By Subhasis Chattopadhyay –
The nature of scholarship has to change to accommodate the precariat and its quest for the apparently silent God[xxxviii]. God for the human person in the here and the now is silent when a private-sector employee is forced to graciously receive the pink slip and leave her workplace for no fault of her own. This is the new form that evil and humiliation has taken. Guy Standing in his non-obscurantist book, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011) wrote of this new exploitative work ethics imposed on our youth by neo-capitalists. Standing shows how youth labour[xxxix] is being reshaped as disposable fodder for merciless 24*7 slave-labour by multi-national companies and, how inhuman impersonality has become the norm in every sphere of interaction:
“The market is the embodiment of the Darwinian metaphor, ‘the survival of the fittest’. But it has a disquieting tendency to turn strugglers into misfits and villains, to be penalised, locked up or locked out. Policies and institutions are constructed that treat everyone as potential misfits and villains. For example, those who are ‘poor’ must prove they are not ‘lazy’ or that they are sending their children to school regularly to obtain entitlement to state benefits.
The precariat hovers on the borderline, exposed to circumstances that could turn them from strugglers into deviants and loose cannons prone to listen to populist politicians and demagogues.” (Standing 155)
Standing’s wide ranging analyses includes the dumbing down of liberal education to a hotchpotch of specialised education amounting to nothing[xl]; the cult of the superficial dandy who has to smile just to keep his job and by extrapolation, of the young person who has to come to terms with the vacuity of protesting in any sphere of life since the skill-set needed to survive now have nothing to do with radical thinking. They instead involve:
“Another range of skills [which] are personal deportment skills,covered by what some sociologists call ‘emotional labour’. The ability to look good, produce a winning smile, a well-timed witticism, a cheery ‘good day’greeting, all become skills in a system of personal services.” (Standing 144)
One need not be good or holy; one only needs to look good, look holy and pretend to be young and happy no matter what. This is the age of cosmetics and simulation. Everything has to be make-believe[xli]. The Hindus call this the Kali Yuga, the era/aeon of deception. This false gaiety reflects the false gaiety of It: the Father of Lies.
#MeToo protests have died down; Frantz Fanon’s shame at being called out as a black man by a white French child in France has been accommodated within post-colonial studies as an instance of negritude, and the alt-right has been legitimised by third and fourth world scholars holding meaningless non-activist seminars about alt-right zealots in the First World. In short, we have come to terms with everything abominable on earth. Within the Indian Hindu context, structuralist scholars without praxes having fed on the regurgitated detritus of Enlightenment empiricism post-Nazi purges, have concluded that they can praise each other by writing meaninglessly on Hindu and Buddhist Tantra. For instances, the works of Hugh B. Urban[xlii] and Sarah H. Jacoby[xliii] within Hinduism and Vajrayana respectively seem scholarly but are certainly misrepresentations of the truth. Neither Hindu Tantra, nor Vajrayana is about sex. But sex as represented by Urban and Jacoby sell as only assertions about white supremacy sell in the First World, when cherry-picked from the Bible. Thus, we had white supremacists before the American Civil War and the alt-right now, who quote(d) the Bible in scholarly ways to prove the inferiority of black people and other people of colour. All of these groups have vested interests in reading holy texts to create and sustain a nomadic workforce which is forced to accept the radical lie that there is no goodness, no love other than physical love in this earth, which they come to accept as a veritable living hell. All transcendence is robbed from our youth in the here and the now. They start to believe that it is wrong to start revolutions, it is wrong to abide in and by the Truth and they start to believe that they are rats in rat races. They forget that they are created in the image of God. How can one believe in God when one has to publish some jargon-laden book or perish in academia where tenures are no longer based on merit? How can one meditate on Sri Abhinavagupta’s theology or Kierkegaard’s lonely carrying of the Cross, when one has to run from pillar to post to just get a paper on either of them published in a peer-reviewed journal when all the peers are seasoned Gradgrinds who manipulate academic tenures as insiders manipulate global stock-markets? It is within this social matrix that we begin our Biblical annotation. For that which was secret, needs to be reinterpreted for the precariat. And evil which seems unconquerable, needs to be defeated. Otherwise the likes of Richard Spencer and Niall Ferguson will soon swamp our already robbed nation. Oligarchs in India have begun suffering from radical mediocrity which is marked by superficial existence and boredom. Ironically, the radically mediocre engage in precariat like behaviour to pass their days. Everything appears the same to the radically mediocre. Any theologizing, acts of glossing or annotations have to address Indian precariats and the increasing numbers of Indian radical mediocres. The Indian precariat and the Indian radical mediocre have both given up all hope and are at risks of becoming subsumed by evil. This project therefore, seeks to fight this evil to which Indians have already fallen prey to. We are not speaking here of existential angst or ennui, but of acedia. Sage Patanjali in his Yogasutras mentions sloth as a great hindrance to seeking God. The Yogasutras were composed millennia before St. Augustine of Hippo experienced acedia.
And we choose to start with the Book of Job, for, along with the Book of Ecclesiastes, Job addresses the nihilism that the youth of today face. It is Job that resonates the most with our world in June, 2019. All seem Orwellian; Margaret Atwood seems not too off the mark in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). And W.B. Yeats’ beast has at last slouched to Jerusalem to be born. And while the world turns, the Cross has all but vanished. The sun has set in Christendom, and Tantra too has turned to black magic and both Christianity and Tantra have been devoured by the Godless in their eagerness to serve the Father of Lies.
This project is a tribute to two visionaries: Sri Avinavagupta and the late Professor John Senior. Both seem to be different but were of one accord. Both are today forgotten; yet their foresights have quickened this writer to make what they knew as true to take shape in a morally fluid world which now knows no shame in disowning God and the Holy. Before annotating and commenting on the Book of Job, we will spend some time on Sri Avinavagupta and the late Professor John Senior. Both will provide us with a new hermeneutics of action mediated through interpretation.
[xxxviii] The silence of God baffles scholars and disbelievers alike. It is a recurrent motif in literature:
“I drew them, fat and lean: then, folk at church,
From good old gossips waiting to confess
Their cribs of barrel-droppings, candle-ends,—
To the breathless fellow at the altar-foot,
Fresh from his murder, safe and sitting there
With the little children round him in a row
Of admiration, half for his beard and half
For that white anger of his victim’s son
Shaking a fist at him with one fierce arm,
Signing himself with the other because of Christ
(Whose sad face on the cross sees only this
After the passion of a thousand years)
Till some poor girl, her apron o’er her head,
(Which the intense eyes looked through) came at eve
On tiptoe, said a word, dropped in a loaf,
Her pair of earrings and a bunch of flowers
(The brute took growling), prayed, and so was gone.
I painted all, then cried “‘Tis ask and have;
Choose, for more’s ready!”—”
Robert Browning, Fra Lippo Lippi (1855), bold letters mine.
God’s silence is to be found in Hinduism too. In the life of Sri Ramakrishna Paramhamsa, we find Mother Kali silent till Sri Ramakrishna decided to end his own life unless Mother Kali appeared to him. Buddhism, which is an offshoot of Hinduism, remains silent about the Supreme Godhead not because there is no God, but because it is impossible for those without praxes to experience the Bliss of Brahman qua God. Technically, Brahman and God are not cognate textual registers.
[xxxix] Our youth in 2019, are an exploited lot. They are forced to remain in non-productive labour markets which age them before their times. This is contrary to what various socially accepted academics including Christian scholars would have us believe. To understand the dire condition of young people today watch B.A. Pass (2013) which has English subtitles and is available globally. The economy in which the youth are forced to slave is now called ‘gig economy’ which provides no social security, no health benefits and no holidays. In short, both global and Indian economies do not allow for restful reflection. God’s time has now been replaced by capitalist work ethics qua Satan’s or Pharaoh’s time. I borrow this idea from Walter Brueggemann’s Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now (2014).
[xl] There has been a concerted effort in India by hawkish intellectuals who have little original academic writing, to import the puerile American higher education principle of ‘publish or perish’. The process of dumbing down scholarship has begun in India from about 2010/11. One may have a huge corpus, which in fact, is just, semi-plagiarised jargon laden nonsense.
[xli] Satan, who has an essence which had gone bad, is just a creature who subsists on make-believe. Not for nothing Satan is the Lie. It (Satan) is a simulation of the good. It is just something which struts around pretending to be profound and falsely, happy. Within Hinduism, we find that the demoniac person exteriorly is indistinguishable from the holy person. The Bhagavad Gita has much to say about human (self) deception in Chapters 14 & 16. It is worth remembering what I have mentioned previously in this website; that there is no concept of Satan in the Christian sense within the Indic religions. Satan cannot change and become good. Within the Indic religions the possibility of change always remains. The textual registers demon and preta are not cognate. It is necessary to keep this distinction in mind.
[xlii] Urban’s books give the impression that Tantra is only about sexual perversion. Yet, the likes of Urban and Wendy Doniger rule the roost in First world academia. Their perverse readings of Hinduism seem accurate but are ideologically rooted in intellectual jingoism which have nothing to do with holiness and Hindu praxes. Urban’s reading of the Hindu Tantras will always be in vogue because of their raw sexual content. As I have pointed out in this blog-entry and elsewhere, Tantra has nothing to do with sex. One has to remember that the main mode of Hindu worship is Tantric and there is absolutely nothing sexual about this worship. Doniger of course, has translated the Kamasutra, and that is fine. Because this shows Doniger’s libidinal orientation which informs her scholarship. It is like a man reading the Bible for the Song of Songs’ denuding that book of the numinous. Had Doniger studied, for example, Vijñānabhikṣu and then practised what Vijñānabhikṣu taught, then she would not have bothered so much with the Kamasutra. I am in no way saying that Doniger, Urban and Jeffrey Kripal are less than scrupulous scholars. But their tamasic natures will not allow them to ever see anything but the erotic in everything they behold and write on. Moreover, sex sells like nothing else. If they do not write about sex, how can they be cited ad nauseam? Who on earth will then fund their conferences and bursaries? All three have seen God as perverted and a sex-crazed maniac. Yet the American Academy of Religion praises and cites them as sterling women and men of Hindu scholarship.
[xliii] Jacoby’s childlike, wide-eyed adoration of the misguided Buddhist medieval mystic Sera Khandro is again a disaster in scholarship. See my Review of Love and Liberation: Autobiographical Writings of the Tibetan Buddhist Visionary Sera Khandro , by Sarah H Jacoby. Prabuddha Bharata, vol. 124, 1 May 2019, pp. 477–478, freely accessible at philpapers.org/archive/CHAROL-8.pdf. Prabuddha Bharata is edited by Swami Narasimhananda.
Jacoby seems to believe that ‘live in’ relationships are morally sanctioned within Vajrayana. Like Doniger, Kripal and Urban mentioned in the previous endnote, Jacoby is able to get First world white religious studies’ scholars to praise her. It is because of their likes that today we have a systematic misconception about Hindu and Buddhist Tantra(s). But they peddle in pornography. And pornography is the most reprehensible, yet the most saleable qualia in the world.
On the other hand, see Gil Fronsdal’s The Buddha before Buddhism: Wisdom from the Early Teachings. Shambhala, 2016. This is a translation and commentary of the Atthakavagga. Fronsdal does not sell his soul for his few pieces of lucre. See “Interview with Gil Fronsdal.” Realizing Awakened Consciousness: Interviews with Buddhist Teachers and a New Perspective on the Mind, by Richard P. Boyle, Columbia University Press, 2015, pp. 121–135 for Fronsdal’s awareness of the libidinal and his conscious rejection of perverted human sexuality within Buddhism. Fronsdal could have chosen to focus on sex as pornography as do Doniger, Kripal, Urban and Jacoby.
Subhasis Chattopadhyay is an Assistant Professor in English at the (PG and UG) Department of English at Nara Sinha Dutt College, affiliated to the University of Calcutta, Howrah. He is a reviewer with the Ramakrishna Mission’s Prabuddha Bharata from 2010 onwards, & his reviews have been appreciated by Ivy League Presses. Till 2010 he wrote for the Catholic Herald, published from Calcutta. He has been a contributor to ICM from 2017. He was the judge of an international literary festival for two consecutive years.
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