Anarchist Apartheid : The Weltanschauung of Indian Unipluralism

By Subramanian, Balasundaram, Ph.D.

Book Id: WPLBN0002828302
Format Type: PDF eBook:
File Size: 0.3 MB
Reproduction Date: 6/6/2012

Title:	Anarchist Apartheid : The Weltanschauung of Indian Unipluralism
Author:	Subramanian, Balasundaram, Ph.D.
Volume:
Language:	English
Subject:	Non Fiction, Political Philosophy, Apartheid
Collections:	Authors Community, Politics
Historic Publication Date:	2012
Publisher:	Geetanjali

Member Page:	Monto Nagesh
Citation APA MLA Chicago Subramanian, Ph.D, B. B. (2012). Anarchist Apartheid : The Weltanschauung of Indian Unipluralism. Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.us/

Description
“The genius of Indian social life lies in living together separately.” Humayun Kabir (at the inaugural of IIT Madras, 1959). This essay seeks to highlight segregation as the keynote of traditional Indian life and caste as the key to the evolution of segregation. Caste in India could, over the centuries, unfold a truly pluralist polity, though each caste in itself was quite monolithic. The coexistence without coalescence of numerous castes could facilitate a polycentric social order in which power was diffused in the local communities.

Summary
This essay seeks to highlight segregation as the keynote of traditional Indian life and caste as the key to the evolution of segregation. Caste in India could, over the centuries, unfold a truly pluralist polity, though each caste in itself was quite monolithic. The coexistence without coalescence of numerous castes could facilitate a polycentric social order in which power was diffused in the local communities. Politics and government found little salience in this centrifuged dispensation which was a kind of evolved anarchy that gave no scope for centralized autocracy or mega-government. The pluralist legacy of caste may finally account for the unique success of the Indian experiment with Western democracy which has had a none too commendable record in many other non-Western nations. True, caste in India would countenance no open or mobile society. But deeper than the compulsions of the social grad-grind and the disparities stemming from them marking the diurnal excrescences of caste in the theatre of life, are the hidden pulsations of a sublime philosophy politic etched indelibly in the ethos and encoded in the inner recesses of the psyche that inspires the weltanschauung of one and all, whatever one’s social station, towards asocial individuation, the impersonal individual programed to exit society in the end.

Excerpt
“Contraries of belief and diversities of religion…are in fact part of the scheme of Providence; for as a painter gives beauty to a picture by a variety of colours, or as a gardener embellishes his garden with flowers of every hue, so God has appointed to every tribe its own faith, and every sect its own religion that man might glorify him in diverse modes, all having the same end and being equally acceptable in his spirit.” [Statement made by the learned Brahmin pundits and recorded by the Rev. C.T.E. Rhenius in the ‘Preface to the Code of Hindu Laws’ commissioned by Warren Hastings] “The genius of Indian social life lies in living together separately.” Humayun Kabir (at the inaugural of IIT Madras, 1959).

Table of Contents
Foreword Summary I. The Methodological Bug II. Indian Unipluralism: Introductory III. Hinduism and Buddhist Protestantism IV. The Impersonal Individual V. Hindutva: A Theological Figment VI. Nature of Caste Pluralism VII. Royal Government and Caste Plurarchy Afterword Notes