Dilip Simeon's blog

Rajendra Prasad, the first president of India, gave this speech on August 14, 1947, just before India achieved independence. Because his thoughts on non-violence, truth and tolerance continue to have an enduring relevance today.     At this crucial juncture in our history, when after years and years of struggle, we are finally going to hold the reins of our country’s governance in our own hands, we should remember God, the Supreme Being, who shapes the destiny of individuals and countries. Let us pay homage to the many men and women, known and unknown, who laid down their lives, voluntarily or involuntarily, to attain the freedom of this day, those who happily climbed the gallows, and boldly embraced the bullets. Those who gave up their lives languishing in jails and on the island of Kala Pani, who without hesitation left behind their parents, their wives and children, their familial ties, and even the country and offered their life and wealth in sacrifice. This day to ...

Initially tolerated by the Nazis, Freemasons became the subject of regime conspiracy theories in the 1930s, seen as liberal intellectuals whose secretive circles could become centres of opposition. Curators combing through a vast historic archive of Freemasonry in Europe amassed by the Nazis in their wartime anti-Masonic purge say they believe there are still secrets to be unearthed. From insight into women's Masonic lodges to the musical scores used in closed ceremonies, the trove - housed in an old university library in western Poland - has already shed light on a little known history. But more work remains to be done to fully examine all the 80,000 items that date from the 17th century to the pre-World War II period. "It is one of the biggest Masonic archives in Europe," said curator Iuliana Grazynska, who has just started working on dozens of boxes of papers within it that have not yet been properly categorised. "It still holds mysteries," she told AFP, of t...

I said at the beginning of my first talk that this is not a critical age. It is an age of partisanship and not of detachment, an age in which it is especially difficult to see literary merit in a book with whose conclusions you disagree. Politics - politics in the most general sense - have invaded literature, to an extent that does not normally happen, and this has brought to the surface of our consciousness the struggle that always goes on between the individual and the community. It is when one considers the difficulty of writing honest unbiased criticism in a time like ours that one begins to grasp the nature of the threat that hangs over the whole of literature in the coming age. We live in an age which the autonomous individual is ceasing to exist - or perhaps one ought to say, in which the individual is ceasing to have the illusion of being autonomous. Now, in all that we say about literature, and (above all) in all that we say about criticism, we instinctively take the autonom...

The morning after a great historical crisis, you feel as sad and sick as after a heavy night. But there is no aspirin for historical hangovers .. The world is no longer divided into the just or unjust, but into masters and slaves. He who is right is he who enslaves.  Albert Camus     La crise de l'homme : THE HUMAN CRISIS   (Text read by Viggo Mortensen on March 28 2016)   Ladies and Gentlemen: when I was invited to give a series of lectures in the United States of America, I felt some doubt and hesitation. I am really not old enough to give lectures, and I am more at ease with the process of thinking than I am making categorical statements... since I don't feel I have any claim on what is generally called the truth. I shared this reservation and was very politely told that my personal opinion didn't matter. What mattered was that I'd be able to offer some facts about France so that my listeners could form their own opinions. It was then suggested...

NB: Since the Black Lives Matter movement, some intellectuals have begun (yet again) their campaign to slander Gandhiji as a 'racist'. An interview published in The Caravan in January 2019 reiterated this. Much can be said about the prejudices of this or that leader, and I have appended some comments beneath that interview. Leaving India aside however, here are some observations on Gandhi by a great American fighter against racism. DS Extract from Martin Luther King : My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence "Like most people, I had heard of Gandhi, but I had never studied him seriously. As I read I became deeply fascinated by his campaigns of nonviolent resistance.... The whole concept of Satyagraha was profoundly significant to me...   Perhaps my faith in love was temporarily shaken by the philosophy of Nietzsche. I had been reading parts of  The Genealogy of Morals  and the whole of  The Will to Power .  B. R. Ambedkar on Pakistan Nietzsche’s glorifica...

WEB du Bois (1868-1963) was the first African-American to earn a PhD at Harvard This is the country to which we Soldiers of Democracy return. This is the fatherland for which we fought! But it is our fatherland. It was right for us to fight. The faults of our country are our faults. Under similar circumstances, we would fight again. But by the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that that war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land. 1 We are returning from war!  The Crisis  and tens of thousands of black men were drafted into a great struggle. For bleeding France and what she means and has meant and will mean to us and humanity and against the threat of German race arrogance, we fought gladly and to the last drop of blood; for America and her highest ideals, we fought in far-off hope; for the dominant southern oligarchy entren...

Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we - you and I, and our government - must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow. .... Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea. Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well.  But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of ...

NB : Hari Vasudevan passed away on May 10, 2020, aged 68. A great scholar and wonderful man, he was widely respected and loved. He will be mourned and missed by friends and students. RIP, Hari Hari Vasudevan and the Soviet Archives : A Personal Remembrance It was May, 1995, exactly 25 years ago. Hari Vasudevan (Calcutta University), Purabi Roy (Jadavpur University) and I myself (Calcutta University) were in Moscow for two months, working as a team sent by The Asiatic Society, Calcutta in connection with a project of collection of documents from the newly opened Soviet archives on Indo-Russian Relations : 1917-1947. This project was the result of a Protocol signed between The Asiatic Society, Calcutta and Moscow’s Institute of Oriental Studies.  ... as we proceeded in our work on the publication of the texts of the documents, we began to face insurmountable resistance... from a section of the Left establishment in West Bengal. We were threatened, maligned and discouraged not...

Creative Democracy – The Task Before Us   By John Dewey  (1859-1952) Written late in Dewey’s life and during the rise of the Nazis, Creative Democracy is Dewey’s explanation of how democracy can and should be revitalized as a means of creating the good society and combating the growth of fascism. Note the emphasis placed on cooperation and Dewey’s general optimism regarding human nature. Under present circumstances I cannot hope to conceal the fact that I have managed to exist eighty years. Mention of the fact may suggest to you a more important fact – namely, that events of the utmost significance for the destiny of this country have taken place during the past four-fifths of a century a period that covers more than half of its national life in its present form. For obvious reasons I shall not attempt a summary of even the more important of these events. I refer here to them because of their bearing upon the issue to which this country committed itself when the nat...

A little over two years into the Spanish civil war, one of Spain’s greatest poets wrote to a Chilean friend to tell him how desperately he and a couple of their mutual acquaintances longed to escape the conflict and travel to South America.  “We’ll come to your sad and beautiful land,” wrote Miguel Hernández in September 1938. “We have to leave, and we’ll rest from this fight, and we’ll breathe the air we lack.”  Hernández, a goat-herder-turned-poet and staunch Republican, would never breathe Chilean air. He was dead within four years of writing the letter, his lungs eaten away by the tuberculosis he contracted after being shunted through a succession of baleful Spanish prisons.  Along with more than 600 books, manuscripts, photographs, magazines, letters and postcards, Hernández’s missive to his Chilean correspondent, the poet and diplomat Pablo Neruda, now forms part of a unique and lovingly amassed collection dedicated to the  Nobel-prize winner’s life and wor...

New light will be shed on one of the most controversial periods of Vatican history on Monday when the archives on  Pope Pius XII , accused by critics of being a Nazi sympathiser are unsealed.  A year after Pope Francis  announced the move , saying “the church isn’t afraid of history”, the documents from Pius XII’s papacy, which began in 1939 on the brink of the second world war and ended in 1958, will be opened, initially to a small number of scholars. Critics of Pius XII have accused him of remaining silent during the Holocaust, never publicly condemning the persecution and genocide of Jews and others. His defenders say that he quietly encouraged convents and other Catholic institutions to hide thousands of Jews, and that public criticism of the Nazis would have risked the lives of priests and nuns.  “The opening of the archives is decisive for the contemporary history of the church and the world,” said Cardinal José Tolentino Calaça de Mendonça, the Vatic...

NB: This is a magnificient contribution to Indian historiography. Rahul Sagar and his collaborators deserve the thanks of the Indian public and indeed of all those interested in an honest exploration of the past. DS Starting in the early nineteenth century, ambitious Indians began flocking to newly-founded schools and colleges offering instruction in modern languages and sciences.  Among the habits they acquired was reverence for contemporary British periodicals such as  Athenaeum ,  The Quarterly Review ,  The Saturday Review ,  The Contemporary Review ,  The Fortnightly Review ,  The   National Review, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine , and  Nineteenth Century . Not unreasonably, they came to view these periodicals as exemplars of public debate and deliberation. Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Once upon a time there was another public, another India As the century progressed, these increasingly urbane Indians ached to discuss subjects...

The single best thing ever written on the idea of the university in India is Ashutosh Mukherjee’s Convocation Address to Mysore University in 1916, and published in the now inaccessible Dacca Review (October 1918). It literally anticipates every single debate we have on the idea of the university - from finance to governance, from pedagogy to the romance of research - but with a rigour, insight and generosity that is a reminder of how small we have become. This should be compulsory reading for everyone concerned with higher education If you want to resist the will to simplicity, the flattening of public discourse, and the potential slide into barbarism that characterises our times, you could do worse than to turn to an astonishing new resource that has for the first time been made available to the public. Rahul Sagar, an academic at NYU, and his associates have laboriously created the single most comprehensive, and searchable, database of over three lakh articles published in all I...

Victor Serge’s Notebooks: 1936-1947 Reviewed by J. Hoberman Victor Serge was born into exile in 1890 and died in exile 57 years later. The child of Russian radicals who fled to Belgium in the wake of the plot to assassinate Tsar Alexander II, Serge (né Victor Lvovich Kibalchich) embraced anarchism and was jailed for writing in support of a band of notorious, quasi-anarchist French bank-robbers known as the Bonnot Gang. He subsequently participated in the abortive anarcho-syndicalist Catalan uprising of 1917, was again imprisoned and then made his way across Europe to his parents’ now revolutionary homeland, where he made common cause with the Bolsheviks. Dispatched in the mid-1920s to Germany and Vienna as a Comintern agent, Serge came to know many of the world’s leading revolutionaries. He returned to the Soviet Union to join the anti-Stalin opposition, led by Leon Trotsky. With the opposition’s defeat and his resulting expulsion from the Communist Party, he became a full-tim...