Essays on Marxism and Asia begins with the largely forgotten
prophet of ancient Iran Zarathushtra, remembered and immortalised
by Friedrich Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra. In contrast to
the infamous clash of civilisation thesis, this book argues for a
humanist theory of civilisations and studies the Parsis or Persians
who left Iran to settle in India and make it their home. It claims
that Parsis, despite being a migrant community, took strength from
their Persian heritage and civilisation and rose to become the
architects of industrial modernity in India. This book locates this
humanist theory in the larger genre of the Asiatic mode of
production with caste as its sub- text. It then takes a
phenomenological reading of caste in India and says that India is
afflicted by a very strange illness called 'silent blindness' where
humanity is silenced and blinded in front of the caste apparatus.
It then analyzes how capitalism and modernity fashioned caste in
the image of capitalism and how the Indian right- wing imagined its
fascistic politics of race and racial superiority based on the
image of caste hierarchy. The problem in India has been that the
liberals could not take caste seriously so as to confront it and
then annihilate this violent apartheid structure. This, the book
argues, has led to the rise of fascism in India. The book concludes
with positing two different strands of secularism, namely liberal
or bourgeois secularism which merely separates religion and the
state (but mixes these when required) and revolutionary secularism
which humanises religion and politics first in order to find the
human and class content in both. The chapters in this book were
originally published in Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory.
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