notes of a freethinker

I guess impartial recording of history has never been a strong point for us, we either have heroes or villains. it goes without saying that all of us a humans and thus fallible. If only people understand that.

We need ideals and Utopia, and we project that need onto historical figures and ideologies, Prophets and religions.

This is interesting for someone from outside South Asia, because I've always encountered the image of Gandhi as a sort of saint exemplar who, one often gets the impression, preached non-violence, in response to which the British and everyone else realised he was right and agreed to independence.

Jinnah, in my experience, is barely heard of. The indians seem to have scored a symbolic point there. :P

Hey good article. i found YHLs comments abt gandhi to be extremely biased. Gandhi is not perfect and there are more critics of gandhi in india that one would imagine. hey we even murdered him. but i doubt he was all those imaginary things YHL claims, or that Jinnah can be absolved of all the 'side effects' of his communal politics.

Hey good article. i found YHLs comments abt gandhi to be extremely biased. Gandhi is not perfect and there are more critics of gandhi in india that one would imagine. hey we even murdered him. but i doubt he was all those imaginary things YHL claims, or that Jinnah can be absolved of all the 'side effects' of his communal politics.

I must admit that I was mildly amused to read Freethinker’s rant against me which was at best a pointless personal attack (or an attempt at a modern day cyber-witchhunt). Pointless because Gandhi, the most sanctified saint of 20th century, hardly needs any defending against little old me. Rest peacefully, ah defenders of status quo and monopolists of free thought, for so long has the world been taken in by the Gandhian fraud, that surely my attempt to expose him is not going anywhere. Freethinker keeps repeating “social conditioning” like a broken record? Well what of the social conditioning that makes a charlatan like Gandhi look like a saint world over? Surely instead of looking at me swimming downstream in the little pond of Pakistani public opinion, my efforts to expose Gandhi’s other side are more akin to swimming against an ocean current.

First of all I brought up Gandhi in response to Hades’ comment on the post on “Quaid-e-Azam” only to show that before asking Pakistanis to stop admiring Jinnah, perhaps a better candidate for his profound wisdom would the Indian population that admires Gandhi. To suggest that this was my only argument (and not the last point it really was in a long list of points) is just plain dishonest. Since Freethinker likes to speak of logical fallacies, may I suggest that this is what they refer to as “Strawman fallacy”. My arguments about Jinnah were based on his own record as a politician and a legislator. Also it did not presuppose that anyone who dislikes Jinnah automatically likes Gandhi… here too Freethinker is getting ahead of himself/herself. Nor is it “conservatism” of another kind for no one should be compartmentalized on the basis of one’s view of a historical figure- especially someone whose social conservatism is well established. Similarly if I do not allow for doubt, why would I admit so quickly that I was wrong about my initial assessment of Mumbai being the handiwork of Hindu fundamentalists?

When I first went to the US for College in 1998, I did not have any particular anti-Gandhi feelings nor did I idolize Mr. Jinnah as I do today. My view of Gandhi was generally positive- as a saintly leader of a neighboring country. Contrary to Freethinker’s assertions, there are only two references to Gandhi that I clearly remember from my schools days. The first was a chapter on “Gandhi: a great non-violent soul” in the book “First Steps in Our History” published by Ferozesons and written by K H Haye. The second reference was in a English reading book- published by Longman in England- which had a chapter comparing Martin Luther King Jr and Gandhi. So my general opinion of Gandhi – as formed in Pakistan- was net positive despite all the “social conditioning”. On my first day at Rutgers, I sat next to an Indian who introduced himself as Jignesh Gandhi. My first question to him was if he was related to the “great” Mahatma Gandhi and to my great disappointment he said no.

To accuse me of “social conditioning” might work as an occam’s razor but it certainly is not a proper explanation for why I have written so often about Gandhi’s racism, casteism or misogyny. Freethinker should have just asked me instead of going through the trouble of psychoanalyzing someone Freethinker doesn’t know or has never met. Furthermore, Freethinker is being less than honest when he claims that Pakistani textbooks talk about “Khilafat Movement” as a negative. It is not described as disastrous but is shown to be a great movement that set the ball rolling for the Khilafat Movement. Also most Pakistani textbooks fail to mention that Jinnah did not support the Khilafat Movement.

Now let us come to the question at hand: Why should/shouldn’t there be a critique of Gandhi? The issue here is not that I am feeding into the appetite of “patriotic bigots” for anti-Gandhi critiques. Most “patriotic bigots” I know of are not very concerned about Gandhi. I am yet to find a decent critique of Gandhi from our Pakistani right wingers. To them it does not make a difference whether Gandhi is admired world over. It makes a difference to me though as a citizen of the world - I am merely following Gandhi’s own advice: be the change that you want to see in the world. I want to see Gandhi’s other side getting as much press as his saintliness. I am probably the only Pakistani who has put up these arguments against Gandhi. All other major Gandhi-bashers are either from the west or from India itself. M N Roy and Dr. Ambedkar cannot be accused of being socially conditioned by Pakistani textbooks now can they? Nor would Arthur Koestler or Richard Grenier… I name names only because it seems important to freethinker (freethinker’s argument is essentially based on “Appeal to Authority” fallacy). The picture painted by British historian Alex Von Tunzelman I suspect had nothing to do with a Pakistani textbook.

My critique of Gandhi is directed at only one end: to balance out what I perceive to be a hagiographic account of a Machiavellian politician who was far from what is made of him. Is there anything wrong with that objective? If one-sided hogwash like the Gandhi the Movie can be presented as history, why should I not give an account of the other side of Gandhi? If there is a “dualism” here it has been drummed into us by movies like Gandhi. After all the movie went out of its way to create a villain out of Jinnah didn’t it?

In my post to the author, I admitted that I am neither ready nor willing to see the more internationally established view of Gandhi. Why should I argue the other side’s brief? My objective is to show only that side of Gandhi which has been deliberately hidden from the world- why then should I waste my time repeating hagiographic hogwash that the world has been subjected for so long? My points are:

1. Gandhi believed in racial purity. In South Africa all of his activities were predicated on Indian racial superiority to Africans and not – as is commonly perceived- on Indian racial equality with whites.
2. Gandhi believed in caste based division of humanity. He believed that Hindu caste system was the natural military organization of humanity. Despite all the propaganda about his efforts to uplift the “harijans”, Dr. Ambedkar, the great author of the Indian constitution, found him patronizing and an outright protector of the evils of caste system that are deeply trenched in Hinduism. The quotes I put up did not speak of any equality of castes contrary to freethinker’s allegations. (Freethinker wants us to believe that there is some sort of inherent equality in relegating one caste to toilet cleaning irrevocably and the other caste to worshiping god and yet another to fighting wars- talk about confirmation bias).
3. Gandhi’s views on women were distasteful to the say the least. These bear close resemblance to those Taliban today.
4. Gandhi brought religion into politics. Before Gandhi brought religion into politics, nationalists like Jinnah, CR Das, Motilal Nehru etc were well on their way to creating grounds for a secular and united dominion of India which would be modeled on Canadian or Australian lines. Gandhi through his support for Khilafat Movement made religious identities non-negotiable. Had Gandhi not come onto the scene, India would be a self governing dominion as early as 1925 in my opinion.

These are my points. I have argued them by backing them up with facts and sources. Yes we are hard wired for confirmation bias. Damn straight. It is this confirmation bias that forces Freethinker look for “social conditioning” not take on the merits of the argument. But are we always going to hide behind this essential defect in human design and not take a critique for what it is?

Take for example Freethinker’s treatment of my description of Gandhi’s offer of premiership as an attempted “bribe” to Jinnah. Freethinker chides me for not taking it as a last desperate attempt instead-there you have my confirmation bias coming in the way again. By the time that this “last desperate offer” came about, the essential point of dispute was already plain: it was the question of interpretation of groupings clause of the cabinet mission plan. If Gandhi was really desperate, he would have done the right thing and agreed to the proper legal interpretation of the grouping clause which both the Cabinet Mission Plan and all leading legal minds of India had given to it. He didn’t need to do something as drastic as give the premiership to someone as disliked by the Congress as Jinnah. So it was a desperate move alright- move to bribe the one man who was held by all of his contemporaries including Gandhi himself to be the most incorruptible politician in South Asia can only be described as desperate. (The first time I had it described as a “bribe” was when I sat reading a book on Jinnah in a youth hostel while trekking through Northern California. An Indian Hindu who was bunking in the same hall said, “that is a good choice. Jinnah never accepted Gandhi’s bribe of pm-ship. He was not power hungry like Nehru or Gandhi” – I suppose he too was magically a victim of Pakistani social conditioning and confirmation bias).

The reason why Freethinker chose to attack me and my supposed social conditioning, my lack of doubt, my Pakistani confirmation bias and so on and so forth is because Freethinker must have realized that responding on the merits of the argument is not possible. The truth is that Gandhi was racist, Gandhi was casteist and Gandhi was a misogynist (on the issue of Gandhi’s misogyny, please do read Aisha Sarwari’s “Gandhi in the handmaid’s tail”). And all the claims about Gandhi’s special insights on “nature of self” and “sexuality” (presumably like those that made him sleep naked with young girls to test his Brahmacharya resolve) or “satyagraha” etc are not valid counter arguments. I hate to break it to freethinker but Gandhi was neither an environmentalist nor an anarchist. If anything Gandhi’s true role in history has been like a vaccine introduced into the body of the independence movement. He constituted and head up the right wing within the Congress. Gandhi had sided with the British on the issue of Bhagat Singh till very late (now forgive me for being dualistic but Jinnah had championed Bhagat Singh’s cause quite eloquently through out). And the unkindest cut: Israelis sponsored free shows of Gandhi the movie in Gaza and West Bank in 2005.

To say that Gandhi is quoted by green activists and anarchists and other philosophers is a cop-out at best. So what? Is that a valid counter-argument to the points I have raised.

So lacking the substance to argue against my critique of Gandhi, Freethinker did what we are all “hard wired” to do: shoot the messenger. Only in my case since shooting the messenger was not very easy (probably because Freethinker is a bad shot), it soon became a case of shoot the imagined social conditioning of the messenger instead of the message.

Really at the heart of it is only one impulse: Freethinker wants to prove himself/herself a “freethinker” (code word for “look at me I am liberal – here please why don’t you notice me – I am very liberal. Yes give me all the brownies now!” ). He/she misses the irony when he/she constructs a straitjacket and calls it freethinking – assumption being that a freethinker cannot be anything other than a+b+c+d – he cannot even be a+b+c+e or a+f+d+z and certainly not x+y+z because that is only three letters – all from the wrong side of the alphabet. Such mathematical impossibility is called “choking your brain” or the “ossified brain eventuality”. Hence all the disclaimers about being a radical feminist, freethinking, anti-organized religion blah – these are labels unto themselves. We are “hardwired” to label ourselves. Only if we live long enough we realize that these labels have been concocted to put limits and boundaries on thought. It is thus easier to rubbish every argument with the same brush of “social conditioning”, “duality”, “nationalism” than to actually think or break from the established norms of what passes for “free thinking” these days. Such censure of any opinion contrary to your own does free thinking great harm. Is that what freethinker wants? Nobody should have an opinion that doesn’t fit the “sirat-e-mustaqeem” of free thinking? How can a path be straight and narrow and yet be “free thinking”?

At the very least a real freethinker would not ask why Dr. King or Mandela could not see through the fraud of Gandhi. A real freethinker would not ask for such affirmation and name-dropping. They did not because they probably did not have access to the collected works of Gandhi. I know for a fact that Dr. King did not and Mandela – when asked replied: he probably evolved later. To a real freethinker this should not be the end of discussion. A freethinker should ask for evidence of this alleged evolution. I tell you there isn’t any. A freethinker would at the very least stop putting up these names as testimonials and come up with better counter arguments than “you are socially conditioned” or that you are a “Pakistani”.

The real question is when is “Freethinker” going to break away from his/her “social conditioning”?

I must admit that I was mildly amused to read Freethinker’s rant against me which was at best a pointless personal attack (or an attempt at a modern day cyber-witchhunt). Pointless because Gandhi, the most sanctified saint of 20th century, hardly needs any defending against little old me. Rest peacefully, ah defenders of status quo and monopolists of free thought, for so long has the world been taken in by the Gandhian fraud, that surely my attempt to expose him is not going anywhere. Freethinker keeps repeating “social conditioning” like a broken record? Well what of the social conditioning that makes a charlatan like Gandhi look like a saint world over? Surely instead of looking at me swimming downstream in the little pond of Pakistani public opinion, my efforts to expose Gandhi’s other side are more akin to swimming against an ocean current.

First of all I brought up Gandhi in response to Hades’ comment on the post on “Quaid-e-Azam” only to show that before asking Pakistanis to stop admiring Jinnah, perhaps a better candidate for his profound wisdom would the Indian population that admires Gandhi. To suggest that this was my only argument (and not the last point it really was in a long list of points) is just plain dishonest. Since Freethinker likes to speak of logical fallacies, may I suggest that this is what they refer to as “Strawman fallacy”. My arguments about Jinnah were based on his own record as a politician and a legislator. Also it did not presuppose that anyone who dislikes Jinnah automatically likes Gandhi… here too Freethinker is getting ahead of himself/herself. Nor is it “conservatism” of another kind for no one should be compartmentalized on the basis of one’s view of a historical figure- especially someone whose social conservatism is well established. Similarly if I do not allow for doubt, why would I admit so quickly that I was wrong about my initial assessment of Mumbai being the handiwork of Hindu fundamentalists?

When I first went to the US for College in 1998, I did not have any particular anti-Gandhi feelings nor did I idolize Mr. Jinnah as I do today. My view of Gandhi was generally positive- as a saintly leader of a neighboring country. Contrary to Freethinker’s assertions, there are only two references to Gandhi that I clearly remember from my schools days. The first was a chapter on “Gandhi: a great non-violent soul” in the book “First Steps in Our History” published by Ferozesons and written by K H Haye. The second reference was in a English reading book- published by Longman in England- which had a chapter comparing Martin Luther King Jr and Gandhi. So my general opinion of Gandhi – as formed in Pakistan- was net positive despite all the “social conditioning”. On my first day at Rutgers, I sat next to an Indian who introduced himself as Jignesh Gandhi. My first question to him was if he was related to the “great” Mahatma Gandhi and to my great disappointment he said no.

To accuse me of “social conditioning” might work as an occam’s razor but it certainly is not a proper explanation for why I have written so often about Gandhi’s racism, casteism or misogyny. Freethinker should have just asked me instead of going through the trouble of psychoanalyzing someone Freethinker doesn’t know or has never met. Furthermore, Freethinker is being less than honest when he claims that Pakistani textbooks talk about “Khilafat Movement” as a negative. It is not described as disastrous but is shown to be a great movement that set the ball rolling for the Khilafat Movement. Also most Pakistani textbooks fail to mention that Jinnah did not support the Khilafat Movement.

Now let us come to the question at hand: Why should/shouldn’t there be a critique of Gandhi? The issue here is not that I am feeding into the appetite of “patriotic bigots” for anti-Gandhi critiques. Most “patriotic bigots” I know of are not very concerned about Gandhi. I am yet to find a decent critique of Gandhi from our Pakistani right wingers. To them it does not make a difference whether Gandhi is admired world over. It makes a difference to me though as a citizen of the world - I am merely following Gandhi’s own advice: be the change that you want to see in the world. I want to see Gandhi’s other side getting as much press as his saintliness. I am probably the only Pakistani who has put up these arguments against Gandhi. All other major Gandhi-bashers are either from the west or from India itself. M N Roy and Dr. Ambedkar cannot be accused of being socially conditioned by Pakistani textbooks now can they? Nor would Arthur Koestler or Richard Grenier… I name names only because it seems important to freethinker (freethinker’s argument is essentially based on “Appeal to Authority” fallacy). The picture painted by British historian Alex Von Tunzelman I suspect had nothing to do with a Pakistani textbook.

My critique of Gandhi is directed at only one end: to balance out what I perceive to be a hagiographic account of a Machiavellian politician who was far from what is made of him. Is there anything wrong with that objective? If one-sided hogwash like the Gandhi the Movie can be presented as history, why should I not give an account of the other side of Gandhi? If there is a “dualism” here it has been drummed into us by movies like Gandhi. After all the movie went out of its way to create a villain out of Jinnah didn’t it?

In my post to the author, I admitted that I am neither ready nor willing to see the more internationally established view of Gandhi. Why should I argue the other side’s brief? My objective is to show only that side of Gandhi which has been deliberately hidden from the world- why then should I waste my time repeating hagiographic hogwash that the world has been subjected for so long? My points are:

1. Gandhi believed in racial purity. In South Africa all of his activities were predicated on Indian racial superiority to Africans and not – as is commonly perceived- on Indian racial equality with whites.
2. Gandhi believed in caste based division of humanity. He believed that Hindu caste system was the natural military organization of humanity. Despite all the propaganda about his efforts to uplift the “harijans”, Dr. Ambedkar, the great author of the Indian constitution, found him patronizing and an outright protector of the evils of caste system that are deeply trenched in Hinduism. The quotes I put up did not speak of any equality of castes contrary to freethinker’s allegations. (Freethinker wants us to believe that there is some sort of inherent equality in relegating one caste to toilet cleaning irrevocably and the other caste to worshiping god and yet another to fighting wars- talk about confirmation bias).
3. Gandhi’s views on women were distasteful to the say the least. These bear close resemblance to those Taliban today.
4. Gandhi brought religion into politics. Before Gandhi brought religion into politics, nationalists like Jinnah, CR Das, Motilal Nehru etc were well on their way to creating grounds for a secular and united dominion of India which would be modeled on Canadian or Australian lines. Gandhi through his support for Khilafat Movement made religious identities non-negotiable. Had Gandhi not come onto the scene, India would be a self governing dominion as early as 1925 in my opinion.

These are my points. I have argued them by backing them up with facts and sources. Yes we are hard wired for confirmation bias. Damn straight. It is this confirmation bias that forces Freethinker look for “social conditioning” not take on the merits of the argument. But are we always going to hide behind this essential defect in human design and not take a critique for what it is?

Take for example Freethinker’s treatment of my description of Gandhi’s offer of premiership as an attempted “bribe” to Jinnah. Freethinker chides me for not taking it as a last desperate attempt instead-there you have my confirmation bias coming in the way again. By the time that this “last desperate offer” came about, the essential point of dispute was already plain: it was the question of interpretation of groupings clause of the cabinet mission plan. If Gandhi was really desperate, he would have done the right thing and agreed to the proper legal interpretation of the grouping clause which both the Cabinet Mission Plan and all leading legal minds of India had given to it. He didn’t need to do something as drastic as give the premiership to someone as disliked by the Congress as Jinnah. So it was a desperate move alright- move to bribe the one man who was held by all of his contemporaries including Gandhi himself to be the most incorruptible politician in South Asia can only be described as desperate. (The first time I had it described as a “bribe” was when I sat reading a book on Jinnah in a youth hostel while trekking through Northern California. An Indian Hindu who was bunking in the same hall said, “that is a good choice. Jinnah never accepted Gandhi’s bribe of pm-ship. He was not power hungry like Nehru or Gandhi” – I suppose he too was magically a victim of Pakistani social conditioning and confirmation bias).

The reason why Freethinker chose to attack me and my supposed social conditioning, my lack of doubt, my Pakistani confirmation bias and so on and so forth is because Freethinker must have realized that responding on the merits of the argument is not possible. The truth is that Gandhi was racist, Gandhi was casteist and Gandhi was a misogynist (on the issue of Gandhi’s misogyny, please do read Aisha Sarwari’s “Gandhi in the handmaid’s tail”). And all the claims about Gandhi’s special insights on “nature of self” and “sexuality” (presumably like those that made him sleep naked with young girls to test his Brahmacharya resolve) or “satyagraha” etc are not valid counter arguments. I hate to break it to freethinker but Gandhi was neither an environmentalist nor an anarchist. If anything Gandhi’s true role in history has been like a vaccine introduced into the body of the independence movement. He constituted and head up the right wing within the Congress. Gandhi had sided with the British on the issue of Bhagat Singh till very late (now forgive me for being dualistic but Jinnah had championed Bhagat Singh’s cause quite eloquently through out). And the unkindest cut: Israelis sponsored free shows of Gandhi the movie in Gaza and West Bank in 2005.

To say that Gandhi is quoted by green activists and anarchists and other philosophers is a cop-out at best. So what? Is that a valid counter-argument to the points I have raised.

So lacking the substance to argue against my critique of Gandhi, Freethinker did what we are all “hard wired” to do: shoot the messenger. Only in my case since shooting the messenger was not very easy (probably because Freethinker is a bad shot), it soon became a case of shoot the imagined social conditioning of the messenger instead of the message.

Really at the heart of it is only one impulse: Freethinker wants to prove himself/herself a “freethinker” (code word for “look at me I am liberal – here please why don’t you notice me – I am very liberal. Yes give me all the brownies now!” ). He/she misses the irony when he/she constructs a straitjacket and calls it freethinking – assumption being that a freethinker cannot be anything other than a+b+c+d – he cannot even be a+b+c+e or a+f+d+z and certainly not x+y+z because that is only three letters – all from the wrong side of the alphabet. Such mathematical impossibility is called “choking your brain” or the “ossified brain eventuality”. Hence all the disclaimers about being a radical feminist, freethinking, anti-organized religion blah – these are labels unto themselves. We are “hardwired” to label ourselves. Only if we live long enough we realize that these labels have been concocted to put limits and boundaries on thought. It is thus easier to rubbish every argument with the same brush of “social conditioning”, “duality”, “nationalism” than to actually think or break from the established norms of what passes for “free thinking” these days. Such censure of any opinion contrary to your own does free thinking great harm. Is that what freethinker wants? Nobody should have an opinion that doesn’t fit the “sirat-e-mustaqeem” of free thinking? How can a path be straight and narrow and yet be “free thinking”?

At the very least a real freethinker would not ask why Dr. King or Mandela could not see through the fraud of Gandhi. A real freethinker would not ask for such affirmation and name-dropping. They did not because they probably did not have access to the collected works of Gandhi. I know for a fact that Dr. King did not and Mandela – when asked replied: he probably evolved later. To a real freethinker this should not be the end of discussion. A freethinker should ask for evidence of this alleged evolution. I tell you there isn’t any. A freethinker would at the very least stop putting up these names as testimonials and come up with better counter arguments than “you are socially conditioned” or that you are a “Pakistani”.

The real question is when is “Freethinker” going to break away from his/her “social conditioning”?

Aisha Sarwari, I did not assume you are oppressed. Just that I found it rather disturbing - as a crazy, ranting radical feminist, yes - that this comment makes you look like a thoughtless mouthpiece for your hubby, and that your profile name suggests that you find it hard to have a self-identity that's independent of him.

Of course that would be an unfair impression of you...just that this comment and the profile name suggest that.

For a reader who's not followed PTH and the ugliness that ensued over there, this article I took for faggot-baiting on the author's part, especially as it's title was 'brownies for pinkos'. Here's what I posted in response:

'So you’re desperate to know what I thought of this hate speech (of course it’s one: if you know what ‘Pinko’ and ‘Paki’ means).

Well, my silence was partly because of anger, which I, unlike YLH, think is not a healthy state of mind to write anything, and partly because of the grueling end-of-semester assignments and assessments at my university.

Of course YLH didn’t think of that. He went and accused me of being against freedom of speech for not allowing his comment through. Did he consider that Blogger enables comment moderation for older posts and that I might be too occupied to publish his comment? Did he consider maybe his comment doesn’t qualify for ‘freedom of speech’, which does not apply to offensive personal attacks?

No, because he likes to have an opinion, as I indicated in my post. Just like he couldn’t find Faridkot on the map when he condemned those stupid Indians for making up wild stories about terrorists in Pakistan, he couldn’t find the Gandhi-Jinnah duality in Pakistan Studies textbooks playing out especially in the Khilafat Movement accounts. The reader is advised to verify this through a reading of chapters on Khilafat Movement and Jinnah’s political career in books by M.Ikram Rabbani, M.D.Zafar, Dr.Sultan Khan, etc. (all texts used by teachers - even in more conservative O/A-Level schools), and in the Punjab-board Pakistan Studies textbook, which sees Gandhi’s role in Khilafat Movement as a planned conspiracy to make Muslims suffer and render them politically and financially weak (pg. 19, 20).

But coming back to the question I asked in the post: what did I really think of the post? Frankly, I was scandalized.

Apart from YLH’s stubborn inability to grasp the existentialist view of history which is concerned with meanings rather than facts (see the last few paragraphs of my post, or a comment in the previous post which mentions Kierkegaard, or the comment by ‘F’), and his blatant lie about Pakistan Studies books which he clearly hasn’t looked through, he expresses his anger in offensive slurs. Us pinko, commie, he/she faggots with our silly, wishy-washy flaccid views (we ‘lack the substance’ and we’re ‘a bad shot’) obviously just have a (feminine) need of approval, and *the man* at PTH will set us faggots straight with his hard facts.

Go ahead and say it now, YLH, that I’m getting hysterical like a woman now, a frustrated, ‘please why don’t you notice me’ woman. And I want is brownies and then I’ll shut up like all hysterical, attention-craving ‘pink’ ones should.

I would also like to criticize YLH’s lack of experience with modern literary theory. The author is ‘dead’, as Foucault points out, in the linguistic formalism of a text like his post on Gandhi and the comment on Jinnah that I analyzed for my post. So it doesn’t matter whether he studied abroad or in Government Schools…how exactly the Gandhi-Jinnah duality in his text comes about is not the point; it’s there and it’s for the literary critic to analyze it.

Now, as for responding to his slandering on Gandhi, I really think that is quite unnecessary, because as you can see in people’s responses to this and the last thread, everyone is coming here to contest or confirm their already established views. I would however like to repeat what I said about how you cannot adopt a reductionist view like YLH’s about a historical phenomenon laden with meanings, which are both fact-based and symbolic, and forever flexible. Modern philosophers also stress that meaning is inside our heads, rather than ‘out there’, and in case of Gandhi, that meaning is a source of inspiration for revolutionaries and people dissatisfied with modernity and its spiritual crisis.

And if you subject all history to the criticism of the sort YLH uses for Gandhi, then you can say good-bye to history as a source for inspiration. I am going to make devout Muslims angry here, but I would just like to remind them here how they hate it when someone talks about their Prophet Muhammad this way, mentioning the controversial accounts of the details of his life as they appear in Al-Tabari for instance.'