Sohail Inayatullah

“Cycles of Power,” first published in Edges (March 1990)

I left work early last Friday, largely to go home and watch an amazing event. No it was not star American basketball player Michael Jordan soaring through the sky, rather I went home to watch the Chinese revolution. Like many other developments in telecommunications technology, I was suddenly made part of this awesome event, but the space that I was watching had now been transformed from entertainment space to juridical space, meaning that this age of video had now included me in judging the goodness or the rightness of the events. My eyes could then decide whether the official words of the Chinese government or the American government were true, I could judge myself. I could, for example, compare this revolution with the earlier Aquino People’s power. And as the Chinese bureaucrats tried to force Cable News Network (CNN) to leave, I again could decide who was correct. Was Chinese national territory and culture being violated by this foreign presence or did CNN have a larger global right to provide information.

In the end CNN did not try to evoke a universal right to telecommunicate, rather they avoided the philosophical issue and settled for the bureaucratic discourse. They agreed to pull the plug only when a letter signed by the Chinese government was given to them. The Chinese were of course puzzled by this. The official tried to explain to the newsperson that these were obviously extraordinary times, why the evocation of official stationary? But with CNN unwilling to evoke rights, all that was left for them to buy time was procedure, due process, and when the letter–written in Chinese–was produced, the live revolution was over. The basketball game too was over and as there appeared to be no revolutions in the offing : Aquino was already stable and Marcos appeared to not want to die Friday evening; Zia had died last year and Noriega has his own timeline, I turned the age of video off, walked onto the street and pondered the fantastic nature of the real world we live in.

THE ANCIENTS SPEAK

Ssu-Ma Chien ancient Chinese historian had written–without access to live real-time revolutions–how new dynasties are born from the actions of the sage-king and how they rise in virtue, but eventually over time there comes squandering, laziness and pride and then the tyrants step in; virtue is gone and the dynasty ends. This cycle is repeated over and over. The Tao is present; it then disappears. In virtue all gain; in decline all lose.

Ibn Khaldun, the 13th century founder of sociology and modern history, too outlined this cyclical view of history. But to him it was not the rise and fall of virtue, it was the rise and fall of asabiya or unity. He studied the Bedouins and saw that their success was a result of their solidarity; a closeness derived from their struggle against the elements. In the desert, they had a remarkable level of communications among themselves and a low degree of noise, of disunity. But with power, over generations, usually four, unity disappeared and people’s mind turned to wealth and to expectations without hard work. Each succeeding rulership did not have to work for leadership, it was routinized. Thus, the empire fell and asabiya passed on to some other group; usually someone from the provinces, from the desert who still had unity and a collective vision of the future–he would then on a camel ride into power.

For these two historians and others like Indian philosopher P.R. Sarkar all things rise and fall. Leaders come into power, they exaggerate their power and in this exaggeration their is exploitation and there is thus a circulation of elites as Italian macrohistorian Pareto would say. And as Sarkar would say, power always centralizes to some group on the wheel: it goes to the warriors (the military or those who try to deal with the real world through physical domination), to the intellectuals (the priests and technocrats who deal with the real through theories, myths and ideologies) and the acquisitors who deal with the real world through accumulating wealth, through making greed into a social good. And of course, in this cycle there is the group who causes revolutions but rarely gets to enjoy them–this is the people, the students, the workers, the women, the groups who do the work. They bring about a new world, but power quickly centralizes to other groups and although each new era brings about increased rights for the previously rightless, power quickly congeals and the cycle of power continues. The wheel is eternal.

From this macrohistorical perspective, even if the Chinese students succeed, there is larger deeper structure which will reemerge. It is the cycle. The ancients noticed this cycle everywhere: in nature, in our breathing, in the moon; it was this cycle that led women to create mathematics (mother-wisdom according to writer Barbara Walker ); it was this cycle that reminded the great that one day they would fall and it reminded the impoverished that they would one day rise–everyone knew they would have their turn. It is this cycle that gives hope to the third world, to the Pacific Islanders, to women and to the environment itself–to Gaia. And to use another sports metaphor, mother earth always has the last bat. Nature always wins. This is then the world of the rise and fall. Here, there is no linear progress, rather there are fits and starts, moments of glory and episodes of betrayal.

And as I walked outside seeing the sea and looked above at the near full moon of May, the self-evident truth of the cycle seemed utterly obvious. For when Michael Jordan rises he falls. When great teams win, eventually they lose. People are born and then they die. They cycle speaks to that which is irreversible; that which is ancient; it is the story of creation; the story of who we are.

THE CHALLENGE

But all stories are challenged and the European Enlightenment was precisely a radical challenge to the ancients. The enlightenment brought forth reason and made it natural. It brought forth the linear arrow of time and made it a necessity. It brought forth greed and made it divine. And finally it brought forth nature and made it human. This was the end of the cycle; with reason and industrial technology, God and the cycle of nature could forever be vanquished and in its place would emerge the city of heaven on Earth. A city where power was curbed through the written word, where despots could not claim the divine mandate instead they were forced to exist in a mutual contract with the people. The world was now not god-centered or nature centered or myth centered, rather it was man centered. In fact as Michel Foucault brilliantly argues humans have only epistemologically existed for a few hundred years, knowledge was ordered differently in feudal and religious eras. Man is thus a recent category and soon as we enter a postmodern world, whether the spiritual recovery of enchantment or a technological creation of the evernew, man will once again disappear to the sidelines–the gods of magic or the robots of the future will become the focus of thought.

Now when the enlightenment faltered, when the cry of equality, liberty and fraternity only ended the reign of the clergy and the aristocrats (the british and french revolutions), but not the bourgeois technocrats, there came another challenge–that of Marxism, but it too continued the project of rationalism, after all historically speaking liberalism and Marxism are minor deviations from each other: they both believe in empiricism, materialism, prediction, domination and separation from nature, and technological progress. Marx however saw the cycle but believed that if ownership could pass to the people, then new technological developments would not create contradictions, rather they would generate greater levels of wealth. The wheel of history would end and the heaven promised by the people of the book–the jews, muslims and christians–would descend. The secret of knowledge would be forever gained.

But, we all know where that project ended. Power centralized, new wealth went to the Party and instead of the priests of religion, the ideologues of the Party watched over the braindeath of creativity. Just as the priests took away all spiritual insight, the partycrats took away all individual initiative. The grid of partocracy succeeded but at a cost that led to its own demise. The cycle of history was not so easily defeated.

But the liberals put something else at center stage that could once and for all solve the problem of poverty: this was technology. Tools removed us from the monkey and they would provide the next jump in human history; one where the myths of the past, the myths of scarcity, of the rise and fall, of the stranglehold of irreplaceable, nonrenewable commodities such as oil, would keep us from realizing the good society that was possible.

But the technology of the industrial revolution did not do this, although incredible wealth was created; it destroyed the family, raped the environment, impoverished the colonies, and denigrated women.

THE NEXT REVOLUTION

But there is a new revolution that will culminate the project that was begun a few hundred years ago. For this revolution has as its base something that when used becomes better and when shared increases. It promises to bridge the distances between individuals, cultures and nations. It promises to join the isolated into a community and to take the best from the historical and the modern world: to create a global village and an electronic cottage. This world will have highways but not polluted ones, rather they will be of light; instead of seaports or airports there will be teleports. We will have resolved the historical contradictions of the urban and the rural; between self and community; between worker and manager.
This will have been resolved not by the Pacific Shift, not in the Japanese method of miniaturizing nature and including it in the city (the Bonsai tree, for example); making meditation as a corporate activity; or giving lifetime employment, but it will be resolved by creating a postscarcity society. The up and downs of history, the rise and falls will then disappear once basic needs such as food, health, shelter, medicine and education-information are plentiful and natural, not for the few, but for all.

Through these new technologies poor countries will be able to jump past the industrial era and quickly and painlessly enter the Age of Video. Villagers won’t need to go to cities as the Mango (the Pakistani clone of the Apple computer) will allow them to stay at home and work from there. Families will remain united and the rumor that in the big city streets are made of gold will forever be gone from history. Population will stay evenly distributed and with increased wealth, population rates will continue to decline. Businesses will no longer be site specific; they can move here and there, and even labor will be free to move from region to region and both business and labor will be able move through history, from one culture to another, then and now, for the cycle of time will have been vanquished.

And to those critics who argue that these new technologies are prohibitively expensive, can anyone not afford to invest in them comes the reply. Moreover, perhaps it is too late anyway.

Among other technologies, the VCR is already a global phenomenon. Within minutes of a release of any movies, pirated copies are available throughout the world. In Pakistan, for example, any movie from any country is available. And those that try and remove this new technology from the home are quickly rebuked. While there a few years back, I saw an amazing television show. A village family found there fortunes changed by the addition of a tv and a vcr from a brother who had made it as an engineer in Saudi Arabia. These new technologies attracted more and more people to the house of the family. Every day, all the neighbors would gather to watch. And of course, the host family would have to provide food and drinks. The father would complain that he missed the old peaceful days, but others in the family loved their new centrality. One night the tv/vcr was stolen. The man saw it happening but kept his eyes closed. His nemesis and the villagers’ prized possession was gone. The police quickly captured the thieves. But the man would not admit that the new technology was his. His meal were prepared on time, his house was quieter; he had never liked his relatives anyway. But finally the chief of police begged the man to claim the tv and vcr, his family would stay home and make life hell for him; his wife refused to cook for him. The technology was back in the man’s house and all was normal again. All was natural again. In this story there are numerous codes; the extended family finds unity not through the fireplace but through the electric; the search for individuality and community, all are there, but the key is in the nature of the normal. For suddenly these new technologies have become the natural, it is not the flicker of wood that evokes images of the mystical, but the flicker of the screen that leads us into other worlds. In my parent’s village which became wired for electricity in the early 70’s and still has no toilets, they have these new video technologies. Soon they will have satellite dishes and will have access to more information in a few years then in the last hundred thousand or so, it seems. And even while the streets are still made of mud, they have access to texts and images from everywhere and everytime.

Thus these new information technologies, according to many, do not have the contradictions of previous industrial technologies, for they allow one to live at a ancient stone age level. They do not open and close, nor expand and limit at the same time; rather they allow the past, present and future, real and unreal, to exist simultaneously.

Thus what the best minds of Europe failed to do in the enlightenment, what the Marxists failed to do this century, is about to be accomplished by the technological revolutions–the cycle is about to end.

Will this mean that the moon will no longer shine above us at night. That crickets will no longer sing at night. Yes! For this era of information is also about other related technologies. According to Eric Drexler –not Portland basketball player Clyde “the Glide” Drexler who too defies gravity–the most significant breakthrough in history is about to become real. It is the molecular assembler or nano-technology. Combined with artificial intelligence, we will soon be able to rearrange the molecules of what ever and create food, materials and what have you. The capital base of the world will continue to double in minutes; it will truly be the end of work. Coupled with this will be the flight into space, but this flight will not be through conventional materials, through genetic engineering, according to Freeman Dyson , respected professor of physics at Princeton, these new spacecrafts will weigh a kilogram instead of the present Voyager’s ton. They would be grown and integrate animal and electronic components. He calls this the Astro-Chicken and if truly the next century is the Pacific Era, then it will certainly be the Chinese Astro-chicken.

Thus genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, telecommunications are in the process of creating a new world, a faster more intimate world, a good world. In the meantime, instead of Hot Dog stands there will be Hot Doc stands (not meals on wheels but documents, information on wheels); instead of one way novels and information we will have hyper text where the mind of the universe will be available to us. We can move from article to article, past to future, language to language; it will be the final unity of man with machine, the spiritual liberation that the ancients really meant to tell us about. The ancients of course did not understand that light meant fiber optics, that the word of God meant hyper text, and that ascension to heaven was space travel.

Thus, the age of video of information of the post industrial society is about the end of myth, about the end of the cycle of misery and injustice that has plagued humanity, and it is about the reconstruction of the world in any shape and form that humans want, not just in terms of the way they see the world–that is, philosophically–but also the reconstruction of the material world. It is also about the end of humans, for we will soon exist along with robots, clones, cyborgs and not only will we sue other humans, once robots have rights, we will sue them as well, and of course we will do this through video arraignment and of course trials will be available for all to see and just as there will be direct electronic democracy, there will be direct electronic judging, but instead of the upward or downward thumb of the Roman trials, there will be the touch or the voice of the electronic key.

THE RESPONSE

But there remains a fear among us all. What if we have gone too far. What if the new technologies are not creating a new world, but simply reproducing old inequalities. What if there are limits; what if there really is a natural state of things that we humans in our desire for control and power are upsetting. Have we have gone too far? The myth of the cycle thus lurks underneath all who claim to have defied the laws of nature. In this fear, what lies ahead is a catastrophic depression. This depression will result in the end the era of liberalism and capitalism; it will be the reclaiming of earth; it will be the conclusion of greed; the revenge of Kali or Pele–Mother Earth as destroyer. Those individuals and nations who are linked with the present whether intellectually, materially or spiritually will be devastated by the massive depression. Those islands that depend on tourism or on economic aid from the Core powers will see their existence ravaged. Those places that remain self-reliant, that still have traditional ohana (extended family) structures will survive; that is, the high will fall and those that have bought into the liberal/capitalist or technological worldview will pay for it. The dream of the last few hundred years of progress will vanish before their eyes as the Tokyo, New York, and London markets begin their slide. We gave ourselves a warning in 1987 but did not listen. And in a matter of years, just as communism is ending before us, capitalism too, will disappear. However, there will be many that will have their life meanings decimated such that they will be caught between a future that has disappeared and a past that no longer exists. But how can that happen, every thing seems to be going so well, even the feared recession might be merely a soft landing. There is more wealth then ever before; peace and democracy are breaking out every where. Six hundred years ago, Ibn Khaldun said it best: “At the end of an era, dynasty, there often appears a show of power that gives the impression that the senility of the era has been made to disappear. It lights up brilliantly just before it is extinguished, like a burning wick the flame of which leaps up phenomenally a moment before it goes out, giving the impression it is just starting to burn, when in fact it is going out.”
The 1990’s will bring in an end of an era, but it will be a difficult end; capitalism has not survived five hundred years by accident. It will take the collapse of the speculative bubble that has fueled the markets; it will take the realization that the debt game is really a pyramid scheme, and it will take, say, a minor earthquake in Tokyo, a flood here, sealevel rise elsewhere, a nuclear explosion or two, and soon the project will be over. And within moments the rational world of liberalism and Marxism will have met its end.

THE OTHER MYTH

But there are others who have been described by the Enlightenment project as people outside of history and thus outside of the future, who view things quite differently. To them they have been in a depression for centuries; they have lived without a self, without a home. These were the people in the colonies who provided the labor, these were the regions from which the raw materialism emerged from. These were the people who lived and rejoiced in the cycle. And it was only brutal force and the promise of joining the world of progress that convinced them to join forces with the liberals and the Marxists. But this joining did not make things better for them. Each time the flame of power passed, from riverene to Mediterranean to Atlantic and now to the Pacific Rim, they were left behind, for the system of expansionist power always needs something and someone to be the resource, to be the difference, the inequality, from where wealth can emerge.

Thus again as we look all around the world at the feminist movements, at third world efforts to renegotiate the terms of technological trade, at the spiritual movements, at the peace and green movements, we see a counterproject that is emerging. While many of these groups are anti-technological, others have become more sophisticated and want to create conditions where they can create their own technologies based on their local histories and conditions. From this view, the world has been created by the West and all of us see ourselves through this Western view: the culture of the self itself has been conquered. What then is needed are ways to recover the self that existed before the modern world. This is the view of the recovery of the past. The recovery of historical ways of seeing the world before Contact with the expansionist West. It is for example the effort to keep alive the language of the oral traditions presently being done in Vanuatu by the Vanuatu culture center. And it is not letting Western cultural institutions have copies so that oral history can be economized and transformed into the additive intellectual knowledge of the West. It is also the Prime Minister of Papua and New Guinea, Paias Wingti attempting to stop the Australian dreams of a Pacific tv empire. In his words, “we are being asked to sacrifice our cultural heritage for passing material gain. No money can buy back our languages once they are lost.”

It is also groups like PROUT (Progressive Utilization Theory) who are attempting to create a new cycle. Sarkar the founder of this movement is among the few spiritual activists and mystics who is basing his vision on a merger of spiritual and physical technologies. Although he believes the cycle of rise and fall will continue forever, through spiritual wisdom and intellectual information, it is possible to keep the cycle moving, to through evolutionary intervention significantly reduce the phases of misery. And unlike humanists who still believe that there is dignity to work, he looks forward to the day when we will not have to work. For him, to bring about this new world, we must think beyond left and right. There must, for example, be ceilings and floors on wealth, and there must be ways to reward excellence. Instead of bureaucrats, technocrats or partycrats, there must be people’s organizations, that of course could work best with the new telecommunications technologies. Instead of corporations, there should be local and eventual global cooperatives. In addition, even while new cultures are constantly being created, he has started cultural, linguistic, bioregional, local self-reliance movements to counter the liberal/Marxist paradigm. Yet at the center of this counter movement is a spiritual universalism, lest the movements become particularistic.

This universal, he hopes, will come about largely from spiritual practices, but also from the fall of the national community, the nation-state–brought about by travel, videos, and of course, pollution and the fear of nuclear destruction for they do not respect boundaries of nation or body. For indeed, we are forced outside of ourself not only by awe but by pain and fear. In our agony, the agonies of the Other becomes real. Universal cultures and individuals who partake in this worldview do not arise painlessly, it is a life task for an individual and a civilizational task for a culture. Becoming cross-cultural, as everyone here must know, arises through the force of confrontation, not the banality of liking Thai or Chinese, or Indian food.

This spiritual view is also expressed by the Greens who claim they are neither left nor right, but in front. Central to them is the natural world. This world must be given rights not for our sake, but for its sake. They are not interested in information, nor knowledge, but in that which comes from understanding the cycle of life–wisdom. For wisdom cannot be commodified; the power of the king or the market cannot control it. This the yogis and the martial artists of past knew well–thus, they learned to fast, to think, to live with few clothes, to master the elements, and to live outside of wealth, such that the soldiers and the priests could not control them. They lived with the natural world. In this view, the real communications is not among humans, but in the planet itself, and the messages she receives about us, are no longer positive. We are perhaps incidental to the needs of the global project, that is the survival of the planet, the recovery of the garden before God and humans.

The Feminist movement too is reminding us who has done the real work for the last thousand years and that new technologies must be developed that lead to cooperation not dominance among groups. Otherwise, although men prefer the image of the virgin and the mother, creation and preservation, there is also the Crone–the image of power and destruction that descends upon all, and forces us to remember the temporality of that which we thought was eternal.

But while Sarkar’s PROUT and to some extent the Green and the Feminist focus on ownership of technology as central to the social good, they also speak about other technologies. For Sarkar, the future is not about molecular assemblage or genetically engineered chickens, but it is about the Age of Microvita. He posits that the smallest building blocks of life are emanations from Pure Consciousness. These emanations however can be understood not by more refined microscope, but by refined minds, for they exist outside our sensate world, yet provide the bridge between the mind and the brain. They are the silver lining between perception and conception. They can be used to spread ideas throughout the world, they can be used to heal bodies, and they can be used to spread information throughout the stars. According to him, the rediscovery of these “mind waves” will soon radically change physics and chemistry and biology, for these microvita impact our thoughts, our food, and our social movements. One goal, then is to find ways to refine the mind so that it can perceive these seeds of life and use them to increase economic productivity, intellectual awareness and spiritual well being.

There is also the theory of Rupert Sheldrake articulated in his A New Science of Life . For him too, this is the end of the materialistic age of science. The new telecommunications technology are not physical but fields of awareness that are invisible but organize behavior. Some of these fields over time have become almost eternal, others are more malleable. They explain how once one group of humans learn a behavior or receive an insight, this spreads to others. His institute has conducted numerous experiments which show partial validity. Among other experiments, they have found children in England could more easily memorize an ancient rhyme in a foreign language instead of a recent one or a gibberish one since the ancient rhyme has a stronger field as it has existed longer. The point is that there exists fields of awareness that explain how ideas are unconsciously transmitted; how ideas become powerful and resonate among us. He provides a scientific reading of myth and of social change. Thus, this means that humans can learn from the past, and they can learn at quicker and quicker rates. The exact conclusion that telecommunications experts believe that telematics will lead to. More information means more learning, means a better world, eventually. The wheel then is just a reflection of everything we have seen for the last thousand of years, but this structure with learning and new ways of thinking can be overcome. New structures can gain force.
Of course, the movements mentioned above would focus on access to these new technologies, while the liberals the growth of them, and the Marxists would argue that through a central authority, they can better distribute the benefits of them.

THE END OF THE REALLY REAL

But the theories of Sarkar, Sheldrake, and others who write of a postmodern era, where the materialistic rationality has been made contentious, are being attacked by another group as well. For them, the liberal/Marxist project believes that there is a real world that can be managed, controlled and predicted. In the liberal view, through science and the discovery of laws, the world can be made more rational and understandable; tomorrow can be in fact known; uncertainty can be reduced and better policy decisions thus made. Eventually, all will be able to join in this project–even the colonies. Most of the work by futurists falls into this realm–to them the goal is the prediction of the empirical world, the search for the elusive truth of tomorrow.
The challenge so far has been by those who seek to recover the best of the world prior to rationality of the science and technology revolution. It is about capturing meanings, economic systems, polities that existed before capitalism destroyed time and culture. It is about recovering the natural–the spiritual and the cultural.

But this third group believes nothing is natural–everything is human creation, whatever we know is perceived. We cannot know anything as it really is. And every theory whether Platonic or Aristotelian, earth centric or sun centric puts at center one way of knowing over another way. In this view, there is nothing to predict; there is nothing to recover or remember; there is no self to prop up, to save from technology–the self is created by society. For when we perceive we must describe in language and in this representation the world is created. Thus the Rushdie/Khomeni affair. For Rushdie nothing is really real, there is no truth that appeared in the middle east and all words, texts, must be made relative. For Khomeni, there is a text, a piece of information that is more real; it cannot be attacked for it is the direct word of the Real. To attack the text is to attack God, thus the only appropriate punishment is death to Rushdie.

For this group, we must look at our language and our categories of thought and see who gains from them, what is lost, what is silenced. We must look at the cycle and see what this construct does–does it liberate or oppress. For them, nothing is really real, everything is description–power is that of making one description seem more real or natural than others. Thus time is a category, not a reality. The purpose of talking about the future or the past is not to predict or to recover, but to make the present remarkable; to thus make the status quo contentious and thereby create the possibility for change, for creation.

In this view we must also live on the edges of reality, always testing to see if have made a representation really real–ontologically real–always seeing the power of our descriptions of the world. In this view, the new technologies will create more and varied texts and the present notion of the separation of the empirical-physical world and the world of text or video will forever be gone. Television creation Star Trek will really be more interesting and thus real than the landing of humans on the Moon. Fiction and non-fiction will become one and focus of the text or the video will not be the writer, the producer, the manufacturer, but the reader, the interpreter, the consumer, or in the world of the telecommunications discourse, the user. There will then really be as Roland Barthes argues an infinite number of interpretations to everything.

And what exists beyond language, perception, interpretation? from the cultural and spiritual view, a world of mystery and bliss, of the divine. For the empiricist, the material physical world–tables and chairs but no inherent meanings. And from the third view, beyond interpretation are other interpretations waiting to describe what is, for both the divine and the physical are simply imposed meaning structures, we cannot really know if anything really exists–the key question is who gains and who loses by every description of the world.
In the meantime, I look forward to being ever at home and seeing the myriad of worldviews that exist past, present and future. I look forward to watching the live revolution continue, to watching the Chinese students create a new world, and attempt to recover that which they believed was true in the past and as these images enter my eyes, I have no idea what appears to be real and what is really real: are the Chinese restructuring their world because positive microvita has entered them, or because they have more knowledge of things, more information, or because new fields of awareness have been created by the Filipino non-violent demonstrations. I do not know, but will more information, microvita energy waves, or fields of awareness help me slam dunk a basketball after watching Michael Jordan this week?

Perhaps there are limits!

As it turned out, the Chinese student’s hope for celebration that could transform the bureaucratic party structure of the past fifty years did not turn out to be. Perhaps it was that Deng did not wish to be humiliated again in Tiananmen square, or perhaps their turn will come another day, perhaps a video image of crumbling of the Berlin Wall will be catalytic leading to a transformation in the Great Wall.

But more central than video images themselves, however, are individuals who can transform these images into myths and visions. These larger stories of who we are provide the link between the routine day to day activities of the present and the personal sacrifice, the episodes of bravery, needed to create a new tomorrow.

To create this new future, these stories will, I believe, have to speak to the cycle and speak to a notion of progress. Effective leadership will have to do more than simply deconstruct the epistemological basis of history or merely provide a blueprint of technological change. While deconstructing history is important since leadership casts the new vision in stone forgetting that “yesterday dissent is often today’s establishment and, unless resisted, becomes tomorrow’s terror” and while technological development is essential, the former does not speak to the “where to now” question and the latter forgets that it exists in a cultural historical framework–mythology.

To meet the challenges ahead, leadership will have to speak to and balance humanity’s spiritual, knowledge and material dimensions. Here Sarkar reminds us that while the cycle will continue, through spiritual–intellectual, servant, protective, and entrepreneurial–leadership the phases of exploitation and human misery can be reduced thus creating a vision that dialectically embraces the ancient, enlightenment and postmodern.

SELECTED REFERENCES
Roland Barthes, Critical Essays trans. Richard Howard. Evanston, Ill.,Northwestern University Press, 1972.

James Dator, “The Futures of Cultures and Cultures of the Future,” in Marsella et al (eds.) Perspectives on CrossCultural Psychology. New York, Academic Press, 1979.

Eric Drexler, Engines of Change. New York, Anchor Press, 1986.

Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions. New York, Harper and Row, 1988.

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things. New York, Random House, 1973.

Liz Fell, “Poor Reception for TV Moguls,” Pacific Island Monthly (May 1988).

Chris Jones, The Politics and Futures of Gaia. Doctoral dissertation. University of Hawaii, 1989.

Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History trans. Franz Rosenthal (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1967).

Ashis Nandy, Tradition, Tyranny, and Utopias, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1987.

Ed Rampell, “Hi-Tech on the High Seas,” Pacific Island Monthly (May 1988).

Avadhuta Rudreshananda, Microvita: Cosmic Seeds of life. Berlin, Ananda Marga Publications, 1989.

Nicolas Rothwell, “Keeping the Language Alive,” Pacific Islands Monthly (May 1988).

P.R. Sarkar, PROUT in a Nutshell, Vols. 1-22. Calcutta, Ananda Marga Publications, 1988.

Michael Shapiro, The Politics of Representation. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.

Rupert Sheldrake, A New Science of Life. London, Blong and Briggs,1981.

William Irwin Thompson, Pacific Shift. San Francisco, Sierra Club 1985.

Barbar Walker, The Crone: Woman of Age, Wisdom and Power. San Francisco, Harper and Row, 1985.

By Sohail Inayatullah

PERSONAL HISTORY

Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar was born in May of 1921 in Bihar of an old and respected family that had its roots in regional leadership and in ancient spiritual traditions.  Sarkar’s early life was dominated by fantastic events, spiritual miracles and brushes with death.  He was nearly killed in his early years by a religious sect who believed that Sarkar was destined to destroy their religion (as astrologers had predicted about Sarkar).  Surviving this event and many other similar ones, by the 1950’s he had become a spiritualist with many followers.  In 1955, he founded the socio-spiritual organization Ananda Marga. Soon after, he articulated a new political-economic theory and social movement called the Progressive Utilization Theory or PROUT.

Ananda Marga and PROUT grew quickly in the 1960’s and managed to attract opposition from numerous Hindu groups, they believing Sarkar to be an iconoclast because of his opposition to caste (jhat) and his criticism of orthodox schools of Indian philosophy. By the late 1960’s his followers were in key positions in the Indian civil service. The government argued that it was a politically subversive revolutionary organization and banned civil servants from joining it. Ananda Marga asserted that it was being harassed because of its opposition to governmental corruption.

In 1971, Sarkar was accused of murdering his disciples and jailed. Before Sarkar’s eyes his movement was decimated and publically labelled as a terrorist organization.  In 1975 with the onset of the Indian Emergency his organizations were banned and his trial conducted in an atmosphere where defense witnesses were jailed if they spoke for Sarkar. Notwithstanding reports by the International Commission of Jurists and other associations of the partial judicial conditions making it impossible for Sarkar to receive a fair trial, Sarkar was convicted.1  When the Gandhi government was removed, his case was appealed and reversed. During those difficult years, Sarkar fasted in protest of the trial and the numerous tortures committed by the police and intelligence agencies on his workers and himself.  By the 1980’s his movement grew again expanding to nearly 120 nations.

Until his death on October 21, 1990 Sarkar remained active in Calcutta composing nearly 5000 songs called Prabhat Samgiit (songs of the new dawn), giving spiritual talks, giving discourses on languages, managing his organizations, and teaching meditation to his numerous disciples, especially his senior monks and nuns, avadhutas and avadhutikas. His most recent project was Ananda Nagar or the City of Bliss and other alternative communities throughout the world.  These communities have been designed with PROUT principles in mind: ecologically conscious, spiritually aware, socially progressive and embedded in the culture of the area.

THE PERSONAL AND SOCIAL

Sarkar places the rise, fall and rise of his movement in the same language that he uses to explain aspects of history.  For him, whenever truth is stated in spiritual or material areas of life, there is resistance.  This resistance eventually is destroyed by the very forces it uses to destroy truth.  “Remember, by an unalterable decree of history, the evil forces are destined to meet their doomsday.”2

For Sarkar movements follow a dialectical path: thesis, antithesis and synthesis.  A movement is born, it is suppressed and oppressed (if it truly challenges the distribution of meanings of power), and if it survives these challenges it will be victorious.  The strength of the movement can be measured by its ability to withstand these challenges.

Sarkar’s own life and the life of his organizations follow this pattern, although at this point the success of the PROUT movement has yet to be determined.  In our interpretation, it is this mythic language that is also perhaps the best way to understand his theory of history, for it is myth that gives meaning to reality, that makes understandable the moments and monuments of our daily lives and that gives a call to sacrifice the moment so as to create a better tomorrow.

Sarkar’s universe is the habitat of grand struggles between vidya and avidya: introversion and extroversion, contraction and expansion, compassion and passion.  This duality is an eternal part of the very metaphysic of the physical and social universe.  Unlike the Western model where social history can end with the perfect marketplace or the conflict-free communist state, for the Indian, for Sarkar, social history will always continue.  Only for the individual through spiritual enlightenment can time cease and the “mind” itself (and thus duality) be transcended.

SARKAR’S LARGER CIVILIZATIONAL PROJECT

Sarkar’s intent was and is (his organizations continue his work) to create a global spiritual socialist revolution, a renaissance in thought, language, music, art, and culture.  His goal is to infuse individuals with a spiritual presence, the necessary first step in changing the way that we know and order our world.  Unlike the socialists of the past who merely sought to capture state power–forgetting that the economy was global and thus in the long run strengthening the world capitalist system–or the utopian idealists who merely wished for perfect places that could not practically exist or spiritualists who only sought individual transformation at the expense of structural change, Sarkar has a far more comprehensive view of transformation of which his social cycle provides the key structure.

His theoretical offerings include a range of new approaches to understanding social reality.  His theory of neo-humanism aims to relocate the self from ego (and the pursuit of individual maximization), from family (and the pride of genealogy), from geo-sentiments (attachments to land and nation), from socio-sentiments (attachments to class, race and community) from humanism (man as the center of the universe) to neo-humanism (love and devotion for all, inanimate and animate, beings of the universe).  Paramount here is the construction of self in an ecology of reverence for life, not a modern/secular politics of cynicism.  Spiritual devotion to the universe is ultimately the greatest treasure that humans have; it is this treasure that must be excavated and shared by all living beings.

Only from this basis can a new universalism emerge which can challenge the national, religious, class sentiments of history. The first step, then, is liberating the intellect from its own boundaries and placing it in an alternative discourse.  Sarkar then seeks to make accessible an alternative way of knowing the world that includes yet steps beyond traditional knowledge points; reason, sense-inference, authority, and intuition.

The central framework for his neo-humanistic perspective is his Progressive Utilization Theory.  PROUT encompasses Sarkar’s theory of history and change, his theory of leadership and the vanguard of the new world he envisions, as well as his alternative political economy.

THEORY OF HISTORY

His theory of history constructs four classes: workers, warriors, intellectuals, and accumulators of capital.  Each class can be perceived not merely as a power configuration, but as a way of knowing the world, as a paradigm, episteme or deep structure, if you will.  In Sarkar’s language this is collective psychology or varna (here, dramatically reinterpreting caste). At the individuals level there is varna mobility, one can change the influence of history and social environment!  At the macro level, each varna comes into power bringing in positive necessary changes, but over time exploits and then dialectically creates the conditions for the next varna.  This cycle continues through history and for Sarkar is indeed an iron law of history, true irrespective of space/time and observer conditions.  It is a law because it has developed historically through evolution and because the cycle represents a universal social structure.  For Sarkar, there have been four historical ways humans have dealt with their physical and social environment:  either by being dominated by it, by dominating it through the body, dominating it through the mind, or dominating it through the environment itself.

While the parallel to caste is there (shudra, ksattriya, brahmin and vaeshya), Sarkar redefines them locating the four as broader social categories that have historically evolved through interaction with the environment. Moreover, varna for individuals is fluid, one can change one’s varna through education, for example. Caste, on the other hand, developed with the conquest of the local Indians by the Aryans and was later reinscribed by the Vedic priestly classes.3

Sarkar believes that while the social cycle must always move through these four classes, it is possible to accelerate the stages of history and remove the periods of exploitation.  Thus Sarkar would place the sadvipra, the compassionate servant leader, at the center of the cycle, at the center of society (not necessarily at the center of government).  In his life, Sarkar’s efforts were to create this type of leadership instead of building large bureaucratic organizations. He sought to create a new type of leadership that was humble and could serve, that was courageous and could protect, that was insightful and could learn and teach, and that was innovative and could use wealth–in a word, the sadvipra.

These leaders would, in effect, attempt to create a permanent revolution of sorts, creating a workers’ revolution when the capitalists begin to move from innovation to commodification, a warriors’ revolution when the workers’ era moves from societal transformation to political anarchy, an intellectual revolution when the warrior era expands too far–becomes overly centralized and stagnates culturally–and an economic revolution when the intellectuals use their normative power to create a universe where knowledge is only available to the select few, favoring non-material production at the expense of material production.  Through the intervention of the sadvipra, Sarkar’s social cycle becomes a spiral: the cycles of the stages remains but one era is transformed into its antithesis when exploitation increases. This leads to the new synthesis and the possibility of social progress within the structural confines of the four basic classes.  Sarkar’s theory allows for a future that while patterned can still dramatically change. For Sarkar, there are long periods of rest and then periods of dramatic social and biological revolution.  Future events such as the coming polar shift, the possible ice age, increased spiritual developments in humans due to various spiritual practices, and the social-economic revolution he envisions may create the possibility for a jump in human consciousness.4

Sarkar’s theoretical framework is not only spiritual or only concerned with the material world, rather his perspective argues that the real is physical, mental and spiritual.  Concomitantly, the motives for historical change are struggle with the environment (the move from the worker era to the warrior era), struggle with ideas (the move from the warrior to the intellectual), struggle with the environment and ideas (the move from the intellectual era to the capitalist eras) and the spiritual attraction of the Great, the call of the infinite.  Thus physical, mental and spiritual challenges create change.

Table: Sarkar’s Stages

Shudra / Worker / Dominated by Environment

Ksattriya / Warrior / Struggle with and dominates Environment

Vipra / Intellectual / Struggle with and dominates Ideas

Vaeshya / Capitalist / Struggle with and dominates Environment/Ideas

The key to Sarkar’s theory of history, thus, is that there are four structures and four epochs in history.  Each epoch exhibits a certain mentality, a varna.  This varna is similar to the concept of episteme, to paradigm, to ideal type, to class, to stage, to era and a host of other words that have been used to describe stage theory.  Sarkar, himself, alternatively uses varna and collective psychology to describe his basic concept.  Collective psychology reflects group desire, social desire.  There are four basic desire systems.  The four varnas are historically developed.  First the shudra, then the ksattriya, then the vipra, then the vaeshya.  The last era is followed either by a revolution by the shudras or an evolution into the shudra era.

The order is cyclical, but there are reversals.  A counter evolutionary movement or a more dramatic counter revolution which may throw an era backwards, such as a military ksattriyan leaders wresting power from a vipran-led government.  Both are short-lived in terms of the natural cycle since both move counter to the natural developmental flow.  But in the long run, the order must be followed.

Significantly–and this is important in terms of developing an exemplary theory of macrohistory–Sarkar does not resort to external variables to explain the transition into the next era.  It is not new technologies that create a new wealthy elite that can control the vipras, rather it is a fault within the viprans themselves.  Moreover, it is not that they did not meet a new challenge, or respond appropriately, as Toynbee would argue.  Rather, Sarkar’s reasoning is closer to Ibn Khaldun’s and other classical philosophers.  They create a privileged ideological world or conquer a material world, use this expansion to take care of their needs, but when changes come, they are unprepared for they themselves have degenerated.  While changes are often technological (new inventions and discoveries of new resources) it is not the significant variable, rather it is the mindset of the vipran, individually and as a class, that leads to their downfall.

ALTERNATIVE POLITICAL-ECONOMY

Embedded in his social theory is Sarkar’s alternative political economy.  In this project he designs his ideal theory of value.  For Sarkar there are physical, intellectual and spiritual resources.  Most economic theory privileges the material forgetting the intellectual and especially the infinite spiritual resources available to us.  Secondly, his theory uses as its axial principle the notion of social justice, the notion of actions not for selfish pleasure but for the social good.

Society is perceived not as an aggregate of self-contained individuals nor as a mass collectivity designed for the commune, but rather as a family moving together on a journey through social time and space.  Within the family model there is hierarchy and there is unity.  Newly created wealth is used to give incentives to those who are actualizing their self, either through physical, intellectual or spiritual labor, and is used to maintain and increase basic needs–food, clothing, housing, education and medical care.  Employment, while guaranteed, still requires effort, since central to Sarkar’s metaphysics is that struggle is the essence of life.  It is challenge that propels humans, collectively and individually, towards new levels of physical wealth, intellectual understanding and spiritual realization.  Sarkar speaks of incentives not in terms of cash, but in terms of resources that can lead to more wealth.

Finally, Sarkar would place limits on personal income and land holdings for the world physical resources are limited and the universe cannot be owned by any individual since it is nested in a higher consciousness, the Supreme Consciousness.

THE INDIAN EPISTEME AND THE INDIAN CONSTRUCTION OF HISTORY

Following the classic Indian episteme, reality has many levels; most ideologies only have accentuated the spiritual (Vedanta) or the material (liberalism), or the individual (capitalism) or the collective (communism), the community (Gandhism), or race (Hitlerism) or the nation (fascism).  Sarkar seeks an alternative balance of self, community, ecology, and globe.  Yet the spiritual is his base.  In his view Consciousness from pure existence transforms to awareness then to succeeding material factors (the Big Bang onwards) until it becomes matter.  From matter, there is dialectical evolution to humans.  Humans, finally, can devolve back to the inanimate or evolve as co-creators with consciousness.  For humans, there is structure and choice, nature and will. There is both creation and there is evolution.  With this epistemic background, we should then not be surprised at his dual interests in the material and spiritual worlds and their dynamic balance.

Placing Sarkar in an alternative construction of the real is central to understanding his social theory.  Every macrohistorian and thinker who creates a new discourse evokes the universal and the transcendental, but their grand efforts also spring from the dust and the mud of the mundane.  They are born in particular places and they die in locatable sites as well.  Sarkar writes from India, writes from the poverty that is Calcutta.  The centrality of the cycle then can partially be understood by its physical location.  The cycle promises a better future ahead; it promises that the powerful will be made weak and the weak powerful, the rich will be humbled and the poor enabled.  The cycle also comes directly from the classic Indian episteme.  In this ordering of knowledge, the real has many levels and is thus pluralistic; the inner mental world is isomorphic with the external material world, there are numerous ways of knowing the real, and time is grand.  According to Romila Thapar, “Hindu thinkers had evolved a cyclic theory of time.  The cycle was called the kalpa and was equivalent to 4320 million earthly years.  The kalpa is divided into 14 periods and at the end of each of these the universe is recreated and once again Manu (primeval man) gives birth to the human race.”5

In this classical model (ascribed to the Gita) the universe is created, it degenerates, and then is recreated.  The pattern is eternal.  This pattern has clear phases; the golden era of Krta or Satya, the silver era of Treta, the copper era of Dvapara and the iron age of Kali.  At the end of Kali, however, the great redeemer whether Vishnu or Shiva or Krishna, is reborn, the universe is realigned, dharma or truth is restored, and the cycle begins again.

Now is there a way out?  An escape from the cycle? Classically it has been through an alchemical ontological transformation of the self: the self realizing its real nature and thus achieving timelessness–the archetype of the yogi.  Concretely, in social reality this has meant the transformation of a person engrossed in fear to a mental state where nothing is feared, neither king nor priest; all are embraced, lust and greed are transcended and individual inner peace is achieved.  To this archetype, Sarkar has added a collective level asserting that individual liberation must exist in parallel and in the context of social liberation.  Spirituality is impossible in the context of the social body suffering in pain.  For him the world has a 6  defective social order…. this state of affairs cannot be allowed to continue.  This structure of inequality and injustice must be destroyed and powdered down for the collective interest of the human beings.  Then and then alone, humans may be able to lead the society on the past of virtue.  Without that only a handful of persons can possibly attain the Supreme Perfection.

But Sarkar too uses the redeemer concept to provide the way out of cyclical history.  This is his taraka brahma.  The first was Shiva who transformed the chaos of primitive life to the orderliness of humanity. Next was Krishna who restored the notion of national community.  And, for Sarkar, another redeemer is needed to transform the fragmented nation-states into a world community.  However, paradoxically the concept of the redeemer for Sarkar is  also metaphorical: it is meant to elicit devotion by making the impersonal nature of Consciousness touchable in the form of a personal guru.

Sarkar thus develops ways out of the cycle: individual and social. In contrast Orientalist interpreters like Mircea Eliade believe that the theory of eternal cycles is “invigorating and consoling for man under the terror of history,”7 as now man knows under which eras he must suffer and he knows that the only escape is spiritual salvation. Sarkar finds this view repugnant, for people suffer differently and differentially in each era, those at the center of power do better than those at the outskirts, laborers always do poorly.  Indeed throughout history different classes do better than other classes, but the elite manage quite well.8

Oftentimes, some people have lagged behind, exhausted and collapsed on the ground, their hands and knees bruised and their clothes stained with mud.  Such people have been thrown aside with hatred and have become the outcastes of society.  They have been forced to remain isolated from the mainstream of social life.  This is the kind of treatment they have received.  Few have cared enough to lift up those who lagged behind, to help them forward.

Hope lies not in resignation to but transformation of the cycle–it is here that Sarkar moves away from the classic Hindu model of the real–of caste, fatalism, and mentalism–most likely influenced by fraternal Islamic concepts, liberal notions of individual will, and by Marxist notions of class struggle.

For Sarkar there are different types of time.  There is cosmic time –the degeneration and regeneration of dharma; there is individual liberation from time through entrance into infinite time; and there is the social level of time wherein the times of exploitation are reduced through social transformation, thus creating a time of dynamic balance–a balance between the physical, social and spiritual.

This differs significantly from other views of Indian history. In the Idealistic view history is but the play or sport of Consciousness.9  In this view the individual has no agency and suffering is an illusion.  In the dynastic view history is but the succeeding rise and falls of dynasties and kings and queens; it is only the grand that have agency.  In contrast is Aurobindo’s10 interpretation, influenced by Hegel, in which instrumentality is assigned to historical world leaders and to nations.  For Sarkar, making nationalism into a spiritual necessity is an unnecessary reading.  God does not prefer any particular structure over another.

Following Aurobindo, Buddha Prakash has taken the classic Hindu stages of gold, silver, copper and iron and applied them concretely to modern history.  India, for Prakash, with nation-hood and industrialism has now wakened to a golden age that “reveals the jazz and buzz of a new age of activity.”11  But for Sarkar, the present is not an age of awakening, but an age “where on the basis of various arguments a handful of parasites have gorged themselves on the blood of millions of people, while countless people have been reduced to living skeletons.”12

Sarkar also rejects the modern linear view of history in which history is divided into ancient (Hindu), medieval (Muslim), and modern (British-nationalistic).  In this view, England is modern and India is backward.  If only India can adopt rational, secular and capitalist or socialist perspectives and institutions, that is, modern policies, it too can join the western world.  India then has to move from prehistorical society–people lost in spiritual fantasy and caste but without state–to modern society.13  Sarkar’s views are closer to Jawaharlal Nehru14 who thought that history is about how humanity overcame challenges and struggled against the elements and inequity.  Sarkar’s views are also similar to the recent “Subaltern”15 project in which the aim is to write history from the view of the dominated classes, not the elite or the colonial. However, unlike the Subaltern project which eschews meta-narratives, Sarkar’s social cycle provides a new grand theory.

SARKAR’S HISTORIOGRAPHY

Sarkar’s stages can be used to contextualize Indian history.16  Just as there are four types of mentalities, structures or types, we can construct four types of history.  There is the shudra history, the project of the Subaltern group.  However, their history is not written by the workers themselves but clearly by intellectuals.  There is then ksattriyan history; the history of kings and empires, of nations and conquests, of politics and economics.  This is the history of the State, of great men and women. Most history is vipran history, for most history is written and told by intellectuals, whatever their claims for the groups they represent.  Vipran history is also the philosophy of history: the development of typologies, of categories of thought, of the recital of genealogies, of the search for evidence, of the development of the field of history itself.  This is the attempt to undo the intellectual constructions of others and create one’s own, of asking is there one construction or can there be many constructions? Finally, there is vaeshyan history.  This is the history of wealth, of economic cycles, of the development of the world capitalist system, of the rise of Europe and the fall of India.  Marxist history is unique in that it is written by intellectuals for workers but used by warriors to gain power over merchants.  Sarkar attempts to write a history that includes all four types of power: people’s, military, intellectual and economic.

For Sarkar, most history is written to validate a particular mentality. Each varna writes a history to glorify its conquests, its philosophical realizations, or its technological breakthroughs, but rarely is history written around the common woman or man. For Sarkar, history should be written about how humans solved challenges.  How prosperity was gained.  “History… should maintain special records of the trials and tribulations which confronted human beings, how those trials and tribulations were overcome, how human beings tackled the numerous obstacles to effect great social development.”17  History then needs to aid in mobilizing people, personally and collectively toward internal exploration and external transformation.  Thus history should be a “resplendent reflection of collective life whose study will be of immense inspiration for future generations.”18 History then is a political asset.  Here Sarkar moves to a poststructural understanding of the true.  Truth is interpretive, not rta (the facts) but satya (that truth which leads to human welfare).  History then should not be placed solely within the empiricist view, but within an interpretive political perspective.

Sarkar’s own history is meant to show the challenges humans faced: the defeats and the victories.  His history shows how humans were dominated by particular eras, how they struggled and developed new technologies, ideas, and how they realized the atman, the, the eternal self.  It is an attempt to write a history that is true to the victims but does not oppress them again by providing no escape from history, no vision of the future.  His history then is clearly ideological, not in the sense of supporting a particular class, but rather a history that gives weight to all classes yet attempts to move them outside of class, outside of ego and toward neo-humanism.

CONCLUSION

History then is the natural evolutionary flow of this cycle.  At every point there are a range of choices; once made the choice becomes a habit, a structure of the collective or group mind.  Each mentality, with an associated leadership class comes into power, makes changes, and administers government but eventually pursues its own class ends and exploits the other groups.  This has continued throughout history.   Sarkar’s unit of analysis begins with all of humanity, it is a history of humanity, but he often refers to countries and nations. The relationship to the previous era is a dialectical one; an era emerges out of the old era. History moves not because of external reasons, although the environment certainly is a factor, but because of internal organic reasons.  Each era gains power–military, normative, economic or chaotic–and then accumulates power until the next group dislodges the previous elite.  The metaphysic behind this movement is, for Sarkar, the wave motion.  There is a rise and then a fall.  In addition, this wave motion is pulsative, that is, the speed of change fluctuates over time.  The driving force for this change is first the dialectical interaction with the environment, second the dialectical interaction in the mind and in ideologies, and third the dialectical interaction between both, ideas and the environment.  But there is also another motivation: this is the attraction toward the Great. The individual attraction toward the Supreme.  This is the ultimate desire that frees humans of all desires.

While clash, conflict and cohesion with the natural and social environment drives the cycle, it is the attraction to the Great, the infinite, that is the solution or the answer to the problem of history.  It results in progress.  For Sarkar, the cycle must continue, for it is a basic structure in mind, but exploitation is not a necessity.   Through the sadvipra, exploitation can be minimized.

To conclude, Sarkar’s theory uses the metaphor of the human life cycle and the ancient wheel, that is, technology.  There is the natural and there is human intervention.  There is a structure and there is choice.  It is Sarkar’s theory that provides this intervention; an intervention that for Sarkar will lead to humanity as a whole finally taking its first deep breath of fresh air.

NOTES

1.         See Vimala Schneider, The Politics of Prejudice. Denver, Ananda Marga Publications, 1983.  Also see, Tim Anderson, Free Alister, Dunn and Anderson. Sidney, Wild and Wolley, 1985. And, Anandamitra Avadhutika, Tales of Torture. Hong Kong, Ananda Marga Publications, 1981.

2.         Ananda Marga, Ananda Vaniis. Bangkok, Ananda Marga Publications, 1982.

3.         For various interpretations of caste in Indian history and politics, see Nicholas Dirks, The Hollow Crown. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987; Rajni Kothari, Caste in Indian Politics. New Delhi, Orient Longman, 1970; Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus.  Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1979; and, Romila Thapar, A History of India. Baltimore, Penguin Books, 1966.

4.         See Richard Gauthier, “The Greenhouse Effect, Ice Ages and Evolution,” New Renaissance (Vol. 1, No. 3, 1990).

5.         Romila Thapar, A History of India, 161.

6.         P. R. Sarkar, Supreme Expression. Vol. II. Netherlands, Nirvikalpa Press, 1978, 16.

7.         Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return. New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1971, 118.

8.         P. R. Sarkar,  The Liberation of Intellect–Neo Humanism. Calcutta, Ananda Marga Publications, 1983.

9.         Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, “History: An Idealist’s View.”  K. Satchidananda Murti, ed. Readings. See  K. Satchidananda Murti, “History: A Theist’s View.” K. Satchidananda Murti, ed. Readings.

10.       Sri Aurobindo,  “The Spirituality and Symmetric Character of Indian Culture,” and “The Triune Reality,” K. Satchidananda Murty, ed. Readings in Indian History, Philosophy and Politics. London. George Allen and Unwin, 1967, p. 361. Also see Vishwanath Prasad Varma. Studies in Hindu Political Thought and its Metaphysical Foundations. Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass, 1974.

11.       See Buddha Prakash, “The Hindu Philosophy of History.” Journal of the History of Ideas (Vol. 16, No. 4, 1958).

12.       Shrii Anandamurti, Namah Shivaya Shantaya. Calcutta, Ananda Marga Publications, 1982, 165.

13.       See Ronald Inden, “Orientalist Constructions of India.” Modern Asian Studies (Vol. 20, No. 3, 1986). See also Edward Said, Orientalism. New York, Vintage Books, 1979.  And, Ashis Nandy, Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias. New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1987.

14.       Jawaharlal Nehru, “History: A Scientific Humanist’s View.” K. Satchidananda Murti, ed. Readings.

15.       Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies. New York, Oxford University Press, 1988.  See also D.D. Kosambit, “A Marxist Interpretation of Indian History.” K. Satchidananda Murty, ed. Readings, 40.

16.       See also Sabyasachi Bhattacharya and Romila Thapar, eds. Situating Indian History. Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1986.

17.       P. R. Sarkar. A Few Problems Solved. Vol. 4. trans. Acarya Vijayananda Avadhuta. Calcutta, Ananda Marga Publications, 1987, 64.

18.       ibid, 66.