The Floods of 2019: will it vanquish Kerala?

One of the tragic aspects of adaptation to climate change is that people cannot react quickly enough to the way in which the earth defines the new patterns of events and activities. Anyone who was present in Kerala during the last week, from 8th to 12th August  2019, knows that the velocity of rain was such, that it appeared as if the sky was falling.  The usual  hush of rain falling mediated by the trees and tiled roofs was replaced by a terrible sound rather like gunshots of staccato dripping sounds, the hardness of which bit into one's brain.

Globalisation has meant that more airports have opened in Kerala, and the people who work in the Gulf, Europe, America and Australia often choose August to return home, because that is when they get their vacation. Return to the homestead involves sometimes travelling vast distances along the length and breadth of Kerala because one airport or another shuts down. Yet, they start their journey not knowing when or whether they will reach their destination. They feel love, energy, fear, intense ambition, and when there is an obstacle they seek to bypass it, by calling on clan and neighbourhood loyalties, they make phone calls, change their tickets, but forward they must proceed. What we know is that while they see the earth and water cloying together, being washed into the sea, when they see their beloved hills being washed away, they feel that they might not reach home, but at least they tried.

What is most surprising is how efficiently the  local administration moves in, and local communities are in the forefront, in terms of providing relief. Television and smart phone visuals accompany the floating population of viewers everywhere. Yet, the actual mismanagement of flood operations last August came from the efficiency yardstick, that a certain quantum of electricity generation had to be completed and the shutters were all opened simultaneously, flooding the inhabitants in such a way that thousands had to escape to relief stations, or "camps". This year, the Kerala government was careful not to fill the dams, but the velocity of the rain for the four days from 8th to 11th August was such, that flooding occurred on a massive scale, and the landslides in the Western Ghats was blamed on the settlers, for building their homes on laterite soil, which crumbles easily. The army reached four days later, and Rahul Gandhi was seen plodding through the mud,  in Wayanad,with his hands locked  together behind his back,  comforting those who had lost their families and all their material goods. Good intentions are not enough, there has to be the ability to provide in times of loss, and politicians would do well to make commitments to the future, rather than assuring  temporary relief, which remain promises. As a young man said to the tv camera, "We are poor people, who live day by day."The fact that the dams were kept empty, and require the Retreating monsoon to fill its capacity mean that Kerala will have to face new problems regarding water distribution to the towns, and electricity generation. This year the floods were caused by the quantam of rainfall, and not by the opening of the dams.

As we watch the rain taking over, and wonder from day to day, whether it will be possible to get back to work, knowing that we are guests on planet earth, there is a certain insouciance that politicians who have the  backing of the people communicate. They seem fearless, though the idea of  the persistence of 100,000 crores in debt is something which is totally ennervating. In December 2018, there were no signs of the floods of August 2018. Everything had been cleaned, whitewashed, rebuilt. In early August there were seven sunny days, and the roads were in excellent condition,  from 1st to 7th August, mild drizzles, some heavy rain at night. The Boat Races were anticipated, Allapuzha town was building up to the  excitement of the Nehru Trophy. All those dreams were washed away by the thunder storms of 8th August. The communists were totally disappointed, but tv showed that Prof Thomas Issac was travelling in  country boats, assuring victims of the flood, that they had  been provided help last year, and their problems would be addressed this year too. When one understands that the language of affirmation was met with smiling certainty, on both sides, as tv crew showed us, then we know that subsistence society actually depends on the truth value of these claims, the certitude of help coming from the State. Yet, the actual redistribution of goods when it does arrive shows that there is a certain imbalance. This only means that some people get excess, depending on their geographical location, or their organisational membership, and those who are distant from these, remain destitute. For the Keralite, this swing between aspiration, ardour for work and honour, and the sudden slip into penury is hard to handle.Kerala is a fantasy land for tourists, and this new turn to dread is hard to handle. One man said at the airport to television crew, "Yes, it is dangerous, and we will reach when we reach, but it is Kerala, Naad (country/home) is it not?"
Organic farming which had been the mainstay for many families is suddenly  a space of tremendous losses, as the entire season's crop disappears into the sludge. This is the second year that people have lost everything they grew, along with valuable spice  and coconut trees felled by the monsoon and the force of the winds. This year they are not even sure of receiving donations from the rest of the country, and the Centre has been bilious in its  remarks that Keralites have been punished for beef eating. Ofcourse, this is part of an ideological push toward vegetarianism and a homogenising Hinduism, which the Keralites have rejected. Farmers have said that they have not received insurance money for losses in last year's floods. As the rain falls unabatedly, and the sun shone only on 12th August 2019, a long and desperate situation remains, dampening the hearts of Malayalis. The long wait for the joys of Onam  and the surcease of the ballast of rain is punctuated by the  social scientists' hope that those who live in Kerala will understand that anticipation of the floods in August is something they have to live with annually. Traditionally, it was called Pattinni Massam, or The Hunger Month.

New Scenarios

One of the things we recognise as we grow older, is that time has a different connotation. When we are young, we have so many responsibilities. For women, particularly, the day unfolds with a myriad things to do, as they are responsible for the routines of the house and all who belong to it, or are passing through. Every day is marked by a need to perfection, and we bungle along in our 20s feeling that we have to keep integrated, keep everyone happy. There is a startling sense of solitude, because others are intent on the same task. As Ph.D. students, we find that the world begins to close in on us. We meet our friends, fleetingly as we run to one errand or another. The isolation of the Phd student is a well known factor, for the gang life of the M.A and M.Phil is over, and now they have to prove themselves by original work. For social scientists, this is hard. There has been so much that has been written on any subject, that making a dent in the discipline is impossibly hard, and yet, it is the only way that they can write about what they are inspired by.

Now that I am in my 60s, and look at the young people around me, I recognize that their challenges are much harder than mine. The milieu is such, that the State,  actually imagines that academics when employed in state run institutions,  are government servants.  It is true that the older generation does have the privileges of  free speech and medical benefits, pension and so on, but the abilities and orientations of academics  as a tribe are  generally different. An academic is someone who recognizes the importance of freedom of thought and ideas. A bureaucrat recognizes that responsibility to the institution he serves is paramount, he or she must deliver to the people, and explain to the politician that his/her wishes are subservient to the order that he serves.

Now, the problem with politicians is that they come and go. They recognize this, and it makes them nervous. Bureaucrats who serve politicians, rather than the constitutionally bound statutes of the sovereign republic are even more nervous, because they are bound to the whims and fancies of the orders they receive from the political party and its representatives. The documentation of their anti constitutional activites are now recorded so steadily by multimedia that we have no cause to fear that they go unnoticed or unrecorded.

The output of a Ph.D. student depends on many factors. For a Sociology student, the very preoccupation with finishing on time is the only marker of his success. If he or she misses the date of submission, then the work of the last eight years is gone! The problem with our bureaucrats and politicians is that they are so overwhelmed with the success of the West in the indexes of everything, but human rights, they spend all their time trying to imitate them. So by taking away the flexibility of the time that a doctoral candidate can have, the student is constrained to a new way of doing things. The first thing that goes for the Sociologist in the new system is of course time spent in the field. The old battle between deduction and induction, time honoured in terms of the pressure to use questionnaire methods within four months, rather than interview schedules running into a year and a half of interactions, which in turn,  can change the relationship between the social scientist and the respondent, is probably the most vivid aspect.

The discussion on the  ethnocide of marginal communities, the push toward structures which can only be supported by electricity, the inability to accept that farming communities must not be brought under industrialised systems of farming, but must have the support to grow food for themselves and the market, is now continually on the anvil.  Ofcourse, that there is no water, and that electricity is always desired but one of the most vulnerable of resources,  complicates the story somewhat. The Death of the Village is now so elaborate a myth, that it fuels the desire to move the entire rural population out, and have planet earth emptied of its native populations, so that a chosen class of people can survive the impending meteor crash. advertised by NASA. Because ideologies, Left, Right or Centre, push for industrialization, they mark indigenous populations as not in synchrony with the race to keep up with the West. The West itself is rethinking its orientation towards industrialization by marking out the East as the site of its sweat shops. Whether it is human labour, or the garbage and industrial waste disposal systems,  the site of praxis constantly moves Eastward.

All of this means that the  social science Ph.D. student has to rethink the parameters of his/her own commitment to understanding what the present is. It is constantly changing, and the reflexivity of people and occupations depends on the right to life. By taking away the academic’s preoccupation with changing structures and social dynamics, by fixing him or her to clock time, and office hours and a notion of governmentality that is contract bound, the singular ability to think outside of the box is threatened. What is required now is to understand why a new army of ideologically influenced university bureaucrats  think that because they are representative of a new world order which smacks of authoritarianism and hierarchy, they really think that the academic can be boxed in.

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No Nuclear Heads, Please

War Clouds Gather.

Hannah Arendt famously wrote on the significance of common sense. She argued that often we believe, in the Humanities, that common sense does not aid us in our rational pursuit of scientific truth. Yet, common sense is what keeps people alive, allows them to hope, and returns them to  a sense of order. Why must we believe that the sun will rise tomorrow, that human beings will live in co-existence, that they will be ready to hear one another out? The will to live is the most important thing we have, and it is the legacy we leave for our children. The devastation brought by war are so huge, we see it all around us. Those who are wired into television and the net, respond to the crises of impending war, by continuously following the barrage of news reports, the continuous hectoring, and the ways in which the State responds to a crises.

We need to believe that the relations between two countries will represent the will of the people to live, and not to die. To succumb to the threats of terrorists who attack both our countries, Indian and Pakistan, simultaneously, would be to set up a huge morass of destruction. It is to fall into the hands of the enemy itself. The enemy lies secretly waiting to bring life to a halt. The nation state becomes its chamber maid, clearing up after its mindless terror tactics. The socialization of young people through theological motifs of the  imminent end of the world is its hidden weapon. It does so, which ever religion pushes its cards forwards, by feeding young people the rhetoric of death as cleansing. It is a Malthusian exercise, which believes that the poor are indeed excess,  that they are human masses, who can be rendered extinct in active or passive ways.

War as vengeance is part of this rhetoric, which ceaselessly works to collect people together as an ideological machine, well oiled and constantly moving into war zones. Once war is declared between two countries, it takes years to counter the physical suffering it brings forth. The number of people who die from cancer, from poverty, from neglect is the consequence of the daily costs of development. Unless we are able to count our losses in demographic terms, which involve understanding the fate of the Dalits in our country, we cannot proceed to present ourselves as Developed. The material symbols of development show that the functional aristocracies of post modern societies are well placed, and the scientists and technologists control the landscape of representation. Yet, while putting space ships in orbit, what have we done to alleviate the suffering of the poor? Our continuing and unabated indexes of poverty are an embarrassment to us.

To move into the realm of issuing orders that define victory, a free rein to the Army, crossing the LOC,  constitutes breaking the rules of democratic governance and comes as a real shock to the Nation. Neglect of the poor leads to more deaths in any country, than threats of war.

 Capitalism believes in war as a necessary axiom of its own ideology. The working class must remain enslaved in the factories of production, agriculture must submit to chemical infusions of excessive degree, technology must take the onus of mass production, 19^th century  type genocides of the peasantry, through starvation, or as voluntary cannon fodder must proceed. Not surprisingly, the drug and medical industry treats the harm caused in war and by environmental damage for its own monetary profits, as an intended consequence of iatrogeny.

There is no  quick solution to climate change, which some Prime Ministers and Presidents do not even accept as a life style induced conflagration of the ozone. We can only slow down the degree by which gassing of peaceful populations by consent of industrialists and politicians takes place. How did Punjab for instance allow gmt crops to be planted, and the stalks to be burnt by the farmers? Was it common sense to allow the city of Delhi to be submerged in dense smog for four months? How do we benefit from the decisions made by the government which includes using petroleum carbon to be used as a fuel in Delhi? Does more instant electricity for malls in Delhi make up for the damage the air quality does to the lungs and blood circulation of newly born infants?

All these questions are surely  worthy of debates in parliament. Hierarchical federal politics, like hierarchical pluralism is a problem in itself.  We cannot run into war without debate, without legal ramifications. Indians always remained aware that their country was blessed by a certain luminousness,  in which ideas prevailed, that wisdom could come from anywhere. Adi Sankara had to respond to the Chandal, he had to reconfigure his own opinions. We, as a people, have always reacted to urgent crises in myriad ways.

Once war is declared, our freedoms will be taken away from us, our daily routines will be marked by the dirge of listening to the lists of dead every day, announced over radio and tv. We will be rationed for food, standing in queues, listening to the confounding rhetoric of an  ‘eye for an eye’ theology, quite misplaced in today’s creative global citizens and human rights forums, where people of different countries work side by side.

Prof Susan Visvanathan is the author of  The Children of Nature – The Life and Legacy of Ramana Maharshi  published by Roli  Lotus imprint, 2010

Bomb Blasts in Jammu

Terrorists Attack in Pulwama on 14^th February 2019

Delhi gets its political climate, and its seasons from its North West and North East borders. The British built the capital in 1912, in order to establish their sovereignty over India, and to be closer to Shimla. Yet, the people of Delhi inheriting all the venom of the past, have always remained loyal to the city, with its dust storms from Rajasthan desert Thar, and the cold winds that blow from the Himalayas, and the view of the Terai as a silver line in the clouds, that greets them when they fly back from the North East.

Delhi - ites are least sympathetic  to or intimidated by terrorists. The call to arms made to college students and to the unemployed, whether in Jammu and Kashmir, or in Assam, or in Jharkhand, or in the various states of the North East leaves the migrant worker to Delhi baffled. The rural population moves to Delhi for work, and in slum settlements, and instant housing prefabricated by noveau riche magnates, they quickly make their living, for the wages are better than where they lived earlier. When luck runs out, they return to their villages for brief periods to recuperate, but they are back as soon as they are employed in the city.

The paramilitary forces who risk their lives in the borders are people who see serving their country as an honourable profession. They are not mercenaries. They come from farming families, and thousands compete against one post, which also represents gainful employment. It involves repayment of debts, education for their children, and the hard won gains of having gone to courts to settle the matter of pensions payable to them. The paramilitary is part of the grid operations of the Army, Police and State and Centre representatives, who discuss the mode of operation, in places where civil war is imminent.

Needless to say, the citizen’s forum is always active on behalf of the people who are being monitored. Wherever rape or injury has been committed, there is immediate reporting by journalists. The documentation of war crimes are part of the occupational obligations of many Human Rights Organisations, who make this data available. The Military and Police represent the coercive arm of the state, and is under the jurisdiction of Parliament and Judiciary. The idea of democracy is therefore legally represented by the constitutional impetus of keeping institutions alive.

Each of the forty men who were killed in the bomb blast at Pulwama  on 14^th February 2019 had obligations to family, which they had set aside, to return to duty. What were their thoughts as they set out on a new assignment? Was it a job like any other, to drive out into the cold and lose their lives in a fraction of a moment? The tragedy was something that the Nation experienced sorrowfully, so soon after Republic Day. One of the soldiers  killed came from Lakkidi village in Wayanad, Kerala. It is an obscure village, where there is a temple to Sita, for it is believed that it was here that Luv and Kush were born, and that she was absorbed into the Earth. These legends are what the Indian subcontinent is always composed of, where extra terrestrial time, and local time converge. The soldier had hoped to retire from the CRPF in two years, and focus on his children.

His brother told journalists that they were sorry to lose him, but proud that he had died for his country.

In these deaths, the Nation comes together, because the sacrifice soldiers make for their country are expressions of how they represent their love for the country as being the sole goal, in their possible martyrdom.

Kashmiris have presented themselves as scapegoats in the confrontation between the Military and their dream of a promised homeland. The pellet injuries that Kashmiri children have been blinded with become the most terrible evidence of how the Nation state sees forms of warfare as legitimate in contexts of civil war. How can human rights activists deal with the infiltration of terrorists among the Kashmiri civilians? India has a political sensibility which while not trying to get back Pakistan occupied Kashmir, will not give up Jammu, Ladakh  and Kashmir. There is no possibility of the further severance of the subcontinent.

Kashmiri school children doing  Central School examinations know that the idea of the homeland is tied inextricably with the Nation. Pakistan becomes an ally of Saudi Arabia,  and of China, when it requires aid. Kashmiris are to be found in every nook and corner of India, either as merchants or as refugees. The problem of borders cannot be solved by expressing enmity with neighbouring countries, whether it is China or Pakistan. The first step towards healing is for the presentation of occupational rights to Defence personnel, along with the line of duty which premises that citizens cannot be treated as if they are enemies. The unholy alliance that terrorists have with anybody who provides them with guns and money is something that cannot be condoned.

Miners Lives

 The drowning  of miners, in mid December 2018, who were working  manually, in rat hole mines in agricultural land, in the Jaintia hills in Meghalaya, came as a  severe shock to readers of newspapers. However, they  naturally presumed that the State would handle it, and went back to their duties. What a shock it was, when no help was forthcoming, and the miners died the most terrible and tragic death, where the water rushes in, and the lungs burst, and their tears wash away in the mud, and their screams cannot be heard. They would have thought of their families in those last seconds, being aware that they had not thought that when they left home, they would never see their homes again.

Rockets to Mars, and the space mission are domestic subjects of great pride. However, rural populations are left to their own devices. When the State camouflages as a political party with vested interests, then it dips into the exchequer to spend more money on defence, beat up the drums of battle, and cuts on those grants which provide relief to  the rural poor, such as medical aid and education.  JNU Professors, such as Mohan Rao, Geetha Nambissan and Rama Baru, have presented us with important data describing the prioritization of primary health care and school education in the post 1947 era. What followed was the rampant corporatization of these, when the rapid industrialization ideology placed itself over the economic bases of village India. Those who are biased toward rapid industrialization have not learned from the lessons that the 19 century placed before us. The genocide of the peasantry was a given, because the need to move faster and faster into modernism, factory production and rapid transport meant that whole villages would be decimated of their  working population. The move to Mars, and the six newly discovered hospitable planets {six new planets discovered.www.phys org.) are only the  proverbial carrot to the donkey, since  humans are being told by the conglomerate elites of the war industry, combined with telecommunication, medicine and food industries, that the end is in sight, and lets just give up on planet earth.

Since there are no medical facilities available in rural areas, or viable schooling, the Alternatives project has gained momentum in India. People know that they have recourse to traditional healing, and so the State machinery has also promoted it as one way of thinking about palliative medicine as a back up for diseases like cancer and life style induced illnesses. What follows is the corporatization of  production of herbs to be found in hilly or mountainous areas. The tribals are pushed out of their homes as a result of plantation economies which affect their way of life. Consequently they join the labour force, and the fight for wages is something that affects them on a daily bases.They travel vast distances, keeping with them their sense of honour about being wage workers, and survive with difficulty. The middle man, or contractor is always present to glean his commission from the little that they earn.

Philanthrophy in India is still a minimal contribution  usually made to a religious organization, and shown as tax deductible.  This is a good economic measure which benefits those who are in power, as not only do they get to skim off large sums of money by cheating the poor of their citizenship rights, they also come away with an aura of having done their duty to them, by pledging petty sums. By using the idea of karma, the concept of religious duty is also fulfilled, as the philanthropist completes his ledger after providing tin sheds to workers, and crèches to the children of the working class. Like any other occupation, the charitable organization uses its profits to pay salaries and leave  a carbon trail of hotel stays, foreign visits and seminar lunches. The solution is proper wages and health and educational rights to workers, not charity.

Manual scavengers, and miners know that they are entering the bowels of the earth. They depend on luck, and accept their fate as the poorest of the poor. Jawaharlal Nehru University, for instance, has still not invested in a waste water removal truck, which the neighbouring IIT has. The manual scavengers, come to work on motorcycles, bringing their children along on some days when they cannot be looked after at home. The children watch their fathers divesting themselves of their  outer clothing and entering into the sewers without masks or gloves or sufficient compensation. No health insurance is provided to them. Sulabh Latrines has made a rational organization the bases of social reformation, the pioneer being a JNU trained Sociologist Dr Pathak, who was Prof Yogendra Singh’s student.

 The construction of an engineering college is now being presented to the Faculty as fait accompli decision of the vice chancellor, Prof Jagadish Kumar, who has allegedly taken a loan, and has placed faculty as the loan debtors,  which means the faculty is  named as responsible for the loan repayment.  This news  follows a report in The Wire on 2nd April  2018 , that UGC has not promised the VC funding for his proposed college on JNU campus. Kerala has 168 engineering colleges, and its return to farming by the new age farmer is a response to the entropy induced by overbuild in its rice lands, and coastal zones.

Looking for body parts after a disaster is one of the most frightening aspects of the routine work of rescue teams. We have to return to the idea of being human and having empathy for others as a return to the normal, rather than succumbing to the vision of a selected few entering space crafts to enjoy the splendor of the universe.

Gender Studies Banished in CEU

The Central European University, Budapest, like Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi has been going through a tremendous period of unrest, as there is danger of it  partially closing down, in Hungary. The Hungarian Prime Minister believes that since CEU has American funding from the billionaire Soros, it implies the degradation of the  nationalist values of the  present Hungarian government. Conclusively, the greatest alarm that Prime Minister,  Viktor Orban experiences is regarding the Gender Studies Department at CEU.

Gender Studies is a discipline which has specialized, in the last couple of decades, in sensitizing students to the questions of biology and social orientations. As a result, it communicates that sex is a social question, and men and women are socialized to their specific tasks, in uniquely different ways, in different societies. This is not acceptable to the Orban government, because the post modern questions of  the legal rights of third-gender citizens, human rights, androgyny, and same sex love, are all essentially problematic to the present Hungarian government, who are seeking to return to the fascist preoccupation with kitchen, church and kindergarten as the sole interests of women. As a result, this has meant that for several months now, the Director of the CEU has been busy finding an alternative space for its afflicted departments in Vienna, so that students applying to the Gender Studies Course in 2019, can do so with accreditation from Vienna, and the course will continue to be taught.

Ofcourse, the more general shunting of CEU to Vienna has gone side by side, so that  a partial exodus to the Vienna campus, is planned next summer. The heads of academic Departments have been busy all year, in planning the survival of their units, and the preparation of new syllabus in the 2019 academic year, which includes undergraduate courses they have not taught before.  Administrative officers in the CEU are anxious that they will lose their jobs, as they may not be able to learn the legal rules for a new Viennese campus in time, involving new language skills in another country. The teaching faculty, however,  have been essentially problematized by the certainty of the Vienna campus,  affecting their present routines. The roster of faculty who can stay back in Budapest had to be made in time for the advertisement of courses so that  fresh candidates applying for courses know which campus they would be going to.  Since many courses are interdisciplinary, these have created new hurdles for teachers and students alike.  A two-campus attendance is essentially a financial burden as teachers and students would have to oscillate between Vienna and Budapest, a distance of three hundred miles. CEU library is a public library, open to the public, which will be adversely affected with the departmental transfer. So also the café culture, so charming to all university environments will be adversely affected.

All these problems are essentially because under the name of nationalist loyalties and interests, the present Hungarian government is trying to shut down a very popular university, with a thriving international student presence, including many Indian students availing scholarships. Michael Ignatieff, the Director of CEU, a well known sociologist of Borders, Boundaries and Ethnic Violence,  finally decided  that the threats by Prime Minister Orban was too hard to handle from  year to year, and as a result, laid down the operative rules for the migration of those departments which did not have Hungarian creditation, along with  their American certification. Sociology, for instance, did not have this, as courses were not taught in Hungarian, and did not have sufficient courses with content relating to Hungary. So for teachers and students of Sociology and Gender Studies, the shift to the Vienna campus is fait accompli. The question for faculty now is how to get their children transferred to schools in Vienna, how to find residential accommodation in a short time, how to organize the daily routines of old people living with them, and how to arrange for their spouses to accompany them, or transfer their existing employment responsibilities to a new work place. Commuting from Budapest to Vienna would take three hours everyday, like travelling from Delhi to Agra, and while it can be done, it would be expensive and time consuming.

As a result, the demonstrations by students who have taken to the streets in freezing winter conditions has now expanded to include workers resisting dictatorial rule. The numbers demonstrating on the square outside Parliament, at Kossuth metro station is huge. There are lectures and theatre performances, and the intelligentsia and the working class are very adamant that freedom of expression depends on their daily attendance and  informed participation at these. Why do politicians fear feminist theory so much? Gender Studies was the legal manner in which feminist engagements entered the classroom. This was supported by democratic political institutions, which are present even in fundamentalist and totalitarian state craft. Feminism demands that those who are enslaved would benefit from the ideologies of emancipation and freedom, and this includes younger sons and slaves, who have not the benefits in patriarchy, of the free citizen.

Sociology, further is fearsome to fundamentalist political organizations, because the basic axiom of Sociology rests on its methodological atheism. It presumes that since there is so much diversity in religious belief, and the variability of these are so vivid, the Gods are constructed by humans. The Greek Gods/Goddesses slipped into oblivion after the Romans domesticated and renamed them, and the Egyptian and Roman Gods later had no followers except in literature and art, for they had been obscured by civilisations which followed. Whether in Hungary or India, the orthodoxies are confounded by the rationality of the University intellectuals and seek to suppress them.