Roots, Routes and a New Awakening: Beyond One and Many and Alternative Planetary Futures 981157121X, 9789811571213

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Roots, Routes and a New Awakening Beyond One and Many and Alternative Planetary Futures Edited by Ananta Kumar Giri

Roots, Routes and a New Awakening

Ananta Kumar Giri Editor

Roots, Routes and a New Awakening Beyond One and Many and Alternative Planetary Futures

Editor Ananta Kumar Giri Madras Institute of Development Studies Chennai, India

ISBN 978-981-15-7121-3 ISBN 978-981-15-7122-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7122-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Maram_shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

For Lawrence Cohen, Mukul Kumar and Stefan Johnsson Inspiring Travelers for a New Awakening of Roots and Routes and Alternative Planetary Futures

Foreword

The One and the Many, the Many and the One: Rooting the Human Routes The human quest for survival is part of the quest for understanding the world, a world which is populated by humans, non-humans and other phenomena of the world. The phenomenological project of Edmund Husserl couched in making a distinction between the natural attitude, the phenomenological attitude, “noesis” (act of consciousness) and noema (intentional object as experienced) has continued to be central to understanding the place of humans in the world and how their experience can lead to apodictic/apodeictic knowledge that will guarantee harmony of the self with the other. The self could be the individual person, an ethnic group or even a nation. The other could also be the individual, the group or nation, detached from the self (see Edmund Husserl 1960 & 1975). The undermining of human sentiments, passions, prejudices and predilections did not help the Husserlian phenomenological project as these factors bordering on human sentiments cannot be totally underplayed in human social relations and cognitive activities. The problem is now between thorough-going subjectivity and objectivity. The existentialists, particularly Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, provided a midway solution of intersubjectivity (Oyeshile 2006). Intersubjectivity has been a very viable and feasible tool of organizing the logjams involved in human social experience that resonates in

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many theoretical analysis of human society that is a manifestation of the dialectics of roots and routes. The perennial and problematic issues of roots, routes, identities, social creativity, cultural regeneration, planetary realizations and a new awakening that form the discourse of this book, edited by Professor Ananta Kumar Giri, exposes the nature of human conflict and the need to find lasting solutions to them in order to live happy, harmonious and development-oriented life. We can only pretend if we claim, advertently or inadvertently, that all is well with our planet. The crisis we confront in today’s world spares no one, no group, no society, no country and no civilization. Malgorzata Czarnocka captures the crisis thus: The causes initiating today’s civilizational crisis are differently identified. However, it is commonly perceived that the crisis already spread over the entire human world—it has invaded all geographical regions and civilizational spheres—social-political, economic, ecological, cultural, also the spheres of individual as well as collective human everyday life and personal existence. Our time of turmoil has generated a combustible mixture of threats: arrogance, irresponsibility and the complete dereliction of duty by ruling classes in many countries of the world, threats to security, global threats to national and international peace, threats to social order, increasing inequalities, the degradation of natural environment (Czarnocka 2019: 6).

One cannot pretend about the veracity of the situation as described above by Czarnocka. It all boils down to the need for co-operation, tolerance, human solidarity, recognition of identities and accommodation of differences. It simply underscores the need to reconcile disparate interests for the good of all. Let me draw some examples from the Yoruba Culture of Nigeria of how this can be done based on the assumption that the one is part of the many and the many is part of the one as earlier echoed by Heraclitus and Parmenides. In fact, Empidocles of Akragas postulated that the disparate primitive elements such as earth, air, fire and water are subjected to the forces of love and strife. It is love that unites all the primitive elements while strife separates or disunites the basic elements. It bears pointing out that the issue of unity has always remained a major philosophical preoccupation from the ancient times. It has however taken a new dimension in contemporary world as can be discerned in social relations among humans across the globe. Morality called Iwa (character) plays a crucial role in the harmonization of disparate interests in Yoruba society. A well-behaved person is called Omoluwabi. An Omoluwabi is an epitome of morality because he among

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other virtues gives consideration to the well-being of others. The consideration of human well-being is very crucial in establishing and sustaining a harmonious world. Drawing from the Yoruba example, the well-being of the world community is ensured based on the well-being of every member of the human community. And because the individual is a social being, any decision by him, which is immoral, would affect the well-being of other members of the society and subsequently retard human development, peace and security. It is the duty of every community, therefore, to ensure that individuals imbibe moral virtues through education, communal living, reward and sanctions. The dictates of Iwa (character) within the Yoruba society make individual’s freedom a relative one, relative to the survival of the individuals in Yoruba community. It is a means to the good life of man and his community. The following aphorisms underscore the relative freedom of the Yoruba individual: 1. Ti eye ko ba feye niron, oju orun teye lai fara kan ra (If birds do not want to create inconvenience for themselves, the sky is large enough for every bird to fly). 2. Enikan ki je ki ile fe (One person does not consume all the goods and expect expansion or progress of the land). 3. Owo die die ni ara nfe (The body/person deserves some respect). 4. Owo ki ndowo lorun (One person’s business endeavour should not create inconvenience for another person’s business endeavour). 5. Ti a ba soko so ja, ara ile eni ni nba (If we throw a stone in the market, it may hit a person of our own household). It should be noted that it is within the communal moral universe that the Yoruba individual exercises his freedom, anatomy, right and authenticity not in absolute terms but in relative terms as part of the community. This is taken to be a major defining feature of the African society and is aptly expressed by John Mbiti thus, “I am because we are, and since we are therefore I am” (Mbiti 1969: 108). Extrapolating from the Yoruba moral universe, certain perennial problems can be addressed. For instance the problem of identity and difference. Identity is important be it ethnic identity, social identity and national identity but it must not metamorphose to politics of identity that pitches one group against the other as we have in many countries today. We

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cannot eradicate or eliminate ethnic identity but manage it to produce greater goods. This is because ethnic identity is primordial. Sometimes it is prior to national identity in multi-ethnic societies or coterminous with national identity in a situation where a single ethnic group forms the nationality, but this latter case is few. Again, universalism should not be essentialised and should be purged from Eurocentric hegemonic tendencies. The essays in this book reflect, in an unambiguous term, the facts of common human ancestry (roots) and interdependency in the navigation (routes) of human flux of experience. The imperative of joint survival on the human planet must be supported by all. The COVID-19 pandemic has once again underscored the blunt fact of human interdependence. We either survive together or perish together. I strongly urge that we work towards the former option. This to my mind is the central message of this book. The one leads to the many and the many leads to the one. Identity and difference are two inevitable sides of the same phenomenon. We must therefore endeavour to live as members of the same human family while we continually manage our differences to realize the universal identity of humanity. Olatunji A. Oyeshille Department of Philosophy University of Ibadan Ibadan, Nigeria

References Czarnocka, M. 2019. ‘Editorial’, Dialogue and Universalism, Vol.29, No.1. Husserl, E. 1960. Cartesian Meditation, Translated by Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. 1975. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, 5th Edition. New York: Collier Books. Mbiti, J.S. 1969. African Religion and Philosophy. London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd. Oyeshile, O.A. 2006. “An Existentialist Critique of Husserlian Approach to Knowledge”, in R.A. Akanmidu (ed.), Footprints in Philosophy, Ibadan: Hope publishers.

Preface

Today we are witnessing new complexities and violence in the dynamics of roots and routes in self, culture, politics, society and the world. With the rising nationalism which is taking a xenophobic character and is directed against others who do not belong to one’s so-called roots and hatred and violence directed against travelers from routes, we need a new political and spiritual awakening about the integral entwinement of roots and routes and its contemporary evolutionary transformations. This book, Roots, Routes and a New Awakening: Beyond One and Many and Alternative Planetary Futures, is a humble effort in this direction which follows the accompanying volume, Cross-Fertilizing Roots and Routes: Identities, Social Creativities, Cultural Regeneration and Planetary Realizations from Palgrave Macmillan. These two volumes can be read together as part of our effort to rethink identities, social creativity cultural regeneration and alternative planetary futures. This book is dedicated to Lawrence Cohen, Mukul Kumar and Stefan Johnsson, inspiring travelers for a new awakening of roots and Routes and alternative planetary futures. Lawrence Cohen is a creative anthropologist of our times. Born in Boston and studying both Anthropology and Medicine at Harvard, he came to India to study lives of old people. He has then continued many-sided engagement with India. His work No Old Age in India is a remarkable work. Cohen cultivates an anthropology of care and concern and cultivates roots and routes in his own creative ways. Mukul Kumar was a dedicated sociologist and scholar of poverty and rural development. Mukul taught at Institute of Rural Management, Anand and inspired many students and colleagues to have a deeper xi

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and broader view of poverty, exclusion and social transformation. Mukul was a dear friend. When I wrote to him a month ago, I got an email from his daughter that Mukul is no more. He could not survive the cancer that visited him. But Mukul lives in the hearts of students and friends he nurtures and new ways of cultivating roots and routes that his life and work embodies. Stefan Johnsson is a creative thinker who has explored many important issues of history, anthropology and cultural studies inspiring us to look afresh issues of roots and routes. Stefan is also a concerned and committed public intellectual working with the creative and artistic community at large in Sweden. His works such as A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions is an important work in cultural history which can help us rethink anew the issues of identities, social creativity, violence and cultural regeneration. I am grateful to all the contributors of this volume for their kindness, patience, support and contributions. I am grateful to my dear friend Professor Olatunji A. Oyeshille for his insightful Foreword and to my dear and respected friends Kanchana Mahadevan, A. Osman Farah, Paul Schwartzentruber, Maroof Shah and Bishop Thomas Menarampally and Kanchana for joining us in our Afterword dialogues on roots, routes and a new awakening. I thank Vishnu Varatharajan, a contributor to the volume, for his kind and invaluable help in taking care of many chores of the volume. I cannot express my thanks enough for the inspiring and encouraging support from Connie, Li of Palgrave Macmillan. I also thank Sara Crowley Vigneau for her kind interest in and support for this work. Finally I thank colleagues in our Institute especially Professor P.G. Babu, our Director, and Mr. T.R. Ramakrishnan, our Administrative Officer, and Mr. Ashok R. Chandran and Mr. A. Arivazhagan of our Publication Office, Mr. R. Muruggan, our Librarian, for creating a creative atmosphere of dialogue and learning in our Institute. Finally I hope this work helps us in overcoming our contemporary anxiety about roots and routes and create new movements of awakening and alternative futures for all of us. As part of our journey, I offer my following poem: Hermeneutics: Beyond Fixed Locations and Rivers of Co-Realizations Ananta Kumar Giri Is hermeneutics Only about where are you from What about where have you been

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Where are you going– Your journey. You say you come from Jerusalem and Athens But what about journey with Benares? Is Jerusalem not linked to Benares? Athens with Taxila? Abarhamic with Indic Abrahamic with Brahmavidya [knowledge of Brahman] Are Jerusalem, Athens and Varanasi fixed locations Or rivers of co-realizations? Can hermeneutics be a new prayer with roots and routes A new journey with one and many A new dance with Aspirations and Futures Across Tradition?1

As we move across roots, routes and towards a new awakening and hermeneutics of life, we can also draw inspiration from the adventures of relationship and consciousness that Savitri, a symbol and reality of life and spirit, undertakes in Sri Aurobindo’s epic Savirti: Our life is a march to a victory never won This wave of being longing for delight This eager turmoil of unsatisfied strengths This long far file of forward-striving hopes [..] (Sri Aurobindo 1993: 199). Chennai, India May 7, 2020, Buddha Purnima

Ananta Kumar Giri

Reference Sri Aurobindo. 1993 [1950–1951]. Sri Aurobindo: A Legend and a Symbol. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

1 [Written on August 13, 2018 during World Congress of Philosophy, Beijing and updated on 23, 2020 at home in Kotivakkam, Chennai]

Contents

1

Cross-Fertilizing Roots and Routes: An Introduction and an Invitation Ananta Kumar Giri

Part I

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Cross-Fertilizing Roots and Routes: Border Crossings in Self, Societies and Spiritual Awakening

Beyond One and Many: Deconstructing the Notion of Identity Nishant Alphonse Irudayadason Siva Tantra Rediscovered: Transforming the Etic Routes and Emic Roots of Indian Spirituality Justin M. Hewitson Semiotic Roots and Buddhist Routes in Phenomenology and Intercultural Philosophy: A Peircean Study of Abhidharma Buddhist Theories of Consciousness and Perception Alina Therese Lettner

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Ecological Interconnectedness: Entwined Selves, Transcendent and Immanent Sarah Louise Gates

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From Root to Return Routes: A Brief Tantric Description of the Passage from Being to beings Rafaela Campos de Carvalho

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Roots, Routes, and Creative Transformations: New Perspectives on Transitions in Human Society Subhash Sharma

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Thoreau—Tolstoy—Gandhi: The Origin of Satyagraha Christian Bartolf, Dominique Miething, and Vishnu Varatharajan

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“The Gospel According to Babylon”: The Rastafarian Challenge to Eurocentric Theological Discourse in the Caribbean Amitha Shantiago

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Part II Roots, Routes and a New Awakening: Beyond One and Many and Alternative Planetary Futures 10

Cross-Fertilizing Roots and Routes: Towards a New Art of Border Crossing Ananta Kumar Giri

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Multicentric World and Nationalism Boike Rehbein

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Roots, Routes, and a New Awakening: Walking and Meditating with Raimon Panikkar Joseph Prabhu

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Overcoming Evil as Creation of Others as Enemies: Roots, Routes and a New Awakening of Plural Identities Kathrin Bouvot Muddled Roots and Diverse Routes of Reality: Understanding Hindu R¯as.t.ra and Gandhi R¯as.t.ra Through the Myth of Bhat.t.oji D¯ıks.ita Vishnu Varatharajan Roots, Routes and a New Awakening: Rupantara, a Transformative Intiative in Co-Learning and Training of Tribal Teachers of Odisha, India Mahendra Kumar Mishra Roots and Routes and the Origins of Urban Theory: A Journey to “Stadtluft Macht Frei” Johannes Dragsbaek Schmidt

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Utopias and Dystopias in Literature and Life Peter Heehs

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Mysticism in the Tree of Anthropocene: The Feminine Tree of Life and the Virtual Sphere Umar Nizarudeen

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Roots, Routes, and Crossing Borders: Embracing Cosmopolitanism in a Transcultural World David Blake Willis

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Afterwords Roots, Routes and a New Awakening: Towards a Festival of Dialogues and Planetary Conversations Kanchana Mahadevan

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Beyond the Restrictive Sociopolitical Autonomy and Sovereignty A. Osman Farah

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Roots, Routes and a New Awakening: Remembering the History of Canada in Times of Corona Paul Schwartzentruber

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The Hidden Common Roots of Diverse Traditions: Revisiting the Route of Traditionalism Muhammad Maroof Shah

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A Mystic’s Mission Today: Propagate the Truth of Co-belonging Thomas Menamparampil

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Index

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Notes on Editor and Contributors

Ananta Kumar Giri is a Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, India. He has taught and done research in many universities in India and abroad, including Aalborg University (Denmark), Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris (France), the University of Kentucky (USA), University of Freiburg & Humboldt University (Germany), Jagiellonian University (Poland) and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has an abiding interest in social movements and cultural change, criticism, creativity and contemporary dialectics of transformation, theories of self, culture and society, and creative streams in education, philosophy and literature. Dr. Giri has written and edited around two dozen books in Odia and English, including Global Transformations: Postmodernity and Beyond (1998); Sameekhya o Purodrusti (Criticism and Vision of the Future, 1999); Patha Prantara Nrutattwa (Anthropology of the Street Corner, 2000); Conversations and Transformations: Toward a New Ethics of Self and Society (2002); Self-Development and Social Transformations? The Vision and Practice of Self-Study Mobilization of Swadhyaya (2008); Mochi o Darshanika (The Cobbler and the Philosopher, 2009); Sociology and Beyond: Windows and Horizons (2012), Knowledge and Human Liberation: Towards Planetary Realizations (2013); Philosophy and Anthropology: Border-Crossing and Transformations (co-edited with John Clammer, 2013); New Horizons of Human Development (editor, 2015); Pathways of Creative Research: Towards a Festival of Dialogues (editor, 2017); Cultivating Pathways of Creative

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Research: New Horizons of Transformative Practice and Collaborative Imagination (editor, 2017); Research as Realization: Science, Spirituality and Harmony (editor, 2017); Beyond Cosmopolitanism: Towards Planetary Transformations (editor, 2017); The Aesthetics of Development; Art, Culture and Social Transformations (co-editor, 2017); Beyond Sociology (editor, 2018); Social Theory and Asian Dialogues: Cultivating Planetary Conversations (editor, 2018); Practical Spirituality and Human Development: Transformations in Religions and Societies (editor, 2018); Practical Spirituality and Human Development: Alternative Experiments for Creative Futures (editor, 2019) and Transformative Harmony (editor, 2019); The Calling of Global Responsibility: New Initiatives in Justice, Dialogues and Planetary Realizations (forthcoming); Pragmatism, Spirituality and Society: New Pathways of Consciousness, Freedom and Solidarity (editor, forthcoming); Cross-Fertilizing Roots and Routes: Identities, Social Creativity, Cultural Regeneration and Planetary Realizations (editor, forthcoming); Roots, Routes and A New Awakening: Beyond One and Many and Alternative Planetary Futures (editor, forthcoming); Mahatma Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo (editor, forthcoming); Learning the Art of Wholeness: Integral Education and Beyond (forthcoming); and Cultivating Integral Development (forthcoming). Address: Madras Institute of Development Studies, 79 Second Main Road, Gandhi Nagar, Adyar, Chennai-600 020, India. Web: www.mids.ac.in/ananta.htm. Christian Bartolf is an Educational and Political Scientist based in Berlin and is President of Gandhi Information Centre, Berlin, Germany. He is the author of articles and books on Gandhi and Tolstoy, e.g.: Letter to a Hindoo—Taraknath Das, Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi (Berlin, 1997); Hermann Kallenbach—Mahatma Gandhi’s friend in South Africa [with Dr. Isa Sarid] (Berlin, 1997). The Breath of my Life: the Correspondence of Mahatma Gandhi (India) and Bart de Ligt (Holland) on War and Peace (Berlin, 2000). Author of twenty-one exhibitions on the history of nonviolent resistance (Thoreau, Tolstoy, Gandhi, King). http://www. bartolf.info/https://www.nonviolent-resistance.info. Kathrin Bouvot earned her Master’s degree (Master of Arts for Philosophy) in June 2012 from the University of Vienna and her second Master’s degree (Mag. phil) in January 2014 at the same university. Since October 2017 she is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. In January 2018 she was nominated for a scholarship as a visiting lecturer in moral philosophy at the Department

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of Philosophy of the University of Trnava in Slovakia. Her research interests are social and political ethics, aesthetics, medical ethics, peace ethic and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. She can look back on the attendance of various congresses, conferences, symposia, colloquia and workshops, as for example, she attended the 53rd Societas Ethica Annual Conference 2016 (Ethics and Law) in Bad Boll in Germany, the 2017 IVR World Congress of the International Association for the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy in Lisbon in Portugal and the 3rd Braga Colloquium in the History of Moral and Political Philosophy (1st and 2nd February 2018). Some of her recent publications are: a) Kathrin Bouvot, Das Ringen zwischen Erinnern und Vergessen. Über die Suche nach einer Umgangsweise mit der Geschichte, die eine Dienerin des Lebens sein kann., in: Renate Reschke (Hg.), Nietzscheforschung. » … So erzähle ich mir mein Leben. « Über den Zusammenhang von Biographie, Philosophie und Literatur bei Nietzsche. Band 25, Heft 1, im Auftrag der NietzscheGesellschaft e.V. Walter de Gruyter: Berlin/ Boston 2018, p.343–367; b) Kathrin Bouvot, The Role of Lying in Politics., in: João Cardoso Rosas et al. (ed.), Ethics, Politics & Society. A Journal in Moral and Political Philosophy. Number 2–2019. Centre for Ethics, Politics and Society. University of Minho, Braga, Portugal April 2019. p.177–p.204; and C) Kathrin Bouvot, Nietzsche versus Plato: Unmasking the Concept of “Truth,” in: Gianluigi Segalerba & Cornel- Florin Moraru (ed.), Revue Roumaine de Philosophie. Vol. 63 Issue 1. The Problem of Evil in the Platonic Tradition. Ontological, Ethical and Theological Approaches. Bukarest 2019. p.131–155. Rafaela Campos de Carvalho is graduate in Social Sciences and has a Master’s degree in Social Anthropology from the State University of Campinas, Brazil, in which she studied concepts of animality and flora, its limits to the idea of human and the historical social interactions between them. Currently she is a Ph.D. student in Religious Studies at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Brazil, where she was also an Assistant Professor of Legal Anthropology. The main themes that Rafaela develops in her writing are the notion of person and the construction of corporeality, especially in intersection with the tantric strands of Indian philosophy. Abdulkadir Osman Farah is a lecturer at Aalborg University where he teaches Development, transnational relations, transnationalism, transnational NGOs, New-regionalism and transnational State formation. Dr.

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Farah is a co-founder of the Centre for Research and Integration in Denmark and North Eastern African-Nordic Network (NEANOR). He serves as an associate editor of Somali Studies Journal as well as the editorial review boards of a number of journals focusing on political development and political sociology. His latest books include “Transnational NGOs: Creative Connections of Development and Global Governance,” Aalborg University Press, Denmark” (2014); “China-Africa Relations in an Era of Great Transformations” Ashgate Publishing: London UK (2013)”; “Transnationalism and Civic Engagement: Diasporic Formation and Mobilization in Denmark and the UAE” London, UK: Adonis & Abbey Publishers (2012). Sarah Louise Gates is a final year Ph.D. candidate at Edith Cowan University, Perth. Her discipline is postcolonial ecocritical theory with Trika Tantra. The research project is on realizing interconnectedness toward an ideological framework for action on world peace and ecological justice. Peter Heehs is an independent scholar based in Pondicherry, India. He is connected with the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives and is on the editorial board of the Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo project. Heehs has published more than sixty articles in journals such as History and Theory, Modern Asian Studies, and Postcolonial Studies, and in magazines such as History Today and Art India. He is the author or editor of twelve books, the most recent of which are The Lives of Sri Aurobindo (Columbia University Press, 2008),Writing the Self: Diaries, Memoirs and the History of the Self (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2013 by Choice) and Spirituality without God: A Global History of Thought and Practice (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). Justin M. Hewitson is a Researcher of comparative literature and philosophy whose research integrates Indo and Sino spiritual traditions into ancient and modern Western philosophy. He seeks to bridge Tantra-Yoga, Buddhism, Daoism and Sarkarian studies. He is an assistant professor at the Education Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences, National YangMing University in Taiwan. His lectures and writing encompass historical meditative praxes and understanding the ontology of consciousness as a path to transcendental realization as they are presented in Sanskrit, Mandarin and English works. Dr. Hewitson’s essays have been published

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in Comparative and Continental Philosophy, CLC Web’s Comparative Literature and Culture; more articles are forthcoming in the Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture, and Palgrave Macmillan. Justin can be reached at [email protected]. Nishant Alphonse Irudayadason ([email protected]/nishant@ papalseminary.in) is a Professor of Philosophy and Ethics at JnanaDeepa Vidyapeeth: Pontifical Institute of Philosophy and Religion (JDV), Pune, India. Having obtained two doctoral degrees in Ethics and Philosophy from Université Paris-Est and Insitut catholique de Paris, France, he has been actively pursuing academic life. He is also visiting faculty in many colleges and universities in India. He has presented research papers in many National and International Conferences. He has authored two books, edited two books and published many articles in National and International Journals as well as in edited books. He is a regular contributor to contemporary political analysis in “Light of Truth,” a bimonthly published from Kochi, Kerala. Alina Therese Lettner: independent researcher with a classical humanistic background (translation awards in ancient Greek). English/American and Italian Studies at the Universities of Vienna, Stirling, Florence, and Innsbruck, Austria (M.A. 2002). Training in a whole range of classical philologies (Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Biblical Hebrew) and modern languages (e.g. Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Norwegian), including sociolinguistic fieldwork (New Zealand, Singapore) and paleographical basics (Old English homilies, Latin and Byzantine manuscript cultures). Second degree in Indology and Medieval English Language and Literature at the University of Göttingen, Germany (M.A. 2013). Research assistant, lecturer and doctoral candidate at the Department of English and American Studies (IfAA), University of Kassel. 2014 successful defense of her doctoral dissertation (summa cum laude): Eine Philologie der Denkformen für Indien und Europa: Sanskrit-S¯ utras und Semiotik in den Cultural Studies, i.e. a “semiotic philology of thought forms” developed with regard to the classical intellectual traditions of India and Europe. https://uni-kassel.academia.edu/AlinaThereseLettner. Kanchana Mahadevan is Professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Mumbai. She teaches and researches in the areas of feminist philosophy, decolonization, critical theory political thought, aesthetics and film. Her book Between Femininity and Feminism: Colonial and

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Postcolonial Perspectives on Care (published by the Indian Council of Philosophical Research in collaboration with DK Printworld New Delhi in 2014) examines the relevance of Western feminist philosophy in the Indian context. She is currently working on the relationship between the secular and the postsecular with reference to gender. She has held several visiting professorships and fellowships. Thomas Menamparampil has been in the field of Education in Northeast India during the last half a century. Apart from bringing into existence many educational institutions in Assam and his years of service in education, he has contributed to cause peace in promoting dialogue between ethnic groups and reflection on intercultural understanding among various communities. His themes of interest in recent years have been on the healing of historic memories and addressing the collective psyche of communities in anxiety. Dominique Miething is a Lecturer in History of Political Ideas and Civic Education, Free University of Berlin. He is also a Board member of the Gandhi Information Centre, Berlin. Mahendra Kumar Mishra is a well-known Folklorist of India. Born in erstwhile Kalahandi district of Odisha in 1952, Dr Mishra served in primary schools of tribal areas. And after that he joined in Odisha Education service. He served as the state coordinator for Tribal Education in District Primary Education Programme(DPEP) and SarvaShikshaAbhiyan (SSA) from 1993–2010 under School Education Department, Govt. of Odisha. He has conducted intensive fieldwork on tribal folklore in Odisha and Chhattishgarh to explore community knowledge. His major work on Odisha folklore is Visioning Folklore(2002) Saora Tales and Songs (2005) Oral Epics of Kalahandi (2007) Oral poetry of Kalahandi (2008). He is the author of five books on Odia and tribal folklore. He has also compiled Folktales of Odisha (NBT, New Delhi). His Odia books in folklore Paschima Odishara Loka Samskruti(1989), Kalahandira Loka Samskruti(1996) and Loka Samskruti Siddhanta O Prayog(2012). Dr Mishra was the state Coordinator for Multilingual Education (1996– 2010) in the state government of Odisha and was the founder of mother tongue-based multiingual education in ten tribal languages of Odisha in the primary schools . He innovation in using folklore in school curriculum has been widely applied in the elementary schools in the state of Odisha and Chhattishgarh.

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Dr. Mishra has received the Sahitya Academy Award on1999 in Odisha. He is also the recipient of a National Award Veer Shankar Shah Raghunath Shah award by the government of Madhya Pradesh in 2009 for his life time contribution in tribal literature. Dr Mishra has also been awarded by the Kalevala Institute, Turku, Finland for translation of Finnish epic Kalevala in 2001. Besides, Dr Mishra has translated AK Ramanujan’s Folktales from India (2005), Himachal Pradesh Ki Lok Samskruti (2006) from English and Hindi, respectively. He is the founder trustee of Folklore Foundation in Bhubaneswar Odisha in 2008. He brings out Lokaratna—the e-journal of this foundation from 2008 regularly in collaboration with World Oral Literature Project in (D Space), Cambridge University. Also he has set up a community digital archive in his birth village of Sinapali, Odisha, India. Umar Nizarudeen is the Author of two books. His Ph.D from Jawaharlal Nehru University was on a psychoanalytical reading of Bhakti literature. An M.Phil from JNU on matrilineal crafting of romantic literature in Malayalam preceded that. In 2013 he presented a paper on matrilineal Muslims in Kerala at the NISIS autumn school held at the University of Utrecht. Formerly a columnist and reporter with the New Indian Express, a national daily, his poems and articles have been published in journals including Muse India, Culture Cafe journal of the British Library, Vayavya, Veda, Indian Ruminations, Litcrit, The India Gazette London, and also the Ibex Press year’s best selection. As a founding member of the “Parallax Collective” in Kerala, he has attended workshops at the universities of Oxford, Utrecht, Tilburg and Wurzburg. He was formerly Head of the department of English at the Government College, Kalpetta. Having served as an English teacher at the universities of Delhi, Kerala and Calicut, he is at present with the Directorate of Collegiate Education in Kerala. Olatunji Alabi Oyeshile, Ph.D. is a Professor of African Philosophy, Metaphysics and Existentialism in the Department of Philosophy, University of Ibadan. Published extensively in books and journals of international repute, some of his publications include: Reconciling the self with the other: An Existentialist Perspective on the management of Ethnic Conflicts in Africa. Ibadan: Hope Publications, 2005; Co-edited with J. Kenny, The Idea of a Nigerian University: A Revisit, Washington D.C: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2013; “Towards an African Concept of a Person: Person in Yoruba, Akan

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and Igbo thoughts,” Orita, XXXIV/1–2; 2002; “Communal Values, Cultural Identity and the Challenge of Development in Contemporary Africa,” The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Vol. 29, No. 3. Fall, 2004; “Corporate Existence and Individual’s Freedom in African Communal Society: The Yoruba Example,” Ultimate Reality and Meaning Journal (URAM), Vol. 30, No. 4, 2007 and “Sen’s Realization—Focused Notion of Justice and the Burden of Democratic Governance in African Societies,” Indian Journal of Human Development, Vol. 5, No. 1 January 2011. His research focus in recent times has been in the area of African Socio-Political Philosophy where he has paid attention to the place of the individual within the community and also on how to resolve some perennial problems in the area of religion, politics and nationhood. He is a member of Nigerian Philosophical Association (NPA), Nigerian Academy of Letters (NAL) and International Society for Universal Dialogue (ISUD). He is presently a Visiting Researcher/Lecturer at Institute of Philosophy, Leiden University, The Netherlands, August–December, 2019. Joseph Prabhu is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles, and Adjunct Professor of Religion at Claremont Graduate University. He is the editor of The Intercultural Challenge of Raimon Panikkar (Orbis Books, 1996) and the co-editor of the two-volume Indian Ethics: Classical Traditions and Contemporary Challenges (Ashgate, 2007). He is also the editor of the forthcoming Raimon Panikkar as a Modern Spiritual Master (Orbis Books, 2020), and the author of the forthcoming Liberating Gandhi: Gandhi’s Legacy for the 21st Century and Beyond. He has been a Consultant to the UN Human Rights Commission and has been both a Trustee and an Executive Committee Member of the Parliament of the World’s Religions. He has lectured in more than eighty universities around the world and was honoured by his university with an annual lecture series in his name. Boike Rehbein is Professor for the sociology of Asia and Africa at Humboldt University Berlin. He studied philosophy, sociology and history at Freiburg, Paris, Goettingen, Frankfurt and Berlin and received his Ph.D. in 1996 and “habilitation” in 2004 at the University of Freiburg. He was acting chair of sociology at Freiburg from 2004 to 2006 and director of the Global Studies Programme from 2006 before moving to Berlin in 2009. His areas of specialization are social theory, globalization, social inequality and mainland Southeast Asia. Recent books

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in English: Critical Theory after the Rise of the Global South (Routledge 2015; translated from German), Society in Contemporary Laos (Routledge 2017), Inequality in Capitalist Societies (with Surinder Jodhka and Jesse Souza, Routledge 2017), Inequality in Economics and Sociology (edited with Gilberto Antonelli, Routledge 2018). Johannes Dragsbaek Schmidt is Senior Expert at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies; Senior Researcher at Global Policy Institute, London and Adjunct Associate Professor in Development and International Relations at Aalborg University, Denmark. He has held visiting Fellowships in Australia; Canada; Malaysia; Singapore; Indonesia; Thailand and Philippines. Furthermore, he has extensive research experience from India, China and Bhutan and done consultancies for UNESCO, the World Bank, ASEM, Nordic Consulting Group and the Danish Development Agency. He published about 240 publications on issues ranging from social welfare, labour, economic policymaking, geo-politics and geoeconomics, etc., with a primary focus on Asia. http://vbn.aau.dk/en/per sons/pp(6b5a9a55-a5d7-4d0d-ac2c-896a774b708d)/publications.html. Paul Schwartzentruber is an Independent Writer and Researcher with primary interests in intercultural and inter-religious dialogues. He has lived and traveled extensively in the Middle East before recently returning to live in Halifax, Canada. Prior to that (2007–2012), he spent parts of five years in India working as a volunteer with the Gandhian land rights organization, Ekta Parishad as well as for the International Gandhian Institute for Nonviolence and Peace in Madurai. During this time, he travelled extensively in India, doing advocacy work, documentation, editing, website development, coordinating volunteers and writing. He also published many scholarly articles on Gandhi and nonviolence for Ahimsa/Nonviolence, a journal of the IGINP and regularly edit the English version of the Journal. Paul has B.A in English and Classics from University of Toronto and an M.A., in Theology and a Ph.D (ABD) from St. Michael’s College. He has worked as the Director of a Retreat Centre in Ontario (1997–2007) and a Lecturer in the Graduate School of Theology at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota (1985–1990). Muhammmad Maroof Shah has done his doctoral work on The Problem of Nihilism and Absurdist Impasse in (Post)Modern Literature: AMetaphysical Appraisal of Samuel Beckett and Albert Camus.

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Besides contributing book chapters for ten books, co-translating first volume of a medieval Quran commentaryTafsir e Rehmani by MakhdoomAlauddin Ali Mahaimi, publishing several research papers and co-editing a manual and a journal in applied animal sciences, he has widely published in journals of comparative mysticism, Muslim philosophy and literary studies and authored three books The Problem of Evil in Muslim Philosophy: A Case Study of Iqbal, Muslim Modernism and the Problem of Modern Science and Perennial Philosophy in the Postmodern World?: Enigma of Osho. His interests include explorations on the interface of religion, philosophy and mysticism with more focus on Islamic Tradition in dialogue with other traditions. He has been a regular columnist for English daily Greater Kashmir. He blogs at maroofshah.blogspot.com. Amitha Shantiago is Professor and Head, Dept. of English, Bishop Cotton Women’s College, Bangalore. Her areas of interest include Cultural Studies; South Asian Studies; English Studies; Postcolonial Studies; Gender Studies; Religious Studies; Theology; Critical Theory. Subhash Sharma is well known in the management education world both in India and abroad. He holds Post Graduate Diploma in Management (PGDM) from Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad, and Ph. D. from the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, USA. He is author of well-known books such as Management in New Age: Western Windows, Eastern Doors; New Mantras in Corporate Corridors and New Earth Sastra. His writings have been considered as “thought provoking contribution” with “quite a few revolutionary points of view” (Business Standards). He has made significant contributions to institution building as founding member of Women’s Institute for Studies in Development Oriented Management (WISDOM) at Banasthali University, Banasthali, Rajasthan; Founding Director, Indian Institute of Plantation Management, Bangalore; and founding member Indus Business Academy (IBA), Bangalore. He is currently Director, Indus Business Academy, Bangalore. He is also a recipient of many excellence, achievement and leadership awards. Vishnu Varatharajan is an Independent Scholar with primary interests in Gandhian thought and Indian nationalist movements. Having obtained a masters degree in Political Science from the University of Madras, India, he was a visiting scholar at the Institute of Asian and African Studies,

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Humboldt University of Berlin. Prior to that, he was a freelance translator at People’s Archive of Rural India, and a student photojournalist at Vikatan group of magazines. Vishnu is a public speaker and columnist with regular appearances on print and electronic media. He is also a blogger, photographer and digital graphic artist by passion, and an occasional numismatist inclined to learning history through collecting coins. He is now a corresponding member at Gandhi-Informations-Zentrum, Berlin. Twitter—@vishnutshells. David Blake Willis is professor of anthropology and education at Fielding Graduate University and professor emeritus of anthropology at Soai Buddhist University, Osaka, Japan. He taught and did research at the University of Oxford and was Visiting Professor at Grinnell College and the University of Washington. His interests in anthropology, sustainability, social justice and immigration come from 38 years living in traditional cultural systems (Japan and India). His scholarly work is on transformational leadership, education, human development, the Creolization of cultures, transcultural communities, and Dalit/Gandhian liberation movements in South India. His publications include World Cultures: The Language Villages (Leading, Learning and Teaching on the Global Frontier) with Walter Enloe (2016); Sustainability Leadership with Fred Steier and Paul Stillman (2015); Reimagining Japanese Education: Borders, Transfers, Circulations, and the Comparative with Jeremy Rappleye (2011); Transcultural Japan: At the Borders of Race, Gender, and Identity with Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu (2007); and Japanese Education in Transition 2001: Radical Perspectives on Cultural and Political Transformation with Satoshi Yamamura (2002). His volunteer work has included responses to the Kobe Earthquake (1995), Indian Ocean Earthquake/Tsunami (2004), the 3/11 Earthquake and Tsunami in Northern Japan (2011), and more recently as a trainer for Friendly Water for the World.

List of Figures

Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2

Tradition Modernity Dialogue matrix A perspective on Indian history, beginning with Shiva-Shakti Civilization in Himalayas

123 130

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List of Tables

Table Table Table Table Table Table

7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6

Transitions Transitions Transitions Transitions Transitions Transitions

in in in in in in

human societies human societies human societies human societies human societies Indian society

(perspective (perspective (perspective (perspective (perspective

I) II) III) IV) V)

118 119 120 120 121 126

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CHAPTER 1

Cross-Fertilizing Roots and Routes: An Introduction and an Invitation Ananta Kumar Giri

Roots and routes are our intertwined foundations and moving and nurturing streams of our lives. But their dynamics and manifestations in self, culture, society, history and the world is not free from tension and challenges of creative reconciliation and transformations. In this book, we make an effort in this direction. The book begins with the first part of the book “Cross-Fertilizing Roots and Routes Border Crossings in Self, Societies and Spiritual Awakening.” This begins with Nishant Alphonse Irudayadason’s essay “Beyond One and Many: Deconstructing the Notion of Identity.” In his essay, Irudayadason attempts to challenge the metaphysical dualism pervasive in history of Philosophy, which is responsible for the binary opposition of identity and difference. The author suggests that the question of identity surpasses the metaphysical binary of one and many. He explores the philosophical significance of three inter-related concepts, namely resistance, belonging and hybridity. Resistance to homo-hegemony paves way for a

A. K. Giri (B) Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. K. Giri (ed.), Roots, Routes and a New Awakening, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7122-0_1

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new meaning of identity in terms of the hospitality of visitation implying that there has never been a purity of self-identity since it is always and already constituted by what threatens it. While discussing the idea of belonging, the author by creatively appropriating Derrida, shows that between individual and community lies the figure of spectre whereby all belonging is only “belonging without belonging.” Through his discussion on hybridity, the author anchors his arguments on many postcolonial thinkers to take his ideas to a logical conclusion that we are summoned to an exilic identity. ´ Irudayadason’s essay is followed by Justin M. Hewitson’s essay, “Siva Tantra and S¯ adhan¯ a: The Emic Roots of India’s Meditative Traditions.” In his essay, Hewitson presents a timely intervention into the ongoing Indological debate surrounding etic and emic perspectives on the origins ´ of Siva Tantra and its emergence in Buddhism. His boundary-crossing comparative essay draws on multiple dimensions of the contested classical and oral traditions articulated by researchers and practitioners. Examining the philosophical history presented by Western Indologists and Indian philosophers, Hewitson examines the contested roots of India’s proto´ spirituality purportedly taught by Siva and his uniquely hybrid presence in Hindu forms of Tantra as well as less known Buddhist practices, festivals and iconography. Hewitson broad overview of India’s contemplative tradition is the first academic account of P.R. Sarkar’s intriguing emic ´ representation of Siva Tantra. Hewitson offers an important account of the Aryan migration routes, Vedic religious roots and linguistic developments that spread from the first codification of proto-spiritual praxes known as Tantra. Hewitson’s essay is followed by Alina Therese Lettner’s “Semiotic Roots and Buddhist Routes in Phenomenology and Intercultural Philosophy: A Peircean study of Abhidharma Buddhist Theories of Consciousness and Perception.” In her essay, Lettner attempts to achieve a crossfertilization between Buddhism, semiotics, and phenomenology and seeks to develop both a Peircean interpretation of Buddhism and, reciprocally, a Buddhist development of Peirce’s philosophy. In order to clear the ground for a more in-depth comparative appraisal of consciousness, cognition and perception with regard to Buddhism and Peirce, she focuses on working out process-philosophical synergies between Peirce’s pansemiotic universe of signs and relations and the Abhidharma Buddhist deconstruction of commonsense objects into minimal constituents of experience (“dharmas”). Lettner’s essay is followed by Sarah Louise Gates

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who in her essay “Ecological Interconnectedness: Entwined Selves, Transcendent and Immanent” helps us relate to the themes of roots and routes and self and other to our reality and possibility of ecological interconnectedness. For Gates, “Ecological interconnectedness studies are a portal into dual and non-dual frameworks for bioculturally embedded human identity.” Environmental philosophy of the 1990s laid the foundation of deep ecology, ecofeminist and social ecology that inform western eco-justice activism, and the ecocritical theory to which this essay belongs. The discourse of ecocritical literary theory is a fertile ground for intersecting paradigms within contemporary western and medieval Indian philosophy of Kashmiri Saivism or Trika Saivism on the liminal boundaries of self and world, and how these permeable systems motivate action through flexible parameters of human and non-human agency. In this way, Gates help us cultivate new pathways of awakening with roots, routes, immanence, transcendence and ecological connectedness. Gates’ essay is followed by Rafaela Campos de Carvalho’s essay, “From Root to Return Routes: A Brief Tantric Description of the Passage from Being to Beings,” in which Campos de Carvalho discusses the philosophy and practice of Ananda Marga and P. R. Sarkar and how it can help us in going beyond closed identity and realize an expanded one of mutual recognition, flourishing and cross-fertilization. Campos de Carvalho’s essay is followed by Subhash Sharma’s “Roots, Routes and Creative Transformations: New Perspectives on Transitions in Human Society” which presents some new perspectives on creative transformations in human society occurring over a period of time. As a case study of India, transitions in Indian society have been presented in terms of its long journey from tradition to modernity and spirituality and now a new blending and convergence of tradition, modernity and spirituality through "spiritually guided modernity." Sharma’s essay is followed by the essay, “Thoreau—Tolstoy—Gandhi: The Origin of Satyagraha,” by Christian Bartolf, Dominique Miething and Vishnu Varatharajan in their essay. In their essay, Bartolf et al. summarize the confluence of the three thinkers as Gandhi found a new expression for civil disobedience and passive resistance in Gujarati language. Gandhi recollected the concept of Truth in the old Indian scripts and then found the wisdom of Truth in Socrates’ fearlessness, in Henry David Thoreau’s emancipation from slavery and war, in Tolstoy’s concept of nonviolent non-cooperation, and also in Jesus’ non-resistance principle (“Resist not evil”). When Gandhi held an essay

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competition on “The Ethics of Passive Resistance,” he wanted to organize active nonviolent resistance on a new level. In the end, the authors raise a profound question: Will the application of Satyagraha originate a new era of a world federation without armies? Or will we—as human species—fail to find our roots and to transcend borders? Bartof et al.’s essay is followed by Amitha Shantiago’s essay “’The Gospel According to Babylon’: The Rastafarian Challenge to Euro-centric Theological Discourse in the Caribbean.” This chapter maps the trajectory of one of Jamaica’s striking engagements with Europeanized Christianity and its discursive practices: the religion of Rastafari and its "Gospel According to Babylon." In her essay, Santiago discusses the work of the Rastafrian and the challenges they pose to the roots of Eurocentric theological discourses. Her essay opens new ways of envisioning relationship among roots, routes and human freedom. With this we come to the second part of our book, “Cross-Fertilizing Roots and Routes: Beyond One and Many and Alternative Planetary Futures,” which begins with Ananta Kumar Giri’s essay, “CrossFertilizing Roots and Routes: Towards a New Art of Border Crossing.” In this essay Giri explores how we can cultivate a new art of border crossing which would help us cross-fertilize roots and routes. Giri also discusses a new way of meeting across borders and margins moving beyond an anxiety of incompleteness to a festivity of incompleteness. Giri’s essay is followed by Joseph Prabhu’s essay on Raimon Panikkar as a border-crossing thinker, Cross-Fertilizing Roots and Routes: Walking and Meditating with Raimon Panikkar.” Prabhu tells us how walking and meditating with Panikkar we can get new inspiration to cross-fertilize roots and routes. Prabhu’s essay is followed by Kathrin Buvot’s essay, “Overcoming Evil as Creation of Others as Enemies: Roots, Routes and a New Awakening of Plural Identities.” In her essay, Buvot challenges us to realize our propensities in creating others as enemies and realize this as the primal evil. This creates reduction of others into enemies. But human life consists of our intertwined plural identities of self and others and for realizing this we have to overcome our evil as creation of others as enemies. Buvot’s essay is followed by Vishnu Varatharajan’s essay, “Muddled Roots and Diverse Routes of Reality: Understanding Hindu R¯as.t.ra and Gandhi R¯as.t.ra through the myth of Bhat.t.oji D¯ıks.ita” in which Varatharajan discusses the works of Bhat.t.oji D¯ıks.ita and Gandhi. This is followed

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by Mahendra Kumar Mishra’s essay, “Roots, Routes and a New Awakening: Rupatara, A Transforamtive Initiative in Training and Co-Learning of Tribal Teachers of Odisha, India” in which Mishra tells us how this training and co-learning programme enables tribal teachers, students, parents and all concerned to discover the roots of their languages and identities and also discover routes of relationships with other languages and cultures. Mishra’s essay is followed by Johannes Dragsbaek Schmidt’s essay, “Roots and Routes and The Origins of Urban Theory: A Journey to “Stadtluft Macht Frei.” In his essay Schmidt urges us to rethink urban theory in the context of social theory and create a new root of urban freedom and empowerment. Schmidt’s essay is followed by Peter Heehs’s essay, “Utopia and Dystopia in Literature and Life.” In his essay, Heehs explores the question how human beings visualize possible future societies. From the time of Plato to the present, a common method was utopian fiction. Peter Heehs sketches the development of this genre, but points out that from the end of the nineteenth century, dystopian fiction became more prevalent, as people struggled with the problems introduced by industrialism, centralized government and overpopulation. Heehs shows how authors like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell foresaw many of the negative characteristics of the twenty-first-century world. But whereas they imagined surveillance and social control to be the prerogative of the centralized State, in the contemporary world this role has been taken up by technological giants such as Google and Facebook, or rather by a nexus of government agencies and tech companies. Heehs challenges us to understand the growing tyrannies in societies and histories which destroy freedom and plurality in our lives and the world and to cultivate alternative politics and spirituality to counter this and create alternative human futures. Heehs’ essay is followed by Umar Nizarudeen’s essay “Mysticism in the Tree of Anthroposcene: The Feminine Tree of Life and the Virtual Sphere.” In his essay, Umar Nizarudeen presents a technological vision of an egalitarian ecosystem of feminine nurturing which can be termed a multiverse ecosystem. It inquires into the potential of a scientifically rigorous and logically coherent coexistence of multiple realities. This impasse, which was the Achilles heel of traditional analogue media, can be negotiated through the strategic utilization of digital media. The anthropocene era thus makes its presence felt, in the philosophical posthuman. The category of the "human" is reterritorialized into a hybrid

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digital universe. Bhakti and such technologies can support this process by averting misogyny. Technology is constructed, and technology supersedes tradition. The contingent, material nature of technology means that technology can be anything. Technologies of Bhakti can thus become a media for immersive cognitive mapping. It is fitting and insightful that our volume concludes with the essay by David Blake Willis, “Roots, Routes, and Crossing Borders: Embracing Cosmopolitanism in a Transcultural World.” In his essay, Willis writes: “The transnationalization of societies and cultures, the easy movements of people across borders, and the ubiquitous spread of world media all have in common that they are an alternate source of cultural power. This is no more so than in our common ecoculture, burgeoning global consciousness, and shared consciousness about a shared planet together so well-illustrated and led by Greta Thunberg.” For Willis three conceptual domains need to be prominent if we are to grapple with the needs of this “era of deep transformation”: liminality, performance and dialogue. We have to cultivate creative liminality across borders and perform for realization of higher potential in each one of us and dialogue even with our so-called enemies. This way we can overcome the politics of hatred and xenophobia that is blowing across the world today. The book concludes with Afterwords of dialogues and conversations in which Kanchana Mahadevan join with her essay, “Roots, Routes and a New Awakening,” A. Osman Farah, “Beyond the Rhetoric of Socio-political autonomy and sovereignty,” Paul Schwartzentruber, “Roots, Routes and a New Awakening: Remembering the History of Canada,” Muhammad Maroof Shah, “The Hidden Common Roots of Diverse Traditions: Revisiting the Route of Traditionalism,” and Thomas Menaramapally, “ A Mystic’s Mission Today: Propagate the Truth of Co-Belonging.” In their conversations, Mahadevan, Farah, Shah and Menaramapally bring deep philosophical, socio-political, historical, theological and mystical reflections on issues explored in our book and help us in cross-fertilizing roots and realize a new awakening of creative consciousness and relationship. Thus our book joins our contemporary epochal challenges of creation of new knowledge, consciousness and awakening about our intertwined human existence and alternative planetary futures.

PART I

Cross-Fertilizing Roots and Routes: Border Crossings in Self, Societies and Spiritual Awakening

CHAPTER 2

Beyond One and Many: Deconstructing the Notion of Identity Nishant Alphonse Irudayadason

Introduction The question of identity is ancient and multifaceted. In the contemporary era characterized by globalization, this question assumes significance especially in the light of assertion of individual and collective identities. There is a deep seated aspiration to trace one’s own roots but this aspiration gets manifested often violently thanks to the metaphysical dualism of identity and difference, one and many. Some of the fallouts of this are also visible in the political arena especially in the resurgence of the spirit of nationalism, the spirit that haunted Germany during the Nazi regime and which haunts most countries today including India. This phenomenon demands an academic reflection to illumine the “routes” we create both for ourselves and for future generations. We shall try to achieve this through our discussion on three inter-related ideas: resistance, belonging and hybridity.

N. A. Irudayadason (B) Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth, Pune, India e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. K. Giri (ed.), Roots, Routes and a New Awakening, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7122-0_2

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Resistance This term has a romantic aura. Resistance is always against hegemony or homogenization. Today more than ever, when globalization and cultural industry are indissolubly linked, what Derrida rightly calls homo-hegemony, resistance becomes the imperative of our times. A dominant hegemonic power always tends to homogenize or establish and impose uniformity. The notion of resistance against all forms of monolithic identity possesses a philosophical dimension. It begins as a movement against Hegel’s system, since all contemporary philosophy has been reflections on resistance against the dominant and totalizing discourse of what Hegel’s philosophy was (or was believed to be). This is because the Hegelian philosophy is not one of the many philosophies; it was intended as the completion of the whole history of thought. Thus everything begins with the Hegelian concept of understanding in both senses of the term: to encompass and to account for all reality. This hegemonic claim to understanding is expressed in the famous assertion: “What is rational is real; And what is real is rational” (Hegel 1896: 10). Hegelianism thus appears as pan-logos that is, as a resolute affirmation of the victory of reason over all irrationality, the victory of the universal over all particularities. In order to do justice to Hegel, it would be appropriate to recall that the Hegelian reason is not a narrow rationality, or a pure positivist rationalism: The Hegelian universal is not an abstract universal which would refuse any particularity, difference and otherness. On the contrary, since what Hegel calls the concept of understanding is to be understood as a process which, by its own dynamism, could be said to take hold of everything foreign to it, absorb it and nourish it to transform it into a part of its own identity, to which then nothing could be foreign and nothing, of course, could resist. This is the reason why Hegel was able to show perfect mastery over the whole of reality, including history. And it is no coincidence that a collection of Hegel’s courses was given the title: Reason in history; the Reason of the world is universal which is realized in and through the history of the different peoples. It is against this hegemony of reason and therefore of the universal that contemporary philosophy has entered into resistance, a resistance that may have assumed different modalities in different thinkers, but always in view of resisting the Hegelian totality suspected of being totalitarian and accused of ignoring the moment of difference, more precisely the otherness. Going back to the logical source of notions of identity and

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resistance is to recognize that Philosophy is suspicious of identity. It is because even before Hegel, already since Plato, identity was thought of as a refusal of difference and otherness. This means that identity is considered to be identical with itself, but it has always been other than itself, different from itself, in every sense of the term. Though identity often means singularity, it cannot be anything other than plurality, if it has to survive. This is true of any identity—whether individual or cultural: every culture is born out of appropriating and transforming an already existing heritage and it can survive only by accepting to be metamorphosed in turn. That is why Malraux wrote that only dead works do not change [“Il n’y a que les œuvres mortes qui ne changent pas ”] (Malraux 1974: 253). Derrida (following Walter Benjamin) speaks of survival precisely in this sense: not only to continue living but to live above and beyond. Identity is inseparable from what Derrida calls an expropriation: to affirm one’s identity is, in one sense, to affirm one’s mastery, but it is also, contradictorily, to desire to be dislodged from this mastery, to be visited by the other. Derrida calls this hospitality of visitation which is to be distinguished from the hospitality of invitation. Every identity must be able to be appropriated, at least in part, in order to survive—to survive otherwise, in something other than itself. The distinction between these two types of hospitality can be evoked through the distinction between two terms, alteration/alterity. Alterity is the otherness of the other, whereas alteration is the otherness that inhabits me, transforms me and even corrupts me. An identity which refuses to allow itself to be inhabited by the other would be a dead identity since it refuses openness and therefore any alteration. There is no purity, but only the ever-reborn phantasm of purity, or a spotless origin. Derrida shows that this purity of self-identity is always questionable: it is always contaminated by what it tries to exclude. According to this logic, no identity is ever complete or pure: it is constituted by that which threatens it. Derrida does not want to deny self-identity or presence; he merely wants to show that this presence is never as pure as it claims to be. It is always open to the other, and already contaminated by it. Let us recall that Plato in his Phaedrus makes a critique of the written discourse distinct from oral discourse. Socrates, by comparing written discourse to pharmakon that can mean both medicine and poison, holds that it is less a remedy for forgetfulness and more a poison for memory. Hence he privileges the oral discourse as it refers to the figure of mastery, the metaphysics of presence (meaningfully present to consciousness to

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which nothing could escape), which Derrida criticizes unceasingly. The written discourse is compared to an orphan deprived of the assistance of his father; contrary to oral discourse, it is left to itself, lost from all primary meaning and exposed to the most hazardous interpretations. This condemnation of writing is thus emblematic of a desire for absolute mastery which can establish its hold only by refusing all otherness. It is undoubtedly this otherness, this contingency, this impurity, that challenges the imposition of a particular language. Post-colonial historians wonder whether the colonial power, by favouring Sanskritization, did not intend to silence the Tamils in the peninsula. What is more important, from a philosophical point of view, is to underline how the imposition of one language and therefore the reduction of the plurality of languages is always a factor of impoverishment, not only for the language reduced to silence but even for the very language which succeeds in imposing its dominance. It is also important to recall that translation, is an enrichment of both languages since translation is, as Jacques Derrida pointed out following Walter Benjamin, a condition of the survival of works. This is because translation allows a text to survive in the double meaning of the term: to live longer and to live at a higher level. In translation, the original is not identical, as is naively believed, but it is endowed with an extra meaning. For in its afterlife—which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living—the original undergoes a change… even the greatest translation is destined to become part of the growth of its own language and eventually to be absorbed by its renewal… It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work. (Benjamin 1968: 69–82)

Thus translation is useful both to the original language and to the language of the translator: it is the after-life both of written works and languages. The imposition of one language to be the same for all is a deadly closure. It is the old desire or the old demon of a return to purity, an original purity, the mother-language before the fall into the plurality of languages: it is the old dream of a tower of Babel before destruction and dispersal and the old demon of identity.

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There is therefore no contradiction in asserting that identity is constituted by resistance, and that resistance itself is always a resistance to identity. This identity, which is constituted in resistance, is what philosophers call difference and it is always done against the identity that intends to reduce all differences and homo-hegemonize everything. We understand how all singular cultures are haunted by the threat of assimilation under the pretext of universalism, which is only another name for ethnocentrism or ethnocide. Resistance is therefore a refusal to assimilation. It is indeed this sense that contemporary philosophy thinks of resistance as a refusal to a closed identity. This is similar to how Jean-Luc Godard captures the essence of montage: There is no single image, but images. So there is no single closed culture, there are only cultures and from their coexistence is born something that surpasses them. Derrida, evoking the unity of a language, writes that “this unity is not comparable to any other. It is open to the most radical grafting, open to deformations, transformations, expropriation, to a certain a-nomie and de-regulation” (Derrida 1998: 65). Derrida calls this writing, even if it may be oral, vocal, musical and we may add pictorial and sculptural. It means that a tradition must enter into a process of repetition, not an identical repetition for it would mean the death of this tradition, but a repetition in difference, what Derrida calls iterability: a logic that binds repetition to otherness. The term iterability was coined by Derrida, in his essays “Signature Event Context” and “White Mythology” to theorize the paradox of the simultaneity of sameness and difference in conceptualization. Derrida specifically examines iterability as the condition of writing, language and oral communication. For Derrida, iterability does not simply signify repetition as in “reiteration”; rather, every iteration is an alteration, or a modification of the same. At the same time, iteration depends on a minimal remainder and illusion of an identity of the same so that repetition can be recognized in the first place. Iteration introduces new contexts and variety into the constitution of the same. It is therefore the very status of the universal which is at stake here and this question occupies the centre stage of the twentieth century when it challenges the universal humanism of Husserl who asserted with certainty that the European philosophers, in so far as they are devoted to universal reason, are the “Functionaries of Mankind” (Husserl 1970: 17). But the twentieth century deepens and reverses this question of universalism. Derrida, for example, never ceased attempting a movement of resistance to European universalism without completely abandoning it: “It is a logic,

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logic itself, that I do not wish to criticize here. I would even be ready to subscribe to it, but with one hand only, for I keep another to write or look for something else, perhaps outside Europe…. but not to close off in advance a border to the future, to the to-come[a-venir]of the event, to what which comes [vient], which comes perhaps and perhaps comes from a completely other shore” (Derrida 1992: 69).

Belonging Derrida’s book titled The Other Heading was originally a paper that he presented in a seminar on “European cultural identity” held in Turin in 1990. It answers precisely the question of whether or not he belongs to a supposed European identity. What does it mean to be a European philosopher when one tries to invent another identity? The conclusion of his text reads as follows: I am European, I am no doubt a European intellectual, and I would like to recall this […]. But I am not, nor do I feel European in every part, that is European through and through. […] Being a part, belonging as ‘fully a part,’ should be incompatible with belonging ‘in every part.’My cultural identity, that in the name of which I speak, is not only European, it is not identical to itself… If, to conclude, I declared that I feel European among other things, would this be, in this declaration, more or less European? Both,no doubt. (Derrida 1992: 82)

What does it mean to be at the same time more or less European? It is precisely to renounce the totality of belonging; it is to try to hold this seemingly untenable paradox of belonging that passes through heterogeneity and dissimilarity. To understand the Derridean idea of belonging, it must be placed in relation to “beyond the real” that has constituted in Derrida a fantasy for strangeness or stranger. Let us recall a pertinent remark he made in a conference organized at Montreal in 1979: “Unless I am mistaken, not one of the subjects at this table speak French as his or her maternal tongue, except perhaps two of us.And, even then, you [Péraldi] are French, I am not. I’m from Algeria” (Derrida 1985: 146). It is this fantasy—to belong without belonging, to be French but not completely—that we need to analyze briefly. A fantasy, let us note in passing, is not necessarily an illusion. But we must first recall this “identity disorder” (trouble d’identité) of which Derrida often spoke while referring

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to himself as he suffered from it: “To be a Franco-Maghrebian, one‘like myself,’ is not, not particularly, and particularly not, a surfeit or richness of identities, attributes, or names. In the first place, it would rather betray, a disorder of identity [trouble d’identité]” (Derrida 1998: 14). There are well-known facts of his biography, facts which he himself often recalled that it was on account of his being Jewish that he was banned from the Lycée Ben Aknoun (today’s lycée Mouk-rani) at the age of twelve, following the abolition of the decree Crémieux in October 1940, a decree which, since 1870, had granted French nationality to the Jews of Algeria. This abolition of citizenship lasted two years and Derrida more than once spoke of the suffering and the inconsolable mourning of being brutally pointed out as a stranger, excluded from the community and from this untenable position, he would seek to assume his life: to be French without being one and speaking a language that is not his own. He laments, “I have only one language, (and, but, yet) it is not mine” (Derrida 1998: 27). We can add to this non-exhaustive list the intimate paradoxes which has woven the disorder of identity: to be a Jew without Judaism and his strange identification with Freud, which sometimes made him suggest that deconstruction was a form of psychoanalysis. We cannot dispense with questioning the intrinsic relation between the philosopher’s subjectivity, for example, the intimate challenge of belonging that he questions, and the elaboration of his philosophical thought. We know, moreover, how much he himself has always been anxious to question this relation, recalling that every philosopher is first and foremost a living subject, that he has a personal life, a subjectivity, a body. It is the idea amply illustrated (and which he deliberately wanted and accepted) in the American documentary which was devoted to him in 2003, under the title “Derrida” and in which one sees him in the hairdressing saloon to have his hair cut or dine in his residence in the suburbs of Paris. Perhaps there were excesses in this documentary; we can imagine that some people were able to cry out against narcissistic complacency, but the fundamental idea remains: any thought is incarnated in a body. Just as Freud showed that there was sexual drive at the basis of every sublimated act, Derrida showed that there was triviality at the basis of all thought, even if it was brilliant. It was perhaps also the strength of Derrida’s philosophy to support this exhibition of his life. Derrida elaborates in one of his texts a paradoxical topology of the notion of belonging, a figure that one might say disfigure belonging and which would be like the antidote of our old exhausted notions of

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being-together. In the paradoxical topology explored by Jacques Derrida starting from his very first texts, figures such as supplement, trace and hymen defeat the stability of relationships of inclusion and belonging. In the face of these paradoxical redefinitions of belonging which he has constantly sought, how can we conceive of a new politics of beingtogether? We would like to address this question primarily because it is essential to understand the academic discussion that has emerged clearly in the last two decades as direct political reflection of Derrida, even though, as he has often rightly repeated, all his thought since the beginning was political. Secondly because it can allow us to put forward a reflection on what we can continue to think in Derrida’s company. In the exordium of his Specters of Marx, he imagined someone coming forward saying: “I would like to learn to live finally”. He then continues to explain this: “The time of the learning to live, a time without tutelary present, would amount to this, to which the exordium is leading us: to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts […] And this being-with specters would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations” (Derrida 1994: xvi–xviii). Let us come back to the broad question of the community that Derrida took up for reflection following Nietzsche and Bataille and in the light of the debate between Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot. The reflection of Jean-Luc Nancy in his work The Inoperative Community, originally published as an article in 1982, was primarily a project of questioning the failure of the very idea of community after the collapse of the communist ideal. His book began as follows: “The gravest and most painful testimony of the modern world, the one that possibly involves all other testimonies to which this epoch must answer (…) is the testimony of the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community. Communism, as Sartre said, is ‘the unsurpassable horizon of our time’” (Nancy 1991: 1). It is from this Sartrean declaration, so cruelly disowned by history, that Jean-Luc Nancy begins his assertion. What communism emboldened, the desire for a place of the community rediscovered beyond social divisions, is no longer valid. Nancy adds that “the individual is merely the residue of the experience of the dissolution of community” (Nancy 1991: 3). We know that the text of Nancy is a dialogue with Maurice Blanchot who focuses in particular on the meaning to be given to the words communism and community. For this reason, communism and community always bear

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what he calls a “flaw in language” if “we sense that they carry something completely other than what could be common to those who would belong to a whole, a group, a council, a collective, even where they deny belonging to it, whatever the form of that denial” (Blanchot 1988: 1). The whole question was indeed to know (and this is an idea that will be taken up by Derrida) if in any community there is not necessarily something of the other, of difference, in other words, anything other than the collective and the totality. And in this case, should we not think of the individual other than as a mere residue of a community that has disintegrated—thus curbing a certain common presumption of a triumphant individualism of Western societies? Derrida often asserted that he was not very communitarian and that he believed in a possibility of community, but a community without a community or, as Blanchot said, a membership without belonging. Derrida neither stigmatizes the rise of the individual nor sees in the individual a mere residue of the dissolution of the community. He constantly rethinks and reinvents another articulation between the individual and the community, an articulation that complicates the supposed stable limits between the two and shows how no boundary is clear and perfect. Then every sphere overflows within its limits, it opens and disseminates itself, it contaminates what in the other believed itself sheltered within its own borders. For Derrida there is something between the individual and the community, which sets both in motion, distorts and defeats them, makes them pass into each other, forbidding them to at odds with each other. Between the individual and the community, there is this strange figure which he calls the specter. The specter is neither private nor public. Crossing the borders of the individual and the community, it is at the same time the bereaved memory of my own death and the infinite horde of the ghosts of all wars, exterminations, oppressions—thus the specter of communism returns to haunt us. The conclusion of Specters of Marx is that one must learn to live with the specter. A scholar of the future “should learn to live by learning not how to make conversation with the ghost but how to talk with him, with her, how to let them speak or how to give them back speech, even if it is in oneself, in the other, in the other in oneself: they are always there, specters, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet. They give us to rethink the ‘there’ as soon as we open our mouths” (Derrida 1994: 221). The specter, which does not belong to any place but which haunts is perhaps another figure of the philosopher

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in equilibrium, suspended above the void, fantasizing here and elsewhere, outside and inside, dead and living, always alive, standing in the untenable, the unthinkable. The question of belonging, by definition, is bound to remain in abeyance. We must therefore continue to think of Derrida’s “belonging without belonging” and theorize it.

Hybridity: Third Space and Negotiation Bhabha finds in the post-colonial literature, “a restless apprehension about who one is—as an individual, a group or a community—and the complexities of forming a global perspective” (Bhabha 1994: xix). This reality convokes the postcolonial subject, whether individual or community, to an exercise of the reconstruction of one’s identity. This cannot be done without taking into account the facts of history, facts that raise questions requiring clear answers: What have I done? What did I endure? What changes have taken place? What do I do now? The postcolonial subject will have to analyse these facts concerning his/her life, in other words his/her “narrative identity”, in order to be able to consider the continuation. Obviously, colonization has introduced an unexpected cultural plurality among the colonized peoples. On the linguistic, religious, economic and political levels, new structures have been established. The ardent struggles set up by the generation of the colonial period against the intrusion of the imperialists and the novelties they brought were not entirely resistant. History tells us that despite their efforts, a new culture was established either by supplanting or merging with indigenous culture, leading eventually to a cultural dislocation for the colonized people. It should be noted, however, that this was the case for societies where indigenous peoples were colonized on their own territory, for example in Africa. This was much more complex for cases of deportation and slavery. With the cultural crossroads, the former colonies attest to a hybridity which, of course, acts on their identity. The anxiety which results from hybridity characterizes postcolonial world. Hybridity in this case becomes agonizing because it allows us to glimpse a past that was once glorious, but now lost forever; it is the attestation of a break in the continuity of an original lifestyle, without any presentation of a clear path towards the future. Hybridization is a problem for affected people because it is not clear about culture or identity. Moreover, the complexity of choosing between the different cultures involved can be painful, unpleasant and distressing, given that each choice always

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has consequences. Bhabha himself knows this experience when living and studying in England, he felt a strong desire to be in India he says: “I went to Oxford to embellish the antique charms of the armoire; I ended up realizing how much I desired street food” (Bhabha 1994: 7–8). Towards the end of colonialism, English-speaking African writers decided on the question of language to be adopted in their literary productions. At the conference in Kampala, Uganda, in 1962, a controversy arose and, according to the positions taken, expressions such as “tremendous betrayal” and “sense of guilt” have appeared in the writings of some of them after the conference. Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o, reflecting on the impact of the conference years later, wonders why the African writers had to use English when a large population of Africa do not speak English. For him, “African” and “English-speaking” was a conflictual association (Ten 2011: 2–3). In his own words: “The bullet was the means of the physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation” (wa Thiong’o 1986: 9). This is the emerging complexity of a hybrid situation. Both the difficulty of adapting to new developments and the impossibility of reconstructing the past have led the postcolonial world to be on crossroads with identity. In this age of globalization, the cultural and linguistic domains present a reality that does not provide a solution for those who seek authenticity. According to Bhabha, this is the era in which cultures intersect and people move in-between the cultural traditions, which sometimes lead to unresolved tensions between cultures and end up aggravating the question of identity. Facilitated by mutation in the channels of communication and changes in the means of communication, globalization has the effect of multiplying contacts between people and groups from different corners of the world, which means placing together different cultures and the identities associated with them. This coexistence of cultures can lead either to tolerance and accommodation, or intolerance resulting from abnormal conditions such as xenophobia. Nevertheless, globalization, despite its benefits to the world, such as the privileges of bilingualism or multilingualism and the advantages of multinational associations, reveals a new hegemonic reality that refers to that of the era of colonization, namely linguistic and cultural hegemony. In the latter resides the issue of unresolved identity. Hybrid situations, although alien, offer a way out. These hybrid situations correspond to third spaces which are always contrary to the pure positions through which they emerge. Without any obligation to comply with the requirements of the parties that constitute it, the hybrid subject has all the

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possibility of positioning himself/herself in the third space and to be transformed in a new direction. This space in-between, which he also calls the interstice, allows the subject to see things more objectively. This becomes possible because “these ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood—singular or communal— that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself” (Bhabha 1994: 2). It is a sort of liminal space from which the subject negotiates his position, finally to decide on his identity beyond the trouble initiated by the hybrid context. “It is in the emergence of the interstices—the overlap and displacement of domains of difference—that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated” (Bhabha 1994: 1). Bhabha’s ideas of working from the gap and of narrative identity are illustrated by Saïd, who in his own life, turns his experience of exile into something fruitful. He confesses that he had the feeling of belonging neither to the United States nor to Palestine, but in-between these two countries. Taking advantage of this third space, Saïd faces challenges and refuses any assignment of identity, thus maintaining the right to negotiate for himself who he is and who he would like to become. The exile that makes Saïd dive into a hybrid situation, becomes for him, not a punitive reality, but a new terrain to explore and to enhance. Saïd transforms the idea of exile into a liberating concept and finds solutions to the problems associated with identity. Saïd subtly establishes a relationship between the university and identity. The role of the academic environment is very important for this theorist in his debate about identity. The international and even internal struggles of nations have always had an effect on the identity o f a people. Colonization, for example, almost destroyed the identity of certain peoples. Once freedom is restored, the stage of building or reconstructing the national identity begins, which normally involves teaching. Consequently, schools and universities always have a mission to carry out projects in the political arena. This is problematic because national identity, despite its few merits, tends to be restricted; limiting people to what is one’s own. In order to assert a national identity, governments are often tempted to insist on the teaching of what is one’s own. As a result, the school and the university are involved in teaching what belongs exclusively to the internal culture of the country. This can be an understandable action on the part of nations, as Saïd explains that “all cultures teach

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about themselves and all cultures naturally assert their supremacy over others” (Saïd 2000: 395). However, the author has some reservations because according to him the exclusive imparting of one’s own culture and tradition through education centred on oneself, only tends to show its hegemony over others. But identity is constructed and it is not static at all. Moreover, it is not given by anyone. This construction must be realized according to what surrounds us including others who are different, whom we come to experience and from whom we can learn. Considering the impact of fortified national identities, cultural conflicts and power relations that characterize the world today, Saïd holds that the solution can be found in the academic field. He therefore addresses the issue of identity through the concept of freedom within educational institutions, including the university. Saïd’s vision is amply clear when he addresses the question of the status of Palestine. The Palestinians, he said, who are deprived of their schools and major universities by the Israelis in order to “deny, efface, and otherwise render impossible the existence of a Palestinian national identity… long for the day when they can practice their self-determination in an independent state of their own, when Palestinian universities and schools can instruct young people in the history and traditions of Arab culture and in those of the other cultures that make up human history” (Saïd 2000: 397–398). In affirming this, Saïd underlines the important role of the university and the intellectual in the construction of identity. This responsibility of the intellectual, however, demands that the he/she should be detached from all kinds of adhesions pertaining to identity, for, he says, “If the academy is to be aplace for the realization not of the nation but of the intellect—and that, Ithink, is the academy’s reason for being—then the intellect must not becoercively held in thrall to the authority of the national identity” (Saïd 2000: 396). On this point, Saïd invites the intellectuals to undergo the experience of exiled subjects. Forced to address the question of his own identity when the war between Palestinians and Israelis broke out in 1967, the young Saïd decided to opt for a Palestinian identity given his cultural roots. Later, however, he had to reconsider this position when, visiting Palestine with his family, he realized that it would no longer be his home, that he would never feel at home there. Drawing on his personal experience, Saïd transposes the experience of exile to another level, that of the university, aimed at the intellectual, for he finds in his status as an exile, the solution to internal conflicts.

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Using metaphorically the notion of voyage, he proposes to consider the university as a place to travel freely: “We must always view the academy as a place to voyage in, owningnone of it but at home everywhere in it” (Saïd 2000: 402). Thus the intellectual, like the traveller, “must suspend the claim ofcustomary routine in order to live in new rhythms and rituals. Most of all, andmost unlike the potentate who must guard only one place and defend itsfrontiers, the traveller crosses over, traverses territory, and abandons fixedpositions, all the time” (Saïd 2000: 403). “What is necessary for this is the academic freedom at its highest, since one of its main features is that you can leave authority and dogma to the potentate” (Saïd 2000: 403). This is an identity of exile, without any compartmentalization, by which the intellectual becomes more or less winged, having the capacity to overcome any barrier which might hinder his progress. Saïd actually called intellectuals to a metaphorical exile, because, as an exiled, the intellectual “cannot identify at all with the triumphalism of one identity because the loss and deprivation of the others are so much more urgent” (Saïd 2000: 397).

Conclusion The impossibility of a unique, compartmentalized identity invites us to adopt an exilic existence that allows us to cut across disciplines within the human and social sciences without compromising the rigour of scientific research. The notion of an exiled intellectual liberates us from all enslaving identities of closure. In so doing, it places the task of orienting society in the hands of intellectuals with regard to choices or the construction of identity. They can achieve this only insofar as they get rid of any limiting and crippling identity in order to be able to have the intellectual competence on multiple disciplines while interacting with people without feeling restricted. In other words, intellectuals must aspire to an exilic identity in order to lead society towards liberating identity choices that are likely to survive in the future. We are thus summoned to an exilic identity, to an existence that is, in fact, beyond any fixed identity, resisting all that attempt to reduce us to one singular identity and thus belonging to a community without belonging.

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References Benjamin, Walter. 1968. The Task of the Translator. In Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. and Intro. Hannah Arendt. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Blanchot, Maurice. 1988. The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris. Barrytown: Station Hill Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1974. White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy, trans. F.C.T. Moore. New Literary History 4 (1): 5–74. Derrida, Jacques. 1985. The Ear of the Other, ed. Christie V. MacDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Schocken Books. Derrida, Jacques. 1888. Signature Event Context. In Limited Inc., 1–25. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1992. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hegel, G.W.F. 1896. Philosophy of Right, trans. S.W. Dyde. London: G. Bell. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Malraux, André. 1974. La Tête d’Obsidienne. Paris: Gallimard. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1991. The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Saïd, Edward. 2000. Reflection on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ten, Kristina S. 2011. Vehicles for Story: Chinua Achebe and Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o on Defining African Literature, Preserving Culture and Self. Student Pulse 3 (5): 2–14. wa Thiong’o, N. 1986. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Portsmouth: Heinemann Educational Books.

CHAPTER 3

Siva Tantra Rediscovered: Transforming the Etic Routes and Emic Roots of Indian Spirituality Justin M. Hewitson

´ Siva Tantra’s legacy of secrecy and inter-traditional assimilation has left its common spiritual origin almost indiscernible. Most studies of Tantra commence with the caveat that it is no longer a single system but has roots across Asia and the West, evidenced by the earlier development of Hindu and Buddhist tantric sects, which continue to spread across “sectarian boundaries” and “spiritual” spaces (Gray 2016: 1). As a ramified spiritual tradition, Tantra’s branches are uniquely hybrid, making it all but impossible to navigate the prehistorical routes it took before crossing paths with India’s other great religions. Nevertheless, records suggest Tantra agitated against ritualism with its spiritual concepts and meditative praxes that encouraged adherents to realize universal consciousness. Long before Tantra’s appearance in texts, it was transmitted directly from guru to practitioner. This oral “route” was mostly ignored by etic colonial

J. M. Hewitson (B) National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. K. Giri (ed.), Roots, Routes and a New Awakening, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7122-0_3

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scholars who preserved their “objectivity” by elevating textual studies over ethnographic data. This one-dimensional journey through India’s spiritual episteme fed anachronistic histories, political and religious divisions, and ´ misrepresented Sad¯as´iva’s (Siva) message of spiritual universalism to his prehistorical milieu that, at the time, was negatively impacted by ritualism and conflict. However, the erstwhile limited focus of Eurocentric studies is expanding because comparative studies have introduced new routes to understanding Tantra’s roots and spiritual philosophy. Tantra’s transmission from the tenth century to the present stretches along somewhat discernible—if highly variegated—routes, but its ancient origins remain hotly contested. The earliest emic claim to a founding ´ figure centers around the mythologized Siva who codified India’s protoyogic meditations into a mystical system that granted dedicated Tantric ´ meditators moks.a, “spiritual liberation.” While Siva Tantra’s origin is obscured by the complex religious transformations that preceded its ´ founder’s advent seven thousand years ago, Siva’s pervasive imprint remains visible in India’s surviving oral traditions and in Vedic or Buddhist sects. Contemporary scholar-practitioners over the last two decades have also begun to reinterpret older philological and archaeological research within the context of indigenous historiographies. New findings suggest that India’s pre-textual era, from roughly ten to two thousand BCE, was a period of spiritual and planetary transformations that echo into the present era. The horse-riding Aryan migrants, who brought the major propitiatory elements of the Vedic religion into India, encountered the prototypical forms of meditation practiced by segments of the indigenous ´ Tantra. During this ancient period there were population that became Siva ´ regular internecine conflicts. According to Sarkar, Siva strove to unite the various warring factions under a common spiritual ideology that subsequently generated the new religious and spiritual ideas which permeated the Vedas, Puranas, Tantras, and Buddhist works. The earliest Rigveda and the subsequent Vedas demonstrate a peculiar admixture of ceremonial Sanskrit and esoteric content indicative of these entangled and widely misunderstood roots. This is partially because the Rigveda’s polyvalent Sanskrit seemingly contains hidden esoteric meaning, so all translations are necessarily interpretive. It was not until recently that a critical English translation of the work was published. Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton’s 2014 opus, The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India states that its 1028 hymns were the “beginning” and one of the “paramount expressions of both the

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religious tradition and the literary tradition” reflecting the Vedic poets’ engagement with the “complex and ultimately impenetrable mysteries of the cosmos” (2014: 2–3). Much of our present misunderstandings about ´ Siva Tantra’s presence in the ancient metaphysical efforts of Vedic era poets stems from the purported seven millennia gap since Tantra’s inception and a lack of academic engagement with the ideas of emic Tantric gurus who might explicate arcane Vedic and Sanskrit instructions and philosophy. From a strictly academic perspective, the lack of decipherable written records in the roughly ten thousand years of oral transmission that preceded the first written appearance of the Rigveda, circa 1500 BCE, makes emic historiographies polemical, but it is undeniable that these seminal spiritual works came from a strictly oral prehistory. Ancient spiritual metaphysics were probably first articulated around campfires in the Proto-Indo-European language. This mother language morphed into the Vedic, Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Greek spoken by mystics in caves and forests. By examining the oral roots and the textual routes of Tantra’s emergence in India’s spiritual traditions, it is possible to explain the ´ apparent differences between Siva Tantra’s pure monism and its maligned antinomian influences on Buddhism. When it comes to India’s spiritual history, informed emic narratives do not serve as mere mythmaking but richly interpretive accounts of Tantra’s prehistory that could contextualize ´ later spiritual texts and commentary during the eras when Siva Tantra and the Vedic religion intermingled. Moreover, while we have no way to ascertain how much ancient material is lost, the writings on the Vedas, Upanis.ads, Buddhist P¯ali Canon, and Tantras penned in Sanskrit, Pali, ´ Mandarin, and other scripts map some of the blurred routes that Siva Tantra took prior to 5000 BCE. At the very least new—and perhaps more accurate—ways of understanding this shared history are relevant to the one and a half billion Indians who have inherited the pathologies of political, religious, colonial, and historical divisions built on historically distorted narratives. Etic Indologists generally agree that the Aryan’s polytheistic Vedic religion was primarily sacerdotal, entreating protection from pantheistic divinities like the life-giving Saraswati River. No consensus exists ´ regarding Siva Tantra’s prehistorical presence or independence from Vedic and Buddhist sources. However, the contemporary philosopher and Tantric guru, P. R. Sarkar (1921–1990) presents Shivology as his radical

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´ revisionary history of the “historical Sad¯ashiva.” He claims Siva introduced a system of yogic metaphysics, ethics, and meditative praxes that was “roughly divided” into the “crude” and “subtle” paths to India’s Neolithic agricultural cultures around 5500 BCE (Ánandamúrti 1994: ´ tantric philosophy of universal monism united some of India’s 46).1 Siva’s warring Aryan and indigenous clans under a common spiritual ideology. Tantra’s left-hand, avidy¯ a, and right-hand, vidy¯ a approaches to liberation and power rerouted their primitive desires toward universal consciousness. Sarkar explains Tantra’s overtly transgressive and subtle s¯ adhan¯ as are encapsulated in the Sanskrit advaitadvait¯ advaita, translated as “nondualistic cum dualistic monism”: a fundamental non-dualism both open to “pluralism and spiritual devotionalism” (Kang 2011: 303). Sarkar’s answer to the paradox of dualistic monism is that meditators’ realize spiritual liberation or moks.a by objectively approaching their spiritual ideology while making subjective adjustments according to temporal and personal ´ constraints. Siva Tantra therefore regulates humanity’s diverse inclinations through psychospiritual exercises that actualize a universal outlook. Exposing the roots of India’s spiritual identity requires challenging emic and etic accounts with comparative methods that are sensitive to the agendas of previous Indological research. The last few decades of scholarship into India’s religious history show greater sensitivity to the previous biases that negatively impacted our understanding of Tantra’s pervasive influence. Consequently, Western Indologists like Hugh B. Urban and Christopher Wallis have questioned whether non-initiates can or should analyze the “emphatically esoteric” discipline. Given these concerns, this essay’s comparative approach considers both etic research and emic studies to open new pathways into India’s ancient spiritual identity. The overarching aim is to outline the conflicted etic narratives and Tantra’s transformation by surveying Sarkar’s emic discourses on Tantra’s ´ clouded beginnings. This is not intended to idolize Siva Tantra or cement its authority but to propose that millennia of complex linguistic and religious changes cannot be addressed without interdisciplinary and trans´ traditional dialogues. From Sarkar’s perspective, forgetting Siva’s universal objectives allowed later religious and identity politics to undermine his inclusive spiritual ideology. With this in mind, Sohail Inayatullah sees “Shiva” as an “extra-historical” teacher who “existed empirically” yet went on to play “a grand and mythological role in righting the balance of the world” (2002: 13). Inayatullah also situates Sarkar within the Indian episteme as his “universal” teachings parallel that of “tracts on

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Indian historical figures” such as Shiva, Krishna, and other Indian philosophers (36). I propose that analyzing Sarkar’s informed emic positions and parsing scholarship facilitates a reconceptualization of Tantra’s roots while reestablishing its transcendental identity from India’s contested spiritual past. An accurate history of this past may never be fully revealed and is anyway beyond the scope of any single work. Notwithstanding these qualifiers, the first section of this study presents a comparative etic anal´ ysis of Siva Tantra’s historical transformations which integrates multiple perspectives under the lens of Tantra-Yoga as a fundamentally practical spiritual science: Tantric meditators seek to unite ¯ atman “ipseity” with Nirgun.a Brahma “Metaseity,” or cosmic consciousness. This survey ´ of etic and emic research articulates an unknown picture of Siva’s widespread presence in Indian philosophies of path and purpose. It incorporates the Aryan migration/invasion theory, Vedic religious developments, and linguistic transformations. The emic component of the study ´ presents Sarkar’s contention that Siva was the first enlightened master or “Sadguru,” subsequently deified by the Brahmanical and Buddhist traditions, to teach the universal science of spiritual s¯ adhan¯ a “meditation” around 7500 BCE that later became known as Tantra-Yoga. The concluding section argues for Sarkar’s position, in light of Tantra’s roots, that a Tantric is any “person who, irrespective of caste, creed or religion, aspires for spiritual expansion or does something concrete” directed at this aim. From Sarkar’s emic position, we see that Tantra’s liminal status derives from the fact that it is “neither a religion nor an ism” but a “fundamental spiritual science.” (Ánandamúrti 1994: 22). This understanding of Tantric universalism highlights Ananta Kumar Giri’s introductory statement to this collection that realizing spiritual and material togetherness requires that we “create a new category of sahadharma” as a path toward “togetherness” that transcends the “existing discourse of self and other.” ´ Finally, I propose that Siva Tantra’s ancient rejection of all dualities make it a viable path to neo-humanistic realizations.

Tangled Roots, New Routes Tantra’s history has become an intractable gestalt of fact and fiction as Indologists try to unravel the complex interweaving of archaeological evidence, religious myth, secret oral traditions, and centuries of philosophical development. Modern scholars face over two centuries of

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research and vitriolic debate on these issues: internet forums and academic venues show opposing sides accusing different studies of poor scholarship, eisegesis, Indian nationalism, colonial agenda, and Nazism.2 Vocal supporters of early Indo versus a late Aryan aetiology of the Vedas include respected authorities on both sides. Michael Witzel extols the commonly accepted 1500 BCE timeframe against the “fringe” element’s tenth to third millennium BCE chronology. Frawley and Rajaram contend all evidence points to India’s “indigenous” heritage going back to the “last Ice Age 10,000 years ago” (2009: ix) and that yogins discovered “paths to spiritual knowledge” in approximately 10,000 BCE (13). Regardless of these arguments, the Rigveda’s textual appearance in 1500 BCE marks the academic starting point of the historical record, followed by the subsequent blending of Tantra, Shaivism, Yoga, Buddhism, Jainism, and Puranic thought. Hugh B. Urban nicely sums up the West’s “imaginings of Tantra”—which “has been anything but a simple process or the result of a straightforward, linear narrative.” Instead, it is the “result of a tangled genealogy, as conflicted and contested as the history of encounters between India and the West over the past several hundred years” (2003: 14). According to Stuart Sarbacker, changes to Tantra and Yoga made them “products of particular historical moments,” both “shaped,” and possibly “determined, in important ways by the changing political, economic and other social factors in Indic religious history” (Bronkhorst et al. 2011: 303). These influences suggest that examining Tantra’s roots demands renegotiating two centuries of research shaped by political, religious, and academic perspectives that frequently strayed from indigenous understanding. The first etic narratives stood on dubious colonial era philological and archaeological interpretation; nationalism and religious maneuvering also tainted many of the initial “historical” studies. George Feuerstein notes the received view of Tantra as an “exceptionally ramified and complex esoteric tradition” that “appeared in the middle of the first millennium,” reaching maturity “around 1000 CE in the philosophical School of Abhinava Gupta.” However, he points out that practitioners “claim a far longer history” as evidenced by “Tantra-like ideas and practices” uncovered “in traditions and teachings of a much earlier era” (1998: x). A prime example of the historical dispute concerns the prehistorical proto-Shiva seals, held by some as evidence for Tantra’s existence prior to—or parallel with— the Aryan Vedic religion. Edwin Bryant’s Quests for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indian Aryan Debate examines the claims that the “so-called

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Pasupati proto-Siva seal” found in the Indus Valley depicting an “ithy´ phallic figure on some kind of a seat in yogic posture” represents Siva. The seated figure is “surrounded by a number of animals” with an indecipherable “inscription above it” (2004: 162). Bryant notes the popular interpretation given by Sir John Marshall in 1930 that the figure was “recognizable at once as a prototype of the historic Shiva” because the figure has “three faces … sometimes ascribed [to] certain forms of Siva.” ´ Resolving this debate would put Tantra’s terminus a quo and Siva’s presence two millennia earlier than the Rigveda’s currently accepted 1500 BCE composition. This could validate Tantra-Yoga’s independent presence in the philosophical worldview of the indigenous population, but we will have to wait on further comparative studies and archaeological discoveries to conclusively settle this debate. Urban’s Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion, notes the inclusion of key term Tantra in the Rig and AtharvaVedas is neither clear nor fixed, yet researchers generally agree P¯aninffi’s interpretation of Tantra derives from the verbal root “tan” which means to “stretch, to spread, or to weave, and, metaphorically, to lay out, to explain, or to espouse.” The verb tan used in the “classic cosmogonic hymn (RV 10.90)” describes “the sacrificial dismemberment of the primordial man, Purus.a”: When the gods spread out (atanvata) the sacrifice with the Man as the offering, spring was the clarified butter, summer the fuel, autumn the oblation … (T)he gods, spreading the sacrifice, bound the Man as the sacrificial beast (RV I0.90.6,15). (2003: 25)

Larson claims tantra first appears in the “R . g. Veda in the sense of a ‘loom’ and the fabric on a loom,” and argues Tantric philosophy did not exist prior 1500 BCE. This aside, he states the term Yoga first appears in the “Taittir¯ıyaUpanis.ad (11.4.1) and then in the Kat.ha ´ a´svataraUpanis.ads (11.3.11 and 11.11 respectively).” These and Svet¯ texts were composed after the “Rg. Veda.” and Yoga appears “widely in the epic and puranic literature”; elements of Tantra-Yoga tradition are also clearly evident in “classical Sanskrit literature,” yet tantra does appear in the much earlier “RigVeda.” Larson does not find either terms in the earliest or main Upanisadic literature (2009: 489–490).

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Tantra’s efflorescence and growth in the first millennium of the common era is readily evidenced by the textual commentary of Kashmiri Shaivism. Christopher Wallis’s superb Tantra Illuminated notes that most of India’s recognized Tantric works appeared around the middle of the first millennium, but “hundreds of major” and “thousands of minor” Tantric texts were composed over the next thousand years until the sixteenth century. By as early as the third to the fifth centuries CE, tantra could refer to several sciences; nevertheless, while a Tantra might be “any sort of book,” their teachings were supposedly inspired by ´ Siva. In contrast to Sarkar’s inclusive spiritual perspective, Tantra became linked with systems formulated “within a specific sacred text” (2012: 25). ´ Following Siva Tantra’s diversification, “the sectarian turn” of “certain ´ Buddhist and Saiva” traditions resulted in “yoga and Tantra” embodying “dramatically different meanings,” and even though nascent sectarian developments existed earlier, there is little “textual evidence” of their practice before 500 CE (2012: 491). It is worth noting that detailed contemporary studies of Kashmiri Shaivism have constructed a relatively clear view of Tantra’s later developments, and outstanding research has done more to open Tantric studies over the last half-century than any other Indological discipline (Goodall 2011: 121). Still, the emic claims of Tantra’s prehistorical roots are not easily validated when textual scholarship carries more weight than ethnographic research that delves into the direct undercurrent of history and philosophy transmitted from guru to student. Given the broad spectrum of Tantric systems, is it possible to identify Tantra as a deified religion, antinomian counterculture, or a social movement that attempts to circumvent racial divides and sexual hege´ mony? Alexis Sanderson states that Saivism constitutes multiple “distinct but historically related systems” made up of “theology, ritual, observance and yoga” that are transmitted as the instructions of the “Hindu ´ deity Siva” (1988: 601). Western researchers have adopted Sanderson’s influential divisions: the “Mantram¯arga, or ‘way of mantras,’” and the “Atim¯arga” of the “non-Tantric P¯as´upata religions” from which Saivism supposedly “sprung”3 (Frazier 2011: 124). These two paths are similar ´ to Siva’s crude and subtle approaches to spirituality that subsequently became confused as hedonism or antinomianism. Furthermore, many Buddhist and Hindu traditions criticize Tantra’s misunderstood praxes without realizing their debt to Tantric influences. Different traditions with antinomian elements within their own sects push these developments on

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to other religions: contemporary Hindu academics tend to “blame Tantra on the Buddhists” while Buddhist researchers return the “compliment” or claim that “Buddhist Tantric practices” were “pure and compassionate” directed at the highest spiritual aims—unlike the debased forms of Hindu Tantra. Both perspectives ignore that “Saivas and Buddhists borrowed extensively from each other” without acknowledging the degree to which they depended on each other (Samuel 2008: 232). What is undeniable is that Tantra, more than any other tradition, has historically crossed a spectrum of boundaries to challenge divisions with a unified approach to spiritual progress. New Tantric scholarship has also begun to permeate the etic–emic divide, allowing for traditional definitions and histories to carry greater weight than foreign interpretations. Mark Dyczkowski claims the proto´ Tantric “oral traditions” underpinned an evolving body of mystical Saiva literature that was independent Ved¯anta (1988: 4). Marcus Bussey sees Tantra as a practical meditative tradition whose “worldview” stemmed from the “indigenous pre-Aryan Indian culture,” which influenced other mystical traditions to generate the neo-Tantras of “popular Western culture” (1998: 708). Thomas McEvilly suggests proto-Tantric systems existed prior to Aryan migration, and Saiva practitioners go back “to the Indus Valley culture and beyond” (2002: 229). To summarize this admittedly condensed overview of these conflicts, Tantra is no longer considered a single system: correctly speaking numerous sects of Tantra exist based on Tantric texts, which involve several major lineages that ´ Sarkar contends originated from Siva’s ancient teachings. Tantra has become a complex “protean phenomenon” that is “practically impossible to define” (Padoux 2002: 17). Even within the Indian subcontinent, it is misunderstood, and “the sectarian turn” that took place as Tantra and Buddhism interacted led to yoga and tantra having considerably different ´ meanings, despite their shared Siva origin. In this regard, although prehistorical Tantra-Yoga was undocumented, we know Gautama Buddha did ´ yogic meditations associated with Siva Tantra before the creation of Buddhism.

´ Sarkar on Siva’s Transhistorical Identity in Indian Culture The ancient formation of Indian society and culture has fueled political and religious debates, with the most contentious argument centering

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on the Aryan invasion/migration theory. While the theory successfully explains India’s different genetic makeup and partially addresses the causes of casteism, it is impossible to overstate the historical suffering caused by privileging groups who controlled religious authority in India— a phenomena that continues in contemporary religious and political domains across the Indian subcontinent. Modern genotyping strongly indicates that India was an early melting pot of Asian and Caucasian DNA, language, and culture. But well before genetic studies demonstrated this blending, Sarkar asserted that prior to 10,000 BCE, India was inhabited by the “Austrico-Negroid-Mongoloid races” who mainly lived in the northwest. Caucasians from the central portions of southern Russia gradually entered through northern India in search of fertile lands. The assimilation of “Aryan” DNA was prevalent in the “north and west,” with relatively less “in the south and east of India.” The warlike Aryans spoke “a distorted Vedic language” that influenced the dialects of the Austrico-Negroid-Mongoloid races (2006b: Par. 6). Ultimately, the Sanskrit “dialects” of groups, including the “Kash, the Scythians, the Euchi, the South Ku´sán, etc.” were altered by this interaction (2009: 3). And by the time classical Sanskrit appeared, it was a combination of prehistorical indigenous Sanskrit dialects and Aryan Vedic. We do not have a timeframe for these blendings as the Aryans migrated into India, but according to Sarkar Aryans continued to enter India after the ´ ´ historical Siva’s birth in 5500 BCE. He claims Siva understood “the ´ Vedic language and the Vedic religion,” and references to Siva occur in later portions of the “Vedas” and other Tantric texts but not in the most “ancient texts” because the lack of written scripts during India’s ´ prehistory obscured these original references (2009: 3). Moreover, Siva’s injunction against publicly disseminating Tantra’s powerful meditations (which continues in Sarkar’s system and other Tantric traditions) suggest why none of the ancient Tantric praxes appears in the oldest portions of ´ the Rigveda. Although Siva’s teachings may have waned, his myth spread throughout India’s spiritual milieu. The mutual interaction of Vedic language, indigenous dialects, and spiritual ideas that Sarkar examines in the early phases of Aryan migration has been followed by other Indologists. Nicholas J Allen’s analysis of Thomas McEvilly’s seminal study into Indo-Greek connections, The Shape of AncientThought, details McEvilly’s argument that the existence of “massive” philosophical similarities between ancient Greek and ancient

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India came from “Mesopotamian ideas” that spread eastward and westward, while Indian thought moved west “via Greek-Indian encounters within the Achaemenid Empire.” Allen theorizes that a common “IndoEuropean” origin existed as Indo-European linguistic similarities were not due to chance: similar words must have descended “independently from the ancestral language.” Simply put, a shared ancestor to Greek and Sanskrit could have given rise to “similar ideas” echoing the old ideas of the ancestral language (2005: 59–60). As it stands, we do not know whether an earlier Proto-Indo-European “common ancestor” of Greek, Sanskrit, and Hittite was in use before 3500 BCE (2005: 72). However, these hypothesized influences dovetail with Sarkar’s argument that the Aryans borrowed words and concepts found in the Indic worldview and that Vedic was the “tie amongst the recognized tongues of the ancient world.” Samskrta ´ or Sanskrit, which means “reformed or repaired language,” evolved from Vedic as the general masses gradually adopted a similar language. According to Sarkar, there were three types of Vedic pronunciation: “Rg Vedic, Yajur Vedic and Artharva Vedic.” For example, Samskrta ´ in “Rg Vedic is Samskrta”; ´ in Yajur Vedic, “Samskrata”; and in Atharva Vedic; “Samskruta” (2006c: Par. 24–25). Sarkar claims The Rigveda was the “chief Veda in ancient times” because the system of “Vedic initiation” was based on the “Savitr Rk” ´ that appears in the “first man´ dala of the Rgveda” which is composed in the “gáyattriimetre” and depends on eight syllables per line: Tatsaviturvarenya ´ m ´ Bhargodevasyadhiimahi Dhiyoyo nah pracodayát The Supreme Father who did create the seven strata of manifestation – we meditate on His divine effulgence so that He may guide our intellect towards the path of blessedness. (2006c: Par. 12–15)

Sarkar’s analysis of the first line reveals only seven syllables: “tat, sa, vi, tur, va, re and nyam,” ´ violating the “unwritten grammatical rules” of the period. Later on, “om ´ bhúrbhuvah-svah” was prefixed and suffixed to the Rk, but this was expropriated from the “Atharvaveda” to more effectively express the addition of “meditating on the excellent effulgence of Savitá” and the “collective expression of the seven layered manifestation of Parama Brahma: bhúrbhuvah-svah-maha-jana-tapa-satya.” This

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was a shortened expression of the “crude, subtle and causal worlds” in the form of “bhúrbhuvah-svah.” Sarkar explains the proper pronunciation of the mantra reads as follows: om ´ bhúrbhuva-svah om ´ tatsaviturvarenya ´ m ´ BhargodevasyadhiimahiDom” ´ ‘in this bhúr-bhuvah-svah, that is, crude, hiyoyo nah pracodayát subtle and causal worlds, we are meditating on the excellent effulgence of Savitá, or the father, so that he might guide our dhii, or intellect, to the path of truth. (2006c: Par. 18–20)

As the primary mantra of Vedic initiation, the Savitr Rk invoked the desire for spiritual teachings from the all-powerful divinity whereas Tantrics were ´ initiated into the actual practice of meditating on Siva consciousness. The Rigveda was an introductory Veda later surpassed by the Yajurveda whose “closer contact with Tantra” meant it adjusted the “spiritual world with the material world.” The Yajurveda’s “pronunciation and phonetics” therefore differed from the Rigveda. Finally, Tantra had a great influence on the composition of the “Atharvaveda” portions of the Vedas because the Aryans “learned Tantra sadhana to some extent after coming in contact with the Indian Tantrics” (2010: 251). The Atharvaveda became “mixed with Tantra at nearly every step,” causing the orthodox supporters of the Rigveda to declare followers of the Tantra influenced Atharvaveda, “social “outcasts” and establishing the orthodox injunction that “atharvánnam ´ má bhui njiitháh”—‘food of the followers of the ˆ (2006c: Par. 21–22). This orthodox Atharvaveda should not be accepted’ discrimination parallels what Ariel Glucklich justifiably calls the “IndoAryan controversy” that still feeds contemporary nationalistic and colonial “agendas” (2008: 26). ´ Sarkar’s response to these divisive forces is to reinsert Siva into Tantra’s inclusive spiritual ethos. ´ Sarkar contends the Siva myth is a shadow of the powerful historical personality and spiritual Sadguru whose spiritual teachings over the millennia were adopted and distorted by secular and religious forces, ultimately creating antinomian systems which reified power over libera´ tion and fear of Tantra. Before Siva’s advent in 5500 BCE, proto forms of mysticism developed in the ancient area of Rá´rh (Bihar) and the regions of Mithila and “Magadha,” or the Rigeda’s “KlkaTa” (Talageri 2008: 86). Tantra’s embryonic esotericism was transmitted from Guru to disciple, and this Tantric norm influenced how the Vedic religious

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teachings, known as “shruti,” or “ear,” were transmitted “from [Vedic] guru to disciple.” Over time, power-hungry Vedic authorities used their lineage to cement religious power in the hands of the Brahmanical class, subverting Tantra’s spiritual philosophy of non-distinction. Even after the first scripts appeared, the early Vedic and Tantric injunction against transmitting esoteric methods without a guru or authorized teacher present obscured Tantra’s impact on the Vedas (Sarkar 2006b). Sarkar there´ fore argues that understanding Siva’s roots in Indian spiritual life will inform a renaissance of Tantra’s transcendental soteriology that sets aside all physical, psychic, and religious attachments to ritualism and duality: ´ Shaeva Dharma [Siva Tantra] is the dharma [spiritual path] for attaining ParamaPuru´sa [Metaseity], and thus there is no external ritual in it. It does not enjoin any ritualistic offering of ghee, or any sacrifice of animal’s blood in yajina [ritual sacrifice]; it is not a path of self-gratification … dharma is the ˆpath leading to supreme attainment [italics added] not the path of animal enjoyment. (Sarkar 2009: 39)

´ Siva was the first Tantric “mahakaola” to systematize a route between duality and singularity. His Tantra reduced social disharmony by nurturing humanity’s common longing for peace through spiritual real¯ ization (Anandam¯ urti 2010: 207). Lalan Prasad Singh is another emic scholar who claims that “Lord Siva expounded the scientific and mystic tradition known as Tantra” to form the “esoteric basis of all religion” and offer a “sound philosophical foundation of spirituality” that eschews dogma and lifeless rituals because Tantra is an intuitional science (2010: ix). Sarkar’s answer to the long-debated identity of Tantra is uncovered in its etymological root: “the letter ta is the seed (sound) of dullness.” When the “verb trae suffixed by da becomes tra,” it means “that which liberates.” Tantra simply means “liberation” from the bondages of stagnation through meditation. In this regard, Stuart Sarbacker rightfully says that the “character of s¯ adhan¯ a [meditation]itself is an emphasis on the practical,” distinguishing “the tantric from the non–tantric” forms of ´ Hinduism and Buddhism (2005: 114). Siva Tantra has proven remarkably malleable to cultural changes and continues to reintroduce the world to prehistorical spiritual praxes that allow us to imagine a future of harmonious interaction fueled by a common longing for universal realization.

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Even Indologists who are apparently unaware of Sarkar’s emic historiography have echoed his idea that Tantra and Yoga are essentially different terms for the same spiritual ideology: Georg Feuerstein states Tantra-Yoga is a “unitive discipline.” (1998: 112). And Sarkar explains Yoga’s “root meaning” is not only “addition” but carries the subtler distinction of ¯ “unification” (Anandam¯ urti 2010: 2). Yoga is therefore coterminous with unifying praxes techniques that unite the self with cosmic consciousness passed from guru to disciple ages before they appeared in texts. ´ At this point, it is worth questioning how much Siva could have impacted his era, given the survival of oral transmission and beliefs over the millennia before scripts were invented testifies to the longevity of India’s prehistorical spiritual traditions. The United States Census Bureau sets global human population estimates for 5,000 BCE between two and twenty million, with a general consensus of five million (“World Population: Historical Estimates of World Population” 2013). Perhaps a quarter of the earth’s citizens lived in the fertile regions of the Indian subconti´ nent. How many of them might have encountered Siva’s ideology during his lifetime? Whatever the number, history shows a handful of dedicated individuals carried religious beliefs far beyond their nexus. We know that the ancients traveled remarkable distances, and Sarkar says Shiva covered great distances by bullock cart-. Others have suggested Tantra spread north and west as far afield as Norway. The Gundestrup Cauldron (400–100 BCE) discovered “in a peat bog in Denmark” appears to depict the “image of Pashupati or Shiva,” “strikingly similar” to the “many seals attributed to Shiva found in the Indus Valley” (Bjonnes 2011: 129). Mookerjee and Khanna also contend that Tantric precepts took root in “Nepal, Tibet, China, Japan and parts of South-East Asia.” Tantric influences are discerned in “Mediterranean cultures such as those of Egypt and Crete” (1977: 12). While Tantra diffused throughout Asia, its esoteric teachings remain closely curated, limiting deeper knowledge of the sources of its meditative praxes, so by the time the first scripts appeared in the fifth to third millennia BCE, practical Tantra had almost completely disappeared from common knowledge, but isolated pockets survived. Another factor mitigating Tantra’s complete disappearance was its assimilation and diffusion into various shamanistic and religious practices—and perhaps the predatory interests of practitioners who sought Tantra’s occult powers preserved its existence. ´ If Siva Tantra helped initiate India’s spiritual awakening, it did not ´ survive the millennia unchanged, yet even the transformation of Siva’s

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original purpose did not reduce his significance in India. The areas of Rá´rh ´ in Bengal, where Siva Tantra predominated, produced numerous philosophers and spiritual teachers who rose to prominence around 600 BCE. Their teachings spread rapidly during the periods traditionally attributed to classical Yoga and the Tantra Age (European late antiquity). The ´ post-Siva era generated new traditions and forms of worship; moreover, the incorporation and transformation of older deities and ideas became common as newly minted traditions attempted to convert more followers. This presaged a remarkable convergence of Buddhist, Jain, and Puranic ´ deities originally linked to Siva. Sarkar suggests the pan-Indian synthesis of ´Siva-based deities in newer religions is proof of India’s shared indigenous cultural memory that explains the great variety of Indian festivals, idols, ´ iconography, and ritual worship incorporating Siva. As it stands, exam´ ining the routes Siva worship took from 5500 BCE to the present will necessitate granular ethnographic studies. Sanderson is correct that the various surviving material sources of ancient religious life such as “temples, monasteries, and images of deities”—along with information from “current practices, sects, and beliefs” and competing traditions such as the ´ ´ “Saiva and non-Saiva”—point toward the broad inter-traditional boundaries that vex research into Tantra (2013: 217). Intriguingly, Sarkar’s ´ polymathic emic insights into the strong undercurrent of Siva worship still present in the village life of West Bengal exposes some of the routes that Tantra took as ittrickled into different social strata. While all Hindu religions are undoubtedly a complex fusion of these ancient teachings, ´ Siva’s direct or liminal presence suggests the depth of these entanglements partially addressed below. ´ The earliest argument for Siva worship is based on the prehistorical phallic lingam. Sanderson does not regard Rigvedic references to ´si´snádev¯ ah, “‘those whose God is the phallus,’” proves Shaivism’s presence “1000 years before Pata¯njali.” He suggests the term more likely means “those whose highest object of veneration is (their own) ´ sex organs,” indicating “godless carnality rather than Saiva religious practice” (2013: 219). Sarkar’s explanation of the prevalence of Shiva-liu nga ˆ ´ “phallic” worship in post-Siva Tantra appears in his discourse Rá´rh-4: The Cradle of Civilization. The worship represented the Indian prehistorical hill clans’ desire for increased clan numbers during warfare. Thus, many ´ Siva temples in Rá´rh contain “numerous Shiva lingas ” in “almost each and every village” dating back “2500 to 7000” years. Phallic worship was

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also “prevalent in the Mayan civilization of Mexico in Central America” (Par. 9). It is possible that phallic worship was a primitive expression of humanity’s inclination to psychophysical expansion. As such, Sarkar says phallic worship was the “most ancient system of worship in the world,” so certain sociologists consider it “humanity’s first step on the path of dharma,” yet there is no evidence to suggest “Shiva upheld idol worship.” Phallic worship gradually transformed from being these primitive peoples’ pragmatic desire for a larger population into a subtle “spiritual ideation” that symbolized “the relationship between Puru´sa (Consciousness) and Prakrti (Operative Principle or energy)” (1981: Par. 9). Gradually, the ´ relationship between unqualified Siva consciousness and qualified creation became ensconced in the Shiva-liu nga, as the transformation of worldly ˆ desires into pure spirituality. Contemporary Shiva worship exists in overt and metamorphosed ´ forms; post-Siva traditions interacted with Buddhism. The Ca´raka festival ´ is a Siva inspired festival that began long after his death that incorporates the “dharmacakra of the Maháyána Buddhists.” It represents ´ the “great reverence and love” Siva’s devotees held for their Guru. The Ca´raka festival is mainly practiced by Bengalis and has connections with Buddha’s first “preaching in Sarnarth” near an area in “Benares called Sáraunganáth.” The latter had an older name, “IishipattanaMiˆ gadáva,” known in Sanskrit as R´sipattanaMrgadáva” (Sarkar 2009: 34). The Jhánpán festival was introduced by “King Vána ´ of Varendrabhúmi (the Northern part of Bengal),” a devotee of Shiva, in about 500 BCE. This system of worship was named “VánaviddhaHaoyá” ´ after the king. There are also various places in North Bengal prefixed by Vána ´ such as “Vánargarh ´ and Váneshvara.” ´ During the festival devotees jump on “thorns, pointed iron bars,” and “iron nails” and get pierced by hooks ´ without displaying pain. Their intense “devotion and love” for Siva generates a concentrated spiritual state that temporarily numbs the physical body despite the extreme torture and “heavy bleeding” (2009: 36). Bolánis another well-known post-Buddhist and Jain festival celebrated ´ in Bengal based on Siva worship. Devotees hold skulls in their hands while they “dance and shout the name of Shiva” and beg for alms. They recite the chant, “Vandaná karibaámiShivereámárYinipúrna, ´ yininitya, yinisárátsár. I will surely worship my Lord Shiva. The absolute, eternal ´ and supreme essence of all” (36). Numerous other examples of Siva’s presence in Hinduism exist that exceed the limits of this paper, yet the interaction between Tantra and Buddhism deserves a brief look.

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Traditional Buddhist scholarship considers Tantra’s inclusion in Vajrayána a second- to fourth-century phenomena created by “Asanffga (c.400) the eminent Yog¯ac¯ara master” and “N¯ag¯arjuna” in the second century CE. Still, Miracea Eliade rightly states that the earliest routes Tantra took into Buddhism “are far from being solved” (1990: 201). Questions of origin aside, Buddhism’s bifurcation into the Northern and ´ Southern branches in about 200 BCE was a major source of new Siva deities (Sarkar 2009: 46). The northern Mah¯ay¯ana sect itself divided into two subgroups, the “Mantrayána and Tantrayána,” and the Tantrayána divided into two more subgroups: “Kálacakrayána and Vajrayána” (47). Followers of these subdivisions invented new Buddhist deities to differentiate themselves from other schools. Sarkar does not consider these changes spiritually beneficial because they introduced a new hedonistic dimension to Buddhism. The Buddha’s “Caturájjasaccam” “Four Noble Truths” preached the notion of “Duhkhaváda” “suffering” as an integral part of existence, but the evolving Buddhist practices and rituals prescribed to alleviate suffering became gradually divorced from the demands of practical life (47). As Buddhism’s popularity waned, the Kálacakrayána and Vajrayána sects, circa 300–400 CE, attempted to reinvigorate Buddhism’s popularity by minimizing Buddhist detachment with their new doctrine called “Atisukhaváda” that espoused “extreme hedonism” and prayers to the Buddha for pleasurable objects. The founders of Atisukhaváda conceived of “Pai ncabuddha” as a stage just before ˆ believed to be the logical outcome “enlightenment.” Pai ncabuddha were ˆ of Buddha’s control of the operative forces of “Pai ncabuddha-shakti” ˆ that enabled a bodhisattva to influence material existence. This led to the development of five Buddhas: “Ak´sobhya, Amoghasiddhi, Amitábha, Vaerocana, and Dhyániibuddha” (48). Many deities found in Buddhist Tantra crossed into “Post-Shiva Tantra, and conversely, many of the goddesses of Post-Shiva Tantra were accommodated … in Buddhist Tantra” in a “continual process of mutual exchange” (50). These trans´ formations were admittedly not unique to Buddhism, Siva Tantra was equally affected. The likelihood of diverging approaches increased as the source receded from memory. The erosion of Tantra’s meditative praxes can be correlated to the deification of new preceptors and the rise of ritualism that is prevalent in modern Buddhism. Ritualistic prayer is common in temples across Taiwan, Thailand, and other Asian countries. This stems from ignorance of the Tantra-yoga meditations that Gautama Buddha practiced prior to his enlightenment. Sarkar’s Shivology attempts

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´ to reverse this unfortunate development through a new route to Siva’s ¯ praxes in the form of his spiritual organization, AnandaM¯arga.

Future Routes… In most gradual transitions from older to newer systems, the adaptation of previous praxes is common, even as their preceptors are forgotten. Each step along new routes into religious and spiritual identities modifies preceding beliefs and praxes, and when religions compete for dominance, their oldest roots are often downplayed or ignored. The phenomenon of newer traditions subverting their shared origins to carve out their niche has done much to undermine Tantra’s real historical impact. These revisions deserve attention, but Sarkar does not historicize Tantra as the ´ first systematic expression of spirituality to idolize Siva or promote his ´ monolithic spiritual authority. Rather, Siva represents the earliest step on an evolutionary continuum of Tantric praxes from the distant past to the present that continues to elevate individuals through a progressive spiritual ideology. Sarkar does not consider ceremony, prayers, or ritualism aspects of Tantra or s¯ adhan¯ a; however, all meditations designed to realize “the Supreme” regardless of their “religious affiliation” are Tantric because “Tantra is not a religion.” It is “simply the science of sádhaná — it is a principle” (1994: 31). As a modern concept, Tantra’s roots begin everywhere and end nowhere: they exist wherever spiritually minded individuals and communities strive to overcome inimical divisions ´ by inventing new routes to truth and wisdom that follow Siva’s spiritual example. Sarkar is acutely aware that religious foundationalism has been leveraged to disenfranchise certain groups and empower others. His Shivology does not oppose diversity or demonize orthodox Indian philosophy to ´ ´ create a new idol out of the Siva myth, but as a reminder of Siva’s ancient ¯ path to unity. Thus, Sarkar claims to have created Ananda M¯arga to drive ´ a renaissance of Siva’s spiritual ideology and to build a classless society rooted in meditative realization and planetary service. In 1957, Sarkar argued that conflict could be reduced by eliminating the weaknesses and accentuating the strengths of different groups. Accordingly, one of the “oldest vices of human beings” is to divide themselves “into classes for their own benefit,” yet groupism, apart from survival, is also the natural outcome of people with similar skills working together to enhance their

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overall efficiency. In ancient India, educated and politically minded individuals united to become the “Brahmins,” the physically brave became the “K´satriyas,” and the “Vaeshyas and the Shúdras ” followed suit. ¯ Ananda M¯arga does not denigrate these “classes” but seeks to develop ´ their good qualities in all its members. Siva Tantrics combine the best attributes of each class by encouraging individuals to struggle against their limitations: “Every person who joins Ananda Marga, whether of the Shúdra or Vaeshya or any other class, has to strive to develop and strengthen the mind. Everyone has to work for a strong and healthy body. Everyone has to work for a living.” Tantra considers the “most menial of tasks” more desirable than relying on others work for one’s daily needs (2006a: Par. 5). Creating this unified planetary identity will not proceed along a tidy linear route into an idealized future but in fits and starts as we excavate the past to reveal the crises of religious divisions and the triumphs of universal spiritualism. Sarkar’s Shivology restores myth into a viable path devised by an ancient liberated guru who understood the material and psychological suffering generated by war and groupism. Inayatullah therefore argues that Sarkar changes our present epistemic maps by inaugurating new emic categories of knowledge that are not easily grasped by contem´ porary paradigms (1999b: 2). By revealing Siva’s historical role, Sarkar gives us insights into a “social level of time” which reduces “exploitation” by enhancing our understanding of social transformation to create a “time of dynamic balance — a balance between the physical, social and spiritual” (1999a: 7). In this regard, Bussey argues that challenging traditional hegemonies may be simpler than building alternative futures ´ (2006: 39). By situating Siva well before India’s textual era, Sarkar vexes etic hegemonies and addresses some of the pathologies of excessive sectarianism that have devitalized Tantra’s monistic philosophy. He reconnects ´ Siva to the ancient philosophies of path and purpose that spread across Asia into the West to foster the recognition of humanity’s shared longing for spiritual transformation.

Notes ¯ 1. Sarkar’s discourses are also published under Shrii Shrii Anandam¯ urti. I convert his unique Sanskrit transliteration into IAST when different diacritical marks are found over the same letter.

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2. Witzel heavily critiques Talageri’s book published in 2000, The Rigff Veda: A Historical Analysis, and Talageri’s 1993 study, “The Vedic Aryans were the Purus of traditional history,” calling the studies “Garbage in, Garbage out.” For more details, see “Westward Ho! The incredible Wanderlust of the Rffgff Vedic Tribes Exposed by S. Talageri,” pages 2–3 (Witzel 2001). 3. Also see Dominique Goodall and Harunga Isaacson (2011) “Tantric Traditions”, in The Continuum Companion to Hindu Studies and Alexis Sanderson (2006) “The L¯akulas: New Evidence of a System Intermediate ¯ ´ between P¯añc¯arthika P¯as´upatism and Agamic Saivism,” Indian Philosophical Annual, No. 24: 143–217.

Works Cited Allen, N.J. 2005. Thomas McEvilly: The Missing Dimensions. International Journal of Hindu Studies 9 (1–3): 59–75. Ánandamúrti, S.S. 1994. Discourses on Tantra, vol. 2. Calcutta: Ananda Marga Publications. Ánandamúrti, S.S. 2010. Yoga Sádhaná. Kolkata: Ananda Marga Publications. Bjonnes, R. 2011. The Dawn of Enlightenment. In Eternal Dance of Macrocosm: An Encyclopaedia of Matter, Mind and Consciousness, vol. 2. Belconnen, ACT, Australia: Proutist Universal. Bronkhorst, J., C. Key Chapple, L. Patton, G. Samuel, S. Ray Sarbacker, and V. Wallace. 2011. Contextualizing the History of Yoga in Geoffrey Samuel’s The Origins of Yoga and Tantra: A Review Symposium. International Journal of Hindu Studies 15 (3): 303–357. Bryant, E. 2004. Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate. Cary, NC, USA: Oxford University Press. Bussey, M. 1998. Tantra as Episteme: A Pedagogy of the Future. Futures 30 (7): 705–716. Bussey, M. 2006. Critical Spirituality: Towards a Revitalized Humanity. Journal of Futures Studies 10 (4): 39–44. ´ agama and The Kubjik¯ Dyczkowski, M.S.G. 1988. The Canon of the Saiv¯ a Tantras of the Western Kaula Tradition. Albany: State University of New York. Eliade, M. 1990. Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, trans. W.R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Feuerstein, G. 1998. Tantra: The Path of Ecstasy. Boston: Shambala. Frawley, D. a. N. S. R. 2009. Hidden Horizons: Unearthing 10,000 Years of Indian Culture. Shahibaug: Swaminarayan Aksharpith Amdavad. Frazier, J. 2011. The Continuum Companion to Hindu Studies. London and New York: Continuum. Glucklich, A. 2008. The Strides of Vishnu : Hindu Culture in Historical Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Goodall, D. a. H. I. 2011. Tantric Traditions. In The Continuum Companion to Hindu Studies, ed. J. Frazier. New York: Continuum. Gray, D.B. 2016. Tantric Traditions in Transmission and Translation. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Inayatullah, S.J.F. 1999a. Situating Sarkar: Tantra, Macrohistory and Alternative Futures. Maleny, QLD, Australia: Gurukula Press. Inayatullah, S.J.F. (Ed.) 1999b. Transcending Boundaries: Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar’s Theories of Individual & Social Transformation. Maleny, QLD, Australia: Gurukula Press. Inayatullah, S. 2002. Understanding Sarkar: The Indian Episteme, Macrohistory and Transformative Knowledge. Leiden: Brill. Jamison, S.W., and J.P. Brereton. 2014. The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kang, C. 2011. Sarkar on the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths. Philosophy East and West 61 (2): 303–323. Larson, G.J. 2009. Differentiating the Concepts of “Yoga” and “Tantra” in Sanskrit History. Journal of the American Oriental Society 129 (3): 487–498. McEvilley, T. 2002. The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies. New York: Allworth Press. Mookerjee, A., and Amdhu Khanna. 1977. The Tantric Way: Art, Science, Ritual. New York: Thames and Hudson. Padoux, A. 2002. What Do We Mean by Tantrism. In SUNY Series in Tantric Studies: Roots of Tantra, ed. K. Harper. Albany, NY, USA: SUNY Press. Samuel, G. 2008. The Origins of Yoga and Tantra: Indic Religions to the 13th Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ´ Sanderson, A. 1988. Saivism and the Tantric Traditions. In The World’s Religions, ed. S. L. H. P. C. a. F. H. Sutherland, 660–704. London: Routledge. Sanderson, A. 2013. The Impact of Inscriptions on the Interpretation of Early Saiva Literature. Indo-Iranian Journal 56: 211–214. Sarbacker, S.R. 2005. Sam¯ adhi the Numinous and Cessative in Indo Tibetan Yoga. Albany: State University of New York Press. Sarkar, S. P. R. 1981. Rá´rh: The Cradle of Civilization. Sarkar, S. P. R. 2006a. Ananda Marga: A Revolution. In The Electronic Edition ´ Acyut´ananda Avt. of the Works of P.R. Sarkar, ed. Shrii Giridhara and Ac. Sarkar, S. P. R. 2006b. A Scriptological and Linguistic Survey of the World. In ´ The Electronic Edition of the Works of P.R. Sarkar, ed. Shrii Giridhara and Ac. Acyut´ananda Avt. Sarkar, S. P. R. 2006c. The Significance of Language. In The Electronic Edition ´ Acyut´ananda Avt. of the Works of P.R. Sarkar, ed. Shrii Giridhara and Ac. ´ Sarkar, S. P. R. 2009. Namah Shiv¯ aya Sh¯ ant¯ aya, ed. Shrii Giridhara and Ac. ´ ´ 2009. Acyut´ananda Avt., 3rd ed., Ananda M´arga Prac´araka Samgha

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Singh, L.P. 2010. Tantra: Its Mystic and Scientific Basis. New Delhi: Concept Publishing. Talageri, S. G. 2008. Rig. Veda and the Avesta: The Final Evidence. Urban, H.B. 2003. Tantra: Sex, Secrecy Politics and Power in the Study of Religions. Berkeley, CA, USA: University of California Press. Wallis, C.D. 2012. Tantra Illuminated: The Philosophy, History, and Practice of a Timeless Tradition. The Woodlands, TX, USA: Anusara Press. Witzel, M. 2001. Westward Ho! The incredible Wanderlust of the Rffgff Vedic Tribes Exposed by S. Talageri. Electric Journal of Vedic Studies 7 (2): 1–29. World Population: Historical Estimates of World Population. 2013.

CHAPTER 4

Semiotic Roots and Buddhist Routes in Phenomenology and Intercultural Philosophy: A Peircean Study of Abhidharma Buddhist Theories of Consciousness and Perception Alina Therese Lettner

Abbreviations Skt. P¯a. EP 2

Sanskrit P¯a.li Essential Peirce, vol. 2, cf. Peirce 1998

A. T. Lettner (B) University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. K. Giri (ed.), Roots, Routes and a New Awakening, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7122-0_4

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Introduction: Phenomenology, Buddhism and Semiotics The influence of Buddhist philosophy on Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic semiotic pragmaticism is well-known, but only in very general terms. Not many a work has tried to develop the consequences of a Peircean interpretation of Buddhism and, reciprocally, a Buddhist development of Peirce’s philosophy. And yet, Buddhism can teach us a lot about the limitations of our existing conceptual categories as well as the need to achieve a transformation of awareness by strengthening phenomenological sensibilities. In this paper, intercultural philosophy will be embraced as an endeavour of cultivating semiotic roots for taking Abhidharma Buddhist routes of analysing consciousness and perception. The attempted cross-fertilisation between Buddhism, semiotics, and phenomenology (including dharma analysis and Peirce’s own version of a systemic phaneroscopy) is hoped to contribute to epistemological biodiversity and dialogue by “impregnating” Charles Sanders Peirce’s spiritually profound philosophy of signs with Indian Buddhist philosophical conceptions. Buddhist Abhidharma theory, which deconstructs commonsense objects into dharmas as minimal constituents of experience or states of consciousnes s, has an elaborate processual view to offer for exploring phenomenological similarities between Buddhist conceptions and Peirce’s phaneroscopy. Against this background, synergies between semiotic roots and Buddhist routes are going to be worked out on the hypothesis that Buddhism, with its focus on processes of cognition rather than on substantial entities, corresponds in a deep sense to Peirce’s notion of a universe conceived as existing almost entirely of signs and relations. In fact, the so-called “higher doctrine” of Abhi-dharma, whose intricate “scholastic” analyses of philosophical and psychological issues boil down to a veritable theory of consciousness, echoes the Peircean notion of a universe “perfused with signs” (CP 5.448) in a whole range of its interpretations. Peirce’s semiotics is based upon relations and principles provided by his systemic science of phaneroscopy. In order to contribute to an “epistemology of conviviality and cross-fertilization” (Giri 2021), the idea is to render more comprehensive the theoretical and methodological options of semiotics by exploring a range of phenomenological affinities with Abhidharma Buddhist theories of consciousness. Within the larger context of transdisciplinarity, there is a need for developing a common

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scholarly language and, more importantly, for creating shared discursive options within the pragmatic context of academic institutions and scholarly discourse. In this respect, the transdisciplinary model of a semiotic philology of thought forms (Lettner, diss. thesis, forthcoming.a) links up well with the attempt at “cross-fertilizing roots and routes” by integrating theories of consciousness from various disciplines and cultural knowledge traditions. When coupled with philological attention to ancient Indian (incl. Buddhist) textual traditions, the Peircean framework can make for a consistent, yet flexible basis for translating fundamental Buddhist notions into semiotics as well as for “impregnating” semiotics with Buddhist conceptions. The notion of impregnating semiotic roots by taking Buddhist philosophical routes is meant to stress the creative transfer of going beyond a superficial transplantation of terminology by pervading the conception as a whole. This metaphorical move relies upon the idea that our perceptions are necessarily “impregnated” by using interpretations: a notion formulated by Hans Lenk with regard to the Kantean theory of how our attempt at grasping reality is structured through the “schematizing” process associated with perception (cf. Lenk 2003). Along these lines, the proposed Peircean reading of Buddhist conceptual issues and methodology is meant to refine the toolkit of Peircean semiotics with Buddhist conceptions in order not to unilaterally privilege the interpretive lens of the West (cf. Garfield 2002). At the same time, such an overlap is characteristic of “Buddhist semiotics”, which necessarily elucidates and re-contextualises “conceptual tools drawn from within the Buddhist tradition itself”, even when the analysis focuses upon a “semiotic study of Buddhism” (cf. Rambelli 2013, pp. xiv–xv). Instead of perpetuating a hegemonic representational “position of actor, spectator, judge and jury” (cf. Chakravarty 2021, pp. vii–xix), the proposed crossfertilisation between phenomenology, Buddhism and semiotics draws its inspiration from the “executant”, who in George Steiner’s terms “invests his own being in the process of interpretation”: by going beyond the limitations of external survey, the enactment of “chosen meanings and values” becomes “a commitment at risk, a response which is, in the root sense, responsible” (1989, p. 8) for the routes taken. Phaneroscopy constitutes the most fundamental philosophical discipline within the Peircean approach (cf. Pape 1989, 1998, p. 2019). While most of Peirce’s “[phenomenological] analyses should be looked for under the heading of semiotic” (Ransdell 2017, p. 77), there is still a need

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to distinguish between descriptions of how the world appears phenomenally and of how it is represented semiotically (cf. De Tienne 1999, 2013). As for the Buddhist tradition,1 the philosophical and psychological discussions of Abhidharma literature constitute something of a “phenomenological” approach avant la lettre (cf. Lusthaus 2002). This development culminates in the philosophy of Yog¯ac¯ara, whose central doctrine of cittam¯ atra (i.e. “cognition-only”) stresses the fundamental significance of consciousness (vijñ¯ ana) to “everything we know, everything we consider or posit, everything we affirm and deny” (p. 5): because we can indeed do so only within consciousness itself. A case in point is how the existence of objects and an “outside” world tends to be affirmed by making reference to an external existent (cf. Lettner forthcoming.b). According to Lusthaus, Yog¯ac¯ara is Buddhist phenomenology par excellence in that it shares with Husserl’s epistemic concerns “the search for the cognitive roots of knowledge” (p. 11). While in the present chapter we are going to deal with theories of Abhidharma Buddhism (ca. 200 B.C.E –200 C.E.), most of the problems that Yog¯ac¯ara wrestled with have their roots in Abhidharma texts or even in the early and medieval P¯a.li materials, as Lusthaus tells us (p. ix). The key notion in this respect are dharmas as the ultimate constituents of experience (see Note 4), which are crucial to understanding almost any matter with regard to Buddhist theories of consciousness, perception and reality. In fact, according to the “dhamma hypothesis” (Warder 1971), which amounts to a downright “metaphysics of experience” (Ronkin 2018), the notion of (human) “self” is deconstructed into a conglomeration of impersonal (i.e. “objective”) factors (cf. Lettner forthcoming.c), just as (composite) objects are considered to be merely mentally and linguistically constructed entities without any real existence (cf. Lettner forthcoming.d). Such ontologically relevant processes of differentiation as underlying “the contextual distinctions that make stimuli distinct ” (Waldron 2003, p. 52) point us towards the cognitive and operational knowledge accumulated in grammar, which may be brought into view through the perspective of a philosophy of grammar (Köller 1988). Hence, in addition to the close connection of semiotics with phenomenology and hermeneutics, Peirce’s philosophical pragmatism (or pragmaticism, cf. Lettner 2020) allows us to shift the epistemological focus from a critique of reason to a critique of signs and, in keeping with the pragmatic turn in philosophy and linguistics, to bring into view the social dimensions of sign processes and communication (cf. 41ff.). Housing “deeply entrenched conceptual languages”,

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natural languages embody “comprehensive structures of cognitive grammar” that make up the acknowledged (cultural) ways in which forms of knowledge are “recognised as knowledge, acquired, deposited, examined, disseminated and continued as intellectual and practical traditions” (Kaviraj 2005). Going beyond the “epistemic rupture” of colonialism (Kaviraj) and the “epistemicide” of modernity (Santos), we may thus hope to foster new forms of life by creating “new categories of reality, living and realization” through nurturing spaces of togetherness and by sharing the cultural heritage of languages as well as natural resources (cf. Giri 2021). Impregnating the chosen methodology, i.e. semiotic roots, by taking Buddhist philosophical routes thus turns out to be of prime importance for investigating epistemological and ontological modes of knowledge constitution from the semiotically combined perspective of intercultural philosophy and phenomenology.

On Being and What There Is in Phenomenological Terms The ontological problem can be put it in “three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: ‘What is there?’” (Quine 1948/Ed. 1953, p. 1). Indologists are going to find this phrase reminiscent of Wilhelm Halbfass’s investigation On being and what there is (1992), in which the famous philosopher and cross-cultural theorist explores ontological matters in light of Vai´ses.ika (i.e. Indian natural philosophy) and its categories. Within an ontological context, Buddhism is clearly associated with “process philosophy”, including a fundamental insight into the “illusory nature of self and substance” (cf. pp. 35–36). However, since we are not dealing with any persistent entities, where does asking this question “what (things) are there?” take us in Buddhism (cf. Potter 1996, p. 121)? What about the Quinean notion that the ontological question “can be answered, moreover, in a word – ‘Everything’” (p. 1)? The Buddhist answer to the ontological question is basically a phenomenological one. When asked about “What is everything (P¯a. sabba)?”, the Buddha explains (in the Sabba Sutta of the Sam aya “Connected Discourses” that it is “The . yutta Nik¯ eye and forms, the ear and sounds, the nose and odours, the tongue and tastes, the body and tactile objects, the mind and mental phenomena. This, bhikkhus, is called ‘the all’” (slightly modified trans. following Bodhi 2000, Vol. II, p. 1140), a reply that is referring to “the sensorium: sensory organs and sensory objects” (Lusthaus 2002, p. 56).2 Thus, what

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exists are dharmas as the items listed in such classifications. So what is a dharma? Dharmas (as the plural form of a countable noun in contrast to “the dharma” in the singular, see Note 4), i.e. dharm¯ ah. (pl.) in Sanskrit and dhamm¯ a (pl.) in P¯a.li, is a term that designates minimal “psychophysical factors” (Willemen 2004, p. 220) whose continuous flux of arising and ceasing constituents is regulated in keeping with the conditioned causality of “dependent arising” (Skt. prat¯ıtyasamutp¯ ada; P¯a. pat.iccasamupp¯ ada) (cf. Lettner 2020, 191ff.). Thus, existence is seen to arise as “an interplay of a plurality of subtle, ultimate, not further analysable elements of Matter, Mind, and Forces”, which are technically called “dharmas” (Stcherbatsky 1923, p. 73).3 In keeping with the function of a dharma as a “state of consciousness” (cf. Piatigorsky 1984, p. 172), the three basic classifications of dharmas into the five “aggregates” (skandhas), twelve “sensory bases” (¯ayatanas) and eighteen “elements” (dh¯atus) (cf. Stcherbatsky 1923, p. 3; see Note 14 below) all serve to explain the ways in which dharmas are cognised (Potter 1996: 130). As is going to be set out briefly in the (next) section on “Analysing Experience: Phaneroscopic Categories and Dharma Theory”, this interest taken in the “discrimination of dharmas” (dharmapravicaya) is soteriologically motivated (cf. Cox 2004, 550ff.). As an umbrella term, “dharma” functions almost like “our English ‘thing’ does” (Potter 1996, p. 121), but it is also the “most notorious” term with regard to the difficulty of finding Western equivalents to specifically Indian conceptions (cf. Warder 1971, p. 272), continuing to be a “still hotly debated notion” (Waldron 2003, p. 50).4 In the present paper, such “constituent elements” as make up the phenomena of human beings and the world (cf. Odagawa 1997, pp. 86–87) will be glossed as minimal constituents of experience. This minimal definition in the form of a paraphrase is intended to highlight the relevance of dharmas to the constitution of sentient experience and to thereby bring into view their phenomenological dimension. The translation as “elements” (cf. Stcherbatsky 1923) or “elements of existence” is not without difficulties because it raises wrong expectations of substantiality and duration (cf. Warder 1971, p. 273). Even though according to Peirce “an object of a sign can be nearly anything” (Liszka 1996, p. 21), it would be hasty to assume an all too easy correspondence between dharmas as an umbrella term5 and the arguably similar description that Peirce gives of an object— that is: of the object of a sign.6 Whatever further differences may hold between the Peircean definition of the object of a sign and the Buddhist

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notion of dharma, the latter could never be used to refer to “a collection, or whole of parts” (CP 2.232). On the contrary, the function implied by its very definition is to break up “the apparent unity of persons and things into a conglomeration of elementary dharmic events” (Conze, p. 97). Dharmas are not things, but events.

Analysing Experience: Phaneroscopic Categories and Dharma Theory In a way that is rather similar to the semiotic function of Homo signans (“the signer”) as “a ‘representer’ or ‘modeler’ of the world” (cf. Danesi and Perron 1999/2001, p. 39). In keeping with its central doctrine of “no self” (P¯a. anatta, Skt. an¯ atman) (cf. Lettner forthcoming.c), Buddhism focuses more strongly upon how such processes of constitution work rather than singling out anything like an active agent of interpretation. At the same time, it is through sentient beings that “the universe” is seen to arise (cf. Piatigorsky 1984, p. 22). What makes Peircean phaneroscopy so apt a framework to be compared to (Abhidharma) Buddhism is, above all, its overarching attempt to “account for the whole of our experiential confrontation with reality” (Pape 1998, p. 2019; cf. Lettner forthcoming.e)7 Even though the Buddhist “categorial analysis of dharmas ” (cf. Ronkin 2018) operates with much longer lists of “constituents”,8 there are profound similarities to Peirce’s three universal (phenomenological or phaneroscopic) categories of firstness, secondness and thirdness (cf. Esposito 1980). Not unike dharmas, which function as purely relational notions (cf. Piatigorsky 1984, p. 181), Peirce’s three categories “have to act as the relational forms that pattern the ultimate constituents of experience involved in all sorts of signs and representations” (Pape 1998, p. 2023, my emph.). In phaneroscopic terms, we could say that dharmas correspond to the minimal constituents of those externally complex properties of phenomenological elements that according to Peirce enter into the constitution of sign classes by functioning as “representations of relations of varying degree” (cf. Pape 1990, 377ff.). In fact, Abhidharma Buddhism also intends to provide “a systematic account of sentient experience [...] by analyzing conscious experience – and in this sense one’s ‘world’ – into its constituent mental and physical events” (Ronkin 2018). Even though the Abidharmic system of description thus encompasses the entire domain of what counts as relevant experience (Waldron 2003, p. 53), dharmas are not intended to furnish

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“a closed inventory of all existing dharmas ‘out there’ in their totality” (Ronkin 2018, no. 2). In fact, rather than to provide a complete list of all existing dharmas for establishing a “system of phenomenology” out of purely philosophical interests, the systematic analysis of dharmas into good, bad and neutral ones concentrates upon listing soteriologically relevant dharmas (cf. Strauss 1925/2004, p. 85; Glasenapp 1848/85, p. 328). Abhidharma can thus be seen to constitute “the theoretical counterpart to the Buddhist practice of meditation” (Ronkin 2018; cf. Rospatt 1997, p. 159): by training the mind and sharpening awareness through the discrimination of dharmas in meditational practice, the practical purpose of dharma lists is to enable a focus on wholesome dharmas that are conducive to attaining liberation (cf. Hayward 1987, p. 589 ). Peirce’s phenomenological (or phaneroscopic) interest in “the collective total of all that is in any way or in any sense present to the mind, quite regardless of whether it corresponds to any real thing or not” (CP 1.284) puts the emphasis on “the totality and the immediacy, the directness, with which one is aware of the phaneron” (cf. De Tienne 1999, p. 422). In a similar way, according to Abhidharmic analysis, the world of matter is considered as relevant only in so far as it becomes an object of cognition that triggers processes of perception and thus affects the mental dimension (cf. Rospatt 1997, p. 162): “materiality is analyzed as being reducible to the phenomenal content of experience” (Coseru 2012, no. 2.3, my emph.). As far as the mental dimension is concerned, Peirce makes it clear that “all phenomena are of one character, though some are more mental and spontaneous, others more material and regular” (CP 7.570). In Buddhist terms, “perceptions of mind and matter are understood to be different kinds of experiences of equal phenomenological reality” (Cho 2014, p. 422, my emph.). In fact, the basic unit of analysis in Abhidharma philosophy are dharmas as “discrete events” which carry their own “distinguishing mark” (svalaks.an.a) in conjunction with the arising of cognitive awareness (Waldron 2003, p. 53). Moreover, there is an interesting parallel between Peirce’s phaneron and the notion of dharma. A dharma, in fact, “‘is’ no thing, yet a term denoting (not being) a certain relation or type of relation to thought, consciousness or mind” and in this sense is “a purely relational notion” (Piatigorsky 1984, p. 181). The semiotic implications of this conception are rather complex, suggesting a certain functional correspondence of a dharma to both Peirce’s notion of representamen and

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object, while corresponding to neither of them in a one-to-one way. We may view an object as something that is constituted through the relation to an organism that experiences and observes (cf. Deely as quoted by Brier 2008, p. 269). Buddhism has a lot to say about the relationship between an “experiencing organism” and “objects”, including such fundamental notions as “craving” (P¯a. tan.h¯ a; Skt. tr..sn.¯ a ) and “grasping” (up¯ ad¯ ana), which as part of the twelve “links” (nid¯ ana) of “co-dependent arising” (prat¯ıtyasamutp¯ ada) are crucial to the logic of liberation and signlessness (cf. Lettner 2020). By placing the phenomenology of sentient experience at the centre of its philosophical analyses, Buddhism has something to teach us about “Structuring nature” with regard to both the small-scale investigation of dharmas (notably their functioning in cognition) and the macrological level of evolution (cf. Lettner 2019a). In semiotic terms, the notion of sentient experience raises the question of how (the matter of) cognition is related to occurrences of cognising. According to Buddhism, all forms of vijñ¯ ana (P¯a. viññ¯ an.a, “awareness”, “consciousness”) “occur, rather than act” (Waldron 2003, p. 29). As a result of its “negative ontology” (cf. Halbfass 1992) or “no-substance ontology” (an¯ atmav¯ ada) (cf. Bhatt and Mehrotra 2000), Buddhism actually provides us with an “expert view” on dealing with (mental) entities in terms of processes, not substances: “The process is the thing” (Hiriyanna 1932/1994, p. 142), just as Peirce’s approach offers the perspective of “a true semiotic process philosophy” (Brier 2017, p. 102; cf. Inada and Jacobson 1984/1991). Thus, the Buddhist understanding of the transitoriness of phenomena offers its own particular processual view on what in philosophical terms presents itself as a “categorial symmetry between objects and events” (cf. Abel 1985, p. 167, my trans.): dharmas are viewed as events, teaching us “How to undo objects and concepts in process-philosophical terms” on the basis of Peircean semiosis: an attempt I have made with some preliminary steps “Towards a cybersemiotic philology of Buddhist knowledge forms” (Lettner 2021). The way in which dharmas are understood to enter into experience rests upon a processual view of experience and “dharmic events” that links up well with Peirce’s conception of phaneroscopy as that which “scrutinizes the direct appearances” (CP 1.287, ca. 1904). The “categorial analysis of dharmas ” (cf. Ronkin 2018) also applies to the whole range of experiential phenomena. As we are going to see in more detail below with regard to its non-psychological conception of dharmic events (cf. Piatigorsky 1984), Abhidharma theory accords well with the Peircean

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conception of semiosis, which is “not a mental act of interpretation” (cf. Ransdell 2017, p. 77), but a way of locating the agency of interpretation in the semiosic process itself. However, dharmas are not (complex) “events” in the same sense in which Peirce’s conception of semiosis comprises a triadic relation between a representamen, an object and an interpretant. Given that a dharma is by definition a minimal, not further reducible functional unit, it is part of semiosic processes rather than being equivalent to semiosis as such. We can witness a certain similarity between Peirce’s conception of semiosis as an “action” that involves a “cooperation” of three correlates (i.e. representamen, object, and interpretant) (cf. EP 2, p. 411, ca. 1907) and the Abhidharma Buddhist notion that in order for a mental sensation or perceptional cognition to take place, three factors are required to appear “in close contiguity” (cf. Stcherbatsky 1923, p. 55): i.e. a (physical or cognitive) “sense” (indriya), a (sensory or cognitive) “object” (vis.aya), and the respective modality of “cognitive awareness” (vijñ¯ ana) (see Note 14 below). While some of the issues raised by such a comparison are going to be touched upon in the following sections, the question of how to interpret agency in light of there being no “self-identical” or permanent subject in Buddhism as well as what to make of external (or objective) vs. internal (or subjective) elements with regard to the process of cognition would seem to call for a more detailed study on the semiotic potential of Abhidharma Buddhism. I intend to explore some of these matters in a paper on “A Buddhist model of semiosis? Perception in ‘the sign of three’: sense, object and consciousness”

¯ ) and Embodied Experience Sensate Matter (Rupa As Rupert Gethin (1986) has stressed, early Buddhist accounts of what in Western philosophy would be termed “matter” focus upon “the physical world as experienced by a sentient being” (p. 36). However, the quasiequivalent notion of r¯upa (“material form” or “body”, cf. Coseru 2012) comprises “no other matter than sense-data” (Stcherbatsky 1923, p. 6). Sentient beings are part of the same matter they cognise! While traditional Western philosophical connotations of “matter” are hardly appropriate because of their associations “with concepts such as inert ‘stuff’ or ‘substance’”, all of which stand in stark contrast to the literal meanings of r¯ upa as “form”, “shape” or “appearance” (cf. Gethin 1986, p. 36), the phenomenological dimension suggested by the Buddhist conception can

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be captured well by the Peircean notion of matter being “merely mind deadened by the development of habit” (CP 8.318). Peirce’s rejection of the “old dualistic notion of mind and matter, so prominent in Cartesianism” (CP 6.24) makes his version of objective idealism “anti-Cartesian and phenomenological” (cf. Singer 1980, p. 487): an approach that is highly apt for describing the non-dualistic implications of the Buddhist stance towards “matter” and “mind”. In fact, the notion of r¯ upa constitutes the first “group” of the five components (pañcaskandha) that are understood to make up the aggregation of empirical personality.10 As a result, the conception of human existence in terms of sentient experience and the notion of matter being sensate stuff are deeply linked—in the very sense in which Potter (1996) explains: r¯ upa includes “also those things grasping (up¯ ad¯ ana) them” (p. 126). When considering the Abhidharma Buddhist conception of sensate matter and embodied experience within the larger cosmological context of these notions we find that certain basic assumptions are very similar to the way in which micro- and macrological reasoning processes are understood in Peirce’s evolutionary cosmology. In Peircean terms, as humans we are “products of the same nature we investigate” (Brier 2017, p. 104). Just as “human thought necessarily partakes of whatever character is diffused through the whole universe” (CP 1.352), in Buddhism sentient beings are part of the same “matter” which they grasp at through cognising and perceiving. As regards the role of knowledge and reasoning, the Buddhist soteriological mode of unlearning afflictive cognitive and emotional habits may at first sight seem to be diametrically opposed to Peirce’s notion of the growth of knowledge (cf. Lettner forthcoming.f). However, on taking a closer look, the Buddhist key question of how to achieve a deconditioning with regard to one’s cognitive and affective “dispositions” (samsk¯ ˙ ara) can be accommodated by Peirce’s notion of habit and the way in which he understands the “operation of self-control” (cf. CP 8.320). Moreover, there are a number of structural and cosmological parallels with regard to the non-dualistic and phenomenological conception of “matter” and “mind” as well as the processual and thus semiosic conception of consciousness and cognition that in a deep-structural way can provide us with a methodological basis for doing intercultural philosophy in phaneroscopic terms. In order to more fully comprehend sentient experience, let us now move on to take a look at the remaining “heaps” (skandha) of dharmas that together with r¯ upa make up the “five aggregates” (pañcaskandha) of the human empirical being. The second collection of aggregates, i.e.

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“sensation” or “feeling” (vedan¯ a ), defines the quality of the impressions that result from “contact” (or “sensation”, cf. Stcherbatsky 1923, p. 55) (spar´sa) between the “sense” (indriya) and its “object” (vis.aya) (Coseru 2012, no. 2.3). The corresponding “emotional” dharmas are classified as “pleasant” (sukha), “unpleasant” (duh.kha) and “neutral” (avy¯ akr.ta), making vedan¯ a the “automatic affective response to form, before any higher conceptual processes enter in”: such a simple evaluation (cf. Hayward 1987, p. 58) is in fact very similar to the Freudian upa) notion of the “pleasure-ego”.11 While the first skandha of “form” (r¯ “corresponds to the ‘physical-material’ pole of dualistic experience” and skandhas 3 (samjñ¯ ˙ a “apperception”), 4 (samsk¯ ˙ ara “karmic formations”) and 5 (vijñ¯ ana “consciousness”) correspond to the mental pole, the second skandha of “feeling” (vedan¯ a ) “connects ‘mind’ and ‘body’”: i.e. within the “‘body’ it manifests as the inner feeling of the body as pleasurable, painful or neutral, the proprioceptive sense” (p. 59, my emph.).12 This conception of r¯ upa (“form”) as constituting a physical-material pole, which through the aggregate of “feeling” shades off into an inner dimension of feeling, makes for an interesting comparison to Peirce’s non-dualistic conception of “the psychical and the physical aspects of matter”13 : Viewing a thing from the outside, considering its relations of action and reaction with other things, it appears as matter. Viewing it from the inside, looking at its immediate character as feeling, it appears as consciousness. (CP 6.268; cf. a Brier 2008, p. 374)

The Buddhist notion that the twelve “sensory bases” (¯ ayatanas )14 represent all dharmas —indeed: sarvam (“everything”)—as “distributed within six subjective and six corresponding objective items” (Stcherbatsky 1923, p. 8)15 would demand further analysis with regard to the Peircean notion of the phaneron (cf. De Tienne 1999, 2013): here the concept of “phaneral awareness ” could be regarded as the “inner” dimension while the corresponding aspect of “phaneral manifestation” comes closer to the “outer” aspect captured by the Buddhist notion of “object” (vis.aya). In a way similar to Peirce’s metaphysics, which “operates with the ‘inside’ of material nature” (Brier 2008, p. 373) in the sense that “chance is but the outward aspect of that which within itself is feeling” (CP 6.265), Buddhist phenomenology does not make any strict distinction between “inner” and “outer” worlds (cf. Cho 2014).

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Consciousness as a Semiosic Process Without a (Psychological) Subject A combined Peircean semiotic and Buddhist interpretation of consciousness along the lines just sketched lends itself well to going beyond the Cartesian “objective validity of pure subjectivity” and the self-stylisation of “Westernizing man as the Subject of History, conceptualizing, representing, objectifying the life of beings, through technological progress” (Chakravarty 2021). In other words, a philosophy of border-crossing that conceives the world as a living organism and is in harmony with the laws of nature (cf. ibid.) resonates well with both Peircean (as well as cybersemiotic) and Buddhist conceptions of consciousness and the cosmos (cf. Lettner 2019a, b). We can also see this from the fact that Peirce conceives of consciousness as a “phenomenon that develops in nature to emerge in new and more structured forms in living beings, nervous systems, and language-based culture” (cf. Brier 2008, pp. 372–373). More precisely, Peirce’s view of consciousness as “nothing but Feeling, in general”, i.e. “the immediate element of experience generalized to its utmost” (CP 7.365), does not refer to “human self-consciousness”, but to “consciousness as the immediate element of experience in its most generalized form” (Brier 2008, p. 372): Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical world; […] Not only is thought in the organic world, but it develops there. But as there cannot be a General without Instances embodying it, so there cannot be thought without Signs. We must here give “Sign” a very wide sense, no doubt, but not too wide a sense to come within our definition. (CP 4.551, my emph.)

This “very wide sense” of “sign” opted for by Peirce seems to allow very well for capturing Abhidharma Buddhist notions of consciousness where “there is nothing that does cognize, apart from the evanescent flashings of consciousness itself” (Stcherbatsky 1923, p. 58). While it would go beyond the scope of the present study to consider in any detail Peirce’s definition of the sign, it is important to understand his conception of consciousness as an all-encompassing reasoning process that pervades various levels of conscious life. We are going to see in a moment that the Abhidharma Buddhist conception also does not assume anything like Cartesian (self-)reflexion. Rather, the very point of the Buddhist view on

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consciousness is that even with beings that are endowed with a brain the arising of consciousness or thought moments is not a psychological or subjective affair relating to some permanent agent to be termed a “self”. In fact, what presents itself as a reflexive awareness of some sort in the form of “mental cognitive awareness” (mano-vijñ¯ ana) (see Note 14 below) becomes deeply problematic once the mind or “mentation” (manas; P¯a. mano) joins forces with conceptual and linguistic proliferation, thereby generating its own recursivity and leading to “our reflexive sense of self-existence, the sense ‘I am’” (Waldron 2003, pp. 37–38). As Alexander Piatigorsky states in The Buddhist philosophy of thought (1984), in Abhidharmic philosophy, “it is consciousness that acquires its states, not the subject of consciousness or person whose presence at the ‘rise of thought’ […] is merely nominal” (p. 182). Accordingly, “it is ‘thought itself that thinks, not a person” (p. 66). As a result, “there is no psychology here” when observing a person with regard to the “rise of a thought” (cittupp¯ ada) as theorised in the first book of the Therav¯ada Abhidhamma-pit.aka, the Dhammasangan ˙ . i 16 (cf. pp. 65– 66). The Buddhist consideration of consciousness “as an object”, i.e. “to depersonalize and desubjectify the thought to such an extent as to be able to see it entirely devoid of any specifically psychological functions or properties” (p. 172), is highly reminiscent of Peirce’s notion of the “quasi-mind” as well as the way in which agency is located within the process of interpretation itself (cf. Ransdell 2017).17 According to Piatigorsky, it is indeed “in Buddhism, that the first serious attempt was made to look at thought and consciousness (citta) as an object ” (1984, p. 172). Accordingly, an “object is always conceived as ‘object of thought’, i.e., by any means not considered as, say, ‘more objective’ than thought” (p. 183). Hence, Peirce’s conception of semiosis, which “is not a mental act of interpretation” (Ransdell), is very similar to the Abhidharmic understanding of consciousness as “an entirely non-psychological category” (p. 182). Peirce actually reminds us “not to make the blunder of supposing that Self-consciousness is meant” (CP 7.365) when looking at consciousness in its generalised aspect as feeling. When describing the connection between situations observed by an observer and the “rise of thought” coming along with it, Piatigorsky (1984) explains that this “observation is totally devoid of any traits of reflexion” in the Cartesian sense (p. 186): as a result, the observer cannot be taken “for a subject (in the sense of the opposition ‘object/ subject’)” because observation “is not related to himself as to its subject”

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and “thinking is not related to him as an observer” (ibid.). This is not to be confused with such Buddhist conceptions as the “self-revelation of cognition” (svaprak¯ a´sa) or “cognition cognising itself” (svasamvitti) ˙ (cf. Bhatt and Mehrotra 2000, 16ff.), which would invite comparison with Peirce’s view that “sensation has two parts: first, the feeling, and second, the sense of its assertiveness, of my being compelled to have it” (CP 7.543, ca. 1896). Shedding some more light upon such reciprocal processes of fabrication as occur between the “I” and (Kantean) “things in themselves” (cf. Hayward 1987, p. 146) would also profit from analysing the Buddhist notions of “self” and “world” with regard to systems theory and autopoiesis (cf. a. Lettner 2021).18 In fact, Buddhist semiotics or Buddhist cybersemiotics allows us to achieve what Aleida Assmann (1997) has described as a semiotic-functional replacement of spirit/mind by the code, thereby opening up the decentring (and thus also non-Eurocentric) potential of Peirce’s process philosophy. Hence, by going beyond Western traditions of thinking, which are typically subject-centred, cultivating semiotic roots by taking Buddhist philosophical routes is hoped to foster a truly dialogical explication of how “the world” is interpreted in terms of such fundamental notions as consciousness and perception. As envisaged by the basic coordinates of a cybersemiotic philology of Buddhist knowledge forms (Lettner 2021), such an approach modelled along the lines of Peircean semiosis can help us to embed (more or less) “comparative” endeavours within a transdisciplinary programme of research (cf. Nicolescu 2002). Integrating approaches from the humanities, the cultural and the social sciences with insights from the natural sciences19 for the sake of doing intercultural philosophy with Peirce and Buddhism will ultimately also work to the benefit of a “dynamics of generativity and regeneration of soul, culture and society” as envisaged by Ananta Kumar Giri (2021).

Concluding Thoughts The main thrust of this paper has been an attempt to work out the semiotic purport of Abhidharma Buddhism as “a theory of consciousness” (cf. Piatigorsky 1984, p. 202): a project that is going to be pursued further by offering “A Yog¯ac¯ara view on the bio-cybernetic complexities of living systems” (cf. Lettner forthcoming.g). Summing up we may say that since semiosis is not conceived as something to be performed by a mind in the narrow sense of the term, semiotics and Buddhism match up very well with regard to their process-philosophical conception of agency. While

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dharmas refer to the various states that consciousness may assume, such states comprise both “mental” and “physical” constituents in the form of temporary flashings of consciousness. This does not, however, involve cognition or perception as an act to be performed by a subject with regard to a separate object: a stance that links up well with Peirce’s understanding of phaneral awareness. We have seen how Buddhism refrains from “construing cognitive awareness as the activity of an abiding self” and from “treating the senses as the faculties of an internal agent” (cf. Coseru 2012, no. 3.2). In a very similar way, at the level of Peirce’s phaneral awareness, “it has to be sheer experiencing, a kind of continuous happening in which nothing is detached from anything, and in particular no ego is experiencing itself as a phaneral ego in opposition to a phaneral non-ego” (De Tienne 2013, p. 20). All in all, those various parallels can be seen to point to the deeply phenomenological conception of both the Buddhist and the Peircean approaches: indeed, phenomenological and semiotic approaches match so well because both of them refuse to strictly separate in categorial terms an objective sphere on the one hand and a subjective sphere on the other hand (cf. Köller 1988, p. 30). At the same time, the results of this study call for a more detailed investigation of the challenges that Buddhist theories present to a Peircean interpretation of basic Buddhist conceptions and vice versa. To start with, while the notion of “dharmic events” (cf. Waldron 2003, 51ff.) seems compatible with the Peircean conception of semiosis in view of its temporal and processual dimension, the assumed momentariness and distinctness of dharmas raises a number of questions with regard to the notion of the interpretant and the question of continuity within this process of sign translation: for within such rapidly occurring sequences of causally connected consciousness moments each occurs with its own particular object. More precisely, keeping in mind the thirdness of “apperception” (samjñ¯ ˙ a) (cf. Lettner 2021, p. 369; Lettner forthcoming.d) as well as the semiosic dynamics of “dependent arising” (prat¯ıtyasamutp¯ada) as a sort of large-scale equivalent to Peirce’s principle of semiosis (cf. Lettner 2020, 191ff.), we would need to semiotically investigate the Buddhist notion of specific conditionality with regard to the fact that “each of the items in the sequence of conditioned origination [serves] as condition for the next” (cf. Warder 1971, p. 282); such an investigation would need to be completed by considering how a succession of “conscious moments” is dealt with in the context of Peirce’s conception of semiosis and “the meeting of the three” (tray¯an.¯am sam . nip¯atah.),

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i.e. sense, object and consciousness, as envisaged with regard to the above-mentioned paper on “A Buddhist model of semiosis”. Acknowledgements I would like to express my sincere thanks to Tiago da Costa e Silva for his helpful suggestions and my deep gratitude to Søren Brier, Professor Emeritus of Copenhagen Business School, for his encouragement and criticism of my work.

Notes 1. The canonical texts of Buddhism are contained in the so-called “three baskets” (P¯a. tipit.aka/ Skt. tripit.aka), i.e. 1. the vinaya (monastic rules), 2. The s¯ utras/ suttas (P¯a.) or ¯ agamas, i.e. the discourses and teachings attributed to the Buddha, and 3. the abhidharma or abhidhamma (P¯a.), i.e. “scholastic” interpretations in the form of highly systematic exegetical literature, which in early accounts is frequently referred to as “Buddhist scholasticism”. This body of exegetical literature builds upon the third collection of texts as preserved in the Abhidharma-Pit.aka (“Collection of Higher Doctrine”). As for the two major schools of Abhidharma philosophy, the Therav¯ada Abhidhamma has come to us in (the Middle Indic language) P¯a.li while the canon of the Sarv¯astiv¯ada-Vaibh¯as.ika is in Sanskrit (cf. Buswell and Jaini 1996, 89ff.). However, depending upon the relevant literature consulted in each case, Sanskrit or P¯a.li terms may at times be used to highlight something general about this genre of literature (rather than about a specific school tradition), without mentioning both the Sanskrit and P¯a.li terms in each case. Unless otherwise indicated, terms in italics are Sanskrit (Skt.). P¯a.li terminology will be indicated by adding “P¯a.”. 2. The Sabba sutta, i.e. the Sutta on “The all”, can be found in “The Book of the Six Sense Bases” (Sal.¯ ayatanavagga) of the “Connected Discourses” (Sam aya) (35:23, cf. Bodhi 2000, p. 1140). The P¯a.li text for the . yutta Nik¯ quoted passage goes as indicated in brackets: “And what, bhikkhus [i.e. “monks” or “brethren”], is everything [or: “the all”] (Kiñca bhikkhave sabbam . )? The eye and forms, the ear and sounds, the nose and odours, the tongue and tastes, the body and tactile objects, the mind and mental phenomena (cakkhuñceva r¯ up¯ a ca sotañca sadd¯ a ca gh¯ anañca gandh¯ a a ca k¯ ayo ca phot..thabb¯ a ca mano ca dhamm¯ a ca). This, ca jivh¯ a ca ras¯ bhikkhus, is called ‘the all’ (idam . vuccati bhikkhave sabbam . )” (cf. Samyuttanikaya 2\ GRETIL s.d., 3. Sabbavaggo 1. 3. 1 Sabbasuttam . = 23.). As Stcherbatsky explains with regard to a comparable passage from the Sanskrit canon (Sam agama, xiii), “everything exists means that the . yukt¯

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3.

4.

5.

6.

twelve ¯ ayatanas exist” (Stcherbatsky 1923, p. 5): i.e. the twelve “sensory bases” (¯ ayatanas ) (see Note 14), which constitute one of the various classifications of “dharmas” (i.e. the ultimate constituents of experience). The Sanskrit terms for these central notions are “matter” (r¯ upa), “mind” (citta), and “forces” (samsk¯ ˙ ara). For a detailed outline of the samsk¯ ˙ aras see Stcherbatsky, The Central Conception of Buddhism and the Meaning of the Word “Dharma” (1923, 33ff.). The traditional distinction between the material and the mental poles as known from the conception of the “five aggregates” (pañcaskandha) (to be discussed further ahead with regard to “Sensate matter (r¯ upa) and embodied experience”) will be partly maintained, but also refined through the conceptions of r¯ upa and (in particular) citta (now given alongside caitta, i.e. “thought concomitants” by means of which the three non-material skandhas are expanded) within the context of later dharma taxonomies (cf. Cox 2004, 553ff.) (see Note 8). The Sanskrit term “dharma”, derived from the root dhr. “to uphold” (i.e. to hold, bear, carry, maintain, preserve, keep etc., cf. Monier-Williams 1899, s.v. dhr.), which is cognate to Greek thronos and Latin firmus (cf. Conze 1962, p. 92), finds its equivalent in the P¯a.li term “dhamma”. In the singular, “dharma” (frequently capitalised) refers to the teachings of Buddhism in the sense of the “Buddha-Dharma” as the truth realised ´ akyamuni (i.e. “sage of the [clan of] S¯ ´ akyas”). While the by Buddha S¯ two basic meanings of dharma as “cosmic order” and “personal duty” in Brahmanical thought (cf. Hamilton 2001, p. 89) both reveal the notion of “maintaining” or “what is proper”, the term’s reference to the “‘doctrine’ of Buddhism” seems to “derive from the idea of ‘the way things are’ as ascertained by the Buddha through his experience” (Warder 1971, pp. 277–278). However, in contrast to the classical Indian philosophical meaning of the singular noun dharma (= Skt. or P¯a. dhamma) associated with truth, moral duty and religious teachings, which is evident also in the notion of the Buddha-Dharma, the focus of this study is going to be upon dharmas in the plural (i.e. dharm¯ ah. = Skt. pl.; P¯a. pl. dhamm¯ a ), which have been glossed as minimal constituents of phenomenal experience. Dharmas in this sense are continuously arising and fading in keeping with the conditioned causality of “dependent arising” (Skt. prat¯ıtyasamutp¯ ada; P¯a. pat.iccasamupp¯ ada) (cf. Lettner 2020, 181ff.). For an explanation of how Sanskrit and P¯a.li versions of terminology (e.g. dharma vs. dhamma) have been used see Note 1. i.e. “applicable equally to concrete and abstract, immediate or remembered, sensory or conceptual, subjective or objective, sentient or insentient, organic or inorganic, and so on” (Hamilton 2001, p. 89). “The Objects -- for a Sign may have any number of them -- may each be a single known existing thing or thing believed formerly to have existed

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or expected to exist, or a collection of such things, or a known quality or relation or fact, which single Object may be a collection, or whole of parts, or it may have some other mode of being, such as some act permitted whose being does not prevent its negation from being equally permitted, or something of a general nature desired, required, or invariably found under certain general circumstances.” (CP 2.232). 7. In Peirce’s philosophy, semiotics “occupies an in-between position” between the foundational phenomenological discipline (later to be termed phaneroscopy) and evolutionary metaphysics as the discipline that aims at the understanding of the structure of reality (cf. Pape 1998, p. 2019). The final replacement of “phenomenology” by “phaneroscopy” occurs in two paragraphs written ca. 1904 for “Logic viewed as Semiotics, Introduction Number 2, Phaneroscopy,” (1.286–287), as Spiegelberg explains in his 1956 paper on “Husserl’s and Peirce’s phenomenologies: Coincidence or interaction” (p. 179). 8. In order to get an impression of the way in which dharmas are organised into categories that represent both types of occurrence and particular tokens or instances (cf. Ronkin 2018, no. 2), let us take a look at the fivefold taxonomy adopted by the Sarv¯astiv¯adins (which is the school whose teaching asserts that “all exists”, cf. Skt. sarvam asti, i.e. that the dharmas exist throughout the periods of past, present and future). The complete list of 75 dharmas comprises dharmas that are “conditioned” (sam . skr.ta) by other factors (through the working of samsk¯ ˙ aras, i.e. “karmic formations” or “conditioning factors”, cf. Glasenapp 1985, p. 318; Potter 1996, p. 129) and organised into the following four categories: 1. r¯ upa, i.e. “(sensate) matter”, “material form” or “physical phenomena”, comprising 11 dharmas; 2. citta, i.e. “thought” or “consciousness”, comprising one single dharma; 3. caitta, i.e. “thought concomitants” or “mentals” that arise together with citta, comprising 46 dharmas; and 4. citta-viprayuktasam ara, i.e. “factors dissociated from thought”, comprising 14 dharmas . sk¯ that cannot be classified as either material or mental. We can see the soteriological orientation of dharma classification when looking at such subcategories of “mentals” (caitta) as the 10 “wholesome dharmas of large extent” (ku´sala-mah¯ abh¯ umika) that accompany every wholesome a ), and thought and include e.g. “faith” (´sraddh¯ a ), “equanimity” (upeks.¯ “nonviolence” (ahims¯ ˙ a ), or the caitta subcategory of the 6 dharmas that accompany every defiled thought (kle´sa-mah¯ abh¯ umika), including e.g. “confusion” (moha) and “negligence” (pram¯ ada). In addition to these 72 conditioned dharmas, the taxonomy contains a fifth category of three “unconditioned” (asam . skr.ta) dharmas, which comprise 3 dharmas, namely, “space” (¯ ak¯ as´a) and two states of “cessation” (nirodha),

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9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

i.e. pratysamkhy¯ ˙ anirodha (“cessation occurring as the result of meditative discernment”), and apratysamkhy¯ ˙ anirodha, (“cessation occurring not through meditative discernment”, but owing to a lack of productive cause) (cf. Willemen 2004, 221ff.). Just as nirv¯ an.a literally refers to “blowing out” or “extinction” (cf. Conze 1962, p. 71), the term nirodha (“stopping” or “cessation”) frequently functions as a synonym of nirv¯ an.a and clearly belongs to the Buddhist liberational path of signlessness (cf. Lettner 2020). Bronkhorst (1985) discusses a list of seven items occurring in the s¯ utras and vinaya texts, which is most commonly presented as “a list of beneficial psychic characteristics (ku´sala dharma) or simply psychic characteristics (dharma), noting, however, that in early Buddhism the latter were used in order to reach meditational states (cf. pp. 305– 306). Accordingly, Buddhist approaches distinguish between dharma as “an object of visual meditation” (bh¯ avan¯ a ) and as “an object of thinking”—in the sense of philosophical analysis as well as “our own metaphilosophical understanding of it in a systematic way” (cf. Piatigorsky 1984, pp. 181–182). In fact, this schematic classification was originally designed with regard to human embodiment until later “worldly stuff” was also assigned to it (cf. Rospatt 1997). i.e. the “purified pleasure-ego” that is “constituted by an introjection of everything that is a source of pleasure and by the projection outwards of whatever brings about unpleasure” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1967/1973, p. 230). In fact, the role of the body figures prominently in the Buddhist soteriological programme, and a phenomenologically inspired theory of embodied consciousness and lived experience is fundamental to any cultural studies approach dealing with the pragmatic foundation of ‘thought forms’ within the context of ‘life forms’ (cf. Lettner, diss. thesis, forthcoming.a). A short account of the Buddhist potential for working out the significance of the “karmic formations” (sam ara) of body, mind . sk¯ and speech with regard to Luhmann’s triple model of biological, psychological, and socio-communicative autopoiesis as discussed by Brier (2008) can be found in my sketch for a “cybersemiotic philology of Buddhist knowledge forms” (cf. Lettner 2021). The notion of sapratighatva (“impenetrability”) (cf. Stcherbatsky 1923, p. 11) would be interesting to consider in light of Peirce’s category of secondness. The central conception of “sensory bases” (¯ ayatanas ) constitutes a fundamental classificatory scheme for dharmas that explains how consciousness (vijñ¯ ana), which never appears alone, arises when there is contact between a cognitive faculty or sense (indriya) and a corresponding

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object (vis.aya): i.e. through six “consciousnesses” or modalities of cognitive awareness. More precisely, when one of the six “internal bases” (adhy¯ atma-¯ ayatana) that denote the six “sensory (or cognitive) faculties” (indriya), i.e. 1. caks.us “eye”/sense of vision, 2. ´srotra “ear”/sense of audition, 3. ghr¯ an.a “nose”/sense of smelling, 4. jihv¯ a “tongue”/sense of taste, 5. k¯ aya “body”, skin/sense of touch, and 6. manas “mind”/cognitive faculty, and (the corresponding) one of the six “external bases” ( b¯ ahya-¯ ayatana) that refer to the six categories of “objects” (vis.aya), which are consecutively numbered as 7. r¯ upa “visibles”/colour and shape, 8. ´sabda “audibles”/sound, 9. gandha “smells”/odour, 10. rasa “tastes”/taste, 11. spras..tavya “touchables”, and 12. dharmas “mental objects”, appear simultaneously (albeit without any “grasping” by means of the intellect), they act as the “bases” for the respective “modality of awareness” (vijñ¯ ana) to arise (cf. Lusthaus 2002, p. 55; Stcherbatsky 1923, p. 55). To give a simple example: when there is simultaneously 1. a momentary flashing e.g. of the visual faculty (of the eye) (caks.us ), 2. a moment of something visible, i.e. (a patch of) colour or shape (r¯ upa), and 3. a moment of pure consciousness (citta), the latter being supported by 1 and 2 to arise as “visual awareness” (caks.ur-vijñ¯ ana), what occurs is a sensation of colour. Even though the sixth type of consciousness, i.e. “mental cognitive awareness” (manovijñ¯ ana) “arises in conjunction with two kinds of objects: with a previous moment of sensory cognitive awareness as an object and with its ‘own’ kind of object, that is, mental phenomena” (Waldron 2003, p. 29) and mind (manas ) as the sixth faculty thus experiences what are discrete operations occurring in separate sensory domains (cf. p. 195), it does not constitute anything like an abiding agent or permanent self according to Buddhist understanding. 15. Cf. Kant: “I, as thinking, am an object of inner sense, and am called ‘soul.’ That which is an object of outer sense is called ‘body’” (B 400/ A 342). 16. Cf. Buswell and Jaini (1996, p. 91). 17. “What I have attempted to convey thus far is that Peirce was attempting to show how thought could be construed, for logical purposes, as internal to the representational process by identifying it, in effect, with the interpretant in that process. But every representation is an interpretant, when viewed from a certain perspective, and the process itself consists wholly of representations. Hence that process is the thought process, as far as the logician is concerned: the philosophy of mind is thus reduced to semiotic. In order for this to go through, though, it is essential that the conception of mind as something apart from this process not be surreptitiously reintroduced by construing the interpretation of a representation as an interpreting act by a mind independent of the process, which is

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to say that the agency of interpretation must be located in the process itself. In other words, that which generates the interpretant is not a mind which is interpreting the representation but is rather the representation itself: thus semiosis is defined by Peirce as the action of the representation (sign) in generating its own interpretant. Semiosis is not a mental act of interpretation” (Ransdell 2017, p. 77). 18. I have developed some of these issues in a draft on “Notes for a Buddhist cybersemiotics” with regard to Buddhist Yog¯ac¯ara philosophy. 19. While Peirce may have to be regarded first and foremost as a “man of science” (cf. Ketner 2009), his systematic classification of the sciences “reflects a very broad, classical sense of ‘science,’ not restricted to the modern empirical sciences alone…” so that “he could include under the label of ‘science’ not only laboratory sciences such as chemistry but also human sciences…” (Liszka 1996, p. 3). This outlook provides us with a suitable framework for cross-fertilising semiotic roots with various philosophical routes in the spirit of transdisciplinarity. In order to develop synergies between Eastern and Western knowledge traditions and to provide a coherent view of both natural and cultural forms, we can also seek the help of a Peirce-based model that combines various philosophical and philological insights by integrating cultural studies with bio- and cybersemiotic approaches (cf. Lettner 2021). One such project proceeds by means of “Buddhist phenomenological steps to an intercultural cognitive semiotics” (cf. Lettner forthcoming.g).

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Change” held at the Department of Social studies, University of Stavanger (UiS) in Stavanger, Norway, June 13–15, 2019, cf. https://ebooks.uis.no/ index.php/USPS/catalog/view/9/6/22-1. Abstract Available at https:// www.academia.edu/39633654/_Connecting_consciousness_and_the_cos mos_in_cybersemiotics_and_Indian_Buddhism_Two_process-philosophical_p aradigms_for_the_challenges_of_change_in_nature_and_culture_NASS_XI_ Stavanger_UiS_Norway_2019_. Lettner, Alina Therese. 2020. Peirce’s Semiotic Pragmaticism and Buddhist Soteriology: Steps Towards Modelling ‘Thought forms’ of Signlessness. Ch. 9 in Pragmatism, Spirituality and Society: Border Crossings, Transformations and Planetary Realizations, ed. Ananta Kumar Giri. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 187–219. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7102-2_9. Lettner, Alina Therese. 2021. Towards a Cybersemiotic Philology of Buddhist Knowledge Forms: How to Undo Objects and Concepts in ProcessPhilosophical Terms. Ch. 13 in Introduction to Cybersemiotics: A Transdisciplinary Perspective, ed. Carlos Vidales and Søren Brier. Dordrecht: Springer (Biosemiotics 21), 317–389. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-527464_13. Lettner, Alina Therese. forthcoming.a. Eine Philologie der Denkformen für Indien und Europa: Sanskrit-S¯ utras und Semiotik in den Cultural Studies. Doctoral dissertation. University of Kassel, Kassel University Press. Lettner, Alina Therese. forthcoming.b. Referenz ohne Referent in der Philosophie des Yog¯ac¯ara-Buddhismus: Ein Blick auf ‚nur Bewusstsein‘ (cittam¯ atra) und semiotische agency [i.e. Reference Without a Referent in Yog¯ac¯ara Buddhist Philosophy: Taking a Look at ‘Nothing-but-Cognition’ (cittam¯ atra) and Semiotic Agency]. Paper accepted for the 16th International Conference of the German Semiotics Society (DGS 16) on Transformations—Signs and their Objects in Transition (University of Technology Chemnitz, Germany, September 28–October 2, 2021). Section Zeichenphilosophie (i.e. Philosophy of signs ) on the Topic “Das Ende der Referenz? Wahrheitsansprüche im ‚postfaktischen Zeitalter‘“ [i.e. “The End of Reference? Truth Claims in the ‘Post-Factual Era’”] (Org. Georg Albert, Jörg Bücker and Jan Georg Schneider). Abstract Available at https://www.academia.edu/44225508/_ Referenz_ohne_Referent_in_der_Philosophie_des_Yog%C4%81c%C4%81ra_B uddhismus_Ein_Blick_auf_nur_Bewusstsein_cittam%C4%81tra_und_semiot ische_agency_DGS_16_Chemnitz_2020_2021_. Lettner, Alina Therese. forthcoming.c. No Self, No Trivial Pursuits: Personhood and Agency in Buddhist Ethics: Reflections Inspired by a Dialogue with Charles Foster (Oxford). In Asian Journal of Social Theory, Inaugural Issue, eds. (in chief) Ananta Kumar Giri (Madras Institute of Development Studies) and John Clammer (Jindal Global University).

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Lettner, Alina Therese. forthcoming.d. Language and the Constitution of Objectivity in Abhidharma Buddhist Philosophy: A Semiotic View on ‘Apperception’ (samjñ¯ ˙ a ) and ‘Nominal Designation’ (prajñapti): Paper accepted for The Fifteenth International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS XV, Università del Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy, August 23–27, 2021). Abstract Available at https://www.academia.edu/44209461/_Lan guage_and_the_constitution_of_objectivity_in_Abhidharma_Buddhist_phil osophy_A_semiotic_view_on_apperception_sa%E1%B9%81j%C3%B1%C4% 81_and_nominal_designation_praj%C3%B1apti_ICHoLS_XV_Milan_2020_2 021_. Lettner, Alina Therese. forthcoming.e. Transpositional Subjectobjectivity and Wholeness—A Buddhist Phenomenological Prelude to Merleau-Ponty. In Transpositional Subjectobjectivity, ed. Ananta Kumar Giri. In preparation. Lettner, Alina Therese. forthcoming.f. Of Seeds and Weeds in Buddhist and Christian Models of Faith and Knowledge: A Comparative Ethics and Epistemology of Spiritual ‘Growth’ vs. ‘Not Becoming’. In Cultivating Transforming Faith and a New Ecology of Hope, ed. Ananta Kumar Giri. In preparation. Lettner, Alina Therese. forthcoming.g. Buddhist Phenomenological Steps to an Intercultural Cognitive Semiotics: A Yog¯ac¯ara View on the Bio-Cybernetic Complexities of Living Systems: Paper accepted for the 4th Conference of the International Association for Cognitive Semiotics at RWTH Aachen, Germany (IACS4), cf. https://iacs4.signges.de/aachen2020/program (originally planned for July 2–4, 2020: Conference date postponed), Abstract Available at https://www.academia.edu/43136371/_Buddhist_phenomeno logical_steps_to_an_intercultural_cognitive_semiotics_A_Yog%C4%81c%C4% 81ra_view_on_the_bio_cybernetic_complexities_of_living_systems_IACS4_A achen_2020_. Liszka, James Jakób. 1996. A General Introduction to the Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lusthaus, Dan. 2002. Buddhist Phenomenology: A Philosophical Investigation of Yog¯ ac¯ ara Buddhism and the Ch’eng Wei-shih Lun. London: RoutledgeCurzon. Monier-Williams, Monier. 1899. A Sanskrit-English Dictionary, Etymologically and Philologically Arranged, with Special Reference to Cognate Indo-European Languages, New ed., greatly enlarged and improved, with the collaboration of E. Leumann, C. Cappeller and other scholars. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Available online at http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/scans/ MWScan/tamil/index.html. Nicolescu, Basarab. 2002. Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity, trans. Karen Claire Voss. Albany, NY: State Univ. of New York Press. Odagawa, Masako. 1997. Buddhism. In Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, ed. Lester Embree, et al., 85–90. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

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Samyuttanikaya 2\ GRETIL s.d. = Samyuttanikaya 2, Input by the Sri Lanka Tripitaka Project to the Göttingen Register of Electronic Texts in Indian Languages. Suttantapit.ake\Sam . yuttanik¯ayo\Catutthobh¯ago\ Sal.¯ayatanasam yuttam , cf. http://gretil.sub.unigoettingen.de/gretil/2_p . . ali/1_tipit/2_sut/3_samyu/samyut4u.htm Singer, Milton. 1980. Signs of the Self: An Exploration in Semiotic Anthropology. American Anthropologist 82 (3): 485–507. Spiegelberg, Herbert. 1956. Husserl’s and Peirce’s Phenomenologies: Coincidence or Interaction. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 17 (2): 164–185. Available online at http://www.jstor.org/stable/2104214. Stcherbatsky, Theodor. 1923. The Central Conception of Buddhism and the Meaning of the Word “Dharma”. London: Royal Asiatic Society. Steiner, George. 1989. Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?. London: Faber and Faber. Strauss, Otto. 1925/2004. Indische Philosophie, ed. Andreas Pohlus. Lizenzausgabe. Aachen: Shaker. ¯ Waldron, William S. 2003. The Buddhist Unconscious. The Alaya-vijñ¯ ana in the Context of Indian Buddhist Thought. London: RoutledgeCurzon. Warder, A.K. 1971. Dharmas and Data. Journal of Indian Philosophy 1: 271–295. Willemen, Charles. 2004. Dharma and Dharmas. In Encyclopedia of Buddhism, ed. Robert E. Buswell, 2 Vols., Vol. 1: A-L, 217–224. New York: Macmillan Ref. USA.

CHAPTER 5

Ecological Interconnectedness: Entwined Selves, Transcendent and Immanent Sarah Louise Gates

Ecological interconnectedness studies are a portal into dual and nondual frameworks for bioculturally embedded human identity. This field is part of the transdisciplinary, holistic epistemology shift across academia. The discourse is catalysed by concern over injustice, conflict, climate change, ecosystem collapse and extinction. It coincides with an increasingly modernised, interconnected—and vulnerable, “old world order” of pan-global industrial capitalism. Ananta Kumar Giri introduces this volume by calling us to reimagine selves and worlds, to reconceptualise identities and ethnicity as roots earthed in soil, language, embodiments and culture; without being bounded, escaping the rigidity of both exclusionism and cultural holism towards acknowledgement of contemporary transmodernity, the translocality of revised ethnicities and the sahadharma, or commons, where individual dharmas can integrate within community as shared duties and dreams, beyond the power of states and markets. By revisiting our roots, reclaiming traditional knowledge systems

S. L. Gates (B) Edith Cowan University, Perth, WA, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. K. Giri (ed.), Roots, Routes and a New Awakening, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7122-0_5

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and languages from epistemicide, despite the flux of population movements, it is possible to harness creative forces of newly recognised cultural capital, integrative and hybrid know-how, to reclaim from universalism and monocultures of the mind, rich seeds to cultivate from our roots, new routes. Ananta Kumar Giri has earlier explained: As we realize the deeper spiritual meaning and challenge of existing categories coming from our culture and religions, we also need to create new categories of reality, living and realization. In case of the existing discourse of self and other, swadharma and paradharma, which has been thrown up into antagonistic battles, we need to create a new category of saha (together) and sahadharma (dharma of togetherness).

One of the means to reconceptualise the self and common dharmas, from a system of traditional knowledge that has prospered in translocality as a living, and breathing, dynamic means of self-knowing, and of knowing other, is tantra. Far from the epistemological violence of misrepresentation as sexualised spirituality, tantra’s roots are deeply philosophical, pan-Indian, with routes already pan-global in seed form as transnational yoga. Drawing into common parlance models of multidimensionality like the five koshas and six chakras, transformative potentials of kun.d.alin¯ı awakening and the quest for absorption in transmental consciousness, studio yoga is replete with a mixture of S¯an.khya, Ved¯anta and Tantra concepts and practices. The unfoldment of the young intercultural phenomenon contains largely untapped reservoirs of potential on three levels of reimagining selves as humans, communities and humanity. The seeds are fertilised by establishing traditionally rooted yoga as a “soft power” through the United Nations International Day of Yoga, seemingly without recognising how yogic practices and teachings contradict universalist dogmas, wake up non-local identities, more prehuman than post- or trans- given the Self as consciousness is prior to the embodied self, existed before and will exist after individual entities are long gone. Although it promises shared identity, that Self manifests as endlessly reformulating, always original, multiplicity in the world of selves, names and forms. In this way, yogic teachings have readily transmitted and taken root, and offered new routes, all over the world. The greatest promise of tantra for today is offering the practical methods and routes, to see reality in terms of the “interconnected worldview” already rooted in millennia of conceptual development in the

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teachings. A new planetary civilisation is raised from the matrix of earth, being a collective body of individual centres, each with their own interwoven peripheries. As humans grow from their true planetary matrix within organic, ecological, intersecting, non-linear living systems, new ways of being can unfold from embodied knowledge factoring mutual, reciprocal relations. This manner of extending self-realising roots from the soils of reclaimed ecological identities, into self-realising routes of commons and collective, is a natural progression from the ineffective, vertically linear hierarchies of limited egos, occupying civil societies, dependent on neoliberal market economies, governed by nation states and their selected representatives that form the umbrella body of the United Nations.

Ecological Roots and Routes: One Being Many Environmental philosopher Freya Mathews (2003: 74) proposes the universe is an “indivisible unity organised along the lines of a self-realising system”…“created out of the fabric of itself” with…“finite subsystems” as “an endless stream of relatively individuated finite systems/selves”. Each one of these selves is a subjectivity inside the wider subjectivity, or plenum of overarching universal sentience. Mathews (ibid.: 75) describes creation as erotically entwined rather than just causally related, with “a communicative impulse [that] manifests as a poetic order” where “the world speaks to selves” symbolically. Her extensive contributions include models of ontopoetics, ecological self and panpsychism (Mathews 2007, 2009) all relevant to tantric themes of identity, aesthetics, consciousness and matter, and each combined, to cognitive psychology. There is widespread agreement in environmental philosophy on the potential for global change based on humanity’s improved understanding of interconnectedness in pragmatic terms of “realisation” and “actualisation” rather than the reproductive learning model of atomistic knowledge production (Chen and Rutter 2013: 33; Evitts et al. 2010; Laszlo 2003; Montuori 2006; Montuori and Donnelly 2016). Present research affirms “systems thinking, the tendency to perceive phenomena as interconnected and dynamic, is associated with a general pro-environmental orientation” (Ballew et al. 2019). Whilst “systems thinking is positively related to global warming beliefs and attitudes, the relationships are almost fully explained by an ecological worldview” (Ballew et al. 2019).

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Ecological Selves The polarities of interconnectedness are the “Ocean of Continuity” on the one hand, and for the “hyper-separated” the “Desert of Difference” on the other (Plumwood 1993: 3). Here we continue a conversation that addresses Plumwood’s (ibid.: 6) view that: Overcoming the dualistic dynamic requires the recognition of both continuity and difference: this means acknowledging the other as neither alien to and discontinuous with self nor assimilated to an extension of the self.

Continuity and difference are epitomised in two tacitly divergent insights of deep ecology. Although each idea speaks of human–natural union via ecological selfhood, they take alternate routes to the same root, with mixed results. One claim is that ecosophical Self-Realisation loosely correlates to identification with the a¯tman (Næss and Rothenberg 1989). We return to this. The other claim is described by John Seed’s famous exclamation (cited in Merchant 2005: 111): I am rainforest…You destroy me so carelessly, tearing down so many of my trees for a few planks…You cause my thick layer of precious topsoil to wash away, destroying the coral reefs that fringe me…Your screaming machines tear through my trunks, rip my flesh, reducing me to sawdust and furniture.

This verse describes the individual as co-extensive with the Earth, speaking in first person of that which is normally spoken in third. All listed descriptors here are material: trees, planks, topsoil, reefs, machines, flesh, sawdust, furniture. We find a parallel framework of “self-Self” and “agency to act in the interests of the whole” in the Bhagavad G¯ıt¯a where Arjuna synchronises with universal dharma, by allowing Kr.s.n.a to guide the chariot of his body, mind and senses, and this, by enacting his personal dharma as warrior. These two frameworks of deep ecology and Hindu philosophy look similar, and obliquely related in theory, but they are not identical. For example, in Advaita Ved¯anta, a person acting on behalf of the whole, does not perceive that whole as solely Nature. Sthaneshwar Timalsina (2013) evaluates from source texts that: From the perspective of absolute reality, when establishing oneness of ´ nkara] the phenomenal self and the absolute reality, the Brahman, he [Sa ˙

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maintains that the self is devoid of agency. When engaging in his relative perspective, however, his is not a case of either free will or determinism: it is a compromise between free will and a mild determinism that is based on the karmic residue of an agent’s previous actions that were effected with his own free will.

Acting as nature positions agency somewhere between the j¯ıva and the Brahman, that is, if nature (as prakr.ti) can act. ´ nkara Sa ˙ argues, what possible motives could insentient prakr.ti have behind creation? Prakr.ti is nothing but the three gun.as, none of which have any ´ nkara purpose of its own. Sa ˙ fundamentally disagrees with the premise that something insentient can act, since any “act” is directed toward achieving a goal and is carried out by a conscious agent. (Timalsina 2013)

In Seed’s verse, the destruction of Nature is by conversion from a living ´ nkara, tree to an inert product of culture. For Sa ˙ nature never really happened and is always inert. For Mathews’ nature is sentient and has its own telos, or self-actualising interests as whole and part. For Trika Shaivism, this is complex, because on some levels of awareness nature is insentient and on others, it isn’t. When Seed says that the rainforest is being destroyed, it need not be inferred that nature as a whole, or Gaia is killed, however it could be taken as symbolic of that outcome. The death of nature alongside the sacred feminine, and the greening of God, are tropes summonsed in the discourse (Merchant 1989; Sheldrake 1994; Roszak et al. 1995). The characterisation of a dying larger Self, through the loss or fragmentation of many smaller selves, as indicated by Seed, occurs with the rise of the “screaming machine”. Ecocritical writings historically contextualise ecocide within the military/industrial revolutions as a Nature vs Machine binary. Putting the body before the machine, the ghost/self in the machine/nature, singularity with machines represent a struggle between modernity, identity and ecology, that build intensity from the Romantic era. The distinguishing factor between a machine and a living being is sentience which offers autonomy vs automatons. These dichotomies narrow as the gap between ecological and technological systems rapidly closes. For some, transhumanism promises freedom from biological, cultural and sexual confinement (Haraway 1991). Other themes are the creator and creation where man removes God, then takes his place. For

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example, stripping out sentience from non-human animals counterposed by unshakeable faith in granting sentience to machines like the clay and breath of Genesis, but atheist. The new myths appear to demolish the old ones by resurrection with new protagonists. It seems impossible to morally consider, that nature could create both saviour and evil within the same type of organism since monsters are reserved for Franken-figures, but these have always been all too human. Freya Mathews (2018 [1994]) refers to deep ecology’s “identification dilemma” and counters this point in several ways, one of which, from her panpsychist model, that suffering endured by individuals is also endured by the whole (Mathews 2003). There is a difference, agreed between theorists, between actions of a person who is awake and one possessed by their separateness from all else. On this point, few eco theorists would disagree, that pathological egotism, cannot foster ecological or social justice, and is responsible for much harm. But neither can unbounded empathy assist, if all the agent does is suffer over the suffering of self or others. Even nature has boundaries and for those empathically inclined there are tantric means to elevate even the darkest of emotions, thus granting agency, and empowerment, perhaps even more so, to those who feel the most by transformation of emotional energy. When experienced as ordinary emotions, they can be positive or negative, but when elevated to the level of rasa, they all provide aesthetic relish. The recognition (pratyabhijña) of the self is thus not that of a disembodied and disinterested witnessing self. Accordingly, the body is not the problem but the means of liberation. Corporality is the presupposition of the emotional self and thus of liberation. Obscure Tantric practices, while reinforcing embodiment, simultaneously promote transcendence…. (Timalsina 2017: 125)

Empathic relations are an opening up of subjectivity between selves, to spaces of shared conscious states, for example feelings are not contained in our bodies, but can easily permeate a room. This is similar to Naess’ claims to widening the circles of self to encompass others and the above technique is a means to avoid the emotional overload it would cause if those shared spaces became normalised as ordinary encounter, which is what Naess implies.

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There is an implied responsibility in ecological and yogic theories due to interconnectedness, not necessarily just oneness, that there are individual, collective and impersonal levels from which to engage within the world so not impose suffering unnecessarily on others. This includes concern for non-/humans and insentient life—for instance, seeds, minerals, mountains, rivers and elements—arising into conditions over which they have little control and who do not have the same degree of agency. Being an agent, however, also needs maintenance and cultivation of the environment to increase freedom to employ it. Yoga, even at the most basic level, incorporates concern for obstacles to realisation from the outset. We see this inscribed in the simplest of practices ´ ananda like chanting s´¯antih. three times when reciting mantra, which Sarv¯ (2009) says is to ward off the three obstacles to study: “¯adhy¯atmika (bodily), a¯dhibhautika (terrestrial) and ¯adhidaivika (heavenly)”. Contemporary yoga, in practice derived from hat.hayoga, is concerned with maintaining health which minimises obstacles of the body. The ethics of general studio yoga are from the eight-fold system of Patañjal¯ı’s Yoga S¯utra defined in Feuerstein (1997). This attends to some terrestrial obstacles by yama: non-harming, truthfulness, cleanliness, not stealing, chastity and greedlessness. Heavenly obstacles would be deferred by niyama: purity, contentment, asceticism, study and devotion to ¯Ishwara.1 Taking these observances alone more seriously, even if only by the significant minority in the west who practice yoga, could advance society. Chapple (2005) speaks of s¯am . khya and ecology in similar terms. Yoga in theory and practice, can inform and transform people, but is not activism. It can make more resilient, less co-dependent, and critically minded actors though—if the dharmic aspects are applied and form the basis of actions. What does a panpsychist model say for selves born into hunger, poverty, disease or the selves who become the victims of atrocities and violence? If the universe is not simply the observer, as Mathews (2005) tells us, but actively engaged in it, it is prepared to live, die, alternate between joy and sorrow, to suffer for its capacity to be and become. To do that, a universal entity forgoes its own agency as creator, to enable agency to individual entities who then participate in the co-creation of worlds. If the universal being must suffer with us, surely the most pain is borne by those on the ground, who identify with mind, senses and body. If it was the case that the divine felt its own Self-inflicted suffering, lamentations of humans might be as irritating as a mosquito bite in terms

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of scale. Freedom from this bondage is the general direction of a yogi concerned with Self-realisation and clearly, if the universe suffers with us it reduces it in sum, whole and part.

Seeing Three In Trika Shaivism, the determinant between individual and the universal Self is about perception. Dyczkowski teaches that there are initial and subsequent acts of perception. The first which arises naturally is non-dual, and the second is differentiated awareness.2 The purpose of this lens alternation, if we do not consider the universe to be inherently binding, but power of consciousness to reveal itself, and a play, is practicality. Trika aims for an integral monist perception of both views simultaneously, which makes three: unity, diversity and overall union; part of which process is mastery of alternation without losing sight of the other. The trouble for the bound soul is not that they see the world as differentiated per se, but they only see it in this way, and mistake the tree for the forest. Similarly, John Seed’s verse, only sees the forest, just as some yoga teachings aim only for the transcendent at the expense of the immanent. This concept of integral monism is expressed to some extent in different terms, showing how science may end up with a similar paradigm (Laszlo 2003: 113)3 : The metaphysics of universal connectivity is ontologically unitary but not categorically monistic: in it both psyche and physis are defining features. Such a conception is not classically dualistic, for matter and mind are viewed as defining, but not as disjunctive, features— they are complementary aspects of the same evolving reality…Physical reality evolves into all of reality, and mind is an element throughout evolving reality. The universe is “bipolar”: matter (in the form of matter-like bound-energy entities) and mind (as manifested in the stream of lived experience), are distinct but complementary aspects.

Ecological models call for the cultivation of this skill, but they cannot provide the means as yogic practice does. Trika teachings train vision, not of the physical eyes, but those of the higher centres from buddhi to Pratibha. One metaphor of this is our perception of time as both a seamless flow and as incremental instants. Another is the continuity of consciousness between the three states: waking, dreaming and deep sleep. This is due to a fourth aspect, of tur¯ıya.

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´ The fourth state, or tur¯ıya, according to Siva S¯ utra 1/7, “(abides constantly in) the various (states) of waking, dreaming and deep sleep” (Lakshmanjoo 2010b; Dyczkowski 2007). The gap between one state and the next through which the yogi catches a glimpse of the Fourth state, expands until he is carried beyond all levels and states in his experience of oneness of the absolute (anuttara). Mindful of the true nature of subject and object in all three states, the yogi is no longer a victim (bhogya) of these states but their master and achieves liberation while yet alive (j¯ıvanmukta). (Dyczkowski 2007)

This explanation for the oneness of reality whilst not negating its differentiation is ultimately an immanentalised form of transcendence, and it could also be a transcentalised immanence, that does not turn away from reality, world, body, mind and senses, but hones the skill of perceiving in three modes of being: individual, universal and “awareness at the centre”. Once this is perfected there is nowhere else to go and nothing more to do. This occurs due to the pervasion and stabilisation of the fourth state, which is also acquired after kun.d.alin¯ı has burnt obscuring impurities away. This final state is tur¯ıy¯at¯ıta referred to in the M¯alin¯ıvijayatantra (2:38) as “mah¯apracaya”, the “unlimited and unexplainable supreme totality” and the Tantr¯aloka (10:283) as “satatoditam”, “that state which has no pause, no break” (Lakshmanjoo 2003). Vy¯ana, is the fifth state, once the fourth has completed expansion of consciousness. The ¯I´swarapratibhijñ¯ak¯arik¯a (Utpaladeva c.900–975C, 3:2.20) says: Flowing upwards through the middle path, the breath is called ud¯ana; it is the fourth state and is made of fire, it corresponds to the Vijñ¯an¯akalas, the Mantras and the Lord. The supreme breath is the vy¯ana, whose essence is all.

Although selves acting in opposition to the best interests of other beings are possible, due to their freedom to be and become, and the reality may be that they are part, as a limb self of the same universal Self, they do not act in accord with the collective dharma of duty to care for Nature, because they have not seen that: the nature of all things is in the nature of the self, and the self is in the nature of all (ekabh¯avah.sarvasvabh¯avah., sarvabh¯avaekasvabh¯avah.).4 The sense of being as one within the diversity and unity of totality, is attained by the pervasion, or samave´sa of supreme consciousness. There is

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no doubt that it arises when we are “in” nature spontaneously but it isn’t limited to the earthly realm, unless of course, we would like to call all of it, nature. That would redefine the western understanding of Nature. There is scope for Shakta aspects of tantra to better inform our understanding of Nature as divine, as well as the elevated status of the divine feminine as emanatrix of consciousness. This is a direction suggested in Timalsina (2007) that deserves a study of its own.

Other Natures In the verse of Seed, despite a similar self/Self arrangement, his identity being one with nature, a dichotomy is inferred in the tension between the self of forest defenders as insiders, with forestry agents as outsiders. Historically, this tension has manifested in confrontation including violence. The role of self-reflexivity and self-identification is key to deciphering this contention, neither of which are exclusive to either activist or forest workers as individuals, but their effects are reflected by actions and whom they benefit. Workers that comprise an industry can also be eco-psychometrically evaluated for pathological defences (Ketola 2004). Reading this conflict through Val Plumwood’s (1993) Master Model, on the basis of identification, values, actions, instrumentalisation and ends, it is possible to draw a distinction between which personality acts for and against the ecosystem more clearly. The identity construct of the self of the Master Model, which underpins the destruction of nature, is relationally defined by projection upon the othered of all that is rejected within the self. Traditionally, this sets out from what Plumwood calls values dualism, built upon a core masculine/feminine relation that maximises value on one side and reduces the other to nothing. Value is accrued then only in terms of its usefulness or conformity to the Master and his agenda. Typically, this elevates mind over matter, intellect over emotion, culture over nature and so forth. A post-colonial ecofeminist reading of our background is that the primary culture, being European Imperialists at the time the Industrial Capitalist system began, set into legislation and maintained, by ongoing exploitative transactions, the dominance of white men. The global north feminised and demonised the global south through this series of evaluations that attracted capital to the centre and the south and ecosystems became the “raw materials” into the “machine” that drove modernity.

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The exclusion of Master selves by distancing, or relational definition from the effeminised does not mean though, that Masters are not actually embedded within nature, or that other cultures are not significant, only that one form of culture has become psychologically elevated from the natural, to become the domain of white men’s work, or “primary, secondary and tertiary production” (Fisher 1939 [2018]). Human and ecological resources are devalued or excluded from the economic equation (Shiva and Mies 1993 [1988]; Plumwood 1993). Being above the primitive, savage and barbaric, to take a post-colonial view, or pure in relation to the soiled, sinful and stained from a puritanical view, for example, enables splitting of the self from reality. What we see in yoga, may look like withdrawal from the worldly, but it is more recognition of the self-Self continuum as actor within the sheaths of the mind, senses and body. Not through negation or denial. The householder, rather than renunciate model reiterates this at every level. This includes emotions, feelings, energies, imagination and subjectivity. As Timalsina tells us (2017: 125) The esoteric experience, central to the practice of Tantra, is not a transcendental experience that manifests in negation of corporeality, but rather, it breaches the dichotomy of the mind and body. At the somatic level, this experience is a consequence not merely of so-called ‘positive’ emotions, but also of emotions such as fury, disgust, or marvel. Rather than transcending somatic conditions in order to achieve liberation, the Tantric approach embraces emotions as its path, and in this process, it provides a higher meaning to embodied experience. While the goal of both Tantric and aesthetic activity is to reach to the transcendent (lokottara) experience, it is in their immanent modes of rejoicing that the link between these two systems is found.

In contrast, although they might be categorised as “enjoyers” rather than “renouncers”, persons who are bound by sensory over-stimulation, unrestrained materialism or greed, may remove themselves psychologically from nature and associate more with culture, but they are bound by both, especially if identity is added into the mix. There is an inability, from a yogic view to perceive the products of the earth as “not mine” and belonging to nature, which is imbued with the same sentience as the self. Part of this equation has been to historically deny sentience, cognition and sophisticated interiority to non-human animals; to claim those as exclusively human, and in their elevated forms, to men.

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In Seed’s citation, the tree, a living being, becomes a plank, sawdust or furniture, and this is where the destruction of the being of Nature is located: “you destroy me”, which catalyses defence mode. This is the “Nature knows best” maxim where the individual knows what nature knows to be best. It hardens the edges of an engaged ecological self within and opposed to other ecological selves. To this objection a deep ecologist might reply that although we are ontologically one with Nature, we may not consciously recognise this to be the case. In consciousness we may construct our identity in opposition to Nature. Our actions vis-à-vis the environment will then reflect this false consciousness…Such action may then be regarded as unnatural…. (Mathews 2018 [1994])

If we frame it as agents in a single ecosystem that behave in contradictory ways, similar scenarios within a human body when cells behave abnormally and other cells are released by the body to counter their effects are not unnatural. In Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, Arne Naess (1989: 173– 174) suggests widening the notion of self to include others: Through identification, higher level unity is experienced: from identifying with ‘one’s nearest’, higher unities are created through circles of friends, local communities, tribes, compatriots, races, humanity, life, and, ultimately, as articulated by religious and philosophic leaders, unity with the supreme whole, the ‘world’ in a broader and deeper sense than the usual…. This way of thinking and feeling at its maximum corresponds to that of the enlightened, or yogi, who sees ‘the same’, the atman, and who is not alienated from anything. The process of identification is sometimes expressed in terms of loss of self and gain of Self through ‘self-less’ action. (Naess cited in Mathews 1991: 104)

This stretching of ahamk¯ara reverses the standard interiorisation. Naess refers to the concept of the a¯tman when describing his model of SelfRealisation as norm T3 of his model. Naess loosely defines the term SelfRealisation “to indicate a kind of perfection…a process and a goal [that] includes personal and community Self-Realisation [and] an unfolding of reality as a totality” (Naess 1989: 84–85). Naess (1989: 85) prefers to let Self-Realisation remain an unfolding process towards what he conceives of as the “analogous” terms from Indo-European languages such as “the universal self”, “the absolute” and “the ¯atman”.

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´ ananda (2009) tells us: Verse two of Kenopanis.ad Sarv¯ It is the ¯atman, the spirit, by whose power the ear hears, the eye sees, the tongue speaks, the mind understands and life functions. The wise man separates the a¯tman from these faculties, rises out of sense-life and attains immortality.

This means that the “wise man” withdraws his preoccupation and identification with the sense organs and their stimuli. The state of jivanmukti in Trika Shaivism, makes in his own hands, an elixir of all the sense impressions by casting each act of perception as offering to the divine within, into the flame of self-reflexive awareness. The process of withdrawal precedes the state described as Parabhairava in Kashmir Shaivism. In the commentary of Kenopanis.ad (part 2, verse 1), commentator Sw¯am¯ı ´ ananda (2009: 17) of Ramakrishna Math tells us: Sarv¯ Only to a perfect knower of Brahman, is vouchsafed this experience of all objects – man, animals, Nature, God, etc., – as Brahman. Until this state is reached, we may try to approximate to this ideal by practicing the presence of the divine in all these limited manifestation; but it has to be clearly understood that Brahman is more than them.

Withdrawal, whether the simple form of Patanjali ˙ Yoga S¯utra or the advanced form in the M¯alin¯ıvijayottara Tantra, is for a specific phase of the spiritual path, and the same can be said for “seeing the divine in all forms”. Whilst there is no harm per se in imagining states to which we strive as means toward our goal, it is not fruitful to jump forward and identify with a liberated yogi, because, as Naess shows, it is easy to mistake the a¯tman for prakriti.

Autonomic Autonomy Locating the boundaries between self and other from a macro to a micro view entails some explanation so as not to reduce autonomy to automatons. Mathews (2005: 51) explains: A question also arises as to the status of subsystems within a self-realising system: do cells or the kidneys or the circulatory system in mammals for instance, constitute distinct self-realising systems? This question can largely be answered by pointing to the requirement of self-realising systems that

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they be proactive in maintaining their own existence, where this entails its own energy supply; for although mammals themselves depend on their native ecosystems for sustenance, they do actively seek out food and water for themselves, whereas their kidneys rely passively on the body for nourishment.

What we can say is that when the self of the human dies, so do the organs, giving credence to the notion that the body, and other matter, is insentient in the absence of the ¯atman. Being sentient is not always necessary for relations, as human beings project personality onto inanimate objects, like sacred sites, or murtis, which then appear to assume a life of their own. If communications now include information, or the mycorrhiza under the soil enabling trees to communicate, then widening the scope of language has the potential to include inter-species, intra-subjective communications, even between non-cognising tissues like neurons, or between the valences of chemical bonds, just as it is possible to imagine communication without sentience between artificially intelligent quantum computers. Equating music with a language, then other vibrations and feelings are also communicative forms like a language that need not demand a single language to cross-cultural bounds.

Ecological Awareness If it is still correct that “all exponents of deep ecology seem to agree, that the extent they can be identified as all, are constituted out of their relations with others” and self-realisation is to “shed our confining ego identity” into “wider and wider circles of being” (Mathews 2018 [1994]), it is internally self-contradicting. Relations with others must have others with whom to relate. If they are not egos, then deep ecology fails to tell us which aspect of them identifies at all. The Param¯arthas¯ara of Abhinavagupta (11th C.: k¯a 31–32) says: It is darkness upon darkness, it is a great ‘pustule upon a boil’, to think that the Self is located in the non-Self – the body, breath, etc.

Ecosophy stresses the importance of including within one’s development the “sharing of the joys and sorrows of others” as well as the

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“development of the narrow ego of the small child into the comprehensive structure of a self which comprises all beings” and “the Deep Ecology movement…takes a step further and asks for the development of a deep identification of individuals with all life forms” (Naess 1985: 85). Mathews (2003) and Arne Naess (1989) agree on realisation or actualisation as an active process of continual unfoldment, rather than a static mode, within which self-realisation is ever-deepening, or self-actualisation (Næss and Rothenberg 1989). Mathews (1991: 104) cites Naess’ reference to Hinduism as inspiration for his ecological Self-Realisation, but she argues her own case along different lines. Clearly for Naess Self-realization…involves the identification of the small human self—the personal ego—with ever wider wholes, up to the level of the cosmos as a whole…The biological fact of ecological interconnectedness is taken to be a model of a deeper kind of interconnectedness which permeates the entire physical realm, from micro- to cosmo-levels…But it has not been part of the programme of Deep Ecology to undertake any kind of thorough-going justification for such a metaphysic of interconnectedness.

Mathews’ (1991) ecocosm is more amenable without deferring to reconstituted Hindu thought: The conclusion of the argument is that true selves can exist only in a universe which is a self-realizing system, and that only a substantivally holistic—as opposed to atomistic— world can be a self-realizing system. If selves exist, then, the scope of selfhood must extend all the way up to the cosmic level. If the cosmos is not in fact a self-realizing system, then the appearance of selfhood at the biological levels must be illusory— organisms must indeed be machines, built from the ground up, as Descartes believed.

How then do liberated beings conduct themselves as divine persons? Does it make them more ecological? In terms of morality, once the Self is known, all sense of merit or demerit as to conduct fails to detract from the liberated state (Abhinavagupta 11th C: k¯a 68 & 70): Thus, awakened by the winds of his meditative realisation, as he pours an oblation of all his thought constructs into the blazing fire of the Self, he becomes the fire itself.

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Whether he performs a hundred thousand horse sacrifices, or kills a hundred thousand brahmins, he who knows ultimate reality is not affected by merits or demerits. He is stainless.

In this paradigm, the circular argument of an awakened “ecological self” as compared to the “unawakened false self” of nature, with one who saves and the other who kills, is contradicted. Even an enlightened man is capable, under the right circumstances, of killing; even the most depraved, in theory, of liberation. But this cannot mean that a liberated yogi is likely to go about slaying Brahmins. This is clearly metaphoric. The example in the society of writing, is the greatest sin of all, and however shocking, to convey the stainlessness and untouchability of this Self by any defilement. The likelihood of performing actions in such a liberated being that would deliberately bring harm to others is diminished by qualities that offset motivation for harm.5 The Param¯arthas¯ara says: Living without self-deception, excitement, anger, infatuation, dejection, fear, greed, or delusion; uttering neither praises [of the gods] nor ritual formulae, and having no opinions whatever, he should behave as if one insensible. (Abhinavagupta 11th C.: k¯a 71)

Swami Lakshmanjoo (2010a) interprets verse 71 slightly differently to translators Bansat-Boudon and Tripathi above. In the liberated, the lower nature is discarded including misidentification with the body, excitement for merits and demerits, he discards, wrath and desire for sex “because he has undergone in another supersex”6 (2010a: 59). “He has no threat, threat from anybody; threat from enemy” (ibid.: 58) including wild animals which are said to become tame in the presence of a realised master. This is the fruit of the perfection of non-violence. The other qualities attained upon Self-Realisation are freedom from attachment to one thing, or person, or another. Because of the sameness of his consciousness, there is a corresponding sameness of attitude towards all experiences and persons. Feelings of ownership over objects or forms subside to the sense that all things are the Brahman or “sarvabrahm¯asmi” (Lakshmanjoo 2013). This sameness is what Naess refers to in his conception of Self Realisation in Ecosophy T. It is the aspect of “widening the self” to include others he attempts to articulate but he does this from the ground up, rather than from the top down. The results may or may not be the same, as we cannot say that expanding

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the consciousness of “self to Self” to include all beings has any particular lineal hierarchy of bottom-up or top-down. The role of bhakti, or devotion in shaping the attitude towards others corresponds with the realisation that all those selves are the same Self as the form to which devotion has thus far flowed in yoga sadhana. In the niyamas, raised in the first part of this essay, is devotion to ¯Ishwara. That devotion is also the Bhakti Yoga of the Bhagavad G¯ıt¯a. When a devotee recognises that their own self is the same Self as the universal being, then the outflow of love is as if united with a lover.Kr.s.n.a taking numerous forms so that he can “sport” with his earthly gopis, describes this spiritually elevated form of eros in the transcendent made immanenten counter. Sw¯am¯ı Lakshmanjoo (2010: n199–201) provides insight: It is very difficult to feel oneness in each and every being because hatred comes…A person who feels that God is existing in each and every being, and in each and every object, and feels and adores everybody, loves everybody, is attached to everybody – not individually, universally – sarvath¯avartam¯ano’pi, no matter if he does all worldly things, sa yogi mayivartate, he roams and walks in my circle… And that yogi who feels the pain and pleasure of others as his own pain and pleasure, he is nominated as a supreme yogi by Me.

In k¯arika 74 of the Param¯arthas¯ara (Abhinavagupta 11th C.) it says: The divine abode for him is his own body – endowed with the thirty six principles, and replete with…[the sense organs], constructions inset in the body – or [if not his own] the body of another, or even an object, such as a jar.

This verse receives additional explanation from Lakshmanjoo (2010: 62). This body, or others body, or the objective (external) world: …is all a collection of temples, temple of Parabhairava (supreme Self). This pot is also temple of Parabhairava. This machinery is also temple of Parabhairava. Because Parabhairava comes out of it, in one way or another. Or this [body] is the temple of Parabhairava, and inside the heart is the temple of Parabhairava. Everywhere you will find Parabhairava…And this ‘whole’ is also temple. ‘Part’ is also temple. Part is whole and whole is part. You can’t find any distinction between parts and wholes.

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Without the knowledge of Parabhairava, Lakshmanjoo (2010) says that the entire universe appears to be a cremation ground. On earth, we think of life and the biosphere but try to avoid that life entails death. Hinduism holds the Self to be eternal. Thus, the world is full of death by comparison. The image of the world as desecrated, with plastic filling our bodies, oceans and even remote mountains like Everest covered with trash, looks like a cremation ground where living systems make way for the non-living. Facing death includes the death of the smaller self, which attaches itself to the body and impermanent things. As this self always undergoes death whilst the things it has attached itself to pass away, suffering over loss and death is part of identification with the world. The foremost obstacle for the realisation of Parabhairava, or totality is fear, as outlined in the Bhagavad G¯ıt¯a Chapter 11, when the full form of the universal being is described. Just as Kr.s.n.a is terrible in his allinclusive totality, comprising the most hideous and sublime alike, then so too does Parabhairava appear to the dual of mind. Fear is, for the new age, the opposite of love and seems repulsive, and so it is “faced” as confrontation, like Timalsina has pointed out on rasa theory. For those without grace, Bhairava’s thundering is terrifying. For those who love him it brings joy. This is easy to comprehend if we think back to the possibility that totality must by its all-inclusiveness contain everything—ghosts, murderers, rapists, demons, hells, heavens, deities, the creative diversity of beautiful and grotesque are all present in the universal form. Recognising the world as cremation ground can unify the polarities of ecological systems, that each lives from the lives and bodies of others, is fed by and feeds them. The notion of a cannibalistic universe is present in the Chandogya Upanisad and in the Bhagavad G¯ıt¯a where the universal being is consuming the entire universe, including the kin of Arjuna. To face such truths requires the courage of a warrior. The theme of offerings, sacrifices, eating and being eaten is one of the most intensely ecological concepts throughout Hinduism and conveys the finite nature of parts transforming one into the other against the backdrop of eternity, like energy changing form but never actually dying. However self-evident it is that the universe contains all that we know to be real, it is horrifying to consider as the content of a divine being, which may help to explain our obsession with purity and impurity as sacred and profane. It is also this fact of inclusivity of all forms that offers the persistent generosity, that this is a system suited to all beings, human, non-human, or even theoretically vegetation, rocks or jars. Thus, there

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is nothing outside the totality, and since we are already in it, no reason to fear it. It is in the differentiated state that these things are in any case threatening because only then is death possible. In k¯arika 86 of the Param¯arthas¯ara, Abhinavagupta says “consciousness, once it has been separated from the complex of sheaths [that is the body etc.], is [forever] completely alien to their touch…”. All that is left is for the liberated to “play” or “sport”, which is what is meant by being insensible. The outcome of the union with Param¯atma, the term Naess refers to, we read in chapter six (Bhagavad-G¯ıt¯ a with the Commentary of ´ nkar¯ Sa ˙ ac¯ arya 2006): One who has his mind Self-absorbed through Yoga, and who has the vision of sameness everywhere, see his Self residing in everything, and everything in his Self. (6.29) One who sees Me in everything and sees all things in Me – I do not go out of his vision, and he also not lost to My vision. (6.30)

Additional commentary on this verse adds to the interpretation of ¯atma from the GitarthaSamgraha ˙ of Abhinavagupta translated by Sw¯am¯ı Lakshmanjoo (2013: 290): This sarvagatar¯upa, the all-pervading svar¯upa of Parabhairava, [for the one] who does not experience [Parabhairava] in each and every object, from him, Parabhairava has walked out. He will not come to him. [Parabhairava] has fled away from him. Because [Parabhairava] does not appear to him in his real form…And on the contrary, the one who sees and experiences everybody in My nature, that is the reality of param¯atma [i.e. Parabhairava].

This implies widening the self to include not just the wilderness but the loggers and the terrorists we would not want to be like. This verse is followed by: That yogi who, being established in unity, adores Me as existing in all things, he exists in Me – in whatever condition he may be. O Arjuna, that yogi is considered the best who judges what is happiness and sorrow in all beings by the same standard as he would apply to himself.

To synthesise the positions of Naess and Seed, I will refer again to another quote of Seed on the same topic cited in Macy (1998: 46–47):

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“I am protecting the rainforest” develops to “I am part of the rainforest protecting myself.” I am that part of the rainforest recently emerged into thinking. What a relief then! The thousands of years of imagined separation are over and we begin to recall our true nature. That is, the change is a spiritual one, sometimes referred to as deep ecology.

This addition confers a special attribute to part of the rainforest. I propose, in favour of Plumwood and Mathews, that it is a specific form of thinking, to the exclusion of feeling, which Plumwood calls values dualism, that is the main problem. When Seed says that he, as the rainforest has only recently evolved into thinking, we know humans have been capable of cognition for at least 3.3 million years since stone tools (Harmand et al. 2015; Lewis and Harmand 2016). Thinking, or jñ¯ana yoga, is a neglected path. Standing back, without actually disengaging from acting, perceptions and experience, is an internal process of withdrawal, not a renunciate model. This gives a space from which to contemplate the self-Self continuum, detach the limited ego construct from its bonds, expand from the heart rather than ahamk¯ara. Optimally, once knowing the universal Self in the heart, it will then be possible to have the freedom to create an identity, or not to have one, like an actor, rather than be made into a self by others, whether that self is human, divine, nature or machine. In this sense rooted in the heart, the route is to expand that sense of being, include the hearts of others into the domain of our concern. The determination of individual selves is balanced against that of collective and universal selves, each of which can become multiple, rather than singular, giving us the practical means to then balance individual svadharma, collective sahadharma and cosmological, universal dharma, as Ananta Kumar Giri suggests.

Notes 1. ¯Ishwara would translate to the transcendental, or in this context, ‘higher Self’ nevertheless ‘personified’ yet devoid of impurities. It is perhaps this aspect of Self, as 25th Tattwa that is more reasonably aimed for to acquire a ‘whole’ view of nature given it is the first part of the j¯ıva/self to be distinguishable from embedment within the material aspect of Nature as prakr.it¯ı. Feuerstein (1997: 160) finds the term ¯Ishwara is ancient and with various readings including the ultimate reality ‘abiding within the heart’ and ‘whirling M¯ay¯a’ rather than just the 25th tattwa.

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2. The reversion to a former, unified view, finds correlate to the slackening of a musical string that is returned to its original state once played, in (re) connection between those who “do not understand how being borne apart it is being borne together with itself; a backward stretching ‘harmonia’ as of bow and lyre” Stokes, M.C. (1971). One and Many in Presocratic Philosophy. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. 3. Laszlo (2003: 106) refers to Advaitav¯ada briefly in his transdisciplinary approach but does not seem to be aware of extensive Indian philosophical treatments on interconnectivity from the ‘plenum’ or field to the particulates. 4. I owe this overall application of the soteriology of Trika Shaivism to my teacher, Dr Mark Dyczkowski. 5. It should be noted that although having knowledge of the Self, there is a common assumption that enlightened gurus become perfected in every way according to impossible standards. If a person being trained as a doctor is liberated, they do not become an astronaut or whatever they or their students imagine them to be. 6. Swami Lakshmanjoo’s teachings refer to the bliss of liberation as like magnified sexual pleasure and explains that all contact between senses and objects is sexual. The entire universe is comprised of a dynamic mass of bliss, of “god consciousness” in which sexual activity is a diminished variant. Kun.d.alin¯ı is another intensely blissful and erotic, internal expression of this intoxicating energy of consciousness.

Bibliography Abhinavagupta. 11th C. An Introduction to Tantric Philosophy: Param¯ arthas¯ ara of Abhinavagupta with the commentary of Yogar¯ aja. London: Routledge. Ballew, M.T., M.H. Goldberg, S.A. Rosenthal, A. Gustafson, and A. Leiserowitz. 2019. Systems Thinking as a Pathway to Global Warming Beliefs and Attitudes Through an Ecological Worldview. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 116: 8214–8219. ´ nkar¯ Bhagavad-G¯ıt¯ a with the Commentary of Sa ˙ ac¯ arya. 2006. India: Advaita Ashrama. Capra, Fritjof. 1982. The Turning Point: Science, Spirituality and the Rising Culture. New York: Simon & Schuster. Chapple, Christopher Key. 2005. Yoga and Ecology. In Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, ed. Bron Taylor. London: Continuum. Chen, M., and A. Rutter. (2013). Interconnectedness: The Root of Sustainability. ´ ´ Dyczkowski, Mark (ed.). 2007. The Aphorisms of Siva: The Siva S¯ utra with Bh¯ askara’s Commentary, the V¯ arttika. Varanasi: Indica.

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Evitts, S., B. Seale, and D. Skybrook. 2010. Developing an Interconnected Worldview: A Guiding Process for Learning. Masters Thesis. Blekinge Institute of Technology. Feuerstein, Georg. 1997. The Encyclopedia of Yoga and Tantra. London: Shambhala. Fisher, Alan B. 1939 [2018]. Production, Primary, Secondary and Tertiary. Wiley Online Library. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Harmand, S., Jason E. Lewis, Craig S. Feibel, Christopher J. Lepre, Sandrine Prat, Arnaud Lenoble, Xavier Boës, Rhonda L. Quinn, Michel Brenet, Adrian Arroyo, Nicholas Taylor, Sophie Clément, Guillaume Daver, JeanPhilip Brugal, Louise Leakey, Richard A. Mortlock, James D. Wright, Sammy Lokorodi, Christopher Kirwa, Dennis V. Kent, Hélène Roche. 2015. 3.3Million-Year-Old Stone Tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya. Nature 521: 310–315. Ketola, Tarja. 2004. Eco-Psychological Profiling: An Oil Company Example. Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management 11: 150–166. Lakshmanjoo, Swami. 2003. Kashmir Shaivism: The Secret Supreme. Delhi: Universal Shaiva Fellowship. Lakshmanjoo, Swami. 2010a. Abhinavagupta’s Paramarthasara: Essence of the Highest Reality. Culver City, CA: Universal Shaiva Fellowship. ´ Lakshmanjoo, Swami (ed.). 2010b. Siva S¯ utras: The Supreme Awakening with Commentary by Kshemaraja. India: Munshiram Manoharlal. Lakshmanjoo, Swami (ed.). 2013. Bhagavad Gita in the Light of Kashmir Shaivism: Revealed by Swami Laksmanjoo. Delhi: Ishwar Ashram Trust. Laszlo, Ervin. 2003. The Connectivity Hypothesis: Foundations of an Integral Science of Quantum, Cosmos, Life, and Consciousness. Albany: State University of New York Press. Lewis, Jason E., and S. Harmand. 2016. An Earlier Origin for Stone Tool Making: Implications for Cognitive Evolution and the Transition to Homo. Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society Biological Sciences, 371: 20150233. Mathews, Freya. 1991. The Ecological Self . London: Routledge. Mathews, Freya. 2003. For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism. Albany: State University of New York Press. Mathews, Freya. 2005. Reinhabiting Reality: Towards a Recovery of Culture. Sydney: UNSW Press. Mathews, Freya. 2007. An Invitation to Ontopoetics: The Poetic Structure of Being. Mathews, Freya. 2009. Introduction: Invitation to Ontopoetics. PAN Philosophy Activism Nature 6: 1–6.

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Mathews, Freya. 2018 [1994]. Relating to Nature: Deep Ecology or Ecofeminism? In Feminist Ecologies: Changing Environments in the Anthropocene. Cham: Springer International Publishing, Palgrave Macmillan. Merchant, Carolyn. 1989. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Harper & Row. Merchant, Carolyn. 2005. Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World. New York: Routledge. ´ Mishra, Kamalakar. 2011. Kashmir Saivism: The Central Philosophy of Tantrism. Varanasi: Indica. Montuori, Alfonso. 2006. The Quest for a New Education: From Oppositional Identities to Creative Inquiry. ReVision 28: 4–20. Montuori, Alfonso, and Gabrielle Donnelly. 2016. The Creativity of Culture and the Culture of Creativity Research: The Promise of Integrative Transdisciplinarity. In The Palgrave Handbook of Creativity and Culture Research. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Næss, Arne, and David Rothenberg. 1989. Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge. Roszak, Theodore, Mary E. Gomes, and Allen D. Kanner. 1995. Ecopsychology— Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. ´ ananda, Sw¯am¯ı. 2009. Kenopanis.ad. Chennai: Sri Ramakrishna Math. Sarv¯ Sheldrake, Rupert. 1994. The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press. Shiva, V., and M. Mies. 1993 [1988]. Ecofeminism. North Geelong: Spinifex Press. Stokes, Michael C. 1971. One and Many in Presocratic Philosophy. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. Timalsina, Sthaneshwar. 2007. The Body of the Goddess: Eco Awareness and Embodiment in Hindu Myth and Romance. In The Constant and Changing Faces of the Goddess: Goddess Traditions of Asia, ed. Deepak Shimkhada and Phyllis K. Herman. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Timalsina, Sthaneshwar. 2013. Self, Causation, and Agency in the Advaita of ´ nkara. Sa ˙ In Free Will, Agency, and Selfhood in Indian Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Timalsina, Sthaneshwar. 2017. Tantric Visual Culture: A Cognitive Approach. Abingdon: Routledge. Utpaladeva. c.900–975C. The ¯ I´swarapratibhijñ¯ ak¯ arik¯ a of Utpaladeva with the Author’s Vr.tti: Critical Edition and Annotated Translation. India: Motilal Banardisas.

CHAPTER 6

From Root to Return Routes: A Brief Tantric Description of the Passage from Being to beings Rafaela Campos de Carvalho

¯ This article intends to present fundamentally the Ananda M¯arga creationist tantra yoga cosmology, which unfolds in a teleological way. Therefore, the focus is to present the fundamental concepts of the explanation about the emergence and cause of the universe. Some epistemological clarifications are necessary, even if the very definition of certain concepts is the debate in its entirety, an effort will be made to minimally delimit a shared vocabulary. This shows not only the difficulty in explaining a non-empirical reality through an empirical basis, a question developed by philosophy through metaphors, teachings, proverbs, alliterations, but also the difficulty in understanding the effort of translating its object realized by religious traditions, translate the translation of the untranslatable into an academic language marked by a skeptical rationalism. But that is the effort of this article.

R. C. de Carvalho (B) Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Juiz de Fora, Brazil © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. K. Giri (ed.), Roots, Routes and a New Awakening, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7122-0_6

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“Everywhere in this observable universe we find that there is a system” (Sarkar 1978, v. 33), be the patterns found in the shapes of objects, the different ecosystems, the configuration of atoms in relation to their electrons and nucleus, or the solar system. Each pattern given systematically, with clear rules from which predictable functioning can be assumed, is called a cakra, “(…) And the biggest cakra, the biggest system, is Brahma Cakra, the Cosmological system” (Sarkar 1978, v. 33). ¯ Thus, the central cosmology of Ananda M¯arga’s Tantra Yoga is based on Brahman Cakra, the name assigned to a series of processes, cosmogonic events that justify and describe both the cycle of transmigrations that the individual experiences and, prior to this, the explanation of the emergence of the universe—and the possible overcoming of individual existence. All these factors are encompassed and explained by the “cosmic cycle” (Brahman Cakra). There are three central concepts, which could be understood by the beginning of the cosmological order of the “cosmic ´ cycle”, which require further explanation of its meaning: Brahman, Siva, ´ and S¯ akti. There are multiple meanings to these terms. Depending on the philosophical context in which they are applied, a set of meanings contained within the set is mobilized. Throughout the narrative development of the cosmic cycle such concepts branch out into modifications of the same nature. The immense proliferation of signifiers that refer to the same sign points its categorical relevance to the thought structure of the philosophy presented. The word Brahman referring to the expression of this “cosmic cycle” (Brahman Cakra), refers to the noun Brahman, about which Sarkar (Sarkar 1955, v. 2) states “The word, Brahma means ‘uniquely Great’”, that which makes all other beings great, once it is the portion of greatness and oneness contained in each one. From this inexistence of boundaries comes the impossibility of communicating the totality of its reality, for to rationally order Brahman’s concept as an object it would be necessary to correlate it with others. It is by the relation between signs, and not by their absolute description, that the human mind understands the phenomena (Lévi-Strauss 1989), so each concept mobilizes a set of properties and restricts others. But Brahman is an all-encompassing concept. As such, it does not share certain characteristics with one group of beings more than it shares with another; it does not associate with a privileged form. Demarcating Brahman would be antagonistic to the concept of limitlessness in which he participates (Sarka, 1955, v. 2).

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The opposite of this would be to formulate a discourse of refusal, an apophatic discourse, in a movement similar to that of a negative theology (Derrida 1995, p. 7). To speak of Brahman by continual denial is one way of using the pattern by which the human mind works to express something about him. Brahman is not any object, it is no possible adjective, it is continually not that which one tries to impose upon it. From the point of view of theoretical terms as well as from the point of view of devotion— just as a devotee who seeks God, upon encountering diverse objects, denies them all, thus pursuing his search for another radical otherness. To deny what Brahman is, is a way to quench the dissatisfaction of separation, for the search remains. Tolerating not knowing about Brahman is a condition for experiencing it in the future. “This (Brahman) inobjectifiability is not based, in this case, on a present non-existence, but rather on an essentiality which is itself the eternal and ever-present substratum of any linguistic denotation, of any empirical objectification” (Loundo 2014, p. 16). Following Loundo, Brahman is thus the substrate that conditions the possibility of appearing, the common platform for all beings, the unperceived dimension that is a condition of perception, that which cannot be captured in its entirety by the senses, but that allows anything to be captured. Indian traditions never talk about the Being. They describe conditions of detachment, ignorance of the individual about the Being, for this is what is possible to communicate to another, this is what touches individual experience. They are a language about the nonbeing, never about the Being, for about that there is no possible speech. The limit of language is to point out where the nonbeing is, so as to eliminate the illusion that it is indeed the Being. It is a practical process of deconstructing the illusion about reality, of deconstructing the condition of identification with any object other than the Being. If Brahman is, therefore, an integral engendering, the principle of wholeness, it also means that any truly soteriological investigative methodology tends, to a greater or lesser extent, to glimpse this everpresent Consciousness (“god”). Although only Brahman is the whole, other objects are fractions of him and can be brought to mind. If, on the one hand, rational language presents barriers in its capture, on the other, devotional language is one of the most prolific, and commonly adopted, forms of talking about Brahman. From an aesthetic point of view, there is no entity but Brahman, it is a continuous and unbreakable flow (Sarkar 1980), encompassing all colors, smells, shapes, and sounds. It can thus

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be seen by different languages, by different modes of expression of the ¯ human mind, with the god-directed arts classified in the Ananda M¯arga as a “supraesthetic science”, the science of extreme rejoicing (atinandana vijñ¯ ana). One of the most common forms of this tradition is the Prabh¯ata Sam . g¯ıta, (Dawn Songs) devotional songs composed by Sarkar to express spiritual feelings on different social occasions, and quoted here to express this idea of which I briefly discuss aesthetically too: Tvamasisarve´sam . pit¯a, Tvamasi mama devat¯a Tvamasitrilokan¯atha, Namaskr.tyam . Gang¯adharam . Vis.aye vis.ayepujya, ¯ saye¯as´ayeyujya A´ Anu´saye an¯asakta, N¯astitavak¯alasth¯anam Namaskr.tyam . Gang¯adharam . ¯I´soh.asian¯ıs´oh.asitvam ., Gun.¯ıgun.at¯ıtoh.asitvam Gan.an¯athagan.aprabhu, Dev¯an¯am . ¯adidevatvam . Namaskr.tyam . Gang¯adharam .

You are the progenitor of all, You are my God. You are the supreme Lord of the three worlds, I salute You, O Ganga’dhara, Shiva He He He He

is is is is

the most venerable of all entities, the supreme desideratum of all entities; unassailed by any relative object. beyond the scope of time and space.

You are the supreme controller of all, You have no controller; all qualities emanate from You but You are above the bondages of triple attributions. You are the mighty leader of all, You are the God of all gods. (Sarkar 19881 )

The phrase in the verse anu´saye an¯ asakta, meaning, free from the binding strings of objects, epitomizes this idea of Brahman, inter´ preted in the song by Siva for a devotional tone. He is unrelated and yet is the source of all qualities immanent to him. Brahman is the unchanging universal entity, all of his manifestation comes from continual and harmonic transformations from one pattern to another, of the same essence yet diverse resemblance, due to a series of distortions occurring within his own “body” through action of a force that is nothing but itself, as will be shown below. Returning, however, to realistic rational pessimism, although Brahman is also the qualities that can be described, he is not only that. He is not an object apprehended by one method or another of knowledge, for he surpasses the apprehensive capacity of any inquiry. He has no history, as it does not result from relationships. Brahman itself has no measurable parameters. There is no tiny fraction, essence, inferential wave (tanm¯ atra)

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of total and unitary Brahman to be absorbed by the human mind, for the quality of the latter is its finitude, while of the former its infinity. It is therefore impossible to measure an infinitely complex and subtle entity with a rudimentary instrument derived from and consequent to it (Sarkar 2007). ¯ Brahman is beyond the mind, according to Ananda S¯utram . , 2-11: The seed of the universe exceeds the mental condition, since it is [intellectually] indeterminable [M¯ anas¯ at¯ıte anavasth¯ ay¯ am . jagadb¯ıjam]

The human mind is the consequence of a series of metamorphoses, in the Goethean sense, which has occurred in Brahman’s body, and thus it is subsequent to him in its double sense. It is as much in a kairotic chronology after him as it is hidden in it in a non-spatial cartography. In this supreme state the principle of causality does not apply, so that “(…) a deepening beyond this stage would establish the fallacy of infinite regress” (Sarkar 2007, p. 27). To really achieve this answer, the path the human mind must take is to stop being itself, which is the very path of practicing this yoga. Although Brahman is this immeasurable fact, in an extremely rational movement, the response of a continuous contemplation that is not lost in thoughtless ignorance, in wonder and astonishment without fruit, but instead, tries to digest the Being, the Indian philosophy seeks to process it, making it the privileged object of his speech, “as if” it were possible for a moment to objectify it. Concepts are formulated to manage it, to make it achievable for the human mind to some extent. Lacking the possi¯ bility of fully understanding Brahman, the response of Ananda M¯arga’s philosophy, in continuity with Indian philosophy, was the proliferation of meanings, metaphors, narratives, which surround and approach the subject in an abstract way. The “cosmic cycle” system is no more than the creation of various descriptive terminologies of Brahman’s movements. From this teleological and pluralistic epistemology comes the first peda´ gogical framework of reflection, the separation of Brahman into Siva and ¯ ´Sakti. According to Ananda S¯utram . 1-1 (1992): ´ ´ Brahman’s nature is Siva and Sakti ´ sakty¯ [Siva´ atmakam Brahma] .

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The first s¯ utra proposes that Brahman is something whose composition, whose interiority and truth, has in essence, has by nature (dharma), these two terms. An entity may be formed of two elements, and yet be a third itself. This does not apply in the foregoing definition, Brahman ´ ´ is only Siva and Sakti, and nothing more. Brahman is exactly equal to ´ ´ the sum of these two beings, Siva the pure Consciousness and Sakti the creative power. Philosophically, this apparent duality is merely instructive for the intellectual understanding of Brahman’s ways of being. On an individual level, the realization of this non-duality is attained through spiritual practice (s¯ adhana). ´ ´ Siva and Sakti are a general terminology applied to two groupings of features that they will perform. These characteristics will be active or dormant, stronger or weaker, predominant or veiled, and it is within this movement, this change in polarization, this dance between possibilities, that the unfolding of phenomena will occur. Each change within the narrative will be given a slightly different nomenclature for the concepts in order to inform a new potentiality or function exercised by them. ´ The central characteristic attributed to Siva is cognitive ability, while ´ the central characteristic attributed to Sakti is operative force. These two characteristics are inherently connected, “… Like the two sides of a sheet ´ ´ of paper” (Sarkar 2007, p. 13). Sakti generally means strength, Siva is a ´ kind of Sakti in the sense that it is a force of consciousness, and there´ fore Siva is synonymous with citi´sakti, a cognitive force. Similarly, when describing the ability to generate activity in a less abstract sense, in the ´ operative principle of moving objects, of promoting change, Sakti is no longer used, but Prakr.ti, the creative principle, the causal matrix, the one that manages causal relationships. Kr. in Sanskrit is the root used when there is some action to be performed, so that which causes the change, Prakr.ti is the one whose nature is to cause the action, as opposed to the one whose nature is akart¯ a (Sarkar 1978, v. 10), i.e., one who does not. ´ is this powerless awareness, but its synonym, Purus.a, is often more Siva used. Prakr.ti does not simply qualify, it specifically qualifies Purus.a, for there is no entity external to these two. Prakr.ti’s nature (dharma) is to attribute qualities to Purus.a, to promote the capacity for action, just as “(…) the ability to burn is the nature of fire. There must be something that gives this quality to fire (…)” (Sarkar 2007, p. 12), that which attributes the heat property to fire is Prakr.ti. What is commonly called “nature”, this general concept for an abstract collective entity, which

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combines the totality of what is not “cultural”, which does not belong to the world of men, is not Prakr.ti. This referred nature (svabh¯ ava) is the very nature of Prakr.ti. Prakr.ti’s dharma, being dharma the inherent and intrinsic property of an entity, is nature. Prakr.ti’s own doing, which is an immediate consequence of what she is, is a consequence of the action of its force. The existence of fire therefore depends on the existence of two beings, Purus.a, the fire itself (and the subjectivity that bears witness to the existence of fire), and Prakr.ti, which ensures that fire is, in fact, fire, by being capable of burning by having the ability to impose combustion by nature. In addition to the fact that Prakr.ti is not nature itself, Prakr.ti exists within Purus.a, is attributed and conditioned to him, and is merely ¯ his property. As stated in the Ananda S¯utram . 1-2 (1992): ´ ´ This Sakti is the power of Siva ´ ´ ´ [Saktih. s¯ a Sivasya Saktih.]

Prakr.ti is a blind potentiality, a brute energy, an active force (“kriy¯ a s´akti”, Sarkar 1978, v. 5), which can accomplish nothing without a guiding consciousness, Purus.a. Both cognitive power and creative potentiality are unobservable, being abstract entities that only form a contemplable phenomenon through a process of objective expression resulting from the interaction between them. This means that there is no possi´ ´ bility of direct contact with the uniqueness of SivaSakti Consciousness, only with its mediations, with the result of the analysis, and not with the previous synthesis. This analytical process, to be described in detail, performed by Prakr.ti, shapes Purus.a, the Consciousness into observable objects. I explain this in advance, for the purpose of comparing the functions and positions held by each. The substance that is the only component of the formula that engenders wholeness is Consciousness (Purus.a). The reagent that produces a change in the cognitive element to transform it is Prakr.ti. Purus.a is the central and unique element of the equation, as heat loss from water produces ice. Purus.a is both water and ice, Prakr.ti is only temperature in this analogy (Sarkar 2007). Thus, the material cause (up¯ ad¯ ana k¯ aran.a), the foregoing element, in order to allow the making of objects, is Purus.a. The efficient cause (nimitta k¯ aran.a) is also Purus.a, since Prakr.ti can only act when Consciousness allows it, as if the surface of the water has enough tension to withstand the climate as much as it wishes.

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Prakr.ti is thus the subordinate effective cause (Sarkar 2007, p. 9), the binding force between the primary effective cause and the material cause, both Purus.a. If there is nothing external to Brahman, if he is the only entity existing in the universe, then there is no way to exist any material cause for the universe other than himself. Brahman is non-causal, has no cause, principle, or genealogy. As Brahman is the sum of Prakr.ti and Purus.a the two are also non-causal. Otherwise, the movement of its own movement is the cause that scopes the theory of cause and effect to be active in the universe, “(…) these three factors – time, space, and person – are creations of the Cosmic Mind, that is, a psychic creation. And where there is mind, there is time, space, and person. Without mind, there cannot be time, space, and person” (Sarkar 1955, v. 21). For causality to exist, these entities must no longer be suspended, inactive, in a state of total abstraction, inert to each other, it is necessary that Prakr.ti acts on Purus.a in order to create a primeval state that can be named cosmic mind. This state of inertia in which the two entities previously coexist is named Nirgun.a Brahman, that is, Brahman in his non-attributive state, with no qualities imposed upon him. This “non-subjectivated transcendental entity” (Sarkar 2008, p. 34) is not subject in the sense that Brahman in this state is not self-conscious, being a stream of selfunconscious consciousness in a state of absolute peace (par¯ a-´s¯ anti). Awareness of one’s own existence is a prerequisite for the imaginative flow of Brahman (Sarkar 1958), that is, the phenomenal world, the whole universe. Prakr.ti, the force that will allow the awakening of this consciousness, at this moment cannot metamorphose Brahman, so that Brahman is in brahmasvar¯ upa (Sarkar 1955). Svar¯ upa means “one’s own form”, the original state of a thing, before any modification, the original form of Brahman. In this state, the cognitive principle and the operative principle exist, ´ but not in mutual relation. Citi´sakti, the cognitive force, and Sakti, the creative principle, are described at this stage through mathematical language, using expressions of geometric shapes and wave physics. This language is used to describe the flow (rasa) attributed to all entities, ´ a vibrational, rhythmic, and wavy language. In these analogies, Siva is rasika (Sarkar 1980), the one who creates the “vibrational waves” in which the universe flows, which “vibrate” at different rates depending on the stage at which Brahman’s manifestation is. During the poten´ tial process of manifestation, but still prior to its development, Siva is called Citi´sakti. If there is rasa in it, there is “curvature and vibrational

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flow”, there is the possibility of creation. The non-possibility of “cur´ vature” means that Siva is Para´siva, a non-attributive Consciousness, something that does not imbue anything with consciousness, whose core is at the beginning of the formation of this Consciousness (¯ adi´siva). It is said that this flow has no “curvature” moving in a “straight line” (SS, v. 21). The nucleus of Consciousness in this state of non-expression, in its inactivity, is the supreme noumenal subjectivity (SS, v. 21), that is, that which cannot be known through any sense-captive phenomenon, for it has no expression. ´ Siva, the attributive cognitive faculty, has by its nature the possibility of ascribing consciousness to objects as a force (´sakti), a force of a consciousness (citi). Citi´sakti, this cognitive force, is absolutely “pure”, and can be called that way as long as there is no influence of the operative forces ´ ´ (Sakti, prakr.ti) on it, while Sakti is contained in it, being assimilated by it, i.e., when it is still there is indistinction between the beings. When Consciousness is called Citi´sakti it is said that Prakr.ti is submerged by this force, being waning (SS, v. 20), in a dormant state (Sarkar 2008, p. 8). This allusion to a state of sleep does not remove from Prakr.ti the ability to exert its influence, but rather the opportunity to do so. Following Sarkar (2008), this analogy, however, is not completely correct, because if Prakr.ti were dormant it would be necessary for another entity to wake her up, otherwise there would never be a passage from the one to the multiple. This other entity would need to be aware of itself to perform an action, such as waking someone. Purus.a is beyond qualifications in his unmanifest state (Nirgun.a Brahman), so that he would be unable to wake her. It has been previously established that there is no ´ ´ entity other than Prakr.ti and Purus.a, Siva and Sakti. Prakr.ti, therefore, is not latent before the manifestation (Nirgun.a Brahman) (Sarkar 1959), she is awake. If Prakr.ti is awake, there must be another reason why her nature, which is to qualify Purus.a, does not manifest itself effectively, and that her title in the state prior to the creation of the attributes (Nirgun.a Brahman) is anucch¯ uny¯ a, unmanifest (Sarkar 1959). Prior to manifestation, this state that is being described here at length (Nirgun.a Brahman) the Purus.a force of Consciousness is overwhelming. It is understood that the force of Purus.a is always greater than that of Prakr.ti, for Prakr.ti is only an attribute of its force. That is, the nature (dharma) of Prakr.ti is to make a constant effort to generate creation, but the state of plurality, of difference between beings, is impeded by the

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presence of Consciousness. The analogy used is that of a force applied by Prakr.ti with constant intensity, as a conductor of electric current in which all extension has constant voltage (Sarkar 2007, p. 23). Prakr.ti does not obtain results from the full exercise of her nature while Purus.a maintains the force of his influence, as does an electrical resistance. The ¯ use of this analogy is only an indication that in the philosophy of Ananda M¯arga it is understood that the state of wholeness and integration with Consciousness (“god”) predominates over the state of differentiation. This is the circumstance of the narrative, a broad picture of language for the affirmation of this truth. The reason for the change in the state of unity by which Brahman becomes “conductive” is not revealed but is the mystery of existence. It is understood that why Brahman allows areas of “scarcity” of its consciousness is beyond the comprehension capacity of the human mind. The abstract narrative effort of this analysis conducted on Brahman’s composition creates causal relations that, in fact, would not exist. The reason for the origin of phenomena is something that, within this narrative, would have no parallel. There is then a twist in the point of view adopted in the explanation, and this overriding motive becomes a devotional tool, the only possible positive destination for this question. The anthropomorphism performed with Purus.a, the Consciousness, becomes the best possible answer to a question that cannot be answered with the methods available to the intellect. It is thus said that Brahman was feeling alone in the universe (Sarkar 1978, v. 5, but also repeated insistently throughout the literature), and manifested creation so that he could play with it (l¯ıl¯ a; kr¯ıd.¯ a ) through a playful spontaneity. This is the question to which the potential response lies in a devotional practice (bhakti yoga), not a practice of knowledge (jñ¯ ana yoga): ´ When the cause of an There is a subtle difference between liilá and kriida. ´ effect is easily discernible it is called kriida, but when the cause is unknown and only the effect is easily discernible it is called liilá. This creation is the liilá of Parama Puru´sa because human beings do not know why He has created it. With the help of their intellect they are eager to know the cause of creation, but will they ever be successful in this quest? They want to solve the riddle of creation, but they have no notion about the cause. So ´ whatever Parama Puru´sa does is all His liilá, It cannot be called His kriidá. I have already said that when one discovers the relation between the cause ´ but when one can see only the effect and not and effect it is called kriidá,

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the cause, it is called liilá. For human beings having only a small unit mind ´ For the creation is the liilá of Parama Puru´sa, but to Him it is His kriidá. instance, in the relative world wherever there is time, space, and person, and wherever the limited intellect can function, we can discover the cause behind every action. In this connection you remember the oft-quoted aphorism of Mara´siKanada: ´ Káranábhávatkáryábháva—“Where ´ there is no cause there is no effect.” In the process of tracing the cause-effect relationship back to its original cause we arrive at the last stage. Beyond this stage action does not remain within the scope of time, space and person. Since the cause remains beyond the scope of the three relative factors, it does not also come within the periphery of mind. If the mind transcends the periphery of the relative factors it is automatically annihilated. So the action which comes within the periphery of the mind but whose cause remains unknown is called the liilá of Parama Puru´sa. But this cause, whether it remains within or without the periphery of the human mind, is clearly known to Parama Puru´sa. The so-called scholars attempt to discover this cause, but in vain, because it remains beyond the domain of the first effect. (Sarkar 1955, v. 9)

Thus, the reason why, like gravity, the presence of Consciousness has “points of least compression” in the “mesh of cosmic tissue” results from a desire (k¯ amab¯ıja, or icch¯ ab¯ıja, Sarkar 1959). K¯ amab¯ıja, the seed of desire, the origin of will, the source of longing (of this “playing”), is formed as a result of the withdrawal of Purus.a’s dominance so as to allow Prakr.ti’s forces upon him to act, “(…) this point is called the noumenal cause of the phenomenal” (Sarkar 1978, v. 33). The formulation of this point, this turning point from which play (l¯ıl¯ a ) stems, develops as follows. ´ ´ Just as Brahman equals the sum of Siva (Purus.a) and Sakti (Prakr.ti), Prakr.ti, the matrix of creation, is equal to the sum of three forces, sattva, rajas, and tamas. These three principles are called gun.as, the “attributive forces”. Gun.a does not mean exactly quality, although this is the observable consequence of its action, just as the general consequence of Prakr.ti’s dharma is nature. Gun.a literally means “rope”, specifically in the sense of its ability to tie an object (Sarkar 1955, v. 1). The object to which the “attributive forces” (gun.as ) that compose Prakr.ti tie is the Consciousness. Prakr.ti is the rope with which Purus.a is bound to various forms and ideas (Sarkar 1955, v. 1), which imbues him with attributes. Consciousness ceases to be an abstract entity and gains limits through the action of these tendencies (gun.as ) and can thereafter be expressed in the relational universe.

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Sattva-gun.a is the “subtle attributive force”, the sentient, sensitive principle among the immanent principles of Prakr.ti. The main effect of the “subtle attributive force” on an object is to give it an awareness of itself, a sense of existence. In addition, the subtle attributive force is also characterized by conveying feelings of happiness and relief (Sarkar 1955, v. 1). The subtle attributive force (sattva) is the potential energy of an activity, the ability to exist that prevails over inaction but does not act to express its existence. When applied to Purus.a, the subtle attributive force gives rise to the Consciousness the “feeling of existence” (mahattattva), the existential “I”. Rajas-gun.a, in turn, is the “mutative attributive force”, the changing tendency, which directs energy to make it express itself in the form of an activity. The “mutative attributive force” (rajas ) is what keeps the “self” busy with a task (Sarkar 1955, v. 1). When shaping Consciousness, the mutative attributive force engenders the sense of authorship of actions, that is, the “feeling of agency”(ahamtattva). Tamas-gun.a is Prakr.ti’s “static attributive force”, responsible for attributing objectivity to beings, that is, for making Consciousness a crude object, upon which an action can be performed. Through the application of the static attributive force upon Purus.a arises the “feeling of objectification” (citta), the imaginative “screen” upon which the universe expresses itself. Attributive forces (gun.as ) cannot be perceived, only inferred by their effects. Like the logic followed in Brahman’s description, the attributive forces, as subtle entities, cannot be perceived by a system of perception ¯ cruder than themselves. “Subtle” (s¯ uks.ma) is an Ananda M¯arga terminology used to describe an object that is beyond the grasping power of human sensory and motor (indriyas ) organs, but nonetheless capable of being imagined by the human mind. Otherwise, those objects that the sensory or motor organs can capture are considered dense, crude objects (sth¯ ula) (Sarkar 1955, v. 9). Wherever there is manifested consciousness one can see the “subtle attributive force” (sattva), where there is movement one can see the “mutative attributive force” (rajas ), and where there is apathy or paralysis the “static attributive force” (tamas ). The matrix of creation, Prakr.ti, however, does not appear equally in all objects. All objects have the attributive forces themselves, but in different proportions. An object that has the predominance of the static attributive force necessarily has the subtle and mutative attributive forces themselves, but to a lesser extent. There is an ascendancy of these dispositions, for in order for the objectivity produced by the static attributive force to exist,

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there must be movement, the mutatory attributive force to materialize it, and a consciousness produced by the subtle attributive force to observe the unfolding action. Objects thus have the three Prakr.ti tendencies in themselves, in different dominance proportions, depending on both their constitution and the viewer’s point of view (Sarkar 1955, v. 1). Any object that has limits is an object that has all three tendencies in it, as “(…) boundary line means the static force” (Sarkar 1978, v. 12). This composition of the attributive forces (gun.as ) in objects will only appear in the stability of existence, at a moment of appearing already defined by Prakr.ti’s broad expression, that is, in the manifestation of plurality. As said, the language used to describe Prakr.ti is that of an analytical effort to detail its composition. Prakr.ti, in turn, is itself Brahman’s figurative descriptive effort in conjunction with Purus.a, the cognitive force. In describing the cosmic cycle (Brahman Cakra) the matrix of creation (Prakr.ti) continues to be approached through figurative language. Its constitutive principles, that is, the attributive forces (sattva, rajas, and tamas ), have an abstract description at the moment before the manifestation of the beings, in the stage of non-expression of Brahman (Nirgun.a Brahman), this previous description will be portrayed. It is said that while Consciousness retains its unified form, the three principles of the creation matrix (Prakr.ti) flow indefinitely, continuously, ´ into the transcendent body of this cognitive principle (Siva). Figurative language describes a picture in which, at first, the attributive forces are not localizable within an infinity of flows of different waves. That is, in a sense it is like saying that prior to the emergence of beings due to the will of the one, there was a blurring of boundaries between things, described as a “cluster of waves”. This amorphous mass, the “continuous flow of different waves flowing in infinite directions” begins to be delineated by Prakr.ti’s three principles. It is described that waves which are almost “rectilinear” in shape are classified with subtle attributive force (sattva), those of “short wave” with mutative attributive force (rajas ), and those of “wide length” with static attributive force (tamas ) (Sarkar 1955, v. 24). With the beginning of the expression of the desire of Consciousness to manifest, it is said that the attributive forces (gun.as ) are related to a greater identity. The figure of language used to describe this relationship is that of geometric shapes; various figurations are formed, which eventu¯ ally succeed the attributive forces in triangulation, as described in Ananda S¯utram . 4-1 (1992):

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The matrix of creation, which is constituted of the three gun.as, manifests itself in an integral flow of triangular shape. [trigun.¯ atmik¯ a sr..s.tim¯ atr.k¯ a a´ses.atrikon.adh¯ ar¯ a]

The matrix of creation, synonymous with Prakr.ti, the operative principle, still does not operate, does not ascribe qualities to Purus.a. This matrix is also identified as the causal matrix, or, m¯ ula Prakr.ti, an original Prakr.ti, which has the attributive forces (gun.as ) that compose it in complete equilibrium, unmanifest. The idea of its attributive forces forming a “triangle” indicates an idea of unity, a moment of stability of Being. The s¯ utras referring to Brahman’s unmanifest state describe this moment prior to the manifestation of multiplicity as a moment of equilibrium. They thus indicate that an imbalance is contained in plurality, to be explored below. In relation to Purus.a, Prakr.ti can also be called at ¯ ´ an¯ı according to s¯ this stage Siv¯ utra 4-3 in Ananda S¯utram . (1992): At first, characterized by an unmanifest state, the matrix of creation is called ´ an¯ı. In its center is Parama´siva Siv¯ ´ an¯ı kendre ca Parama´sivah.] [pratham¯ a avyakte s¯ aSiv¯

´ an¯ı, as an only feminine grammatical form of Siva, ´ Naming Prakr.ti Siv¯ ´ is a way of saying that the difference between Prakr.ti and Purus.a, Siva ´ and Siv¯ an¯ı, is only theoretical as long as there is no manifestation. Several names will be given to the set, depending on the movement in the creation process. The names of Prakr.ti and Purus.a therefore represent ´ distinct aspects of their appearing. Parama, associated here with Siva, ´ means absolute, the greatest, and concerns the still unconscious Siva, ´ indivisible (nis.kala), in Nirgun.a Brahman. Siva, however, in this preevolutionary state, pre-expression, has a theoretical difference with the cognition of when Prakr.ti is completely unmanifest (anucch¯ uny¯ a ) (Sarkar 1959). Although there is no expression yet, the possibility arises when a portion of Parama´siva is circled by this triangle of forces that consti´ an¯ı, being it in the center. Being only a portion of Parama´siva tutes Siv¯ surrounded by this triangle of forces suggests the restricted location of the phenomenon of creation. The multiple will emerge from this unity, but not from its full extent. The existence of Brahman in its manifest state (Sagun.a Brahman) does not exclude the existential continuity of Brahman in its unmanifest state (Nirgun.a Brahman), Brahman without

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attributes. Like an iceberg in a sea of consciousness (see above), it will not be the whole body of water that is influenced by the temperature drop (prakr.ti), only a portion will be condensed. While Parama´siva is not attributed qualities, and existence is only a possibility, a primal seed, it is understood that there is a “proper fit” (Sarkar 1978, v. 33) between the triangular-restricted, subdued Prakr.ti forces (gun.ayantraka) themselves. This tethering does not occur, however, inertly, there is constant movement, intense fluctuation between the waves due to mutual conflicts resulting in an exchange between their ¯ characteristics, as described in s¯ utra 4-2 of theAnanda S¯utram . (1992): In the condition of triangularity [i.e. in the equilibrium condition of gun.as ], the matrix of creation manifests as a uni-morphic modification [tribh¯ uje s¯ a svar¯ upaparin.¯ am¯ atmik¯ a]

Svar¯ upa means “same form”, sva is an adjective that also serves as a reflexive pronoun in the sense of “self” (Apte 2015, p. 714) of something innate, natural, and r¯ upa is a neutral noun whose meaning is that of “Form, figure, appearance” (Apte 2015, p. 532). Parin¯ ama, on the other hand, refers to emanation, to the modification of consciousness (Apte 2015, p. 362). Once the discussion is that of a monist philosophy, parin¯ ama can also be understood as “alteration”, or “transformation”, since every emanation is Consciousness modified in some way. This changes, despite occurring, do not alter the shape (r¯ upa) of what is being modified, such is the result of the conflict between the attributive forces (gun.as ) of Prakr.ti at this stage. Otherwise, Sarkar (2007) translates svar¯ upaparin¯ ama as “homomorphic evolution”, and attributes the term meaning distinct to that understood by the philosophy of s¯am . khya, “(…) according to Sámkhya, ´ the gunas ´ change, each within itself, without disturbing the others” (Sarkar 1978, v. 33). It is precisely this change in uniformity from one attributive force (gun.a) to another, this assuming other characteristics, that will produce an unbalanced result, which, in turn, will result in an eruption of the resultant conflict between these forces by one of the vertices of the triangle. The point at which this breaking of the triangular form, this vertex occurs, is called k¯ amab¯ıja, the source of longing, Brahman’s will to manifest. It is from this point that creation begins, and that Prakr.ti begins to exert its influence on Purus.a (Sarkar 1978, v. 33), which at that time is named

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¯ Bhairav¯ı and Bhairava, as described in s¯ utra 4-4 of the Ananda S¯utram . (1992): In a second moment, characterized by a state of differentiation arising from the first, the matrix of creation is called Bhairav¯ı. Bhairav¯ı has its refuge in Bhairava [dvit¯ıy¯ a sakale prathamodgame Bhairav¯ı Bhairav¯ a´srit¯ a]

From then on Brahman becomes manifest (sakala Brahman), and a new moment emerges, no longer named Nirgun.a Brahman, but all further development, in which the manifest universe exists, is called Sagun.a Brahman (attributed Brahman by the qualifying tendencies, the gun.as ). Prakr.ti, Bhairav¯ı, begins to be able to exercise the capacity of its strength and Purus.a is attributed of a first quality, the ability to witness his ¯ own expression, according to s¯ utra 2-12 of the Ananda S¯utram . (1992): The origin of creation comes from the consciousness qualified by the gun.as [sagun.¯ at sr..s.tirutpattih.]

A distinct state in which the same consciousness finds itself. The passage of Brahmasvar¯ upa, Brahman in its true form, in its original condition, to Sagun.a Brahman is only a difference in the state of the same entity, as is: “Rama asleep and Rama awake only indicate the two different states of existence of the same person” (Sarkar 2007). Therefore, it can be said that this creationist philosophical exercise is based on a negative conception of origin. The idea that the universe originates from an aspiration is not necessarily positive, despite the devotional nature to which such an idea converts. Desires are disturbances of a mind that would otherwise be tranquil, an idea that is repeated at the individual level. The search for an object is something that mobilizes the being, that drives it to action, that torments it, that wakes it up. So much that all the terminology used to describe this movement indicates a nuisance, an imbalance. Prior to the resultant moment that generates the manifestation Prakr.ti and Purus.a are indifferent. It is from the irritation (ks.obha) of the gun.as in complete harmony that creation, the apparent duality, develops. This loss of balance is philosophically called gun.aks.obha, an irritation, a disturbance, of the gun.as, of the operative principles that are the qualifying force of Brahman. The seed of creation results, therefore, from a loss of equilibrium in the triangulation of these forces (Sarkar 1955, v. 7),

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which can only be reestablished by an individual effort (s¯ adhana), from each of the beings that compounds the multiplicity. Thereafter, Purus.a’s cognitive body will become the substance, the macrocosmic body, into which Prakr.ti will focus, in a process of heterogeneous evolution (sadr.´sa parin¯ ama) that will qualify (or, “crudify”, “densify”) successively, Purus.a. Sadr.´sa, more than a difference, indicates a similarity between two objects. An approximation of appearances is not, however, equality (svar¯ upa). Through several small but exponential changes, Prakr.ti will act on Purus.a by slowly modifying it, “(…) there is hardly any difference between B and C; C is following B. But there is a gulf of difference between A and Z” (Sarkar 1955, v. 24). These transformations are precisely the difference between the beings in the world: “Now, here we are in the realm of the vibrational principle” (Sarkar 1955, v. 24). Descriptions move then from geometric analogies to vibrational analogies. The difference between Prakr.ti and Purus.a is no longer only ideational, but practical, assuming a maximum appearance of dissimilarity at this stage, when they become Bhav¯ an¯ı and Bhava (Sarkar 1959). Thus, ¯ according to s¯ utra 4-5 of the Ananda S¯utram . (1992): On condition of modification in [a plurality of] similar forms, the matrix of creation is called Bhav¯ an¯ı, the consort of Bhava [sadr.´saparin.¯ amena Bhav¯ an¯ı s¯ a Bhavad¯ ar¯ a]

Bhava means to become, as is also the name of Purus.a at this stage. Purus.a becomes the world of phenomena, the creation. The idea of a cosmic entity is put into practice, into action, its unity is transformed into multiplicity by the strings (gun.as ), the possibility of being opens, as opposed to the previous state of a potential being. Brahman’s creative essence, Bhav¯ an¯ı, engages in creation, which transforms it into m¯ ay¯ a, the supreme creative principle, the matrix of individuality, Prakr.ti whose gun.as are unbalanced (Sarkar 1978, v. 30). Prakr.ti previously, in equilib´ ´ rium, was only Bhairav¯ı Sakti, a primordial principle, while Bhav¯ an¯ı Sakti becomes the vibrational principle, from which the five-element universe will be extroverted by transformations in the wavelengths that will focus on cognition, now expressed in manifest beings (Bhava).

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Note 1. Song no. 4279, composed on 15 February 1988, available at: http:// prabháta-samgiita.net/lyrics/ps_4279.htm, ´ accessed September 20, 2019. ¯ The translation of the whole song is authored by the Ananda M¯arga publishing committee, unlike the other Sanskrit translations throughout the text, which I performed.

Bibliography Apte, Vaman Shivram. 2015. The Student’s Sanskrit-English Dictionary. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Derrida, Jacques. 1995. Salvo o nome. Campinas: Papirus. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1989. O pensamento selvagem. Campinas: Papirus. Loundo, Dilip. 2014. Ser sujeito: considerações sobre a noção de ¯ atman nos Upanis.ads. Cultura Oriental 1 (1, jan–jun): 11–18. Sarkar, Prabhat Ranjan. 1955. Subhá´sita Samgraha, ´ vol. 1–24. Eletronic Edition 2009, version 7.5. Sarkar, Prabhat Ranjan. 1958. Tattva Kaomudii, vol. 1–2. Eletronic Edition 2009, versão 7.5. Sarkar, Prabhat Ranjan. 1959. Idea and Ideology. Eletronic Edition 2009, versão 7.5. Sarkar, Prabhat Ranjan. 1978. Ánanda Vacanámrtam, vol. 1–34. Eletronic Edition 2009, versão 7.5. Sarkar, Prabhat Ranjan. 1980. Namámi Kr´snasundaram. ´ Eletronic Edition 2009, versão 7.5. Sarkar, Prabhat Ranjan. 1988. Prabh¯ ata Sam . g¯ıta nº 4279. Available at: http:// prabháta-samgiita.net/lyrics/ps_4279.htm. ´ Accessed August 20, 2019. Sarkar, Prabhat Ranjan. 1992. ÁnandaSútram. Eletronic Edition 2009, versão 7.5. Sarkar, Prabhat Ranjan. 2008. Idéia e Ideologia. Brasília: Editora Ananda Marga Yoga e meditação. Sarkar, Prabhat Ranjan. 2007. Filosofia Elementar da Ananda Marga. Brasília: Editora Ananda Marga Yoga e Meditação.

CHAPTER 7

Roots, Routes, and Creative Transformations: New Perspectives on Transitions in Human Society Subhash Sharma

Let noble thoughts come to us from all directions. Rigveda Let noble thoughts go from us in all directions. Quantum Rope by the Author

Introduction To understand the changes and challenges of creative transformations of societies across the world, we need to take a historical perspective on changes in human society and its impact on Self, Other and World (SOW). By SOWing we imply an understanding of the changes in human society in terms of its transition from Tribes to Religions to Nation-States to Globalization to a New Era of New Consciousness. Sharma (2005) in his article, A Brief History of History: Lessons for Management & Leadership, and related writings, develops some new perspectives on transitions

S. Sharma (B) Indus Business Academy, Bangalore, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. K. Giri (ed.), Roots, Routes and a New Awakening, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7122-0_7

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in societies that are helpful to us in understanding their SOWing implications for Self, Society, Management, and Leadership, as well as in tracing their roots and routes in their historical journey from one region to other.

Perspectives on Transitions in Societies Six perspectives identified in this paper on transitions in human society are as follows: Perspective I: Transitions from Religion (S) to Science to Spirituality to New Consciousness In a metaphorical sense, Fall of Apple witnessed by Newton led to a shift in human thinking from Religion rooted in God (G) to Science rooted in cause and effect represented by gravity (g). Darwin challenged Creation theories of Religion and provided scientific view of evolution. While Religion focused on God and Faith, science provided a new perspective as its focus was on Cause and Effect. Thus, there was a shift from God and Faith to Cause and Effect. However, focus of science has been on external. Deeper need to shift the focus to Inner Self, led to the emergence of the idea of Spirituality rooted in inner search. In twentyfirst century we are moving toward a new consciousness of combining science and spirituality for the benefit of whole humanity. This perspective is presented in Table 7.1. Perspective II: Transition Toward Sacro-Civic Society In Western societies we observe transition from Age of Religion (Church driven society) to separation of Church and State leading to dominance Table 7.1 Transitions in human societies (perspective I) Religion (s)

Science

Spirituality

God:

Nature:

Self:

Faith (I)

Cause & Effect (II)

Inner search (III)

Convergence Convergence of Outer and Inner search (IV)

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Table 7.2 Transitions in human societies (perspective II) Religion

Church-State Separaon

Church Dominance Ancient I

(II)

State

Emergence of Market

(III)

(IV)

Market

Sacro-civic society Consciousness driven society

DominanceDominance Medieval mes (II)

Modern mes (III)

Future evoluon (IV)

of State in secular affairs and then with advent of science, modernity, and democracy. Western societies moved further in the direction of secular approach in the affairs of the State and it led to further dominance of State over religion. With the advent of Market as a dominant force in last 150 years or so, there was further secularization and push to consumerism. This process gained further momentum with influences of globalization and technology. However, these developments created spiritual vacuum and now a new awakening toward inner search and a balance between outer and inner focus. Popularity of yoga, meditation, etc. is a pointer toward the same. In future this balance may lead us toward a new vision of human society viz. sacro-civic society. Table 7.2 presents these transitions in the Western Society. Perspective III: Transitions from Kingdoms to Nation-States to Corporations to Globalization to New Era of New Consciousness Transitions in societies can also be viewed in terms of transition from Kingdoms to Nation-States to Corporations (and associated Globalization) and now new era concerns and consciousness about social responsibility, spiritual responsibility, environment, ethics and values, gender issues, human rights, human duties, animal rights, earth’s rights, well being, etc. Table 7.3 presents this perspective. As per this perspective, we observe following transitions: In the new era of new consciousness, nations are recognizing the need of interdependence and interconnectivity in the global context. No nation can remain isolated and insulated from interdependence and interconnectivity. Cyber revolution has facilitated the interconnectivity among nations. With arrival of new consciousness in future contemporary idea of globalization

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Table 7.3 Transitions in human societies (perspective III) Kingdoms

Naon-State

Corporaons

(II)

(III)

New Consciousness

& Globalizaon (I)

(IV)

As per this perspecve, we observe following transions:

Table 7.4 Transitions in human societies (perspective IV) Commandments (I)

Constuon (II)

Codes of conduct

New Consciousness

(III)

(IV)

may be replaced by the idea of global connectivity rather than dominance of globe by Corporations.

Perspective IV: Transition from Commandments to Constitution to Codes of Conduct to New Consciousness Transition from Kingdom to Nation-State to Corporations to New Global Consciousness (with focus on Self) can also be captured through the idea of Commandments to Constitution to Codes of Conduct to Consciousness. Nation-States need Constitution, Corporations need Codes of Conduct (for Good Corporate Governance rooted in Ethics & Values), and new concerns of environment, well being, and spiritual development of human beings require a new global consciousness with focus on self-awareness, self awakening, self-realization and a sense of cosmic connectivity. This perspective is presented in Table 6.4. Perspective V: Transition from Tribes to Religions to Ideologies to New Ideas Human society has also seen transition from Tribes to Religions to Ideologies to New Ideas. In tribal societies, Tribal Chief dominated the social thought. With the rise of Religions to integrate various fighting

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Table 7.5 Transitions in human societies (perspective V) Tribes

Religions

Ideologies

Tribal chiefs

Prophets

Philosophers

(II)

(II)

(III)

New Ideas Professionals and practioners (IV)

Perspecve VI: Modificaons in Tradion and Modernity

tribes of a region, under a broader umbrella of Religion, Prophets dominated the social thought. Subsequently, ideologies formulated by various Philosophers, emerged as main source of social thought. These ideologies represented by various isms challenged Religions and claimed to be more universal than religions arising from various regions of the world e.g., challenge posed by Communism, Feminism, and various other isms to the very idea of God and Religion is well known. Secularism underwent a transition from its separation of Church and State idea to an anti-religion and atheistic ideology. There have been well known clashes among religions as well as among ideologies. These clashes continue in one form or other even to this day. However, we are also observing emergence of new ideas transcending both religions and ideologies. These ideas are being generated by Professionals and pragmatic practitioners who have now started dominating social thought through their new and innovative ideas. In fact, technological innovations combined with a new age of human creativity have provided new pathways beyond religions and ideologies. We refer to it as New Era, because it shifted our focus from Religions (and their rituals) and Ideologies to New Ideas. It also represented a shift from Prophets and Philosophers to Professionals and Practitioners. Table 6.5 presents this perspective. Perspective VI: Modifications in Tradition and Modernity We also observe transitions in societies from Tradition to Modernity and its modifications. Modifications in modernity can be viewed in terms of transitions from modernity to postmodernity to transmodernity and now toward a new era of modernity. In the New Era Modernity (NEMO) we find a new integration of heritage, modernity, and traditional knowledge to create new ideas and new perspectives, taking us beyond the rigidities of ‘Western modernity’. New Era Modernity provides legitimacy to

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Traditional Knowledge, in contrast to modernity that rejected traditional knowledge as unscientific. Ithas also opened new doors, in addition to Indian Spirituality, for India’s traditional knowledge with respect to Business and Entrepreneurship leading to development of new ideas with roots in Indian thought. For example, Yoga, Meditation, and Ayurveda have found new market and new business opportunities at the global level. A New View of Modernity: Modernity created many side effects, Which became its main defects Defining MODERN: ‘Means of Destroying & Eliminating Real Nature’ (WWED 1996)

Some side effects of Modernity: 1. Colonialism and Imperialism 2. Ecological destruction 3. Ethical erosion 4. Over focus on Rationality leading to Mono and Binary views about society To overcome the side effects of modernity, modification of modernity is needed. Modification of modernity has been taking place in various forms e.g., through the ideas of postmodernity, transmodernity, and new era modernity as well as new era of spirituality. ‘Spirituality driven modernity’ helps in overcoming the side effects of modernity. In the process of modifications of tradition and modernity, we are observing a new dialogue between Tradition and Modernity that can be represented in terms of following Tradition Modernity Dialogue matrix, presented in Fig. 7.1. This dialogue matrix suggests that when we take +, + view of both tradition and modernity, we can leverage it for the benefit of human society. New Era Modernity (NEMO) takes an integrative view wherein ideas from Tradition, Modernity, Post modernity, and Transmodernity are integrated to create new perspectives. Traditional view of Tradition Modernity dichotomy is based on binary thinking, wherein Modernity

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Fig. 7.1 Tradition Modernity Dialogue matrix

Positive

(-,+)

123

(+,+)

Tradition Negative

(-,-)

(+,-)

Negative

Positive

Modernity

rejects Tradition. In new era modernity, this binary approach is transcended and an integrative approach is taken as both Tradition and Modernity have their rightful places and capacities to contribute positively to society through their new blending and their moving together, through ‘spiritually guided modernity’. Above presented perspectives of changes in human society at the global level, provide us some new insights for the roots and routes connectivity at the local, regional, and global levels. In the subsequent discussion we examine them in the context of Indian society.

Case Study of Roots, Routes, and Creative Transformations in Indian Society In this section we provide case study of India and Indian society in its creative transformations from ancient times to contemporary times and its future directions. For this we use creativity and cultural view of Indian history in contrast to socio-political views that usually dominate the social discourse. Socio-political and economic views are generally rooted in structuralist view of history. In contrast we present some new ways of viewing Indian history from culturalist and spiritualist perspectives. A Creativity View of Indian History Sharma (2005, 2007, 2013) taking a creativity and culturalist view of Indian history, provides a framework of Indian history in terms of four periods of Indian history viz. Vedika, Hindika, Indika, and Extended

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India. This four periods’ classification of Indian history is in contrast to other categories that were provided by Western thinkers and are still used widely. In our framework ancient period is referred to as Vedika because of the influence of Vedas and Upanishads on Indian Thought. It is also the period of origin of Sanatan Dharma. During this period sapt-sindhu region was known as Bharat and Yogis, Vedic Rishis, and Munis provided deep insights to a worldview of life, leading to a vision of life that emphasized oneness of everything and created a pathway of life for the human beings.OM: One and Many/One as Many, was the essence of this vision reflecting unity in diversity. Such a world view is often referred to as Ancient Indian Wisdom contained in the ancient noble books of India that provide a Rishi Vision of Oneness, for the whole world. These sources also provide a base for Indian Ethos. During medieval period, India became known as Hind. Hence, this period is referred to as Hindika and most significant influence of this period is Bhakti movement, that brought out the significance of Heart in human conduct. Many saints and sages who came from all walks of life, provided a ‘leadership of the heart’ to guide the masses toward a holistic approach to life and living. Hinduism owes a great deal to the Bhakti period saints and sages. These saints and sages emphasized the ‘HINDU’ vision of ‘Harmony InNature, Diversity and Unity’. This ‘HINDU Vision’ of the world represents three basic principles of Hinduism as a ‘Vision of life’ viz. (1) Harmony in nature (2) Diversity (3) Unity. Word ‘Hindu’ as a derivative of Sindhu originated during this period and subsequently in modern period it led to the origin of the word Hinduism. During Hindika period Vedic and Vedantic ideas of Rishis and Munis from ancient times were brought to the masses by the saints and sages and thus Hinduism became a mass movement and religion of the masses. During modern period, Freedom movement played significant role in liberation of India and as a consequence, liberation of many nations from colonialism. This period is referred to as Indika period. Modern Indian Philosophers, Integral & Holistic thinkers, and sacro-social thinkers, such as Vivekananda, Gandhi, Aurobindo, and others provided a new intellectual leadership to the Indian society and created the idea of Indian nationalism and Indianism. These Philosophers and thinkers rooted in ‘sacro-social approach’ to change had freely drawn from the ancient Rishis & Munis as well as from the saints & sages of Bhakti period. Thus Sanatan Dharma and Hinduism and other contemporary influences

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became a basis for Indian Nationalism and Indianism. For all practical purposes Indianism is a product of India’s freedom struggle and intellectual contributions of modern Indian visionaries and sacro-social thinkers who emphasized ‘spirituality based social change’ and provided a touch of spirituality/non-violence/higher consciousness in their approach to social change. This is in contrast to purely ‘matter based approaches’ originating from the thinkers of the West during modern period. Subsequently with globalization of Indian thought, many spiritual gurus played an important role in spread of yoga, meditation, and spirituality at the global level. Thus Indian ethos were further carried forward to modern period by writings of many such ‘modern Rishis’ and gurus and yoga teachers who globalized the ideas across the world. Thus Indian thought has been influenced by Vedic Rishis of ancient times (Bharat), Saints and sages of medieval times (Hind/Hindustan— derived from Sapt Sindhu-sthan, place of seven rivers) and Sacro-social visionaries and thinkers of modern times (India) and in the era of globalization, spiritual gurus and yoga teachers have emerged to spread yoga, meditation, and spirituality across the globe. After India’s independence in 1947, a new era of Indian history started, that can be referred to as India period because Bharat-Hind became officially known as India and the word India found mention in Indian Constitution. Word India derived from Indus is a derivative of Sindhu and Indu sound in Sindhu. Thus new derivatives of the word Sindhu emerged over a period of time. During post 1947 period, many Indian scholars and researchers with focus on Indian ideas, started contributing to new ideas and perspectives and thus lot of new literature on Indian Ethos was generated. This literature was deeply influenced by earlier three periods viz. Vedika, Hindika, and Indika period. Last 30 to 40 years, also saw emergence of ‘extended Indias’ beyond physical boundaries of India. We refer to them as Indiapuras and with their emergence, Indian history entered a new period viz. Extended India/Indiapuras period. Now, ‘India as an Idea’, extends beyond physical boundaries of India through Indian diaspora that includes NRIs and People of Indian Origin. In this ‘INDIA vision’, India represents Infinity and diversity in absolute. This spiritual vision of India, is in consonance with Rishi vision of ancient, medieval, and modern times. This period also saw spread of ‘Indian Ideas’ e.g., Yoga, Meditation, and Indian Spirituality at the global level. Celebration of International Yoga Day, approved—by

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Table 7.6 Transitions in Indian society Vedika period (I) Vedas, Upanishads,

Hindika period (II) Bhak literature

Indika period

Extended India period

(III)

(IV)

Liberaon literature

Globalizaon of

Epic literature etc.

Yoga, Meditaon and Indian spirituality literature

Rishis &Munis

Saints & Sages

Sacro-social thinkers

Spiritual gurus & yoga teachers

UN, is a pointer in this direction. From ancient roots it has travelled through many global routes. Above presented flow of the Indian thought currents of literary and spiritual heritage of India is presented in Table 6.6. It may be indicated that ‘Ancient Bharat’ has been described in ancient literature in terms of Golden Bird, Jagat Guru, Vasudhaiva Kutumbkam (World as one family), etc. These phrases also provide us an imagination for the future. In contemporary times, influences of Ancient Bharat, Hindustan, and India (ABHI) find their expressions in many different ways not only within India but also among the Indian Diaspora (Indiapuras) and other communities, leading to the new concept of ‘India Way’ based on Indian worldview, and Indian vision of life. In this respect, ‘ABHI Gyan’ represents the knowledge and wisdom of India arising from its long journey. It also represents the essence of the Indian ethos and the India way. Sapt-Sindhu Foundations of India Earlier we mentioned that Saptsindhu refers to seven rivers. Region known as Bharat in ancient times, Hind in medieval times and India in modern times, was sapt-sidhu region in South Asia. Seven rivers of this region are well described in an ancient Sanskrit sloka: Ganga cha Yamunechaiv Godavari Saraswati, Narmade, Sindhu, Kaverijalesminsamsidhikuru

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(O ye Ganga, Yamuna, Godavari, Saraswati, Narmada, Sindhu and Kaverai, come ye and enter into this water in my offering)

This sloka is indicative of fundamental territorial and cultural unity of the people of this entire South Asian region. Indian civilization was rooted in regions covered by these seven rivers. While we are familiar with Indus-Saraswati civilization, Indian civilization was essentially represented by interconnected civilizations originating from different regions/pradeshviz. Ganga-Yamuna, Narmada, Sindhu– Saraawati, Godavari, and Kaveri. These regions covered the entire region of Bharat. At times, identity of people living in the region of the specific river, was defined by the name of the river e.g., Saraswati is linked with Saraswati, Kaverians are linked with Kaveri. In some cases new phrases were coined to define the identity e.g., Kaveri region became known as Dravid region. As the above sloka indicates, there was a fundamental cultural unity among people living across these seven rivers and corresponding regions, which defined ancient Bharat. In general, historians have highlighted only Indus-Saraswati civilization and thereby IndusSaraswati (Sindhu-Saraswati) region. Most of the cities and sacred places developed on the banks of these seven rivers because rivers were the lifeline of communities and were indicative of cosmic connectivity of human beings with cosmos. Himalayan Connections: Birthplace of Hinduism? Himalaya connections of Indian civilization and Hinduism are worth exploring. Out of Sapt-sindhu, four rivers viz. Ganga, Yamuna, Saraswati, and Sindhu (Indus) originate from Himalaya. Sindhu/Indus originates from a place near Mansarovarlake in Himalayas. Gangotri and Yamnotri, places of origin of Ganga and Yamuna, are located in Himalayas. Saraswati also originates from Himalaya. Shiva is associated with Kailash Mansarovar in the Himalaya. Shiva-Parvati myth has its roots in Himalaya. As per this interpretation, Himalaya in general and Kailash Mansarovar in contemporary Tibet region, is the birthplace of Hinduism with its origin in Shiva-Shakti civilization. Thus ‘roots of Hinduism’ are in Himalayas. This is in contrast to the prevalent idea of roots of Hinduism in Indus area/Indus region. It may be indicated that Shiva images were found in Indus Valley civilization and Sindhu-Saraswati region. This is indicative of the influence of Shiva-Shakti civilization on Indus valley civilization

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through Himalayan Yogis. Myth of Yogis, Rishis, and Munis meditating in Himalayan caves is still widespread. In fact, origin of Hinduism is essentially from ‘Himalayan caves’ and now it has spread to ‘Harvard classrooms’ and ‘corporate cubicles’ through yoga, meditation, and spirituality. Even in contemporary times, many spiritual gurus undertake journey through Himalaya before they evolve as Gurus and start preaching. Further, Ganga-Yamuna Civilization (GYC) with its roots in Himalaya, has played a significant role along with other regions such as SindhuSaraswati, Narmada, Godavari, and Kaveri, in evolution of Indian civilization. If Indian researchers and scholars take a note of this perspective, a new view will emerge about fundamental territorial, cultural, and spiritual unity of India through an interconnectivity of various regions defined by seven rivers (sapt-sindhu). Tagore mentions: Snehomayitumimata, jonogonodhkhotrayokojohohe, Bharatobhaggobidhata Oh Loving Mother Oh! You have removed the misery of the people, Victory be to You, dispenser of destiny of India!

It may be indicated that journey of Hinduism from ‘Himalayan caves’ during ancient times, and ‘pooja rooms’ in medieval times to ‘yoga studios’/yoga centers across the globe, represents its silent expansion over centuries. Globally Extended India: Empire of the Spirit With the emergence of ‘Globally Extended India’ we see the transition of India from Sapt-sindhu (seven rivers) to Sapt-sindhu (seven seas). During this period, Indian Thought also reached many places, not only through the efforts of Indian spiritual Gurus, but also through Non-resident Indians and Persons of Indian Origin and others interested in Indian thought. Today Indian thought with roots in an ‘India is an Idea’ is represented by the idea of ‘Extended India’ through the concept of India as Extended Nation-State Civilization (ENSC). Indian ideas, particularly, Yoga, Meditation, and Indian Spirituality, have found a global expression

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and Indiapuras have played a significant role in popularizing these ideas. It may be indicated that the idea of roots to routes connectivity in Indian context is also represented by the well known catch phrase, ‘Indian at Heart, Global in Spirit’. As mentioned earlier, Sapt-sindhu also refers to seven seas. Sindhu refers to not only river but also seas. Further, Sindhuthat we know as Indus, is only one of the rivers among sapt-sindhu. As a result of migrations abroad, people from the seven rivers regions have now crossed seven seas and settled in various countries across the world. Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) and People of Indian Origin (PIOs) are spread out globally and this has led to spread of Indiapuras across the world. In this process they have taken with them regional cultures from India represented by Ganga-Yamuna, Narmada civilization, Indus-Saraswati civilization (North-Western India), Godavari, and Kaveri. Thus, from sapt-sindhu (seven rivers) roots, Indians have taken sapt-sindhu (seven seas) routes and in the process taken many Indian ideas and even Indian Gods and Goddesses to various parts of the world. In the process, in a very non-violent and silent way without any conversions or invasions, many ‘Sthan – devtas’ (Gods of a region) have become ‘Global devtas’ (Gods of the Globe). Further, NRIs and PIOs have also taken with them many ‘Noble Books of India’ such as Ramayana, Mahabharata, Gita, and other literature and thus extended India’s ‘Empire of the Spirit’. This also led to silent spread of ‘Sanatan Dharma’ ideas, Hinduism, and Indianism to various parts of the world. In fact India’s roots to routes story captured by the phrase, Sapt-sindhu to Sapt-sindhu, is not a story of ‘Empire of Sword’ but a story of ‘Empire of Spirit’ expressed through its Ideas, Culture and Ethos (ICE). Historian Michael Wood notes, ‘History is full of Empires of the Sword, but India alone created an Empire of the Spirit’. Even today India is creating a new empire of the spirit through yoga, meditation, and spirituality and through a new blend of tradition, modernity, and spirituality. From Rishis and Munis to Saints and Sages to Modern Philosophers and Thinkers and now Scholars and Researchers, represent the flow of Indian thought from ancient times to contemporary times. Their visions, ideas, and concepts have found varying expressions across the world. This is the essence of the Indian story and the narrative at the world stage variously referred to as Sanatana Dharma, Hinduism, Indianism, and ‘Viswanization’ of India Way.

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Shiva-Shakti

Indus Valley

Vedic

Civilization

CivilizationCivilization

Hinduism

IndianismSHIVI spirit

( IV)

(III) (II)

(I) Shiva Shakti Civilization

Fig. 7.2 A perspective on Indian history, beginning with Shiva-Shakti Civilization in Himalayas

SHIVI Narrative of India We refer to the above presented Indian story as SHIVI narrative of Indian history: S (Sanatana dharma)—H (Hinduism—I (Indianism)—VI (Viswanization) of India way. It may be indicated that the word Viswa has a deep significance in Indian narrative e.g., Viswaroopdarshan, Viswanath (God of the universe), Viswamitra (Friend of the world), Viswabharati, Viswaguru, etc. In this SHIVI narrative, Viswanization implies, drawing upon the deeper significance of ‘viswavision’ and globalizing it for the benefit of humanity by establishing the ‘empire of the SHIVI spirit’ throughout the world, through its ‘Sanatan narrative’. Above presented ideas about Indian history and Indian story are represented in Fig. 7.2.

Conclusion In this paper we have presented some historical perspectives on transitions and transformations of human society from different perspectives. Then we provided case study of India and Indian society in terms of its

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journey over centuries from its origin from Sapt-Sindhu (seven rivers) to Sapt-Sindhu (seven seas). In this long journey, it has taken along with it tradition, modernity, and spirituality toward a new vision for the world rooted in new consciousness of sacro-civic society wherein modernity is driven by a touch of tradition and spirituality and thus it is given a new direction. Such a view can transform self and societies toward sustainability vision though holistic view of life and human existence. This is also the essence of the ‘New Earth Sastra’.

Notes and References 1. This paper is a modified and revised version of the paper, Roots, Routes and the Challenges of Creative Transformations of Self, Society and Management, in a New Era, Subhash Shrma, Southern Economist, May 1, 2016, pp. 21–30. 2. These ideas were initially presented at the Workshop on Cross-Fertilizing Roots and Routes: Social Creativity, Cultural Regeneration and Planetary Realizations, organized by C-School of IBA and Vishwaneedam Center for Asian Blossoming, Puducherry, held at Indus Business Academy (IBA), Bangalore, November 25, 2014. Author thanks Prof. Ananta Giri, Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, and Prof. Meera Chakravorty, Jain University, Bangalore, for their feedback and comments on an earlier version of this paper. 3. This paper is primarily based on earlier writings of the author. Readers may refer to the following: Sharma, Subhash. 1996 and 2006. Management in New Age: Western Windows Eastern Doors. New Delhi: New Age International Publishers. Sharma, Subhash. 2005. A Brief History of History: Some Models of History and Lessons for Leadership & Management Lessons. Journal of Human Values 11 (2): 123–137. Sharma, Subhash. 2007. New Mantras in Corporate Corridors: From Ancient Roots to Global Routes. New Delhi: New Age International Publishers. Sharma, Subhash. 2012. New Earth Sastra: Towards Holistic Development & Management (HDM). Bangalore: IBA Publications. Sharma, Subhash. 2013. Wisdom & Consciousness from the East: Life. Living & Leadership. Bangalore: IBA Publications. Sharma, Subhash. 2014. A Quantum Bridge Between Science and Spirituality: Towards A New Geometry of Consciousness. 3 D …IBA Journal of Management & Leadership 5 (2): 64–73. Sharma, Subhash. 2015. Globalizing Indian Thought Through Indian Management Knowledge Tree. IIM Kozhikode Society & Management Review 4 (1): 1–14.

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Sharma, Subhash. 2017. New Indian Perspectives on History: Lessons for Leadership and Management. In A Big History Anthology, vol. 3, ed. Barry Rodrigue. New Delhi: Primus Books.

CHAPTER 8

Thoreau—Tolstoy—Gandhi: The Origin of Satyagraha Christian Bartolf, Dominique Miething, and Vishnu Varatharajan

Prologue Let us begin by highlighting the fact that it was the eminent 1935 Nobel Peace Laureate, Carl von Ossietzky, Hitler’s concentration camp prisoner then, who had already comprehended the global challenge of Mahatma Gandhi when he wrote in his weekly magazine Die Weltbühne (The World Stage) in the year 1929, a few weeks before the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression:

C. Bartolf (B) Gandhi Information Center, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] D. Miething Free University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] V. Varatharajan Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. K. Giri (ed.), Roots, Routes and a New Awakening, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7122-0_8

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Gandhi is no political human being in the European sense. He is more. He is the secret force without office and party, yet dominating everyone. He is a defender of the Old and a guide to the unknown, at the same time teacher of wisdom and an elementary school headmaster, thinker and practitioner, dreamer and organizer of American format. But in everything exemplary: whether he stood up for sanitary reforms or whether he fought the ancient prejudice against the Pariahs or whether he silently entered the British prison. […] India can be considered fortunate enough that her new law is not imposed on her by a dictator, does not boast in the relentless command of an Asian Napoleon, but is proclaimed by the gentle voice of Mahatma Gandhi.1

Carl von Ossietzky’s statement is a historical example of how crosscultural understanding could have prevented the worst from happening: the rise of fascism. Cultural mediation, as exemplified by Ossietzky, that aims at overcoming antisemitism, colonialism, imperialism, nationalism and racism, strengthens our fundamental roots and values: human dignity and rights and mutual respect for each other, transcultural and transnational. Why did Gandhi become so significant for his contemporaries? Because his political program meant cultural, economic and social regeneration through constructive work, conviviality2 and hospitality instead of hostility, instead of brute force: soul force!

Introduction The year 1906 is marked as the year of birth of Satyagraha in India, South Africa and the rest of the world. However, an interesting fact to note here is that the term Satyagraha was not coined until 1908. So, what happened between those two years? The events that happened between 1906 and 1908 laid the foundation to the most important civil resistance program of the twentieth century that profoundly influenced the later movements for emancipation organized by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists. Gandhi started his passive resistance movement in 1906 against the South African government, demanding the abolition of discriminatory laws. Particularly, in September 1906, Gandhi delivered a speech in a mass meeting held at Empire Theatre, Johannesburg, which was organized as a protest against the discriminatory bills and laws, for instance the Transvaal Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance No.

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29 of 1906, and later the Transvaal Immigration Restriction Act No. 15 of 1907 (called “The Black Act”). Gandhi introduced and explained the concept of passive resistance to the British Indians, urging everyone to take the pledge of commitment to the resistance movement. These were his words3 : It may be that we may not be called upon to suffer at all. But if on the one hand one who takes a pledge must be a robust optimist, on the other hand he must be prepared for the worst. It is therefore that I would give you an idea of the worst that might happen to us in the present struggle. Imagine that all of us present here numbering 3,000 at the most pledge ourselves. Imagine again that the remaining 10,000 Indians take no such pledge. We will only provoke ridicule in the beginning. Again, it is quite possible that in spite of the present warning some or many of those who pledge themselves might weaken at the very first trial. We might have to go to gaol, where we might be insulted. We might have to go hungry and suffer extreme heat or cold. Hard labour might be imposed upon us. We might be flogged by rude warders. We might be fined heavily and our property might be attached and held up to auction if there are only a few resisters left. Opulent today, we might be reduced to abject poverty tomorrow. We might be deported. Suffering from starvation and similar hardships in gaol, some of us might fall ill and even die. In short, therefore, it is not at all impossible that we might have to endure every hardship that we can imagine, and wisdom lies in pledging ourselves on the understanding that we shall have to suffer all that and worse. If someone asks me when and how the struggle may end, I may say that, if the entire community manfully stands the test, the end will be near. If many of us fall back under storm and stress, the struggle will be prolonged. But I can boldly declare, and with certainty, that so long as there is even a handful of men true to their pledge, there can only be one end to the struggle and that is victory.

In the following year, he gradually evolved his resistance method by adopting the ethics of Socrates, Leo Tolstoy and Henry David Thoreau. However, after careful observations on other passive resistance movements that happened around the world—like the Suffragette movement in Britain—Gandhi became dissatisfied with the term “passive resistance”, as he wanted to stress fearlessness and firmness in the good and right cause—instead of conformism and opportunism. Therefore, at the end of 1907, Gandhi began to search for a Gujarati equivalent for passive resistance, and invited suggestions from the readers of the Indian Opinion.4

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After reviewing a series of dissatisfying alternatives to passive resistance, Gandhi himself finally came up with a new term—Satyagraha: But I could not for the life of me find out a new name, and therefore offered a nominal prize through Indian Opinion to the reader who made the best suggestion on the subject. As a result Maganlal Gandhi coined the word ‘Sadagraha’ (sat-truth, agraha-firmness) and won the prize. But in order to make it clearer I changed the word to ‘Satyagraha’ which has since become current in Gujarati as a designation for the struggle.5

He continued to shape this new resistance method by deriving influences from various historical instances, most of all Jesus Christ, Socrates and the Russian Doukhobors (Spirit Wrestlers) to name a few. He organized an essay writing competition to his readers, inviting them to write on the ethical principles of Satyagraha. However, the subsequent prize-winning essay “The Ethics of Passive Resistance” by M. S. Maurice was not satisfactory to Gandhi, because it did not deliver a political program that could serve as a basis for the Indian resisters. Therefore, he decided to write his first own political program called Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule). During these formative years of the Mahatma between 1906 and 1914, we discover the renaissance of these four fundamental concepts: Satyagraha, Sarvodaya, Swadeshi and Swaraj.

Truth When recollecting the philosophy of the ancient Indian scriptures, Gandhi always referred to the oriental roots of the key concept of Truth in order to remember the moral virtues of the sages—these following quotes we found in his article “Oriental Ideal of Truth”6 may give a proof of this method of recollection: Truth is That which Is, and Untruth is That which Is Not. [Gandhi]

– Speech rests on Truth; everything rests on Truth. Therefore they call Truth the highest. Mahanarayan Upanishad XXVII. I . – Truth weighed heavier than a thousand horse-sacrifices. Mahabharata, Shanti Parva, clxii, 26.

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– There is no duty higher than Truth and no sin more heinous than untruth. Indeed, Truth is the very foundation of Righteousness. Mahabharata – There is nothing greater than Truth, and Truth should be esteemed the most sacred of all things. Ramayana. – The man who speaks truth in this world attains the highest imperishable state. Men shrink with fear and horror from a liar as from a serpent. In this world the chief element in virtue is truth. It is called the basis of everything. Truth is lord in the world, virtue always rests on truth. All things are founded on truth; nothing is higher than it. Professor Max Muller’s translation [of the Ramayana]. The tenfold law, as laid down by Manu, gives some of the qualities needed for the discipline of the mind and reaching the highest Truth, the one Reality [Gandhi]:

– Endurance, patience, self-control, integrity, purity, restraint of the senses, wisdom, learning, truth, absence of anger, are the ten signs of virtue. Manusmriti, vi, 92. The virtues that bring about unity and harmony, secure peace and calm, and enable a man to fulfil his destiny, were thus stated by Shri Krishna [Gandhi]:

– Fearlessness, sattvic purity, steadfast pursuit of wisdom, charity, control of the senses, sacrifice, study, austerity, uprightness; – Harmlessness, truthfulness, absence of anger, resignation, peace of mind, avoidance of calumny, pity for all beings, absence of greed, gentleness, modesty, absence of restlessness; – Energy, forgiveness, endurance, purity, freedom from hatred and from pride,—these are his who is born to the divine qualities, O Bharata. Bhagvat Gita, xvi, 1-3. – Truthfulness, equability, self-control, absence of self-display, forgiveness, modesty, endurance, absence of envy, charity, a noble wellwishing towards others, self-possession, compassion, and harmlessness—surely these are the thirteen forms of Truth. Mahabharata, Shanti Parva, clxii, 8, 9.

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When highlighting the legendary role models in history, Gandhi remembers the heroes of his childhood and youth: Satyagrahis have had to mount the gallows [The reference probably is to the crucifixion of Jesus], embrace a pillar of red-hot iron [Legend of Prahlad], suffer being rolled down a mountain, swim in boiling oil in a big frying pan [Legend of Sudhanva], walk through a blazing forest [Legend of Nala-Damayanti], suffer loss of a kingdom and be sold [as slave] in a low-born family [Legend of Harishchandra] and stay in a lion’s den. Thus, satyagrahis have had to pass through different ordeals in different parts of the world.7

… most of all, not only the mythological Prahlad: We have said earlier that he alone is a satyagrahi who gives up everything for the sake of truth—forgoes wealth and property, allows his land to be auctioned, parts from his relatives, from his parents, his children, his wife, and sacrifices dear life itself. He who thus loses for the sake of truth shall gain. By disobeying his father‘s order for the sake of truth, Prahlad not only remained staunch in satyagraha but also did his duty as a son. Making himself a satyagrahi, he won his own and his father‘s deliverance from this earthly life. No one lacking the determined spirit of Prahlad can ever hold on to satyagraha to the end.8

… but also his contemporary Shrimad Rajchandra (Kavi) (1867–1901) whom he had met for the first time in the year 1891: By birth I am a Vaishnavite, and was taught ahimsa in my childhood. I have derived much religious benefit from Jain religious works, as I have from scriptures of the other great faiths of the world. I owe much to the living company of the deceased philosopher Raja Chand Kavi who was a Jain by birth.9

… and the poet Dayaram (1777–1853) from Gujarat: Who without utmost suffering has attained to a vision of Krishna? Find any, if you can, among the saints of the four ages; Rare are the men who have much love for a Vaishnava; Persecutors all and enemies to bhakti.10

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Truth transcends Death—that is why an ancient Greek philosopher became the champion of Truth: There was once a wise man, named Socrates, who lived in Athens. His unconventional ideas, which, however, spread love of truth and goodness, displeased the authorities, and he was sentenced to death.11

Socrates As early as 1905, Gandhi searched for historical role models for the Indian resistance movement for emancipation from the discriminatory laws against their community and referred to various independence movements, as e.g. in Egypt (Mustafa Kamil Pasha, 1874–1908),12 Ireland (Sinn Féin, founded in 1905),13 Italy (Giuseppe Mazzini, 1805–1872)14 and the U.S.A. with George Washington (1732–1799)15 and Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865),16 but also admirable writers like Maxim Gorky (1868–1936)17 and humanitarian workers like the Quaker pioneer of prison reform, Elizabeth Fry (1780–1845)18 and the Crimean War nurse and pioneer of hospital reform, Florence Nightingale (1820–1910).19 Gandhi repeatedly referred to Charles George Gordon (1833–1885),20 also known as Gordon of Khartoum who had secured the evacuation of 2.500 civilians in Khartoum during the Mahdist uprising. But in order to gain the sympathy and support of Western citizens in South Africa, Gandhi also referred to the courageous examples of Christopher Columbus (1451–1506), Martin Luther (1483–1546) and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642): The great Luther defied his people single-handed and it is thanks to him that Germany enjoys freedom today. And there was Galileo who opposed society. The people were resolved to kill him. Undaunted, he told them that they could kill him if they wanted to, but that it was nevertheless true that the earth revolved [round the sun]. Today, we all know that the earth is round and that it rotates round its axis once every 24 hours. Columbus acted like a true satyagrahi when facing his sailors. Exhausted [by the long voyage], they declared, “We will never get to America. Let us turn back, else we will kill you.” Unperturbed, Columbus answered, “I am not afraid of being killed, but I think we ought to go on for a few days more.” They did discover America, and Columbus won everlasting fame.21

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The occidental pole star among all these, however, had been—in Gandhi’s opinion—Socrates (470–399 BCE), the Greek sage philosopher— “He had no fear of death”—whose Maieutics, a dialectical and elenctic method, became the blueprint for Gandhi’s first political program, Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule), most of all the legal “Defence of Socrates” (Apology) against accusations, narrated by Plato: Defence of Socrates or The Story of a True Warrior is a Gujarati rendering of Plato’s immortal work printed in order to illustrate the virtue and the true nature of passive resistance.22

In 1908, Gandhi represented the biography and philosophy of “Socrates, the Soldier of Truth”23 in a six-part serial portrait: In Athens it was an offence to disregard the traditional religion of the polis or encourage others to do so. The offence, if proved, was punishable with death. Socrates adhered to the traditional religion, but called upon the people to fight the corrupt elements [associated with its observance]. He himself would have nothing to do with them. Under the law of Athens, such offences were tried before a popular assembly. Socrates was charged with violating the religion of the state and teaching others to do likewise and was tried before an assembly of elders. Many members of the assembly had suffered as a result of Socrates’ teaching. Because of this, they bore him a grudge. They wrongfully declared him guilty and condemned him to die by taking poison. A prisoner sentenced might be put to death in anyone of a number of ways. Socrates was condemned to death by poisoning. This brave man took poison by his own hand and died. On the day of his death he discoursed to his friend and companion on the perishable nature of the human body and the immortality of the soul. It is said that up to the very last moment Socrates showed no fear, and that he took the poison smilingly. As he finished the last sentence of his discourse, he drank the poison from the cup as eagerly as we might drink sherbet from a glass. Today the world cherishes Socrates’ memory. His teaching has benefited millions. His accusers and his judges stand condemned by the world. Socrates has gained immortality and Greece stands in high esteem because of him and others like him. Socrates’ speech in his own defence was committed to writing by his companion, the celebrated Plato. It has been translated into many languages. The defence is excellent and imbued with moral fervour.

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Thus, Socrates became an undeniable point of continuous reference for the Indian Satyagrahi, Mr. Gandhi: Jesus Christ, Daniel and Socrates represented the purest form of passive resistance or soul force. All these teachers counted their bodies as nothing in comparison to their souls. Tolstoy was the best and brightest exponent of the doctrine. He not only expounded it, but lived according to it.24

Tolstoy Count Tolstoy is a Russian nobleman. He was once a very wealthy man. He is a man of about eighty now, with wide experience of the world. He is considered to be the best among the writers of the West. He may be looked upon as the greatest of satyagrahis.25

Count Leo Tolstoy, the Russian philosopher and writer of novels and short stories like “God Sees the Truth, But Waits” and “How Much Land a Man Needs”, has been the most eminent critic of the militarized societies of his age. One of his most influential works on Peter Verigin and the Doukhobors (Spirit Wrestlers) as well as on Mahatma Gandhi was “The Kingdom of God Is Within You” (1893), a tract against military conscription which inspired the burning of weapons by the Doukhobors in summer 1895—to declare a new era of peace. Tolstoy challenged Gandhi in many ways: (a) through his writing “Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves” against alcohol and narcotic drugs and gambling, (b) through his writing “The First Step” as a plea for fasting and vegetarianism, (c) through his propagation of “Bread Labour”: according to the peasant writer and Subbotnik Timofej Bondarev (1820– 1898) and his treatise “The Triumph of the Farmer” (1888; 1906), (d) through his concept of nonviolent non-cooperation Tolstoy elaborated (following Laozi’s non-acting (“wuwei”) principle, Étienne de La Boétie’s “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude”, and the U.S. American abolitionist and non-resister William Lloyd Garrison’s “Declaration of Sentiments”): His writings had a great effect on his own mind. He gave up his wealth and took to a life of poverty. He has lived like a peasant for many years now and earns his needs by his own labour. He has given up all his vices, eats very simple food and has it in him no longer to hurt any living being by

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thought, word or deed. He spends all his time in good works and prayer. He believes that: 1. In this world men should not accumulate wealth; 2. no matter how much evil a person does to us, we should always do good to him. Such is the Commandment of God, and also His law; 3. no one should take part in fighting; 4. it is sinful to wield political power, as it leads to many of the evils in the world; 5. man is born to do his duty to his Creator; he should therefore pay more attention to his duties than to his rights; 6. agriculture is the true occupation of man. It is therefore contrary to divine law to establish large cities, to employ hundreds of thousands for minding machines in factories so that a few can wallow in riches by exploiting the helplessness and poverty of the many. These views he has very beautifully supported by examples from various religions and other old texts. There are today thousands of men in Europe who have adopted Tolstoy’s way of life. They have given up all their worldly goods and taken to a very simple life.26

Tolstoy had crucial experiences with death during his trip to France when he witnessed an execution by guillotine and during his military service during the Crimean War when he collected war experience as described in his Sevastopol Tales. In his prize essay on “The Ethics of Passive Resistance”, the Indian Christian M. S. Maurice wrote: Most men of our day account Count Tolstoy a paradox. By common admission, however, he is a great thinker, if not quite a seer. He has certainly probed into the deeps of humanity. He has laid bare many of the human follies and foibles. Upon war as upon capital punishment, he looks with the deepest horror. An extremist he may be, yet he is a realist-a rationalist. Passive resistance is almost a fetish with him.27

It was Tolstoy’s nonviolent non-cooperation principle called “passive resistance” and Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” which paved the floor for Gandhi’s Satyagraha, that is why Maurice (who later accompanied Gandhi to Mauritius) summarized: Tolstoy and Thoreau appear to agree in the matter of civil disobedience: they seem to be at one in regard to the claim of conscience on the individual soul.28

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Thoreau Many years ago, there lived in America a great man named Henry David Thoreau. His writings are read and pondered over by millions of people. Some of them put his ideas into practice. Much importance is attached to his writings because Thoreau himself was a man who practised what he preached. Impelled by a sense of duty, he wrote much against his own country, America. He considered it a great sin that the Americans held many persons in the bonds of slavery. He did not rest content with saying this, but took all other necessary steps to put a stop to this trade. One of those steps consisted in not paying any taxes to the State in which the slave trade was being carried on. He was imprisoned when he stopped paying the taxes due from him. Historians say that the chief cause of the abolition of slavery in America was Thoreau’s imprisonment and the publication by him of the abovementioned book after his release. Both his example and writings are at present exactly applicable to the Indians in the Transvaal.29

The U.S.A. transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) derived much inspiration for his ecological and pacifist philosophy through Indian sources of wisdom.30 In the year 1908, Gandhi represented the basic thought of Thoreau’s 1849 essay about “Resistance to Civil Government” or “Civil Disobedience” under the title “Duty of Disobeying Laws”31 . Gandhi wrote for the Asian passive resisters: David Thoreau was a great writer, philosopher, poet, and withal a most practical man, that is, he taught nothing he was not prepared to practise in himself. He was one of the greatest and most moral men America has produced. At the time of the abolition of slavery movement, he wrote his famous essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience”. He went to gaol for the sake of his principles and suffering humanity. His essay has, therefore, been sanctified by suffering. Moreover, it is written for all time. Its incisive logic is unanswerable.32 Civil disobedience presupposes the habit of willing obedience to laws without fear of their sanctions. It can therefore be practised only as a last resort and by a select few in the first instance at any rate. Nonco-operation, too, like civil disobedience is a branch of satyagraha which includes all non-violent resistance for the vindication of Truth.33

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Satyagraha Under the influence of Tolstoy’s “bread labour” concept and the four essays on the principles of political economy, “Unto This Last” written by John Ruskin (1819–1900), Gandhi created the “Phoenix Settlement” (since 1904) on the northwestern outskirts of Inanda near Durban, close to John and Nokutela Dube’s Ohlange High School, created in 1900 after Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute model university. With residences, a clinic, a school and a printing press, Phoenix became home to Gandhi, his family and his followers as they strove to follow a path of social change through passive resistance. Indian Opinion, which argued strenuously for the civil rights of Indian South Africans, was published here in four languages (Gujarati, Hindi, Tamil and English). Phoenix Settlement continued to serve as home to a number of residents and activists even after Gandhi’s departure to India in 1914, including his son, Manilal Gandhi. The editor had invited [suggestions from readers for] a Gujarati equivalent for “passive resistance”. I have received one which is not bad, though it does not render the original in its full connotation. I shall, however, use it for the present. The word is sadagraha. I think satyagraha is better than sadagraha. “Resistance” means determined opposition to anything. The correspondent has rendered it as agraha. Agraha in a right cause is sat or satya agraha. The correspondent therefore has rendered “passive resistance” as firmness in a good cause. Though the phrase does not exhaust the connotation of the word “passive”, we shall use satyagraha till a word is available which deserves the prize. Satyagraha, then, is at high tide at present. The Indian satyagrahi is getting world-wide publicity.34

In March 1908, Gandhi finally decided to choose this term: Only four persons took the trouble of sending in suggestions […] One of them says that “passive resistance” can be rendered as pratyupaya. He explains the word as connoting [the state of] being passive to whatever happens and taking all possible remedial measures. The word and the explanation are both worthless. Pratyupaya means counter-measure. Opposing good to evil will then be pratyupaya, but so will be the use of force to solve a problem. Passive resistance means resistance of evil with inner force instead of physical force. The explanation offered betrays ignorance. A passive resister cannot remain passive to everything that happens. In other

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words, he will always pit his inner strength against everything evil. Another equivalent that has been received is kashtadhinprativartan [“Prativartan = resistance; kashtadhinprativartan = resistance through submission to hardship”]. Here the word prati is superfluous and suggestive of antipathy. It betrays an ignorance of language. Kashtadhinvartan has in it a suggestion of the significance of passive resistance. But it is a big word and does not convey the full meaning. The third term is dridhapratipaksha [“Dridhapratipaksha = firmness in resistance”]. Like pratyupaya, this too cannot be used to convey the meaning we attach to passive resistance. The person who sent in that word has also sent us an equivalent for “civil disobedience”. It appears to have been sent in without much thought. The word suggested is satyanadar. The meaning here is the contrary. It means “disobedience to truth”, that is, resistance to truth. [“The correspondent may have intended it to mean “truthful disregard” of laws, using (satya) as an adjective. Literally, however, it could mean, as Gandhiji assumed, “disobedience to truth”.”] Civil disobedience is disobedience to untruth, and it becomes “civil” if it is “truthful” in its manner. The word [civil] also includes the meaning of passive. We have therefore only one word available to us for the present, and that is satyagraha.35

Perspective Thus, Gandhi syncretized and complemented the concepts of “civil disobedience”, “nonviolent non-cooperation” and “passive resistance” by creating a new term for his civil resistance nonviolent alternative to violence and civil war. In the years between 1909 and 1910, Gandhi corresponded with Tolstoy who had published an open “Letter to an Indian” (Taraknath Das) and Gandhi named, together with his friend and supporter Hermann Kallenbach, his second settlement project “Tolstoy Farm”. Gandhi, the Thoreauvian and Tolstoyan, desired to go beyond: to create a massive resistance of Satyagraha for the good and right causes of ecology, equality, freedom, justice, nonviolence and peace. His opponents, like General Jan Christiaan Smuts, encountered soul force instead of brute force. Their military weapons of deterrence, intimidation, fear and violence became symbols of capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, militarism and racism. Gandhi and his Satyagrahi paved the way for the emancipation from all kinds of mental, physical and psychological slavery, from indentured labour to the superiority complex of nationalism. His message transcends every gun, sword, weapon of mass destruction—will Satyagraha originate a new era of a world federation without armies?

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Or will we—as human species—fail to find our roots and to transcend borders?

Epilogue To find our roots means to follow the path of realizing our diverse cultural traditions, and to transcend borders means to realize that we are not prisoners of our ethnic and national identities, as the origins of our traditions have always been cross-cultural or, as Ralph Waldo Emerson mentioned in his essay “The Over-Soul” (1841): We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related […] We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.

Gandhi was influenced by Socrates, Emerson, Ruskin, Thoreau and Tolstoy, and Gandhi in turn influenced civil rights activists like Benjamin Mays and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, who wrote about the reality of inter-dependence: We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.36

When Gandhi discovered his “master-key” of nonviolent resistance, and named it as Satyagraha, he publicly expressed his cultural autonomy and independence, heading towards his first political program for “Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule” in 1909. The moderns make a key which will open many kinds of locks. They call it the “master-key”. Likewise, satyagraha is the master-key to our innumerable hardships. How much could be achieved if only all the Indians would use that key! Satyagraha is not a difficult term to understand. It only means adherence to truth. Whatever else the ethical life may mean, it cannot be ethical if it is not based on truth. Truth is easy enough to follow once we know its meaning.37

Let us continue on this route.

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Notes 1. Carl von Ossietzky (1889–1938) about Mahatma Gandhi, in: Die Weltbühne [The World Stage], vol. 25 (II), no. 41, October 8, 1929—German original: Gandhi ist kein politischer Mensch im europäischen Sinne. Er ist mehr. Er ist die geheime Gewalt, die ohne Amt und Partei doch alle beherrscht. Er ist Verteidiger des Alten und Führer ins Unbekannte, Weisheitslehrer und Elementarschulmeister zugleich, Denker und Praktiker, Träumer und Organisator von amerikanischem Format. In allem aber beispielhaft, ob er für sanitäre Reformen eintritt oder das uralte Vorurteil gegen die Parias bekämpft oder schweigend in das Gefängnis der Engländer geht. […] Indien ist glücklich zu schätzen, dass ihm sein neues Gesetz nicht von einem Diktator auferlegt wird, nicht in dem unerbittlichen Kommando eines asiatischen Napoleon dröhnt, sondern von der sanften Stimme Mahatma Gandhis verkündet wird. 2. Ref. Ivan Illich: Tools for Conviviality. New York, 1973. 3. M. K. Gandhi: Satyagraha in South Africa, Chapter XII, Madras, 1928, see: The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (henceforth: CWMG) vol. 5, p. 421. 4. Indian Opinion, 18 December 1907, in: CWMG vol. 7, pp. 455. 5. An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Chapter XXVI: The Birth of Satyagraha, 1920, in: CWMG vol. 39, p. 255. 6. Indian Opinion, 1 April 1905, in: CWMG vol. 4, pp. 392–394. 7. Indian Opinion, 5 June 1909, in: CWMG, vol. 9, pp. 236–238. 8. Indian Opinion, 5 November 1910, in: CWMG, vol. 10, p. 346. 9. The Modern Review, October 1916, in: CWMG vol. 13, pp. 297 f. 10. Golden Number, Indian Opinion, 1914, in: CWMG, vol. 12, p. 510. 11. On February 29, 1932, in: CWMG 49, pp. 169 f. 12. Indian Opinion, 28 March 1908 and 4 April 1908, in: CWMG vol. 8, pp. 166 f., 174–176. 13. Indian Opinion, 7 September 1907, in: CWMG vol. 7, pp. 213 f. 14. Indian Opinion, 22 July 1905, in: CWMG vol. 5, pp. 27 f. 15. Indian Opinion, 30 September 1905, in: CWMG vol. 5, pp. 84–86. 16. Indian Opinion, 26 August 1905, in: CWMG vol. 5, pp. 50–52. 17. Indian Opinion, 1 July 1905, in: CWMG vol. 5, p. 5. 18. Indian Opinion, 19 August 1905, in: CWMG vol. 5, pp. 45 f. 19. Indian Opinion, 9 September 1905, in: CWMG vol. 5, pp. 61 f. 20. The Modern Review, October 1916, in: CWMG vol. 13, pp. 297 f.; Indian Opinion, 29 February 1908, in: CWMG vol. 8, p. 107; CWMG 13,

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21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

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pp. 525; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 15 August 1925, in: CWMG vol. 28, pp. 22 f. Indian Opinion, 22 February 1908, in: CWMG vol. 8, pp. 91 f. Indian Opinion, 7 May 1910, in: CWMG vol. 10, pp. 245 f. Indian Opinion, 4 April 1908, in: CWMG vol. 8, pp. 172 f. Indian Opinion, 12 June 1909, in: CWMG 9, pp. 243. Indian Opinion, 30 October 1909, in: CWMG vol. 9, pp. 448 f. Indian Opinion, 2 September 1905, in: CWMG vol. 5, pp. 56 f. Indian Opinion, 18 April 1908, in: CWMG vol. 8, pp. 497. Indian Opinion, 18 April 1908, in: CWMG vol. 8, pp. 497. Indian Opinion, 7 September 1907, in: CWMG vol. 7, pp. 217 f. R.K. Dhawan: Henry David Thoreau: A Study in Indian Influence. New Delhi 1985, pp. 30–49; A.R.S. Nagar: American Transcendentalism and Indian Thought (A Comparative Study). Delhi 2003, pp. 70–100. Indian Opinion, 7 September 1907, in: CWMG vol. 7, pp. 217 f.; Indian Opinion, 14 September 1907, in: CWMG vol. 7, pp. 228 f. Indian Opinion, 26 October 1907, in: CWMG vol. 7, pp. 304 f. Young India, 23 March 1921, in: CWMG vol. 19, pp. 466 f. Indian Opinion, 11 January 1908, in: CWMG vol. 8, pp. 22 f. Indian Opinion, 7 March 1908, in: CWMG, vol. 8, pp. 131. Martin Luther King Jr. Why We Can’t Wait. Chapter V: Letter from Birmingham Jail (April 16, 1963). Indian Opinion, 28 October 1911, in: CWMG, vol. 11, p. 175.

CHAPTER 9

“The Gospel According to Babylon”: The Rastafarian Challenge to Eurocentric Theological Discourse in the Caribbean Amitha Shantiago

Plead my cause, O Lord, with them that strive with me; fight against them that fight against me. Take hold of the shield and buckler, and stand up for mine help. Draw out also the spear, and stop the way against them that persecute me…; Let them be confounded and put to shame that seek after my soul; let them turn back and bring them to confusion that devise my hurt… (Ps. 35:1-4)1

When the temporal and the spatial sanction interdependence a journey takes congenital form. And out of such alliances have emerged many a community. And when communities muster the first murmurings of their belief and etch the shape of their God/s through such movement, religious communities reach for contour. This is perhaps truer of the Rastafarians of the Caribbean who plot their being and becoming,

A. Shantiago (B) Department of English, Bishop Cotton Women’s Christian College, Bangalore, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. K. Giri (ed.), Roots, Routes and a New Awakening, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7122-0_9

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belonging and growing across Atlantic crossings, arrivals, and struggles spanning centuries. White Christian theology with its stylized response and politically driven addressal to living and dying, amassed races, territorialized continents, and marched crusades to set the course that the Afro Caribbean Rasta would look to imaginatively, stirring in its restless wake a new song that dared the edge. Scholarship has made visible the very material, psychological, and spiritual costs that were incurred by the Church’s colonizing march across the globe.2 In the heat of the scathing racial prejudice and discriminatory leanings of evangelism, narratives exist, of the several brutalities that were unleashed on natives, slaves, and indentured laborers in colonized lands. And on these stages where subjugation and dominance were performed have arisen communities longing for originary stories, reaching back beyond the Atlantic crossing to the land of one’s ancestors in Africa, simultaneously reaching forth toward a claim of self that measures the distance in between. This study of the journey to selfhood of the Rastafarian Afro Caribbean begins, I must confess, from a space that is at once personal and academic. Questions come early to us humans. Some of us outlive them and some of us suggest answers to ourselves and … often believe them. The questions that dwell within an insider’s location in Christianity are often enough faced with more than just an arm’s breadth of tar between us, that is to say, warily. But that’s just me. I know from my association with the Indian Christian world that to many, Christianity in India has given a deep sense of worth and valuable identity, and has led to, empowerment. However, there have been losses: of culture, social structures, language, lifestyle— some of which have been lost with relief [such as the caste system and its oppressive hierarchies and discursive practices], some without a trace [such as local languages replaced by the language of the Christianizing colonizer]. Not the most arresting of my questions was: what were the factors that led to changes in social structures, culture, and identity among the Afro Caribbean Rastafari? Chaperon—like accompanied by—why does this happen? This meant a study of the Imperialist Raj and its diverse colonies. India inevitably, the Caribbean interestingly… The islands of the Caribbean, and in particular those of the Anglophone West Indies, suggested a delectable spread of answers to the question that most captured my attention: How do a people in a colonial outpost and a postcolonial nation-state deal with a dominant religious discourse such

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as White Christian theology? Followed by: What identities are produced by such an interface, and what spaces do these identities inhabit in the Caribbean? This chapter maps the trajectory of one of Jamaica’s striking engagements with Europeanized Christianity and its discursive practices: the religion of Rastafari and its “Gospel According to Babylon”.3 The beginning of this “Gospel According to Babylon” resides in the fact that White feared Black. The thrill of setting foot in daunting, cannibal, headhunting tribal territory set the European pulse thumping like African talking drums. Africa and the Caribbean were lands unlike any known in their radius of experience. Discovery was irresistible and heroic and male and dangerously so. It was to fund an enterprise of representing the unfamiliar to those who didn’t know of it. The representations of lands such as the Caribbean were typically made with the vocabulary of racial superiority, patriarchy, Christian angst, political intent, moral alarm, and economic resolve. 1492 was the year of Columbus’ awkward “discovery” of the West Indies. This was when the imperial validity of conquest, colonization, and eventually “plantocracy” was established in the Caribbean at large and the West Indies in particular. This was the year of the advent of what I’d like to call the “Gospel According to Babylon”, as produced by the emissaries of White theology and colonization. I find it useful to annex Homi Bhabha at this point when he says in his Introduction to The Location of Culture (1994)4 that: “What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural difference. These ‘in-between- spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood – singular or communal”. While conceding the importance of initial and originary subjectivities it appears to me that it would be far more productive to delve into what happens when varied subjectivities come in contact with one another. One finds that in the spaces of contact that exist between Rasta and Euro Christian theology, negotiations occur, recasting fixed notions of subjectivities. Therefore, Rasta is arguably a movement that suggests a subjectivity that works not only as Afro centric but also Afro Caribbean. In Rasta’s articulation of difference is a claim to a constituency that is primarily Afro and to this extent is about originary subjectivity. However, looking closer at the tools and processes employed (Euro Christian worship protocol, the Bible, etc.) enables us to see that Rasta is

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not just a popular counter “ism”.5 Rasta can then be seen as a religiocultural negotiation of Euro Christian discourse that documents what Bhabha calls in his Location of Culture a “moment of historical transformation”. Rastafari has employed unique strategies in grappling with the dominant religious discourse of White Christian theology. If in the age of discovery, exploration, and conquest, the Bible was unsheathed and then wielded to justify, bolster, and further colonial agenda, now, the Bible was a rich resource for the Rasta to take the fight against colonialism and postcolonial oppressive state apparatuses to the streets of Jamaica. There was enough reason for this appropriation of a hitherto sacred text of a dominant religion. The reasons lived within the covers of the King James Version of the Bible which until today is used by Rasta.6 Rasta is said to have had its earliest manifestations in the belief of Caribbean plantation slaves from Africa and in their belief that after death their souls would travel back to Africa. Later, Rasta believers reread the Bible to develop this faith in an afterlife on African soil. The Bible we find was not “The Word” for Christian discourse alone. It was the sacred scripture of the Rasta too and the fulcrum upon which all Rasta discourse was balanced. Rasta chose not to reproduce received readings of Biblical texts. Needless to say, this turned many a Jamaican’s head and brewed a much-needed religious movement that held current meaning for the Afro-Jamaican constituency. Rasta’s strongest reading of the Bible declared that the crucified and risen Christ had in fact been reincarnated in the person of Haile Selassie Rastafari of Ethiopia. Leonard Howell and Marcus Garvey, both Jamaican Rasta prophets and in many ways founders of Rastafari’s tenets, declared that Psalm 68:31: “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God” was prophetic.7 This prophecy gave credence to the belief that Jesus had been reincarnated as part of the fulfillment of the messianic foretelling of humankind’s final upliftment from suffering and sin. When in 1930, on November 20, Negus Tafari Makonnen, son of Ras Makonnen of Harare, great grandson of King SahekaSlassie of Shoa was crowned emperor of Ethiopia, he took on the title of NegusaNagast (King of Kings). His title was attached to his Christian name Haile Selassie. “He then became known to the world as Emperor Haile Selassie I, King of Kings, Elect of God, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah” (Murrell 1998).8 Claiming direct descendancy from King David, he was

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the 225th ruler in an unbroken line of royal lineage from the time of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Garvey, in 1920 had heralded the ascension of a messianic King. His clarion call was: Look to Africa when a Black King shall be crowned, for the day of deliverance is at hand! A word about the role of Garvey’s newspaper “The Negro World” and The Universal Negro Association (an organization that developed opportunities for Black people to work in Black-run establishments) is imperative here, since both were instrumental in providing spaces that were empowering. The huge popularity of the UNIA and “The Negro World” was also due to Garvey’s Rasta pan nationalist “Back to Africa” preaching. Repatriation to Africa, and back to Ethiopia specifically, was a theme with Rasta in the post-independence era. However, when Haile Selassie was unable to fulfill these aspirations, albeit some attempts, Rasta began to enlist the metaphorical, when visioning “the promised land” or “the kingdom of Jah”. This is undoubtedly startling in its parallel to the metaphorical use of “the kingdom of God” in Christian belief.9 Leonard Howell read Psalm 68:31 as well as in Revelations 5:5 and 19:16 in order to prophesy the coming of the Deliverer. This was furthered by Acts 2:29: “He shall come through the lineage of Solomon, and sit on David’s throne.” Haile Selassie RasTa Far I was now clearly the Christ.10 Rasta is colored in decidedly Afro-Caribbean shades. And the Bible shows us why. The Bible, hailed by many believing Christians as “the Word of God”, documented customs, lands, and royal lineage all of which were ironically part of the African slaves’ past. I say ironically because this was the text that was employed to make the first insertion into new lands, for colonization and slavery. Many Biblical events, mythologies, stories, characters, tribes, royalty, and geography were not unfamiliar to the “heathen” slaves. Ethiopia, for example, is mentioned many times in the Bible either directly or as metaphor. Euro Christian discourse had represented the Ethiopians as “the impossible”. So much prejudice and stereotyping was whipped up on the subject of Ethiopia that even a pictorial depiction was created showing two white men washing an Ethiope with a caption reading “the impossible”. Missionary persistence to introduce Christianity and Christ to the Ethiopians is legendary and therefore the washing is also an attempt to “wash their sins away”. But in the Bible, many events and narratives were firmly situated in Africa and Ethiopia. African slaves

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therefore saw a great deal to hope for in the white “massa’s” religious scripture. However, Eurocentric theology had long appropriated the Bible to conquer lands, races, people, and souls for Christ and King/Queen in the case of Britain. Rasta opposed this Euro Christianization of the Bible that went far beyond homilies, centralizing Whiteness as Good. Theology thus produced had racial underpinnings even in pictorial depictions of the characters of the Bible. Not least of these was the image of a European Christ, rather than a Middle Eastern one that until today lurks in Christian homes. Murrell reminds us that: … ancient Hebrew laments, sung as an “inner jihad” against Babylonian culture in the sixth century B.C.E., and still recited as grace after meals during weekdays at modern Jewish tables, was not only a Black lamentation but a popular liberation theme song in Rasta…it also shows how profoundly the Bible resonates with the political ideology of the Jamaican Rastafari. The song he refers to is familiar: By the rivers of Babylon Where we sat down There we wept when we remembered Zion ‘Cause, the wicked carried us away captivity, required from us a song, but how can we sing King Alpha’s song in a strange land? So let the words of our mouths And the meditation of our hearts Be acceptable in Thy sight… -The Melodians, 1970. (Murrell 2000)

There is a whole mosaic of verses from the Psaltery that Rasta ideology leans on. This includes Psalm 23, which is read to recast David’s war theme into a cry to ‘Jah’ to assist Rasta in their war against “Babylon”— the oppressive powers. Take for instance reggae legend and Rasta icon Bob Marley. His “Redemption Song” (Marley 1972 &1981)11 calls for a freedom from “mental slavery” something that is far more dangerous in that it presents the threat of a potential threat to sabotage the fight against “Babylonic” powers.

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Redemption Song: Marley Old pirates yes they rob I Sold I to the merchant ships Minutes after they took I From the bottomless pit But my hand was made strong By the hand of the Almighty We forward in this generation Triumphantly Won’t you help to sing These songs of freedom Cause all I ever had Redemption songs (2) Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery None but ourselves can free our minds Have no fear for atomic energy Cause none of them can stop the time How long shall they kill our prophets While we stand aside and look? Yes, some say it’s just a part of it We’ve got to fulfill the Book Won’t you help to sing These songs of freedom Cause I all I ever had Redemption songs… These songs of freedom Songs of freedom. - (Marley 1972 &1981)

It became necessary for Rasta reggae artists such as Bob Marley to retell the story of their past through music because as far as Eurocentric historiographers were concerned the Africans didn’t have a history to narrate. An instance of this attempt to erase a race’s history is evidenced in the inaugural lecture at the founding of the University of The West Indies in 1963. Hugh Trevor Roper, Prof. Regius of Oxford, laid the foundation for a generation of Eurocentric historiography in and of the Caribbean by declaring in a mandate that University colleges were to teach courses on Britain and Europe in Africa and The Caribbean. The Cannon further stated that:

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The African past was nothing more than the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque corners of the globe…. History is essentially a form of movement, and purposive movement too…. Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history… But at present there is none: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa.12

Leading the protest against such draconian policies on curriculum and syllabi were Rasta Researchers and scholars who, but also Rasta musicians like Marley. The fact that Rasta meanings have commonly transgressed Euro Christian liturgy in Jamaica is corroborated by Velma Pollard. In her analysis of Rastafarian language she quotes a telling example of the “sacramentization” of ganja/marijuana among Rasta believers: The question, ‘ What is a Chalice?’ posed to a group of upper- school teenagers received answers like ‘ a pipe ’, ‘a kind of pipe’, until one seeing the anxiety on an attending adult’s face admitted “it is a thing in the Church”…. (Pollard 2000)13

The other largely debated aspect of Rasta that stood on Biblical reading was the use of Ganja/marijuana/the weed/the herb in Eucharistic ritual. The sacramental use of Ganja was ascribed to many a Biblical verse including Psalm 104:14. Rastafarians justify the growing of marijuana and smoking of the Chillum Pipe in the declaration that: “Jah causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man” (Ps. 104:14). Like other religions, Rastafari reproduces the contexts from which it takes shape. For example, that the use of ganja was to Rasta a sacrament and helped meditation is logical in Jamaica where ganja grows freely. Ganja is therefore used for religious purposes by Rasta. They believe that its use is advocated in the Bible and cite several verses from the scriptures to endorse its utilization. The following are a few of the many Biblical texts that Rasta cites as reasons Jah (which is their name for God) gave for the use of the herb: Thou shalt eat the herb of the field.- Genesis 3:18 Eat every herb of the land.- Exodus 10:12 Better is a dinner of herb where love is, than a salted ox and hatred therewith.- Proverbs 15:17

Here’s a Rasta number by Aswad that depicts Rasta’s ritualistic use of ganja:

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Pass the Cup - Aswad Pass, ……pass the cup (2) C’mon now, c’mon now…. It’s just a little cup So won’t you c’mon now my frien’ an’ take a sup Good for you bredren Is gonna be good for you sistern And yes my friend I know that it’s not hard to see What’s good for you is also good for me Ya, c’mon an’ pass the cup An’ let the ganja wine flow through your mind (pass the cup) As one to another now (pass the cup) Elevate your mind (pass the cup) In an’ out your nerve system an’ your spine (pass the cup) Pass the cup You let it touch your very, very soul You elevate your mind …pass,… Pass the cup around … (Aswad 1982).14

The challenge then that Rasta offers is in its fluid composition. Here is a religious movement that does not rigidly stand as a counter to Christianity but jostles it, troubles it, engages it in order that differences are bounced off. The contact produces a liminality wherein neither Rasta nor Euro Christianity in the Caribbean can sustain rigidity. They are henceforth constantly being “effected”. Christianity is a religion that has dominated Western Christian consciousness for several centuries now. Today, we see right-wing Christian discourse gathering momentum. It feeds Islamophobias and communal protectionism keeping alive prejudices, stereotypes, and “othering” dogma. These regressive theologies invoke conquest and plunder politics of the Columbian era in a techno-savy guise. We are each produced by our various contexts and perhaps an awareness of these contexts will prove healthy. Indian Christian (CSI, CNI, Baptist, Methodist, Anglican, and so on), Rastafrian (Jamaican Rasta, Cuban Rasta, Bobo Ashanti, Nyabhingi, etc.), Santeria in Haiti, Voodoo, Poco mania… I could go on listing the many religious identities that are in continuous process. The point is to ask if these identities have furthered secular thinking and practice. Spivak recently said in a key note address:

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“Secularism is not an episteme…it is an impoverished abstract system that must be protected as such…. Teaching tolerance is not secularism…”.15 When we avidly proselytize and emerge from the sanctum of the Church filled with a sense of being privileged and blessed because we are Christians, we also emerge with a gaping hole in the shape of ethics that early explorers and colonialists chose to ignore. Are we then part of the machine that reproduces intolerance and communal leanings? In a violent world, Rasta to me brings a much-needed recentralizing and thereby a decentralizing ethos. What this means is that Rasta destabilizes the core of Euro Christian belief to “move forward in this generation”.16 It accentuates the relevance of staying grounded in one’s roots and contexts and growing one’s religion through it all.

Notes 1. This set of verses is used by Rastafarians as a prayer. 2. See De Las Casas, Bartolome. A Short History of the Destruction of the Indies. Penguin Books, New York, 1992. 3. Babylon is the Biblical code that many black struggle movements used, and this includes Rasta. Rasta referred to a host of oppressive and repressive systems as ‘Babylon’. These included: the early discoverers, conquerors, colonizers, the geographical land of slavery, the White system of Education, the White Church and its agents of discourse, the legal system and its functionaries, the police force, and any such system or structure that was Euro-centric or derived from Euro centricism. 4. Bhaha, Homi. The Location of Culture. 1994. Routledge, New York, USA. 5. In fact, the ‘isms’ of the ‘Babylon system’ are derided by Rasta. 6. Murrell, Nathaniel Samuel. “Tuning Hebrew Psalms to Reggae Rhythms: Rasta’s Revolutionary Lamentations for Social Change”. Cross Currents. Winter, 2000. 7. Babylon, Chanting Down. The Rastafari Reader. Edited by Nathaniel Samuel Murrell, William David Spencer, and Adrian Anthony McFarlane. Temple University Press, 1998, pp. 145–158. 8. For more on this aspect of Rasta see Murrell, Nathaniel S., Spencer, William David and McFarlane, Adriane. Eds. Chanting Down Babylon: The Rastafari Reader. Temple University Press, Philadelphia. 1998. 9. http://affmissions.co.uk/churchandpolitics/brief-history-on-rastafarifrom-jamaica-to-ghana. 10. Murrell, Nathaniel Samuel. “Tuning Hebrew Psalms to Reggae Rhythms: Rasta’s Revolutionary Lamentations for Social Change”. Cross Currents. Vol. 50. No. 4, Winter 2000, p. 525. Accessed 26 October 2020.

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11. Marley, Bob. Legend. Island Records. 1972 & 1981. 12. Roper, Hugh Trevor. “The Rise of Christian Europe”. The Listener, XXX, No. 18, 871.1963. 13. Pollard, Velma. “The Social History of Dread Talk”. Caribbean Quarterly. Vol 28. No. 4. LANGUAGE. December 1982. The University of the West Indies. Caribbean Quarterly. URL: http://www.jstor.org/sta ble/40653574. 14. Aswad. “Pass the Cup”. 1982. 15. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “The Subaltern and the Popular: The Trajectory of the Subaltern in my Work.” ‘Voices’ a UCSB Series hosted by the History of Art and Architecture and Film Studies. http://youtu.be/2ZH H4ALRFHw. 16. Marley, Bob. ‘Redemption Song’. Legend. Island Records. 1972 &1981.

PART II

Roots, Routes and a New Awakening: Beyond One and Many and Alternative Planetary Futures

CHAPTER 10

Cross-Fertilizing Roots and Routes: Towards a New Art of Border Crossing Ananta Kumar Giri

Introduction and Invitation Roots and routes raise the questions of boundaries and borders and call for a new art of border crossing.1 Boundaries, borders, and margins are related concepts and realities and each of these can be conceptualized and organized in closed or open ways with variations in degrees of closure as well as openness. The existing conceptualization and organization of boundaries, borders, and margins reflect and embody a logic of statis, closure and a cult of exclusivistic, and exclusionary sovereignty. In this place we need a new art and politics of boundary transmutation, boundary transformation, and border crossing. We also need a new realization of margins as spaces of creative boundary transmutation and border crossing rather than a helpless mirror of dualism between margin and the mainstream. In this essay I explore new meanings of boundaries, borders, and margins and a new art of border crossing which can help us transform the existing politics of boundary maintenance, existing conceptualization

A. K. Giri (B) Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. K. Giri (ed.), Roots, Routes and a New Awakening, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7122-0_10

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and organization of identities and differences and help us realize, cocreate and recreate boundaries, borders and margins as places and times of new beginnings. While the existing politics of boundary maintenance is wedded to a cult of sovereignty at the levels of state, society and self— a sovereignty which produces bare lives, bodies and lands—a new art, politics, and spirituality of border crossing is inspired by a new politics, art, and spirituality of shared sovereignties and non-sovereignties (cf. Agamben 1998; Dallmayr 2005; Giri 2009). This border crossing challenges us for creative aesthetic, ethical, political, and spiritual work not only in the field of physical borders and bounded territories but also in the fields of cultural, social, intellectual, and civilizational borders. A new art of border crossing is also linked to a new art, politics, and spirituality of pluralization which may be called meditative verbs of pluralization which are different from conventional discourse and practice of pluralism. Conventional pluralism looks at pluralism as a noun and in a fixed state where identities and differences are also conceptualized in essentialized ways as nouns. Meditative verbs of pluralizations transform these nouns into multiple verbs which are simultaneously activistic as well as meditative (Giri 2012). Art of border crossing with meditative pluralization at the heart of it not only pluralizes existing conceptions of boundaries, borders, identities, and differences but also brings a process of meditation into the dynamics of interactions and interrelationships. Interaction here is not merely reflective or action-oriented as it is in the dominant discourse and practice of modernity but also involves meditation so that interacting individuals and groups also meditate about their selves and identities and realize the need for pluralization and border crossing. Meditation brings a depth dimension to action and interactions involved in border crossing.

Rethinking Boundaries, Borders, and Margins Our borders and boundaries are usually looked at as fixed. But they are historically generated and do embody dynamic flows. One epochal challenge is how do we transform entrenched borders and boundaries into dynamic flows. Borders and boundaries are related to conceptions and organization of order. But though in modernity we are deeply preoccupied with the problem of order, we need to realize that non-order is also an integral part of order.2 Similarly sovereignty has a dimension of non-sovereignty and shared sovereignties. Modern nation-states have

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been based upon a cult of sovereignty but sovereignty has a dimension of limits of sovereignty. Non-sovereignty is a fact of life though states, societies, and selves want to assert it through violence and war. The history of modern world is a story of fragile sovereignty of nation-states where they have attacked each other in the name of sovereignty. In the modern world inability to share sovereignties created wars and violence which still continues unabated when it comes to politics of boundary maintenance and border policing. In this context, there is an epochal need to realize that sovereignty has a dimension of non-sovereignty and it is confronted with the challenge of practicing shared sovereignties. A new art, politics, and spirituality of non-sovereignties and shared sovereignties is crucial in zones of boundaries and borders and spaces of margins. This also calls for understanding non-differences in the work of differences and non-identities in the work of identities. Usually we have monolithic, absolutist, and one-dimensional conception of identities and differences. But identity has also an integral dimension of non-identity as differences have also an integral dimension of non-difference. If we approach the relationship between identity and difference from the reality, journey, and aspiration of non-identity and non-difference then it can help us overcome entrenched boundaries and dualism between identities and differences. This in turn calls for and leads to a new process of identity formation and differentiation where non-identities and non-differences play an important role. But in this journey of creative identity formation and differentiation, the issue of closure and openness does face us squarely. Both are parts of life, they have their own necessities as well as they have their in-built limitations. Life needs boundaries but the crucial challenge is what is the nature of these boundaries. The crucial distinction here is if our boundaries are lines of death and destruction of potential or circles of generation and cultivation of lives and co-lives. The line between the two can be often drawn deliberately thin by the powers that be. In this context, the challenge is critical contextual judgment, development of moral and spiritual consciousness as well as institutional forms which facilitate creative boundary making and their transcendence.3 We also need conscious work on creative boundary transmutation and border crossing and border workers, institutions and pedagogies embodying this (see Giroux 2005).

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Borders and Margins: Some Contemporary Reflections At this point, we can invite two interesting contemporary reflections on borders and margins, one which looks at margins as spaces of meeting building upon insights of philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the other which challenges us to understand the limits of discourse of margins especially when it is posited against the notion of mainstream. The first reflection comes from Noel Parker who builds upon Deleuze and the second comes from philosopher Mrinal Miri. In his essay, “From Borders to Margins: A Deleuzian Ontology for Identities in the Postinternational Environment,” Parker argues that border was “too stringent a concept for discrimination between entities in play” (Parker 2009: 28). “It suggests […] manifest difference, sovereign separation, usually control, sometimes the opposition between what lies on one side of the border and what lies in the other. We need to identify the possibility of discriminating identities in much more open terms than the concept of border permits” (ibid.). For Parker, the notion of margins is much more helpful than the concept of border. For him, margin is the “space of the meeting of identities. It is the space to determine provisionally shared and discriminating features” (ibid.: 29). Furthermore, for him, “most openness can be captured with a notion of margins between entities […] At their margins […] the identities of entities are continuously being determined and redetermined” (ibid.: 28).4 While Parker presents margins as more open than borders with more possibilities, Miri challenges us to understand the limitation of the discourse of margins in his essay, “On Mainstream and Marginality” (Miri 2003). For Miri, “It is clear that the metaphor of the mainstream is a powerful hindrance to the understanding of India, especially for those who set great score by the idea of one nation, one culture” (Miri 2003: 113).5 For Miri, “To begin with, the idea of a margin suggests a condition beyond the limit, beyond which a thing ceases to be possible, or simply does not exist. Does this picture at all help us in understanding the cultural situation in India? If we take it seriously, culture other than what we might call the ‘Indian culture’ proper with its own proper margins (frame) will have to be obliterated from our view […] Can an image of India be more distorting than this? There are cultural texts, and perhaps subtexts, which together constitute the complete text of Indian culture” (ibid.). Miri makes a distinction between boundaries and

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margins: “These texts may have boundaries, which […] are fluid and frequently messy (mixed up, imprecise). None of them has margins in the above sense; nor does the ‘complete’ text of Indian culture have any margins. It has perhaps has boundaries, but if it does, these boundaries can never be delineated. And, this is, of course, just as it should be. The margin metaphor as an aid to understanding the culture of India should, therefore, be abandoned as quickly as possible” (ibid.). It may be noted here that Miri and Parker are looking at margins from two different vantage points. While Miri looks at the limits of discourse of margins as it is produced by the discourse of mainstream in the context of a pervasive and hierarchical dualism between margins and mainstreams, Parker drawing on Deleuze looks at margins as a space in between and thus integral to any condition of life, more so in the work of identities and differences. Both Parker and Miri urge us to make borders more fluid. Parker here stresses the significance of making borderlands into spaces of margins—meeting places. For Miri, for this we need not only abstract and intellectualized interactions among individuals and groups but living interactions touching the poetic and intuitive level of our existence.6

Art of Border Crossing: Toward a Festivity of Incompleteness and an Artistic Ontological Epistemology of Participation Our borders are governed by a logic of anxiety and the attendant rule to control and govern (Maguire 2009). The existing logic of boundary maintenance and border control is governed by what Arjun Appadurai calls, in another context, “anxiety of incompleteness” (Appadurai 2004: 8). Anxiety of incompleteness also governs our a existing logic of identity, difference, identity formation, and differentiation. In this place we need to cultivate and create a festivity of incompleteness. Incompleteness is a condition of life; it is integral to any identity and difference. Poststructuralist thinkers such as Ernesto Laclau (cf. Laclau 1994) urge us to realize this and to this we can add the Buddhist perspective and realization of emptiness. Our cultivation of identity and difference can be accompanied by cultivation of emptiness and incompleteness and we can celebrate our incompleteness rather than be anxious about it. Our borderlands can be zones of festive celebration of limits of

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our identities rather than anxious places of anxiety ridden security arrangement, violence, and death (see Giri 2017a). Our border zones can be “zones of proximal development,” to put in the words of Vygostsky where we help each other to develop our potential rather than to annihilate it (cf. Holzman 2009). At present, our border zones are spaces of terrorism of state and non-state actors but they can be also zones of meetings, communication, and transcendence. One concrete policy of transcendence can be to make our borderlands places of welcome, hospitality, and singing. When we cross borders we could be welcomed with a smile and song rather than be subjected to suspicious looks. Our border petrol officers also could be trained to sing the songs of both cultures lying on the sides of borders.7 Both the border crossing officers and people can dance together. But for this we need to cultivate an art of incompleteness and emptiness which is not static but dynamic. It calls for self-transformation and transformation of the existing organization of state and society. But this agenda of transformation is a continuous one—any little step that we take toward a new art of border crossing can contribute to transformation of existing consciousness, discourse, and organization. In anxiety of incompleteness, violence becomes an intimate mode of knowing as Appadurai (2004) tells us in his work on collective violence. We need here other modes of knowing and being. We need fluid and seeking ontologies instead of aggressive, self-certain, arrogant, and violent ontologies and we need new modes of knowing or epistemologies where knowing of or about the other is also a festive and artistic process of knowing with (cf. Giri 2013; Sundara Rajan 1998). We need an artistic ontological epistemology of participation for a new art of border crossing in which the boundary between ontology and epistemology is continuously being redrawn with emergent negotiation and creativity (cf. Giri 2006).8 In our contemporary reflections we get intimations of such emergent moves in some thinkers. Parker here brings the perspective of Deleuzian ontology which urges us to realize the distinction between “ontological” conditions of existence valid for the world and “ontic” conditions of existence of particular entities or types of entities in the world. Parker further presents us the glimpses of Deleuzian ontology that is helpful here: Discriminations between players are now seen to be needed, but neither fixed nor inherently hostile. Discriminations arise in political processes,

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broadly understood, in and among the players, whose identities are determined in the qualities that they acquire or lose over time. [We can note this point about quality of actors and then link it to the issue of artistic representation discussed later in the section on border crossing and a new aesthetic politics] As the qualities of entities shift, so do the articulations of their margins, which determine the identities they exhibit in the world and to themselves. (2009: 34)

To this we can bring the perspectives of Betsy Taylor and Herbert Reid who talk about “ecological ontology” building upon the insights of Dewey and Merleau-Ponty. Ecological ontology is a folded and layered ontology in which self is part of body, place, and commons (Taylor and Reid 2010). In terms of interactions among people and groups, Taylor and Reid building upon Dewey talk about an aesthetic ecology of public intelligence (Taylor and Reid 2006). While the dominant ontology and epistemology of modernity creates a logic of fungibility where we are produced and realize ourselves as separate and unconnected atoms which then feeds separatism and fundamentalism, ecological ontology and aesthetic ecology of public intelligence realize the connections that exist and then cultivates it in creative ways. Ecological ontology helps us have a field view of our identities, differences, and borders and realize that both the sides of borders are part of a field. At present, this field is divided by fences but ecological ontology, aesthetic ecology of public intelligence, and artistic ontological epistemology of participation urge us to build bridges by ourselves becoming bridges.

Toward a New Art of Border Crossing and a New Aesthetic Politics A new art of border crossing is also accompanied by a new art of politics. Predominant mode of politics in both traditions and modernities has been one of politics of closure rather than openness. Our politics of closure has determined our existing politics of boundary maintenance and border crossing. Here a new art of politics can help us open up our politics of closure. Bringing art and politics is not easy and traditionally it has been fraught with the danger of what David Harvey (1989) had termed long ago as “aesthetics of empowerment.” In aesthetics of empowerment, for Harvey, as it happened in Nazi Germany, art is used to annihilate the other. Here

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we can also remember the way the music of Richard Wagner was played to trump up the nationalistic spirit of Germany and it is said that Wagner was played by the Nazi soldiers while marching the Jews to concentrations camps. But this political use of Wagner in creating an aesthetics of hatred, humiliation, torture, and annihilation does not exhaust possibilities in Wagner’s music as Daniel Barenboim shows us. Barenboim is a creative Jewish musician who has not only played Wagner in Israel but has also played with Edward Said and together they have created space from bringing young musicians from Israel and Palestine together (Barenboim and Said 2002). This is a new aesthetics politics of crossing borders and building bridges by singing songs of harmony realizing that disunity is at the heart of quest for harmony itself. Historian and philosopher F. R. Ankersmit (1996) has talked about aesthetic politics and has made a distinction between mimetic representation and artistic representation. Politics in modernity has been imprisoned within a logic of mimetic representation in which politicians mimic the existing reality as representatives within a logic of representation. They mimic the existing logic and politics of closure and politics of border petrol and boundary maintenance. They rarely have the courage to question the existing logic and representation itself. But in a new aesthetic politics, politicians as representatives understand the limit of the logic of representation itself. They realize how difficult it is to represent one’s constituency. In order to represent others and the public they need to develop themselves and this is an artistic process. When they develop their own lives as a work of art they are better able to perceive the nuances in the desires and aspirations of people and they can give voice to some of these in their work as representatives. A new art of border crossing calls for such politics of artistic representation where political actors realize the need to go beyond the existing logic of constitutive closure and justification and create new spaces and times of conviviality and co-creation. We see this at times in border politics in India and Pakistan when concerned actors—politicians, singers, players, and citizens—try to go beyond mimetic representation of status quo and seek new ways of meeting, border crossing, and reconciliation though such efforts are sabotaged by forces who are prisoners of existing logic of bounded violence. Aesthetics politics through artistic representation as different from mimetic representation is related to an aesthetics of travel rather than being imprisoned within a logic of fixed and controlled border. Aesthetics

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of travel creates a “travelling identity” (Majeed 2009).9 But contemporary organization of nation-state and border control does not make this possible. Our borders are spaces of intense and military security arrangement. But despite this borders are being made fluid by the varieties of actions of actors. Politics of boundary maintenance as it revolves around nation-state needs to be transformed to make space for aesthetics of travel and a new art of border crossing facilitated by aesthetics politics at home and the world. But this aesthetic politics and aesthetic travel need to go beyond dualism between ethics and aesthetics. In the conventional understanding while ethics is oriented to the other, aesthetics is oriented to the self. We need a border crossing between ethics and aesthetics which nurtures self and other simultaneously in creative ways with the additional integral cultivation of the spiritual.10 Thus we need an aesthetics ethics of politics and travel for a new art of border crossing which can emerge from the very space of contemporary condition of boundary maintenance, border control and entrenched closures and parochialisms of many kinds.

By the Way of Conclusion: The Sadhana and Struggles for a New Art of Border Crossing Our contemporary condition of border and boundary maintenance reflects deep anxiety and a military apparatus of exclusion. This is not confined only to national borders but also border between disciplines. While old borders are being dismantled such as that among nation-states of Europe who have become members of European Union (EU) an impenetrable and brutal border is being created between Europe and outside which is called fortress Europe. In the mean time EU itself is facing the threat of pulling apart with Britexit and other moves. The condition is equally precarious in our part of the world in South Asia (cf. Banerjee 2010). It is in this space of difficulty that we would have to practice a new art of border crossing. This calls for sadhana and struggle. In this essay I have presented an outline of some pathways towards this. As we do this we can draw inspiration from the following thoughts of Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet: Movement always happens behind the thinker’s back, or in the moment when he blinks […] Questions are generally aimed at a future (or a past). […] But during this time, while you turn in circles among these questions,

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there are becomings which are silently at work, which are almost impossible. We think too much in terms of history, whether personal or universal. Becomings belong to geography, they are orientations, directions, entries and exits. (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 1) Acknowledgements This builds upon my presentation in the national seminar, “Politics of Boundary Maintenance,” Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, November 16–17, 2009. I am grateful to Drs. Prasenjit Biswas and C. J. Thomas for their kind invitation and Professor Peter D’Souza, Director of Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, for his welcome and hospitality. I am grateful to Drs. Sukalpa Bhattacharjee, Rajesh Dev and Vijayalaxmi Brara for their comments, reflections and generosity.

Notes 1. To understand the manifold challenges entailed here, we can meditate with the following epigraphs of thinking and reflections: Do not give me scissors, Give me a needle to stitch Since I do not cut. —Baba Farid. Post-colonial societies everywhere are caught up in the politics of borders leading to extreme sensitivity about issues of security/insecurity around the question of population settled/unsettled in and across these borders. Added to this problem is the understanding that the ideological construction of the state is almost always weighted against ethnic, religious and other minorities who then are relegated to the borders of democracy. Democracy is affected by the socio-political consciousness of those who construct it. Nationalistic democracies aim at being a hegemonic form of territorial consciousness. National identity links territory to culture, language, history and memory. The process of nation-formation legitimates national identity by tracing it back to fictional common pasts of specific groups. It also simultaneously privileges/marginalizes certain territories. It is therefore crucial to reflect on how discourses of national identities are created by privileging certain spatial units, such as the borders. —Paula Banerjee (2010), Borders, Histories, Existences: Gender and Beyond, pp. xi–xii.

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The exclusivist or statist view is deeply flawed. This was perceived with remarkable prescience by Hugo Grotius, Francisco de Vitoria, Francisco Suarez and other seventeenth-century writers, who were committed to the idea of human unity and worried that the newly emerging states risked undermining this by setting themselves up to morally self-contained units standing between individuals and humankind in general. To say that humankind is divided into states is only partially true. The humanity of the citizen is not exhausted in the state, territorial boundaries do not negate the moral bonds that obtain between human beings, and every state remains embedded in a wider human community. —Bhikhu Parekh (2008), A New Politics of Identity: Political Principles for an Interdependent World, p. 240. If the Samaritan had followed the demands of sacred social boundaries, he would never have stopped to help the wounded Jew. It is plain that the Kingdom involves another kind of solidarity altogether, one that would bring us into a network of agape. —Charles Taylor (2004), Modern Social Imaginaries, p. 66. 2. This may be linked to contemporary discourse of chaos theory and notion of order emerging out of chaos. 3. Bhikhu Parekh’s related discussion of morality of partiality and impartiality can help us to think of the difficult challenge of morality of closure and opening. For Parekh, morality is not just about impartiality: “If the principle of impartiality were to be the sole basis of morality, one would either need to avoid identity relations, or so define and structure them that they do not make moral claims” (Parekh 2008: 231). Parekh’s plea for balance here has implication for the difficult field of morality of closure and opening, boundary and boundary transmutation: “The question therefore is one of striking a balance, a and determining to what degree and kind of partiality should be allowed to enable special relations to be sustained and the basic demands of principle of impartiality to be met” (ibid.: 235). 4. What Deleuze and Guittari (1994: 17, 19–20) write below about concepts is applicable to borders as well: There are no simple concepts. Every concept has components […]. It is a multiplicity […] Components are distinct, heterogeneous, and yet not separable. The point is that each partially overlaps, has a zone of neighborhood […] something passes from one to the

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other, something that is undecidable between them. There is an area ab that belongs to both a and b, where a and b “become” indiscernible. In this context, what Bussey writes about Deleuze deserves our careful attention: “His tools are his creative disregard for boundaries, a playful approach to language and form what Tony Conley describes as a ‘consciousness of possibility’” (Bussey 2018: 2). 5. What Miri (2003) writes about Shankaradev and the tribals in Assam is helpful here: “Shankardev’s Vaishnavite movement among the tribals has enriched them “in their independent being” “rather than blind them into walking into Hindu embrace. And this was a good thing to do” (ibid.: 114). 6. As Miri writes: At a popular level, cultures and therefore, religions have met, conversed with each other, and in many ways, made an impact on each other but such conversations and meeting took place at an intuitive, instinctive, and ‘poetic’ level rather than at an abstract and cerebral, intellectual level. Mutual understanding was, for the most part, unmediated by an abstract articulation of cultures in which one lived and had one’s being. On the other hand, abstract articulations frequently lead to closing of boundaries and deadlocks in communication (2003: 111). In recent works, I have also been exploring how poetics can help us in moving across entrenched and be part of creative border crossing (see Giri 2017b). 7. We can consider here the following poem on how a cauliflower crosses border between America and Canada: With a cauliflower We would go from America to Canada But what would we say On the border? Asks the officer Do you have anything? Oh We have just a cauliflower We have got it with us We want to make a salad While having our lunch Under the sun and near Detroit Art Museum

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With the cauliflower We crossed the border Smile also returned Before the border So much silence, so much anxiety All smile lost In the dreary desert Why do our borders feel so dry Why are they not homes of welcome A place of affection Oh our cauliflower We brought it home It may have been born in a green field of America We got this transnational cauliflower From a Canadian supermarket But is the cauliflower happy to come back home America is my motherland Am I happy to come home? (A poem originally written in Oriya by the author and then the above is an extract from this longer poem). 8. I have discussed elsewhere ontological epistemology of participation which involves simultaneously epistemic and ontological in transformational ways. This has relevance for border crossing as it involves simultaneously work on our mode of being and mode of knowing in mutually interpenetrative and dynamic ways (Giri 2006, 2017d). 9. Majeed discusses this in the context of the work of Iqbal. He discusses Iqbal notion of creative selfhood as a dynamic process. He, at the same time, refers to Iqbal’s preference for Aurangzeb over Dara Sikoh whom he killed to get the throne of the Mughal Empire. While Aurangzeb was for a bounded purity of orthodox Islam, Dara Sikhoh for creative border crossing. He translated Upanishads into Arabic and has gifted us this epochal work in border crossing, Majma Ul Bahrain: Commingling of Two Oceans, A Discourse on Inter-religious Understanding. See Dara Sikhoh (2006) and also Gopal Gandhi’s (2010) play on him. Both travel and translation walking and meditating with Truth helps us in creative border crossing. This is explored in the following poem of the author:

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Three T and More Ananta Kumar Giri Travel, Truth and Translation Travelling with Truth Translating Truth in Travel In Between the Relative and the Relational Absolute and Approximate Translating While Travelling Self, Culture and Divine Beyond the Annihilating Tyranny of the Singular A New Trinity of Prayer A New Multiple of Sadhana and Surrender [Written at Lake Putra, Putra Jaya, Capital of Malaysia, May 15, 2015: 530 PM]. 10. Note here what Edward Said (in Barenboim and Said 2002: 11–12) writes in his dialogue with Daniel Barenboim about his work: One of the striking things about the kind of work you do is that you act as an interpreter, as a performer—an artist concerned not so much with the articulation of the self, but rather with the articulation of other selves. That’s a challenge. The interesting thing about Goethe […] was that art, for Goethe especially, was all about a voyage to the “other,” and not concentrating on oneself, which is very much a minority view today. There is more of a concentration today on the affirmation of identity, on the need for roots, on the value of one’s culture and one’ sense of belonging. It has become quite rare to project one’s self outward, to have a broader perspective. In your work as a performer, Daniel, and in my work as an interpreter—an interpreter of literature and literary criticism—one has to accept the idea that one is putting one’s identity to the side in order to explore the “other.” The above pathways reflects a primacy of the ethical and a conventional understanding of self and identity as closed in oneself. The proposed pathway of aesthetic ethics of border crossing seeks to simultaneously cultivate and transform the self and other in creative ways including cultivation of its aesthetic and spiritual reality and potential (see Giri 2017c).

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References Agamben, G. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ankersmit, F.R. 1996. Aesthetic Politics: Political Theory Beyond Fact and Value. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 2004. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham: Duke University Press. Banerjee, Paula. 2010. Borders, Histories, Existences: Gender and Beyond. Delhi: Sage. Barenboim, Daniel, and Edward W. Said. 2002. Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society, ed. with a preface by Ara Guzeliman. London: Bloomsbury. Bussey, Marcus. 2018. Dancing East and West: Charting Intercultural Possibilities in the Thought of Gilles Deleuze and Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar. In Social Theory and Asian Dialogues: Cultivating Planetary Conversations, ed. Ananta Kumar Giri. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dallmayr, Fred. 2005. Small Wonder: Global Power and Its Discontents. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Deleuze, G., and F. Guittari. 1994. What Is Philosophy?. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 1987. Dialogues, trans. Jaris Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press. Gandhi, Gopal. 2010. Dara Shhukoh: A Play. Chennai: Tranquebar Press. Giri, Ananta Kumar. 2006. Creative Social Research: Rethinking Theories and Methods and the Calling of an Ontological Epistemology of Participation. Dialectical Anthropology 30 (3/4): 227–271. Giri, Ananta Kumar (ed.). 2009. The Modern Prince and the Modern Sage: Transforming Power and Freedom. Delhi: Sage. Giri, Ananta Kumar. 2012. Sociology and Beyond: Windows and Horizons. Jaipur: Rawat Publications. Giri, Ananta Kumar. 2017a. Cross-Fertilizing Roots and Routes: Ethnicity, SocioCultural Regeneration and Planetary Realizations. Social Alternatives 36 (1): 5–10. Giri, Ananta Kumar. 2017b. Poetics of Development. In The Aesthetics of Development: Art, Culture and Social Transformations, ed. John Clammer and Ananta Kumar Giri. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Giri, Ananta Kumar. 2017c. New Horizons of Human Development: Art, Spirituality and Social Transformations. In The Aesthetics of Development: Art, Culture and Social Transformations, ed. John Clammer and Ananta Kumar Giri. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Giri, Ananta Kumar (ed.). 2017d. Pathways of Creative Research: Towards a Festival of Dialogues. Delhi: Primus Books.

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Giroux, Henry. 2005. Border Crossing: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education. London: Routledge. Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. Holzman, Lois. 2009. Vygotsky at Play and Work. London: Routledge. Laclau, Ernesto (ed.). 1994. The Making of Political Identities. London: Verso. Maguire, Mark. 2009. The Birth of Biometric Security. Anthropology Today 25 (2): 9–14. Majeed, Javed. 2009. Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism. Delhi: Routledge. Miri, Mrinal. 2003. Identity and Moral Life. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Parekh, Bhikhu. 2008. A New Politics of Identity: Political Principles for an Interdependent World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Parker, Noel. 2009. From Borders to Margins: A Deleuzian Ontology for Identities in the Postinternational Environment. Alternatives 39: 17–39. Shikoh, Dara. 2006. Majma-Ul-Bahrain: Commingling of Two Oceans: A Discourse on Inter-Religious Understanding. Gurgaon: Hope India Publications. Sundara Rajan, R. 1998. Beyond the Crisis of European Sciences: New Beginnings. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Studies. Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press. Taylor, Betsy, and Herbert G. Reid. 2006. Globalization, Democracy and the Aesthetic Ecology of Democratic Publics for a Sustainable World: Working from John Dewey. Asian Journal of Social Sciences 34 (1): 22–46. Taylor, Betsy, and Herbert G. Reid. 2010. Recovering the Commons: Democracy, Place, and Global Justice. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

CHAPTER 11

Multicentric World and Nationalism Boike Rehbein

Introduction There is a frightening return to nationalism in the contemporary world. It seems to entail a decisive shift to the political right and to authoritarian governments or at least an authoritarian style of governance. In many ways, this appears to be a reaction to globalization, which is interpreted as an elite project, a homogenization of the world, a loss of identity, and a threat to one’s very existence. None of these interpretations is entirely wrong. On this basis, it is easy to understand the return to nationalism. Nationalism is linked to identity. A national identity seems to be invoked against tendencies of homogenization, unification, and globalization. However, it is not possible to understand the current configuration only as a cultural phenomenon. I will argue that many of the homogenizing tendencies are driven by capitalism, which means that the dichotomy of globalization and nationalism has to be understood with reference to capitalism. Capitalism, in turn, is driven by capitalists. And capitalists, in turn, strive for domination rather than wealth. As a consequence, the analysis has to understand the current configuration of domination. This argument will be unfolded in the third section of the

B. Rehbein (B) Sociology of Asia and Africa, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. K. Giri (ed.), Roots, Routes and a New Awakening, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7122-0_11

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chapter. The first section outlines the return of the multicentric world, while the second section seeks to identify tendencies of homogenization and resistance to unification and globalization more generally, especially on the level of culture. The final section of the paper will try to show that both capitalist globalization and nationalism bloc the opportunities that arise from the return of the multicentric world. The interconnectedness leads to the possibility of communicating with people from most cultures on the globe. And the multicentric character of the globalized world entails that not one culture sets the standard for all and refuses to listen to the rest. For the first time in history, we are in a position to learn entirely new things, which we can and should take seriously. This is possible as long as globalization has not created a homogenous world and as long as nationalism has not prohibited communication.

The Multicentric World Until quite recently, most people took it for granted that Europe and North America were more advanced than the rest and presented the model for the rest’s future. This view still is somewhat plausible since we see a significant degree of “Westernization”. The institutions of the nation state, from the systems of education to the corpora of law, the products of the culture industry and, of course, capitalism have originated mostly in the West (or the global North, which I will use as a synonym) and become increasingly unified across the globe. There are many countertendencies but the degree of similarity between historically and spatially very distant places has got to be amazing to any traveler. Virtually every person between ten and fifty years of age uses a cell phone, including many of the very poor, all large airports look the same, the products of transnational corporations are available around the world, people make use of the same social media to share the same songs and clips. But there is the rise of the global South, which I characterize as the return of the multicentric world. And there is the return of nationalism. Both may be connected. We seem to have entered a period which is characterized by the struggle between nationalism and globalization. In order to understand this struggle, we need to identify the forces behind globalization and nationalism.

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From the Western perspective, the status of North America and/or Western Europe as the norm for the rest of the world has been selfevident, especially since this claim could be backed by power and military force, if necessary. Many Westerners still find it convincing (see Fukuyama 1992; Merkel 2010). The rest is represented as corrupt, underdeveloped, undemocratic, dangerous, and dysfunctional. Any travel to the global South seems to reconfirm this assessment. Statistical data, academic studies, and media reports seem to underline the point. One closer look, however, reveals that the assessment presupposes Western norms and does not necessarily work if we apply norms that prevail in the rest—or the global South. The interesting novelty of contemporary globalization is that these norms can be backed by power as well (NederveenPieterse and Rehbein 2009). The music plays not only in London and Washington but increasingly in Beijing and New Delhi as well. At the same time, cultural products and ideas are exported from the new centers to the old, from movies to medical systems to language. Hollywood has to share the market with Bollywood, Nollywood, Brazilian telenovelas, and East Asian anime. More and more westerners turn to Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine at least part of the time. Millions around the world study Chinese apart from and sometimes instead of English. The advocate of Western exceptionalism might counter that history’s aim is Enlightenment and/or economic development increasing the wealth of nations. According to this view, human beings had been living in caves and forests for millions of years before they became sedentary. Then, civilization emerged in the centers of ancient culture and reached its first stage of perfection in Greece and Rome. After the Dark Ages, European Enlightenment completed the project of civilization (Hegel 1992). In the twentieth century, the US claimed to have replaced Europe as the apex but basically repeated the same narrative. It seemed convincing between 1800 and 2000. In 1914, almost 85% of the world was under Western domination (NederveenPieterse 1989). England’s dominance before and American hegemony after the First World War does not need any further explanation. From the perspective of the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries, however, this narrative is not convincing. Before the unfolding of colonialism, the world was multicentric with a slight gravitation toward China and India. Until 1750, China had a higher income per capita than England, until 1850 a higher GDP and until 1860 a larger share of the

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world production (Hobson 2004). Universities were founded in China and Vietnam at the same time as in Europe. Many of the epitomizing inventions of human civilization were made in China, not in the West, from the printing press to the free market (Pomeranz 2000). The description of the past increasingly fits the present. China leads the way in many regards. But a lot of smaller centers have evolved that compete with the West on some level or another. Singapore has the highest GDP per capita, Korea has the most popular culture, IT is produced in India. It is no longer coherent to claim that the West is a model for the rest, if the rest is ahead. It is unlikely that the rise of the rest is ephemeral. Instead, Western domination was a historical exception. All Western indicators point to a return of the historical “normal,” which is the multicentric world. These are indicators like industrialization, trade, finance, education, and demography. In terms of industrialization, it is well known that centers in the global South combining cheap labor, good infrastructure, and sufficiently trained personnel have become the global hubs of manufacturing. In contrast, industry contributes 19% to the GDP of the US, about the same rate as that of Niger. China is the top exporter of the world and trade between countries of the global South is picking up. In finance, cash reserves have moved to China and the Gulf, while government and population of the US are heavily in debt. Growth in the global South is no longer exclusively based on cheap labor. China invests in education and leads the way in many segments of hi tech. India provides the software and produces more engineers per year than Germany produces university graduates. Demographic trends are in favor of the global South. While populations of the South are young, those of the North are ageing and, in some cases, shrinking. It is true that many countries and regions in the South do not participate in industrialization and that transnational corporations from the North continue to control production and trade. It is also true that the important financial markets and universities remain in the North. In all of these categories, the South is catching up, however. Furthermore, it is true that the South is suffering from administrative inefficiency, corruption, agricultural crises, fragmentation, weak financial systems, and resource scarcity. But these problems increasingly trouble the North as well. Even in the military realm, China is beginning to catch up with the US. The multicentric world is back.

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Westernization The multicentric world has returned—but under different conditions. The contemporary world is rooted in colonialism and dominated by capitalism. Both are of Western origin. They have unified the world and led to what we call globalization today. It seems that the West is losing its power after having westernized the rest. Transnational corporations dominate the economy and the standardized nation state dominates politics (Dicken 2003). And even if cultural products originate in all regions of the world today, their format is mostly of western origin: electronic music, the motion picture, IT, and even the content of most university courses around the globe. The nation state has become the global norm of political organization. Almost the entire surface of the world is divided between nation states and almost every human being is citizen of a nation state. The nation states are standardized. They have a multi-tiered system of education, a corpus of laws drafted by elected parliaments, political parties, central and commercial banks, patent offices, a health system, a state-controlled internet and infrastructure. All of the associated institutions have nationally specific characteristics but basically follow the model developed in the West. At the same time, representatives of the nation states cooperate in international organizations and representatives of international organizations contribute to national institutions. Thereby, standardization continues. Transnational corporations dominate the global economy and contribute to its standardization. Only around 150 corporations generate one quarter of the world’s turnover (Vitali et al. 2011). Most of these corporations have their headquarters in the global North. They organize production chains that span the globe and sell their products globally. Many of them would be adapted to the national conditions but they resemble each other and belong to the same network. You will find many of the brands you consume at home when you travel to the most remote places. The products, consumers, and local imitations contribute to a homogenization. The process of homogenization associated with Western capitalism has been called McDonaldization by the American sociologist George Ritzer. According to Ritzer, McDonaldization is a process of rationalization in the sense of an optimum ends-means-relation reaching all spheres of

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society (1996: 35), whereby Ritzer draws on Max Weber’s study of rationalization as a main characteristic of Western society. Ritzer’s concept of rationalization comprises efficiency, quantification, predictability, and control. These principles are exemplified by McDonald’s. They characterize not only business strategies but the entire economy and increasingly all spheres of society. Thereby, the world becomes homogeneous. Even China has been penetrated by McDonald’s and, in many ways, by McDonaldization. The structure and functioning of the Chinese state is similar to that of any nation state and Chinese corporations do not differ much from other corporations, especially not in terms of McDonaldization. At the same time, Western corporations enter the Chinese market, Chinese citizens travel the world and consume products by foreign corporations, Westerners move to China and the knowledge of English spreads. McDonaldization entails homogenization. So does the integration of all economies into capitalism. More and more products and services are commodified. This process is closely related to McDonaldization and to the generation of a “culture industry” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1984). Even if McDonald’s serves a veggie burger in India and champagne in Brazil, they are commodities. And they are even branded the same way in all countries where McDonald’s is present. Furthermore, even where local differences persist, globalization leads to a mix rather than to clearly delimited national cultures. From the tomato and the potato to Thai Curry and Wiener Schnitzel, the same culinary items seem to be available almost anywhere in the world. Such items have been globalized to such a degree that their local origin is not only unclear but even erased. This is true for many cultural items. Especially urban middle classes develop lifestyles that comprise similar patterns of consumption even if the products have diverse origins. Standardization and mixing lead to a global homogenization. However, McDonald’s in China is not the same as in the US or Brazil (Watson 1997). The brand caters to different social classes in these nation states. It is also significant that local characteristics modify the menu, the functioning and the appearance of McDonald’s. Along these lines, all nation states preserve a host of peculiarities. Political regimes range from authoritarian to socialist to democratic. Economic regimes range from redistribution to welfare to neoliberalism. And they combine with local traditions that are often incompatible with western models to create particular hybrids. Communist-party rule shapes Chinese society as much

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as rural structures, the household registration system, and Confucian traditions do. Standardization is linked to localization. Social institutions are persistent and resistant. Such traditions seem to counter homogenization. In many cases, local or national peculiarities are even actively supported by authorities. While the state seeks to construct a homogeneous national culture, local associations revive local traditions. Dialects do not seem to become extinct and not everybody speaks English. Many households stick to local cooking traditions and not everybody frequents McDonald’s. Even though some of these tendencies seem a bit outdated, they contribute to cultural diversity. It is unlikely that this diversity will vanish completely. In addition, the role of inequality in the reproduction of diversity is often ignored. Classes, milieus, castes, ethnic groups, and other social groups have their own cultures, as E. P. Thompson (1963) has shown impressively with regard to the English working class. The superrich have their gated communities and private jets, which are inaccessible to the rest of the population. This entails the reproduction of an exclusive culture. While the culture of homeless groups is technically accessible to the remaining population, none of its members would share it willingly. Similar, albeit not as rigid dividing lines exist between the cultures of other classes and social groups. Few people know how other ethnic groups in the same country actually live. Inequalities do not seem to disappear in capitalism. Therefore, cultural differences associated with class or milieu are likely to persist as well. They may even be strengthened, since they are significant components of their members’ identities. Upper classes always have to distinguish themselves from the rest of the population (Bourdieu 1984). Ethnic groups that are dominant within a nation state will cherish their culture as long as constructed ethnic differences matter. Pride and shame, distinction and discrimination will matter as long as inequality and domination exist. Capitalism is not intelligible without inequality.

Globalization and Nationalism Since the late 2000s, many electorates seem to be shifting toward rightwing populism, which endorses nationalism. One might want to explain this by the pressure of homogenization that globalization exerts on local as well as dominated cultures. While this is certainly true to some degree, most of the elected parties and individuals do not really support those

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cultures that are under threat. Trump, Duterte, Johnson, and Bolsonaro champion nationalism but do not draw on any particular aspect of national culture. Modi draws on Hinduism but equally favors neoliberal globalization. Erdogan builds on neoliberalism and Islam, both of which reach well beyond the borders of Turkey. Groups that actually or imaginatively suffer from globalization may vote for such nationalists, simply because their rhetoric is directed against globalization. But this does not explain why these leaders—all of whom are multi-millionaires and businessmen who profit from globalization— employ this rhetoric in the first place. And it does not explain why the very diverse groups with their particular cultures should rally behind a one-size-fits-all nationalism. I would claim that culture is instrumentalized for other purposes. Most countries are struggling with economic stagnation and recession. All the while, financial markets are booming. Jobs, especially well-paid and stable ones, have become scarce. The measured approaches of centrist political parties have stopped resonating with markets and populations. Extremists are gaining ground. The situation is reminiscent of the 1920s on the eve of the Great Depression, when seemingly stable institutions and markets collapsed and gave rise to fascist governments and, eventually, the Second World War. The current global configuration of social and political forces is obviously much different from the 1920s. Today’s leaders are not petty bourgeois, and ruling parties are not blatantly extremist. Perhaps more interestingly, the trends we can observe are not confined to the global North but reach all parts of the globe. A closer examination of today’s leaders in the global North and global South reveals that the populists, both those who have been elected and those striving to be elected, are mostly businessmen who want to push the neoliberal agenda even further. In many countries, they are elected democratically. To be elected, of course, they require the support of a sizable part of the population. In most places, support is being drawn from the very center of society, the middle classes, by appealing to their resentment of groups that seem to threaten their socio-economic positions. These groups are composed of the lower classes, foreigners, those with different cultural and religious backgrounds, and ethnic and racial minorities. After more than three decades of increasing inequality and an almost obscene and continual concentration of wealth among the richest fraction of the world population, it is altogether surprising that the middle

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classes would support neoliberal businessmen. According to the Global Wealth Report (2015), 0.7% of the world’s population consists of dollar millionaires. Only this group has seen a significant increase in its wealth throughout the past thirty years of neoliberal rule. Those 124,000 individuals whose wealth exceeds $50 million have done especially well. While it is true that at least some of the rest of the world’s inhabitants have seen moderate improvements, most have been subjected to prolonged economic stagnation or even decline. How is it possible that these same people endorse governments that very clearly wish to concentrate wealth even further by cutting social spending, corporate taxes, economic regulation, and environmental protection? This is where resistance to globalization comes into play. The middles classes appear to be threatened by the alien forces of globalization and migration. They endorse those politicians who promise to protect them. The result has been a general conservative transformation of the world’s political landscape. It is neither fascist nor neoliberal but instead represents a novel combination of capitalist class rule and middle-class fears. The structures of the middle classes that support populist businessmen differ enormously between regions and states. They are deeply divided in the global North but are much more united in the South. While the upper middle class in the North is clearly anti-populist and the lower classes are still at least partly left-leaning, a configuration of a different kind can be seen in the global South. The conflict runs along class lines in much of the South, with the established middle classes seeking to defend their privileged positions against encroaching aspirations from below. In both contexts, the numerical majority opposes extreme nationalism. Due to the existence of various ideologies, parties, and classes, this majority is fragmented in the North, while in the South it is demotivated or made ineligible through illiteracy, remoteness, or the active exclusion of the lower classes from the political process. The strategy to unite the voting population behind business entails the criminalization of established politics. The development in Brazil exemplifies this strategy (see Souza 2016). By attacking leftist members of the Brazilian government with accusations of corruption, the struggle against poverty they championed was portrayed as a criminal endeavor. True, the attacks were launched by the media, but these same media are mostly owned by Brazilian capitalists. The economic crisis, which began in 2008

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and has become more acute in recent years, has affected the entire population. The established and upper middle classes have increasingly thrown their support behind the business elite whom they view as the moral and practical safeguards against corrupt leftist politicians and their penchant for wasting the public’s money on the poor. In reality, these leftist politicians represented too great a threat to the socio-economic positions of the established and upper middle classes. Since the lower middle and lower classes still comprise the electoral majority, a broad change in government through the ballot box was precluded. A creative workaround, a media-aided coup by the business elite, ensued with Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment in 2016. Now, the state is in the peculiar position of having to ask members of the business elite, who are seemingly flush with cash on account of not having to pay taxes anymore, for loans to sustain the budget and prop up the economy. At the same time, social and public spending have been axed. The entire population has become hostage to the business elite. At the surface, this conflict in Brazil seems like a localized one. If we look at where the profits go, however, we see that they flow in the same direction on a global scale: to the 0.7%. The business elite does not have any kind of national loyalty, at least not in the same sense that the former industrial elites and fascist ideologues did in the last century. The state is no longer in the position to challenge the new elite. Quite the contrary, they can simply blackmail the state by threatening to invest elsewhere. The final result is the full marketization of everything, including health, education, and culture, the production of which is controlled directly and indirectly by the 0.7%. These spheres must comply with upper class interests to an even greater degree, because, well, they are now owned by the upper class.

Global Understanding The return of the multicentric world defies our notions of the social sciences in many ways. Raewyn Connell (2007) has explored some of them: firstly, our scope of vision and research has widened significantly. For example, we all of a sudden need to occupy ourselves with Indian society, because it so defies our theories. Secondly, the return of the multicentric world allows for novel and practical social perspectives which do not value growth above all else. Thirdly, it promotes the formation of

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new theories and approaches. Fourthly, it opens up the possibility for new epistemologies. Therefore, we cannot view the world from the perspective of the West anymore. And we cannot conceptualize the world as one closed container with one structure following one law of history any more. We should rather conceptualize it as a configuration of societies and cultures. A scholar has to learn something about other societies and from these societies. This knowledge alters his or her concepts, theories, and explanations while adding to the stock of empirical knowledge. At present, theory and empirical knowledge have to be revised constantly, as the return of the multicentric world forces us to revise the Eurocentric social sciences. I call for a “configurational” approach (Rehbein 2015). By configuration, I mean the construction of theories from one perspective and then contrasting them with theories from entirely different perspectives as well as with the empirical world as viewed from all perspectives under consideration. The necessity to think configurationally becomes evident when we start learning about entirely new and different societies. We tend to explain the world from our desk. When we leave our desk, we may discover very different realities. The necessity and possibility to look at society in a non-Western way emerges when we look at nonWestern societies. Only recently have Western scholars started to do this with a sociological interest in the societies themselves, instead of using these societies as illustrations of modernization or underdevelopment. Instead of a problem for Western societies and social sciences, the contemporary situation should be viewed as a singular opportunity for learning. If societies actually differ fundamentally from each other, it becomes possible to transcend one’s society. In Hans-Georg Gadamer’s (1960) hermeneutics, one can merely interpret what is already given because there is only one tradition to interpret (namely, the European tradition). In a post-Eurocentric world, however, one can actually learn something new, something that has not been known before. According to Gadamer, the social sciences and humanities need to include understanding—in a double sense. First, one has to understand the object and second, one has to seek an understanding with others. To understand the object not only implies to understand meaning but one has to understand the other’s perspective as well. This is a hypothetical and conceptual construct just like any other scientific endeavour. This type of understanding has to be complemented by a form of mutual understanding. In the social sciences, we have to understand meaning and

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to simulate how people, who are (part of) the object of study, view the world. Only on this basis can we interpret and explain their actions appropriately. Interpretation and explanation may even teach us something about own life. Without the effort to understand, any mutual understanding implies symbolic violence. For this reason, one has to know why someone agrees the process of mutual understanding. This is only possible on the basis of an effort to understand the other person’s view of the world. One actually has to make the effort to understand in order to transcend provincialism and to reach a mutual understanding. As forms of life differ greatly in the world, perspectives, standards, and actions diverge to a substantial degree as well. Perspectives have to be organized as a configuration with varying relations between elements. Any understanding opens up a new perspective and thereby new aspects of reality, even though any configuration in its entirety remains limited. A hermeneutic and mutual understanding is not only a necessary component of epistemology in the social sciences but it is also relevant in getting out of the struggle between globalization and nationalism. Each perspective implies a different idea of the best life. European critical theory presupposed that there is one identical best life for all. And it developed this idea without any effort at understanding. The idea of a universal theory of society and a clear definition of the best society presupposes, just like any other universalistic conception, that society can be fully known in its totality. However, we can only imagine the best society on the basis and within the framework of the existing society, as Adorno (1969) has argued. For this reason, any idea of the best society will remain imperfect. Therefore, social theory has to be a critical theory whose only goal is to improve the existing society as a configuration and in relation to other societies. And this type of critical theory, today, is a global theory including positions from all corners of the world. The more positions, the better—which stands against nationalism and against homogenization.

Conclusion It is true that there is a struggle between globalization and nationalism. And it certainly draws on resistance against cultural homogenization as well as on xenophobic fears. However, it is contemporary neoliberalism that exploits and instrumentalizes them. The world’s electorates no longer endorse unfettered capitalism. Recognizing this, political attacks have

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been focused not on large-scale issues but on minorities and the corrupt state in the name of “cleaning up” society and politics. The result in many countries has been a crackdown on opposition parties and groups which are portrayed as anti-national, corrupt, and heavy handed. In reality, these parties and groups merely oppose neoliberalism. In some countries, such as India or Turkey, the crackdown has begun to resemble the fascist persecutions of the last century. Democracy seems to be under siege—but this time on a global scale. It seems to me that only an approach like the one outlined in the previous section under the heading of “global understanding” can lead us out of this siege.

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1969. Negative Dialektik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Connell, Raewyn. 2007. Southern Theory. The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Cambridge: Polity Press. Dicken, Peter. 2003. Global Shift. London: Sage. Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: The Free Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1960. Wahrheit und Methode. Tuebingen: Mohr. Global Wealth Report 2015. Zurich: Credit Suisse. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1992. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Hobson, John M. 2004. The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 1984. Dialektik der Aufklärung. Frankfurt: S. Fischer. Merkel, Wolfgang. 2010. Systemtransformation. Wiesbaden: VS. Nederveen Pieterse, Jan. 1989. Empire & Emancipation. New York, Westport and London: Praeger. NederveenPieterse, Jan, and Boike Rehbein (eds.). 2009. Emerging Societies and Globalization. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pomeranz, Kenneth. 2000. The Great Divergence. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rehbein, Boike. 2015. Critical Theory After the Rise of the Global South. London and New York: Routledge. Ritzer, George. 1996. The McDonaldization of Society. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press. Souza, Jessé. 2016. A radiografía do golpe. Sao Paulo: Leya.

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Thompson, Edward P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Vitali, Stefania, James B. Glattfelder, and Stefano Battiston. 2011. The Network of Global Corporate Control. Zurich (arxiv.org). Watson, James L. 1997. Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

CHAPTER 12

Roots, Routes, and a New Awakening: Walking and Meditating with Raimon Panikkar Joseph Prabhu

Cross-fertilizing roots and routes calls for new practices of seeking, being, and Self-realization. Raimon Panikkar embodied such a vocation and praxis of being and becoming. Known to many as a teacher, scholar, mentor, and friend, he died at his home in Tavertet, near Barcelona, on August 26, 2010. He was ninety-one and had been in poor health for some time, but he did live to see the day when his Gifford Lectures, originally delivered in Edinburgh in 1989, and over which he had agonized ever since [he produced some nineteen different versions of parts of the texts], finally saw the light of day in June 2010, as The Rhythm of Being (Panikkar 2010).

This short reflection builds on an essay originally published as a eulogy in the Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies, Volume 23, 2010. J. Prabhu (B) California State University, Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. K. Giri (ed.), Roots, Routes and a New Awakening, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7122-0_12

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Panikkar taught and lived in the United States from 1966–1987 and was known to generations of students here and around the world through both his lectures and his many books. What they heard and read were the arresting reflections of a multi-dimensional person, who was simultaneously a philosopher, theologian, mystic, priest, and poet. It was also that combination of personae that made him at times difficult to understand. He was a formidable scholar with doctorates in philosophy, theology, and chemistry and an acquaintance with the worlds of learning and religious reflection in more than a dozen languages. But at heart he was a mystic and a contemplative, who chose at the end of his academic career in 1987 to live in the small mountain village of Tavertet (population 75) in a remote part of the Pyrenees north of Barcelona. Even there he was not easily accessible because he would shut off his phone for half the week. The prayer and meditation room in his house was right next to his study, and he would drift imperceptibly between the two spaces both literally and in consciousness. He once wrote Writing, to me, is meditation—that is medicine—and also moderation, order for this world. Writing, to me, is intellectual life and that in turn is spiritual existence. The climax of life is, in my opinion, to participate in the life of the universe, in both the cosmic and divine symphonies to which even we mortals are invited. It is not only a matter of living but also of letting life be—this life, offered to us as a gift so that we may sustain and deepen it. (Panikkar 1993: 79)

Writing, contemplation, and teaching constituted an essential and interconnected triad in what we may call Panikkar’s “route” through life. Knowing from an early age that he had a contemplative vocation, he steadily deepened and broadened that calling through inter-cultural and inter-religious work that resulted in some fifty books and over four hundred major articles in philosophy, religion, textual translation and commentary, social analysis, cultural history, and spiritual reflection. His Opera Omnia is now being published in twenty-five volumes in six different languages. This stupendous productivity, sustained over some sixty-five years, was made possible by great discipline, dedication, and focus. He was a classic Jnana Yogi. He was born the son of an Indian Hindu father and a Spanish Catholic mother on November 3, 1918. He received a conventional Catholic education at a Jesuit high school in Barcelona before launching on his

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university studies in the natural sciences, philosophy, and theology, first in Barcelona and then in Madrid. Shortly thereafter, the Spanish Civil War broke out, and Panikkar was able to take advantage of his status as the son of a father who was a British citizen to go to the University of Bonn in Germany to continue his studies. When World War II started in 1939, Panikkar returned to Spain and completed the first of his three doctorates, this one in philosophy, at the University of Madrid in 1946. In late 1954 when he was already thirty-six, Panikkar visited India, the land of his father, for the first time. It proved to be a watershed, a decisive reorientation of his interests and of his theology. He had entered a dramatically new world, religious and cultural, from the Catholic Europe of his youth. The transformation was aided by his meetings and close friendship with three monks, who like him were attempting to live and to incarnate the Christian life in Indian, predominantly Hindu and Buddhist, forms: Jules Monchanin (1895–1957), Henri Le Saux, also known as Swami Abhishiktananda (1910–1973), and Bede Griffiths, the English Benedictine monk (1906–1993). All four of them, in different ways, discovered and cherished the riches and the deep spiritual wisdom of the Indic traditions, and attempted to live out and express their core Christian convictions in Hindu and Buddhist forms. To some extent this multiple belonging was made possible by their embrace of Advaita, the Indic idea of non-dualism, which sees the deep, often hidden, connections between traditions without in any way minimizing the differences between them. One of Panikkar’s many striking sentences looking back on his life’s journey asserts: “I left Europe (for India) as a Christian, I discovered I was a Hindu and returned as a Buddhist without ever having ceased to be a Christian.” A wealth of meaning lies in that assertion. Christianity in its historical evolution began as a Jewish tradition and then spread to the Greco-Roman world, acquiring along the way Greek and Roman cultural expressions which have given it a certain form and character. Panikkar, having grown up and having been trained in a traditional Catholic and neo-Thomist environment, had a profound knowledge of, and respect for, that tradition. This knowledge prepared him for discussions with some of the great minds of twentieth-century Catholicism: Jean Danielou, Yves Congar, Hans Urs von Balthazar, and others. He was also invited to take part in the Synod of Rome and the Second Vatican Council. But Panikkar did not confuse or conflate historical contingency with spiritual truth. In Hinduism and Buddhism Panikkar found other languages, in addition to

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Biblical Hebrew, Greek philosophy, and Latin Christianity, to express the core convictions (the kerygma) of the Christian tradition. That was the main thesis of The Unknown Christ of Hinduism, which Panikkar originally presented as a doctoral thesis to the Lateran University in Rome in 1961, based as it was on a close textual comparison between Thomas Aquinas and Sankara’s interpretation of a canonical Hindu scripture, the Brahma-Sutras. Christ and his teaching are not, so Panikkar argues, the monopoly or exclusive property of Christianity seen as a historical religion. Rather, Christ is the universal symbol of divine-human unity, the human face of God. Christianity approaches Christ in a particular and unique way, informed by its own history and spiritual evolution. But Christ vastly transcends Christianity. Panikkar calls the name “Christ” the “Supername,” in line with St. Paul’s “name above every name” (Phil 2:9), because it is a name that can and must assume other names, like Rama or Krishna or Ishvara. This theological insight was crucial for Panikkar because it provided the basis of the inter-religious dialogue that he and Abhishiktananda and Bede Griffiths were both advocating and practicing themselves. Far from diluting or in any way watering down core Christian beliefs and practices, such dialogue, in addition to fostering inter-religious understanding and harmony, provided an indispensable medium for deepening the Christian faith. Such dialogue provides an insight and entry point into other, non-Christian names and manifestations of Christ. This was particularly important for Panikkar because together with other Asian theologians he saw how historical Christianity had attempted, especially during its colonial periods, to convert Christ into an imperial God, with a license to conquer and triumph over other Gods. This for Panikkar is the challenge of the post-colonial period inaugurated in the mid-to-late twentieth century and continuing into our present and the future. In his words, “To the third Christian millennium is reserved the task of overcoming a tribal Christology by a Christophany which allows Christians to see the work of Christ everywhere, without assuming that they have a better grasp or a monopoly of that Mystery, which has been revealed to them in a unique way.” Needless-to-say, such striking ideas carefully and rigorously argued and dramatically expressed got the attention of religious thinkers and secular institutions around the world. Panikkar was invited to teach in Rome and then at Harvard (1966–1971) and the University of California, Santa Barbara (1971–1987). He was now, as Leonard Swidler, occupant of the

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Chair of Catholic Thought at Temple University, called him, “the apostle of inter-faith dialogue and inter-cultural understanding.” In true apostolic fashion, he traveled tirelessly around the world, lecturing, writing, preaching, and conducting retreats. His famous Easter service in his Santa Barbara days would attract visitors from all corners of the globe. Well before dawn they would climb up the mountain near his home in Montecito, meditate quietly in the darkness once they reached the top, and then salute the sun as it arose over the horizon. Panikkar would bless the elements—air, earth, water, and fire—and all the surrounding forms of life—plant, animal, and human—and then celebrate Mass and the Eucharist. It was a profound “cosmotheandric” celebration with the human, cosmic, and divine dimensions of life being affirmed, reverenced, and brought into a deep harmony. The celebration after the formal service at Panikkar’s home resembled in some respects the feast of Pentecost as described in the New Testament, where peoples of many tongues engaged in animated conversation. At the center of these celebrations, retreats, and lectures stood Panikkar himself and his arresting personality. People who heard or encountered him could not help but be struck by this physically small man who in his earlier days was like a cluster of fireworks exploding in an array of shapes and colors. Here is what the great Mexico poet Octavio Paz, who was his country’s ambassador to India from 1962–1968, had to say about him: It is impossible not to recall a Catalan Hindu, both a theologian and a migratory bird in all climates from Benares to Santa Barbara, California: Raimundo Panikkar. A man of electric intelligence, with whom I would spend hours discussing some controversial point in the Gita or a Buddhist sutra—I have never heard anyone attack the heresy of Buddhism with such furious dialectics as Panikkar. (Paz 1997: 209)

In later life, his persona managed to combine the dignity of a sage, the profundity of a scholar, the depth of a contemplative, and the warmth and charm of a friend in his effervescent personality. An Australian friend of his, Dr. Meath Conlan, mentions having dinner with him at his home when the phone rang. It was the Pope calling from the Vatican, seeking Panikkar’s advice on how best to handle the aftermath caused by his ill-advised remarks about the Prophet Mohammed in his Regensburg Address of 2006.

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Panikkar is well known as a great scholar of both the Hindu and Christian traditions and the dialogue between them. The 940-page translation and commentary of the Vedas and the Upanishads, published as The Vedic Experience: Mantramanjari, is a sensitive hermeneutical study that attempts to bring the ancient Vedic world alive as a resource for contemporary celebration. Likewise, his account of Hindu myths in Myth, Faith, and Hermeneutics tries to bring out their deeper cross-cultural philosophical resonance. Critics, of course, charged him with proffering a Christian interpretation of Hinduism to which his wry response often was that he had a Hindu interpretation of Christianity. The point for Panikkar as a thinker was to move beyond labels and the conventional ideas they carry to deeper spiritual truth. Indeed, one of the main purposes of inter-religious dialogue for Panikkar is the intra-religious dialogue it should spark and the discovery of often hidden treasures in one’s own tradition. Perhaps the most daring of Panikkar’s attempts at charting a HinduBuddhist-Christian spirituality within a still Christian self-understanding came in his early and path-breaking little book first published in 1970 as The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Man: Icon—Person—Mystery. Here he imposed a Trinitarian structure on Hinduism and an advaitic structure on Christianity, both “trinity” and “advaita” being alternative symbols for the cosmotheandric Mystery. Drawing on traditional and unacknowledged, submerged dimensions of the Christian trinity, Panikkar attempted to connect Buddhism with the silent, self-emptying dimension of the Father; Christianity, Judaism and Islam, as religions of the word, with the Son, the incarnate Word; and advaitic Hinduism with the immanent, radically inner dimension of the Spirit. In doing so it was not his purpose imperialistically to provide a Christian grid onto which other traditions could be forced. Rather, taking Christianity as his point of departure, he wanted to show that Christianity has no monopoly on Trinitarian understanding and that such understanding enriched by the contributions of different traditions can in fact deepen and transform all of them. It is important, however, to balance this account of Panikkar as thinker with the stress he placed on living an authentic life. “My aspiration,” he would often say, “does not consist so much in defending my truth, but rather in living it out.” As one of his students speaking for many put it, “He integrated intellect, commitment, and practice in a very important

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and inspirational way for so many of us. Many of our lives and paths have benefitted from his touch.” To cite just one example of that commitment, in September 1994 at the age of 76 Panikkar made a pilgrimage of almost a month to Mount Kailash. He had a weak heart, and the doctors were against it, but Panikkar was determined. Anyone who has been on such a pilgrimage can vouch for its hazards—there are no resources for rescue and hardly any medical amenities. It was in part a fulfillment of a promise to his Hindu, Saivite father. As Panikkar wrote after the expedition I have always been more inclined to the spiritual pilgrimage. And yet that memory of a Hindu father telling his teen-age son about Kailasa reverberated in him when the occasion arose to join the last batch of sadhus the Chinese would allow in 1959. He had then to renounce by virtue of ‘holy’ (Christian) obedience, and later on due to other reasons, not the least his heart not supporting high altitudes. By an inexplicable synchronicity of events he found himself this time almost led to undertake the pilgrimage which for him was likely to be not only ultimate but final. (Baeumer 1996: 8)

In many ways, it is appropriate to see Panikkar’s entire life as a pilgrimage, rooted in his sense of a Mystery that beckoned him and to which he responded whole-heartedly.

References Baeumer, Bettina. 1996. Setu: Bulletin of the Abhishiktananda Society, Number 17. Panikkar, Raimon. 1970. The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Man. London: Darton, Longman and Todd. Panikkar, Raimon. 1977. The Vedic Experience Mantramanjari: An Anthology of the Vedas for Modern Man and Contemporary Celebration. Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass. Panikkar, Raimon. 1979. Myth, Faith and Hermeneutics: Cross-Cultural Studies. New York: Paulist Press. Panikkar, Raimon. 1993. A Dwelling Place for Wisdom. Westminister: John Knox Press. Panikkar, Raimon. 2010. The Rhythm of Being. New York: Orbis Books. Paz, Octavio. 1997. In Light of India, translated from the Spanish by Eliot Weinberger. London: The Harvill Press.

CHAPTER 13

Overcoming Evil as Creation of Others as Enemies: Roots, Routes and a New Awakening of Plural Identities Kathrin Bouvot

Introduction Although evil has almost innumerable facets that find expression in the most diverse behaviors, acts, conceptions and attitudes, its root has to be seen invariably in the personal disposition of the man to do evil things; that is, evil is located in the human being itself or, to be more precise, in the soul of the same. As Plato claims in the Republic Book IX, 571c3–d5, the root of the evil cannot be found in another place than in the human being or in the human soul: Those that are awakened in sleep, when the rest of the soul – the rational, gentle, and ruling part – slumbers. Then the beastly and savage part, full of food and drink, casts off sleep and seeks to find a way to gratify itself. You know that there is nothing it won’t dare to do at such a time, free of all control by shame or reason. It doesn’t shrink from trying to have sex

K. Bouvot (B) University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. K. Giri (ed.), Roots, Routes and a New Awakening, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7122-0_13

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with a mother, as it supposes, or with anyone else at all, whether man, god, or beast. It will commit any foul murder, and there is no food it refuses to eat. In a word, it omits no act of folly or shamelessness. (Plato 1997: 1180)

In this passage, Plato asserts that evil is a component part of the area of the desires that constitute the appetitive sphere of the human soul. Plato considers the process of acquisition of knowledge in the form of a rigorous philosophical education to be the only efficient antidote against the evil in us. Alternatively, and by means of a quite different approach, namely through comparative behaviour research, in On Aggression, Konrad Lorenz locates the root of the evil as well in the human itself. To be more precise, Lorenz comes to the conclusion that an instinctively controlled evil is inherent in all humans. This innate evil that manifests itself in aggressiveness is admittedly in no way always detrimental to the own species. Quite the contrary, in the majority of cases, it is even crucial for the preservation of the species. But the inability of the human to adapt quickly to certain situative changes accompanied by the spontaneity of the aggression instinct may lead to a complete invalidation of the speciespreserving function that is normally inherent in man’s aggression drive. This combination might end, according to Lorenz (2002: 46), in the self-destruction of mankind. According to Lorenz’s thesis of man’s incapacity to adapt in a timely manner to new situations, the actual flow of refugees to Europe could unleash man’s aggression drive or, as one could describe it, an evil in the form of racisms and radicalisms since the flow of refugees to Europe lead to rapid changes in terms of population composition. In the present paper, I am interested in one specific facet of the evil, i.e. in the evil that becomes apparent in a certain prejudiced attitude in which we treat our counterpart, in which we face the supposed “other”, that is to say when a demonization as a menace and stigmatization as the evil as such of the new arrivals take place. The illustration or the artificial construction of the “other” as evil can be seen as the triggering factor or the catalyst as such that leads to the phenomenon of reductionisms consisting in classifying persons through one or, at the utmost, two identity-establishing features. Such reductionisms in turn are the bottom therefor that one certain identity might gain a predominating status within a society that is to

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be evaluated as an extremely dangerous development. Identities with the aforementioned significance frequently have a pugnacious nature, namely to the effect that they enhance intolerance, a prejudiced communication culture, discrimination and readiness to use violence towards the “others” and, in addition to it, they engulf any freedom and any sense of responsibility between people. In this context, I would like to make a small digression to Max Frisch’s parable Andorra in which Frisch addresses the consequences of prejudices or of a reductionist view, the guilt of the followers and the question of the identity of a person towards the picture that its fellow human beings are making of it. Frisch shows that human beings adhere to the identities that their fellows ascribe to them. It is demonstrated by Frisch that human beings would not even distance themselves from the ascribed identities when they are told that such identities do not correspond to the truth. The protagonist of the parable, Andri, is passed off by his father, the teacher Can, as Jewish foster son. In truth Andri is the result of an extramarital romance of his supposed foster father. The prejudices of his fellows shape Andri in such a great degree that he adheres to his ascribed Jewish identity even after his father, the teacher, tries to inform him about his true origin in the 6th scene: Teacher: Why do you have to make money? Andri: Because I’m a Jew. Teacher: My son -! Andri: Stop that! (Frisch 1992: 132)

Andri does not stop to adhere to his ascribed Jewish identity, as the following passage in the 10th scene shows: “Andri: You don’t understand that, because you are not a Jew – He looks into the street. Now leave me!” (Frisch 1992: 159). In the end, Andri is murdered by racist neighbours because they consider him a Jew (cf. Frisch 1992: 179). The Andorrans let Andri’s assassination happen without intervening after which justify their misconduct and their cowardice and then deny their guilt for Andri’s death. In his novel I’m not stiller Max Frisch puts the problem of identities that the surroundings create of a person in a nutshell: “Every image is a sin. All those things you’ve been saying are exactly the opposite of love, you know. I don’t know whether you realize that. When you love someone you leave every possibility open to them, and in spite of

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all the memories of the past you are ready to be surprised, again and again surprised, at how different they are, how various, not a finished image such as you have made of your Julika” (Frisch 2006: 127). Frisch positions himself clearly against the human disposition to tie the counterpart down to a certain identity, to a finished image. Frisch defends the position that the surroundings should not enable a rigid image of their fellows since the same are vivid and therefore permanently changing and so not settleable. In Frisch’s view it is a sin to ascribe a certain unchangeable identity to a person. According to Frisch, human beings commit the just mentioned sin nearly without cease. Only when two human beings are loving each other they do not ascribe a rigid identity to the beloved person. The Andorrans define Andri according to their prejudices against Jews. Andri tries to align himself with the identity that the Andorrans created for him. Andri accepts the identity that the others created for him. He tries to fulfil the role that the others anticipate. In this way Andri confirms the prejudices against him. Frisch wants to inform the audience of his Andorra of the phenomenon prejudice, especially of collective prejudice. Frisch’s Andorra is the model for a community that is not identical with itself (cf. Petersen 2002: 71f.). The pressure of the community or collective towards Andri leads to constant self-examinations of the young man and, in the end, to an adaptation in relation to the prejudices that the fellows have towards him. Such adaptation comes out clearly in the following dialogue between Andri and his father: Andri: At seven I have to be in the shop, selling chairs, selling tables, selling cupboards, rubbing my hands. Teacher: Why do you have to rub your hands? Andri: Could you find a better chair? Does it wobble? Does it creak? Could you find a cheaper chair?” (Frisch 1992: 131)

Through Andorra, Frisch wishes to heighten the consciousness of his audience by suggesting that every human being is obliged to look at his or her fellow being without prejudice and thereby address the collective contributory fault. The Andorrans are not exonerated from their culpability only because they were not the executioners themselves, as the following lines show: “ich möchte die Schuld zeigen, wo ich sie sehe, unsere Schuld, denn wenn ich meinen Freund an den Henker ausliefere, übernimmt der Henker keine Oberschuld” (Wendt and Schmitz 1978: 53).1 Here, Frisch clearly defends the position that the guilty ones are

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sitting in the pit. In other words, Frisch thinks that those that are saying that they did not want a certain happening, should be scared. Frisch wants that the audience of Andorra lies awake during the night, after watching the play. For Frisch, the accessories are everywhere. The problem that Frisch wants to show in Andorra is that the guilty ones are everywhere and that they are completely unaware of their guilt. Frisch wants to show the lack of insight of the Andorrans or of humankind in general. He wants to demonstrate the danger of reductionist views and of prejudices. This was a little digression to Max Frisch’s Andorra, but now I want to come back to my topic of reductionisms and of the danger that is posed when one identity feature becomes dominant within a society. The rise of a dominant identity feature within a society can be seen as a trigger of radicalism. Within radicalisms, reductionisms are often used as instruments in order to achieve the complete submission of people since it is much easier to manipulate and to take into possession (Sen 2006: 174–176 and 178–179) of individuals, if they are defining themselves in a reductionist way. Fundamentalists aspire to suppress the existing diversity of identities with the aim of making their target audience distance itself from all identities that could lead astray the loyalty with respect to a specific radical conception. In that regard, it should be remembered all those cases in which radicalisms directly result from the presence of such a dominant identity or a situation where the free competition of the diverse identities is annihilated. We have had more often in our history constellations in which radicalisms have arisen from a dominant identity that, in turn, has its root in the indoctrination of the idea that the evil lies in the “other” or in persons that come from abroad. The indoctrination of the just mentioned idea often leads to the dangerous conclusion that the local inhabitants have to unify building a kind of united front against the newcomers. Basically, the root of nearly all wars is grounded on such a forming of a common front against the “others” or newcomers and on the idea that those that are coming from the outside are a danger for the long-time residents or local people. The human disposition to form a front against the “other” reminds me in a way of Freud’s concept “anticathexis”, even though “anticathexis” in Freud is not with negative connotations: “The anticathexis or the resistance does not form part of the unconscious but of the ego, which is our collaborator, and is so even if it is not conscious” (Freud 1991).

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The consequences of the idea to form a phalanx against the “others” should basically be known but nonetheless this horrifying idea to gang up against the “other” has not disappeared. It seems to be a constitutive part of the human nature to judge the “other” as a disturbing factor. This way of thinking stubbornly sticks to people’s thinking. Presumably, it is a kind of human primordial fear of alterity, of differentness that leads to the phenomenon that the “other” is interpreted as an undermining or as a negation of the own manner of existence. The genesis of positions that display a defensive attitude against the “other” and that claim that the “other” is evil can be explained out of the aspiration to create a defining characteristic that should serve to protect the way of life of the local people against that one of the newcomers. For example, Carl Schmitt develops his theory about the utility of the evil or of such constructions of those who come from the inside and their opposite in his work Der Begriff des Politischen, using the conceptualities “friend” and “enemy” (cf. Schmitt 1963: 27–30). According to Schmitt, the differentiation between “friend” and “enemy” serves to describe the highest degree of a situation of connection or separation. Schmitt claims that the political enemy or friend is something independent from other modes of differentiation as moral, aesthetic or economic ones, namely to the effect that the same need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly. The political enemy or friend is, according to Schmitt’s thesis, simply the “other” who can be characterized as being something existentially strange in a specifically intense sense with the result that it is given the possibility of having conflicts with him. He functions, as it could be described, as a kind of source of friction (cf. Schmitt 1963: 27). Chantal Mouffe works out a similar theory about the socially and politically useful aspect of a constructed evil, namely about the utility of a differentiation or demarcation between inside and outside or between domestic and foreign, with main focus on the crucial importance of the distinction between “us” and “them” in the constitution of collective political identities: In order to avoid any misunderstanding, let me point out that the ’constitutive outside’ cannot be reduced to a dialectical negation. In order to be a true outside, the outside has to be incommensurable with the inside, and at the same time, the condition of emergence of the latter. (Mouffe 2000: 12)

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In the just mentioned positions, the artificial construction of the “other” as an enemy and the with that correlated idea of protection against the “other” fulfils the function to enable a clear differentiation between the “own” and the “foreign” that, in turn, is conducive to clarify, to define and to strengthen the own position and to preserve the power of the interior of a society or of a state. This distinction induced by the artificial image of an evil antagonist from the outside that threatens certain values of the people within a state leads to an increased cohesion and feeling of unity of those that are inside. The “enemy from the outside” can be used, according to those positions, efficiently as a kind of instrument to control the own supporters.

The Illustration of the “Other” as Evil and Its Consequences My thesis is that it is exactly the illustration of the “other” as evil or as an overcoming imminence that leads to the phenomenon of reductionisms that classify human beings completely undifferentiated and narrow-minded through reductionist glasses. The will to homogenize the “other” can be seen as the result of an artificially provoked fear of the evil “other”. Reductionisms are hurting any peaceful contact and any communication with a positive attitude insofar as they unify persons with a certain identity while they segregate and seal off other persons without that certain identity. Reductionisms are sowing the seeds for a conflict between diverse people, whereas it is to be pointed out decidedly that they deal with an artificial provocation of belligerence since in reality there need not exist such a gap.2 Theses like that provoke prejudices, racism and radicalisms. Reductionisms constitute a direct way to misunderstand practically all people in this world by claiming that every person can be correlated readily with one singular identity-establishing feature in an irreversible way and that such a classification is necessary in an absolute way. No person can be understood in its diversity by being defined through a reductionist view. Already Friedrich Nietzsche claims in the 292nd aphorism of Human, All Too Human I, entitled Forward, that all humans are products of different cultures, of so-called “rings of culture” and that humans can only be understood by a multiperspectival viewpoint: “This goal is yourself to become a necessary chain of rings of culture and from this necessity to recognize the necessity inherent in the course of culture in general”

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(Nietzsche 1996: 135). For Nietzsche every way of thinking is the result of different cultural attempts, as he clarifies unequivocally in the 223rd aphorism of Human, All Too Human II , entitled Whither we have to travel, when he makes reference to the “hundred-eyed Argos” (Nietzsche 1996: 268) that is accompanied by “his Io” (Nietzsche 1996: 268), by which the identity is meant, everywhere. In other words, every man rediscovers his identity in different cultures and diverse ways of living. Identity models that are based on reductionisms produce, as Sen describes it pointedly, a “(…) pallid view of the world divided into boxes of civilizations (…)” (Sen 2006: 42). In my view, reductionisms do not merely ascribe one certain identity to a person. Much more is it the case that they force a singular identity on a person, producing a situation in which every man is a kind of prisoner of his own identity in the sense that he is not free to choose and—what is sometimes even more important—to deselect his identities. In that regard it needs to be said that to deselect certain identities can be seen in some situations as an expression of remarkable braveness. Anyway, metaphorically speaking, such a forced identity by reductionisms is like an unyielding corset that has nothing to do with the real nature of the concerned person. Moreover, the person who is affected by reductionisms suffers a grave form of despite. As an example for how much forced identities or rather reductionist views are despising people, one should call to mind the prejudices against the Irish and the Indian that were spread in times of Irish (cf. Sen 1999: 170–175) and Bengal famines (cf. Sen 1981: 39–153) by the colonial power. To show how an artificial war based on reductionisms can be created, it is necessary to mention Samuel P. Huntington’s thesis of a clash between the cultures that he defends in his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Huntington’s negative assertions of Muslims, arguing that civilizational “(…) conflicts are particularly prevalent between Muslims and non- Muslims (…)” (Huntington 2003: 208) can be seen with good reason as an example of how to create or, at least, to provoke a wide gap between people, all the more so because of the reductive correlation of humans with conflict behaviour and their religious affiliation, as the following passage clearly illustrates: “In the early 1990s Muslims were engaged in more intergroup violence than were nonMuslims, and two-thirds to three- quarters of intercivilizational wars were between Muslims and non- Muslims. Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards” (Huntington 2003: 257f.). The acceptance that Muslims are very different from each other and that it is not possible to define

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them only by their religion is very important because since 9/11 they are under a kind of general suspicion of being religious extremists. They represent a kind of paragon per se to demonstrate the importance of the avoidance of reductionisms.

The Greatest Campaigner Against Reductionisms Amartya Sen might be called without exaggeration as the greatest campaigner against any kind of reductionist views and as the defender as such of the tolerance for the cultural diversity. He rejects with a vengeance all forms of reductionisms, stressing the importance of consolidating the idea that every person consists of a plurality of identities and of innumerable cultural3 components. Sen considers the classification or the categorization of human beings through one singular criterion as a kind of attack on humanity: “Our shared humanity gets savagely challenged when the manifold divisions in the world are unified into one allegedly dominant system of classification – in terms of religion, or community, or culture, or nation, or civilisation (…)” (Sen 2006: xiii). Such systems of classification undermine the fact that we are all human beings even if we are very different and they destroy simultaneously the perspective that the existing cultural differences can act or can be used as a personal enrichment for each and every one of us, as for example, as an asset for our own plural identity. Into the bargain, they are covering up the fact that there are a lot of connecting factors between the diverse cultures that have to be found out by an open attitude towards the “other” and via an indefatigable dialogue with the “other”. The threatening character of unidimensional classifications is shown by Sen in the following lines: “The insistence, if only implicitly, on a choiceless singularity of human identity not only diminishes us all, it also makes the world much more flammable” (Sen 2006: xiv and 16). As an example for the just thematized inflammability potential of narrowly defined identities, Sen mentions the conflicts between the Hindus and the Muslims in the context of the division of India in the 1940s that he had experienced by himself. In his homeland, as a result of such a radicalization caused by unidimensional classifications, humans were getting capable of killing their neighbours because they were belonging to the “false” group, as Sen describes it based on his personal childhood recollections in Development as Freedom:

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I was playing one afternoon – I must have been around ten or so – in the garden in our family home in the city of Dhaka, now the capital of Bangladesh, when a man came through the gate screaming pitifully and bleeding profusely; he had been knifed in the back. Those were the days of communal riots (with Hindus and Muslims killing each other), which preceded the independence and partitioning of India and Pakistan. The knifed man, called Kader Mia, was a Muslim daily laborer who had come for work in a neighboring house – for a tiny reward – and had been knifed on the street by some communal thugs in our largely Hindu area. (Sen 1999: 8)

Sen also describes in great detail the devastating experience with the knifed Muslim Kader Mia and the cataclysmic carnage, in which hundreds of Muslims and Hindus were killed by each other, in Identity and Violence (cf. Sen 2006: 170–174). In this context, it has to be remarked that as a matter of course the religious affiliation of the people was practically given in ages. What was new was the development of a dominant status of one single affiliation that had the aim to extinguish all other affiliations. In this way the foundations for aggressions were laid, as observable when riotings take place. This shows impressively the extent to which the reduction of life to one dominant identity increases the probability that conflicts, riots and wars erupt. Sen uses the term “bellicose identities” in this context and, in my view, it could hardly be expressed better: it has to be accepted as an unassailable matter of fact that such tension is immensely dangerous for the preservation of peace in general, if reductionist views or efforts to homogenize people are gaining the upper hand in a society or in a state. The conviction for an absolute identity almost always goes hand in hand with the belief that the concerned identity is the truth, and as such has to be protected. In such an atmosphere of worry for the own identity the “other” is generally considered hastily as a danger that has to be eliminated. Thereof it can be explained why persons who have another identity than the dominant one are becoming vulnerable persecutees in such constellations of provoked xenophobia. In such circumstances, the dire risk is that the consciousness of the own identity can become so strong and overwhelming that every other sense, as for example compassion or any sense of sympathy for the “other” person might be deactivated by being overtrumped. A frequent consequence of such a strong feeling of identity is an ever-ready attitude to use the nearly unlimited power of violence against all other identities.

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The Actual Situation of Europe “United in diversity” is the motto of the European Union since the year 2000. At the present time, and that is for sure, the same motto has to provide proof of its applicability and of its defensibility as never before since its conception. In my estimation, on taking stock we see that the motto is not put into practice, at least not on the level of a real acceptance of diversity. It seems to me that in the European Union assimilation counts more than the real tolerance towards the existing cultural and religious diversity and the implementation of a more peaceful togetherness between the cultures and religions. The will or the desire to assimilate the “other” in turn can be seen as the result of an artificially provoked fear of the evil “other”. In defence of my thesis that in the European Union, in spite of its motto “United in diversity”, in reality assimilation counts more than the acceptance of the manifoldness of cultures and religions, there is evidence that in several European cities there are serious resistances against the building of mosques. The building of mosques is seen by a large part of the old-established population of Europe as a disturbing factor, as an imminence, as an alien body or as something that does not belong, not by any means, to Europe. The severe protests against the planning of a mosque in the Lombardic town of Lodi illustrate clearly the defensive attitude of the, as I would like to describe them, old-established population of Europe against the Muslim religion since they are anything but a solitary case in Europe (cf. Saint-Blancat and Schmidt di Friedberg 2005). A further example to prove the islamophobic tendencies in Europe is the fact that the headscarf ban in Austrian kindergartens was decided unanimously in parliament.4 The interlinkage with the European Union consists of the fact that actually the maxim of the European Union since the year 2000 is “United in diversity”. But by a more profound illumination of the not exactly good status that the Muslim religion enjoys in the European Union it can be seen that the motto of the European Union “United in diversity” is not put into practice, at least not in the case of a real acceptance towards the Muslim religion. In the European Union, the Christianity enjoys an unreserved acceptance in daily life and in politics, whereas the Islam is only accepted in the European constitution as religion that played a certain role in the development history of Europe and in current life. In real life, in Europe the Muslim religion does not enjoy this status of acceptance as the Christian religion does. The attitude of the old-established population of

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Europe towards the Islam is prevalently characterized by a certain degree of refusal and distrust. The fact that there is given a urgent demand for action to improve the position of the Muslims within the old-established population of Europe (since in the constitution of the European Union the Islam is actually accepted) and to do something against the islamophobia that exists in Europe is reflected in the report “Muslime in der Europäischen Union. Diskriminierung und Islamophobie. [Muslims in the European Union. Discrimination and Islamophobia]”.5 At least in certain fields, it cannot be denied that the motto of the European Union “United in diversity” is more a pretence than an established practice. In the present Europe there can be observed a general climate of assimilation pressure that stems from the idea that there exists something like a homogenous receiving society to which the immigrating people could be assimilated or that there is something like a core culture. Moreover, the aspiration for the assimilation of the newcomers can be explained by the human desire for security and control. The truth of the matter is, however, that there is neither a homogenous receiving society nor a homogenous migrant flow which is why any unidirectional ambitions of assimilation are to be seen as something unjustifiable or as a manifestation of a naive fallacy. Every host state is as much as every migrant flow not a homogenous entity but a colourful, lively, chaotic, confluent, developing, permanently changing, incomplete system of diverse individuals. It is part of the receiving society’s nature that it is receiving without interruption new cultural and religious features. This is the reason why the receiving society cannot be seen as an isolated and definitely finished whole that is completely independent of new influences. If one thinks it through to its consistent conclusion integration in the meaning of an unidirectional assimilation is in no sense realizable because it presupposes a homogeneous receiving society, a society that in reality doesn’t exist nowhere. In reality, it is without exception the case that heterogeneous humans with a hybrid sense of belonging meet with heterogeneous receiving societies. Vienna is an excellent example of how heterogeneous a society can be. According to the results of the 4th Viennese monitoring of integration and diversity people from 190 different countries live in the city of Vienna. More than one-third of the about 1.8 million Viennese inhabitants are foreign-born. Every third Viennese is not born in Austria.6 In this context, I would like to refer to Paul Mecheril who argues that a homogeneous society does not exist. According to Mecheril, national states or societies in general are in regard to their cultural practices and

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traditions always heterogeneous (cf. Mecheril 2009: 20). For this very reason, in my estimation, politics should not speak about the receiving society nor about the group that has to be integrated since neither homogeneous receiving societies nor homogeneous immigrating groups actually exist. This is the reason why such ambitions of assimilation are not justifiable. Quite apart from its unjustifiability, any unidirectional assimilation in the sense of an assimilation of newcomers to a putative long-established society is problematic because it contains oppressive and discriminating tendencies towards the newcomers. A solution could be a reciprocal process of adaption7 of all people, namely of long-time residents as well as of newcomers. The reciprocal process of adaption should happen slowly, unforcedly, quasi naturally, i.e. through the daily coexistence, encounter and dialogue. As opposed to this, a concept of integration that means nothing else than the cultural assimilation of the newcomers into the cultural customs together with the ruling social order of the host state or the receiving country I do not consider as a good approach because it is a variant form of the obligation to subjection and to assimilation to the cultural customs of a majority. Integration in this sense is in each and every case counterproductive for a peaceful and reciprocal living together of diverse people. It is, as one could argue without exaggerating, the death of every attempt of ensuring a good functioning pluricultural society since the realization of the same requires inclusion and participation instead of exclusion and dominance. On reflection, anyway, it becomes clear that the idea of unidirectional assimilation or the presumption of insularity is more than a highly dangerous illusion. The reminding demonstration of the dangerousness of the presumption of insularity is the historical example of the social policy of the National Socialists. I quote this historical example because the presumption of insularity reminds me in some way of the striving after homogenization in times of the Nazi era. Europe has lived through the ideology of the National Socialists and all its truculent consequences. For this reason, the risks and the impossibility of the idea of homogeneity should actually be common knowledge. But the current comportment of the human beings proves the opposite. It is a sad fact that humankind has obviously learnt nothing or only very little from the disasters of the past. It can be observed that diversity is still seen unfortunately too often in different contexts as a problem or even as “the” origin of problems which have their genuine root completely elsewhere. To prove this

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thesis we can think of diverse occurrences of the present, as, for instance, the riots against the construction of mosques that I have mentioned earlier. Human nature seems to have a hardly extinguishable disposition to uniformity.

Plural Identity Models as an Imaginable Solution Approach Promising and fruitful solution approaches for dealing with the problem of a more peaceful encounter with the supposed “other” and for achieving a better intercultural understanding in general are offered, in my estimation, by Amartya Sen’s plural identity model that he develops in Identity and Violence and that he based on the idea that every person consists of diverse identities. According to Sen, every man is a sum of a plurality of diverse identities, as observed in the following excerpt: In our normal lives, we see ourselves as members of a variety of groups – we belong to all of them. A person’s citizenship, residence, geographic origin, gender, class, politics, profession, employment, food habits, sports interests, taste in music, social commitments, etc., make us members of a variety of groups. Each of these collectivities, to all of which this person simultaneously belongs, gives her a particular identity. None of them can be taken to be the person’s only identity or singular membership category. (Sen 2006: 4–5)

This passage shows unambiguously that in reality nobody consists of solely one singular identity-establishing feature since identity is invariably a complex and absolutely unique construct of countless features between which untold overlappings and similarities exist. Identity formation is, as I see it, based on three specifics. Firstly, every person consists of a plurality of identity-establishing features. Secondly, the own identity is subject to a constant change process. The identity changes everlastingly since there are arriving permanently new features. Thirdly, the importance for the individual of the identity-establishing features may change significantly over the life course to the effect that a new weighting can ensue, namely while certain features might become less important or even lose completely any meaning, others can become increasingly important. The acceptance of the just mentioned three specifics about the identity formation can, in my judgement, lead to the positive consequence that a general curiosity

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for the “other” is produced. This just described curiosity, in turn, could contribute to a more open attitude towards the supposed “other” since the same could be interpreted as a potential fountain for enhancing the own identity with new features. Plural identity concepts, as I would like to call identity conceptions as Sen’s, could lead to the reduction of the idea that different cultures are of necessity incompatible. This fundamental idea, in turn, could be used, as far as I can see, in politics in order to encourage measures in the fight against radicalisms. Anyway, Sen considers his plural identity concept in which every man feels associated with different cultures and group memberships as a chance8 for peace or as a tool for achieving the reduction of violence in our crisis shattered world: “Rather, the main hope of harmony in our troubled world lies in the plurality of our identities, which cut across each other and work against sharp divisions around one single hardened line of vehement division that allegedly cannot be resisted” (Sen 2006: 16). Plural identity concepts or conceptions of multiple belongings may reduce reserves against certain population groups or minimize tendencies of racial segregation. In this context, it can be noticed that there are certain similarities between Sen’s identity concept and Avishai Margalit’s view about group memberships. Margalit argues that every man usually belongs to several groups simultaneously: “And the way things are in our world, everyone belongs to an encompassing group, and generally to more than one – for example, nationality, Nigerian; tribe, Ibo; religion, Anglican” (Margalit 1998: 140). Plural identity concepts concede the freedom to choose within a certain frame of limitations its identities to every person. Sen assumes such a freedom of choice of the identities and becomes the subject of criticism because of this idea. John Christman is one of such critics and comments that individuals are not completely free to choose their identities (cf. Christman 2009: 199–203). However, Christman’s critique is problematic because Sen writes decidedly that the freedom of choice of the identities is not an absolute freedom but a restricted9 one (cf. Sen 2006: 34f.). In any case, one of the most effective tools against these limitations of the freedom to choose one’s identities is the person’s education whereby the level of freedom magnifies with the increasing of the educational level. In relation to the freedom of choice it is necessary— especially in the fight against any form of religious radicalization or any kind of absolutization of the identity in general—to bring to mind on the moral level that it is very important to make a choice in the sense of the

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assumption of responsibility. It should be appealed to the moral awareness that the construction of the own identity and the assumption of responsibility for the same should be seen as two things that are inseparably linked. Unfortunately, the implementation of this insight that the former cannot be owned without the latter cannot be reached as a kind of general maxim on a legal level. But it can be done everything to found the insight that there should be an inseparable nexus between identity formation and assumption of responsibility on a moral level. It is very important that as many human beings as possible develop a sense of responsibility for their identity and for how they act. The moral insight of as many people as possible should be reached in order that they understand that an identity should not be used never ever as an excuse for any sort of problematic behaviour.

The Drawback of the Plural Identity Analysing the applicability of plural identity models, it is very important to enlighten likewise the potential drawbacks, problems and detriments correlated with a belongingness to several identities. Paul Mecheril discerns, as do Sen and Margalit, that the plural identity or the hybridity of national, ethnical or cultural nature became a normal case as a consequence of globalization and postcolonialism. But Mecheril’s position differs in one point diametrically from the views of Sen and Margalit: Mecheril considers the just described normal case of a plural or hybrid identity not in an absolute unreserved way as an inoffensive one. The problem that persons with plural affiliations can have, is, according to Mecheril, the denied acceptation of the plural or hybrid identity on behalf of the major part of the society in spite of the ample prevalence of the phenomenon that one person belongs to a lot of affiliations at the same time (cf. Mecheril 2009: 24). The disadvantage of such plural identity constructions is the risk that the concerned individual can have the feeling to belong to nowhere. Sensations of lost, of rootlessness, of inner disunity and of fragility can arise. In this context, I would like to refer to the concept of the “marginal man”, introduced originally by Robert Park. This concept describes the phenomenon of cultural and social strangeness in the meaning of a marginal position within the society as a result of cultural amalgamations by reason of migration (cf. Wierlacher and Albrecht 1995: 158f.). To put an example, children of parents with a different national, cultural and/or religious background

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might be involved by the just described feeling of cultural and social strangeness or by deracination. If parents of such children part one’s ways, they often decide to return to their homelands. In other words, it can happen that father and mother of those children return to two different countries and leave the country where they stayed with their children before their dissolution. This may mean a great inner strife for the concerned child. This is aggravated by the question whether the concerned child stays in the future in the country of its mother or in the country of its father. Furthermore the concerned child has to abandon all its social contacts of the country in which it spent its previous life. Binational couples that are rooted in two different countries often don’t realize or refuse to believe because of an extraordinarily marked sense of bonding to their respective homelands that their children have their centre of one’s life nevertheless in one country and normally not in two countries simultaneously. As a consequence of such a very strong sense of national identity of the parents, children of binational couples might feel in the truest sense of the word torn between the respective homelands of their parents. The aforementioned children need like all children a certain degree of rootedness for being able to feel secure.

Conclusion The present contribution demonstrated that the existence of cultural differences or cultural plurality in general should be seen as a value that has to be saved. The paper tried to point out that cultural plurality does not represent an obstacle for the coexistence of diverse people in a positive sense when they encounter one another with an open and positive attitude. The analysis showed that the reduction of the cultural differences between the people in the form of a unidirectional integration does not manifest in no way a solution approach that can make a contribution to the cut of already established conflicts. The basis for a non-violent dialogue between the different cultures and religions lies in the effort to foster the understanding of and the curiosity for the “other”. Such an open-minded attitude in turn could be reached by making it clear that every man can broaden his identity and/or rediscover certain identity features in different cultures and in diverse ways of living. Every man’s identity is an assemblage of diverse identity features. Plural identity concepts can favour a respectful atmosphere for dialogue where the

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“other” is not compelled to give up his identity features in the sense of assimilation. Jonathan Sacks, with whom I would like to conclude, claims in his book The Dignity of Difference: How to avoid the Clash of Civilizations that conflicts between different cultures can be avoided if the differences between the cultures are interpreted as something of fundamental importance, as a value that has to be saved. According to Sacks, cultural pluralism may not be destroyed not under any circumstances, arguing that the existing cultural diversity and the manifoldness of identities must be saved. The precondition of unity10 is, according to Sacks, diversity: “Unity in heaven creates diversity on earth” (Sacks 2002: 54). I would like to conclude my paper, holding the following conclusion in place: It should be grasped as a value to make contact with the “other” because in the “other” can be found diverse similarities with the self and in addition to it new identity features for enhancing and broadening the own identity. Every man should consider the possibility to create his life by choosing identities and cultural features from the diverse cultures that are existing within the society as a privilege, as a source of inspiration and not as a disadvantage or something negative. The possibility to choose new identities from an existing cultural diversity should be seen as a way to enlarge the freedom of a society in total and not as its opposite.

Notes 1. My translation of the German quotation: “I want to show the culpability, where I see the same, our culpability, since when I turn my friend into the hangman, the hangman does not assume the main share of the blame”. 2. For more critical notes about reductionisms see Sen (2006: 40–42, 46– 50, 106–109). 3. In this context, I would like to note that the relation between the cultural freedom and the respect for the cultural plurality can be problematic. As for example, it would be very problematic, if the forced marriage or the female genital cutting is allowed with the intention of saving the cultural plurality. With this in mind the tolerance for certain cultural practices can turn out as a false tolerance. Such a false tolerance reduces massively the cultural freedom instead of supporting it. Another example for a false tolerance, although on a completely different level, is the Spanish tradition of the bullfights. 4. https://www.parlament.gv.at/PAKT/PR/JAHR_2018/PK1311/ [17 March 2020].

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5. https://fra.europa.eu/sites/default/files/fra_uploads/156-Manifesta tions_DE.pdf [18 March 2020]. 6. Cf. https://www.wien.gv.at/menschen/integration/pdf/monitor-2016. pdf [19 March 2020]. 7. In the present analysis, I use the term “adaptation” with a positive connotation, namely in the sense of a reciprocal process of mutual convergence that takes place slowly, unforcedly, quasi naturally, that is to say via the daily coexistence, encounter and dialogue. The term “assimilation” I use by contrast exclusively in a negative connotation in the current analysis. The difference between “assimilation” and “adaptation” in the present analysis is that while the first mentioned term is negative connoted in the sense of enforcement and involuntariness, the latter has a positive meaning since it should signify a slower, more unforced and more natural process of reciprocal convergence. 8. Amartya Sen is sometimes accused of being too idealistic. In my view, Sen is accused wrongly since his insights about how much forced identities or reductionist views are despising human beings proved themselves true, as several historical examples prove. One example are the prejudices against the Irish that were spread in times of Irish famines by the colonial power [cf. Sen (1999: 170–175)]. 9. The restriction is based on the assumption of responsibility. The sense of responsibilty acts as antagonist to the freedom of choice of the identities. 10. In this context, I would like to mention that Sacks polemicises against Plato’s assertation of the universality of truth when it is “(…) applied to ethics, spirituality and our sense of what ought to be” [Sacks (2002: 54)].

References Christman, John. 2009. The Politics of Persons: Individual Autonomy and SocioHistorical Selves. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1991 (first 1917). Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey and ed. Angela Richards, 7150th ed. London: Penguin Books Ltd. Frisch, Max. 1992. Andorra. In Three Plays: The Fire Raisers & Andorra, trans. Michael Bullock and ed. Max Frisch. Triptych, trans. Geoffrey Skelton. Introduced by Peter Loeffler. London: Methuen Drama. Frisch, Max. 2006. I’m Not Stiller, trans. Michael Bullock. Rochester, McLean, and London: Dalkey Archive Press. Huntington, Samuel Phillips. 2003. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks. Lorenz, Konrad. 2002. On Aggression, trans. Marjorie Kerr Wilson. With a foreword by Julian Huxley. London and New York: Routledge Classics.

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Margalit, Avishai. 1998. The Decent Society, trans. Naomi Goldblum. Cambridge, MA, and London, UK: Harvard University Press. Mecheril, Paul. 2009. Politik der Unreinheit. Ein Essay über Hybridität. Wien: Passagen Verlag. Mouffe, Chantal. 2000. The Democratic Paradox. London and New York: Verso. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1996. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R.J. Hollingdale and intro. Richard Schacht. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge [et al.]: Cambridge University Press. Petersen, Jürgen H. 2002. Max Frisch. 3., überarbeitete und aktualisierte Auflage. Stuttgart and Weimar: Verlag J. B. Metzler. Plato. 1997. Republic, trans. G.M.A. Grube, rev. C.D.C. Reeve. In Complete Works, ed., with intro., and notes, by John M. Cooper. Associate Editor D. S. Hutchinson. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing. Sacks, Jonathan Henry. 2002. The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations. London and New York: Continuum. Saint-Blancat, Chantal, and Ottavia Schmidt di Friedberg. 2005. Why Are Mosques a Problem? Local Politics and Fear of Islam in Northern Italy. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 31 (6): 1083–1104. Schmitt, Carl. 1963. Der Begriff des Politischen. Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und drei Corollarien. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Sen, Amartya. 1981. Poverty and Famines. An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sen, Amartya. 1999. Development as Freedom. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc. Sen, Amartya. 2006. Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. New York. London: W. W. Norton. Wendt, Ernst, and Walter Schmitz (eds). 1978. Materialien zu Max Frischs » Andorra « . Erste Auflage. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Wierlacher, Alois, and Corinna Albrecht. 1995. Fremdgänge. Eine anthologische Fremdheitslehre für den Unterricht Deutsch als Fremdsprache. Bonn: Inter Nationes.

From the Internet Kopftuchverbot in Kindergärten einstimmig beschlossen, Parlamentskorrespondenz Nr. 1311, 21 November 2018. Available at https://www.parlament.gv.at/ PAKT/PR/JAHR_2018/PK1311/ [accessed 17 March 2020]. Muslime in der europäischen Union. Diskriminierung und Islamophobie, EUMC 2006. Available at https://fra.europa.eu/sites/default/files/fra_upl oads/156-Manifestations_DE.pdf [accessed 18 March 2020]. Monitoring. Integration. Diversität. Wien. 2013–2016. 4. Wiener Integrations& Diversitätsmonitor 2013–2016. Herausgegeben von der Stadt Wien. Magistratsabteilung 17 – Integration und Diversität. Projektleitung: Manolakos, Theodora et al. Available at https://www.wien.gv.at/menschen/integration/ pdf/monitor-2016.pdf [accessed 19 March 2020].

CHAPTER 14

Muddled Roots and Diverse Routes of Reality: Understanding Hindu R¯as.t.ra and Gandhi R¯as.t.ra Through the Myth of Bhat.t.oji D¯ıks.ita Vishnu Varatharajan

Introduction and Invitation The Gandhian ontology of modern India began from the colonial exploitation that not only was deeply epistemic with recent memories, but also awarded equal value to all inhabitants of the subcontinent who equally deserved emancipation from the imperialist system. Gandhi did not supplement any apocryphal lost memories to nurture a national consciousness, but politicised the reality of imperialist oppression that was indifferent to all religions in India. Therefore, his ideological position pleaded the national consciousness to go back to the roots no further than the British colonialism, and that any remnants of the distant memories about events that predated British colonialism was to be considered as a positive history of change and transformation that facilitated the present fraternal coexistence—the diverse routes of reality. This was everything

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against Hindutva. The canvas of a glorious Hindu past propounded by the proponents of Hindutva are unreachable, not only because it is impractical, but also because it is definitely far from Truth, irrespective of how false it is. We can never completely recover the knowledge about the past, since our interpretation of such knowledge will be based on our subjective understanding of reality, which was shaped by our perception of knowledge in the previous tiers. I divide my essay into three parts. In the first part, I describe the uniqueness and limitations of Gandhian perception of India vis-à-vis his notion of the West. In the second part, I narrate a myth of Bhat.t.oji D¯ıks.ita and put forth my logical inferences. In the third part, I use those logical inferences to explain why the idea of Hindu R¯as.t.ra is unrealistic, and how the Gandhian ontology is cautious of its muddled roots and not depreciative of its diverse routes. I then conclude my essay with a truncated poem of Kalyanji.

Part I---Gandhi and the West We are a postcolonial nation in the making. Every historically subjugated society that has perceived a hegemonic force from above, has searched for emancipation and liberation concepts from within. In this regard, the Hindu renaissance movement in the nineteenth century was not only a reformation movement, but also a movement for rediscovery—rediscovering the lost knowledge systems of the past. Organisations like Arya Samaj vouched on the infallibility of the Vedas and wanted to seek the “Roots”. There was a deep belief that a time-tested societal system had been working in ancient India, the knowledge of which was lost, corrupted and damaged due to invasions from outside. Therefore, when the renaissance movement crystalised into political consciousness, the definition of independence also acquired an inseparable cultural component—the rediscovery of Indian way of life. For Gandhi too, Swaraj was not just political independence, it was something more.1 I was in Berlin with Christian Bartolf, founder of GandhiInformations-Zentrum for six months in 2019, and in March, we were looking at Mahatma Gandhi’s journal “Indian Opinion” and his letters to various people between 1906 and 1908. Gandhi during these years was very vocal about his search for a new word to replace the word “passive resistance” that he had been using for at least eighteen months to denote the method of his movement in South Africa.2 Gandhi was also very explicit about why he wanted the change, that the word “passive

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resistance” not only was inadequate in reflecting the method that he had been conceiving, but also was incorrect in context. Gandhi wrote in a letter in 1920, “I have drawn the distinction between passive resistance as understood and practised in the West and satyagraha before I had evolved the doctrine of the latter to its full logical and spiritual extent. I often used ‘passive resistance’ and ‘satyagraha’ as synonymous terms: but as the doctrine of satyagraha developed, the expression ‘passive resistance’ ceases even to be synonymous, as passive resistance has admitted of violence as in the case of the suffragettes and has been universally acknowledged to be a weapon of the weak. Moreover, passive resistance does not necessarily involve complete adherence to truth under every circumstance”.3 This statement of Gandhi was clear enough to reveal his motivations but Bartolf felt that something was missing. It was not just the semantic differences that led Gandhi search for a new term. It was something more. Bartolf observed that Gandhi wanted cultural autonomy - to look for a word in an Indian language that best described his motivations independent of the “western” conception of passive resistance. Bhikhu Parekh has written about this “cultural autonomy” in his book Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination.4 Mohammed Asif Kidwai in 1943 used the term “cultural autonomy” in a relevant topic, while addressing the issues of minorities in India.5 Richard G Fox from Duke University also used the term “cultural autonomy” to denote Gandhi’s motivations to rethink conventional notions and solutions of his time vis-à-vis the Western politics and notions.6 Gandhi himself used the term “cultural autonomy” during a later time, but during a different context. When the debate of linguistic creation of provinces arose, Gandhi was concerned that it might disrupt the national unity. He observed, “Cultural autonomy had been our watchword… But such re-distribution should not militate against the organic unity of India… Autonomy did not and should not mean disruption…”.7 Gandhi’s letter becomes very significant at one point, where he writes, “…passive resistance as understood and practised in the West…”. Through many of his speeches, editorials—and this letter in particular—it is clear that Gandhi had some notion of the West. Like any other thinker from a colonised world, he had an imagination of what the West meant, and what the West stood for. Gandhi grew up at a time when the colonial prism was the epistemic gateway to understanding India from outside. India was perceived in a very negative and patronising connotation—an uncivilised, exotic region. Ashis Nandy writes that Gandhi was one of the

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first few nationalist leaders who prevented their self-perception of India from being influenced by the British colonial stereotypes.8 However, the colonial representation of India was not the only image that the world constructed. Richard G. Fox in his essay “Gandhian Socialism and Hindu Nationalism: Cultural Domination in the World System” writes about a world system of cultural domination—“a single set of hegemonic cultural beliefs constructing identity and self-perceptions in all corners of the world”, that is, co-dependent of the colonial view of India, there was a cultural belief with an amalgamation of not only the negative stereotypes about India, but also the positive ones. This world system included the orientalist perspective of India by the Theosophical Society, Max Müller, and other external perspectives from people like Leo Tolstoy, etc., which were deeply influential among the Indian intelligentsia. Leo Tolstoy understood India not through reflections about its social fabrics which he had no access to, but through Vedas, Gita and Thirukkural, and suggested an emancipation philosophy of acknowledging the greatness within.9 The orientalist perspective had within very genuine intentions to view India independent from the supremacist narrative. However, the very displeasure of some orientalists towards the colonial, exploitative, industrial, racist, unjust and violent West skewed their construct of alternative knowledge systems away from the Truth, and they ended up patronising and even becoming undertone racist themselves. The colonial bias therefore was countered with an idealistic orientalist bias. The early documentation of the history and cultures of the Indian subcontinent invariably had these biases, but the Indian national movement legitimised the orientalist romanticisation of India as a response to British imperialism. Richard Fox writes, “Gandhian Socialism built cultural resistance by accepting the pejorative stereotypes of India encoded in the world system and making them affirmative: otherworldliness became spirituality; passiveness became passive non-violent resistance; absent national integration became the integrated consensual village community and the ‘oceanic circle’ of people’s democracy; insufficient individualism became altruistic trusteeship”. Like any other nationalism around the world, Gandhi’s territorial, inclusive and secular nationalism gave India a character. “She” had within herself a character, that had to be preserved to embark on a mission to realise the collective story of nation-building. The Gandhian project of national unity through the acknowledgement of diversity and shared colonial oppression was the

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most pragmatic national character that could be woven around India, given the complex history and tension it held within.10 Since the national consciousness can never escape from this orientalist ontology, we can see that the Gandhian perception of India can be incompatible with some of the subnational narratives. The Dravidian ideology in Tamil Nadu, for example, takes a different route in understanding the subcontinent by speaking of a different social history and a different narrative of cultural hegemony. The complex intermingling of knowledge within and outside India makes the ontologies difficult to arrive at a common ground, and hence ultimately results in the never ending argument about which is more influenced by “the West”, in order to claim legitimacy for both root and the route. When Gandhi says “regional autonomy did not and should not mean disruption of national unity”, he takes a nationalistic ideological position with a particular view of history. Bhikhu Parekh criticises that Gandhi misplaced the Indian cultural synthesis as a “uniquely Hindu achievement and a tribute to the Hindu spirit of tolerance”, and viewed the pre-Muslim India with a Hindu framework rather than as a “home of many different cultures, of which the dominant Hindu culture was but one”.11 The Gandhian empathy approaches its precarious limits here. However, my intention here is not to showcase the fallibility of the Gandhian vision. My argument, on the contrary, is that even while an ultra-inclusive Gandhian vision of India has compatibility issues with many sections of the Indian society, a story like Hindu R¯ a.s.tra is far more unrealistic.

Part II---the Myth of Bhat.t.oji D¯iks.ita In September 2019, I was fortunate to be present during an interaction between Pranav, a devoted lover of education, and Dr. Ananta Kumar Giri in Bengaluru. It was very inspiring to hear about Pranav’s thoughts, motivations and his fascination towards Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj. He narrated a myth that he collected during one of his travels—a myth about Bhat.t.oji D¯ıks.ita. Bhat.t.oji D¯ıks.ita was a seventeenth century Sanskrit scholar who authored Siddh¯ anta-Kaumud¯ı12 —a grammatical commentary on Panini’s As..t¯ adhy¯ ay¯ı, the grammar book. In one of the mythologies of the Hindu collective, there is a belief that if a scholar does not completely transfer or impart his knowledge before his death, or consciously hide a piece of knowledge from the world, he would be cursed to turn into a Brammar¯ aks.asa—a demon spirit that is stuck in the

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earthly realm. The myth of Bhat.t.oji D¯ıks.ita employs this belief to convey a profound story about what I interpret as the limitation to Truth and transfer of knowledge. Bhat.t.oji D¯ıks.ita imparted his vast knowledge to his disciples, but it so happened that he intentionally hid one knowledge to himself, and did not transfer it before his death. So, after his death, instead of leaving the earthly realm, he turned into a Brammar¯ aks.asa and lurked on the Earth. A century later, a philosophical conference was convened at K¯as.i. In that conference, a group of learned scholars had a heated debate over a philosophical question about Truth, but they could not arrive at a convincing answer. They deliberated for hours and hours, but were unable to come to any consensus, and the conference ended in an impasse. On the way back from the conference, a young scholar was walking away from K¯as.i, and he encountered a hill on the way. Pushed by an instinct, he took a detour and went atop the hill, and there he encountered Bhat.t.oji D¯ıks.ita in the form of the Brammar¯ aks.asa. Bhat.t.oji D¯ıks.ita claimed to the young scholar that he had an answer to the question that was deliberated at the conference, and proposed to transfer that knowledge to him. The young scholar agreed to his proposal and became his disciple. For the next one year, the young scholar stayed in that hill as Bhat.t.oji D¯ıks.ita’s disciple and learnt what he had to offer. After successfully imparting the knowledge that Bhat.t.oji D¯ıks.ita initially hid to himself, his curse was lifted and he attained liberation as he left the earthly realm. The following year, the conference was convened again, and the same question about Truth came under deliberation. In that forum, the young scholar presented the answer that Bhat.t.oji D¯ıks.ita taught him. As soon as he transferred that knowledge in that forum, every scholar present there got shocked, because that was the answer that everyone were waiting for. Intrigued by this enigma, the scholars asked him how he arrived at that answer. The young scholar replied that it was Bhat.t.oji D¯ıks.ita who taught him. As soon as they heard his name, the scholars became confused. “But Bhat.t.oji D¯ıks.ita died long back! How was this possible?” And, the myth ends. As soon as I heard this myth, it kindled a profound realisation about the fragility of memory. I felt that my narration of this myth in the future would invariably be inaccurate to some degree from the version I heard, as there would be some expressions lost in the transfer. However, the real beauty is that there are also some expressions that are gained in the transfer. I infer three points out of this myth.

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One, knowledge and experiences are highly unique and tailored to one’s own subjectivity. Assuming that humanity is a puzzle, Bhat.t.oji D¯ıks.ita had one of the pieces. So, every knowledge acquired by each and every human being on Earth is unique and inherently valuable— not equally valuable—irrespective of whether such knowledge is put to good use or bad use in the larger sense. Two, what happened in the myth cannot happen in reality. The knowledge that was lost, because Bhat.t.oji D¯ıks.ita failed to transfer in this story, is realistically lost forever. Therefore, loss of knowledge is irreversible. Three, I interpret the young scholar’s encounter with Bhat.t.oji D¯ıks.ita as a metaphor to us looking for the past, yearning to rediscover knowledge that we considered lost. However, we can never completely recover the knowledge about the past, since our interpretation of such knowledge will be based on our subjective understanding of reality, which was shaped by our perception of knowledge in the previous tiers. Our faith towards rediscovering history and optimism towards its contemporary relevance is important, as those are what drives us to discover our stories of identities. However, there must be an acknowledgement within that faith, that we cannot hope for a utopia in the past. It is indeed agreeable that the modernist notion of linear progression of human development is flawed, and that there are creative solutions to contemporary problems in alternate systems of knowledge across time. However, the phenomenon of damage and loss to such knowledge is also an integral part of its past, whether we like it or not. The myth of Bhat.t.oji D¯ıks.ita reveals the limitation of the ideological faith of one of the prominent movements of this century—Hindutva.

Part III---Muddled Roots and Diverse Routes of Reality Every knowledge that has been acquired so far by the human collective is inherently of a minimal value. They are products of complex structures of thinking evolved over the dialectic between various social, political, cultural and biological systems. It is no doubt that the era of imperialism resulted in sustained erosion of local systems of knowledge across the colonies, deeply muddling the existentialist structures like religion. It was a true catastrophe. However, constructing that it ravaged a pinnacle of human way of life is black-and-white catastrophisation that is deeply embedded with idealisation of societies in the Indian subcontinent.

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A significant amount of problems that contemporary Indian societies face has been existing even without the co-dependence on empires. The utmost faith about traditional knowledge systems being the panacea to all Indian problems and the utmost faith about a glorious past that was lost due to external invasions forms the bedrock of Hindutva vision. I understand the multiple dimensions of Hindu R¯ a.s.tra through various strands of thought—the intrinsic link between Sanatan Dharma and the Indian independence as put forth by Aurobindo in his earlier years,13 the intrinsic link between Sanatan Dharma and the territorial history of the Indian subcontinent as developed by V. D. Savarkar and later a.s.traas expanded by Golwalkar,14 and the Savarkarite vision of Hindu R¯ a polity to preserve Hindu culture from further political and cultural invasions, etc. The Hindutva project sees the British and the Mughals both as outsiders, and what they represented as ideally alien. However, it comes from an assumption of a homogenous value system that supposedly existed throughout the Indian subcontinent that was qualified to be considered as a single total unit; furthermore, that its influence pervaded the political and religious sphere of the entire length of breadth of the subcontinent. The canvas of a glorious Hindu past propounded by the proponents of Hindutva is unreachable, not only because it is impractical, but also because it is definitely far from Truth, irrespective of how false it is. Faith towards a utopian past, is more dangerous than the hope for a utopian future, because the utopian past not only demarcates the range of the past using false ideological history, but also delegitimises the memories of the innocent majority of the group it outcasts. This aggression especially manifests more in violent revolutions, a glimpse of which Gandhi sensed in London at the wake of the assassination of Curzon Wyllie by Madan Lal Dhingra in 1909,15 and was motivated to write his non-violent political programme, Hind Swaraj —with all the biases included, nevertheless. Gandhi indeed was not completely immune to the “Western” perception of India, and his very belief that India was radically different from the West calls back to the orientalist romanticisation of India. However, Gandhi from the very beginning clearly dismissed the Hindutvaite ideological history which reduced the history of the Indian subcontinent as the rise and fall of Sanatan Dharma. Gandhi refused to see Indian history as a cultural struggle like the crusade wars, and acknowledged the deep complexities and contributions from different religions across centuries. The Gandhian ontology of modern India thus began from

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the colonial exploitation that not only was deeply epistemic with recent memories, but also awarded equal value to all inhabitants of the subcontinent who equally deserved emancipation from the imperialist system. Gandhi’s interactions with Dadabhai Naoroji from South Africa in the 1890s and 1900s are deeply significant in the sense that he did not supplement any apocryphal lost memories to nurture a national consciousness, but politicised the reality of imperialist oppression that was indifferent to all religions in India.16 Therefore, his ideological position pleaded the national consciousness to go back no further than the British colonialism, and that any remnants of the distant memories about events that predated British colonialism was to be considered as a positive history of change and transformation that facilitated the present fraternal coexistence. This was everything against Hindutva. The idea of Hindu R¯ a.s.tra on the other hand was constructed in an ambition to not only give a national character to the land of Bharat, but also to give a national character to Hinduism and inextricably link it with Bharat, parallelly facilitating the continuation of religious integration that the Hindu renaissance movement initiated with the faith of restoring a glorious past. This positive orientalist understanding of the Indian subcontinent has planted an irreversible perspective about India that is not only far from Truth, but also embedded to it the risk of the rise of supremacist tendencies, which exactly happened. A fact worth noting here is that India is not the first victim to be affected because of the positive stereotype about India. Umberto Eco argues that the Aryan myth that emerged in the nineteenthcentury Germany was a “profoundly tragic” side effect of the discovery that Sanskrit was the Ursprache—the root language—of their language group.17 Here is a passage by the nineteenth-century linguist Adolphe Pictet that I found deeply disturbing, that illustrates how our obsession towards our roots and utmost conviction about its glory can end up disastrous beyond our sphere of good intentions: In an epoch prior to that of any historical witnesses, an epoch lost in the night of time, a race, destined by providence to one day rule the entire world, slowly grew in its primitive birthplace, a prelude to its brilliant future. […] Is it not perhaps curious to see the Aryas of Europe, after a separation of four or five thousand years, close the circle once again, reach their unknown brothers in India, dominate them, bring to them the

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elements of a superior civilization, and then to find ancient evidence of a common origin?18

Such presuppositions like the revelation of a destined race are found in Savarkar’s writings too. Thirty crores of people, with India for their basis of operation, for their Fatherland and for their Holyland with such a history behind them, bound togetherby ties of a common blood and common culture can dictate their terms to the wholeworld. A day will come when mankind will have to face the force.19

Not realising the complexity of history and the limitations to finding the Truth runs the risk of getting consumed by ideological fanaticism, in the sense that one begins to believe there would be a root cause, and not a complexity of diverse forces, that could be identified from history which should be essentially simple and straightforward, and which would seem to be “hidden to men’s eyes, provisionally inaccessible, sitting in the shadows, [just waiting] to be unveiled”20 as Michel Foucault put it. Such simplification of history and the romanticisation of Truth—supposedly hidden by historical forces and waiting to be discovered by those destined—muddles the very nature of that Truth. Therefore, our faith about our roots must be exercised cautiously. Perhaps, this is also where Gandhi’s obsession to transparency gains relevance vis-à-vis Truth. Gandhi was very transparent in his daily life, so much that he consciously wished to bridge the gap between personal and social life. This doesn’t mean bridging the personal identity with social identity, which is altogether different,21 but the individual personal experience as a part of the collective social experience. In this way, his importance to Truth vis-à-vis the transfer of knowledge pleads us to be conscious about our reality in the presence of hegemonic forces like imperialism, and romanticised, revivalist counter-forces like Hindu-puritanism. The unreconstructable memories of the lost past render it impossible to erect a Hindu R¯ a.s.tra on a deeply convoluted space where different ideological histories—flawed in its own right—exist simultaneously that are beyond explanation by a grand narrative. The Gandhian engagement with the Indian diversity, however, has scope for empathetic dialogue that is not backed by an uncompromising

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ideological roots, but by dynamic morality that has the courage to introspect the various routes of Indian reality and update its position on the institutions of violence. For example, Gandhi would be open to the argument that the independent State of India, which was born out of the resistance against colonialism, has all the potential to become a neocolonial authority by itself, since again the Gandhian idea of nationhood is not erected upon a grand ideological narrative with an ambition of permanence, but a dynamic flow of co-dependence between simple individuals. Therefore, unlike the idea of Hindu R¯ a.s.tra, the Gandhian ontology of India—despite suffering from the limits of inclusivity—is cautious of its muddled roots and not depreciative of its diverse routes of reality.

Conclusion For Michel Foucault, our very idea of knowledge is always under the influence of Power. He regarded that contrary to the conventional notion, Truth was not being approached through a series of continuous and cumulative endeavours of human scientific and creative activity, but through a set of grids that are kept one upon the other over the course of time, that simultaneously masks and reveals knowledge. [The collective and complex transformation of… understanding] is the suppression of a negativity, the effacement of an obstacle, the disappearance of prejudices, the abandonment of old myths, the retreat of irrational beliefs, and access finally freed to experience and to reason; it represents the application of an entirely new grille [grid], with its choices and exclusions; a new play with its own rules, decisions and limitations, with its own inner logic, its parameters and its blind alleys, all of which lead to the modification of the point of origin. And it is in this functioning that the understanding itself exists.22

That is, when we seek out for solutions to specific problems, our endeavour not only gets past the barricades of the unknown, but also simultaneously masks some of the existing knowledge, since our thoughts and biases arise out of our relation with the power systems. The positive stereotype of the orientalist perspective of India, and its acceptance by the intelligentsia of the Indian freedom movement, reveals the existence of a world system of cultural domination, whose strings are inescapable during our pursuit of Truth. A grid could mask an existing knowledge and reveal

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new knowledge, and another grid upon it unearths the hidden knowledge and masks further existing knowledge. New grids would get stacked one upon the other, performing the dance of hiding and revealing, forever keeping the Truth elusive. Bhat.t.oji D¯ıks.ita would never resurrect to offer Truth. The ideological historical puzzle could never be solved, let alone acknowledged of its existence in the first place. This should not discourage us from seeking the Truth, but rather should enable us to stay conscious of the pitfalls of ideological hatred. Especially in a diverse developing country like India, aggressively seeking muddled roots without indianising and humanising the diverse routes of reality has a price that not many have the heart to afford. I wish to end this essay with a poem by Kalyanji, truncated and translated from Tamil. Someone knocks this door - someone who hadn’t knocked it before. When someone who hadn’t knocked this door before, knocks it, This room becomes a whole new room that hadn’t existed before.23

Notes 1. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 19, p. 80, Young India, 8 December 1920. 2. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 6, 7. 3. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 16, p. 509. 4. Parekh, Bhikhu C. 1991. Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination, 211. Springer. 5. Kidwai, Mohammed Asif. 1943. A Scheme of Cultural Autonomy as a Solution of the Problem of Minorities in India. The Indian Journal of Political Science 5 (1): 75–79. 6. Fox, Richard. 1983. Gandhian Socialism and Hindu Nationalism: Cultural Domination and the World System. Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics XXV (3): 233–247. 7. MAHATMA—Life of Gandhi, 1869–1948—Chapter 13, India Liberated, 1947–1948, Reel 31. Refer GandhiServe Foundation. 8. Nandy, Ashis. 2009. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Oxford University Press. 9. Bartolf, Christian. 1997. Letter to a Hindoo: Taraknath Das, Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi. Berlin: Gandhi-Informations-Zentrum. 10. The convincibility of such an ambitious project is evident in the thoughts of Jawaharlal Nehru, a man who is regarded as someone deeply infatuated towards the West. “…The more I study the history of India, the more

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

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convinced I am about this. There are two things which immediately strike me. For thousands of years of her history, there has been some bond which has bound India together, though politically the country was often in fragments, ruled by different dynasties of rulers…”. Selected Works of Jawahar Lal Nehru—Series 2, vol. 20, p. 15. Nehru was already the Prime Minister of India during this time, carrying the burden of holding India intact and transferring this national character to the next generation of citizens. Parekh, Bhikhu C. 1989. Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination, 189–190. Basingstoke: Macmillan. It roughly translates to “the illumination of the established position”. Aurobindo Ghose, Uttarpara Speech. “Karmayogin”, June 1909. Golwalkar, Madhav S. 2015. Bunch of Thoughts. Print. Juergensmeyer, Mark. 2007. Gandhi vs. Terrorism. Daedalus 136 (1): 30–39. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 2, 3. Eco, Umberto. 1997. The Search for the Perfect Language, 104–105. London: Fontana Press. Print. Pictet, Adolphe. Les originesindo-européennesou les Aryasprimitifs, 1859– 1863: III, 537, cited in Olender, Maurice. 1989. Les langues du Paradis, 130–139. Paris: Gallimard-Seuil, cited in Eco, Umberto. 1997. The Search for the Perfect Language, 106. London: Fontana Press. Print. Savarkar, Vinayak D. 2003. Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu. New Delhi: Hindi Sahitya Sadan. Print. Chomsky, Noam, and Michel Foucault. 2006. The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature, 16. New York: New Press Distributed by W.W. Norton. See Pape, Robert A. 2005. Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. New York: Random House. Print. Chomsky, Noam, and Michel Foucault. 2006 The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature, 18. New York: New Press Distributed by W.W. Norton.

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CHAPTER 15

Roots, Routes and a New Awakening: Rupantara, a Transformative Intiative in Co-Learning and Training of Tribal Teachers of Odisha, India Mahendra Kumar Mishra

Prelude This article is the outcome of a home-grown movement for transforming the teachers serving in tribal areas of Odisha undertaken during 1997– 2003. The issue of connecting a historically marginalised culture and language with the state curriculum followed by the standard monocultural and monolingual nation-state ideology to make the teachers’ profession appropriate to millions of linguistic disadvantaged children of Odisha1 India. In this work, I have preferred to adopt the narrative historiography of the teachers (both tribal and non-tribal) serving in tribal areas to ‘educate’ the tribal children through a state curriculum in which the experiential knowledge and their communicative language were ignored. The gap was, of course, negating the identity of tribal children and tribal

M. K. Mishra (B) National Advisor, Language and Learning Foundation, New Delhi, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. K. Giri (ed.), Roots, Routes and a New Awakening, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7122-0_15

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teachers and ethically denying the appropriate professionalism of the nontribal teachers in context, thereby resulting in the obliteration of tribal identity and social creativity. Therefore the ‘knowledge’ and ‘language’ denied historically in the state curriculum was introduced in this movement by empowering the teachers with a transformative training through Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of dialogue and conscientisation, and fostering cultural regeneration among the teachers to understand the spirit of cultural democracy in school and classroom. Through this movement, education was not exclusively adopted as a discipline unconnected to sociocultural history, but to explore the ‘other realities’ of tribal communities, their cultural learning system to recognise in the state curricular system to bring a cultural regeneration. This draws inspiration from social thinkers and activists like Kishen Patnaik, Chitta Ranjan Das, and Radhamohana. Kishen Patnaik was a socialist leader; Chitta Ranjan Das was an educational activist, writer, and philosopher and Radhamohan, an environmental activist. Understanding the Ground Reality This article presents the narrative of a movement to affirm the linguistic, cultural identity of tribal communities in schools. Teachers explored their self as a combination of ecology, cultural democracy, and social justice to establish social creativity in which the cultural revitalisation of their communities could be made possible. The name of the programme was Rupantar which means transformation. Two generative words ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ were incubated in my mind to explore what were the roots of knowledge, language, and culture in tribal societies, and why these components were not a part of state curriculum and what are the trajectories that we came across to affirm the knowledge through a loving struggle. This movement was not to change the existing educational ideology in toto but to create a space for the teachers where their neglected knowledge, language, and culture can be recognised and the dominant systemic culture of exclusion and disrespect can be transformed.

Education in Tribal Areas The reality about the education of tribal children is not only limited to language but many other aspects around schooling, teachers’ professional development, preparation of instructional materials, tribal knowledge in

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the school curriculum, and transaction method of using more than one language in the classroom. The majority of parents of the tribal children are first-generation learners, and therefore, the tribal children did not have a learning atmosphere in the home. School, as an agency of state system, does not represent the language, culture, and experience of tribal children. A school is an unattractive place where the tribal children have little hopes of coping with classroom situations. The ethnic prejudices and social biases of the teachers and educational administrators about the tribal people are not favourable (Alcorn 2006: 62–63) besides, most of the teachers working in the tribal area are non-tribal and have several stereotypes, attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions on tribal communities. The monolingual teaching system and lack of knowledge on the tribal culture and society among teachers and their inability to relate to the sociocultural context and language of the children in classrooms are the main reasons for educational disadvantage in tribal area schools. Unfortunately, neither the education officers nor the teachers were vigilant about the realities of schooling in tribal areas, children’s backgrounds, needs, and interests, nor were they informed about the constitutional provision for a multicultural and multilingual education as envisioned by the makers of the nation. Social integration as a goal to be realised and mentioned in Kothari Commission was missing from the schools, and the objective defined at the national level is reduced to mere literacy in an unfamiliar language of children negating their language of learning in the classroom. When the non-literate people of this country had understood the meaning of freedom during the freedom movement, after five decades of independence, teachers in the classroom were unaware of the spirit of the educational goal of the nation. It indicates that most of the teachers were not aware of their ground realities and were mere agents of information delivery devoid of social awareness. After all, the tribal children were deprived of their educational opportunity for the deprivation they faced in the classroom. The state objective has not deprived the tribal children in providing opportunity. Still, the realities of the deprivation of tribal children were not explored as it should be explored in the academic domain. Somewhere the issue of educationally backward children was unresolved either due to lack of understanding of the realities or due to lack of a strategy to overcome this issue since, in Indian situations, such matters had not been resolved, and a successful model was yet to be showcased. However, when DPEP (District Primary

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Education Program), a centrally sponsored programme of the Government of India was introduced in the state in 1996, the issue of educating the tribal children gained a significant focus for which the appropriate strategies necessary for the tribal children were planned. It is essential to understand the realities of the teachers serving in tribal areas and to resolve the issues with them. Two critical areas were addressed. One is the attitude of tribal area teachers on teaching and learning in a given context. Another is the professional development of teachers to teach the children whose mother tongue is different from the medium of instruction in schools. These two points led to the related areas of discussion like child-appropriate curriculum and medium of education in schools. First of all, it would be essential to discuss the attitude and belief of teachers in tribal areas, because about eighty per cent teachers were non-tribal serving in tribal areas and their cultural attitude towards the children, language, culture, and society of tribal communities were contributory factors for the smooth education of tribal children.

The Question of Attitude The reasons for better performance or failure can be attributed to the social role played by a teacher inside the classroom besides his academic position. The interpersonal relation, despite cultural differences between children and teachers, along with his ‘self’ in a sociocultural situation, determines the teaching–learning act. If the teacher comes with their prior stereotypes about the tribal children reflected in the attitude, behaviour in the classroom, then the teaching activity is not free from discrimination. The ethnic superiority of the teacher’s perspective to culture and language and people was an act of information delivery in context-free curricular activities where the children’s experience, knowledge, or the lifeworld was deliberately ignored. In Indian Ashram Schools also, the trend of such stereotypes was visible. Caste was the marker of social status in schools, either the teacher or children. Tribal, Dalits, and female teachers were also were the victim of such ethnic stereotypes, and teachers from upper caste and class were knowingly or unknowingly showing their supremacy over these social classes. If the teacher’s community had the divide of social studies based on race and gender, what about the children of disadvantaged classes whose parents were either hated or exploited in the social sphere. In the celebration of sacred worship, teachers from the upper caste were keeping a safe distance, and they were not taking food together.

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Distribution of food in Ashram Schools was also made by the Adivasi students and helpers and Dalits were not involved in the mass kitchen. Dalit teachers had to take water from a separate pitcher in schools, and children from higher castes were not offering a glass of water to teachers belonging to the Dalit community. In post-independent education, there have been little emphasis on fostering a cultural democracy (Darder 2012: 102) in schools making the teacher sensitive to the sociocultural environment of tribal/Dalit and girl children and understand their background, interest, and need. In a democratic education, the social consciousness emerges from the social realities by examining the equality of access and opportunity to all, irrespective of caste, class, and gender. Indian society continues to maintain its social solidarity despite the multiculturalism and multilingualism in the social sphere. Still, in the educational sphere, the standard uniform curriculum does not touch upon the in-depth social mechanism assuming that the schools will maintain national integration as an agency of the state, and society will maintain social integration in the social sphere (Kothari Commission 1968). Advocates of standard monocultural and monolingual ideology ignore the sociocultural and linguistic context of children. Children from the low socio-economic background with illiteracy fall prey to social discrimination, which is against social justice. Therefore, training teachers of tribal areas aimed at making the teachers rethink their traditional teaching practices and question their beliefs and assumptions and to remove these make beliefs and transform theme to understand the sociocultural situation and make them rethink on their self to act as a reformer than information givers. Teachers teaching in tribal areas must possess a healthy attitude towards tribal culture, life, language, and children. Unless the ethnic stereotypes of teachers are changed, and a new vision towards tribal children and culture is developed, a mere context-free content-based teaching-learning process will not serve the purpose. Paulo Freire, in his critical pedagogy, has suggested four pillars of any training. These are a. Education means a critical understanding of reality b. Education means making a commitment to utopia and changing reality c. Education means training those who will make this change

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d. Education means dialogue (Cacarrillo 2007: 30). Looking at the existing educational scenario of Odisha from the lens of Freire, an attempt was made to understand the situation. The state education system is democratic, but the adoption of a standard monolingual ideology contradicts the objectives of equity in education. Sensitising the teachers on each of the attitudinal objects (language, children, culture, and values) and analyse the implications of teacher–pupil interaction in the classroom have a severe impact on transactional strategies. Next, discover the unexplored potentials of tribal knowledge and Orissa initiated its first strategy, i.e., it to train tribal area teachers on attitudinal issues. For this, 29 blocks from a total of 53 blocks were selected from DPEP districts of Kalahandi, Rayagada, Gajapati, and Bolangir in the first step. The selection of Block was made based on their population from 45 per cent to 80 per cent. The idea of this training was experimental in a three-day workshop entitled ‘Identification of training needs of tribal area teachers’2 held between 28 and 30 April 1997 at Regional Institute of Education, Bhubaneswar. Teachers from tribal districts participated in this workshop. There were tribal teachers, but most of the term, nontribal with a robust tribal bias. The attitudinal assessment formats were distributed to the participants to assess their attitudes towards tribal children, tribal language and environment, and developmental mathematics. Through dialogues, discussions, and group work, individual attitudes were studied and consolidated. This workshop served as an eye-opener and brought to the fore specific problems that had to be dealt with in the course of the training. A workshop in July 1997 on ‘Preparation of Teachers Training Module for Tribal Area Teachers’ was organised at the state project office, Bhubaneswar. The participants in this workshop consisted of teachers who had earlier attended the April 1997 workshop along with teachers for DPEP Districts. In this workshop, the training module for attitudinal training was finalised, based on the requirements of the teachers. A group of experts on tribal education shared their expertise and knowledge with the teachers and helped to identify certain grey areas on which the training should focus. The modules finalised constituted of a fourday session plan to address the attitudinal, sociocultural problem among teachers teaching in tribal areas. The training content covered topics like

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understanding the tribal children and explore their sociocultural environment from which they experience knowledge. Children’s local knowledge, children’s folklore, play, an oral tradition which shapes the knowledge and language repertoire of the children inherited from the elders was incorporated in the training module. The cultural methods of learning in the villages were also the topic for discussion. Besides this, they know the hopes and aspirations, as well as the fears and apprehensions of tribal children before coming to school, were also discussed in training.

Learning a Language in Home and School The next topic was to know the process of language learning from the social context and at home and the school. The purpose was to discover the reasons as to why children from the social context use local folk tales, stories, riddles for language learning, and how these tales and songs are instrumental to the teaching of oral language in a complex sociocultural context. Additionally, how language learned in the classroom was also a part of it to compare how both the ways of learning have either a connection or not.

Gender Role in Tribal Society and Schools The next topic was to understand the gender role of tribal boys and girls practice in their homes and schools. The final sessions were about exploring the strength of tribal community and their socio-religious function of culture in a tribal society where the community create, share, and transform culture in their everyday life. Another factor was to explore that despite the multicultural and multilingual nature of society how the people maintain the diversities and do not confront but complement each other and maintain composite culture. It was necessary to understand how local knowledge could be used in the classrooms. The questions were to understand the ways of using local knowledge for classroom teaching and the methods in which village can be made a living classroom for a tribal child; the relevance of fairs, festivals, and other sociocultural activities for classroom teaching. The comparison of child-centred learning processes with the traditional learning process in primary school was also discussed to know the methods of learning at home and school.

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Understanding Tribal Children Some critical questions to explore the realities of schools in tribal areas were developed. These are 1. What do the tribal children know before coming to the school? 2. What do the tribal children like or dislike? What are their hopes and aspirations before coming to school? 3. What are the language learning resources in oral tradition that empowers the children with local knowledge? 4. How is the spoken language/mother tongue helpful in learning in tribal area schools? 5. Do the current textbooks reflect the tribal culture? If no, then what kinds of textbooks are needed where a majority of tribals are monolingual, e.g., Saura and Kuvi. The outcome was revealing since the majority of teachers expressed that tribal children have a lot of fear and apprehension in the classroom due to the negative attitude of teachers. The unfamiliar language and content of the curriculum and textbook also contribute to the low achievement of tribal children since the teaching is not useful to children since they do not understand the language of instruction or the textbook.

Potentialities of Tribal Language Another session was about the tribal language and its potential to use them in the teaching-learning process. Like other languages, tribal languages have also had their natural structure, function, and identity. Some teachers were not ready to accept that using tribal language in the classroom would develop children’s self-confidence and self-recognition. Teachers were not prepared to take it since they were the employees of state monolingual education system where education aimed to enable the children primarily to learn read and write, not meaningful learning. Teachers discussed tribal language on the following questions: I. If there is a difference in home language and school language, what strategy could be adopted? Should the school force the child to use a language that is unknown to her, or should it adopt a bilingual model?

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II. Does the teacher have to learn the tribal language to teach tribal children? If so, should the non-tribal teacher be trained on tribal languages? III. Would it do justice to leave tribal children in the hands of nontribal teachers teaching them non-contextual textbooks? The workshops were first of its kind to involve teachers from tribal areas to take part in the state capital. Many educators and educational administrators were curious and questioned about the relevance of such workshops, which, in their opinion, could be divisive and pejorative to mainstream tribal children. The training objective of tribal area teachers was decided based on the above themes: 1. To assess the attitude of teachers towards tribal children as learners and also as a cultural group on issues and themes like language, culture, children, parents, and teaching methods. 2. Identify the current social bias, which stands against tribal education and its reflection in the textbook and transactional strategies. 3. Examine the beliefs, assumptions, and stereotypes of the teachers about tribal children and their culture and make them examine these beliefs and assumptions. 4. To acknowledge that it is not the tribal child, instead of the school and the classroom transactions, which create problems in the growth of the tribal children and learning outcomes. 5. To make the teacher non-judgemental, less ethnocentric and dismissive. 6. (a) To tune the school and the teacher towards identifying the potentials of tribal children to know how the tribal children learn in their social atmosphere. (b) To understand and make use of the tribal language, culture, and customs in the learning processes of the children. 7. Identify strategies to link the language resources of tribal children with the medium of instruction at school and to know the process in which a child learns language. 8. Develop basic approaches towards language, arithmetic, Environment Science, using the knowledge base from the natural and cultural environment of tribal children.

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9. To make use of tribal folklore in the learning process to make the classroom contextual (in language, EVS, and arithmetic). 10. Identify the concepts, skills, information, attitudes required by the teachers to understand and make the school suitable for tribal children.

Training Outcome Teachers after a discussion in the group revealed that a child’s mind is not like on the empty slate since she already knows many things before coming to school. He knows about his village, identifies his family members and friends, knows his relative’s uncle, aunt, grandfather, grandmother, etc. He knows the news of birds and animals, identifies wild animals from domestic’s animals, and knows the village fairs and festivals, knows how to make small objects and household work. Distinguish between what can be eaten and what cannot be. They know specific selfdefence mechanisms. They see many words and can communicate their ideas in their dialect or language. They have some knowledge of mathematics like preliminary counting, concepts like big and small, far and near, short and tall, thick and thin. In environmental science, they learn the image of colour, shape, distinguish between different sizes, identify objects, classification of skills, and knowledge of their sociocultural environment, have a concept of time, possess spatial skills, and have a sense of direction. This discussion made the teachers aware that a tribal child is not an empty brain, and he already knows many things from his local context and environment. If the everyday life experience of the children is linked up with the textbooks in the language and knowledge of the children, they can learn better associating their experience with the text that is taught. The teacher plays a significant role in the tribal village. He has to have a healthy attitude towards tribal culture, language, customs, and people. No culture is inferior or superior. Therefore the teacher has to understand the strength of tribal society, its rich cultural heritage, which his embedded in its folk tales, local knowledge, customs, and traditions. Since the majority of the tribal are illiterate and impoverished, they do not understand the purpose of learning; the teacher plays an essential role in generating interest towards education in the minds of tribal children. He has to work along with the parents, peers, and community.

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How Children Learn The session about how children learn was to discuss the learning potentialities of the children from their cultural world. They have cultural methods of learning and teaching. Their elders help the children to learn from productive behaviour. There is no such activity that is nonproductive for either the child or the elders. Their learning is intergenerational. After the discussion, the teachers revealed that the community is a stockroom of productive knowledge. They participate in the socioeconomic activity in their everyday life, and thereby they learn their ecology. They take part in various social and religious functions and learn about social customs. They know from village fairs and festivals, dramas, plays, oral tradition, dance, and music. Children learn by apprenticeship in necessary activities that are required in their everyday life. Catching fish or collecting leaves or firewood, leaves or mushrooms teach them how to learn it. They do not undergo any session for catching fish or selecting the fruits. Their methods of learning are simple observation while working as well as through their survival instincts. Unlike non-tribal children who are cut away from nature and rely on textbooks for information, a tribal child is exposed to a whole gamut of experiences from which he learns, with a productive purpose and meaning. How did all these findings emerge from the teachers serving in tribal areas? Irrespective of tribal or non-tribal, they voluntarily narrated the strength and potentials of the tribal children in the workshop. Still, it is surprising to know that they had never thought about the experiential knowledge, needs, and resources of tribal children before this workshop. It means teachers unconsciously came across the nature of the strength of the tribal children and were unaware of it since they had no necessity to think about the tribal children. Assuming the grand theory of all children are equal in the eyes of a teacher, they were teaching the children. It revealed that the state curriculum was not prepared to distinguish the learning need of tribal children compared to non-tribal students. No doubt, language played a significant role in making the non-tribal children successful in achieving their learning scores. What about the tribal children who have been historically marginalised and endured to an unfamiliar language in the classroom? It is not fair to blame the tribal area teachers without empowering them.

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Community Knowledge To make the teachers believe that community knowledge has equal cognitive ability, and can be a good written text in the classroom, an African folktale, ‘The Crocodile and Hen’ was presented before the teachers [Please see the box below for the story]. It was an oral tale. The Crocodile and the Hen A hen felt thirsty and went to a nearby river to drink some water and quench her thirst. She reached the river and while about to drink the water; suddenly a crocodile appeared before her and told, I will eat you. The hen was afraid, but mustering courage, she replied, brother, I am your sister, being my brother how you can eat me? Listening to this, the crocodile was puzzled and left the hen to go. Another day the hen appeared in the river to drink water. That day, the crocodile made up his mind to ear the hen. When the crocodile said the hen, today I will eat you. The hen, with an act of courage and love, said, brother that day I had told you, I am your sister, being my brother how you can think of eating me? Being perplexed, the crocodile let her allowed to go. He was unable to understand the puzzle, how the hen became his sister? Meanwhile, a reptile appeared before him and said, good evening, brother, what is the matter? Why are you looking worried? The crocodile said, oh you have come, tell me how the hen became my sister. He narrated the even to the reptile. Listening to this, the reptile laugh and said, O, this is a silly question. You and hen, both are born of an egg, and therefore you are brother and sister. The crocodile nodded his head and said, O yes, I did not know that. Since then, the crocodile does not eat the hen.

When the teacher discussed forming four groups to elicit how the story could be taught to learn language, arithmetic, environmental science and values, and morals, teachers separately analysed their pedagogical implications in different subjects. Teachers expressed that they had no such idea that an oral story from an unlettered community could be a part of a teaching lesson. The attitude of what is written is a text, and unwritten is not broke, and they knew that any item of culture could be a good lesson provided it is familiar to the children in their language. A child

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has to be able to link all that he learns to a particular context. Stories are drawn from the local context and culture often stirs the imagination of the child, and when she can associate himself with the story, she can learn intimately. Learning, therefore, has to be holistic. The teacher has to be a facilitator in the learning process. Teaching should not be disjointed, and the subject matter should be such that learning is holistic. The teacher has to use stories to teach the children inside the class. Since children are very familiar with riddles, they can be used while learning lessons. The class becomes lively and exciting, makes the child active and imaginative. Riddles can be drawn from everyday lives, folk tales, and stories and can be used to teach language, numerical, and even environmental science (Mishra 2016, 73–74). Sukru’s life in the village (a Case Study) was given to the teachers to analyse Sukru’s daily life and make a list of what a tribal child likes and does not like. After the analysis, teachers revealed that Sukru takes the cattle out for grazing, gathering fruits, vegetables, herbs, shrubs, collect firewood from the forest, help parents at home and in the field, play games, marbles, etc., with friends, love dancing, singing, music, fishing, hunting for birds and animals, looking at pictures in the books, enjoy in village fairs, festivals, and other ceremonies. The dislikes of Sukru is sitting 6 hours in the classroom without any activity, spend a confused and meaningless time with the teachers, words whose meaning he cannot understand, pronouncing harsh words, most difficult is reading and writing. Fear of asking which he does not know

How Language Is Learned at Home and How Language Is Learned at School To delve further into the question of how a child learns at home and in the school. How is it that at the house he picks up words fast and frames sentences, while in the school he is unable to do? Teachers discussed and inferred that a child could learn faster at home than in the school because the process of learning differs significantly at home and school. The language used in the book is out of context, and the children are unable to relate to the world of books. The teachers often do not know the local counterpart of the Oriya words used in the book; as a result, the explanation becomes difficult. If the children were explained the meaning of the terms used in the books in their local dialect and by

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drawing examples from the local context, they would be able to understand and also link their learning to what they see and observe in their daily life and surroundings. What is important is that language learning should be a by-product of game, role play, conversations, and storytelling. Songs, riddles. Language should not be understood only as grammar. The oral tradition of the village children should be used in learning a language in the classroom. Stress should, therefore, be the use of songs, tales, riddles, and rhymes.

Learning Language from the Social Context The discussion was about the learning process in a village where there is no school. Can there be learning or education without school? If the response is yes, then what kind of knowledge do the people practice and over to their younger. Further, if the community resolves that there is learning potential in their language resources; could these resources be used in the classroom to learn a language? Teachers through group works came up with a lot of tales, songs, riddles, proverbs, and play sings with the principles of the game from their folklore practices in the villages. They also recalled that they were using these items of folklore in their childhood, and even now, children in villages used to playing and singing these items. A story entitled ‘why the crocodile does not eat the hen?’ was discussed, and teachers were asked if there is any learning potential in the tale? Teachers initially were not analysing the story from different viewpoints except telling the tale and retelling the stories as a marker of their memorisation. However, when the story was discussed critically, they were curious about the way the story was analysed. A community story is a complete integrated knowledge embedded in its content and language with deep meaning. School subjects like language and arithmetic’s of the environment is a part of such stories.

Gender and Tribal Community Problems of Tribal girl children and strategies to remove them. 1. To find out the attitudes of parents and teachers towards tribal girl children both in the social and school context. 2. To evolve strategies to remove the biases from society and school.

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3. To innovate some activities through which the teachers can create a healthy atmosphere to improve the access and retention levels of tribal girl children. The outcome of the discussion in the workshop was: 1. In a tribal society, gender forms the basis of division of labour. 2. The distinction based on the division of labour is visible in all spheres of life at home, in the field, at work, in the market place. 3. Just as gender bias is present in society, it is also apparent in the teacher’s behaviour towards the boys and girls in the classroom situation, for example. Girls are made to sit separately, the role assigned to girl children is akin to the role played by them at home, they are asked to clean the classroom, wash the floor, wash utensils after meals, draw water from wells, and so on. The teachers do not lay any stress on girl’s education, and they are frequently promoted without any proper evaluation of their performance. To make the teachers realise that the education of the girl children is essential and necessary. To think of ways in which they, along with parents and peer groups, can help remove some of the age-old gender biases and disparity existing in the society. To know the sociocultural life of the tribal. • To understand the characteristics and uniqueness of tribal culture and way of life. • To discuss the positive qualities such as conservation of nature, shared understanding of life, community belongingness, gender equity in tribal society, recognition of individuals in the group. • To find out the factors responsible for the backwardness of tribal.

Findings 1. The tribal society is based on community living, and it is reflected in their socio-economic, religious, and cultural life. 2. The village headman plays a vital role in the tribal village. He represents the welfare of the village and its peoples.

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3. Women enjoy a high status in the tribal community in comparison to non-tribal society. She is more responsible, rational, and pragmatic. 4. Most of the tribal parents are non-literate and, therefore, do not realise the importance of education in their day-to-day life. Parents feel that their economic well-being is disturbed if children go to school, as they can no longer serve as helping hands at home or in the fields. 5. Parents feel that the school belongs to the teachers or government and do not identify themselves with it 6. The value systems inherent in tribal society. – – – – – – – – –

Community belongingness. Concept of gender equity and parity. A shared understanding of life. Integrated worldview with nature and religion. Their sense of valour and bravery. Lack of concepts like dowry and treachery. Believe on hard work and dignity of labour. Minimum use of natural resources. The storytellers, singers, musicians, and artisans play a significant role in the tribal village and life. They can be used mediums for imparting education in the school beyond the school hours.

This programme wanted to sensitise the teachers on the richness of tribal culture and way of life. To make them think of ways in which they can incorporate elements from their sociocultural life into classroom teaching and transaction.

Knowing the Role of Village Fairs and Festivals The objective of this activity was to make the teachers realise the social function of fairs and festivals and make the children aware of their roles in the social life of the village. Each teacher group prepared a detailed list of the festivals observed in their village. The findings of this group activity were to accustom the teachers to identify different functions, of fairs, festivals held in the village, and make use of this knowledge in the classroom to teach and make them think of ways in which these fairs and festivals maintain social solidarity and group identity.

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Reflections After the training, the teachers were a lot enlightened because, for the first time, they questioned their own beliefs and values, which they often took for granted. They realised that apart from newer and better methods of making learning more enjoyable, it was vital for them to understand the mind of tribal children and study the world in their eyes. All the questions raised in the workshop were related to their involvement with the children, parents, community, and tribal culture, not the content or transactional activities in the classroom. Instead of confining themselves to the textbook, teachers developed an insight into the world around them. They were made to realise that the geography and natural environment of the village is the science, the older men of the village are the history, folklore is their language, and expressive tradition and the realities of their life is their day-to-day arithmetic. They felt the importance of informal learning and understood how a child’s creativity takes shape from informal learning mechanisms. The teachers self-introspected their behaviours and attitudes and realised the effect it can have on one child’s psychology. The school, belonging to the children, had to be a place where children come to learn out of love and not by fear and compulsion. It was the moral and human duty of the teachers, therefore, to create an atmosphere of learning and help generate interest in education among the children. The most important outcome of the programme is formation of solidarity between the tribes and understands their intertribal relation. For instance, Linguists divide the tribes of Odisha into Austro Asiatic, Dravidian, and Indo-Aryan language family. Scheduled tribes from all these families live together and interact with their linguistic and cultural funds of knowledge following an integrated worldview, faith, and belief. The tribes of Odisha living in rural areas don’t know that they are belonging to a certain language family and they are unaware about their linguistic and cultural affinity with other tribes. For instance, the Saora in South Odisha belongs to Southern Mundari language family and the Santal, the Munda and the Juang are belonging to northern Mundari language family. Neither the Saora nor the Santali has ever thought that they have common roots of origin and their routes of migration from one place to the other are a historical reality. In Odisha the Saora cultural primer for children was prepared and the Saora teachers were deputed to north Odisha to provide their academic support to the Santali, the Munda and the Juang communities for preparation of primer for their children.

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While interacting the Saora teachers were astonished that the structure, function of the Santali language has striking resemblance with that of the Saora language. The sentence structure, vocabulary, and speech pattern was similar to Saora language. Tribes from the Mundari language family had not even thought that in ancient time, they had a common root of origin and in course of time they have migrated to other places. Interestingly the Korku community of Madhya Pradesh are also belonging to central Mundari language family and have very similar sentence structure and vocabulary as compared to the Saora. Not only this, the Gond and the Kondh of South western Odisha also belong to a common stock of origin, but they do not know about it. The point here is to understand and explore the connectivity of these tribes as a language family can bring solidarity. Similarly the coexistence of non-tribal communities with the tribes also constitutes a speech community for their socio-economic reason, and their linguistic and cultural reciprocity has given a sense of belongingness to share their linguistic resources in a given place. Our modern development paradigm has secluded the social solidarity of the scheduled tribes in one term “adibasi”: which submerge the diversities of culture and language. Diversity does not mean to see a tribe in isolation or isolate them from the other social groups. In fact multilingualism is a reality in all societies, so with the tribes. The interaction of different tribal groups living together in a given environment has helped them to realise that discovering the roots of one’s language and identity also brings one to the routes of other languages and identities.

Follow-up and Sustainability From November 1997 to December 1997 teachers, training was organised in 29 blocks of 4 DPEP districts of Bolangir, Gajapati, Kalahandi and Rayagada. 125 Resource persons trained a total of 3200 teachers through 80 programmes. After the training, the teacher’s perception in the classroom was exploratory and optimistic. They started exploring the inherent potential of tribal children. They also believe that knowledge imparted in school textbooks is not compatible with the tribal children’s experiential learning. Teachers who had undergone the training on language and culture demanded books in the tribal language. They demanded

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that when the children are not provided with the text from their environment, and if the language they know is not introduced, how the child-centered learning can take place and how the teachers can teach. The next step of the state was to listen to the claim of teachers to fulfil the learning need of children, i.e., preparation of classroom materials in tribal languages.

Conclusion As the learning and training movement went on, the teachers and the state system could realise that this journey helps in realising the promise of equality and cultural and linguistic diversity in Constitution of India. This movement broke the culture of silence of teachers to become a responsible citizen to maintain cultural democracy. They developed self-realisation and self-responsibility to understand the realities and their moral role to play for the most marginalised children who were in linguistic and cultural deprivation. This movement enabled teachers, students, and all concerned to discover and regenerate their roots of language, knowledge, and identity and have a new awakening of their significance. It also created a dialogue among multiple roots and discovers the significance of cross-cutting routes for example bringing African folklore and Odisha tribal folklores together. It helped the educational establishment of Odisha to go deeper to routes of languages and cultures of tribal children and create a new awakening among tribal, non-tribal teachers, tribal and non-tribal children and concerned parents and administrators to rediscover our roots of multiples languages and identities and creatively relate these to criss-crossing routes of learning, co-becoming, and co-realisations.

Notes 1. Odisha, a state in eastern India has 64 scheduled tribes constituting onefourth of the tribal population of the state population. There are 17 districts with more than 50% scheduled tribes constituting distinct ethnolinguistic feature. The medium of instruction in the state is Odia, for which about 1.7 million children face learning difficulties in the classroom. 2. This essay builds on the report of the workshop ‘Identification of Training Needs of Tribal Area Teachers’ in 1997. This was conceived by the author in consultation with Professor Minati Panda of Jawaharlal University, New Delhi and with participation of Professors Chittaranjan Das and

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Radhamohan as resource persons. This workshop was first of its kind to question the authenticity of state curriculum in tribal areas and based on the need of the teachers training programme was designed which was well accepted and disseminated in all the districts of Odisha over seven years (1997–2003). To make this programme officially valid, Dr Dhir Jhingran, the Ex-Director of Elementary Education and Literacy, Ministry of Human Development Department, Government of India had provided his unconditional support to bring a transformation in teacher education. I am thankful to him and Prof Minati Panda. As a lifelong practitioner of indigenous education, I have served in the field, and my learning is enriched from the ground realities. I am thankful to Dr Ananta Kumar Giri for encouraging me to write this article to explore the realities from the praxis of teachers.

References Alcorn, Laurel. 2006. Indigenous Education at Crossroad, James Bay Cree and the Tribal People of Odisha. Bhubaneswar: Siksha Sandhan. Cacarrillo, Alfonso Torres. 2007. Paulo Freire and Education Popular. Adult Education and Development 69. Bonn, DVV International. Darder, Antonia. 2012. Culture and Power in the Classroom, Educational Foundation for the Schooling of Bicultural Students. London: Paradigm Publishers. Kothari Commission Report. 1968. Report on Education. Government of India. Mishra, M. K. 2016. Multilingual Education in Orissa, India, Constructing Curriculum in the Context of Community and Culture. In Multilingual Education in India, ed. Mahendra K. Mishra and Anand Mahanandia. New Delhi: Viva Books.

CHAPTER 16

Roots and Routes and the Origins of Urban Theory: A Journey to “Stadtluft Macht Frei” Johannes Dragsbaek Schmidt

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe Karl Marx Nothing will be done any more without the whole world being involved Paul Valery You gentlemen perhaps think I am mad? Allow me to defend myself. I agree that man is preeminently a creative animal, predestined to consciously strive toward a goal, and to engage in engineering, that is, eternally and incessantly, to build new roads, wherever they may lead…. Man loves to create roads, ~that is beyond dispute. But… may it not be…. that he is instinctively afraid of attaining his goal and completing the edifice he is constructing~? How do you know, perhaps he only likes that edifice from

J. D. Schmidt (B) Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Copenhagen, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. K. Giri (ed.), Roots, Routes and a New Awakening, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7122-0_16

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a distance and not at all at a close range, perhaps he only likes to build it, and does not want to live in it Fyodor Dostoevski

Invitation and Introduction According to statistics from the multilateral institutions the bulk of the populations in the developing countries now live in urban areas. It is also true, at least in most Third World countries, that eradication of differentials in income levels and access to services between the urban and rural populations forms an important priority in development planning. However recent trends challenge this truism. The growth of the urban population is accelerating so quickly that approximately 55% of the global population in 2020 live in urban areas and some estimates claim that twothirds of the world’s population may be urban in 2050 (UN 2018). By 2045, the number of people living in cities will increase by 1.5 times to six billion, adding two billion more urban residents. More than 80% of global GDP is generated in cities (World Bank 2020), implying that social well-being and the sense of uprootness and “occupying no space” felt by many rural migrants seems to challenge the time-space compression and “distanciation” formulated by David Harvey (1990). Even in the United States more than 46 million people live below the poverty line most of them live in urban spaces denoting an urgency in understanding the implications. New projections are even more alarming. In the two most urbanized regions, Latin America and Europe/Central Asia, over half of the poor live in urban areas. By 2025, two-thirds of the poor in these regions, and one-third to one-half of the poor in East and South Asia, will reside in cities and towns. Even if the rural and agricultural programs currently being implemented are successful, they will have little immediate impact on changing the pace and direction of urbanization. Mechanization and increased agricultural productivity have so far led to surplus labor from rural areas and promoted migration from rural to urban areas. This process has lead to the general assumption that policies emphasizing public investment in the rural sector are often advocated as an alternative to the provision of basic needs within cities by governments which encourage rapid migration from rural to urban areas, but there is very little evidence to suggest that rural development retards urbanization.

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These combined trends present a challenge to contemporary social sciences, and as the following intends to illuminate urbanization per se has always played an important, but unsolved and non-agreeable role in various competing theories, methodologies, and conceptualizations. Which factors and determinants lead to urbanization and which retard this process is the point of departure of this inquiry? In various ways, the assumptions of the major schools of thought in Western social science theories have influenced most areas of study of cities and their relationship with society as a whole. These areas of study have been, (1) the role played by cities in the emergence of civilization; (2) analysis of the sociological characteristics of the city; (3) the internal ecological structure of cities; and (4) the study of the spatial organization of society and especially of systems and settlements. However, it remains an open question whether those theories are useful in a Third World context and hence how urban bias as a prerequisite for development is linked to development theory?

The Roots of Urban History of Ideas As is well known, concern with the “polis” stood at the center of political philosophy in ancient Greece where philosophers conceived the “polis” as the highest form of social life and the one best suited for the realization of an ideal society. Both Plato and Aristotle sought a formula for achieving the perfect city-state, Plato by means of a rigid system of laws and Aristotle by analyzing different types of city-states, their institutions, and social structures. Later on many social philosophers went beyond this search and attempted to analyze the actual changes in cities and their functions in various civilizations. Among these was the Egyptian philosopher and historian Ibn Khaldun (fourteenth century). The focal point of his comprehensive historical analysis of the rise and fall of Islamic regimes was the city. In the early period before and after industrialization, different approaches appeared sharing the belief that there is a specific “urban” form of social life as distinct from the “rural” forms. Above all, these theories sought in a historical perspective to analyze either the specific types of social and cultural creativity characteristic of cities or the cities as loci of such creativity.

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With the rise of Western social science, the city and its place in society became a central part of social science analysis and played an important role in the comparative analysis of societies and their evolution. Subsequently, two types of study of cities evolved: one focusing on the close connections with the general concerns of the classical period of modern sociology and deep influences by the more implicit but strong analytical assumptions prevalent in this classical period. This perspective was bequeathed to the second type—later generations of scholars—who developed the study of urban structures and forms as a specialization within their respective disciplines. The analysis of cities has often been closely related to a comparative evolutionary study of civilizations, which postulates a continuous development of the city from a simple community, in which the urban element is weak, to more advanced societies, in which this element is much stronger and differentiated from the rural element. Such evolutionary “modern” approaches have usually assumed that different modes of social division of labor provide the best explanation for variations in the institutional structure of different societies. These modes of social division of labor are defined in terms of social differentiation and specialization developing from Durkheim’s mechanical to organic solidarity and are mainly shaped by the development of technology and demographic processes (Eisenstadt and Shachar 1987: 24). We may briefly recall that Adam Smith in “Wealth of Nations” expressed the belief that “Cities, instead of being the effect, have been the cause and occasion of the improvement and cultivation of the country” (Gutkind in Ansari and Nas 1983: 22). To Thomas Malthus the smile of the Almighty hid behind a more frowning providence. To Thomas Malthus the smile of the Almighty hid behind a more frowning providence though it was a more grimly Parsonical. Just as his estimate of the means of subsistence was limited by his experience of the village economy, so his fears of man’s unchecked procreativity was born out by his observations of rustic society. Malthus had apparently modified his opinion by stressing, as Smith had done, the interdependence of rural and urban occupations and claiming that “the improved habits of cleanliness, which appear to have prevailed of late years in most towns of Europe, have probably in point of salubrity, more than counter-balanced their increased size” (Davison in Fraser and Sutcliffe 1983: 351). The appearance of improved habits as a counter-influence to have deadly effects of town growth was Malthus’ characteristic device for reconciling a catastrophic

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forecast with the designs of providence. In human affairs, as distinct from nature, divine order was achieved by the exercise of intelligence and moral responsibility. The more man distanced himself from nature—that is, the more civilized or urbanized he became—the more intelligence and virtue needs to improve. If we jump some one hundred years in time and space, we find Friederich Engels writings on “The Housing Question” (1872), and before that, “The Condition of the Working Class in England” (1845). His paper of “the Great Towns” may be read in many ways: as a traveler’s description, as a diatribe against the industrial bourgeoisie, as an experiment in class analysis of urban society. But it is also a devastating, if largely implicit attack on the idea of the city as a natural system. His favorite metaphors are of disorder—Manchester is “an unplanned wilderness” and its people “struggle helplessly in the whirlpool of modern industrial life”—and of artificiality—the town dwellers’ restless activity is “abhorrent to nature” (Davison 1983: 368). For Engels there was no solution to the problems of the cities without challenging the perverted logic of capitalist society on which the “antithesis between town and country” was based (Davison 1983: 369). Only when the capitalist order was overthrown and the population dispersed more evenly over the countryside would the problems of the great cities disappear. The urban question, that is to say, would not be solved but transcended. This radical approach drew on the cooperative doctrines of Robert Owen or in the specific case of Engels (and Marx) on the dialectical framework of Neo-Hegelian philosophy, which identified with the poor and the working classes. The theoretical responses to the “urban crisis” of the 1830s and 1840s foreshadow many of the issues still exercised by scholars of urban society, and theories born of that era continue to influence urban debate in our days and space constitutes to be determining this debate. The writings of both Marx and Engels explore the important concept of the division of labor which they borrowed from Smith and Ricardo. It was used for the analysis of the class structures within society, but was given a further spatial dimension. For Marx, the division of labor within society was seen as paralleling the development of the productive forces to such an extent that he thought “that the analysis of the level of development of the division of labor within a nation provides us with the most straightforward method to assess the level of development of its productive forces” (cf. Forrest et al. 1982: 161). The major spatial consequence stemming from this

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increasingly complex division of labor was seen as being the town-country contradiction: “The division of labor within a nation provides for the separation of the industrial and commercial activities from the agricultural ones; and resulting from this, for the separation between town and country and for the opposition of their interests” (ibid.). The opposition town-country is therefore for Marx and Engels a direct consequence of the division of labor. This basic social and spatial separation of activities was seen, however, only as a minor element in an overall territorial division of labor which, supported by natural geographical differences, tended to confine “special branches of production to special districts of a country.” The territorial division of labor within a country was itself conceptualized as part of an emerging international division of labor: “the more these individual spheres (nations) in constant interaction, are enhanced by this development process (of the division of labor) and the more the primitive isolation of the various nations is destroyed by the improved mode of production (…), the more history became world history.” This territorial division of labor at both the national and international levels was considered as having contradictory social effects. The contradiction between the depopulation of the countryside and over-urbanization of the cities was regarded both as originating the housing question and obstructing any attempt to solve it, as Engels saw it. At a different level, for Marx, the developing international division of labor far from being to the mutual advantage of the parties involved, as claimed by Ricardo, “was merely suited to the requirements of the centers of modern industry.” “The use of the division of labor concept - and its geographical extensions territorial and international division of labor - accounts, therefore the most of the specific spatial references in the work of Marx and Engels: the town-country contradiction, the housing question, the uneven development of capitalism both at a national or an international level, etc. Somehow removed from this theoretical problematic only the analysis of the land rent, extensively discussed in Capital, can be referred to as involving a substantial spatial dimension” (Forrest et al. 1982: 162). Of course it is possible to argue that spatial considerations are ubiquitous in all the writings of Marx: in the determination of production prices through the uneven value of raw materials, labor, and fixed capital over space, etc. (Harvey 1989: 1–59). One contradictory formulation in Marx and Engels texts is that, although the city plays a secondary role in the analysis of capitalism, they

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regarded the process of urbanization as a condition necessary to the transition to socialism. This was not because the city was considered as the locus of a new mode of production, but because it was in the capitalist city that the proletariat fully matured and conditions were provided there for effective class struggle. The concentration of capital in the city, the polarization among the classes, and the appalling deprivation of the proletariat led to the emergence and formulation of class consciousness and revolutionary organization (Eisenstadt and Shachar 1987: 55). Marx and Engels promoted a linear evolution, through the transitional periods of history and the analogous transition of the modes of production. As will be illustrated in the following Marx/Engels, Weber, and Durkheim all saw the city as having immense sociological importance at particular periods in history.

The Roots of the City as a Transitional Phenomenon When considering the so-called “founding fathers” of Western sociology and social science they all included an analysis of cities as an important component of their overall theories. Despite deep theoretical, methodological, and political divisions between them, these writers tended to focus on common themes in their analysis of cities. What is not included, however, is any attempt to theorize the city in the context of developed industrial capitalist societies, for all these writers agreed that in the contemporary period, the city is not a significant economic, political, or social unit of analysis. Weber like Marx focused his attention on Western cities in the Medieval period. He was concerned with different types of human association and particularly with the origins of calculative rationality in social relationships. He argued that in the Ancient world, the basis of human association was the family or the clan irrespective of whether the place of residence of particular family units was in town or countryside. In the Medieval period, however, the traditionalism of clan or family authority was eroded by the growth of city guilds and corporations in which individuals were constituted as citizens with rights and duties legally defined through membership of the city as the unit of legal and political organization. The Occidental City in the Medieval period was thus the basic unit of social organization legally, politically, and economically, and the break

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which is represented with traditional bonds represented the necessary condition of the later development of economic rationality and political democracy in the West. Today, however, the city as the basic unit of social organization has been replaced by the nation-state, for the city is no longer the locus of autonomous markets, autonomous law, autonomous military, etc. Like Marx, therefore, Weber suggested that it is only in the Medieval period that the city constituted a sociologically and historically significant entity (Saunders cf. Gregory and Urry 1983: 77). Durkheim’s analysis was similarly concerned with the changing source of social cohesion over time and the consequent development of a complex division of labor in society. Like Weber, Durkheim saw the basis of social organization and solidarity as nothing less than the nation-state (indeed, at one point he likened the nation-state to “one big city”). When these classical theorists did discuss the modern city they did not develop or explore it in an analysis of urbanization per se, but rather in an analysis of processes unleashed by the development of the capitalist mode of production in society, or as a contingent factor in social change. What follows from all this is a renewed focus on the relevance of space in social theory? If space is central to social theory, then the study of different socio-spatial arrangements—villages, towns, cities—would appear to be fundamental to social theory. The important implication for building a theory or a concept of the city will inevitably broaden into a theory or sociology of society as a whole. Peter Saunders (1980 and 1981), points out four major attempts over the past seven decades to identify a particular type of social relationships or social processes as distinctive to social life in cities. All four attempts have failed, although they have bequeathed some interesting and useful legacies in the process. The fact that they have failed suggests that the attempt to relate particular social processes to particular spatial forms, and thereby to establish a rationale for an “urban” sociology concerned with the study of cities, may be futile. The City as an Ecological Community The first attempt to develop a sociological theory of the city was done by Robert Park and his research associates. Urban analysis should focus on the “ecology-community” which, in contrast to “society,” was characterized by an unconscious process through which human beings were

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engaged in a “biotic” struggle for existence resulting in a functional adaptation between themselves and their environment. Human ecology was in this way constituted as the study of a basic process (competition) and its unintended effects (functional adaptation) (Saunders 1981: 70). This scheme, based on basic principles of “biological ecology,” was believed to provide a general framework for the analysis of the internal structure of cities. In essence this was a sociological interpretation of spatial behavior: various groups of the urban population utilized their place of residence as a means of staying near the people of their own socioeconomic status or ethnic origin and of moving as far as possible from the groups with which they did not wish to be associated. The conceptual framework of this approach was based on several assumptions: that all parts of the city were clearly identified with regard to their respective status and prestige; that the prestige map was well known to the population of the city; and that there was increasing spatial differentiation between the functions of the city—work, residence, business, leisure, and so forth. The entire process of change in the urban ecology thus depended to a large extent on a continuous flow of migrants into the city (Eisenstadt and Shachar 1987: 32). The urban ecological approach developed a theoretical framework closely related to evolutionary approaches. From the outset, however, there was an uneasy tension between the concern with biotic competition as process and concern with the city as an object. This tension was manifested in a market ambiguity about whether human ecology was a new and separate discipline within the social sciences with its own theoretical concerns with competition and adaptation, or whether it was simply a branch of sociology distinguished by its empirical interests in cities. The problem was whether human ecology should be defined in terms of its interest in a process (biotic struggle) or an object (the city), because it was clear from its outset that the two were not complementary. In short, the theoretical focus of human ecology was not specifically urban in the sense of city-based, and the inevitable result was that the twin and discrete concerns of the human ecologists eventually fell apart. “As defined by the Human ecology, the concept of biotic competition is more likely one aspect of all forms of human activities. Thus, Human ecology is more a functionalist theory of how various types of social groups and organizations adapted to their external environments, than an urban theory” (Saunders 1981: 71).

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The City as a Cultural Form The principal proponents of this approach are Louis Wirth building on Georg Simmel. They argued that the size and complexity of social aggregates affects the forms of social organization which develop within them. As Simmel argued early this century: “It will immediately be conceded on the basis of everyday experiences that a group upon realizing a certain size must develop forms and organs which serve its maintenance and promotion but which a smaller group does not need. On the other hand, it will also be admitted that smaller groups have qualities, including types of interaction among their members, which inevitably disappear when the groups grow larger” (Saunders ibid.). Given that cities, however, are clearly large and complex (socially differentiated) human aggregates, it is not surprising that “urban” theorists have attempted to identify specific patterns of interaction which are associated with cities and explicable in terms of their size and heterogeneity. Simmel himself sought to identity a distinct “metropolitan personality type,” while thirty years later, Louis Wirth sought the same social and moral quality as the principal traits defining cities—are conducive to specific behavioral patterns and moral attitudes. He maintained that, “Concentration in limited space… has certain consequences of relevance in the sociological analysis of the city… and an increase in density tends to reduce differentiation and specialization… diversifying men and their activities and increasing the complexity of the social structure, and a way of life characterized by such traits is impersonal, superficial, transitory, segmental” (Eisenstadt and Shachar 1987: 28–29). Wirth also stated, “The city and the country may be regarded as two poles, in reference to one or another of which, all human settlements tend to arrange themselves. In viewing urban-industrial and rural-folk society as ideal types of communities, we may obtain a perspective for the analysis of the basic models of human associations as they appear in contemporary civilization” (Eisenstadt and Shachar 1987: 29). The problem with both Simmel and Wirths’ formulations, however, is that they confuse the sociological effects of size with effects which are better explained with reference to the cultural impact of capitalist social relations. The confusion is obvious in Simmel’s work where he explains the “metropolitan personality” as a product both of the effect of settlement size (a characteristic specific to cities) and of an advanced division of labor and money economy (a characteristic of capitalist society as a

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whole). The same confusion is also evident in Wirth’s work as Gans, has shown, the way of life which Wirth identified in the city is better explained in terms of the social class and life cycle stage of those who live there than as the outcome of large, dense, and heterogeneous settlements. None of this is to deny that factors such as size and complexity have some effect on patterns of social relationship; life in large settlements, for example, is in general more anonymous than life in small ones. But this leaves us a long way from identifying a distinct “urban way of life” still less from explaining it solely in terms of peculiarly “urban” variables. Simmel’s work showed, a potentially fruitful and fascinating area, but it is not sociology of the city. City as a System of Resource Allocation This third attempt to approach distinct urban processes was developed in Britain in the mid-1960s principally by John Rex and Ray Pahl, who tried to show that the city was the course of distinct patterns of inequality and social conflict arising over and above inequalities and conflict generated through the world of work. The specific task of urban sociology was to study and explain the ways in which inequalities in the city arose out of the actions of “urban managers” (that is individuals such as estate agents, local authority bureaucrats, social workers, and so on who controlled access to strategic “urban” resources such as housing) and how these inequalities were in turn the subject of “urban class struggles” (in particular “housing class struggles” between different groups in the city who enjoyed different degrees of access to scarce and desirable housing resources). As Pahl scrutinizes the attempt: “In the same way that market capitalism on the ground of early twentieth-century America gave rise to the ecological paradigm in urban sociology, so welfare capitalism in the 25 years following the second World War produced a distinctive academic response. Laissez-faire capitalism gave way to various forms of public intervention: land-use planning, public health, education and housing… A whole army of health visitors, child guidance experts, school attendance officers… and the like, combined in the collective surveillance system planned to produce good workers… This planned and organized ‘urban system’ increasingly dominated by bureaucratic rules and procedures meant that local government got bigger and whole new professions

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arose to administer housing, planning and welfare services. This stimulated some urban sociologists to consider more closely the processes that produced the patterns” (Pahl cf. Fraser and Sutcliffe 1983: 371–372). These studies tended to focus on the access to various public services or facilities such as housing or welfare benefits. However, urban sociology became more and more the study of the welfare state on the ground (Fraser and Sutcliffe 1983: 374). Both studies, thus, had serious problems of maintaining the urban as a strictly defined approach. The housing class conflict by Rex, rather turned out to be a conflict drawn on lines of ethnicity, gender, etc., and therefore based on inequalities of identity. Similarly, Pahl’s work on urban managers displaced the independent variables of his urban sociology beyond the confines of the city. The City as a Unit of Collective Consumption Castells was probably the first to address the question of specificity explicitly while at the same time attempting to reformulate the urban question in theoretical terms when he noted: “Urbanism is not a concept. It is a myth in the strictest sense since it recounts, ideologically, the history of mankind. An urban sociology founded on urbanism is an ideology of modernity ethnocentrically identified with the crystallization of the social forms of liberal capitalism” (Castells cf. Pickwance 1976: 70). Castells reformulated his critique in 1983: “We know that classical urban sociology, organized around the tradition of the Chicago School, was (and is) more concerned with the problem of social integration than with the problem of social change, the latter viewed mainly as the source of disruption of the established moral order” (Castells 1983: 292). Castells argued that urban sociology is unscientific—because it lacks a “specific real object” due to the “absence of any clear definitions” of the term “urban,” and because it lacks a “specific theoretical (or scientific) object,” since the “themes around which urban sociology constitute itself as a science” (that is, urbanism, urbanization and ecological system) “do not possess the characteristics of theoretical distinctiveness.” He therefore concludes that “urban sociology is an ideology.” The essential point is that, “urban areas are not autonomous entities which exist independently from the rest of society.” Inter alia, “urbanization refers to the process by which urban areas grow and to the resulting spatial structure of those areas” (McKeown 1987: 91 and 94).

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Previously, it may be recalled, Castells related the division and use of space exclusively to the dominant mode of production, which under capitalism is the industrial system; and within this, the urban as the focus of the consumption process. To this he now adds the crucial element of social process. By this he means the conscious actions of individuals and social groups (as well as classes) in shaping the city image of their own choosing. “Technology per se or the structure of the economy itself are not the driving force behind the process of urbanization. Economic factors and technological progress do play a major role in establishing the shape and meaning of space. But this role is determined, as well as the economy and technology themselves, by the social process through which humankind appropriates space and time and constructs a social organization, relentlessly challenged by the production of new values and the emergence of new social interests” (Castells 1983: 291). This new approach was a response to critics, who argued that the absence of any subjective understanding of the way in which people interpret their social places and roles (characteristic of the structuralist formulation) leads to an inadequate explanation of the structure of social relations and the process of mobilization (Lowe 1987: 30–31). A second crucial area of change was the question of the historical context of the urbanization process in particular societies. The two factors, of social process and social history, became key aspects of Castells position of change—the redefinition of the “urban.” It was fundamentally about the role a city plays in the context of the particular historical stage of society: “Urban is the social meaning assigned to a particular spatial form by a… historically defined society.” Castells sees cities as the product not of predetermined economic functions but as the interaction between social classes, interest groups or individuals. Each city comes to have a particular “meaning” as a result of the outcome of this conflict in which dominant interests imprint their image and functional purpose on the urban system and process. This is not a static situation because dominated groups, within the dominant mode or “meaning,” are resistant and form the basis of new social struggles to change urban meaning. Thus, urban meaning is defined as the structural performance assigned as a goal to cities in general (and to a particular city in the inter-urban division of labor) by the conflictive process between historical actors in a given society. Urban functions are defined as the articulated system of organizational means aimed at performing the goals assigned to each city by

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the historically defined urban meaning. Urban meaning and urban functions jointly determine urban form, that is, the symbolic spatial expression of the processes that materialize as a result of them. In any event, Castells pinpoints, “we are not arguing that the economy determines urban forms but, rather, we are establishing a relationship and hierarchy between historical meaning, urban functions, and spatial forms. Urban form is defined as the symbolic expression of urban meaning and of the historical superimposition of urban meanings (and their forms) always determined by a conflictive process” (Castells 1983: 303). The conflict of urban meaning is the focus of Castells’ urban politics; and the process and redefining and challenging urban meaning is called urban social change. Of course he is careful to suggest that all social change does not necessarily lead to changes of urban meaning. Of all the criticisms which have been made against Castells’ work, three are pertinent for our present concerns. The first is that the identification of consumption with the spatial unit of the city is arbitrary and unconvincing since the processes of consumption, no less than processes of production, or politics or of ideology, are not territorially bounded. As Mingione observes “The consumption process itself is not definable in a purely territorial context, it does not correspond to any ‘urban question’” (cf. Saunders 1981: 75). Secondly, another important innovation in Castells’ social/cultural analysis of urban social change is the recognition he now gives to the role of women. Throughout “The City and the Grassroots” women are described as having a special place in urban struggles. In the historical case studies, e.g., in the Glasgow rent strike of 1915 he notes that, “a women’s movement that fell short of being a feminist movement” (1983: 33). Women are seen as mobilizing on behalf of their “familie’s” needs in the context of the evolution of urban-based class and power struggles. It is not made entirely clear why women carry this special range of functions or the terms of the relationship between women’s struggles and the feminist movement. He argues that the feminist consciousness is about “overcoming” the structural domination of one gender by another, but the urban experience of social change suggests that, “The redefinition of urban meaning to emphasize use value and the quality of experience over exchange value and centralization of management is historically connected to the feminist theme of identity and communication” (Castells 1983: 309). The problem here is that although he sees the feminist movement

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as a key battleground in the liberation struggles it is not theorized into his model. Criticism of the third aspect is his understanding of the state. Also here he has transformed his former structuralist approach, and now the basic understanding of a theory of the state, is understood as a crystallization of class and other social struggles, where the political apparatus manifests almost in a Weberian autonomy. Paradoxically, Castells’ points out that action must be analyzed in its historical specific context, simultaneously as he emphasizes in his methodology the establishing of a general crosscultural model.

Urban Studies and Western Sociology---Just Another Brick in the Wall? So far we have seen that although all four attempts this century to establish a theoretical foundation for a sociology of the city have failed, each attempt has left a fruitful legacy in the form of particular questions and issues which remain pertinent once they are divorced from a concern with territorial arrangements. From human ecology we have been left a theoretical concern with the problem of how human groups adapt to their physical environment. This is an important and legitimate question for sociologists to pose, and has as such been taken up and incorporated within mainstream functionalist sociology. Also the ecological, nature and environmental (climate) perspective should not be underestimated, perhaps this is actually the overall main concern for humankind today, and as such incorporated in the main discourse at the global level. From the ‘cultural’ tradition we have been left two distinctive concerns. The first is the question of the sociological significance of number. The second is a concern with the impact of capitalism and/or industrialism on the quality of social relationships. The work in the 1960s on the city as a resource allocation has left us with a number of themes. Rex’s concern with ethnic inequalities and conflicts has, for example, been subsumed within the sociology of identity relations, just as Pahl’s interest in the development of corporatism is today reflected in the political sociology literature regarding the state and its relations to civil society. In a schematic way the work from the 1970s can be listed as “the political cleavage” in France between the structuralists (Althusser), which could be characterized as politicizing the urban as a specific object

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(Castells), and on the other hand, the orthodox view, with its scientific base in Marx dialectic historical materialism, and the urban as one aspect of a holistic theory about the social formation (Lojkine). This was the so-called “Neo-Marxist” urban sociology debate. In particular Castells is significant for having directed scholar’s attention to the new patterns of social and political cleavage, which arise out of the social organization of consumption in advanced capitalist societies. Apparently Castells completely breaks with structuralism, by discussing the struggles for community, individualism and new cultural forms (1983), and by recognizing that different societies are subject to different historical processes. When considering his epistemological shift, it is reflected in his social theory as: Marx for the analysis of class relationships; Freud and Reich for the understanding of personality on the basis of sexual and family relationships; Weber for the analysis of the state married with a number of contemporary social scientists (Poulantzas, Touraine, Chodorow, Heller, Foucault and Sennett) (Castells 1983: 396– 397; 1989: 354). This gives a picture of a highly differentiated theory, but a social theory, and not an urban theory. This brief review has showed that so far all theories and conceptualizations on “the urban” have ended up in social theory. There is still an ongoing debate regarding the status of the category “urban,” but I would argue together with Thrift, that this debate is a direct consequence of the adaptation of a nineteenth-century model of social theory. On the one hand, the category “urban” is denied existence, or, on the other hand, it is reified; processes like collective consumption or class formation (at least in particular kinds of society) are mapped onto a generalized location (presumably with lots of people and buildings in it) called the “urban.” In truth, there is little choice between the two options. A contextually sensitive social theorist would not feel the need to stress this level of generalization, because the urban might potentially be considered a contextual category, predicated on difference. As Thrift puts it: “Thus different urban centers fairly obviously have different sets of economic and social practices arranged in all manner of different ways. But, more importantly and as both cause and result of this changing set of practices, different urban centers provide different contexts for the organization of different kinds of social action by different kinds of social group which have more or less chance of changing the (constantly) established order” (Thrift and Forbes 1983: 372).

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Also Saunders (1983: 234) gets very close to Thrift’s assumption: “The spatial dimension obviously enters into an explanation of virtually any social action, for it is now well established in social science that where you live is a significant factor in influencing the pattern of your life chances, the nature of your sociality, your ‘image of society’ and so on.” According to this line of reasoning, the “urban” as a category is actually not just another brick in the wall, because the wall has disappeared. “Grand theory” as the nineteenth-century models of social theory was more concerned with higher levels of abstraction and therefore with the grand “why” of large-scale social change, rather than with the lower levels of abstraction and with “how” these processes originate and are maintained. “Grand theory” has been questioned by new (post-modern) approaches, which try to tackle the contextual dimension of people practicing in place through which social structure must be produced and reproduced. The assumption being that a contextually sensitive social theory which sees societies as “contingently structured” in conflict is a way to tackle the problems of reductionism, containerism, and empiricity. That is, societies are made up of various social groups ranged in structural relations of domination or subordination to one another but likely to succumb to, defy, or even overcome these relations according to: the strength of their internal economic, social, and cultural organization, as it is laid out over space and in time; the differential ability of other groups to penetrate and undermine this organization; and the catalytic potential of external events. However, it is still assumed that the specific is only interesting as an example of more general laws or tendencies (Thrift and Forbes 1983; Thrift 1989). Contextually sensitive social theory tends to be more interested in difference and variations for its own sake. This is in recognition of the fact that society is made up of locales and regions, which contain not only general but also specific features, and because such specific features can act as generators or conductors of different kinds of organizations of social action that are differentially effective. Finally, there is the assumption that space and time are parameters rather than operators. They are the surrounding stage rather than the action which may be more concerned with present-day capitalism as an era of “explosion of spaces” (Lefebvre 1979). Contextually sensitive social theory also sees space and time as parameters, but as parameters that continually change the action of time-space “distanciation.” More than this, space and time are seen as

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operators, as resources intimately involved in the construction of social action at a number of scales (Thrift and Forbes 1983: 371–372). This section is closed with Castells assumption that urbanization refers to the process by which urban areas grow and to the resulting spatial structure of these areas. “The urban” is the social meaning assigned to a particular spatial form by a… historically defined society, thus it is necessary to address the political and economic system in each national context in order to be able to elaborate the categorization of the urban. To cope with this issue social theory has to become more contextually sensitive. It must borrow into the hearts of people practicing in place, but also be able to relate with non-Western social theory, and provide some explanatory value to urbanization in the Third World.

The Urban Roots and Development Theory A surge of interest in population, urbanization and development in the Third World in the 1950s and 1960s resulted in an expansion of Western social science research literature almost in tandem with the attempts outlined above. These researchers brought the assumptions of the dominant modernization perspective to their work. This model of development was explicitly or implicitly based on North American or European experience. Urbanization was seen as primarily an endogenous dynamic. Presumably, these countries were travelling a course previously followed by the West. City growth, industrialization and social, political, and economic development were conceptualized as intermeshed, mutually reinforcing changes leading to modernity. This approach was highly empirical and as such a reflection of the functionalist, positivist, and consensual view discussed in the previous parts of this chapter. During the 1970s studies of the Third World and urbanization increasingly shifted to a political economy approach echoing the above mentioned general debates about “the urban” as a subfield or category in social theory (Gilbert and Gugler 1984: 1). In his influential work, Gugler has elaborated on this problem and the following discussion relies partly on some of his ideas. The emergence of the “world political economy approach” to the study of urbanization was presented by the work of Frank (1971), Wallerstein (1974), Walton and Masotti (1976), and many others. They raised questions about the manner in which urban systems and urban centers in Third World countries are a reflection of the role that the national states

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play in the international economic system. A sharp difference of opinion emerged between such writers as the late Bill Warren, and Frank and Amin. The latter focused upon the role of Third World cities as the institutional structures that permit accumulation of capital in the Third World countries and its siphoning-off to the metropolitan centers of the developed countries. According to this perception, Third World cities play a crucial role in the underdevelopment of the Third World. Warren, on the other hand, argued that the integration of Third World countries created conditions for rapid independent capitalist development and set in motion a definite process of industrialization located in the major urban places. The significance of this debate is that it indicates how developments in the international economic system have ramifications on the urban systems of Third World Countries, and suggests they be taken into account in research (McGee in Armstrong and McGee 1985: 11–12). The fallacies of the “ontology of the urban” as a closed system have been exposed, thus it is not possible to understand the economic, social, political, and spatial aspects of urban development, except by means of a method which embeds the city in its wider changing international and societal context. The one body of literature that seems to suggest a possibility of analyzing the development of territorial units (including cities) in the “developed” world in a systematic relationship both to each other and to equivalent units in the “developing” world, was that encoded by Wallerstein as “world-systems analysis.” The world-systems literature stresses the need to understand development in any territorial unit, whether in “core” or “peripheral” areas in relation to the changing historical circumstances under which units are structurally incorporated into a global capitalist system (Henderson in Drakasis-Smith 1986: 64). Almost a century after Marx launched the concept of a new international division of labor, the concept has taken a contemporary definition as a powerful description of the modern transnational economy, wherein strategic parts of the Third World have become suppliers of manufactured goods and play a certain role in the restructuring of the global economy. Froebel et al. define the concept of the new international division of labor in the context of the shifting world market for labor and production sites. The world economy is not the sum of national economies each of which functions essentially according to its own laws of motion with only marginal interconnections, such as those established by external trade. These national economies are, rather, organic elements of one allembracing system, namely, a world economy which in fact is a single

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worldwide capitalist system… the structural changes in individual nations are interrelated within this single world economy and mutually determine one another (Fröbel et al. 1980: 8). Let us call statement one the industrial diffusion hypothesis, and statement two the global factory hypothesis, and note in passing that the first does not necessarily imply that the second the international diffusion of industry leads to an international industry organized like a global factory (Hill in Henderson and Castells 1987: 20). According to Froebel et al. the preconditions forcing the development of the NIDL include a world reserve army and advances in transportation and communication technologies, which together make possible “world market oriented industrialization,” that is, a global factory in which a detailed division of labor spans the globe. NIDL theory has been roundly criticized on a number of grounds. Inter alia, it overstated the extent and prospects of a general relocation of jobs from developed to developing countries, and also it focused almost exclusively upon the export-led growth of a rather small number of Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs). Likewise, it overestimated the role of Transnational Corporations (TNCs) while underestimating the extent to which the state and even the indigenous bourgeoisie have played in mobilizing capital in the Third World (Southall 1988: 2). This all changed when China entered the world economy in the 1980s and till today’s debate about decoupling and trade wars between the US and China. What is the role of urban development and Third World cities in this context? Ultimately, there is an intimate relationship between the web-like organization of modern capitalism, the worldwide net of multinational corporations, and the global network of cities. Their urban classification takes into account the position a city occupies in the decision chain of the transnational economy: thus, world command cities are those in which the top corporate financial industrial, and commercial decision-makers are concentrated (Henderson 1987). Castells notes that “capital has always moved throughout the world. But only in the most recent period of history have individual amounts of capital been able to operate daily on a global scale. This is a fundamental change in socio-economic organization, and it has been the major contributing force in the formation and consolidation of the new urban entities that Saskia Sassen has labeled “Global Cities” (Castells 1989: 338). While the emergence of Hong Kong as second-tier financial center bears witness to the possibility for new locations to emerge on the basis

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of deliberate policy to organize a market in a given location, the highlevel financial centers, commanding operations on a global scale, have historical and geographical roots, linked to their role in the national and international economies. The major centers, and the ones that are truly global cities, are three: London, as the major financial market in terms of number of transactions; New York, as the major recipient of capital flows and exporter of related services; and Tokyo, as the major lender of capital and headquarters of the largest banks in the world. In 1986, New York, London and Tokyo together accounted for 80% of the world market capitalization, up from 73% in 1974, in a process of growing concentration and dominance by the top tier of financial centers. New York alone controlled 40% of world capital (Castells 1989: 340–341). With Hong Kong, Beijing and Shenzhen emerging in the 2020s as new entrants challenging this dominance. “The combination of spatial dispersal and global integration has created a new strategic role for major cities. Beyond their long history as centers for trade and banking, these cities now function in four new ways: first, as highly concentrated command points in the organization of the world economy; second, as key locations for finance and for specialized service firms…; third, as cities of production including the production of innovation in these leading industries; and fourth, as markets for the products and innovations produced” (Sassen cf Castells 1996: 384). With the growth and transformation of global capital markets, the fields of commercial and investment banking are merging, and the all-important function of intermediation is becoming increasingly dominated by a small band of 25–30 financial institutions. Included in this group are: the twelve major New York commercial and investment banks, a small number of UK merchant banks, the four big Japanese securities houses, with Nomura in the lead, and the few European universal banks, including Swiss and German (ibid.). Next to the command cities, we find the specialized command cities as those in which the headquarters of specific industries are located (e.g., Detroit); and division command cities with a high concentration of division headquarter (e.g., Houston); then there are state command cities (e.g., Brasilia); and so on. Major Third World cities (megacities) as we have seen are not at the world command level with the important exception of three Chinese cities mentioned above. Only Seoul in South Korea has headquarters of firms belonging to the worlds 500 largest TNCs. Indeed, cities such as New Delhi, Singapore, Lagos, Cairo, Mexico City, and Sao Paolo do not lend themselves to such a clear classification, because of the diverse mix of their

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economic and state functions. Nevertheless, the cities, pivotal for global capital accumulation, are critical elements in the organizational network of the internationally integrated production and consumption system. They occupy a variety of niches in which international capital, particularly TNCs and financial speculative capital play a key role. The concept of surplus is central, but for the present purpose it is defined as value extracted by capitalist (private or/state) and state/government from wage labor, rent, interest, and unequal exchange. This process is subject to historical cycles of expansion and contraction and is exceptionally uneven in its class spatial impacts (Armstrong and McGee 1985: 58). The central question is how much surplus is held by the state and/or the capitalist sector at each level of the global settlement hierarchy, for the extent to which the surplus is either held or further funneled to another level conditions the spatial distribution of development through the system. Relatedly, what is most significant about megacities is that “they are connected externally to global networks and to segments of their own countries, while internally disconnecting local populations that are either functionally unnecessary or socially disruptive… It is this distinctive feature of being globally connected and locally disconnected, physically and socially, that makes megacities a new urban form” (Castells 1996: 404). So much for global and transnational spatial implications, but how about the role of class and work in the NIDL and what are the consequences for Third World urbanization? And connected to this, the question of migrant labor, highlights the more general implication of the NIDL for urban development. One result of the export of industrial capital and industrial restructuring within core economies is that this process has contributed to a population explosion by virtue of rural-urban migration, and hence to rapid urbanization by means of the expansion of squatter settlements in the Third World. Export-oriented industrialization while creating some employment can’t create as much as Third World governments and rural–urban migrants believe. In this sense, therefore, it provides both an impetus for migration while doing little to relieve urban under- and un-employment (Henderson in Drakasis-Smith 1986: 77). Another aspect of global class formation under the impact of the NIDL is that a new proletariat is being created. New industrial investments tend to bring more women into the labor force than it does men. Women often become the principal wage earners in the household and this has important implications in Third World cities, for traditional customs and

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cultural forms (Linn 1983; Fawcett et al. 1984; Goldscheider 1983), and not least in terms of new gender relations. The model gives a valuable contribution placing the question of surplus extraction in the forefront of the NIDL theory. However, what is central here, is a picture of a Third World city whose development needs to be recognized as a complex, dynamic whole. What I mean, is that the question of the state does not attract enough attention in the global settlement hierarchy model, however, it shows an important, but not determining aspect, of a multifaced urban development, both within the city and at the same time in terms of the city’s relationship to the global economy. World-systems analysis and NIDL theory seem to contain important implication for the theories of urban development. They show fundamentally the links and some levels of the national developing countries dependency on the capitalist world market. If industrialization is an important determinant of urban development, then NIDL theory and more generally world-systems analysis, when suitably reconstructed, would seem to hold out significant methodological promise. However, the marriage between the contextually sensitive social theory, the urban as a contextually category, and NIDL/World-systems analysis has severe implications, which will be elaborated upon in the conclusion. To achieve a framework for the analysis of urbanization it must be developed with regard to a historical and contextual analysis. This means that its method must be comparative and historically grounded. Differences in the patterns and magnitude of cities are not fixed, but change over time. The beginning point for any analysis should focus on the nature of economic organization within society with some form of bureaucratic allocation.

The Journey Toward a Preliminary Framework for Analysis Together with Thrift (1989) the following suggests that “the urban” might be analyzed according to the loci of a number of processes interacting with one another in a number of ways. First of all, and most fundamentally, the city is viewed as a focus of production. The mode of commodity production is an essential first step in understanding the nature or urbanization. It provides the raison d’être for many of the activities that take place in a city. “Cities are spatial divisions of labor, embedded in even larger spatial divisions of labor” (Thrift

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1989: 43). This means they are, and they are a part of, a mosaic of uneven development and redevelopment, the result of a constant dialogue between the location of production and the location of labor forces. Second, the city is the locus of money, finance, and credit, in short, of the manipulation of money and power. A third and related way in which the city can be viewed is as a locus of consumption. Hence the state is seen as an important progenitor of the city through its role as a provider of public goods and services, of collective consumption, e.g., schools, housing, health care facilities, and the like, and as a guarantor of the production of labor power. Fourth, the city is a locus of the reproduction of subjects. The socialization of human beings, from cradle to grave, is the result of a complex interdigitation of influences which cannot easily be reduced to a theory. But what is clear is that any such theory will have to take into account the competing or integrating influences of the economy, state, and civil society. Thus it involves disciplinary processes and processes of resistance at work and in the labor market. It also involves the state’s role in schooling, law, and other means of control—all those practices that are part of biopolitics, or the demography of power. It will include, as well, the various dimensions of civil society and the way that they structure subjects in households and elsewhere, most especially gender, ethnicity, and religion. The chief importance of such a tripolar format is to point to the way that diverse social institutions can interact to form active and creative subjects by producing systems of social positioning which are simultaneously objective conditions of existence and categories of perception (Thrift 1989: 45). Last, the city can be seen as a locus of meaning, as a means of representation, as a source of understanding, and as an anchor of culture (Thrift 1989: 46). So far, the city has been presented as the loci of a set of five interrelated processes. But it is also crucial to capture the city in such a way that the active, social nature of its creation is stressed. That represents a difficult move from a rather clinical compositional analysis to something more contextual. The problem is how to get beyond the conventions of representation, but not so far that the conventions can no longer be seen (Thrift 1989: 48). The choice here is to recommend a new focus on urban social movements and the way they inscribe the city with their presence and the city inscribes them. Such an analysis will need to take in elements of each

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register outlined above in one way or another in order to reach a judgement on the ways in which people have been able to experience class and/or identity (or class and/or identity formation understood as how people crystallize this relation in different forms according to the different contexts), the degree to which class and identity intermingles with other social relations like gender, and the extent to which class emerges as a primary force in political struggle (also Thrift ibid.). “The step” from the city as the loci of a set of five interrelated processes, does not reject the substantive content, however this method argues for a more thematic approach relating to political process, and to social process. Urban movements per se, and their experience of each society can be read against those core influences. In general, this type of analysis tries to explain urbanization in terms of the relationship and the interaction between the state, the economy, civil society, and external relations with other countries with focus in the Third World. But first, and foremost, it is important to explore the historical making and meaning of the cities and of course here a revitalized framework of world-systems analysis and NIDL theory becomes important (Schmidt 1998: 133).

Stadtluft Macht Frei---Further Perspectives This review has been a process of learning by setting out a number of tentative ideas. It has shown how different branches of social sciences overlap and then playback to (Grand) social theories in general. If scholars intend to understand the theoretical meaning of a certain subject it is (sometimes) necessary to start somewhere in the history of knowledge. The first question was whether the concept of “the urban as such, has its own dynamics or is determined by other factors, such as the state, external factors, i.e. the world market?” The answer to this question had to be found in an exploration of the ontological and epistemological connotations implied in different approaches and their concepts to define “the city,” “the urban,” and “urbanization.” So what were the major findings? First, the chapter criticized “single determinant” approaches. “The urban” implies a multidimensional interplays at the theoretical level. Thus, the epistemological “heritage” of positivism, Marxism and functionalism have shaped a discussion about urban sociology, mainly composed by sociologists, anthropologists, historians, social theorists, geographers, etc. Throughout the years, this discussion mainly reflected the evolution at the societal level, and the great clashes in social theory and so forth between

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traditionalism and progression, inter alia, positivism, and Marxism. After some years, the specific branch of urban sociology, i.e., the Chicago ecologist’s turned into a new “Grand theory” suggesting that the specifics of the urban are not valid at a theoretical level. Second, however, structuralism has been one of the main causes for a constant evolution of new “Grand theories” about “the urban.” Castells noted that urban sociology is unscientific, because it lacks a specific real object due to the absence of any clear definitions of the term urban, and because it lacks a specific theoretical (or scientific) object. The problems of structuralism in the discussion about urban sociology and the validity of the concept were traced back to the general problems at the abstract levels of analysis in the Nineteenth century (Marx, Weber etc.). The adaptation of social theory (sociology) at this abstract level is not able to catch reality at the societal level, i.e., that different societies are subject to different historical processes, etc. But, this does not necessarily imply that the position here is against Grand theory per se but it suggests an additional need at the moment of theorized histories of social phenomena, and not transhistorical theories of society. Therefore, “the contextually sensitive social theorist,” was introduced and it was tentatively concluded that the urban is essentially a contextual category, predicted on difference, largely following Thrift in his critique of Giddens structuration theory and different Marxist structuralist positions. “Thus, different urban centers fairly obviously have different sets of economic and social practices arranged in all manner of different ways. But, more importantly and as both cause and result of this changing set of practices, different urban centers provide different contexts for the organization of different kinds of social action in different kinds of social groups which have more or less chance of changing the (constantly) established order” (Thrift 1989). The grand “why” of large-scale social change is then modified to the lower level of abstraction with “how” these processes originate and are maintained. Hence it was assumed that “the contextually sensitive social theory,” which sees societies as “contingently structured” in conflict is a way to tackle the problems of reductionism, containerism, and empiricism. The contextual dimension of people practicing in place through social structures must be produced and reproduced, and is the core of this paradigm. Societies are made up of various social groups ranged in structural relations of domination or subordination to one another but likely to succumb to, defy, or even overcome these relations according to:

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the strength of their internal economic, social, and cultural organization, as it is laid out over space and time; the different ability of other groups to penetrate and undermine this organization; and the catalytic potential of external events (Thrift 1989). The urban is not simply a branch of social theory, or another brick in the wall, it is a category predicated on difference, it has its own dynamics as laid out in the heterogeneous. It is one in which there is more and more Stadtluft since Stadtluft macht frei. There is a lot to say about this perspective. First of all, there has indeed been, as noted above, a continuing increase of urbanization in the world and it continues, slow or fast, depending on the concrete historical context. And there has somehow been more freedom for city-dwellers, though perhaps less than is frequently asserted or assumed. It is also true that most political organization has been centered around city-dwellers, although this may have been the result merely of population density, but also in some cases as a self-fulfilling prophecy. To get an understanding of the urban as a dynamic factor in the Third World, another branch of social theory—development theory came into focus—to explore the implications of the development of the urban in development theory. Of course, the same epistemological connotations is found in development theory largely between theories of modernization and nation-building and Marxist theories, dependency, etc., thus echoing the discussion in social theory in general. So what did this discussion accomplish? First, the notion of stadtluft macht frei, is a metaphor used to illustrate that the urban as a category might be placed in a contextually social theory. The investigation at a merely societal level implies the confrontation with development theory, especially if the goal is to establish a framework for a comparative investigation of the political dimension of urbanization in different developing societies. Second, besides some essential critical assessments about the NIDL and World-Systems analysis, they do contribute to our understanding of the external dimension on the urban and societal levels. Third, NIDL and World-Systems analysis help to understand the globalization of the economy, and the content of the creation of an urban hierarchy on a global scale. The terms, “the Global city,” i.e., “the World Cities,” are seen to constitute the control centers of the international corporate capitalist economy located in the core.

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Fourth, these theories can provide important tools in a concrete historical analysis of some of “the great cities” of the developing countries bearing in mind that they sometimes underestimate the political factors, i.e., the role of the state, and other domestic factors. Fifth, the implication of such theory to an investigation of urbanization is that it is reasonable to accept that all developing countries are part of and integrated with the capitalist world market, but dependency has to be explored at a societal level, before making any strict notion. Sixth, it was tentatively concluded that, the city can be viewed as, (1) a focus of production, (2) the locus of money, finance and credit, (3) a locus of consumption, (4) the locus of the reproduction of subjects, and finally, (5) a locus of meaning, as a means of representation, as a source of understanding, and as an anchor of culture. Thus, the city is used in the latter, as a cultural resource, as a way of creating and expressing meaning, a social formation. It means that the city is viewed as the loci of these five interrelated processes, and thus, urbanization is the process in action. Finally, it is argued that the struggle of social movements in urban settings is an extremely important matter of investigation. Simply because the fight for collective consumption is becoming one of the most important determining factors in developing countries. It is not, anymore, only the rural contradictions that play the major role in the distribution of collective consume simply because of capitalist penetration, land reforms, and so on. It gives a sharp curve in the priorities of social research too. This analysis has reviewed urban theory and urbanization processes and their various relationships at different levels: At meta-theoretical level, where revitalization of the concept was launched at the level of the international capitalist system, where the different theoretical perspectives put forward to explain its operation, and particularly the dependency of “developing” countries at the level of national society in which the interaction between the state, the economy, civil society and space is central together with the relationship between national and international capital and finally, it was argued that it is important to get down to intercity level, where the immediate impact of these processes can best be comprehended.

References Ansari, G., and Nas, P.J.M. (eds.). 1983. Town-Talk—The Dynamics of Urban Anthropology. Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Briel. Armstrong, W., and T.G. McGee. 1985. Theatres of Accumulation—Studies in Asian and Latin American Urbanization. London: Methuen and Co.

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Castells, M. 1977. The Urban Question. A Marxist Approach. London: Arnold. Castells, M. 1983. The City and the Grassroots—A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements. London: Arnold. Castells, M. 1989. The Informational City. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Castells, M. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Castells, M., and J. Henderson. 1987. Global Restructuring and Territorial Development. London: Sage. Davison, G. 1983. “The City as a Natural System: Theories of Urban Society in Early Nineteenth. Century Britain”. In The Pursuit of Urban History, eds., Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe. London: Edward Arnold. Drakasis-Smith, D. (ed.). 1986. Urbanization in the Developing World. Kent, UK: Croom Helm. Eisenstadt, S.N., and A. Shachar. 1987. Society, Culture and Urbanization. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Fawcett, J.F., S.E. Khoo, and P.C. Smith (eds.). 1984. Women in the Cities of Asia, Migration and Urban Adaption. Boulder, CO: A Westview Replica Ed. Forrest, R., J. Henderson, and G. Williams (eds.). 1982. Urban Political Economy and Social Theory. Wiltshire, UK: Gower. Frank, A.G.F. 1971. Capitalism and Underdevelopment, Latin America. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Fraser, D., and A. Sutcliffe (eds.). 1983. The Pursuit of Urban History. London: Arnold. Fröbel, Folker, Jürgen Heinrichs, and Otto Kreye. 1980. The New International Division of Labour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gilbert, A., and J. Gugler. 1984. Cities, Poverty and Development: Urbanization in the Third World. New York: Oxford University Press. Goldscheider, C. (ed.). 1983. Urban Migrants in Developing Nations Patterns and Problems of Adjustment. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, Praeger Publishers. Gregory, D., and J. Urry (eds.). 1983. Social Relations and Spatial Structures. London: Macmillan. Harvey, D. 1989. The Urban Experience. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Iverson, J., and K. Ishwaran (eds.). 1983. Urbanism and Urbanization Views, Aspects and Dimensions. Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Briel. Lefebvre, H. 1979. Space: Social Product and Use Value. In Critical sociology: European Perspectives, ed. J.W. Freiberg, 285–295. Halsted: Irvington. Linn, J.F. 1983. Cities in the Developing World: Policies for Their Equitable and Efficient Growth. Oxford: A World Bank Study. Lowe, S. 1987. Urban Social Movements—The City After. London: Macmillan.

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Masser, I., and R. Williams (eds.). 1986. Learning from Other Countries Cross-National Comparative Research—Complexities in Research Methodology. Norwich, UK: GEO-books. McKeown, K. 1987. Marxist Political Economy and Marxist Urban Sociology. London: Macmillan Press. Mingione, E. 1981. Social Conflict and the City. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Moore, Barrington. 1966. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Harmondsworth, London: Penguin. Park, R.E., E.W. Burgess, and R.D. McKenzie (eds.). 1925. The Growth of the City: The City of Chicago. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Peet, R., and N. Thrift (eds.). 1989. New Models in Geography, vol. 2. London: Unwin Hyman. Pickwance, C.G. (ed.). 1976. Urban Sociology: Critical Essays. London: Tavistock. Saunders, P. 1980. Urban Politics: A Sociological Interpretation. New York: Penguin. Saunders, P. 1981. Social Theory and the Urban Question. London: Hutchinson. Saunders, P. 1983. Social Theory and the Urban Question: A Response to Paris and Kirby. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 1: 234–239. Schmidt, J. D. 1998. Globalisation and Inequality in Urban South-East Asia. In Third World Planning Review, vol. 20, 4. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Scot, James. 1985. Weapons of the Weak—Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Smith, M.P. (ed.). 1984. Cities in Transformation. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Southall, R. 1988. Labour and Unions in Asia and Africa: Contemporary Issues. Hampshire and London: Macmillan Press. Thrift, N. 1989. Introduction. In New Models in Geography, ed. R. Peet and N. Thrift, vol. 2. London: Unwin Hyman. Thrift, N., and D.K. Forbes. 1983. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 1. London: Pion. Thrift, N., and D.K. Forbes. 1985. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 3. London: Pion. United Nations. 2018. Revision of World Urbanization Prospects. https://www. un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/2018-revision-of-worldurbanization-prospects.html. Wallerstein, I. 1974. The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press. Wallerstein, I. 1979. The Capitalist World Economy. New York and London: Cambridge University Press.

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Wallerstein, I. 1983. Historical Capitalism. London: New Left Books. Walton, J., and L.H. Masotti (eds.). 1976. The City in Comparative Perspective, Cross-National Research and New Directions in Theory. New York: Sage. World Bank. 2020. Urban Development. https://www.worldbank.org/en/ topic/urbandevelopment.

CHAPTER 17

Utopias and Dystopias in Literature and Life Peter Heehs

Utopias as Imagined Future Societies How do we decide what will happen in the future? One way is to make observations in the present, collate them with past observations, use logical thought to discover regularities, and come up with a forecast of the future. This is the method of the scientist. It provides accurate answers to simple questions, for example: How long does it take to bring a cup of water to boil at sea level? It is less reliable when applied to complex matters such as commodity futures or the weather. A second way is to make observations of the present, collate them with past observations, and allow the imagination to envisage possible futures. This is the method of speculative writers—poets, novelists, philosophers. It gives patchy results when applied to physical things: water at sea level will continue to boil at 100º C even if a poet imagines it otherwise. But some speculative writers envisaged useful concepts before scientists described them: Immanuel Kant (nebulae), William Gibson (cyberspace). Logical thinking is remarkably inept when it comes to social developments. Who foresaw the collapse of Communism or the rapid changes that followed the popularization of the Internet? In this sphere the literary

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imagination has done a better job, coming up with influential ideas from preliterate antiquity to the post-literate present. Myths of ancient cultures situated the ideal society in a Golden Age of the past. Imaginative writers generally placed them in an imagined future or futuristic present. Plato straddled the borderline between the two approaches: in the Cratylus he discussed the myth of the Four Ages of Man, in the Republic he presented and defended the ideal of a perfect commonwealth. Thomas More, whose Utopia (1516) set the pattern for modern speculations on ideal societies, spoke of Plato as his predecessor but claimed to have surpassed him (More 1999: 127–128). Utopian tracts and fictions proliferated during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During the nineteenth they attracted great popular interest. Social philosophers Henri de Saint-Simon, Robert Owen and Charles Fourier published treatises promoting the reorganization of society on cooperative lines. Saint-Simon called this “socialism”. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were influenced by Saint-Simon, Owen, and Fourier but criticized their approach as impractical and unscientific, dismissing it as “utopian socialism”. Against this they proposed their own “scientific socialism”, which called for revolution rather than social engineering to bring the ideal society into being. Despite their efforts to distance themselves from their predecessors, Marx and Engels remained in the same orbit. Their approach, in the eyes of philosophical critics, was as utopian as anything Saint-Simon, Owen or Fourier ever dreamed up.

The Twentieth-Century Philosophical Critique of Utopias The initial successes of the communist revolution caused many to think that a new age had dawned, but it soon became clear that the Marxist version of utopia was not all it was cracked up to be. An early critic of Marxist-Leninist Communism was the philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev, who warned of the dangers of totalitarianism and stressed the importance of individualism. The Russian government tolerated his criticisms for a few years, but in 1922 deported him. In his exile Berdyaev wrote that intellectuals and cultivated people would soon have to “dream of ways to avoid utopias, and return to a non-utopian society” that was “less ‘perfect’ and more free” (Berdyaev in Huxley 2004: xxvii).

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Between the early 1920s and middle 1940s, there was enormous interest in Marxist theory throughout the world. Wary of the consequences of over-centralization, liberal thinkers attacked the assumptions and arguments of Marx and his disciples. Economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek published The Road to Serfdom, a critique of state socialism, in 1944. Taking aim at advocates of central planning such as the writer H.G. Wells, Hayek wrote: “The individual rights which Mr. Wells hopes to preserve would inevitably obstruct the planning which he desires”. The leaders of centralized states remained in power by imposing uniformity of thought: “totalitarian governments succeed to a high degree in making people think as they want them to”, chiefly by means of propaganda (Hayek 2001: 88, 157). Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies appeared a year after Hayek’s book, and quickly became a touchstone in the debate between those who favoured or denounced collectivism. Popper argued that social theories that claimed to provide a final answer were fundamentally flawed. He distinguished two types of such theories: those offering a “return to the womblike security of a precritical or tribal society” and those promoting an “advance to a Utopia”. Both rejected “existing society”, proclaiming that “a more perfect one is to be found at some other point in time”. Both tried to achieve perfection by suppressing messy change, either by insisting on tribal fixity or beating the drum of historical necessity. But because change can “only conceivably be prevented by the most rigid social control”, both are “led into totalitarianism” (Magee 1988: 89–90). Popper’s model for the changeless tribal society was the commonwealth of Plato’s Republic. His oracle of inevitable advance towards Utopia was Marx. Since the rise of humanism during sixteenth century, countless thinkers have looked on the Republic as a roadmap to a just and happy society. Popper shocked intellectuals by asserting that Plato’s political programme was “fundamentally identical” to totalitarianism (Popper 2011: 84). Historical change, in Plato’s view, is degeneration from an original golden age. Marx’s historicism is the opposite: an inevitable advance towards a future golden age. But the result of both approaches is the same: social rigidity and the destruction of the individual. Popper was aware of the positive side of the Marxist programme: “I see now more clearly than ever before”, he wrote in 1950, “that even our greatest troubles spring from something that is as admirable and sound as it is dangerous—from our impatience to better the lot of our fellows”. But he remained opposed

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to Marx’s utopian project, observing aphoristically in The Open Society: “The attempt to make heaven on earth invariably produces hell” (Popper 2011: xxxiv, 442). The philosophical critique of utopianism by Hayek’s Popper and other post-World War II thinkers penetrated politics and popular culture. Since the 1940s the connotations of the term utopia have been primarily negative. To give one example: In 1945 Winston Churchill said in a political speech: “It is no easy, cheap-jack Utopia of airy phrases that lies before us”; it was a time “for grim, stark facts and figures, and for action to meet immediate needs” (Churchill in Manchester and Reid 2012: 939). This practical critique of utopia was echoed in the literary world by anti-utopian or, as it came to be called after 1952, dystopian fiction.

Literary Utopias and Dystopias Utopian fiction had something of a golden age during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, with socialist novels such as Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy (1888) and News from Nowhere by William Morris (1890) achieving great popularity. These books critiqued the civilisation of contemporary England and America from the standpoint of a utopian society set sometime in the future. But around the same time other novelists were deflating the dreams of utopian socialists. Two of the earliest examples of this anti-utopian fiction were the story “The New Utopia” by Jerome K. Jerome (1891) and the novel The Sleeper Awakes by H. G. Wells (1898–1899, revised edition 1910). Wells’s book was the first of the four seminal dystopian novels of the early twentieth century. The other three—Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)—show the influence of Wells, and each of them influenced its successors: Huxley (probably) and Orwell (certainly) were influenced by Zamyatin.1 Orwell certainly was indebted to Wells, Zamyatin, and Huxley, and all subsequent dystopian writers owed a massive debt to Huxley and Orwell. I therefore take these four novels as my main literary sources. Many of the themes in the four classic dystopian novels are negative images of themes first developed by utopian writers. I arrange them in six categories.

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1. Isolation. The first step King Utopos took “toward imposing a pattern of good life on the native population”, wrote philosopher Ursula Niklas, “was to isolate them from any external influences by ordering the excavation of a wide channel to turn their land into an island” (2001: 217). The terrestrial isolation of utopian worlds remained standard until the end of the nineteenth century, when the lack of unexplored regions obliged novelists to place their imaginary realms in the future or on distant planets. All four of the novels under study are set in superstates composed of one or more megacities, which are separated physically from the uncivilized parts of the world. In The Sleeper Awakes, the land beyond the city lies in ruins; to live there, “outside the range of the electric cables was to live an isolated savage” (Wells 2010: 73). In Zamyatin’s We, the subhuman tribes live beyond the apparently unbreachable Green Wall; in Huxley’s Brave New World, they are permitted to stay in Savage Reservations. In Nineteen Eighty-Four the “proles” live in rundown areas that seem to be beyond the reach of the Thought Police. 2. The totalistic State; the Leader; the technological aristocracy. In Plato’s Republic and More’s Utopia, the state is an all-encompassing system of political and social organization. Plato’s city-state is headed by philosopher-kings, who are specially trained members of the highest caste. The city-states of Utopia are governed by a Prince, who is selected by the syphogrants or magistrates. In the four novels under study there is a single all-powerful superstate (We and Brave New World), or balance of superstates (The Sleeper Awakes and Nineteen Eighty-Four). These regimes are ruled by a remote and powerful oligarchy or dictator (Wells’s White Council, Zamyatin’s Benefactor, Huxley’s World Controllers, Orwell’s Big Brother); but the actual work is done by a technological aristocracy which takes its orders from above. 3. Technology in the service of the state. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, most literary utopias and dystopias have been based on the power of applied science. The futuristic London of Wells’s Sleeper Awakes set the pattern for the high-tech megalopolis that would appear in most subsequent dystopian novels. Zamyatin’s We was, according to Orwell, “a study of the Machine, the genie that man has thoughtlessly let out of its bottle and cannot put back

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again” (Orwell 1946). The same could be said of Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s own Nineteen Eighty-Four. 4. Social stratification; the supremacy of the group. “Utopian thinking”, according to Niklas, “grows out of a deep distrust of the world of political affairs and deplores its factionality, instability, and uncertainty” (2001: 211). Utopian societies are organized with the aim of preserving stability. Their defining characteristic is a rigid caste system, modelled on the threefold system in Plato’s city-state: guardians, warriors and workers. The four dystopias under consideration also are rigidly structured. Huxley gives more attention than the other writers to the nuts and bolts of his system. The castes of the World State are created by biological intervention before birth, and reinforced by conditioning during childhood. The purpose? “Stability”, explains World Controller Mustapha Mond. “No civilisation without social stability. No social stability without individual stability” (2004: 36). In the World State every individual is subordinate to the social whole. When the disaffected psychologist Bernard muses about his desire to become “more me”, his co-worker and love interest Lenina bursts out: “how can you talk like that about not wanting to be part of the social body?” (2004: 78). Zamyatin’s One State represents the definitive “victory of the many over the one”. To right-thinking members of society, “individual consciousness is just sickness” (2006: 42, 113). In Nineteen Eighty-Four, party members have no personal time or personal ideas: going for a walk alone is condemned as “ownlife”; having thoughts unendorsed by the party is “thoughtcrime” (Orwell 2011b: 1005, 962). 5. Uniformity; regimentation; purposelessness. Uniformity of belief and behaviour is a sine qua non in the utopias of Plato and More. It also is important in the dystopias under discussion. In Jerome’s “New Utopia” everyone looks alike, dresses alike, lives in identical lodgings and, inevitably, thinks alike. People are known by numbers—odd for men, even for women. The same sartorial and naming conventions are followed in Zamyatin’s One State. The “ciphers”, male and female, wear identical “unifs”. When they go out to walk, they march “in measured rows, by fours, rapturously keeping step”. All their activities are governed by the Table of Hours, which transforms each cipher into a well-oiled machine: “each morning, with six-wheeled precision, at the exact same hour,

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at the exact same minute, we, the millions, rise as one” (Zamyatin 2006: 6, 12–13). Enforced uniformity, Huxley once remarked, was “the whole idea of Brave New World”: if one could “iron” people “into a kind of uniformity, if you were able to manipulate their genetic background”, one could do anything one wanted to them (Huxley in Bedford 1985: 245). In his novel, as in Zamyatin’s, uniformity is associated with lack of freedom and lack of freedom with “happiness”. A character in We declares that the Guardians “guard our non-freedom, that is, our happiness” (Zamyatin 2006: 55). In Brave New World, the savage John cries out to the World Controller, “I want freedom”. The Controller replies: “You’re claiming the right to be unhappy” (Huxley 2004: 211–212) But the regimented happiness of dystopian worlds appears to outsides as bovine purposelessness. In “The New Utopia”, the visitor from the past finds a “patient, almost pathetic expression” on the faces of passers-by, which reminds him of “the faces of the horses and oxen that we used to breed and keep in the old world” (Jerome 1891: 359). Commenting on Wells’s Sleeper, Orwell wrote that it presented “a world without purpose, in which the upper castes for whom the workers toil are completely soft, cynical and faithless. There is no consciousness of any object in life” (Orwell in Watt 2013: 332– 333). He wrote similarly of Brave New World: “everyone is happy in a vacuous way” but “life has become so pointless that it is difficult to believe that such a society could endure” (Orwell 1946). 6. Methods of control. The social fixity, regimentation and uniformity of utopias and dystopias are enforced by elaborate systems of control: social, physical, biological, and psychological. (a) Intrinsic social control. The main means of control are woven into the fabric of dystopian societies, so they do not stand out as specialized methods. Several have already been discussed: isolation, centralization, stratification, regimentation, uniformity, groupthink. Two others are hyper-urbanization and overpopulation. In Brave New World Revisited Huxley observed that “overpopulation leads to economic insecurity and social unrest”, and this leads with “virtual certainty” to dictatorship (2006: 10– 11). One consequence of overpopulation is the development

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of a herd-mentality. “Herded into mobs”, Huxley wrote elsewhere, “men and women behave as though they possessed neither reason nor free will. Crowd-intoxication reduces them to a condition of infra-personal and antisocial irresponsibility” (1983: 306). The creation of herd-mentality is a prerequisite for the imposition of all other forms of state control. (b) Physical control. Plato’s model for his Republic was oligarchic Sparta, not democratic Athens. All the dystopias under study follow the Spartan pattern. The state is a military dictatorship and the secret police never far away. The visitor from the past in Jerome’s “New Utopia” is surprised by “the number of policemen” patrolling the streets, so many that he wondered “where the other people were” (1891: 345). The world of The Sleeper has its fearful “red police”, Zamyatin’s One State its “Guardians”, Orwell’s Oceania its “Thought Police”. In Huxley’s World State, the police are more low key: when a riot breaks out, they quell it by spraying soma, a tranquilizing drug. The security forces in all these dystopias are commanded by the bureaucracy, which employs repressive and punitive methods to keep the population under control. The interrogations and tortures carried out in Orwell’s Ministry of Love have made “Room 101” a fixture of popular culture. But the most fearful means of physical control in dystopian literature are surgical. The Great Operation performed by technicians of the One State turns ordinary ciphers into “person-looking tractors” (Zamyatin 2006: 166). The protagonist D-503 must undergo it to be cured of his errant thoughts and his infatuation with the rebel I-330. (c) Biological control. Control of society through control of lifeprocesses has been a feature of utopias and dystopias since Plato’s Republic, notorious for its state-controlled marriage and childrearing. Following Plato’s lead, Jerome sketched the pattern of the official eugenics that recur in the novels of Wells, Zamyatin, Huxley and Orwell: “In the spring, so many children, according as the State requires, are arranged for, and carefully bred, under medical supervision. When they are born, they are taken away from their mothers (who, else, might grow to love them), and brought up in the public nurseries and schools until they are fourteen” (Jerome 1891: 351). The absence of motherchild relations is also a feature of Zamyatin’s One State and

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Huxley’s World State: women are looked on primarily as sexual objects, and sex is controlled by the state. In the One State “each cipher has the right to any other cipher as sexual product” (Zamyatin 2006: 2); in the World State, “free and frequent access to the opposite sex” is how the populace is “detensioned” (Huxley 2006: 13). In Orwell’s Oceania, on the other hand, “sexual puritanism” is enforced for two reasons; first, to remove a source of subjective experience “which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed”; secondly, to induce hysteria, “which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship” (Orwell 2011b: 1045). (d) Psychological control. All the dystopian societies under study are heavily invested in thought control. This comes in two broad types, which we may label soft and hard. The main means of soft control are indoctrination and brainwashing. In Wells’s Sleeper, hypnotism is used to convert workers “into beautiful, punctual, and trustworthy machine minders”. Schools inculcate “just a few simple principles—obedience—industry”, which are needed to keep the factories running efficiently (Wells 2010: 88, 77). In Huxley’s Brave New World, education is virtually identical with indoctrination. Children are brought up in “Neopavlovian conditioning rooms”, where professionals expose them to negative and positive stimuli that are meant to produce the habits the state requires (Huxley 2004: 15). While they sleep, they listen to hypnopaedia recordings that predispose them to accept their lot. While they are awake, they space out on soma. Entertainments and games—the feelies, orgy-porgy, centrifugal bumble-puppy—“are deliberately used as instruments of policy” (2006: 35). In Nineteen Eighty-Four soft techniques play a comparatively minor role. One method of indoctrination is the “Two Minutes Hate”, a community session that fosters hostility towards the enemies of the state (Orwell 2011b: 947–952). The regime of Big Brother is far more notorious for its use of hard control. The main instruments of hard control are surveillance and propaganda. All the dystopias we have been studying make widespread use of electronic surveillance. In The Sleeper, the rebel leader Ostrog’s headquarters are equipped with a special

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mirror through which distant places can be seen. In We there are “diaphragms” fixed in public places that allow the Bureau of Guardians to monitor conversations (Zamyatin 2006: 48). Huxley’s World State, with its mastery of soft control, has little need of high-tech eyes and ears, but it does keep tabs on the inhabitants of the Savage Reserves. In Orwell’s Oceania the most famous slogan is “Big Brother is Watching You”, and it is not an idle threat. Ubiquitous “telescreens” receive while they transmit: “Any sound that [the protagonist] Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up” by the telescreen in his room, and as long as he was within its field of view, “he could be seen as well as heard” (Orwell 2011b: 942). Propaganda goes hand-in-hand with surveillance, as shown by the dual function of Orwell’s telescreens. In The Sleeper, propaganda is transmitted by “Bubble Machines”, which are programmed to broadcast “counter suggestions” when rumours sweep the streets (Wells 2010: 96). Huxley and Orwell described the practice of propaganda in their novels, and wrote about its theory in non-fiction pieces. Huxley quoted Adolf Hitler on its cardinal rules: the propagandist must confine himself to “a few bare necessities” that “must be expressed in a few stereotyped formulas”, and must adopt “a systematically one-sided attitude towards every problem that has to be dealt with”, never admitting he or she might be wrong or that another point of view might be partially right (Huxley 2006: 43–44). Orwell drew on speeches delivered by Hitler and other dictators in developing his idea of doublethink. Central to this was the concept of blackwhite, “the ability to believe that black is white, and more to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past”, which is made possible by doublethink: “to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them” (Orwell 2011b: 1106, 968). These, in brief, are the leading characteristics of the utopian and dystopian societies we have been studying. How do they relate to contemporary realities? Were the writers true or false prophets?

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Dystopian Fiction and Socio-Political Facts Futuristic fiction is always about the present. The four dystopian novels I have discussed use hyperbole and satire to criticize aspects of latenineteenth and early twentieth-century European life: industrialization, regimentation, collectivization, centralized government, worship of technology, susceptibility to propaganda, surrender to the mass mind, loss of individuality. Wells, in The Sleeper Awakes, imagined how some nasty features of late nineteenth-century English life might develop if left unchecked. His London of the twenty-second century is a “great machine”, with “multitudes of people” everywhere. The privileged class is “unscrupulous, pleasure seeking, energetic, subtle”, while the workers are trapped in “abject poverty” (Wells 2010: 33–34, 96, 69). Zamyatin’s primary targets in We were the regimentation of industrial capitalism, which he witnessed in England, and the state control and collectivization that were coming into force in his native Russia as the Soviet Union came into being. The routines of his One State satirize Taylorism, the system of industrial management developed by the American engineer Frederick Taylor and applied by industrialists such as Henry Ford. Huxley took aim in Brave New World at the culture of consumption and entertainment he observed in Western Europe and the United States, and the planned economies proposed by European socialists and put into practice in the Soviet Union. The first was based on “self-indulgence up the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics”, the second on robotic acceptance of the status quo. Both were underpinned by technology (2004: 209). He was particularly disturbed by the techniques of psychological conditioning. “A really efficient totalitarian state”, he wrote, “would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced because they love their servitude” (Huxley 2004: xxxv). Orwell believed that socialism, “wholeheartedly applied”, was “a way out” of the impasse of modern capitalism (2001: 158), but he also saw its dehumanizing side. He insisted that Nineteen Eighty-Four was “NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or the British Labour Party”, yet he called the political system prevalent in Oceania “Ingsoc”, short for English Socialism. The problem with European politics, Orwell felt, lay not in the tenets of any particular system, but in the tendency of the rising ideologies of the 1940s, communism and fascism, to move “towards a form of oligarchical collectivism”. This had become possible because “totalitarian ideas have taken

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root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere” (Orwell in Claeys 2010: 122–123). Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Huxley’s Brave New World offer opposed models of the dystopian future. The two novelists were aware of this and passionately defended their fictional worlds. Orwell wrote to a correspondent in 1943 that one should not “overestimate the danger of a ‘Brave New World’—i.e. a completely materialistic vulgar civilisation based on hedonism”. He felt that “the danger of that kind of thing is past, and that we are in danger of quite a different kind of world, the centralized slave state, ruled over by a small clique”. “Such a state”, he continued, “would not be hedonistic, on the contrary its dynamic would come from some kind of rabid nationalism and leader-worship kept going by literally continuous war” (Orwell 2011a: 217–218). Six years later, Orwell had his publisher send a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four to Huxley, who wrote a long letter in response. “My own belief”, he said, “is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World”. He went on: “Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that I imagined in Brave New World” (Huxley in appendix to Huxley 2006: 9–10). Orwell did not live to see the fulfilment of some of the prophecies he made in Nineteen Eighty-Four and the non-fulfilment of others. Huxley, who lived longer, had time to look back and around as well as ahead. In the foreword to the 1946 edition of Brave New World, he wrote that the terrible history of the thirties and forties made some of his prognostications in seem overcautious: “All things considered, it looks as though Utopia were far closer than anyone, only fifteen years ago, could have imagined. … Today it seems quite possible that the horror may be upon us within a single century” (Huxley 2004: xxxviii). Eleven years later, he returned to the same theme in Brave New World Revisited: “The prophesies made in 1931 are coming true much sooner than I thought they would. … The nightmare of total organization, which I had situated in the seventh century After Ford [2540 in the Gregorian calendar],

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has emerged from the safe, remote future and is now awaiting us, just around the next corner”. Returning to his differences with Orwell, he continued: “In the context of 1948, 1984 seemed dreadfully convincing. But tyrants after all are mortal and circumstances change”. In particular, “In the light of what we have recently learned about animal behaviour in general, and human behaviour in particular, it has become clear that control through the punishment of undesirable behaviour is less effective, in the long run, than control through reinforcement of desirable behaviour by rewards, and that government through terror works on the whole less well than government through the non-violent manipulation of the environment and thoughts and feelings of individual men, women and children” (Huxley 2006: 2–3). Huxley went on to say that it was democracies, not dictatorships, that were laying the foundations for the total organization he feared. All of them paid lip-service to the ideals of freedom and democracy but in fact, with “political and economic power” becoming more and more “concentrated and centralized”, democracy was becoming impossible. In the authoritarian East, “the media of mass communication” were “controlled by the state”. In the ostensibly democratic West, they were “controlled by members of the Power Elite”, a term Huxley borrowed from sociologist C. Wright Mills. Coddled by the media, people in America and Europe cherished “the illusion of individuality”, but were “to a great extent deindividualized”. This was especially evident when they got together to watch sports, films, political speeches and other forms of mass entertainment, becoming victims of “herd-poisoning”, which made them “lose all sense of individual or collective responsibility”. The result was “new kind of non-violent totalitarianism” (Huxley 2006: 18, 34, 20, 41, 115). Huxley clearly believed that his version of the future was going to win out over Orwell’s. At the same time he admitted that the methods of control of the societies he wrote about were hard as well as soft: “Brainwashing, as it is now practiced, is a hybrid technique depending for its effectiveness partly on the systematic use of violence, partly on skilful psychological manipulation”. He felt this was a sign that “the tradition of 1984” was on its way to becoming “the tradition of Brave New World” (Huxley 2006: 67). But it is more likely that the two traditions will always coexist.

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The Dystopian Present Huxley wrote the essays from which I have just quoted in 1957. How do things measure up today? The idea that we live in a dystopian world has become commonplace. But which sort of dystopia is it: Orwellian or Huxleyan or hybrid? Or it is perhaps something no novelist or theorist could foresee. The defeat of Nazi Germany and the transformation of Communist Russia and China from straightforward dictatorships into state-capitalist autocracies make it look as though Orwell has lost. But this leaves the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea out of the picture. The realm of Kim Jong-un is an isolated, totalistic state centred around the worship of the leader and his father and grandfather. Technology is used in service of the regime, particularly the military. The society is immobile, stratified, and group-oriented, the individual almost completely suppressed. There is squalid uniformity and mechanical regimentation of every aspect of life. The government stays on top by means of social, psychological and biological control. Propaganda and surveillance approach Nineteen Eighty-Four levels (Times Editorial Board 2014). Some former Communist states—Russia, Turkmenistan, China, Vietnam—keep something of their Orwellian past, but their openness to the international market economy and the global information-entertainment industry make it hard for them to avoid contamination by liberal-democratic model as championed by the United States and Western Europe. The countries of North America and Western Europe are not dictatorships (although some seem to be moving in that direction), but they do exhibit many of the characteristics of dystopian societies as discussed in the section headed “Literary Utopias and Dystopias”. In the modern West the Power Elite has dug a trench between itself and the citizenry, turning its world of privilege into an island more remote than More’s Utopia. Leaders in the spheres of politics, finance, entertainment and sports are worshipped to a degree that would make an old-style monarch envious. Society is stratified, with alarming disparities of wealth between the one and ninety-nine percent. Uniformity of dress and accoutrements prevails, though it is presented as personal choice by the merchants of style and wizards of advertisement. People are bombarded by propaganda yet believe their political opinions are their own. Last but not least, surveillance abounds. The politico-military elite uses advanced technology

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to tap into the electronic network that people increasingly rely on for communication, entertainment and shopping. These features are more characteristic of Huxleyan than Orwellian dystopias. Huxley understood that soft surveillance and control are more effective, in the long run, than the hard techniques of Big-Brother-style totalitarianism. “As the art and science of manipulation come to be better understood”, he wrote in Brave New World Revisited, “the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine these [hard] techniques with the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now threatening to drown [rational discourse] in a sea of irrelevance”. Distracted minds are unaware that the media are misdirecting their attention in the way professional magicians misdirect the attention of their audiences before performing their tricks. As a result, people “remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim” (Huxley 2006: 36, 114). Distraction, misdirection and silent manipulation are leading features of twenty-first-century mind-control and surveillance, but they have taken forms that Huxley, for all his prescience, never imagined. Over the last thirty years the Internet has reconfigured the spheres of communication, finance, commerce, entertainment and social interaction. It has also introduced undreamed-of possibilities of surveillance and mind-control. Billions of people use the Internet daily to conduct searches, read the news, post pictures and videos, send emails and messages, and so forth. They may be aware that the sites they visit use cookies to keep track of their activities—supposedly (as the now mandatory messages put it) to “improve your experience”, provide “personalized advertising”, and so forth. For most users, this seems a small price to pay to access the enormously useful services offered by the companies who maintain the sites. Only recently have technologically literate critics made it clear that the data the companies collect is sold to commercial and government agencies at enormous profit to the sellers. The services they provide misdirect our attention from the data collection and sale that is, when all is said and done, their raison d’être. In the early days of the Internet, people were transfixed by the possibilities it offered: cheap and rapid communication, global interconnectivity, access to vast stores of data. They took at face value the mission statements of the big technology companies: Google’s “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” (Thompson 2019);

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Facebook’s “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” (Chaykowski 2017). Even after it became clear that Google search results could be manipulated by bad actors and that much that was shared on Facebook was mendacious and unhealthy, most people held on to the idea that these companies were fundamentally benign. This began to change in 2012 when the results of Facebook’s “massive scale emotional contagion” experiments were published. Six years later the Cambridge Analytica scandal made it abundantly clear that Facebook was harvesting personal information without the consent of users and selling it to companies who used it for political advertising. Since then a deluge of articles and books have revealed that Facebook, Google, Amazon and other internet companies are primarily in the business of creating “prediction products” that are sold on the open market, and that these products can be used, and in fact are used, to create surveillance profiles, skew markets, influence elections and otherwise alter human behaviour (Zuboff 2019). Internet companies log our activity each time we visit a page, click a link, post a photo, request a song, order a book, change our location, write an email, send a message or engage in any other form of digital behaviour. Each of our digital devices, from the commercial point of view, is “simply a supply-chain interface for the unobstructed flow of behavioural data on its way to predicting our futures in a surveillance economy” (Zuboff in Naughton 2019). Once it is logged and stored, our data is processed by artificial intelligence programmes and packaged as prediction products. Facebook (as a leaked company document reveals) “ingests trillions of data points every day, trains thousands of models… and then deploys them to the server fleet for live predictions”. In their most benign form, prediction algorithms suggest songs we’d like to hear or books we’d like to buy. But when our data are combined with the data of millions of other users, it can be used by commercial and political agents to alter human behaviour on a massive scale. “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles”, the whistle-blower in the Cambridge Analytica case admitted, “and built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons”. One probable result was the victory for Leave in the Brexit referendum (Zuboff 2019). Internet companies possess more information about their users than governments hold about their citizens. As a result, governments have become major buyers in the data market. The motives of the parties in these transactions differ—“Corporations use information gained by

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surveillance for profit, governments for control”, explains technology writer Evgeny Morozov—but their interests “have converged: both are interested in the collection and rapid analysis of user data. Google and Facebook are compelled to collect ever more data to boost the effectiveness of the ads they sell. Government agencies need the same data—they can collect it either on their own or in coöperation with technology companies—to pursue their own programs” (2013). This “public/private surveillance partnership”, as computer-security expert Bruce Schneier calls it, is now central to the strategies of both parties and despite the efforts of citizen groups “neither corporations nor governments are going to back down” (2013). The amazing thing about the new surveillance economy is that we helped to build it ourselves—without being aware of what we were doing. Technology blogger Dylan Curran (2018) summed up the situation in a bon mot that is both amusing and terrifying: “we would never let the government or a corporation put cameras/microphones in our homes or location trackers on us, but we just went ahead and did it ourselves because … I want to watch cute dog videos”. This is a classic instance of the distraction-misdirection techniques that Huxley warned about in 1957, carried out on a planetary scale. Our everyday world of internet searches, social-media posts, emails, and Whatsapp messages has become the scene of a Brave New World–style dystopia that we are too distracted to see. But below its pleasant patina our digital dystopia has Orwellian depths. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the hero Winston Smith remarks that the Thought Police were not necessarily listening to everyone all the time, but “they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to” (Orwell 2011b: 942). In June 2013, former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden revealed: “Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector, anywhere. Where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks and the authorities that analyst is empowered with” (Snowden 2013). In March of the same year, a United States Senator asked James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, whether the NSA gathered “any type of data at all on millions of Americans”. “No, sir”, Clapper responded. “Not wittingly”. Three months later, after Snowden’s revelations, Clapper was asked why he had given a negative reply in March. He replied: “I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying ‘no.’” (Clapper in Reily 2013). More than one commentator observed

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that this was an example of doublespeak that even Orwell would have been hard put to equal.

A Utopian Future? The speed with which the new surveillance economy has taken hold, and the resistance of tech companies and governments to regulation it make it look like the movement towards global surveillance and mind-control is unstoppable. Consumer organizations and citizens’ groups will continue to demand more oversight but for the moment they are voices crying in the wilderness. As Huxley noted in the last essay of Brave New World revisited: “Despite all the preaching” by critics of the surveillance state, “the disease grows steadily worse. We know it is unsafe to allow power to be concentrated in the hands of a ruling oligarchy; nevertheless power is being concentrated in fewer and few hands” (2006: 119). What was true in 1957 is even more true today. To many sober-minded observers the future looks bad. The problems posed by climate change, overpopulation, political conflict and digital surveillance seem too intractable to solve. This has not stopped some speculative writers from proposing utopian alternatives. One novelist who made an effort in this direction was, ironically, the very one who wrote the most believable dystopian novel of the twentieth century. In 1962 Aldous Huxley published Island, a novel he referred to as “a kind of reverse Brave New World”. Written after the author had become a student of mystical literature and an experimenter with LSD, Island was, Huxley said, an attempt to depict “a society in which real efforts are made to realize human potentialities” (Huxley 1960). On the fictional island of Pala, education, hypnosis, sex, and psychoactive drugs (all agents of enslavement in Brave New World) are used to promote well-being. The results are promising—but Huxley was too much a realist to give his fable a happy ending. The island is invaded by a nearby kingdom which is financed by Western oil interests. Its people, we realize, will be forced to adopt Western ways and be exposed to Western neuroses. In the world of philosophy, utopia is even more passé than in the world of literature. Perhaps the only thinkers willing to take the idea seriously are members of the transhumanist school. In his optimistic, some would say naïve, “Letter from Utopia”, transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom wrote of three transformations that humans will have to undergo to be able to reach utopia: a physical transformation that will ensure long

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life, if not yet immortality; a psychological transformation, developing the brain’s special faculties, among them “music, humor, spirituality, mathematics, eroticism, art”; and a hedonistic transformation, making bliss an everyday condition (2008: 1–7). Bostrom’s utopian dreams are appealing but for the moment seem impossible to realize. Utopias may lie beyond our grasp, but as philosopher Michael Hauskeller observed, they “fulfil an important function. They serve as a reminder that the world doesn’t have to be as it is: that there are other possible worlds that we could live in” (2014). The social utopias of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries proved to be monstrosities; the digital utopian dreams of the early twenty-first century are well on their way to becoming nightmares; but the ideal of utopia—a world without strife, stratification, and surveillance—remains an inspiration to many.

Note 1. Huxley denied having read We before writing Brave New World, but many critics, Orwell included, have taken it for granted that he did (Orwell 1946; Meckier 2011: 229).

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Thompson, Andrew. 2019. Google’s Mission Statement and Vision Statement (An Analysis). Panmore Institute, February 13. Available online at http:// panmore.com/google-vision-statement-mission-statement. Times Editorial Board. 2014. The Nightmare That Is North Korea. Los Angeles Times, February 19. Available online at https://www.latimes.com/opinion/ editorials/la-ed-north-korea-crimes-against-humanity-united-n-20140219story.html. Watt, Donald (ed.). 2013. Aldous Huxley. London: Routledge. Wells, H.G. 2010. The Sleeper Awakes. Overland Park, KS: Digireads.com. Zamyatin, Yevgeny. 2006. We, trans. Natasha Randall. New York: Modern Library. Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York: Public Affairs.

CHAPTER 18

Mysticism in the Tree of Anthropocene: The Feminine Tree of Life and the Virtual Sphere Umar Nizarudeen

Emancipation from the bondage of soil is no freedom for the tree —Rabindranath Tagore

In the Indian ecosystem of belief, woman is the ‘devi’, the goddess. Here the divine virtual tree of life in the feminine anthropocene reaches into the sky, even as it is being tempered by the devotional Bhakti ethos. This paper looks into ways in which this banished human/feminine can be thus rewritten back, where it irrigates/nourishes the harmonious centre of a digital multiverse. The virtual cogito in the Cartesian ‘cogito, ergo, sum’ is feminine. The interiority of this thinking self that we carve out in literary forms such as the novel and also in Bhakti literature are instances of feminine crafting. The idea of a feminine crafting in a multiverse ecosystem encompasses a logically coherent mutual coexistence of multiple realities simultaneously. The predominant regime of this epoch has been the digital (the other being cloning, which is a regime of the simulacral) which operates in the

U. Nizarudeen (B) Directorate of Collegiate Education, Thiruvananthapuram, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. K. Giri (ed.), Roots, Routes and a New Awakening, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7122-0_18

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realm of the cogito in an arena of super diversity. This Cartesian cogito, as previously stated, is feminine, which offers an immanent, in utero critique of the transcendental divine in the anthropocene age. In the anthropocene age, humanity is in peril owing to the dangerous proliferation of thermonuclear weapons. Graham Harman offers an interesting definition of the anthropocene as the epoch following the Trinity Nuclear Test when human beings have increased in population so much so that they have become a shaping force of geography itself. Homosapiens as a species have been so successful that the quantitative leap has led to quantitative shifts, paving way to emergence of novel ideas like that of Steven Vertovec’s ‘Super Diversity’ (Vertovec 2007). Bhakti devotionalism operates in this very realm of rampant super diversity. In the age of ecological catastrophe and climate change, the old axioms have been rendered obsolete by emerging paradigms of super diversity which calls for an infinite acceptance. In this way, Bhakti precedes the modern cogito. Bhakti’s infinite acceptance of deities and its essentially polytheistic nature means that one already is in Bhakti, so to speak, before consciously realizing it. Sagun Bhakti provides an alternate realm of human consciousness. It is not an act of appropriation, but rather a progression of consciousness in the Hegelian sense. In this context, Bhakti becomes the world-conquering spirit albeit confined within the limits of the sacred geography of India. In the intensity of its devotion, Bhakti creates an appeal to renunciation which in turn produces its jouissance of enjoyment, the mystical jouissance of the ascetic, which is a core component of Bhakti. It is not a repressed libido, but an effulgence of the spirit that finds its fullness in communion with the deity, who manifested, or gave darsan, in the literature of Bhakti. The literary manifestation of asceticism was Bhakti poetry. Thus the repressed emerges in Bhakti poetry. Bhakti was the outpouring of what remained repressed within the subaltern collective consciousness of medieval India. The symbolism of Bhakti is thus crucial in a Jungian sense. Bhakti itself is this repressed traumatic kernel of the failed symbolization with no substantial materiality to itself. It is in this very failure and act of submission that Bhakti asserts itself. It took flight in the medieval darkness like the Hegelian conception of the owl of Minerva. This belatedness of Bhakti constitutes the paradoxical trope of the world renouncing ascetic in traditional Indian culture who ironically returns to wield much power before potentates (which in turn has been earned through this very act of renunciation). This is the same trope found in the

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biblical story of the prodigal son, articulated from within a very different philosophical milieu, similar to the technological analog that preceded and even today coexists with the digital. The state of being in this epoch has been the performative digital, which has successfully superseded the analog. The primordial, embodied feminine wellsprings and sources of human civilization can possibly be lost in the labyrinthine realm of the digital. Unfortunately the digital sphere has been a space of spectacular violence, rampant misogyny and atrocious masculine posturing comprising a case of cognitive mapping going haywire in such a way that the digital, while being animated by the feminine principle, has banished the feminine itself from its centre. This happens in real time, in eco systems and environments like the Technopark in Kerala, HITEC City in Hyderabad, Silicon Valley in San Jose and Bangalore in India and also in the larger, more expansive economic and political, social and cultural spheres opened by the digital regime. Shepherd Bliss rightly calls this the mythopoesis of men’s achievements (Bliss 1995). The virtual object has emerged as the divine incarnation. Coeval with the discourse of virtual developmentalism with mystical overtones, there also is a constant glorification of technological innovation and scientific advance as the products of a testosterone-driven toxic masculine culture. Psychoanalysts like Urvashi Agarwal and Ananya Khushwaha, female psychotherapists, have worked on this phenomenon of toxic masculinities in India, which affects not just its victims, the women, but also the male perpetrators in ways hitherto unfathomable.1 Gender and race barriers upset the anthropocene apple cart of human permanence. The phenomenon of toxic masculinity often acts a barriers to proper mental health treatment (Kupers 2005). The very process of mental healthcare and masculinity has been taken over by the phallic apparatus of the National Rifle Association in the USA and its adjacent toxic ecosystems. The discourse of law exists only as punishment and woman is posited as the object of desire and conquest. The ecology of science has been rendered toxic by accumulated debris of masculinist technological edifice. Krishna Bhakti mysticism provides a kaleidoscopic vision of the multiple possibilities of the unitary masculine. Humanity is not lethal, but rather a malleable life form seeking its ethical-social coordinates. The multiple coordinates of (analog) embodied reality can be sought in the digital virtual sphere.

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In the digital realm, it is paradoxical how the plural epistemes of race, sport, conservative politics, science and cutting-edge digital technology bleed into each other in the anthropocene. This paper looks into ways in which the banished human can be rewritten back into the very centre of the digital multiverse. The idea of a multiverse which encompasses a logically coherent mutual coexistence of multiple realities simultaneously was proposed by Isaac Newton in his ‘Opticks’ (Newton 1704), and it has become the gravity of our times. Bhakti provides the grounding even as the virtual dances its flamenco moves. The digital, disembodied virtual world has often been harnessed in ways that are subversive in unanticipated ways.2 The prognosticated takeover of science and technology by robots, could be interpreted as the pinnacle of misogyny appropriating for itself reproductive faculties of the human, or rather it could be seen as the separation of procreation as an act from the central place it occupies in the current gender binary, the regime within which science and technology also operate. The gender binary surrounding the mothering role, from Freud onwards is the locus of the nerd ecosystem (that must be mystically transcended) comprising memes, dank memes, trolls, offensive humour, snuff videos and the like. These errors are horrific, unlike in devotion, where there are no errors. The ritual and scriptural core of vedic faith was circumvented by Bhakti through deploying secret scriptures and oral narratives as well as a non-ritualistic ideology. The literary corpus of Bhakti was the secret and yet not-so-secret scripture of medieval India. This comprised a primordial repository of human wisdom. Bhakti provides the syncretized archive that can meld our schizoid reality split between the disembodied virtual robotic and the embodied analog feminine. The devotionalism of the robotic being (its subservience according to the first rule of Asimov’s Robotics) in the new industrial revolution melds it together with the human embodied feminine. In virtual disembodied digital technologies, there is an inherent danger that threatens humanity in general and the feminine in particular. The latent misogyny in the virtual technology matrix, of coders and developers, belies its potential. Toxic masculinity among technology workers, cuts across the board, in a glocal way including those from the elite IITs, while claiming to be gender-sensitive prone to making philosophical errors pertaining to gender in their mediated spheres. As a computer engineering student at the foremost state-run university in the

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most literate state in India, I had first-hand experience of the masculine anxieties and how they are rather simplistically resolved via whatsapp groups pandering blatant misogyny and pornography that function as the obscene supplements or otherwise normative media/workspaces. The originary misogyny of social media still stalks its users. In the first decade of the new millennium, Rajani S. Anand, a young engineering student committed suicide throwing herself down from the engineering entrance commissioner’s office in Trivandrum, Kerala. She had not been able to pay her fees in time.3 The virtuality of the abyss beckons. The gravitational pull of the abyss is the void of nothingness and abjection, engendered by simplistic gender binaries. Simplistic male–female gender division still serves as the primary locus for binary demarcation within patriarchal societies, of disciplines such as psychology, philosophy and literature for women and the STEM4 areas of mathematical sciences/mechanical engineering for men. Technology that serves the non-gender binary norms of LGBTQ+ and the immersive non-alienated inhabitation of technology outside masculine habits and obsolete norms have to be made possible. The Experimental Reality of the multiverse, of which the physicist Stephen Hawking was a votary of, has to be taken into consideration. The multiverse exists on the famous premise that ‘god does not play dice’. The Pascalian wager, put forward by Blaise Pascal, posits that if one is in doubt over the existence of deity, it is always better to believe anyway since the possibility of an eventual non-existence of deity cannot hurt you. But Bhakti subverts this not by radically positing the non-existence of a deity, but rather through the assertion of the existence of a multitude of deities, so that non-belief segues into the realm of belief in the density of gods/deities (In similar fashion, a polygon with infinite sides becomes a circle, the perfect two-dimensional figure). In this density of gods did the humanism of Bhakti prosper. The groundedness of Bhakti is luminescent with an iridescent spirituality shorn of any inertia. This provides a relief from the inertia of conventional feudal-patriarchal religion with its leaden core of ritual and scripture. Bhakti devotionalism had once created a broad-based democratic ecosystem that operated in the virtual ‘nirgun’ sphere in the case of Kabir, and in the ‘sagun’ embodied space for Surdas. In the parallax between these two can be found the devotional public sphere of Bhakti, where it was possible for a feminine mystic such as Akka Mahadevi to remain

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‘skyclad’. Democratization of the virtual sphere is demanded by its very universality. It comprises a modernization of tradition. Technology supersedes tradition. The universal values that supposedly permeate science confront cultural specificities, as something beyond culture, even as technology is touted as a user-generated/designed phenomenon where technological media has travelled far ahead of limited horizons of human evolution and imagination. As a result, old technologies such as television as a medium, rather than being interactive in the cyber age, remains stuck in the monolith soap opera era of the valve tube television. Static innovation, like the sleep of reason, is bound to produce monsters. The universality of technology is that of the end user, the consumer. This end user, consumer humanity has very little space for enlightening debate. Bhakti as cybernetic media, dissolves this crisis. A modelling of a virtual Bhakti space based on the traditional archives is necessary for this. The legend of Mirabai is a case in point. She was a Rajput princess, who renounced the palace and became a mystic under the tutelage of Sant Ravidas. The inherited tradition of devotion was effortlessly melded into the subaltern ethos of a primordial Indic civilization. Mirabai, a Rajput princess was the disciple of Sant Ravidas. The unity in multiplicity of Advaita was furthered in this ecumenical process of Bhakti. The more different entities are, the more they remain the same and static. The regime of the multiple-being, cloning and such cutting-edge technological developments have bestowed a certain theoretical agency to women. But the old patriarchal edifice still reserves for itself the right to inject some sort of diversity/identity. Patriarchy still claims to insert the uniqueness into the process of procreation. Patriarchy brings with it the matrix of identity. The politics of identity collapses the universal into the particular without conferring upon its individual agency. The digital circumvents the particularity of the identity and reaches out for the universal. In the process it creates a new individual, a devotional mystic in the modern sense who refutes the conservatism of traditional societies. The conservatism of traditional societies led to their inability to differentiate between the conjugal and procreative spheres and has led to widespread anxiety over LGBTQ+ identity formations, which are at heart technological. From the time of Plato onwards, the regimes of the multiple and the virtual have been viewed with suspicion.5 LGBTQ+ identity operates in the post-metaphysical realm of technology. Biotechnological mutations which are still in the nascent stage, but yet facilitated

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by some regimes, and the erection of class and race barriers along with climate change and fourth-generation cyborg capitalism comprise challenges for the post-millenial generation (Mannheim 1952). Identity that doesn’t include multiplicity is a misnomer. Advaita wisdom says that even as clay vessels retain their identity, their very mould of clay comprises a certain universality. The masculine is engendered within the feminine, and they are not mutually exclusive categories, in the ether of Bhakti devotionalism, which was unique to India. Especially in India, unity is a modality of diversity. Can the digital subalterns speak?, is the question of the hour. The advent of the identity politics has decimated the emancipatory possibilities that post-modernism imbued within itself and has rendered the subalterns mute (Spivak 1988). Instead of facilitating the creation of alternative realities, the decentring relativism has buttressed the regressive advancement of conservatism and orthodoxy masquerading as popular sentiment and mass reason (Reich 1933) which functions as molecular level of fascism. The revenge of the withdrawing patriarchy means that women, while being rendered repositories of affect and feeling, are no longer in a position to bestow symbolic agency upon emotion, love and affect. The digital has swallowed up the symbolizing power. This hegemonic assertion of virile masculinity starts right from the R&D laboratory where the connectors are still called ‘male’ and ‘female’ in sexist fashion depending on whether they have inward or outward jutting tips (Latour 1979). These protrusions replicate the Freudian symptom of phallic masculinity. The profusion of phallic sharp objects that proliferate the digital hardware ecosystem, from CPUs and ‘mother’ boards to Mu-Ps and Integrated Circuits, and extreme video graphics cards indicate an ultra-masculine takeover of scientific reason and innovative technology. The fertile mellowness of femininity remains castigated within universal male phobia for the replicating ovum. How does the feminine fertility of Moore’s law reduce into a flippant joke about procreating robots (dropping a baby etc.)? It is imperative upon us to find an answer for this in the anthropocene. The cognitive grasping aggressive business model of the technological start-up mimics the testosterone-charged environment of the locker-room.6 Patriarchy has withdrawn its care and left its clones to the mercy of the elements. How can the earth/nature be re-enchanted? The pan-local schizophrenic pathology of new media can be cured by an immersive and integrated, holistic approach to the Real, adopted by mystical cosmopolis,

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which accepts the virtual so as to translate cyber-pathology into cyberdemocracy. The sickness of digital disembodied virtual technologies can be cured by the Reality of the immersive virtual. It creates virtual interiority a la Bhakti. The gestalt of the holistic universal is articulated within the paradigm of the particular. The monological calibration of the particular into the universal in the realm of Bhakti is very much Deleuzian. To substantiate this, in nonhistoricist fashion, it would be possible to use the manifold of assemblage theory proposed by Giles Deleuze and also the flat ontology proposed for the sciences by Bruno Latour in conjunction with the devotional articulation in the Indic sphere. Bhakti also has nomadic, transient roots. Bhakti is a mode, a spatio-temporal medium for spatial particles and time, to be pickled in. Bhakti-media of India, rooted though it was reached into the transcendental realm and was a readymade solution (Duchamp) to issues of integration. The first articulation of Bhakti occurs in the Bhagavad Gita, also a technological treatise of Indic ethos. This historical evocation of Indian mysticism, Bhakti occurs in ‘Bhagavad Gita’ where Krishna tells Arjuna, ‘bhav madbhakto’ (be my devotee). The historicist approach divides mystics into settlers and nomads, and goes back to agrarian settlerism, raises claims that the exigencies of agrarianism compelled women to stay at home, lending to men the heavier muscular labours, thus depleting influence on decision-making and larger corporeal well-being. A more holistic, horizontal modelling of Bhakti is called for. Similarly, the ultra-reductive approach of a contemporary philosopher like Daniel Dennet, famous for his intuition pumps, would entail the elimination of vinologists by wine-tasting machines. Such a paradigm would replace wombs with Frankenstein laboratories. The nerves underlying the muscles can be activated through the musculature, of political action, not direct intervention.7 The structure spectrally repeats and recreates itself in zombie fashion. The digital universe calls for virtual and holistic solutions. It is aniconic, and so is the ‘nirgun’ mystical devotional universe of cosmic unity. It has philosophical,8 ‘sagun’ virtual solutions and ‘nirgun’ analogue embodied systemic solutions. Philosophy, unlike science, according to Graham Harman is never a direct description/explanation of things, in the post-human scheme of things. Science on the other hand is never a potential. One is either a scientist or not, and never a ‘potential scientist’. But a philosopher often is. The subjective, experiential quality that foregrounds the feminine (in experiences such as childbirth) are alien to science, systematically or

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otherwise. The unending quest for objectivity renders science into an allegory for masculine anxieties. Rosi Braidotti, Brian Massumi, Levi Bryant, Jane Bennet, Quentin Meillassoux, the late Gilbert Simondon provide the conceptual apparatus (anukriti) that can replace this. Braidotti, the foremost contemporary scholar of subjectivity and affect, treats difference as originary to subjectivity. The rise of a digital consciousness can be envisaged as gender outside the hierarchical or binary notions of patriarchy (Braidotti 2002), which is the emergence of a new reality. Reality is only a rumbling of resonances or vibrations? The phallus withdraws/banishes itself into fractals. Katherine Hayles speaks of flickering bodies of the new media. Destruction of women (the slashed vagina) is coded into the very structure of modernity, hence its discontents. Particles of the primordial amniotic intra-uterine, attach themselves to the Real. The entire paradigm for our architecture (digital or otherwise) is uterine. How to go back in time and pre-empt modernity’s hysterectomy? The notion of multiple dialogic temporalities is to be deployed. The iron-cage of method is the bane of science which privileges methodological correctness over common sense. The unending parade of the modern age has been the victory of scientific method over science. Robert Carlyle would argue that genius is but an abundance of common sense. The notion of the chora and the platonic-cave womb and the semiotic conceptual apparatus propounded by Julia Kristeva serve as supplements to the immersive new-age media which are more democratic and accommodative. (‘Agnostic Faith’ is the model that Bhakti provides for the digital multiverse.) Thus in the digital multiverse, barriers to gender-democratization of the digital are not material/economic barriers, but rather constructed or learned. A feminine takeover of science and technology need not necessarily mean a violent feminization that would function as some sort of counterpoint to masculine hegemony. Akka Mahadevi in Karnataka for instance used Bhakti as a technology to espouse a sky clad divinity, that graced herself in the form of the ‘lord white as jasmine’. A feminine digital regime would rather be sui generis and readymade, non-violent. Immersive new-age media and three-dimensional projections and Virtual Reality simulations are emancipatory and inclusive and less alienating just like the medieval Bhakti, which was an immersive technology allowing for the serpent of avidya and the rope of vidya to coalesce, leading agential women like Mira and Akka Mahadevi to challenge normative masculine notions of power, unreason and hierarchy.

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Inhabitation of technology outside masculine spatial habits and obsolete temporal norms is possible. Mapping the spatial coordinates of Bhakti in India posits many different Ramayana epics, a prime vehicle of Bhakti. ‘Kambaramayanam’ written by Kambar in Tamil in twelfth century, ‘Ramavataracharitram’ composed by Karprakash Bhattar, ‘Ramakam’ also called ‘Diva’ in Kashmir, ‘Adiramayanam’ in Telugu; all these are Ramayana stories in India. Sri Lanka, thought to be Ravana’s land, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Philippines, Java, Sumatra, Mali, Cambodia also have their Ramayana stories. ‘Ramaki’ is Ramayana of Thailand. It is ‘Yamastya’ in Myanmar, ‘Ramacareplant’ in Cambodia’, ‘Sriakath’ in Laos, ‘Serirama’ in Malaysia, ‘Kakavin’ in Indonesia. After the Indian revolt of 1857, and taking over of administration of ‘jewel in the crown’ by Queen Victoria, and the migration of Indians including priestly class, to the Caribbean, Fiji, South Africa and other locations, globally it shares contours with ‘Sanskrit cosmopolis’. Bhakti becomes thus, an all pervasive ether. Bhakti became a media, ether for spatial coordinates to be pickled in. Bhakti-media was hence a readymade solution (Duchamp) to complex issues of national sovereignty and integration. It stretches spatially between particularity of blinkered seaview of naval peephole on one hand and the universality of the all encompassing universal ‘Piri Reis’ map on other, i.e. unity in diverstiy. The temporal and spatial elasticity derives from mystical spectrality of media, sookshma (micro) and sthoola (gross) at same time. The future demands a conceptualization of the ‘Ratnakara’, Indian Ocean cosmopolis via Bhakti. The depth of Bhakti devotionalism is commensurate with its cosmopolitan outreach. Bhakti is both a feminine readymade multicultural-design to conceptually solve cultural differences, and a forensic mechanism with antennae deep into primordial Indic reality. Having circularized time, Indic systems of thought thus manipulate and control space in the anthropocene. Coevalness is thus the hallmark of Bhakti, it emerges simultaneously, in diverse spatial coordinates, across time.

Notes 1. Psychoanalysis: An Indian Terroir. (eds) Anup Dhar and Anurag Mishra. Westland Books, New Delhi. 2018.

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2. The Iraqi born architect Zaha Hadid’s work has been called a call to feminist arms against gravity as well as patriarchy. Feminism is in this sense an anti-gravity as well as anti-patriarchal ideology. 3. https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-kerala/girljumps-to-death-from-housing-board-building/article27644043.ece. 4. Science Technology Engineering Mathematics. 5. The use of computational and digital humanities techniques like Big Data in the human sciences and the inertia of traditional scholarship towards such methodological innovations have to be read in conjunction with this. 6. It is possible in this context to raise the question of ‘Why not unisex dress codes for labs?’ 7. Direct interventions like chemical libido treatments have been counterproductive in South Korea and elsewhere where serial offenders have bargained for reduced sentences in return for undergoing direct chemical treatment and returned to their previous life of crime. 8. Spinoza calls the philosophical, intellectual love of God, the acme of love.

Bibliography Bliss, Shepherd. 1995. Mythopoetic Men’s Movements. In The Politics of Manhood: Profeminist Men Respond to the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement (And the Mythopoetic Leaders Answer), ed. Michael S. Kimmel (pp. 292–307). Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2002. Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: MIT. Kupers, Terry A. 2005. Toxic Masculinity as a Barrier to Mental Health Treatment in Prison. Journal of Clinical Psychology (June): 713–724. Latour, Bruno. 1979. La Vie de laboratoire: la Production des faits scientifiques. Paris: La Découverte. Mannheim, Karl. 1952. The Problem of Generations. In Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge: Collected Works Volume 5 (pp. 276–322). New York: Routledge. Newton, Isaac. 1704. Opticks. Reich, Willhelm. 1933. The Mass Psychology of Fascism. London: Farrar Strauss and Giroux. Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Vertovec, Steven. 2007. Super-Diversity and Its Implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies 30 (6): 1024–1054. https://doi.org/10.1080/014198707 01599465.

CHAPTER 19

Roots, Routes, and Crossing Borders: Embracing Cosmopolitanism in a Transcultural World David Blake Willis

We are now at a crossroads for the world created by the Coronavirus Pandemic. This essay is meant to help us understand the present dilemma we are in, and the New World we may be entering, by revisiting the roots and routes of some of the great transformative educators of the twentieth century, those giants whose shoulders we stand on as we face the terrifying uncertainty of the Pandemic.1 Living in this truly cosmopolitan moment means being aware of our obligations to others that go beyond those we are related to or with whom we share a common language or citizenship (Appiah 2006). The value of cosmopolitan thinking is that it sees both global obligations and the celebration of local differences as important. Embracing a critical cosmopolitanism and moving border thinking from the margins to the center will enable and empower all of us to imagine a new future together.

D. B. Willis (B) Fielding Graduate University, Santa Barbara, CA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. K. Giri (ed.), Roots, Routes and a New Awakening, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7122-0_19

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If we acknowledge our differences from those around us we set in motion the pursuit of our own identities. I have had, as most of us, many contradictions in my life. Uncertainty and self-confidence have both acted as catalysts in my journey toward self-discovery. This has been a lifelong search for identity/identities as a person and as a teacher/scholar. Negotiating ambiguity is a key theme for this new era. Fixed ideas of how things are supposed to be are giving way to a reality in which the constants are change and the production of ever newer knowledge. What we are seeing now is the emergence of new imagined communities and a transcultural consciousness. An understanding that the choice for us is between different mental models, with culture as “patterns of sense-making” a key factor that has been proposed by Hikaru Komatsu, Jeremy Rappleye, and Iveta Silova in their article “Culture and the Independent Self: Obstacles to Environmental Sustainability?” (2019: 2). In this essay, they bridge empirical scientific data between the EF or Ecological Footprint of Consumption with data on individualistic cultures, helping us to move away from the present apocalyptic trajectory. I propose further that we see “the future as cultural fact” (Appadurai 2013), and our time as an era of aspiration, anticipation, and imagination.

Imagining the Future: New Identities, New Consciousness The world is open now in ways unimaginable even a few years ago, even as the closed attitudes and actions of the powerful, whether militarily or economically, reverberate with condescension, arrogance, and racism. These attitudes and actions would be less surprising fifty years ago, when the world was divided into national and ethnic enclaves, but today every instance of discrimination and abuse has the potential of being reported widely and promptly. With openness comes responsibilities for each of us to learn, to better understand, and to respect our fellow human beings and their cultural expressions. In his prescient musings on our world, Peter Drucker saw three main characteristics of the knowledge society that was emerging and that are very much related to this discussion of new paths to “an education for freedom”: (1) Borderlessness, (2) Upward Mobility, and (3) The Potential for Failure as Well as Success (2002). Learning is now taking place in what we might call “learning circles,” a term being used more and more

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frequently by many educators. Learning circles are what Native Americans call Sacred Hoops where we honor an intentional education for liberation and bring this vision to life. How can we as educators, scholars, and citizens transform the centers of power and privilege by re-imagining our societies in America, Japan, and elsewhere, especially in the midst of a common global pandemic? The failures of imagination until now have to do with our lack of recognition of the Other and their values. This failure to see the other side raises the question: What could we do to humanize this? We can begin by being wary of totalizing discourses and commentary, especially when they are suggested scripts for how we should think (Nederveen Pieterse 2011: 22). Layered processes and layered outcomes are what we can really expect. How might we move, too, beyond what has been called “the techno-human condition” (Allenby and Sarewitz 2011) or the converging technologies of “Humanity 2.0” (Fuller 2011) to what the great social activist Grace Lee Boggs envisioned as sustainable activism for the twenty-first century (2011 [2012])? The Impact of Imagined Worlds on Social Action In his brilliant work on Orientalism (1978) and in Out of Place (1999), his exceptional accounting of his own childhood and the rules of its engagement with difference and diversity, Edward Said took us all to a new understanding of place and power, of dominance, racism, and hierarchies perpetrated in the name of civilization(s). Cultural power exists in the power of defining Others. This imperious/imperial power is inevitably linked with the will to dominate politically, as well as actions that follow that will. Said showed us in Orientalism (1978) that the Western view of The East was a way of asserting power and authority over subject peoples and was the underpinning of colonialism and neocolonialism. These relationships continue, and while the language has changed, the elements of dominance and realpolitik power games remain, making the world today more dangerous than it has ever been. The militarization of the United States, China, India, Russia, and of the world are problematic legacies of colonialism and neocolonialism which should be prominent in any discussion of what will come after the Coronavirus Pandemic. Related to this are weapons of mass destruction and pending environmental catastrophe. The existence of these issues foreshadows in an ominous way our future together and is a direct threat to

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diversity, democracy, citizenship, education, and life. And to any Roots or Routes which we may have had. This is an existential moment. As these threats to humanity are becoming more globalized, so too should we be acting globally in response to their challenges. Allow me to suggest that we follow here in the footsteps of the radiant visions of Mahatma Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Septima Clark, Myles Horton, Martin Luther King, Paulo Freire, and other great transformative educators. It may be time now to move to the work of the inner colonialism of the mind and spirit which helps us see the past and envision the future. Crossing Borders: Return to the Borderlands The borders are our natural sites of creation… the places where we invent, transgress, and create. —Toni Morrison (In Lawrence-Lightfoot 2009)

We return, as we often do, to the borderlands, those areas where the crossroads beckon and tell us that another future is possible, depending on the direction we choose. We begin with where we are, but we also imagine a future which will take us to a different place. We need to begin looking at cultures in terms of processes, especially at those crossroads, in those transnational and transcultural borderlands where we come into contact with each other. Where we are meeting and interacting is where we are articulating a common, shared culture is. In the end it is about deeply felt human needs. As Amma, the great social activist Krishnammal Jagannathan, told me many years ago, “People are attached to me and I to them. Fellowship. It is fellowship they are starving for.” This is one of the primary borderlands, that of recognition and respect. The basic dignity and respect which Amma accords to all people, whatever their age or wherever they come from, follows her belief in the “unity of the light,” that “the spirit is one” (see Coppo 2005). Where else might we look for inspiration for the twenty-first century from the giants of the twentieth century? Learning from Questioning: Highlander Folk School Learning from questioning is an approach to education and consciousness-raising that Highlander Folk School has used to great effect in its critical work on education and social change (Horton 1990, 1998). The central role of Highlander in the Civil Rights Movement in

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the United States is unquestioned. Highlander is where the Citizenship Schools which lead to education and the right to vote began for many disenfranchised people; and it was this work which inspired Rosa Parks, who had trained at Highlander, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Myles Horton, the founder and one of the leaders of Highlander, spoke of the new society of the future in terms of the direction, the steps, and a vision (Horton 1998: 226). Horton saw that no one can know the future shape of society, but the quality of the process leading in that direction should be appreciated and valued. When you want to build a democratic society, you have to act democratically. If you want to love and have brother/sisterhood, then you have to practice those. As Horton said, “You just can’t expect those feelings to occur in the future without experiencing them before you get there.” One of the most important techniques at Highlander was the workshop which he called “the circle of learners.” This is a technique which can be reproduced and used by teachers in any educational setting (Horton 1998: 144–160; Jacobs 2003: 272). The teacher’s job is twofold: to be part of the circle of learners and to facilitate the learning process and help those in the circle understand they have experiences worth learning from for everyone. Unless they build on these experiences, nothing is going to happen. The members of the circle don’t know that they have these experiences or ideas because the educational system and the authorities have told them their ideas are nothing and that they (the authorities) are the experts. So that previous learning has to be undone. As Horton said: “That’s the role of a person at Highlander, to undo that so they can get to have some confidence in themselves” (ibid.). You can make a contribution once you are accepted as a member of the group, not as the “expert.” Horton explains this approach and technique further: “You establish yourself as saying, ‘Look, let’s analyze your experiences – talk about what you know, talk about what you’ve learned.’ You give value to them that they haven’t had before, and they’ll begin to say, ‘Well, you know…’; they begin to appreciate, they begin to articulate, and they begin to accept you as somebody who isn’t trying to dominate them” (ibid.). For Myles Horton a long-range goal was a direction that grew out of loving people, caring for them, and believing in their capacity to govern themselves (1998: 227). If you believe in people, you can inspire them by your belief. And that goal has to be something for everybody, because

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it can’t be a goal if it helps some people but hurts others. Moreover, the goal will grow as time goes on, like a tree planted to shade a house. It will be a vision beyond what we can imagine. It was the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr., too, who sought a world with justice, equality, and humanity, a vision for which he gave the ultimate sacrifice. An active participant in what he termed the “great human revolution,” Dr. King possessed “perspective consciousness.” He understood the process and dynamics of change, and he believed that we controlled choices for the future. In his 1956 address, “Facing the Challenge of the New Age,” Dr. King eloquently argued that, “The new world is a world of geographical togetherness. This means that no individual or nation can live alone. We must all learn to live together, or we will be forced to die together” (Washington 1986: 138). “To accept the Nobel Peace Prize,” Dr. King concluded when he was awarded this august honor, “is to accept a ‘commission’ To work even harder not only for America’s oppressed but for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights exalting justice and equality. To receive the peace prize, is the calling which takes me beyond national allegiances” (Washington 1986: 234). Dr. King’s growing global awareness was evident in his historic and controversial speech in April 1967, “A Time to Break Silence,” which linked the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. Dr. King called for a revolution in human values, a shift from an ethnocentric worldview to a global perspective: “A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies. This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men” (Washington 1986: 253) In his book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1968) Dr. King writes of the “world house,” where, because of the powerful twentieth-century scientific and technological revolutions, “all inhabitants of the globe are now neighbors.” As he said, “This is the great new problem of mankind. We have inherited a large house, a great ‘world house,’ in which we have to live together - black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu - a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who because we

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can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace” (King 1968: 617). Dr. King had a vision of what the world could become, not only to survive, but to prosper as a human family sustaining the planet. It is our responsibility to help today’s generation to develop the necessary knowledge, skills, and attitudes to ensure that Dr. King’s dream does become a reality. Education within the context of transformative visions like Dr. King’s focus on the planet as always at the forefront. This vision of transformation can help us to begin to heal that “deep fracturing of the personal from community life at all levels of involvement” (O’Sullivan 1999: 26). It is time to reach beyond what we are doing to the planet, “a morbid process that is toxic to the earth and all its inhabitants” (ibid.: 17), to learn from and for humanity.

Embracing Transnational Humanism and Cosmopolitanism Soedjatmoko, Piaget, and Kuroyanagi: Small Steps, Giant Leaps Civilization is steeped in the raiment of religion, hegemony, and imperialism. The origins of the word and concept deserve careful investigation if we are now to move to a truly sustainable New World. “Civil” of course means “of the city,” as does the term citizen. Derived from the ancient Greeks, those paragons of “civilization” (their systems of slavery and oppression of women come to mind), “civilization” immediately implies a “Clash of Civilizations.” Violence and the importance of the military are assumed. And yet there are other possible paths. Jean Piaget is someone who suggested a different path. Piaget was one of the principal commentators of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations 1948, http://www.un.org/en/docume nts/udhr/index.shtml) particularly Article 26 on the right to education. The Universal Declaration, which Eleanor Roosevelt had a key hand in drafting, is in many ways the touchstone global document for Human Rights in a world context. Along with Piaget’s important work in childcentered developmental psychology, which is better appreciated in Europe than North American, Piaget lead an active life campaigning for human rights.

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We can see his work in both the Universal Declaration of Human Right s and his treatise on it, The Right to Education in the Modern World (1948, later published as To Understand Is to Invent ). As the director of the International Bureau of Education (1934–1968), the predecessor organization to both UNESCO and UNICEF, Piaget actively campaigned on behalf of children and their right to an education. Those of us who believe in a learner-centered or child-centered approach to pedagogy owe much to Piaget. His goal was to support children as creators and inventors of their own lives, especially in the ways we conceive of the world. What especially made Piaget’s ideas stand out was that he rejected the idea that cultural norms should always be the norms for judging and educating a child. Peers, not parents, and the child’s interaction with them were the source of basic norms like fairness, reciprocity, and equality. If one of the members of a given relationship has power or dominance over the other then Piaget saw this as an asymmetrical relationship in which knowledge is regarded as fixed. In contrast, in cooperative relationships, where power is more evenly distributed, real intellectual exchange, debate, and creation take place. Active discovery, assimilation, and then accommodation are at the heart of Piaget’s learning theory. Instruction should be individualized as much as possible and opportunities for experience and exchange with others should be facilitated. Learning is active—and democratic. We think about others, respect them, and construct solutions to problems: to understand is to invent (and reinvent). A thoughtful scholar on this invention and reinvention in social contexts was Soedjatmoko, Indonesia’s most important intellectual and philosopher of the twentieth century (Soedjatmoko, Newland, and Soedjatmoko 1994). As Indonesian Ambassador to the United States and then later as first head of the United Nations University, Soedjatmoko had ideas which were rooted in culture, spirituality, social change, human rights, and tolerance. He called his nation, and by extension other nations, to its soul. The intellectual has the responsibility to defend the common goals of freedom and justice. The value of scholarship is to be judged by its relevance to the common good. Moreover, there should be an international consensus upon which a common ethical framework is built. That broader consensus requires a search for the highest common values widely shared among cultures, including non-Western cultures, and that come

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from their legal, moral, and philosophical traditions. In other words: human solidarity. This of course is a major shift from the nation-state to one in which the state revolves around the community of human interests. Human wellbeing should be the primary goal (ibid. 1994: 17). Freedom is one of his major themes. As he said, “One of the most important things humankind must learn if we are to survive and progress in this increasingly insecure, perilous, and fragile world is the art of existing in a state of rapid social change, accompanied by a great common vulnerability and a new sense of limits.” As he also notes, the old-world system is simply no longer viable or morally acceptable. That system has served the powerful but not the emerging aspirations of the hundreds of millions who are marginalized and voiceless. “We can no longer afford the luxury of separate moral standards and values tailored to the perceptions and ideologies of separate societies or cultures” (ibid.: 44). Interdependence and technology have opened all national boundaries to the flow of information and ideas, and new standards will have to be put in place that are acceptable across a wide spectrum of cultures and ideologies. As he said, “Embodied in these standards will be the notion of the human species as a single and indivisible but pluralistic unit constituting the global society in all its cultural, social, racial, and religious diversity” (ibid.). The problems we have today cannot be solved by power alone: “No one is in control and no longer can one nation or a group of nations chart the course of the world.” The challenge to education in this new world is to have more study of the humanities, not less, that many of the problems we have in the world today arise from the neglect of the humanities. As Soedjatmoko reminds us, “The projection of our own imagination into the experience of others breeds an awareness of the commonality of human experience and aspirations. This is the beginning of empathy and tolerance” (ibid.: 77). The humanities foster intellectual tools for independent analysis, judgment, and criticism, and while these tools equip us to participate in the world, they also—maybe more importantly—equip us to accept the participation of others. “In the humanities, along with the arts, is embodied a people’s cultural memory: the record not only of what they did as a people but what they became, and how and why. In determining the development potential of a society, what people are is as important as what they can do.” (ibid.: 79). And our diversity is what he calls “the

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cultural equivalent of nature’s vast biological gene bank, an asset rather than an obstacle to national development.” Soedjatmoko warns us, too, that, “the process of individualization, so successful in releasing enormous creative power, at some point begins to erode the bonds between people” (ibid.: 148) The cohesiveness of a society and of the world depends on a general social consensus that the institutions of a society are reasonable, fair, and accessible. Otherwise, as he says, the rule of law becomes entirely dependent on enforcement, with the police and army an occupying force in their own country. The ultimate lesson for all of us is that it is profoundly important that we retain a sense of self, our sanctuary where we can each find a true center. “Inner freedom, we have learned, can survive even in the midst of oppression” (ibid.: 153). And yet we need to be wary of what he calls the drifting apart of the rich and the poor into two separate worlds, where the only form of communication degenerates into violence (ibid.: 197). “The business of building consensus around an ethic of human solidarity is a long-term proposition, but this should not be a source of discouragement. There is plenty to do in the meantime, step by step, to remove the causes of human suffering and ease the lot of the victims of humanitarian disasters” (ibid.). Our next case, Kuroyanagi Tetsuko, is someone who has done much to remove these causes, supporting the victims of great catastrophes around the world again and again in her work. She is considered the Oprah Winfrey of Japan (Or perhaps we should say Oprah Winfrey is the Kuroyanagi Tetsuko of America). Tetsuko’s TV show “Tetsuko’s Room,” which was the first “talk show” in Japan when it began in 1975, is based on intimate interviews with important celebrities. It remains very popular even as we enter the 2020s. She has been voted Japan’s top television personality 14 times. Her book Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window (1997, originally published in 1981) is the best-selling book in Japanese history, beloved not only by the Japanese but by those who have read it in translation in over 30 languages. What is important for our purposes here is that she is also a great social activist. Her book has a number of themes concerning social justice, such as the discrimination against Koreans and notes on war and peace. She is widely regarded as a path-breaker in women’s rights, showing that women can be active in many fields and do not have to be submissive and obedient. In her indefatigable charity work as UNICEF’s Goodwill

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Ambassador she has raised tens of millions of dollars. She frequently tours developing countries and brings the stories of common, everyday people back to Japan in ways that are admirable and needed in other countries. In 2000 she received the first Global Leadership for Children Award from UNICEF. What she has demonstrated most of all, though, is that all of us count, that every little contribution matters, and that we are all in this together, when it comes to supporting the world’s children. Next Steps in a Post-pandemic World: Sekai wa issho and La tierra Transformativa The world is one: Sekai wa issho (世界は一緒). This Japanese phrase in its simplicity, yet deeply nuanced meaning of sharing, is the place of what Gary Howard (1999) calls La tierra transformativa—the land of transformation, vision, and healing, of moving from the margins and borderlands to live in and embrace a new world. As I have tried to show in this essay, too, territoriality is fast becoming an outdated boundary marker of social functions and cultural identities (Benhabib 2002: 180). The transnationalization of societies and cultures, the easy movements of people across borders, and the ubiquitous spread of world media all have in common that they are an alternate source of cultural power. This is no more so than in our common ecoculture, burgeoning global consciousness, and shared consciousness about a shared planet together so well-illustrated and led by Greta Thunberg. The first cosmonauts and astronauts who went into space told of how they were trying on the first few passes around the world to see countries, but that after a few times around the earth they began seeing the whole. The neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor tells a similar graphic and wonderful story of the brain and its two hemispheres following her stroke and then recovery (“Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke of insight”: http://www.ted.com/ talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html). The old model of citizenship—residency, bureaucratic categorization and control, democratic participation and cultural membership of Weber and other social scientists may have been the “ideal type” for some, yet the limitations and problems of this monolithic representation are now apparent. Understanding the role of identities is a special key in this deliberative process of renewal as we move into the 2020s. The binary, essentialist oppositions of black or white, Latino or Anglo, Chinese or American, and so on, fraught with simplicity, now seem

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divisive and limiting indeed. This zero-sum conception of identities, and by extension citizenship, is rejected by the theory and practice of multiculturalism, which views multiple identities as both possible and complementary. This suggests of course nothing less than a map for global citizenship as practice and praxis (Gaudelli 2016), a map that will need a focus on decolonizing wealth. Indigenous wisdom may be able to help lead the way in healing divides and restoring balance. This includes what Edgar Villanueva (2018) calls “bringing the oppressor into the circle of healing” with compassion, drawing on Native traditions with the seven steps for how to heal: Grieve, Apologize, Listen, Relate, Represent, Invest, and Repair. Such an approach also embraces the deep sense of interconnectedness with all life in the universe that the Lakota sacred prayer invokes when they say Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ (All are related). Three conceptual domains need to be prominent if we are to grapple with the needs of this “era of deep transformation”: liminality, performance, and dialogue (Holzmer 2013). Indigenous communities have long emphasized all three of these in the creative yet practical functioning of their societies. Generative tension is central to dialogue here as transformative process, something commemorated and ritualized by Indigenous societies. The prospects are good. Michael Tomasello’s magisterial, datadriven study Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny (2019) identifies eight pathways for human cognition and human sociality that give us hope: Social Cognition, Communication, Cultural Learning, Cooperative Thinking, Collaboration, Prosociality, Social Norms, and Moral Identity. That these represent the preponderance of what it means to be human became very clear in the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Somehow, we have been able to come together in shared agency to address deep and even catastrophic circumstances. Multiple forms of citizenship, of dual or multiple citizens are now becoming more commonplace, the “flexible citizenship” of Aihwa Ong (1999). Along with flexible identities, the notion of flexible citizenship helps us envision the creation of a new world of justice, peace, and equity, making these more than just some distant hope as we reflect upon our roots and search for new routes. Sekai wa issho (世界は一緒): The world is one, together.

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Notes 1. Here we can draw inspiration from the following lines from John Lennon and Martin Luther King, Jr. A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality. —John Lennon We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. —Martin Luther King, Jr.

References Allenby, Braden R., and Daniel Sarewitz. 2011. The Techno-Human Condition. Cambridge: MIT Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 2013. The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. London: Verso. Appiah, K.A. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Norton. Benhabib, S. 2002. The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Boggs, Grace Lee, with Kurashige, Scott. 2011 [2012]. The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Coppo, L. 2005. The Color of Freedom. Monroe: Common Courage Press. Drucker, P. 2002. The Next Society. The Economist, http://economist.com/sur veys/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID-770819. 12 January 2002. Fuller, Steve. 2011. Humanity 2.0: What It Means to Be Human Past, Present, and Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Gaudelli, William. 2016. Global Citizenship Education: Everyday Transcendence. New York: Routledge. Holzmer, David. 2013. Leadership in the Time of Liminality: A Framework for Leadership in an Era of Deep Transformation. In The Embodiment of Leadership, ed. Loi Ruskai Melina, Gloria J. Burgess, Lena Lid Falkman, and Antonio Marturano, 43–64. San Francisco: Jossey Bass. Horton, M., P. Freire, with B. Bell, J. Gaventa, and Peters, J. (eds.). 1990. We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

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Horton, M., with J. Kohl, and H. Kohl. 1998. The Long Haul: An Autobiography. New York: Teachers College Press. Howard, G.R. 1999. We Can’t Teach What We Don’t Know: White Teachers, Multiracial Schools. New York: Teachers College Press. Jacobs, D. (ed.). 2003. The Myles Horton Reader. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. King, M.L. 1968. Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?. Boston: Beacon Press. Komatsu, Hikaru, Jeremy Rappleye, and Iveta S. Silova. 2019. Culture and the Independent Self: Obstacles to Environmental Sustainability? Anthropocene 26: 1–13. Kuroyanagi, T. 1997. Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window. Tokyo: Kodansha. Lawrence-Lightfoot, S. 2009. The Third Chapter: Passion, Risk, and Adventure in the 25 Years After 50. New York: Basic Books. Nederveen Pieterse, J. 2011. Global Rebalancing: Crisis and the East-South. Development and Change 42: 1–27. Ong, A. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. O’Sullivan, E. 1999. Transformative Learning: Educational Vision for the 21st Century. London: Zed Books. Piaget, Jean. 1948 [1972]. To Understand Is to Invent: The Right to Education. Available at http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0000/000061/006133eo. pdf. Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon. Said, E. 1999. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Knopf. Soedjatmoko, with K. Newland, and K.C. Soedjatmoko (eds.). 1994. Transforming Humanity: The Visionary Writings of Soedjatmoko. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press. Tomasello, Michael. 2019. Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. United Nations. 1948. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Available at: http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml. Villanueva, Edgar. 2018. Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance. Oakland: Berrett-Koehler. Washington, J. (ed.). 1986. A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Harper & Row.

Afterwords Roots, Routes and a New Awakening: Towards a Festival of Dialogues and Planetary Conversations Kanchana Mahadevan

The range of essays in this work engages with the dialectic between rootedness and dialogue. Rootedness in diverse geographies, ethnicities and cultures is not simply constituted as a static given. On the contrary, it is an active process of constituting and remaking through aspirations and what Giri (2020) terms as “struggle”. Such rootedness has been a foil against the dominant notion of an unfettered abstract Enlightenment modernity as the supposed story of civilizational progress. With its emphasis on formal reason and culture-free self-identity, such modernity had homogenizing and stifling consequences. In contrast, rootedness attempts to engage with diversity to acknowledge multiple modes of existence. However, all is not well with rootedness either. Rootedness often draws borders by affirming rigid combative identities, whereby the many rooted identities do not necessarily coalesce with each other. As Giri observes, it has reinforced the hegemony of self-idolizing, non-inclusive and violent ethnocentrism. However, as the authors in this volume argue, one does not have to choose between the Scylla of homogenizing modernity, and the Charybdis of conflictual rootedness. Further, following Giri’s nuanced observation, the innumerable possibilities of mobility across “roots” reveal the limits of both “culturalist holism and ethnic absolutism”. Amitha Shantiago examines modes of thinking through rootedness © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. K. Giri (ed.), Roots, Routes and a New Awakening, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7122-0

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in heterogeneous and non-Eurocentric ways via Rastafarian theologies. The myriad “routes” of social movements emerging from “roots” reveal possibilities of transcending essentialist notions of rooted identities as immediate and fully given. It is on this note that Nishant Alphonse Irudayadason reconstructs belonging by questioning its possessive versions embedded in the standard binary of identity and difference. Rafaela Campos de Carvalho and Subhash Sharma similarly question the idea of “roots” as implying singular identities. “Roots” change, expand and travel across the planet through “routes” as the various trajectories and territories of tantra’s travel in Justin M. Hewitson’s essay reveals. Giri argues for understanding “roots” following Weil as “multiple modes of rootedness”, so that the plural implies an inherent hybridity. Boike Rehbein and Peter Heehs investigate the plurality integral to rootedness. Along similar lines, Alina Therese Lettner’s essay explores hybridity in terms of Peircean elements in Buddhism as well as Buddhist dimensions in Peirce. Similarly, Christian Bartolf, Dominique Miething and Vishnu Varatharajan bring out the hybridity in Gandhian satyagraha that has emerged from the fusion of many different traditions. The possibilities for mutual coexistence via dialogue grounded on interconnected notions of the self are explored by Sarah Louis Gates, Joseph Prabhu, Vishnu Varatharajan and Johannes Dragsbæk Schmidt. On the same tone, Umar Nizarudeen explores bhakti and the feminine for working towards a relational notion of the self. Prima facie these reflections reveal the dialogues at work at interpersonal, intercultural, interreligious levels in the numerous ways in which “roots” enter “routes”. Following Giri’s reference to Habermas, such dialogues are necessary for a positive notion of tolerance that avoids both cultural holism and absolutism (Habermas 2006). Habermas distinguishes his own “reciprocal recognition” (2006: 197) from paternalistic accounts that are not grounded in dialogue. However, the failed dialogue between Gadamer and Derrida demonstrates that dialogue does not lend itself to an easy understanding. Dialogues, despite having common “roots”, often take different “routes”, often because the “roots” themselves are ambiguous and plural. “Roots” could lead to “routes” that are incommensurable and irreconcilable. It is instructive to turn to the different “routes” taken by Gadamer and Derrida on dialogue who are nevertheless rooted in Heidegger’s philosophy of language.1 For Heidegger language cannot be traced to any original point in metaphysics. There is no language of metaphysics, but just concepts that are derived from

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living speech (Gadamer 1989c: 107). Nor does it originate in any representative function of science or the mental intentions of a sovereign being. Heidegger critiques the modern understanding of language as representative and rooted in the mental world of the subject. He envisages language as constitutive framework for thought and understanding. Language is neither controlled by the human subject nor does it have a merely representative function. Human beings are contingently and accidently thrown into language. Despite their common ground in Heidegger, there are fissures between Gadamer’s and Derrida’s pursuits of Heideggerian philosophy of language. Gadamer follows the Platonic model of dialogue, where its participants discuss and debate in a collaborative search for meaning (1989a: 33–34). He adds the dimension of their willingness to enter dialogue and adhere to mutual understanding from wherein meaning can emerge. Gadamerian dialogue operates within a hermeneutic circle of taken for granted assumptions. It reinforces tradition, presupposes prejudice and upholds the authority of the text. In Gadamer’s view, dialogue as a collaborative search for meaning follows a spoken form. Dialogue, thus, leads to unity of meaning in the primacy of spoken discourse. Derrida, in contrast, believes that the sign infiltrates the spoken word; further the written sign does not merely reproduce a given determinate meaning (1982: 309–330). It is instead governed by absences giving rise to the excesses of competing meanings. The author or context cannot control meaning so that meaning endlessly proliferates. Moreover, language is textual without metaphysical or scientific origins. The differential relation between linguistic signs makes this textuality inevitably intertextual or interdisciplinary. For Derrida, texts are not firmly drawn territories. As a result, stable and authentic meaning is deferred and remains elusive. Speakers in conversation cannot take charge of the path that meaning follows; meaning splinters in contradictory ways to transcend their intentions. Consequently, Derrida deciphers the dialogical underpinning of Gadamer’s hermeneutics as logocentric in its search for transparent and agreed meaning. For Derrida, the very idea of willingness to participate in dialogue is founded on the gesture of arbitrary subjectivity. Gadamer discerns will as the starting point of dialogue. Conversation according to Gadamer is surrounded by idle chatter, rhetoric or processes of listening, reading and understanding where one does not respond semantically to words, which are in this instance “empty” (1989c: 106). Its core is a concerted

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deliberation of asking questions and answering them. Thus, questions determine the meaning that could emerge in a conversation. However, Derrida discerns such goodwill governing dialogue as conceding to its subjective origins. He gives the instance of Heidegger’s subjectivism in providing a non-autobiographical reading of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homoso as to rescue him from a psychological-biological interpretation (Derrida 1989b: 62–66). According to Derrida, Heidegger chooses to interpret Nietzsche through the lens of the history of Being. However, this instance notwithstanding, he also draws attention to the non-subjective moment in Heidegger philosophy of language. He points to Heidegger as maintaining “die Sprache is in a certain sense a monologue” (2002: 33). Yet this, clarifies Derrida is not a solipsistic system with rigid identity and borders that do not yield to what is outside. Rather even as this language speaks to itself, Derrida notes that it embodies difference in being borderless. “… it is already a difference” (2002: 34). He upholds that with such alterity for Heidegger there is no “metalanguage” (2002: 33). One cannot ever stand outside language to make choices within language. One is always immersed in language, even while making claims about language. Even in standing before language with a question, one surrenders to it, saying “yes” to language (Derrida 2002: 34). Hence, the rootedness in language with its vicissitudes of not having a determinate position is for Derrida a precondition for individual choice and interrogation. Gadamer agrees with many of Derrida’s arguments. He appeals to Derrida for engaging in dialogue by subscribing to the terms of dialogue on the basis of their common Heideggerian linguistic roots. Conversation for Gadamer is not simply an exchange of ideas but a process of coming to an understanding. It is constituted through language, where one participant speaks the word, while the other understands it. Participants in dialogue need to share a common language, choosing one out of many, for a conversation to happen. Moreover, the linguistic process of conversation through the spoken word is for Gadamer also oriented by questioning. The latter determines the domain of dialogue by drawing its territory. Understanding or Verstehenis defined by Gadamer as “to stand in for someone” (1989d: 118). He gives the example of a lawyer who stands before a judge to speak on behalf of and represent the client. The lawyer does not mechanically reproduce the client’s words, but interprets them to convince the judge. Thus, according to Gadamer, hermeneutics does not look for a Platonic style essential meaning. However, Derrida considers the very idea of a living dialogue between persons as

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problematic. It brings together people in ways where mental intentions control the process of communication. Derrida observes that Verstehen is not a primordial bond between dialogue partners; it is rather “an interruption of rapport or a rapport of interruption” (1989a: 53). He regards Gadamer’s quest for the “the basic structure common to all languages” (Gadamer 1989c: 105) as affirming a point of origin. To enter into a conversation, two people speaking different languages have to speak the same language.2 For language is fundamentally a conversation for Gadamer. One must look for the word that can reach another person. And it is possible for one to find it; one can even learn the language of the other person. One can cross over into the language of the other in order to reach the other (Gadamer 1989c: 106). However, according to Derrida, Gadamerian dialogue merely assumes a symmetrical reciprocity between the intersubjective relations of its participants. He critiques Gadamer for overlooking how non-discursive forces of rhetoric and idle talk disturb such symmetry. Thus, the spoken model of dialogue tends towards one-sided preaching, while the questions raised by the participants circumscribe dialogue into a sort of a force that operates in it. Derrida does not adhere to Gadamer’s emphasis on a single language of dialogue in search of a determinate meaning. For he believes this to be monolithic. Considering that there is no single condition of dialogue, Derrida prefers negotiation to engage with the alterity (2002: 32) of both “roots” and “routes”. The non-dialogue between him and Gadamer demonstrates as much. There is no single understanding of Heidegger’s philosophy of language, nor is there a single development of alternative linguistic perspectives. To return to negotiation, Derrida characterizes it as the lack of leisure; the endless array of perspectives and positions, both implicit and explicit, of participants in conversation can neither be closed nor settled. Negotiation is itself a state of mobility that goes back and forth between positions, which in turn are also mobile. It differs from Gadamerian Verstehen where participants stably occupy locations and put forth perspectives to unswervingly go through the process of question and answer. In contrast, Derrida’s negotiation is a “shuttle” (2002: 12) that never concludes conversations but ceaselessly continues with them by moving across diverse, incompatible and changing positions. Moreover, negotiation is contaminated by non-discursive force and power, attempting compromises without closures (2002: 13).

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The reflections in this volume are negotiations in the Derridean sense of exploring unpredictable “routes” arising from the ceaseless circulation of indeterminate and multiple “roots”. They negotiate diverse intellectual and spiritual traditions, as well as, social movements from across the globe. There are many travels in this book, such as the Hindu and Buddhist “routes” of tantra, King’s “route” from Gandhi’s “roots”, Panikkar’s integration of scholarship and sagacity or the phenomenological interweaving of Peircean semiotics and Buddhism to name a few. They transcend the predictability of basing deliberative dialogues on accepted assumptions within familiar benchmarks of the hermeneutic circle.3 The essays in this volume, instead, open up possibilities of the unpredictability and creativity by energetically shuttling between positions with prospects of more rooted “routes”.

Notes 1. The “Introduction” by Michelfelder and Palmer (1989) influences this discussion. For Derrida’s and Gadamer’s relationship to Heidegger see Michelfelder and Palmer (1989: 1–2). Derrida’s relation to Heidegger’s philosophy of language see Derrida (2002, 33–34); for Gadamer’s relation to Heidegger see for example (1989a: 28–29; c: 104–107; d:118). 2. Hence Gadamer sees himself as going from dialectic—as metaphysics/— to dialogue (1989c: 109)—recovering from German idealist metaphysical dialectic and going towards Greek dialectic. 3. Warnke has analysed the stagnant static positionality that results from deliberating with set assumptions (2012).

References Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1989a. Three Questions to Hans-Georg Gadamer. In Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, 52–54. Albany: State University of New York. Derrida, Jacques. 1989b. Interpreting Signatures (Nietzsche/Heidegger): Two Questions. In Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, 58–71. Albany: State University of New York. Derrida, Jacques. 2002. Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971–2001. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989a. Text and Interpretation. In Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, 21–51. Albany: State University of New York. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989b. Reply to Jacques Derrida. In Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, 55–57. Albany: State University of New York. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989c. Destruktion and Deconstruction. In Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, 102–113. Albany: State University of New York. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989d. Hermeneutics and Logocentrism. In Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, 114–125. Albany: State University of New York. Habermas, Jurgen. 2006. Religious Tolerance: The Pacemaker for Cultural Rights. In The Derrida-Habermas Reader, ed. Lasse Thomassen, 195–207. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Michelfelder, Diane P., and Richard E. Palmer. 1989. Introduction. In Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, 1–18. Albany: State University of New York. Warnke, Georgia. 2011. The Hermeneutic Circle Versus Dialogue. The Review of Metaphysics 65 (1): 91–112.

Beyond the Restrictive Sociopolitical Autonomy and Sovereignty A. Osman Farah

Ananta Kumar Giri cautions us extrapolating a dynamic direction of ethnic cross-fertilization-with necessary embracing of culturally and spiritually creative spaces. In simultaneously accommodating roots and routes such approach historicizes and contextualizes transnational encounters and connections and turning societal into splendid common good. In addition, this dialogical turn integrates the concerns and actions of the self as well as the other into a collective self-renewal. However, the challenges pointed out correctly by Kalyan Kumar Chakravarty in the foreword enthuses us into the situation that this border crossing currently occurs in an almost unequal, asymmetric and under less collaborative constellations. For instance, in the current world, dominant political elites remain distant, greedy and narrow-minded, particularly in recurring exploitation of ethnic differences for political ends. Meanwhile cynical economic oligarchs, with diverging ideological bases, often strategize for capital expansion. Similarly, speculative media moguls routinely subvert sincere transnational public communication for sensationalism and superficiality. From their part academics engage internal debates with innately inaccessible jargon for most. Even transnational ethnic communities occasionally preoccupy themselves with internal, often politically instinctive rivalries of us versus them. Potential alternative to such foredoomed societal conditions yearns for convincing processes in which cooperative transnational encountering and connections reflect the wishes and concerns of both those © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. K. Giri (ed.), Roots, Routes and a New Awakening, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7122-0

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propagating state-centered perspectives as well as those insisting on the struggles of transnational ethnic communities. If successful, such interconnectedness could unleash authentic cross-fertilization and convincing coherence. People may, at least in the short term, not transform their basic entrenched identities, but they will eventually overtime be able to raising practical questions regarding the political concepts of autonomy and sovereignty. The concepts of autonomy and sovereignty dominate our modern sociopolitical discourse. In its cavalier forms those insisting on singularity and imposed autonomy often pay lesser careful attention to diverse contexts, historical discursive justifications as well as constitutive explanations. So far, in practical terms, emphasis and implementation of contradicting autonomies and sovereignties in diverse sociopolitical contexts across the world, seem to have failed. This is particularly the case with regard to the task of installing a more prosperous stable world with expanded transnational harmony, tolerance and coexistence. Consequently, many people in the world struggle with a sort of combined risk and liquid societies. In recognizing such existing complexities, the contributors of this book propose alternative sociopolitical platforms— which may resolve the conditions under which we currently conceive reality and progress. This includes the application of multiple approaches demystifying and extending the centuries old, if not a millennium, of the dialectical thesis of not unifying but diversifying human existence, conditions and actions. The first theses roughly concentrate on the more ubiquitous dimensions of human endeavour. This includes the way in which people pursue concrete actions in mobilizing, resisting and eventually overcoming sociopolitical limitations and subordination. Sort of partial manifestations through diverse group formations as well instances of ethnic affiliations. Consequently, such civic life-world dwelling complicates and eventually transforms the ambitions and emphasis on exclusive autonomy and sovereignty. The second thesis deals with the intellectually reflective spiritual dimension of human existence. Here perceptions as well as the significations of the meanings of realities related to the way in which humans conduct their lives remain central. Alternatively, the sociopolitical realities and the temporal social and political conditions, in which humans encounter and connect, shows that it is rather the combination of human intellectual capacity that usher concrete living practical situation of nuances and iridescences. One can therefore conclude that the

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current insistence of individual and group autonomy combined with statecentric sovereignty remains inconsistent with the prevailing realities of transnational human encounters and connections. The authors in this volume suggest that societies around the world should alternatively combine forms of sociopolitical lives-not necessarily neglecting the significance of history and sociocultural and political situations. This potentially includes transnational conditions expanding the horizons in seeking connections and collaborations beyond inwardlooking emphasis on restrictive autonomy and sovereignty—which often insist on intense zero-sum competition and rivalries. Societies could experiment in incorporating and accommodating diverse forms of transnational encounters and connections that, as several authors of this volume, emphasize accommodate creative forms of art as well as spirituality. People should in this regard confront realities, reflect it and eventually attend the ultimate purposes and implications for not just the particular imbedded goals and interests but also for common general wellbeing of the surrounding environment. Increasingly, the world seems too small a place for exclusive autonomy and national sovereignty to persist. The constant recourse of transnational encountering and connections, with continuing reflections and practices, is what we should expect and work for in shared autonomies and sovereignties. With the dominant subjective-objective distinction one will have difficulties in grasping the diverse dynamic encounters and connections between, for instance, subjective cares and concerns in the existence of concrete objective realities. As Alina Therese Lettner shows us, linking the phenomenology of religion with the application of semiotics allows us to get a better grasp of such dynamic relations in order to eventually overcome intractable dualistic dilemmas. This is because we need to differentiate between how the world phenomenally appears and how it is represented through different approaches. Particularly, transnational religious concerns often depart and build on the senses and the reality of what we see and feel. This in return requires a transdisciplinary approach enabling us to integrating diverse disciplinary consciousness and knowledge within and across diverse transnational cultural traditions. The spiritual dimension, for instance, brings diversification and expansion of the western focus on political conceptualization and representation. In addition, this is not just an issue of reflecting consciously or unconsciously in interpreting signs but also concretely attending political actions

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of overcoming dominations. Consequently, this will in return require the contextualization of transnational power and institutional relations. Ananta Kumar Giri supplements with the proposition that through living paratactical experiences people could jointly create innovative political categories building on principles of “non-divisiveness and togetherness” and “power concentration and exclusion”. This should move us beyond the limited national focused political and citizenship frames and hopefully towards more spiritual and inclusive conditions where harmony and coexistence can prevail. Often the elites, though themselves transnational, politicize certain selective ethnicities often focusing on primordial lineage concern rather contemplating the epistemological as well as the ontological realities transnational communities. We particularly need to understand the indigenous knowledge and idea of development that could mobilize and empower transnational communities through education. Again, the challenge here is that religion and spirituality (at least in its divisive forms) are already part of the political processes. Though categorization remains unavoidable, it should initially depart from how people categorize themselves and together instead of the powerful often cataloguing and thereby stigmatizing the lesser fortunate transnational communities. Justin M. Hewitson adds that modern political development, particularly in its imperial and colonial forms, not just subordinate the spiritual dimension, but also suppress legitimate ancient transnational spiritual encounters and historical connections. For most cases colonial powers exploited ethnicity as a source of divide and rule for their own benefits. In postcolonial periods this politically and pugnaciously imposed colonial groupism continued and were in certain extent institutionalized. Serious transformation then calls for both theoretical and practical commitment in reconsidering centuries of imbalanced knowledge aggregation. In this regard, according to Justin M. Hewitson, we will be able to see that the politics of group identification and categorization was different and likely reflected the normal function of the society in maintaining communal productive livelihoods. In the end a prosperous human lives demands people avoiding diverse forms of regressive conflictual groupism. This requires the combination of genuinely intellectual as well as practical concerns. It will also entail deep understanding and analysis of the formations of group solidarities as well existing differences between groupism imposed by outsiders contrasted with groupism internally generated and maintained. There should be a difference on social and political divisions

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aiming at subordinating people and exploiting them for colonial reasons and social and political formations emerging from people’s actual living situations in their pursuing of a vibrant communal life. Transnational community lives and its diverse functions should be an end in its own terms. To better understand the context in which we live, Sarah Louise Gates reminds us the debates on whether we should focus on how individuals and groups might rationalize experiences in the world. Or alternatively whether we should depart from existing realities on the ground of how people concretely live their lives. It is an issue of both, as actions depend on the conditions and the purpose of such actions. It is not just an intellectual issue but a practical and concrete one—not just emerging from ideas but also from practical social and political concerns and activities. Bureaucratic national and transnational systems—here under states and multilateral organization such as the UN, that are often formal and top-down—should accommodate creative dimensions of spiritual and concrete civic-oriented platforms. In addition, the world not just belong to the mankind but also to other living and non-living creatures. In other words, the world is not just a means to sustain human live but also an end itself. Urging people should engage in the combination of ecological awareness and spiritual practice such as Yoga—with the aim of people reimagining new forms of collaborations, Sarah refers to the case of UN yoga day as an alternative exemplary global soft-power platform. One of the major challenges for humanity is whether we should necessarily know everything. Under the current global crises, for instance, Jurgen Habermas suggests that responses to the Covid-19 crises have exposed a kind of real comprehensive fear. Not only that ordinary people occasionally admitted and have long lived with diverse forms of anxieties. It is the exposition of the kind of spreading macro fear, that have always existed among leading experts and politicians, but were often hidden under diverse forms of public management schemes and performances. Now almost everyone seems concerned and worried, including those with institutional and decision-making capabilities. For Habermas, something positive can come if this fear is recognized and probably reflected discussed and managed intersubjectively. In the end, it will therefore be, not just an issue of knowing, but also a process of not knowing—that eventually will lead us to a more transnationally accommodating coexistence. There are things we will never know as human capabilities both

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intellectually and practically remain limited. The idea that humans have solutions for everything, so far, remains a modern exaggeration. Recognizing such limitations Rafaela Campos de Carvalho questions whether we could attend the systems and existing empirical patterns, while we also conceptualize the existence and the dynamics of different groups in time and space. This could help us overcome the proposition that historically certain societies could develop while others should underdevelop. Though historical processes are interdependent, these often remain separate depending on the dominant societies and how they deploy historical discourses. Then colonizers expect oppressed societies accepting and implementing imposed developmental discourses and paradigms. In response freedom seeking people often resist, though others prefer adopting and sustaining dominant ideologies and practices. We often hear that politically humans transitioned from being tribes to having religions and eventually becoming modern nation-states in a complex globalized world. Here the assumption is that science might have finally liberated the world from oppressive traditions and spiritualities. But, over time science also became a form of religion. In the current more complex world creative people combine spirituality and science— each contributing to solving different challenges people confront in their daily lives. Probably the division between the two never existed. As Subhash Sharma implies transnational connections bring the political, the corporate, the science and the spiritual communities together to dominate and maintain biased traditions. The philosophical ideologies such as capitalism, socialism, feminism, etc., tried to replace religions. One way of moving beyond the western modernity is going back to the tradition of seeking traditional knowledge with ingredients from the modern sophistication. There are already multiple cases of people in this world who pursue such creative combinations without entangling their roots and routes. Even when spiritual and peace issues are adopted it happens so following the dominant groups realizing that they will have to gain more in adopting the middle and peaceful way. It is not a genuine intellectual and ethical transformation as injustices persist—though superficial symbolic and formal transformations occurred. Examples include historic decolonization processes that produced similar postcolonial structures, civil rights movements that produced temporary structural changes leading to symbolic gestures but not genuine distribution of wealth and development in colonized societies.

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To help us overcoming such obstacles Carl Von Ossietekys presents a dialogue and sympathy nourished by Gandhi during the liberation of India from colonial rule—as exemplary in the direction of potential global liberty and dialogue. But this horizontal dialogue does not reflect the general development. The Nelson Mandela and South Africa case shows it begins as a progressive project—then after long pressure it is adopted by the mainstream. Vision and imagination were key for what transnational civil rights movement icons were doing. Despite setbacks and manipulations, recognition and dialogue however remain key for people and nations coming together. There are nonetheless, people morally remaining committed to multiple forms of solidarities in resist—despite immense political pressures. Furthermore, the case illuminated by Amitha Shantiago on how Christianity evolved in the Caribbean shows that religious mobilization also rests on superiority and ethnic classification. Nonetheless within imposed frameworks—people creatively imagine alternative transnational dimensions of resisting the categorization and dominance of particular format. The struggling people in the Caribbean, for instance, pursued the transnational possibility of emancipating political spirituality in the form of adopting and linking to African Rastafari traditions. This suggests that we should move away from the language of focusing origins and subjectivity to a language stressing political and cultural dynamics and creativity. Ananta Kumar Giri again urges to shift from state centrism to more transnational encounters and connections we need to consider transnational and border crossing as an end itself—not a means to oppress and exploit. The logic of power as an end itself—in the form of state power concentration—prevents people from linking to cultural, social, economic as well as political contexts. Currently, existing borders are maintained through power and violence. Instead, Artistic and spiritual borders could bring transformation through dialogue and creative mutual understanding. Herewith sovereignty of borders and control remain connected to non-sovereignty for others—particularly on what Giri calls “the spaces of margins”. Comparing the old multicentric transnational to the current multicentric partially transnational world, we see that the old transnational world served for the people and their needs. Meanwhile, the current transnational world seems to serving mainly for the powerful—resulting the disempowerment of the masses. There is, in other words, cosmopolitanism but a kind of “banal cosmopolitanism” as Ulrich Beck had

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suggested. Under such superficial conditions colonial capital structures build on the criminalization of legitimate public welfare politics—and instead praising and accommodating diverse forms of populism and exclusion—in the process also undermining legitimate autonomy. Such imbalances make Vishnu Varatharajan inquire the significance of autonomy for multiple contexts and historical process. For instance, Gandhi wanted to use cultural autonomy for promoting diversity in unity, while others also sought autonomy for resisting national cultural hegemony. In extension, though we often talk about national, state and societal autonomies—most of humanity seem urbanized and often metropole autonomy and cosmopolitanism. Under such vibrant contexts, there exist opportunities in accessing multicultural environments in bringing and combining multiple traditional and less traditional dimensions. But the challenge is also an issue of security and survival—where developments and positive aspects occur in cities—negative issues such as modern slavery and oppression equally prevails in urban environments. Johannes Dragsbaek Schmidt elucidates the potentiality of forestalling such discrepancies in presenting the so-called tripolar format in which diverse social and institutions can creatively engage—reflecting creatively positioned perceptive subjectivity. In somewhat similar vein, SaskaiSassen and Mary Kaldor, in their recent work “Cities at War: Global Insecurity and Urban Resistance” caution us the link between metropole existence and perpetual insecurity. Cities have the capabilities of preventing or sustaining conflicts. Urban environments were in the past places of dreams, freedom and refuge. With the current mass surveillance and technology these places might become oppressive locations. In the developing work in urban environments, there exist immense suffering and extreme oppression in the form of occasional enslavement, gated communities and child labour. In forestalling such tragic urban deficits, we could probably relate to the proposition by RabindraNath Tagore in pursing multiple realizations through dance and interaction in an increasingly globalized technological space with plural diverse epistemes of race, sport, conservative politics, science. Building on Derrida’s arguments, for RabindraNath Tagore, is it possible to create a new politics of being together by stressing difference in difference. Meanwhile Derrida himself admitted that misunderstanding and thereby crossing a red traffic light could have grave consequences for the inattentive transgressor.

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To conclude, the chapters of this book collectively identity alternative pathways for the diversification of not just politically dealing with established concepts such as autonomy and sovereignty in existing often conflictual roots and routes. But the different chapters also urge us to carefully consider the essence of innovative art, spirituality, history, ethical leadership and vibrant urban cosmopolitanism as integral components to the processes of perfecting the capable but often unknowledgeable, uncertain and fragile human condition.

Roots, Routes and a New Awakening: Remembering the History of Canada in Times of Corona Paul Schwartzentruber

One remembers that my nation is not just composed of Nishnaabeg. It is a series of radiating relationships with plant nations, animal nations, insects, bodies of water, air, soil and spiritual beings in addition to the Indigenous nations with whom we share parts of our territory. Indigenous internationalism isn’t just between peoples. It is created and maintained with all the living beings…. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 2017; 58.

… by contrast, my rootedness in the nation state of Canada traces itself back—in a very linear way—along migratory routes leading to the old worlds of Europe. All of those migrations led to a new and spacious but inhospitable wilderness. Or at least, so it seemed to my migrating ancestors. Nonetheless, they embraced this “green hell” (as one of our German visitors later described it) as their own new-found reality, quite literally: it was a terra nullius (a land belonging to no one) or so the Pope of the time christened it just in time for our “discovery” of it. When I think of my people, my nation, my culture, it is here that I must begin, with the narrow perspectives and inflationary imagination of the colonizing settler. It all began with an essential lie, a lie we told ourselves then and have repeated often since, over and over again. I can only imagine now how the old and the new really encountered each other for those long ago ancestors of mine. To what degree did they really see and perceive the new? To what degree did the already known © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. K. Giri (ed.), Roots, Routes and a New Awakening, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7122-0

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reshape this new unknown in its own image? If there are “routes in all our roots” as Ananta Giri observes, there are also “roots in all our routes”. We see in the new only what we have known in the past and in the ways that we have known it. Much of the old world, then, with its narrow and constricting categories of place, goods and property, came with these ancestors and was thought lessly transplanted into that wilderness, often with violent and devastating effects upon it and upon its many other— and somehow overlooked—inhabitants. At the same time, a steady stream of goods was extracted, again, for the most part, thoughtlessly, from the forests and their many inhabitants, and sent back as commodities to the old worlds where they in turn were transformed and funded their own renovations into “empires”. On the other hand, it is probably true to say that what was not discovered or really even seen in the very midst of this vast discovery, were the peoples who had lived in this place from time immemorial. Although they were woven tightly into all the strands of the fabric of the creatures and plants and places there, these peoples were simply not seen or if discovered, then not granted an acknowledgement as humans, as peoples who lived here as well. My ancestors perhaps were oddly mystified by their own categories, the taxonomies of “savage” and “civilized” in particular. So while the Crown signed treaties of “peace and friendship”, its governors on the ground put bounties on the heads of the “natives” and hunted them like creatures of the forest. As a “Canadian”, I am a child of that settler colonialism and my genetic history is built on the long-standing action of erasure of the indigenous peoples, on the insistent disregard for their ways-of-life (as different from our own) and on the virtually unrestrained violence expressed towards their families and communities by the new capitalism of the colonizers of the land that later proclaimed itself to be “Canada”. All of these acts of deep ignorance, racist violence and narcissism are a parts of the narrative of my heritage. Speaking for myself, I can say that for a long time now—for most of my now sixty some years—I have not known, let alone acknowledged any of this. My blissful identity-ignorance has been well insulated by the various mythologies of both Canada and North America: the mythologies of discovery, of the “new world”, of unrestrained spaces of freedom and endless horizons of expansion and above all, of the capitalist mythology of unlimited resources, technology and development which sets people against people and people and creates the Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes (“the war of all against all”). Long before I knew of

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Hobbes, I knew of the sacred unquestioned worship of the oikonomia— the economy—by means of which my people ruled the land and all its “resources”. For like a good parent, it supported and nurtured us, one and all, through its diabolical bargain with the spirits of this land: “we will use you and transform you, bring you into our modern world of comforts, well-being and protection” it said. “And all you have to do, is to submit, to give yourself without reserve, to allow yourself to be transformed in our hands”. Of course, this economic bargain with the demon of capitalism produced a lot of waste and there were many who could not tolerate its rigours, who fell by the wayside, as it were. They were, or so we told ourselves, shiftless, alcoholic and unproductive in nature. The original inhabitants of this land had all been (somehow) displaced to “reserves”, and now that we looked, they seemed to us to lead lives of unrelenting despair. Only later, after the excruciating and intergenerational trauma of the residential schools set up by the government of Canada and its Christian churches, did we hear the true story, told by the victims itself, the story of children separated from their parents by the RCMP and other ministers and agents of the crown, children denied their own language, family and culture, children beaten and abused—all in the vain and cruel ambition of turning them into “normal Canadians”. By the time I heard that tragic story from the voices of those of the lost generation, I also began to hear the voices of their children, children who had begun, despite all the odds and all the ill-will of my fellow Canadians, to recover their own language, culture and traditions. What I heard from them was a broad and spacious vision of the land and its peoples, a vision based on the recognition of “all my relations” (mitakuyeoyasinin Lakota). It was, in short, a vision of inclusion and acceptance of difference, of peaceful dialogue, of living together in respect and hope. I could only marvel that such a vision of peaceful coexistence in justice and mutual respect could ever have come from this sad history or the ignorance and lies which my ancestors brought with them from the old world. Now, I have learned that it did not come from there, but rather that it was here all along, in this land, rooted in its complexities and routes of self-discovery. It was the real treasure waiting to be discovered in this new world. Only we could not see it, nor could we imagine it. We brought the traumas of the old worlds with us, we transplanted them here and then nurtured them with a kind of perverse insistence on what should grow here and how we alone could grow it.

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What we thought we knew, prevented us from seeing what was already rooted here in the land and growing. Who we thought we were, prevented us from undertaking the journey of encounter. Only now, in my old age, do I feel that I have begun to walk on the route leading to the “Canada” that is still waiting to be discovered. Who knows where it might still lead?

The Hidden Common Roots of Diverse Traditions: Revisiting the Route of Traditionalism Muhammad Maroof Shah

Modern secular humanistic, postmodern relativist and fundamentalist religious camps all agree in privileging a certain ideological ferment that downplays/marginalizes the epistemic, ontological and axiological claims of certain or all premodern/wisdom/archaic traditions/religions or negate Absolute/Reality/Transcendence centrism of traditions and find reasons to debunk vast majority of people with their adherence to their religions, myths, philosophies, folklore and have globalizing ambitions at the cost of local, archaic, “wild”, colonized others. Against all of them are little known, little read, much reviled, mostly misunderstood traditionalist thinkers who uphold the primacy of Tradition, see its ramifications everywhere, assert that only Absolute is absolute, God has never been without witness in any culture and there are as many paths to Truth as are souls even though. It transcends in its essence every approximation of knowers/gnostics and has infinite faces and facets implying pluralism of beliefs, darsanas, rituals and other cultural expressions. It is time we seek to discover our roots and find our way to Home/Salvation/Felicity/Eudemonia. We need to explore key premises of traditionalism against West/Eurocentrism/modernism (and implied colonizing ideology that overrides and erases local expressions) and other forces that prevent people from respecting diversity without disowning a unity that grounds diversity without erasing uniqueness of diverse expressions. We illustrate the traditionalist doctrine of nondualism, for anchoring diverse expressions of beliefs and grounding dialogue between © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. K. Giri (ed.), Roots, Routes and a New Awakening, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7122-0

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self and other enshrined in Islamic Tradition in the writings of one of its greatest expositors IbnArabi.

Critique of Modernism Tradition is opposed to modernism because it considers the premise upon which modernism is based to be wrong and false in principle. Nasr, one of the major figures in perennialist school states in this connection: “What tradition criticizes in the modern world is the total world view, the premises, the foundations which, from its point of view, are false so that any good which appears in the world is accidental rather than essential.…It wishes to slay the modern world in order to create a normal one .…From this point of view the history of Western man during the past five centuries is an anomaly in the long history of human race in both East and West” (Nasr 1988: 84–85). Gandhi’s remark about Western civilization that it is an interesting idea expresses the same dismissive view. It is the idea of progress that is vehemently rejected by traditionalists. Renaissance humanism bound man to earthly level and in doing so imprisoned his aspirations for perfection by limiting them to the world. The traditional idea of perfection and progress of the soul from its upward vertical dimension towards God is reduced to a purely this worldly and temporal one. It directed men towards conquering the other—the nature, the neighbour or the other nations rather than the inner territory of the self. All the defining characteristics of Post-Renaissance and Enlightenment Western modernity—rationalist, masculine or androcentric, subjectcentred or egoistic, logical, dualist, outward looking or extrovert, aggressive, scientific, capitalist, desacralizing or secularist, humanistic, individualistic—create an environment, a worldview that is congenial to colonialist enterprise which means an othering of non-Western cultures, religions, sciences, philosophies and of course the supreme science scientia sacra or Metaphysics that is the soul of traditional cultures.

The Project of Othering/Colonizing The West has constructed the colonized world as the other and legitimated its rule on the assumptions of its superiorly in religious, philosophical, scientific and other spheres. (Perennialists reverse this hierarchy). It has constructed the orient in an image, which would justify its rape of it. Said has tried to deconstruct these othering and marginalizing strategies

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of the West. Other postcolonialists have also worked in this direction. But their perspective remains largely Western and they are unable to extricate themselves from what may be referred to as colonialist metaphysical and theological worldview. The history of religious thought in the West can be read as a pendular movement between seemingly exclusive and evident opposites, like the following (adapted from Taylor): Go Eternity Being Rest Permanence Presence One Order Life Meaning Transcendent Identity Affirmation

World Time Becoming Movement Change Absence Many Chaos Death Absurdity Immanent Difference Negation

Truth Certainty Reality Light Vision Sanity Spirit Vision Spiritual Mind Innocence

Error Uncertainty Illusion Darkness Blindness Madness Body Blindness Carnal Matter Guilt

Good Proper God Centered

Evil Improper Man Excentric (continued)

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(continued) Purposeful Seriousness

Purposeless Play

Now, as Taylor says, Like its intellectual twin philosophy, theology doesn’t regard these opposites as equivalent. It refuses to allow the possibility that opposite terms can coexist peacefully. Invariably one term is privileged through the divestment of its relative. The resultant economy of privilege sustains an asymmetrical hierarchy in which one member governs or rules the other throughout the theological, logical, axiological and even politicaldomains. (Taylor 1984)

In the precise context of discourse of othering and exclusion, we find the modern West has privileged the first term in following binaries: Reason Man Self Anthropocentrism being This world Becoming Kingdom of Earth Thinking Masculine Science (Positivism) Scientist Modernity Body Matter Time White Speech Head Activism Modern

Unreason God Other Theocentrism Being Other world Being Kingdom of Heaven Meditation Feminine Metaphysics Mystic Tradition Soul Spirit Space Non-white Silence Heart Quietism Primitive

This privileging of one term over the other and consequent marginalization of the other as “Other” in all these binaries is what has

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sustained the grand narrative of modernity and one can say its child, colonialism. Traditions are, perennialist saver, nondualistic and their aspiration to middle path requires cognizance of and thus transcendence of polar opposite. Binaries are embraced and transcended and alternately affirmed. For instance they are Reality-centric which embraces God/world, matter/spirit, action and contemplation, jnan and bhakti, all six points of view that six traditional darsana in Indian tradition are. The perfect man is one who is open to all forms and bonds by no belief as all beliefs are limiting as Ibn Arabi would say. We will later turn to Ibn Arabi—whom perennialists believe to be a prime expositor of Islamic Tradition—to show how dualisms are avoided though dualities are retained and one’s commitment to realize what is due to every object—as justice requires—is ensured.

Traditionalist Perspective Against promethean enterprises and limiting exclusivist ideological currents such as the nineteenth-century’s pseudo-religion of nationalism, the positivistic belief in science, racism and evolutionism that served to legitimize unbridled imperialism, Perennialists hold out the transpersonal authority of intellect that unifies instead of discriminates and suprahuman authority of primordial revelation, divine gnosis adapted providentially to different circumstances in the form of religions, and a evolutionistic view of history that sees the world is in a state of intellectual and spiritual decline, inevitable from the very start of an historical cycle. We are at present in what the Classical West called the Iron Age, and the Hindus Kali Yuga. The idea of a perennial philosophy (philosophia perennis ) has received different articulations throughout the history of Western philosophy. Whether explicitly formulated or not it has been an underlying idea across cultures. Though originally formulated in the East and later in the West we can trace its ideas in Plato, Meister Eckhart and some Sufi thinkers. However wherever mysticism has been lived perennial philosophy seems to be in the background. Throughout the history of philosophy, the term perennial philosophy or philosophiaperennis was also used as “a synonym for Scholasticism and Thomism; as the final goal of philosophy by Leibniz; as the regulative ideal of philosophical practice by Jaspers; and as a world philosophy, synthesis of East and West, by Radhakrishnan”. The search for a universal, permanent, and all-encompassing philosophy has

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been traced to the Neoplatonism of Philo of Alexandria or the PlatonicChristian synthesis of St. Augustine. However, it was AgostinoSteuco (1497–1546) who coined this term to refer to the priscatheologia or philosophiapriscorium of MarsilioFicino, a unifying philosophical system based on a synthesis of Platonic principles and Christian doctrines. Here it is used to specifically refer to a school of thought spearheaded by the trinity of Rene Guenon, Frithjof Schuon and Ananda Coomaraswamy. Perennialists believe in an overlying/underlying current of affirmation of the Real/Absolute as universal inheritance of mankind grounding a universal orthodoxy for all people across all times. The idea is that a philosophical/metaphysical current exists that has endured through centuries, and that is able to integrate harmoniously all traditions in terms of a single Truth which underlies the apparent plurality of world views. This unity in human knowledge stems from the existence of a single ultimate reality which can be possibly apprehended by all men through intellect/intellective intuition and is accessible through universally efficacious symbolism. Religions, myths, arts and folklore across cultures have basic correspondences and are connected to this shared universal metaphysic. Philosophiaperennis, as Nasr states, pertains to a knowledge “which has always been and will always be and which is of universal character both in the sense of existing among peoples of different climes and epochs and of dealing with universal principles. This knowledge which is available to the intellect is, moreover, contained in the heart of all religions or traditions” (Nasr 1988: 54). (Intellect, nuous, in the traditionalist metaphysical perspective is a supra-individual faculty distinct from reason though the latter is its reflection on the mental plane.) The philosophiaperennis possesses branches and ramifications pertaining to cosmology, anthropology, art and other disciplines, but at its heart lies pure metaphysics, if this later term is understood as the science of Ultimate Reality, as a scientia sacra not to be confused with the subject bearing the name metaphysics in post-medieval Western philosophy. (Nasr 1988: 54)

The perennialist school believes that there is a primordial tradition which constituted original or archetypal man’s primal spiritual and intellectual heritage received through direct revelation when Heaven and Earth were still “united”. This Primordial Tradition is reflected in all later traditions,

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but the later traditions are not simply its historical and horizontal continuation. This concept of tradition is a key concept of this perennialist school that has arisen as a response to modernism and humanism. What is tradition? It is the knowledge of First Principles or Universal Principles, the metaphysical core or kernel of all traditional religious and wisdom traditions which are the prerogative of so-called primitive men (and that ancient age is the Age of Gold, in contrast to which modern age being the most degenerate age signalling the end of the world-Kali Yuga-Iron Age) and “barbaric” Africans and Asians—in short the third world, the premodern world or non-European or colonized world. Tradition means truths or principles of a divine origin revealed or unveiled to mankind and, in fact, a whole cosmic centre through various figures envisaged as messengers, prophets, avatars, the Logos or other transmitting agencies, along with all the ramifications and applications of these principles in different realms including law and social structure, art, symbolism, the sciences, and embracing of course Supreme Knowledge along with the means of its attainment. (Nasr 1993: 68)

In its more universal sense tradition can be considered to include the principles which bind man to Heaven. Lord Northbourne defines it as the chain that joins civilization to Revelation.

Convergence with Other Critiques of Othering Perennialist critique converges (though fundamental differences separate it in turn from more postmodernist approach) with postmodern critique of colonialist narrative. Postmodern turn (in Huston Smith’s reading as presented in 1961 essay “The Revolution in Western Thought” we see post-modern scepticism and uncertainty as only a transition to yet another intellectual perspective, one that hopefully will be characterized by a more holistic and spiritual outlook. And in fact that outlook is already there though we may still be searching for the appropriate idiom to express it for the postmodern man) also exposes historically and culturally constituted nature of bourgeois or Eurocentric or colonialist norms. The rationale of scientific discourses Foucault identified with the transformation of human beings into knowable—that is, controllable “subjects”. It is the self-other binary representing the exclusionary relationship between

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subjects who occupy opposite positions on centre/margin model of political and other power relations which is the basis of colonialist ideology. The binary relationship between self and other suggests that the “I” of the self can’t exist without the “non-I” or the other. The proponents of postcolonial theory rightly view the relationship of self to other as one of domination and exclusion that maintains unequal power relations in support of racist imperialistic colonialist enterprise. Theorists such as Gayatri Spivak have suggested the deployment of a strategic “otherness” or identity politics levelling unequal power relations and disabling this binary opposition. Perennialists would principally agree with all this but point out that self-other dichotomy is too deeply entrenched in Western thought and one needs a radical deconstructive strategy to problematize this binary and postcolonialist theorists can’t provide it being insufficiently radical for the purpose and being rooted in the modernist humanist Western (as against the traditional nondualist Eastern) framework. It is Buddhism and in fact all mysticism (which is the kernel of religion) that cuts at the root of the problem. The self-other dichotomy can’t be challenged without rejecting the whole tradition of Western philosophy or its metaphysics of presence and the cogito principle of Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, which establishes the human self and its material reality independent of human thought. The absolutization of subject-object duality is the very foundation of modern colonialist project would claim legitimacy from this basic metaphysical position. All fundamental antagonisms and dualisms of the West stems from the great cleavage between form and matter. This split is predicated upon that peculiarly Western relation between the subject and the nonsubject, in which the two stand in opposition to each other. This is true both chronologically and ontologically. For in establishing this opposition, the mind detached itself from the world and initiated the theme of Western thought and civilization which is objectivation of the given, its controls by the human subject, Iits relationship with it and all this necessitating and culminating in outwardly directed war against Nature and against the Other as other appears as hell to it. The history of colonialism is so to speak mirrored in the history of Western thought and civilization which is more interested in via active than in via contemplativa, in domination or mastery over the object, the other. By virtue of the incessant urge or the will to posit objects, the subject itself creates its own antagonists. It is the same will which also constitutes the means of mastering them. The modern science with its profound interest in the

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outer world (rather than the inner one) and its very methodology of objectivation is the logical development or illustration of this mind structure and attitude of the West. Even Absolute is conceived as an object in the West. All this is alien to Eastern mystical spirit—the entire construction with its schism between the logos and the empirical world and the ensuing pairs of irreconcilable opposites. The Eastern mind isn’t interested in shaping the non-subject as the other and encounters this other in almost Levinasian ethical sense. The Eastern framework of juxtaposition and identity and its both/and logic of polarities or logic of “contradictions” is to be contrasted to Western either/or logic and its vain attempt at unity in variety as the genuine—otherness of the other is subsumed in some abstract higher category. If the postcolonialist enterprise is decentring of the imperialist privileging of western epistemology and culture and the promotion of other formerly denigrated forms of knowledge and cultures, it is perennialist approach that is an ally in the sense that it provides an alternative epistemology, a fully developed worldview that includes whole range of sciences against the dominant colonialist modern one. Some powerful objections have emerged against the deployment of deconstructionist and postmodernist thought and methodology in postcolonial theory. Some critics have pointed to Fredrik Jameson’s identification of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism to advance their case. Lenin had argued nearly a century ago that imperialism itself represents the latest form of capitalism. This places both imperialist culture and postmodernism within the same history and fundamentally at odds with any practical resistance to the consequences of colonialism. Opponents of poststructuralist inflected theory have pointed to another tradition of anticolonial theory which considerably predated the work of Said, Bhaba and Spivak—the trinity of postcolonial theorists—and reaches back to certain African American writers (such as W.E.B Du Bios or the South African Sol Plaatje) anticolonial independence fighters and thinkers such as Mahatma Gandhi and authors such as Chinua Achebe. Perennialist metaphysical approach provides a systematic refutation of all the important assumptions and grand claims of Occidental thought and civilization—perennialists have shaken the foundations of secularized Western thought—its rationalism, desacralizing secularism, nationalism, scientism, tenchnocracy, progressivism and the like—and shown how the marginalized terms of such binaries as primitive/progressive, traditional science/modern science, tradition/modernity, nature/culture, traditional

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crafts/modern technology, unreason/reason, etc., need to be evaluated differently and even privileged. They aren’t arguing for just neutralizing or crossing these binaries as some postmodernist would like to but clear reversal of these privileging terms. Colonization should be understood as the human condition itself and not a mere socio-politico economic historical process. It is Freudian Nietzsche an intertext of Drive for aggression and the Will to Power and is the originary violence.

Self-Other, One-Many Dialectics in the Resources of Ibn Arabi Ibn ‘Arabî’s great contribution is to argue for cognitive importance of imaginal faculty. As Chittick notes, he reconciles the poles of transcendence and immanence by seeing the heart as unitary consciousness which must become attuned to its own fluctuations and see God’s incomparability with the eye of reason on one beating, and His similarity with the eye of imagination on other beating. Its two visions are prefigured in the two primary names of the Scripture, al-qur’ân, “that which brings together”, and al-furqân, “that which differentiates”. These two demarcate the contours of ontology and epistemology. The first alludes to the unifying oneness of Being (perceived by imagination), and the second to the differentiating manyness of knowledge and discernment (perceived by reason). The Real, as Ibn ‘Arabî often says, is the One/the Many (alwâhid al-kathîr), that is, One in Essence and many in names, the names being the principles of all multiplicity, limitation and definition. In effect, with the eye of imagination, the heart sees Being present in all things, and with the eye of reason it discerns its transcendence and the diversity of the divine faces. The scientific West sees with one eye Manyness only while the Vedantic and Buddhist East has largely emphasized the eye that sees One only. Man needs binocular vision to see the depth of things. He doesn’t merely speak of women’s rights or human rights but the rights of everything and mostly importantly of God as Reality which embraces all things and is all things. Muhammedan saints give each created thing exactly what is due to it on the basis of seeing it as a unique self-disclosure (tajallî) of the absolute Haqq. They simultaneously see the oneness of the Real and the manyness of creation that allows them “to give each thing that has a haqq its haqq”, as demanded by the Prophet (Chittick 1998). For him a Muhammedan is one who realizes the perfections of all the prophets—an ideal worthy of emulating for every man

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and who can assert that he is truly a Muhammedan and who can be more inclusivist than a Muhammedan in this sense? He demands, as Qunawi puts it, that one should perceive each thing only through that thing itself and inasmuch as one is identical with each thing and thus one is the attribute of every attribute and the quality of every essence and one’s act is the act of every actor (Nafahat, 265). The highest station of nostation demands disengaging oneself from all qualities, bonds, limitations, and constrictions and standing Non-delimited Wuj¯ ud, i.e., to be absolutely open to the Real with no imposition or will of one’s own. It is what Jesus calls the poverty of spirit and other scriptures such as the Bhagvat Gita detachment. His vision of the unity of Being demands in short implies transcendence or cessation of all inequalities and distinctions of class, creed, colour, race, gender, nationality, regionality, etc. He demands the sacrifice of the ego which thinks in terms of its rights over and against the rights of the other. “I” must be annihilated in fana so that one mirrors Existence or God and flows with the Tao. Ibn ‘Arabî thus demands nothing less than Universal Compassion and encountering the other with infinite humility and care—an ideal which Levinas attempts to appropriate. In his inclusive perspective the binaries of action and contemplation, grace and self effort, invocation and resignation or acceptance of divine will, religious and secular or sacred and profane, knowledge and faith, men and women, soul and body, matter and consciousness, good and evil, truth and error, guidance and misguidance, philosophy and metaphysics, theology and philosophy, symbol and history, myth and fact and the like appear as complementary polarities rather than as opposites as would follow from his nondualism which means transcendence of binaries or unification of polarities. He advocates a sort of perspectivism which implies epistemological pluralism that vetoes totalizing narratives and allows every possible angle on infinite faced reality. He embodies the perspective of “judge not” that Jesus advocated. He appropriates the conceptions of negative divine which is the hallmark of Buddhism and positive divine which is the hallmark of Islam and Judaism. Everyone can be heard as every path is a straight path in its own way. His integral spirituality appropriates all the traditional paths to God, all the basic forms of yoga—bhaktic, jnanic and karmic. The thesis of Akbarian universalism has been succinctly formulated by a contemporary scholar in the following words.

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The particular gift that comes from Ibn’‘Arabî, or possibly even is Ibn ’‘Arabî, is the all-inclusive point of view. If it is situated anywhere it is at the point of coming into manifestation of everything. As such it is not only a spiritual point of view, unless what is meant by that is the existence of one absolute and all-encompassing reality, which is the only real existence of everyone and everything. This is a perspective that leaves nothing out. It is not a Judeo-Christian or Islamic perspective, but it is this which has informed and given rise to the Abrahamic line and to all spirituality everywhere… this point of view is completely distinguished from all partiality, and all qualifying adjectives, and that it is free from the qualifications of all religions, and is thereby completely muslim to the Truth. (Young 1999)

The rights of experience, reason, intuition, revelation all are recognized but no empiricism or positivism, intuitionism, rationalism and fidesism is allowed to emerge. The rights of both time and eternity, immanence and transcendence, man and God, self and nonself, animate and animate worlds, visible and invisible realms, history and metahistory, this world and the otherworld are recognized. The truth or haqq of all possibilities, potentialities, manifestations are in principle taken care of. He is not exclusively a theologian or a mystic or a philosopher or an ideologue of this or that thought. He is not a humanist who doesn’t lift up his eyes to heavens and sees all possibilities and potentialities exhausted in earthly career, a rationalist philosopher caught in the categories of reason, a theologian who behaves as if God needed an advocate or special secretary and he is the one, a mystic whose rational life is flooded by subjective life of feelings but a humanitarian philosopher-mystic-theologian all simultaneously. Because he is a poet as well besides being a philosopher or a theologian he embraces wider angle of what constitutes universal human experience. He is a strict monotheist but didn’t reject idolaters as utterly misguided finding God as the true object of worship despite what men would erroneously think sometimes. He is the strong upholder of universal orthodoxy, of purity of doctrine but found truth, though not the whole or exclusive truth in all doctrines. He is the heir of Abrahamic Tradition but doesn’t exclude even Pharoah from salvation. Ibn ‘Arabi, in arguing for cognitive importance of imaginal faculty, offers invaluable tool for bridging philosophies. He reconciles the poles of transcendence and immanence by seeing the heart as unitary consciousness which must become attuned to its own fluctuations and see God’s incomparability with the eye of reason on one beating, and His similarity with the eye of imagination on other beating. Imagination perceives

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the unifying oneness of Being and reason the diversity of divine faces. The scientific West sees with one eye Manyness only while the Vedantic and Buddhist East has largely emphasized the eye that sees One only. Man needs binocular vision to see the depth of things. Modern man lacks the unifying eye of imagination and all his knowledge is “dispersion in detail”. Much sought after unity of knowledge is impossible to be achieved without the use of the currently atrophied eye of imagination. Acknowledgement fundamental mystery and unity of existence in Ibn ‘Arabî amounts to possibility of dialogue with the other that transcends our comprehension and granting that it can be accessed/known or spoken to, in a way, means that we can have a dialogue with everything that exists beyond the narrow cocoon of our self. Life being He/not-He is dialogic, dialectical play of binaries, of God and the inexistent world or transcendent divinity and the world of forms. Life is a dialogue. Ibn ‘Arabi while resisting every attempt to make absolutes from philosophical and theological positions would not be much troubled by such seemingly antagonistic formulations in different schools that sharply categorize and distinguish them in such terms as presence or absence of personal God in them, prophetic vs. mystical, mayaistic vs. world affirming, rational vs. intuitional, pantheistic/polytheistic vs. theistic or transcendentalist, idealist vs. realist/pragmatic, theological vs. philosophical. All beliefs are limiting though have some truth at their own levels. The perfect man can accommodate all the sects that there are as Rumi, Ibn ‘Arabi’s contemporary said in his famous DiwaniShamse Tabriz, or appropriate all points of view or beliefs seeing the aspect of truth in all of them but without identifying with any of them as Ibn ‘Arabi would like to put it. Dualistic binary thinking is transcended in the metaphysical standpoint as knowing and being become one. One recalls Simone Weil’s method here that one may surmise echoes Jainasyadvada. And this does converge with the implications of Nagarjuna’s method of crossing all positions and taking rest in a position of no-position—the right view is no view—and as Ibn ‘Arabi would put it, the highest station is the station of no-station. Socratic dialectics was originally tailored to arrive at a consensus of rational just beings which Habermas’ idea of communicative dialogue. “One must accept all opinions”, Simone Weil has written, “but then arrange them in a vertical order, placing them atappropriate levels”. She also noted that “as soonas one has arrived at any position, try to find in what sensethe contrary is true”. Thus we find, as Leslie Fielder notes in the introduction to Waiting

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for God, that “corresponding to Simone Weil’s basic conviction that no widely held belief is utterly devoid of truth is a dialectical method in which she balances against each other contrary propositions, not in order to arrive at a synthesis in terms of a ‘golden mean,’ but rather to achieve an equilibrium of truths”. This equilibrium of truths is what traditionalism attempts to attest in world religion, art traditions, mythologies, folklore and darsanas. Recognition of this would help resolve all conflicts based on superiority of one’s ideological or truth claims. Dialogue that Plato extolled as a mechanism for reaching truth requires mastery of the art of listening about which Kierkegaard also reminds us so eloquently.

Conclusion It is time to let thousand flowers bloom, let all cultures cultivate their unique styles while seeing how our roots trace to the soil of the Real and we are led, by appreciating the other, to the depths of our own selfhood. Iqbal’s great work Secrets of the Self echoing Hegel and Sufis elaborates the idea that everything is really a projection of the self and thus every other is one’s own self that is there as part of the grand play of the Self. The idea of creation as lila (cosmic play) and its embodiment in great epics like Mahabharat and Ramayana amply demonstrates that there is no real other to be bothered about and one in loving others loves only oneself and thus compassion is really for one’s own good. What is especially noteworthy in great Indian epics is how the political or ideological other is engaged in dialogue and even thought to be redeemed due to sticking to dharma even though that dharma contradicts what one is following. This explains lengthy dialogues of attempts at reconciliation or engagement with opponents, trying to avoid war to the end, possibility of last minute redemption of Rawan in Ramayana and Barberek envisioning Krishna as fighting on both sides in Mahabharatas. What is required is to instil this spirit in polarized geopolitics and politics. In fact self gets its recognition from the other. Levinas showed how we owe everything to other and this other should include other cultures, other communities. This calls for countering what de Sousa Santos calls epistemicide—the killing of different knowledge traditions in the wake of modernity—through cultural regeneration, one important aspect of this cultural regeneration is regeneration of knowledge, one’s knowledge tradition (de Sousa Santos 2007, 2014). It is heartening to see, despite globalization’s homogenizing move causing disappearance of

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local languages and other formations, a slow movement of regeneration of knowledges of our soil and soul in varieties of indigenous movements. In the North East of India where tribals were converted to Christianity, there is a movement for indigenization of Christianity into one’s soil (Frynkenberg 2010). Religious and spiritual movements such as Donyi Polo in Arunachala Pradesh create new spaces of cultural regeneration from one’s soil. Post Corona is an opportune movement for more localcentric and environment-centric traditional expressions and it is hoped that Corona will prove a blessing in disguise for dying local traditions and we collectively find better anchorage in our roots and fight fragmentation and alienation. It was thanks to commitment to local land, tribe, language, folklore, customs and what Ibn Khaldun called asbiyah that people have preserved diversity and it is now thanks to traditionalists and their hermeneutic that we are better able to appreciate unity in this diversity and see traditions mirroring each other and getting their strength from embracing the other instead of negating it. If philosophy is a way of life and its end communion with Ultimate Reality and ethics or cultivation of virtues integrally connected with it and not the science of ratiocinative arguments or mere linguistic analysis or clarification of concepts then perennialist contention that there is unity among different—in fact all—traditions, Semitic and nonSemitic, archaic and “advanced” ones can be granted without much difficulty. All traditions teach the doctrine of two selves, one lower and the other higher divine one. All traditions are for self-transcendence. All traditions advocate a vision of hierarchy of existence consisting of a series of gradations from matter to Spirit. All traditions believe in the other or deeper world that encompasses or complements this world. The primacy of the moral but transcendence of good-evil binary by sages is discernible in all major traditions. Transcendence of binary thinking and the principle of simultaneous negation and affirmation serves not only as a critique of the given in both individual and social realms—and thus answer Marxist critiques that complain that religion and mysticism are complicit with the given or dominant sociopolitical reality which is never the ideal and always in need of transcendence or negation from the perspective of social justice and individual’s freedom from most forms of alienating and exploiting power structures—but also allows us to see relative validity of divergent philosophical and theological points of view which are often couched in terms of binaries in divine economy.

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References Chittick, William. 1998. The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-‘Arabî’s Cosmology. Albany: State University of New York Press. de Sousa Santos, Boaventura (ed.). 2007. Another Knowledge Is Possible. London: Verso. de Sousa Santos, Boaventura (ed.). 2014. Epistemologies of the South: Justice AgainstEpistemicide. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Frynkenberg, Robert E. 2010. Christianity in India: From the Beginnings to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ibn‘Arabî. 1972–1991. al-Futûhât al-makkiyya, 14 volumes, ed. O. Yahia. Cairo: al-Hay’at al-Misriyyat al-‘Âmmali’l-Kitâb. Nasr, S.H. 1993. The Need for a Sacred Science. SUNY. Nasr, S.H. 1988. Knowledge and the Sacred. Lahore: Suhail Academy. Weil, Simone. 1959. Waiting for God (Letters and Essay), Introduction by Leslie Fielder. G.B Putnam’s Sons. Young, Peter. 1999. Ibn ‘Arabî: Towards a Universal Point of View (from the website of MIOS).

A Mystic’s Mission Today: Propagate the Truth of Co-belonging Thomas Menamparampil

Introduction I must congratulate Professor Ananta Kumar Giri and the contributors to this volume for the issues they raise here in relationship to the anxieties of the day: exaggerated forms of nationalism, xenophobia, and exclusive thinking. We need a New Enlightenment. While being proud of our specific identities, our unique heritages and our original cultural roots, we need to realize that we belong to the human family, we need each other and that we cannot be ourselves without others. People with a sense of social responsibility should search for routes to bring together people of different cultures, competences and convictions, both religious and secular. I would give them the title “mystics” in a new and contextual sense. Differences can be transcended when partners in conversation really wish to help, complement and enrich each other. What has made a relaxed conversation between different religions/ideologies/interests difficult in today’s world is that they have become greatly politicized. And yet, we belong to a world of continuous exchange of ideas and ideals; neither Hindus nor Muslims nor Christians nor secularists need to feel embarrassed about their indebtedness to each other. A collective sense of responsibility must be roused in the followers all faiths/convictions to address the shared anxieties of the day.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. K. Giri (ed.), Roots, Routes and a New Awakening, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7122-0

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We Belong Together in Our Spiritual/Intellectual Search Oh men, direct your energies to promote the good of all mankind. Let your relations with all be characterized by love, peace and harmony. Let your hearts beat in unison with human hearts. (Rig Veda 8,49,4)

I would like to define spirituality as an upward surge of the human heart to reach out to the Ultimate together with others. It was never understood as a lonesome venture, even by enlightened hermits. For, we belong together. We depend on each other. So, if we were to fight against each other in the name of religion, we would be least religious at that moment. Something similar could be said about the human being’s intellectual drive, which finds expression in diverse schools of philosophy, scientific understanding, or sociological thought. Human eagerness to discover Truth, express the sense of shared responsibility for the common good, and work towards ultimate destiny can find fulfilment and realization only in a shared venture. In my definition of the word “mystic” in this paper I would like to include people who are ardent searchers for all that is good, true and beautiful. They belong to all. They have a deep sense of mission to bring this eagerness to search together for others as well. Their desire is not to refute and reject, but to co-strive, collate, co-build and collaborate. I would put in this category rishis, munis, sages, monks, holy people of every tradition, philosophers, reformers, independent thinkers, philosopher-kings, creative personalities, initiators of new ventures, social activists, responsible media persons… persons who looked beyond themselves to develop a common vision for humanity, who, even if they failed in this concept of togetherness in some manner, contributed to the common thought and common good. A deeper “mystic” and a perceptive genius seeks to bring all these efforts together for a shared purpose towards human destiny. For, we cannot be “we” without the “other”. Even our faith/original thought would not be what it is, without the edifying faith/stimulating thought of the other. How little we realize that we are mutually dependent, even for our religious fervour! Francis of Assisi was strengthened in his own faith seeing the sturdiness of faith in Islamic society, so was Charles Foucauld. Raimundo Panikkar stood in reverence before the Kailas. Indian spirituality has edified the rest of the world.

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We Need Each Other All people are a single nation. (Quran II)

We are mutually dependent in many other areas of life too. Today we recognize that our economies are interlocked, that “trade wars” are suicidal. Insightful people argue that even our conflicts prove that we need each other. All we have to do is to change the nature of our relationships: from confrontational to collaborative, from mutually opposing to mutually stimulating. In the cultural world we keep borrowing from each other continuously. In the world of philosophy we profit from each other’s intuitions. In the area of science, those who learn from others most, benefit the most. The fact is that Nature has distributed abilities, talents, skills and insights in such a way, that what is meant for one is given to another… to be discovered, appreciated, tapped and generously shared. Everything ultimately turns to everyone’s benefit. When we begin to recognize this truth both in theory and practice, we will have an inclusive outlook; and we will have Peace. We need to emphasize this, because we notice certain exclusive attitudes today that make us anxious.

We Ought to Be Constant Learners from Each Others’ Insights To be one with the world is wisdom. (Tirukkural)

In today’s globalized world there are so many trends that seem to point to our universal togetherness. The new Economy is interlinking people who had never known each other, innovations in communications are bringing peoples and communities together, international solidarity offers indefinite possibilities of self-expression; good ideas generated anywhere have opportunities to reach out to every other part of the world; and good values preserved in any civilizational tradition can offer inspiration to persons and societies in any other place on the planet. There is every possibility today for cultures, civilizations and faiths to dialogue with each other, to listen to each others’ insights, and learn from each others’ wisdom. For this, we need to go deeper into our religion.

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Mutual Respect Has to Be Inculcated from Young Days A man who exalts his own sect and despises another, hurts his own sect. (Asoka’s Rock Edict XII)

The future belongs to the younger generation, who are already showing themselves to be creative, dynamic and energetic. If they are wellmotivated and united, there is no limit to what they will be able to achieve for their own people and contribute to the rest of the world. But if, today’s young people happen to be unmotivated, self-oriented, inwardlooking, divided, mutually exclusive, they will be the cause of anxiety for the entire society. If the rising generation will not able to live together as brothers and sisters and cultivate values that will help them to collaborate with other communities, our society will be heading for major troubles. In fact, we are experiencing some of them. Our ancestors taught us, “There is none high or low amongst you. You are all brethren and therefore strive altogether to attain prosperity” (Rig Veda 5,60,5). We have a duty to pass on this message to coming generations.

The Golden Rule My religion is kindness. (The Dalai Lama)

Love for other people stands at the heart of all religious beliefs, ethical codes and inherited traditions. Every religion and philosophic vision has some way of saying that we ought to do to others what we would like others to do to us. This is a powerful message in an age of communal clashes, ethnic conflicts, merciless competition and intense cultivation of self-interest. The central teaching of Jesus was this, “Whatever you wish that men would do to you, do to them” (Matthew 7:12). Islam puts it in this manner: “Not one of you is a believer until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself” (Forty Hadith of an-Nawawi 13). The Quran is even more specific, “You shall speak to men good words ” (Quran 2,83). Jainism

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has a similar teaching: “A man should wander about treating all creatures as he himself would be treated” (Sutrakritanga 1.11.33). One would have considered these mere “pious thoughts” for pious people. But this, in fact, was the programme of life that Mahatma Gandhi brought to the political field with absolute confidence and unbroken determination. And he was eminently successful.

All Religions Promote Harmony How wonderful it is, how pleasant, for people to live together in harmony! (Psalms 133:1)

All religions have taught peace, impartiality, fairness and harmony. Centuries ago, ancient Indians exhorted each other, “Meet together, speak together, let your minds be of one accord…… May your counsel be common, your assembly common, common the mind, and the thoughts… Let your aims be common, and your hearts be of one accord, and all of you of one mind, so you may live well together” (Rig Veda 10.191.2–4). The Quran re-echoes similar sentiments at 49.10. “Consider the family of humankind one”, taught Jainism (Jinasena, Adipurana). “Let all mankind be one sect”, advised Sikhism (Adi Granth, Japuji 28, M.1, p. 6). People like Mahatma Gandhi and Tagore, spoke of the human race as one, as did Buddha, Asoka and others in their times. Jesus prayed, “I pray that they may all be one” (John 17:20–21).

Economy Must Retain a Human Face, Must Remain Humane Would it not be better for you to be robbed? Instead you yourselves wrong one another and rob one another, even your brothers! (1 Corinthians 5:7– 9)

We agree that economy has its own importance. However, economic success cannot be made the ultimate goal in human affairs. It cannot be allowed to entice and enslave human beings, wipe out cultures, and ruin the environment. When people are evaluated only in market terms, when

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they are classified merely as “labour” or evaluated solely in reference to the “market ”, they become mere objects. Economy on the contrary must have a human face. Only humane relationships will create an atmosphere conducive to the common good. When people’s worth is calculated only in terms of their use to the economy, they become less than human beings and deprived of their dignity. And yet, the tragedy today is that entire nations are opting for this form of self-abasement by making economic growth their sole goal. The very foundational principles of this way of organizing one’s life must be re-thought, if peace has to find a place in the area of relationship between people of various levels of prosperity.

Respect Shown to Nature Is Respect for Humanity Reckless men who cut down trees for their pleasure destroy many living beings. By destroying plants, when young or grown up, a careless man does harm to his own soul. (Jainism: Sutrakritanga I.7.7–9)

Despite the blessings it brought, the technological age has been the cause of the destruction of ecosystems and erosion of traditional cultures, and the undermining of quality of life (The Tao of Liberation, by Mark Hathaway & Leonardo Boff, Orbis Books, New York, 2009, p. 17). We may well recall how the great civilizations of Mesopotamia, Crete, Greece, Rome, Maya and the Indus Valley collapsed because they ruined the very environment that had brought them into existence. Damage to environment has led to an accentuation of poverty, depletion of resources, falling of water tables, drying up of wells, shrinking of forests; collapse of fisheries, erosion of soils, desertification of grasslands. The list of disasters can be made longer: loss of forests, release of carbon dioxide, hole in the ozone layer, undermined fertility of the soil, chemicals in the air, soil, water; extinction out species; overuse of energy (Hathaway 6). “A wise man should not act sinfully toward the earth, nor cause others to do so, nor allow others to act so” (Jainism: Acaranga Sutra 5)

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Media Ought to Build Bridges Mass media and the politicians are in splendid symbiosis. The airwaves promote corporate products, consumer values and the careers of friendly politicians. The politicians promote media deregulation, low taxes and freedom from scrutiny of performance and public service. (Jeffrey Sachs, The Price of Civilization)

The instruments of communications that have done so much of good in the globalized world, are today also being misused. Someone has described the tragedy in this manner: human society is made subject to the market; the corporations control the market subjecting every field of human activity to serve their interests. Mass media strengthens this effort by promoting consumerism (Hathaway 16). Added to that, the other types of social media promote other kinds of self-interests. As intelligent readers, can we respond to such negative trends, rather than be reduced to the level of being mere mute observers? Common well-being is everyone’s creation. “Fake news” and biased reporting can plant prejudice in the minds of readers, inflame anger. Today it is being recognized that technologies of mass persuasion are being used as instruments for manipulating minds. Could we grow a little more conscious of this danger? Nearly all wise teachings of the East spoke of the need for resisting “illusions” and attaining “truth”. How relevant those teachings seem to us in our times when so many of us spend any length of time in the “unreal” (virtual) world of the TV, and in the world of “illusions”? Co-prosperity shall remain elusive.

The Responsibility of Leaders, Citizens And all of you must put on the apron of humility, to serve one another. (1 Peter 5:5)

Leaders should excel in civic virtues and in their concern for the common good. Their goals should not be GDP growth alone, but also social justice and environmental sustainability. Citizens should collaborate in this endeavour. If they succeed in creating a set of values in society that

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are motivating and unifying, it will bring peace and contribute to the long-term good of everyone. Loss of credibility in institutions, e.g. in the judiciary, election officers, election processes, etc., leads to cynicism and inaction. In such situations, social criticism is a citizen’s duty, not merely his/her right. One engages in it not to hurt and humiliate, but to arouse a sense of responsibility in the leaders and fellow-citizens alike. It has become important to remember that democratic structures alone do not guarantee democratic functioning, when elected members keep a distance from the people and are more keen on raising a ruckus in the Parliament and Assemblies than in engaging in intelligent discussions. Alert citizens can insist on responsible behaviour from their elected members.

Deeper Reflection Leads to a New Enlightenment O Lord, grant me such qualities of head and heart as would endear me to the enlightened and learned among us, to the ruling class and to all that have eyes to see. (Atharva Veda 19,62)

Perceptive people recognize one reality: the more worrying problems in life are not ultimately economic or academic; they are existential. They call for serious reflection. That is what made insightful persons in our civilization, especially religiously inspired people in the East, to long for apartness, silence, contemplation, peace of mind, community-building, self-realization (The Turning Point, Fritjof Capra, Flamingo, London, 1983, p. 440). It is precisely when we feel helpless before mighty problems that we begin to hear an inner voice, a soft whispering. A new inspiration awakens in our minds. A new insight is churned out from the running stream of the cultural wisdom that comes to us from our ancestors who were a little closer to the origin of things than we are. That is meant for the whole world.

“For the Welfare of the World” Silabhadra Go and spread righteousness everywhere. (Guru Govind Singh)

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We have emphasized from the beginning of this paper that we belong to each other. Nature gives us models of several patterns of interrelationships and integrated systems: atoms, molecules, organs, body, individuals, families, tribes, societies and nations. As the material world is made up of an inseparable network of linkages, and as the human body and nature itself are self-regulating systems, in the same way we belong to each other in an intimate fashion within the human family. We depend on each other. An intense awareness of our mutual dependence itself translates into energy. We feel an inner urge to make of life not a competitive struggle, but a cooperative venture, each person and community playing a complementary role with the other like musicians in a concert. We notice creative forces in nature continuously causing the emergence of something new in the Universe. We too contribute to this when we work together according to the norms of the natural order. Our contribution on this occasion has to be a New Approach to Peace, to common well-being. This well-being is meant for everyone, we wish to carry it to everyone around us. Silabhdra, the Buddhist Teacher at Nalanda, told Hiuen Tsang, his student from China, “You have become a disciple in order to benefit the world”.

The Future Is in Our Hands The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard lie down with the kid….Nothing vile or evil shall be done. (Judaism: Isaiah 11:6–9)

When several scientific discoveries take place at the same time, we know that they come from the “Collective Unconscious” of humanity where those ideas had been floating for some time. The same is true of new philosophical insights, social perceptions and probings about the future. Our co-belongingness that promotes Collective Thought generates energies for building up a future of Peace, of Collective Good. The Enlightenment we referred to earlier is precisely about this Truth: a truth that reveals that Self-renunciation in behalf of others is not a loss to oneself, but Self-Realization in its true meaning… because we belong together. In Self-Realization in this sense one gains the same joy that a poet feels giving shape to a poem, a musician in composing a piece of music, a scientist in making a unique discovery, an achiever in accomplishing an impossible task. It is a moment of Ecstasy.

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This may sound a curious statement: it is precisely when a person is lost in his concern for others, that he/she has an intense feeling that he is loved and cared for! It is at that moment that he discovers his cobelongingness to “the Other”, and to the whole of cosmic reality. We as a human family are on various routes in search of this togetherness. May there be many a mystic to point a helpful route to a fellow-searcher!

Index

A Albrecht, Corinna, 216 C Christman, John, 215 D Diversity, 42, 82, 83, 92, 124, 125, 185, 205, 207, 209, 211, 213, 218, 224, 230, 241, 253, 310, 315, 323, 324, 329, 335, 350, 357, 366, 369, 371 E Europe, 14, 142, 155, 171, 180–182, 195, 202, 211–213, 229, 256, 258, 297, 299, 300, 327, 353 Evil, 80, 142, 144, 145, 201, 202, 205–207, 211, 367 F Freud, Sigmund, 15, 205, 270, 312

Frisch, Max, 203–205 H Huntington, Samuel P., 208 I Identity, 9–15, 18–22, 28, 29, 37, 42, 43, 75–77, 79, 84, 85, 88, 111, 127, 146, 150, 151, 157, 164–169, 172, 173, 176, 179, 185, 202–210, 214–219, 224, 227, 230, 235, 236, 242, 250, 252, 253, 264, 266, 268, 269, 279, 314, 315, 322, 331, 332, 335, 336, 338, 344, 351, 364, 365, 373 L Lorenz, Konrad, 202 M Margalit, Avishai, 215, 216

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. K. Giri (ed.), Roots, Routes and a New Awakening, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7122-0

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INDEX

Mecheril, Paul, 212, 213, 216 Mouffe, Chantal, 206 Muslims, 208–212, 373

N Nietzsche, Friedrich, 16, 207, 208, 338

P Petersen, Jürgen H., 204 Plato, 11, 140, 201, 202, 219, 257, 288, 289, 291, 292, 294, 314, 361, 370

R Reductionism, 202, 205, 207–209, 218, 271, 280 S Sacks, Jonathan Henry, 218, 219 Saint-Blancat, Chantal, 211 Schmidt di Friedberg, Ottavia, 211 Schmitt, Carl, 206 Schmitz, Walter, 204 Sen, Amartya, 205, 208–210, 214–216, 218, 219 W Wendt, Ernst, 204 Wierlacher, Alois, 216