Why We Are Not Hindus

Description

Why we are Not Hindusis a critique of the communal-fascist and Eurocentric understanding of India and the colonization of the Indian mind. In this book Jal claims that "Hinduism" itself is not something indigenous to India, but a colonial import created by the Western Orientalists and the Indian Brahmanical elites, that the Indian nationalists unwittingly used in their political repertoire, post-1857. According to him, the recent attempts to make secular and democratic India into a mythical and phantasmagorical "Hindu Rashtra" is a sign of economic and cultural subjugation, as well as a sign of rising fascism and the complete destruction of the very idea of India. Indian fascism, so Jal claims, has grown from the terrible seed of caste divided society combined with neo-liberal policies that the Indian elites have been pursuing for the last two decades. Caste, according to him, has to be understood as: (1) enclosed and deformed class appearing as a clannish system, even as a type of gang and clique that restricts all forms of democracy, (2) a form of racism that propagates hatred, and (3) as "neurosis-psychosis" which destroys all forms of critical thinking. This book then advances for a radical form of articulating revolutionary politics based on the"Marxist-Ambedkarite" critique of caste that attacks both caste and neo-liberal capitalism. It argues for a different understanding of Indian history based onMarx’s original account of the Asiatic mode of production with caste as the foundation of this mode. This book is a consequent scientific synthesis ofMarxand Ambedkar. It claims that if the philosophy of Ambedkar is not understood, then democracy will be impossible in India.Why we are Not Hindusalso claimsthat fascism in India will have to be fought with the philosophy ofMarxist-Ambedkarism. It also talks of a new India wherein will bloom the million flowers of real democracy.

Murzban Jalis Professor at the Centre for Educational Studies, Indian Institute of Education, Pune and author ofThe Seductions of KarlMarx,Zoroastrianism: From Antiquity to the Modern PeriodandThe New Militants. Jal is both a classicalMarxistas well as a Freudian critical theorist who basis his research onMarxand Freud’s theories of alienation in late capitalist society. He combinesMarx’s theory of the reification of humanity with Freud’s theory of neurosis and psychosis. His recent claim is that the old stages theory of psychoanalysis where neurosis and psychosis are divided into two distinct stages of mental illness is now redundant. Instead he claims that both neurosis and psychosis are integrated as “neurosis-psychosis”. According to him, fascism in particular andviolencein general that the world under globalization faces, is an outcome of both late imperialism in permanent crisis as well as of “neurosis-psychosis”. Combining the understanding of neurosis-psychosis as the new disorder of contemporary society, he argues for a model of mass politics where the idea of humanity as humanity is kept centre of an alternative society where the programme of de-alienating humanity is heralded as a new philosophical and scientific discourse.