhere. Since the shape of chaos changes over time, the very act of separating the two halves—mountains and plains, the waters and sun—changes over time. Faced with this demand to interpret Dharma, Vyasa—that great raconteur of moral and ethical shapeshifting concerns—tells us in the Mahabharata, ‘dharmasya tattvam nihitam guhayaam’, or ‘The essence of Dharma is hidden inside a cave’. Generation after generation is therefore accursed, or blessed, to discover the constituents of this order-making.
But when faced with similar epistemic questions about interpretative difficulties regarding ‘artha’ —or wealth, resources, or wherewithal to maneuver the world—we are relatively impoverished in our understandings. In parts, this is because capital, like Dharma in ethical discourses, changes shape, is often obscured by changing ownership, and encourages actions and motivations that are often outside the scope of sustained thought. And when it is discussed, artha is often perfumed and poisoned by the utilitarianism that governs most of our everyday life and commerce. Furthermore, the nature of our economic arrangements are subject to a plethora of local details and idiosyncratic formations which belie or buttress everyday political pieties and hypocrisies which has a tendency to agglomerate and cohere into larger wholes. This urge to foist a supra-narrative is all the more evident in an increasingly centralized democratic machinery. In parts, this is because of the structure of how our politics is arranged. Politicians, who are the sharp end of the civic discourse, are often asked to facilitate the needs of their most organized and therefore their seemingly most powerful constituents. And no force in present day discourse is more organized, potent, and ultimately powerful as the assorted species of transnational capitalism that arrive in various guises: corporations, lobbies, media, and sections of academia.
The result of this is not surprising. Faced with an increasingly homogenous global capital-trade market and an accompanying cross-border tariff and regulatory regimes, any political leader who interfaces with these nebulous but ferocious forces comes face to face with the need to craft a national-level economic policy which inevitably clashes head-on with the fragmentary and historically contingent nature of economic relationships on the grounds. These local economic ties have typically evolved, over decades, to create unique forms of economic rent-seeking and political patronage which is often indistinguishable from the practice of democracy itself. We often often forget it is through excesses and inefficiencies that democracy works. The real enemy of democratic ideals then is not authoritarianism—which thrives in great many sub-national Indian elections where bosses rule—but rather the doctrines of efficiency. Democracy and capitalism become nomenclatures behind which the real power-play is between the old rent-seekers who control small amounts of capital and vast pool of local labor and the new rent-seekers who bring new technologies to sidestep labor and their deep pockets to forgo the fruits of rent-seeking longer than their competition. Historically, the pace of such changes and challenges were often over decades and the State could leverage its prowess to manage affairs on its own terms, which often meant suborning the demands of commerce to those of the ruling classes. Thus, when we learn that in the 11th century, ‘Chola naval forces raided Srivijaya trade centres on the Malay peninsula’ and the result of ‘such depredation [likely] damaged trade relations’—it is not surprising. This has been the preponderant case in world history. The rajan and his amatyas (king and ministers) supersedes the shreni (merchant guilds). However, by the 15th-16th century, as commercial capitalism begins to take shape, we find that the State increasingly tries to play an umpire by providing a semblance of equidistance among various commercial interest groups. Perhaps most starkly, as Jairus Banaji tells us, we see this in Kozhikode of 16th century, which the French traveler François Pyrard de Laval tells us that the Zamorin ‘permits the exercise of every kind of religion, and yet it is strictly forbidden to talk, dispute, or quarrel on that subject; so there never arises any contention on that score.’ The real religion of Kozhikode—about which we find statements such as these: ‘merchants from all parts of the world, and of all nations and religions, by reason of the liberty and security accorded to them there’—was trade, commerce, and money. The State became the provider of security and conditions for commerce.
By the 21st century however, as financialization of the world has become de facto and de jure realities, the State was often the messenger boy of global capital and its masters. This was the reigning mantra of the 1990s as neoliberalism imperiously stomped across the world aided by its dutiful pontiffs at the IMF and the World Bank who sprinkled the holy waters of economic orthodoxy on the faithful and threatened the heretic with a burning at the bond markets. But two spectacular forces have sought to reassert the powers of the State. One, the rise of an authoritarian and technocratic China where billionaires mysteriously suffer accidents and Wall Street darlings are kneecapped overnight thanks to decrees emanating from the Zhongnanhai. The other, the rise of reactionary, rightwing and leftwing populist anger across the Europe and North America which has ended the career of great many public intellectuals and politicians who shilled for the Washington Consensus in the 1990s. In an unanticipated turn of events, the Indian State now finds itself as an heir to ideas such as structural reforms, liberalization, single-markets, free-trade agreements in a world where all major powers now look inward. In such an environs, an heavy-handed State policy that upsets traditional economic arrangement runs the risk of preparing conditions for prolonged conflicts—not because the policy is in itself right or wrong but because the politics of policy-making cannot be separated from the history of the contemporanous policies elsewhere. Failing to heed this reality can facilitate the transformation of these low-level agitations into violent extremism and even revive the rhetoric of political secessionism. Thus, what we need from our political leaders—they are not the principal guilty parties, they are merely weathervanes who proximate the flow of electoral prejudices—and our omnivorous intellectual classes are not the out-of-context verses from the Arthashastra or a gnomic utterances by Thiruvalluvar but more critical assessments and active education and communication about where India is at this juncture in history of capital and capitalism itself.
To do this, we need to begin by interrogating and trying to understand what does India mean at this hour in our public, and especially economic, discourse. Is ‘India’ merely a category of commercial commitments held together by institutions that project cohesion when needed and are otherwise entirely dedicated to maintaining the sclerotic present? Or is ‘India’ a typology of assessments with specific similarities frothed forth by historic forces? Implicit in these questions is that when we begin to think Indian history—in whose name much is done—we need to ask what is it a ‘history’ of? Is it an history of everything, subsumed by the geographies demarcated as India; is it a history of connections between ideas, institutions, and geographies across state borders; or, is it an history of how we have internalized alien ideas. These questions become even more difficult and pressing when we place India within the sway and history of ‘Capitalism’. Henri Pirenne, the great Belgian historian who studied the medieval era, defined capitalism as ‘the tendency to the steady accumulation of wealth’. For Adam Smith, capitalism was intricately linked to particular economic arrangement that was linked to the production of goods; for Marx, capitalism was a system that depended on the subordination of labor to the capital in order to accrete surplus value; for others, capitalism was a self-sustaining system constituted of a ‘propertyless labour force’ and ‘separation of the state and market activity’; for an older generation of European economists who metamorphosed into neoliberals by late 20th century, capitalism was a means to resuscitate the vanished worlds of empires wherein capital moved freely. Borrowing from Schumpeter (who pithily observed, capitalism is ‘like a hotel where the clients are forever changing’), in the post World War 2 era, free market capitalism had acquired near-religious connotations especially as the dirigiste Soviet economy of USSR offered itself as an alternative means of salvation—a religion that has now fallen into disfavor. By our times, the question of what does ‘capitalism’ mean is even more complicated. Is it the Foxconn factories of Shenzhen in China (‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’) which supplies to corporate behemoths like Apple? Or is capitalism the mechanisms and modalities that govern sabzi-mandi in small towns and municipalities across India? What are we to call the present American financial system where large financial corporations enjoy unending access to liquidity at the specialized financing windows of the Federal Reserve?
These questions merely highlight the difficulty of trying to subsume a vast array of economic arrangements—all of which thrive in a continent-sized India—and force us to face the fact there is no substitute for a periodic rethink of where we are in history and in the world. This interregnum between the pandemic and a return to business-as-usual world offers us an unprecedented break and an opportunity to rethink anew the fundamentals of our world, our artha—the meaning and material of our being—and all else that we hold as familiar and valuable. []