Autobiography of Dharmanand Kosambi, in Marathi

The Autobiograpy of Acharya Dharmanand Kosambi, father of DD Kosambi, and a great Buddhist scholar himself, is available in three parts at Arvind Gupta's site. The book is in Marathi and can be downloaded by clicking on the following links:

Part 1 (pages 1- 100) 3 MB file
Part 2 (pages 101-200) 4 MB file
Part 3 (pages 201-330) 5 MB file

Thanks to the indefatigable Arvind Gupta.

A beautiful mind- Dharmanand Kosambi

HindustanTimes-Print

A beautiful mind

How do you become an academic and a scholar? Usually, those who aim to research and teach are privileged with a formal education and spend their lives in academia. This was the path taken, for instance, by historians like Jadunath Sarkar and RG Bhandarkar. Sarkar began life in a village, then studied and taught at Presidency College. Bhandarkar took the regular exams and taught at Elphinstone and Deccan College. Both wrote for English-reading audiences. This made them widely known.

It is virtually impossible to come across a scholar of international stature who had neither access to a regular education nor libraries. Dharmanand Damodar Kosambi (1876-1947), a self-taught man who became a scholar of Pali and Buddhism, is in this sense unique. Obscured by the fame of his historian son D.D. Kosambi (1907-1966), Dharmanand also remains little known outside Maharashtra because he preferred Marathi to English. His local renown will now become widespread because his granddaughter, Meera Kosambi, has recently edited and translated his writings into English (Dharmanand Kosambi, The Essential Writings, Permanent Black, 2010).

What these writings reveal, described so well in her introduction, is a man of phenomenal intellect with a matching capacity for austerity. Kosambi the Elder scripted for himself “a trajectory of intellectual and ideological adventure” that transported him, in his search for knowledge about Buddhism, from an impoverished rural Goa to various places in India, Nepal, Ceylon, Burma, Russia and America.

It has been said that our lives are irrevocably shaped by the cards we are dealt in childhood. The frail and mentally impoverished Dharmanand, a Gaud Sarasvat Brahmin by birth, seemed destined to spend his life tending the family’s coconut grove in village Goa. But his passion for reading, which developed around the time he was married off at age 14, spurred him out of domestic disenchantment into a life filled with an almost incredible severity of self-teaching. Reading material wasn’t readily available. So, every month he travelled to Madgaon to borrow it from friends and relatives. In a Marathi magazine, Bal-Bodh, he first read about the Buddha. Later, travelling to learn Sanskrit in Poona, he read a Marathi translation of Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia (which also influenced Gandhi and Nehru). For Dharmanand, this book on the Buddha became a religious text: “I have still not forgotten how,” he says, “while reading certain portions of it, my throat would constrict and tears would stream down my face.”

Roughly half of Kosambi’s Essential Writings comprises an unusually moving autobiographical narrative: ‘moving’ in both senses, because this is an Indian Pilgrim’s Progress crafted to inspire disadvantaged people to carve out extraordinary paths; and because his self-abnegation in the cause of replicating the Buddha’s suffering for self-enlightenment leaves one close to tears. The almost penniless Dharmanand, after studying Sanskrit in Varanasi, walks virtually barefoot to Nepal in February 1902 because he has been told that knowledge of Buddhism might be acquired in the vicinity of Kathmandu. Reaching the promised land exhausted, he finds only sadhus who tell people’s fortunes by throwing dice.

Filled with sorrow, his search resumes, taking him towards Bodhgaya, and then, by begging for money in the prescribed manner of the true bhikshu, to the doorstep of the Mahabodhi Society in Calcutta. Supplication here results in sponsors who send him to Colombo, where he finally acquires direct knowledge of Buddhism. Now Dharmanand becomes a monk, subsisting daily on begged food, which must be consumed before noon. Through all his trials and tribulations he neither loses his sense of humour nor his aversion for unappetising food: in Kashi the dal was, as he nicely puts it, swimming in Ganga water.

The pilgrim then becomes a missionary. Forsaking the monk’s cowl, Dharmanand repays his debt to Calcutta, introducing Pali into the curriculum of the National College and teaching at the university. The restlessness of the truly zealous overtakes him again: he gives up a bhadralok’s salary to be closer to Marathi-speaking regions where he may spread knowledge of the Buddha. He lectures in Baroda, introduces Pali to Bombay University, and writes copiously in Marathi on Buddhist texts and ahimsa. His itinerant narrative ends at Harvard, where over three spells he helps prepare a critical edition of Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhi-magga.

Paradoxically, the journey to capitalist America opened Dharmanand’s mind to socialism. At Liverpool, a Dutch accountant introduced him to Marx’s thought and bought him books on socialism that he followed up with others in America. In his later writings, Dharmanand consistently sought to trace socialism’s compatibility with ancient Indian thought.

Dharmanand’s writings on Buddhism made him a celebrated figure across Maharashtra: they comprise the second half of his Essential Writings. The most unusual here is a play, Bodhisattva. In it he enlists the past for present social reform. Yashodhara is shown marrying Bodhisattva knowing full well that celibacy for a protracted period is the condition of their marriage.

A critique of child marriage, and the difficulties faced by couples married before their time, is implicit and links with what Gandhi said of his failed attempt to teach Kasturba, whom he married when she was 13: he was anxious to teach her, but lust left him little time, and later public life left him none. Dharmanand worked with the Mahatma and must have known this. Sensing and espousing the connections between Buddhism, socialism, and Gandhianism, it was in Gandhi’s Vardha ashram that he chose to die in 1947 — voluntarily, by giving up food. In his tribute to Dharmanand, Gandhi said: “May God inspire us all to walk in his footsteps.”

Pay and promotions provoke rather more passion among academics now than the disinterested quest that so nobly motivated Dharmanand. In a consumerist world where socialism and Gandhian principles are thoroughly dead, it is difficult even to imagine a life of the kind lived by Dharmanand Kosambi, let alone live it.

India has produced outstanding and committed scholars. And then there is Dharmanand, the only scholar-sage that Indology has known.

Nayanjot Lahiri is a member of the Delhi Urban Art Commission

The views expressed by the author are personal
http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print/577651.aspx
© Copyright 2009 Hindustan Times

Crossing Thresholds: Feminist Essays in Social History by Meera Kosambi

Scholars without Borders

Meera Kosambi is a prominent Indian sociologist. She has done her PhD in sociology from the University of Stockholm and has authored several books and articles on urban sociology and woman's studies in India. She is the youngest daughter of a prominent Marxist historian and mathematician, D. D. Kosambi, and grand-daughter of Acharya Dharmananda Kosambi, prominent Buddhist Scholar and a Pāli language expert.

In her book "Crossing Thresholds: Feminist Essays in Social History" Kosambi states that 'The notion of the threshold, indicating the restricted periphery of the 'woman's place' in family and society, was firmly embedded in the psyche of nineteenth-century women in western India. Yet some remarkable and articulate women (who are the focus of this book) 'transgressed' patriarchal boundaries--crossing thresholds, literally and metaphorically--to make their mark in the public sphere. These Indian women created the 'first ripple feminism' of the region.

Nineteenth-century men also inbabit the book--social reformers and those who helped these women, as well as conservatives who opposed both the reformers and the progressive women. The central objective of Professor Kosambi's book is to interrogate official social history--which posits strong male reformers and passive women recipients--as well as retrieve and assess women's own pioneering contribution to their proto-feminist efforts.

The Introduction presents a conceptual framework of public/private spheres, attempts to retrieve women's subjectivity through their published narratives, and discusses questions of representation and 'voice'.

The ten essays that follow span a variety of topics--the politics of iconizing individual women, women's complex relationships to their homes and their bodies, women's exposure to education and nationalism, the nature of conjugality and 'consent', ideas of motherhood and widowhood.
Uniting all these themes is the effort to amplify women's voices and reconstruct their experiential worlds.

The book straddles the areas of Gender Studies, History, and Asian Studies while underscoring the resonance of these women's lives with those of other women across South Asia and the West. '

The Middle Class in Colonial India- a book review

The Hindu : Book Review : The making of the Indian middle class

THE MIDDLE CLASS IN COLONIAL INDIA: Edited by Sanjay Joshi; Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 795.

This thought-provoking book is a compilation of readings on the making of the Indian middle class from the late 19th century to the early 21st century. There is both a challenge and an advantage in compiling such a volume. The challenge: what to include and how to order it. And the advantage: an enviable opportunity to make a critical appraisal of the essays. On both counts, Sanjay Joshi has performed admirably.

Microscopic minority

What or who constitute the Indian middle class? Since the secular and liberal Western middle class is taken as the norm, its Indian counterpart will often be seen as falling short of the ideal, so to speak. In 1888, according to the outgoing Viceroy, the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, it was a “microscopic minority” that was incapable of representing the interests of the masses.

Even today, the middle class in India does not occupy a median position, and may, more properly, be dubbed an “elite, affluent class,” as Aurobindo Ghosh anticipated in his 1893 essay (“A Cheap Shoddy Import”) and D.D. Kosambi recalled, some 50 years on, in his review of Jawaharlal Nehru's Discovery of India. One of the earliest tributes paid to the Indian middle class is to be found in the 1961 essay by B.B. Misra, where he called it “a product of British benevolence.”

It is not as if such a class did not exist in pre-colonial times. The main change in its status came about in the form of its participation in the public sphere (which C.A. Bayly calls ‘ecumene'), resulting in a kind of universalisation of middle class norms. But this so-called universalisation was tainted owing to the colonial experience.

The post-colonial subject, from Jawaharlal Nehru to the Bollywood scriptwriter (as M. Madhava Prasad argues), was forced to indulge in a paradoxical nationalist discourse, hoping to reconcile the goals of objective Western rationality and subjective Indian antiquity. To this day, there have been an uneasy, troubled coexistence of liberalism and caste endogamous practices in virtually all parts of the country. Nevertheless, the Indian middle class is not a monolith, as suggested by the various ways in which the contributors describe it — the non-fixity of the Western middle class narrative within the Indian context (Dipesh Chakrabarty); the Bengali rentier component giving rise to complex gender politics (Tanika Sarkar); players of cricket in the extended Macaulayan education system (Boria Majumdar); the prudent white-collar Kanara Saraswat community in Bombay (Prashant Kidambi); the family-oriented merchant class (Claude Markovits); the new sharif Islamic class divorced from the nobility and the lower classes (Margrit Pernau); and the educated Tamil Brahmins, who embody a schizophrenic realm of Westernised public and Sanskritised private values (M.S.S. Pandian).

Not demarcated

In reality, the ‘public' and the ‘private' are not very clearly demarcated as the ‘Westernised material sphere' and the ‘native spiritual sphere' respectively, as Partha Chatterjee would have it. According to Chatterjee, there can be no such phenomenon as the Indian middle class in colonial times, simply because the natives were excluded from the public sphere of economics and politics. Since the natives were confined to the private sphere of the household, religious, caste and gender hierarchies flourished in the Indian community during the colonial phase. However, as Sanjay Joshi (‘Re-Publicising Religiosity') points out, the native private sphere did not remain private; it acquired an aggressive public face, as in the case of religious expression, in defiance of the British colonial embargo on native participation in politics.

In a lighter vein, A.R. Venkatachalapathy tells us that even a private pleasure like coffee drinking — initially viewed as a Western vice — acquired a public face in the form of Brahmin-run coffee houses, which before long gave rise to the ‘other', namely the working-class tea houses, all over Tamil Nadu.

The importance of a volume like this lies in that it throws light on the historical evolution of the values of the middle class that are naturalised and taken for granted in the present-day.

Saluting a Genius: Dr K K Kusuman

Saluting a genius

Sabloo Thomas
First Published : 14 Jun 2010 01:38:46 AM IST

When Dr K K Kusuman, former head, Department of History at the University of Kerala died in a road accident in 2007, a group of his friends decided to bring out a volume in his memory. Dr Suresh Jnaneswaran, presently Reader of History at the University, who was then working in SN College, Chempazhanthy, was asked to take up the task of coordinating the work. and he accomplished the feat in time.

During the work, Jnaneswaran realised that there has been no similar work to honour Dr T K Ravindran, former Vice Chancellor of Calicut University and one of the prominent historians of our time.

In fact, Ravindran is among the few historians of his generation who has not been honoured with such a work.

‘‘That was when I decided to initiate a work that would be a tribute to the great scholar,’’ Jnaneswaran told.

Jnaneswaran single-handedly took up the task of bringing out the book. ‘‘The response from historians was very encouraging as most felt the need for such a book,’’ said Jnaneswaran.

‘‘Many, who could not contribute as they were working on other projects, were disappointed with the fact that they could not associate with the work.’’

It was during the course of the work that Jnaneswaran realised that there were other facets to Ravindran’s personality. Ravindran is a poet with over 20,000 poems to his credit. He is also an amateur painter. Historiography was selected as the topic for the festschrift, as it was Ravindran who introduced historiography as a topic for study in universities in Kerala, said Jnaneswaran.

The work ‘Historiography: Structure and Practice,’ a festschrift in honour of the eminent historian and teacher, has turned out to be a scholarly work and a fitting honour to the great man.

Union Minister for State for Home Mullappally Ramachandran released the book at a function at Palakkad on May 16.

‘‘The Minister cancelled all the programmes for the day to attend the book release function. He arrived well before the scheduled time and sat through the entire programme. This clearly showed his reverence for Ravindran who was also his teacher,’’ said Jnaneswaran.

It is a mystery why many consider Ravindran as an anti-Marxist historian, says Jnaneswaran. ‘‘He, in fact, is the one who first introduced the writings of Marxist historians like D D Kosambi and R S Sharma to the students in Kerala,’’ Jnaneswaran said.

Contributors to the festschrift include most of the prominent historians - Aditya Mukherjee, professor of Contemporary History, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University; Dr Sukumar Bhattacharyya, former Professor of History, Viswa Bharati, Shantiniketan; Professor R Mahalakshmi, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University; Professor M G S Narayanan, former Chairman, Indian Council of Historical Research and Prof B Sheik Ali, former Vice-Chancellor, Goa and Mangalore universities.

Some of the themes dealt in the book are ‘Ideas in History and Reflections on the Emergence of Indian Historiography;’ ‘D D Kosambi and Historiography in India’ and ‘The Return of the Colonial in Indian Economic History: The Last Phase of Colonialism in India’.

The book is a vast collection of articles that will add to historical knowledge and will serve as a reference book for teachers, researchers and students.

sabloothomas@expressbuzz.com

DDK- A paper on mathematics

I am not sure what this paper is about, it is too obtuse for me to understand, but there seem to be significant references to DDK's work on mathematics. Download.

DDK on social aspect of Buddhism

Features | Online edition of Daily News - Lakehouse Newspapers

Buddhist doctrine for all

Ven Dr Beligalle Dhammajoti

Some scholars with a little knowledge of Buddhism are of the opinion that there is no socio-economic and political philosophy of Buddhism. A well-known scholar, Max Weber, who is considered as’ father of sociology of religion’ explaining the socio-political aspect of Buddhism says: “Buddhism had no sort of tie with any sort of social movement, nor did it run in parallel with such and it has established no social and political goal.” He further says that Buddhism is a social and anti-political and it can be considered to be an ‘other-worldly religion.’
Max Weber

This is a misleading and distorted concept of Buddhist doctrine. It is very clear that Max Weber never analyzed and understood Buddhist teachings deeply. Early Buddhism is in no way another-worldly religion. It includes a well-defined socio-economic and political philosophy and also a philosophy of history. Professors D D Kosambi and Rhys Davids explicitly recognize that there is a socio-economic and political philosophy of Buddhism and their idea give one lie to the above-mentioned notion of Max Weber.


A dagoba seen through a gong. Picture by Saman Sri Wedage

Another misconceived idea of Buddhism states that Buddhism is such a sublime system that ordinary people cannot practice it. One has to retire to a monastery if one desires to be a true Buddhist.

This is a partial and distorted view. The doctrine of the Buddha is meant not only for mendicant monks but also for ordinary men and women living in their homes with their family members. The Noble Eightfold Path, meditation on loving-kindness and ten perfection are meant for all. They can be practised in their daily life.
Competitive society

It is extremely incorrect to say that Buddhism is social. Addressing the first 60 Arhaths, the Buddha says: “O monks walk on tour, for the good of the many, for the happiness of the many, for the welfare of the many, good and happiness of human beings and celestial beings.” This shows that the Buddha has laid much emphasis on the members of society and their welfare. Therefore the old Buddhist monasteries had become the spiritual centres and the centres of learning and culture. The five precepts are meant for the whole human society. Any person can observe them and lead a spiritual life and that would be of great benefit for him and to this competitive society.

The Sigalovada Sutta explicitly explains the family and social relationships. It gives a set of instructions and teachings that pertain to man’s socio-economic and spiritual progress. Modern man can lead a very happy and prosperous life if he understands the significance of these social relations explained in the Sigalovada Sutta.
Development

Some scholars are of the opinion that Buddhist philosophy is interested only in higher morality and it ignores the social and economic welfare. This is also another misconception of Buddhist socio-economic and political philosophy. The Kutadanta Sutta explains the way and approach of development of a country with proper planning and also it shows the nature of socio-economic progress. We should not forget that the Buddha expounded these words in the 6th Century BC and even today that they are of great value.

The Cakkavattisihanada Sutta explains poverty, revolution, poverty-related crimes and the reasons for the chaotic situation of a country and also the reasonable grounds for arising those social ills. Today our competitive global society experiences these socio-economic and political ills and tribulations that are explained in the Cakkavattisihanada Sutta.
Moral degeneration

In the Agganna Sutta we find a theory of the origin of social classes. There the Buddha explains the arising and evolution, the origin of State, the evolution of human race and social grades, the changing nature of moral values and the relationship between moral degeneration and the deterioration of environmental elements. The Sutta explains how beings were becoming less hard-working, less honest, less ethical and how they lost their physical and mental qualities with the passage of time.
Dogmatic views

Fundamental unreasonable concepts related to social organisations were radically transformed by the Buddha. The Buddha explained the nature of those concepts and their connection with the ditthis or dogmatic views of certain religious traditions.

The socio-economic and cultural transformations by the Buddha can be seen explicitly even in the present time in our Buddhist societies. Making a comment on the social upheaval of Buddhism, Narendranath Bhatthacharya says:

“The rise of Buddhism was certainly to serve some social purpose. It had some distinct social and functional role. But very few attempts have been made to understand all these.”

It is a well-known fact that Buddhism is capable of making a drastic transformation of the present day competitive and war-like Society. For such a transformation, it needs a proper knowledge and correct understanding of the Buddha’s teachings.
Koppen

The first significant work in the Buddhist social field was Die Religion des Buddha (1957) written by C F Koppen. In his book Koppen explains.

“.....the Buddha was viewed as the emancipator of the oppressed and a great political innovator.”

Here it is very interesting to note that Koppen was a close friend of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Equality

Karl Marx ruthlessly criticized religion and the widely accepted concept of omnipotent God. Buddhism is completely free from that criticism, for it has no concepts of God. Trevor Ling in his great work on Buddha, Marx and God explains that Buddhism is free from his critique. French scholar La Loubere says that Buddhism is totally different from other religions as it does not possesses a doctrine of God and it teaches rebirth (re-becoming or Punabbhava) without accepting the concept of a soul. Addressing the Berlin Science Academy in 1856, Albrecht Weber explained that Buddhist teachings were so helpful for social reformation and it had accepted the equality of all human beings.

DDK and Unilinear Progression in India

The Hindu : Arts / Books : Social patterns in early south India

This is an extremely timely anthology of 17 essays on social formations of early south India (from the prehistoric beginnings to circa 1300 CE) which Rajan Gurukkal has contributed to leading publications since the early 1980s. Of these, two essays — “The Course of Social Historiography of Kerala” and “Semiotics of Ancient Tamil Poetics: A Methodological Consideration” — are published for the first time. Many of the already published ones have been revised/modified for this collection.

The essays have been grouped under four heads: historiography and method; early social formations (up to the ‘Early Iron Age'); social transformations (tracing the transition from the ancient to early medieval); and the new social formation (into which the ancient agro-pastoral social transformation had dissolved itself).
Marxist method

Given that the Marxian thinkers and practitioners in India are under attack all round, it is courageous of Gurukkul to have reiterated his strong conviction in the validity of Marxist methodology of studying the dynamics of Indian society through the millennia. His introductory chapter, “Conceptual Preliminaries” sets the tone and tenor by underlining the central thesis of social formation. It successfully demolishes the myth of homogenised uni-dimensional notion of the definitional parameters of ‘social formation' not only through Marx's own formulations but also by alluding to the more recent refinements of the theory of ‘mode of production' in the writings of such renowned structuralist-theorists and anthropologists of Marxian tradition as Althusser, Balibar, Godelier and Poulantzas.

There is a subtle semantic departure in the definition and framework of the concept of social formation adopted in these essays. Instead of being viewed as a combination of ‘modes of production', it is sought to be defined as an ensemble of a few unevenly evolved ‘forms of production' (emphasis added) interconnected to one another and structured by the dominance of one form that need not necessarily be superior to the rest in terms of technology and productivity. The defence offered is that, since the expression ‘mode of production' is widely used to mean a specific social totality of epochal identity almost on a par with ‘social formation', ‘forms of production' is found to be more appropriate and free of confusion.
Distinction

It is essential for a historian to bear in mind the distinction Marx draws between the universality of economic, political, and ideological practices, and the variety of determinate institutional forms, which can be located historically. It is heartening to see Gurukkal recalling D.D. Kosambi and seeing in him “a historian committed to anti-deterministic stance with ‘source first' approach.” Kosambi's contempt for the OMs (‘Official Marxists') and his deviations from the Marxian scheme of unilinear progression of historical changes in the context of India are well- known. No wonder his formulation “...no single mode prevailed uniformly over the whole country [India] at any one time...” is the most abiding influence in this anthology.

And yet, Gurukkal is not averse to speaking his mind fearlessly. To illustrate, he forcefully asserts: “in the absence of classical society in South Indian history, the direct application of the feudal model became difficult.” Recognising that the particularities of the ‘Indian feudal model' are not pan-Indian, he takes up the agrarian social formation in the Tamil south as a case study to bring out its distinctiveness. In the process, he goes on to critique the so-called ‘gradualists/evolutionists' (including his own peers M.G.S. Narayanan and Chamapakalakshmi — this anthology is dedicated to the latter). Accusing them of having ‘diffusionist assumptions', he argues that they simply critiqued Burton Stein's ‘Segmentary State Model' (put forward as an alternative to the ‘feudal' paradigm) to defend the feudal model without providing any alternative theoretical framework to suit the specificities of the region concerned (Tamilakam). Such formulations demonstrate Gurukkal's grounding in Marxian theory and firm grasp over empirical evidences.
Major changes

The major changes that the social formation underwent over time are presented in detail. For instance, the transition from kin-labour to non-kin labour; from thrust hoe to plough; from millet to paddy; from clans to hereditary occupation groups and caste; from chiefdom to monarchy; and from heterodox ideology to Brahmanism. In the process, illustrations have been drawn from the experiences of the Tamil macro region as well as of the Kerala micro region. There is a specialised study of the technology of irrigation and institutions of water management, particularly the cascaded reservoir system, and the community practice of prioritised distribution. This book fills a significant gap in the study of social formations in early south India.

Keywords: South Indian history, Rajan Gurukkal, Social history

Caste- Annihilition and beyond

Himal Southasian/Equalisation to annihilation-and beyond

The idea of corrupting the system of caste through genial viruses like intermarriage and inter-dining is defeated even before organisations like the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal in Lahore or the Periyar E V Ramasamy-led Self-Respect Movement in Tamil Nadu offered these as counters. After all, the very system we are dealing with is a gigantic virus, which is why Ambedkar spoke of the need to “dynamite” the Brahminical religion that upholds caste. Yet his subsequent recourse to Buddhism, stripped of all the metaphysical baggage it had acquired over centuries, has not exactly led even Dalits into a caste-free utopia. A whole generation of Dalit Buddhists has relapsed into popular Hinduism, as studies have shown.

Further, new communities are always being enlisted as castes. According to historian D D Kosambi, at the instance of Kautilya, the Brahmins were designated with the task of creating castes among tribes that rebelled against the Mauryan Empire – despite the fact that the Mauryans were themselves believed to be of tribal/Shudra origins. In her recent essay on Maoists in Dandakaranya, writer Arundhati Roy notes that, as part of the Hindutva drive,

In north Bastar, Baba Bihari Das had started an aggressive drive to ‘bring tribals back into the Hindu fold’, which involved a campaign to denigrate tribal culture, induce self-hatred, and introduce Hinduism’s great gift – caste. The first converts, the village chiefs and big landlords – people like Mahendra Karma, founder of the Salwa Judum – were conferred the status of Dwij, twice-born, Brahmins.

DDK's associate, thinker R P Nene no more

RP Nene, close associate of DD Kosambi, among others, is no more.

TNN, Mar 24, 2010, 12.54am IST
PUNE: Noted progressive thinker and an active member of the Maharashtra Rationalist Forum, R P Nene, passed away at a private hospital in the city on Tuesday following illness. He was 81.

His body was donated as per his wishes. The body was kept at his brother's residence off ILS Law College road from 12 to 3 pm to enable people to pay tributes.

Nene was a senior freedom fighter, philosopher and left- progressive ideologue. He was associated with several political and social movements and with social organisations, including Goa Liberation Movement, Samyukta Maharashtra movement, Ek Gaon Ek Panavtha (one village one water source), Lokayat, movement for renaming of Marathwada university, discussion group, and the latest Narmada Bachao Andolan, to name a few.

Nene undertook over 22 social research projects with scholars in India and abroad. Some the topics include Power politics in Pune zilla parishad' and Impact of Panshet flood on people's lives.' He also contributed extensively for journals like Tatparya', Milun Saryajani' and Vatsaru'.

Though Nene was influenced by communist philosophy later in his life, in the initial stages he was also in contact with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and was impressed by the philosophy of late Swatantryaveer V D Savarkar. Later, he became associated with the All India Students' Federation and Marxism. When he was studying in the final year of MA, he was active in the students' movement and became a card holder of the communist party for a brief while during 1948-52. Though he never remained an active party worker, he retained his association with the leftist movement.

During 1948-1950, when there was a ban on communist literature, Nene operated the People's Book House and extended its reach by keeping books on other subjects as well.

Nene was a close associate of renowned thinkers D D Kosambi, D K Bedekar, A R Kamat and social activists like Baba Adhav, Medha Patkar, Vilas Wagh and Dada Sonawane. Though a soft spoken person, Nene never hesitated to express his views and opinions even when they differed from those of his associates.

Arvind Gupta's long interview with RP on DD Kosambi has previously appeared at this blog.