The British not only destroyed agriculture as a revenue system, but also wrecked agriculture as an epistemology, a theory of food, of myth and hospitality. It doesn’t explore the possibility that both might be wrong. The writer is a social science nomad end-of.Dharampal used documents in English archives to demonstrate the rapacity of colonialism. The idea of swadeshi was not the same as Mr Modi’s “Make in India”. As a result, Dharampal could provide a critique of the West, while the BJP, in being nationalist, becomes a mere mimic of the West. More interestingly, Dharampal used history to make society understandable. When Dharampal talked of Indian science and technology, plastic bowl he was talking about culture and cultural styles of science, while the BJP’s idea of “Make in India” and “skilling” is located in a Western tradition of innovation. Or that there is another vein of scholarship which critiques Mr Modi closer to the core of BJP thought. His overt nationalist rhetoric hides the fact that his economics has no sense of the sacredness of nature and leaves India open to the deprivation of rapacious industrialists. Dharampal and Gandhi had a more nuanced understanding of colonialism which they saw not merely as a mode of exploitation, but as a disempowerment through an imposition of alien logic and categories.Dharampal showed that Gandhi’s ideas of swadeshi and swaraj were part of an oceanic circle of ideas where the local was not aridly a space, but a place for the indigenous, the traditional and the vernacular. Controversies in India leave one jaded and jarred because they produce neither debate nor resolution
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