Debating the ‘Post’ Condition in India: Critical Vernaculars, Unauthorized Modernities, Post-Colonial Contentions 9781138203280, 9781315099606

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Debating the ‘Post’ Condition in India

How was the post-modernist project contested, subverted and assimilated in India? This book offers a personal account and an intellectual history. Tracing independent India’s engagement with Western critical theory, Paranjape outlines both its past and ‘post’. The book explores the discursive trajectories of post-modernism, post-colonialism, postMarxism, post-nationalism, post-feminism, post-secularism – the relations that mediate them – as well as interprets, in the light of these discussions, enduring postulates of Indian philosophical thought. Paranjape argues that India’s response to the post-modernist project is neither submission, willing or reluctant, nor repudiation, intentional or forced; rather India’s ‘modernity’ is ‘unauthorized’, different, subversive and alter-native. Thus, India is alter- rather than ‘post’ modern. The book makes a forceful case for a new intermedial and integrative hermeneutics. Combining the idea of an indigenous ‘critical vernacular’ with that of svaraj, it presents radical possibilities, beyond decolonization and nationalism, of personal and political transformation. A key intervention in Indian criticism and theory, this volume will interest researchers and scholars of literature, philosophy, political theory, culture studies and post-colonial studies. Makarand R. Paranjape is Professor of English at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He was the inaugural Eric Auerbach Visiting Chair in Global Literary Studies at the University of Tubingen, Germany, and served as the first ICCR Chair in Indian Studies at the National University of Singapore. His latest works include Cultural Politics in Modern India (2016) and The Death and Afterlife of Mahatma Gandhi (2015).

In his unique self-reflective style, Paranjape engages vast peripheries and marshals a dazzling array of thinkers and creative artists in attempting to describe alternative modernities shaped from India’s revaluation of her own cultural imaginaries. In doing so, he offers new and important perspectives on the meaning of decolonization. Debashish Banerji, Haridas Chaudhuri Professor of Indian Philosophies and Cultures and Doshi Professor of Asian Art, California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), San Francisco, USA To write about the ‘post’ condition in India as a theoretical problematic requires a writer who comes to the subject matter with a mastery of both Indian and Western traditions. Paranjape is among only a handful of scholars of world literature and theory who has that mastery. This book, written with a superb understanding of critical and cultural theory, challenges generalist (both ‘grand’ and ‘minor’) accounts of the ‘post’ condition in India by grounding texts in the real, material conditions of Indian history. It is a path-breaking and challenging study which will become a touchstone for any future work on Indian reflections on tradition and modernity. Vijay Mishra, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Murdoch University, Australia

Debating the ‘Post’ Condition in India Critical Vernaculars, Unauthorized Modernities, Post-Colonial Contentions Makarand R. Paranjape

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Makarand R. Paranjape The right of Makarand R. Paranjape to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-20328-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-09960-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Hari Kiran Vadlamani Garu, who has worked so hard and so selflessly to change the narrative.

Contents

Preface

ix

Introduction – ‘post’ positions: a ‘selfish’ review

1

PART I

Critical vernaculars

19

1 Parampara

21

2 Gunas

42

3 Desivad

60

4 Criticism

82

PART II

Unauthorized modernities

99

5 Invasion of theory

101

6 Svaraj

129

7 Three states

151

8 Duality

168

PART III

Post-colonial contentions 9 Discontents

185 187

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Contents

10 Alterities

202

11 Ends

220

12 Prospects

236

Index

261

Preface

This book is an account of India’s contretemps with ‘theory’, our engagement with what might be called the ‘post’ condition.1 By this is meant, first of all, a complex set of circumstances and discursive practices mediated by and constituted of several strands of post-structuralism, postmodernism and post-colonialism, as also other ‘postal’ movements such as post-Marxism, post-nationalism, post-feminism and post-secularism. But more than just discourse, ‘post’ condition also refers to the changing reality of India since the late 1980s, subsequent to the eclipse of the ‘modern’, secular, socialistic, statist and, some would add, static phase of Indian national life. This book, in other words, also maps India’s transition from ‘nationalist’ to post-national. These two things – the discourse and the materiality of India – are neither identical nor coextensive but intertwined and implicated in the term ‘post’ condition. That is why it is important to avoid both a reductive collapse of discourse into reality and the abstraction of reality into ‘mere’ discourse. Rather, the relations between the two are the subject matter of concern. The discourse, with its own reality, and the reality, producing its own discourse, neither identical nor entirely separate, each impinging upon and forming the other, though different, are interconnected dialogically. Often, the discourse must be read symptomatically, viewed as a gesture, a performance, signifying something other than what it proclaims. Almost unbeknownst to the discourse, softly stealing up on it and overtaking it, is the huge economic, social and cultural transformation of India whose ramifications are yet to register fully. At one level, this book is about the reception, relevance and response to the discourses of the ‘post’ or what used to be called ‘theory’. This rubric of intellectual cross-currents, mostly imported from the West, but awash in India through the 1980s and 1990s, was hugely influential but problematic.2 While ‘postal’ discourses shared a suspicion

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of master narratives, rigid binaries and oppositional thinking, in India they often assumed the garb of homogenized ‘theory’, themselves turning into a master narrative, excluding and obscuring cultural and political complexity. While critiquing their totalizing tendencies, the book also keeps itself open to the immediate and ultimate possibilities of ‘theory’. Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition (1979) advanced the argument that one of the chief characteristics of the ‘post’ was its ability to undermine the master narratives that made up the matrix of modernity. What this book adds is that modernity itself is constituted of various types of dualism. Duality, which is so essential to the structure of our experience and rooted deep in our psyche, is the basis of how most of us experience ourselves as embodied beings in relation to all other beings and things, human and non-human. This book examines the possibilities of non-dualism in the ‘post’ condition, of ways of seeing the world and ourselves differently. India’s response to the (post-)modern project is neither submission, willing or reluctant, nor total rejection, intentional or forced. Instead, the ‘modernity’ of India is ‘unauthorized’, that is different, subversive, even alter-native. This difference is articulated in what might be termed the ‘critical vernacular’. Criticism of the dominant as the key to finding svaraj both individually and collectively is thus the chief concern here. Svaraj is how we might understand the (ad)venture not just of decolonization or of nationalism, but of personal and political justice. Svaraj, in other words, is a non-dual way of seeking and finding self-rule resulting from self-illumination. The sva or self is not limited and atomistic, but non-exclusive, interactive, processual in widening, oceanic circles of interdependence and responsibility, as Mahatma Gandhi described it. Svaraj, in other words, leads to sarvodaya, the augmenting of all. Non-dualism, following Ramchandra Gandhi’s I Am Thou, is what we may consider ‘India’s truth’ – that among the many ‘truths’ of India which makes us who we are. To that extent, these debates on the ‘post’ condition are merely pretexts for a restatement or revalidation of what we might suppose as India’s special gift. Even if such a position may seem to some as transcendentalist, if not trans-historical, the book is, in fact, a record of my own, individual trajectory as a teacher-criticscholar in India, confronting a variety of issues arising from the ‘invasion of theory’. There is thus no dualism between what is ‘outside’ history and what emerges from ‘within’ it. To that extent, this response to the ‘new’ challenge of the ‘post-’ is my own specific rejoinder to (post-)modernity, articulated in a specific fashion from a specific subject position constituting a specific locus of enunciation.

Preface

xi

My account may be personal, but my actual concerns have been more extensive, nothing short of an embroilment in the condition of India itself. In offering this account of my academic involvement with the ‘post’ in India, I also attempt to recount a deeper and wider movement of history, the narrative of the progress of a nation, of a civilization even. The concern, thus, is not just with myself and my own intellectual experiences, but with what was happening in India, in the parliament and in the streets, in seminars and conferences, in books and articles, in debates of its leading intellectuals, both in public and private, in print and television media, in email chats and on-line exchanges and, above all, in classrooms and in discussions around campuses. This is how vernacular non-dualism and criticism may function in our times. Unlike books by critics and scholars located elsewhere, usually in the Western academy thousands of miles away from what actually goes on in India, this is a report from the ground. It is thus not just about ‘theory’ but about lived experience. In its three decades of daily concern and interaction with the intellectual and cultural scene, this book, as it were, is a record of India seeking a voice, a unique mode of self-expression. It is, in that sense, India’s intellectual biography. Thus it will, I hope, be of interest not only as a thematic analysis but also as a historical, sociological and personal narrative. What also makes this book somewhat different is an ongoing, if not far-reaching, engagement with the resources of Indian intellectual and cultural traditions in understanding the modern and post-colonial predicament. This knowledge and deployment of Indian intellectual traditions in a face-off with modernity is lacking in most post-colonial theories, thus rendering them mostly a form of dissent from within the perimeter of the dominant. This book seriously tries to theorize alternative sources and spaces by evoking ‘usable’ Indian pasts against the ‘abuses’ of the present. It seeks to do so in a critical, if post-secular, manner without succumbing to the pulls of either primordial fanaticisms or modern totalitarianisms. Admittedly, there remains a sense of the ‘anti-’ in parts of this book, an antagonism, agonistics, against the dominant. But actually the ire arises from the easy capitulation of Indian intellectual elites to Western cultural and academic hegemony. No wonder, there is the sense of feeling isolated and beleaguered from time to time, the Indian academy itself being collaborative rather than decolonizing. Are Indian elites really committed to svaraj, or are they happy with an inferior but seemingly advantageous position in the West-dominant global intellectual system? Can our aspirations exceed the quest for the material benefits that accrue from working in or being patronized by the Western

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academy? As subservient Indian intellectuals, we often present a sorry picture. The svaraj-ist position adopted in this narrative thus does not sit easily with many of us. The result is a sense of double anxiety: the adversary is too huge and powerful, and there are few native allies. Over the years, however, I have become increasingly aware of my own slips, errors, lacunae and blindnesses. Much of Indian academics is actually about finding jobs, securing careers, doing well materially or simply surviving. It is quite idealistic if not unrealistic to expect that intellectuals should either pursue the life of the mind seriously or strive to make a difference to their societies. One may individually pursue a svaraj-ist course, but to hold others accountable to standards or values they do not subscribe to seems as presumptive as it is pointless. To want others to live up to one’s ideals is thus tantamount to asking repeatedly to be frustrated, if not thwarted. Looking back, however, I see my years of struggle in India as being exhilarating and rewarding in themselves, yielding their own peculiar sense of accomplishment and relish, not to speak of acuminating a special traction or edge to my criticism. Reconsidering my own cultural practice over these decades, I realize that svaraj is not about seeking converts, even if it is an attempt to change the world. There is no need to be a svaraj evangelist. What is far more important is to mediate between capitulation and reaction, letting go of individual or personal anxieties. Today, I no longer feel besieged as I find many of my concerns vindicated by the times. What is to be celebrated, thus, is the new convergence, not attributed to solely one’s efforts, but surely to be savoured, with the satisfaction that one might have contributed, howsoever modestly, to it. ‘The world is what it is,’ says V. S. Naipaul in the opening sentence of A Bend in the River, ‘men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.’ Yet men who are ‘nothing’ may also amount to something. Indeed, no one is worth ‘nothing’. The world may go the way it pleases even if one man tries to do what he considers right. We only have some bearing on our inputs, the outputs being beyond our control. Not being beset or embattled does not mean we vacate the struggle altogether, but there is another, less fraught way of joining the lists. I think this is what attainting svaraj implies. * The chapters that make up this book have been written over a considerable span of time. Most were originally presented at conferences in different parts of India and elsewhere. I thank those who invited me to these academic exchanges. Many chapters have also appeared in earlier versions in journals or edited volumes. My thanks also to their previous publishers and editors. In extensively reworking this material

Preface

xiii

I realize how much it has travelled from its somewhat more innocent, if impassioned, origins. The book is thus no longer just about ‘theory’ or ‘criticism’ in India, something out there, but it is also about understanding deeply what is persistent in Indian ways of seeing, being, becoming and belonging. It is about finding and enjoying svaraj here and now. I started working on this book in 2008 at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Belo Horizonte in Brazil. I owe special thanks to Carlos Gohn of UFMG, who facilitated that visit, and his whole family, Nicé, Iarra, Marcus and Nicé’s mother, Dona Eugenia, all of whom looked after me with such affection. The memory of those times is all the more poignant because Nicé is no longer with us. I am also grateful to Laura I. P. Izarra, her husband Martin and all the wonderful colleagues and students at the University of Sao Paolo (USP), where I taught a course before UFMG. In the computer room of the Morajia, the visiting scholar’s residence at UFMG, I had an epiphany to embark upon a series of books on Indian culture and criticism. This, the projected first volume, has been the last, perhaps, most challenging to finish. Three other books, Another Canon: Indian Texts and Traditions in English (2009); Altered Destinations: Self, Society, and Nation in India (2010); and Making India: Colonialism, National Culture, and the Afterlife of Indian English Authority (2014), have already been published, in both international and Indian editions. In between, almost to take a break from this demanding, almost grand, publishing plan, I worked on a volume that seemed more topical and straightforward to produce, Cultural Politics in Modern India: Postcolonial Prospects, Colourful Cosmopolitanism, Global Proximities. That book was published by Routledge in 2016. Today, with the completion of the fifth book and, indeed the series, it feels as if a major phase of my academic career has been completed. I am grateful to Shoma Choudhury and Aakash Chakrabarty, my editors at Routledge, for their patience and perseverance in commissioning this complicated and difficult book. I must thank the anonymous readers for their valuable suggestions, which helped me considerably in my final revisions. Special thanks are also due to the two senior professors who wrote generous blurbs. Editorial assistance at Apex CoVantage was provided by Denise File and her team, for which I am thankful. This book is part of the ongoing UPE-II project on ‘Asian Crossroads, Indic Neighbourhoods’, of which I am the Principal Investigator. Finally, my thanks to my colleagues and staff at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, for their continuing support. Vijayadashmi 2017

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Notes 1 Quite distinct from its usage in computer programming where it signifies something that follows the execution of a computer code. 2 Both ‘India’ and the ‘West’ are not without their complications. These are, arguably, not monolithic entities; each is constituted in a relational manner through opposition and interpenetration. But for the purposes of this book by ‘West’ I mean a materially and ideologically hegemonic entity constituted geographically, politically, historically, philosophically and economically, consisting largely of Western Europe and North America. Japan has been economically a part of the West for over fifty years; so have been Australia and New Zealand, which are Anglophone settler colonies like the US and Canada. Countries like Brazil are not a part of the West though they largely consider themselves Western for cultural and intellectual purposes. China is a world power, though it is not a part of the Western alliance. Its ‘peaceful rise’ does not mask its imperialistic position in the world system. I do not, however, engage with it here. In short, the West is an imprecise but useful entity for the purposes of any anti-colonial argument or struggle.

Introduction ‘Post’ positions: a ‘selfish’ review

*

Patiala post Perhaps, an opportune juncture to begin this book is a debate in an academic conference in a non-metropolitan town in northern India. This debate on the ‘post’ condition took place over fifteen years ago in Punjab, 250 km north of Delhi, at Patiala, the erstwhile seat of the Maharaja, now home to the Punjabi University. The English Department hosted a seminar on ‘Interrogating the Post-Condition: Theory, Texts and Contexts’.1 It was at this seminar that the first impulse to write such a book arose when I heard two diametrically opposed, and perhaps incommensurable, views on the topic. But as interesting as this debate was, its manner of staging was equally noteworthy. The drama of post-modernism versus Marxism as presented by both its proponents happened in Europe, not in India. The points of reference were the European Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Second World War, the Cold War, the ‘revolution’ of 1968, the fall of the Soviet Union and so on. But the effects and fallouts of these debates were evident all over the world, even in distant Patiala. Neither speaker reflected on his Eurocentrism; they seemed to take for granted that European, not excluding intellectual, history was world history; to that extent, both were devotees of Hegel, with his belief in the centrality of Europe in the unfoldment of the grand narrative of the progress of world history.2 Consequently, both speakers and positions also derived their legitimacy and claim to fame from their knowledge from the trajectory of European thought, not to mention degrees earned and work published in metropolitan centres in the West. As in most Indian seminars, there was no actual face-off between these two philosophical antagonists. Each said his piece and left it to

2

Introduction

the audience to draw its own conclusions. Ahmad left on the evening of the first day itself and was thus unavailable for interrogation or discussion. Singh was present in all the sessions, reiterating his position now and again, without refuting, even referring, to Ahmad’s. In many ways, it was a classic neo-colonial situation, with star speakers imported from Delhi, but with degrees from overseas, performing in plenary sessions and departing soon after, leaving behind the plodding plebs. The latter even pleaded for autographs from and photographs with these ‘celebrities’, without a clear idea what the latter stood for. Though the two main speakers never actually engaged let alone debated each other, they ignited a critical exchange in my mind. I found myself in partial agreement with both. That is why, when it was my turn to speak in the concluding plenary, I tried to steer an intermedial course between the two. Suspending the question of the provenance or prevalence of post-modernism, I tried to examine its pragmatics. Could we, I asked, evaluate its utility to our own national, if not local, critical enterprise? In doing so, I tended to agree with Ahmad that the prodigious challenge for us, considering where we are located, is that of imperialism and neo-colonialism. If we accord centrality to the question of power, expressed in cultural and relational terms, then the key issue was how post-modernism either abets or resists imperialism and neo-colonialism. So Ahmad was right in trying to critique post-modernism from such a perspective. But I was also alarmed by the series of binary oppositions upon which the whole edifice of his argument rested: reason versus superstition, order versus flux, truth versus faith, cognition versus rhetoric, scientific competence versus customary knowledge, future utopias versus present exploitation, revolutionary politics versus neo-liberal imperialism, or in a word, history versus theory. Equally troubling was his nostalgic evocation of the Cold War decade of the 1970s as the period when ‘large portions of humanity seemed poised to gain historically unprecedented levels of freedom’. How could we forget that this was also the period of the gulags and concentration camps of Russia, the brutal suppression of human rights and civil liberties in China, Eastern Europe and other parts of the ‘communist’ world, and the massacres and genocides of the Maoist-Stalinist regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In India, it was the period of the Emergency, the only time in our short history when the Constitution and civil liberties were suspended, and democracy upturned for eighteen months from mid-1975 to early 1977. Going a bit further back in European history, the Enlightenment, which Ahmad considered the only human project that held hope for universal human redemption, never quite yielded its promised fruits.

Introduction

3

The paix perpétuelle that Kant dreamt of never came to pass, least of all in the manner envisaged by the philosopher. Instead, wars and revolutions, culminating in the unprecedented carnage of the twentieth century, the most violent in human memory, marked by the two world wars, the Holocaust, the atom bomb, the Partition violence in India, the Stalinist and Maoist purges, the genocide of Pol Pot, end-century global terrorism and innumerable other horrors are the legacy of that century. To what do we owe these outcomes? To modernity or to its discontents? To me, Ahmad’s view of history was skewed, his dream of the communist utopia characterized by the kind of schizophrenic ‘rationality’ that enabled the writers of the American Declaration of Independence to aver, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal’ and to be slave-owners themselves at the same time. The French Revolution, which gave the world the slogan of ‘Liberty, equality and fraternity’, also popularized, if not perfected, our first rational and efficient killing machine – the guillotine. And it was the guillotine that so fatefully presaged the fatal gas chambers of Nazi Germany, exterminating millions of innocents 150 years later. If this was the legacy of modernity, we definitely needed to look hard before we leapt to embrace it. If post-modernity gave us that space, the respite to re-evaluate modernity, we in India must not miss this opportunity. That is why I differed from Ahmad and hesitated to dismiss, pace Lukacs, those who make up the ‘other’ mind of Europe as ‘romantic anti-capitalists’, belonging to the lineage of ‘irrationalist thought’. With Michel Foucault and Deleuze-Guattari, I rather celebrated the lineages of Nietzschean irrationality that allowed us to overturn or resist the frightening (ir)rationality of concentration camps, hydrogen bombs, Star Wars and other such hubristic celebrations of the will to power, not to mention consequent aspirations of social engineering, all supposedly embodying the fruits of modernity. To that extent, wouldn’t it be better to join Gurbhagat Singh in singing hosannas to the death of master narratives and celebrating the new glasnost of the ‘post’? I referred to that specific exchange and my position in it because this whole book attempts to intercede between the condemnation and the celebration of the ‘post’ condition. Yet, it does so, I believe, from a radically different stance than either Ahmad’s or Singh’s. For both of them, the point of reference is necessarily Europe and North America. The contemporary West is for them still the centre of their discursive practice. They are preoccupied in reading that elsewhere world, in interpreting it, arguing about it, writing back to it, even if it is supremely unaware, indifferent or, at worst, even contemptuous of

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Introduction

them. It would seem that they believe that once the nature and reality of the ‘West’ is determined, that of the rest of the world will automatically fall into place.3 Ahmad, Singh and for that matter most of their peers usually begin and end with the West, taking if at all a reluctant and occasional detour to their own location in India. That they even choose to do the latter sets them apart from many other Indian scholars who don’t even bother. Had they totally ignored India, their discourse would demand merely a symptomatic reading, exposing their irrelevance to our lifeworlds. In the case of Ahmad and Singh, however, such a dismissal would be unfair. Both are genuinely interested in India, but only as an adjunct to the West. Somehow they do not see the possibility of an alternative discourse emerging, free from the compelling need constantly to replace Indian reality within the Western discursive universe. Though both Ahmad and Singh have differing points of view, they share a similar practice when it comes to cultural and intellectual relations between India and the West. Whether they admit it openly or not, their very methodology assumes that the latter is dominant and the former is subordinate. This is not an assertion that they make, but an assumption. Like many others before them, they too see India’s story as peripheral to world history. Much of this book asks if such asymmetrical discursive relations can be altered. If they cannot, then what other agency is available to us given our location and alternate concerns? Are we condemned to remain marginalized minorities in the world of Euro-American intellectual dominance, or is there another second-order, even if peripheral, discursive space, under the sign of ‘national’, ‘third world’, ‘subaltern’ and so on, which we might creatively cohabit or occupy? More to the point, would it be possible to retain the option of engaging with the ‘post’ condition without rejecting it out of hand or celebrating it as a universal panacea for our ills? One, rather self-centred way to explore such a question, I venture to propose, would be to review my own positions on the subject. To that extent, this Introduction is really one part of an inter-text in which I shall present, somewhat self-reflexively if not narcissistically, that peculiar ramification of the ‘post-’ as it applies to my own thinking career. In a sense, because this ‘Introduction’ comes after these earlier positions of mine, it signifies a space, which is ‘post-’ the previous ones. It also obviates, to exploit the slipperiness of the ‘post-’, the necessity to take rigid stances, allowing if not a refusal, at least an evasion of determinate positions. My ‘selfish’ review, thus, acknowledges the postal undermining of ideological fixities, celebrating the provisionality and contingency of our opinions and positions. This Introduction

Introduction

5

not only is thus ‘post-’ the earlier positions chronologically, but also expresses the ideological urge, sometimes articulated as the cry for freedom, to move beyond any and all positions – hence post-positions. This Introduction is not just ‘post-’ but also ‘selfish’ in that it reconsiders, by and large, my own previous work, some of which this book collects but also, more broadly, focuses on the ‘self’ rather than the Other, in this exchange between India and its most significant jousting partner, the West. There are two reasons for this ‘self’-absorption. Simply put, selfish is actually not just devoted or caring only or primarily for oneself and one’s own interests; ‘selfish’ is my rather deliberately skewed translation of ‘svaraj-ist’. Svaraj is a compound word made of sva or self and raj or rule. But it means much more than selfgovernment or autonomy. Svaraj, as popularized during India’s freedom struggle especially by M. K. Gandhi in his seminal pamphlet Hind Swaraj (1909), also implies the praxis of an ongoing interrogation of power and a continuing commitment to decolonization. Svaraj, to me, in this sense, is supremely post-colonial and post-colonizing. Svaraj means not only self-rule and self-control but also self-reliance, selfconfidence, self-development, self-realization and self-illumination. It implies the sort of selfishness that leads to selfhood, self-regard and self-assertion when the self is relatively powerless and to self-restraint, self-control and selflessness when the self is powerful enough to dominate others. This concern with the self, then, is quite apposite to a civilization which I have argued elsewhere is radically self-centric, rather than theo- geo- or anthropocentric, in its material and metaphysical disposition.4 If I were to sum up my entire approach to the various theoretical debates that have preoccupied Indian critical endeavours over the last two decades or so, I would therefore call it svaraj-ist. In this approach what is important is self-empowerment and self-emancipation, not so much the attacking or blaming of others. It thus differs considerably from the opportunistic blame-game that characterizes a good deal of what was post-colonialism.

Unauthorized modernities This book argues that we must read ‘postal’ theories not just in their content but also in terms of their mediation and reception in India. Focusing on the latter, we quickly realize that as consumers of imported theories, our relationship with their producers is one of gross inequality. The conditions of exchange, if we might call them that, are unequal. They are so designed as to perpetuate the very inequality that these

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Introduction

new modes of resistance ostensibly seek to redress. The ironic, possibly unintended, result is that imported machineries of emancipation actually strengthen our bondage and subjection. Post-colonial structures of knowledge thus generate an imperialism of categories in which, as Ashis Nandy puts it, the whole ‘conceptual domain is hegemonized’ by concepts ‘produced and honed in the West’ (177–194). In other words, debating these theories is pointless unless we do so in a manner that critiques the very structures of knowledge under whose auspices they are read and received. But does this mean that we discard, reject or resist everything that comes to us from the metropolis simply because it is foreign? That is not what I advocate. Some form of critical engagement, even convergence, with the West is inevitable, just as a similarly open but critical attitude to Indian traditions is imperative. The problem is that our own subservience to the dominant is reified when we gratefully accept what has been passed on to us in a condescending fashion, like handme-downs, leftovers or jhoota. Given this, how do we regard many of the exciting shifts of metropolitan discourse, which we have managed to observe from the outside as it were? For instance, consider the key contentions of post-modernism, which Jane Flax sums up as the ‘Death of Man’, ‘Death of History’ and ‘Death of Metaphysics’ (32–34)?5 How are these really relevant to our condition, here in India? In fact, arguably, we might be in need of their contrary, not to speak of other Enlightenment values, to shore up our own incomplete modernization and rationalization process. That Indian society is incompletely rationalized is obvious when we observe the outcomes of traffic jams, stampedes in places of pilgrimage and even approaches to a ticket counter. There is a marked absence of order or organization; instead we see a chaotic melee, with everyone scrambling to get ahead, but in the process making the situation more unmanageable. The lack of efficiency or orderliness is seen even in simpler matters such as the absence of automation to switch on or off streetlights or even shut taps in public toilets. In India, theory thus seems mostly irrelevant to the lives of the common people in their daily struggle with their environment. In Europe too, the whole move against metaphysics was a form of social criticism, not some abstract philosophical contest. Actually, what better example of the dismantling of master-discourses and oppressive structures than the deconstruction of the Soviet Union? That was perhaps the most radical instance of post-modernism available to us though, ironically, it had nothing to do with Derrida or Foucault. Perestroika and glasnost were not products of the theoretical carping of

Introduction

7

Western Europe critics; neither were they entirely an outcome of the internal contradictions within the erstwhile Soviet Union. Behind them was the whole might of the West, which wanted to defeat international socialism so as to make the world safe for capitalism. Similarly, what ended ‘theory’ was not counter-theory so much as 9/11, the felling of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in downtown New York by Al-Qaeda operatives. The end of theory came from geopolitical compulsions, not from the academy’s internal debates. The new war between the West and radical Islam replaced the older Cold War between capitalism and socialism. The neo-cons received an unprecedented fillip, now attacking theory as a form of left-wing self-indulgence on American campuses. Similarly, in India, it was arguably the digital revolution, one of whose outcomes was Wikipedia, which did more to decolonize knowledge than post-colonial theory. But was there some positive charge that we could salvage from post-modernism for our own social realities in India? If post-modernism was a cry for greater freedom and autonomy, then it was bound to resonate among those who were denied both in any corner of the world. For India, it would seem that the forging of an alternative tradition of criticism in which texts could be reread so as to bring about social and political reform was more apt as a strategy than the kind of perestroika that destroyed the Soviet Union. Similarly, we needed new readings of all our major thought-leaders, including the mystics, whose disciples tried to institutionalize unitary and totalized ‘official’ interpretations of their lives. Sri Ramakrishna, Ramana Maharshi, Mahatma Gandhi, Sri Aurobindo, J. Krishnamurti and so on all demand to be read afresh, so that the vitality and emancipatory power of their ideas can be recovered. To resist closed and oppressive readings of our ‘great’ texts, both religious and secular, is an ongoing challenge. The Constitution of India, for instance, may be reinterpreted to facilitate greater autonomy and federalism; perhaps the number of times it has been amended shows how tentative a document it really is. Though its chief architect, Dr Babasaheb Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, espoused The Buddha and His Dhamma, the Constitution itself does not even mention dharma.6 Similarly, religious texts such as the Ramayana must be reread to show why Ayodhya ought to indeed be a site not of religious war and confrontation but of peace and cessation of conflict as its name suggests. Indeed, the question that persists is whether the critique of modernity in India needs to be mounted from a post-modernist platform at all. This was Europe’s choice that too not one endorsed by all European thinkers, but should it be ours? Both in Europe and in India there

8

Introduction

are older traditions of dissent. Indeed, Marx and Freud, to name an odd couple, emerge as two powerful exemplars of modernity’s internal critique. However, it is from an older, spiritual centre that India has drawn its strength. In the West, an alternative tradition of dissent includes Blake, Goethe, Carlyle, Dickens, Emerson, Thoreau, Ruskin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Weil and Derrida. Though they vary in their responses, all of them have one common thread running through their work. They use religion, mysticism, spirituality or literature to critique modernity. They do not attack modernity on its own terms as Marx or Freud do, but invoke Europe’s ‘other’ traditions of epistemology and metaphysics. This ‘other mind of Europe’ can, as Gandhi realized, serve as a useful ally in our own quest for selfhood. In India, we find an ambivalence towards modernity from its very inception. Modernity, underwritten by colonialism, created a major rupture and dissonance in the Indian mind. Some resisted it; others were fatally attracted. But, overall, an uneasy discomfort remains.7 Indian critiques of modernity reach a powerful and far-reaching articulation in Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909). We might argue, as some have, that Hind Swaraj is post-modern or predicts several post-modern concerns. I would prefer to think of it as anti-modern or even neo-traditional. Yet it does share and anticipate some of the criticisms mounted by post-modernism later. The point is that using post-modernism to critique modernity is not our only option; we have other resources, including tradition, which Ashis Nandy, following Gandhi, uses critically to interrogate modernity. Indeed, historically, because India never fully accepted or internalized modernity, our need to debunk or transgress it may not be as urgent as Europe’s. This brings me to the part of the subtitle, ‘unauthorized’, not yet been touched opon. The phrase ‘unauthorized modernities’ occurred to me in an unforgettable fashion. Several years back, I was driving to Sainik Farms, a rather posh locality in South Delhi. Since the entrances to this colony are only two and quite far apart, I was hesitating before one, when a man, very rudely, admonished me, ‘Are you blind or what? Can’t you see where you are going?’ Somehow, the sheer excess of that remark made me ponder over it. I was going to meet a property dealer to negotiate the sale of a flat in Mehrauli, a historic district in New Delhi, which actually pre-dates the modern city by several centuries. Gradually, I discovered that many things about this real estate ‘tycoon’ were suspect, including his standard act of being in the puja room, absorbed in worship, when clients came to visit him. It turned out that the apartment building in which I was planning to buy a flat was not lawful. In fact, this very colony, Sainik Farms, in which the

Introduction

9

businessman had a very large house, was also not fully legit. In a sense, I was ‘blinded’, not really aware of where I was heading. When I started doing more research, I was struck by how not only the apartment building in Mehrauli or the entire Sainik Farms but much of the real estate in Delhi was ‘unauthorized’ in one way or another. Nearly half of the citizens of Delhi lived in developments and structures that were illegal or quasi-legal. In fact, there were various levels and kinds of violations. First of all, there were many old villages in what is now the metropolitan area of Delhi. These villages, because they were older than civic bodies or codes, had been designated as ‘lal dora’ (red thread) areas by the British. They included all those parts of rural Delhi, which the British colonial authorities recognized as constituting ‘genuine’ village boundaries. Within these areas, the villagers were essentially exempt from following modern norms. In independent India, the term ‘lal dora’ began to be used to justify many other kinds of illegal constructions, even in areas outside the original ‘red rope’ spaces, but often contiguous to them. Later, even when the laws revoked the exemptions granted to these areas, villagers continued to violate regulations, thus extending and perpetuating a large number of unregulated spaces within the city limits. Not only would such structures be virtually impossible to demolish because of the number of voters who would be displaced, but in many of the villages the lanes leading to the tenements are so narrow that not even a car, let alone bulldozer, can reach them. On the outskirts of these areas, one might find a well-planned and regulated building on one side of the street, while the other side is pell-mell with an unregulated mass of construction. Under political pressure, some irregular settlements have been regularized, thus leading to a new category, originally unauthorized, now regularized colonies. But even within perfectly legal settlements, many homeowners encroach onto the street, build an illegal basement or floor, extend a balcony and so on. The total picture is thus very complex – much of Delhi is, as I said, in fact, ‘unauthorized’. Metropolitan Delhi, which is India’s capital, thus consists of a variety of types of landholdings. Officially, the city is divided into (old) Delhi, New Delhi and the Delhi Cantonment, each of which is administered by different bodies such as the New Delhi Municipal Committee (NDMC), the Metropolitan Corporation of Delhi (MCD) and the Delhi Cantonment Board. Much of the government land in Delhi has been controlled and developed by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA). According to an official report, of the 1,489.39 sq. km that make up Delhi, the MCD looks after an area of 1,399.26 sq. km.

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This consists of the following kinds of colonies: ‘135 urban villages, 191 rural villages, 567 unauthorized-regularized colonies, 308 unauthorized colonies, 45  J[huggi] J[hopdi] Resettlement colonies, 442 approved colonies and 9 dairy colonies’ (www.mcdonline.gov.in/ mcd/adds/engd.doc).8 This shows a bewildering diversity of types of land use. Jhuggi-jhopdi actually means hutments and slums. ‘Dairy colony’ is a special category unto itself; presumably, it was originally meant to be a place where dairy farmers and their animals lived in close proximity. Now it refers to a colony which is just like any other except that it once housed a dairy. There are, in addition, not just urban villages, which is a contradiction in terms, but rural villages too. Several unauthorized colonies have now been regularized, but they still retain the traces of their unregulated past. There is thus hope for the 308 colonies still considered unauthorized; perhaps, they may be regularized too one day. The number of ‘approved colonies’, 442, is way below the sum total of the other kinds of irregular, unauthorized colonies of slum clusters. The excursion to Sainik Farms and subsequent research into Delhi’s land status gave me the idea that India’s modernity is also in some sense ‘unauthorized’. It is unorthodox, unregulated, unrecognized, non-standard and incredibly varied – hence not modernity at all but modernities. These Indian modernities are neither authored by the West, nor authorized by it, though they were birthed by Western colonialism and bear family resemblances to modernities all over the world. Indian modernity is heterogeneous, comprising of accurate replicas, genuine indigenous variations, hybrids, distortions, imitations, fakes and fantasies, with residual indigenous, largely pre-modern, semi-feudal, tribal and other such formations. Yet together these function with their own peculiar logic, which is amenable to understanding and explanation. This is what makes India so special, as I argued in a talk at the South Asia Institute in Heidelberg, when I first used this phrase.9 But my work in this area also speaks to those who have tried to theorize alternative modernities.10 As Dilip Parmeshwar Gaonkar’s book with a similar title suggests, ‘[M]odernity always unfolds within specific cultures or civilizations and that different starting points of the transition to modernity lead to different outcomes.’ But my book is also different from such efforts in that I try to understand India in terms of its own traditions, political, religious and cultural, albeit critically, not just vis-à-vis Western modernity. To me, of the many possible roads to modernity that India experimented with, the one that uses tradition critically to fashion an alter-modernity is the most promising.

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This alternativity consistently crops us, reminding us of its reality repeatedly, so that it becomes impossible to ignore or wish away. It has multiple points and positions of enunciation and development, but it also seems to invite us to add own perspective. It is this ‘spiritual’ dimension that makes India’s modernity special. In that sense, India’s self-fashioning is something akin to Paul Ricoeur’s ‘second naiveté’, a (post-)modern recuperation of the spirit. Another way of critiquing modernity is to call for a shift from knowledge to wisdom as the basis of right action. Instead of relying on reason alone, a deeper understanding resulting in wide-ranging and effective interventions is preferable. From a fragmentary epistemology to a holistic mode of insight and contemplation, from information to gnosis, such an awakening of intelligence, if it is genuine, is bound also to result in a widespread transformation. This is also one of the ways by which we can avoid turning our adversaries into enemies, our forms of dissent into habits of consent. Instead of trying to salvage the modern project, as Aijaz Ahmad advocates, we might let modernity’s self-dismantling proceed, without lamenting its possible decease. Indeed, what better symbol can we find for the failed promises of the modern project than the doomed hulk in the eponymous blockbuster Titanic? All that the movie offers, symbolically, is the movable setting of an elegiac love story in which the beautiful girl, though rescued from her ‘filthy’ capitalist fiancé, can never obtain her artistic working-class lover who, though he represents the triumph of the free proletariat, must go down with the sinking ship. The working class does not attain revolution; the girl, who is saved, loses her love; the ship goes down, but capitalism, of course, triumphs; in the end, the scope of the human spirit is diminished. What we need for India, instead, is a different kind of ship, an aircraft or spaceship perhaps, powered by a different form of energy, to launch us into a more promising future, less dirty, dangerous, and demeaning, in this new millennium. A new science, a new spirituality and a new India is what we yearn for, which is possible only through integral wisdom not through the ‘post’al project.

Indian jugad11 The rest of the book consists of twelve chapters in three parts, followed by a conclusion. Part I, ‘Critical Vernaculars’, is devoted to the idea and activity of criticism in contemporary India. The four chapters examine what is available by way of a tradition of criticism, indeed, what tradition itself means in India, and how it is constantly modified, corrected and transformed. These chapters engage with some of the

12

Introduction

more appealing critical movements and initiatives, looking at the work of select critics. My purpose is not to offer a survey of Indian criticism but only to indicate some possibilities through the chosen examples. The field of Indian criticism is vast and varied; another work would be required sufficiently to describe or theorize it. Here, I suggest a methodology, a way of reading and negotiating it. What I propose is first the discovery, and then the development, of a tradition of contemporary criticism and theory in India. Such a tradition should be able to resist Western hegemonic discourses and also to serve as an agent for change. It will, when necessary, critique the past or draw on its resources to understand the present and alter the latter dynamically, while it also tries to fashion futures. The agenda for criticism in India is, ultimately, the assuming of responsibility for one’s own individual and civilizational enterprises. This requires a clearer self-understanding as well as a sense of one’s adversaries. Without such accurate recognition, I suggest, the critical endeavour will remain colonized or confused. Part II, ‘Unauthorized Modernities’, concerns the reception and critique of the ‘postal’ discourses from an Indian location. Again, its four chapters offer not so much a survey, as a sustained engagement with post-modernist ideas and theoretical positions and an engagement with Indian modernity itself. Post-modernism, especially its academically sanctioned US varieties, is seen as the playful and protected project of somewhat recent provenance, secure within the ivory towers of the academy, withdrawn from everyday ‘third-world’ realities, liable to be dislodged once the protocols that enabled it were shattered by 9/11 and events following it. When it comes to India, tradition, modernity and post-modernity are seen not just sequentially or diachronically, but also simultaneously, as features or paradigms of how reality is made manifest or performed. They get specialized, spatialized, rather than being trapped in temporal or teleological linearity. The chapters in Part II also try to define the complex inter-relationships between tradition, modernity and post-modernity as abstractions, ways of thinking and describing reality. I seek to combine a discussion of these with other critical triads or triangulations such as subaltern, national and global. The final chapter in this part treats the problem of duality in modern times, trying to understand its relationship with (the absence of) beauty. It asks if modernity is itself a special species of duality. It looks at traditional notions of art in India, especially their relationship to the aesthetic, to ask if there is an aesthetic leap that can take us beyond modernity.

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Part III, final part of the book, ‘Post-Colonial Contentions’, contemplates India’s tryst with post-colonialism, starting with the almost precise date of its ‘official’ introduction in India in a seminar at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, in 1994, right to the perhaps precocious if not premature announcement of its demise in another international conference in Hyderabad, Deccan, ten years later. The chapters in this part examine how post-colonialism, which became part of the Western academic industry, cannot adequately grasp India’s vast and diverse literary and cultural production. One reason for this is that post-colonialism is Anglo-centric, whereas India is multilingual and multicultural. While post-colonialism opened many new avenues in the West for intellectuals from the third world, those who remained at home and were thus somewhat deprived of its benefits have instead to set their houses in order without complaining about lost opportunities. The ‘real’ post-colonials paradoxically have no place in the official discourse of post-colonialism. Their absence renders post-colonialism answerable, if not lacking in legitimacy, to those in the colonized parts of the world. But merely holding the West accountable will not do; the rest have to work hard to search for alternatives. Rather than harping on past wrongs and indulging in a politics of blame, a new kind of post-colonialism in India actually looks ahead, wishing to compete for new opportunities and express its native genius in a world that it perceives to be increasingly flatter. Finally, a newer way of engaging with Indian literary production is offered in the last chapter of this part. Here, instead of focusing only on Indian English texts, an argument is made in favour of looking at ‘vernacular’ literatures, either in their original languages or in translation. It is by such an extension in scope and outlook that a critical vernacular and a native tradition of English can be fostered. The locus of enunciation in a text cannot be decoded without also examining how meaning is created through linguistic and cultural codes, which, in India, are often other or more than English. The part thus ends with the demonstration of the kind of critical idiom which can go beyond the present practice of post-colonialism. This is the vernacular move that the book attempts as the most promising way to engage with Indian trans-literatures. Most of these twelve chapters embody a decolonial critique of ‘high’ metropolitan theory, arguing against its relevance to the multiple and challenging Indian contexts. Yet this book, while making a case for indigenous and homespun theorizing, is neither denial of nor escape from theory. The svaraj-ist position is for a culturally rooted and

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responsible theoretical enterprise, not for an undifferentiated globalized, metropolitan theory, whereby non-Western critics are either incorporated into the Western academy or marginalized. My endeavour also records the influence of the very theories it interrogates or resists. In seeking an answerable style, the form of these essays breaks the usual mould of academic writing by refashioning suitable, usually subversive, styles of dissent, which may be considered enabling of the larger project of devising ‘critical vernaculars’ for India. In that sense, the chapters that follow do, at times, effect a break with the conventions of academic writing, sometimes in the register of ‘postal’ playfulness. Perhaps, the narrative mode of these interventions might be seen as undermining their substance, as if the author were resisting post-modernism in a very post-modernist way, thus indirectly ratifying it. I would like to believe, however, that assimilation and naturalization rather than imitation, mimicry or flattery are my way of engagement. Taming theory, rather than being disciplined by it, is a vital tactic for non-metropolitan Indian criticism, neither shunning or hating theory, on the one hand, nor capitulating and perpetuating it on the other. That, after all, would be the way of svaraj, mediating between extremes, instead of posing or posturing theory, as often is the case in India.12 Is my svaraj-ist orientation, then, a way of intermediating between Ahmad and Singh? Or is it the attempt to bypass that debate altogether? To me, pushing for svaraj does have a bearing on these debates, though it need not be trapped in their binary opposition. The quest for svaraj is not just mine, but India’s own quest. India’s unauthorized modernity subverts mainstream Western narratives. It also serves as a way to moderate capitalism and consumerism. Svaraj keeps us on track and keeps our desires in check. It creates its own critical vernaculars, which inflect or disrupt the grand narratives of modernity. It is the story of such inflections or disruptions that this book attempts to capture. India and its vernacular traditions, as the late U. R. Ananthamurthy used to say, have the jeernagni (digestive power) to assimilate the modern. I hope this book is one instance of such artfulness. A deep and integral understanding resulting in multilateral and transnational action is our best antidote to capitalism run amok and modernity gone out of control, as it is to the multiple economic and ecological challenges that threaten our planetary futures.13 Critical vernaculars will strive to be part of the solution rather than of the problem. India, with its vast and varied resources of spirituality, philosophy, culture, literature, criticism and political activism, can play a crucial part in redemptive planetarity. Disrupting the logic of modernity, we might still erupt into the alter-modern, raising consciousness and offering hope to those

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who are beleaguered and beaten down by its onslaughts and relentless advances. This is India’s jugad, rather than jihad, our makeshift, homespun improvizations which nevertheless make a difference. If jugad leads to jod, rather than tod – joining, rather than breaking – then many victims and wounded sufferers of modernity might join hands to chant, another world is possible.

Notes 1 Held on 20–21 January 2000, with the proceedings published later in the same year as The Post Condition: Theory, Texts and Contexts (2000). 2 See Teshale Tibebu’s Hegel and the Third World: The Making of Eurocentrism in World History. 3 No surprise that the debate continues to this day; see, for instance, Can Non-Europeans Think? by Hamid Dabashi. 4 See Making India: Colonialism, National Culture, and the Afterlife of Indian English Authority, where I observe that India ‘is not anthropocentric, logocentric, or even theocentric, but radically self-centric, where the self is, ultimately, non-separate, radically relational’ (244). 5 Also see Seyla Benhabib, ‘Feminism and Post-Modernism: An Uneasy Alliance’, Praxis International 11.2 (July 1991): 137–149. Benhabib concludes her critique of post-modernism, saying, ‘A certain version of post-modernism is not only incompatible with but would undermine the very possibility of feminism as the theoretical articulation of the emancipatory aspirations of women’ (148). In addition, in what is a very useful and sophisticated strategy, she interprets these three theses through their strong and weak versions. In all cases, the moderate, weak versions are found more compatible with feminism than the strong, extreme versions. 6 It is a curious absence since not only dharma-dhamma has been the foundation of social ethics and polity in India, but Ambedkar, in The Buddha and His Dhamma, himself argued for such a renewed basis of civic and political life: Religion, it is said, is personal, and one must keep it to oneself. One must not let it play its part in public life. 8. Contrary to this, Dhamma is social. It is fundamentally and essentially so. 9. Dhamma is righteousness, which means right relations between man and man in all spheres of life. 10. From this it is evident that one man, if he is alone, does not need Dhamma. 11. But when there are two men living in relation to each other, they must find a place for Dhamma whether they like it or not. Neither can escape it. 12. In other words. Society cannot do without Dhamma. 13. Society has to choose one of the three alternatives. 14. Society may choose not to have any Dhamma as an instrument of Government. For Dhamma is nothing if it is not an instrument of Government. 15. This means Society chooses the road to anarchy. 16. Secondly, Society may choose the police – i.e., dictatorship – as an instrument of Government. 17. Thirdly, Society may choose Dhamma, plus the Magistrate wherever people fail to observe the Dhamma. 18. In anarchy and dictatorship liberty is lost. 19. Only in the third

16

Introduction [case] liberty survives. 20. Those who want liberty must therefore have Dhamma. (www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00ambedkar/ ambedkar_buddha/04_01.html)

7 See a more detailed discussion of this in my book Making India: Colonialism, National Culture, and the Afterlife of Indian English Authority. 8 Some figures put the number of unauthorized colonies at 895, much higher than what I have cited. See http://delhi.gov.in/wps/wcm/connect/ DOIT_UDD/urban+development/our+services/unauthorized+colonies+ce lls+(uc)/list+of+895+colonies+with+maps. 9 ‘Unauthorized Modernity’, invited lecture at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg, 14 July 2002. 10 Dilip P. Gaonkar’s Alternative Modernities (2001), based on a special issue of Daedalus (2000) on the topic. S. N. Eisenstadt titled his essay in that volume ‘Multiple Modernities’ (Daedalus [Winter 2000]: 129.1: 1–29). Later, he published a more extensive treatment in Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities (2003). See also Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996) or Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000) and Habitations of Modernity (2002). Since then it is quite common to think in terms of plural modernities. 11 Jugad may loosely be translated as ‘fix’ or ‘hack’, a creative salutation to a complex problem, with meagre resources, often involving unconventional methods, including bending of rules. Jugad has now been elevated to a management technique, studied and taught in an effort to understand how India ‘works’. 12 In India, everyone wants theory. Any seminar invoking names such as Foucault, Derrida, Levinas and Agumben is likely to be a sell-out. It works like a short cut to academic legitimacy if not stardom, almost a new Brahmanism. 13 Prasenjit Duara tries to do this in terms of the global traffic of ideas in The Crisis of Global Modernity.

References Ahmad, Aijaz. ‘Keynote Address’. National Seminar on ‘Interrogating the PostCondition: Theory, Texts and Contexts’, Punjabi University, Patiala, 20–21 January 2000. ———. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992. Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji. The Buddha and His Dhamma. Electronic ed. www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00ambedkar/ambedkar_buddha/ index.html#index. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. ———. Provincializing Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Dabashi, Hamid. Can Non-Europeans Think? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

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Duara, Prasenjit. The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Eisenstadt, S. N. Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2003. ———. ‘Multiple Modernities’. Daedalus. 129.1 (Winter 2000): 1–29. Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand. Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule. 1909. Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1984. Gaonkar, Dilip P., ed. Alternative Modernities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi, Department of Urban Development. ‘Tentative List and Tentative Maps of 895 Colonies Subject to Further Authentication by the Urban Development Department GNCTD’. http://delhi.gov.in/wps/wcm/connect/DOIT_UDD/urban+development/ our+services/unauthorized+colonies+cells+(uc)/list+of+895+colonies+with +maps. Kapoor, Ranjit Kaur and Manjit Inder Singh, eds. The Post Condition: Theory, Texts and Contexts. Patiala: Punjabi University, 2000. Municipal Corporation of Delhi. ‘Particulars of Organisation Functions and Duties and Engineering Department’. www.mcdonline.gov.in/mcd/adds/engd. doc. 21 July 2007. Nandy, Ashis. ‘The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance’. Alternatives. 13 (1998): 177–194. Paranjape, Makarand. ‘Bypassing Post-Modernism: The Burden of Creating Meaningful Knowledge in Contemporary India’. In Sandalwood: Essays and Articles in Honour of Dr Shankar Mokashi Punekar. Eds. K. Raghavendra Rao, et al. Dharwad: Dr Shankar Mokashi Punekar Felicitation Committee, 1998: 16–38. ———. Decolonization and Development: Hind Svaraj Revisioned. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1993. ———. Making India: Colonialism, National Culture, and the Afterlife of Indian English Authority. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2013. Singh, Gurbhagat. Literature and Folklore after Post-Structuralism. New Delhi: Ajanta, 1991. Tibebu, Teshale. Hegel and the Third World: The Making of Eurocentrism in World History. Syracuse, NY: University of Syracuse Press, 2011. Tikekar, S. R., comp. Epigrams from Gandhiji. New Delhi: Publications Division, 1994.

Part I

Critical vernaculars

1

Parampara

* Indian modernity is Janus-faced, even schizophrenic. On the one hand, it looks to the West and to the future, but on the other hand, it also looks back at India and its past. Arguably, the single most significant problematic in recent Indian history is that of tradition versus modernity. After nearly 200 years of debate and discussion, it seems fairly clear that India can have neither pure tradition, nor uncontaminated modernity. Whatever we are or have become has to be some combination or amalgamation of both. But in these contestations and constellations of tradition and modernity, it is not always clear what tradition is or stands for. This chapter attempts to redress this lack. It engages with the idea of parampara, which is the Sanskrit word, also used in many other Indian languages, for what we call tradition in India. While tradition is not exactly an equivalent, it is also quite resonant. I will explain my reasons for retaining the Indian word in addition to tradition, but the question I ask is how parampara influences, even shapes individuals and in what ways individuals carry it forward, break or reshape it. More specifically, I try to explore what happens to Indian traditions in modern times. Do they survive or die and under what circumstances? The chapter is in three parts. In the first, I recount two anecdotes to illustrate how I was forced to confront the problem of exactly what my tradition was as a writer and critic. In the second part, I try to formulate how I grappled with this problem, at least at a theoretical or philosophical level. Of course, the question of whether or not I have been able actually to live up to or manifest this resolution remains unanswered. Finally, I come to the implications of retaining several Indian words in the chapter, including parampara. Does this serve its intended purpose, which is to make the present discourse more in tune with our own traditions by trying to vernacularize it? Is it, in

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other words, truly enabling? Or is it merely a token gesture, a sort of conscience-salving, temporary escape from our defeat in the contest of categories? If so, what can we really do to connect meaningfully with our heritage? What are the options available to us and how do we exercise them?

(Dis)inheritance I was once offered the Honorary Directorship of a non-governmental organization (NGO) set up to promote svaraj in ideas. What could have been closer to the heart of a professed svaraj-ist? But, by a peculiar turn of events, this offer was withdrawn because of a novel I had written. I was quite struck by the reasons for my disqualification, especially because few reviewers, let alone readers, seemed to have paid much attention to my book. I had always believed that literature ‘makes nothing happen’ and was therefore nonplussed to discover how wrong I was, at least when it came to the personal price I had to pay for my writings. The note that terminated my relationship with the NGO explained why I was thought to be unsuitable. The Trustee, citing Ananda Coomaraswamy, said that the function of literature was to tell the stories of Gods and heroes. It was therefore pointless to write, as I had, about those aspects of life which are degrading, disturbing or debasing. Art should elevate, inspire and uplift, all of which my novel had failed to do. Since I had not succeeded in fulfilling the higher purpose of art, she thought I would not make a suitable Director for her NGO. With growing disbelief I wondered where was I, in what century or decade? Was I dealing with a prude or a prophet? The letter produced profound unease in my mind, forcing me to confront my own creative work in a new light. After some reflection, I began to detect a contrary impulse at the core of my writing, if not my life itself. In most of my criticism, I could sense an orientation toward, longing for and, in fact, reassertion of some sort of tradition. It might have been a need to return to an integrated analytical framework, which incorporated moral, spiritual, aesthetic and historical-material impulses, not present in that combination in the work of my peers, colleagues or immediate predecessors. From another standpoint, most of my work could be seen as a reaction and critique of the modern condition. Because modernity seemed to enshrine a divorce between dharma and aesthetics, between morality and utility, between fact and value, I supposed that we had a society full of fear, violence, alienation and suffering, all of which were reflected in literature as well. It was a literature without rasa, or if you

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prefer, full of the rasa of alienation, anomie, even despair.1 Yet, the dispossessed in our midst, especially the Dalits, found tradition abhorrent and had, apparently, embraced modernity wholesale. There was a challenging paradox here which demanded unravelling: modernity had disposed and destroyed so many, but those it had dispossessed themselves found in it a welcome escape from the inequities of tradition. Wasn’t it true that colonial and capitalist modernity had wiped out several populations in the world, incorporating and subduing those who still survived? Even its antagonistic ideologies such as Stalinism and Maoism had caused genocides and pogroms, the decimation and extermination of millions, plus untold sufferings to their own countrymen and women who had survived. Even the greatest literary works of modernity portrayed loss, betrayal, denial, self-destruction, violence and the collapse of values. All this led to a clarification of my own position: I always thought of myself as a critic of modernity, even a ‘critical traditionalist’, the phrase used by Bhiku Parekh in Colonialism, Tradition and Reform (1989) to describe Gandhi. I saw myself as someone who did not wish to jettison tradition, neither follow it blindly or rigidly either. This allowed me to exercise my critical responsibilities and yet seek to reconnect with the life-giving energies of the past. Indeed, it was such a position, articulated in my neo-Gandhian primer, Decolonization and Development: Hind Svaraj Revisioned, which the aforementioned Trustee had admired. Now, when I regarded my fiction, especially, but also, to some extent, my poetry, I found in both a different, even opposite, kind of impulse. These writings emerged out of what was already a modern literary landscape, freed of older constraints and conventions. I found myself revelling in this freedom, even displaying a certain propensity to shock which modern works sought with their urge for novelty. What I wrote might even be thought of as sexually explicit by some, if not improper. My creative oeuvre, I realized, was marked by a compulsive transgressivity, a tendency to violate auchitya or ‘propriety’. At least the novel in question portrayed prominently if not predominantly the rasa of bibhatsa – abhorrence, disgust, loathing or revulsion. So from a certain point of view what I depicted was a fallen world. Yet here was the paradox again: wasn’t bibhatsa itself, on deeper reflection, a part of the traditional aesthetic framework? Loathing was also one of the sauces that spiced our affective universe. How dull would our life-worlds be without it! I understood dimly what I was really trying to do. Finding myself in a space already defiled and desacralized, I was asking how to restore the lost innocence that sringara possesses in its pristine form? In an age of Internet pornography and

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constant fetishization of the body as an object not so much of desire but commodifaction, how to return to some kind of purity and wholeness? Perhaps, my creative writing was groping towards the opposite of what it depicted; it was only through a systematic deglamourization and demystification of the dominant codes of sexuality that the purity of the body and mind could be restored. After the free play, or should I say, foreplay, of form and technique and beyond all the messy surface textures of the narrative, perhaps a calm and serenity that were really akin to sanata rasa might be detected. The latter, not a part of Bharata’s original template of eight rasas, was the substratum of all the rasas according to Abhinavagupta. This intuition seemed corroborated by the most unlikely source, Ananda Coomaraswamy himself, who had been quoted against me. In ‘Hindu View of Art’ Coomaraswamy, citing Dhananjaya’s Dasharupa, asserts that ‘[b]eauty is absolutely independent of the sympathetic – “Delightful or disgusting, exalted or lowly, cruel or kindly, obscure or refined, (actual) or imaginary, there is no subject that cannot evoke rasa in man” ’ (54). Obviously, the Trustee did not think so. She clearly felt the bibhatsa and reacted accordingly, with repugnance rather than sympathy. But, if she was insensitive to the deeper design of my text, she was probably right about its overt gestures. My novel was obviously not a traditional composition in the sense in which she had understood Coomaraswamy. It did not depict the lives of Gods or heroes and was, therefore, not directly amenable to the promotion of dharma. If it did promote dharma, it did so indirectly, in an almost unintended fashion, seemingly not because but in spite of itself. My novel was not and did not aspire to be a sacred text; it depicted a fallen world and in that sense was a fallen thing itself, bearing all the dirt and defilement of the age in which it had taken birth. To use a simile from one of my short stories, I could understand what Gandhari must have felt because, from the Trustee’s viewpoint, I too had given birth to monsters. Only lately have I become aware that my creative and critical writing are probably less contradictory than they may seem at first, that both reveal the similar urge and longing for unity and truth, in the traditional sense of those words, but go about seeking these values in two different, even opposite, ways. While the criticism is overtly committed to a holistic, traditional paradigm, the fiction and poetry do so only unconsciously or subterraneously. On the surface, the latter seems to succumb to the brokenness and fragmentation of modernity and postmodernity. They begin in the present fallen state, they fall, in fact, even lower, before attempting recovery. As a medieval Christian might put it: ‘Even in the darkest hell, there is a glimmer of the light of heaven;

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no sin is great enough to block the grace of God.’ The criticism, on the other hand, starts with the premise that we are not entirely fallen, that a tradition of resistance and continuity exists with which we may align ourselves. The critical work dares to be didactic, even going so far as to preach the continuing salience of dharma, while the creative seldom ventures to write a poem or novel of devotion or gnosis. One exception might a collection of poems called Confluence (2007), which contains pieces written over a twenty-year period, some of which make ‘sacred’ overtures. The tension between the sacred and the profane is not just across the critical and creative oeuvres, but within both discursive domains. Though it occasioned such insights, the rejection of the Trustee did hurt. I thought I ought not to have written my novel at all. What good did it serve? Whom did it benefit? Had I not written it only to indulge myself? Wasn’t it just fooling around if not playing the fool with words and narrative techniques? It was not sadhana, spiritual effort dedicated, as medieval art had been in both India and the West, to the ‘greater glory of God and the salvation of humankind’. Nor was it like the works of some modern writers, Sri Aurobindo or Raja Rao to name two, who tried to rekindle the idea of the word as mantra. Modern art, on the other hand, destroyed and discarded such grand teleologies; even T. S. Eliot, in a rear-guard reaffirmation of the sacred had done so in an idiom that was distinctly modern. Other modernists were not even sympathetic to the sacred; from them we got the manifesto that art must do away with all false idealisms; its job was to portray the ugliest truths of life. The art object need not shy away from the horrors of war, degradation, sexual abuse, murder and so on, all of which are equally a part of our lives, even if they are unacknowledged or suppressed. To foreground these, to report these, to tell the most unpalatable truths about society is the artist’s task. Art must give tongue to the unspeakable, like Edvard Munch’s ‘Scream of Nature’. Had I inherited a literary tradition from ancient India, I could no more have written my kind of novel than a temple sculptor have crafted a modern nude or a Kathakali artist depicted urban violence in India against women. Of course, most of the Gods and Goddesses the traditional sculptor carved out of stone would be at least seminude, but their nudity would not be of the modern sort that got M. F. Hussain into trouble. In traditional art, the divine body would be sacralized, elevated, exalted in a way no modern work of art could succeed in doing. My real problem as a writer was that literature, in the modern sense, was quite different from sahitya, the common good,

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which is Indian word for it. In his essay ‘Bengali National Literature’, Rabindranath Tagore had observed: If we take into account its etymological sense, we find in the word sahitya the sense of a union. It is not simply a union of idea and idea, language and usage, book and book; nothing except sahitya or literature can establish deeply intimate ties between one person and another, between past and present, between far and near. The people of a country deficient in nature have no vital bonds to join them: they remain isolated. (Tagore 179) This was my problem; I felt isolated. What I had written didn’t connect me with the reading public of India, or did so in a partial and unsatisfactory way. Tagore was well aware of the problem, which he identified as the rupture between rich literary and creative traditions of the land and present realities: We have in our country ties of convention linking past and present; yet somewhere within us, a vital artery has been so ruptured that the vital juice of the mind cannot flow to our times in a continuous stream from the past. (Tagore 179) In the very next page, he re-emphasizes the point: ‘[T]he vital and intellectual stream of literature has not flown uninterruptedly from the ancient days to the present’ (Tagore 180). Later in the essay, Tagore credits Rammohan Roy and other predecessors with trying to establish a common Bengali ‘national culture’, linking all the people of the land with a new medium of creative and critical expression. It is this medium that he, Tagore, himself perfected by practising in nearly all the genres available, besides creating new ones. From ancient sacred and classical literature in Sanskrit to the most humble Vaishnava kathakatas (ballads) and Bhatiyali composition of riverine rural East Bengal, Tagore had found a way to embrace whatever was available of sahitya, enter its very soul as it were and embody it through his own verses, songs, plays, stories, novels and, later, paintings. Tagore had found the sahityatatva, the essence of literature so to speak, which I was still looking for. As a contemporary Indian writer, what was my parampara, that set of values and techniques, the sum and substance of my artistic

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inheritance both in form and in content, style and theme, shaping its production and interpretation? It seemed as if, unlike Tagore, I as an Indian English writer, lived in a broken world, with a scattered and indefinite audience and hardly any established artistic criteria to mark a significant work. We in India still suffered from the after-effects of deep colonization, which allowed hardly any independent criticism to flourish, let alone a culture to support writers or writing.2 My world was marked, instead, by absences, flights, departures, ruptures, transgressions, desertions, violations – and ultimately emigration to the US, UK, Canada, Australia or similarly desirable destinations. Staying in India and writing in English, I was hardly likely to develop a symbiotic relationship with my society. It was with such questions in mind that I confronted the eminent danseuse, Leela Samson, who also served as the Director of Kalakshetra, Chennai. At an event in which both of us were speakers, I asked her if Bharatanatyam – or for that matter any other ‘classical’ Indian dance – seemed rather static and repetitive.3 Naturally, Samson was not pleased with my question. ‘I couldn’t disagree with you more,’ she replied. Haven’t you been observing all the formal and technical changes that have taken place over the last few decades, not to speak of this whole century? I myself don’t dance the way I used to ten or fifteen years back. We are constantly changing, constantly innovating. If you watched how Balasaraswati danced and compare it with the way I dance today, you’ll see such a great difference. What we were taught at Kalakshetra when I was a student is quite different from what is taught there today or what I teach my students. ‘Yes, yes,’ admitted hastily, ‘but I am not referring to the formal aspects; I meant the content, the narrative – the stories that you perform. They seem to be rather typical. They are, moreover, all mythological stories. I have never seen a Bharatanatyam or Kuchipudi performance on a modern text or even on a modern situation. Can you, for instance, depict the divorce of a couple or a murder mystery through a classical dance form?’ Samson paused for a moment. ‘Well, as you know, there have been some attempts to modernize the content our traditional dance forms. Mallika Sarabhai or Chandralekha, for instance, have used it to depict modern themes like feminism.’ ‘But, usually, don’t they do this only by giving a modern interpretation to a traditional story, like Sarabhai’s Draupadi, for example?’ I rejoined.

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‘True. But, let me ask you a counter-question. Why should my dance be used to depict what every TV serial shows these days? Why should it enlarge contemporary reality? I think I perform a more meaningful and important service for my audiences. They leave the performance enhanced, not diminished. Only a classical art form can give you that, no?’ ‘Yes, but can’t it do both? I mean, why can’t it be contemporary as well as traditional? Why should there be this break, this barrier between them? I know, of course, that Tagore’s or Bharati’s works have been performed in Bharatanatyam. They were contemporary poets, so you see it can be done. But not very often.’ ‘What you’re asking for is very, very difficult,’ Samson said with a sigh. ‘Kumar Gandharva could do it. He could innovate so effectively as to evolve a new style of singing. But how many Kumar Gandharvas have there been?’ The conversation had to be abandoned; there were other, more pressing, demands on our time. But the issue remained in a state of uneasy suspension, without our differences being fully resolved. Our exchange reminded me of the problem that I had been grappling with for years – the relationship, almost schizophrenic, between tradition and modernity in India, one instantiation of which was the aforementioned split between my own criticism and creative writing. What such oral histories illustrate is the great difficulty of reconciling or harmonizing tradition and modernity. In Indian literature, this was especially the case because the break between the two was decisive and far-reaching. The colonial intervention severed forever our tenuous ties with the older sacred literature of India as, indeed, it destroyed the society which supported such sacrality. In its place, ‘secular’ modernity, aided by the printing press and the invention of prose, gave rise to a new wave of creativity in what the British called our vernaculars. The literature written in these new languages was usually modelled on European works and its content quite different from traditional compositions. The difficulty for any creative writer was how to bring to her work the sense of the sacred which was available in the past but not so readily in the present. Writing in a purely traditional manner was no longer possible. Modern Indian literature was therefore invariably the struggle to relearn or learn anew one’s connection with the past and present. Each one of our modern ‘masters’ has done this in his or her own way. Indian literary modernism in Aurobindo attempted the impossible in inventing a mantric poetry in English. Aurobindo’s Savitri, one of the longest poems in English, is also perhaps the only contemporary

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epic which is read and recited daily in a manner reminiscent of a traditional sacred text. It is indeed regarded as a modern Veda by the devotees of Aurobindo and the Mother. But most modern Indian poets reject it as unreadable. Eliot, on the other hand, who also tried to produce sacred literature in modern times, is considered the founder of modernism in English. But Eliot’s Wasteland is the lament of modern man over the loss of the sacred. Eliot’s works, though universally acclaimed, are still literary texts; no one recites them daily or opens them at a random page hoping to be guided as to what the day ahead has in store. Aurobindo’s Savitri, on the other hand, though known and admired only by the select, has acquired the status of a modern spiritual classic. His followers consider it the embodiment of the supramental prophecy. It has sacred, even cultic status. In fiction, the name that comes most readily to mind is Raja Rao. The Serpent and the Rope, The Cat and Shakespeare and The Chessmaster and His Moves are all informed by the near-impossible quest for the ultimate reality in the twentieth century. For Raja Rao, all writing is sadhana, a means to self-realization. In Chessmaster, he even tried to go beyond language itself to invoke the sacred. Yet, his books are not read as sacred texts. Though he was one writer who unabashedly sought the transcendent and tried to invent an answerable style to such a lofty purpose, neither he nor his works is worshipped. Tagore, called ‘Gurudev’ by his admirers, is somewhere in between. He is revered, adored, almost worshipped, but he is still considered a literary and artistic genius, not a spiritual guru. He remains on the side of humanity. In India today, which one of us would like to write like Aurobindo or Raja Rao, let alone Tagore? No one would even dare to think on it. Instead, don’t we all want to write like Salman Rushdie or Vikram Seth, or, to mention a more recent and somewhat less lofty example, Chetan Bhagat? In my novel, I too tried to write a clever contemporary book, not a sacred text. Did it or did it not offer a camouflaged traditionalist perspective on life? I am not sure. Perhaps, the result failed to satisfy either faction. What I had produced was neither ‘literature’ nor sahitya. A young admirer, after taking the trouble to read it, exclaimed, ‘What a strange book you’ve written – the less said about it the better!’ I too shall mention it no more.4 Sruti, Smriti, Sthiti The issue at the heart of this chapter is the relationship between the individual and tradition. It is an old question, made internationally resonant by Eliot in his celebrated essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual

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Talent’. I wish to ask, similarly but in the Indian context, what tradition means, if, moreover, it is a source of liberating knowledge or oppressive practices? Must the individual, in his or her creative journey, discover the ‘truths’ of tradition anew, or are they merely handed down to him or her? Finally, how can the individual benefit from his or her past instead of being stifled by it? Again, we are confronted with opposing possibilities: our answers depend on how we view tradition and how we define it. On the one hand, we have a ‘traditionalist’ position, which sees parampara as the repository of truth and virtue. According to this view, we would lose our way and end up destroying ourselves – if not the planet itself – if we turn out backs to ancestral truth and wisdom. The ‘modernist’ view, on the other hand, sees tradition negatively, as the carrier of much that is dead and destructive: it is tradition that is the source of most of our present ills. It is so much false thinking that cripples us, binds us, promotes social inequality, not to mention superstition. Modernists, first of all, seek to destroy and disavow, or, at any rate, reshape, traditions so that space may be created for something new to emerge and flourish. It is only by breaking the oppressive shackles of tradition, say the modernists, that new creation can take place. Some, like Dr Babasaheb Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, also invoke alternate pasts, more equitable or rational traditions such as Buddhism, to oppose what they see as the source of their oppression. A pioneering modernist like Eliot is, paradoxically, also the greatest champion of tradition. Tradition, according to Eliot, shaped, informed and even directed individual talent. But, by tradition, Eliot meant something ‘timeless’, synchronic, even contemporary in its essential genius. It is what is living in us that is tradition, not what is dead and gone, he clarifies. He gives us the image of all the great writers of Europe sitting together, around a table, in front of the poet about to write a poem. Yet, when it came to his immediate predecessors, he certainly rebelled against them, in both the theme and the form of his poetry. Eliot, no doubt was a modernist poet, but he was also an archconservative. In fact, neo-Marxian criticism never tires of reminding us how politically reactionary, elitist and closed modernism was. In other words, though Eliot longed to write the kind of poetry that Dante, Shakespeare, Donne wrote, he ended up totally rejecting his immediate predecessors, the fin-de-siècle poets. For Eliot, when a good poet wrote or innovated, he had the weight of the entire tradition behind him, pushing him forward. As opposed to this view, Harold Bloom advanced his famous neo-Freudian thesis of The Anxiety of Influence in which every poet had to grapple with the strong predecessor and supplant the latter before he could really find his own voice.

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Apart from an exaltation of tradition or its summary rejection, there is a third, somewhat intermedial position which looks at tradition merely as, what is handed down from generation to generation, whether it be good, bad or indifferent. This, I believe, is one of the obvious, if reduced, meanings of the parampara. The difficulty with this position is that it does not offer grounds for judging what is good and bad, harmful or useful. These grounds must be derived from either tradition or modernity itself, and hence are already compromised. Else, the individual must rely on his or her own experience, without the benefit of his or her ancestral voices. This apparently neutral in-between position, hence, actually leads us to a critical conundrum to solve in which we must question tradition as we do modernity. To me, however, it is this critical mediation, meditation, that is crucial; that is what saves us from the extremes of binary oppositions, hasty judgements and dialectical antagonisms. While such a critical attitude may appear somewhat modern, per se, it need not necessarily be so. The critical and questioning bent of mind is both historical and contemporary, available to us as it was to our ancestors, at least in India. The quality and aims of critical rationality may change; indeed, criticism itself must not be transvalued as a transcendental, trans-historical mode of being in the world. Rather, it is grounded and situated in its own time and place. Yet, criticism, which is the ability to discriminate and make qualitative distinctions, belongs properly to the human faculty of thought or vivekabuddhi, discriminating intellect, which we cannot deny to our predecessors. To construct the entire past as an area of darkness is both contra-intuitive and contra-evidential, not to speak of counterproductive. Certain periods in history may encourage criticism, but it cannot be totally absent from others, even though it may appear subdued or curtailed. From where we are located, however, which is a predominantly modern terrain, both critical modernist and critical traditionalist positions have a special significance. They imply an analytically questioning attitude not only to the past, but also to the present. Because modern, Western civilization, which may be considered to be about 200 years old, is built upon a rejection of the past, to be critical modernist or critical traditionalist implies that we are totally opposed neither to the past nor to the modern project; likewise, we may not wholeheartedly endorse either. My own position as a critical traditionalist, thus, makes me a critic not just of modernity, but also of tradition. I appreciate the freedom which modernity affords to criticize and modify tradition, but I do not go so far as to reject tradition altogether. Indeed, to me freedom is the greatest gift of modernity. It is not that traditional

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societies were unfree, but they curtailed human freedoms considerably. We might argue that modernity provides excessive, even destructive freedom. But this does not take away from massive and multiple liberation of the human spirit that modernity wrought. As a critical traditionalist, I accept Sanatana Dharma in its broadest and most fundamental sense.5 Gandhi, incidentally, also called himself a sanatani Hindu though much of what he espoused went contrary to what was thought of as Sanatana Dharma in his times. For my part, I accept the validity of both the sruti and the smriti, though I choose to define both somewhat differently from how we understand them. Sruti to me refers to the Vedas, but not only of the Vedas. Veda, moreover, refers not just to a specific set of texts, but also to transcendental gnostic wisdom and the knowledge of the higher reality. I shall spell out in another chapter what the fuller implications of being a sanatani are, but to put it simply, I believe that the possibilities of realization are in our midst right now, not only in the ancient scriptures ‘heard’ or ‘seen’ by the Rishis. The Vedas, which refer not only to a group of texts, but also to transcendental knowledge itself, embody this wisdom but do not exhaust it. This knowledge is not trapped in or confined to a certain set of texts or their corresponding enunciations; it ranges freely in and beyond any captivity in the word. To that extent, the truth is not word made flesh; it is remains beyond the flesh even as it is incarnated as flesh. This knowledge or reality is imbued in the sign, but escapes the totalizing force of signification. It is available to us, within our grasp, but cannot be captured or controlled by us. Moving from sruti to smriti is like shifting from what is immediate to what is remembered. But memory, though stored, must be retrieved and renewed before it is made fresh again. Fundamentally, there is no absolute distinction between the two; sruti and smriti are two forms of one and same flow of truth. When it comes to tradition, we cannot but help recognize the importance of memory in its constructing and renewal. Even if everyone has direct access to sruti or the ultimate reality we are not entirely open to or aware of it. Most of us content ourselves with its description and recording. We are quite willing to take someone else’s word for it, to receive it second hand as it were. Though this record is no substitute for the real thing, it does help those who wish to have a road map before actually undertaking the journey. Moreover, smriti governs our more mundane actions and orders society. It is what we learn when we are instructed not to steal or kill. A society, which has no smriti, then, is in great danger of moral annihilation. In more recent times, the destruction of smriti has led to relativism and confusion. Law has

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taken the place of dharma or ethics. We don’t worry if a thing is right or wrong, only if it is legal or illegal. Since we are enjoined upon only to conform to the letter of the law as to what is really right or wrong, who can judge? Modern times, in a sense, are smriti-less because they offer unhampered freedom to each individual without accompanying guidelines for the best use of such freedom. Freedom, needless to say, is contingent, even subservient to multiple protocols. Ultimately, it may even be a form of coercion, compelling us, for instance, to turn into consumers, enslaved to the economic regime. In the guise of freedom, everywhere, the spirit is actually in chains. In this respect, the gospel according to Saint Marx did contain some important truths. What, then, is parampara, made up of sruti and smriti as it is supposed to be? At its most basic, the former supplies the inspiration, the latter carries it forward. In periods when the former goes underground, the latter officiates in its place, waiting to be renewed. Yet, we cannot survive too long on memory alone. That is why the reemergence of sruti is necessary to renew parampara, to keep tradition healthy. Indeed, where sruti ends and smriti begins is thus indeterminate; it is impossible to draw a very clear line of separation between them. They slide and merge into each other. At the very moment of revelation, another faculty of the mind starts recording it, turning it into memory, for future use. They are akin, though not identical; the distinction is only for our convenience. They are both shades, grades, of spirit. The spirit is alive and well, still with us. It has not vacated our world and gone into hiding, abandoning us to our own follies and to an uncertain future. Nor did it show itself once and for all, in some far away, distant past, never to resurface again. It is right in our midst, in the here and now, should we wish to acknowledge it. Parampara means the flowing, flowering, of the spirit in present times. Obviously, then, the real challenge is how to keep smriti in consonance with sruti. Every now and then, smriti seems to get corrupted and falsified, thus losing its capacity to guide and direct; it becomes rigid and ossified, an iron law to grind us and curb the spirit. Then its rigid structures need to be demolished. Such destruction is actually creative. Better if a continuous cleansing process were possible. But often, what happens is corruption, fossilization, paralysis. Then overturning it, breaking free of its hold, becomes imperative. On the one hand, the individual must keep himself or herself open to the possibilities of sruti and, on the other, strive to keep its memory fresh and uncorrupted. For the latter, a special class of dedicated keepers of the word was established. Now that that class has been dislodged, all of us have become, to the extent possible, keepers of the word.

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Ultimately, the individual is both the product and the creator of tradition. Just as our genes are already given to us, our traditions have already left their mark on our minds. This is true also of traditions of discontinuity and rejection, such as modernity, as it is of traditions of affirmation and continuity. And yet, our genes do not exhaust the possibilities of our physical and mental development. They provide the base but not necessarily the limits. Therefore, each individual re-creates his or her tradition in the light of his or her own experiences. This re-creation often involves a rejection of some aspect of the inherited past as it does a reorientation of others. Purushartha In Hindu culture, the relationship between the individual and parampara was regulated by a set of codes or purusharthas, dharma (virtue, ethics), artha (power, profit), kama (desire, pleasure) and moksha (freedom, transcendence), signifying the four-fold expression and general thrust of life itself. In our traditional understanding they were seen as a unity, in continuum, not fragmented or divided. Thus, there was no dichotomy between moksha and dharma, on the one hand, and artha and kama, on the other. The opposition between the sacred and the secular, spirit and matter, was thus inadmissible. That is why paramartha (ultimate value) includes, not rejects, artha (immediate value), even in the manner in which the words are constructed. Paramartha, then, is quite different from anartha or wickedness and chaos. Artha is the base, the material foundation upon which we raise the edifice of self and society. If we agree that such paramartha or ultimate value is what calls for the persistent application of ourselves, then the question is how do we attain it? What are our resources? Where do we begin? Again, there are different approaches to this problem. One approach regards a direct apprehension of truth, anubhava, as the bedrock of attaining paramartha. In some religious traditions, such a moment has occurred in the past, at the very point of origin or foundational moment of the religion. This is then encoded and enshrined in one or more sacred texts, which in turn become smriti, the official recordbook of the faith. Thereafter, the emphasis of most religions is to conserve the original purity of the inspiration or to keep going back to it; that is why most religions are usually conservative and backward looking. The grand, transformative moment has already passed; now what remains is to (re)connect with it. That is why tradition becomes so important. It consists of what is handed down from generation to generation, the wisdom and knowledge of the past, without which the present and the future become meaningless.

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But can the handed-down record, however sacred, yield the original inspiration? What about the attendant problems of interpretation and mediation? The truth was revealed, perhaps, but how do I reach it? How do I connect myself to it? Hence priests, churches and all the paraphernalia of intermediacy. To overcome this difficulty, each revelation is also characterized by accompanying assertions of its own, often unique, claims to truth. In contrast, in other religious traditions, the revelation itself may claim the special capacity to extend and renew itself through time, thus maintaining its eternal presence. That is what the idea of Sanatana Dharma implies. The Vedas refer, as I said earlier, not just to limited clutch of sacred texts, but also to transcendent knowledge or gnosis itself. The latter is greater than the former. This, however, is the esoteric meaning of the Vedas; the common, exoteric meaning, does take us back to the texts. And yet, because these texts were to be recited and heard, they had constantly to be renewed and drawn into the present, not frozen into some book. They were, in that sense, not texts at all, certainly not scripture, but performance, invocation of presence. The same is the case with, say, the Guru Granth Sahib, whose contents are to be recited, not merely preserved or fetishized as an object of worship. Sruti, which refers to direct knowledge of ultimate reality, is the basis of most religious traditions. At its radical best it implies that each individual experiences or apprehends truth for himself or herself. But history has shown that such a direct experience is not claimed for everyone. Only a few gifted individuals have access to it or, to put it in another way, even if everyone can not everyone does recognize it or is transformed by it. Most must content themselves with the record or the memory of someone else’s truth. Even the Vedas, if they do not become our own experience, remain merely smritis, remembered truths, derived second hand from books or heard from others, but not understood. All knowledge, the moment it is encoded, put into words, automatically passes into smriti. Our normal experience is that that is what we have at our disposal – smriti – second-hand knowledge, accounts of someone else’s primal experience. We perceive the world, as J. Krishnamurti would put it, through the veil of conditioning, which is millions of years old. This is received knowledge, not fresh perception. We cannot see ourselves as we are and the world as it is because of this interference of the past. In Krishnamurti’s scheme, then, smriti or tradition is the obstruction, the veil, the screen between reality and ourselves. It is only when we rend the veil, when we begin really to see things in their true light, we are liberated. All past, all received, notions, all smritis, whether good

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or bad, are ultimately limited and binding. Nothing short of a radical rupture from our past will release us into the eternity of the present – smriti is caught up in the movement of time, while only sruti is the release into timelessness. For Krishnamurti, smriti, memory and tradition are the problems; it is these problems that interfere with reality. But such interference may be superseded by direct experience, sruti, just as the actual taste of the proverbial pudding is in the eating. If sruti is more powerful than smriti, then we need not see the latter as the villain. Moreover, without any direction or understanding from the past, many feel disoriented and confused. Finally, who is utterly free from conditioning, from memory, from the burdens of the past? No one – to that extent, being immersed in the moment can be only that, momentary. Then the action of memory, of the past, re-establishes itself. We are, once again, inserted into older narratives, subject once more to the tyranny of time. That is why sruti and smriti are not dichotomous or oppositional but complimentary and continuous. Sruti, direct perception, is primary, while smriti, memory, is secondary. I interpret Krishnamurti’s work as an attempt to restore this rightful order even if entails a radical denial of tradition. Krishnamurti reminds us that sruti is available to each of us, if we are alert. He warns us not to be contented merely with smriti. Such denial itself, inevitably, sets itself into another sort of tradition. After his passing, most of Krishnamurti’s followers get by with listening to his tapes and reading his books. It is smriti, which is available; sruti remains beyond their reach. In time, some of these followers, listening and reading his work, also form their own rigid interpretations, including some, excluding others from their sampradaya (sect). In the name of radical freedom, freedom comes to be denied. In direct opposition to Krishnamurti’s position, the Bhagavad Gita in Chapter 2 says that loss of memory leads to the destruction of the intellect, which in turn results in total annihilation. Here, memory refers to the seed of Enlightenment, the knowledge of our own ultimate nature, which we already possess. It is anger that leads to delusion, delusion to memory loss, which in turn to utter destruction. Directly linked to sruti, memory or smriti, reminds us who we are and arrests our fall from grace. Smriti here is saviour, not sinner. The present is, after all, that which replaces not the past, but another present, which has, from the point of view of time, just elapsed. We therefore have two distinct views of the relationship between sruti and smriti. One view implies continuity and consonance between the two, while the other discontinuity and opposition. The former is, to

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my mind, the traditional view, while the latter is the modern one. Both are, to varying degrees, justified. When smriti works against sruti, as is often the case, then the modern view is right. Then we need a Krishnamurti to cleanse and deconstruct tradition so that something new may emerge. The stream of sruti cannot flow if its course is dammed or overrun with obstacles. Someone must perform the task of desilting the channel so that the flow or sruti resumes. Who will cleanse the channels of grace, throwing all the soil and mud out? The critical modernist does such a job. However, the revolutionary or radical modernist goes too far and destroys everything, good as well as bad. But when smriti transmits what is right and good, then to overthrow it would be not just disruptive, but undesirable. The traditionalist defines tradition as that which is the custodian and conveyer of truth, wishing to preserve it at all costs. By the latter definition, anything that departs from smriti also departs from tradition. Our view of the problem will depend, as I said earlier, on which of the definitions we accept. I think that the most useful and enabling position is one that allows us to see tradition as the repository of both good and bad, both the positive and the negative. A critical traditionalist, while leaning to the good in his or her tradition, is nonetheless critical of what is bad, whether it is really a part of his tradition or goes by that name. Similarly, a critical modernist will have the capacity to critique modernity when it departs from its proclaimed objectives. A traditionalist, when he critiques tradition, will have to take recourse to either tradition or modernity; likewise, when a modernist critiques modernity, he will have to find alternatives either in modernity or tradition. In either case, the two do not function dichotomously, but dialogically. In a certain sense, sruti itself is the ever-new, if not the modern, because it is the contemporary, the immediate, the instantaneous while smriti, properly, belongs to the old, the remembered, once contemporary, but now historical. However, while modernity, not of the Indian (that is, traditional) but of the Western variety, always needs something to oppose, something to Other, something to destroy, while sruti is inclusive and self-sufficient. Similarly, tradition in its original, wider sense as parampara is self-renewing, self-critical and self-regulatory. Made up of both sruti and smriti, it is a broader system of integrated wisdom, which includes both tradition and modernity. That is why parampara cannot be identified with tradition; properly speaking, it has no Other. Only a society entirely constituted by enlightened beings can afford to dispense with smriti. All other social arrangements need both sruti and smriti. Some think that they can function only on the basis of

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smriti, remaining content with some revelation in the past. Such societies, too, are doomed to failure because they have lost the capacity to renew themselves or critically examine their pasts. A healthy society combines the riches of both sruti and smriti. The possibility of ‘new’ sruti should always be present, even if its vanguard consists of a few chosen individuals, while smriti can be collective as well as individual. The problem of tradition can be solved if we see it as the basis of our own realization, not if we regard it as the sole custodian of ultimate truth. Tradition can guide us, but merely repeating what we have inherited will not suffice. We have to add to it, to grow beyond it, to discover our own truths. Tradition is, indeed, the repository of truth, but it does not restrict or close truth’s domain. In fact, it yields itself only to someone who undertakes the discipline to understand it. This process of tapas or askesis serves to duplicate or at least to replicate the conditions which made the original revelation possible. Thus, tradition is renewed; sruti flows again; smriti is revitalized. Unless such renewal takes place periodically, tradition will be lost. Like a path on which no one walks anymore, it will be covered with weeds and brambles.

Svaraj Though the underlying thrust of this chapter is in favour of retaining the original Sanskrit word parampara, along with its different nuances, and although this chapter has been written with an awareness of how parampara differs in both emphasis and essence from the English word ‘tradition’, it is obvious that I have continued to use the latter word. Why? To begin with, it seems to me that the English word, especially as it has come to be used by writers and scholars like T. S. Eliot, Ananda Coomaraswamy and A. K. Saran definitely carries a wider and deeper sense, closer to that of parampara, which we can fruitfully engage with. According to this sense, tradition is not merely a dead weight, but a living, ever-flowing stream. Not making the replacement of the English word by an Indian one into a theory if not habit has deeper reasons. I wonder what might be achieved by piecemeal substitutions such as parampara for tradition when we continue to talk in English and continue to live under the dominance of Western knowledge systems. At the most, such substitutions help offer us an alternate focus or direction, but are not in themselves sufficient for the larger project of better self-understanding or a more equitable and dignified relationship with the West. It seems to me that there are at least two ways of doing the latter. One way is to try to overhaul our entire intellectual vocabulary, not

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just substitute one word. Such an overhauling would mean, at the least, that such discussion need not take place exclusively in English. English has won the language wars in India, but its victory need not be so complete as to obliterate all other registers of resistance. Moreover, merely substituting English by, say, Hindi, will not do either. I am afraid Hindi is almost as colonized a tongue as Indian English is, when it comes to being a viable medium for svaraj. What is true for Hindi is also true for our other languages. Therefore, simply changing the medium alone will not be sufficient, just as sprinkling some Indian words into English will not do. We need to change our minds. This more fundamental transformation is crucial rather than all the superficial changes that are usually advocated as remedies to our problems. The larger project of svaraj, therefore, cannot be achieved merely by such substitutions, but by carrying the struggle into our adversary’s territory. Our endeavour should be to use the English language as a medium for svaraj, just as we should also use Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and so on, to the same end. Once we see our task clearly, we will also realize that we are not the first ones to use English for svaraj-ist purposes. It has been consistently used, against the grain as it were, for the past 150 years or more in India. Once we understand that svaraj is the issue, then we should ask if using parampara instead of tradition serves any special purpose. If it does, we should retain this substitution; if it doesn’t, then we need not dwell upon it. To me, it is not a question of substitution but of clarifying the fundamental distinction that parampara is not in trapped in a dialectical opposition with its Other, adhunikata (modernity), but includes it. It is thus whole, integral and not oppositional and fragmentary as tradition, which is always posed in contra-distinction to modernity, is. A mere substitution without such an understanding is of little value. It is only a knee-jerk reaction to the domination of Western categories over Indian ones. But with a deep understanding of the difference, a dialogue may be opened up between parampara and tradition so as to create new spaces of knowledge and svaraj. And the struggle for svaraj is far from over. In this discussion itself, while I have used both parampara and tradition, I have not tried ever to find a substitute for svaraj. Some words and concepts, which form the cornerstone of our thinking and culture, must not be substituted, while the rest of our discussions can be carried out, arguably, in any language. Language chauvinism is not the answer to our language problems. English dominance and Anglocentrism may be opposed but not the language English itself. We need multicultural

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or multilingual registers of exchange in India, not the substitute of one monoculture or monolingualism with another. Before I close I would like to mention the extraordinary sense in which Dr Baidyanath Chaturvedi, then associated with the Indira Gandhi National Centre explained the concept of parampara to me.6 According to him, parampara can never die because it predicts its own decline, even death. Because of this foretelling, the breakdown of the parampara becomes a part of the parampara itself. In that sense, parampara signifies the ultimate reality or truth itself, beyond or outside which no meaning making is possible. He cites as example the Puranic foretelling of the decline of dharma. In Kali Yuga, so the legend goes, the cow (or in some versions, the bull) of dharma, stands only on one leg. That is why, in Kali Yuga, people forget the dharma. There is wickedness and chaos everywhere. Moral values are uprooted; social and family norms lose their meaning. There is disharmony, degradation and corruption. What happens to dharma in such a situation? Only a few wise ones, who are aware of the parampara, are able to follow dharma. The rest go astray. Even when a particular epoch comes to an end, as in the metaphor of pralaya or flood, which submerges all life, the Vedas or the gnosis they embody is saved for the next yuga, the next cycle of creation. In this manner, parampara reigns across the times of its own demise, linking the broken-down and bygone order with a new birth. In this extraordinary sense of the word, parampara signifies that which transcends itself, transcendental of the transcendent, which can only signify the movement of supreme reality itself, simultaneously immanent and supernatural, in time and beyond time, situated and spaceless.

Notes 1 See Despair and Modernity: Reflections from Modern Indian Painting edited by Harsha V. Dehejia, Prem Shankar Jha and Ranjit Hoskote (2000). 2 While this is true, India is the hub of South Asian publishing. Such are the paradoxes of global print capitalism, with its uneven distribution of cultural capital and markets, not to speak of the ‘development of literary underdevelopment’ to adapt an expression of the dependentistas. 3 Our meeting took place twenty years back, at Virasat, a festival of arts and culture organized by SPIC–MACAY at University of Roorkie, 24 January 1997. 4 As it happens, I have written one more novel, Body Offering (Rupa, 2013) subsequently. Did I succeed any better? I thought I had attempted a novel of ideas, but the little attention or publicity that the book received was as a pioneering text in the ‘new’ genre of literary erotica in India! In the Times of India Literary Festival 2014, I was invited to speak in a panel with another

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writer of erotic fiction in India. When I told the audience that I wanted to discover the bridge between the physical and the metaphysical in the novel, they stared at me uncomprehendingly, clearly less interested in the latter, whether in fiction or life. 5 Likewise, I have no hesitation in calling myself Hindu; indeed, the demand of the times is that we accept the unapologetic self-identification that being Hindu implies. To be a Hindu within and be recognized as such socially, both in India and overseas, will only improve the quality of our way of life. To hide one’s identity would be to shame if not denigrate oneself and one’s past. 6 For the conference on ‘Parampara and the Individual’ at the Indira Gandhi Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), New Delhi, 21 January 1998, where this paper was originally presented. I must record my appreciation of Dr Kapila Vatsyayan, the then director of IGNCA, and conference organizer, who also complimented me on my paper by observing, ‘Your interpretation of Indian tradition is uniquely creative, even unprecedented.’

References Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. The Dance of Shiva: Fourteen Indian Essays. Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1952. Dehejia, Harsha V., Prem Shankar Jha, and Ranjit Hoskote, eds. Despair and Modernity: Reflections from Modern Indian Painting. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2000. Eliot, T. S. Selected Essays. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950. Krishnamurti, J. Freedom from the Known. 1969. San Francisco: Harper, 1975. Paranjape, Makarand. Confluence. New Delhi: Samvad, 2007. ———. Decolonization and Development: Hind Svaraj Revisioned. New Delhi: Sage, 1993. Parekh, Bhikhu. Colonialism, Tradition and Reform: An Analysis of Gandhi’s Political Discourse. New Delhi: Sage, 1989. Saran, A. K. Traditional Thought: Towards an Axiomatic Approach. Sarnath: Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, 1996. Tagore, Rabindranath. Selected Writings on Literature and Language: Rabindranath Tagore (The Oxford Tagore Translations). Eds. Sisir Kumar Das and Sunakta Chaudhuri. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010.

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Recovery My first endeavour in this chapter is to re-appropriate the term ‘criticism’ to render it more productive in the Indian context. To pick up this word as one might a seashell, shake out the sand and water in it so as to empty it of its previous connotations, whisper one’s own energies into it, then offer it to anyone who wishes to lend an ear – what will she hear? The murmur of the stars, the roar of the seas  – or even the humbler secrets of making sense of texts? Let us find out by reclaiming criticism, making it our business, even dharma, in these dire straits. We can immediately think of several useful ways of thus ‘re-covering’ criticism. One would be to interface it with parallel concepts from our own languages, such as vimarsa, sameeksha or samalochana, all words currently used in Hindi and several other languages for similar activities. Each of these words is, of course, deeply resonant. Take vimarsa, for instance. According to Monier Williams, the word means consideration, deliberation, trial, critical test, reasoning, discussion, knowledge and intelligence. But in Kashmir Shaivism (or the Trika darsana as it may more accurately be called), vimarsa refers to the Shakti or the cosmic energy that animates the world while Shiva, or pure consciousness, is likened to prakasa or light. They are two in one, the Lord and his manifestation, which is the world itself.1 Prakasa-Vimarsa thus becomes a central concept, with prakasa signifying the light of consciousness and vimarsa its representation or reflection. Another word for reflection is darpana, especially in the sense in which Viswanatha Kaviraja used it in Sahityadarpana, his celebrated fourteenth-century treatise on aesthetics. The idea of the artist and artwork (hence critic

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too) as a mirror to nature and society is of course widely prevalent in post-renaissance Western thinking. M. H. Abrams considers the mirror as a defining metaphor in his celebrated book The Mirror and the Lamp. Differing from the idea of reflection, but still focusing on sight, sameeksa and samalochana, with kindred meanings, suggest that criticism involves seeing things correctly and comprehensively – sama (integral) + eeksa or lochana (seeing or looking).2 What happens when we make criticism and vimarsa or sameeksha converse with each other? The ensuing dialogue, I am sure, would be worth attending to. Perhaps, we shall be able to see texts – and the world – aright. Seeing aright may even lead to setting aright. Criticism, in other words, is not so much out there, well defined and organized; it is not regulated by a canon, kanoon, which we must aspire to or approximate. Rather, criticism is the name we give to interpretive and analytical tasks that we consider worthwhile, especially those undertaken in cooperation with peers in the field and resulting in some form of common or public good. Re-appropriating criticism for such an endeavour is thus our first priority. By now it should be obvious that criticism is not merely the analysis of literary texts. Even if it were to be defined so narrowly, in today’s intellectual climate the analysis of literary texts would necessitate interdisciplinary forays into history, psychology, philosophy, sociology, politics and linguistics. The questioning and redefining of traditional disciplinary boundaries is bound to affect the way we fulfil our function as critics today. Therefore, criticism may be better considered as creative and orderly thinking about issues concerning literature and society. This rubric at its narrowest implies conventional literary criticism, at its broadest, every type of social and cultural critique. For many, this is also a professional activity, even obligation; we, its practitioners, do it because it is considered part of our job description. Because it is paid work, it is organized in a certain manner, in academic institutions and networks, not undertaken in a haphazard or amateur manner. If I have spent too much time restating the obvious, it is in order to point to an urgent agenda which critics in India share at our present historical moment: the decolonization of our cultural and intellectual practices, the resisting of hegemonies and oppressions and the safeguarding and furtherance of those rights and freedoms which are necessary for our social and cultural survival. Let me reach back to Krishna Chandra Bhattacharya’s evocative phrase, ‘svaraj in ideas’. If we combine this with Gandhi’s notion of sarvodaya or the welfare of all, then criticism in India ought to lead to svaraj and sarvodaya.

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Invoking Bhattacharya immediately inserts this chapter into a svaraj-ist framework directly speaking to one of our great challenges, which has voiced over and over again. The often-heard lament is: why don’t we develop our own modes of criticism and own theories of interpretation? Why must we be in constant and renewed subjection to Western ideas? Bhattacharya’s call to Indian intellectuals issued nearly a hundred years back did not exactly fall on deaf years, but was never taken seriously enough to be the foreground of our national consciousness. That is why to remember it again underscores how unexamined this issue still is. We are hardly worried about or incensed over our subjection or subordination. Reading our apathy symptomatically simply reveals our peculiarly post-colonial state of mind. Anybody who is inspired by Bhattacharya’s lecture, originally delivered in 1928, and the special number of the Indian Philosophical Quarterly (October–December 1984) on the theme of ‘Swaraj in Ideas’, knows that our anxieties are not new. There is enough outstanding material since the beginning of our contact with the West upon which adequate and viable models of Indian criticism can be built. Why are we not looking at them? The answer is simple. We are not interested in svaraj, whether in ideas or in life; we would rather be in a state of apparently gainful subjection to the dominant. But isn’t the desire for full liberty and selfhood natural? Haven’t we yearned for it during the bitter years under colonialism? Why do so few struggle for svaraj today? Why is svaraj so unimportant or irrelevant? I do have ways of explaining our apathy, but I shall not dwell on them here. My concern is how to counter it. An important strategy in breaking free of the dominant and working towards constructing a viable critical vernacular is to find, acknowledge and cite others who in our midst have been carrying on such a struggle. Sometimes such critics or scholars are not from our own discipline, but reading them empowers us immensely. I shall cite two examples. Dharampal (1922–2006), thinker, historian, political philosopher and independent scholar, who wrote an outstanding book, The Beautiful Tree, on education in India at the eve of British colonialism. His sources were British colonial records. His findings are, to say the least, astonishing. We are used to thinking that before British rule we were totally illiterate and uneducated. In fact, the paradox is that literacy was higher in the eighteenth century, in certain parts of the country, than it is today. His survey of several villages in Tamil Nadu where the colonial administration maintained records shows that the populace was fairly welleducated, regardless of caste. Similarly, Dharampal and others have looked at the state of science and technology in eighteenth-century

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India, before the consolidation of British paramountcy. Again, we discover that India was not especially backward, ‘an area of darkness’ as V. S. Naipaul would put it. Instead, in many respects, including inoculation, steel making and surgery, India was actually ahead of Europe. Dharampal’s Collected Works were published by The Other India Press in Goa by Claude Alvarez. Alvarez’s work is also noteworthy, particularly when we talk about indigenous science and technology. When he was researching on this topic for his PhD on Indian science and technology in the Netherlands, he found very little material. At last, he came across one of Dharampal’s articles, which he read like thirsty man quaffing a glass of cool water in mid-summer India. Alvarez’s own book, Decolonizing History: Technology and Culture in India, China and the West: 1500 to the Present Day based on his PhD, is a valuable contribution to the field. Of the many workers in the svaraj parampara, I shall mention one more, my former colleague at the Centre of English Studies in JNU, Professor Kapil Kapoor. He also served as Chair of the Centre; Dean of the School of Language, Literature, and Culture Studies; and Rector (Pro-vice-chancellor) of the University. One of his favourite quotations was a rephrasing of a statement attributed to Bhartrihari: ‘What does he know, who knows not his own traditions?’ Of course, Bhartrihari was thought to have said the opposite, ‘What does he know who only knows his own tradition?’ Unfortunately, we have come to that stage today when we only know other people’s traditions and have become gloriously ignorant of our own – hence, the need to rephrase Bhartrihari. It is Professor Kapoor’s singular achievement that he has brought Indian intellectual traditions to several generations of students by introducing into the MA English curriculum texts of classical Indian thought, including Bhartrihari’s Vakyapadiya, Panini’s Asthadhyayi and Bharata’s Natyasastra. As far as I know this feat has not been accomplished anywhere else. What is more, he effected it JNU, the bastion of Left-wing politics and inimical to such a project. During his tenure as Rector, JNU, he also established the Special Centre for Sanskrit Studies in a university where many Indian and foreign languages, including Greek, Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, German, Russian, Hindi, Urdu and Korean, were taught, but not Sanskrit. It took thirty years since the inception of the university to start such a Centre for Sanskrit Studies. It was Professor Kapoor who took the initiative to establish the Special Centre, that too out of a totally missionary motive, his own substantive appointment being in English Studies. He worked hard and almost single-handedly, in the teeth of opposition and indifference, to raise the funds, lobby the

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UGC and the ministry and ensure that the centre was not only sanctioned but established. This Centre is completely independent with its own building; it is not under the aegis of any of the existing Schools, including the School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies. It is also not a Centre merely for the study and dissemination of the Sanskrit language, but of Sanskrit Studies, a broader category of research, implying not merely a linguistic but an inclusive, civilizational orientation approach. In addition, Professor Kapoor’s work as a scholar and teacher is of course well-known throughout India. The author of many books and papers on a variety of fields, he travels widely as a keynote invited speaker, inspiring audiences and influencing minds. He also edited the multi-volume and multinational Encyclopedia of Hinduism and still serves on several important, committees of the Government of India, which are instrumental in encouraging research in Indic topics and themes. I have mentioned only a few, but there are several other writers and critics in the modern period, from Rammohun Roy to Ramchandra Gandhi, who may be said to belong to our svaraj parampara.3 Trigunas My attempt in what follows will be to contribute to the svaraj parampara in criticism by presenting three perspectives on the practice of criticism in India. I do so by deploying indigenous theoretical resources, drawn mainly from Samkhya Darsana, of the six classical systems of Indian philosophy. The perspectives are ascending, though not necessarily fixed or hierarchical. My three-step model may be taken to correspond with the three gunas, (qualities) as enunciated in classical Indian philosophy – tamas, rajas and sattva. Beyond them is the implied transcendental fourth – turya. This tetra lemma may also correspond with the four-fold progression from mumukshatva, through viveka and vairagya, to mukti.4 The framework of the gunas or qualities enables us to strive for self-improvement, which culminates in moksha or emancipation. Roti, kapda aur makaan A talk that I gave at the Academic Staff College, Guwahati, in March 1989 helped me understand the importance of the idea of criticism as survival. I was mentioning to the audience the contrasting formulas of knowledge that Bankim Chandra Chatterjee had enunciated: ‘ “Knowledge is power”: that is the slogan of Western civilization.

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“Knowledge is salvation” is the slogan of Hindu civilization.’5 But one of the participants got up and said, ‘But for most of us knowledge is just survival.’ It was a defining moment for me. I was just twenty-eight, but, soon to be a Reader (Associate Professor) at a Central University, flown in across the country to the North East as a resource person in a Refresher Course at the Academic Staff College, lecturing to several colleagues who were senior in years. The Academic Staff Colleges set up by the UGC, to offer ‘Refresher Courses’ to lecturers in colleges and universities, were themselves disciplinary if not coercive institutions. Until a teacher cleared two of these courses, promotions were blocked. This led to the absurd situation of very senior teachers, on the verge of retirement, being forced to ‘be refreshed’ in order to retire with the higher pay scale. No wonder, many of the participants were totally uninterested. To some this was a paid holiday, to others a tourism-cumshopping opportunity. Yet, somehow, the participants and I established a rapport, perhaps because they had been curious to listen to me, whom they considered both young and naive. When one of them got up to say that there was nothing glamorous about knowledge, but that it was merely a means of livelihood, I saw the ground reality of India with a stark clarity. I would receive several such reality checks. On another occasion around the same time, I was called to be the external examiner at Gulbarga University in the Deccan for their MA English examination. There, pillion-riding the broken road on a scooter with a Chemistry professor who would later became the ViceChancellor of the same university, I could see both sides of the Indian equation. How things did get better, how merit did matter, but also how higher education in India, especially in the Humanities and Social Sciences, was in a total mess. During the MA ‘moderation’ at the English Department, the Head of Department pleaded with me to raise the marks of students who had failed. After resisting at first, I reluctantly agreed, especially because the other external expert, a much more senior professor, gave me to understand that such adjustments were par for the course during moderation. Later, I learned that our extra marks fell short of the mark, so to speak. The Head of Department was physically assaulted by irate students when the results were declared.6 There was a huge gap between ‘theory’ and the ground reality, whether in Guwahati or Gulbarga. At Guwahati, I met the most famous Assamese English professor. He was a Marxist, a regional writer and a nationally known critic. Slim and sharp nosed, he eyed me steadily, even a trifle suspiciously. In those days, I was keen to call on all the well-known members of my fraternity. Why? Perhaps, I had delusions of my own

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role as a possible protagonist for English Studies in India, learning from seniors, carrying forward the baton. The professor wasn’t very encouraging. He gave me to understand that living and working in India were very difficult; my idealism was fundamentally misplaced. He wasn’t very forthcoming to my attempts to draw him out with more details or specific examples. He gave me to understand that one had to find one’s métier and survive in a tricky and troublesome environment. Survival, I realized, though at the base of the quality (guna) pyramid, is crucial to any post-colonial society. At its best, the urge to survive is heroic and informs the critical practice of a society whose national, notional, culture is threatened, destroyed or yet to form. Some of the best criticism produced by Indians has been under duress, when our backs were turned to the wall and we were facing our intellectual nemesis in the shape of British imperialism and cultural dominance. Those who enabled our cultural survival under those adverse circumstances deserve our thanks today. Obviously, survival of this kind is not tamasic or retrogressive. Nor is the kind of survival that the college teacher in Guwahati was speaking about, which was simply earning a living. A lot of us in India teach to earn a living – to find jobs, promotions and other material benefits, some publications, even a gesture towards criticism, is mandated. This professional requirement isn’t bad, intrinsically. But when all that remains of the survival instinct is merely cynical indifference, selfishness and the enshrining of mediocrity, then surely what results is a tamasic form of criticism. Such ‘survival’ is not heroic as in Margaret Atwood’s book by that name, but merely a type of philistinism. Much of our criticism in India falls into this trap: it is self-regarding and self-promoting, without contributing much to the discipline. At its worst, it is nothing but a racket: cheating, plagiarizing, self- or paid publishing, involving all manner of wheeling and dealing. At the bottom of such practices is not helplessness so much as self-abasement, ignorance, unscrupulousness and cynicism – tamas. This is hardly criticism as we understand it. Ultimately, not just bad criticism, but the absence of any criticism is the sure sign of tamas. Tamas is noncriticism pretending to be criticism; it is the characteristically prevalent uncritical attitude to texts and life; it ensues when mediocrity leads to more mediocracy. Then we can be sure that tamas has triumphed. Satta Just as there is a positive side to ‘Criticism as Survival’, ‘Criticism as Power’ too has its constructive aspect. It is the rajasic type of selfassertion, a will to power. We know that even to live normally, a certain

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level of empowerment is necessary. Whether in one’s family or in one’s profession, a minimum amount of muscle is necessary just to claim one’s place, obtain one’s dues, get on with the business of living. The weak are universally treated with contempt; even those perceived to be weak are hardly given respect or taken seriously. Nice guys may not always finish last, but wimps do get left behind in the rat race. On the other hand, both individuals and groups may become too aggressive and assertive, bordering on pathological disregard for others. But to play a more meaningful role in society requires a certain balance; indeed, the more one wants to contribute to society, the more power one needs – to be heard, understood, accepted, even obeyed. But the crucial question is whether one seeks power in order to give, to share, to contribute – or to exploit, dominate and oppress others. The line is very thin; every dictator or tyrant is convinced of his mission, destiny or role in the transformation of his society. Power is a narcotic, gradually controlling those who seek it till they become habitual abusers. No wonder, then, that in a time marked by the misuse of power, power itself has come to be viewed with suspicion. Often, power is considered automatically evil or undesirable, with the critic becoming a self-appointed watchdog against it. Behind the economic, political and military might of imperialism was the ideology that justified the use of power over others as the civilizing mission of Europe. Theory and criticism were intimidating to us, but subservient to political and economic forces – this is fairly obvious because even now we are often at the receiving end in the ‘third world’. Even liberating and emancipatory ideologies can be, and were, used to coercive ends when they are exported and imposed upon a subject people. In a way, we are actually experiencing this in the manner in which the latest critical jargon from the West takes hold of some of our best minds, making them sound like mimic men. It was against such subjection that Bhattacharya raised his voice in ‘Swaraj in Ideas’. But should this lead us to forget the power to do good, to benefit others, to protect the powerless? In a sense, then, the virtuous or righteous use of power may be seen as an absence, as what it does not do: power is good as long as it does not oppress, insult, injure, all of which British colonialism did in ample measure. Similarly, the practice of criticism can be empowering, rather than tyrannical, when it empowers those who have been subjugated and oppressed. But for that, Indian critics must empower themselves first, then those even less privileged than themselves. To reach out to fellow critics, create alternate forums to be heard, to be read – this way of resisting hegemony is an example of honourable empowerment. Decolonization is itself such

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an exercise in resisting and thereby gaining power. Svaraj also implies self-restraint and power over oneself on the one hand, also the power to resist oppression and aggression on the other. Swami Vivekananda, the monk in flaming robes who revived a moribund nation, was a great champion of positive rajas.7 Rajas has etymological connections with raj and raja – that is with power and those who wield it, but its root meaning is to shine (rajdeepnoti). This is the guna identified with the Kshatriya or ruling class. Rajas is thus passion, motivation, restlessness, drive, activity. The just ruler or king was called Rajan because he shone with the luminosity of confident and constructive power. Without activity, no change is possible, but if untempered by sattva, compassionate wisdom, activity becomes unmanageable, destructive, cruel, self-serving and oppressive. Criticism as power, hence, can be both empowering and tyrannical. Of course, criticism merely for power is limiting, if not ultimately self-destructive, like the power-hungry self-mortification of the asuras. The devas, the deities or the shining ones, on the other hand, supposedly used their power for positive purposes. They exemplified the right type of rajas. Those who seek power for the sake of power find themselves implicated in the no-win bipolarity of oppressor-oppressed, violator-violated, victor-victim. The only status that the victim aspires to is that of the oppressor. I see many of the practising Indian critics entrapped in such dialectic. They have internalized the values of the West and do not see any way out of their position of inferiority except by becoming like their oppressors or by joining them. Moksha Can criticism be liberating, redemptive? Socially engaged criticism, such as came to be known as ‘liberation theology’ in Latin America or compassionate activism inspired by Buddhism might be cited as illustrations. But, in the Indian context, perhaps the best example would be Gandhi’s non-violent praxis of satyagraha, the political activism as insistence on truth. Such criticism, to be effective, is nothing short of sadhana, self-purification, self-development and only, finally, selfassertion. Here the ‘self’ does not refer to the selfish and self-centric survival or assertion associated with tamas and rajas. Sadhana requires viveka and vairagya.8 The English word offered as a translation for viveka is usually discrimination, a term which the New Critics, not to mention their predecessors, liked. Taste, discrimination and judgement are still considered necessary to any meaningful evaluation of art. But these qualities are often thought to be reducible

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to upbringing or just class interests and therefore discredited. Good taste, in other words, is the taste of the few who have the power to impose it; it is a form of cultural capital. What, then, of bad taste? To which class can it be attributed? Cultural materialists are usually silent on this matter. Isn’t there bad taste in working-class art? One might presume that in working class as much as bourgeois culture, there is both good and bad taste. My concern, however, is not with taste in this sense, though I will return to criticism as taste later. By discrimination or viveka is denoted a certain type of reasoning, the ability which can help us cope with life holistically and intelligently. What is the source of this reason? Is it in the individual psyche or is this reason the collective legacy of humankind? Or is it the specialized discovery and deployment of a common faculty? Reason, as associated with the European Enlightenment, even its reductive, instrumental and institutionalized sense, is therefore not to be rejected. But it cannot be, is not, sufficient in itself. It needs to be leavened by wisdom, by compassion, by sattva. Reason, buddhi, as discrimination, dispassion are absolutely necessary to relate to reality aright. Human civilization is marked by disastrous self-delusion and illusion-mongering, which have caused untold suffering, destruction and death. Without reason, without discrimination, without right understanding, we would be doomed. That is why criticism, which exemplifies such discrimination is nothing short of an important and desirable resource to human life. In its higher forms, criticism thus implies compassion as well as intelligence: the capacity to see the falsity of the false as much as the truth of the true. Practically speaking, criticism helps resist cultural imperialism both externally and internally. It prevents both oppression and fragmentation. It enables seeing any problem in a wider perspective, not just narrowly and locally. Criticism becomes karma yoga or right action, the outcome of non-attachment or dispassion. It is not ‘disinterested’ in the sense that it hides its interests, but it is deeply interested and committed to human causes, to revolutionary possibilities and to self-knowledge. This is sattvik criticism because its agenda is not domination or conquest as in rajasic criticism, nor is it self-serving and ignorant as in its tamasic manifestation. Integral sattvik criticism can save us not only from the predator without, but from own predatory instincts. And the ultimate goal of such criticism, like Fredric Jameson’s negative hermeneutics, is to move towards the transcendent reality of the ultimate revolution,9 that revolution which is not just external or social, but also spiritual and internal. Earlier words for this state were

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nirvana or moksha, not just for the individual, but for all creation itself. Later, such a state was called Ramrajya, the ideal state, invoked by Gandhi during the freedom struggle. Sri Aurobindo called it the Life Divine. This, I believe, is the utopian agenda of all revolutionary ideologies, whether idealist or materialist, traditional or modern. Of course, such a goal is inferred, not realized – because it is just out of reach, therefore a source of hope. But its possibilities colour all that we do. We feel its obscure presence in all our gestures, whether futile or fruitful, at transformation. It is the familiar otherness just beyond everything that takes place within the iron curtain of human mentality, whose logical and inevitable untranscendable horizon it is.

Reprise Having set up this three-tiered, somewhat hierarchical structure, how can I just leave it at that? I shall have to dismantle it or show a way out of it lest it become a straitjacket or iron collar. I may do so by deconstructing the original terms of discourse: tamas, rajas and sattva and then replicate the move in my suggested three categories of criticism as survival, as power and as liberation. I might propose that especially in Kali Yuga, the degraded ‘iron age’, the gunas have been mixed up badly. Not only is each personality a complex combination of the gunas, but the gunas themselves seem to overlap and interpenetrate. Thus we can think of sattvik anger as different from rajasic anger or tamasic anger – anger of course, being tamasic to begin with. Tradition tells us that renunciation, itself tending towards sattva, can be rajasic if its goal is to acquire power or tamasic if it is meant to hurt someone else.10 In this sense, no quality is ‘pure’ or ‘uncontaminated’, but takes on the hue of additional gunas which inform it. The result is that the categories themselves, cleaving close to one another, are better understood in their more mixed up formations and performances. If so, criticism as survival can be sattvik, rajasic or tamasic, so can criticism as power or criticism as liberation. Of course in the last category, we are moving beyond the gunas and their relativism; moksha or nirvana cannot possibly be tamasic, rajasic or sattvik because by its very nature it is free of the gunas, as is the Purusha of Samkhya, pure consciousness uncontaminated and uninvolved with Prakriti. However, what we do have is a neat reversal wherein samsara = nirvana, survival = liberation or svaraj = sarvodaya. The sign = is used somewhat imprecisely if bidirectionally. It is not meant to suggest mathematical equality or identity but instead resemblance or correspondence between things which may appear different: the sign suggests

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reversibility, interpenetration and simultaneous difference-sameness. Perhaps, another sign like a bidirectional arrow ↔ may express this relationship better. It could denote the relationship between Yang ↔ Yin, Shiva ↔ Shakti, Purusha ↔ Prakriti, Krishna ↔ Radha. Mystical formulae are also, ultimately, equations. Mysticism and mathematics are, of course, very closely related as Raja Rao reminds us in The Chessmaster and His Moves. This, in Ramchandra Gandhi’s terms, is the essential good news of advaita or non-dualism: the self = the other, or, there is no other; there is only the Self.11 At this juncture is the slippery slope of what may be termed poststructural advaita. It is that charmed space, accessed by the very few, where post-modernism and mysticism curve and bend towards each other, suggesting a new, non-dual luminosity. We reach here because criticism, going back to its original meaning, pertains to crisis. Earlier, we had sought and offered one productive way of re-appropriating the term ‘criticism’ so as to make it serve Indian arguments and interests. At the end of this exercise, let me offer another way by prying open the ambivalence in the word itself. Isn’t criticism actually implied in the critical, ‘of or forming a crisis or turning’, ‘decisive’, ‘dangerous or risky’, ‘causing anxiety’ (Webster’s New World Dictionary)? Interestingly, the Sanskrit vimarsha, also current in modern Indian languages, has this sense of the critical or crisis. According to the Natyasastra, it is one of the five sandhis or junctures intervening between the core of the plot and its catastrophe, the removal of Shakuntala’s veil in Act V of Kalidasa’s play being the example given. Vimarsha, thus, refers to a turning point, a crisis, akin to the Greek hamartia. Both sound similar enough to be cognate. In a related extension of its significance, aren’t some times, as Matthew Arnold suggested, more conducive to criticism than to creativity? Isn’t this, perhaps, true of our own times in which both senses of critical are fruitful? Not only is this a critical time for us in India to move to a new sense of confidence and purpose in our praxis, leaving behind the anxieties or inadequacies of (post)colonialism, but this, our age, more than ever before, is most certainly a time of criticism, polemics and intervention. Can we measure up to the challenge of the times? I would like to consider this chapter a modest attempt to formulate the theoretical possibility of a new critical idiom drawing on the resources of Indian poetics and philosophy. Such a critical idiom would also address the multiple functions, options and uses – that is, the pragmatics of criticism in India. The discerning will notice how I have resisted temptations of being ‘revivalistic’, that is trying to justify, revive and reassert Sanskrit poetic concepts and terms in their

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traditional forms. Many others have tried to do this, some more successfully than others.12 But often such attempts in their restricted and ‘pure’ use of traditional critical concepts fail to offer exciting or challenging readings. Is it because perhaps they are not critical enough? Instead, we must try actually to re-appropriate such ideas and concepts from Indian traditions so as to make them relevant, viable and powerful in contemporary praxis. Towards the end of this reflection (mimamsa), I want to make one such concept from Indian aesthetics, rasa, tangle with ‘criticism’.13 Often translated as ‘essence’ or ‘quality’, rasa is still spoken of in our languages as a thing to be ‘tasted’ or ‘savoured’. I therefore prefer to think of it as aesthetic or artistic flavour, relish or sauce, as Aghenanda Bharati termed it somewhat irreverently. Rasa, in fact, may truly be the savour of life. This is where the idea of ‘critical taste’ which I had referred to earlier, crops back in. In Western aesthetics too criticism was for many centuries a matter of taste, or by extension, of testingtasting. From rasa to Rasna (a popular fruit drink), we are still in the universe of tasting, drinking and eating. So, rasa theory can be construed to imply that art or literature is meant to be tasted, savoured, eaten, relished, just as Western aesthetics implies that judging art is to have the right kind of taste for it. This is where we might introduce a final sense of the word ‘critical’ into our discussion. ‘Critical’ also suggests the crisis of a disease. Thus we have the whole terminology of disease, what Derrida referred to as the pharmakon. Eating is closely related to both health and disease. It can be a form of nourishment or substance abuse. One man’s food is literally not just another man’s but one’s own poison. What we eat, even something as basic as salt or sugar, may literally kill us. Eating rightly or wrongly directly leads to the presence or absence of disease. Critical, in this sense, designates ‘a point at which a change in character, property or condition is effected’ (Webster’s New World Dictionary) as in a nuclear reaction, the point at which the reaction becomes self-sustaining or in the treatment of a disease when the crisis either worsens, leading to deterioration and death, or ameliorates, resulting in recovery or restoration of health. Rasa also takes us to rasayan shastra (Chemistry) or in its earlier incarnation, alchemy.14 The project of alchemy was to transmute base metals into gold, or tamas into turya, the human into the divine, the mortal into the immortal. In that sense, alchemy becomes an ultimate trope of human longing and aspiration. Art, like alchemy, is supposed to transform us. We relish art or literature to ward off disease, to retain our sanity, to cope with the travails of our lives; art is restorative, curative and therapeutic.

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Therefore the act of criticism, which discriminates between good and bad art, promoting and explicating the former, rejecting and criticizing the latter, is also an act that cures, heals, makes complete, transforms. Hence, once again rasa-pan = eating-drinking literature and criticism = redemption = moksha. East is East, West is West – but not only or entirely. Ultimately, East = West; self = other; Hari Bol = Halleluhyah!

Coda Ashis Nandy in his seminal essay, ‘Cultural Frames for Social Intervention: A Personal Credo’ for the ‘Swaraj in Ideas’ issue of the Indian Philosophical Quarterly, argued that Indian civilization has repeatedly reinterpreted and even distorted its traditions ‘to update its theories of evil and to ensure cultural survival while allowing large-scale social interventions’ (418). Such reinterpretations of tradition usually deploy three languages: ‘[T]he language of continuity, the language of spirit, and the language of the self.’ The language of continuity ‘assumes that all changes can be seen, discussed or analysed as aspects of deeper continuities. In other words, the language assumes that every change, howsoever enormous, is only a special case of continuity’ (418). The language of spirit often expresses, when decoded, an analysis of oppression which rejects the analytic categories popular with the oppressors and with the modern sectors from which the oppressors come.  .  .  . The language seeks to reinstate the mythopoetic language which is closer to the victims of history. The understanding of oppression expressed in myths and other forms of shared fantasies – or expressed through alterations in existing myths and shared fantasies – transcends the barriers of regions and sub-cultures in a complex civilization. (419–420) The language of self emphasizes variables such as self-realisation, self-actualisation or self enrichment and apparently underplays changes in the not-self or the outer world.  .  .  . [But] The language of the self . . . also has an implicit theory of the not-self – of oppression and social transformation. . . . Self-correction and selfrealisation include the principle of intervention in the outside world as we have come to understand the world in post-Galilean and post-Cartesian cosmologies. (420)

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These three languages, I suppose, are present in this very chapter. I have emphasized the viability and relevance of traditional philosophical contexts in the present environment by using the samkhya concept of the gunas to describe current critical practice. I have thus privileged continuity over change in the options and challenges open to Indian criticism. Similarly, I have used the language of the spirit not only to interrogate binaries and dualities received from the West, but also to suggest an alternate mode of thinking logically, illustrated in the very style and rhetoric of this chapter. Finally, I have used the language of the self to valorize the self-actualizing potential of criticism. I would, however, question Nandy’s use of the terms ‘spirit’ and ‘self’ as representing two different categories. By ‘spirit’ Nandy really means an alternative to reason, but myths are not necessarily closer to ‘spirit’ than reason is. To consider rationality as antithetical to spirituality is, I believe, an error that comes partly from not understanding Indian traditions. Both astik and nastik philosophies, that is those who accepted the Vedas and those such as Buddhist and Jaina, retained the rigor of rationality without losing their spiritual focus. Indian modernity requires, indeed is built upon, a similar combination.15 That is how it distinguished itself from medieval devotionalism or mysticism. The ‘other’ of modern, instrumental rationality is not faith, myth or poetry, but trans-modern reason, which is holistic, rigorous, communicative and transcendental, without becoming instrumental or reductive. It is, to put it differently, a reason that is at once more than reason. It is not merely a revival of classical, illuminative, but something akin, a rediscovery, which also promises the new creation, whose green shoots are everywhere implied if not visible, especially in the inadequacy of all existing forms of reason and irrationalism. Nandy’s last point about how any project of self-realization also includes a theory of the non-self and of social transformation, when combined with Ramchandra Gandhi’s retooling of advaita, really does away with the dichotomy between the self and the non-self. Svaraj, in other words, sarvodaya, and inner transformation is simultaneously social transformation as well. Nandy’s three languages, as he tells us clearly, are languages of the oppressed. If in using them I have unconsciously betrayed my own condition as one of the wretched of the earth, to invoke the title of Franz Fanon’s celebrated revolutionary tract, then I rejoice in such identification. Ultimately, turned on itself, advaita (non-dualism) dismantles even the dichotomy between itself and its other or dvaita (dualism). Conventional human rationality thus sees its own limitations and in that moment of recognition becomes transformed into something other, something higher.

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In such a closure, this chapter demonstrates its own thesis statement, thus allegorizes the progression of its own plot. Is there, can there be, an Indian tradition in criticism, which is both alive and available, offering alternatives to those dominant paradigms generated by the West, which Indian collaborators tend to replicate? The very fact that this chapter, this book, could be written – and in the manner in which it came to be written – proves that this is possible. All that we must do, however, is to discover and recover this tradition. ‘All’, of course, is the critical word here: on one hand it suggests something simple, easy, ingenious; but on the other hand, it really means everything, the totality, the purna.

Notes 1 See Swami Lakshman Joo’s explanation of these terms in John Hughes’ Self Realization in Kashmir Shaivism: The Oral Teachings of Swami Lakshman Joo. 2 Indeed lochana and looking are cognate. 3 See my previous book, Cultural Politics in Modern India, for an account. 4 Most of the terms and ideas referred to here are from classical Indian philosophy. See The Cultural Heritage of India, ed. Haridas Bhattacharyya, Vol 3: ‘The Philosophies’ for an introduction. Chapter 37, ‘Types of Human Nature’ by Hari Mohan Bhattacharyya, is also useful in understanding this paradigm. The guna-terminology, though originally from Sankhya, is used extensively in several texts, including the Bhagavad Gita. English equivalents of the terms I have used are inexact, but here is an off-the-cuff glossary: gunas (qualities or attributes); tamas (inertia, darkness); rajas (activity, passion); sattva (purity, clarity); turya (the attributeless fourth stage beyond the three gunas); mumukshatva (the state of longing for freedom); viveka (discrimination); vairagya (dispassion); and mukti (emancipation). 5 Quoted in Partha Chatterjee’s Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986). 6 See Chapter 5 for an account of what else transpired on this trip. 7 See Swami Vivekananda: A Contemporary Reader. 8 The process of right cognition is fundamental to the Yoga school of philosophy. See Chapter 4, ‘Yoga Philosophy’ by Haridas Bhattacharyya in The Cultural Heritage of India, op. cit. 53–90. 9 See Frederick Jameson, The Political Unconscious (London: Methuen, 1981). Also see William C. Dowling’s Jameson, Althusser, Marx: An Introduction to ‘The Political Unconscious’ (London: Methuen, 1984). 10 The three gunas can be used to classify several kinds of human activity. For an account of such a classification, see Surendranath Dasgupta’s History of Indian Philosophy, vol. 2 (1922; rpt. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1988), 468–470. 11 Ramchandra Gandhi, ‘I Am Thou’: Meditations on the Truth of India (Poona: Indian Philosophical Quarterly, 1984). My last book Cultural

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14 15

Critical vernaculars Politics in Modern India (2016) ends with a chapter on Ramchandra Gandhi. See, for instance, V. Raghavan and Nagendra, eds., An Introduction to Indian Poetics (Madras: Macmillan, 1970). The names of K. Krishnamoorthy, K. Kunjunni Raja and Krishna Rayan are well known for their efforts to prove the continued vitality and relevance of Indian poetics. Also see M. S. Kushwaha, ed., Indian Poetics and Western Thought (Lucknow: Argo, 1988). This section is for Professor Probal Dasgupta as a small token of my appreciation for his creative and critical camaraderie over the decades. The chain of ideas of criticism = taste = rasa = health = liberation originates in conversations I had with him. In writing it out I am bringing to mind one of the many such exchanges we had when we coincided at the University of Hyderabad. See Surendranath Dasgupta’s History of Indian Philosophy, vol. II, ch. XIII, section 12, ‘The Theory of Rasas and Their Chemistry’ (357–465) for an account of Indian theories of alchemy. See my book Making India: Colonialism, National Culture, and the Afterlife of Indian English Authority (2014) for a more sustained development of such a position.

References Alvarez, Claude. Decolonizing History: Technology and Culture in India, China and the West: 1500 to the Present Day. Goa: The Other India Press, 1997. Bhattacharya, K. C. ‘Swaraj in Ideas’. 1954. Indian Philosophical Quarterly. Special Issue on Swaraj in Ideas. 11.4 (October 1984): 383–393. Bowen, John. ‘Post-Structuralism, Pedagogy, Politics: The American Connection’. Critical Quarterly. 31.1 (Spring 1988): 3–25. Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986. The Cultural Heritage of India. Calcutta: Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture. Dasgupta, Surendranath. History of Indian Philosophy. 1922. Vol. 2. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1988. Dharampal. Collected Writings. 5 vols. Goa: The Other India Press, 2000. Dowling, William C. Jameson, Althusser, Marx: An Introduction to ‘The Political Unconscious’. London: Methuen, 1984. Gandhi, Ramchandra. ‘I Am Thou’: Meditations on the Truth of India. Poona: Indian Philosophical Quarterly, 1984. Hughes, John. Self Realization in Kashmir Shaivism: The Oral Teachings of Swami Lakshmanjoo. 1994. Srinagar: Ishwar Ashram Trust, 2006. Indian Philosophical Quarterly. Special Issue on ‘Swaraj in Ideas’. 11.4 (October 1984). Jameson, Frederick. The Political Unconscious. London: Methuen, 1981. Kushwaha, M. S., ed. Indian Poetics and Western Thought. Lucknow: Argo, 1988.

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Paranjape, Makarand R. Cultural Politics in Modern India: Postcolonial Prospects, Colourful Cosmopolitanism, Global Proximities. Abingdon and New Delhi: Routledge, 2016. ———. Making India: Colonialism, National Culture, and the Afterlife of Indian English Authority. Dordrecht: Springer, 2014; New Delhi: Amaryllis, 2015. ———, ed. Swami Vivekananda: A Contemporary Reader. New Delhi and Abingdon: Routledge, 2015. Raghavan, V. and Nagendra. An Introduction to Indian Poetics. Madras: Macmillan, 1970. ‘Swaraj in Ideas’. Special issue of Indian Philosophical Quarterly (1984). Zavarzadeh, Mas’ud and Donald Morton. ‘Theory Pedagogy Politics: The Crisis of “The Subject” in the Humanities’. Boundary. 2 (1988): 1–21.

3

Desivad

* To start not just with Lord Ganesh, the remover of obstacles, as is customary, but with Ganesh Devy seems almost inevitable in this chapter.1 Not only is After Amnesia (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1992) one of most discussed Indian books of criticism in recent times, but the issues it raises have a direct bearing on the subject of a viable critical tradition for contemporary India.2 One way of trying to arrive as such a tradition is to read the discourse of nativism and the problematic of contemporary Indian criticism through Devy’s influential book.

Amnesia Devy’s book starts with the tragi-comic scene of musical discord between a ‘Mahatma’, who sings in one raga, his wife who sings in another, and their musical instrument, which is playing a third. Devy likens this to the ‘crisis’ in ‘literary criticism in India’. The latter ‘displays patterns of the tripartite relation of the bhasa, the marga, and the colonial traditions’, and ‘conditioned by a cultural amnesia . . . still remains a fragmented discourse’ (119). What are ‘bhasa’ and ‘marga’? Devy uses these terms to designate two traditions. By bhasa he refers to the ‘vernacular’ traditions and by marga, the classical, mainly Sanskritic, of both language and thought. Of course, the word bhasa in Sanskrit simply means language; in Panini’s grammar, the word is used to refer to Sanskrit itself. In that sense, bhasa and marga are not all that different or discordant semantically as to be used to label two opposing critical traditions. But I must not anticipate myself. For Devy, however, bhasa means languages other than Sanskrit and English. To him and those who follow his lead, one must not ask if Sanskrit and English are not bhasas, then what are they – non-bhasa (which in the sense of ‘non-languages’ would be absurd)? As to marga, which refers

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to classical, ‘high’ poetics, the allusion ought to have been to Kavirajamarga, a ninth-century text, one of the earliest, to theorize the relationship between the vernacular and the cosmopolitan (Pollock, 2006). Devy, however, does not even mention it. So where did the idea of marga come from? Devy does not deign to inform us. To go back to After Amnesia, though, the Gosavi, or religious leader, who hears the out-of-tune mendicants, has a straightforward though radical response to their cacophony: ‘Die, you miserable wretches!’ I admit that this sounds a bit more drastic in English translation than it might in the original Marathi Mahanubhava text. What actually ensues is that the singers hold their tongues, the Gosavi walks out, and the performance is brought to a premature close. Devy almost does, but not quite, go as far as the Gosavi in his admonitions to Indian critics. Though he does not quite say, ‘Die, you miserable wretches,’ he implies that our present, out of tune, critical discord is quite as useless. Instead, he exhorts us to adopt nativism as the way out of the crisis. However, nativism to Devy, as we shall soon discover, is more about practice and less about theory. In that sense, Devy is asking Indian critics to shut up theoretically and start practically refurbishing our knowledge of bhasa traditions. Though this exhortation sounds inviting, it is probably best not to submit to Devy right away but first to seek from him a definition of what he means. According to Devy, nativism understands writing as a social act, and expects of it an ethical sense of commitment to the society within which it is born. It rules out the colonial standard of literary history as a series of epochs, and the marga claim of the mainstream literature as being the only authentic literature. Nativism is a language-specific way of looking at literature. (120) This, by and large, is a negative definition, explaining nativism in terms of what it is not. That, in fact, is one of the difficulties with Devy’s approach. It also begs the question of why a ‘language-specific way of looking at literature’, its only positive part, should exclude Sanskrit or English. He asserts that marga claims ‘mainstream literature as being the only authentic literature’ without substantiation. We must simply take it for granted, just as we must reject colonial approaches to our literature. Tracing the genealogy of nativism, Devy takes us to an essay published in 1980 by Bhalchandra Nemade, the noted Marathi writer, called ‘Marathi Kadambari: Prerana va Swarup’,3 translated and published in 1986 by Devy himself as ‘Marathi Novel (1950–1975)’ (Setu

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2.1: 29–70). The key passage, which Devy quotes, contains the catch phrase deshipanace bhan (187), which Devy translates as ‘nativistic awareness’. This phrase, then, appears to be the beginning of nativism as it has come to be understood in Indian criticism. Of course, as Devy himself goes on to describe it, the essay by Nemade is really not about nativism so much as an example of it. This is an intriguing distinction, fundamental to Devy’s praxis. One could extend its scope to Devy’s text itself, absolving him of being unable to articulate nativism as a coherent critical position as long as he practises it. Nemade’s essay, on the other hand, offers a critical survey and taxonomy of recent Marathi fiction. The sources of its classificatory framework, as of some of its other presuppositions, are actually derived from American criticism and anthropology. Devy falls short of analysing or discussing these theoretical assumptions, let alone their sources, in any significant detail. He is content with summarizing Nemade’s main points. What matters to Devy, perhaps, is the nativistic orientation, not the videsi (foreign) influences. When we look eagerly for more directions on how nativism in criticism may be practised, what Devy gives us are fairly generalized observations: The principal advocate of Nativism in Marathi is Bhalchandra Nemade. However, there are several other trends in Marathi, such as the literature of regional sensibility, caste sensibility and dialect sensibility, that converge onto nativism proper. (120) Or Nemade’s essay has provided a new direction to criticism of the novel in Marathi. It has created a general awareness that criticism is not a universal game of concepts and tools, but a serious investigation of native literary tradition. (122) And Nemade’s essay is an excellent, though solitary, example of Nativism in literary criticism. It has opened the possibility of rooting criticism in the bhasa tradition. It shows a way out of the tripartite division that has kept Indian literary criticism fragmented and abstract. (123)

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If we were to go by what Devy’s declarations, the more we look for nativism, the harder it is to find. After all, Nemade’s is the solitary example which, as Devy acknowledges, does not offer ‘a systematic theory of fiction’, but ‘suggests a new style of critical thought’. Evidently, Devy is patently against turning nativism into a theory noting disapprovingly that ‘there have been attempts to present “theoretical” statements about Nativism’ (122). That is why it is rather surprising that Devy ignores Nemade’s 1983 essay on the subject, ‘Sahityatel Deshiyata’, which attempts to formulate precisely such a ‘nativistic’ aesthetic. More damaging is Devy’s dismissal, in a passing footnote, of the New Quest special issue (May– June 1984) on ‘Nativism in Literature’, which carried an abridged English version of Nemade’s essay. This issue, until the volume Nativism: Essays in Criticism, which I edited for the Sahitya Akademi, is the most substantial if not only attempt to establish nativism as a critical school. The issue also contains other papers such as ‘The Concept of Nativism’ by Vasant Palshikar, ‘Nativism of Kannada Language and Literature’ by Shankar Mokashi Punekar, ‘Nativism in Modern Marathi Fiction’ by Chandrashekhar Jahagirdar, ‘Nativism in Modern Kannada Fiction’ by M. M. Shanbhag, ‘Nativism in Modern Kannada Drama’ by Giraddi Govindraj and  ‘Nativism in Modern Marathi Poetry’ by Chandrakant Patil. I mention these essays because their authors are significant writers and critics in Marathi and Kannada though Devy ignores them completely. That special issue of New Quest was itself based on papers presented at a UGC seminar on ‘Nativism in Modern Marathi and Kannada Literatures’, which Devy also fails to mention. I shall return to Nemade’s original essay and its English translation, ‘The Concept of Nativism’, but here I only wish to emphasize that Devy seems, at least in After Amnesia, to resist precisely the kind of remembering of vernacular traditions that his book recommends, himself displaying an amnesia about recent instances of nativism in criticism.4 Is Devy’s neglect of previous research on the subject merely a scholarly lapse? Or is it something more serious? Could it be, perhaps, construed as a refusal to theorize? Is Devy afraid that if nativism is appropriated by theory it will become another self-serving ideology, an arid, intellectual exercise which academics comfortably tenured, tethered, in the academy might indulge in as a professional pastime? Does Devy, instead, want critics to re-establish their links with the bhasa traditions and thereby contribute directly ‘to the development of the literary culture’? We have only hints, no direct answers, to such questions. As Devy puts it, ‘[L]iterary criticism will benefit immensely if it cultivates a nativistic awareness of Indian literary tradition’ (123).

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Devy’s main contention seems to be that ‘what Indian literatures need at present is a realistic historiography and not so much of a theoretical discussion’, but such a ‘recovery of the memory of native literary traditions will reduce the anxiety about the absence of theory’ (124). The absence of theory, in other words, is not as much of a calamity as we might think; what is needed in its place is recovery of memory. Reducing anxiety, not creating alternate theories, is what Devy wants. Since this chapter is itself an attempt to theorize nativism, I think I should deal with this objection to theory before confronting the whole project of nativism. I must confess that I am somewhat in sympathy with Devy’s suspicion of and resistance to theory if by theory is meant the super-sophisticated post-structuralist, post-modernist and deconstructionist discourse that proliferated in journals and books in the West and, by the inevitable logic of neo-colonialism, also in India. Such rapidly multiplying, if not mystifying, terminologies of knowledge are simply unaffordable in a developing country like ours; we lack both the means and the ability to produce them on a competitive scale. Yet, as with any ultra-modern technology or gadgetry, we cannot afford to ignore them totally either. We need instead a concerted effort and well-thought strategy to address them in a systematic, rather than random, fashion. That might be the way to avoid being overrun, overcome, by them. Perhaps, we should adopt a ‘selective assimilation’ approach to theory as we have, say, to the computer industry. While we do not compete in the hardware business, we are quite well positioned in the software side of it.5 Similarly, as regards the knowledge industry, we need to adopt a stance of strategic negotiation with the dominant international discourse. Some of us may actually end up producing or being produced by the same academic engines which generate theory, but most of us cannot have any but the most marginal space in their discursive commodification. Consequently, while we cannot afford theory for the sake of theory, we still require theory for the sake of criticism, criticism for the sake of literature, literature for the sake of society and so on. Certainly, there is an urgency to take control of the interpretation and understanding of our own literatures instead of reneging on this responsibility and surrendering abjectly to more sophisticated specialists stationed abroad. What I am implying is that even to resist theory we need theory. We cannot innocently disregard theory or crossly repudiate it. Instead, we shall have to work out rather carefully how to cope with it, what of it to accept, what to resist, what to modify to our ends, in brief, how to theorize on our own and for ourselves. Those of us whose profession it is to speak, teach, read and write cannot adopt the silence of sages

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even if it is the most potent weapon against the atrocities of speech. Neither can we, as creative writers might, counter theory through our novels or poems, with or without the use of the ‘nativistic awareness’ that Devy advocates. As professional critics, we should not be afraid of theory or afraid to theorize. In that sense, keeping nativism uncontaminated from the soiling g(r)asp of theory is at best a well-intentioned but impractical alternative to theory’s potential benefits or depredations. So, what we need are both a realistic literary historiography and a robust and ongoing theoretical enterprise – not one or the other. We need both to cultivate a nativistic awareness of our traditions and to theorize this awareness into usable critical concepts. This brings me to the first of my criticisms of Devy and thence of nativism. Devy constructs his whole argument on the basis of binary, or in his case, ternary oppositions. This, to my mind, is the most important of the objections of Debjani Ganguli in her critique of Devy. She rightly points out how Devy seems to be going even farther than Nemade in asserting that ‘[l]iterature growing out of one type of underlying linguistic and metaphysical structure cannot be understood and studied by criticism growing out of another and alien type of underlying linguistic and metaphysical structure’ (Devy 124). Devy quotes Sudhir Kakar’s remarks on the differences in childhood and upbringing in India and in the West to argue that ‘intellectual traditions are culture-bound’ (22). While this is a useful argument against the universalist claims of Western discourse, it becomes dangerously self-defeating when it turns into cultural exclusivism. Are cultures hermetically sealed from one another and thus completely different and incomprehensible? Or are they porous, overlapping, influencing and influenced by one another? Devy’s own lament over the damage done by colonialism certainly acknowledges the historical fact of cultural conflict, influence and interaction. As such his other claims of cultural separateness, incomprehensibility and exclusion are untenable. Moreover Devy, while making such a claim, runs the risk of seeing cultures as static, timeless, frozen, again going contrary to the rest of the book, which surveys the growth and development of the bhasa traditions. In asserting cultural difference, Devy doesn’t take into account the constantly evolving, changing, assimilating and adapting nature of cultures. Indeed, cultures which were once totally different from one another have become so similar that their differences become hard to identify. Not only are the spread of Christianity or Islam or Buddhism cases in point, but so are the more recent spread of capitalism and modernity all over Europe, North America and gradually other parts of the world. Japan, for instance, which was once quite different from

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the West, might arguably be considered a part of the Western world today. Similarly, it is possible to observe that in many respects contemporary Taiwanese culture is closer to the US than China. Examples like this can be multiplied manifold. Therefore, Ganguli’s conclusion seems sensible: ‘[A]n equilibrium . . . attained by negotiating between the two extremes of national (or regional) essentialism and a global, cosmopolitan migrancy’ is perhaps more useful as a critical strategy than ‘nativistic self-awareness’ (280). In fact, in the present context, it is quite ironic that Nemade’s nativism, which upholds cultural sovereignty and independence, is itself borrowed from the American cultural anthropologist, Ralph Linton. It was Linton who identified nativism as a strategic and symbolic mode of protest adopted by groups who feel inferior or threatened by the onslaught of more powerful or dominant cultures. Linton is cited by Nemade in his 1980 essay on the Marathi novel: ‘The 19th century gave rise to the feeling that the native culture was being smothered by the cultural encounter of a victor-victim character. Anthropologists call this phenomenon “Nativism” ’ (‘Marathi Novel’ 30). Native, here, refers to Native American or ‘Red Indian’ cultures. Nemade, in an endnote, refers us to Linton’s essay, ‘Nativistic Movements’ in Ralph Linton: The Man and His Theories edited by Adelin Linton and Charles Wagley (1971). The same Linton essay is also quoted by Chandrakant Patil in ‘Nativism in Modern Marathi Poetry’ (New Quest, May–June 1984: 175–180). Linton, reports Patil, had identified four primary types of nativism: revivalistic-magical, revivalistic-rational, perpetuative-magical and perpetuative-rational (177). These categories are still useful in understanding, for instance, Bankim’s historical novels which might be termed revivalistic-magical; similarly, his non-fictional prose might be classified as revivalistic-rational. In contrast to the revivalistic mode in which ‘extinct or moribund elements of culture gain prominence’, in the perpetuative mode, ‘current elements of native culture are projected vigorously’ (177). Thus, Sri Ramakrishna’s teachings might be considered perpetuative-magical, while his disciple Vivekananda’s neo-Vedanta closer to perpetuative-rational. Of course, Indian culture and society, though it bears some resemblance to that of Native Americans, is also quite different. The Indians, like the Chinese, are an ancient, classical civilization, therefore much more adaptable and capable of surviving in the modern world, while Native Americans were practically wiped out. Linton’s work, however, is not just an example of a wider applicability of Western theory, which disproves the idea that one culture’s

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theoretical insights are useless to another culture, it also demonstrates the enormous power and vitality of modern Western academics. The latter is not only the dominant knowledge system in the world, but has actual explanatory power, which may be creative redeployed, as Nemade does, by native critics. Not without anguish, Devy enquires, ‘How can an Indian critic brought up on the Derridean sense of differance do justice to literature produced in a society which has never experienced the anxiety resulting from logo-centrism?’ (24). My objection would be to the phrases ‘brought-up’ and ‘do justice to’. Surely, one need not be brought up on Derrida to make productive use of his ideas; would, for instance, Devy consider Nemade to have been brought up on Ralph Linton? We must, moreover, acknowledge that reading European texts does not automatically and necessarily enslave us. Also, how do we really do justice to our literature even if it is not logocentric? Or to flip the question, is it not possible to offer an Indo-centric reading of Derrida himself, as some have, via Nagarjuna? Similarly, can we not use Derridean deconstruction as a powerful tool to question both textual and institutional authority in India? Ultimately, the problem with After Amnesia runs deeper. It is rooted in a flawed methodology. Devy arrives at his anti-theoretical position through a curious combination of informative summary-cum-narration, on the one hand, and categorical sweeping generalizations, on the other. The relationship between these two strategies in his text is never exactly clear; often, very concentrated passages of hypothesis or argument will be followed by loose descriptions of literary history or summaries of the views of important critics. His theorizing, by and large, tends to erase complexities in favour of stark and simplified positions. What is appealing is an almost prophetic zeal promising a new way to read Indian texts, which, however, ends up in tenuous, inadequate, unclear formulations. The very first page of the book seems to suggest a lost paradise, an El Dorado of bhasa criticism, if only we could reconnect with which, we would become whole and holy again. But in the end what we are told instead is that no such tradition of bhasa criticism is really needed; all we need is a ‘nativistic awareness’, which will, it would seem, magically transform us from our present colonized and deprived, depraved, state to glorious self-mastery and meaningful endeavour. By that token those writing criticism in our bhasas should be our critical leaders and path breakers. Instead, as Nemade repeatedly declares throughout Teekasvayamvara, criticism is almost non-existent in Marathi. What passes off in its name is so trivial, puerile, imitative and pompous that Nemade feels ashamed. Even if we were to adopt a

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less dismissive, more charitable view of our compeers in other bhasas, I wonder if they are really capable of leading our critical enterprises in India. On looking at the question of criticism in Indian vernaculars more seriously, we see that wherever exists in the pre-modern period follows Sanskrit models. In other words, there is no fundamental difference between marg and desi as far as the aesthetics and poetics of bhasa literatures are concerned. The great bhasa writers did not see themselves as overthrowing, as much as extending the domain of Sanskrit and sanskriti (culture). And when it comes to the modern period, the bhasha critics follow the lead of English language and other Western critics. There is, thus, no independent bhasha tradition in criticism to speak of, whether in the pre-modern past or in the post-modern present. Obviously, a ‘nativistic’ awareness, whatever it means, is not all that is required to produce good criticism. For such an awareness to be born in the first place, so much literary and historiographical work would have to be done and disseminated. For that to happen, not just institutional support, but a will seriously to study our literatures would be needed, not to speak of decades of dedicated scholarship and study. All these, unfortunately, as we have already seen in the previous chapter, are sorely lacking in India. Criticism for survival dominates our literary and institutional landscape. How are mere jobseekers and time-servers, such as those we spoke of in the previous chapter, going to produce such outstanding scholarship? While some preliminary work of rereading and excavation has been done with women’s writing in India, such efforts must be periodically renewed, say every ten or twenty years, before we form a robust mechanism for rereading our texts. Unfortunately, far from being reinvented, even such useful research is not ongoing in the bhasas. Moreover, supposing that such a widespread mining of Indian bhasha texts were to happen, it would not necessarily produce good criticism. For that to happen, many of these rediscovered texts would have to be reread, widely circulated and debated. We would have to discover news ways of interpreting and understanding them. We would need to see their connections with their multiple pasts and complex, Western inflected presents. While I would take Devy at face value and agree that a major archaeological task needs to be undertaken to articulate the critical potency of those bhasa texts which we would not ordinarily read in this manner, literary history alone cannot produce good criticism or be a substitute for it. Neither job, in fact, does Devy undertake in his book. Recommending ‘nativistic awareness’ as the panacea to our woes, we are left to our own devices. In that sense, Ganesh Dev(y) is god that fails.

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Nativism I have discussed ‘nativism’ to a considerable extent; it is now necessary to turn to its native substitute, desivad.6 That way both its English and the bhasa versions may be considered and compared. Desivad means desi (country) + vad (ism), sort of country-ism, local-ism or another version of ‘nativism’. This, from the available sources, seems to be a case of translation-reverse translation-re-translation – from Linton’s English word nativism to Nemade’s desiyata in Marathi, from the latter back to the original English nativism, finally to its Hindi version, desivad. Needless to say, overlooking the Nativists’ ‘commandment’ to use the Indian word ‘desivad’, I have continued with ‘nativism’ through much of this chapter. That is because the case for desivad is complicated not only because it differs from Nemade’s original use, desiyata, but because Nemade himself uses desivad to suggest a more vigorous, oppositional, self-defensive, movement as distinguished from the natural, normal and self-evident sense of desipana or ‘nativity’. Desiyata to him includes both desipana and desivad, both innate ‘nativity’ and ideologically charged ‘nativism’. Therefore, there remains some doubt if desivad can be simplistically equated with nativism. Desivad was a term that Nemade not only distinguished from his idea of nativism (desiyata), but also disapproved of for its ideological and chauvinistic connotations. Hindi critics, however, show no awareness of such a distinction. The question of the accuracy of translations and back-translations, it turns out, is even more involved than just the problem of equivalences or emphases. Nemade, the trained literary professional, is quite aware of this. At the beginning of his essay, ‘The Concept of Nativism’, in the New Quest special issue, he says: ‘[T]he English term nativism is used as the equivalent of the Indian term deshi’ (133). He further clarifies the different connotations of both: ‘[T]he terms native and deshi refer to something of indigenous origin, although the former emphasizes “birth” while the latter emphasizes “locus” or “space” ’ (133). The issue of desi versus native, thus, is actually an issue of domicile versus nativity. Nemade later suggests that nativity in India is better defined by jati while domicile is defined by desham (133). In the Marathi original, Sahityateel Desiyata, which is longer, fuller and stylistically richer than the English abridgement, Nemade says that two systems of naturalization enabled a person to settle anywhere in the subcontinent as long as he accepted the region and language of his domicile. In the English version he says, ‘Thus the concept of deshi in India indicates a total freedom of settling down anywhere and belonging to any locus’ (133).

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The issue of locus and domicile, however, are not so easily resolved. If nativism is preference for the local over the foreign, then a Tamil writer living and writing in, say, Mumbai, would be non-native, in a manner not too different from the way the Shiv Sena would have it. Similarly, being born into a particular jati (endogamous group rather than caste) did not mean unobstructed access to any part of India. The ‘same’ jati could be higher or lower elsewhere in the social hierarchy than in a person’s native place. Hence, access to goods, services, employment, preference or privilege would vary. Jati, language, community, ethnicity, class and other markers of identity in India, constituted heterogeneous and varied grounds for both inclusion and exclusion. Thus even in medieval India, despite much less mobility, migrancy, exile, bilingualism, code-switching and code-mixing were widespread, making the question of one’s nativity and domicile far more problematic and complex than Nemade implies. The issue of language is as knotty and contentious as that of nativity or domicile. Devy, following Nemade, defines nativism as a ‘languagespecific way of looking at literature’ (120). Nemade had admonished readers to remember that ‘the novel in Marathi is a creation of Marathi writers, who, in turn, are product[s] of the Marathi society’ (‘Marathi Novel’ 29). Similarly, in ‘[t]he Concept of Nativism’, Nemade stresses, ‘[s]ince a literary work can be expressed only in language the historical, geographical and sociological contexts of a language exercise inevitable control over its stylistic features. We need not emphasize here the filial relationship between the linguistic and cultural milieu and the writer’s work’ (135). In his essay on the Marathi novel, Nemade had thus castigated critics for undertaking a facile comparative approach in which ‘all and sundry works of art from languages all over the world’ were picked up ‘for a comparative assessment of artefacts in Marathi’ (29). Nemade’s nativism, thus, certainly seems to be asserting the single-language system of both creativity and criticism as the only valid domain of discourse. Yet, we in India are constantly assailed with the difficulties in drawing linguistic boundaries. That bi- and multilingualism were a widespread cultural condition in our daily lives now has impressive statistical proof in the findings of the massive Peoples of India Project of the Archaeological Survey of India. India’s pervasive language overlapping and multilingualism also means that a writer writes in more than one language or that texts in more than one language become the standard repertoire of a community or region. In addition, the distinctions between different languages themselves seem to be extremely difficult to fix: for example Hindi and Urdu, Braj and Hindavi and Marwari

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and Gujarati. In fact, major languages such as Hindi are seen as language continuums, constituted of fifty or more varieties, not all of which, at least from one to the other end of the spectrum may not even be fully intelligible. That is why major figures like Jayadeva, Vallabha, Vidyapati or Meera are claimed by more than one region and linguistic community. Unilingual histories of literature have therefore proved unsatisfactory in understanding what has essentially been multilingual, multicultural and diverse cultural practice. In fact, as Aijaz Ahmad points out, claiming that poets like Namdev, Kabir, Guru Nanak, Raidas or Zafar wrote in more than one language is itself to impose modern linguistic boundaries on linguistic fluidities which were very differently conceptualized in earlier times (247–250). Ironically, a good illustration of this process in present times is Nemade’s own Teekasvayamvara. The book has an epigraph by Mirza Ghalib quoted in the original Urdu, though transcribed in the Devanagari script: ‘Dair nahin, haram nahin, dar nahin, aastan nahin; baithe hain rehguzar pe hum, ghair hame uthaye kyon.’ A rough translation would be: ‘neither at the temple nor the mosque, neither at the gate nor the threshold, seated by the roadside am I: why should some stranger uplift me?’ The hope is for someone to recognize the solace-seeker and restore him; who else will understand his plight? Such is indeed our predicament, those of us who are filled with discontent at the state of things, Nemade implies. Yet, though this admission of our own responsibility for our plight fits quite well with the ideology of nativism, it does not do much for nativism’s tendency to uphold linguistic exclusivism. Besides, Nemade’s book is replete with phrases, sentences, quotations and citations in the original English. The book also contains Marathi translations by others of some of his English essays, plus three interviews. It is, by any yardstick, a polyglot and polyphonic text, requiring the knowledge of more than one formal or linguistic code to understand it properly. This is quite at odds with Nemade’s exhortation to critics to stick to Marathi texts and standards while evaluating Marathi literature. Of course, the subtext of nativism’s emphasis on the indigenous language is also its opposition to writing in English. In his long and wellrehearsed invectives against Indian English literature, Nemade has repeatedly asserted that Indians are not native speakers of English and therefore can succeed only in writing ‘pseudo prose or pseudo poetry’ (‘Indo-Anglian Writings’ 10). Nemade uses ‘historical, socio-linguistic, and literary-cultural’ criteria for arguing against Indian English creativity, even if informing his criticism are ‘nationalist-nativist and psychological’ considerations. He ascribes the fecundity of Indian English

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literature to a ‘surplus elitism’ fostered by the replacement of ‘foreign superordination’ by ‘indigenous superordination’ (6–7). For him, language is ‘both the result of culture and the condition of culture’ (21). Given the fact that English continues to function in India as a ‘supra language’ whose sociolinguistic domains are ‘cultural-written-formal rather than social-oral-conversational’, no distinctly Indian English pidgin or creole has emerged in which the common people can express themselves (8–9). Clearly, therefore, for Nemade a nativistic Indian English writing is a contradiction in terms and therefore impossible. Such attacks and criticisms against Indians writing in English have been prevalent for decades, if not centuries, but have gradually lost force. The triumph of English is well-nigh self-evident.7 Without taking fresh issue with Nemade’s objections, we might acknowledge that the ground reality of English in India is rather more complex than he admits. For one, English is the mother tongue of not just the Anglo-Indian ‘natives’ of India (as Vasant Palshikar reminds us), but also certainly one of the mother tongues if not the mono-tongue of an increasing number of urban Indians. It is, besides, to use Probal Dasgupta’s evocative phrase, the ‘auntie tongue’ of a vast number of other Indians, whose size may be as large as the population of the UK itself. Surely, a language with this kind of following, with a history of nearly 200 years of domestication, cannot be dismissed so easily as ‘alien’ or ‘foreign’. Not just the market-dominance of English, but the internationally recognized work of linguists like Braj B. Kachru has identified precisely those strategies of nativization and acculturation which make Indian English a distinct variety. English to us, even if not entirely native, is certainly not non-native. Its in-betweenness actually makes the literature produced in it interesting  – Indian English literature seems to resonate with the in-formation of languages other than English. That is what distinguishes it, even adds to its appeal, to monolinguals. When we read an Indian English text, it is as if we hear the cadences of another tongue, not just the smells and tastes of another land. Besides the actual role, status and use of English in India, the other problem with Nemade’s dismissal is his clear-cut distinction between criticism and creative writing. The former he can tolerate in English, but latter is anathema. This sets up another conundrum if not contradiction. How can one continue to function, read, think and write in English arguing all the while that it is impossible to write creatively in it? Is ‘creativity’ confined only to poetry, fiction or drama and absent in criticism, not to mention other literatures of the mind? What about

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intermediate genres such as creative non-fiction, biography and ‘faction’? It seems impossible to be so rigid and categorical in distinguishing literature from criticism. Even Nemade’s own English criticism, which is far from being ‘devoid’ of creativity, proves to be contraindicative of his position. Moreover, would it not be feasible to argue that Indian English itself is a bhasa, as many, somewhat opportunistically do? In the 1995 issue of Katha Prize Stories, Geeta Dharmarajan makes precisely such a plea: I would like to argue a case for an English that can stand right royally along with the other modern Indian languages – those that are called bhashas by Prof. G. N. Devy. . . . Such an English bhasha would be its own and yet capture all the immediateness that other Indian languages are capable of. (‘Treading Euclid’s Line’, Katha Prize Stories Volume 4)8 Can we ignore the fact that all modern Indian languages have been reshaped by and during the colonial period, chiefly because of our contact with the West through the medium of English? Indian English too has its genesis at the same time and under similar circumstances to modern Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and so on. It has been very much a part of our national life and consciousness in a manner which is coextensive with these Indian languages, contributing to the Indian freedom movement and the ongoing project of nation-building. This, indeed, is my argument in Making India: Colonialism, National Culture and the Afterlife of Indian English Authority. That is why I think it more fruitful to apply the cultural values of nativism to Indian English creativity in order to distinguish the alien and the alienating from the local and the authentic. Even if such an exercise were unpopular or fraught with danger, it might still result in culturally relevant ‘nativist’ criticism. These and similar discontents bring us to the main problem with nativism which is its, almost by definition, oppositional nature. It cannot exist without its opposite or other. Nemade himself is aware of this: ‘[I]ts value is perceivable only in relation to its opposite’ (‘The Concept of Nativism’ 136), he acknowledges. If so, the inevitable question is not just who the native is, but also who the non-native, the outsider, the alien is. Nemade tries to deal with one such polarity: the native versus the international. In the first place, he refutes the claim that what is ‘more universal’ is accorded an international status, arguing

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instead that the international is merely ‘the voluntary recognition of one native culture by another’ (134). Nemade is equally vociferous in debunking a ‘bogus internationalism’ which he considers a by-product of ‘the over-dominance of rootless urban upper classes’ (136). In contrast, Vasant Palshikar, in an essay by the same title published in the same issue, says: ‘[A] nativism which, while distinguishing between “native” and “non-native”, yet achieves continuity and unity between what is native with what is universal, is the one which is worth upholding and promoting’ (141). Similarly, at the very beginning of his essay, Palshikar cautions against the excesses of nativism: A nativistic movement has mixed motives and not all of them are constructive or positive. A nativistic movement can easily go chauvinistic: the aim is to exclude, to restrict, to whip up an anti-feeling, which ordinarily is part of the power game. (139) To be fair to Nemade, he is also aware of some of these dangers: ‘[C]ivilizations have been built, created and strengthened by immigrants and sometimes destroyed by natives themselves’ and ‘international cooperation has already made nativism a prejudice’ (134). Yet Nemade’s nativism seems narrower than Palshikar’s. When it comes to Devy, desivad becomes more slippery, ambiguous, even expedient. Nemade is himself aware of other difficulties: ‘[I]s [nativism] an allpervasive principle like, for example, style? Or a factor in literature like, for example, content in a work of art’ (134). He raises such questions without properly answering them. Later in the chapter, he also categorically states that it is ‘not a qualitative term, it is a general principle evident in both good and poor works produced in a particular culture’ (135). In fact, he admits that ‘[a]lthough no acceptable literary concept of nativism is available, the native principle has been fairly evident in literary works’ (135). It is again Palshikar who takes this question forward by asking how nativism is to be measured or found. He agrees with Nemade that it is a ‘descriptive, classificatory category’ not so much a ‘prescriptive, evaluative norm’. He then asks, ‘What should be the distinguishing criteria of a nativistic work of literature?’ He argues that ‘local/regional’ or ‘rural/ primitive’ settings or even the use of local dialects in the narrative are not the only characteristics of nativism: ‘In India both the Great and the Little Traditions are “native”. Even the Anglo-Indian[s] . . . have by now their own native traditions and culture’ (142). In this, Palshikar

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seems directly opposed to both Devy and Nemade who valorize desi over both marg (Sanskritic) and (Indian) English. Finally, Palshikar identifies three levels of nativism and how they arise: 1) The writer depicts, as an outside observer, the life of a person or persons who are native in the sense that they are rooted. . . . 2) The writer, either because he himself grew up in the same milieu or because he is knowledgeable enough does not limit himself to what can be seen from the outside, but lets the readers have a peep into the minds of the characters. . . . 3) the writer comes to choose a nativistic theme as a part of his search for roots. (142) Of these levels, Palshikar devalues the first, which he calls ‘documentary’, ‘regional’, ‘rural’ or ‘sectional/local rather than nativistic’ (142). He also excludes the pseudo-historical and the politically motivated revivalistic-conservative novels from his definition of nativism. Such refinements, however, scarcely add to either the rigour or glamour of nativism. What emerges from a reading of all these texts, especially Devy’s book, Nemade’s Marathi and English essays, and the special issue of New Quest, is a somewhat complicated if not convoluted picture of nativism. It is in this context that a contradiction emerges between the rest of the critical corpus of nativism and Devy’s book. The former clearly indicates that nativism not as an isolated term used in criticism, but as a point of view, a literary movement, even a discourse or theory. In contrast, Devy is quite categorical in declaring, as I have already noted, that Nemade’s is a solitary example of nativism in literary criticism. Clearly, Devy is mistaken. Even so, is nativism a coherent body of critical and creative texts that form a movement or is it a term to be variously understood and loosely interpreted? It should be clear from the foregoing narrative that nativism is not so much a well-developed theory or literary movement but a corpus of concepts and attitudes, some of which contradict or diverge greatly. On the one hand it can refer to specific styles, genres, linguistic and formal features of a work; on the other, it can encompass the whole socio-cultural and psycho-spiritual outlook of an author or even a society. With such a breadth of possible meanings, its efficacy and utility as a critical tool is somewhat limited. Yet, we cannot deny that it played an influential role in literary and critical production in India for a few decades, say, from the 1970s to the 1990s.

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Marga   Desi Before closing, let me try to situate nativism in the larger literarycultural debates that inform this book, tracing its genealogy within widely acknowledged historical and cultural processes. This move will, I hope, help us relocate it more usefully in our construction of a modern Indian critical tradition. I shall do so by relating nativism to two extremely significant cultural-historical grand narratives or discourses, namely modernism and nationalism. Anyone who reads Nemade carefully or even examines contemporary surveys of Indian literatures will notice how often nativism is perceived as a reaction to cosmopolitan or international modernism. Its practitioners, though often foreign returned and trained overseas, stand up to the dominance of the videsi (external) element in their culture. It was Palshikar who defined the non-native as ‘someone who is rootless, someone who is no longer “at home” in any one place, amongst any people and culture. ‘A moment’s pause,’ Palshikar adds, ‘should make it clear that it is the “modern condition” par excellence: the modern capitalistic-technological civilization is rooting out nativity out of men’s lives in a thorough fashion’ (142). Perhaps, it would even be possible to argue that a return to roots, to cultural authenticity, to a sense of belonging is a part of literary post-modernism in Marathi. I know such an idea will be deeply resented by Nemade as another attempt to appropriate and subvert a nativistic project, but its very possibility shows that nativism, far from being a totally unique or distinct cultural trend, is very much a part of the ongoing intellectual movements and debates of our times. Nativism, in this sense, is an offshoot of the crisis in modernism, a reaction to modernism’s alienating aesthetic and its internationalist ethos. Nativism is the subaltern celebration of the local that has been rendered marginal. To that extent, it is very much a part of the post-modern scenario, which includes the literary identity politics of Dalit literature and other forms of grassroots cultural assertion, which arose in opposition to modernist and internationalist hegemony. There is yet another way of siting nativism. It can be placed in the long and rich tradition of the literature of nationalism and decolonization. Nationalism, during this phase, also promoted regionalism and linguistic self-assertion. Nemade is quite aware of such a possibility. He considers the freedom movement under Gandhi’s leadership as ‘the most brilliant example’ of a nativistic movement. Similarly, Palshikar says, ‘Nationalist movements everywhere have given birth to nativistic movements in the domain of language, literature and culture’ (139). In

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fact, Palshikar goes beyond this link to actually to critique such movements, like Fanon, because they ‘are often meant to create a power base for the traditional elite class which had been displaced earlier by some one or the other “outsider” ’ [sic]. Nativism’s links to ethnic or regional essentialism are noted by Shantinath Desai in his brief note at the end of the New Quest issue. He connects nativism to negritude: ‘Nativism is, like Negritude, an attitude of assertion, the assertion being that of one’s peculiar national and cultural identity.’ Later he adds: ‘Nativism is not primarily an attitude of Swadeshi but an attitude of Swaraj’ (182). Of course, this last distinction would be at variance with Nemade’s insistence on an authentic participation in one’s local linguistic and cultural environment. Svaraj, no doubt implies the extensive, even preferred use of native tongues, but does not rule out appropriate, ‘vernacular’ English. If simply using one’s mother tongue meant svaraj, then the long struggle against British imperialism was uncalled for. In my own view, it is svaraj that is more important than nativism; to the extent that the latter contributes to the former, it is welcome, but when beginnings to depart from the former, it must be questioned, even resisted. Nativism, then, cannot in and of itself be considered coextensive with svaraj. Thus, what finally emerges from this reading of nativism is a multifaceted picture of a concept that had the potential to become one of the few full-fledged indigenous literary movements, but fell somewhat short of the target. At its narrowest, it is oppositional, reactive, doctrinaire, upholding the primacy of the local over the national and international through the language and the culture of common people instead of that of the elites. To that extent, it seems to share an orientation with subaltern studies. The protagonists and practitioners of the latter, even if not its objects of study, are elites. Similar the proponents of nativism are elites of the regional and local variety. Nativism also implies a fierce self-esteem, an assertion of selfhood and self-respect instead of slavish conformity to received ideas or abject helplessness over one’s colonized state. Consequently, nativists are against both Brahminism and English-domination. Nativists reject and ridicule what they see as cultural slavishness or foppery. They are both antiEnglish and anti-Sanskrit linguistically, anti-Brahminical and antielitistic socially. But at its more broader and open-minded, nativism more generally favours the indigenous over the outlandish, whether it is in genre, style, form or content. In that sense, it is consonant with both svadeshi and svaraj. Though its politics is socialistic rather than capitalistic, its class base is the landed upper peasantry or urban middle class, thus petit-bourgeois rather than folk or Dalit or feminist. Its

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aesthetics is realistic rather than fantastic, erotic or romantic, or modernist. Ultimately, as Jahagirdar says, it aspires to ‘a general theory of culture itself’ (151). In this sense, Nemade’s attempt to create a great, alternative, ‘people’s’ tradition in Marathi is similar to Raymond Williams’s politically overt Marxist project in English criticism or Namvar Singh’s Leftist interventions in Hindi criticism. What we learn from trying to connect Nemade’s brand of nativism with the ninth-century text Kavirajamarga is that the former may be considered an instance, albeit unconscious, of the revitalization of the older marga-desi dialogic framework. Devy, like Pollock, aims at driving a wedge between them, but that, as I have tried to show, is not well founded or sustainable. As to Nemade, even if he borrows the idea of ‘nativism’ itself from Linton, most of the former’s ideas of desiyata are already implicit in the centuries older marga-desi structure. In this dyad, desi refers to the local and the regional, while marga or margi to the classical and universal. Robert Redfield reused such traditional ideas when he theorized Indian civilization as an interaction between the ‘little’ and the ‘great’ traditions. After colonialism, as Devy brilliantly reminds us, a third element, the videsi or the English and the foreign or cosmopolitan, has been added. The videsi may also include the Indian diaspora, especially those writers and intellectuals who leverage being Indian in the metropoles. Indian culture today is an amalgam, a rapid transformation composed of these three streams. They are, however, not always in conflict or contradiction. Every now and then, a great historical figure or artist such as Gandhi or Rabindranath Tagore, to name one of each, respectively, brings them together in unprecedented ways. Where there is a confluence, that space, in keeping with the best of our traditions, is regarded as sacred. Desi, of course, has other resonances. It also means region, country or nation. Therefore, desi can be translated as regional, rural, suburban or even national. In some senses, the desi is also the margi, that is, the local or rural can easily become the national, as with Gandhi’s idea of khadi or hand spun and handwoven cloth or even dosa, a South Indian rice pancake which is now a national dish. By the same token, both or either desi and margi may become videsi cosmopolitan, such as Bhangra or Bollywood. In all these cultural (trans)formations, however, the emphasis on the local, national or international may be retained as a useful and productive critical distinction. In other words, the thrust and spirit behind nativism are not entirely wasted or irrelevant. We can detect and appreciate nativistic tendencies in works of all types.9 Thus, not only do we have the useful traditional distinction between desi and margi, but also the idea of desi as somehow rural as opposed

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to urban, regional as opposed to national, or even national as opposed to the international. We could also extend desi to suggest the colony as opposed to the metropolis. In fact, we could argue that in today’s context, the national is the desi in India, while the international, the metropolitan or the Western is the margi. Thus, vis-à-vis the West, the nation itself becomes the site of both desa and desi; vis-à-vis the hegemonic national, the regional or local occupy that space; and vis-à-vis the regional itself, the Dalit, tribal or subaltern become the locus of the desi. Desi and margi are, therefore, not fixed positions but relational counters, which change places depending on their opposites or others. Such provisionality and flexibility, though, is seldom to be found in Nemade’s or Devy’s formulations. Perhaps, this is too ‘postal’ for their likes. While the contribution of nativism is notable, it cannot satisfy our need for a robust, flexible, broad-based and eclectic trans-tradition of contemporary criticism. Such a trans-tradition, trans- as in transitional, transitive, transgressive and transcendental would allow enormous space for pluralities and divergences. Yet, it would have coherence, meaning, rootedness, even telos. Certainly, it would give more serious attention to the possibilities classical traditions of criticism, both Sanskrit and Tamil, as it would to Western literary and interpretive theories, both classical and modern. Such a tradition, in my view, would have to ground itself in the intellectual history of modern India because without such a locus it would lose its identity. Modern India, created out of a combination of the classical Indian and the Western modern, even though inflected by colonialism, has tremendous possibilities. It taught us to connect with our entire civilizational prowess and possibility. The medieval, vernacular and unresolved Hindu-Muslim synthesis, only a portion of which Devy refers to, still remain to be incorporated in our fuller self-understanding. In this reconnection, nativism could help. Our trans-tradition would share nativism’s concern and commitment to decolonization, but allow a wider range of methodologies and styles with which to achieve it. It would also, perforce, be implicated in some sort of nationalistic or global project because it would require such wider contexts for its endeavours. Such a critical discourse need not, however, be ideological and hegemonic in the way post-colonial nation states tend to be. It can be predicated upon less oppressive notions of geo-civilizational commonalities and spiritual orientations such as Gandhi’s ideas of svaraj and sarvodaya. The main purpose of this book would be to define and develop such a critical tradition.

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Notes 1 Sri Ganeshaya Namah: Hindus begin with the ritual, auspicious obeisance to Lord Ganesh, the remover of obstacles. Originally presented at a Sahitya Akademi seminar on ‘Desivad’ at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, in 1995, a modified version of this chapter also appeared in a volume of essays, Nativism: Essays in Literary Criticism, which I was invited to edit. Published in 1996 by the Sahitya Akademi, this volume also contains the two original essays by Bhalchandra Nemade in English translation that initiated debates on nativism as a critical position in Indian criticism. 2 It is one of the very few books on criticism that received the Sahitya Akademi award (1993) in English. 3 Later collected in the Sahitya Akademi award–winning Marathi book, Teekasvayamvara (Aurangabad: Saket Prakashan, 1990). 4 It is another matter that Devy was himself the organizer of the ‘Nativism’ seminar at IIT-Kanpur, where I was invited to present the earlier version of this very chapter. 5 Such a division is by no means unproblematic; after all, it turns us in exporters not of things but of people and mindware. India is the source of hundreds of thousands of ‘cyber-coolies’ that service global business and capital. 6 The prospectus Kanpur seminar, organized by Devy, boldly declared, ‘Nativism has been replaced by the term desivad.’ 7 See Indian English and Vernacular India edited by G.J.V. Prasad and me for a fuller account of these debates and their outcomes. 8 Dharmarajan changes Devy’s spelling from bhasa to bhasha. If such an argument were accepted then, by a strange quirk of history, the only ‘nonbhasa’ would be Sanskrit, the original bhasa of Panani. 9 I develop this at greater length in Chapter 7, ‘Subaltern, National, Global’.

References Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992. Devy, Ganesh N. After Amnesia. Mumbai: Orient Longman, 1992. Dharmarajan, Geeta, ed. Katha Prize Stories. Vol. 4. New Delhi: Katha, 1995. Ganguly, Debjani. ‘Of Colonies and Literary Heritages: After Amnesia as a Post-Colonial Text’. New Quest (September–October 1994): 275–280. ‘Nativism in Literature’. Special issue of New Quest (May–June 1984). Nemade, Bhalchandra. ‘Marathi Novel (1950–1975)’. Trans. G. N. Devy. Setu 2.1: 29–70. ———. Teekasvayamvara. Aurangabad: Saket Prakashan, 1990. Paranjape, Makarand, ed. Indian English and Vernacular India. Co-edited GJV Prasad. New Delhi: Pearson, 2010. ———. Making India: Colonialism, National Culture, and the Afterlife of Indian English Authority. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2014; New Delhi: Amaryllis, 2015.

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———. Nativism: Essays in Literary Criticism. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1997. Patil, Chandrakant. ‘Nativism in Modern Marathi Poetry’. New Quest (May– June 1984): 175–180. Pollock, Sheldon. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006. Wagley, Charles and Adelin Linton, eds. Ralph Linton: The Man and His Theories. New York: Columbia University Press, 1971.

4

Criticism

* The importance of criticism is by no means uniform in different nations across the world. Some societies value criticism in itself, while others not much. In India, criticism, in the broadest sense of the term, is becoming more and more pronounced because, in addition to its primary function, it also serves as an outlet to the people’s frustration, anger, outrage or helplessness. Criticism, in other words, is an avenue of venting, both a therapeutic safety valve and a way to enjoy the freedoms that a mostly soft and often inefficient state affords its citizens. The country’s infrastructure may be terrible, living conditions tough, the quality of life horrendous, but there’s no limit to complaining and criticism. Though it might not be easy empirically to establish that India is a criticism surplus society, I would hazard that this should be obvious to most observers.1 Indians frequently complain about their lives, criticizing almost everyone and everything. What is more, in mainstream and social media, as in novels, movies, posters, marches, strikes, sit-ins and so on, there is an enormous dose of criticism being dished out every day. Far from a passive or lenient lot, Indians, while they may put up with incredible discomfort not to mention injustice, will not cease complaining. Some have likened us to crabs because we spend so much energy pulling each other down. In contrast, the Chinese, for example, never air their differences in public, usually presenting a united front. Certainly, they never criticize their own country when they are abroad; even within the country, public criticism of the state isn’t allowed. In India, though we are hyper-critical about most things that concern us, rarely is this criticism positive or constructive. Is there a way to turn this around, to use our critical tendency to benefit? At least in the world of literary and cultural criticism, how might we act responsibly and constructively?

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In the last several decades, especially in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the thrust, thirst, for new knowledge-production has been trans-disciplinary. The questions that assail our increasingly complex world cannot be addressed, let alone solved, by one discipline. We need an integral approach, with varied and multiple kinds of expertise. But more than analytical skills, we need a synthetic and synthesizing wisdom. Where is that to come from? It is not enough that a few embody such wisdom; it needs to be more widely available, even prevalent. But perhaps, we are not there yet; the human species is not yet ready to embody higher consciousness. Till then we may look to transdisciplinary and cooperative intellectual modes to cope with the pressures of an age of exploding information. That is why it might be useful to ask, once again, what we mean by ‘criticism’. This term subsumes the specifically literary work of scholars and critics working in literature and the allied arts, but also extends to interpretation, textuality, culture, communications theory and so on, across the humanities and social sciences. Criticism, in this broader sense, also links science and religion or, in the Indian context, science and spirituality.2 In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to consider the West’s most exciting philosophers, theorists and thinkers of recent times as critics in this larger sense. To me, the word ‘criticism’, thus, has a rich range of meanings, some of which have already been explored in the previous chapters. I would like to hark back to the sense of crisis, which the etymology of the word suggests. Criticism began to be used in its modern sense after the seventeenth century, but the idea of ‘crisis’ as the turning point in a disease was prevalent much earlier. As a medical term, ‘crisis’ entered the English language via Latin, but many centuries prior to that both Hippocrates and Galen used the Greek verb ‘krinein’, which means to sift, to separate, hence, to decide. Few realise that the Sanskrit cognate is kriti, meaning action, composition as a noun, but to cut, separate or tear as a verb, also conveys the sense of an action that separates or distinguishes. To decide, to make a judgement, to establish standards for making such judgements – all these imply not only the setting up of new norms and values, but questioning existing ones. That is why without criticism there can be no change, whether cultural, social, economic, political or even spiritual. For us, therefore, criticism can be the engine of personal and social transformation. It is not merely a game, a play, a pastime, or even a profession, but something far more meaningful and urgent.

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The problematic It is possible to argue that in India, too, criticism in this broad sense of a response to crisis has been central to our intellectual endeavours since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Colonialism, which gradually penetrated most aspects of Indian life, also stimulated a vigorous and many-pronged response. Much of this took the form of criticism, either of Indian traditions or of Western modernity, or of both. Such criticism was employed in a variety of ways, chiefly to reform society or to create a new, national consciousness. It would be no exaggeration to say that the past 200 years have produced in India an astonishing concentration of major thinkers, scholars, writers, philosophers, politicians, social reformers and teachers who devoted their energies to these pursuits. Most of these cannot be contained in any one discipline or area because their work is undoubtedly of far-reaching importance; yet, it may be included in this broad rubric of criticism. Despite the availability of this rich tradition, contemporary literary and social criticism in India is yet to make substantive use of it; on the other hand, we have continued to be subject to waves of Western influence – modernism, existentialism, Marxism, structuralism, neohistoricism, post-modernism, post-structuralism, feminism and so on. In spite of a strong national movement for independence, the decolonization of the Indian mind is, at best, still an unfinished project. One reason for this is the inability of Indian academics and intellectuals to make even a minimal use of the resources available to them from their immediate present and recent past. For instance, literary critics in the various Indian languages are unaware of the ideas of their counterparts in other languages. Our endeavours have been fragmented and confused, unable therefore either to resist the continued dominance of Western theory or to provide viable indigenous alternatives. The aim of this book, as I have indicated in the previous chapters, is to redress this problem, in howsoever small a measure, by engaging with the theory and practice of criticism in India. In this chapter I would like to continue this agenda by raising three questions: do we need a modern Indian tradition in criticism? If so, do we already have the makings of one? If not, what should the shape of such a modern Indian tradition in criticism be? When it comes to the need for a viable tradition of contemporary criticism in India, I doubt whether there is anyone who would seriously disagree. Most would emphatically concur that it is required, even imperative, though several less explicit issues are implicated in the affirmation. For instance, we might notice that this need is voiced in different ways, less and more direct,

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by several contemporary critics.3 Such pleas are a part of what might be called the discourse of decolonization, whose beginnings may be traced way back to the emergence of institutionalized colonialism itself. In this discourse can be included most of our major thinkers, activists and cultural figures in the past 200 years or so. This chapter argues that it is in this broader de-colonizing intellectual tradition that our contemporary critical discourse needs to be located. That is because Indian anti-imperialism was also supportive of social, cultural and political transformation within India. However, I arrive at the possibility of such a critical tradition by examining two important recent literary critics, each of whom represents a path worth considering, but not actually taking. The choice of these two critics, Krishna Rayan and John Oliver Perry, is not accidental, but exemplary.4 Each of them represents a major option or possibility for Indian criticism. Their two positions may be characterized, after the manner of Ganesh Devy, as the Sanskritic and the Western, respectively. If we include the nativist stance already discussed in the previous chapter, we would have tried to do justice to the triadic nature of contemporary Indian criticism as spelled out by Devy himself. The three stances can also be described in other, parallel, vocabularies or taxonomies: respectively, the traditional, modern and post-modern; the marga, desi and videshi; the nationalist, regionalist and internationalist; the classical, nativist and Anglicist; and so on. I try to show how an exclusive adherence to any of these results in a limited and inadequate critical praxis. What is needed, instead, is the possibility of combining the resources of all these traditions so as to construct a vibrant, flexible and powerful critical trans-tradition.

Two critics The central purpose of Krishna Rayan’s book, Sahitya, a Theory for Indian Critical Practice (1991), is to define ‘literariness’ or that quality which allows a text to be considered literary. This is a problem which has engaged both ancient and modern aestheticians. Rayan relies on the dhvani model propounded by two great Kashmiri mystics, philosophers and aestheticians, first Anandavardhana of the ninth century in his treatise, Dhvanyaloka, then further developed and elaborated by Abhinavagupta in his commentary, Locana (tenth to eleventh centuries). Anandavardhana argued that words operated not on the literal (vacyartha) and metaphorical (laksyartha) planes alone, but also on a third non-logical, associative, evocative and suggestive level (dhvani or

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vyanjana). Following this school, Rayan defines literariness in terms of the dominance of suggested meanings in a text over literal meanings. Further, Rayan argues that the meaning of a text lies in the affect that it evokes in the reader. Here he draws both on the idea of rasa, first expounded in Bharata’s Natyasastra (c. 500 BCE–300 CE) and later in the classical Tamil text, Tolkappiyam (c. 400 CE). He also brings T. S. Eliot’s notion of the ‘objective correlative’ (possibly derived from Eliot’s readings in Sanskrit) and the more recent reader-response school of criticism into this conversation. According to Rayan, rasa or the emotional response to literature is generated in the reader by certain ‘objective elements’ in the text such as imagery, narrative, character, style and rhythm. The latter part of Rayan’s book devotes a chapter to each of these elements, often illustrating how each may be analysed in specific literary texts. A book such as Sahitya is not easy to evaluate or critique, especially because it raises several difficult questions. What should a literary theory do? What is the utility of classical Indian theories and of present-day Western ones for us in India? What are the procedures for reviving, modifying and using both of these types of theories? Finally, what are the grounds for evaluating theories? Such questions arise because we have not evolved an institutional mechanism and context for producing theory as we have done for literature. By this I mean that while literature has been read and evaluated extensively all over India, theory is a comparatively new genre for us. In the absence of a context and mechanism in which to evaluate indigenous production of literary theory, we should only be appreciative and grateful for an effort like Rayan’s, based as it is on private passion and initiative. It would be vain to engage in a long debate with Rayan’s ideas as outlined in Sahitya simply because unlike Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992), published around the same time and which I’ve mentioned earlier, it is not the sort of book that was widely read, discussed or cited. But the main problem, as I see it, is what I would call the binary mode of discursivity which Rayan employs. This mode is also found, as I have shown, in both Ahmad and Devy, whose criticism has attracted far more attention in India. In this way of reasoning, the ‘either-or’ type of argumentation is dominant. Rayan seems to take his cue from a certain strain in classical Indian thought. These works, when reread today in the traditional manner, appear prescriptive, normative and, ultimately, closed. Much of the commentary on these texts is also of a reductive technical kind; for instance, which rasa dominates in a particular work and how it is

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produced. Such classical texts, thus, lack the element of criticism in the post-Kantian sense, that is, the criticism of ideology, which allows us to move beyond the master-text-cum-commentary mode of the classical aestheticians of India. Yet the classical tradition, though closed and confined to a small group of scholars and thinkers, mostly belonging to one caste, was amazingly rigorous, dynamic and liberal, allowing for a variety of views and arguments. With the demise of this tradition in the late eighteenth century, attempts to revive it in contemporary times often seem artificial and unconvincing. No seamless reconnection seems possible; what we have to contend with are several possibilities of mediation. The either-or logic in Rayan’s book becomes especially insistent in working out its conclusion. The crux of the whole book is the distinction between suggestion and statement. The key question of ‘literariness’ for Rayan is hinged on this premise. Rayan does attempt to explain suggestion in terms of the post-structuralist notion of signification, polysemy, indeterminacy and dissemination. But what is puzzling is Rayan’s revival of the old structuralist opposition between the signified and signifier, denotation and connotation, statement and suggestion. Post-structuralism would deconstruct such binary opposites and argue that there is no ultimate way of distinguishing suggestion from statement: signification as polysemy applies to both of them, not just to the first as Rayan states (10). Similarly, the whole notion of ‘objective elements’ in a text may be questioned. If the reader is the ultimate producer of meaning, then there are no objective elements in a text. That is the death of the author and, by extension, of authority. Suggestion and statement are at best provisional categories, useful but not fixed. They can no more be utilized to determine the value of a work than any other set of predetermined criteria. The identification of such criteria itself is suspect because it can result in the setting up of a hierarchical if not tyrannical structure that limits the free play of signification. Similarly, the question of literariness is not so pertinent any longer because any text can be considered ‘literary’ if one so desires. What has happened is nothing short of the dismantling of the entire ideological and political project of positivistic epistemology, something that Rayan sidesteps entirely. Under such circumstances, what should a literary theory do? I think that a theory should provide a way of explaining how literary texts are produced and how they are read meaningfully. If so, then the dominant trend is not to see literary meaning in terms of the emotional response it evokes in the reader but in terms of the thematic that it reveals. In other words, what is it trying to say? What sort of debates does it

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address itself to? Hence, the ideology of a text ought to be in focus, not so much its emotional charge. At any rate, the former cannot be denied in favour of the latter. Thus, in our times, a literary theory cannot afford to be divorced from its social and historical determinants as the older Sanskrit poetics usually was. In an age dominated by an interest in the sociology of literature, theories which stress its objective (dhvani) or pragmatic (rasa) aspects may need considerable reworking and not necessarily on Rayan’s lines. Yet, giving primacy to the emotive and affective aspects of literature could be our own, special contribution to the construction of a modern critical tradition. It would certainly be consonant with India’s aesthetic orientation and its ethos. Bollywood, as I have argued elsewhere, is still a cinema of emotion rather than action.5 In view of the ‘death’ of aesthetics, how do we use the rich resources of classical Indian texts? Dismissing them summarily, as many modern intellectuals are wont to do, is no solution at all. It seems that they deserve and demand to be reread or even misread; that is the way we would treat them if we respect ourselves as much as, perhaps, their authors respected themselves. The first order of rereading requires an availability of these texts in modern editions. Even this has not been adequately done. It is not enough to provide translations merely; what is required is to make these translations speak to present readers. This latter imperative has not been addressed. The texts, in translation, seem obscure and irrelevant. The second-order task requires more or less straightforward applications of these texts. Here a scholar like Rayan is a worthy example. To apply an ancient theory effectively and intelligently to modern texts needs considerable expertise, which few have. Rayan in his numerous works has shown it consistently. Now, a third order of reading (or misreading) is required. These texts have to be liberated from their straitjackets and made to implode into the present-day literary and theoretical scene. What better instance of this than Robert Magliola’s reading of Derrida and Nagarjuna in Derrida on the Mend. But it is here that we are most lacking. There is neither that bold and engaging rereading of tradition that we see so often in the West, nor a rigorous and authentic adherence to tradition that we had in the past. Indian critics, unfortunately, haven’t made adequate use of such readings where they exist, their neglect of Magliola being an example.6 Here is where we might find an otherwise excellent and dedicated critic like Rayan lacking. He is content with restating classical aesthetic formulations, then applying them faithfully to modern texts. He does not take liberties with the former, not challenge the latter with the additional critical resources at his disposal. What ensues,

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thus, is an application of Sanskrit aesthetics on modern texts that does not seem to engage with our times. It remains a sort of sideshow. Of all our ancient aesthetic theories, I think dhvani has the most potential for a new re-appropriation, especially if we wish to interface it with post-colonialism or post-modernism. Dhvani can also be best used against authoritarian interpretations of texts, against the abuse of totalizing forces, which misappropriate the resources of our society, whether religious or secular. Whether the debate is over the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid in Ayodhya or over the Indian Constitution, the dhvani within these controversial ‘texts’ can be liberated to allow for more freedom, more autonomy, more radical unpacking of difference. Dhvani can lead to several alternate readings and meanings, especially when we do not try to fix its import in a revivalist imitation of the classical mode of argumentation. Returning to Rayan’s book, there is no doubt that it is useful, lucid and highly recommended. But I wonder if in its present form, it addresses adequately the crucial aspects of either our literary or larger cultural praxis. Taking the ‘immense diversity and dynamic inclusiveness of Indian culture’ as its base and noting the lack of ‘any prior authoritative tradition’ (9) in Indian English criticism, our second critic, John Oliver Perry, also published around the same time, Absent Authority: Issues in Contemporary Indian English Criticism (1992). This book argues for a ‘reliable and responsible criticism of Indian English poetry’ with ‘a more indigenous, if appropriately mixed, critical approach’ (29). In trying to define such an approach, on the one hand, Perry rejects the ‘short-range hedonistic–pragmatic–capitalistic’ aesthetic which we import from the West, as he does the older, phallocentric, ‘Western classical–Christian’ tradition (33). On the other hand, he also rejects, without properly understanding it, the classical Indian ‘Brahminical’ tradition of literature as ‘authoritative law’ (39) and its ‘harsh vision of a legalistic, ritualistic perspective on literature’ (40). After departing from the Western and Sanskritic traditions, Perry also distances himself from the third ‘nativist’ alternative. Here, he disapproves of the work of critics like Devy who, in their search for local roots and alliances with the desi traditions, ‘succumb to distortions of perception and categorization that arise from seeking indigenous criteria in national and regional terms’ (61). Thus, for Perry, a resultant situation obtains ‘in which “absent authority” reigns both in India as a nation and society and in Indian English writing of poetry as well as criticism’ (119). However, he is not alarmed by this vacuum but sees in it instead ‘an opportunity for creating, not merely reviving or reconstituting from past sources, a “contemporary tradition” ’ (49).

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The challenge, of course, is how to define the ingredients of this tradition. Here, Perry attempts his crucial distinction between ‘Indian’ and ‘indigenous’. He argues that ‘ “Indian” and “Indian-ness” are not concepts useful for literary discussion’ because ‘Indian must be so polycentric in its referential meaning as to be ineffective as a definitive term; its only use is as a non-exclusive category’ (111). Instead, Perry makes a case for ‘ “indigenizing” or making one’s own, versus “Indianizing” or attempting to be Indian in an authoritarian, absolutist way’ (276). Perry defines indigenization as ‘a personally and culturally inward-turning creative process’, which works ‘as a natural means of coping with the various senses of “absent authority” ’ (36). What we are left with, then, is ‘a positive pluralist attitude’ which is not passively ‘tolerant’ and ‘open’, but active in defense of threatened diversities (as neo-conservatives are) and in pursuit of new developments (as modernistic liberals are). Containing and restraining within itself the potentially destructive strains between neo-conservatism and liberalism, the truly pluralist contemporary perspective resists making hierarchies of value-systems, and in that sense is relativistic, democratically pluralist in a levelling, non-committal sense. Yet this process can also defend the inevitable hierarchies within valuesystems and can even judge which is the least oppressive among them, making sure that genuine openness to productive conflict and non-violent change is thereby protected. (216) The best specific instantiation of such progressive pluralism offered in the book is the remark that ‘[t]here is room in Indian criticism not only for a self-contradictory India-lauding American but also a selfcontradictory India-rejecting Indian’ (192). Such, then, is Perry’s vision of an enabling, multicultural criticism for a multicultural, polycentric and multilingual India. This remarkable book, an outstanding contribution to Indian criticism by an American scholar, has unfortunately not been taken too seriously. The same metropolitan, post-colonial fashions that have marginalized Indian criticism have also sidelined this intervention. Ironically, had Perry published with a leading university press in the US, such as Harvard, Chicago or Columbia, he would have won instant renown. But he chose to self-publish with Sterling Publishers, creating a badly edited, prolix and repetitive book. His key arguments might be made in less than a third of its present size of his rather fat book. In that sense, he chose to be Indian here rather than metropolitan.

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That is why, while recognizing its genuine contribution, we must also examine, analyse and engage with Perry’s position for what it lacks. To begin with, the more substantive criticism of Perry is that his most important concepts are not sufficiently elucidated or explained. Thus, on close examination, ‘indigenous’ doesn’t seem all that different from nativist or Indian, both positions which Perry repudiates: though ‘making indigenous’ might be different from ‘being or making Indian’, the result is, perhaps, similar. Indigenization and Indianization, then, imply very similar processes, even if there is a subtle attitudinal difference between them, as Perry wants us to recognize. Indigenization, certainly, appears less threatening, more individualistic, more flexible, while Indianization seems to be part of the bigger project of nationalism, chauvinism or patriotism. Yet, when it comes to actual practice, they turn out to be not too different. Let me illustrate with a hypothetical example. An Indian English critic practices, say, a form of alien and alienating high-deconstruction claiming that she has indigenized it even if it appears un-Indian or irrelevant. Such a claim, obviously, would not automatically render it indigenous and therefore meet with Perry’s approval. Just labelling something indigenous does not make it so. On the other hand, the non-indigenous may also turn out to be quite Indian. For instance, parliamentary democracy, which we got from Britain, but which is now quite our own, in our own unique way. The Indian electoral process is our greatest carnival or tamasha. Non-indigenous becomes Indianized, in this case, through a process of nativization. If non-Indian can be Indianized and non-indigenous indigenized, then what is the distinction between the two? The actual processes of acculturation must be quite similar in both. If indigenization is more politically correct that Indianization, so be it. But are there any other real benefits that may be accrued by substituting the former for the latter? Similarly, Perry’s other crucial concept of ‘absent authority’ is rather self-contradictory. The word ‘absent’ itself has at least two different meanings: not present and non-existent. If one is a follower of Derrida, then one would certainly celebrate absence, especially of the first kind. All authority, then, would be merely chimerical, a myth, an illusion foisted by logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence, hence, to be deconstructed for one’s emancipation. But absence is also a kind of presence. Absent authority, thus, would itself constitute a pseudo authority. The second sense of absent as non-existent would send alarm bells ringing in the minds of most thoughtful people. It suggests a moral anarchy in India, which can be dangerously manipulated

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by cynical nihilists and power-seekers. Strenuous attempts have been made to refute such a lack of centre by reviving or revalidating all sorts of old and new authorities to counter it. In Perry’s own rendering, the phrase ‘absent authority’ is used in both the above senses. Evidently, non-presence of authority is seen by Perry as a negative state. It implies a condition in which Western imperialism directs the course of Indian criticism like an absentee landlord (119) or a dead author, established critic, ancient or modern theory controls the production of textual meaning (391). Instead, Perry would seem to prefer a truly decentred world and a correspondingly decentred text which would allow a contemporary, that is, ever-new play of meanings and interpretations (35). However, these distinctions are only implied, never clearly stated or explained in the text. Consequently, the fuller implications of his ideas, which need to be worked out in detail, are not forthcoming. At present, then, ‘absent authority’ remains a tantalizing concept, with hints of a cornucopia of hidden benefits, but without an actualization of its real advantages. It is clear that Perry quickly recognizes the dangers implicit in any kind of cultural or political commitment; however, he doesn’t seem to be troubled by the ill-effects of a lack of commitment, even the destruction of a civilization or the deracination of a people. The atomism, alienation, anomie and emotional trauma that a traditional society may experience in modern times are not something he takes cognizance of. The multiculturalism that he advocates, then, is tantamount to a version of American liberalism, confident in its own certitudes, but out of place in India. This is certainly a state of mind to aspire to, but because its cultural coordinates are missing it ends up being not much more than a laudable, but vacant, or should I say absent, concept. Ultimately, if I were to summarize my own dissatisfaction over this otherwise admirable book, it is this: the book lacks not just a critical but ethical centre. Now, we know that such an absence of authority, to use Perry’s own phrase, certainly has its advantages: it allows polysemy, a free play of competing and contradictory significations. Perry’s book won’t oppress us, but after dethroning all forms of existing authority, he doesn’t seem to offer us real alternatives. He thus doesn’t satisfy, or even inspire, our quest for an alternative tradition of criticism. He critiques the present situation no doubt, but offers no convincing way out of our predicament, no positive framework for a trans-tradition of criticism. What we need actually is not absent, but responsible authority.

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Present responsibilities The question is not if authority is absent, but if those vested with authority are performing their functions properly. A knee-jerk radicalism advocating an overthrow of all existing authorities because they are incompetent, inadequate or corrupt would also not amount to much more than a political gesture. Nor would I say, in conservative fashion, that those who wield power in India are all worthy, competent or the better than the rest. India, evidently, does need better governance at all levels. When it comes to academics, we see quite clearly that our institutions or higher education have been systematically sabotaged by vested interests. They produce very little internationally recognized research. Their publication record is also dismal. No wonder as practising Indian English critics, we find ourselves increasingly dissatisfied and frustrated by the absence of avenues for self-expression. There is not a single noteworthy, peer-reviewed journal in our field published in India. This fact is startling as well as shameful given the long history of English studies in India (some even claim that the discipline started here), not to speak of the second largest number of college-level English teachers in the world (after the US). The absence of recognition and legitimation cripples us intellectually; in that sense, Perry is right – our discipline, and our society at large, does lack authority. But who will confer authority? Some external agency, when a huge national apparatus is found dysfunctional or wanting? With the elites content to fall in line with the dominant culture of the West, what should the rest of us do? In this situation, we might best shift our focus from authority on responsibility. If we, as practising Indian English critics, fulfil our responsibilities, then the little authority that we actually wield will actually yield results instead of hampering us. Rather than being demoralized or paralysed by our lack of authority, we could try to assume the mantle of our responsibilities. That will prevent us from feeling helpless, irrelevant or marginal in our own country, where some of us have made the conscious decision to return. If we consider our obligations we would, I think, get a more accurate notion of how much authority we really have. Then, instead of surrendering even such little power as we do actually possess, we could try to optimize it. Instead of crawling even before we are asked to bend, we’ll remain upright even if we are encouraged to bow. That, at any rate, would be the svaraj-ist approach. If this is a valid position, what is our responsibility as Indian English critics, teachers, intellectuals and writers? And, in however varying a

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degree, what is the amount of real power and authority that we could exercise, if only we lived up to our responsibilities? In my view, these are the questions that really matter. Our first duty is to recognize our tremendously privileged position as members of a hyper-educated elite in present-day India, however ineffectual we might consider such an elite to be. More than a third of the country is illiterate; even those who are literate cannot be said to be educated in any significant sense of the term. Of these, even fewer are intellectuals. And of these intellectuals, very few are teachers at colleges and universities such as we are. It is as if 1.3 billion Indian people have, in effect, mortgaged or entrusted their intellectual rights to us. We are thus, whether we like it or not, the trustees of India’s intellectual capital. We hold this great treasure and resource and are entrusted as its custodians, to protect, enrich and augment it. It is our responsibility to see that it is not sold off cheaply in the international marketplace where the rupee is so weak; it is, likewise, our responsibility to ensure that we ourselves are not bought off cheaply in the same bazaar. I would have agreed with Perry’s celebration of absent authority in a perfectly egalitarian, perfectly just society in which each individual is free and valued. But in an unequal and hierarchical society such as ours, to take refuge in post-modernist indeterminacy or free play would be to shirk our share of the national burden. We who are so privileged have to recognize our accountability towards those who are not. To claim to be powerless, emasculated, post-colonial subjects, with no purpose, direction or goal would be escapist, even dishonest. To do so would be to cop out, to deny all the advantages that we enjoy in this country, to renege on our social debt. It is now time to define, more specifically, what the responsibility of the Indian English critic might be: 1 2 3

4

To survive, even flourish, as individuals and intellectuals under adverse post-colonial conditions To recognize our ‘objective’ or ‘real’ positions in our hierarchical society and in the larger West-dominated world order To perform a function commensurate with our privileges and responsibilities in our own society, without succumbing to the temptation of trading our independence To do our share of institution and nation-building

All of this requires a release of our energies from our routine and unavoidable irritations and their redirection and sublimation in a

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more satisfying, empowering and enriching cultural praxis. It also implies opting out of petty politics, machinations and negative thinking. The agenda for Indian English criticism, likewise, may consist of the following: 1 2 3 4

To preserve and conserve our cultural diversity and usable past To resist foreign and domestic hegemonies To work towards an empowerment of local critical traditions and practices To make criticism more politically and socially responsive as befits a plural and democratic society

Modern Indian criticism Let me now revert to the questions I raised at the beginning of this chapter: do we need a modern Indian tradition in criticism? Do we have a modern Indian tradition in criticism? If not what should the shape of a modern Indian tradition in criticism be? The answer to the first question should be amply clear: of course, we need a modern Indian tradition in criticism. The answers to the other two questions need to be fleshed out a bit more. Criticism, it seems to me, is a communal activity, one which has broader cultural, social, political, even national dimensions. For criticism to flourish the prerequisites include the coexistence of several institutional factors such as journals, book publishing, reviewing mechanisms, a reading public and various forms of patronage, both public and private. Hence, criticism always functions within certain structural constraints and parameters. It certainly needs a past, a living tradition and a direction for the future. Perry himself is aware of this because he uses the phrase contemporary tradition to characterize the kind of criticism that he advocates. But the moment the contemporary becomes traditional, it constitutes itself into an authority, which he is averse to. When a certain body of such texts builds up, then we have a fairly effective and powerful means of self-expression and survival, responsible, I hope, rather than authoritarian. That is why I would argue that there do exist several possibilities for a modern Indian critical tradition from Rammohun Roy to Mahatma Gandhi via Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, Madhav Govind Ranade, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and so on; and from Gandhi to present times, via Vinoba Bhave, Rammanohar Lohia, Jayaprakash Narayan and Anna Hazare, to our present times. What I have named are largely political thinkers and

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actors, but the constituents of this tradition can be varied to suit our purposes. There could also be competing or counter-traditions, from Jotiba Phule to B. R. Ambedkar, and from the latter to Kanshi Ram. To this very ‘mainstream’ Dalit construct, there could be alternate formulations and formations which highlight, say, Narayana Guru in Kerala or the Namasudra movement in Bengal. Certainly, what we are talking of is a tradition of traditions or a trans-tradition rather than a single and singular lineage.7 Also, as indicated previously, this broad movement of national awakening has internal divisions and contradictions. There is, for instance, a tussle for power between the colonialist and the nationalist, the upper caste and the lower caste, or upper class and lower class, elite and subaltern, or patriarchal and feminist, not speak of the major tussle between Hindus and Muslims, which resulted in the partition. We need not resort to simplistic or reductive definitions but this is the broad tradition, with its various and even contending strands, with which we are invited to align ourselves. Indian English criticism, by doing so, can end its isolation and ineffectuality. The best Indian writers and critics from Tagore to Ananthamurthy or Nirmal Verma have done precisely this. They have found their place, their voice, in the larger growth and development of modern Indian national consciousness. A certain kind of viable, contemporary and modern tradition, such as Perry is calling for, then, already exists – if only we want to and know where and how to look for it. I have myself compared it to the mythical river Saraswati which flows not so much out there, but inside us, whose discovery is like an energizing elixir which enables us to become invincible against not just the West but against the oppressiveness of our own traditions. Indeed, no contemporary criticism can be effective if it does not simultaneously question existing hegemonies from both the West and our own past and, I might add, present. To conclude by extolling, once again, the virtues of the via media or the middle way would be appropriate, especially given how crucial it is as a critical methodology is to our endeavour. I think the need of the hour is evolve a hermeneutics of mediality – this mediality may be intermedial to begin with, but to be truly effective, it will also need a remedial. Borrowing from Raimundo Paniker and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, we might call this an advancing of diatopical hermeneutics, which calls for a compassionate detachment from settled and reductive ideological positions. It means ‘placing oneself simultaneously inside and outside what one critiques, and thus making possible what I call the doubly transgressive sociology of absences and emergences’ (Santos). Steering between the anarchy of a fragmentary relativism and a hegemonic, universal grand narrative, what we really need is a criticism

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which is non-oppressive and democratic, but which still has a local, regional and national identity. This would generate a trans-tradition which is substantial yet supple, serious yet flexible. This is Bharatiya parampara at its best, characterized by kutastha niti (depth) and pravaha niti (flow). Indian tradition is deep like a well and ever flowing like a stream; it is both profound and dynamic at the same time; it is cumulative and accommodative; it has a character and momentum of its own, yet is open to innovations and new directions; it is well defined and yet elastic. Indeed, not just Indian, but any tradition worthy of continuation, must have some of these attributes to be both living and meaningful. Otherwise, if it only oppresses its own practitioners and others better to get rid of it.

Notes 1 I wonder if we could propose a world criticism index as we have, say, the human development index (HDI – see http://hdr.undp.org/statistics). 2 See Dharma and Development: The Future of Survival (2005); Science and Spirituality in Modern India (2006); Earth Lessons: Three Essays on Saving the Planet (2008 with Devaki Singh); Science, Spirituality and the Modernization of India (2008); Sacred Australia: Post-Secular Considerations (2009), all edited by me, as attempts at such transdisciplinarity. 3 See, for instance, the Survey of Indian Criticism, the largest of its kind, designed by John Oliver Perry, and posted on www.samvadindia.com/survey. 4 To me this choice is also personal: both showed much kindness to me but are, alas, no longer in our midst. This chapter is my tribute to their contribution to contemporary Indian literary criticism. 5 ‘Postcolonial Bollywood’ (2002), ‘Balle Bollywood: Bombay Dreams and Postcolonial Realities’ (2004), and Bollywood in Australia: Transnationalism and Culture (2010). Also see ‘The Philosophy and Aesthetics of Rasa: A Note’, Sanskrit Studies 2 (2007). 6 A rare exception in this regard was the late K. Ayyappa Paniker; see, for instance, his survey of Indian Narratology. Paniker, like Ananthamurthy, was primarily a poet-professor. One of the contributions to criticism was to creatively reuse classical Indian aesthetic traditions. Unfortunately, he was not able to do it in a sustained manner so as to inspire many critics or readers outside Kerala, his native state. 7 I have tried to map this tradition in Making India: Colonialism, National Culture, and the Afterlife of Indian English Authority (2013).

References Ayyappa Paniker, K. Indian Narratology. New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts and Sterling Publishers, 2003. Devy, G. N. After Amnesia. Mumbai: Orient Longman, 1992. Magliola, Robert. Derrida on the Mend. Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1984.

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Paranjape, Makarand R. ‘Balle Bollywood: Bombay Dreams and Postcolonial Realities’. In Language, Society and Culture. Eds. Udaya Narayana Singh, et al. Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages and Mahatma Gandhi International Hindi University, 2004. ———, ed. Bollywood in Australia: Transnationalism and Culture. With Andrew Hassam. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2010. ———, ed. Dharma and Development: The Future of Survival. New Delhi: Samvad India, 2005. ———, ed. Earth Lessons: Three Essays on Saving the Planet. With Devaki Singh. New Delhi: Vikram Sarabhai Foundation, 2008. ———. Making India: Colonialism, National Culture, and the Afterlife of Indian English Authority. Dordrecht: Springer, 2013; New Delhi: Amaryllis, 2015. ———. ‘The Philosophy and Aesthetics of Rasa: A Note’. In Sanskrit Studies 2 (2006–2007). New Delhi: Special Centre for Sanskrit Studies, JNU, and D. K. Printworld, 2007: 205–219. ———. ‘Postcolonial Bollywood’. Evam: Forum on Indian Representations. 1.1&2 (2002): 268–276. ———, ed. Sacred Australia: Post-Secular Considerations. Melbourne: Clouds of Magellan, 2009; Indian Edition, with New Foreword and Preface, New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, 2010. ———, ed. Science and Spirituality in Modern India. New Delhi: Samvad India, 2006. ———, ed. Science, Spirituality and the Modernization of India. New Delhi: Anthem, 2008. Perry, John Oliver. Absent Authority: Issues in Contemporary Indian English Criticism. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1992. Rayan, Krishna. Sahitya, a Theory for Indian Critical Practice. New Delhi: Sterling, 1991. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. ‘Toward a Multicultural Conception of Human Rights’. Web.

Part II

Unauthorized modernities

5

Invasion of theory

*

First encounters About thirty years back, I wrote what was probably the first paper on the reception of ‘theory’ in India. That paper, whose title I have borrowed for this chapter, not only tried to problematize the travels, travails, of theory from the first to the third world but also articulate a preliminary critique of the unequal power relations that regulated both its transmission to and arrival in India. Both narrative and a polemic, my essay tried to advocate a modicum of intellectual selfrespect and self-reliance in Indian academia when confronted with the dominant cultural inputs from the metropolis.1 Though the particular emphasis was on ‘theory’, my real concern was with broader questions of cross-cultural intellectual relations between India and the West.2 The paper itself had an interesting history that needs recounting as it illustrates the broader point of this chapter. I first presented it as an invited speaker at the All India English Teachers’ Conference in November 1988. Their official organ, The Indian Journal of English Studies, published it the following year. One might imagine that reading the paper at the largest conference of English teachers in India would be the best possible forum, as would its publication in the official journal of this Association. However, both the Association and its journal were already in a sad state, with ineffective, if not unprofessional, office bearers who wrangled over the spoils of office. The Association continues to exist, still in a deplorable condition, dominated by another coterie. Needless to say, it does not represent the interests of the larger body of the college and university teachers

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of English in India, nor command the respect, let alone prestige, it once did. A fuller version of that paper was published in New Quest in 1990. This journal, with its long history of distinguished contributors, was one of the best channels for such an essay. But, once again, except for a small circle of largely Indian readers, it hardly evoked a response. Imagine its impact if it had appeared in the West, say, in Critical Inquiry. The difference is so enormous that the thought-experiment itself seems mindboggling, bordering on the inconceivable. The difference cannot but underscore the colonized and ineffectual state of Indian academics. New Quest itself is no more; each of its dedicated founding members has passed away as has its last editor, the gifted and eccentric, poet, translator, film-maker Dilip Chitre. Given the lack of generosity and professionalism in Indian criticism, the fact that this first response to theory in India was overlooked is hardly surprising. A subsequent paper on a similar topic published four years later in The Lie of the Land (New Delhi: OUP, 1992) does not even cite it. Ordinarily, in Western academics, this would be simply an oversight of bad scholarship, but here I think there was clearly something else at work.3 The book in question was itself based on a conference in which several people, including me, were not given an opportunity to participate. I learned early on in my career in India how the Indian academy worked, through purges, exclusions, cabals and cruelty, all of which were legitimated politically or ideologically. In that paper my argument originated in my distress over what I saw as the easy capitulation of Indian intellectuals to Western academic domination: our often blind and uncritical acceptance and imitation of the latest critical fads that are spawned in the West, our incredible naïveté in ignoring history, culture and the Indian traditions of thought in our attempt to position ourselves favourably in this transaction. What minor and inconsequential positions do our wares occupy in the gigantic ideological supermarket that the Western critical enterprise has become – and such satisfaction and vanity do we derive from what is really our subservience and humiliation.4 A polemic arising out of distress, or for that matter out of shame or rage, usually occupies a oppositional space, generating what Edward Said has called ‘a politics of blame’. The ensuing rhetorical and political problem begins with using the language of the colonizers, with its apparatus and terminology. But there is no ‘uncontaminated’ space to speak of, free from Western influence. No Indian bhasa today is completely free from Western influence or has escaped a reconstruction of itself after the Western impact on India. So we are

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in a confused world where boundaries overlap and merge: nothing is ‘pure’ or ‘unsullied’ in culture, nothing has totally escaped the ‘vitiating’ contact with the West. Therefore, the aim is not to arrive at any such state of idealized purity, but to cope, here and now, with the realities of this oppressive partnership in which we seem to be trapped. The West is that necessary evil which we must understand and live with, without losing ourselves entirely in its iron embrace.5 It is in this sense that the ground of this exercise is somewhat strident and factional, if not unpopular or inopportune.6 After all post-colonial elites who collaborate with the dominant culture from the West do not wish to be exposed. They would instead shoot the messenger, so to speak. On the other hand, those who oppose the West are also frequently the most intolerant, fanatical and irrational groups in the third world. The space that my discourse occupies is thus tricky, like a minefield. My position, as stated in the previous chapter, is intermedial and remedial, rather than oppositional. Yet I have been thrust into this polemic by historical and ideological compulsions. The arguments I make are relevant in the context of our continuing subservience. To speak up in this fashion is thus both a duty and a necessity. We should, therefore, not be ashamed to raise our voice against our own subordination. Speaking ‘truth to power’, the old Hebraic imperative, is as much a dharma for our times as it has been for enslaved people anywhere and at any time.

Cutting edge of the profession To retell in greater detail the true story that I already alluded to, I came to the cutting, or should I say bleeding, edge of my profession in the most unlikely of places. It was a mid-sized town in the historic heartland of the Deccan, South India. Scattered in the dusty, semi-arid landscape were the ruins of old kingdoms.7 It was difficult to sustain the grandeur or glamour of any intellectual enterprise in such surroundings. Neither the university nor its English Department were particularly well known outside the region. I had been invited to give a special lecture. Of all things, I spoke on ‘theory’, of which the students in my audience had never heard, while the teachers had at best a cautious curiosity. In effect, I was given the impression that my talk was in line with the expected posturing of a ‘foreign-returned’ central university lecturer like me, but was totally irrelevant to them. I realized that several of the students in MA English were incapable of stringing together even four correct sentences in the language. How passionately did they desire all that went with the mastery of the

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master’s tongue. Yet they had no interest in, or idea of, what went into acquiring even a rudimentary understanding of the language, let alone attaining mastery in it. The reality of my situation sunk in as I rode on the pillion of a motor scooter to the campus where my talk was scheduled. My host was a senior Professor of Chemistry at the same university. We had met in the US where I was doing my PhD and he a post-doctoral fellowship. As we pottered over the bumpy, half-tarred and tattered dusty track avoiding the potholes and lumps of bitumen, he asked me a number of questions about my life and my work. He was a well-wisher, recognized and regarded in his own field. He also had the right caste identity later to become the Vice-Chancellor of that university. He said he had been thinking of my career. Interestingly, his advice was just the opposite of that of the English professors, whom I was soon to meet and who complained of the sad state of the discipline. After my talk they also hinted that all that I had said was fine-sounding but not ‘practical’. The ground reality was that their students had no interest in English Studies. My Chemistry Professor host said, instead, that I had done right to choose a ‘frontier’ area in my field such as theory. He advised me to keep working in it despite the odds. If I persisted, he was sure it would pay off: ‘In the long run, that will be your contribution to the discipline and help define who you are to yourself and to the world.’ My talk, titled ‘English Studies and the Search for Alternatives’, argued that English studies in India as an academic discipline was a construction of British imperialism, part of its larger agenda of domination and control. Despite what Homi K. Bhabha had said about the subversive power of mimicry, the fact was that the British had succeeded only too well. We were a ‘translated’, if not converted, lot, no matter whether our knowledge of English was rudimentary, middling or sound. ‘Knowledge is power’ was an old Roman dictum that the imperialists understood only too well. However, the pursuit of knowledge in English Studies in India had, I tried to show, paradoxically the opposite effect. The pupil comes to English from a mother tongue in which she is conversant, but which she has to abandon. Hence, instead of empowering the student, English disempowers her. I was tempted to use the gendered metaphor of gelding or emasculation, given that the majority of the students at that university were boys, but I could as easily have said that it neuters or spays the subject.8 The actual effects of the loss of mother tongue are too colossal to document fully; in India this enormous tragedy has struck not just

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individuals but entire classes. What ensues the loss of the mother tongue is a long and painful process of regaining and reclaiming lost power by acquiring proficiency in English, a process which is never completely successful. Even if the subject succeeds in becoming partially proficient in the field, it is usually at great personal expense – she has to pay the heavy price of cultural, social or national alienation. More often, she fails to become truly powerful in the field.9 She remains a ‘half-person’; the whole human, usually a white male, towers above her across continents, casting a baleful shadow on her puny endeavours. ‘I am the original,’ says the giant, ‘and you – ah well, what are you?’ I would have ventured to answer had it not been politically incorrect, ‘Someone who wants an MA in English to improve her marriage prospects!’ On the other hand, if you are a boy and haven’t made it to engineering, medicine or even commerce, what good are you? How many of us, whether privileged or not, ever hope to excel in this field, let alone become globally competitive? The situation in the lecture hall confirmed and illustrated my thesis. The blank looks and occasional hostility aside, I felt many had a genuine difficulty in understanding the drift of my argument. The odds of your doing well in English studies are very small, I was saying in effect to my audience of MA students. A few nodded politely, now and then. ‘Poor language skills’, said the Head of Department to me later, ‘very low comprehension in the language’. The mofussil background, the socio-economic and cultural deprivation of these students, considered ‘backward’ even in this part of country, were emblematic of our own subservience vis-à-vis the first world. My talk went on to question the various strategies that we might adopt to offset, at least partially, the inherent disadvantages of our area of study. When it comes to literature, we modify and restructure the syllabus by including post-colonial or Indian English literatures. Indian English literature is hardly taken seriously anywhere in the world unless the authors studied, such as V. S. Naipaul or Salman Rushdie, are globally recognized. When it comes to criticism, we try to apply the standards of Indian aesthetics to English literature, though few such attempts have proved fruitful. The response to such efforts to empower ourselves or to change our discipline does not amount to much. Not only in the West, which simply ignores them, but in India too, where they are regarded with scepticism, ironic amusement or dismissal. It would appear that we have no natural place in Western or cosmopolitan critical discourse; even in India, our own traditions hardly matter. Given this, how would theory, a new frontier, relate to the struggle of the colonized for liberation or independence? Would

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theory be merely a new burden, another imposition or an exciting tool for decolonization? Perhaps, the only person who actually understood the drift of my argument, if not its intricacies was my host, the Professor of Chemistry. Mulling over what I said, he responded rather cryptically: ‘It’s not so bad in the sciences.’ As I rode to his house on his scooter after the talk, I couldn’t but help admire him. He seemed to be saying that instead of complaining about adverse circumstances and lack of facilities, we in India ought to put our noses to the grindstone and work sincerely without hope or expectation of great results. I am not sure if I had the sense to follow his advice, but I know in retrospect that he was right. The almost miraculous manner in which India itself has advanced materially and intellectually in the intervening quarter century is itself the best demonstration of the changing times. But what I realized was that the cutting edge of my discipline was, to alter the metaphor, rather blunt. English studies in India were pursued usually for reasons other than research, scholarship or the production of knowledge. People learned English to rise socially, economically and professionally; English was a highly desirable cultural marker because it ensured a shortcut to upward mobility. If your English was good in India, you could do well even without having any other skills. Within the discipline, theory performed a similar role. It conferred instant visibility and upward mobility. It was like a caste-marker. It was highly regarded partly because it was little understood. Its very obscurity was its best advertisement.

Paradise lost Not surprising and somewhat ironically, I had declined to step onto the theory wagon not once, but twice. I missed my opportunity first in the heartland of the superpower when I was a graduate student at a large and respectable mid-Western school. I missed it a second time on my return to India, when theory was taking off in the colonies after having conquered the metropole. I first missed the bus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The year I joined the graduate programme in English, 1980, was somewhat significant. The impact of theory, which had begun to make itself felt during the 1970s, chiefly at Yale, Johns Hopkins, Berkeley and select elite schools, now started shaking the establishment all over America. As its tremors upset the stability of the older, descriptive and judicial modes of criticism, there was something of a mad scramble in academia to keep abreast. The Department of English at the U of I. was

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no exception to this trend. About a year after I joined, the School of Humanities constituted a Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, an interdisciplinary centre to study and propagate the new knowledge. The Unit was successful beyond its wildest dreams. While the die-hard empiricists, late new critics or upstaged structuralists were slow on the uptake and most of us graduate students too dazed or overworked to read the signs, the clever ones grabbed at the chance to join the winning side. Availing themselves of the theory elixir, it is they who won the job and tenure sweepstakes, proclaiming, He-Man like, ‘I have the power!’ By the time the first group of the students from the Unit completed their doctorates, theory was the hottest field going, its votaries very much in demand. Other graduates of the university found the going rough – conventional fields being already saturated. Invariably, they had to move down, going to less prestigious universities or colleges; those who had worked in theory, on the other hand, moved up. One remarkably successful case was of a graduate student who found placement at Cornell even before he had submitted his dissertation. That he was a compatriot, another third-world type like myself, made his leap to fame all the more breathtaking. In 1984 when I was just beginning to write my dissertation, the Unit organized a large conference on Marxist Critical theory. It was attended by ‘big names’ like Frederic Jameson, Stanley Cavell and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. It was here that Spivak gave her most celebrated and quoted paper, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’. UrbanaChampaign was agog; no one quite understood the tsunami that had hit it. The world would not be the same afterwards. Amazingly, I did not get involved even though one of the main graduate volunteers invited me too. Instead, I read Indian mystics then. Besides being temperamentally stubborn and emotionally immature, I had another reason for not becoming a joiner. I was struggling with a moral dilemma: just because everyone starts running in one direction, should one also join the melee or should one stick to one’s ground? I didn’t want to fake it. I didn’t know what theory, especially as propounded and preached by left-leaning post-colonialists and subalterns, was about. On the other hand, I had read precious little of Continental philosophy and simply did not have the equipment to understand, let alone notice, possible convergences of concerns between mysticism and theory. As to the Unit, I thought that there were a couple of big flaws in its enterprise. First of all, far from being universal it was utterly Eurocentric. Though its professed aims suggested global concerns, its concerns, if not ‘parochial’, were not sufficiently internationalized in those days. There was little room for the valorization of cultural difference. With

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a large Indian chip on my shoulders, I felt shut out. Of course, later, cultural difference would become key, as in Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s work. She, incidentally, was the graduate student organizer of the conference who had so generously invited me to jump onto the bandwagon. Even if literary criticism if not critical theory flourished outside Europe, the members of the Unit knew nothing about it, nor were they interested. Not a single one of the weekly seminars considered Indian theories of meaning and interpretation – Bharata, Nagarjuna, Anandavardhana, Abhinavagupta – none was ever mentioned or discussed. As I passed their door, I often felt like barging in and demanding: ‘But what about non-Western criticism and interpretative theory?’ But I never asked the question. There are ways and means of asking such questions, but I did not have them. On the other hand, I had a sense that the moment you advance your claim for recognition, you have already put yourself in a subaltern position. The burden of proving the worth of your tradition is upon you; those from whom you seek recognition become the sanctioning and licensing authorities. It is as if we come into academic existence when they accord us the right. Until then, even in our own eyes, we don’t exist. By not joining, not protesting either, I thought the burden was on them: my very existence as someone who was the repository of nonWestern theory was proof of their inadequacy and incompleteness. It was a living disproof against their claim to universality and inclusiveness. I justified my position by convincing myself that in any ideological battle, we have to remember to play the game on our own terms and by our own rules. We must attack not the conclusions of the opponent, but the assumptions; strike at the root, not the branch. Perhaps, by abstaining, non-cooperating, I was actually deluding myself rather than denting the Unit or the Western academy that supported it. Perhaps I should have joined the group to make my point. But they were also happy to ignore me. I was inconvenient to them. It was a strange situation, which I lacked the vocabulary if not the consciousness to articulate. My other concerns were more fundamental. One of them related to the imbrication of the theoretical enterprise in the will to power. Theory instead of being liberating was creating new hierarchies. It was displacing older power structures with new ones. Though not a bloody revolution, this substitution was often like a coup d’etat. Those who were considered obsolete were hounded out of academic positions of power and prestige, while others on the make grabbed the new opportunities, staking their claims not only to the vacated sinecures but to new empires. I could detect this subterraneous struggle even in my

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own English department. The competing factions each sought followers and acolytes, graduate students being their favoured troopers. But apart from being roiled in power politics, the theoretical enterprise also seemed to be trapped in a linguistic and (ir)rationalist prism, out of which there was no visible or viable escape. Theory still went on in the domain of the intellect. Its self-consciously agonized or triumphant cerebrations left me cold. My readings in mysticism, in which I was then immersed, showed me the limitations and transitoriness of the mind. Theory, no matter how hard it tried, was still enmeshed in mentality because it did not allow or posit anything beyond the mind or its languages. Even while denying logocentrism, it still seemed stuck in the kingdom of logos, that demiurge enshrined by the Greeks as pure reason and by the Christianized Romans as God Incarnate. But I found its masquerade oppressive and unconvincing, at least in its modern avatar. This was the deity of fallen and secularized species, who had denounced the Orphic mysteries, the oracles of Delphi, and the truthseeking of the Sophists. It was also the replacement of the jealous Abrahamic monotheos, that God who forbade reverence to any other. In its later European version, it became a sleek, hard and efficient instrument to all kinds of horrific causes. Such was the memoire of logos. What a wonderful tool-maker and handyman it was, classifying everything, measuring everything, helping us control nature and create our daily comforts. But could it understand and cope with life, suffering, death? I did not know then that there were ways, both past and present, of linking logos not only to mythos but also to theos, ways that might change the very purpose and direction of the Unit of Criticism and Interpretive Theory. I remained stuck in my grouses and dissatisfactions. My ‘boycott’ of the Unit, which perhaps went totally unnoticed, was not without its significance, at least to me. After all, I thought, we don’t live to be noticed by them; we live for ourselves, to do what we value and cherish. If we believe in ourselves, we will never give another the power to tell us what we are. I was saving myself for the opportune moment when a fitting response might be possible on my own terms. I had no idea that such a response would take years, even decades to materialize. Looking back I realize that my diffidence was also a defence mechanism. But the mystics kept me company and when they were kind to me, I was lost to my immediate concerns and to the world. One thing was, however, clear: I would plough a lonely furrow. I would go against the dominant academic currents of my time. That would form me even if did not alter the discipline.

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Theory at the ASRC The participants, youngish research scholars and lecturers; the location, that once-hallowed, soon to be hollowed, precinct of the American Studies Research Centre (ASRC) on the campus of Osmania University, Hyderabad; the year, 1989. The organizers of the workshop had chosen the ‘best and brightest’ of the many applicants. The purpose was to acquaint them with the ‘latest’ developments in theory. These college teachers and research scholars in turn longed to be initiated into the secret rituals of the field. Moreover, their lodging, boarding and train fares had been paid for by the ASRC. Among the teachers of the course were not just ‘senior’ Indian professors or junior upstarts like me, but the greatest, grandest last minute star attraction, none other than Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak herself, persuaded to conduct one session. The quality of the presentations, of course, was mixed, but what was clear was that we were all to worship at the shrine to a new goddess, Devi (Gayatri Chakravorty) Theory. Like all self-motivated worship, the prayers at this altar were also very this-worldly: knowledge, power, promotions, tenure, fellowships, foreign trips. I could not blame the aspirants. We were, all of us, seekers after professional advancement. Moreover, the conditions in which we taught and lived were, perhaps, not the most attractive and conducive to any grand quest for truth or higher consciousness. All of us were compromised by our (op)positions in the system. But what of the senior professors, the conductors of the workshop? Couldn’t they offer some resistance to what was being promoted? I began to consider their ideological roles. They were the transmitters of the new knowledge from overseas as the participants were the recipients. ASRC, the host institution, was the conduit, the agent of neocolonialism. Not one of the Indian professors who were present had made an original contribution to theory. They had been invited simply for their ability to read, summarize and transmit. The system encouraged them in their secondary roles; as always, the immediate rewards for subservience and mediocrity are high. This is the manner in which our duteous truckling flourished. There are rewards in it for everyone – the producers of the discourse in the West, their middlemen and agents in India, and the recipients, thousands of them, beyond these eager college teachers to hordes of struggling students. Is it any wonder then that literature is a lucrative ‘cash crop’ in Britain or the US, a profitable, export-oriented commodity? Note the proud blazoning of this in the special franking on the envelopes of the Cambridge University Press, Britain’s second oldest

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publisher: ‘Her Majesty’s special award for export-promotion’. The ideology of Western academia is obvious – it works a propaganda machine which, directly or indirectly, is supported by the capitalistic, industrial state apparatus, which in turn funds institutions like the ASRC or the British Council. So we go to such seminars for our half-yearly dose of the latest from the West. Who’s in, who’s out; what’s true, what’s not – we wait patiently to be told, to receive. How glibly the rhetoric of indoctrination flows: as I. A. Richards has shown; as Levi-Strauss suggests; as Derrida has demonstrated. . . . On marches the colonial juggernaut, constructing, deconstructing, reconstructing. We, the marginalized, neo-colonials watch with profound awe – that is, until we discover that we are in the belly of the beast. The star of the show, Spivak, hardly said anything. Her appearance and disappearance were both puzzling and anti-climactic. She came covered in a grey shawl, perhaps not wanting to be recognized, mobbed. But no one seemed to know her; what was even more astonishing is that no one cared. The organizers were preening in reflected glory, but she ignored them utterly. They, too, had not read her. She was perhaps aware of the pointlessness of the whole exercise. I happened to drop her home in my car later – there were no taxis available. She and her companion, who had been my block tutor at College and now felt feverish, wanted to make a quiet getaway. In my dinky little car she and my former block tutor sat at the back, while I drove them, chauffeur-like, with the co-passenger’s seat beside me empty. Spivak said that none of the participants had any preparation for such a course. They knew very little of mainstream Western philosophy, without which it was impossible to understand a thinker like Jacques Derrida, whose Of Grammatology she had translated. Earlier, during her semester as a visiting professor at JNU, she had similarly punctured the bloated self-esteem of her leftist students by telling them that they were both ignorant and pompous, not having read or understood even Marx himself. She, one of the producers of theory, was in effect admitting that it was not everyone’s cup of tea nor did it travel as easily as it was made out to, that, instead, it required many years of hard work, training and preparation. I was reminded of Said’s evocative, provocative, essay, ‘Travelling Theory’, where he suggests that theory travels so easily precisely because it has come to mean almost anything to anyone. Am I deliberately misreading Said? Perhaps, what he really meant is how difficult, almost impossible, it is for theory to really travel, the contexts of its producing, transmission and reception being so different. What

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does travel, by implication, are simplified summaries, taken out of context, translated from difficult original passages in French, German, Russian and so on, into American English, then disseminated the world over, for the consumptions of the masses. The participants, innocent of all such thoughts, were quite pleased to be a part of the elect few. On completing the workshop, they could show off among their peers that they had superior endowments. Spivak was perhaps the only other person in the Workshop who was aware of these issues, with their complex power dynamics, inequalities and hierarchies. But she had been a beneficiary of the system while we at the receiving end. Moreover, her interest in India was quite at odds with mine. I was still committed to svaraj, to nation and institution building, perhaps foolishly. The ASRC, where this and many such workshops, conferences, seminars and courses took place over the years, was actually an institution I loved. It was an oasis in the academic deserts of middle-India. Organized and managed like an American library, with resources unmatched by any similar institution in South Asia, it had a totally different work culture and atmosphere from most Indian institutions. The librarians were efficient; they actually found books and journals for you. The library building was air-conditioned. Even the lunch, reasonably priced, was not inedible. Plus, the toilets were clean and the environs pleasant. All these features, which we may take for granted in India today, were really rare thirty years back. Most of all, you met everyone who was anyone in American Studies there. From the other end of the city, the Gachi Bowli campus of the University of Hyderabad, I would make a weekly trek to the ASRC to spend my library day there. It was worth all the trouble getting there and back. You could spend the whole day without feeling that you had wasted any time. Even the abominable 25-km commute through the crowded, dusty and polluted city was worth reaching this US outpost in the distant Deccan. You could see at ASRC the great desire of Indians to be like Americans; it was a strong, raw animal urge, almost. But it was also exclusive and excluding; somehow, you knew that not everyone could get this. If you were in, you had to keep the smelly masses out; else they might overrun and destroy the place. No surprise, then, that the ASRC, as I have argued elsewhere, was clearly a neo-imperial cultural institution, built during the Cold War with the specific intention of promoting the American ideology, and funded by the State Department through its extension, the USIS. Why should it surprise us that it encouraged American Studies that were based on US models and therefore imitative?10 It nevertheless performed the vital function of showing us what a well-run, contemporary

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academic institution in India would look like. In its own way, the ASRC was not only the last of our neo-colonial institutions in being directly funded by the US government, but also a welcome station, as I earlier acknowledged, of America in the South. After it won the Cold War, the US pulled the plug. Perhaps, promoting American culture was no longer necessary; its superiority was self-evident. In those trying times, I was one of the many who tried to ‘save’ the ASRC. We moved petitions, tried to lobby the USIS, even succeeded in getting a transitional grant from the Ford Foundation. But the writing on the wall was clear. This was the end. The American lady sent under the Ford Foundation bridge grant wasn’t interested in securing the future of ASRC; instead, we realized that her mandate was to wind it up. You want it, you fund it – that was the message. No Indian body or individual was willing to shoulder the burden, perhaps rightly so, for what was now clearly acknowledged as a US pet project. The institution was returned to its ill-equipped, reluctant parent, the Osmania University. After some changes in name and identity, it survives today only with the additional aid from the University Grants Commission. But neither the UGC nor the Osmania University on whose land it is located has been able to restore it to its former glory. Sadly, we failed to do in our own country what the Americans succeeded so well in accomplishing in a far-off, unfamiliar territory. Neoimperialism succeeds better than nationalism: this is a fact that all but a few such as myself are happy to accept.

An essay in Oxford Literary Review11 It is an interesting example of the attempt by a third-world intellectual to use the available forums in the West to state the anti-colonial case. Gauri Viswanathan was Edward Said’s student at Columbia. Mentored by one of the most eloquent critics of Western imperialism, she had the right tutelage to find a place in the Oxford Literary Review (OLR). The journal itself, with another scholar of Indian origin on its editorial board, had become a kind of oasis for third-world intellectuals, a rallying point for a new nucleus of criticism. This nucleus was, supposedly, on the ‘right’ side of things though so obviously ‘left’ ideologically. Or was this really the case? In his essay, ‘Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community’, Said provides the following framework for analysing the ‘Politics of Interpretation’: ‘Who writes? For whom is the writing done? In what circumstances?’ Answering these questions, according to Said, ‘provide us with the ingredients making for a politics of interpretation’ (7).

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Applying these criteria to the article in OLR, we might quickly see that the writer, a scholar of Indian origin (‘who writes’), writing for a Western audience (‘for whom is the writing done?’), living in the West (‘in what circumstances?’) constitutes a part of the West. Indeed, I have no difficulties with this situation; any such academic must publish, seek tenure, form her own affiliations to survive. But let us try to answer the question that Said asks, ‘for whom is the writing done’? Is this essay in OLR written for an Indian audience? Even if the answer is obvious, let us try to address it properly so that we are not perceived as being hasty, ungenerous, dismissive. Let us ask how many people in India get to read OLR? Even in a big city like Hyderabad where I lived, with a population of over 3.5 million in the late 1980s, with several universities and institutions of higher learning, with libraries which are very good by Indian standards, how many copies of OLR might be available? After a search, I found that only one library, the previously mentioned ASRC, subscribed to the journal. One must not, of course, discount the Indian knack of collecting secondary sources by any means possible, which implies that the article would circulate in those pre-Internet days through photocopies made by the greedy or the needy. By now the point should be obvious: by its very placement, the article is not primarily for an Indian readership. My audience at Gulbarga University, for instance, would never get to read this article, let alone hear of it. And barring a few exceptions in major cities, nor would English teachers elsewhere in India. The fact is that even today, after much more contemporary scholarship is available online, Indian students, scholars and researchers hardly read journal articles. They simply do not feel part of the literary or critical community for whom such journals function. In those days, matters were much worse. I remember having to play catch-up every summer, whenever I had a chance to go abroad, doing a year’s reading in a month or two, just to stay abreast with what was going on in my field of interest. To return to Viswanathan’s essay, it is in the main, a narration of by-now well-known historical events, later incorporated in her book Masks of Conquest (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). The fundamental ‘flaw’ in this book is that it conflates the beginnings of English Studies with the institutionalization ‘English education’, which actually were related but not identical: (1) education in the English medium and (2) Western knowledge and curricula in general. This change took place after Macaulay’s infamous Minute of 2 February 1835 settling the policy debate in favour of English. ‘English education’, which actually meant the Western knowledge system studied

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through the English language as distinct from native Indian systems of learning through Sanskrit or other Indian languages, was not the same as English Studies as we understand them. Not just History, Logic, Philosophy, but Chemistry, Anatomy or medicine, in fact anything originating in the West, would come to be called ‘English education’. English literature was merely one of the many subjects that students appearing for a BA in Hindu (later Presidency College) would be expected to study. It is, however, true that the study of English literature in this fashion began not in England, but in the colonies, where the first anthologies of English poetry were compiled and produced. My purpose is not to analyse the content of the essay as much as to analyse its placement vis-à-vis India. Viswanathan’s central argument is that institutionalization of English in India was an outcome of the political designs of the British imperialism. But to whom is the author trying to say this? To the very system whose discourse now rules over our minds – that is, Western academia? The latter, like all powerful groups, quickly co-opts and appropriates the author and her likes, according them a subsidiary place within its own system, rewarding them with jobs, tenure and professorships. The compatriots on whose behalf she might have raised her voice remain where they are – looking on from the margins. Obviously, this is a very peculiarly political, possibly reductive reading of an academic paper. The contra-argument would be that scholars do not represent nation, race or ethnic interest; they simply write to discover and communicate the truth. While this may be the selfestimation of the objective sciences, no one in the Humanities and Social Sciences would subscribe to such a context and value-neutral epistemology. Instead, we would argue that all knowledge formation is situated, embodied and interested rather than disinterested. If so, by choosing to live and work in the West and by using the benefits of its system, such intellectuals become affiliated to the West, as Viswanathan’s guru Said reminds. Do they also forfeit their right to speak on our behalf? Perhaps, I might not go that far, but how can anyone deny that she who pays the piper calls the tune or that those intellectuals serve the Western academy, working for it and earning their salaries from it, cannot represent the Global South? It is those who live and work in and for the latter that, strictly speaking, have this right. In fact, merely by living in the third world, sharing its day-to-day struggle for selfhood and dignity, an intellectual participates and thus suffers this struggle; the expatriate intellectual, on the other hand represents her own cause – unless she has been driven out of her country, forced into exile. Why should she be accepted as the voice of her people if she has emigrated for her own pleasure and profit?

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Any post-colonialist worth her salt would agree that it is the former, stay-at-home, organic type of intellectual to build the counter-imperialistic discourse. Whatever they may claim, our expatriate friends who have settled down in the West are really fighting for themselves, which is hard enough. For them their ethnicity or colonial past may be a marketing ploy, a pretext to find their niche in system which would otherwise give them very little space. We can give them our sympathy and support, but not the authority to speak on our behalf. Their concern is with finding a legitimate place for themselves within the West, while our struggle is with finding an alternative to it. In the worst cases, these expatriate intellectuals end up doing little more than exploiting their status as ‘victims’, a status which they have materially forfeited by living in the West and enjoying its prosperity, to further their own interests. Worse, they are middlemen and women, commenting on, critiquing, reorientalizing, serving up India to the West, where there is always a demand for their expertise. If those of us who live and work in the third world were proud and conscious of their locations rather than being ashamed, helpless and envious, matters would be different. But, as I have shown, most of us are colonized here and most of those who go to the West, no longer serve our interests. Therefore, truly, speaking no one really speaks or cares for the colonized. This is the harsh truth of our times. My point is that the politics and privileges of location cannot so easily be overlooked as they usually are. The privileged are so in denial or full of guilt that they simply dismiss those who question their cultural politics. There is a huge gap and difference between being located within the metropolis and advocating, say, a vernacular cosmopolitanism  – and living in a vernacular and subaltern situation, actually practising as a vernacular writer or critic. In the latter case, paradoxically, the usual aspiration is to cosmopolitanism, while in the former the putative vernacularism becomes a way to mitigate if not mask privilege. Said’s politics of interpretation is usually a way to critique the dominant; when it is turned on third-world intellectuals in the Western academy, there is much discomfort and some discomfiture, if not wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth.

Domination and dependence There comes a time when one must stop using decoys or firing from behind sandbags; one must come out into the open, even if it is to expose oneself to attack from all sides. If I were to make such a last ditch, I would say that the ‘post’, despite its many possibilities, is as irrelevant, at one level, as what preceded it, whether it was structuralism, existentialism or new criticism. Relative to India, they have

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essentially the same effect – they all tend to be seen not for what they are but as privileged examples of Western knowledge, authorized by the latter’s civilizational superiority. This might sound strange, especially when we consider how several ‘postal’ developments like deconstruction, Marxist, feminist and psychoanalytic criticism were distinctly anti-authoritarian in their orientation. They arrived with the promise of new vistas and were eagerly welcomed by a profession threatened, at least in the West, with financial cuts from without and ennui from within. This new wave overturned authority not only out there, in the real world, but within the text itself: it dethroned the tyranny of interpretation and challenged the capacity of language itself to make meaning. The text could thus become the symbolic battleground for a struggle towards a more ethical and egalitarian world order. But for us over here, this invasion made not much of a difference, as I noticed in Gulbarga or, even, Hyderabad. We just wanted to learn the jargon, not be left behind. The power struggle is going on out there but whoever wins, we are still lost. From Arnold to Eliot, Richards to Frye, Lukács to Gramsci, Sartre to Derrida – our principals have changed, but we still remain clients. The propulsion to intellectual change in the West is usually generated by forces which are internal; but for us in the south, the impetus is usually external. We must keep up with the West at any cost or be left forever behind. The struggle to bridge the knowledge, the technology and, above all, the ideology gap is our foremost compulsion in the humanities and social sciences. Indeed, we derive our legitimacy in India by how well we keep up with the ‘latest’ trends in Western scholarship. Western scholars who work on India and patronize us as junior partners, in turn, may lay claim to acceptance and authenticity. This intellectual world system develops dependence in us and supports the West’s dominance over us. It is true that the content of the theories cannot be ignored, nor can all theories be lumped together. But their structural asymmetry vis-a-vis Indian intellectual production remains. It is this lopsidedness which is reproduced from generation to generation. This is the common thread that runs through colonialism and post-colonialism, regardless of the claims of the latter to overturn unequal relations.

Five fissures 1. The dialectical trap If we turn our attention to what the West has been grappling with, we might call it the trap of dialectics. Even when Robert Ornstein, for

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instance, talks of the right brain generating the non-discursive, nondialectical or intuitive mode of consciousness, he is doing so in a very left-brained way. His very classification is dialectical. Derrida comes closer to the mystical position by admitting that his own text is open to continual deconstruction. This brings us to aporia (derived from apoha?) ‘the impassable path’ – because language offers no fixed position, no stable observation post or centre of gravity from which we may formulate or codify the rest of the universe. Thus, key words in Of Grammatology are placed sous rature, ‘under erasure’, to undercut any attempt to view them as rigid categories. But doesn’t this suggest that the Derridean method still assumes that the ‘real’ state of things can be alluded to if not expressed through such semantic or graphic tricks – while paradoxically repeating that the search for the signified is interminable? If we ‘know’ that the word is/is not the thing, to try to ‘prove’ this in words would be merely to show how unprovable it is. Western philosophy has a misplaced faith in logos as the final arbiter of things. When logos is used against itself, we have aporia – which, unfortunately, remains yet another concept to be worked out, inverted, criticized, analysed, elaborated, transformed, misread and so on. But where is the breakthrough, the way out of the trap?12 There is existential despair, loneliness and suffering in the Western philosophical project. It cannot put an end to itself; like Lucky’s speech in Waiting for Godot or the final scream in Cries and Whispers, it cannot deny the mind, but only express its anguished cry. Like a tethered beast it grunts and growls, making endless patterns within its own petty boundaries. ‘What else do we have,’ it cries out in anguish, ‘but reason?’ Such a query can only be answered in silence lest the attempted answer drag one back into the blighted circle of reason. Post-structuralist indeterminacy of meaning and eternal play, in one sense, are reminiscent of Indian concepts of leela (play) and maya (seeming). But such connections are yet to be made rigorously. Several of us, ironically, arrive at our conceptual vocabulary via Western sources. Similarly, the ‘postal’ impasse, causing such mental torture and the anguish, may be countered by ‘pure awareness’. Mysticism, in fact, begins with aporia, with the noetic or the ineffable, unlike much of the ‘post’, which ends with it. 2. Europe and patricide The Oedipus myth well illustrates the fatal flaw in Western thought. Freud said as much when he called it as early as 1905 in Totem and Taboo, ‘the nuclear complex of the neurosis’ (2001: 149–150). But

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Oedipus is a much later figure in a long line of partricides: Cronus kills Uranus, his father, and usurps the overlordship of the Titans; he, in turn, is overthrown by his son Saturn; Saturn too is killed by his son Zeus. These myths illustrate how the Western intellectual enterprise works. A literary adaption of Freud’s Oedipus complex may be found in Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence. In this book, a poet to attain literary stature, struggles against his predecessor, the strong poet that he misreads if necessary, but must overthrow, before he can find his proper space in the canon. Such patricide I see as a powerful motif in the intellectual history of the West: each generation denounces, if not decapitates, its forbears in order to supplant them.13 That is why the West is merely rewriting itself, generation after generation. As Howard Felperin observes, the structuralists rethought everything in terms of linguistics; now the post-structuralists are rethinking everything in terms of deconstruction (72). In the sphere of ideology, it is an endless process of substitution, arguably without real progress; progress is confined to science and technology. Because Western modern civilization, as Gandhi alleged in Hind Swaraj, is a quest for power and pleasure, not virtue and truth, it remains violent and usurpatory. The more it progresses technologically and materially, the more destructive it can be because its wisdom quotient, worked out through substitution rather than evolution, has remained more or less static. In addition, given the logic of theory-commodification, every few years we must be prepared for yet another invasion, another wave, another version, displacing what is quickly declared as outdated or obsolete. Such occasions, like new models of motor cars or launches of new phones, are somewhat festive; after all, much profit is to be made and the spoils are likely to be shared. The dethroning of authority, hence, means the reinstation of newer authorities. Move over Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva – welcome Levinas, Zizek, Butler. 3. Criticism for power and profit The Western critical enterprise is competitive not to mention commercial. It functions in the marketplace as any other form of capitalistic production, with lobbies, special interest groups and brokers. Behind the special interest groups or lobbies are careerist individuals, each working for more power and money. What is in demand is what sells, not necessarily what is ‘true’. Each fights for his or her slice of the pie. The whole field is hopelessly fragmented, individuals and groups struggling for personal gain, holding on to their flag and identity. In this free for all scuffle, the commonweal is forgotten. In India, too, we

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seem to be following the same pattern. Competitive identity politics and the fetishization of deprivation have replaced cooperative intellectual endeavour or ideas of the common good. Where is dharma in all this? The aggression and suffering produced in the wake of such a system should hardly surprise us. There are winners and losers; those who make it and those who end up as rejects, flung by the wayside, mere refuse.14 The strong, with their privileges, lord it over the weak, who in turn wish to become like the former. Western scholarship, as it exists today, is a product of European expansion and colonialism. What a sorry history it has of greed, plunder, oppression, land-grabbing, conquest and mass-murder in the name of progress, Enlightenment, humanism. This is a history of slavery, indenture, torture, conversion, genocide, war, famine, the holocaust and the atom bomb. Through brute force the West sought their ends in the world, whether in the Americas or in Africa or in Asia. Wherever they went, they took with them death, destruction and disease. Such is the patrimony of modern Western civilization.15 The West, despite professing Christianity, knows little of compassion and power-sharing. That is why the disenfranchised even within criticism have to fight tooth and nail for their rights, whether they are blacks, females or other minorities. In India, on the other hand, many elite groups voluntarily gave up or denounced their own privileges. This fact cannot be falsified even if their contribution is vehemently and vociferously denied by the underprivileged, who have succeeded in using the state machinery to institutionalize reverse, even revengeful, discrimination. Critical communities on both sides of the north-south divide are internally divided and unproductive. But that doesn’t mean that all these fragments are equally virtuous or viable. 4. ‘Provincializing’ Europe Europe and its extension, North America, are not the world; they themselves say this over and over again. We hear, but we don’t really believe them. We still ‘know’ and behave as if they are the master-race. Some, like the jihadists, may hate them, but the rest still treat them as superior beings. Not just socially, but sexually, the premium placed on the white male is immense – witness how it is played on in every part of the world in the James Bond franchise. ‘License to kill’, which really makes Bond a state-sponsored murderer, is also a euphemism for the licence to sexually ‘slay’ all types of significant others, regardless of nationality, race, ethnicity or region.16 Omnivorous appetite – coupled with the will to preserve hunting rights – is what Bond represents. Such symbolism, so widely prevalent, is not without theoretical import.

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Given their material, military and cultural supremacy, the space that Europe and North America occupy in our collective consciousness is so immense that very little room is left for the other countries and regions of the world. There is so much else, even in the conventional package of history, politics, economics and culture, in the rest of the world to learn from. But because we were colonized by Europe and now willingly embrace American imperialism, we find ourselves compelled to spend our entire intellectual energies coming to terms with their thought, philosophy, culture, not to mention technology and gadgetry. Rather than perpetuating Euro-American centrism, shouldn’t we try the harder to understand the other parts such as the Arab world, Iran and central Asia, Indo-China and China, which form a part of our own neighbourhood, not to mention Africa and South America? Our history will show how different we are from Europe, how greatly our experience differs from theirs, how un-European we are really. In fact, conscious Europeanization of Indian intellectuals begins with their realization that they are not European. They realize that given the way the world is, this renders them powerless. So they begin to Europeanize in order to empower themselves, turning themselves into the agents of Europe in the process. This turning away from our roots, exchanging our inherited svadharma for another more alluring and lucrative one is, paradoxically, the very moment that we also lose power. The moment we capitulate, accepting the superiority of Europe, is also admission of our own inferiority. In looking for our place in the Eurocentric world order, we allow ourselves to get Westernized. Once converted, we might chafe and complain. Guilt, shame, rage, ressentiment – these may be the characteristic responses of the decultured, denationalized third-world intellectuals to their condition as hirelings of the West – but they do not conduce, or conduct us, to svaraj. 5. Svaraj as power But does power really confer superiority? The moment we accept this, we have lost our battle for intellectual equality and self-respect. To generate our own counter-colonial discourses from our own experiences, traditions and imaginations, not to regret our powerlessness in the world of someone else’s making into which we find ourselves inserted, to fight for greater self-determination and self-respect – these are the challenges for third-world intellectuals. The radical response to the West is the response from a different, non-European centre. This is the gift of Mahatma Gandhi to us, the gift of fearlessness, of moral and spiritual might with which to tackle material and monetary power. It is svaraj, self-mastery, which teaches us not to feel powerless because we know

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that we are actually very powerful, each one of us carrying within the infinite capacities that birthed the stars. Indeed, we could argue that this is one of modern India’s gifts to the world – how to face superior physical and material power without losing one’s dignity or self-esteem.

Recovery Even as I finish this chapter, it is obvious that the way of resistance that I have advocated is not the only way. Often, we have to capitulate, give in, accept defeat – in the face of overwhelming force. This too is sanctioned in our shastras as a possible option under extreme duress. Hence, we must accept imitation, collusion and Westernization as valid and inevitable types of response to the West. Such crossings and conversions, both within and outside the fold are as old as the clash of civilizations. While we cannot but empathize with those who have succumbed, we must not hold them up as exemplars or models, even if they are the poster boys or show girls of neo-colonialism. Indeed, some of us, breaking with them, must come out to the forefront to resist openly and consciously our continuing subservience and subjugation. True, the West is not really separate from us; we are the West – we are our other. But this oneness and concert can only be achieved by asserting our difference, by standing up for ourselves, our culture, our interests, by insisting on svaraj. That is why one aspect of this chapter has been to recount how the project of decolonization of the Indian mind has advanced over the years. If we in India do not behave as if we have come of age intellectually or academically, our inferiority and subjection to the West will continue, as will our insecurity, insularity, narrow-mindedness and lack of generosity to each other. If we behave as colonized people do, we shall continue to remain colonized. We neither read nor cite each other in India. We do not take ourselves or our peers seriously. We have a oneway relationship with the Western academy; we read and quote them, while they ignore us. Our efforts are almost exclusively directed at winning the approbation and authorization from the West, so content are we to remain their lackeys and camp followers. If at all we take notice of each other at all, it is either via the West or via its Indian outposts such as the Oxford University Press, the British Council and the Max Mueller Bhavan. It embarrasses us to say that we have not read Marx, Gramsci, Derrida, Foucault, Levinas, Agamben, Latour, whereas it is almost a matter of pride to confess that we have not even heard of read Buddadev Bose, Shantinath Desai, G. N. Devy, Dharampal, K. R. Srinivasa Iyenger, Kapil Kapoor, M. K. Naik, C. D. Narasimhaiah, Bhalchandra

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Nemade, Krishna Rayan, Harish Trivedi, D. R. Nagaraj, Namvar Singh, V. Y. Kantak, to name a few. To admit that we have not read major Euro-American critics is to concede to one’s incompetence; to say that we have not read our Indian peers is merely to indicate our low opinion of them. In fact, it is only slightly less fashionable to divulge in India that we have not read or are not interested in Rabindranath Tagore, M. K. Gandhi, Sri Aurobindo, B. R. Ambedkar, Ram Manohar Lohia, Jayaprakash Narayan and so on. On the other hand, to declare that one has not read the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, the Dhammapada or Kabir, Nanak, Tulsi and so on is often considered a positive advantage. In fact, some of the brightest Indian minds in Indian Humanities and Social Studies assume an ambiguous and ambivalent space in which they neither reveal nor declare their ideological, national, regional, political, cultural or local identities, let alone shoulder the responsibilities of their privileges. They continue to flaunt their latest imported ideological and technological gadgets, boast of frequent visits abroad and do their best to keep their juniors in awe and subordination. To have a long-standing summer appointment abroad in addition to tenure at central government institution in India is of course next only to being a star professor at an Ivy League university or its equivalent abroad.17 Yet being a lonely and against the grain intellectual long before India’s great leap forward has not been entirely bad. Lonely svarajists like me were sustained by other intellectual karmayogis. One of them was the remarkable and redoubtable professor of philosophy, the late K. J. Shah, who said to me: ‘The day I started reading Manusmriti I stopped worrying about trying to keep up with the latest from the West.’ As I stared at him slightly perplexed, even alarmed, he continued, ‘When I started seriously engaging with Indian intellectual traditions, reading classical texts like the Natyasastra, Vakyapadiya, Mahabharata and, yes, Manavadharmasastra, I knew that this civilization has depth and power.’ Shah was born in a Jain merchant family, but left his ancestral vocation for an academic career. He read philosophy at Cambridge with Wittgenstein, was one of the pioneers of analytical philosophy in India, but then switched to a study of classical Indian texts. After teaching at the Karnatak University, Dharwar, for several decades, he retired but gave his time and talent to encourage Indian intellectuals. Let me recall two other such organic intellectuals, Ram Bapat the political philosopher from Pune and T. G. Vaidyanathan, professor of English in Bengaluru, both left of centre, authentically situated intellectuals. In these three decades as an Indian academic, I learned from many such practitioners of India’s oral tradition not merely to read or

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respond to theory – or any academic discourse for that matter – but to produce and practise theory myself. The ability to theorize out of a lived struggle with ideas, situations and intellectual systems is quite different and far more empowering that what is derived second hand just through books and ideas imported from abroad. The ecology of subservience, mediocrity, entitlement and chicanery, which did not seem to bother many of my colleagues, was almost unbearable to me. My daily struggle with it, with neo-colonialism, with my subordinate position in the world system and, above all, with the contradictions of my own society – both inside and outside the classroom, has defined my identity as an intellectual in India. Much of my anguish came not so much from not being recognized in the West, but from knowing that my own society, on whose behalf I had returned and for whose svaraj I was striving, did not care. In fact, I was repeatedly reproved for not conforming to the general acquiescence to Western dominance, penalized for not upholding and perpetuating it, which would have been my rightful ‘duty’ as a foreignreturned intellectual. On the other hand, those who raised the flag of revolt were usually Marxists, whom I found to be conformists of another sort. Again, adherence and obedience to an ideological line were expected. Deviance was severely punished. Indian Marxists hunt in packs and practise intellectual untouchability. Their journals such as Social Scientist or Economic and Political Weekly also practise the same forms of exclusion and excommunication. Such was the scheme of things throughout the 1980s and 1990s in India. Yet, I felt a tremendous drive, an unflagging energy, to continue doing what I knew best because I was convinced that it was worthwhile. Every now and then, there were sure signs of support from unexpected quarters – all of a sudden, events, experiences and people who would renew one’s faith in oneself and one’s culture. Above all, the parampara, made up of both ancient and modern rishis or sages, the real source of the sanskars or cultural codes of the land, nourished and sustained one. In spite unfavourable circumstances and not inconsiderable intellectual and material hardships, I think I have produced better work in India than I could have anywhere in the world. I was never as free, as inspired, as involved, as busy and as stimulated as I have been in India this last quarter of a century. Above all, I had found svaraj. That is why, in spite of these dolorous musings, I am convinced that time is on our side. The decolonization of the Indian mind is an inevitable historical process. In the last few years, it has been accelerated not by theory but by our actual economic and scientific achievements.

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In this, successful Indians abroad, especially in the US, have played as great a role as first generation billionaires in India. The IT revolution has done more to shift us out of our sense of inferiority than truckloads of theory could. The rise of our GDP is more important in promoting decolonization than any ideology. After years of carrying a campaign against academic globalization, organized Left economics in India was defeated; India did embrace globalization after 1991. There is enough data to show that freeing the productive and creative power of Indian masses alleviates poverty, not socialist slogans nor a licence-permit-quota Raj brand of crony and statist capitalism. Since the 1990s, when we adopted economic liberalization, the economy has grown at no less than 5 per cent each year, among the highest in the world. Not surprising, since then, the Left has steadily lost both elections and popular support. As this book goes to press, with a 7.5 per cent spurt in the GDP, India is the fastest growing economy in the world, ahead even of China. India is changing rapidly, with businessmen, entrepreneurs, engineers, IT specialists, economists, scientists and start-up aspirants among others, seizing the initiative. The times have changed, the world has changed, India has changed and, I suppose, I too have changed. The struggle is far from over; the future of higher education in India looks bleak unless the primacy of excellence is restored in the academy. We continue to export our best students and teachers. But personally I have a sense of both satisfaction and respite. The ideas and views that I defended alone are today championed by a sizable and influential group of people both in India and abroad. The tide has turned.

Notes 1 I had in mind concepts like svatantra, svadeshi and svadharma, but a more appropriate expression for intellectual decolonization in this context might be svaraj, as mentioned in the previous chapters. Could our theory also be home spun instead of being imported, like finished goods, from abroad? Of course, ideas are not to be rejected just because of their source; they must be evaluated for their relevance to the receiving culture. My argument has been against slavishness, imitation and opportunism, not against the free flow of intellectual traffic among equals. Years after this paper was first published, the Sangh Parivar floated the ‘Swadeshi Jagran Manch’, which, however, did not think made a significant impact on Indian society nor did calls by related organizations to ban ‘imported’ cultural practices like St. Valentine’s Day. Rajiv Malhotra has recently led a movement called Swadeshi Indology. 2 By ‘theory’ I mean the various strands of post-structuralist criticism such as deconstruction, Marxism, psychoanalysis and feminism. See Ramon

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Selden’s A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory for an early, and therefore historically useful, overview. I refer to ‘The Indian Academic and Resistance to Theory’. The fact is that both the author of the paper and the editor of the book received copies of this paper. I personally gave a copy to the former, who, even as he accepted it, said, ‘I hope you don’t mind if I don’t cite it.’ I said, ‘That depends on what sort of scholar you are.’ The editor of the volume failed to acknowledge the receipt of the paper. These facts need to be recorded to illustrate how certain people or positions are marginalized, ignored and even erased. I must confess here that subsequent to my writing of this paper and reading it out in a few different places, I am pleasantly surprised to see how, on the one hand, several intellectuals resist, very intelligently and respectably, the Western juggernaut of neo-imperialism in their own ways and, on the other hand, still refuse to accept their capitulation, even collaboration, with it. See Said’s ‘Intellectuals in the Post-Colonial World’ (1986). Such a formulation, of course, begs several troublesome questions: who are the ‘we’; how are we different from the West; why is there no one, universal civilization? The truth is that ‘we’ are a people without adequate self-knowledge (atmabodh) and, consequently, are equally ignorant of our adversaries and thus sorely lacking in the knowledge of our adversaries (shatrubodh). Rajiv Malhotra, like a one-man army, also occupies such an oppositional, anti-Western position. See Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines (2011) and Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism (2011). He is a brave man but much disliked in the Western academy. He also has countless admirers and ‘followers’. Gulbarga, once known as Ahsanabad, was the capital from 1347 to 1425 of the Bahmani Sultante, the first independent Muslim kingdom of the Deccan. The capital was later shifted to Bidar, where the Bahmanis ruled for another 100 years, before their kingdom disintegrated into five smaller sultanates, Bijapur, Golkonda, Ahmadnagar, Bidar and Berar. Finally, Aurangzeb conquered and reintegrated these petty states into the Mughal Empire in his 1686–1687 campaign. In contrast to the elite science and technology programmes, the majority of students in most humanities and social sciences in India are women. Entire disciplines are thus segregated, thereby engendering employment and social stereotyping. In the entire range of humanities and social sciences, there is arguably only one truly exceptional and outstanding female scholar critic from India, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak – one in a billion, literally. When it comes to males, there may be a few more than one. ‘Rethinking America: A Trans-Civilizational Approach’, in Rediscovering America: American Studies in the New Century. The essay in question is Gauri Viswanathan’s ‘The Beginnings of English Literary Study in British India’. I chose to use it as an example because it was much discussed when I first wrote my paper in 1988. It became part of her well-cited first book, Masks of Conquest (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Post-structuralist indeterminacy and play, to me, are reminiscent of Indian concepts such as leela (play) and maya (seeming). But no one talks of

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parallels or connections such as these; we must, it seems, arrive at them via Europe. Similarly, the ‘postal’ impasse is neither entirely new nor unprecedented. Mysticism, for instance, begins with aporia, with the noetic or the ineffable, unlike post-structuralism, which ends with it. In The Death and Afterlife of Mahatma Gandhi I develop this idea at length, showing how assassination of Gandhi, the ‘father of the nation’, by Godse is an unprecedented ‘modern’ abomination, therefore unbearable to the traditional, Hindu psyche. An interesting example of this is Sir Walter Raleigh’s angst described by Chris Baldick in The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848–1932 (75–85). See Teshale Tibebu’s Hegel and the Third World (2011); he calls this negative or Columbian modernity, characterized by ‘destructive destruction’ (xv–xxvi). Only identifiably Muslim women, for fear of giving the kind of offence that will impact the box office, seem spared of Bond’s compulsive and predatory foraging, though there are one or two ambiguous instances. I do not except myself from being subject to such criticism.

References Baldick, Chris. The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848–1932. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. Felperin, Howard. Beyond Deconstruction: The Uses and Abuses of Literary Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. Freud, Singmund. Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. 1905. Trans. and Ed. J. Strachey. London: Routledge, 2001. Kaul, Suvir. ‘The Indian Academic and Resistance to Theory’. In The Lie of the Land. Ed. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992: 207–228. Malhotra, Rajiv. Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism. New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2011. ———. Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines. New Delhi: Publisher, 2011. Ornstein, Robert. The Psychology of Consciousness. 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1977. Paranjape, Makarand. The Death and Afterlife of Mahatma Gandhi. London: Routledge, 2014; New Delhi: Random House, 2015. ———. ‘The Invasion of Theory: An Indian Response’. Indian Journal of English Studies. 28 (1989): 74–82. Full text in New Quest. 81 (May–June 1990): 151–161. ———. ‘Rethinking America: A Trans-Civilizational Approach’. In Rediscovering America: American Studies in the New Century. Ed. Kousar Azam. New Delhi: South Asian Publishers, 2001: 34–60. Said, Edward. ‘Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community’. In The Politics of Interpretation. Ed. W.J.T. Mitchell. Chicago: University of

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Chicago Press, 1983: 7–32. First published in Salmagundi. Spring–Summer 1986. ———. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. ———. ‘Traveling Theory’. In The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983: 226–247. Selden, Ramon. A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. London: Harvester Press, 1985. Tibebu, Teshale. Hegel and the Third World. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011. Viswanathan, Gauri. ‘The Beginnings of English Literary Study in British India’. OLR. 1–2 (1987): 2–26. ———. Masks of Conquest. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

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* There are at least three ways of responding to the advent of postmodernism in India. The first is with lamentation, the second with a symptomatic reading and the third with the more customary scholarly engagement. I propose to indulge a bit in all three.1

Lamentation Post-modernism is already passé. The simplest and rather obvious proof of this is the fact that we are talking about it. Whatever is current here has to be obsolete over there: that is the simple logic of the time-and-phase lag phenomenon in post-colonial intellectual production. We are unable to initiate a single intellectual movement of importance because we are always waiting for directions from abroad. This is not to say that the present condition will persist forever; when our masters and mentors tell us to grow up, perhaps we shall overnight cease to be minors, also at their behest. Meanwhile, in India recycled ideas will continue to have a decent innings; our intellectual playgrounds will not be totally devoid of some action or the other. Post-modernism too will have a good market in our cultural bazaars, especially in what might be termed the vernacular circles. Even after the Indian English elites will have moved on to other things, their desi counterparts will continue to play the field until they realize that there is a new game in town. There are, I admit, more productive ways of dealing with our situation, which I shall turn to soon. But indulging in an exercise of customary self-flagellation or grieving at the start is not as ridiculous as it sounds. The fact is that the Indian intellectual class has been systematically weakened and demoralized. It is materially insecure and even

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more unsure of itself spiritually. Its essential character is colonized and cowardly. This includes our English language media and print elites, our urban glitterati and chatterati. If not totally subservient to some foreign agency, most of us are often statist or otherwise opportunist. Without a radical self-renewal we, as a class, will remain self-loathing, parasitic, and prone to betraying ourselves, our gurus, our nation, our culture and our civilization. What better symptom of this than the proclivity of all our billionaire philanthropists to donate to Harvard, Columbia or some other prestigious university abroad, even when they wish to promote Indian culture or literature? As Indian intellectuals, we simply do not inspire trust; we have no global recognition or brand value. We have not made our mark on the world stage. Whenever any one of us reaches a level of visibility or makes an impact, she quickly exports herself out of India to greener pastures at some metropolitan university.

Symptomatic reading What I have tried to suggest through this unflattering, if slightly exaggerated, summary is less about post-modernism in India as about a certain opacity, a conspicuous blindness, in the manner in which discussions on such topics are conducted here. Perhaps, we need a new methodology to understand these conversations; trends and theories which come to us from overseas ought not to be accepted at face value, but read symptomatically. The malaise that we cannot face, and which we camouflage by discussion such topics, is simple and familiar enough: it is our incapacity to address our own problems independently of the West, on our own terms and in our own terminology. But if we read our situation symptomatically, we would take our intellectual subservience for granted, even to exploit it, rather than crying ourselves hoarse. Thus, we may assume that when we discuss romanticism, modernism, Marxism or post-modernism, we are actually talking about something else. What is more, all of us, except the truly innocent or ignorant, know this. Instead of regretting our inability to raise our own questions, relevant to our own contexts, we should immediately pretend that the most natural of all discussions in India should be about some European or American idea, philosophy or theory. Because whatever be the pretext, we are actually talking about ourselves howsoever indirectly. That is the ‘something else’ that any such discussion represses: our own abject subject positions. Whatever we say reveals this, our own reality or situation, rather than anything new or worthwhile about our ostensible object of study. The

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formidable topos, the ground for all our debates and contestations, unavoidable in any discussion or inquiry, is simply the condition of India. The moment we understand that the condition of India is our true subject matter we may actually end up doing something useful. I shall revert to this possibility towards the end of this chapter. So, the first move we need to make is to be aware that the real topic of debate and discussion, even in this very case, is not post-modernism but the condition of India. It is project India that really inspires and excites us. Once we thus shift our emphasis, what we immediately realize is that the intensity of discussions around post-modernism abated in the mid-1990s. In the decade that followed, both the West and India, the latter more spectacularly than the former, were transformed. Liberalization, privatization, globalization and information technology dominated our minds and pocket books in India. The intellectual pressures of neo-colonialism also abated. Finally, theory itself suffered a deathblow by 9/11. The neo-cons in the US triumphed; the world changed. Today, more than ever its critics aver that the playful ‘post-’ of postmodernity was a passing phase, a game that ‘spoiled’, leisured, intellectuals could play behind an elaborate defence system of missiles and nuclear warheads. Once the bastion of the West was breached, however, the playfulness met with disapproval, eventually dissipating. It was replaced by ethnic profiling, electronic surveillance and wars – in Iraq, Afghanistan and, more recently, Syria. From post-modernity back to realpolitik has the calculus of power shifted. Today, with Muslim refugees streaming into Europe, the privileged continent faces an unprecedented cultural and political crisis. Most of the immigrants are unwelcome; the receiving culture does not think they can assimilate. Modern, European values are alien to their make-up, some aver. The working classes are afraid that the newcomers will steal their jobs. The neo-conservatives are returning to centre stage. We were back to the anxieties of modernity; the playful ‘post’ seems a matter of the past.

Three theses The third approach to such a topic is a conventional scholarly engagement, rather than a polemical lamentation or politically informed symptomatic reading. But what does a scholarly engagement involve? An engagement with post-modernism on its own terms before rethinking it from an Indian perspective.2 The three central theses of postmodernism according to Jane Flax, the ‘death’ of ‘Man’, ‘History’ and

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‘Metaphysics’, which I mentioned in the Introduction, may well serve as convenient point of departure for such an exercise. On the ‘Death of Man’, Flax says: Post-modernists wish to destroy all essentialist conceptions of human nature. . . . In fact Man is a social, historical or linguistic artifact, not a noumenal or transcendental Being. . . . Man is forever caught in the web of fictive meaning, in chains of signification, in which the subject is merely another position in language. (32) Such anti-essentialism when it comes to ‘Man’ actually resonates with several strands of Indian thought, especially the anatmavada (‘nonselfness’) of the Buddhists. The idea of the sovereign self or autonomous human being would not sit well with much of traditional Indian philosophy. Are we totally capable of free agency, or is our so-called free will, the outcome of a web of causality, too complicated to disambiguate? Indian psychology would go with the latter position, recognizing the provisionality of the self, whether the latter be a combination of gunas (qualities) as in Samkhya or as an ascending hierarchy of levels of consciousness constituted by manas, buddhi, ahamkar and chitta as in Vedanta, non-substantial flux as in Buddhism, or pure jiva (sentience) as in Jainism or material substance as in Charavaka. Even in medieval bhakti literature, the self is still provisional and dependent on the personalized Godhead for its sustenance. In modern times, Sri Aurobindo has considered the self as made up of five levels, physical, vital, mental, psychic and spiritual. For J. Krishnamurti, the self is an outcome of the individual’s particular conditioning. In fact, Sudhir Kakar has gone so far as to claim that the Indian personality is characterized by an underdeveloped ego. India, it would seem, has never been enamoured by an essentialist notion of human nature. The ‘modern’ conception of the self in terms of intentionality, rationality, self-reflexivity, autonomy, agency and so on is quite new, traceable not much prior to Rammohun Roy. Perhaps, what we need instead is a greater dose of the Enlightenment view of the human subject as capable of choice, rational behaviour and world-modifying action. This certainly has been the view of some of our recent social reformers including Vivekananda, Gandhi and Ambedkar, all of whom tried to empower individual colonized subjects by altering their sense of self. The whole process of consciousness-raising, of giving power to individual to change their world, of providing them education, health care and so on, is impossible if we were to subscribe

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to the death-of-man thesis. What the so-called common man needs, instead, is more not less of a sense of selfhood. On the ‘Death of History’, Flax observes: The idea that History exists for or is his Being is more than just another precondition and justification for the fiction of Man. This idea also supports and underlies the concept of Progress, which is itself such an important part of Man’s story. . . . Such an idea of Man and History privileges and presupposes the value of unity, homogeneity, totality, closure, and identity. (33) The death of History with a capital ‘H’ might be necessary for those who trapped in historical consciousness and the straightjacket of teleology. If Europe suffers from an excess of History, it is commonplace to assume that India is the most ahistorical major civilization in the world. That is why native historiography became, as with Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, almost an obsession. It was thought that our being colonized was because of our inability to understand history or insert ourselves into it. Without a history, we were lost as a people, incapable of having our own grand narrative. Nowadays, though, with History being so badly discredited, we can actually celebrate our lack of it. We can even boast that we have our own alternative conception of mythopoetic and cyclical time as opposed to historical time. We can celebrate the circularity of our creation myths and the polyphony of our puranas and itihhasas. Flax’s third thesis, ‘The Death of Metaphysics’, states: Western metaphysics has been under the spell of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ at least since Plato. . . . For post-modernists this quest for the Real conceals most Western philosophers’ desire, which is to master the world once and for all by enclosing it within an illusory but absolute system they believe represents or corresponds to a unitary Being beyond history, particularity and change. . . . Just as the Real is the ground of Truth, so too philosophy as the privileged representative of the Real and interrogator of truth claims must play a ‘foundational’ role in all ‘positive knowledge’. (Flax 34) Here again we run into inevitable difficulties with what Seyla Benhabib calls the ‘Heidegger – Derrida tall tale about the “metaphysics of presence” ’. Instead, she argues that Richard Rorty’s account of the project

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of philosophy in modern times is more convincing. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty calls this project ‘epistemology . . . a metadiscourse of legitimation, articulating the criteria of validity presupposed by all other discourses’ (Benhabib 143). According to Benhabib, ‘Derrida’s notion of the metaphysics of presence is a “tall tale” because social criticism and philosophy are interdependent’(ibid). The project of Indian metaphysics has differed from that of the West. Indian metaphysics has been experiential and mystical, rather than merely speculative and rational. As such, even in its most rigorous formulations as Nagarjuna or Sankara, it was never logocentric. The ground of Ultimate Reality cannot be reached through reason alone, but requires a supra-rational, supra-sensual awareness of pure being according to the mystics. What constitutes this ultimate reality has, however, been disputed in India: while the Vedantists considered it in terms of presence or being, the Buddhistics spoke of it in terms of sunyata, emptiness or absence. Thus we have at the very heart of our metaphysics the eternal contradiction between being and nothingness, purna and sunya, samsara and nirvana, the body and spirit, the human and the divine and so on, with the mystical project being to somehow reconcile or transcend this duality through states such as jeevanmukti (living liberation), siddhi (perfection) or nirvana (dissolution). European metaphysics, on the other hand, has arguably never been able fully to free itself of dualism, whether Christian or Cartesian. I would therefore venture that the death-of-metaphysics thesis is somewhat tangential to India because we have not had the sort of metaphysics which post-modernists desire to slay. On the other hand, many would advocate the need for epistemology in Rorty’s sense of the term. Indian thought has lacked the element of social criticism as critique of ideology. This does not mean that there were no social uprisings or movements, but even in these the spiritual, metaphysical ends were paramount. This has, of course, changed in modern times, since Rammohun Roy. Perhaps, it is too early to renounce this indigenous renaissance, whose fruits are still half-ripe, so to speak. Without criticism, whether of the self or the other, Indian thought will again find itself irrelevant.

Alter-modernity3 In Making India (2014) I tried to offer a fuller account of India’s tryst with modernity, explaining how it differs from the West’s. To perform a similar pointing here, I shall suggest an alternative method

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of the self-fashioning of the ‘post’ in India. To state my case rather bluntly, I would say that India has tried to modernize itself without fully accepting modernity. India entered the chronologically modern without entirely internalizing the world view or ideology of modernity. This resulted in a variety of Indian views and approaches to Western modernity. At that ‘originary’ (imaginary?) moment of modern contact between India and Europe, Rammohun Roy, in his address to Lord Amherst, pleaded for ‘a more liberal and enlightened system of instruction, embracing mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry and anatomy, with other useful sciences’ (98). All these disciplines, which traditional India lacked, were to be imported from the West. So far, so good, but in the process, Rammohun also denigrated Byakjurun, Vedant, Meemangsa and Nyaya Shastra – or grammar, philosophy, ritual and logic, all of which were then cornerstones of the traditional knowledge system of India. Whether such self-ridicule was tactical or serious is not entirely clear or important right now. To all appearances, though, Indians welcomed modernity, even if they wanted to do so on their own terms. Rammohun himself attempted this synthesis with his Brahmo Samaj, a sort of modern, monotheistic, even Christianized version of Vedanta. When Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote his Minute of 2 February 1835 in favour of English education, he made ample use of Rammohun’s address to Lord Amherst, altering it to suit his own purposes: I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. (101) In places, however, his text echoes the very words of Rammohun, for instance, when he cites the procedures laid down for expiating the sin of killing a goat (106) as an example of the uselessness of traditional Indian knowledge. Today, though few concur wholeheartedly with Macaulay’s dismissal of Indian civilization, the fact is that deep down, we all partly agree with him. We too believe that our traditional knowledge has run its course and is fit to be modified, if not discarded. Instead, we turn to modern science to understand and control the material world. We are all modernizers, some more unconscious rather than missionary, but certainly sold on the project of Western modernity. The education system, whose

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foundations Macaulay laid, produced a type of Europeanized Indian intellectual. This is how Swami Vivekananda describes such a creature: the Europeanised man has no backbone, he is a mass of heterogeneous ideas picked up at random from every source – and these ideas are unassimilated, undigested, unharmonised. He does not stand on his own feet, and his head is turning round and round. Where is the motive power of his work? In a few patronizing pats from the English people. His schemes of reforms, his vehement vituperations against the evils of certain social customs have, as the mainspring, some European patronage. Why are some of our customs called evils? Because the Europeans say so. That is about the reason he gives. . . . These unbalanced creatures are not yet formed into distinct personalities; what are we to call them – men, women, or animals? (Swami Vivekananda on India and Her Problems 83) What is rather poignant about such a denunciation is that Narendranath Dutta was himself such an Europeanized Indian before he came into contact with Sri Ramakrishna. The creation of such a class of Europeanized Indians was what Macaulay, as a far-sighted colonial administrator, had intended in the first place: ‘We must at present do our best to form . . . a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’ (107). It was against the after-effects of such an education system that Mahatma Gandhi raised his voice: It is my considered opinion that English education in the manner in which it has been given has emasculated the English-educated Indian. . . . The process of replacing the vernacular has been one of the saddest chapters in the British connection. . . . No country can become a nation by producing a race of imitators. . . . It [the system of English education] was born in error, for the British rulers honestly believed the indigenous system to be worse than useless. It has been nurtured in sin, for the tendency has been to dwarf the Indian body, mind and soul. (Young India, 27 April 1921) The most sustained attack on Western modernity is of course found in Gandhi’s Hind Svaraj (1909). He accuses modern civilization of being concerned only with ‘bodily welfare’, on account of which it takes note ‘neither of morality nor of religion’. It enslaves men and women to machines, making them labour ‘for the sake of a pittance’, losing a

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large portion of their wages in intoxication. The conditions of these workers and wage earners is ‘worse than that of beasts’. Modern civilization, Gandhi adds, which ‘seeks to increase bodily comforts . . . fails miserably even in doing so’. It is therefore a ‘Satanic civilization’ or ‘the Black Age’, not to be imitated by Indians at any cost (see Chapter VI: Civilization). Clarifying his position in ‘A Word of Explanation’ at the beginning of the text, Gandhi says, ‘I feel that if India will discard “modern civilization”, she can only gain by doing so’ (17). Elsewhere, Gandhi offers further criticism of modernity, of its potential to destroy the environment: God forbid that India should ever take to industrialization after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom (England) is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts. (Young India, 7 October 1926) In ‘What Is True Civilization’, Chapter XIII of Hind Swaraj, Gandhi defines what he considers true civilization: ‘Civilization is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty. . . . The Gujarati equivalent for civilization means “good conduct.” If this definition be correct,’ he adds, ‘then India . . . has nothing to learn from anybody else’ (61). Gandhi sums up the differences between traditional India and Western modernity by declaring, ‘[t]he tendency of Indian civilization is to elevate the moral being, that of the Western civilization is to propagate immorality. The latter is godless, the former is based on a belief in God’ (63). Finally, Gandhi says, ‘So understanding and so believing, it behoves every lover of India to cling to the old Indian civilization even as a child clings to the mother’s breast’ (63). Clearly, Gandhi was a critic of modernity. Some, in their enthusiasm, have considered him a post-modernist. To me, he was a critical traditionalist. Certainly not anti-foundationalist in the post-modern sense, Gandhi believed that moral self-perfection and spiritual liberation were the goals of human life and the pursuit of truth and nonviolence were the best means to attain them. Of the other important Indian thinkers, I shall refer to two who were Gandhi’s contemporaries but differed from him: first, Sri Aurobindo and, then, and briefly, Jawaharlal Nehru, his heir and successor. In Foundations of Indian Culture, Aurobindo offers a vigorous and detailed defence of Indian culture from colonialist attacks. Aurobindo’s model of ‘selective assimilation’ implies not an eclectic synthesis, but ‘subordination and transformation of external elements’ so as to

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harmonize ‘the new element with the spirit of our own culture’ (392). This is not very different from Gandhi’s famous statement: I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any. I refuse to live in other people’s houses as an interloper, a beggar or a slave. (Young India, 1 June 1921) Even Nehru, otherwise considered a proponent of secular modernity, was aware of its limits: secular philosophy itself must have some background, some objective, other than merely material well-being. It must essentially have spiritual values and certain standards of behaviour, and, when we consider these, immediately we enter into the realm of what has been called religion. (193) These three figures, who in their own time, differed considerably are, seen from a distance, not all that at variance on certain fundamental issues. Each, in his own way, is a modernizer. What we thus see is a broad band of attitudes to Western modernity, each of which conceptualizes India and its civilization differently. In Rammohun’s address to Amherst, India culture is portrayed as insufficient and sorely in need of modern, Western knowledge to invigorate it. As opposed to this, Gandhi advances the notion that Indian civilization is self-sufficient, even perfect for its people, because of the dharmic framework it provides to the individual and to society. Between these two, there are several shades of opinion, such as Aurobindo’s and Nehru’s, all of which allow for cultural interaction and growth. Even Ambedkar, himself a great modernizer, ultimately turned to Buddha and his dhamma as shaping influences for his idea of modern India. Overall, most of these thinkers agreed that though interaction with modern Europe is conducive to India’s growth it is worthwhile only if it involves the subordination and assimilation of foreign elements to native systems and structures. Macaulay, of course, like James Mill before him, sees India as severely deficient, but that, as I have suggested, is perfectly understandable in the colonizer. After Macaulay, several Indian Marxists and radical modernizers also follow the same line of radical modernization and disavowal of India’s traditional civilization.

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Though the strongest denunciation of modernity comes, of course, from Gandhi, none of the other thinkers accepted it unquestioningly either. Each offered his own corrective or complaint. It would thus be tempting, even eminently fashionable, to argue that post-modernism begins in India, in the colonies. How? Because the modern project is first interrogated in India and many inflections, if not alternatives to it are proposed. However, such an arguments would miss the point. Gandhi is not a post-modernist, as I’ve observed; in fact, he uses premodern, traditional ideas and values to decry modernity. He belongs, rather more accurately, with those within Europe who resisted modernity on moral, spiritual and humanitarian grounds – the likes of Thoreau, Ruskin and Tolstoy, whom he cites as his authorities. How, then, do we understand the recent post-modern turn in the West? For this we shall have to backtrack a bit to the broader patterns of intellectual evolution in post-Enlightenment Europe. Aurobindo provides a perceptive account. With the growing power of reason, he says, ‘a blank and tepid Theism remained or a rationalized Christianity without either the name of Christ or his presence’ (84). After this, even God was dispensed with because ‘[t]he reason and the senses by themselves give no witness to God’ (ibid). Finally, ‘by an inevitable process we reach the atheistic or agnostic cult of secularism, the acme of denial, the zenith of the positive intelligence’ (ibid). So, when God and the church became oppressive, they were dethroned. In their place was enshrined positive reason. According to Aurobindo: modern Europe separated religion from life, from philosophy, from art and science, from politics, from the greater part of social action and social existence. And it secularised and rationalised too the ethical demand so that it might stand in itself on its own basis and have no need of any aid from religious sanction or mystic insistence. But what happens when reason itself becomes tyrannical? After the shift from a religious to a secular outlook in the West, there have been periodic lapses into irrationality. For Aurobindo, the whole movement of modern European thought may be understood as a recurring cycle: At the end of this turn is an antinomian tendency, constantly recurring in the life-history of Europe and now again in evidence. This force seeks to annul ethics also, not by rising above into the absolute purity of the spirit, as mystic experience claims to do, but

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The cyclical descent into irrationality is the fate of a Europe trapped in the prison-house of rationality and in denial of higher consciousness because the latter smacks of religion. Debashis Banerji lucidly explains how the evolution of both prakriti and purusha were crucial to Aurobindo. Individual agency can be located in this continued, accelerated evolution or growth of consciousness – acts of self-making through yoga, and as resistance to the homogeneity that is symptomatic of late capital. Thus, Aurobindo’s is an indigenous instance of and insistence on alter-modernity. The various expressions of post-modernist agonistics, in their very cry for total emancipation, often end up legitimating irrationality if not irresponsibility. Post-modernist free play, we know, is possible only in the most modern, affluent nation states of the world, not in Bosnia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria. In less privileged parts of the world people are still dying and killing in the name of God, nation, race or ethnicity, which post-modernists have already proved to be illusory. Even as boundaries are erased and the logic of globalization spreads, capital moves freely, but not people. Modern immigration regimes are reinforced with biometric and electronic surveillance. The raison d’être of globalization is, of course, to simplify the process of economic exploitation and expropriation. There is no need any longer to actually colonize the country to extract its resources or surpluses. All this can be effected electronically, by remote control, as it were. The transnational corporation is now a more stable and economically viable an entity than many a nation state. A banana republic here, a sub-tropical dictatorship there, may easily disappear from the face of the earth, but Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Apple and Google confidently assert their will to go on forever, much more stable than postWestphalian nation states. If its easy movement across the globe is a sign of post-modern loosening of protocols, the fierceness with which capital is protected and safeguarded shows that modern systems of command and control are very much in place. Accumulated capital continues to be policed by nuclear missiles and sophisticated defence programmes in advanced countries and by private armies and security systems in the developing world. The culture of post-modernism is thus offset and countervailed by modernist economic pragmatism: nations may be turned

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into markets, space and time shrunk into the virtual reality of miscellaneous websites, but capital itself is never disavowed, even if it is dematerialized as never before. Money may be the most fluid of values, but money-making continues as solidly as before. It is the prevailing obsession, running, ruining, the world. Post-modernism frees the subject from the iron collar of reason, but does not really offer anything other than notional radical freedom, that too only to the initiated. Its anti-foundationalism, thus, inevitably becomes a ‘pseudo-foundation’, which itself may be hegemonic. This is the deeper problem with the metaphysics that informs much of post-modern theory. The reduction of all of reality into wordplay is just one example of such philosophical self-negation. Identities can be theorized only if we accept that selves, societies, cultures and civilizations have primary and secondary features, not necessarily in a dichotomous and binary fashion, but in actual and heuristic ways. Without assuming and identifying such ‘centres’, no demarcation or assertion of identity is possible. In that sense, essence, that which makes each thing uniquely itself and different from all other things, cannot be vaporized altogether. Anti-foundationalism, too, assumes the place of the foundations in a somewhat desultory, if self-contradictory, manner. Language continues to function in thus, not matter how much we try to deny its meaningmaking matrix. For instance, suppose we were to say, with the Buddhists, that everything is impermanent. The subtle meaning that we instantly derive from such an assertion is that impermanence is permanent. In our craving for permanence, we thus cling to impermanence as a sort of pseudo-permanence. That is why the Jains went farthest in their embrace of indeterminacy; anekantavada allows for radical openness and multiplicity long before post-modern philosophers. Of all its expressions, only one fringe of the post-modernist West seems to signal a way out of the crisis of rationality. This fringe is not even recognized by the highbrow academic culture, but it continues to have a mixed, somewhat dubious presence in Western society. I am referring to the upsurge in New Age philosophies and movements all over the West. There was such an anti-materialistic wave in the 1960s too, when the counter-culture was at its height. But this wave subsided, lost in the foam and froth of drug abuse and free sex, leaving behind little but the refuse and debris of some shattered and many more disoriented lives. Yet, this earlier turn too must not be dismissed because it represented rebellion, a search for alternatives at the heart of an affluent civilization tired of its materialism. Some would argue that more significant that American counter-culture were the 1968

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protests across the world. In Europe, France erupted in a mass surge in May 1968, with university students and workers uniting against the state and its bureaucracy, almost bringing down the Charles de Gaulle government. In the end it was a social, not political revolution. In fact, much of what became post-modern theory can be traced to that upturn. There were also protests in Britain, Ireland, Belgrade, Warsaw, Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam demonstrations, across the US, even an anti-feudal communist uprising in Naxalbari in Bengal, which began a year earlier.4 Some New Age ideologues believe that the West made a false choice when it moved away from dogmatic religion during the renaissance to humanistic rationality. Instead of veering towards spirituality, it went askew in its pursuit of materialism. Aided by imperialism and science, the modern West lost its chance to go higher in the consciousness spiral. Now, by realigning itself with wisdom from the East, the West can save itself. But today, New Age movements too have become commoditized and co-opted by capitalism. Perhaps, the New Age will never come into being, mired quite as we are in a consumer culture; even today, it amounts to little more than self-help trivia, parody and pseudo-prophecy. Mind-body-spirit integralism is mostly lost in a plethora of self-deluding fads and fetishes, never living up to its professed aim or promise of transforming Western society. Instead, we are precariously perched on the brink of a worldwide ecological catastrophe. Indeed, the first coherent formulation of a West-to-East outreach can be found more than a hundred years back, in the writings of the intrepid and original founder of the Theosophical Society, Madame H. P. Blavatsky. Theosophy, the mother of all West-to-East movements found the intellectual climate in Europe and America too hostile and inhospitable; with what might be termed a Karmic inevitability, it moved its permanent headquarters to Adayar, Madras, and thereby, some might say, lost its chance to save the West. This was followed by Vivekananda’s mission to the West, which left in its wake a permanent channel of influence from East to the West. All this adds up to one conclusion: both modernity and postmodernity, if taken seriously, will reveal themselves to be quite at variance with India’s civilizational disposition. Of course, a few may no doubt find them profoundly meaningful, but vast numbers of Indians will feel alienated from modernist and post-modernist thought. To accept both uncritically would be tantamount to self-denial. At most they can supply us with interesting new styles, fashions and figures of speech. We can dabble in these as one does in imported cosmetics and fineries. Or keep them in the suburbs of our pleasure as we do

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rock music and Hollywood movies. We may even sport them loosely on our persons we do denim jeans and jackets or, more suffocatingly, suits and ties. As all these examples imply, any amount of eclecticism is possible as long as it is skin deep. As Raj Kapoor said so perceptively, Mera joota hai Japani/ Ye patloon Englistani/ Sar pe lal topi roosi/ Phir bhi dil hai Hindustani, I dare say, with much more sense that Salman Rushdie understood it.5

Svaraj That is why, as we have done repeatedly, we must return to svaraj. Svaraj is a very old Vedic word, but comes into the vocabulary of modern India in the nineteenth century. Some say Dayanand Saraswati’s Satyarth Prakash (1875) contains its first modern usage, but I have not been able to find it. Dayanand quotes the Vedic ‘यःस्वयं राजते स स्वराट’ but does not apply it to political independence from Britain. Instead, when the struggle for freedom started acquiring a certain momentum, several important political leaders like Dadabhai Naoroji, B. G. Tilak and Aurobindo used the word svaraj to mean independence from colonial rule. Gandhi also adopted the word, making it a household mantra. Hind Swaraj (1909) is not only one of his most important books, but also a comprehensive statement of the aims and methods of non-violent revolution. In the discourse of the freedom movement, svaraj is used mostly to signify political independence from the British. Of course, Gandhi meant much more by it, as I shall show soon. Perhaps, he was intuitively familiar with its etymology, though he never explicitly explained it. Actually svaraj is an adaptation and shortening of the Sanskrit word svarajya, which is an abstract noun.6 When applied to a single individual, its form is svarat, an adjective. It is a word that occurs many times in the Rg, Sama and Yajur Vedas, as it does later in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. In the Upanishads, it can be found in the Chandogya, Taitteriya, and Maitri. But what is this svarajya and who is svarat? The word is a compound of sva + raj; sva means self and raj means to shine (the etymology being raj deepnoti). Hence the word means both the shining of the self and the self that shines. The root raj gives us many words associated with power including Raja, Rex and Regina. The symbology of light is very important in the Vedas because it suggests the sun of higher consciousness – tat savitur verenyam, as in the Gayatri mantra. It is to that sun, savitur, that Aurobindo refers in his great poem, Savitri. So svarat is a self-luminous person, and svarajya is a state of being svarat or enlightened. We might actually say that svaraj is a very ancient word for Enlightenment, the power and illumination that come from the mastery of the self.

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It is in India that political independence came to be expressed even in modern times in terms of Enlightenment and self-illumination, not merely political power or independence. Opposing the colonizers and imperialists was thus the external aspect of svarajya; the internal aspect was to have a good, just and beautiful state, an enlightened social order. Svarajya is therefore the principle that aspires for better self-management, more effective inner governmentality, because illumination comes from internal order, not oppression. Originally, svarajya referred to the inner management of a person’s powers and capacities, of the senses, organs and of all the different constituents of the person. When these were well governed, the person too would be all-powerful. For Gandhi, the homology between the individual body and the body politic was a useful metaphor, if not a self-evident truth. But what of sva, from the same root as the Latin sui? Self-rule also means the rule of the self – but which self? The id, the ego or the superego, to use the Freudian set? In traditional Indian psychology, unlike in Freud, there was not only the unconscious self but also the super-conscious, the higher self, what may be termed the ‘divine’ self. In common with pre- and post-Christian Gnostics, Sufis and mystics in other traditions, the ancient Hindus too believed in an unfallen, mighty, spiritual self as constituting the core of each individual. So svaraj would mean the rule of that self within us. Svarajya is the state of self-mastery; the master of senses is svarat. He or she is nothing less than the yogi perfectly poised in himself or herself. What is the opposite of svarat? It is anyarat – anya, other – ruled by others. These others could be the British, the Americans, the Chinese, the dominant or upper classes, those who own and control capital, our bosses, superiors, fathers, mothers, lovers or even our own internal demons, sins, addictions, habits, propensities, errors, whether we are Brahmins or Dalits. The Upanishad clearly says that those who are anyarat perish; they go to the benighted worlds to be reborn over and over again, condemned, so to speak, to the same mortality in which they were trapped and entangled in the first place. There is no liberation for such as these, who are ruled by others. After death, theirs is the smoky path that leads to repeated rebirths, while svarajya is that luminous path or state of self-mastery, the way to immortality and freedom. Synonymous with liberty, freedom and independence, svaraj thus suggests a host of possibilities for inner illumination and self-realization. I prefer the word svaraj to decolonization because svaraj is not antianyone else. One’s own svaraj can only help others and contribute to the svaraj of others. In svaraj the personal and the political merge, one leading to the other, the other leading back to the one. I cannot

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be free unless all my brothers and sisters are free and they cannot be free unless I am free. Svaraj thus allows us to resist oppression without hatred and violent opposition. To fight for svaraj, Gandhi developed the praxis of satyagraha or insistence on truth or truth-force for the rights of the disarmed and impoverished people of India. The svarat is a person who has command over his own body, mind and senses or good internal self-government. Gandhi applied it to the body politic. Simply speaking, he argued that we do not want to be ruled by others; therefore, we should not try to rule over others either. Svaraj, as mentioned earlier, therefore implies self-restraint and selfregulation. If we are self-governing, the state as we know it will wither away. For Gandhi, an ideal society consisted of highly evolved, selfregulating individuals, who respected themselves and the others. Such a society would not need policemen or law enforcers because each citizen would look out for the welfare of his fellows. Svaraj thus means self-restraint, forbearance, refusal to rule over others. One of the clichés about India is that no matter how powerful the country was, it did not send expeditions of conquerors to countries outside the peninsula, huge armies to conquer, colonize, and bring back pelf from overseas expeditions. This is how the Arabs, Mongols, Turks, Persians, Afghans, Portuguese, British, Dutch, French and the others behaved, coming to India to conquer or plunder, but there is no record of Indian armies doing the same in other lands. There are no narratives of Indians bringing back loot from China, Egypt, Tibet, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia or Malaysia, sending out huge ships to conquer and plunder, or out-rigging land expeditions, to bring back elephants or camels laden with the spoils of war. There was a large sphere of Indian influence, most of it not through armed conquest but through cultural osmosis and exchange. The historical record of India does not show a desire to go and rule other people, to enforce its will on them, to trample them, to exploit them economically, to oppress them, to crush them – that is not, it would seem, the Indian way. But, by the same token, to be ruled by others is also unacceptable to the Indian spirit; Indians, too, like other self-respecting peoples, have fought against it. Throughout Indian history, the struggle for svaraj has gone on, often unrecorded. We have innumerable instances of villagers protesting against emperors, blocking roads, refusing to pay taxes, fasting and so on. In the 150 years of British rule, there was a revolt practically every single year in India. Some part or the other was always up in arms against British rule. So Pax Brittanica was a great illusion. How could it not be? If you are an imperialistic power, you can only impose your rule with the force of arms. In today’s context,

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how can you have peace in Iraq or Syria, where every other day people die by explosions, executions, bullets and bombs? For lasting peace, you need svaraj. Svaraj is a political ideal that comes from a deep spiritual ideal. It was resurrected during India’s freedom struggle, defined and redeployed by Indian thinkers like Aurobindo and Gandhi. Despite settling for Westminster-style parliamentary democracy, Gandhi never quite gave up the effort for svaraj. Writing in his paper Harijan a year before independence in 1946, Gandhi outlined his vision of a good society: In this structure composed of innumerable villages, there will be ever-widening, never-ascending circles. Life will not be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom. But it will be an oceanic circle whose centre will be the individual always ready to perish for the village, the latter ready to perish for the circle of villages, till at last the whole becomes one life composed of individuals, never aggressive in their arrogance but ever humble, sharing the majesty of the oceanic circle of which they are integral units. Therefore the outermost circumference will not wield power to crush the inner circle but will give strength to all within and derive its own strength from it. (Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 91: 326) In Gandhi’s model of oceanic circles we have a way of relating to one another and to political authority which is very different from the pyramidical paradigm. In the latter, a few people on top rule the rest; as you go higher and higher, the number is smaller and smaller, until at the very top, you have only one person. In Gandhi’s model the individual is the centre of the oceanic circle, but continually expands his world to include his family, his neighbourhood, his village, his state, his country and so on. What is wonderful is that Gandhi allows each person to be the centre of his or her cosmos, a centre that wishes to expand and include. So the self in svaraj is not a limited but an expanding, potentially unlimited self, which can stretch to embrace the whole world till, ultimately, the self alone is; there is no other. The Gandhian model is not one of conflict, but of cooperation. Progress does not necessarily come through clashes of opposites as in Hegelian and Marxian dialectics, but through sacrifice and transformation. While svaraj has an inbuilt anti-imperialistic orientation, it also evokes a culturalist-nationalist position in which one’s civilizational heritage is owned up, even embraced, rather than discarded. In that sense, it suggests not a Western type of universalism, but a colourful

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cosmopolitanism, rooted in a radically different notion of ‘self’. But there is nothing ‘communal’ or fanatical about this project. It must not be seen as coextensive with Hindutva, unless the latter is redefined. As a part of its strategy to create a Hindu vote bank, Hindutva has consistently appropriated several concepts and terms from Hindu traditions, often using them in an exclusive or restricted fashion. On the other side, there has been the over-reaction by the secularists in India and elsewhere to this phenomenon. The latter have betrayed their anxiety at being dislodged from their dominance in Indian polity. They ruled in the name of secularism; now when a competing force wishes to rule in the name of Hinduism, they bitterly oppose it. One result is that any use of Hindu or Indic vocabulary is viewed with distrust as promoting the agenda of Hindutva. To me, both positions are fallacious. I do not see why we should foreswear Hindu traditions just because some among us want to politicize them; instead, it is all the more necessary to reclaim them for a non-exclusive and non-dualist project. Intermedial hermeneutics shows us a more viable path in between both extremes. That is why I believe that Gandhi took great pains to emphasize that svaraj is not a form of narrow nationalism or jingoism. Instead, it is a special, cooperative and pluralistic way of being in the world, as this series of quotations shows: My nationalism, fierce though it is, is not exclusive, is not devised to harm any nation or individual. Between the two, the nationalist and the imperialist, there is no meeting ground. Non-violent nationalism is a necessary condition of corporate or civilised life. Violent nationalism, otherwise known as imperialism, is the curse. (Quoted in Tikekar 106) These snapshots of svaraj from Gandhi stress that it is not the same as militant Hindu nationalism. Svaraj, I would contend, provides the blueprint for a just, egalitarian world order in which, from the individual to the widest-possible collective, there is both harmony and mutuality. A more detailed reading and application of Gandhi’s ideas is available in my book, Decolonization and Development: Hind Svaraj Revisioned (1993). I deliberately spell svaraj with a ‘v’ instead of the ‘w’ to remind myself that each one of us must seek and find our own definition and notion of svaraj. It is not possible simply to replicate or appropriate Gandhi’s or someone else’s idea of it. The latter may give us directions, but only our lived struggle and daily quest for svaraj will

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empower us, not a second-hand imitation of another’s, however great that might be. Before closing, it would be useful to notice how words which nowadays denote secular phenomena have deeply spiritual roots in India. We have already seen this with the word svaraj. The other word that is frequently used for political independence is svatantrya or svatantrata. Both these words are central to the eschatology of Kashmir Shaivism or trika philosophy. Metaphysically and epistemologically, Shiva, the ultimate reality, is free or utterly independent; so his self-forgetting or self-restricting as well as his self-remembering and self-realization are signs of his total independence. Since the jiva or the individual is the ‘same’ as Shiva, we too are ignorant or wise as the case may be out of our own free and (un)conscious choice. When we suffer, we forget ourselves and our own self-perfection; when we are happy it is because we have regained our original nature (see John Hughes exposition of svatantrya according to Swami Lakshman Joo). Similarly, we might argue that colonialism comes, as Gandhi himself said in Hind Swaraj, because we ‘give’ our freedom, not to mention wealth and well-being, to others; decolonization, then, is only a reclamation of what is ours, a recognition and reassertion of who we are. Never fully colonized in the first place, we now merely assert our right to be free again. Nothing is got from outside either in colonialism or in decolonization. The amazing discovery about Indian intellectual traditions is how each thing means not only what it seems to, but so much more. Meaningmaking, thus, depends not so much on the sign or on object under consideration, but on the consciousness of the thinker or perceiver. As our consciousness is, so the world appears to us. But the task of changing our consciousness is not easy. It requires a continuous engagement with the material realities that surround us. What the tradition does show us is that these material realities are not fixed, but determined by the level of consciousness that we can bring to bear upon them. I had earlier suggested that all discussions on academic topics actually hide deeper concerns and compulsions. These have to do with the condition of India or, to put it a more programmatic manner, with Project India. Perhaps, the only thing that all shades of political opinion from the extreme Left to the extreme Right are agreed upon is that Project India is still unfinished. The Left thinks that Independence was partial and incomplete because it brought about a bourgeois not a proletarian revolution. The Hindutvavadis believe that the dream of the Hindu Rashtra has not yet been fulfilled. We often forget that the frail, old Mahatma also thought that our ‘Tryst with destiny’ was not all that glorious. While Nehru was taking his oath of office in a glittering ceremony in the Viceroy’s palace, the stubborn apostle of love and

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non-violence was trying to bring peace in the blood-soaked streets of Calcutta. Obviously, the coming of independence was not as momentous to him as the wrenching reality that svaraj was still a distant dream. That which harmonizes our personal and political aspirations is the svaraj that Gandhi was after. In it is constituted our true sovereignty, as individuals and as a people. Svaraj does not mean political independence alone, but a certain vision of society which is free from exploitation, oppression, violence and unhappiness. Such a society would consist of self-regulating individuals of high moral character cooperating with one another in a free and non-coercive manner. It will not be a society of the haves living at the expense of the have-nots or a society wherein the individual is dwarfed and crushed by the government, nor will it be a society in which making money and indulging in sense-pleasures are the be all and end all of life. Just as each individual seeks svaraj so does each nation, society or country. I shall sum up in Gandhi’s words, ‘I submit that swaraj is an all-satisfying goal for all time.  .  .  . It is infinitely greater than and includes independence’ (Young India, 12 January 1928). If debates on globalization, sovereignty and culture are ultimately debates about which way we want India to go, it is clear to me that both modernity and post-modernity represent paths which we should not buy into fully. At best, they provide convenient points of entry to the real questions that shape our lives. Because these paths have made inroads into our own life and consciousness, they must be examined, understood, possibly appreciated from a distance, but ultimately negated or incorporated into the broader quest for svaraj. I am convinced that our anxiety over how to cope with the latest intellectual assault from the West will be mitigated once we understand better who we are. This requires a radical dislocation of our subservient fixation upon the West and a realignment of our intellectual energies to serve our own civilizational enterprises.

Notes 1 Earlier parts of this chapter were first presented at the Sahitya Akademi National Seminar on ‘Beyond Creativity: Problems Facing the Cultural Life of India at the Turn of the Century’ in the panel on ‘Globalisation, Sovereignty and Culture’ at the India International Centre, New Delhi, 21–23 February 1997. 2 One of the few contemporary scholar intellectuals to have tried to do so is Debashish Banerji. For instance, his argument about how the hyper-networked, post-modern, late capital era can be read against Aurobindo’s and Simondon’s ideas on individuation and accelerated consciousness, and how the latters’ positions offer a means of productive, ethical resistance to the co-opting power of late capital.

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3 Nicolas Bourriaud is credited with coining the term ‘alter-modern’, though I have myself probably used it earlier. He curated an exhibition at the Tate where he described alter-modernism as a ‘reloading’ process involving four features: the end of post-modernism, cultural hybridization, travelling as a new way to produce forms, and the expanding formats of art (Wikipedia). 4 As usual, we were there first?! 5 ‘My shoes are Japanese, these pantaloons English, the cap on my head is Russian, yet my heart is Indian.’ Arguably, this is the two-step model of modern Indian identity, where the primary determinant, the heart (hridayam), remains Indian, while the accoutrements are all borrowed. The borrowing of the external trappings is a concession to the demands of the times, of modernity itself, but doesn’t affect or violate the inner being that remains Indian to the core. Salman Rushdie, it would appear, distorts this model in Midnight’s Children to imply there is no core to the Indian identity; it is just a motley assemblage. In Imaginary Homelands, Rushdie claims that ‘could almost be Saleem’s theme song’ (11). 6 See C. Mackenzie Brown’s ‘Svaraj, the Indian Ideal of Freedom: A Political or Religious Concept?’

References Aurobindo, Sri. The Foundations of Indian Culture. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1959. Banerji, Debashish. ‘Individuation, Cosmogenesis and Technology: Sri Aurobindo and Gilbert Simondon’. In Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures. Eds. Debashish Banerji and Makarand R. Paranjape. New Delhi: Springer, 2017. Brown, C. Mackenzie. ‘Svaraj, the Indian Ideal of Freedom: A Political or Religious Concept?’ Religious Studies. 20 (1984): 429–441. Flax, Jane. Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West. Berkeley: University Cambridge Press, 1990. Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand. The Complete Works of Mahatma Gandhi. 100 vols. Electronic version. Publications Division, 1989. ———. Young India. 27 April 1921. ———. Young India. 1 June 1921. ———. Young India. 7 October 1926. ———. Young India. 12 January 1928. Macaulay, Thomas Babington. ‘Minute on Indian Education’. Tradition, Modernity & Svaraj. 1.1 (1990): 99–110. Nehru, Jawaharlal. Nehru: An Anthology for Young Readers. Ed. P. L. Malhotra. New Delhi: NCERT, 1984. Roy, Raja Rammohun. ‘Address to Lord Amherst’, 11 December 1823. Tradition, Modernity & Svaraj. 1.1 (1990): 96–98. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–91. London: Granta, 1992. Vivekananda, Swami. Swami Vivekananda on India and Her Problems. Compl. Swami Nirvedananda. Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1963.

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Regional, national, global Critics and theorists in India tend to fall into three broad states or stages: regional, national and global.1 Not only by the content of our work, but by our discourse styles are our positions revealed: the regionalists and nationalists, whether in English or vernacular, speak in a language which their Indian peers can comprehend, while their global counterparts, sights fixed on faraway academic horizons, resorted, especially in the heyday of the ‘post’, to an arcane obscurity, which may (un)justly be termed ‘vaguology’. The verbal froth of some of their effusions required a special strategy of reading; sometimes, when the lather settled, the poverty of the ideas lay exposed. The regionalists, as distinguished from both these groups, define themselves by opposition, whether to the national or global; their rhetoric is often characterized by outraged (outrageous?) demands from those (often from the other two groups) they perceive as their exploiters. Among them are Dalits, minorities and other subalterns, who consider themselves victims of national elites. Their claims cannot be passed over. They must be appeased; their grievances must be redressed. They attack nationalists and internationalists for betraying their interests. As we have already seen in the previous chapters, both regional nativists and global champions of cosmopolitan theory have little interest in or respect for the nation. The former hitches its wagon to some special interest group, regional, linguistic, religious, caste or gender-based. Its proponents, champions of identity politics, ceaselessly attack the ideology of nationalism as being hegemonic and oppressive but speak little of what will replace it. Global academicians, too, dislike the

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nation and its restrictive mores; they live abroad in any case. They are our transnational elites, conversing with fellow cosmopolitans; they peer down their privileged noses at those critics who are still stuck in national cultures for, evidently, the latter occupy an inferior place both materially and intellectually. Many international scholars also forge alliances with situated subalterns to shore up their own legitimacy. Needless to say, these positions are not mutually exclusive, but often overlapping and interconnected. Perhaps, before proceeding, I should apply this framework to myself to check where I survive and subsist. After all, shouldn’t literary theorists, who almost as a second nature start off problematizing other people’s positions, first submit themselves to the same treatment? I already tried to offer a located response in the earlier chapters by posing situation-specific questions such as what sort of literary theory do we need, how will this theory deal with the problems of tradition, modernity and post-modernity and what are our responsibilities as Indian literary theorists? Here I can subject myself to such interrogation. Needless to say, it is in problematizing our own positions that we begin to demonstrate the seriousness of our intent. When we ask ourselves where we stand vis-à-vis our own special region or community, our country or nation, and the West or the world at large – the three broad ‘camps’ between which we scuttle become evident. Where is our own allegiance owed? Sometimes, our positions may be more complicated, like those of brown Orientalists or re-Orientalizers. These are Indians and other Orientals who reside in the West and have come to substitute the white Orientalists by performing a similar function. Their agenda is to reread the East supposedly critically, but, as it ends up happening, for the benefit of the West. They say little to their fellow Indians, but are really at the epicentre of the Western critical establishment for their expertise on the Orient. To some extent, they become brokers of difference because they are the middlemen between India and the West, representing the West when they are in India and India when they are in the West. They don’t care about what we think, but we are compelled to take them seriously because they are empowered in and by the West. After all, how can we ignore someone published by The New Yorker, New Republic or Granta or someone who regularly contributes to the New York Times or Guardian or is awarded the Man Booker or the Pulitzer? Many of these stay-abroad Indians are hugely critical of the Indian state, not to mention Hindu society, portraying themselves as champions of the underdogs or India’s conscience-keepers abroad.

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You can be certain that they will highlight Indian racism, state repression, human rights abuses, ‘untouchability’, attacks on Dalits, naxals and women; in ‘deeply felt’, ‘compassionate’ or ‘outraged’ prose, they make a career by showing up the dark underbelly of India’s economic ‘miracle’. Such writers and critics are patronized by leading Western journals and publishers and often win the highest accolades. Some of them claim dual benefits as the underprivileged in the West and overprivileged in India. They occupy one or the other subject position as it suits them. Even so, they would obviously belong to my third category of global writers of Indian origin. The other two groups, regional and national, perhaps don’t require further elaboration. Ideally, of course, we would like to be subalternregional-national-global in an enabling sequence, if not simultaneously. Deeply committed to local causes in such a manner that we can also participate in larger national and international academic discourses, we aspire to be organic, glocal and cosmopolitan intellectuals. I am not entirely ruling out such a possibility. After all, we do have exemplars of such empowered change makers in Tagore and Gandhi. But few attain their stature. And it’s impossible to call these subaltern Dalit, or some other label of extreme under-privilege. With us, it is usually the opposite: our anxiety to be accepted by the West makes us capitulate to its compulsions. If globalization is the cloak that the hegemonic West wears, we must be prepared to choose what we are first, national or international. Being national does not, in itself, deny the possibility of being international, but if we start off wanting to be international, then we may end up being denationalized instead. Similarly, we need to choose between an enticingly empowering subalternism, chauvinism, communalism or some other form of special interest in the name of caste, religion, language or region or gender, and a slightly less empowering but much more stable national culture founded on dignity and democracy. It is easier to succumb to the temporary gains of former than work for the more elusive rewards of the latter. But what will be of the nation then? Should we regress to a stage when we were a hodgepodge of scores of feuding principalities and fiefdoms, wasting their energies in internecine warfare, easily prey to outside exploitation – to become so many Bosnias or Beiruts? Of course, some might argue that they have no choice; they are so oppressed and marginalized that they cannot choose to be otherwise. But by the very paradox of power, an empowered Dalit, a subaltern whose voice is heard all over the world, ceases to be an uncomplicated or innocent sufferer. The questions that we face as Indian literary theorists are therefore clear: whom do we serve? Is theory merely an imported commodity

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which we must reassemble and use locally or even re-export, if we are so competent? Is it merely a tool with which we can attack the Indian state and support some narrow, special interest? Or, contrarily, is theory something which sustains all of us, regionally, nationally and globally, which truly becomes manna for the soul, which gives hope and direction, which can maintain us in moments of crisis and self-doubt? What kind of literary theory do we want? It is answers to such questions that reveal our true subject positions, which many of us never really wish to uncover or expose. But one of the primary purposes of being really critical is to force us to do precisely this.

Three enclosures In the mela (grand carnival) of contemporary India are three large pandals (marquees) in close proximity. Each houses its own deity: tradition, modernity and post-modernity. What is their relationship to one another? Are they in sequence, one leading to another, spatial sequence imitating, standing for, chronological order? Or are they all mixed up, confusingly present simultaneously, overlapping and organically interconnected? What does each shamiana in this vanity fair of ideas contain? Let’s walk in to find out. Tradition By itself, tradition suggests a weight, a burden, an oppression almost. It is an area of prestige and privilege, both enabling and regulatory. It encompasses the customary and the habitual. Often it is a dead weight, crushing us into the ground. It can be cruel, ruthless and overpowering. Tradition disallows freedom. It is reluctant to change, resistant to reform. It is full of prohibitions and enforceable sanctions. It is blind and mechanistic, unthinking and unreflective. Frequently, it demands a surrender to the past, betrayal of the present. Many, suffocated by tradition, want to rush into the liberating light and air of the modernity tent, pitched just by its side. What of those who are victims of modernity, whose dream has been destroyed, who now inhabit a never-ending nightmare? Won’t they wish to hurry in the opposite direction, from modernity to tradition? For them, the traditional enclosure becomes a refuge, a haven, a nursery. It allows the coexistence of a multiplicity of life forms, of cultural patterns, of ways of life. It is the source of wisdom, of knowledge, of technologies of survival. It shelters the forgotten peoples of the world, the marginalized and the destitute, the scum and refuse of progress. It

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is an area of diversity in opposition to the uniformity of modern structures. Many shapes, many colours, many designs, many languages, many tastes, many sights, many smells nestle in its nooks and crannies. It absorbs change, mutes its destructive potential, cushions its hard blows. Like a mother, it sustains all. It encompasses everything that is handed down, repeated or reinterpreted. It may be deep, but it is not static. It accommodates the new and quickly domesticates it. It traditionalizes the non-traditional. Thus, it seeps into both modernity and post-modernity. Science has a tradition; protest(antism) has a tradition; even modernity has a tradition. Modernity Here, there is motion and bustle everywhere. A new race wants to refashion the world in its own image. It rejects the past with an impatience and vehemence, which are both frightening and magnetic. Its vanguard is youth, always impetuous, always thirsting for new conquests. In one hand it holds a pen and in the other it bears a sword; when one doesn’t work, it uses the other. It started with the cry of liberty, fraternity and equality, but ended with the blood of innocents on its hands. Its shield was the holy book camouflaging a gold-seeking blade. This enormously powerful deity, browbeaten or propitiated by its impatient votaries, yielded up unprecedented powers. Its devotees conquered nature, learning how to end starvation, nakedness and homeless, but also how to destroy the entire planet, decimating all living things. It raised a quarter of the world, in a period of 150 years, to unprecedented levels of prosperity and power, but left the rest in darkness, misery and poverty. Its legacies include the two world wars, the holocaust and colonialism. It made the industrial revolution the engine of world progress and now promises more in the post-industrial information age of high technology and brain drain. In some parts of the world, it championed so called great leaps forward and cultural revolutions, both disastrous and genocidal; elsewhere, it created concentration camps, gulags and killing fields. Modernity, like the Statue of Liberty, holds aloft its torch, inviting the benighted nations of the world to follow its lead. Its buzzword is development; it promises untold progress but causes unprecedented triage. Foreign aid, international agencies and inappropriate technologies are its handmaidens. A world not united but even more unequal emerges in its wake, devastated with overpopulation, unemployment and despair. The very planet has been driven to the brink of annihilation through such rapacious techno-modernism.

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Post-modernity This is a new deity, shaped and crafted, from the half-sublated remains of modernity. Its single cry is liberty, yet more liberty. Modernity’s child has turned, it would seem, to devour its own parent. Post-modernity speaks the language of plurality, of multiculturalism, of dialogue, of difference, of the end of master narratives, of the dissolution of the centre. It tells us, look, the doors are open again. All those whom modernity excluded and drove out of the promised land can come back. It seeks to correct the excesses of modernity, but in the process has created its own extravagances. Most of its proponents are the outcasts and outsiders of Europe who have little to lose by attacking the establishment. Like forgotten bastard children, they have returned to reclaim their patrimony. They have unloosed and unleashed an epistemological anarchy, attacking the very foundations of Western knowledge systems. They celebrate indeterminacy, a new moral and cultural relativism. In its wake, the largest nation state in human history has broken into several pieces, ensuring the unhampered triumph of the master narrative of capitalism. All over the world post-modernity seems to signify the end not only of imperialism, socialism, but of nationalism itself. It attacks global capitalism, but revels through its success; clearly, capitalism has already incorporated post-modernity.2 But who is that shadowy figure lurking like a looming spectre outside the tent of post-modernity, threatening to enter? It is the rising tide of reaction, reasserting older and supposedly dethroned master narratives of racism, imperialism, fascism and fundamentalism. It is supremacist in outlook and speaks the language of conservatism. It bears the crescent on its head, like a halo. All the old values of centralized authority, theocracy and anti-humanism accompany it as its sentinels. In a hoarse chuckle it hisses its prophecy: ‘The end of postmodernism is not too distant. On its ashes we shall create the new universal state. The future belongs to us, the chosen.’ In the meanwhile, third-worldlings still wish to make hay while the sun rises in the West. Before the gates close, they wish to rush in and grab what they can from the spoils of theory. Those disenchanted by its failed ‘postal’ millennium relapse back to the dualities, binaries and oppositions of the modern. Having peeped into these three enclosures, I am quite clear that for Indian literary theory to thrive, it cannot be tethered in any one stockade. Also, in the highly competitive, cut-throat global supermarket of ideas, our best chance for survival is not altogether to jettison,

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not because we Indians have no direct access to modernity or postmodernity. But the fact remains that what is uniquely ours and ours alone, what we are saddled with whether we like it or not, what makes for our difference, is the past and its multiple trajectories. Our tradition is what the West doesn’t have. The West may have lost much of its own traditions too. That is why they often look outside of themselves, to India, for instance. Through us, they can reclaim their own lost links to their repudiated faith and wisdom traditions, recharge their now dried out streams of spirituality. Tradition, then, is a domain that we not only boast of, but can best use to sustain ourselves. The engines of both modernism and post-modernism, on the other hand, are firmly in the control of the West. They are not about to surrender the drivers’ seats to anyone else. Our participation in these discourses is at best peripheral, our continued investment in them risky. Moreover, let alone post-modernity, even modernity hasn’t been properly domesticated in India. We are a society in which the modern usually forms a thin and easily peeled-off layer over older ideas, systems and structures. Those who inhabit only the modern are doomed to superficiality and sterility, trapped in an artificial subculture that allows little air, water or sunshine. We see such raw, unformed minds in the semi-literate lumpens that roam our half-urban townscapes as also in their super-sophisticated, ultra-modern urban counterparts who always look to the latest from the West to fashion their lives thereby remaining restless, insecure and uncertain of themselves. Matthew Arnold’s Jeremiahs and Philistines in Indian hue and garb? As to post-modernism, it is like an imported game to most of us, conceptual buzz, fuzz. While it has tremendous anti-authoritarian possibilities, it also ties up our various regional and subaltern upsurges to the world-tendency for autonomy and decentralization. Yet, its sustaining currents, at least intellectually and ideologically, remain somewhat alien to us. An India that is still home to orthodox Marxists, Stalinists, developmental economists, secularist fundamentalists and other antediluvians, long-extinct elsewhere but still thriving here, may not be its most hospitable host. In the West, arguably, everything is in a post- or even post-post-phase – post-structuralist, post-Marxist, post-feminist, post-human – but here, millions of us are still in a protostage – proto-capitalist, proto-industrial, proto-feminist and so on. To apply post-modernity uncritically and unreflectively to our situation, then, would constitute a special kind of naivete. From our third-world location, there are two ways of regarding the discursive over-refinement of post-modernism. One is to see this as irreducible and integral to its semantics. If so, post-modernism is not

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paraphrasable. In that case, the only way to enter it is by approximating or appropriating its verbal textures as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have done. But such a participation is available only to the very select. The rest of us must remain mere onlookers from outside frosted windows on such cosy scenes in the grand and forbidding temples of learning of Europe or America. Contrarily, we may consider post-modernism as paraphrasable. If so, then what it says is not really new, even if the way it says it may be. If so, we from the old world have access to many of these ideas in our own narratives in various languages, layered one upon another like the multiple layers of warak (silver foil) on sweets. Thus, I believe that the insights of post-modernism are accessible to us through what we have inherited, instead of via a perpetual exile in alien and alienating elite discourses. In the final analysis, what makes us unique in India is not so much the dominance of tradition over modernity or the dominance of modernity over post-modernity or vice versa, but the simultaneous and continuous existence of each, quite contrary to world trends. In India, tradition, modernity and post-modernity all flourish cheek by jowl, without one supplanting or extinguishing the other. This inherent multivalence characterizes our reality more than any one episteme. The real challenge, then, is not only to come to grips with each or to use one strategically against the other two but to deal with the simultaneous relevance, promise and threat of all three of them, not only in relation to themselves in India but also in relation to the West.

Intersecting triads In the foregoing two sections, I have set up two sets of conceptual triads, regional, national and global on the one hand, and traditional, modern and post-modern on the other. Is it possible to make these two sets to have a meaningful interchange with one another? Will such an interaction prove fruitful to our endeavour to evolve a viable Indian critical praxis? I have already suggested that of the second set, our best option is not to get rid of tradition, even as we grope towards our own kind of modernity. From our locatedness in tradition, even the tradition of our own modernity, we have some purchase also with the post-modern. Our tradition has already absorbed a good deal of the modern, starting with Rammohun Roy’s use of the Enlightenment discourse in his dealings with the nascent colonial powers, to our present-day fixation on globalization as the panacea for our poverty and backwardness. I myself have argued that Rammohun represents the way of comprehension, a sort of

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via media between the extremes of total capitulation to the West as represented by Macaulay’s progeny or a total rejection as represented by fundamentalists and revivalists of all types.3 In principle, the national consensus, even if it is not always followed in practice, is the rejection of subservience and imitation as a way of dealing with the West and hence with modernity. The use of modern concepts and strategies to critique tradition has been a part of the standard practice in India for the past 200 years. Contrarily, we have used the insights of tradition to counter the excesses of modernity too: the best example of this, as we have already seen, is Gandhi. Now we can extend these possibilities by using tradition which has already assimilated parts of modernity to critique post-modernity or use post-modernity in conjunction with tradition to critique our continuing investment in the modern.4 A similar range of options is opened up when we try out various combinations of the regional, the national and the international. The national can be used to resist the oppressions of the international, the regional to resist the national and the national or global to resist the regional. On the other hand, the subaltern and the international can be aligned against the national or the regional and national against the international. Such combinations are available within each set; when the two sets interface, even more challenging permutations emerge. For instance, it is obvious that the subaltern is easily aligned with the post-modern in that both celebrate the fragmentary. Likewise, the national and the modern may be seen to be in a close relationship because the national project is, as far as India is concerned, a modern one. This also explains why the hyper-national tends to become the oppressive and the hegemonic, just as the hyper-modern may become murderous. The traditional can also be connected with the post-modern because post-modernity, in rejecting modernity, often retrieves what modernity rejected, which is tradition. The excavation of traditions from the debris of modernity is also one of post-modernity’s tasks. From another point of view, the global, not the national, is the arena of modernity. Supplanting nation states with nation-markets can be seen as the culmination of capitalistic hegemony and thus of modernity’s manifest destiny. A revival of tradition, similarly, may be seen as an international phenomenon, in which case the international is the site for tussle between different versions of modernity and post-modernity. To simplify the possibilities and choices, I propose the following schematic model: Post-modern (P) Modern (M)

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Combining one or more from the first set with one or more from the other, we might derive numerous permutations and combinations. I am not interested in all of these in their mathematical plenitude. Instead, I propose the following broad responses: 1

Post-modernists a

b

c

2

Post-modern global (PG). To this group belong all those who have found their home in the international/post-modernism. From such a location they oppose forms of the modern and the traditional, both at the subaltern and the national levels. Examples: most NRIs (non-resident Indians) and, to use Dhirubhai Seth’s inversion, RNI (resident non-Indian) critics. The prime examples would be Spivak and Bhabha. Post-modern regional (PR). This is an interesting variation of the above. The practitioners believe that it is by a wedding of the local with the post-modern that Indian polyphony is best expressed. They are opposed, in their own way, to both postmodern internationalists and to various kinds of nationalists, whether traditional or modern. Examples: The subaltern school of scholars; Spivak’s translations of Mahasweta Devi’s work. Of course, international subalternists are far more privileged than national or (ordinarily) international elites, for instance Bhabha, with his notion of vernacular cosmopolitanism or Arundhati Roy’s internationalist, post-modern activism for subaltern causes. Post-modern national (PN). This is an unlikely combination because the national is usually a modern site, one which post-modernism would seek to decentre. But if we regard the Indian nation as a nation of nations, it takes on the hue of something post-modern.

Modernists a

Modern global (MG). The best example is Marxists. The Marxist project is, essentially, modernist in its outlook and ideology and internationalist in its ambitions. An example of this position can be found in Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory where

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he advocates a unified socialistic thrust against international capitalism. Like other modernists, these critics oppose postmodernism as being anarchic and relativistic. Modern national (MN). A good example of these are the BJP-RSS Parivar (family). Their versions of both nationalism and Hinduism are modernist. To them the nation is the most important ideological site. Therefore, they have little use for both international post-modernism or for traditional and subaltern identities. Even their invocations of tradition are really modern revisions. Some of the jihadis (Islamic militants) can be modern counter-internationalist or modern counter-nationalist, but they too belong to the modern sector. Modern regional (MR). These include Ambedkarites and other proponents of Dalit, tribal and other special interest groups agitating for social justice. The fight for equity and equality is typically a modern one; welding it to regional, that is sub-national interests, makes its champions subalternists. They oppose both nationalists and internationalists, as they do traditionalists and post-modernists. Tradition, to them, is a source of oppression, whereas the central government, usually led by upper or intermediate castes, not easy to capture or overthrow. Their aim is power that is more locally available. They may have links with global support groups, but they have little to do with cosmopolitan theory. Similarly, they have little use for the blurring of binary oppositions as advocated by post-modernism which would rob them of their victimhood. An extreme example of this group would be Maoists and Naxalites fighting for an armed overthrow of civilian authority on behalf of peasants and tribals in the interiors of India.

Traditionalists a

Traditional global (TG). This is an unlikely combination. The tradition of contemporary internationalism is rather young, going back no farther than the Enlightenment. But we know that such internationalism was itself Eurocentric. Tradition, almost by definition, implies something which the West has foregone in its embrace of modernity; hence, it cannot be anything but localized in the so-called traditional societies of the world. Yet the idea of vasudhaiva kutumbakam the global family is a traditional Indian one. In our times, the inversion of this category is much more prevalent. Located all over the

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b

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world, global traditionalists support the strengthening and even revival of traditions. Examples include Arvind Sharma’s work on Hinduism and Rajiv Malhotra’s campaigns against the Western distortions of Indian texts and traditions. Within India, a good example would be Vandana Shiva, who uses global resources to support local traditions. Traditional national (TN). An interesting and innovative category whose chief representative is Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi tried to offer an alternative definition and model for the nation, one which stresses a decentred and diffused svaraj, rather than a monolithic, modern state with power concentrated in the hands of a few. It is this type of nationalism which I think inspires a people-oriented criticism of the nation. Traditional regional (TR). Not all of these oppose the traditional national. For instance, Medha Patkar and the Narmada Bachao Andolan are supported by those who have a Gandhian view of the nation as a territory belonging primarily to the people and not to the state.

Both traditional national (b) and traditional global (a) would be opposed to the modern, whether in its regional, national or international varieties. International intervention, as exemplified by the World Bank or the IMF, would be seen as a version of modernity. In this sense, the fight between capitalism and communism is one of modernity’s internal quarrels. The traditional national and traditional global would also oppose post-modernism, especially of the global variety, as lacking a moral centre. Traditional world views give an enormous importance to a society’s ethical, religious and spiritual goals. Positions (b) and (a) might, however, make common cause with the post-modern regional. By mixing and matching within the sets in addition to across sets, we get even more accurate labels – global subaltern, for example, which better describes the politics of, say, Arundhati Roy than postmodern subaltern does. Similarly, we have the global national, Gandhi himself being an early example of a diasporic Indian who worked for Indian nationalism. There are also international anti-nationalists, such as Khalistanis, Maoists or jihadis; this group is of course modern, committed as it is to the logic of counter-nationalism. Only the nation that they wished to create requires the break-up of an existing state. International revivalists, many of whom support the BJP or RSS from abroad, are to my mind both national and modern in their orientation, though they do so in the name of an invented tradition. We could call this group global, modern and nationalist.

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I have merely outlined what I consider some of the more important kinds of alignments. Actually, many more combinations are possible. The categories, too, will doubtless overlap and change. Moreover, as I have suggested in the case of modernity, there are internal dissensions within tradition and post-modernity as well. Mapping all of them would complicate the model inordinately. However, what is more significant is that our choices will depend on who or what we consider threatening, oppressive, hegemonic and, conversely, who or what we believe to be life-giving, empowering and enabling. But, if we define our broad agenda as that of developing a viable, indigenous tradition of criticism, then it will immediately be clear that the biggest obstacle to this is our continuing subjection to Western modes of thought. In other words, decolonization will have to be built into any meaningful theory which we wish to develop. Our best svaraj-ist course, as I have already suggested, would be to rework the national and the traditional. We can make our theory more flexible and open if we also allow for various other combinations within this broadly national-traditionalsvaraj-ist framework. For instance, we may allow a traditional-regionalsubaltern combination to propose a desi or Dalit awareness of our several overlapping but distinct linguistic and cultural traditions as opposed to the hegemonic margi or mainstream traditional, national or global. To save even more disadvantaged and threatened folk narratives, we may combine post-modernism with the sub-regional to resist the oppression of the literate print capitalists. Both the regional and the national combined with the traditional and the post-modern may be used to counter the modern, globalizing, Bretton Woods institutions. When, on the other hand, tradition gets too onerous, we may invoke modern rationality, even post-modern irrationality to counteract it. Against religious fanaticism, on the other hand, modern rationality is a necessary tool, but when dealing with left or right-wing intolerance, we may invoke the resources of confident and plural traditions. Similarly, when the regional or subaltern becomes too parochial, the national or global serves as a useful check or broadening measure.

Follow-on In a visit to India, Fred Dallmayr, the eminent political theorist, spoke of the impact of the overthrow of the canon on Western academia, giving us a personal insight into the challenge of post-modernism within the West. His position was somewhat Habermasian: he advocated more not less knowledge. Yet, he opposed the epistemic anarchism

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that equates, say, an obscure (to the West) philosophical system such as Vedanta to the very central (to the West) tradition of ancient Greek philosophy. ‘We need to know who we are, what our Self is, before we can appreciate our Other, don’t you think?’ This was so revealing because our position in India is almost an exact copy rather than inversion of Dallmayr’s. We ourselves profess that Vedanta is obscure while Greek philosophy is central. Our entire academic system is, thus, Western and alien in orientation; we are trained to understand and recognize our Other before we can understand and recognize our Self. Here I am reminded of an observation of the noted Hindi critic, Namvar Singh. Post-modernism, he says, embodies a curious paradox: we have the literature and they have the theory. Now, by positing theory as a substitute for literature, the West seeks not only to contain and control our production of literature but perhaps to edge out our literature and replace it with (their) theory. Ganesh Devy, on the other hand, says that all we need is vernacular literature, not theory. To me both positions are untenable. That is one reason why I emphasize bidirectional resistance, subversion and protest. In a time when we seem to have adopted the path of the globalization not just of our economy but also of our culture, what we resist can only become clear if we define who we are, our interests and subject positions. Modernism, like modernity itself, which was everywhere under attack two decades ago, seems to be staging a comeback, even if it is more vengeful than a mere reboot. In India, however, like modernity, modernism was anti-traditional, Western in its outlook; it bred a brittle, often fragmented sensibility, alienated from the Indian volk. The avant garde, especially in Indian English poetry, affected numerous purges to evolve a hyper-refined, exclusive canon of the pure which would constitute the ‘great tradition’ within this minor tradition. R.  Parthasarthy’s Ten Indian Poets may be cited as an example. It exalted scepticism and mistrusted faith; it debunked romanticism and mysticism. It was essentially urban and Westernized, even though many of its practitioners translated medieval and contemporary vernacular poetry in a modernist idiom. It abhorred enthusiasm, despised sentiment. Its favourite style was free verse; its practitioners rarely bothered with rhyme or metre. It was a dry, precise kind of literature, well-suited for detached and repressed descriptions of outer and inner landscapes. It was, in the ultimate analysis, also insecure and exclusive, rewarding conformity and punishing deviation from its poetic norm. That variety of modernism is, thankfully, passé. But we must not forget its greatest service. It freed literature from the stranglehold of

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tradition. In nature, we don’t find movements or violent uprising, but in culture, which is man-made, structures are erected and then dismantled. There is an ongoing process of institutionalization of ideas, inventions and images, which later must be altered, fractured, destroyed when it becomes oppressive or suffocating. In the shadow of powerful and hegemonic ideologies and structures, nothing new or creative can take root or grow. Therefore, a vigorous and violent deconstruction is necessary before some fresh form, movement or idea can take shape. Modernism created this space by dismantling tradition. This process has been famously termed ‘creative destruction’. If the relationship between tradition, modernity and post-modernity needs to be retheorized, similarly, the relationship between the regional, national and international too needs to be reworked in terms of their literary and ideological production. We know that subaltern regionalists have given us powerful literary movements. The best example is Dalit literature. This has been widespread in several Indian languages in the last twenty-five years or so. In my own mother tongue, Marathi, Dalit literature has been perhaps the single most powerful and exciting artistic development in the last thirty years. Earlier, in the early post-independence decades, the regional voice in literature produced an efflorescence of what in Hindi is called anchalic or local creativity. Regional languages and dialects, customs, life styles and social problems became the highlights of this literature. From Phaneshwarnath Renu to Srilal Shukla, this tradition has produced some of the best writing in Hindi and other Indian languages. It is, of course, possible to argue that folk literature, Dalit literature and the literature of other suppressed minorities is also post-modern in that it celebrates the fragmentary and the local. But we know very well that this kind of localism is very different from aesthetic free play or moral decentring. Dalit writing, in contrast, is informed by a modern rage against tradition and its injustices. In this context, the ‘national’ still remains the elusive and tantalizing domain, which every major writer wishes to aspire to. To be able to write a novel or a poem that embodies the desires of an entire culture rather than a small group of people is still an attractive goal. The great Indian novel remains every writer’s dream project, even if Shashi Tharoor failed to deliver a modern Mahabharata by naming his book thus. Even the internationalism of a Satyajit Ray is based on a notion of a distinct Indian nation and identity. I would therefore argue that the national is still a most challenging literary domain, harder to master than the immediately enticing local or the backdoor entry into the international. Even when a Vikram Seth or Salman Rushdie secures his place in world literature,

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he do so only via constructing (or deconstructing) the nation in a ‘big’ novel like Midnight’s Children or A Suitable Boy. Though we are being increasingly drawn into the willing embrace of global economic and cultural systems, our differences with the West are still stark and obvious, particularly in our need for national cultures and national markets. The West needs novelty – whether in cosmetics, cars or ideas. Its markets must be fuelled with newer and newer products to feed the universal religion of consumerism. But what of us in India, short of both cash and infrastructure? We cannot be academic market leaders for a long time. We must instead resort to our cottage industries, alternate culture models and ecologically friendly creativity. Let our theory therefore be home-grown and homespun. Our resources are unmatched, not only in the tent that we call tradition, but in contiguous enclosures whether modern or ‘postal’, where discards or imitations from the West – adaptations, adoptions, import substitutes of all kinds, even simulacra are crammed to the hilt. We amuse ourselves with the latter, impress each other or while away our time till we are willing and ready to go towards our manifest destiny, which is, of course, self-reliance, independence, dignity and civilizational recognition and respectability in the international community of ideas. In a word, neither subservience nor domination, neither victimization nor counter-imperialism – but svaraj is our goal.

Notes 1 Originally presented as ‘Tradition, Modernity, Postmodernity: Challenges in Theory’ at the Sahitya Akademi Colloquium on Young Writing in India, 20–23 February 1993, subsequently published as ‘Tradition, Modernity and Post-Modernity/Region, Nation, and Internation: Challenges in Theory’, Littcrit 21.1 (40) (June 1995): 5–22, it was reprinted in P. K. Rajan, ed., Indian Literary Criticism in English: Critics, Texts, Issues (Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2004). This chapter is a substantially revised version. 2 As I said before, I do not wish to be entirely dismissive of post-modernism. I am aware that for many, post-modernism has been a liberating, almost religious experience. Not having any other source of emancipation, postmodernism was what served to transform the lives of such devotees. If Derrida and Foucault can enlighten our urban intellectuals, who can object? But we need to remember that liberation is more important than the means of liberation. 3 In Making India: Colonialism, National Culture, and the Afterlife of Indian English Authority. 4 See ‘Post-modernism and India: Some Preliminary Animadversions’. In this and in similar essays I have attempted to expose and problematize the power relations behind our reception of Western knowledge. Without foregrounding

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the inequality of our post-colonial epistemic transactions, it would be futile to embark on any project of decolonization. For a detailed exploration of such a possibility, see Decolonization and Development: Hind Svaraj Revisioned (1993).

References Paranjape, Makarand. Decolonization and Development: Hind Svaraj Revisioned. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1993. ———. Making India: Colonialism, National Culture, and the Afterlife of Indian English Authority. Dordrecht: Springer, 2013; New Delhi: Amaryllis, 2015. ———. ‘Post-Modernism and India: Some Preliminary Animadversions’. In A Way of Leaving So as to Stay: Papers in Honour of Professor S. Viswanathan. Eds. Sudhakar Marathe, et al. Madras: T.R. Publications, 1994: 89–109. ———. ‘Tradition, Modernity and Post-Modernity/Region, Nation, and Internation: Challenges in Theory’. Littcrit. 21.1 (40) (June 1995): 5–22; also in Indian Literary Criticism in English: Critics, Texts, Issues. Ed. P. K. Rajan. Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2004: 260–275.

8

Duality

*

Duality Regardless of where we prefer to be, duality is where we find ourselves. Raja Rao says in The Meaning of India, ‘There can be no world without duality, yet there can be no peace in duality’ (85). Musing over this statement for years, I have often wondered if duality, which is essentially a metaphysical category, might be applied to the aesthetics of modernity.1 From the outset of our inquiry, we are confronted with a problem. How is duality related to time, history or contingency? Isn’t the problem of duality trans-historical, just as its antidote and solvent, non-duality is? Somewhat like the quintessential human problem of dukkha that the Buddha identified, duality persists, whether ancient, medieval or modern times; we have to live with and try to overcome it. What, then, have modern times to do with this existential dilemma, which is our lot? If duality is synonymous with the human condition itself, then how is it to be historically situated or analysed? What makes duality in modern times different from duality in traditional times? This, I thought, was our first question. I approached this problem with the hypothesis that duality, agonizing at all times, acquires a special poignancy during modernity. That is because duality was largely an individual matter in earlier ages, just as one might argue that one’s spiritual quest is an individual matter today. But during modern times, duality gets institutionalized. Two evocative and memorable announcements of this are Weber’s idea of modernity as the progressive disenchantment of the world and Walter Benjamin’s bemoaning of the loss of the aura of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. To my mind, the root cause of the anguish and alienation of modernity could be the abolishing of the spiritual

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or metaphysical from the realm of daily life. A holistic view of life is substituted by one that is fragmented and divided. Such a transformation is marked by the shift from the theocentric to the anthropocentric that supposedly took place in Europe after the Renaissance. In Science and Culture, Jit Singh Uberoi locates this shift in ‘a particular demonstrable set of relations between (a) God, (b) man and (c) nature that can best explain the nature and character of the unity of Western civilization’ (11). Uberoi contends that positivism, ‘as a faith and system’ replaced the medieval Christian world view: Positivism first attacked and successfully demolished the medieval Christian synthesis, transcendentalist and immanentist, in the sphere of science and religion, i.e. divinity or Spirit and its symbols, and only then went on to unfold on its own the new relations, categories, and attitudes of modern life and thought . . . the new regime . . . rested on two fundamental presuppositions: (a) the disassociation and the autonomy of fact and value in the field of knowledge; and (b) the dissociation and autonomy of lexical truth and applied praxis, or theory and technique or consciousness and conscience or belief and conduct, in the field of life. (26) Uberoi credits the Swiss Protestant reformer Huldreich Zwingli (1484–1531) with being the chief architect of this ‘revolution’, rather than Martin Luther or John Calvin. By attacking and rejecting the traditional ritual of the mass, Zwingli effectively separated the world of spiritual truth and inner light from the world of apparent reality and outer forms. . . . The two spheres were to be regarded as separate and different until the last judgement of God . . . and this would lead to the infinite regression of dualism. (32) Uberoi’s thesis is aptly summed up in his diagram of the four sets of boxes (Figure 3.36). In the old system, the box of the spirit, the largest box, contains all the others – mind, life and matter; hierarchically, it is also on the top, numbered 1, followed by mind numbered 2, life numbered 3 and matter numbered 4. In the new order, all the boxes are separated. Matter is number 1, connected to life at number 2, life is connected to mind at number 3 and, that, possibly, connected to spirit at number 4; spirit, however, is a doubtful box, represented by broken lines. It has been rendered ‘metaphysical’.

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There are links between Uberoi’s schema for describing the levels of existence and Sri Aurobindo’s gradation of consciousness from matter, to life, to mind, to what lies beyond. But what is perhaps more interesting is the intersection between Raja Rao’s and Uberoi’s ideas: it is at this crosshairs that their ‘enemy’, duality, is identified. Raja Rao states his position quite unequivocally: There are, it seems to me, only two possible perspectives on human understanding: the horizontal and (or) the vertical. They could also be named the anthropomorphic and the abhuman. The vertical movement is the sheer upward thrust toward the unnameable, the unutterable, the very source of wholeness. The horizontal is the human condition expressing itself, in terms of concern for man as one’s neighbour – biological and social, the predicament of one who knows how to say, I and you. (140) The vertical rises slowly, desperately, to move from the I to the non-I, as non-dual Vedanta would put it. It is the move towards the impersonal, the universal (though there is no universe there, so to say) reaching out to ultimate being, where there are no two entities, no you and I. The horizontal again, on its long, arduous and confused pathways, will reach the same ultimacy by stripping the I of its many vestments, through concern and compassion for the other: ‘The vertical then is the inherent reality in the horizontal’ (140). Or again: There are only two pathways to looking at the world: the causal way or the unpredictable: or to use my metaphor .  .  . the horizontal or the vertical. . . . In the context of Indian philosophy, we could say, either there is duality or non-duality. (192) Raja Rao, using the very method of modernity, scientific reduction, ensures that the crux of the matter boils down to one contest – between duality and non-duality. For him, ‘There are indeed no horizontal solutions, the human has no answer ever’ (190). Discovering this contrast in a trans-civilizational dialogue with Andre Malrauz, Raja Rao quotes the latter as saying, ‘You remember what Dostoevsky said: Europe is a cemetery of ideas – Yes, we cannot go beyond good and evil. We can never go, as the Indians can, beyond duality’ (51). The dukkha, the deep suffering that we experience as human beings, is therefore the distress of duality,

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the sadness of time, process, growth, decay, causality, contingency, in a word, the sorrow of temporality, of horizontal existence. Raja Rao says, ‘In the dissolution of the object, then is happiness’ (83). The dissolution of the object, of the world itself is only possible by a radical negation. It is a negation that rests on the denial of objective reality, of anything other than the self. Upon such a negation of duality, the whole world is reduced to its primal state of pure consciousness, advaita (non-duality). Raja Rao characterizes earthly life as an agonizing, futile trial, a perpetual state of conflict: For the world is war – the war of the opposites. Good and bad, night and day, man and woman, are all, as it were at war with each other, in the sense that the two things can never be at harmony – harmony is always transcendence. (84) The world, which is in grip of duality, caught in the war of opposites, craves for a peace that comes only from transcendence: ‘Thus transcendence is man’s only need. In transcendence there is neither man nor woman, day nor night’ (85). The purpose of the world is to lead, force, us to go there, to That. Every object, every action, every experience points by its very partiality and limitation to that from which it arises for the time being and to that in which it dissolves upon its true cognition – the absolute, the ultimate reality, non-dual. The aim of life, accordingly, is ‘the abolition of duality, of contradiction – and of the peace it should bring to one’ (7). India, in this scheme of things, is ‘not a country (desa), it is a perspective (darsana)’ (17). And the meaning of India is ‘Knowledge, Jnana, itself the “I” ’ (194) as the last page of the book affirms. Going back to our original question, would it be true to say that though duality, in one form or another, is perennial to the human condition, modernity imposes upon us the special compulsion of duality? Saundarya Beauty, saundarya, can only be considered as part of a larger world view, not as an end in itself. This is especially true in the classical traditions of India. Why is saundarya, the sense of the beautiful, so important to our daily lives? I got the answer in Harsha V. Dehejia’s Parvati Darpana. This exquisite little book, a personal as well as a philosophical triumph, advocates an aesthetization of life. The true

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end of living, which is happiness or satisfaction, can never be achieved unless we bring beauty into it. When the mind contemplates the beautiful, it achieves peace. Dehejia, in accordance with Kashmir Saivism, calls this state visranti or true restfulness: The all-important concept of visranti of Kashmir Saivism is a rich and full epistemic rest, it is the rest that comes at the culmination of a joyful activity, it is the pleasurable stillness that succeeds the excitement of orgasm, it is the silence that follows speech and yet contains within it all sounds, it is the glow of restful knowledge that seeks knowledge no more, it is the serenity of self-awareness that need not look outward anymore, but only inward to enjoy that awareness, it is the stillness of self-reflection, it is the freedom of consciousness turning in on itself, it is the beauty of a cosmic vision, it is the glory and majesty of visvarupa. (83) Contrary to Raja Rao’s essentially advaitic and transcendentalist view, Dehejia argues that ‘visranti is not the contentless nirvikalpa jnana of Sankara or the sunyata of Nagarjuna but a rich and primal subjectivity driven by its objectivity reflecting on itself’ (ibid). Hence, it is for a fulfilment of and through the senses that Dehejia stakes his claim, though he does not deny that the ultimate object remains transcendence. No transcendence is possible by negating or bypassing the senses. It is only through the mundane and the sensual that the trans-mundane and the supra-sensual may be attained. In this respect, Dehejia’s point of view is Tantric-Yogic, not Vedantic. In Dehejia’s advocacy of the satisfaction of the senses, the aesthetic principle plays the crucial role. Aestheticizing one’s life means to surround oneself with objects of beauty. Apprehending them, contemplating them, the senses find their satisfaction and the mind is contented, ceasing its wandering. No wonder, saundarya is so significant in Dehejia’s thought. I once asked him, ‘What about those who cannot afford beauty? How are they to aestheticize their lives?’ He replied with characteristic candour, ‘Well, they should try bhakti.’ That is, they should content themselves with devotion and worship. What this meant is that in the modern context, only the adept, the rasika, can enjoy beautiful things on a daily basis, without having to go to a museum to see them behind barriers and glass cases. Traditionally, of course, this was not true because of the beauty inherent in objects of daily use, which were hand-crafted, produced by the perennial artistry of the folk. But after the industrial revolution, the cultivation of taste became the

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prerogative of a few. Dehejia’s view, then, admits to an elitism either of an economic or intellectual kind, exclusive to a certain class of people in recent times. But because a theory of beauty cannot be restricted to just a few, Dehejia suggests a way out for the rest of society: bhakti. Bhakti or devotion does not require lots of money. Nor does it necessitate surrounding ourselves with objects of beauty. Bhakti requires a certain emotional and mental temperament which, even without ample material resources, can launch the practitioner into a realm of sensual and supra-sensual experience that is akin to the rasasvadana, the relish of rasa. The image that instantly sprang to my mind after our discussion at Harsha-bhai’s very beautiful home in Ottawa was of the kirtankars in the Mumbai local trains. Living in distant suburbs in almost wretched surroundings, they still managed to convert their daily commute of a couple of hours into an aesthetic experience by singing bhajans together. The artistic quality of their worship was variable and its effect on non-participants probably not too salutary, but for those absorbed in the ritual, the otherwise tiresome, crowded, even dehumanizing daily journey was suddenly rendered bearable, if not pleasant. From what I understood from Harsha-bhai, saundarya was for those who could afford it, while bhakti was for everyone. A corollary is that saundarya is secondary, if not irrelevant to bhakti. The intensity of the devotee’s emotions is able to transform his or her state of mind to something similar to what the rasika experiences regardless of subjects or objects of the devotion. Interestingly, Harsha-bhai’s second postulate on bhakti is quite similar to the traditional construction of classical Indian aesthetics by theorists like Ananda Coomaraswamy. Coomaraswamy says that the Hindu view ‘treats the practice of art as a form of yoga, and identifies aesthetic emotion with that felt when the self perceives the Self’ (41). If, as Coomaraswamy argues, such a position is predicated on an anti-positivist epistemology, then the objects of saundarya are of little importance: Throughout the East, wherever Hindu and Buddhist thought have deeply penetrated, it is firmly believed that all knowledge is directly accessible to the concentrated and ‘one-pointed’ mind, without the direct intervention of the senses. (46) Coomaraswamy asserts that the purpose of the imager – and by extension, the artist – ‘was neither self-expression nor the realisation of beauty . . . if there is beauty in his work, this did not arise from

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aesthetic intention, but from a state of mind which found unconscious expression’ (47). Nor is it that beautiful themes lead to beautiful works for ‘the quality of beauty in a work of art is really quite independent of its theme’ (ibid). In fact, those who deliberately set out ‘to paint a beautiful picture’ may be surprised to find that the result ‘is insipid and lacks conviction’ (ibid). In ‘Hindu View of Art’ Coomaraswamy reverts to this theme of what is beautiful. Citing Dhananjaya’s Dasharupa, he asserts that ‘Beauty is absolutely independent of the sympathetic – “Delightful or disgusting, exalted or lowly, cruel or kindly, obscure or refined, (actual) or imaginary, there is no subject that cannot evoke rasa in man” ’ (54). Not only is the aesthetic experience not derived from ‘material qualities’ but is quite independent of them and may even, ‘as Dhananjaya says, be derived in spite of sensuous or moral displeasure’ (55). What is more, ‘The tasting of rasa – the vision of beauty – is enjoyed, says Vishvanatha, “only by those who are competent thereto” ’ (55). Coomaraswamy’s contention is borne out by the original texts themselves. For instance, in Sahitya Darpana, Viswanatha observes: Pure aesthetic experience is theirs in whom the knowledge of beauty is innate; it is known intuitively, in intellectual ecstasy without accompaniment of ideation, at the highest level of conscious being; born of one mother with the vision of god, its life is as it were a flash of blinding light of trans-mundane origin, impossible to analyse, and yet in the image of our very being. (III, 2–3; quoted in Shah 40) But, though the aesthetic experience is supersensuous, it cannot dispense entirely with objects: We can no more achieve Beauty than we can find Release by turning our backs on the world: we cannot find our way by a mere denial of things, but only in learning to see those things as they really are, infinite or beautiful. The artist reveals this beauty wherever the mind attaches itself: and the mind attaches itself, not directly to the Absolute, but to objects of choice. (Coomaraswamy ‘Hindu View of Art’ 59) In Coomaraswamy, as in Dehejia, the object is important, but only provisionally in that it leads to the state of pure enjoyment, which, by definition is out of time and space. We are reminded here of the great treatise Abhinavabharati which clearly states:

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The artistic expression is the direct expression of a feeling of passion generalised – that is freed from distinctions in time or space and, therefore, from individual and practical interest through an inner force of creative intuition within the artist. This state of consciousness (rasa) embodied in the poem, is transferred to the actor, the dancer, the spectator. Born in the heart of the poet, it flowers as it were in the actor and bears fruit in the spectator. If the artist of the poet has the creative intuition, the reader or spectator is emotionally educated man, in whom lie dormant the different states of being and when he sees them manifested, he is lifted to that ultimate state of bliss, known as ananda. (Kapila Vatsyayan’s translation, cited in Shah 49) This view of the object as leading to a state beyond itself may be contrasted with Raja Rao’s declaration that ‘[i]n the dissolution of the object, then is happiness’ (83). I would like to turn to one final essay by Coomaraswamy before moving on from this issue of beauty. In ‘That Beauty Is a State’, Coomaraswamy once again declares that beauty is an aesthetic term, having to do with whether a work of art is rasavant, full of rasa, or not. Beauty does not have to do with our sympathetic or ethical response to the work, but only to our aesthetic response. In other words, ‘beauty may be discovered [my emphasis] anywhere’ (65) even if it may not be present everywhere: ‘in aesthetic contemplation as in love and in knowledge, we momentarily recover the unity of our being released from individuality’ (68–69). The ultimate artist or critic, by this logic, is the sage or the mystic, who apprehends absolute beauty in whatever he or she sees, like Kabir who ‘reveals the Supreme Spirit wherever the mind attaches itself’ (70). From the foregoing discussion, it is clear that beauty or saundarya is not a cardinal principle or aesthetic category in classical Indian traditions. Instead, aesthetic delight or rasa and ananda or the bliss of both artistic and spiritual relish are more important. Beauty, moreover, is neither inherent in the work or art nor is it the goal of either the artist or the critic. As an aesthetic experience, beauty may also be found in that which is not beautiful in a conventional sense. In any case, the object, whether beautiful or otherwise, is a means, not the end of either the creative or the critical process. Either the object is ‘dissolved’ in the cauldron of consciousness or transcended as in extreme versions of Vedanta or Buddhism, or the object is transformed and sanctified as in Tantra and Bhakti. In either case, the aesthetic experience, which is akin to a mystical experience, is of a non-contingent, ahistorical

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and nonspatial kind; it is ‘outside’ the bounds of normal space time or process.

Modernity What better ruse for a meditation on modernity than Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909)? As we think back to its context, it seems clear that what Gandhi wanted to offer was not just a clarification of his own ideas and positions, but a blueprint for what could be termed an alter-modernity as well as an alter-nation. This nation would not follow the same path as modern European nation states, but would embody and actualize a different civilizational orientation. For Gandhi, India was tyrannized not just by imperialism, but by modernity; indeed, the former, to him, was just a special version of the latter. Gandhi rejected modern civilization as a system that was evil and immoral precisely because its main tendency was not to direct its citizens to virtue but to pleasure: ‘people living in it make bodily welfare the object of life’ (32). Its institutions and machinery were programmed not to enhance but to diminish the human spirit. According to Gandhi, ‘This civilization takes note neither of morality nor of religion’ (33); on the contrary, ‘immorality is often taught in the name of morality’ (ibid). It encourages the multiplication of human wants and the means provided for satisfying these wants are exploitative, violent and ecologically disastrous. In fact, it ‘seeks to increase bodily comforts, and it fails miserably even in doing so’ (ibid). True civilization, for Gandhi is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path to duty. Performance of duty and observance of morality are convertible terms. To observe morality is to attain mastery over our mind and our passions. So doing, we know ourselves. The Gujarati equivalent for civilization [sudharo] means ‘good conduct’. It is easy to see how the key tenets of Gandhi’s good civilization, with elements such as observance of duty, mastery over the mind, restraint of the senses, leading to self-knowledge, derive from such traditional texts as the Bhagavad Gita. Gandhi sums up his critique by asserting that The tendency of the Indian civilization is to elevate the moral being, that of the Western civilization is to propagate immorality. The latter is godless, the former is based on a belief in God. So understanding and so believing, it behoves every lover of India

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to cling to the old Indian civilization even as a child clings to the mother’s breast. (57) To Gandhi, traditional Indian civilization encouraged piety, virtue and simplicity. It was a God-centric, not Mammon-centric civilization, which made it inherently non-violent, whereas violence and Godlessness were a part of the structural logic of modernity. It is unnecessary to engage with the whole of the Gandhian project here, but it is important to nuance and moderate it. If self-knowledge is one of the major goals of any civilization, modern Western civilization has not lagged behind. However, and this is the moot point, the self whose knowledge they have sought and obtained is quite different from our traditional notions of who or what our deepest reality is. Under modernity we have an unprecedented level and intensity of self-interrogation in literature, art, philosophy and the social sciences. The scale, magnitude and detail of this introspection is so vast that it is impossible to miss. Any assessment of modern Western civilization must take it into account. Whether Indian civilization still encourages morality and the conduct of one’s duties a hundred years after Gandhi is not clear either. Perhaps, India too has succumbed to the lures and pressures of modernity, having more or less given up on its traditional civilization. The peculiar post-colonial state in which we live today certainly does not seem to be conducive to morality or right conduct, either in the public or in the private sphere. Going back to the purusharthas, Gandhi’s critique of modernity seems to be based primarily on dharmic considerations. He dismisses entirely the great advances made by the West in the spheres of artha and kama. As M. P. Rege puts it, ‘Gandhiji seems to ignore the intellectual and aesthetic sides of civilization’ (89). Today, it is not possible for us to ignore those achievements; simple living and high thinking no longer seem to suffice for most of us. A more integrated idea of human development, which addresses all levels of human aspirations in the manner of Aurobindo’s thought, may be closer to our ideals. It is clear, then, that the kind of society that Gandhi envisaged is far from realized in present-day India. But can we say that the contrary is therefore true – that we have become a truly modern nation? Few, I think, would accept the latter proposition either. If anything, what we see in India is a project of arrested decolonization and blocked development. This is a society which perplexes and exasperates both traditionalists and modernizers. Traditionalists would argue for the self-sufficiency of the old, pre-modern, pre-Islamic India. Like Gandhi,

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they would say that we have little that is of essential importance to learn from the West. A healthy tradition, as we have seen, already has built into it a critical component, which allows it to innovate and transform itself ceaselessly. To that extent, the modern is only a subcategory, not the antithesis of tradition. On the other hand, modernizers, including hard-line Marxists, would argue that without a total destruction of tradition, including its ideology, institutions and way of life, no real progress is possible. These tradition-modernity debates, in their various forms and guises, have penetrated nearly every discourse that has emanated from India during the last 200 years or so. In their ‘hard’ versions, the two positions are incommensurable. However, both at the level of lived reality and of ideas, we find interesting hybridities or coexistences in nearly all areas of life. It is clear that the ‘softer’ versions of both theses are not just mutually compatible, but a certain schizophrenic, if not properly resolved, adjustment between the two is to be found everywhere. Perhaps, it is this unique and vibrant compromise that best defines the nature of Indian post-coloniality. It is even more important, however, to see that this debate falsifies, in a fundamental way, the real issue that modernity raises for us in India. In that sense, the shift from the quarrel between happy traditionalists and happy modernizers, to unhappy traditionalists and unhappy modernizers cannot be considered a step forward. There are, instead, multiple frames and world views available to us today contending for hegemony. Many of our most enabling theorists, including Ashis Nandy, have opted for critiquing the dominant. The danger is that dissent is not only a socially and intellectually sanctioned part of the dominant, but it is totally dependent on the latter for its material and mental sustenance. Without dismissing dissent, we must see how it is still locked in a holy, if oppositional, alliance with the dominant. In the end such dissent, complicit with the dominant, demonstrates that there is no life outside, no alternate space. The dominant effectively produces or legitimates certain kinds of dissent, as a result dissent can be domesticated or appropriated. I would instead suggest that the way out is neither tradition nor modernity, neither domination nor dissent, neither rationality nor anti-rationality, neither history nor myth, but something else, something that can be both and neither, a mediating and enabling third way. What I am advocating is not a postmodern eclecticism or a trendy relativism, but an alternate category to the deadly duel of the binaries. As I have argued, special intermedial hermeneutics is called for to attain it. It is the hermeneutics that can take us closer to svaraj.

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If I were to explain India’s peculiarity and particularity in reference to the issue of modernity, I would simply say that India is not necessarily traditional as opposed to modern, but definitely and complicatedly alter-modern. Nandy made a similar point in An Intimate Enemy where he referred to the ‘other’ India which is neither pre-modern nor anti-modern but only non-modern’ (74). ‘Non’ is meant to suggest a radical difference that refuses to be subsumed under affirmation or negation. This position can also be extended, as I have suggested in the previous chapters, to our relationship to post-modernity. Post-modernity denotes a variety of styles and modes of thought and practice. Some of these are distinctly anti-rationalist, while others may be considered neo-rationalist. As opposed to rationality or its opposite, we might posit something that includes and supersedes rationality, as we know it. We might call it wisdom or gnosis or prajna or jnana – all these connote neither instrumental rationality nor anti-rationality, but what is at once less than rationality and more than rationality; we may call it, after Aurobindo, integral rationality because it integrates qualities attributed to the vital and physical, as well as to psychic and spiritual aspects of being. Aurobindo also called it the Supermind. Of course, it is not very clear how this gnosis, once it is enthroned – if that happens – will translate itself into political, social and cultural institutions and practices. Perhaps, such a wished-for transformation will only happen when a new science, with its concomitant technology, emerges – a non-violent, non-exploitative, non-dualistic science. At any rate, it is this third space, often implied and rarely stated clearly, which to me suggests some kind of way forward. From such a perspective, the great Indian thinkers of the last 200 years, in their various self-articulations, might be read anew not so much products of a colonized consciousness, but as responses to the modern from an alternate centre. In the West, the reaction against the dominant can only result in another version of it, but in India it might become a part of the self-expressions of the alter-modern. That is why ‘modern’ Indian art or ‘modern’ Indian poetry is not modern in quite the same way as modern European art or poetry is. I had earlier attributed this difference to derivativeness, imitation and cultural subjection, but now wonder if it may be something else, especially in our most significant thought leaders such as Tagore or Gandhi. It is impossible to think of such figures merely as imitators or importers. Instead, we can see them as being in a critical dialogue with themselves and with the West. This is as true of the Bengal school of artists as of those who opposed them. We might apply a similar argument to

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Indian ‘post-modernism’, even if the latter is not as yet well developed or enunciated. While several of its techniques and styles might be borrowed or assimilated, its best artistic, cultural or intellectual products engage critically with both its sources and its targets. In my 1993 anthology of Indian English poetry, I had argued that some of modern Indian English poetry was inauthentic because while it had adapted the discourse of modernism for its purposes, it was not born out of what might be termed the modern condition as it obtained in the West. I was attacked presumably from the standpoint that the modern condition, however we might define it, is universal and not local to Europe. As opposed to this a well-known professor from JNU was known to assert that ‘there are no cities in India’. When asked why he said this, he replied, ‘Show me one city in Europe or North America where you see cattle roaming about in the streets!’ This sounds like a Sardarji joke because cities in our neighbouring countries, which are less modern but more carnivorous, are cattle-free. Even if we don’t agree that the presence or absence of cows defines urbanization, we cannot help but affirm, even intuitively, that Indian ‘cities’ are indeed very different from European or North American ones. The point is that material and discursive conditions need not always have the same causal relationships. In Europe, we might argue that the former determines the latter, but in India, what is epiphenomenal to Europe actually assumes a causal role. In other words, we talk about post-modernism – or whatever is after – not because we are in a condition that might be termed post-modern, but because the dominant discourse in the West is conducted along these lines. We want to participate in that discourse, respond to it, therefore we engage with it; not because it is directly relevant to our lived realities. Earlier, I had taken this merely as a sign of our intellectual inferiority and colonization, but could it not also be something else, if not something quite different too? After all, our engagement in these discourses is selective, not half-hearted. There is something askance in our whole stance. Only some of us succeed in demonstrating ‘native-like’ fluency, securing a seat at the high table. The rest are clearly marked, both by choice and by default, as non-native, third-world, post-colonial, or what have you and left out of the party. It is almost as if we were posing the modern and the post-modern to save ourselves from the imposing of these dominant discourses upon us. We don’t want to be left out of the conversation. At the ‘bridge party’ in A Passage to India, Mrs Turton, the collector’s wife and hostess, seeing a gathering of Indian ladies, declares, ‘Please tell these ladies that I wish we could speak their language,

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but we have only just come to their country’ (38). She is surprised to hear someone say, ‘Perhaps we speak yours a little.’ ‘Why, fancy, she understands!’ exclaims Mrs Turton. ‘Eastbourne, Piccadilly, High Park Corner’, says another of the gaggle, as we might Derrida, Foucault, Levinas, Deleuze. Adela Quested, who wanted to know the real India and for whose benefit the party had been arranged, cries, ‘Oh yes, they’re English-speaking. But now we can talk: how delightful!’ One of the onlookers comments approvingly of the woman who’d rattled off names of the London localities, ‘She knows Paris also’ (ibid). But the fate of the party has already been decided beforehand, when Ronny, Adela’s ‘intended’ and the deputy collector, remarks, ‘The great point to remember is that no one who’s here matters; those who matter don’t come’ (35). In other words, none of us really matters. But Forster’s novel was published in 1924, more than ninety years back. Surely things must have changed since then! This posing that I had earlier taken to be a weakness, a symptom of inferiority, must be recognized as a genuine position. It is not entirely Bhabha’s mimicry, though that is also a part of it. In addition, it is our own struggle for recognition. In India, what we celebrate is the conceit of the modern and post-modern. But the very posing, born out of the surfeit of cultural input and distorted output, becomes an important part of what I have called the alter-modern.

Alter-modernity Alter-modernity, at its best, offers viable and creative alternatives to the dominant. At its middling, if not bumbling, ordinary it tries to demonstrate its fluency in the vocabulary of the modern, while never fully acceding to the modern condition. At its worst it is an imitative farce or failure. The gap between reality and pose, semantics and lexis, socio-cultural conditions and discursive practices is never bridged totally. Our ‘bridge’ parties, too, flop. The West remains the West, and India remains India. This gap produces not just a doubling or a hybridity that Homi Bhabha speaks of, but a critical distance, an alternative viewpoint that may be termed neither traditional, nor anti-modern, but alter-modern. Our present, in other words, is in constant critical dialogue with our past and with the dominant culture from the East. Spatially, this is the dialogue between the metropoles on the one hand and the Indian heartland, with its rich artistic repertoire. The process of mediation, whether in English or the vernaculars, is continuous. The alter-modern, however, is not just a plural space; it also denotes the absence of one, overwhelming, master narrative. This is what Perry

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called ‘absent authority’. It is not merely characterized by a surplus of styles and practices, whether of thought or action, art or craft, sacred or secular; it is not defined only by the absence of a dominant and controlling centre that defines and governs; it is not merely a shrine to many gods. That would be merely the obverse of the modern. The ‘centre’ that was in India might have fragmented and scattered, leaving a chaotic or anarchic arena of confused contentions and frustrated possibilities. When such a society recoups and regroups its resources, what emerges is not an absence nor the logocentric and oppressive presence of some other oppressive idol, but a new force that allows rationality and plurality, a non-violent, integrative wisdom, enabling both material and spiritual elevation, encouraging both opportunity and equity. Modernity and its discontents cannot be addressed satisfactorily by replacing it with post-modernity or anti-modernity, just as the ills of tradition cannot be cured by substituting it by modernity. That is why, to those who find it increasingly difficult to describe India as a traditional society, I would simply suggest that even if it is not traditional, it is not modern either: neither tradition, nor modernity but something other than both; that is what or who we are today. As Frederic Jameson would put it, the post-modern replaces the beautiful with the cute. Votaries of tradition, the rasikas, are appalled. They throw up their hands in despair and ask, ‘How to restore beauty to its rightful place in the scheme of things?’ The advaitin replies, ‘Dissolve the kitsch, just as you would the genuinely beautiful; both are phenomenal; there is no peace in the world, therefore transcend it.’ The Tantric would say, ‘Use the ugly to reach the beautiful; transform this world, don’t renounce it.’ All these responses are valid, but only in a generalized, non-substantial way. The real question is what sort of cultural products do these two, the modern and the altermodern, produce? The whole is no doubt holy, but is the fragment necessarily profane? For Deleuze and Guattari, only schizoanalysis can respond sanely to the post-modern condition. A fragmentary beauty is better than none; to that extent, the Dehejia agenda of aestheticizing daily life cannot be given up. But at the macro level, what the trajectory of the alter-modern actually offers remains to be seen. The primary distinction between modernity as a condition and modernity as a discourse allows us to play a critical part in the contemporary world, though we may remain alter-modern in our overall civilizational orientation. The special kind of dualism that modernity establishes, of course, remains. But, that is not, except indirectly and tangentially, our problem. We can let the West sort that out, which

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they are doing, perhaps offering a few meaningful interventions, as the Dalai Lama does, now and then. In India, however, the absence of beauty in our lives can be attributed only partially to the pains of modernity. Its real source is elsewhere – it is born out of bad governance, moral and material corruption, environmental and ecological pollution and large-scale disaffection. Our lives are ugly because our institutions are ugly. Our problems arise not so much out of modernity as out of post-colonialism and the failures of nationalism. Many of our difficulties are an outcrop of too rapid a growth in population coupled with the after-effects of bad governance. Yet, however limited, the quantum of autonomy or svaraj that we have attained since independence cannot be dismissed or rejected. It does provide some scope for recuperation and reaffirmation. If sat (reality) and ananda (delight) remain major goals for us, if the means to them remain dharma (virtue) and karma (work), our civilizational orientation has not really changed. Beauty, which is neither a cardinal aim of human life, nor a central component of our aesthetics, will find an expression in whatever we excel in, in whatever our native genius finds its true and full expression. In daily life we treat beauty in two ways. One is by bracketing the beautiful from the ugly. Ensconced in protected spaces, our precious objets d’art create their own special ambience of beauty. On a larger scale, rooms, buildings, ashrams, campus, special enclosures or enclave or even entirely planned neighbourhoods or cities can serve as examples. That is how we try to make beauty serve us, either as an aesthetic or anaesthetic way of coping with the travails of modernity. The other, harder task of ensuring that beauty is built into the very genetic code of our institutions and enterprises is very far from realization. There is a cosmetic beauty than can be added as an embellishment, but the deeper beauty of the spirit is rarer. Even if it is conspicuous by its absence, its reappearance in a more propitious future cannot be ruled out. As our civilization regains its strength and vitality, it may once more express and assert its fundamental tenets. To that extent these are exciting times for us in India.

Note 1 Originally presented as ‘Agonized Fragments: Modernity and the Pains of Duality’ at ‘Saundarya – The Second International Colloquium: The Aesthetics of the Modern’, Jawaharlal Nehru University, 18–20 February 2002. An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Saundarya: The Perception and Practice of Beauty in India (New Delhi: Samvad India Foundation, 2003), 305–316. This chapter is a substantially revised version.

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References Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. The Dance of Shiva: Fourteen Indian Essays. Mumbai: Asia Publishing House, 1952. Dehejia, Harsha. Parvatidarpana: An Exposition of Kasmir Saivism through the Images of Siva and Parvati. Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass, 1977. Forster, E. M. A Passage to India. 1924. London: Penguin Classics, 2005. Gandhi, M. K. Hind Swaraj. 1909. Ahmedabad: Navjivan, 1998. Nandy, Ashis. ‘Cultural Frames for Social Intervention: A Personal Credo’. Indian Philosophical Quarterly. 11.4 (October 1984): 411–421. ———. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988. Paranjape, Makarand R. and Harsha Dehejia, eds. Saundarya: The Perception and Practice of Beauty in India. New Delhi: Samvad India, 2003. Rao, Raja. The Meaning of India. New Delhi: Vision Books, 1997. Rege, M. P. ‘ “Svaraj in Ideas” and Hind Swaraj Reconsidered’. New Quest. 143 (January–March 2001): 65–91. Shah, Ramesh Chandra. Ancestral Voices: Four Lectures towards a Philosophy of Imagination. London: The Temenos Academy, 2001.

Part III

Post-colonial contentions

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Discontents

* This is a chapter about ways of (dis)regarding post-colonialism. It addresses the complex and mutually supportive relationship between the dominant Western academy and the discourse of post-colonialism. That the latter is deeply imbricated in the dominant culture, which it professes to resist, is by now well known. But to what extent does this ongoing process of co-optation, collusion or compromise pose a serious challenge to post-colonial academics in general and to Indian criticism in particular? What, furthermore, is the scope of dissent, of alternatives, of meaningful action? Given the unequal relationship between the West and the rest, the larger part of the lives, experiences and subjectivities of post-colonial people – as opposed to post-colonial theorists – will always remain outside post-colonial discourse. If so, ‘real’ post-colonialism may be defined as that – to adapt the title of one of Spivak’s books – which is outside the discourse of post-colonialism. The question of post-colonialism in India is, thus, part of a broader, historical interaction between India and the West, especially our recent experience of colonialism and nationalism. As we have seen in the previous chapters, in an unequal world, academic exchanges too are bound to be unequal. Examining this inequality and becoming aware of its various consequences is the beginning of meaningful action. Yet for such action, one’s own affiliations, complicities and allegiances have to be examined and owned up. Our own brand of postcolonialism, therefore, will emerge only after we accept our share of responsibility in the unfinished project of national and – if one can go that far – international reconstruction. For post-colonial critics like us who occupy the middle ground between the West and the rest of India, an active, informed and critical biculturalism is, perhaps, the best way of facing our complex and often contradictory cultural imperatives.

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Interrogating post-colonialism1 In Culture and Imperialism Edward Said talks of how imperialism follows culture, not the other way round. Culture prepares the grounds for imperialism as it does for what comes after – post-colonialism. No wonder, the very disciplinary structures within which we function and the content of much of what passes as our academic discourse are both derived from the West. Given this ground reality we must, sooner or later, confront the scope and efficacy of any possible dissent. But is the nature and extent of our subordination really understood? Or are we in denial? Or worse, are we actually collaborators, interested in extending our subordination? How many of us really wish to break free? Are we not content with the status quo? Moreover, how is dissent really dissent when the available means and methods of dissent also come to us from the West? In fact, isn’t dissent, which the West has come to monopolize, itself be the mask of a new form of domination? Today, it seems hard to believe, but the provenance of the postcolonial is quite recent; in India, it is scarcely over twenty years. The very first major conference on post-colonialism in India was held in 1994 at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. Ironically, the conference was held in the very premises that housed the Viceregal Lodge in the summer capital of British India. This used to be the seat of imperial power of our erstwhile rulers, when they shifted to cooler environs of the Himalayan foothills at the onset of the summer. What could be a better setting to discuss post-colonialism? Harish Trivedi’s finely written introductory note to the conference appropriately posed an attitude of challenge: For us in India, in particular, does ‘post-colonialism’ represent any advance or even difference of formulation which could truly be liberating or enabling, or is it, like pristine colonialism itself, yet another form of metropolitan imposition? (‘From Commonwealth to Post-Colonial?’ IACLALS Newsletter, January1994) The subtext was that we were shifting almost overnight from Commonwealth to post-colonial because of developments that had taken place elsewhere. Trivedi’s note acknowledged, in effect, that the bandwagon of post-colonialism had been rigged up in the West. The notion of post-colonial literatures and much of the theoretical discourse developed to understand and interpret it were imported.2 Hence, the ostensible agenda of debating post-colonialism instead of passively

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accepting its validity. The contestatory tone of the introductory note was, supposedly, to inject a note of dissent, if not disquiet, into our deliberations.3 Laudable as this spirit of implied dissent was, I realized during the conference, that most participants disregarded it. It was more like paying lip service to our supposed critical independence. No wonder, Trivedi’s note did not consider the (im)probability of any real interrogation taking place; instead, he assumed that raising questions as he did was enough to indicate our lack of passivity. Suppose we had at that conference resolved en masse to boycott ‘post-colonialism’ – absurd as this may sound – would we have succeeded? Would those who instituted it agree to withdraw it? Or, would anyone else in India have followed suit? Wasn’t the matter settled beforehand, with our capitulation to be taken for granted, even if prefaced by a few doubting grunts or grimaces? To go back a few decades, weren’t many of our seniors in India similarly uncomfortable with the idea of Commonwealth literature and for reasons not too dissimilar? But that concept and discourse did have a certain run; it was a part of standard academic currency for over thirty years. The fact that the substitution had already been effected in the US and Australia, not to mention UK, the ‘mother ship’, where post-colonial had replaced Commonwealth, showed how little we had to do with it. The question for us was not whether to accept post-colonialism or even ask what the change in nomenclature really implied, but to try not to be left entirely behind. If we were lucky, we might try to position ourselves just slightly ahead of some of our African or Asian fellow travellers in the new regime. Interrogation for us was therefore not real dissent or even questioning, but a strategy of repositioning and joining. By posing to contest its hegemony, we are basically suing for better terms in our transactions with post-colonialism, not really holding it to account or challenging its dominance. Moreover, if we were really to interrogate post-colonialism, could we do it under the banner of the Indian Association of Commonwealth Language and Literature Studies (IACLALS)? Our association was the Indian branch of precisely that organization which once promoted the study of Commonwealth literature and now wished to pursue postcolonial studies despite the change in the name of its chosen area of study. The association had been formed in the UK where, after the end of empire, the British Commonwealth had been founded to continue the historic ties with colonies. Later, in more politically correct times, the body gave itself a slightly less imperialistic name, Commonwealth of Nations. Consisting of over fifty former colonies, could such an

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organization really interrogate its own raison d’etre? Could its offshoot, ACLALS, or its Indian branch, really interrogate imperialism? And should we not be suspicious of such interrogations? Would it not be more likely that such interrogation was really a mask of collusion?4 From the previous chapters, it should be clear that I am not suggesting that no dissent is possible or that we are so compromised that whatever we do is already tainted by our bargains with imperialism. Nor am I proposing that we should give up thinking about such issues, or worse, become cynical opportunists whose only goal is to further our careers. These and other similarly defeatist attitudes are, of course, all too easy; every day we see people practising them. However, it is imperative for us to define the real scope of dissent and, more importantly, to identify who might undertake a transformation of our intellectual life through such meaningful opposition. Pretend-interrogation followed by real subservience, it is obvious, would not lead to svaraj. My purpose, then, is to ask to what extent is post-colonialism, as we find it in India, really conducive to svaraj. When we seek svaraj, we quickly discover that many to whom we have turned cannot deliver us out of our present crisis. For instance, there are those among us to whom this unequal academic relationship with the West is almost god-given or natural. They choose not to question it but merely seek whatever advancement is possible within it. Some of these are what one might call conscienceless assenters. They were marked by their alacrity and eagerness to cooperate with colonial and post-colonial authority. At one time, several of our well-known English professors exemplified this type. They were the only ones in the university in suits and ties; they believed that they spoke the King’s (or Queen’s) English, especially if they were ‘foreign-returned’; they were known to read ‘only’ foreign journals – though they hardly published anything. They expected to be looked up to in all matters relating to Western culture and thought; they upheld English and Western values in India. When I was younger, one such teacher explained to me that we needed English literature to teach Indians about the European renaissance because no such renaissance took place in India. Another rather formidable lady, with a remarkably ‘propah’ English accent, stood out even strongly. I discovered only later that she had been prematurely ‘Cambridge returned’ after an MA because she had not been found suitable for research. Her accent was her badge; without it, she would have been like any other teacher of English, rather ordinary. Today, these native colonials or brown sahabes seem like a bygone species, but twenty or thirty years back they were to be found all over India. Even then, they seemed somewhat simple-minded, if not

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misguided, and definitely anachronistic. It was truly a treat to find one of them in some faraway place, still sporting memorabilia from their two- to three-year foreign stint decades ago, dropping names, reminiscing about their college, saving themselves from ever being seen at the bus stand or bazaar. One would be filled with wonder, if not pity, to hear one of them still swearing by Carlyle and Ruskin, Pater and Arnold, quite untouched by modernism, let alone post-modernism, well into the 1970s. How swiftly we have moved from an age of institutionalized assent to institutionalized dissent would itself be a matter worthy of study. In India as in the West, dissenters, riding high on ‘postal’ discontent have all but conquered the establishment. Post-colonialism served as yet another such engine to power one’s way to academic advantage. The slogans of maintaining standards and preserving merit, with which the assenters used to torment those who were less privileged, have now given way to cries of political correctness and social justice, conveniently wielded as weapons in the hands of militantly ‘underprivileged’ intellectuals. The purveyors of the new anti-establishment jargon see themselves as social justice crusaders, seeking converts and followers, promising material rewards to those who strike up anti-Brahminical, anti-state and anti-national positions. They grant benefits to conformists and mete out punishments to transgressors. These professional radicals, with their advanced networking techniques, have achieved considerable success in recent years. They are the new ‘disadvantaged’ elites and brokers of backwardness.5 The majority, though, are those who are aware rather instinctively of how the world of academics functions. They have probably come to realize that it is better, more practical, to cooperate with the dominant than to oppose it stubbornly. They neither wear suits and ties, nor carry red flags to work. They have neither given up on their profession, nor taken to peddling bazaar notes instead.6 We used to call them liberals before that became a term of abuse. Largely middle class in attitudes and ideals, cautious but curious, their professed open-mindedness and tolerance somewhat beleaguered and battered by circumstances, they still soldier on on their quest for a more humane, value-based way of life. What is more, regardless of where they might have lived or studied, they are reasonably committed to improving the present system, however flawed it might be. Surprisingly, their faith in the usefulness of the Indian nation, both as a political entity and as civilizational unit, has not been entirely eroded. They still believe in parliamentary democracy, in secularism of some sort, and in the principles and freedoms enshrined in our constitution. Those of us who more or less fit

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this description make up what I believe is the alternative intellectual ‘core constituency’ that must eventually resist the dominance of the Western academy and its Indian collaborators.7 To understand how this core constituency works, it is useful to see who belongs to it and who does not. For instance, some of the ‘big names’ in post-colonial theory, be they of Indian origin or otherwise, would not qualify. Let me consider two famous non-Indians to start with. First, the late Professor Edward Said, author of the classic, Orientalism, who kick-started post-colonialism in the US. He went on to write not on Culture and Imperialism, but passionately insightful volumes on topics as varied as Palestine and music. He was a living legend, but can he be considered to be the member of a constituency such as the one I have described, cantered even in Palestine? No. Not only was he an American citizen, but someone who has all his life addressing the West. It is not that his efforts to make the West more sensitive, more aware of its own oppressions, more responsible and responsive in its use of power are to be discounted. On the contrary, it is people like Said who represent the humane face of the West and who enable us even to contemplate the possibility of a more universal, cosmopolitan culture. But Said could not help the Palestinians. He can help us even less, especially because India is not Palestine. He can urge the West to question itself, which is what he really accomplished. He had his blind spots, though. Though he was a life-long critic of Zionism, he could not see the dangers of Islamic intolerance, fundamentalism and jihadism. Nowhere in Orientalism or Culture and Imperialism does he critique the legacy of Muslim expansion, conquest and imperialism; he overlooks genocide, conversion, violence, vandalism, slavery, iconoclasm, authoritarianism and despotism under Muslim regimes. Even the alarming attacks on Christian Arabs in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere escape his attention entirely. Let me consider another, this time subcontinental, example, Sara Suleri. Her brilliant book, Meatless Days (1989), in many ways more moving and sapient than her scholarly follow up, The Rhetoric of English India (1993), is really a farewell to Pakistan. The former is an evocative if subtle put down, if we were to see it through her eyes, of a nation and society in the process of progressive breakdown. That Suleri must leave it is the inevitable conclusion. The writing of the book is a document of how Pakistan, a country her father helped to build, cannot be ‘saved’. Consequently, the post-colonial critic is more at home, even happier, in the world of the colonizers than in the former colony from which she emigrates. Leaving behind one world, she faces another, wishing, however, not to lose everything that she’s left behind.

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The book is a nostalgic record of the latter. Suleri cannot, alas, help Pakistan, nor, indeed, can she help us, except indirectly. She enriches the West, making it more multicultural, more open to its enjoyment of other cultures. Coming closer home, we see a similar journey of another mixedrace writer, the Indian Anita Desai. The genre may be called ‘Farewell to India’, the obverse of ‘Passage to India’. Many Indian ex-pats practise it, including Bharati Mukherjee, Rohinton Mistry and, to name the most famous of them all, Salman Rushdie. It usually ends badly for India in these narratives; the narrative of farewell becomes in itself a subtle or not-so-subtle justification of the writers’ own residential and aesthetic choices. Both the ‘passage’ and ‘farewell’ narratives are similar in their exoticization and eventual rejection of India. No wonder they are immensely more popular and profitable in the West than the humbler stay-at-home tales of R. K. Narayan or Shashi Deshpande. To shift to criticism now, can Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak or Homi Bhabha, to name two most visible and celebrated ‘Indian’ champions of theory, belong to the previously defined constituency? Again, the answer has to be a ‘no’, though it would perhaps be a more qualified ‘no’. The fact is that their stake in India and, in the health of our academic culture, too, is minimal. They speak to the West, seek to modify or alter Western modes of thinking and writing. If they had a real investment in Indian academics, would they not publish in India, ensure that their work is readily available here? But I am yet to find a single essay by either of them in an Indian periodical; their books are not available in Indian editions either.8 I shall offer one more example, that of the late A. K. Ramanujan, which is more complex. To the West, his greatest achievement was opening the door to Dravidian studies and Indian folkloristics. But often, and mistakenly, we praise him too much for that. Yes, Ramanujan brought a lot of attention to South Indian texts and traditions in the West, but, again, that would be like ranking Indian events in the order of the media attention they received in the US.9 Dravidian studies or Indian folklore are important in their own right, not because some universities in the US think so. Some aspects of these may prove pernicious in the Indian context too. So we cannot champion them uncritically just because the West does so. Surely, things Indian have an existence and significance of their own apart from how they are perceived by the West. Ramanujan’s being abroad, of course, had several other collateral benefits. One of these was to enable many Indians to visit or study at Chicago. Ramanujan also influenced many back home to take up the study of translation, local culture and folklore.

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However, isn’t interpreting India to Indians more important than interpreting India to the West? Perhaps, Ramanujan did the former in translating Ananthamurthy’s Samskara into English. The translation made the text almost better known in English than the original was in Kannada. But, withal, it is still not a very good translation. This, indeed, is the paradox of translation; some of the worst translations succeed in giving their originals an afterlife in another language. This may also apply to Spivak’s ‘bad’ translations of Mahasweta Devi; they  make better theory than translation. Yet, there is a crucial distinction between Ramanujan and Spivak. He continued to write and publish in Kannada, also to write in Indian journals and publications. Certainly, he was a part of the intellectual life of India, even if only as a yearly visitor. He was neither imprisoned fully by the West nor ever exiled completely from India. The West was merely a geographical and material location for his plural sensibility, a location that he used, more often than not, to his and to our advantage.

Intermediality Through these examples I have tried to fracture the imagined continuity that we, especially in English studies in India, have mistakenly assumed with the West. It is not that an international academic system does not exist; evidently, it does, but the fact is that we do not have the status of full members in it. It seems difficult to attain member status without affecting certain distortions of our subjectivities. I am arguing that instead of asking for a better deal from the West, we should raise our own standards first. We should give ourselves in India a better deal before we ask for a seat at their table. It is here that a sense of academic community needs to be nurtured, instead of looking for a place in a ready-made audience over there. Once we redefine our priorities, our agenda too will change. We will no longer be obliged to debate their problems; instead, we will focus on our own, immediate requirements. Coming back to our present situation, we cannot look to others to help us, whether they are sympathetic Westerners or celebrity NRIs. Instead, we must help ourselves. In other words, the best way to begin interrogating post-colonialism is not by pretending that we are the masters of our own academic destinies but by admitting, paradoxically, how colonized we still are. What is more, we cannot continue to blame only the West for our sorry state of subjection; we must blame ourselves. The dignity of brown-skinned scholarship depends more than ever on how we view ourselves, rather than how others view us.

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To those who have followed my line of thinking, it will be clear that there are no easy solutions or alternatives. No quick fixes or impassioned outbursts of radicalism will instantly empower us. Rather, the path to greater sovereignty and selfhood requires immense patience, perseverance, hard work, years of planning, concerted action, investments in institutions and systems, constant upgradation of the technologies of knowledge and a renewed emphasis on recognizing and rewarding excellence. Perhaps, the decades to come may bring more publishing opportunities, larger scope for domestic utilization of our enormous reserves of talent. But there will also be greater pressures and distortions, particularly vis-à-vis English and other Indian languages. I have so far been concerned with how deeply compromised we are in our efforts to fight academic imperialism. We have become profoundly implicated in this system by a complex web of relationships of dependence and subordination. The question for us is no longer whether we choose to be part of it or not, but rather the extent to which we can coexist and cooperate with it and on what terms. I shall now look at the other side, that is, the limitations of the West’s own efforts to understand or incorporate us. The fact is that just as simple-minded dissent is impossible for us, an easy dismantling of its own oppressive systems is impossible for the West. Try as it might, through all sorts of ideological somersaults and adjustments, the structural basis of imperialism is hard to undo even if the taint of the colonial past does wash off. It is not the lack of emancipating theories or philosophies that has kept the West imperialistic; it is a complex and self-sustaining system of economic, political and military power. Capitalism, as we know only too well, has proved to be so resilient because it has had the capacity to absorb, co-opt and contain its others. It is not that capitalism does not have contradictions or that these contradictions are not of a serious nature; actually, capitalism has thrived in spite of its contradictions. Counter-culture in the West is hooked to the dominant culture and is totally dependent on it. The dominant culture grants it such space as to provide an outlet to all those forces of discontent that it engenders. Those in counter culture use the same technologies of defence and dissemination as the dominant culture. For instance, identical strategies of media manipulation are used to raise money for charity as to sell soap and deodorant. Applying this to academics, post-colonialism was marketed in a similar but rather more sophisticated manner than Commonwealth literature – and this differs little from the way of some other trendy academic products, say, World Literature is being pushed today. Certainly, books on post-colonialism were no cheaper than those in other fields.

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Print capitalism is, thus, built into Western academics. There is no easy way out of it even for those who wish to change things. In fact, Said’s greatest contribution is to show the West how deeply complicit in the imperial project it still is. The nexus between power and knowledge is hard to demolish. Just as the first step towards meaningful dissent lies in recognizing the extent to which we are already compromised, the first step towards a meaningful transfer of academic power lies in the West’s recognition and acknowledgement of its unwillingness or inability actually to affect it. Both sides are trapped, though differently. ‘Post-colonial’ is an omnibus and unwieldy category, which on closer examination, becomes almost meaningless. I shall discuss more of its problems in the next chapters, but, briefly, it hides its Anglophone bias. Other, non-English parts of the colonized world do not receive the kind of attention, nor are their distinctions properly noted. Works produced in the colonized world in languages other than English are also similarly ignored or misunderstood. Moreover, post-colonialism has almost totally ignored other forms of political, cultural and linguistic dominance, such as Russia exercised during its USSR days or China does today. Finally, several parts of the world not directly colonized but under imperial sway are also not studied. But if all these were included most of the world, barring Western Europe and North America, would be a part of post-colonial studies. Yet post-colonialism has acquired a certain disciplinary stability, not to mention marketability. It allows us better selling opportunities for certain aspects of our culture. As such, we may not reject it entirely. After all, it does have its utility and serviceability. By the same token we cannot accept it totally. Even if we wish to, it will not accommodate us. The major portion of our lives and experiences will remain outside its purview. There are, moreover, millions of those who are more post-colonial, or should I say, more post-colonized, than us. Their subjectivities have escaped the notice not just of those who have an institutionalized interest in post-colonialism, but also of those of us who are supposed to live cheek by jowl with them. The subalterns under our very noses are often neglected and ignored, while we go on field trips looking for them, theorizing about them and advancing our careers writing about them. Post-colonialism, then, can be neither rejected nor accepted fully. We have to work out our own adjustment and compromise with it, but how we do that is crucial. We may try to use it against the grain, subvert it to our advantage, or deploy it to our benefit, all the while endeavouring to safeguard ourselves from its distorting tendencies. Post-colonialism, again, like Commonwealth studies before it, is a

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mixed blessing; perhaps, we can even argue that in so far as it foregrounds the central and controlling fact of colonialism, it is actually an advance over Commonwealth literature. Throughout this chapter I have tried to expose the hollowness and futility of a simplistic revolt or rejection of the West, as also the utter senselessness and disgrace of naive capitulation or collaboration. Better, a strategic collaboration, such as Singapore’s, but that is not possible for a country as big and endowed with such cultural resources such as ours. Instead, I have tried to show how our numerous and often unknown ties with the West implicate us in an international and imperialistic academic system in varying stages of dependency and subordination. All this leads us to one inescapable conclusion: there is a lot of cultural life outside the sphere of the West, though not entirely independent of it. National culture, thus, does offer an alternative to the West; however, it is important to realize that it is not autonomous and entirely self-sufficient. The West is not our home; but there is a lot that is Western in our India. Similarly, our national culture is an effective refuge which we inhabit as Indian citizens, yet, perhaps, we are not entirely at home here too. For us, it is not a question of either the West or India, but of both the West and India versus either the West alone or India alone. It is only a truly liberating kind of biculturalism which can genuinely serve our needs.10 My strategy has been to try to postulate a catalytic core constituency within India that would try to work out alternatives to the hegemonic dominance of the West in our intellectual lives. This constituency would be, primarily, national but not necessarily in a chauvinistic or narrow-minded sense. It would also forge alliances with similar linguistic or sub-nationalistic intellectual groups on the one hand and friendly international, metropolitan and sub-metropolitan ‘Global South’ spaces on the other. If this constituency were to be consolidated, the ‘best’ Indian scholarship would not have to be denationalized before it finds a place in the international academic discourse; it would be both national and international in the way in which, say, Tagore’s or Gandhi’s work were. The two domains would not be mutually exclusive. Instead, the former would fuse or clash as the case might be, but never be subservient to the latter. I believe that one cannot posit one, universal, international academic discourse; certainly, what passes off for this discourse is, at present, Eurocentric and Western. Suing for better representation and greater space for India in this discourse is also not the best option. We will only be locked into a relationship of continuing subservience if we adopt this path. We need to strengthen ourselves, our institutions,

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journals and publication industries. We need not merely attempt to duplicate or copy. Whether Indian intellectuals will face this challenge or not appears very uncertain at this juncture. When I first thought of writing such a chapter, I had considered calling it ‘The Absent Post-colonial’. Post-colonial discourse was what the metropolitan West and its academic institutions had invented to understand, categorize and control the literatures and subjectivities of the post-colonial peoples of the world, but the latter were more or less excluded from it. In other words, while the discourse belonged to West, the subjectivities were all that the ‘real’ post-colonial people were left with. ‘Real’ post-colonials were rendered voiceless, faceless and powerless within their own societies, let alone in the international world system. If so, then their ‘post-coloniality’ was all that they had, while everything else belonged to those who endowed them with this label in the first place, the intellectuals of the advanced West, with their latest technologies of knowledge and power. I was trying to highlight the incapacity of post-colonial discourse to come to terms with the lived reality of the people it was theorizing about. All culturally dominant groups thus define the realities of a vast number of people who cannot do so themselves. One question, however, remained. To which group did I belong? To those with the post-colonial magic wand or those without it? My position, obviously, was intermediate if not intermedial. Though, I too as a living and practising post-colonial critic would find no place in the rather exclusive and rarefied elite group of international postcolonial critics, I certainly did have a place in some sort of national, Indian academic community. Therefore, if I considered myself to be a post-colonial too, which I did, I couldn’t very well present a chapter claiming my own absence from a discourse in which I was at that very moment participating through my chapter. My presence at the international conference in Shimla, too, in the same way, would contradict the point of my chapter. This was all the more obvious when I reached IIAS, housed in the grand environs of the Rashtrapati Niwas, perched atop Summer Hill. Ironically, I was the only participant in the seminar who had flown into Shimla – thanks of course to my employer’s generosity, though triggered by the mysterious logic of ‘basic pay’ – a privilege or extravagance which even two foreigners in our midst did not indulge in, having been chauffeured up in the now defunct Contessa from Delhi. At the small airport, getting down from a tiny fifteen-seater regional jet, then driven in the Institute car to my destination, finally arriving at the magnificent stone edifice overlooking tree-lined valleys, once

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the summer residence of the Viceroy of India and the administrative headquarters of the Raj, I had to admit that I had never felt so privileged as an intellectual in India. How could I, being in perhaps the most elevated and exalted setting of Indian academia, still claim to be ‘absent’ from the discourse of post-colonialism? Though an outsider to metropolitan theory, I was certainly a part of the dominant group so far as India was concerned. All my arguments against the West could be turned against me; it was people like me who kept the ‘rest of India’ out of the power dialogues of academics. The opulence as well as the disrepair of the surroundings filled me with deep unease. Throughout, certain troubling questions kept recurring in my mind: do we as Indian intellectuals deserve this? Have we earned it? Are we capable of maintaining it? Or are we merely playing the game, being cynical professionals, interested primarily in furthering our own interests, edging closer to centres of power, through a combination of hard work, networking or sheer academic racketeering. How could Indian academics be made more responsive and responsible? How could we live up to representing not just ourselves and our narrow interests but the interests and welfare of the people of India, many of whom cannot even read and write? When defined thus, our domain is the whole of India and our moral burden as intellectuals all the greater. Shouldn’t we weave such concerns into our discussion of post-colonialism? Unfortunately, that was not really possible in the seminar. I would have to wait for a fuller opportunity such as this book affords. What the conference did accomplish, however, was to show us that we had been late starters and therefore needed to make up for lost time. We were trying to gatecrash a party that had begun elsewhere, started long ago, and to which we were not even properly invited. Would we be called to the high table? I doubted it very much.

Notes 1 An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies and Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IACLALS-IIAS) conference, ‘Interrogating Postcolonialism: Theory, Text and Context’, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, 3–5 October 1994. The paper was published as ‘Coping with Postcolonialism’, in Harish Trivedi and Meenakshi Mukherjee (eds.), Interrogating Postcolonialism: Theory, Text and Context (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1996), 37–47. This chapter is a substantially revised version. 2 By ‘post-colonialism’ I refer to the now gradually fading Western discourse on texts by writers from countries which were formerly colonies. Among

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its many disadvantages is that its focus, by definition, is on contemporary literature though some of the richest literature from such societies was produced during colonialism and even before colonialism. Much of the recent impetus for dissent in Indian academics is derived from various post-structuralist and post-modernist theories such as feminism, deconstruction and new historicism. Rarely has dissent been expressed in indigenous terms, using traditional resources as, say, Gandhi did in politics. Indian theories, as explained in earlier chapters, have not figured in these debates nor native idioms, language and methodologies. Answers to such questions may be found in histories of Commonwealth studies and ACLALS, such as Hena Maes Jelinek et al., eds., A Shaping of Connections: Commonwealth Literature Studies – Then and Now (Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1989). It is to the advantage of the latter to create a polarity between social justice and merit. They argue that ‘merit’ is a myth invented by the upper castes to oppress the lower castes; however, they swear by social justice, without defining what they mean by ‘justice’ or by ‘backwardness’ without defining how it is constituted except in terms of caste and other identity markers. I argue instead that as a society we cannot afford to ignore either social justice or merit; we need both. This refers to the ‘dropouts’, those who have given up trying to produce meaningful work. They have stopped publishing or going to conferences, preferring to opt out of the racket academics has become. Some derive solace and satisfaction from something else – music, theatre or translation. Others have given themselves to the pursuit of money – tuitions, coaching centres, real estate or anything to make some extra cash. Indeed, there are plenty of advantages in such a ‘constitutional’ (pun intended) definition of ‘Indian’. I have since discovered that one of Bhabha’s first papers was published in the Journal of the School of Languages (JSL) of my own Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). A couple of Spivak’s books also have Indian editions; she, unlike Bhabha, has taught and lectured at many Indian universities. Her charitable trust works with the Santhals in Birbhum, North Bengal. She also translates from Bangla to English. In all these respects she participates to a greater degree in the intellectual and cultural life of India than Bhabha. In fact, one of the defining moments in her relationship with India after her success in the West was the public lecture she delivered in ‘chaste’ Bangla in Kolkata, which left her critics spellbound and mute. An NDTV news show called ‘The World This Week’ actually did this. By ‘biculturalism’ I do not refer to the anguish of being torn between two cultures and its attendant crises of identity or to attempts to reconstitute a national culture by recognizing or encouraging cultural diversity. The former has been a frequent condition of the mind of English-educated Indians for over 150 years, and the latter is a recent and fairly controversial proposition, especially debated in countries like the US, Canada, the UK or Australia. Multiculturalism of the latter kind has always existed in India and need not, therefore, be promoted as a proposed improvement over an existing monoculture. Instead, I consider biculturalism or multiculturalism to be somewhat analogous to bilingualism or multilingualism – they involve the ability to be functional in and familiar with more than one

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culture or, to use current economic parlance, cultural market. These cultures may be continuous and overlapping or more distant and dissimilar. In either case, coexistence, extension and accumulation are crucial rather than substitution, rejection or suppression. One adds on cultures instead of seeking conversion from one to the other.

References Maes, Hana Jelinek, et al., eds. A Shaping of Connections: Commonwealth Literature Studies – Then and Now. Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1989. Paranjape, Makarand. ‘Coping with Post-Colonialism’. In Interrogating PostColonialism: Theory, Text and Context. Eds. Harish Trivedi and Meenakshi Mukherjee. Shimla: IIAS, 1996: 37–47. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1993.

10 Alterities

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Wanted: post-colonialism To take a metaphor from the world of criminal investigation, this chapter is an attempt to sketch a sort of composite portrait of postcolonialism, which, till recently, was one of the most ‘wanted’ concepts in academic discourse. That the portrait has necessarily to be composite is because few people seem to have seen the subject so clearly as to be able to identify it accurately or reliably.1 To begin tracing our portrait, we need to notice the following features. 1

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First of all, there is an inherent contradiction between the idea of post-colonialism and its practice. In other words, post-colonial studies become academically viable only through a series of exclusions that belie its professed inclusiveness. That post-colonialism has a somewhat tainted genealogy, implicated as it is in the whole project of colonialism. Thus, the ‘post’ may actually be a euphemism for ‘neo’, the attempt, first by the UK and then by the US, to extend if not territorial at least language imperialism. But imperialisms are economic, cultural and hegemonic, whether territorial, economic or ‘merely’ linguistic and cultural. Because English Studies programmes all over the world have an almost proprietary interest in post-colonial studies, the latter can never free themselves from the stranglehold of the imperial ‘world language’. This exposes yet another contradiction in the attempt of monolingual, largely monocultural disciplines, trying to understand multilingual and multicultural cultures and societies.

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Post-colonialism as a concept is mostly incapable of coping with the totality of the Indian civilization. Indian literature alone, if taken in its entirety, would overrun and overwhelm the limited spaces that post-colonialism offers to it. What, then, to speak of the full range of Indian history, society and culture, which would be impossible to accommodate, considering how even the past 200 years show a significant colonial influence already too vast to be mapped adequately? A new way of theorizing post-colonial difference might be civilizational, more enduring that racial, ethnic, gender or class divisions. Post-colonial alterities, therefore, need to take these into account. Post-colonialism is, somehow, trapped in modernity; it has no way of dealing with pre-modern, such as Islamic, forms of imperialism, aggression and colonialism. No post-colonialist of note has even discussed the Ottoman colonization of Egypt, though it happened after the Napoleonic invasion. Said himself was been silent on this, though he was born in Cairo. It has similarly failed to engage with, let alone oppose, radical Islamic jihadism, a postmodern form of terrorist violence. Post-colonialism simply lacks the vocabulary or conceptual wherewithal to meet this challenge, merely resorting to cliches about ‘Islamobhobia’. Much of what passes for academics in the Third World is at odds or disjointed from the larger social, cultural or economic enterprise of these societies. This is one reason for the persistence of counter-systemic violence or dissent in various parts of the world. Large populations find themselves disconnected and discontented, even if they are not starving or oppressed. In countries like India, people’s culture, whether folk or popular, is quite at variance from academic culture. Post-colonial studies, to hold meaning or relevance, will have to orient themselves: decolonization, or rather svaraj, more than post-colonialism is what we require.

Post-colonial (dis)similarities Before we consider how post-colonial difference is theorized, it would be desirable to examine how post-colonial similarity is posited. Ostensibly, this similarity is predicated upon the common experience of colonialism which vast sections of the world share. As Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffith and Helen Tiffin declare in the very first sentence of their admirable book, ‘More than three-quarters of the people living in the world today have had their lives shaped by the experience of colonialism.’2 Presumably, the quarter that got left out is mostly made up of those who did the colonizing. But, surely, they shouldn’t be so easily

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exempted: don’t they have to cope with the after-effects of the loss of empire? If colonialism affects both the colonized and the colonizers, as theorists are never tired of reminding us, why must our former masters not be considered post-colonials in their present, somewhat reduced, state? Hence, hasn’t the experience of colonialism shaped their lives as well? The former colonizers are post-colonial in the additional sense that they conduct the discourse of post-colonial studies, while the rest are post-colonial in that they conduced or managed through the discourse. But, more seriously, from such a standpoint, the domain of post-colonialism includes practically everyone on earth. Notwithstanding the incongruity of rendering everyone in the world post-colonial, many have advanced such arguments in all seriousness. For instance, the appeal to include contemporary British literature in the holdall that post-colonial literatures have become.3 Granting a back door entry to our former colonizers would be tantamount to a self-defeating tactical blunder, but that hasn’t prevented most mainstream areas of English literature, including Shakespeare, eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury literatures, from taking a post-colonial turn. Moreover, it has not been easy to exclude the Americans, both as colonized and as colonizers. The US branch of the ACLALS is thus intermittently active. Notwithstanding such exclusions and inclusions, the bandwagon of post-colonialism is still a rather overloaded and unwieldy, badly in need of jettisoning unwanted cargo. Despite the bold claim of carrying three-quarters of the globe on its back, which arguably is still a trifle modest and self-limiting, post-colonialism, when it actually comes to who gets a seat on the wagon, seems to refer to a much smaller group of literary passengers. Because its lingua franca is English, countries colonized by other imperial powers such as France, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Italy and Belgium are mostly on the periphery. Also marginal, for even more flimsy reasons, are black, Chicano, Native American and other small literatures. The bulk of what we are left with are ‘the literatures of African countries, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Caribbean countries, India, Malaysia, Malta, New Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, South Pacific Island countries, and Sri Lanka’ (Ashcroft et al. 2). This mixed roll-call of continents, regions and nations suggests the motley and uncommon lot we post-colonials share. But when it comes to making sense of this vast and diverse area, English once again comes to our rescue. With its aid, we can banish all literatures which are not available originally in English or in English translation. The rather limited and truncated idea of post-colonialism is what remains, nothing as inclusive as the first grand gesture with which The Empire Writes Back opened.

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Post-colonialism, hence, becomes academically viable only through a series of exclusions. Without these exclusions, it would be coextensive with the totality of recent human experience itself, thus making it impractical as an area of study. The obvious commonality which the term presupposes is actually quite dubious and debatable. Post-colonialism does not demonstrate similarity; it simply takes it for granted. As such, once we call into question its assumed similarities, what is left is a series of differences, which have been only partially charted and dimly understood. The idea of post-colonialism, thus, camouflages and masks differences so as to create a transnational literary common market, which is what ‘commonwealth’ may actually be taken to connote. The term itself is like a bespoke portmanteau made to order for the Western academy. It caters to the West’s need to study its Others, to accommodate them in some academic framework or the other, so that they are accessible without making too many demands on the West’s time and attention. As such, it is an unwieldy academic suitcase, which cannot be shut, but splits into two unequal compartments, one occupied by settler colonies, the other by invaded colonies. Stuffed in between, hybridized creole cultures, such as the Caribbean, half spill out at the ill-fitting joint.4 The metropolitan mind, with its manic urge to encapsulate, condense and contain other cultures has the satisfaction of believing that it carries ‘three-quarters’ of the world in such a portable spillall.

Post-colonial or neo-colonial? If the concept of post-colonialism itself does not provide an adequate common ground, why is it important to theorize post-colonial difference? To my mind, the need for this arises because we ourselves have half-accepted post-colonialism, if not as a vehicle for our selfunderstanding, at least as the West’s understanding of ourselves. Though it has been foisted upon us by the international academic system, postcolonialism, whether we like it or not, is now a part of our syllabus; we must learn to make the best of it. Yet, the very fact that we have accepted it must not blind us to the mechanisms of such acceptance. It is only by studying the latter that we can uncover the secret imperial burden that the term bears, that burden which it tried to disown when it changed its name from Commonwealth to post-colonial. Post-colonialism was not our creation; though we pretend to interrogate it, there was never really a possibility of rejecting it. Our interrogation, as I have already suggested, was a camouflage for our subordination. If we seek better terms of exchange it is only to improve our share of

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the spoils of this discursive field. This, I should think, largely sums up the whole agenda of our academics, a token protest to the metropolitan academy to take us into account rather than ignoring us completely. Listen to us, recognize us, don’t take us for granted, don’t speak on our behalf, is all we seem to be saying to them. What this really translates into is a plea to be taken in or, if that is not possible, a demand not to be ignored. Some will succeed in better positioning themselves in the international academic marketplace of jobs, publishing opportunities, invitations to seminars and conferences – the rest must content themselves with permission to dwell in the suburbs of their pleasure as occasional citations in footnotes or references. For us, subservience and subjection are underwritten into the very discourse of post-colonialism like genetic codes transmitted through the DNA to each cell; the academic world system, of which postcolonialism is a product, is designed to reproduce inequality even as it proclaims equality as its goal. From such a perspective, the change from Commonwealth to post-colonial does not signify a fundamental difference in power relations between us and them, so much as a shift in power relations within the dominant metropolitan structures. The Commonwealth was a distinctly British invention. Its purpose was to retain a scaled-down hegemony over its former colonies and possessions. Commonwealth literature was only a by-product of such an operation. But when this by-product became lucrative, began to have a worldwide market, there was a further tussle over its control. In this tussle, post-colonial was introduced as the superseding enterprise, like a new multinational corporation taking over an old company. Such an acquisition is just one side of the story. The other side is that in the new order, Australia, Canada and some of the other former colonies got a much bigger market share. Even Indians, especially of the expatriate American variety, assumed prized positions in the lucrative trade in theory. Yet, certain functional limitations of Commonwealth studies have been carried over into post-colonial studies. Because of this, it seems to me that post-colonial discourse is itself guilt-ridden and anxious, never fully freed from its past, haunted by the ghost of imperialism. That this spectre cannot easily be exorcised is amply clear in the very title of The Empire Writes Back, a phrase out of Salman Rushdie. The empire, we had presumed, no longer existed; how and why should it write back? Can, should, it not write for itself if it is truly ‘post’-colonial? The decentring that the discourse of post-colonialism implies is thus belied by the title of its most eloquent exposition. Post-colonialism is, after all, not as anti-colonial as it appears at first.

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Elephant in the burlap bag Another major problem with post-colonialism as it is currently defined is that it does not address prominent areas of our experience. Let me illustrate this point with a story. In the concluding plenary open session of the 1989 ACLALS at Canterbury, Kent, I raised a question that has remained unanswered till today. That session, led by the late Anna Rutherford, then Chair, ACLALS, was orchestrated to display unity and consensus. On the stage were representatives from all the important regions of the Commonwealth, including India. The subterranean politics of the session surfaced when Rutherford openly told off the American contingent, who by their ever-increasing presence posed a threat to the old order, in words to the effect: ‘You are most welcome, guys, but don’t try to take over.’ By putting Americans in their place, Rutherford was ostensibly asserting the primacy of the claim of the new post-colonials over the older ones, the Americans being the first ones to break free from the British king and crown. Yet, as I quickly realized, the wrangle was mostly between former colonizers and settler colonies. The invaded colonies were still junior partners in either arrangement. I tried to address this imbalance by asking, what about Indian literatures not written originally in English? Why was their existence all but ignored in the conference? There was no answer. My question remained uncomfortably deferred, like Trishanku, the mythological king, suspended between earth and heaven. It was only much later that I realized just how destabilizing such a question might be. On the very first page of The Empire Writes Back in answer to the question, ‘What are post-colonial literatures?’ offers the following answer: ‘This book is concerned with writing by those peoples formerly colonized by Britain, though much of what it deals with is of interest and relevance to countries colonized by other European powers.’ Now, why should post-colonialism be confined to what were formerly British colonies? I have raised this question earlier, but I repeat it to suggest a different answer this time. Could the answer simply be: because post-colonialism is tied up with the empire of the English language? Across the continents, it is the Departments of English which have a greatest stake in post-colonial literatures. As such, post-colonialism is the site on which is waged the battle of/for English(es). Post-colonial studies, then, are about who takes control not so much of the English Empire as of the empire of the English language. It is estimated that English is not just the most powerful

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and richest language in the world, but also the single most valuable commodity of the UK itself. Clearly, this is a very high stakes game; language imperialism is very much a part of the global system of imperialism itself. Gandhi knew this and wrote against the hegemony of English in Hind Swaraj (1909). The Empire Writes Back does not disallow the possibility of nonEnglish literatures entering the discursive terrain of post-coloniality; to openly advocate such exclusion would be politically incorrect: Although it [post-colonialism] does not specify that the discourse is to be limited to works in English, it does indicate the rationale of the grouping in a common past and hints at the vision of a more liberated and positive future. (24) Yet, there is a peculiar opacity in this sentence. The opening conjunction, ‘although’, suggests that the second part of the sentence will give reasons why, as a matter of practice even if not in theory, only works in English get included in the rubric ‘post-colonial’. However, no such reasons are forthcoming. Instead the second half of the sentence begins with a questionable assumption of ‘a common past’ and slides off into a vague postponement or promise of future redemption. The implication is, not now but some day, non-English literatures will be a part of post-colonial studies. Surely, English, spelt deliberately by the authors in lower case, not to speak of the vastly varied cultural constituents of empire, is an area of difference, not of identity as far as the enterprise of post-colonialism is concerned. This promise, however, is not likely to be honoured – except in its breach. The very logic of international English studies makes it insupportable for works in other languages to be included, except in English translation. There is thus a mismatch between the culture studied and the medium of instruction. It is precisely this clash which renders Indian English literature vulnerable to the charge of inadequacy and partiality on the one hand and makes it imperative to suggest alternate models of bilingual creativity to account for its special features on the other. This is also the reason why Indian English literature ends up occupying most of the space given to Indian literature: in effect, because English is a dominant language, whether the original works are in English or not matters little. In a later section which specifically examines select Indian theories, the authors of The Empire Writes Back address this issue directly:

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It is frequently asserted that the work produced by contemporary writers in languages as diverse as Maratha [sic], Bengali, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, etc., far outweighs in quantity and quality the work produced in English. This may well be the case, though until much more extensive translations into English from these languages have been produced it is difficult for non-speakers of these languages to judge. (122) But isn’t that precisely the point: if such a claim will be considered ‘true’ only when English critics ‘judge’ its validity, then the plurality and richness of Indian literatures will continue to be reduced to Indian English literature and Indian literature in English translation. Such a reduction is unacceptable not only to those who do not write in English but also to some of Indians who do. However unintended, such stray remarks signal the continuing cultural neo-imperialism of the English language. Wouldn’t it have much more accurate for the authors to admit that post-colonialism as they had defined it cannot adequately address the reality of India’s multilingual creativity? Why are such admissions of inadequacy rarely to be found in texts emerging from metropolitan or semi-metropolitan centres? The incompatibility between monolingual, metropolitan theories and their multilingual post-colonial contexts is just the tip of the iceberg. To try to contain all of Indian culture in the discourse of postcolonialism would be not only to ignore the proverbial elephant in the room, but to take one’s denial to the point of trying to stuff it into a burlap bag. Even if the elephant fitted in – and that would only happen if it were a very small elephant and a very large bag – it might suffocate to death. Much more likely, the elephant would burst through the bag. The cultural richness and variety of India, not to speak of its population and size, are so vast that any notion of post-colonialism is insufficient to come to terms with them. India’s population alone would easily exceed that of the rest of post-colonial world put together. If all the literary production in India’s various recognized, not to mention unrecognized, languages were to be allowed entry into post-colonial discourse, it would resemble an overcrowded barracoon, quite unable to support so many residents. Indian literatures would invade, overrun and overwhelm the rest of post-colonial writing. Prominent postcolonial players like Canada or Australia might be dwarfed by the literature of just one Indian language. If, moreover, we were to take into account the historical depth and continuity of these literatures, it would

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be obvious that India is probably the richest national-cultural territory in the world, comparable to the entire continent of Europe. Can such a vastly rich and diverse cultural area be tagged on or fitted into some all-purpose carry bag? Without quite sounding the call to Indian exceptionalism, I only wish to underscore our need for independent and indepth study of our culture and civilization. Post-colonialism does not offer that to us. Instead, it turns a cultural majority into a minority. Some of us may revel in this diminution, but I hope the majority, if they have really come of age, will object to, and reject, it.

India studies According to The Empire Writes Back, the colonial experience, by and large, embraces the entirety of the cultural production of most postcolonial societies. Settler colonies, particularly, have no history to speak of prior to colonialism, though the people that the settlers conquered, decimated or displaced obviously did, whether it can be termed ‘history’ is another matter. In contrast, British colonialism is only a small part of the totality of the Indian cultural experience. The British ruled India for less than 200 years. Even during these 200 years, large territories, geographical, political and cultural, were outside their direct control, if not influence. If 1757 were considered the beginning of British power in India, then we can easily see that it took another hundred years for this power to be converted into paramountcy. And, ironically, 1857 marks the first concerted and deliberate attempt on the part of various sections of the native population to overthrow British rule. Though the Great Revolt was unsuccessful, it did not yield to a more stable and permanent British rule as hoped for in Queen Victoria’s proclamation of 1858, which made India officially a part of the British Empire. What followed was a fifty-year gestation by the end of which Indian nationalism emerged in a fully blown form. Even during this transitional period, there were innumerable revolts and rebellions against the Raj in different parts of India and by different sections of the populace. The struggle for emancipation took up the first half of the twentieth century, but succeeded in creating two new states in the subcontinent, India and Pakistan. Earlier European colonizers, such as the Portuguese, French, Dutch and Danes, did not impact India as extensively and severely as the British did, but did succeed in colonizing smaller portions. Prior to that, the longer period of Muslim rule has not, as noted earlier, been characterized as ‘colonial’, though it did share many features of latterday imperialism. The impact of that period on Indian culture is, arguably, more pronounced and long-lasting than that of British colonialism.

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Though parts of India were ruled by the East India Company earlier, we were officially part of the British Empire for less than a hundred years. A hundred years is not a very large span of time in the life of a civilization as old as India. In contrast, the Mughal Empire lasted for 300 years, of which the past 150 or so were years of decline and disintegration. The Chola Empire, depending on how you count it, lasted about 400 years, longer than either the British or the Mughal Empire. The house of Mewar (Udaipur) has a history of continuous rule of 900  years. And there were many great or greater empires in India, such as the Mauryan or the Gupta. From a civilizational perspective, then, colonialism was an important episode in India’s history but by no means the only or the defining one. Post-colonialism, therefore, encompasses an even smaller part of India’s civilizational enterprise. While the entire history of some nations is post-colonial, post-colonialism is only a fraction of our past and present. Naturally, they are more invested in it than we ought to be. I started by arguing that before we can theorize post-colonial difference, we must first examine the basis of post-colonial similarity. We have noticed how sketchy and motivated this similarity is. Not only is colonialism a relatively small part of the experience of a civilization like India, but it was experienced so diversely in different parts of the world as to render it an area of difference rather than similarity. What, then, is the salience of considering it a common ground of study in the first place? That, we have clearly seen, is nothing but the exigency of metropolitan and semi-metropolitan academics. Not having space for studying all the nationalities and cultures of the world in their own right, a convenient though unwieldy grouping must be affected. Moreover, we have also seen that focusing on the English language has created the so-called common ground of post-colonialism, which in itself is too scanty to address all the cultural diversity of post-colonial cultures. From such a perspective, when the edifice of post-colonial similarity is sought to be raised on shifting ground, there is very little work for post-colonial difference to do. I must concede, however, that it has not all that easy to disengage from the post-colonial paradigm or project. Perhaps, it is all a matter of time; till the right time comes, disengagement is very difficult; afterwards, once it’s over, to keep it going is like flogging a dead horse. What seemed so hard once suddenly becomes obvious. So it has been with post-colonialism. Once we were so enmeshed in it, now to go on at such length about its demise itself seems unwarranted. The reason for this is obvious: our compulsions are those of a subservient culture, trapped in an unequal academic relationship with the

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metropolis. Our partial acceptance of post-colonialism afforded us, as already seen, an entry into a ready-made and expanding market. There, we could hawk our academic wares, sharing in the benefits that accrued. It was good for our writers to be thus showcased and studied overseas, especially in wealthier countries. Furthermore, those of us who were in English departments had one more avenue to justify our existence. Also, post-colonialism as a notion was certainly an advance over Commonwealth literature in that it at least foregrounded the colonial experience and allowed us to come to terms with its continuing effects. Fair enough: but isn’t it time to break free now?

Civilizational difference Post-colonial difference rests on the different types of colonialisms in occupied territories or on the differences in the societies thus colonized. There are a variety of alterities upon which these differences are erected, but the most common ones are those of language, religion, ethnicity, class, caste and gender. No wonder, the same kind of identity politics is seen to be at work in post-colonialism as in the rest of the Humanities and Social Studies. This is clearly a leftist type of discourse, supposedly championing various minority or oppressed groups in a struggle for greater personal or group empowerment. Some of these assertions might even be self-defeating, if not outright dishonest. But this is how post-colonialism, or indeed academics as we know it, had to legitimate itself. One of the flaws in such mobilization is that all these groups are a part of a Western-dominated modernity. The struggle, thus, cannot be outside this universal order, but only for better placement within, with different ethnicities, religions, genders, classes or sexual preferences struggling against the one imagined dominant. The result is a post-colonialism which erases the difference between the colonized and the colonizer, between the rich and the poor, between the modern and the traditional, between Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic, between those who have power and those who don’t – provided ‘we’ are all together against capitalism, US imperialism, hetero-normative sexuality or some other such big common enemy. On the ground, though, the white folks check into five-star hotels, while the thirdworlders struggle to find any cheap digs in an international conference. Inequality in the real world is naturalized, while within the conference rooms, an imagined solidarity is touted. Thus, much postcolonial theorizing ends up confusing and obscuring issues.

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Ideas such as hybridity are advanced to reiterate what ought to be fairly clear: ‘culture abhors simplicity’. Studying cultures demands complex and nuanced readings. But how is hybridity the unintended or intended outcome of the intercourse between the colonized and the colonizers? It is argued that what is created through this intercourse defies the facile opposition between the colonized and the colonizers. So post-colonialism is marked by hybridity which makes location as the sign of authenticity impossible.5 But aren’t cultures always/already hybrid? When they were not pure and distinct to begin with, before the colonial encounter, how did they suddenly turn impure and hybrid afterwards? The entities which encounter each other through colonialism are themselves products of older interactions and intercourses. Thinking of the new cultural creations which they spawn as hybrids does not really help us. Because there are differences even between hybrids and among hybridities. It is therefore unconvincing to differentiate the pre-colonial and the post-colonial in terms of pure versus hybrid cultures. What is required is to try to distinguish between the older and the new kinds of hybridity. If so, we are back with the earlier problem of measuring and mapping the impact of colonialism on the colonized and vice versa. In that sense, hybridity is a red-herring, creating confusing equations of power, inequality and exploitation. Likewise, the attack on the idea of the nation works against emerging and struggling nations while the Western state system, at once more stable and trustworthy, is taken for granted. A nation such as India is neither arbitrary nor accidental but comes into being as an act of collective will, after a prolonged process of negotiation and contestation. It is imagined only in the sense that it has been put together, brought into being, created or conceptualized into existence, not in the sense that it is a fantasy, a chimera, an illusion. Those who wish to deconstruct the nation do not know where to park the rest of their cumbersome baggage of their identity. In what way are sub-national identities any less unreal or ontologically stable than national ones? To me, the reality of the Indian nation is similar to how an idol in a temple is considered to be ‘alive’. ‘Life’ has been put into an idol by complex processes of ritual sacralization. This process is called pranapratisthapana, literally the infusion of breath or vitality into an image. There are both texts and practices to explain such ritualization. From this viewpoint, the Indian nation has been invoked and brought into being through an elaborate and painstaking yajna – a sacrificial ritual. It has been (re)membered into existence through the collective energies, hopes, aspirations and prayers of millions of people. It will therefore not be easily dismembered.6 Ontologically, how

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is nationalism any less valid than, say post-nationalism which seeks to dismantle or deconstruct it? National culture, in fact, is an important ground for cultural identification and differentiation, especially for a country like India. It cannot be dismissed or disregarded easily. Yet, it is obvious that nations are impermanent and imperfect entities. Some are so unstable that they are unable to keep their boundaries intact for a decade or two. We therefore need a broader, deeper, more enduring basis for cultural self-identification. To me, this basis is civilizational. Civilizations are indeed dynamic, amorphous, shifting and loosely structured both geographically and historically. Moreover, they have not just continuities but discontinuities, not just locations, but dislocations. Yet, they are surprisingly resilient and enduring. The ideas and beliefs that motivate them are more deep rooted. It is difficult to dislodge or destroy these ideas and beliefs because they are embedded in the very texture of each civilization. That is why I would like to propose a cross-civilizational framework as being the most fruitful way of marking post-colonial difference. Such a project is at best difficult because civilizations are hard to define. Usually, when they are defined, it is in religious terms. Books like Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations have made cross or comparative studies between civilizations unpopular if not disreputable.7 Civilizations, moreover, are enormously complex and vast. They spread across national and cultural boundaries. In the age of nationalisms, civilization studies have received a setback and civilizational identities have been forgotten or overwritten by national ones. That is why it is important to understand the relationship between nations and civilizations. It seems to me that it is each nation’s relationship to a broader civilizational entity which helps us define or categorize it. Some nations are formed to embody civilizational aspirations, while others are born to oppose them. There are thus composite nations like India and oppositional nations like Pakistan. There are also nations which have clear civilizational affiliations but rather narrower, more distinct linguistic or ethnic identities. Hence, it is necessary to distinguish between nation states and civilization states. The latter are very rare in today’s world, India and China being perhaps the best examples. America is a special case which I have discussed at greater length elsewhere.8 To be American is to see oneself as the vanguard of not just European, but human civilization. This self-conferred status makes the US a special, or self-proclaimedly exceptional, case. Unlike all these, the Indian nation is valuable not only because it embodies the collective will of a vast populace or because it is an attempt to forge a modern nation out of a diverse and traditional

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society, but because the nation state of India is the custodian of the Indic civilizations. Even a passing comparison with Pakistan or Bangladesh will serve to illustrate the importance of such a role. Pakistan’s civilizational burden, for instance, is lighter because it was born not so much out of an act of affirmation but of disaffirmation. To be a Pakistani, then, is to disavow a common and shared South Asian cultural past and to posit, instead, a separate sub-civilizational history on the basis of religious difference. Pakistan therefore does not participate in the trajectory of Indic civilizations as India does; rather it identifies itself with what might be termed its Islamic phase, more specifically the last thousand years or so. Similarly, the birth of Bangladesh signifies a second disavowal, this time from Pakistan, on the basis of language and linguistic culture, in spite of a shared religion. Again, Bangladesh cannot be seen as identifying with the whole gamut of Indic history, not even with all of our Islamic past, but more specifically, the MuslimBengali part of it. Similarly, the idea of Nepal is not much older than British colonialism; in fact, the state itself comes into its own post1857, its continuance underwritten by the British in exchange for help in suppressing the Great Revolt. Even today, culturally, Nepal is very much a part of a larger Indic civilization. It is clear, then, that neither Pakistan nor Bangladesh or Nepal is a civilization, though they are states. Of course, they take part in the larger South Asian civilizational enterprise, but not wholly, centrally and selfconsciously as India does. By their own self-limitation, they have chosen to disown some parts of the heritage of this civilization. In contrast, India is not just a state, but aspires to encompass and affirm the totality of a civilization, arguably even those parts of it which are at present outside its national boundaries. The present Indian state, large as it is, implicitly suggests not just the Akhand Bharat (undivided India) which stretches from Sind to Burma and from Afghanistan to Sri Lanka, but also a greater India, whose denizens are spread across the entire globe, not only as its diasporic children, but also as the new votaries of its world view. Greater India is not a political entity, but, as Raja Rao constantly reminds us, a metaphysical one: ‘India is not a desa [country], it is a darsana [perspective].’ If the present Indian states were to be destroyed, that might not signal the end of Indic civilization. No doubt, it would mean a grave crisis, a catastrophic event, but perhaps not the end. The civilization itself would flow beyond the changed political boundaries in its efforts to survive and reassert itself.9 Of course, to say any of this is to run the risk of being branded politically offensive or incorrect. Comparing, for instance, Indian and Canadian post-colonialisms from such a standpoint obviously shows that the shared experience of

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colonialism offers at best a thin and flimsy layer of similarity between the two. No doubt, analogous processes of national self-affirmation, resistance to imperial authority and coping with multiculturalism may be seen at work in both countries, easily accessible to mutual scrutiny through the common medium of English, yet the differences and dissimilarities appear to be much more striking and fundamental. Canada, we would at once see, is a nation, not civilization. Canadians, luckily, are not wont to imitate their more assertive and ambitious Southern neighbour in this regard. Canada partakes of the larger civilization of Europe, particularly of its North American extension. It shares Anglo-Saxon-French parliamentary and Judeo-Christian religious traditions, as much as it does the prevailing, transcontinental culture of capitalistic, multicultural modernity. But it would not call itself a civilization, I wager. Canada, actually, is a very large geographical area with a very small population. India, on the other hand, is a fairly large country with a very large population. Canada has a very short history compared to India’s very long one. Canada is, by and large, a monolingual or, at the most, a bilingual society, while India is multilingual and multicultural. The new multiculturalism of Canada cannot be equated with the age-old, intrinsic pluriculturalism of India. Canada is, moreover, a rich country, a part of the Western alliance which controls the world’s economy, whereas India is still among the poorest countries of the world. Canada is modern and developed, while India is still largely traditional and underdeveloped. Finally, Canada and India belong to two different civilizations. Consequently, they inhabit two different, though not mutually exclusive, universes of discourse. Many Indians have the biculturality to understand both these universes because of their knowledge not only of English but of Western ideas. What is more, there is a large Indian diaspora spread across Canada, which makes for a permanent link between the two countries. But Canadian studies can thrive in India while Nigerian studies, far more significant in both literary and cultural value, cannot. Obviously, certain institutional compulsions are at play here. These are born out of material conditions which are easier to explain than civilizational similarities. Canadian Studies is now very much a part of institutionalized English Studies in India. True, Canadian Studies in India are thus a collaborative, but nevertheless largely sponsored project. The Government of Canada invested a lot of money to promote Canadian Studies. That is why we have so many Canadian Studies Centres and not one Nigerian Studies Centre. Nigeria has a culture which is at least as rich as that of Canada; it is certainly older and much more

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populous than Canada. But we do not have an institutional site for Nigerian Studies even though we share a common burden of an imperial past and an imperial language which is now our own. But as long as neither Nigeria nor India invest money in Nigerian studies, we will have very little to do with them. So post-colonial studies are an outcome of an economic politics, which determines what is worthy of study and what is not. This politics is controlled by material conditions mostly emanating from the metropolitan or semi-metropolitan countries, not from the colonies. Canada and Australia, by virtue of their size and prosperity, not to mention their racial, economic and political participation in Western hegemony, function as sub-imperial powers in the post-colonial world. They share in two kinds of imperialisms—linguistic and economic. Both of these give them the kind of power which nations that share in only one kind of imperialism lack. For instance, Sweden or Switzerland are powerful economically, but are not imperialistic culturally because they don’t function in a major international language and therefore we have few centres for Swedish or Swiss studies anywhere in the world. I consider Canada to be sub-imperial because while it has both the cultural and the material resources to exercise dominance vis-à-vis the underdeveloped world, it simultaneously lacks the overwhelming cultural, material and military might of either the UK or the US. Sub-imperialism usually collaborates with imperialism; in that sense, Canada to us is part of the same system of inequality of which the US is the world leader today. I must admit, though, that India too is a sub-imperial power. This is because it has all the ingredients of a major power, including a long history of great art and literature, enormous cultural resources, immense size and talent, even if it lacks the material or military might to convert these into regional hegemony. Nor does it, I am glad to say, have the imperial will to power that China has so amply demonstrated. Indian culture has spread and will, I hope, continue to spread in a non-coercive, non-violent and therefore non-imperialistic way. I have argued that post-colonialism as a problematic poses an invitation, if not challenge, to the thoroughly colonized intellectual class which directs India’s academic enterprises. Will this class buy into post-colonialism or opt for svaraj? This class, I am afraid, is almost congenitally incapable of questioning the fundamental rubric of postcolonialism as a received category. Like all elites, this class will, we must assume, continue to supplicate for better terms of exchange, contenting itself with various spaces of subservience and subordination in the world system of ideas. In the meanwhile, India’s civilizational

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enterprise will chug along, diffusing the brunt of neo-colonialism through apparent capitulation, while asserting its independence and resilience through its select mouthpieces. That these chosen spokespersons will be few is obvious; that they will not be negligible or insignificant is not so clear. Because when push comes to shove, India will line up behind them, magnanimously forgiving the not so petty or pretty betrayals of professional intellectuals as contingent and inconsequential in the long run, however powerful and alarming they might seem momentarily. In the meanwhile, the more effective way of dealing with the contemporary cultural world system is not through the idea of postcolonialism, but through svaraj. The process of decolonization, which did reach a certain peak during India’s struggle for freedom, needs to be renewed and redeployed. Resistance to oppressive structures of power is still required if India is to survive as a civilization. Post-colonialism, I am afraid, often blunts the edge of our urgency. It drags us back into a discursive field in which we will remain secondary players. We may attempt to redefine, modify, expand or adapt its Orientalist designs, but we will not be free until we demonstrate the capacity of thinking of and for ourselves without recourse to the dominant epistemes of metropolitan academics. But svaraj, as should be clear by now, is not only academic but also material and spiritual. It is not merely technological and economic, but also cultural and ideological. On the first two fronts, perhaps we have fared better than on the latter two. The Indian economy has grown at least 5 per cent for twenty-five years. The success of Indian techies, not only overseas, but in India too has also changed our way of thinking irrevocably. This is real decolonization, not just sloganeering.

Notes 1 In the previous chapter, showing the difficulties which post-colonials themselves face with the received idea of post-colonialism, I argued that the postcolonial subject is, paradoxically, that person who is outside the discourse of post-colonialism. 2 The Empire Writes Back is significant not only because it signalled the second ‘arrival’ of this fledgling discipline from one of the former colonies, but also because it continues to be one of the best books on the subject. Written from Australia, rather than the UK or the US, it presents a different point of view from the usual metropolitan approaches to the question of colonialism. 3 Alastair Niven, a well-known critic and former director of the Arts Council, London, said as much in the opening plenary of the Association of Commonwealth Language and Literature Studies (ACLALS) Triennial Conference in

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Canberra in 2000. The appeal was rejected because the category of the postcolonial literatures was invented precisely to get away from the overweening influence of English literature. Stephen Slemon uses a similar metaphor in his introductory note to the special post-colonial issue of Ariel 26.1 (January 1995). He likens postcolonialism to a ‘suitcase blown open on the baggage belt’ (7). Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) is well known for such an argument. Also see Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990) edited by him. For a critique of notions of hybridity, see Robert J. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995). In The Death and Afterlife of Mahatma Gandhi, I show that Gandhi was well aware of the work of sacred imagination that went into the making of a nation; in fact, he considered his own death as an offering to safeguard the newly independent India. Luckily, we also have books like The Clasp of Civilizations by Richard Hartz. ‘Rethinking America: A Trans-Civilizational Approach’ (2001). It is also important to notice how civilizations are not made up only of national or sub-national, but also of transnational histories. Civilizations are, thus, formed by circulatory, not nationally or regionally bounded, ideas and histories. It is the traffic and exchange of ideas, as much as of objects, that we must study to understand civilizations.

References Ashcroft, Bill, et al. The Empire Writes Back. 1989. London: Routledge, 2002. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. ———, ed. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990. Hartz, Richard. The Clasp of Civilizations: Globalization and Religion in a Multicultural World. New Delhi: DK Printworld, 2015. Paranjape, Makarand. ‘Coping with Post-Colonialism’. In Interrogating PostColonialism: Theory, Text and Context. Eds. Harish Trivedi and Meenakshi Mukherjee. Shimla: IIAS, 1996: 37–47. ———. The Death and Afterlife of Mahatma Gandhi. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2014; New Delhi: Penguin Random House, 2015. ———. ‘Rethinking America: A Trans-Civilizational Approach’. In Rediscovering America: American Studies in the New Century. Ed. Kousar Azam. New Delhi: South Asian Publishers, 2001: 34–60. Young, Robert J. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge, 1995.

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Edward Said and the case of the missing folder During the conference at which this paper was first presented, something rather uncanny happened.1 The file folder containing my paper was pinched. I realized this just half an hour before it was my turn to speak. The organizers of the conference very kindly announced that if someone had mistakenly taken my folder, he or she should return it because it contained the paper that I was supposed to present. Perhaps, the folder filcher thought that I would not speak if my paper went missing. When the missing folder did not turn up, the organizers promptly gave me another one. Of course, this was no help because it was the misplaced paper, not folder, which I wanted. But thinking how to make the best of the worst and thanking my hosts for the new folder, I hastily scribbled some notes on the pad provided in the new folder to try to salvage the situation. Incredibly, the second folder, with all my notes, also disappeared. To save myself – or my hosts – from further embarrassment, I began by admitting that I had a perfect alibi for not saying much. From the earlier announcements everyone knew that someone had been interested enough in my work to pinch my file folder not once, but twice. Of course, the perpetrator need not have been the same person in both instances; I could not think of anyone in this audience that was so fond of me. In the first folder was my paper; in the second were the substitute notes. Now that both were missing I asked to be excused for whatever was wanting or wanton in my presentation. The conference was dedicated to the memory of Edward Said, who had passed away a few months before. I begin by stating what I was

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not going to do: I was not planning to talk about Edward Said though I had immense regard for him. I had met him briefly in London, where I found him approachable and unostentatious. Said was not just the founder of a new discipline, but a great humanist and man of extraordinary courage. To be a public intellectual in contentious times is never easy. Representing the Palestinian cause in the heart of America’s most Jewish city, New York, compounded this challenge. To tell the Jews, themselves a persecuted people, that they are now oppressing others required a special kind of integrity and fearlessness, which Professor Said had in ample measure. Though this was only one of a spate of such commemorative meetings held all over the world following his death in September 2003, I had reason not to join the long list of distinguished academics paying homage to Said. As I’ve said earlier, Said’s activism and scholarship flowered in the US, not in Palestine. It is certainly ironic that he grew up to champion the cause of those very people in his biography, so tellingly called Out of Place, shows him alienated from him during his isolated and highly Westernized childhood. Said was being prepared to leave that very world of Cairo and Palestine, whose cause he was now championing. That small Christian elite to which Said belonged and which strove to maintain its distance from their Arab countrymen was soon to be destroyed. Said’s oeuvre, as I have observed in an earlier chapter, provoked enormous selfcriticism within the thinking West and immortalized Said as one of the founding fathers of post-colonial studies. Correcting Western attitudes towards its Others is one thing, but for these Others to understand and represent themselves according to their own self-fashioning is a task that we could not expect of him or his followers. This we would have to do for ourselves and it was in this larger task that I was most interested. As to Said, I was sure that there would be enough papers on him in the sessions to come. I also clarified that I was also not planning to replicate what Professor Tapan Raychaudhuri had attempted earlier in the day. He offered a magisterial overview of the European or rather the British encounter with India. What is more, he tried to present a new model for this encounter, which he termed ‘catalytic’. His idea was that Europe changed very little in its encounter with India, but, like a catalyst, triggered a massive transformation in India. I would have preferred to see cultural contact as a two-way street even if the official signs said ‘One Way’. However, I did agree with one aspect of his argument, namely his refusal to reduce this encounter simply to terms such as dominance and subordination. Yes, these may be the broad parameters of the engagement between the colonizers and the colonized, but when

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we look more closely what we see are numerous complications, many pockets of resistance and various contrarian impulses. The overall picture gets even more complex than we are normally given to understand. Where I coincided with his ideas was his attempt to rethink the Indo-British encounter along independent lines, actually looking for spaces of autonomy and resistance, of what we might call svaraj, though he did not use that word. That everything in this encounter was not a matter of dominance and subordination, but there were many inflections to this broader equation was worth appreciating. But as I added, even that was not the main burden of my paper. Instead, I planned to focus on the genealogy, development and perhaps demise of what is called ‘post-colonialism’. To this end I first offered a narrative, a survey of how this field developed in the last twenty-five years or so. It was a very brief, even idiosyncratic, survey conducted in a short hand, if not underhand manner. It is that survey that I recall below.

Shimla: that bus has left It seems that though issues of colonialism and anti-colonialism were in the air for a long period, the term ‘post-colonialism’ became popular much later, around the time the book The Empire Writes Back came out. This book by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffith and Helen Tiffin was published in 1989, about ten years after Said’s earlier landmark volume, Orientalism (1978). But in Orientalism, neither the notion of post-colonialism nor the term is properly discussed. Said’s key word is, of course, ‘Orientalism’, the discursive corpus and academic discipline whereby the West studied its Others, especially the East or the Orient. In these intervening ten years, how was it that post-colonialism rather than Orientalism attained prominence? Orientalism became a buzzword, but it was post-colonialism that acquired the help and gravity of a discipline. Said had, in a sense, ‘finished’ the term, even if the phenomenon reproduced itself under newer guises. Post-colonialism, even if a modified or contemporary form of Orientalism, could hide its complicity with the dominant in a manner in which it was now impossible for Orientalism. But what is post-colonialism? An essay by this title by Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge published in 1991 tried to answer the question. Mishra and Hodge distinguished between a continuation of colonialism and a resistance to it, a distinction that is still of crucial importance, even though they predicate it on the rather slight hyphen between ‘post’ and ‘colonialism’ – such a huge difference riding on such a little stroke!

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Eventually, however, post-colonialism came to encompass a certain assortment of perspectives, attitudes and critical practices, besides a significant academic industry whose centres are still primarily in the West, in countries of advanced capital. Aijaz Ahmad’s essay, ‘The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality’ is noteworthy for the manner in which he problematizes the rise of post-colonialism. He shows how the term migrates from the social sciences, particularly political theory, in which it was prominent in the 1970s, to the discourse of literary criticism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This transition, bereft of the self-reflexivity normally expected in such a migration, signals an opportunism if not ignorance. Further, according to Ahmad, the repackaging had much to do with the retreat of the organized Left and the rise of post-modernity. Post-colonialism, thus, came to offer a weak resistance to what might otherwise have been the unopposed triumph of capitalism.2 Whether we agree with Ahmad or not, what is undeniable is the manner in which post-colonialism became the refuge within the West of the post-Soviet Left. To bring this debate closer home to India the first time that postcolonialism, as opposed to Commonwealth literature, was discussed seriously was at the conference held in Shimla in 1994 called ‘Interrogating Post Colonialism’. As already mentioned in the previous chapter, I was at that conference, the proceedings of which, edited by Meenakshi Mukherjee and Harish Trivedi, were published by the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. In my paper called ‘Coping with Post-Colonialism’, I tried to make a distinction between the discourse of post-colonialism and the condition of post-coloniality: paradoxically, the prerequisite for entrance into the former was an exit from the latter. Post-colonialism, like Orientalism, was mostly about privileged people in the West discussing underprivileged people elsewhere. What made this less obvious was that these privileged people were often brown, black or yellow, not white, and from areas that were formerly colonized. Opportunities in the West to study India opened up new careers for such academics. No wonder the conference in Shimla did not really interrogate post-colonialism as much as accept its ascendancy, while claiming a small piece of the action. The interrogation was a ruse to camouflage a late entry into a discourse that had already overtaken us. The conference was a roundabout admission that we were trying to play catch-up after finding ourselves left to our own devices in the Commonwealth camp by our former British masters. But now the time had come to accept our new mentors, the Americans, and their new name for us – we were ‘post-colonial’.

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Hyderabad: the end of post-colonialism? If we missed the bus in announcing the arrival of post-colonialism, I reflected, must we be remiss in declaring its demise? Shouldn’t we be the first ones to announce the end of post-colonialism? I knew that such announcements and analyses would be made from different parts of the world by better-placed academics than us. Even so, it was worth trying. In the triennial ACLALS, a major conference in Hyderabad in August 2004, I proposed a panel to do precisely this. Calling it ‘The End of Post-colonialism’, I invited Vijay Mishra (Murdoch, Australia), R. Radhakrishnan (Amherst, MA) and Victor Ramraj (Calgary, Canada) to be co-panellists, with Graham Huggan (Leeds, UK) in the chair. Radhakrishnan didn’t make it to Hyderabad, but the panel was a huge success. Vijay Mishra, again with Bob Hodge, had a paper in it called ‘What was Post-colonialism?’ which I think nicely complemented their earlier paper mentioned earlier. My paper was entitled ‘Post Colonialism – A Requiem’. Radhakrishnan’s paper was to be about ‘Post-Colonialism by any Other Name’. These titles, as is obvious, are telling. For instance, the argument that the issues that postcolonial discourse highlighted would continue to be with us in one fashion or another, even if the discipline goes into decline. Vijay Mishra, too, speaking of Marx and Lacan, pointed out how post-colonialism gave us an opportunity to resist the dominant. My paper tried to show that we are better off with Indian studies than with post-colonial studies when it comes to studying ourselves. This was one of the most widely attended sessions of the conference, all seats taken, with hardly any standing room left. At the end, the discussion was so lively that the Chair had to close the unfinished exchanges pleading that we were out of time. The most spirited criticism of my paper came from Bill Ashcroft who pointed out that far from dying, post-colonial studies were in the process of re-inventing themselves, bringing in altered concerns and keeping up with the changing times. He elaborated this position in full-length book later. I responded by asking why prolong what seems like an inevitable, even swift decline? Post-colonialism was yielding to global studies, world literature and other similar transformations. For us to perpetuate it would only betray our own stakes in keeping it alive. I mention these details because unlike most life-histories of ideas in India, the story of post-colonialism may be told with greater, almost unmatched precision. It originated, as I have already shown, in the 1994 Shimla Conference, and it ended – or at any rate, we announced

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its end in the Hyderabad ACLALS of 2004 – ten years later. Since I had something to do with both events, I want to note the importance of the location of both, Shimla and Hyderabad. The Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, formerly the Viceregal Lodge of the British Raj, was after independence transferred to the office of the President of India and rechristened ‘Rashtrapati Niwas’. In 1964, the second President of India, Dr S. Radhakrishnan, in turn, gifted the imposing, opulent building and its grounds to the newly formed Indian Institute of Advanced Study, perhaps modelled on the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton. Radhakrishnan believed that this would be a more fitting use of what was once the seat of the imperial rulers of India. On a beetling brow overlooking not just Shimla, but the entire range of the Western Himalayan foothills, this neo-gothic building of black granite, with the coat of arms of the British Empire at its entrance, is as imposing today as it is historic. Gandhi, in his white handspun loincloth and shawl, along with the other leaders of the Congress, came here to meet the Viceroy, Lord Wavel, in July 1945 for the failed Shimla Conference. The main portico, which you reach at the end of the climbing gravel driveway, is imposing and majestic. The design and surroundings signify stark and confident authority, without Oriental embellishments or ornamentation. The rose gardens, the lawns and the views have an air of power and exclusivity. As the website of the IIAS puts it: The first building to strike the eye when one comes up to Shimla by rail is The Viceregal Lodge or better known today as The Indian Institute of Advanced Study. The Building which had witnessed the most turbulent phase in Indian history – the slow coming of the Viceroys, their cloaks and ermine tippets to their sudden and swift departure. It saw the change in its inmates from politicians and generals to professors and scholars. (www.iias.org/history.html) Despite the inevitable post-colonial decay and administrative apathy, the building never fails to impress. Once inside, you notice that the wood and red velvet panelled landing, with the massive staircases leading up. The huge back wall that climbs to the top, still shows the imprints of the armaments, once mounted on it. Now these weapons have been removed, but their impressions linger. There could be no doubt that the British thought themselves the conquerors of India, having taken and held it by the force of arms.

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Instead of actual weapons, now in post-colonial India, all we are armed with are ideas and arguments, however ineffective they be, to denote our altered state of being free. But if the Rashtrapati Niwas was so (in)appropriately colonial a setting to introduce post-colonialism to India, the setting of the ACLALS 2004, was to me, no less suitable to announce its decease. Instead of just the Indian chapter of the ALCLAS, here was the main international conference, held only once in three years, with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha as keynote speakers, along with a host of other luminaries. The proceedings were not in a colonial building, but in a modern hotel run by an Indian multinational hotel group. Instead of boasting that the likes of Lord and Lady Curzon had stayed in its vast suites whose closets were as big as bedrooms, hotels such as this one had played host to the contemporary corporate czars of the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs during their visits to ‘Cyberabad’, the new hub of Information Technology in Hyderabad. Hadn’t our own India come a long way in just ten years?

Kolkata: past the ‘post’ Now I return to the site of my paperless and noteless presentation, the premises of India’s oldest university, the city where British colonialism itself began, Calcutta. Instead of merely commemorating Edward Said, I reflected on past and future of the ‘post’. Could there have been a more appropriate place to talk about colonialism/post-colonialism than Calcutta and this very University, pioneering in ‘English’ education? Calcutta was where British colonialism in India took firm root in the eighteenth century. Calcutta, the second city of the empire, was also the cradle and cauldron of Indian modernity. Not too far from these very premises, the very first modern institution of education, Hindu (now Presidency College), had been founded. This very university, in fact the very hall in which I spoke, with its stained glass windows and poor acoustics, had such historical associations. This city, more than any other, had been the creation of the empire. Along with the empire, the people who were to run it, the native bourgeoisie, were also created by the British as collaborators. The latter would not have guessed, but this very elite later, rather unexpectedly, turned against their masters. It was here that the counter-discourse to imperialism was also born. Both the partners of the empire and the rebels were a part of this city, entrenched in that very colonial system that had produced it. Calcutta had reached its zenith under the Raj. Celebrated in literature, art, song, dance and cinema, it remains a cultural epicentre. Likewise, the so-called decline of Calcutta may actually be traced to the

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shifting of the imperial capital to Delhi. Incidentally, in those days, the second city of the East was Shanghai, which was also created by the trading interests of the Western imperialism and capitalism. Colonialism, an extremely resilient, powerful, flexible international system, had diverse manifestations in different parts of the world; naturally the responses it engendered were also diverse and complex. This diversity and complexity accounts, in part, for the differences and similarities between Calcutta and Shanghai, on the one hand, and London and Calcutta, on the other. The end of post-colonialism, thus, must also be diverse and complex, whether in Shimla, Hyderabad or Kolkata. Calcutta shows us, as no other Indian city can, how our colonial past shaped us. When we remember Rajiv Gandhi’s famously controversial dismissal, never as hotly contradicted as here, that Calcutta is a dying city we cannot but help thinking how wrong he was. True, it is still one of the most starkly distressed cities in the world, where humanity survives in extremis: the pollution, traffic, congestion and decrepitude are overwhelming, as is the poverty, the stench, noise, hunger and dirt. But over the last two decades, the streets are cleaner, the pavements less cluttered, the roads better and the water, power and telephone services much improved. It is amazing how the city has recovered, especially after the end of Communist rule. There is a construction and real estate boom; new suburbs and neighbourhoods are being developed; there are flyovers everywhere, even if one collapses occasionally. The metro has expanded. Even in the heart of the city, there is a major renovation and civic repair. How and why has this happened? Because of liberalization, privatization and globalization. Whether they like it or not, even the Marxists who ruled this city for thirty years have to admit that huge amounts of capital are needed to rebuild cities. It is the incredible economic boom of India that is pulling his beautiful city out of the quagmire of stagnation. With its multi-directional expansion, it would seem as if a once asphyxiating city has begun to breathe again. Indian intellectuals have been among the most resistant to globalization. For decades, journals like Economic and Political Weekly carried out a frontal war against liberalization and globalization. All kinds of doomsday scenarios were predicted for India, and they still are being predicted. But Communism, like theology, demands faith that sometimes goes contrary to evidence. The 5–8 per cent growth over the last twenty-five years, however, is incontrovertible and much stronger than ideology. It has changed the way we live. Real growth, real production of wealth does more for globalization than all the theories that have been propounded against it.

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The important political event was the change of government, with Mamata Banerjee of the Trinamool Congress wresting control of the state from the Left Front government in 2011 and winning a second term in 2016. In the years to come, Calcutta is going to re-emerge as a very important regional centre or business, commerce, industry and wealth. Possible linkages between India, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and so on might open up new opportunities too. Besides, a boom in the north-eastern states, which are isolated, underpopulated and economically underdeveloped, might re-establish the importance of Calcutta. With its knowledge base, trained manpower and hunger for wealth, we may also see a revitalization of many of its important institutions, including the very venerable Calcutta University where I spoke on the future beyond the ‘post’.

Odds and ends Before bidding adieu to it, let us connect the contradictions of the ‘post’ to the ends of post-colonialism. It should be obvious by now that post-colonialism refers to a heterogeneous terrain, rather than a homogeneous one. It is also evident that this term encompasses a vast body of people and their cultures and therefore is bound to be varied and diverse in its contents. But what is not equally obvious, which I have endeavoured to show, is that the term also hides two contrary impulses and therefore signifies an internal contradiction. Simply speaking the ‘post’ of post-colonialism is a neutral marker behind which hide two incongruous, even incommensurable, approaches to the discourse and the consciousness it creates. A similar inner contradiction is also contained in the idea of the ‘end’ of post-colonialism. ‘Post’, as we have seen, can mean ‘neo’ or ‘anti’. These two senses, the ideological and the chronological, contradict each other. The chronological suggests continuity, while the ideological rupture. That is because though the empire ends chronologically it does not really end ideologically. Instead of direct exploitation, we see indirect extraction. That is why ‘post-colonial’ is a very convenient blanket word, a portmanteau, a holdall, as noted earlier, which allows a lot of different types of ideas and practices. It is this imprecision and ambiguity that has contributed to its prevalence and popularity. Theory travels easily because it ends up meaning many things to many people. From this standpoint, there is a fascinating interplay between the ‘pre’ and the ‘post’, between what comes during colonialism and what follows after. Particularly, in the case of India, where the fragmented

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and contradictory petty states, often at odds with one another, were relatively easy to subdue and absorb for an imperial power whose national self-interests were very clearly defined. Colonialism happened because of we were decentred and fragmented, without a clear sense of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’. National conscious grew into a new sense of collectivity that formed itself against the colonizers. But today, without a clearly defined sense of an adversary, we are confused again, most of us in collaborative subjection to the dominant. For a true post-colonialism to flourish, we would have to be fully decolonized. To distinguish between neo- and de-colonialism, we would need a clear sense of atma bodh (self-knowledge) and shatru bodh (knowledge of your adversary). We were colonized precisely because we had lost sight of that distinction between ourselves and our adversaries, when we did not know who we were, where our interests lay and what we weren’t struggling against, both individually and collectively. Indian foot soldiers of the East India Company helped the latter conquer India. If these soldiers had a sense of solidarity with other Indians, the British could not have ruled India. Conversely, the beginnings of decolonization and, eventually, of post-colonialism, come from an unambiguous notions of the self and of the other, which was possible during the national movement. To come to our own times, I would suggest that that consciousness is once again being obfuscated by the fragmentation and decentring of the body politic, underwritten by invigorated ‘postal’ discourses. These discourses, in which diasporic intellectuals have had such an important role to play, are not invested in nation-building, a process which is still ongoing in India. Instead, it is more convenient for such intellectuals to claim that nations and nationalism are obsolete, or worse, pathological reminders of our barbarous and tribal instincts. But what many of these theorists neglect to acknowledge is that there are a variety of nationalisms as there are nation states. Some can actually be liberating rather than hegemonic. I have elsewhere tried to counter some of these anti-nationalist discourses.3 But, in the context of post-colonialism, we must remember that just as a lack of self-awareness delayed our coming into being as a nation, a lack of self-awareness will also delay our emergence as true post-colonials. Because colonialism is a complex phenomenon, it does not develop in a uniform or unilinear fashion. Just as its advancement is complex, its retreat is also multiform and diverse. While some will be more staunchly anti-colonial, a number of us will persist in neo-colonial ways of thinking and being. The progress of the post-colonial, hence, will also consist of advance and rearguard actions and interventions.

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Arif Dirlik in ‘The Aura of the Post-colonial’ notes that postcolonialism begins when third-world intellectuals arrive in first world academies. Dirlik is from Turkey, works on China and teaches in the US, making his own position complex. The implication of Dirlik’s essay is that post-colonialism is a form of contained opposition. It is an opposition that is itself a form of collaboration, even careerism. Post-colonial critics get absorbed into the Western academy so easily because the purpose of their opposition is actually assimilation. But while post-colonialism allows a kind of academic upward mobility from the third to the first world, it also entails a different kind of stereotyping whereby persons of colour are expected to confine themselves to select subjects and areas. Post-colonialism, in other words, is a mixed bag. In terms of real gains, it does create space for people of colour in the first-world academy, but in terms of real power, it reinforces Western hegemony. Being aware of these complexities, having a clear sense of our own self-interest, locating ourselves in our own narratives, if we were to evaluate post-colonialism, we should be able to see that it cannot help in own quest for self-definition and self-realization. For that we shall have to strengthen our own creative and critical traditions. It is not that post-colonialism is utterly useless, but only that it is not useful enough for our purposes. It is not that it signifies no improvement, but that it does not go far enough. We must, instead, walk on our own path to self-recovery as a civilization. We may continue to participate in it in a limited, critical way, using it perhaps as a way to engage the West, but the major portion of our energies should be invested in our own critical agenda, which need not be post-colonialism at all. Instead of post-colonial studies, what I advocate may be called a new kind of ‘Indic Studies’, that is, an analysis and celebration of our own narrative and aesthetic traditions. Indic Studies, the study of our self, our sva, will not be modelled on the older pattern of Indology or Orientalism. Those were conducted by Westerners. When we study ourselves, we shall do so differently, keeping our own perceptions and needs in mind. Likewise, we should also systematically embark on ‘Occidental’ studies, ‘white’ studies, ‘superpower’ studies, ‘Western’ studies and other similar ways of trying to understand the para, the other, thus reversing the colonial gaze. Without dismissing post-colonialism, without losing the opportunity to make judicious use of the possibilities it presents, we must nevertheless embark upon a programme of svadhyaya: sva + adhvaya, that is, self study, but also the study of the self and study by the self. This is something we need to do ourselves and not wait for others to

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sanction or endorse. Those who seek liberation must undertake such study of and by themselves. Why should others be interested in our freedom if we ourselves don’t care to preserve or promote it? Conversely, we must also undertake something which did not exist in our tradition, the study of others or paradhyaya because without doing so we will never know what people who think and live differently from us are like. These two types of cultural inquiries will be the critical bedrock of lasting svaraj. This is the opportune moment to reintroduce the idea of the svaraj parampara. That would be the best way to define and identify the approach that we have trying to explore in our study of post-colonialism. Our post-colonialism, or better still, our decolonization, may best be placed in the tradition of independent thinking that we may call by this name. Svaraj is the rule of the self, both at the personal and collective levels. It thus embraces both the individual and society. It does not mean the desire to rule others, but it asserts its resistance to being ruled by others. Svaraj is a word with ancient resonances, re-familiarized to all of us by its crucial reincarnation in the freedom struggle. Post-colonialism may have things in common with this svaraj parampara, but in so far as it hides a neo-colonialist agenda, it is really opposed and inimical to svaraj. The aims of the svaraj parampara may thus overlap with those of post-colonialism, but its departures must also be examined closely, on a case-to-case basis. Consequently, it may be necessary at times to oppose post-colonialism as it is to support it at other times. All along, for our own sakes, we shall have to investigate ourselves, our literatures, our cultures and social relations on our own terms, with or without the aid of post-colonialism. We must use whatever insights we might glean from others studying us, but our studies will not be identical to theirs nor a part of the discourse they generate. Now let me come to the last part of my endeavour by taking up the word ‘end’. It is evident that when I say the ‘end of post-colonialism’, I mean its passing, termination, conclusion. That is one obvious sense of the word. But ‘end’ also means goal, purpose, objective, ultimate aim. So while ‘end’ means cessation, termination, closure, it also implies purpose, fruition, desideratum. Let us consider this other meaning – the end as prayojan or objective. I would like to suggest that the ultimate end, that is purpose or fruition of post-colonialism will, paradoxically, be best served by its effective end or termination. To put it differently, the end or termination of post-colonialism as a discourse will serve the true end or purpose of post-colonialism. That is because the true culmination of post-colonialism is actually full or complete decolonization. Because post-colonialism as a discourse postpones or

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stalls decolonization, we should renounce, if not denounce it, exiting to frame our own alternative discourses. While colonialism was an important, even defining interlude in our recent history, it cannot be the sole determinant of our destiny for all times to come. When we grow into ourselves again, gaining in strength and confidence, becoming truly independent both materially and mentally, we shall be able to conceive of a different kind of world. To assume our rightful place in such a world, we must increase our competitiveness, efficiency and productivity, not just in other fields, but also in academics. Rather than harping on past wrongs we will have to think of future gains. Post-colonialism, of the kind we have practised, is backward looking. It is a form of lamentation, chest-beating, actually a demand for greater attention, even charity from our erstwhile masters. Decolonization or svaraj, on the other hand, looks ahead, staking its claims on the world to be. If we are svaraj-ist instead of post-colonial, we shall think of how strong we are, resourceful survivors, a billion plus in strength, making rapid strides towards a new dawn. After Western hegemony I can see the possibility of a world no longer ruled or controlled by the West, a world after Western hegemony. In such a world, China, India and other countries of the East will have major roles to play. A new world system will emerge in place of the present one. After 500 years of Western ascendancy, we will see a major shift in power. That is the argument in Andre Gunder Frank’s ReOrient. Even in the next twenty years, whether in our economic or cultural relations, we will need to think more about our Eastern neighbours than of the distant West. All this is not as strange as it may sound. After all not too long back, Central Asia was very much a part of our mental and physical neighbourhood. Even earlier, Indian culture extended seamlessly to what was once called Indo-China, the whole region East of where we are today – Burma, Tibet, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, through the great Chinese plains, all the way to Mongolia, Korea and Japan. All these countries, directly or indirectly, were a part of our cultural sphere of contact and influence. The bear hug of the West is only a 200-year old phenomenon, from which we have learned much. The end of post-colonialism will produce not only a new kind of Indian studies but, hopefully, also a new kind of Asian Studies. This is because India is at the crossroads of any major political, economic, cultural, intellectual transaction in Asia. The logical conclusion is that end of post-colonialism is something to be celebrated, rather than lamented. Instead of harping on the guilt

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of the West, instead of looking backwards all the time, instead of being entirely negative in our approaches to the history of colonialism and complaining about what they did and instead of trying to extract some concessions in return for those injustices done to us, we have to strengthen ourselves economically, politically, culturally, even militarily to compete in the new world order. We have to generate surpluses that will wipe out our poverty and backwardness, create the institutional safeguards and humane systems that will protect the interests of those who are the most wretched and marginalized. To those who say that we have little wherewithal and even less autonomy in which to operate, we have to respond that there is no absolute autonomy and no absolute subordination – there is always a tussle between the two. With the means that we have at our disposal and the will to deploy them optimally, we can change our futures. The present situation, I suppose, poses both a challenge and opportunity for us to show the world and ourselves what we can do. The svaraj parampara, which is larger and grander and more meaningful than anything post-colonialism has been able to offer, will serve to safeguard our autonomy and selfhood. At the same time, we shall refrain from exercising power over others. Svaraj is for all, for women and men, lower and upper castes, blacks and white; it is for Muslims and Hindus, for the poor and for the well-off. It is not just for India or Indians, but for all the inhabitants of the planet. It is the third way that we should strive to actualize – where we are neither victims nor victors, neither oppressed nor oppressors, neither subordinate nor dominant. For Gandhi, this ideal could be achieved by an activism that was non-violent and self-sacrificing that had to spread to others through a sort of communicative flow of fellow feeling rather than through a Habermasian type of rationality. But for Aurobindo, this perfection of earthly life could never be achieved without the human race reaching a higher level of consciousness, something he tried all his life to ‘bring down’ to earth. For less ambitious cultural critics, though, there is the way of resisting Western hegemony through nativist resistance in contrast to the modernizing agenda of those who think that there is one global discourse in which we must all try to fit in. I see my own contribution as trying to build a bridge between the visionaries of our freedom struggle and the present times. Only those who will pass across it can judge the utility of a bridge. The bridge that I have been trying to build for years will serve many who wish to discover a historic and civilizational continuity between the past and the ‘post’. I have myself walked on the bridge that I have built to test its efficacy. I continue to cross and recross back and forth on it almost

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every day of my life. The aim of svaraj is not to write revenge histories, but to get on with our own civilizational narrative. All this can only happen through a more positive kind of decolonial praxis not easily afforded by mainstream post-colonialism. That is why I have preferred to call it svaraj.

Notes 1 This was the opening day of ‘Re-viewing Culture and Imperialism’, a conference at the University of Calcutta, 10–11 March 2004. I would like to thank Professor Krishna Sen and Professor Jharna Sanyal for inviting me to it. 2 See Robert J. C. Young’s influential book Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction for a detailed, albeit different, account. 3 ‘Interrogating Indian Post-Nationalism: Culture, Citizenship and Global Futures’ (2003).

References Ahmad, Aijaz. ‘The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality’. Race and Class. 36.3 (1995): 1–20. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffith and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. 1989. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2002. Dirlik, Arif. ‘The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism’. Critical Inquiry (Winter 1994): 328–356. Mishra, Vijay and Bob Hodge. ‘What Is Post(-)colonialism?’ Textual Practice. 5.3 (1991): 399–414. ———. ‘What Was Post-Colonialism’. Presented at the ACLALS Conference, Hyderabad, 6 August 2004 and Published in New Literary History. 36.3 (Summer 2005): 375–402. Nandy, Ashis. The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Self. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994. Paranjape, Makarand. ‘Coping with Post-Colonialism’. In Interrogating PostColonialism: Theory, Text and Context. Eds. Harish Trivedi and Meenakshi Mukherjee. Shimla: IIAS, 1996: 37–47. ———. Decolonization and Development: Hind Svaraj Revisioned. New Delhi: Sage, 1993. ———. ‘Decolonizing English Studies: Attaining Swaraj?’ In Decolonization: A Search for Alternatives. Eds. Adesh Pal et al. New Delhi: Creative Books, 2001: 287–313. ———. ‘Interrogating Indian Post-Nationalism: Culture, Citizenship and Global Futures’. Presented at the Conference on ‘The Philosophy of Value Education’, Organized by the International Forum on India’s Heritage and Sri Sri Sitaramdas Omkarnath Samskrita Siksha Samsad in association with

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IIAS, ICPR, and ICHR, Jadavpur University, Calcutta, 22–23 February 2003. ———. ‘Theorising Postcolonial Difference: Culture, Nation, Civilization’. SPAN. 47 (October 1998): 1–17. Rushdie, Salman and Elizabeth West. The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947–1997. New York: Holt, 1997. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. ———. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Knopf, 1999. Tagore, Rabindranath. Nationalism. 1917. Madras: Macmillan, 1976. www.iias.org/history.html. Accessed on 7 July 2007. www.mkgandhi.org/biography/smlaconf.htm. Accessed on 7 July 2007. Young, Robert J. C. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.

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Trapped by language Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land has an extraordinary passage that shows the difficulties of communicating across languages and cultures.1 The narrator, a trained social anthropologist from India who is Hindu, finds himself hard pressed to explain to his Muslim Egyptian interlocutor why he has not been circumcised: ‘You mean,’ he said in rising disbelief, ‘there are people in your country who are not circumcised?’ In Arabic the word ‘circumcised’ derives from a root that means ‘to purify:’ to say of someone that they are ‘uncircumcised’ is more or less to call them impure. ‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘yes, many people in my country are “impure.” ’ I had no alternatives; I was trapped by language. (In an Antique Land 62) Not just across cultures but even within a linguistically and culturally diverse and complex area such as India, language serves as a site, a location. A linguascape, if you will, is also an ethnoscape and an ideoscape. Language, in other words, plays a crucial role in defining one’s locus of enunciation. Linguistic positions, not just historical or geographic, caste or gender locations, are important determinants in the problematic of representing India, which all Indian cultural tests, including literature and cinema, must perforce do. What I propose in this chapter is to show why Indian English texts should be read along with texts in native Indian languages. The latter

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languages used to be called ‘vernaculars’, a word with pejorative etymological connotations, thus touched with the whiff of inferiority. To me vernacularizing is an enabling way of righting the asymmetrical balances of power between English and the other Indian languages. This involves a conscious process of intervention which translation enables – translation of English texts into Indian languages, of course, but also of Indian texts into English so as to vernacularize English itself and its contexts in India. I shall try to make my case by studying some cinematic texts as well as some literary ones. The domain of literary and cultural analysis in today’s electronic media–dominated age must be extended beyond the boundaries of traditional ‘literature’. Just as vernacular texts help to destabilize or reorient our interpretations of Indian English texts, cinematic texts help to controvert or redefine the manner in which we read literature. Before I come to my main argument, let me propose a slightly different way of classifying the world of the colonizers and the colonized. Such a reclassification has bearing, I believe, not only on the question of centres and peripheries, but also on diasporic creativity. The colonial encounter, I believe, was not just a clash of political and economic regimes, of civilizations, of different ways of apprehending the world, of two or more epistemological and representation styles, but also, for the purposes of my project, of monolingualisms and multilingualisms. Not just centres and peripheries, metropoles and colonies, collaborative and resistant colonial cultures were produced by these encounters, but also cultures that can be differentiated as being monoglot and polyglot, uniphonic and polyphonic, orthoglossic and heteroglossic. Though, in a way, the Manichean cultural economy of colonialism and neo-colonialism ensure that these encounters continue to be framed in binary or oppositional terms, we know that the situation on the ground is much more complex. For the time being, though, I should like to retain this distinction between monolingual and multilingual cultures because it suggests a crucial area of difference which I find useful – that is, until we are really prepared to dislocate, undermine or overturn it later. I would argue that colonialism, modernity, capitalism, indeed the various interlocking systems of power, oppression and exploitation that were brought to bear upon subject peoples, might themselves be construed as a series of mutually reinforcing monolingualisms. The cultures that received them, in this case, the various regions of India were, in contrast, constituted by interlocking sets of multilingualisms. When these two structures collided newer kinds of cultural systems were produced. English, for instance, became the dominant cultural

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mono-system in the colonies, a sort of centre of power, even though different varieties and registers of English coexisted. In India an English was thus born that eventually, as Raja Rao says, tried to ‘convey in a language not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own’ (Kanthapura 5). This English, though already transformed in that it carried the burden of the native tongue, was nevertheless a cultural system at odds with those of the other native tongues of India, which it peripheralized. Thus, it is important to distinguish not only between various kinds of English, but also between English and non-English signifying systems. I would suggest that in the Indian context, language is a space, a world view, a destination.2 Of course, by language I mean the whole complex signifying and mediating terrain through which Indian realities are translated and interpreted. Thus, linguistic positions, not just historical or geographical, caste or gender locations are important determinants in the problematic of representing India, which is at the heart of post-modern debates today. What I thus propose to do is to look at the question of centres and peripheries through linguistic siting.

‘Shame’ on Fire To illustrate, let us briefly review one of the minor scenes from a wellknown feature film of a diasporic filmmaker, Deepa Mehta’s Fire (1996). Not just the choice of the film but the choice of the episode might be suggestive of my larger method; the film sets out to make a certain kind of intervention and the minor scene may actually reveal a major point. I choose this film because I think it is as good a representative as any of what may be called, after Sara Suleri, ‘the rhetoric of English India’ – or to use an even better phrase by Rakesh Bhatt – India as an ‘English-sacred’ imagined community. In what follows, I shall endeavour to interrogate the cultural politics of this English-sacred India. The episode that I shall invoke is ‘minor’, even insignificant to the plot and theme of the film, but is crucial, even constitutive, to its representational grammar. If read in a certain way, I believe it opens up the whole complex range of concerns that govern both cultural production and reception, especially the manner in which the tensions and contradictions between what might be termed location and locution are played out. The scene in question is a thirty-second conversation in the film between Mundu, the servant of the family at the heart of the drama, and an anonymous milkman. The milkman greets Mundu; Mundu asks for 2 litres of milk (instead of one) because it’s the karva chauth

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festival; the milkman tells Mundu that Mundu looks weak; Mundu retorts by asking him to stop adding water to the milk. As I said before, the conversation is totally marginal to the central action or theme of the film, but its careless almost absent-minded retention in the movie exposes a major fault line in the mimetic logic. I would like to think of it as the inadvertent slip which betrays the rhetoric of English India. The extraordinary thing about this conversation is precisely what might have made it most natural outside the film instead of foregrounding it so sharply in the careful viewer’s attention. And this special feature has to do with the medium of the exchange, not its content. This is the only bit of dialogue in the otherwise English movie that takes place in Hindi. In other words, this is the sole occasion in which any two people speak to each other in an Indian language. Otherwise, everyone in Fire – Radha, Ashok, Sita, Jatin, Ashok’s Guru and even the servant Mundu – speaks only in English. What do those few lines in Hindi mean to the rest of this film which, as I’ve already stressed, is entirely in English? What questions do they raise about the production and consumption, the source and target, the content and form, of images of India? The likely answer is that these few words in Hindi are the only time in the film that Hindi is actually spoken in Hindi. The rest of the time, the English that the characters speak is actually supposed to stand for Hindi. A middle-class, business family in one of Delhi’s modest neighbourhoods, Lajpat Nagar in fact, would normally speak Hindi, but since the film is in English, it is as if they must all speak it. In other words, both the actors and the audience are expected to imagine that Hindi is spoken when the characters are speaking English – English here stands in place of Hindi. This metonymic substitution is also suggested by several other devices in the film. The use of linguistic signals, such as different accents, translation, code-switching, code-mixing, collocations, norm-deviant syntax and diction, further reinforces the idea that the speakers are not monolingual. Might we therefore say that the movie only asks us, as indeed all art does, to suspend our disbelief in its own particular linguistic substitution, thereby consenting to imagine that Hindi is spoken when we hear English? But is the problem so simple? What about the dialogue between Jatin and his Chinese girlfriend or between the latter’s father and Jatin? It is clear, even in the film, that they really speak English. This raises the interesting question: when does English stand for Hindi and when is it merely itself? The filmmaker, unfortunately, does not help us by clearly signalling when each shift is supposed to occur, nor does she make any attempt to offer us different varieties of English, apart from the various accents that I’ve already

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noted, that may suggest different social or linguistic registers. I would argue that the problem of the cultural and linguistic dissonance that I’ve identified is compounded by the fact that Radha and Sita, both suppressed and traditional wives, speak in a more Anglicized accent than Ashok, the husband. In Jatin, the same Anglicized accent serves to emphasize his modern ways as opposed to his brother’s, but in Radha’s and Sita’s cases, the incongruity of supposedly oppressed, house and tradition-bound behenjis speaking like foreign-returned or conventeducated memsahibs is not lost on an audience that would instantly associate that kind of accent with a class that is exclusive and powerful, not powerless or deprived – at least in India. For someone who is otherwise quite self-conscious about her artistic intentions, Mehta is rather nonchalant about her choice of English. In her note ‘Why FIRE is in English’ she says, I am a victim of post-colonized India. The medium of my education was English. In fact, not unlike many children of middle-class parents, English was my first language and Hindi, my second. I wrote the script of FIRE in English, a language I am totally at ease with. . . . I thought about translating FIRE into Hindi, but more for the Western audience rather than the Indian one. Western audiences find a ‘foreign’ film easier to imbibe, easier to accept in its cultural context, if it is in its indigenous language. ‘A foreign film can only be a foreign film if it is in a foreign language.’ And if it isn’t then somehow it is judged (albeit subconsciously), as a Western film disguised as a foreign one. . . . Well, how to explain to people in the West that most middle-class Indians speak Hinglish? (Director’s note on the DVD) This quite extraordinary statement from the writer-director helps squarely to situate the film, quite contrary to Mehta’s professed intentions, as a foreign film to Indians and as an Indian film to foreigners (i.e. Westerners). That Mehta is concerned throughout this statement with how Westerners will read her film is all the more evidence that she never once thought of how Indians would see it. Instead of producing the instant identification that she expected and took so much for granted, the same middle class organized protests against her film. The use of English as the medium, far from being natural or unproblematic, actually estranged her from her material. Had Mehta done the opposite, that is translated the script into Hindi, I am sure the film would have been different – it would have been foreign to Western audiences and Indian to Indians. What Mehta has created is

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not a Western film disguised as a foreign film as she feared, but a foreign film disguised, unsuccessfully, as an Indian one. Whereas foreign and Western for her are contrasting categories, to Indians they are synonymous. An opposite example of what I’ve just described can be found in the films of another very talented young Indian English filmmaker, Dev Benegal. In English August, for example, adapted from the novel by Upamanyu Chatterjee, Dev, who co-wrote the script with Upamanyu, ensured that several languages were spoken and heard in the film. The novel itself exploited a sort of mixed Hindi-English idiom, but apart from such hybridity, by now rather commonplace in Indian English texts, English August is a book written entirely in English. The other languages referred to but hardly transliterated or translated from are Hindi and Bangla. These languages are never heard in the book, except through their distant echoes in English. The novel is set mostly in Madna, a fictional territory supposedly somewhere in Central India and the language spoken there supposedly Hindi. But in the film, Madna is in Andhra Pradesh. So when Agastya moves there, we begin to hear Telugu spoken pretty regularly. There are, of course, English subtitles for those who don’t know this. The collector himself, Mr Srivastava, is shown to be a Hindi speaker. Among the government officers, then, not just English, but Hindi is spoken routinely. The local language, as I already mentioned, is Telugu. In addition, one of the characters, Sathe, occasionally breaks into Marathi. The film presents a linguistic texture that is even more complex than the book, which itself is in a diaglossic, polyglot English in the first place. Unlike Fire, which flattens the linguistic complexity of India, the film English August actually augments it by vernacularizing the original Indian English text. The way the two films use language is, of course, symbolic of their larger representational politics. To be fair to Mehta, in her later films like Earth (1999) and Water (2005), she does present greater linguistic and cultural plurality. What can contrast more with Anglophone, diasporic, ‘elite’ cinema than a production from Bollywood? To cite a film with a strikingly similar motif, Raj Kumar Santoshi’s Lajja (‘Shame’), though structured as a typical blockbuster, tries to make some bold statements on behalf of women. The film vernacularizes English which, along with computers and modern education, is seen as the carrier of modern values. Beginning and ending in New York, it suggests both continuities and discontinuities between the diaspora and the homeland in a manner that is at once critical and sophisticated, while retaining elements of the conventional and stereotypical. There are four ‘Sitas’ in

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the film, each with her own struggle against patriarchal norms. The women are neither flatly defeminized, converted into avenging angels, nor forced to turn lesbian as in Fire. On the contrary, each is shown to resist a major aspect of oppressive tradition. Lajja is not only a powerful satire on the double standards and economic cruelties of arranged marriages, but it also questions major patriarchal assumptions about a woman’s place in a male-dominated society. Throughout the film, the agency and the worth of women are emphasized, sometimes in predictable and at other times in unusual ways. Control over one’s own biology, sexual and reproductive freedom, female desire rather than male control and liberation from caste oppression are all emphasized in the movie. In one of its most effective scenes, Janaki, played by Madhuri Dixit, rewrites the famous agnipariksha scene of the Ramayana. I mention this because Fire, indeed the title of the film itself, makes much of this episode and its symbolic significance. In a dramatic turnaround in the play within the film, Janaki, the actress playing Sita, boldly departs from the traditional script. She not only blames Lakshmana for disfiguring Shurpanakha and thus inviting the enmity of Ravana, but also asks Ram to join her in the agnipariksha. Since he’s been separated from her, he also needs to prove his chastity. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time that such a question has been asked in any of the many of versions of the Ramayana, not only on celluloid, but also in other media. In the film, the irate audience sets fire to the theatre. Janaki thus endures her own agnipariksha as the actress who dared to rewrite the script of the Ramayana. What is more interesting to me, however, is that the reaction anticipated by Santoshi in the film was not replicated by Indian audiences. The same audiences that reacted so violently to Mehta’s film accepted the rescripting of tradition that Santoshi offered. One explanation could be that Santoshi’s film was not, after all, really radical. Like all Bollywood masala films, it both violated and reaffirmed social norms. How could a film designed to titillate, to offer an escape from reality though the feminist political fantasy of women’s emancipation be revolutionary? In contrast, Mehta’s film, it may be argued, had the ability really to shock and the shake the bastions of Indian patriarchy and get the fundamentalists out on the street baying for her blood. But one might argue on the contrary that it is Mehta’s film that is sensational, insulting and deliberately injurious. Though the first thing that Mehta says on her DVD is how surprised she was by the reaction to her film, that Mehta used all the controversy to sell the film should come as no surprise at all. Every self-representation of the film makes

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a virtue of this controversy, a whole section of the official DVD highlighting the outrage that the film generated. In addition to the Director’s Notes, there are interviews with the actors and a whole feature on how Indian women are oppressed by tradition. This propaganda, of course, also fits into the neat anti-Hindutva political agenda to which the film offers itself for easy assimilation, thereby insuring its continued currency among the widening circles of the politically correct post-moderns the world over. Mehta frames her problematic in classic modernist/feminist terms as ‘the extremely dramatic battle that is waged daily between the forces of tradition and the desire for an independent, individual voice’ (director’s notes on the DVD). She also contrasts her own supposedly serious and interventionist cinema with the entertainment factory that is Bollywood, which turns women into vacuous objects of fantasy and desire. Mehta’s supercilious claim to superior cognition is odious. As if all that Bollywood serves up is visual popcorn while it is left to Mehta and her ilk to offer the picture of Indian ‘reality’. Ironically, popular cinema is used as a trope throughout the film not only to show its pervasive influence on the lives of the characters but as a romantic and escapist counterpoint to the drudgery of their daily lives. Jatin not only runs a video parlour, but his Chinese girlfriend wants to be a film star in Hong Kong; Sita dances to Hindi film music and acts out her fantasies with Radha, in full costume, to the accompaniment of an old Hemant Kumar-Lata Mangeshkar duet. A. R. Rahman’s score uses his own hit songs as background music. Mehta’s attitude is thus characterized by the peculiar paradox of a parasitic appropriation of Bollywood combined with an utter contempt for its ethos. Though I wouldn’t venture to valorize Bombay cinema to great ideological or political heights, Mehta’s deliberately reductive accusation against it also does it no justice. Mehta simply disregards the complexity of popular cinema in India, in the way it responds to multiple and contradictory ideological, aesthetic, thematic and commercial compulsions. Contrary to Mehta’s assertions, these compulsions and complexities actually make Bombay films challenging and intelligent, if not sophisticated, examples of multilingual, multidimensional, multilayered and multistoried narratives in ways that Mehta does not even deign to consider. In fact, one might even argue that Bollywood cinema has always had a progressive dimension to it, whether it is on questions of Hindu-Muslim relations or the status of the lower castes and women. This evolutionary and reformist dimension of popular cinema cannot be rejected in the name of the more radical or politically engaged rhetoric of art cinema.

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Eleanor Hall, the narrator of the promo clip that accompanies the feature film on the DVD, ends up showing an utter contempt for the popular taste of Indians who watch Bombay films. She takes us to the set of one such film when a song and dance sequence is being filmed, then says quite derisively that Bollywood is not only ‘India’s entertainment factory but the keeper of Hindu culture as well’. Precisely. Mainstream Hindu culture, if we are to go by films like Lajja, knows how to revise its own texts in ways which are different from those sanctioned by monolingual modernity. But dismissing these internal corrections and revisions, branding the whole community as somehow delinquent and ‘fundamentalist’, shows another sort of intolerance that has also contributed to the polarization of the discursive space. In other words, secular modernity, not just Hindu fanaticism, contributes to violence and intolerance. In their own peculiar ways, both are monocultures, blocking heteroglossia and pluralism. I have been suggesting that Lajja may be construed as presenting a special kind of critique not just of tradition, but of diasporic anglophony. Its polycentric and polyphonic Hindustani contrasts with the stilted Anglophile monolingualism of Fire. That is why the critique of Hinduism in Lajja, though bold and far-reaching, is nonetheless not hostile to certain non-negotiable elements of the very tradition that it seeks to reform. To that extent, it is an attempt at re-engineering Indian society from within. The plurality of its mimetic styles, its internal contradictions and ideological confusions notwithstanding, Lajja manages to delineate the complexity and multiversity of Indian society in transition. Fire, on the other hand, is a monolingual discursive infliction that can be seen as foreign and interfering. Consequently, its cultural politics is divisive and, ultimately, counterproductive. In demonizing tradition, it desecrates and insults what it wishes to change. That is the reason why ‘hard’ versions of secularism and modernity have failed in India.

Vernacularizing centres It should be clear from the foregoing analysis that centres and peripheries are not just territorial, economic or cultural, but linguistic. Furthermore, that linguistic centres and peripheries operate both within and across geographical and national boundaries, thereby complicating the representational terrain in ways which conventional criticism, which is Anglo-centric, fails to recognize. Anglo-centric monoculturalism peripheralizes all other linguistic spaces and locations. By foregrounding its conflict with alternative ways of representing

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post-modern realities we might open up radical spaces for criticism and social change that have the potential not just of redefining curricula, but redrawing academic maps. What is more, neither monolingualism nor multilingualism need to be interpreted in solely linguistic terms; they may be seen to stand for two different cultural and representational systems. That these are overlapping and (op)positional rather than rigid, mutually exclusive binaries goes without saying. At this point of my argument, it should be evident that the centreperiphery model, even when it is reversed, is ultimately inadequate in understanding the nature of cultural flows and interactions in the contemporary world. At the least we need to theorize multiple centres and multiple peripheries in order to account for the nature of cultural exchanges today. If this is granted, it follows that diasporic imaginaries are constructed in terms of multiple and shifting notions of ‘homeland’ and ‘domicile’, which are realized through overlapping and contradictory narratives of longing/belonging. Can some heuristic benefit be derived from a binary such as between ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’, especially when they are reversed? I have just proposed that using languages as locations is one way of reframing the centre-periphery dialectic so as to give it a new salience. Ultimately, the way out of what would otherwise be a perpetually reinforced dualism of dominationsubordination is to use translation and multilingualism as strategies to promote cultural difference and overturn cross-cultural inequalities. Post-contemporary futures need to resist both domination and subordination by marking our areas of hope and cooperation as well as construct alternatives. While the centre-periphery model may remain useful in underscoring relations of inequality between agents scattered all over the world, it is not enough significantly to alter an integrated global system of exchange and domination.

Con/texts What I have illustrated above with examples from cinema can be accomplished with literary texts too. This would entail the juxtaposing of Indian English, that is not just the language, but its entire range of literary and cultural production, with its con/texts. Con/texts do not only mean the overall social, economic and cultural backgrounds and grounds or production of a text, which is of course the normal meaning of the word. But con/texts, as John Thieme has argued, also serve as a whole range and group of texts which serve as contrary points of reference. These texts, then, are the con- or contrary texts in conjunction with which a particular literature needs to be read and understood.

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From such a perspective, Indian English literature can best be read in conjunction with these counter-texts. But what are these con/texts? They are the vernacular literatures of India, in which are contained the con- or contrary portrayals of India in juxtaposition to which Indian English literature is best understood. In fact, without their vernacular con/texts, many Indian English texts merely remain con, that is, fake texts, just as much of Indian Anglophony remains simply phoney. The literature of India is complex not only because it is multilingual and multicultural, but because as a cultural system it cannot be contained in one single language. India, ‘Indianness’ and Indian literature are not arithmetical and cumulative, the sum total of the literatures in various languages, but something quite different altogether. The total, in this case is more than a sum of the parts. In a peculiar sense, it is also less than a sum of the parts because every once in a while we may encounter a text which aims at expressing nothing short of the totality of India, even if it is in only one of its multitudinous languages. So, Indian literature, and by extension, India and ‘Indianness’, belongs to a different dimension than the mere accumulation of texts and tongues. It is somewhat akin to how a translated text is neither the original nor an entirely new text, but a different kind of text, a trans-text, if you will. Translation is, of course, central to such a process. Analogically, let me suggest that Indian literature is thus not just a literature but a trans-literature and that Indian culture is not just a culture, but a transculture. That is why it is all the more pernicious for Indian English literature to usurp the entire or the overwhelmingly significant part of space given to India, as is increasingly the case. Not only is Indian English literature not the entirety of Indian literature, but any special claims that it might make either in terms of quality or quantity must be rigorously questioned. This is not to question either the validity or the raison d’être of Indian English literature, but to reposition it in the continuum of Indian literatures. I am making a case against the claims to autonomy and self-sufficiency that Indian English literature or its advocates might advance. To speak of an exclusive tradition of Indian English literature, then, is at best fraught with major problems. To teach this literature in and of itself, as is done in universities all over India, and the world, is even less sustainable. Being a hybrid creature, Indian English literature demands a dual set of parameters, both national and international. There is, on the one hand, an international tradition of writing in English, called by any name, of which Indian English literature partakes, but it is also a part of the inter-subcontinental tradition called Indian literature. To

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extend the argument to texts of the Indian diaspora, I would simply say that these must be read in conjunction and juxtaposition to Indian English texts, just as the latter need to be studied along with our vernacular texts. The thrust of my argument is for a process of continuous vernacularization – a vernacularization not only of English, but of the whole project of modernity and nationalism. M. N. Srinivas made both Sanskritization and Westernization key concepts in Indian sociology. What we need to compete the triangulation is the idea of vernacularization, which, as I see it, has at least two dimensions. On the one hand, it involves going back to vernacular texts, in the manner in which nativists urge us to. The primacy thus accorded to bhasha literature as the main cultural representations of India is therefore a corollary of this position. India is best seen, understood and experienced in the bhasha texts and not in Indian English texts. This becomes quite clear to us if we juxtapose the two traditions. For instance, read Arundhati Roy alongside O. V. Vijayan or Salman Rushdie alongside U. R. Ananthamurthy. We at once begin to see how the vernacular serves as the con/text for the English. The English text is both underlined and undermined by this process. Of course, for this exercise to work, the ‘right’ con/text needs to be found for each text. Similarly, I would argue that one reason why diasporas are so important is that they vernacularize the host nation. But when it comes to the motherland, diasporas are unable quite to do so; instead, they internationalize and sometimes ‘mis’represent the homeland. Sometimes, as we have already seen, these diasporic writers begin to stand for all of Indian literature, though they represent only a small fragment of it. In India, we must not forget that the current disciplinary structures within which we study Indian English literature are extensions of older colonial ones. Higher education in India, including the study of literature, therefore follows a monolingual medium of instruction, which is not only inadequate, but inappropriate to our needs. English in India, consequently, means something quite different from what it might in the UK or the US. Here, English, or better still English, stands for an inter-cultural space. While smuggling Indian English texts into our curriculum is a victory against the imposition of Western canons upon the colonies, it does not go far enough. The next step would be to study Indian texts in translation alongside Indian English texts, which of late has, to a certain extent, started happening in select universities across the country. A further step would be actually to have bilingual and multilingual instruction, as is the case in the area study programmes in the US. I believe a more comprehensive understanding

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of Indian literature, India and even ‘Indianness’, is possible if we do this. In the meanwhile, English, which has the market potential to do so, may serve as the repository of translated Indian texts, which along with original texts written in those languages, could form the core curriculum of an Indian literature course.3 Of course, some Indian English texts may actually work better as bhasha or vernacular texts. That is, if they manage to break through the constraints imposed by the linguistic and cultural codes of international English. This, then, is the second sense of the term vernacularization. Vernacularization is not just a return to native or indigenous texts, but involves the nativization and indigenization of English itself. English can best serve the needs of India as one of its bhashas, not as an elite, dominant or neo-colonial tongue of the rulers and masters of the land. However, we are still a long way from such a re-engineering of this master-language. But, if the logic of this argument is pursued, it is those Indian English texts that best succeed in vernacularizing the language that are also the most ‘Indian’. Examples such as the works of Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand and R. K. Narayan may be provided; even G. V. Desani’s and Salman Rushdie’s hybridization of the language contributes to its vernacularization. Indian English literature will, thus, best serve our needs when it is also a literature written in Indian English. This case for vernacularization is also a case against the usual use of English for upward mobility. Vernacularization, unlike either Sanskritization or Westernization, is a movement not of upward but, ostensibly, of downward mobility. Interestingly, it is also empowering, if for the opposite reasons. Coming closer to the masses is also empowering for their representatives just as going away from them might be for the elites; but the two kinds of power that accrue are different. Just as the Bhakti (devotional) movements were an all-India, multilingual, towards-the-people phenomena, I believe that a new wave of vernacularization may serve a similar purpose. It is a classes-to-masses progression rather than a masses-to-classes one; to that extent, it counter-balances the usual use of English as an elite language in India. Such an idea is neither unusual nor its practice unique when we see that the entire thrust of Gandhian praxis, for instance, as a kind of vernacularization. In studying canonical works, vernacularization would, at the least, imply paying attention to alternative perspectives so as to challenge the dominant ways in which these texts are read. But more properly it would mean juxtaposing them with certain con/texts, either from the same language or as in India, from ‘vernacular’ languages. In all such transgression and transformation, translation has a key role to play. That is because like bi- or multilingualism, translation has

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the power to take us across one language or culture to another, howsoever imperfectly. Translation alters not just English, the target language or Indian English texts, but it also transforms the original vernacular text. The latter, if they remain only within the domains of their own linguistic community, are limited and incomplete. Only through translation can they acquire the kind of attention or understanding that they deserve. To that extent, the translated text might serve as the con/ text for the original. When Vijayan’s Legends of Khasak, or Tagore’s Gora, is read in translation, it becomes part of national and international narrative in ways in which it cannot when read merely as a Malayalam or Bangla text. It would be interesting to reflect briefly on how Indian identities are constructed in translated texts. This would inevitably lead to an exploration of the differences between ‘vernacular’ Indias and ‘English’ Indias, especially focusing on the peculiar anxieties of both. Rather than looking merely at the content of the images of India, the emphasis would lie on the processes of medium and mediation through which such imaging takes place. The question of medium and mediation has at least two aspects. First, are representations in different languages structurally different? If so, how might these representations be hierarchized or classified? Are all Indian language representations similar to each other and different from those in English, or is there an internal hierarchy of languages? How does the power play between the source and the target languages affect representation? For instance, do Indian English texts convey a different impression of India as compared to texts written in native Indian languages? Can the same distinction/ tension be extended to cinema, TV, music and so on? If so, how is the difference between English and vernacular representations to be understood and theorized? The other aspect of this question concerns what happens when a multilingual culture gets constructed or studied in one language, in this case, English? What are the advantages and the limitations of such linguistic compression or collapse? It has been my argument that the cultural logic of vernacular India differs considerably from the rhetoric of English India. Curiously, vernacular texts that are not translated remain a part of what is pejoratively termed ‘regional’ literature. More often than not, neither are they read by a pan-Indian or international audience, nor are they read in a manner that makes them part of the kind of larger discourse that I have been elaborating. It is only when they are translated that these texts begin to mean so much more and something quite different. Their identity changes in translation and gets augmented and amplified in some ways, even as it becomes vulnerable to restriction in

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others. Thus, paradoxically, while I advocate the promotion of the vernaculars, I also suggest that the fuller fruition of these literary efforts lies not in the original language systems but in translation into English. Identity is always a part of a narrative, always in part a kind of representation of oneself to Others. It is in that sense that the destinies of both English and vernacular Indias are closely intertwined, but in ways which involve a radical reordering of their power relations. This radical reordering is the enabling task, as Walter Benjamin suggested in another context, of all translation.

Narayan, Tagore, Vijayan In this last section let us see how the ‘vernacular’ approach works in actually reading a specific Indian text. I want to show how some writers, such as R. K. Narayan, effectively vernacularize English by writing in it while others, such as Tagore, do so by being translated into English. The problems that I have been describing at some length about the difficulty of containing, confining or reducing the multiculturalism and multilingualism of India into the restricted, simplified and flattened monolingualism of English have been handled in novel ways by Indian English writers. Sometimes, something that is simpler may indeed be made to stand for something rather more complex. A textbook case of how this near-impossible task may be managed is offered in R. K. Narayan’s wonderful short story ‘A Horse and Two Goats’. The story may be read as a trope for the possibilities and limitations of all cross-cultural attempts at communication.4 An American tourist encounters a poor Tamil goatherd in a remote village where his station wagon runs out of gas. The goatherd is resting under an ancient statue of a man on a horse. The American wants to buy the statue from the goatherd, thinking that the latter owns it. The goatherd has no idea of what the American wants, but is grateful to get a free cigarette. They conduct a long conversation in which neither understands a word of the other. The American tells the goatherd why he wants the statue, how he will transport it, where he will keep it and so on. The goatherd tells the American about his life in the village, his past and, inevitably, about karma and dharma. In the end, the American gives the goatherd Rs 100; the goatherd believes that it is a very good price for his two skinny goats. He thinks he has at last understood the American. Leaving the goats with the latter, he goes home with the money. The American thinks that he’s really made a good bargain, a ‘steal’, for the statue. He stops a passing truck, pays

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for both gas and help in putting the statue into his station wagon and leaves. The story ends on an uncertain note when the two goats find their way home. The bewildered goatherd is berated by his wife for being straddled with his ill-gotten hundred rupees. The story merely hints at issues of cultural inequality and plunder, but is more properly about a mutually unintelligible conversation between an English speaker and a Tamil speaker. The whole story is, of course, written in English, though more than one half of it is supposed to occur in Tamil. In this case, however, the reader is never in any doubt which is which because both are marked so clearly. What is more, this partially successful, partially failed conversation shows a modest and self-conscious admission on the author’s part of the limits and dangers not only of cross-cultural communication, but of crosscultural translation and representation. The economic asymmetry and its effects suggest that what has occurred is a post, if not neo-colonial transaction. The well-intentioned American has actually appropriated a defining cultural artefact of the village without the villagers’ consent or knowledge. The statue doesn’t even belong to the goatherd in the first place, so how could he ‘sell’ it? The American, in effect, ‘buys’ what belongs to the village, not to an individual, and therefore is not for sale in the first place. The miscommunication suggests that power will distort messages regardless of how well-intentioned the participants are. The windfall that the impecunious goatherd receives also bewilders and injures him in the end to the extent that his wife thinks he’s stolen the money. This is a sort of tragi-comedy because like their mutually unintelligible languages, the value systems of the two interlocutors are also incommensurable. Narayan seems to point to the futility of translating across cultures in certain circumstances even as his own choice of the English medium belies the story’s message. Thus, the story paradoxically succeeds in showing that cross-cultural communication is possible by the very act of demonstrating the failure of such an attempt. It’s like saying that I’ve managed to communicate the impossibility of communication across cultures. Narayan, in my opinion, succeeds in ‘A Horse and Two Goats’ whereas Deepa Mehta fails in ‘Fire’ because of this liminality that he manages to enact. Narayan’s grammar of representation makes provisions for the kinds of problems and pitfalls inherent in his project while Mehta neglects to acknowledge them. Instead, she arrogantly assumes the position of someone who sets out to ‘demystify India’, as she says in her official website. She believes that somehow she has both the ability and the authority to make such an intervention on behalf of modernity against the multifarious ills of tradition.

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Vernacular texts, of course, mange to negotiate complex identity issues too, albeit with different strategies. When it comes to their ‘afterlife’ in a world larger than their own native languages, translation plays a key role. Let us consider, finally, the example of Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora, first serialized in Probashi in 1908–1909 and published in book form in 1910. An English translation, attributed to W.W. Pearson, came out in 1924, before the Viswa Bharati standard edition of the novel published in the following decade. In 1997, Sujit Mukherjee published a second English translation for Sahitya Akademi; more recently, another translation by Radha Chakravarty has also appeared. Early critics of Gora considered it a response to Kipling’s Kim, also an Irish orphan, who eventually becomes a loyal and useful member of the English Empire. In Gora, what happens is quite the opposite. An Irish baby, born of a mother who dies in childbirth and a father killed in the Great Revolt of 1857, is raised by a Bengali Hindu Brahmin family in whose cowshed his mother has sought shelter. Growing up to be a strong and vigorous young man, Gora, which literally means white, becomes a staunch proponent of a narrow form of Hindu nationalism. In his zeal to reform society, Gora often disregards not just his own emotions, but tramples upon the sentiments and feelings of others. In the penultimate scene of the novel, Gora learns from his dying father that he is not the biological son of his parents, Krishna Dayal and Anandamoyi. Stripped of his comfortable identity markers, he realizes that he is neither a Bengali, nor a Hindu, nor a Brahman, but at that very moment, he also discovers that more than ever before, he is now truly an Indian. Gora, Poresh Babu and Suchorita now plan leave Calcutta, the scene of a bitter struggle over the identity of modern India, to retreat to Shimla, where, perhaps, the novel suggests, the seeds of a new India may be sown there. Shimla, which is not only remote from Calcutta, but also well connected to it because it is the summer capital of the Raj, also reinforces the Western component in India’s regeneration. At the same time, it is in the Himalayas, the traditional space of self-discovery, askesis and contemplation. To me, this ending is extremely important because it suggests a curious paradox about the relationship between tradition and modernity, between India and the West. First of all, the conclusion of the novel reinforces the suggestion that the most fanatical element within Hinduism might actually be the least Hindu. We must remember that Binoy, the ‘real’ protagonist of the novel, does not share Gora’s puritanical zeal to return to a militant Hindu orthodoxy. That such an orthodoxy is actually a modern construct is also increasingly clear as the novel progresses. Under normal circumstances, Hinduism resists

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fanaticism and militancy; it is able to allow contradictions to coexist. Binoy, for instance, has no difficulties befriending the Brahmos and the orthodox Hindus at the same time. It is only Gora, who in his apostlic zeal, would like to reject all deviations from his brand of exclusionary Hinduism. But this very tendency is, ultimately, revealed to be of foreign extraction. In other words, those who seek to Semiticize Hinduism actually represent a foreign influence in their reaction to Western colonization. To present-day India, and indeed to all kinds of fundamentalisms, the novel has a powerful message: the most zealous is also the least authentic. India, thus, mediates and moderates extremism. Paradoxically, the same foreign influence, shorn of its mistaken selfidentification, also becomes the ground for a more sustainable and vibrant future for not just Hinduism, but for India. Gora, from this point of view, is the West’s gift to traditional India and may actually represent the liberalism of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on the rights of all human beings. Tagore seems to suggest that cultures must partake of a universal civilization in the making, without foregoing their own distinctive traits and characteristics. This is possible only through an openness to the Other. The novel proposes that Indian nationalism has two processes of self-constitution. On the one hand it is inclusive, even cumulative in an arithmetical variety – Punjab, Sind, Gujarat, Maratha, Dravid, Utkal Banga – but, on the other hand, it can be constituted only through a deconstruction of narrower, primordialist, ethnicist or caste identities, especially if these are exclusivist and incompatible with a modernist universal. New identities can be acquired by shedding, outgrowing older ones or incorporating the older into the newer through a process of dialogic coexistence. Obsessively puritanical or sharply oppositional identities are seen as both harmful and unstable. The novel provides models of all these types of identities. The composite and inclusive symbolism of nationalism in the novel is, of course, Anandamoyi, Gora’s mother, who begins as an orthodox Brahmin, but goes beyond every kind of boundary imposed upon her by society. She accepts all those who come to her – Christian, low caste or Brahmin, without any discrimination, loving them equally as a mother would. In contrast, Gora’s discovery suggests that only that is Indian which is not merely Bengali, Hindu, Brahmo or Brahmin. Binoy who represents the mainstream of modern, reformed India can reconcile both the orthodoxy ‘Hindutva’ of Gora and the heterodox ‘feminism’ of his wife Lolita. Tagore suggests three models for a new Indian identity. Nationalism, in Tagore, thus calls for the sacrifice of narrower identities and interests in favour of larger coalitions. It calls for a radical change in the politics of identity and identification.

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Another novel which gains uniquely through English translation while also vernacularizing its target language audience is O. V. Vijayan’s Malayalam opus Khasakkinte Itihasam, translated into English as The Legends of Khasak. When Vijayan began, he was turning away from his project of writing the ‘revolutionary’ Kerala novel at the behest of the comradepresident of the Malabar District Board of Teachers. The latter had urged him to put more Inquilab (revolution) into his next work, mildly approving of Vijayan’s already published short stories. However, something quite eventful intervened between the comrade-president’s advice and the great revolutionary novel that Vijayan was setting out to write. This was the invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union in 1956. When Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest and Imre Nagy was assassinated in 1958, a disillusioned Vijayan turned away from the master narrative of universal socialism to the legends of a remote village in Kerala, Thasarak. What did Thasarak, immortalized as Khasak, offer Ravi, the protagonist of the novel? An escape from modernity, from the relentless telescope of the Florentine Galileo, always turned outward? Did Ravi, the disappointed student of astronomy, instead of focusing on the heavens, wish to look inward, to those realms of the inner spirit which alone would give him the key to escape the inexorable cycle of births and deaths? At any rate, fleeing from the original sin of postEnlightenment rationality, Ravi finds renewal in the magical world of Khasak. Here, local legends, respected by both Muslims and Hindus, offer a counter-narrative to progress or the march of Hegelian History. If modernity, as Max Weber said, stands for the inevitable disenchantment of the world, Khasak is the place where its relentless logic is circumvented or swallowed up. Ravi is re-enchanted by Khasak. Here he atones for his incestuous escapade with his stepmother, a sin which had dogged him in his earlier life and blocked any other meaningful relationship or commitment. The scourge of small pox catches up with him even in remote Khasak, like bad karma from which there is no escape. But in Khasak, this ‘orphaned’ child, who becomes the object of his stepmother’s desire because his father is a paralysed old man, now finds a whole bevy of surrogate mothers, who with their own breast milk heal the scabs of his raging fever. At last, he mates the houri of Khasak, Maimoona herself, with her translucent skin embroidered with blue veins. In the last scene of the novel, bitten by a snake, Ravi waits to return to the world, as the rain sweeps over him, uniting him with the whole cosmos in its cleansing embrace. The ending is ambivalent, hinting at both death and a resurrection. The ethos of Khasak has been nurtured by the same ‘tender absurdities’ that both Hindus and Muslims share. Much as mischief makers

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like the Mulla or Sivaraman Nair try to instigate the two communities to quarrel, the social fabric of Khasak remains intact and unrent. This is because ‘[t]he history of Khasak is the great oral legend; that, and a shared indigence has held it together’ (96). The two-nation theory is defeated by the dwarf cretin Apu Kili who nonchalantly switches from wearing a tuft to a fez, until his hair grows back and the lice return. Similarly, Nizam Ali turns away from Allah Pticha, the Mulla, first to become a capitalist, then a communist and finally the Kazhi of the legendary Sheikh. As the Kazhi, quite in opposition to the Mulla’s madrassa, he encourages the new primary school, which Ravi has come to run as the first teacher of Khasak’s first modern school. When the Mulla dies, Ali gives the call to prayer after seven long years, reclaiming his link with tradition. Ravi’s school is in Sivaraman Nair’s seeding house, the place of love and imagination. Here the old legends of Khasak and the new narrative of progress blend to offer at least a temporary hope for the new nation that has emerged from the ashes of colonialism and the carnage of the Partition. Vijayan’s Khasak thus provides an arresting antidote to grand narratives of both Marxism and nationalism. The cultural logic of vernacular India, thus, differs considerably from the rhetoric of English India. Curiously, vernacular texts that are not translated remain a part of what is pejoratively termed ‘regional’ literature. Neither read by pan-Indian or international audiences, nor by their native language readers in manner that makes them a part of the kind of larger discourse that I have been elaborating, they remain provincialized. It is only when they are translated that these texts begin to mean so much more and something quite different. It is by being re-born that their identity gets augmented and amplified. It is such wider re-circulation that their ultimate fruition lies, not merely in their original language systems of the vernaculars. That is how they enter and shape the larger world of India. Identity is always part of a narrative, always in a representation of oneself to Others. It is in that sense that the destinies of both English and vernacular India are closely intertwined, but in ways which involve a radical reordering of their power relations.

Conclusion In this final section of the book, I wish briefly to turn to the question of post-contemporary futures. This phrase alludes to the title of Bill Ashcroft’s Post-modern Futures (2001), as also to the last section of the new, sixth chapter of the second edition of The Empire Writes

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Back (2002). In the latter, the authors not only touch on the question of globalization (216–217) and diaspora (217–219), but also suggest that post-modern studies should not be merely analytical, but engaged, even constitutive of new futures. I am in sympathy with this agenda. As Ashcroft says in his Introduction to On Post-modern Futures, postmodern productions are not merely reactive, locked in a ‘prison of protest’ but can be proactive too; this is because post-modern discourses are primarily those of transformation (1). But surely Ashcroft is mistaken in assuming that all that post-moderns do is to take over ‘dominant discourses’ and to transform them ‘in the service of their own self-empowerment’ (1). Obviously, he is still in The Empire Writes Back mode. There are discourses which neither write back to the Imperium, nor react to it – after all, writing back is also a way of reifying the centre. Discourses partly independent of metropolitan centres are, instead, part of the intrinsic expressions of a culture or civilization. These belong to and emanate from societies that have found their own paths to the future, even as they participate and are implicated in a larger world order. That is why English is so important to Ashcroft, but not equally or identically so to us in India. In Australia, presumably they have nothing else to write in. They have no alternative but to for a small domestic market or write back to the empire. So for them to seize the power of self-representation rather than allowing others to represent them makes eminent sense: ‘The central strategy in transformations of colonial culture is the seizing of self-representation’ (2). In India, however, many other languages persist, coexist and jostle for space. The key to decolonization for Ashcroft is the seizing of English for the colonized subject’s own use, thereby fracturing the power of the colonizer’s medium and its dominating and civilizing function. But for us in India it is not only necessary to use English against the grain, but also to deploy translations, vernacular writing and other means of self-representation to resist and combat neo-colonial cultural supremacy. Ashcroft says, ‘The strategies by which colonized societies have appropriated dominant technologies and discourses and used them in projects of self-representation is a model for the ways in which local communities everywhere engage global culture itself’ (2). Once again, we see a dualistic model – there is some kind of global culture somewhere apart for pre-existing local cultures. Actually, we might argue that what is termed global culture is merely an abstraction, while the only realities on the ground are its multiple local mediations. On ‘The Future of English’ (7–21), Ashcroft claims that English has been dismantled and replaced by ‘a network of local post-colonial

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practices’ (18). This network of post-modern practices is precisely what I call the vernacularization of English. Like Ashcroft, I am concerned not just about post-modern futures but about the role that English can play in shaping them. I too believe that transformation rather than reaction or opposition is the key to a more enabling and equitable prospect for us, the once or twice or many times colonized peoples of the world. Nevertheless, I have argued that the one special type of post-contemporary transformation that happens through vernacularization is much more than simply using the colonizer’s language or technologies of representation. Vernacularization is not just writing back to the centre but finding an alternative space and mode of self-representation. It is therefore a way of being and communicating which cannot be simply appropriated or assimilated by the master narratives of colonialism or even post-modern high theory. The real challenge for post-modern futures is not so much to abolish centres so that only a plethora of peripheries exist, nor to abolish a centre with a capital ‘C’ so that only multiple centres remain scattered all over. In the first instance there are only peripheries, no centres; in the second, only centres and no peripheries. Such exercises, however persuasive theoretically, do not transform or overrule the material realities of a complex and highly unequal world order. The real challenge is to try to resist a certain kind of power through the amplification of another kind of power. Such a manoeuvre is exempt from both the naïve self-deceptions of utopians and the brutally cynically exercise of power of those whose business it is to dominate. Post-contemporary transformations require a critical redeployment of power rather than an escape from or the denial of the reality of power. In the more specific context of my chapter, this is effected by invoking the multilingualism and polyphony of India against the monolingualism and monoglossia of both colonial and neo-colonial power. The key device in such a strategic intervention is, of course, translation.

Notes 1 Varying earlier versions of this chapter were presented as ‘Post-Colonial Prepositions and the Logic of Vernacular India’, plenary address at the US Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (USACLALS), Santa Clara University, California, 26–28 April 2002, and as ‘Indian Anglophony, Diasporan Polycentricism, and Postcolonial Futures’ at the conference on ‘Peripheral Centres, Central Peripheries: Anglophone India and Its Diasporas’, University of Saarbrucken, Germany, 30 August 2002. The latter was published as a chapter titled ‘Indian Anglophony, Diasporan Polycentricism, and Postcolonial Futures’, in Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn

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and Vera Alexander (eds.), Peripheral Centres, Central Peripheries: India and Its Diasporas and in Indian English and Vernacular India (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2006), 101–112. This is a substantially revised version. 2 See my book Altered Destinations (2010). 3 See Harish Trivedi’s idea of the panchadhatu (five-element) model of a literary syllabus in Colonial Transactions (1993). 4 See Another Canon: Indian Texts and Traditions in English (2010) for a more detailed reading of this text.

References Ashcroft, Bill. On Post-Modern Futures. London: Continuum, 2001. ———, et al., eds. The Empire Writes Back. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2002. Bandhu, Rakesh. ‘Review of Lajja’. www.planetbollywood.com/Film/Lajja/. Benegal, Dev, co-writer and director. English August: An Indian Story. Feature Film. Mumbai: Tripicfilm, 1994. Bhatt, Rakesh. ‘Experts, Dialect, and Discourse’. International Journal of Applied Linguistics. 12.1 (2002): 74–109. Chatterjee, Upamanyu. English August. London: Faber, 1988. Ghosh, Amitav. In an Antique Land. New York: Knopf, 1993. Kishwar, Madhu. ‘Naïve Outpourings of a Self-Hating India: Deepa Mehta’s Fire’. Manushi. 109. http://free.freespeech.org/manushi/109/fire.html. Macaulay, Tomas Babington. ‘Minute on Indian Education’. In Selected Writings. Eds. John Clive and Thomas Pinney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972. Madhava Prasad, M. Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. Mehta, Deepa, director. Earth. Feature film. India, 1999. ———, director. Fire. Feature film. Canada/India, 1996. Mishra, Vijay C. Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire. London: Routledge, 2002. Narayan, R. K. ‘A Horse and Two Goats’. In A Horse and Two Goats. New York: Viking, 1970: 3–26. Paranjape, Makarand R. Altered Destinations: Self, Society, and Nation in India. New Delhi: Anthem, 2010. ———. Another Canon: Indian Texts and Traditions in English. London: Anthem, 2009. ———. ‘Indian Anglophony, Diasporan Polycentricism and Postcolonial Futures’. In Peripheral Centres, Central Peripheries: India and Its Diaspora(s). Eds. Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn and Vera Alexander. Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2006: 101–112. Indian English and Vernacular India. Co-edited with G.J.V. Prasad. New Delhi: Pearson Longman, 2010. Rao, Raja. Kanthapura. 1938. New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1970. Santoshi, Raj Kumar, director. Lajja. Feature film. Bombay, 2001. Srinivas, M. N. Caste in Modern India and Other Essays. Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1953. See especially ‘A Note on Sanskritization and Westernization’, 42–52.

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Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Tagore, Rabindranath. Gora. Trans. Sujit Mukherjee. Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1997. ———. Gora. Trans. Radha Chakravarty. New Delhi: Penguin, 2009. Thieme, John. Post-Modern Contexts: Writing Back to the Canon. London: Continuum, 2001. Trivedi, Harish. Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India. Kolkata: Papyrus, 1993; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Vijayan, O. V. The Legends of Khasak. Trans. O. V. Vijayan. New Delhi: Penguin, 2008.

Index

Abhinavaguptas 24, 85, 108 academia 101, 106, 111, 115, 163, 199 academics 63, 67, 84, 93, 102, 187, 191, 193, 195–6, 199–200, 203, 206, 211–12, 218, 221, 223–4, 232 academy 7, 13–14, 63, 102, 108, 115–16, 122, 125–6, 184, 187, 192, 205–6, 230 aesthetics 13, 22–3, 42, 54, 63, 68, 76, 85, 87–9, 97–8, 105, 165, 168, 172–7, 182–3, 193, 230, 243 Ahmad, Aijaz 1, 2–4, 11, 14, 15, 17, 71, 80, 86, 160, 223, 234 Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji 8, 16–17, 30, 96, 123, 132, 138, 161 American 3–4, 7, 58, 62, 66, 90, 92, 110, 112–13, 120–1, 126, 127, 130, 141–2, 180, 192, 196, 204, 206–7, 214, 216, 219, 223, 250, 251 Anandavardhana 85, 108 Ananthamurthy, U. R. 15, 96, 97, 194, 247 Anglophone 196, 241, 244, 246, 257–8 Asia 11, 16–17, 40–1, 112, 120–1, 127, 184, 189, 215, 219, 232, 258 assimilation 15, 65, 131, 159, 180, 257 Aurobindo, Sri 8, 25, 28–9, 52, 123, 132, 137–40, 143, 146, 149–50, 170–9, 177, 233 Bhabha, Homi K. 104, 158, 160, 181, 193, 200, 219, 226 Bhagavad Gita 36, 57, 123, 176

bhakti 132, 172, 173, 175, 248 Bharata 24, 28, 45, 86 Bhartrihari 45 bhasha 61, 68–9, 73, 80, 247, 248 Bhattacharya, Krishna Chandra 43–4, 49, 58 bilingualism 70, 200, 208, 216, 247 binary 3, 15, 31, 56, 65, 86, 87, 141, 156, 161, 178, 237, 245 Bollywood 78, 88, 97, 98, 241, 242, 243, 244, 258 Brahmo 135, 253 Britain 91, 110, 142, 143, 207 British 9, 28, 44, 45, 48, 49, 77, 104, 111, 115, 122, 126, 128, 136, 143, 144, 145, 188, 189, 204, 206, 207, 210, 211, 215, 221, 223, 225, 226, 229 Buddhism 30, 50, 56, 65, 132, 134, 141, 173, 175 Cambridge 17, 110, 123, 128, 150, 190 Canada 27, 200, 204, 206, 209, 216, 217, 224, 258 capitalism 1, 7, 12, 15, 23, 40, 65, 77, 89, 119, 125, 142, 156, 159, 161, 162, 195, 196, 212, 216, 223, 227, 234, 237, 255 Chatter, Bankim Chandra 46, 66, 95, 133 Chatterjee, Partha 57, 58 Chatterjee, Upamanyu 241, 258 civilization 6, 11–12, 16–17, 31, 46, 47, 51, 55, 66, 76, 78, 79, 92, 117, 119, 120–3, 126, 130, 133, 135,

262

Index

136, 137, 138, 141–2, 146, 149, 166, 169, 176, 177, 183, 203, 210, 211, 214, 215, 216, 218–19, 230, 233–5, 237, 253, 256 colonialism 8–9, 11–13, 15–16, 18, 23, 27–8, 39, 41, 44, 49, 57, 58, 60, 61, 65, 67, 73, 78–9, 80, 84, 85, 96–7, 98, 102, 105, 111, 116, 117, 120–2, 130, 132–3, 136–8, 143–4, 148, 155, 158, 166, 167, 179, 180, 184, 187, 188, 190, 192, 194–7, 200, 202–4, 206–7, 210, 212, 213, 215–19, 221–4, 226, 227–30, 232–4, 237, 247, 255–9 Commonwealth 188, 189, 195, 196, 197, 199, 200, 201, 205, 206, 207, 212, 218, 223, 257 Coomaraswamy, Ananda 22, 24, 38, 41, 173, 174, 175, 184 cosmopolitan 59, 61, 66, 76, 78, 105, 116, 147, 151–2, 160–1, 192 culture 15, 16, 18, 26, 27, 34, 39, 40, 45, 46, 48, 51, 58, 59, 63, 66, 67, 68, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 89, 93, 97, 98, 102, 103, 112, 113, 121, 122, 124, 125, 130, 131, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 149, 150, 153, 164, 165, 166, 167, 169, 181, 187, 188, 190, 192, 193, 195, 196, 197, 200, 201, 203, 208, 209, 210, 211, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 219, 232, 234, 235, 244, 246, 249, 256 Dalit 23, 76, 77, 79, 96, 126, 127, 144, 151, 153, 161, 163, 165 decolonization 5, 7, 18, 23, 41, 43, 45, 49, 58, 76, 79, 84, 85, 106, 122, 124, 125, 144, 147, 148, 163, 167, 177, 203, 218, 229, 231, 232, 234, 256 deconstruction 7, 52, 67, 111, 117, 118, 119, 125, 127, 165, 166, 200, 253 Dehejia, Harsha 40, 41, 171, 173, 183, 184 Delhi 1, 2, 9, 10, 16, 17, 18, 41, 57, 58, 59, 80, 81, 97, 98, 102, 127,

149, 150, 167, 183, 184, 198, 219, 227, 234, 258, 259 development 10, 11, 12, 16, 17, 18, 23, 34, 40, 41, 58, 63, 65, 96, 97, 98, 147, 155, 165, 167, 177, 222, 234 Devy, Ganesh 60–8, 70, 73, 74, 75, 78, 79, 80, 85, 86, 89, 97, 122, 164 Dharampal 44–5, 58, 122 dharma 8, 24, 25, 32, 33, 34, 35, 40, 42, 97, 98, 103, 120, 183, 250 discourse 4, 6, 13, 21, 41, 52, 57, 58, 60, 64, 65, 70, 75, 79, 85, 103, 105, 110, 115, 116, 124, 143, 151, 158, 178, 180, 182, 187, 188, 189, 197, 198, 199, 202, 204, 206, 208, 209, 212, 216, 218, 223, 224, 228, 231, 233, 249, 255, 258 dominance 4–6, 24, 38, 39, 44, 48–9, 57, 64, 66–8, 76, 84, 86–7, 93, 101, 103, 109, 116, 117, 124, 144, 147, 158, 178–82, 189, 191–2, 195–9, 206, 208, 212, 217–18, 221, 222, 224, 229, 233, 237, 248, 256–7 dualism 13, 56, 134, 156, 168–9, 171, 182–3 ecology 15, 124, 234, 142, 166, 176, 183 economics 15, 33, 49, 83, 106, 121, 124, 125, 137, 140, 145, 153, 157, 164, 166, 173, 195, 201, 202, 203, 216–18, 225, 227–8, 232–3, 237, 242, 244, 245, 251 education 44, 47, 93–4, 114, 115, 125, 132, 135, 136, 150, 175, 226, 234, 240, 241, 247, 258 Eliot, T. S. 25, 29, 30, 38, 41, 117 English 1, 14, 15, 16, 18, 27, 28, 29, 38, 39, 45, 47, 48, 50, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 75, 77, 78, 80, 83, 89, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 109, 112, 114, 115, 123, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 135, 136, 150, 151, 164, 166, 167, 180, 181, 190, 192, 194, 195, 196, 200, 202, 204, 207, 208, 209, 211, 212, 216, 219,

Index 226, 234, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259 Enlightenment 1, 2, 3, 7, 36, 51, 120, 132, 143, 144, 158, 161, 253 epistemic 163, 167, 218, 172 epistemology 8, 11, 87, 115, 134, 148, 156, 173, 237 equality 1–3, 25, 52, 74, 120–1, 136, 155, 161, 206, 228, 253, 256 ethics 16, 33, 34, 61, 92, 117, 139, 149, 162, 175 ethnicity 70, 77, 115–16, 120, 131, 140, 203, 212, 214 Europe 2, 3, 4, 7, 8–9, 16, 17, 28, 30, 45, 49, 51, 65, 67, 108–9, 118, 120–1, 127, 130–1, 133, 134–6, 138, 139, 140, 142, 156, 158, 169, 170, 176, 179–80, 190, 196, 207, 210, 214, 216, 221 fanaticism 103, 147, 163, 244, 252–3 feminism 15, 16, 27, 77, 84, 96, 117, 125, 242–3, 150, 200, 253 film 238–9, 240–4, 258 Foucault, Michel 4, 7, 17, 119, 122, 166, 181 Freud, Sigmund 8, 118–19, 127, 144 fundamentalism 244, 256–7, 259, 192, 242 futures 3, 12, 15, 17, 33–4, 95, 97–8, 113, 125, 150, 156, 203, 226, 228, 232–4, 245, 255, 256–8 Gandhi, Mahatma (Mohandas Karamchand) 5, 8, 9, 17–18, 23, 32, 40–1, 43, 46, 50, 52–3, 56–8, 78–9, 95, 97, 98, 119, 121, 123, 127, 132, 136–9, 143–50, 153, 159, 162, 176–7, 179, 184, 197, 200, 208, 219, 225, 227, 233, 248 Gandhi, Ramchandra 46, 53, 56, 57, 58 globalization 3, 13, 16–17, 40, 59, 66, 79, 80, 105, 107, 115, 125, 130–1, 140, 149, 151, 153–4, 156, 158–64, 166, 197, 204, 208, 219, 224, 227, 233, 234, 245, 256 gnosis 11, 25, 32, 35, 40, 144, 179

263

God 25, 68, 109, 137, 139, 140, 169, 174, 176 gods 22, 24, 25, 81, 182 Gora 249, 252, 253, 259 government 10, 16, 17, 46, 93, 113, 123, 142, 144, 149, 161, 183, 216, 228, 241 Gulbarga 47, 114, 117, 126 guna 42, 46, 48, 50, 52, 57, 132 Guwahati 46, 47, 48 Habermas 163, 233 Hindi 39, 42, 45, 69, 70, 71, 73, 78, 98, 164, 165, 239, 240, 241, 243, 258 Hind Swaraj 5, 8, 17, 119, 137, 143, 148, 176, 184, 208 Hinduism 46, 80, 96, 144, 147, 161, 162, 233, 244, 252, 253, 254 Hindu-Muslim relations 79, 243 Hindutva 147, 253 history 1–4, 6, 15, 18, 21, 28, 31, 35, 37, 43, 45, 55, 57, 58, 61, 64–8, 71–2, 78–80, 88, 93, 101–3, 114–15, 119–21, 131, 133, 145, 156, 168, 178, 187, 200, 203, 209–11, 215, 216, 217, 219, 225–6, 232–5, 254, 255, 258 Holocaust 3, 120, 155 home 1, 13, 17, 76, 111, 125, 157, 160, 173, 192, 193, 197, 223, 250, 251 homeland 150, 241, 245, 247 human 1, 3, 12, 31, 32, 51, 52, 54, 56, 57, 83, 97, 98, 105, 132, 134, 137, 153, 156, 168, 170, 171, 176, 177, 183, 205, 214, 233, 253 humanism 120, 142, 221 humanities 47, 59, 83, 107, 115, 117, 123, 126, 212 hybridity 11, 150, 178, 181, 205, 213, 219, 241, 246, 248 IACLALS 188, 189, 199 identity 41, 52, 70, 76, 77, 79, 97, 104, 113, 119, 120, 123–4, 133, 141, 150, 151, 161, 165, 200, 208, 212–14, 249, 250, 252–3, 255 ideology 5, 23, 49, 52, 63, 69, 71, 79, 87, 88, 102–3, 110–13, 117, 119,

264

Index

123–5, 134, 135, 151, 157, 160, 165, 178, 195, 227–8, 243–4, 258 IIAS 198, 199, 201, 219, 225, 234, 235 imperialism 1, 2, 3, 6, 48, 49, 51, 77, 92, 104, 113, 115, 121, 137, 142, 145, 147, 156, 176, 188–90, 192, 195–7, 201–4, 205–6, 208, 210, 212, 216–17, 225–7, 229, 234 India 1–18, 21, 25–9, 31, 39–41, 43–8, 53, 57–60, 64–75, 79–94, 97–8, 101–6, 110, 112–20, 122–54, 157–64, 166–204, 206, 207, 209, 210, 211, 213–19, 221, 223–30, 232–3, 236–41, 243–4, 246–53, 255, 256–9 indigenous 11, 14, 45, 46, 69, 71, 72, 77, 84, 86, 89, 90, 91, 134, 136, 140, 163, 200, 240, 248 intellectuals 13, 44, 78, 84, 88, 93, 94, 102, 113, 115, 116, 121, 123, 126, 130, 131, 149, 153, 166, 191, 198, 199, 218, 227, 229, 230 international 7, 13, 15, 64, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 94, 98, 149, 152, 153, 155, 159, 160, 161, 162, 165, 166, 183, 187, 194, 197, 198, 205, 206, 208, 212, 217, 226, 227, 234, 246, 248, 249, 255, 258 Jameson, Frederic 51, 57, 58, 107, 182 Japan 45, 65, 143, 150, 232 Kabir 71, 123, 175 Kapoor, Kapil 17, 45, 46, 122, 143 Kashmir 42, 57, 58, 148, 172 Khasak 249, 254, 255, 259 Kolkata (Calcutta) 58, 149, 150, 200, 226–8, 234, 235, 252, 259 Krishnamurti, J. 8, 35, 36, 37, 41, 132 language 14, 21, 26, 28, 29, 39, 41–2, 45, 46, 53–6, 60, 63, 68–73, 76, 77, 81, 83–4, 98, 102, 103, 104, 105, 109, 115, 117, 118, 130, 132, 141, 151, 153, 155–6,

158, 165, 180, 189, 194–6, 199, 200, 202, 207, 208–9, 211, 212, 215, 217, 218, 236–41, 245–6, 248–52, 254–7 Levinas, Emmanuel 17, 119, 122, 181 Levi-Strauss, Claude 111 liberalism 90, 92, 253 liberalization 125, 131, 227 liberation 32, 50, 52, 58, 105, 134, 137, 144, 166, 231, 242 liberty 3, 16, 44, 144, 155, 156 linguistic 14, 43, 46, 65, 70, 71, 75, 76, 77, 109, 119, 132, 151, 163, 196, 197, 202, 214, 215, 217, 236, 238, 239, 240, 241, 244, 245, 248, 249, 258 Linton, Ralph 66, 67, 78, 81 literary 13, 14, 23, 25, 26, 28, 29, 40, 43, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 97, 108, 113, 114, 119, 126, 127, 128, 152, 153, 154, 156, 165, 166, 167, 204, 205, 209, 216, 223, 234, 237, 245, 250, 258 literature 8, 14–18, 22, 25–9, 41, 43, 45–6, 54–5, 61–4, 67–8, 70–4, 76, 80, 83, 86, 88–9, 105, 110, 115, 130, 132, 135, 164–5, 177, 188–90, 195, 197–209, 212, 217–19, 223–4, 226, 231, 234, 236–7, 245–9, 255, 257, 259 logocentrism 15, 67, 91, 109, 134, 182 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 114, 135, 136, 138, 150, 159, 258 Mahashweta Devi 160, 194 Malayalam 209, 249, 254 Malaysia 145, 204, 228, 232 Malhotra, Rajiv 125, 126, 127, 150 Maoism 3, 23, 161, 162 Marga 60, 61, 75, 76, 78, 79, 85, 163 Marx, Karl 8, 33, 57, 58, 111, 122, 224 Marxism 1, 2, 47, 78, 84, 107, 117, 124, 125, 130, 138, 146, 160, 178, 227, 255

Index materialism 51, 52, 141, 142 media 82, 96, 130, 159, 193, 195, 237, 242 mediation 1, 6, 14, 31, 35, 87, 178, 181, 238, 249, 253, 256 Mehta, Deepa 238, 240, 241, 242, 243, 251, 258 Mishra, Vijay C. 222, 224, 234, 258 modern 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 21–3, 25, 27–31, 33, 37, 40–1, 46, 52–9, 63, 66–8, 71, 73, 76, 79, 81, 83–5, 88–9, 92, 95–8, 109, 119–20, 122, 124, 127, 131–2, 134–44, 150, 155–69, 172, 176–83, 191, 212, 214, 216, 226, 240–1, 252–3, 255, 258 modernist 25, 30–1, 37, 76, 78, 140, 142, 160–1, 164, 243, 253 modernity 3–4, 6, 8–11, 13, 15–17, 21–4, 28, 31–2, 34, 37, 39–41, 56, 65, 84, 99, 127, 131, 134–9, 142, 149–50, 152, 154–5, 156–9, 161–71, 176–9, 182–3, 203, 212, 216, 226, 237, 244, 247, 251–2, 254 monolingual 202, 209, 216, 237, 239, 244, 247 monolingualism 40, 72, 237, 244–5, 250, 257 multiculturalism 13, 39, 71, 90, 92, 98, 156, 193, 200, 202, 216, 219, 237, 246, 250 multilingual 13, 40, 70–1, 90, 200, 202, 209, 216, 237, 243, 245, 246–50, 257 Mumbai (Bombay) 41, 70, 97, 98, 243, 244 mysticism 8, 53, 56, 85, 107, 109, 118, 127, 134, 139, 144, 164, 175 myth 27, 55–6, 91, 96, 118–19, 133, 178, 200, 207 Nagarjuna 67, 88, 108, 134, 172 Naipaul, V. S. 45, 105 Nandy, Ashis 6, 9, 18, 55, 56, 178, 179, 184, 234 Narayan, R. K. 95, 123, 193, 248, 250, 251, 258 narrative 1, 2, 4, 14, 15, 24, 25, 27, 36, 74–6, 86, 96, 101, 114, 133,

265

145, 156, 158, 163, 181, 193, 219, 222, 230, 234, 243, 245, 249, 250, 254, 255, 257 nation 2, 5, 13, 15–18, 26, 40, 44, 48, 50, 58–9, 66, 73, 77–84, 89, 93–8, 105, 112, 115, 123, 127, 130, 136, 137, 140, 147, 149–56, 159–67, 176, 177, 187, 189, 191, 192, 197–200, 204, 211, 213–19, 229, 235, 244, 246–7, 249, 255, 258 nationalism 76, 91, 113, 147, 151, 156, 161, 162, 183, 187, 210, 214, 229, 234, 235, 247, 252, 253, 255 nationalist 57, 58, 76, 85, 96, 147, 162 nativism 60–6, 69–81, 91, 151, 233, 247 Natyasastra 45, 53, 86, 123 Nehru, Jawaharlal 137, 138, 148, 150, 183, 200 Nemade, Bhalchandra 61–3, 65–7, 69–76, 79–80, 122–3 neo-colonialism 2, 64, 111, 113, 122, 124, 131, 205, 218, 229, 231, 237, 248, 251, 256–7 New York 7, 221, 235, 241 non-violence 50, 90, 143, 147, 149, 177, 179, 182, 217, 233 novel 22–6, 29, 40, 41, 61, 62, 65–6, 70, 75, 80, 82, 165, 166, 181, 241, 250, 252, 253, 254 oppression 1, 7, 8, 30, 50, 51, 55, 79, 79, 90, 103, 109, 120, 139–40, 144–5, 149, 151, 154, 159, 161, 163, 165, 182, 195, 218, 233, 237, 242 Orientalism 128, 135, 152, 192, 218, 222, 223, 230, 235 Pakistan 192, 193, 204, 210, 214–15 Paniker, K. Ayappa 97 Paniker, Raimundo 96 parampara 21, 26, 30–1, 33–4, 37, 38–41, 45–6, 97, 124, 231, 233 past 10, 12, 13, 21, 23, 26, 28, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41, 68, 84, 85, 88, 89, 95, 96, 109, 116, 131, 154, 155, 157, 159, 181,

266

Index

195, 203, 206, 208, 211, 215, 217, 226, 227, 232, 233, 250 patriarchal 96, 242 peripheral 4, 5, 157, 204, 237–8, 244–5, 257–8 philosophy 2, 7, 15, 21, 43–4, 46, 53, 55, 57–9, 83–5, 97, 98, 107, 111, 115, 118, 121, 123, 130, 132–5, 138, 139, 141, 148, 164, 170–1, 177, 184, 195, 234 poetics 53, 58, 59, 61, 68, 88 poetry 23, 24, 30, 41, 56, 63, 66, 71, 72, 81, 89, 115, 164, 179, 180 politics 3, 7, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 18, 30, 41, 43–5, 49–50, 57–9, 75–8, 83, 85, 87, 91–3, 95, 102, 105, 109, 113, 115–16, 120, 121, 123–4, 127, 131, 139, 142–4, 146, 148–51, 162–3, 179, 189, 191, 195, 196, 200, 207–8, 210, 212, 215, 217, 223, 227, 228, 232–4, 237–8, 241–2, 244, 253 polity 1, 16, 147 polycentricism 90, 244, 257, 258 polyglot 71, 237, 241 polyphony 71, 133, 160, 237, 244, 257 polysemy 87, 92 post 1, 4, 5, 11, 15, 17, 53, 116, 118, 131, 135, 151, 157, 202, 206, 215, 222, 223, 224, 226, 228, 233, 234, 251 post-colonial 5, 6, 7, 13, 44, 48, 79, 80, 90, 94, 103, 105, 126, 129, 167, 177, 180, 185, 187, 188, 189, 190, 192, 196, 198, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 217, 218, 219, 221, 223, 224, 225, 226, 228, 229, 230, 232, 234, 256, 257 post-colonialism 13–14, 89, 107, 117, 178, 183, 187–96, 198–9, 201–19, 222–34, 240 post-modern 6–9, 13–14, 64, 68, 76, 85, 94, 132–4, 137, 139–42, 149, 158–63, 165, 180, 181, 182, 200, 238, 245, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259 post-modernism 13–16, 18, 53, 76, 84, 89, 129–31, 139, 140, 141, 150, 157, 158, 160–4, 166–7, 178, 180, 191, 256

post-modernity 3, 13, 24, 131, 142, 149, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 163, 165, 166, 167, 179, 182, 223 post-structuralism 15, 18, 53, 58, 64, 84, 87, 118–19, 125–7, 157, 200 power 2, 4, 5, 8, 15, 34, 36, 46, 48–6, 54, 66, 67, 74, 77, 81, 85, 92–96, 101, 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 115, 117, 119–21, 122, 123, 125, 131, 132, 136, 139, 143, 144, 145, 146, 149, 153, 155, 161, 162, 165, 166, 188, 191, 192, 195, 196, 198, 199, 206, 207, 210, 212, 213, 217, 218, 225, 227, 229, 230, 232, 233, 237, 238, 240, 242, 248, 249, 250, 251, 253, 255, 256, 257 praxis 5, 15, 50, 53, 54, 62, 85, 89, 95, 145, 158, 169, 234, 248 purushartha 34, 177 Radha 53, 239, 240, 243, 252, 259 Radhakrishnan, S. 224, 225 rajas 46, 48, 50–2 Ramakrishna, Sri 8, 58, 66, 95, 136 Ramanujan, A. K. 193, 194 Ramayana 8, 143, 242 Rao, Raja 25, 29, 53, 168, 170–2, 175, 184, 215, 238, 248, 258 rasa 22–4, 54, 58, 86, 88, 97, 98, 173, 174, 175 Rayan, Krishna 58, 85–9, 98, 123 reason 3, 11, 13, 51, 56, 84, 107, 109, 118, 134, 136, 139, 141, 164, 203, 208, 211, 221, 244, 247 religion 8, 11, 16, 18, 34, 35, 61, 83, 89, 136, 138–40, 142, 150–3, 162–3, 166, 169, 176, 212, 214, 215–16, 219 revolution 2, 3, 7, 12, 37, 51, 52, 56, 108, 125, 142, 143, 148, 155, 169, 172, 242, 254 Rorty, Richard 133, 134 Roy, Rammohun 95, 132, 134–5, 138, 150, 158 Rushdie, Salman 29, 105, 143, 150, 165, 193, 206, 235, 247, 248 sacred 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 34, 35, 78, 97, 98, 182, 219 sacrifice 146, 213, 253

Index sadhana 25, 29, 50 Sahitya 26, 42, 86 Said, Edward 111, 113, 116, 126, 196, 221, 222 Sanskrit 21, 26, 38, 45–6, 53, 60–1, 68, 75, 79, 80–1, 83, 85–6, 88–9, 97–8, 115, 143 Sanskritization 247–8, 258 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa 96, 98 Santoshi, Raj Kumar 241–2, 258 Sarvodaya 43, 52, 56, 79 sattva 46, 50–2, 57 saundarya 171, 172, 183, 184 science 3, 12, 44, 45, 47, 83, 97, 98, 106, 115, 117, 119, 124, 126, 135, 139, 142, 155, 169, 170, 179, 223 secular 1, 8, 28, 34, 89, 138, 139, 148, 182, 244 secularised 139 secularism 18, 139, 147, 191, 244 secularists 147, 157 secularized 109 self 5, 6, 15, 34, 48, 50, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 132, 134, 143, 144, 146, 147, 164, 171, 173, 177, 184, 229, 230, 231, 234, 258 self-realization 5, 29, 55, 56, 144, 148, 230 Seth, Vikram 29, 160, 165 Shakespeare, William 29, 30, 204 Singh, Namvar 78, 123, 164 smriti 29, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38 Socialism 7, 77, 161, 125, 156, 254 Soviet Union 2, 7, 8, 254 spirit 11, 12, 32, 33, 34, 55, 56, 78, 134, 138, 139, 145, 169, 175, 176, 183, 189, 238, 254 spirituality 8, 11–12, 15, 22, 25, 29, 51, 56, 79, 83, 97–8, 121, 132, 134, 137–9, 143–4, 146, 148, 157, 162, 168–9, 175, 179, 182, 218 Spivak, Gayatri Chakraborty 107, 110, 111, 112, 126, 158, 160, 187, 193, 194, 200, 226 sruti 29, 32–8 subaltern 5, 13, 17, 76, 77, 79, 80, 96, 107–8, 116, 151–3, 157, 159, 160–3, 165, 196 subordination 4, 44, 103, 123–4, 137, 138, 188, 195, 197, 205, 217, 221, 222, 233, 245

267

subservience 6, 33, 49, 102, 103, 105, 110, 122, 124, 130, 149, 159, 166, 190, 197, 211, 206, 217 Suleri, Sara 192, 193, 238, 259 svaraj 5–6, 14–15, 18, 22, 23, 38, 39, 41, 43–6, 50, 52, 56, 77, 79, 93, 112, 121–5, 129, 136, 143–50, 162–3, 166–7, 178, 183, 184, 190, 203, 217–18, 222, 231–4 svarat 143–5 Tagore, Rabindranath 26–9, 41, 78, 96, 123, 153, 179, 197, 234–5, 249–50, 252–3, 259 tamas 46, 48, 51–2, 54, 57 Tamil 44, 70, 79, 86, 250, 251 Tantra 172, 175, 182 text 14, 24, 27, 29, 40, 61, 62, 67, 71, 72, 78, 80, 85, 86, 87, 88, 92, 117, 118, 127, 128, 135, 137, 194, 199, 201, 219, 234, 241, 245, 246, 247, 249, 250, 258 theory 1, 3, 7, 12, 14, 15, 17, 38, 41, 47, 49, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 75, 78, 80, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 92, 98, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 131, 141, 142, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 161, 163, 164, 166, 167, 169, 173, 192, 193, 194, 199, 201, 206, 208, 219, 223, 228, 234, 255, 257 Third-World 13, 107, 113, 116, 121, 157, 180, 230 third-worlders 212 third-worldlings 156 totality 57, 133, 203, 205, 210, 215, 246 tradition 6–15, 17, 21–41, 43, 45, 52, 54–7, 60, 62–5, 67, 74–9, 84–90, 92, 95–7, 102, 108, 123, 127, 132, 134, 137–9, 144, 147–8, 150, 152, 154–5, 157–9, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 171, 173, 175–82, 193, 200, 212, 214, 216, 230, 231, 237, 240, 242, 243, 244, 246, 247, 251–3, 255, 258 trans-civilizational 126, 127, 170, 219 transformation 11, 34, 39, 49, 52, 55, 56, 78, 83, 85, 137, 146, 169, 179, 190, 221, 224, 248, 256–7

268

Index

translation 5, 14, 16, 41, 50, 54, 61–3, 69, 71, 80, 88, 104, 111–12, 160, 164, 175, 179, 193–4, 200, 204, 206, 208–9, 237–41, 245–52, 254, 256–7 transnational 15, 97–8, 140, 152, 205, 219 Trivedi, Harish 123, 188, 189, 199, 201, 219, 223, 234, 258, 259 truth 3, 24, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 38, 40, 50, 51, 57, 58, 103, 110, 115, 116, 119, 126, 133, 137, 144, 145, 169 unauthorized 6, 9, 10, 12, 15, 16, 17, 99 universal 1, 3, 5, 62, 73, 74, 78, 96, 107, 126, 156, 166, 170, 180, 192, 197, 212, 253, 254 universalism 126, 127, 146 universalist 65

Veda 29, 32, 40, 56, 143 Vedanta 132, 135, 164, 170, 175 Vedantic 172 Vedantists 134 Vedic 143 vernacularism 116 vernacularization 247, 248, 257 vernacularize 21, 237, 241, 247, 250 vernacularizing 237, 241, 244, 248, 254 vernaculars 12, 14, 15, 19, 28, 44, 60, 61, 63, 68, 77, 79, 80, 116, 129, 136, 151, 160, 164, 181, 237, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 252, 255, 256, 257, 258 Vijayan, O. V. 247, 249–50, 254, 259 Viswanatha 42, 174 Viswanathan, Gauri 113–15, 126, 128 Vivekananda, Swami 50, 57, 59, 66, 95, 132, 136, 142, 150 yoga 51, 57, 140, 144, 173