The continued expansion of the Rāmāyaṇa tradition for the past two millennia and the flexibility of its expression hinges on the fact that the Rāmāyaṇa—as A. K. Ramanujan reminds us—is “always already” (1991, p. 46). The trouble is not in locating its stories. The trouble comes with trying to negotiate all the different ways the stories coexist—all the ways in which they have “already” existed and will continue to “already” exist. Throughout the course of this study, I have tried to connect some of these stories to each other and to the contexts of their creation to demonstrate just how complex the inner workings of the Rāmāyaṇa tradition really are. We must not take for granted the stories we receive; they have been through a long history of change and it is in the social propulsions behind such change that we locate literature's deeper meanings and its effects on the people who create it, read it, pass it on, and bring it into new avenues of expression.

Since the beginning of the Rāmāyaṇa tradition, whenever that may have been, people have evoked the Rāmāyaṇa and the many morals, controversies, truths, and fabrications buried within its stories to bolster any number of social, religious, and political viewpoints. The focus here has been one story that has splintered into numerous modes of narration depending on the needs and intentions of its tellers. As Śambūka's death toll climbs, his narrative tradition gets broader, more complex, and more all-encompassing. Each new iteration carries with it a new message and a fresh perspective on the meaning behind his life and death. Śambūka has died over and over again in a near endless stream of stories, poems, paintings, speeches, dramas, dances, movies, and more. With his story uniquely situated at the intersection of artistic innovation, caste politics, religion, and violence, each expression of his death is poised to comment on a range of social issues and even on the nature of the Rāmāyaṇa itself.

The purpose underlying Śambūka's death has been evolving since the first time his story was penned in the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa. By showing some concern for Śambūka's afterlife, Kālidāsa used the story to demonstrate Rāma's graciousness and authority in alignment with the Gupta Empire's religious innovations and political ambitions.

The formalization of the structures of knowledge as the “third arena” of the modern world-system analogous to those of the axial division of labor and the interstate system completes the view of human reality originally offered by Immanuel Wallerstein. This conceptualization accounts for the constitutive structure, secular trends and cyclical rhythms operating in the sociocultural field. It grew out of, indeed was the response to, a series of well-founded critiques of the early outlines of the world-systems perspective. A research proposal drafted for a working group at the Fernand Braudel Center and published in 1977 stated, in the language of the time:

Hence, the need to integrate the study of large-scale sociocultural questions, clearly implicated in any understanding of historical capitalism, with studies dealing more explicitly with economic or political processes was recognized early on.

From Modernization Theory to World-Systems Analysis

Coming of age during the Cold War, Immanuel Wallerstein became intensely interested in world affairs, and especially anticolonial movements. As a young scholar in the 1950s, he soon began to see himself through the lens of what was then called “political sociology” (Wallerstein 2013, 196) and his academic formation was imbedded in the dominant theoretical/methodological approach to world-scale questions, “modernization.”1 This approach focused on the nation-state as the primary unit in a comparative framework and emphasized “field studies of ‘emerging,’ ‘new,’ ‘non-Western’ nations” (Almond 1966, 96). However, it also embraced issues of large-scale inequality, which linked social scientists with policy planners harboring Cold War agendas such as alliance formations.

Criticisms brought to light the shortcomings of the modernization approach as theory and for its Eurocentric and ideological underpinnings. Practitioners posited a developmental hierarchy through which societies passed, a generalized historical trajectory, with contemporary Western social organization typified by capitalism/industrialism and (representative) democracy indicating the direction and end point of the development of all societies, including, then, what was known as the Third World.

Immanuel Wallerstein's grand and sweeping narrative of the modern condition hinges on a central and seemingly slippery, deceptive and allegedly criminal character: namely, liberalism. Indeed, liberalism is the “cement” that, he says, binds the modern world order. It gives it its unity and orchestrates its evolution and development. From its beginnings as an ideological response to the French Revolution in 1789 to its apotheosis in the global hegemony of the United States after the Second World War, to its dissolution in the collapse of Soviet communism, liberalism is the analytical thread that animates Wallerstein's world-systems analysis (WSA). This chapter aims to explicate and engage with his account of modernity and to focus specifically on the role he assigns to liberalism. I focus on three texts in which Wallerstein sets out his account of liberalism and his detailed critique of its role in the globalization of capitalism—the fourth volume of his monumental series The Modern World-System (Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914), After Liberalism and World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction.

It is essential to first briefly set out the idea of WSA, which is the theoretical architecture that supports the narrative of modernity in which liberalism plays such a prominent role. With this background in hand, I will turn to a close examination of liberalism as ideology, emphasizing the very particular and specific meanings Wallerstein assigns to these crucial terms. However, this task cannot be achieved simply by a conceptual analysis of these ideas since it is crucial to the very idea of WSA that such ideas are embedded in their particular historical contexts. Liberalism is the dominant and dominating ideology beginning in the aftermath of 1789, but since its meaning is thoroughly embedded in time and space, its existence and effects have not only a location first in Western Europe and the world as a whole, but also a time—a beginning and an end. The third section examines Wallerstein's surprising and contrary claim that rather than representing the final victory of liberalism, the dismantling of the Berlin Wall signaled the final defeat of liberalism as a world-dominating ideology.

After Brahminism gained a strong footing in post-Mauryan South Asia—a footing typified by the codification of varṇadharma—the next great South Asian empire, the Guptas, crafted their own schematic for an imperial religion. With the Guptas came an imperially sponsored Vaiṣṇavism marked by a burgeoning temple culture that involved elaborate structures and public spaces that provided the public with a new kind of access to religion (Willis, 2009). The Guptas’ presentation of Vaiṣṇavism opened Viṣṇu worship up to an unprecedented level of popularity, which extended to Viṣṇu's various incarnations (avatāras), including Rāma. Naturally, a text that frames Rāma as both divine figure and avatāra of Viṣṇu as well as a hero in his own right was bound to benefit from the momentum of the religious movement spearheaded by the Guptas. The story of the Rāmāyaṇa, then, saw a rejuvenated life in this new era of South Asian history.

The story of Rāma was, at this point, still largely defined by Vālmīki's Rāmāyaṇa. As interest in the story grew, critical perspectives on this quintessential Rāma text began to emerge. In the world of the VR, it is Rāma's responsibility as king to maintain the prevailing social order by which his kingdom is to be governed and mete out the necessary punishments when that order is violated. The text's Śambūka episode exemplifies both a violation by a member of Ayodhyā's society and the proper response to it, carried out by the king himself. Be that as it may, Rāma's unquestioningly swift action against Śambūka placed him in a role of enforcer that is at odds with the compassionate image of Rāma that pervades a great deal of the epic. The difficulty in reconciling these two seemingly conflicting images of Rāma created a troubling puzzle for later authors who lived in a world where Rāma's divinity and the idealism it represented were becoming increasingly accepted. How could they reframe Rāma's involvement in Śambūka's death to better suit the changing expectations of their audience without abandoning the issue of Rāma upholding Ayodhyā's social structures?

The WTO sits on the edge of Lake Geneva in a building that once housed the International Labor Organization and the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees (UNHCR). We said a few words about it in Chapter 1. It has the distinction of coming under criticism from all points along the political spectrum. This criticism began with the political left in the 1990s who were outraged by certain rulings that affected environmental policies and spread to labor interests who were concerned about trade and wages in manufacturing. It has now moved to the political right in the form of new economic nationalists who, at times, appear to be bent on destroying the institution and its rules-based global trading regime.

Few WTO critics take the time to try to understand it. Despite many flaws, it is an international trade institution that embodies the important principle of multilateralism. As such, it is a response to the tendency toward zero-sum thinking and distributive bargaining discussed in the preceding chapter. What exactly is multilateralism? International relations scholar John Ruggie emphasizes that “multilateralism refers to coordinating relations among three or more states in accordance with certain principles.” Understanding these principles is important.

In his investigation of multilateralism, Ruggie begins with Nazi Germany and Albert Hirschman's National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade discussed in Chapter 1. He emphasizes that the trade relations pursued by the Nazi government were bilateralist. Here is his description:

This is not multilateralism. In the WTO, any bilateral agreement on trade in a particular good is generalized to all members through what is known as the most-favored nation (MFN) principle. If Japan lowers a tariff on Indonesia's exports of lumber, it must also lower its tariff on the exports of lumber from all other member countries. MFN is a core principle of multilateralism that allows countries to escape the confines of bilateralism.

In August 2021, Lee Jae-yong was released on parole from prison in South Korea where he had been held on a bribery conviction. The Korean government cited overcrowded prison conditions when announcing his release, but Lee was no ordinary prisoner. He was the vice-chairman of Samsung Electronics and the son of Samsung's founder, Lee Kun-hee. Despite an official five-year ban on employment, as soon as he was released, Lee went directly to the Samsung's headquarters for a briefing, and deploying an interesting ambiguity, Samsung considered him to have resumed work despite not being employed.

At the time, the world was experiencing a shortage of semiconductor chips. Perhaps not coincidentally, Samsung was one of the three largest chipmakers, the other two being the US-based Intel and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Indeed, the South Korean president justified Mr. Lee's release as a matter of national interest. Half of the world's chipmaking or “foundry” capacity resided with TSMC, and Taiwan was experiencing what could politely be called “political risk” given China's stated goal of reintegrating it back into the Communist fold. Indeed, almost exactly a year later, Chinese forces surrounded Taiwan in a four-day military exercise that interrupted trade.

Samsung's potential to offset this kind of risk was a topic of discussion in the business world, and firms relying on TSMC chips were looking for ways to diversify their chip sourcing. More generally, Samsung and Mr. Lee were caught in the crosswinds of evolving techno-nationalism. China is one of the world's biggest demanders of chips, and Samsung operates in China to help to satisfy this demand. At the same time, the US government is keen to ramp up semiconductor manufacturing capacity in the United States, and Samsung has agreed to be part of that effort as well. We need to consider rival techno-nationalist regimes, as well as the very concept of techno-nationalism, to understand these dynamics.

The Emergence of Techno-Nationalism

As we saw in Chapter 3 on industry and war, techno-nationalism as a feature of economic nationalism is nothing new. It was part of List's “productive power” project that was embraced by Japan in the late nineteenth century. As for the contemporary use of the term, legal scholar Robert Reich played an important role in a 1987 article.

On 5 October 2020, US president Donald Trump appeared on the Truman Balcony of the White House. Days before, he had tested positive for COVID-19 as had many other individuals who had attended recent White House functions. On the balcony, he extoled his own leadership and strength. Many likened this event to Evita Peron's similar appearance on a balcony of the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires on another October day in 1951 when she gave her final speech to supporters in the Plaza de Mayo. Given President Trump's COVID-19 status, and his checkered approach to combating the pandemic, critics dubbed this his Covita moment, and it was indeed emblematic of his administration and its approach to the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic changed the world in many ways. For starters, it impacted growth, employment, investment and trade. The World Bank suggested that the pandemic-induced recession was the worst since World War II. It was more pronounced than the recessions of 1975, 1982 and 1991. In some respects, it even overshadowed even the global financial crisis of 2009. What is more, because the pandemic undermined several important growth factors, the recessionary effects were likely to be long term, particularly given the continued emergence of new variants, including Delta and Omicron.

In 2020, Carmen Reinhart and Vincent Reinhart put it this way:

Despite these dire economic conditions, some economic nationalists saw the pandemic as an occasion to further their cause. For example, as the deaths from COVID-19 reached 100,000 in the United States, US trade representative Robert Lighthizer referred to the pandemic as an opportunity to reshape trade relations and had the audacity to refer to these trade relations (and not the pandemic) as a “disease.”

In 2014, I began to write a book entitled No Small Hope about the universal provision of basic goods and services, drawing upon economics, ethics and human rights theory. In the middle of this project, the world began to shift. In 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union and Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. Both these developments reflected economic nationalist and ethnonationalist political platforms. In 2018, I presented the No Small Hope book at the World Trade Organization's annual public forum. This was somewhat ironic because President Trump was beginning a full-scale assault on that institution, attempting to hobble the multilateral trading system he loathed.

About a year later, COVID-19 appeared on the global scene, setting off further expressions of economic nationalism, exacerbating an already fraught US–China relationship, and causing 15 million excess deaths worldwide. In the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson was “getting Brexit done,” while Indian prime minister Narendra Modi was ramping up his ethnonationalist Hindutva movement. During 2020 and 2021, the pandemic ravaged the world, fraying economic relations. In January 2021, US president Trump attempted to overthrow the country's electoral process while Brexit came into effect. A little over a year later, Russia invaded Ukraine in another ill-considered nationalist spasm.

Whereas No Small Hope was a statement of what could be, this book is a statement of what is, and it is decidedly less hopeful. The main message is that economic nationalism is often a recipe for worsened economic welfare, strained international relations, enflamed ethnic tensions, global public health setbacks and reduced effective innovation. Behind economic nationalism lies a zero-sum mindset that misapprehends many realities and thereby sets back the important project of human flourishing. This zero-sum mindset, however, is an ever-tempting default that must be overcome for continued forward progress. This book argues that we must resist its lure and recognize the possibility of non-zero-sum outcomes as embedded in the principle of multilateralism. This lesson was painfully learned after World War II and unfortunately needs to be learned again.

Some small fragments of this book were published in editorial form in the US-based The Hill, and I would like to thank The Hill's Daniel Allott for his support in that process.

Adjustments to the Śambūka episode covered up to this point have largely been part of a calculated reframing of this controversial moment in theUttarakānḍa in order to protect Rāma's image. The intent had not been to empathize with Śambūka, but rather to elevate Rāma and update the circumstances of their interaction to match prevailing religious sentiments regarding Rāma and his divinity. Throughout the twentieth century, however, we see a new battleground for the details surrounding Śambūka's death. In this new context, Śambūka is the central figure, not Rāma; the protagonist, not the antagonist. One reason for the shift in focus is the fact that new contributors to the Śambūka tradition came from the same social position as Śambūka himself, and their primary purpose in calling on his narrative was to present powerful challenges to the caste system. It is necessary to keep in mind, however, that the perspectives on Śambūka—or even on how to approach the problem of caste—within these groups have never been monolithic. Anticaste ideation has had many different expressions throughout history and figures in the twentieth century representing numerous activist groups sought to reframe the details of the Śambūka story to promulgate their specific anticaste messaging. In formulating such messaging, some made references to a generalized, skeletal Śambūka narrative in hopes of evoking the tragedy of his death to expose long-standing casteism in Indian society. Others created entirely new works on Śambūka, digging deep into the narrative and adjusting its nuances to suit the exact type of message they were promulgating. While the precise message varied, the narrative framework within which these authors were working was often the same: Śambūka was a charismatic leader and teacher of the oppressed classes of India and he died a martyr.

In this chapter, I detail the sociopolitical background that allowed for activists to mobilize the Śambūka narrative against the caste system and I provide several examples of how such mobilization manifested. The anticaste activism covered here operated largely in the realm of literature, which featured new ruminations on the Śambūka story coming from India's socially oppressed communities. However, given that this body of literature advocated for the abolition of caste and typically—though not always—depicted Rāma in an unfavorable light, it often encountered robust challenges from more dominant segments of India's religious and political society.

Near the end of the Rāmāyaṇa, Rāma returns to Ayodhyā to be installed as king after fourteen years of exile to the forest. His reign brings with it a long-awaited era of peace and prosperity. However, that peace is eventually disturbed when a Brahmin father brings the body of his dead son to the palace gates. The Brahmin questions how such a thing can happen, going so far as to accuse Rāma of failing to live up to his kingly responsibilities. Rāma becomes distressed and calls a meeting of his closest advisors. One among them, Nārada, explains to Rāma that when society loses sight of dharma as the ages progress, the birth-based system of societal segregation—the cāturvarṇya or system of four varṇas—begins to break down. By the time of the final age, known as the Kali Yuga, the lowest of these varṇas, the Śūdras, will begin to do the work of Brahmins, the highest of the varṇas. Nārada specifies that only in the Kali Yuga will a Śūdra be able to practice very intense austerities (tapas). Before that time, practicing of tapas is a crime for a Śūdra. Indeed, Nārada identifies the cause of the Brahmin boy's death as being a Śūdra engaged in tapas on the outskirts of Rāma's kingdom. He tells Rāma to survey his kingdom and rid it of all wrongdoing, including this errant Śūdra. Rāma obliges and, after traveling throughout his kingdom, finds an ascetic hanging upside down from a tree on a mountainside in the southern reaches of the Ayodhyā kingdom