India’s general elections began on 19 April 2024; they had been prepared in a climate of state-orchestrated propaganda, violence and repression, so that the outcome became almost entirely predictable: the confirmation of the stranglehold on Indian democracy of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in power since 2014, and therefore also of the autocratic power of its leader Narendra Modi. The opposition, united in a coalition led by the Congress Party, had been in disarray, as the regional elections of 2023 sufficiently demonstrated: faced with the success of the national narrative that supports the BJP, centred entirely on “Hinduism” (and Hindutva, which means “Hinduness” or what is essential to being “Hindu”), it has been struggling to construct a counter-narrative. Finally, the BJP lost the elections and yet came to power in a coalition (1). 

Based on the observations preceding the general elections, an article by the Fondation Jean Jaurès (2) stresses that “for the opposition, Hindutva - cultural nationalism - calls for a debate not on Hinduism, which is as respectable as any belief, but on the excesses” before indicating that another approach which “would be to flush out the fact that Hindutva, in the name of the Hindu nation, is a strategy for perpetuating the age-old domination of the upper castes”.

However, this second approach needs to be clarified. It could in fact be based on a modern Hinduism, compatible with democracy and freedom of belief, and then it is compatible also with one of the parts of the doctrine of the Congress Party since Independence, which has not prevented its recent electoral collapse. In fact, from the outset, the Congress party was nothing more than an agglomeration of incompatible tendencies (liberalism, communism, socialism, Islam, Hinduism) held together only by the objective of emancipation and the chimera, particularly fostered by M. K. Gandhi, of a “Hindu spirituality” that was at once diffuse, unifying and tolerant. Or there could be another approach that could be based on a radical critique of Hinduism, showing that it is inseparable from the caste system and is therefore in no way a morally acceptable religion. Beneath the constructed image of a nation of 80% Hindus, there suffers and rumbles another, the real majority, made up of all those for whom the Vedic religion, known in Europe as Brahmanism, and then in the nineteenth century onwards as Hinduism, is not the religion. Hinduism of the nineteenth century, has never been a belief, but has always been an oppressive system denying the lower caste majority access to power, social or cultural recognition, and even religion. 

This path, which also implies that Western respect for Buddhism is still of the order of a colonial bad conscience supporting political and social oppression in India, finds one of its clearest explanations in a book by the Indian philosophers Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan bringing together their political articles, many of them unpublished; this book, entitled Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution: On Caste and Politics, was due to be published in India and the United Kingdom in January 2024. Its publication was supposed to be a political act in the run-up to the general election, but it was not to be, as it was postponed. There is a path through which this book is also French or Franco-Indian, as it was created through the compilation, organisation, editing, annotations, and a commendable philosophical glossary of concepts of Dwivedi and Mohan by the philosopher of science Maël Montévil, and in that this book forms the introduction to a larger philosophical project which continues onwards from Derrida, Nancy, and Stiegler. 

False Hindu majority and real majority

Dwivedi and Mohan have already given a good overview of their political thinking in several articles in the book first published in French (3), and it seems logical to us to enter it through this door, which already involves several other related texts. 

Traditionally, i.e. since the Aryan invasion of India around 2000 BC and the composition of the Vedas, the studying of these sacred texts, their language (Sanskrit) and their rites, and therefore also the Vedic institutions, were strictly reserved for the colonial elite, i.e. the “Aryans”, divided into distinct groups of upper castes; this strictly hierarchical, endogamic and racial system meant that the indigenous lower castes with dark skin were reduced to slavery-like exploitation (4), with no access to land ownership, drinking water or even right to walk on the roads. This is “the oldest racism” (5) that lasted until (and after) English colonisation, which exploited and reinforced the local social hierarchy. The upper castes then had to negotiate the turning point of decolonisation and the democratisation of India (especially in the crucial period of transfer of power 1947-50) without losing their power, and their strategy was to rely on an English ideology that they had initially fought against: the idea that the majority of Indians belong to “Hinduism” (6).

The legislative steps carried out by the BJP in 2019, under the guise of making it easier for the non-Muslim victims of persecution in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan to obtain citizenship, has given a new legal force to this strategy using “Hinduness” (7). Whereas the 1955 Citizenship Act was based on the right to land according to which the lower caste majority, as well as Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains, who are now administratively considered as “Hindus”, and the Christians as non-Hindu Indian citizens; the Muslims, who are not considered complete citizens according to this new law and who, according to the BJP, are the “marginal elements” of Indian society, now fall into the category of undesirable foreigners or second-class citizens. It should be noted that the decrees to implement this law were issued very recently, in March 2024, in the very context of the intensification of populist and racialised repression (8) in the run-up to the general elections.

If we look at the figures again, the fact (on which the Fondation Jaurès text focuses) that the highest caste, the Brahmins, occupies the highest position in the hierarchy of power even though it represents only 3.5% of the population, it is the tree that hides the forest. The real problem is rather that the 10% who form the upper castes occupy 90% of the political, juridical, academic and socially valued positions,

Meanwhile, untouchability persists across India; 71% of Dalit farmers are landless; 65% of all crimes are committed against Dalits; less than 9% of jobs in the national media are held by lower castes; Dalits and the tribal people account for less than 9% of the faculty in the branches of India’s prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and Indian Institute of Management (IIM). There are hardly any lower caste members in the present central government, and hardly any Dalits in provincial governments. The upper caste minority is still ruling over the lower caste majority using the state machinery, the judiciary, and the police as instruments.” (9)

 In other words, 90% of the Indian population still belongs to the lower castes (the backward castes, tribals, and Dalits), whether or not they are declared “Hindus”, and mostly lives in conditions of poverty and exploitation. These are the same Dalits and lower castes who were decimated during the Covid 19 pandemic, which was disastrously managed by Modi’s party (10). These percentages are known but are not published officially, as the Indian state has refused to make public the censuses by caste since 1931, including the latest, which dates from 2011—“At the same time, the Indian government refuses to conduct a caste census and it is holding back the existing caste census data.”

One obviously wonders why this majority does not reverse the BJP’s domination and ensure the success of the opposition. The first answer (pointed out by the Fondation Jean Jaurès) is that in terms of the number of votes, the opposition would win if it were able to unify its electorate; but as we have seen in the case of the Congress party since independence and as Dwivedi and Mohan remind us (11), this is an opposition that has never been unified. 

The second, more important, and also very present in the book we are discussing, is that its main representatives belong for the most part to the upper castes of “Hinduism” and are incapable of being the voice of the lower castes who therefore do not recognise themselves in the Congress party. 

The third is that Hindu identity, while privileging these castes, is the dominant ideology in education, culture and the media, and that, based on hatred of the other (Muslims, Christians, Europeans), it causes the majority and the poorest part of the population to be won over by this cultural nationalism, thus favouring the party that gives the most extreme version of it to the detriment of the moderate version carried by the Left (12), even if this nationalist party, which has been in power for ten years, brings them nearly nothing politically (13): It is the Indian version of the very same current advantage of all right-wing ideologies. 

And fourthly, let’s not forget that the BJP’s hold on power is also based on violent police repression, the arrest of opponents, incitement to murder and electoral fraud; which shows that ‘electoral’ success is only guaranteed by destroying democracy (14); and all this comes with the blessing of Western governments, which view very positively the fact that India is seeking to reduce its dependence on Russia and are turning towards them, including for arms supplies (15). Translated into a speech at the Elysée Palace [official residence of the French presidency], this is called “our common attachment to democracy, freedom, equality, fraternity and justice” (16).  

Hinduism, a European construct turned neo-colonial post-fascist ideology

It is certainly not easy to give up the idea that Hinduism is the world’s third-largest religion, with a billion followers, and that it is the foundation of Indian cultural identity. Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan’s radical critique of Hinduism is based on the study of this very construction, which offers a rich perspective on colonisation, its post-colonial continuation and the possibility of genuine decolonisation. 

As the desire of Modi’s party to rename India in Hindi as Bharat indicates that the history of the subcontinent has very largely developed under a foreign name: the Persians used the name “Hindus” for the people located in the valley of the river Sindu, which the Greeks therefore named Indus at the time of Alexander’s campaign, and the Arabs as Al Hind. It was in this continuation that, Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution points out, that the English colonisers then used the word “Hindu”—“In the nineteenth century, Indologists and British colonial administrators were the first to use ‘Hindu’ in a loose but consistent fashion to refer to the people of the whole of the Indian subcontinent; and, more rarely to speak about the customs of the upper castes, especially the Brahmins”. (17)

While the authors consider that “Hinduism” was invented mainly in India and at the beginning of the twentieth century, we must insist on its European invention during the nineteenth century, which also appears in the book at times. Firstly, the combined development of philology and the philosophy of history led to the elaboration of a genesis of European languages from Sanskrit and to the admiring recognition of the metaphysical value of the Vedas, translated, commented on and considered as one of the major sources of Greek philosophy: Thus, Europe found outside itself, in India, the very source of its identity. 

Secondly, the same philosophy of history, extending towards the world with the idea of nation which was born from out of the French Revolution came to identify each people with a territory; freedom of belief and the right of peoples to draw up their own constitution thus became the right of peoples to assert their religious conception of freedom upon their territory. For Hegel, India is by definition “Hindu”, just as Europe is Christian (18). In this context, it is very clear that Hinduism is the spiritual version of a social and political system based on a negative conception of freedom, which turns freedom into natural inequality and servitude. The result is a virulent critique of the caste system, which is clearly inseparable from the Brahminical religion, and the European-centric idea that India is condemned to a cultural archaism that requires its majority population to adhere to the very “Hindu” belief that radically alienates them. Marx followed this line, as did Weber at the beginning of the twentieth century, who stressed that the Vedas already clearly expressed the Brahmins’ desire to monopolise all material wealth and judged Indian social organisation to be totally irrational. 

If we continue with the Indian context described by our authors, it is clear that at the beginning of the twentieth century the Indian population was in no way imbued with this European conception of their country: a report by the English census commission in 1921 noted that “no Indian is familiar with the term ‘Hindu’ as applied to his religion” (19). More precisely, what these censuses (which have not been officially published since 1931 as we noted) show is that only the upper castes adhere to their religion (which they themselves still do not call Hinduism) and thus to the legitimacy of the caste system. The conferences of 1930 - 1932 saw the British frankly doubt the possibility of continuing to rely on this traditional elite and their desire to turn towards the demands of the lower castes, in particular their demand for a separate electorate allowing them fair parliamentary representation; and this despite the resistance of Gandhi and the Congress Party. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, one of the few Dalits who had managed higher education (higher than all his upper caste contemporaries), some of them abroad including at Colombia University and London School of Economics, became an important interlocutor with the colonial administration. 

The authors highlight the many differences between Ambedkar and Gandhi. Gandhi refused to allow Dalits to form a separate electorate because he saw, in his words, “I sense the injection of a poison that is calculated to destroy Hinduism” and claiming that “There is a subtle something—quite indefinable—in Hinduism which keeps them [the lower caste people] in it even in spite of themselves”. This “subtle something” has all of the “horror” (20), we read in the book, of a supposed adhesion of the majority population to the racism of which they are the victims; it transposes well in India the European enlistment of the whole Indian population by Hinduism, and opens the falsely subtle way that the superior castes could take to reassure their domination: In fact, Gandhi used his immense influence to ensure that this path was accepted not only by the Congress party, but also by the population, by beginning a long period of fasting to convince the population, which received a great deal of media coverage. However, the energy that Gandhi had expended in the creation of “Hinduism”, including in the form of passive resistance, Ambedkar expended in the service of the lower caste majority. He wrote an unambiguous work, The Annihilation of Caste. 

For Ambedkar, this annihilation had one condition, namely the break between Dalits and Hinduism, through their conversion to Buddhism, a minority religion but one that is explicitly based on the dignity of every human being. He himself converted to Buddhism (21) and organised collective conversions, and this movement would have continued had it not simply been restricted by Modi’s party (22). Still the Dalit movement continues, particularly in the form of the “Bhim army”, which refers directly to Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and played a major role in the student protest against the 2019 constitutional amendment – which was suppressed by the police. 

The Indian constitution drafted at the time of Independence owes its preamble and certain articles clearly affirming the principles of a modern democracy respecting human rights to Dr Ambedkar, who was Chairman of the Drafting Committee: Equality of citizens, respect for freedom of belief, fraternity. On the other hand, it owes the Congress Party its articles affirming the “well-being of Hindus” and ensuring the de facto domination of Hinduism over the entire population: The imposition of Hindi language and “cow protection”, which, by classifying any deviation from the Hindu dietary code as a crime, serves as a tool for police repression and violent acts perpetrated by Hindu militias against Christians and Muslims in many states (23); the same constitutional reference to Hinduism legitimises a morality militia or police force equipped with all the latest technological means to track down and punish any deviation by the lower castes from the religious codes that oppress them (prohibition of inter-caste or inter-religious marriage, control of women’s subordination and sexuality etc.); the repression of any egalitarian demands also takes the form of religious sanctions (24).

We can now take stock of the difference between the Vedic religion or Brahmanism, Hinduism and “Hinduness”. An openly discriminatory Vedic religion eventually became a falsely national “religion”, before rebasing the domination of the lower castes on the biological racialism of the nineteenth century (25). The paramilitary group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), founded in 1925 and openly pro-Nazi (26), has survived to the present day: Modi was a member, the movement is a violent ally of the BJP, and the police give it free rein to carry out criminal acts (often veritable pogroms (27)) against Muslims, Christians, Tribals as the heirs of minority sections of the Marxist left. 

While the European ideology of the nineteenth century, which identified a people and a religion, was also based on the principle that only Europe really had a history, while Asia was said to have remained in an eternal archaism, it now turns out that India, the caste system and the religion that supports it do indeed have a history, linked to that of Europe itself, and leading to a paradox that would be confirmed in other parts of the world that have undergone modern colonisation: Populist nationalism ensures its political success by nurturing a mythical return to pre-colonial traditions, which is however inseparable from the European versions of this past, as well as a hatred of Europe, which is however inseparable from the worst European nationalism (28). India retains a specificity in the fact that European identity itself was constructed by taking it as Europe’s historical and philological source, hence the “perfect” agreement between the Aryan doctrine of Nazism and that of pro-Nazi Hinduism, and this very specificity contributes to making the country “the most important hub of all extreme right-wing movements in the world” (29). 

Decolonising India

It is easy to understand why Dwivedi and Mohan distance themselves so frankly from a postcolonialism that aims to reject all European philosophical, legal and cultural values in favour of ‘Hindu’ cultural identity. Being the readers of Frantz Fanon and Achille Mbembe, they are under no illusion that the most common version of postcolonialism is neocolonialism: The dominant elite of an officially decolonised country encourages the crystallisation of an ante-colonial ethnic identity, while at the same time dividing it between the purest of representatives of that ethnicity – the elite itself – and those it dominates. In this context, the part of the elite that opposes post-colonial authoritarianism shares its presuppositions. In India, for example, the academic community, which is overwhelmingly drawn from the upper castes, values Hinduism and Hindi, the “recently invented Sanskritised language” (30) and claims to be liberating the country from the Western systems on which it is dependent (31).

The authors unfold the Indian version of the paradoxes of this false ‘de-post-colonial’ project (32). It is based on a “speculative archaeology” that constructs a pre-colonial past free of all the impurities of recent history, and with them the impurity of any surviving material evidence - in short, an “idyllic a priori” (33) that eliminates any memory specific to the lower castes. De-post-colonial critique of Eurocentrism helps to forge a cultural identity that denies the real diversity of cultures and languages specific to India. It attributes the criticisable aspect of caste only to European colonisation (in the form of “internal colonialism”), while euphemising it in European terms (the system then becomes “that of vertical diversity”), and reinforcing it by the constant reference to Gandhi's “paternal authority”. It also hovers over post-colonial feminism, dominated by intellectuals who were first upper caste and then women, in a country where caste discrimination is more violent than gender discrimination, and is most often at its source; this feminism therefore interprets crimes against Dalit women as patriarchal phenomena while rejecting as a western import the theory of intersectionality, which would indicate that these women are victims of both their gender status and their caste. As a result, low-caste students have deserted gender studies departments, feminism has split along caste lines (academic, Dalit, Muslim), and Dalit feminism is accused of working for the Hindu right by targeting the elitist upper caste left (34). In all of this, so-called postcolonial thought has reinforced the ideological structure of the BJP’s Hinduism, while enabling its dissemination in schools and universities. 

Once it is understood that there is only a mythical return to the pre-colonial past, that this very return is impregnated with Western culture, even in the very concept of ethnic ‘purity’, once it is assumed that a postcolonial culture, including in Europe, is, as A. Mbembe says, ‘an interlocking of forms, signs and language’, it also becomes clear, as A. Mbembe writes, “postcolonial thought is not anti-European thought; on the contrary, it is the product of the encounter between Europe and the worlds it once possessed” (35). In other words, true decolonialisation implies another hybridization of local and Western concepts, this time genuinely for the benefit of the dominated population. 

The task of Dwivedi and Mohan is therefore as follows (36): decolonising India means dethroning Gandhi, by inventing these new hybrid concepts in the service of truth, and releasing the virtuality of a democracy to come, which implies no more and no less than a new conception of revolution as the only real outcome of decolonisation. 

Dethroning Gandhi

The Gandhi who was fasting to rally as much support as possible for the defence of the upper castes and in order to oppose fair representation of the Dalits in the assembly is not the Gandhi we are used to in Europe. Rather, we know the man who theorised non-violence in the service of India’s independence, and placed this independence, both spiritual and political (swaraj understood as “own rule”), at the heart of modern Indian democracy. But establishing that Gandhi’s thought as a coherent edifice that proved essential in the construction of Hinduism and the maintenance of the caste system was precisely the thread running through the reflections of Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan in a previous work, not yet translated into French, Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics (37).

Gandhi’s thought, this book shows, is a “hypophysics” that merges natural law and moral law, and thus anchors the traditional values of Hinduism in nature itself, 

Were we to state that existence is coextensive with value, this would imply the assumption of a separation of existence and value in thought; it is the appearance of such a separation that Gandhi finds as the falsity called ‘civilization’, and its cure calls for a system which would will the truth in which existence and value are one. Such a system, we call hypophysics, following Kant. (38)

Each being thus has its place in a natural order, and its existence is identical to its value. All beings participate equally in the universal harmony, so that what appears unequal and hierarchical is not fundamentally so: For example, it is up to the lower castes to work at tasks that are wrongly judged to be vile, but which correspond to their function in a whole that transcends them and humanity. This is how Gandhi conceived of equality between the castes. 

Natural and moral law are also divine, because the Creator is no different from his creations. Nature is therefore sacralised and the sacred naturalised. Unlike other beings, including animals, it is up to humanity to be able to deviate from the divine law by over-acting in a way that seems to give it surplus value, but which in fact causes it to lose its rightful place in the order of the whole: so, according to Gandhi's “scalology” (39), what rises on the human scale by stepping out of its given condition falls down from the divine scale. 

This departure from nature, which Westerners call “civilisation” and “history”, is in fact, according to Gandhi, an interruption in the course of things, a detachment from their existence and value (40). This civilisation takes a catastrophic turn with modern western science, which no longer considers natural laws as anything other than the laws governing matter alone, so that physics becomes entirely detached from morality; at the same time, modern western technology makes human over-action exponential: Whereas every being is designed to live at its own pace, technology is dedicated to an indefinite and uncontrollable acceleration, the emblem of which is the train, the development of which Gandhi rejected in India, contrasting it with the right rhythm of walking and pilgrimage. This displacement, which takes the form of a denaturalisation, implies an unleashing of forces and violence that the State, whether colonial or not, concentrates. Human laws then play a full part in this denaturalisation and violence.

In contrast, the east is, again according to Gandhi, the natural place where humanity is still in harmony with nature: each person’s value remains inherent in his or her birth, the hereditary social order is perpetuated in what the authors call a “ceremonial society” where history does not exist, where acts are ritualised, where each person knows his or her place and lives according to his or her own rhythm, embodied above all by the uneventful slowness of village life in India, mythologised by Gandhi—“a ceremonial society is the very observance of the value that is nature” (41).

It turns out that ‘non-violence’ or ‘passive resistance’ is not a political technique invented against English colonial rule and for the emancipation of India: it is a Hindu way of being in tune with Being itself. It is only ‘passive’ in a negative sense, “The lull of an inebriated mind does not imply the passive nor does the silence observed by the fasting passive resister” (42). That is, passive force does not follow upon the unleashing of active forces, causing detachment from nature, which is what Europe’s political and technical over-action implies. It is not, therefore, a simple reaction that uses a certain amount of power that is inferior or superior to that which opposes it; it is, as a force of nature and of God, infinitely superior to any active force. In other words, no deliberate violence can overcome it. Admittedly, man must make an effort on his own to exercise this resistance: he must not violate the natural order, he must restrain himself, keep in his place; but as this place is his own, non-violence (ahimsa) is not an act but a constant state of coherence and cohesion with oneself, which is also the cohesion of one’s existence and value: it is the good itself, from which the wise man (satyagrahi) never leaves. In short, “passive resistance” is as natural as it is moral, it is hypophysical; or again, disobedience to human laws is nothing other than unfailing obedience to divine law, or to truth (satyagraha)—“passive resistance is the permanent state of men who adhere to the Law that is Truth, resisting the laws of men, or the reign of the West”. (43) 

As Gandhi and Philosophy points out, this adherence to truth is what is central to Gandhi: to resist means to grasp the purely (moral) nature of things, to hold on to it, and to remain within it: Non-violent non-cooperation with state violence, withdrawing from all events, including those to which non-violence is subjected, is therefore tantamount to claustration in an impregnable truth similar to the confinement of Ulysses and his companions in the isolated paradise of Calypso’s island: Gandhi’s thought is a “calypsology”—

The reciprocal immurement of means and ends is the matter of the discipline of calypsology; calypsology is the indistinguishability of means and ends from one another in such a way that the room for polynomia – that there can be several regularities for the same thing – is extinguished. (44)

For Gandhi, the understanding of order is the true faith, the true love of God, and also the ultimate science, which does not hesitate to convert contemporary physics into hypophysics, in other words to recognise in it a moral intuition, and this is how he assimilates the passive force contained in nature into the cohesive force of atoms in Einstein’s physics. 

Truth then also becomes an integral political programme, since it is a question of destroying the comprending law (45) that condenses all man’s deviations from nature, and therefore political violence, to allow the advent of another comprehending law, that of God. Against Marxist materialism, Nehru’s socialism, or the modern claims of the lower castes, all of which Gandhi saw as dependent on a “false” civilisation, he conceived of a true State and society, coinciding with the natural permanence of Indian organisation, the fidelity of all castes to religious and social codes, and the total exposure of everyone’s moral life, since no act can escape God or truth. Hostile to inter-caste marriages, which he deemed incestuous, and taking up the usual post-colonial inversion of the category of superstition, Gandhi thus clearly stated that he did not “consider the castes to be a harmful institution”, and that the “superstitions from the West” must be resisted. 

Setting the record straight

The philosophers Dwivedi and Mohan agree with the slogan of the low-caste activists, “speak truth to power”, but they also ask themselves: 

What happens when power itself speaks of the whole truth and nothing but the truth. When power speaks the truth, speech itself would wear Columbian neckties, and politics would become a whited sepulchre. The criticalisation of speaking-the-truth has been reached in India, which makes the clamour about post-truth redundant. (46)

What happens when this truth coincides with the Hindu faith, just as much as with the natural and divine law that gives a speculative framework to Hinduism in Gandhi’s philosophy, and just as much with a false science that finds specific medicinal virtues in cow urine, and sees in the aerial journeys of the Vedic gods the origin of aviation? The real thing, then, is nothing more than a hoax - theological, scientific, cultural, political and, ultimately concerned with policing. 

Fighting for the re-establishment of truth is a critical task, in the Kantian sense of the term: it is a matter of encouraging the advent of a rational and emancipatory community that frees the population from the chimerical truths of power, which is the very condition of democracy. The philosophical task of defending truth in the here and now is thus opposed to religious elegiac poetry in the service of power, and to a discourse based on faith in freedom after death (47). So, the concept of “hypophysics”, the identification between nature and morality, the sacralisation of nature and the naturalisation of the sacred, is a Kantian concept that was first applied to Gandhi’s philosophy and then to Hinduism. It is the very structure of the “hoax”, ranging from the legitimisation of the hereditary status of Indians, whose existence has a place and a moral significance from birth, to the mediatisation of Hindu miracles (for example in 1995, the statues of Ganesha began to drink milk), via the religious charisma of political leaders from Gandhi to Modi. Since being is value, those who have no value miraculously disappear, and “disappearance” is indeed the official term attributed to the mass murders of Muslims and Dalits, as well as to the imprisonment of intellectuals and activists. To criticise this hoax is to show the theological-political fusion that underpins it and to re-establish the difference between the physical, the moral and the political. 

However, as Hannah Arendt has shown, power also means presenting as self-evident what is obviously not true, by repeating it long enough to build up a mass ready to believe anything: it does not substitute the false for the true but destroys the difference between the true and the false. In this context, say our authors, we are in a state of danger and that thinking is a luxury that can be poisonous, which encourages the repression of intellectuals, 

There is a minority of power-hungry people around the world speaking in this form today—action-against-thinking—in Europe and the Americas, all the way from the stock markets to the war machinery. It is a good moment for the world to pause and think. Further, the big lie is the mark of all totalitarian systems: to ‘repeat long enough the lie’ that we are in a state of danger and that thinking is a luxury that can be poisonous. (48)

The task of re-establishing truth, then, is more than a critical one: It requires deconstruction in the most rigorous sense of the term; Dwivedi and Mohan are clearly situating themselves in the wake of the work of Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. The aim is to show how the truth has been sealed like a mythical secret that serves as a constant, but also as empty, a reference for the Hindu hoax. This ‘isolation’ of the truth, which continues to function socially in the disconnection between the upper and lower castes, essential to the domination of one over the other, has also been called calypsology by our authors since their work on Gandhi: It encloses the truth as if in an island, and also as if in a camp authorising other camps in which those who oppose them are locked up. 

But this truth can be deconstructed: it is only ever such in the differences that it produces and that cannot be controlled, including by power, even totalitarian power: the latter deconstructs itself by revealing what its constructions mask, namely the incompatible diversities of Indian society, their non-adherence to a single faith or to the uniqueness of one “nation”. It is doomed to defend a faith that is not a faith, a truth that does not come to be a truth. This deconstruction, as we have seen earlier, is also that was at work on Gandhi’s thought in Gandhi and Philosophy; it is also the deconstruction of postcolonialism, caught between its affirmation of the purity of Hinduism and its contamination by European concepts, and achieving only an elitist critique of discrimination. 

Because it is deconstructive, this re-establishment of the truth is also historiographical, and thus truly decolonial: It is a question of fighting against a falsely postcolonial model of history that perpetuates the history of the victors, and does no more than affirm that, that which has always been believed to be true must continue to be taken as true (49); and it is a question of giving back to the dominated castes their history, another history, reminding us that the unity of a nation is always constructed, that all civilisations are “bastard”, that they have no common ancestor, no assignable origin,

The ancestral model of historiography conserves the image of the common ancestor across all the changes it encounters by treating the bastards among the common ancestors (the so-called Greeks were the cultural bastards of Egyptians, Sumerians, Afghans, and those who came from Ghana and Timbuktu among other locations of Africa) through the narrative tools of ‘nuances’ and the logic of exceptions and contingencies. That is, whenever things and events do not fit the common ancestor—such things are plenty—they are adjusted to the margins of historiography through the excuse that these are merely the exceptions. The ancestral model of history in most cases tells a tale of declines, and its politics projects the will to restore the ancient glory, such as ‘make America great again’. (50)

From then on, history can stop repeating itself, and make way for the advent of something new – a diversant community, and therefore also a community without a community, still to come. 

This future community implies the convergence, against oppression, of movements for the emancipation of lower castes in the name of freedom and if movements for the defence of intellectuals in the name of truth (51). So, to be a philosopher today is to be 

an ambulance driver, a primary school teacher in a village, a carrier of the dead, recipient of the beatings of the fascists, agitator, the agonist of unnamable sorrow which snatches the soul away from the call of the dead to mourn for them because there are worse days still ahead. (52)

It also means reactivating old words (anastasis, reason) or inventing hybrid words to account for the confiscation of truth (hypophysics, calypsology, comprehending law); it means fighting on a daily basis to change the content of education and university discourse, to save and disseminate the memory of the lower castes, to safeguard the Western tools for defending equality and citizenship based on the right to land, to write about the activists under arrest and the racist pogroms, and to do all this on campuses, in the free media that still exist and, above all, in foreign media and social networks. 

But from then on, what we are thinking about philosophically and preparing for politically is a revolution, a revolution different from those that have already taken place and cannot be repeated. 

Revolutionising India: Anastasis

The word “revolution” is one of those that must be both reactivated and reinvented, and therefore maintained,

since it is as polyvalent a word as any other word, and it signifies the defiance of authority, so long as those who defy it are the people who seek freedom. Further, revolution should be qualified and distinguished through the guidance of another concept, anastasis. (53)

In India, it still means, in the wake of Ambedkar and some strands of Marxist criticism, the annihilation of the caste, coinciding more clearly than ever with the end of Hinduism, but also on the condition that the words of the great figures of independence struggle are not simply repeated. For India is already sick of its repetition: This pathology is precisely that of the “ceremonial society” (54), which is based on the ritualisation of the same behaviours, on a hypophysics that asserts that everyone must remain what they were born to be, on a history that is reduced to the commemoration of founding mythical events, so that there are no more events. The revolution, then, first needs to be written down, in the sense that writing is already a break with the ceremony, central to Indian education and even to Indian postcolonial thought, of reading and quoting the same books; it is the inscription of something new. And in this context, as our authors quote Horace, “Those who have dared to begin are already half done” (55).

Just as revolution cannot be repeated, it cannot coincide with simple resistance (56). Rather, it is resistance that is the repeated: All forms of militancy or activism are justified in its name, ever since it was idealised in the struggle against Nazism in Europe and in the struggle for Independence in India, particularly in the form of Gandhi’s ‘passive resistance’. The problem is that resistance is immediately valued as a form of existence, or even as identical to existence: the two terms are derived from the same root sistere, the same “holding firm” in the world. On this basis, resistance can become “hypophysical”: existing is a value, a way of remaining what we are, including in the physical interplay of natural forces that make each and every body resist the others. Politically, then, resistance is limited to ‘being against’, which does not yet mean taking action, but rather offering regulation to what exists already by preventing it from collapsing: resistance to the authoritarian version of neo-liberalism maintains it by limiting its destructive action against society, as shown by the ‘resistant nationalism’ occupying the centre-left of the political spectrum in India. 

Even when resistance becomes civil disobedience, it remains ineffective as long as it is based (as in Gandhi’s case) on general obedience to the law (in Gandhi’s case, apparently the natural and divine law, in reality the law of the caste system): as long as it is not complete and active disobedience—“Unless it tends towards universal disobedience—of all norms, codes, rules, constructs that keep the oppressive system intact—‘civil disobedience’ will eventually dissipate”. (57) On the one hand, then, it is a question of rehabilitating action, which is neither Gandhian non-action, nor ritual activity, nor the neo-liberal apology of ‘doing’ which authoritatively condemns all activism and does not consider the work of the underprivileged classes as ‘doing’, nor the populist reaction on which the Indian government is counting, but which is active reflection and thoughtful action. And the latter is complete, because it aims for a new, truly common law, based on equality and freedom, and not on obedience. 

Revolution is no more based on tolerance, conceived as an absolute, than it is on resistance (58). In fact, resistance and tolerance are identical, and this is what Gandhi’s passive resistance shows, implying the capacity to tolerate all forms of suffering and oppression. Rather, it must be said that every living being has a limited degree of tolerance, in other words of assent and dissent. This is why, in the face of the current oppression in India, involving mass murders and the ‘disappearance’ of intellectuals, Dwivedi and Mohan advocate an assent to thought and truth implying dissent or radical intolerance to everything that attacks thought and freedom, and therefore to the Indian state as it has become – and always has been. 

The fact is that the Indian state is simply no longer fulfilling its role as a state, which is to protect the people, its minorities, whatever their religion or degree of poverty, and each and every one of its members (59). On the contrary, the link between the BJP and the RSS militias, the inaction of the police during the pogroms, the aggression against opponents, the number of deaths during the pandemic period, the amendment on citizenship which means that citizenship no longer appears to be guaranteed, all show that the State has completely failed and has lost all legitimacy. While it still formally has a democratic constitution, this has been defused without being annulled (Hannah Arendt made the same observation about the Hitler Reich, which did not bother to abolish the Weimar constitution), as is also shown by the complete abandonment of freedom of association for the lower castes, as if it were only preserved for fascist and criminal organisations,

It is only through the ratios discovered between the free associations and the assemblies for an egalitarian world, and the opposition to these actions by the mafia famiglia and the state institutions that we can diagnose the health of the Indian union. (60)

The general law in India is more like Hobbes’ state of nature than Gandhi's natural law: you have to kill to avoid being killed yourself. It then becomes necessary to change the state as well as the State, to associate against repression, or more precisely to dissolve traditional identities (and differences) in order to invent new forms of association, simply in order to become citizens collectively.

How can we come together? How can we give new forms to a new common being? According to Ambedkar, while it is politics and religion that hold out the possibility of change, the way to break with a Hinduism that is both recent and archaic could only be religious: this is how a vast movement of conversion to Buddhism was created in 1956. In 2022, such a mass conversion involving the minister Rajendra Pal Gautam led to his ouster and to the measures banning conversions. 

But we know that, Dalits’ opposition to Hindu law (dharma) also leads to their adherence to the secular values of the constitution drafted by the same Ambedkar, with rational motives and social urgency (particularly clear among Indian farmers, who regularly revolt) taking precedence over religion in the struggle for citizenship, freedom and a minimum standard of living. This is why their emancipation movements, 

Owing to their brilliance in theoretical inventions and fortitude in organisation, Dalit-Bahujans have begun to successfully mobilize despite setbacks, and they should not rest until the social transformation of India is achieved—the majority must attain adequate representation in power in all spheres and assert themselves to attain equality. (61)

Their scale, their unpredictability, their very organisation (such as that of the Bhim Army), make them ungovernable and mean that they carry within them the potential for transformation that Indian independence did not achieve, and thus become like a new, unpredictable revival of other movements (May ‘68, the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street) taking part in a transformation of the world (62).

From then on, the philosophers also had to come up with hybrid concepts that could be used to define the uncertain, and hence to think about this revolution: these were the concepts of stasis, anastasis and comprehending law.

A comprehending law is one that manages to hold together the different elements of society: the constitution, the other laws, the government, the intellectuals, the different parts of the population. When it can no longer do this, society enters a period that the Greeks called stasis, when two comprehending laws divide the city: the old one, now monopolised by the elite who still claim to represent the whole, and the new one, claimed by the lower class (63). Thus the comprehending law of the dominant castes (the Hinduism of the BJP) conflicts with the constitutional law of the equality of citizens; it becomes openly partial, one-sided, its theological-natural foundation proving to be a mere gesture of self-sacralization and self-racialization: Its unity is not one either, as is shown by the combination of this religious law and that of authoritarian neo-liberalism.

The revolution then takes the form of an anastasis, in other words a popular movement that puts an end to the “stasis” by changing the comprehending law, and more precisely by moving towards a comprehending democratic law. This law does not understand all the elements of society in the same sense as the traditional law, or as its oppressive version during the previous crisis: it does not totalise them and does not quite unify them: it leaves them disjointed and frees them, in other words, it only understands them in a way that is itself “anastatic”, or remains “polynomial” (64). And this is how we should define democracy, after Jean-Luc Nancy (65), who is a great inspiration to Dwivedi and Mohan, like Mbembe: democracy has a regime that articulates the conditions of its deployment, but it is not itself a regime: it is rather the determined existence of an indefinite number of spheres of existence, the place of “the exploration and sharing of freedoms given here and now” (66). In line with the constitutional promise of citizenship, it implies that each and every one of us decides not to maintain order, but to produce a common future, based certainly on different memories, but in contrast to the constant reference to a mythical past. 

Revolution as anastasis is not, then, the resurgence or even the realisation of an “idea of democracy” that would encompass and unify everything, and that would be articulated in a predefined political and social organisation (Hindu, French, Stalinist...). Nor is it a foreseeable goal, with only the means left to be determined. If it is still permissible to draw inspiration from both post-Heideggerian thought (including that of Derrida and Nancy) and that of Gandhi, it is by underlining the impasse of all thought that separates means and ends and then tries to evaluate one by the other, when there is no final end, and man, or humanity, is not such an end: Human beings are simply in the world, which in Gandhi’s case means that they really must be what they are, in Heidegger’s that they freely decide what they are, and in Derrida’s that they are open to an indeterminable future. What becomes possible, then, is to understand revolution as “conversion” (67): not in the Platonic sense of the turning of the soul towards ideas, nor in the religious sense of a change of belief, but of an indefinite convertibility of the human essence, implying the possibility of a transition to another gender, another nationality, other ways of living, and thus implying the overall possibility of a conversion to freedom. 

So the new fundamental law is yet to come and remains unpredictable, all the more so because it will always be yet to come, since it is the law of the openness of the community it institutes to the future in which that community is produced, and therefore of the overflowing of a democratic organisation that is always inadequate by a democratic promise that is always renewed. It certainly sets out the political conditions (and therefore the constitution) that enable it to invent itself freely, namely equality and freedom, but it is always overwhelmed by the simple being-with of all the citizens who make it up (and invent it by making it up). Democracy is this joint production of new rules and new forms of life or existence, plural, irreducible and indefinitely convertible, and therefore ‘inequivalent’ in Nancy’s sense - that is, singular and incomparable, impossible to hierarchise and infinitely equal. Like the revolution itself, it also implies the invention of new forms of association and new alliances. Unlike a repetitive, ceremonial society, it is entirely focused on the event of “a day unlike any other”, which can arise at any moment to usher in a time when no two days are alike. 

What remains implicit in each history needs to be articulated so that what could follow from it can be comprehended. It is also necessary to draw out the principles behind historiographical tasks of this kind to ensure that the rest of the world too may not carry on the ‘days like any other days’ beneath historiographical silences in their distinct forms […] The phrase ‘days like any other days’ often appears in fiction, only to be followed by ‘except it wasn’t’. That is, something interesting or critical takes place when the resemblance between one day and the other days is broken. A day when one says ‘except it wasn’t’ comes to be of political importance only when that day constitutes another beginning which promises freedoms to a people who had been denied freedoms for ages. (68)

Translated by MAËL MONTÉVIL

NOTES

1. See the op-ed by Dwivedi and Mohan following the elections, “In India, a lower caste revolution is underway”, Le Monde, 14 June 2024, https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2024/06/14/in-india-a-lower-caste-revolution-is-underway_6674773_23.html#

2. Emphasis added. Philippe Humbert, “L'Inde, à quatre mois des élections générales”, La Fondation Jean-Jaurès, 30 January 2024.

3. Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan, “Ce que l'hindouisme recouvre”, Esprit magazine, June 2020; “Divya Dwivedi: ‘En Inde, les minorités religieuses sont persécutées pour cacher que la vraie majorité, c'sont les castes inférieures’”, interviewed by Sophie Landrin, Le Monde, 11 February 2022. 

4. “[…] ancient history where the lower caste people were referred to as Dasyu, Dasa, Asura, Chandala, Mlechchha and so on in order to dehumanise them.” See “Cargo Cult Democracy”, Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution.

5. “The caste order is the oldest and longest lasting system of social enslavement and apartheid in human history, the oldest racism. Caste was at the origin of European racism. It was the driving force of the Indomania (as Léon Poliakov called it) which gripped European scholars and thinkers from Voltaire, Herder and Friedrich Schlegel to Humboldt, Max Müller, and Gobineau.” See “The Aryan Doctrine and the De-post-colonial” in Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution.

6. “[…] the social order, or the caste system, which reproduces itself faithfully as the only invariant of the subcontinent, must be conserved. That is, the strict observation of caste rules as a means reproduces the caste order as the end generation after generation. (Elsewhere we have called the general principle of this reproduction Calypsology). Today we hide the realities of the social order under the neologism ‘Hindu’”. See “The Courage to Begin”, and “The Obscenity of Truth: Arrest the Anti-Fascist!” in Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution. 

7. This amendment, which was much commented on by the Western press and human rights NGOs, was the subject of an article in French by Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan: “En Inde, les troubles s'explique en partie par la Constitution du pays”, Le Monde, 24 January 2020. See the article “From Protesting the CAA to Embracing the Dalit-Bahujan Position on Citizenship” in Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution.

8. See the report “India: Wanton killings, violence, and human rights abuses in Manipur”, Index Number: ASA 20/6969/2023, Amnesty International, 12 July 2023, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa20/6969/2023/en/

9. “Hidden by Hindu”, Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution. 

10. See “The Aryan Doctrine and the De-post-colonial”, “Our Wandering Senses: For the Journalists of the World” and “He Has Lit a Funeral Pyre in Everyone's Home”. See also D. Dwivedi and S. Mohan, “Community of the Forsaken”, the English text follows after the Italian “La comunità degli abbandonati”, Antinomie, 12 March 2020, https://antinomie.it/index.php/2020/03/12/la-comunita-degli-abbandonati/ 

11. See “The Aryan Doctrine and the De-post-colonial” and “Courage to Begin”.

12. See Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi, “April Theses: On Democracy, Anti-caste politics, and Marxisms in India”, Maktoob Media, 28 April 2024, https://maktoobmedia.com/india/april-theses-on-democracy-anti-caste-politics-and-marxisms-in-india 

13. Ibid.

14. See “The Obscenity of Truth: Arrest the Anti-Fascist!” and “The Macabre Measure of Dalit-Bahujan Mobilizations”, Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution.

15. See the article by Chietigj Bajpaee, “La relation Inde - Russie decline”, Conflits magazine, 13 March 2024.

16.  Elysée Palace website, 29 January 2024.

17. “Hidden By Hindu”, Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution.  

18. This “theologised history” is discussed in the article "Looming Objects and the Ancestral Model of Historiography"; the article “The Aryan Doctrine...” sees it as the source of “national unity” – “It is through the circularity of definitions—‘the ancient Greeks were us and we are now the ancient Greeks’—and the circulation of ‘a narrowly European outlook’ that ‘Europe’ meditates on itself. This circularity which circulates the intangible vapour of ‘the European’ can be found foremost in Hegel’s art history and Heidegger’s narrative of the history of metaphysics. That is, the birth of the northern ‘European’ was in the land towards the south and in a people who did not call themselves Greek. These so-called Greeks never had anything to do with the northern ‘Europeans’.”

19. See, "What Hinduism Hides".

20. Ibid.

21. For a theory of conversions see “The Terror That Is Man”, in Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution.

22. “The Gujarat government has issued a circular clarifying that Buddhism has to be considered a separate religion and any conversions from Hinduism to Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism would require prior approval of the district magistrate concerned under the provisions of the Gujarat Freedom of Religion Act, 2003.” The Indian Express, 11 April 2024, https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/ahmedabad/buddhism-separate-religion-hindus-must-seek-permission-to-convert-says-gujarat-govt-circular-9263316/

23. See Divya Dwivedi, “En Inde, les troubles s'explique en partie par la Constitution du pays”, in Le Monde. 

24. “The Macabre Measure of Dalit-Bahujan Mobilizations”.

25. “The Obscenity of Truth: Arrest the Anti-Fascist!”.

26. D. K. Jha, “The RSS and MS Golwalkar’s undeniable links to Nazism”, The Caravan, 01 August 2021, https://caravanmagazine.in/history/rss-golwalkar-links-nazism 

27. “Who Gets to Kill Whom in the Union of India?”, Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution.

28. “At a certain moment from the nineteenth century, this common ancestor wavered between ‘Indo-Aryan’ and ‘Ancient Greeks’, as exemplified by the texts of Nietzsche. That is, the ‘common ancestor’ wavered between a model of ancestral ‘Ancient Greeks’ and European progenies or ancestral ‘Indo-Aryans’ and European progenies. While the ‘ancient Greek’ myth dominates (for better today) the imagined past of ‘Europe’, the myths of the ‘Indo-Aryan’ kind remains active through the underground participations with global Nazi-inspired organisations leading often to the RSS in India.” See “Looming Objects and the Ancestral Model of Historiography” in Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution.

29. “The Obscenity of Truth: Arrest the Anti-Fascist!”.

30. “The Aryan doctrine...”.

31. “Ce que l’hindouisme recouvre”, Esprit magazine, June 2020.

32. “The Aryan doctrine”.

33. “Idyllic a priori — It is a humorous term which was coined by Mohan. A priori in its philosophical meaning is that which is prior to experience which conditions the experience. It suggests that the idylls of the past are often used as a priori for arguments in politics and philosophy. Such idylls may never have existed or if they did they could be sustained always at the cost of many others. It was first used in a text opposing Agamben. For Giorgio Agamben, it was the era of the scholars who went to university and lived an idyllic life of freedom and held discussions. Dwivedi and Mohan showed that such idyllic eras of scholars were reserved for the elites of Italian society which exploited the labours of the poor. In the Indian context, postcolonial theory, subaltern theory, and the decolonial projects are based on the idyllic a priori of the upper castes, especially the Brahmins.” From the Glossary of Concepts by Maël Montévil, Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution.

34. “The Macabre Measure of Dalit-Bahujan Mobilizations” and “Sex and Post-colonial Family Values.”

35. Achille Mbembe, Critique de la raison nègre, Paris, Éditions La Découverte, 2013, chapter II.

36. Ibid.

37. Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan, Gandhi and Philosophy - On Theological Anti-politics, Foreword by Jean-Luc Nancy, Bloomsbury Philosophy, UK, 2019. The theses of this work are taken up in Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution: cf. in particular “The Courage to Begin” and “The Winter of Absolute Zero”.

38. Gandhi and Philosophy, p 14. See the entry “hypophysics” in “Glossary of Concepts” by M. Montévil, Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution.

39. With reference to scala naturae. “Values are gauged in accordance with scales such as speed, loudness, colour, and size; values are nothing other than nature itself at its purest, and evaluation refers to the distance from nature. We call scalology the adoption of scales to gauge the value in nature.” Gandhi and Philosophy, P32.

40. “Gandhi made a decisive intervention into the problematic of history by conceiving it in terms of a relation between two kinds of forces and he insisted that the essential domain of man was ever present. The essential domain of man is nature which is value, and is governed by passive forces. History is the disessentializing of man; it is the work of active forces. It is the chronicle of active forces erecting Babels, bringing Crete down into mere mythical remembrance, instituting the gods at Olympus, and building and ruining Rome as if it were a day’s work”. Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi, Gandhi and Philosophy, P 90.

41. “In a ceremonial society records and instruction in history are redundant. Instead of instruction one is initiated into the year-long ceremony for which only the memory of the previous year is sufficient.” See pp 92-93 in Gandhi and Philosophy. As Montévil explains, “The concept is a critical appropriation of both ethnological conceptions of tribal societies and cybernetic theories, especially autopoiesis. To repeat a society ceremonially, the society should see to it that the rules which allow the reproduction of itself as the very goal of that society. In this way it again characterises caste oppression in the works of Dwivedi and Mohan.” See the entry “ceremonial society” in “Glossary of Concepts” by M. Montévil, Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution.  

42. Gandhi and Philosophy, p 94.

43. Gandhi and Philosophy, p 171.

44. Gandhi and Philosophy, pp188 – 189. “The concept can be defined as follows: A system which deploys its means as its ends repeats itself faithfully”. See also M. Montévil, “Glossary of Concepts” Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution. Emphasis added.

45. “A society is a collection of the regularities given by little laws – of the school, the traffic, the prisons, the factories, the stables, the science labs – and the little laws are themselves gathered into a unity by the Law of laws. We shall call the little laws as the component laws and the Law of the component laws as the comprehending laws […] A certain component law – such as the law of thermodynamics which makes an engine – is distinct from the comprehending law which organizes it with other components – such as the law of automobiles.” Gandhi and Philosophy, p126

46. See Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution, “The Obscenity of truth”, “The Hoax of the Cave”, as well as “The Hindu Hoax” written with J. Reghu and first published in the Indian magazine The Caravan before being translated multiple times in many Indian languages. “The Hindu Hoax: How Upper Castes Invented a Hindu Majority”, The Caravan, 01 January 2021, https://caravanmagazine.in/religion/how-upper-castes-invented-hindu-majority. 

47. “He Has Lit a Funeral Pyre in Everyone’s Home”, Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution.  

48. “Never was a Man Treated as a Mind”, Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution.  

49. “Looming Objects and the Ancestral Model of Historiography”.

50. “Looming Objects and the Ancestral Model of Historiography”. See also Shaj Mohan, “On the Bastard Family of Deconstruction”, from “The Other Beginning of Philosophy”, Philosophy World Democracy, 20 December 2021, https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/other-beginning/on-the-bastard-family-of-deconstruction 

51. “Freedom First: Manifesto” and “Intellectual Insurgency: For Mahesh Raut”, Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution.

52. “He Has Lit a Funeral Pyre in Everyone's Home”.

53. See “Democracy and revolution”, Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution. See also Shaj Mohan “Eudaimonia For All or On Democracy: For Francesca Albanese” (text of the seminar given at Salle des Résistants, Ecole normale supérieure, on 13 December 2024), Philosophy World Democracy, 10 January 2025, https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/articles-1/eudaimonia-for-all-or-on-democracy-for-francesca-albanese 

54. “The Pathology of a Ceremonial Society” and “Romila Thapar: The Modern Among Historians”, Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution.

55. In the title of “The Courage to begin”.

56. “The Futility of ‘Resistance’, The Necessity of Revolution”, Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution.

57. Ibid.

58. See “A Great Intolerance”, Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution.

59. See “Who Gets to Kill Whom in the Union of India”.

60. See “Assemblies of Freedom: Testing the Constitution”, Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution.

61. “The Macabre Measure of Dalit-Bahujan Mobilisations”.

62. “The Current Protests in India are a Training Ground for a Break with the Past”, Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution.

63. See Nicole Loraux, La Cité divisée, Paris, Payot, 2019. And in the work cited, “The courage to Begin”, “Looming Objects and the Ancestral Model of Historiography”, “Democracy and Revolution”, “The Existential Rebellion the World Needs to Save Itself”.

64. “[…] polynomia ensures the modification of bodies for new regularities which resist and break through the established functional isolations, and functional isolations which set into the rhythms of new regularities resist the dreams of polynomia.” Gandhi and Philosophy, p174. See also the entry “polynomia” in “Glossary of Concepts” by M. Montévil, Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution.

65. See Jean-Luc Nancy, Vérité de la démocratie, Paris, Galilée, 2008.

66. See “Democracy and Revolution”. 

67. See “The Terror that is man”.

68. “Looming Objects and the Ancestral Model of Historiography”.