Evola in the BJP

A contributor to Swarajya, a somewhat disreputable English-language Indian magazine closely aligned with India’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), recently published an article supportive of the tough approach of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah to the long-running (Maoist) Naxalite insurgency in central and east India. It was Kishan Kumar, “Hammer of the State: End of Naxalite Nightmare Under Modi-Shah Doctrine,” available here. 

So far, so unremarkable. What was remarkable was the article made frequent use of references to Julius Evola to drive its message home, without any explanation of who Evola was, other than that “Julius Evola taught that decadence must be met with the sword, that the regression of the modern world is not to be negotiated with but to be crushed.”

Evola, we are told, “reminds us that true authority requires the destruction of that which defies hierarchy. That is precisely what the home ministry has done.” “Evola, the article concludes, “taught us that modernity must be resisted with transcendence. India is now fighting not merely for land or law but for Dharma. The forest has been cleansed with fire. The citadels of ideology have been breached. The Kali Yuga still lingers, but the hammer has struck.”

Kishan Kumar, the author of the article, evidently knows his Evola and appreciates Evola's message. Whether he refers to him without introduction because he thinks his readers will all know who he was, or whether he is the only BJP supporter who has ever heard of Evola, is unclear. There are no other references to him in Swarajya, so perhaps the latter.

Maybe a BJP expert will read this post and help out with a  comment

Was Gandhi a Traditionalist?

Michael Allen, a philosopher at East Tennessee State University, has worked on protest movements for many years, and has just published a book about Gandhi in which he asks the unexpected question of whether Gandhi has a Traditionalist. The answer, he argues, is no, but the question still gives rise to an interesting discussion, in chapter 7 of Allen's Gandhi’s Popular Sovereignty of Truth: Devotional Democracy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), available here.

Gandhi was, like Guénon, a fierce critic of modernity, and also a perennialist. So far, so similar. The difference, according to Allen, is that while the Traditionalist route to personal or political realization is esoteric, Gandhi’s route was exoteric: his “devotional democracy” depended on “the whole sovereign people together speaking God’s voice,” not just on an elite.

Allen also compares Gandhi to the contemporary Identitarians, who draw on Traditionalism. Here the difference is about “pluralism of ethno-cultural traditions.” While the Identitarians suppose that “each discrete culture may flourish only in its own territory of origin,” which Allen sees as “an impossible global ethno-cultural apartheid,” Gandhi rejects this idea and looks towards "a wide pluralism" instead.

I am not sure that Allen has got the Identitarians quite right, but I am certainly convinced that Gandhi was not a Guénonian. He was closer to Guénon than I had thought, though, perhaps because I have not previously thought about him enough.

E. F. Schumacher's path to Traditionalism

A new article in the Journal of the History of Economic Thought traces the path followed by E. F. Schumacher (1911-77, pictured) from being a “relatively conventional economist” to writing the iconoclastic best-seller Small is Beautiful, and then to Traditionalism. The article, “E. F. Schumacher and the Making of ‘Buddhist Economics,’ 1950–1973,” is by Robert Leonard, Professor of Economics at the University of Québec.

Leonard is more interested in the origins of Small is Beautiful (1973) than in Schumacher’s Traditionalism, which from his perspective is justified, as it was Small is Beautiful that had a major impact; Schumacher’s later, Traditionalist A Guide for the Perplexed (1977) was less widely read. Even so, the article shows clearly how Schumacher encountered Traditionalism—and it was not, nor at least not mostly, through Lord Northbourne (1896-1982), as I suggested might have been the case in an earlier blog post.

What lay behind Small is Beautiful was first the impact on a German (Schumacher was born in Bonn) who had spent the Second World War in England of seeing what had happened to Germany in his absence. This led Schumacher to difficult questions and then to the Fourth Way of George Gurdjieff (died 1949). He translated The New Man by the Gurdjieff teacher Maurice Nicoll (1884-1953) into German, and spent time with the Gurdjieff teacher and one-time Sufi J. G. Bennett (1897-1974) at Coombe Springs (later famously acquired by Idries Shah, 1924-96).

When he went to Burma on assignment in 1955, Schumacher initially agreed with another German-British former follower of Bennett living in Burma, the anthropologist and film-maker Gulla Pfeffer (1887-1967), that Gurdjieff’s teaching was really Buddhism—an interesting counterpart to those who were at about the same time concluding that Gurdjieff’s teaching was really Sufism. Pfeffer suggested that Gurdjieff had learned his teachings from “a monastery in Upper Burma," but Schumacher did not go so far: “What we in England call ‘Work’ [the Gurdjieff method] is everywhere here a living thing,” he wrote. “I find that the G./O. [Gurdjieff/Ouspensky] teaching… is remarkably accurate. ‘Self-remembering’ is identical (as far as I can see) with ‘Sattipatthana’ [awareness] as it is being taught here.”

The next ingredients were Gandhi (1869-1948) and swadeshi (self-sufficiency), a nationalist doctrine of local production that Gandhi modified and promoted, and which was then much discussed. It has echoes in today’s local source and ethical trade movements--and, of course, in Small is Beautiful.

Schumacher's path, then, is clear. It was the war-time devastation of Germany, Gurdjieff, and Buddhism, then, that helped structure his reaction to Burma. Next come Gandhi and swadeshi. This gives us Small is Beautiful, and also gives us an interested reader of Ananada Coomaraswamy’s Art and Swadeshi (1912). Coomaraswamy then naturally leads to René Guénon, Traditionalism, and A Guide for the Perplexed. Clear.

Traditionalism in India: A. K. Saran

A new article draws attention to an Indian Traditionalist who has until now not attracted much attention internationally, Awadh Kishore Saran (1922-2003), pictured, an academic sociologist. He taught at Lucknow University and Jodhpur University, and was a Senior Fellow at the Indian Council of Social Science Research. In 1962 he joined Pitrim Sorokin, Henri Lefebvre and Ernest Gellner in a round-table discussion of sociological theory at a conference in Washington, DC.

The article, R.K. Misra, "Between Tradition and Modernity: Some Reflections on Professor A.K. Saran’s Intellectual Sojourn," Dialogue Quarterly 17, no. 4 (April 2016), pp. 18-26, is available online. It explains that Saran read Ananda K. Coomaraswamy as a young man, and then René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon, and Marco Pallis. He became well known in certain circles as a critic of modernity. The book considered his best is Traditional Thought: Toward an Axiomatic Approach: A Book on Reminders (Varanasi: Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, 1996).

New book on Western Sufism

A new book on Western Sufism is due out some time around October 2016: Mark Sedgwick, Western Sufism: From the Abbasids to the New Age (New York: Oxford University Press).

Western Sufism is in some ways the continuation of Against the Modern World, but also goes a long way back in time, as the subtitle suggests. Actual Guénonian Traditionalism is only one topic among many, but perennialism is a topic that comes and goes throughout the book, and Guénonian Traditionalism appears in a new light (as do many other things, from Maimonides to Gurdjieff). Ivan Aguéli is covered in more detail than in Against the Modern World, as Swedish sources have been used.

The table of contents can be seen on the companion website, which also has a gallery which gives a good idea of the book's contents. There is also a companion blog, which will be used for posts that are not relevant to Traditionalism.

It is possible to pre-order the book now: $35.00 from Amazon in the US or from Oxford, or £22.99 from Amazon in the UK.

Traditionalism in 1930s Thailand

Just discovered: a small Traditionalist group in 1930s Thailand, described by Arthur Osborne in My Life and Quest (2001), available online.

Osborne was introduced to the works of Guénon by Martin Lings, who he knew in Gdynia, Poland before the Second World War. Lings gave him two books, one by Guénon and one by Gurdjieff's interpreter P. D. Ouspensky. It is interesting that Lings was recommending Ouspensky at that point.

Guénon's book, the Introduction générale à l'étude des doctrines hindoues had a great impact on Osborne, and Ouspensky did not. When he moved from Poland to Bangkok, Thailand, Osborne joined a small group of Traditionalists there, evidently all Europeans. He also became Muslim, joined an Indian dhikr group in Bangkok, and gave bayat to an unidentified shaykh in India in 1939, along with a number of other Bangkok Traditionalists .

It is not clear what happened to the Bangkok group. Osborne's final destination lay outside it.  As the Second World War started and Thailand was threatened by the Japanese, his wife and daughter took refuge in India, where his wife was given "silent initiation" by the Hindu guru Ramana Maharshi, of whom Guénon did not approve. Osborne spent much of the war in an internment camp in Thailand, where he intended to devote himself to "prayer, meditation, incantations and reading the Arabic Quran," but as time passed found himself returning to "profane" life. After the war, he re-joined his family in India, and took Ramana Maharshi as his guru. He edited The collected works of Sri Ramana Maharshi, first published by Rider in 1959.

My thanks to B. H. for bringing Osborne's book to my attention.