Discipline and authority

Pergamon Futures, Vol. 29, No. 10, pp. 985-1OCQ 1997

0 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved Printed in Great Britain

0016-3287197 $17.00 + 0.00

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DISCIPLINE AND AUTHORITY

Some notes on future histories and epistemologies of India

Vinay Lal

Though the preceding 100 years have been marked by unprecedented blood- shed, it is indisputably clear, as the century draws to a close, that domination will increasingly be exercised through the categories enshrined by modern knowledge systems. Notwithstanding the advent of subaltern studies, feminism, and cultural studies, the Indian academy shows every sign of remaining colonized. The contestation and defiance of formal academic disciplines, which

are the principal vehicles through which the hegemony of the Western intellectual apparatus is exercised, is imperative if India is to have a future where its own spirit, culture, and intellectual traditions are not to be compromised. As

a prolegomenon to what future histories and epistemologies of India might look like, it is suggested that Indian intellectuals think ‘more of the rest’, and ‘less of the west’, just as they must find a less oppressive West with which they can cohabit. 0 1997 Elsevier Science ltd. All rights reserved

Reporter: Mr Gandhi, what do you think of Western civilization?

Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.

As we draw closer to the end of the twentieth century, the preceding one hundred years

unmistakably appear to blend together two seemingly diverse trajectories. The twentieth century will be remembered for the gruesome violence perpetrated upon peoples all over

Vinay Lal is Assistant Professor of History, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1473, USA (Tel: +l 818 716 9447; fax: +1 310 206 9630; email: vlalQhistory.ucla.edu).

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Discipline and authority: V La/

the world. The corpses of two fratricidal European conflicts called ‘world wars’, numerous genocides-from the massacres of the Armenians and the Jews to the killing fields of Cambodia and Serbia-and other irredentist and separatist wars litter the globe. Not always desiring to be embroiled in war themselves, the superpowers left some conflicts in the care-taking of reliable despots. As the account-keeping is completed, and the mil- lennium itself ends on the note of globalization, nothing would appear to have become more global than total forms of violence. One might reasonably suppose that the development of technologies of extinction, from air power to nuclear weapons, made possible

the violence of the twentieth century: that was, in any case, the impression so vividly (and mistakenly) conveyed by Stealth Fighters and Patriot missiles in America’s recent decimation of Iraq.

Though the total violence of the twentieth century would appear to owe a great deal to the exponential growth of military technology, it is just as transparent that it is the outcome of modernity and the intellectual categories of modern social thought. This has been particularly well established in respect of the Holocaust and the machinery of death established by the Nazis,’ though the Fordisation of murder and the ‘bureaucratically administered society of total domination’ is to be understood not merely as emerging from certain strands of German cuIture,2 but as an ‘expression of some of the most pro- found tendencies of Western civilization in the twentieth century’.3 Moreover, if the high- intensity but technologically ‘primitive’ violence perpetrated under the banner of ‘development’ and ‘progress’ is taken into account, then it becomes indubitably clear that the

total violence of the twentieth century has no intrinsic and necessary relation to the development of spectacular and massively efficient weapons of destruction. It is the social and political categories enshrined in the intellectual traditions of the West that turned the ‘perpetual and ubiquitous homelessness of the Jews’ into a problem, and that enabled

Hitler and the Nazi leadership to contrue the eternally diasporic condition of the Jews as one that prevented them from participating ‘in the universal power-struggle in its ordi- nary form of a war aimed at land conquest’; consequently, as it was imagined, Jews ‘had to reach for indecent, surreptitious and underhand methods which made them a particularly formidable and sinister enemy’.4 Why should this supposed deficiency have mat-

tered, and why should the notion of home have been so impoverished so as to condemn those without a nation-state, but for the fact that the nation-state was being constituted as the only desirable and legitimate form of political organization? And what is a ‘nation- state’, in the first instance, if not a category of modern thought? Does it not carry notions of rationalisation and secularisation to their logical extreme? It is precisely this form of social engineering in which Stalin was likewise engaged, and here again the millions of deaths on account of the brutal collectivization of Russian agriculture, or as a consequence of forced labor in an effort to industrialize rapidly, were achieved not by superior forms of weaponry, but by coolly and rationally conceiving of these deaths as the necessary price to pay for development. More lives have been lost in search of some phantom ‘progress’, when one thinks of the ruinous economic and political policies that led to the gulags in the Soviet Union and, in China, to the largest famine experienced in modern history, than they have been as a consequence of wars or violent conflict.

If the oppressive idea of productivity, another sterling contribution of the tribe of economists, has been the driving force behind the history of the modern West, the idea of ‘development’ remains the most clear example of the violence perpetrated by modern knowledge systems. By the second half of the nineteenth-century, if not earlier, social

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thinkers in the West had largely come to accept the idea that civilizations were to be placed alongside a scale. Whether a civilization deserved to be placed at the top, or whether it fell to the bottom, depended on a number of criteria. One such criterion was the treatment meted out by that civilization to its women: not surprisingly, India was relegated to the bottom, since British travelers, administrators, and members of the gov- erning elite could point to such phenomena as the burning of widows, female infanticide, the prohibition among the Hindus against widow-remarriage, and the wide, almost universal, illiteracy of women and female children as indicative of the deplorable status

of the Indian female. Indian social reformers readily accepted this form of evaluating civilizations, though all criteria for such evaluations were altogether superfluous. By virtue of the fact that Britain governed India and numerous other colonies, just as other European powers held certain parts of the world in subjugation, it was quite self-evident, as far as the West was concerned, that the colonized and colonizers belonged at different ends of the scale, and that the hierarchy was unmistakably clear.

It is a similar form of evaluative scale that still survives, indeed thrives, in the idea of development. For this idea to be at all meaningful, it must presuppose that there are nations which are developed, others which are developing, and yet others which dog- gedly remain underdeveloped, a testament to Oriental laziness or the savagery of a dark

continent. Frequently these terms are substituted by others: most commonly, there is the First World, and a Third World, the eclipse of the Second World ominously pointing to

a world-wide trend whereby the middle is being squeezed out; elsewhere, the developed nations are characterized as post-industrial societies (already somewhat archaic), or as nations in the throes of ‘advanced capitalism’, an ‘information revolution’, and cyber- space surfing, while countries in Africa and the Indian sub-continent are merely ‘indus- trializing’. Though the idea of development purports to capture reality, describing societies at different stages of social development and political evolution (the ascent to US-style democracy, where the singular party of capital has been camouflaging itself as a two-party system for well over one hundred years, being merchandised as the moment of arrival), the more insidious part of the notion of development is the manner in which

it colonizes our notions of time and space. The present of the developing world is none other than the past, sometimes the very remote and mist-shrouded past, of the developed world; and indeed in this lies one of the greatest uses of the the developing world, which preserves in its institutions and social practices the memory of an European past that is lost or of which there are only very dim traces. Nor can the developing world live in the transcendent present, thrive in the being-in-itself, since its present was already tran-

scended somewhere else: even the much-emulated fakir, saint, and yogi of the East will have his or her renewed birth in the developed West. The future of the developing world: well, there is no future, since its future is already known to Europe and America; indeed, the developed world lives the future of the developing world, and lives it better just as it knows that world, having had the advantage of experiential wisdom, better than do the natives. As the lodestar shines in the West, the Orient must orient itself towards the

Occident: it must forget that it is the Orient, or-a rather more germane consideration- it must forget it enough to allow the Occident to transgress its borders. National borders are sacrosanct, except that in the developing world they exist only to allow penetration by multinational corporations, various imperial formations such as the World Bank, United Nations, and the International Monetary Fund, and trans-national forms of pop culture. Recalcitrance on any of these counts condemns developing countries to regress to the

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stage of being underdeveloped, to open themselves to the charge of being parochial and backward, and to being pushed further back on the evaluative scale of civilizations.

The house of disciplined knowledge

The twentieth century has been a time of total and unmitigated violence, and to this ‘development’ advances in military technology contributed their due share. However hegemonic might have been colonial rule, the threat and exercise of naked force remained critical to governance. This remains the shape of the ‘new world order’: behind the immense consensus of the conglomerate media’s shrill view of ‘outlaw states’, such

as Libya and Iraq, is the force of sanctions imposed by the US-dominated United Nations, and behind that is the constant possbility of punitive air raids and the deployment of the gargantuan American war machne. Nonetheless, as this century draws to a close, it appears (as Ashis Nandy has argued) that domination will no longer be exercised pre- dominantly through ‘familiar organized interests-class relations, colonialism, military-

industrial complexes, and so on. Dominance is now exercised mainly through categories’.5 Categories are created by modern knowledge systems, and it is these categories that dictate whether forms of medicine are authentic or quackery, whether societies are

developed or underdeveloped, whether despotisms are authoritarian or totalitarian (a distinction that, though lost to everyone except Jeanne Kirpatrick and her successors in the American foreign policy establishment, was not without its unfortunate consequences for people subjected to American intervention), or whether an individual is a Sikh, Muslim, or Hindu. No one ought to view the oppression caused by knowledge systems with indifference, since in the name of development alone, hundreds of millions of people around

the world have been killed, maimed, displaced, culturally cauterized, and pauperized. In independent India, over eleven million people have been dislocated by dams alone: that these dislocations induce despair, unemployment, the loss of ancestral land, forcible migration, the drift to big cities with their urban squalor, and loss of belief in the sacred means nothing to policy planners and technological visionaries. As the future of the

developing world as a whole is none other than the present of the developed world, so the future of the tribal or the peasant is only to live the planner’s limited conception of life: in this respect, at least, oppression must show itself as consistent from the macro to the micro.

It is the practitioners of the formal academic disciplines, ensconced mainly in the university, who have created the categories with which we must all work, and whose defiance is necessary if India is to have a future where its own spirit, culture, and intellectual traditions are not to be compromised. Edward Said’s influential Orientalism (1978)

provides some clues as to how the shape of the disciplines in India has closely followed these disciplines in the West. In outlining the nature of the academic study of the Orient, or the non-West, in European and American universities and other institutions, Said came to note in his concluding pages that the burden of Orientalist scholarship had been passed down to Oriental scholars themselves. In this ‘second order Orientalism’, it is Oriental scholars, wheresoever they may be located, who replicate the epistemological structures of Orientalism, and who offer a highly essentialized reading of their own history, culture, and social practices. The idea that many Indian scholars have of ‘Vedic India’, or of India’s Islamic heritage, is almost entirely derived from colonial textbooks or, as is now more likely, from the work of Indians who themselves rely on an Orientalist framework


of knowledge. The insistent urge among Indian scientists and ‘spiritual leaders’ alike to

demonstrate the supposed compatibility between the higher truths of the ancient scrip- tures and the scientific findings of quantum mechanics and particle physics is similarly

derived from the view that Hinduism must prove itself to be a manly, rational, and scientific faith, much as it accepts the primacy of the scientific world-view.

Across every discipline and field of study in India, the same pattern of colonization is encountered. Though physical anthropology has fallen into great disrepute, which is scarcely to say that its proponents do not even in American or European universities continue to occupy a niche in anthropology departments, its most ardent defenders are to be found in India. Many Indian anthropologists are still assiduously engaged in carrying

out anthropometric measurements, such as the distance between the navel and the nose in Indians of different ethnic and racial groups, or the depth and weight of the skull. The ‘nasal index’ of Herbert Risley, the first Director of Ethnography for India (1900),6 is still

adduced as an example of the achievements of the colonial Indian government in the arena of scientific anthropology. Even the wholly discredited theory of ‘criminal castes

and tribes’, a colonial mechanism to suppress the movement and activities of people determined to be criminal by birth, flourishes in the corridors of power, among function- aries of various government agencies dealing with scheduled castes and tribes, and even in the minds of many social workers. Among cultural and social anthropologists, the work still remains resolutely fixated on caste, religion, ritual, and the village. Since colonial anthropology had ordained that India was a collection of village communities, and that caste and religion remained the indissoluble markers and essence of Indian identity,

Indian anthropologists followed suit. Though the best of Indian anthropology and sociology (this distinction being less evident in India), from Ghurye onwards, has not been wholly inattentive to the importance of the city and urban settlements, an anthropology

of urban practices, life-forms, and customs has still barely been attempted. The question, of course, is not merely one of whether Indian anthropology and soci-

ology can fill the gaping holes left by Western anthropology, but whether it can produce a knowledge of India from other than Western categories. These categories need not be ‘Hindu’ or ‘Islamic’, most particularly when it comes to India, where a common culture had developed over the centuries, and where even the present-day sensibility has not wholly accepted the desirability of such reified categories. However, insofar as categories of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ can be invoked heurestically, Louis Dumont gave it as his considered view in 1964, in response to a critique of his highly influential study on the caste

system in India, that ‘A Hindu sociology is a contradiction in terms’.7 The author of a more recent work, who remains unconvinced that ‘you can have an indigenization of

rationality or indigenization of methodology’, argues that it is not possible ‘to develop something called Islamic social science, for the same reason that you cannot have Chris-

tian social science or Jewish social science or any other type of ethnic social science’.8 However, from one perspective the Weberian argument about Protestant Christianity’s inherent propensity towards the spirit of capitalism does very much sound like ‘Christian

social science’; moreover, Turner ignores the virtual equation between the Judaeo-Chris- tian traditions and the West. Social science, whether it be anthropology, sociology, or economics, is a priori assumed to be Western: it is, in Roland Barthes’ language, in the realm of ex-nomination,g and one need not say ‘Western social science’ any more than one would say ‘round ball’, since all balls are round.

As is quite evident, the common supposition is that there can be only one kind of


social science or one kind of economics, within which there are undoubtedly competing (or apparently competing) schools. Any other supposition, it is suggested, would lead us to such anomalies as ‘Hindu economics’, which cannot be anything other than a caricature, keeping in mind that the end of economic activity is productivity, increased rate of growth, and the accumulation of profits. Since, on the Orientalist view, Hindu civilization is eternally unchanging, and Hinduism is a religion of stagnation, Hindu economics is inherently contradictory. Hindu economics can only lead to a negative, or to a snail-like,

rate of growth. Given the injunction against the collection of interest in Islam, the idea of ‘Islamic economics’ would similarly, though not with any more reason, seem preposter- ous to a Western economist and banker. But what if there were an economics that is

based, not on the productivity and greed principles, but on the principle of cooperation? What if economics recognized the fulfillment of needs, not wants, as the desirable goal of economic activity? What is ‘economic activity’ to begin with, and why should it privilege

productivity over non-productivity? Is there anything to be said about Gandhian economics, the first principle of which is to recognize the notion of limits? And why is it that there is nothing economic about the discipline of economics, since the beginning of which waste has multiplied to enormous proportions?

Thus the difficulty in ‘Hindu economics’, ‘Hindu sociology’ or ‘Islamic economics’ lies not so much in each case in the apposition of these two terms, but in the presumption

that there can be no economics or sociology other than that which has been developed by Western economists and sociologists. The same difficulty is encountered in attempting to understand women’s studies and feminism. From a mere trickling in the 196Os, when a course of two was offered at most universities on women’s history, women’s studies in

the U.S. and the West has almost emerged into a fully developed discipline with all the paraphernalia, from journals and conferences to interest groups, that one expects of a

professional field of study. It may already, in consequence, have lost much of its emanci- patory potential, becoming another part of a well-oiled knowledge industry that is past master at packaging and containing dissent. There is, more to the point, the expectation that Indian feminists should follow the lead furnished by feminists in the West, and that Western feminism adequately sets the agenda for Indian feminism. It must have come as a considerable surprise to Western and Indian feminists, then, to find Madhu Kishwar, the editor of Manushi, India’s most well-known journal in women’s studies, speaking of

feminism as a frequent ‘tool of cultural imperialism’. In a provocative piece entitled ‘Why

I do not Call Myself a Feminist’, Kishwar noted that though Indian feminists had not experienced ridicule and ‘outright hostility’ as had feminists at the outset of the movement

in the West, and had even earned the support of the mass media, they persisted in using a vocabulary that is often ‘used by a persecuted movement’. While Western feminists had to ‘struggle hard to find acceptance in professions for themselves’, educated women in India with feminist inclinations found new opportunities for themselves. ‘Since feminism brought with it a certain amount of easy international mobility for many third world feminists’, Kishwar argues, ‘the ideological domination of western feminism and the resultant importation of frequently inappropriate issues was absorbed uncritically’.1° As an Indian feminist, for example, Kishwar was expected to campaign against certain forms of contraception and reproductive technologies being developed in the West; when she told the conference organizers in Germany that she was unable to oppose these techno-

logies on the basis of information made available in India, she was informed that the invitation would be cancelfed.

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Though Kishwar does not take up this point, the very notion of patriarchy, the critique

of which stands at the core of Western feminist thought, is assumed to characterize the

entirety of Indian society. Since the West itself has been deeply patriarchal through the long course of its history, India too is held to be patriarchal and even femicidal since remote antiquity. Such a view ignores the deep substratum of matriarchy that prevailed in Indian civilization and which has not altogether disappeared from all sectors of Indian society. Whatever theoretical innovations women’s history and feminist philosophy have

offered, patriarchy is still held to be a seamless web that connects the various histories of women around the world. Nor have Indian feminists disavowed this line of reasoning.

The mores of caste-Hindu, particularly Brahminical, society are assumed to represent Indian society in its totality. Though most feminists recognize that patriarchy is not every- where the same, few have asked how the Western understanding of patriarchy, which

must be located (among other factors) around the authority of the church, the nucleariz- ation of the family, and the particular importance attached to the husband-wife nexus, can tell us anything about the institution of patriarchy in India. Here it is the mother-

son nexus that is predominant, just as the nuclear family characterizes, even today, only a miniscule portion of India’s urban population. Indeed, Indian feminists have allowed the notion of ‘patriarchy’ to serve in much the same way that ‘caste’ serves as an available and unthinking guide to Indian conduct for anthropologists. Thus the debased phenom-

enon of bride-burning, or the murder of young married women for their dowries, is at once assumed to be an instantiation of Indian femicidal patriarchy, when an undoubtedly

more compelling explanation for it can be found, not only in the deepening contempt for the life and well-being of women and female children, but also in the advent of a cold-blooded market mentality, the reckless and unchecked growth of consumerist ambitions, the deep dislocations created by the shift from rural to urban settlements, and the environmental degradation with its concomitant adverse consequences for women.”

Howsoever acute the limitations in the disciplinary structure of Western knowledge and the categories it has created in attempting to provide an interpretive framework for Indian society, it is sometimes suggested that the work done by Indian historians shows the way to Indian histories and epistemologies that are not already hegemonized by West- ern knowledge systems. The ascendancy of the historian in post-independence India par- allels the rise of the nation-state, and particularly in the aftermath of the destruction of

the Babri masjid in Ayodhya in December 1992 by Hindu militants, when historians were called upon to resolve a dispute about the origins of the mosque, they were to

become major public figures and commentators. ‘* At the same time, the so-called ‘subaltern school’ of Indian historians was acquiring a substantial reputation in the American

academy, and the work of subaltern historians began to be cited not only in works of African and Latin American history, l3 but also by historians specializing in European history. While some scholars are inclined to see ‘subaltern studies’ as the Indian variant of ‘cultural studies’, and others emphasize its relations to post-structuralism and post- colonial theory, the near consensus has been that subaltern studies represents the most

significant attempt by Indian historians to write their own history and free it from the oppressive constraints of the dominant nationalist-colonialist models. It is, one might say, an instance of an intellectually colonized people striking back at the empire. This is all the more remarkable an achievement when we consider that, in the European view, Indians were devoid of a historical sensibility, least capable of appreciating ‘facts’ and writing history. ‘Indians are not historians’, as Edward Thompson, the father of E. P.

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Thompson and a so-called ‘friend of India’ put it in 1925, ‘and they rarely show any critical ability. Even their most useful books, books full of research and information, exas-

perate with their repetitions and diffuseness, and lose effect by their uncritical enthusi- asms... So they are not likely to displace our account of our connection with india’.14

Subaltern studies has spawned an immense critical literature and even a web site that provides a comprehensive bibliography. Though a lengthy assessment of subaltern studies is not possible here, on closer examination many of the claims made on its behalf

turn out to be less than convincing. Some of the strategies of subaltern historians had been anticipated by the proponents of the ‘history from below‘ approach; the critique of foundational categories had already been initiated by various post-structuralists and post-

modern theorists; and though the insights of Foucault and Gramsci were deployed with occasional brilliance in usefully unearthing some strands of Indian history, and in bringing to light the place of rumors and silences in the construction of narratives and the writing

of history, much of this was not particularly novel. The most telling fact, and one that has been largely ignored, is that in the dispute leading to the destruction of the Babri masjid, subaltern historians were unable to make any significant intervention, and not

only by way of influencing public policy (rather too much to expect), but even by way of offering a cogent intellectual framework for interpreting the conflict. While one school of historians and archaeologists, whose allegiance to the militant Hindu view was openly voiced, claimed that a Hindu temple dedicated to Lord Rama was destroyed to pave way

for the construction of the mosque, historians on the left claimed that there was no such evidence and that Hindu bigots were distorting history. Soon almost the entire debate was couched in the sterile terms of an opposition between ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘secular-

ists’, and each side claimed that it had the better version of historical truth. While the fundamentalists purported to speak for Hindus, the secularists purported to speak for their version of the ‘real India’, an India that is decisively above religion and all forms of obscurantism. In this debate, the large middle ground of believing Hindus, who would disavow Hindu fundamentalism but would strongly defer from being addressed as secularists, were forgotten. Also overlooked was the uncanny similarity, in some respects,

between the secularists and the fundamentalists, such as their shared commitment to

modernity, their recourse to history as an arbiter, and their willingness to allow the nation- state to be the standard-bearer of ethical values.

Though subaltern history is good history, it is still history. Bound to the historical mode of reasoning, left and secular historians, whose version of the history of the Babri Masjid is undoubtedly superior to that of their antagonists, were oblivious to the consideration that historical veracity was not at issue, and that most Indians are not prepared to resolve differences by recourse to some historical truth. I5 The awareness of history has

only made Indians more acutely aware of real and imagined wrongs perpetrated by various ‘others’, and studies have repeatedly shown that higher education, far from alleviating the communal malady, often aggravates communal feelings. History is only one of many modes of access to the past, and Indians have always been more attuned to the non- historical modes of accessing the past, such as myth, common customs, folklore, and epic literature. It is revealing that in the plethora of voices heard on the question of the Babri masjid, the most sensible, imaginative, and moral response came from the independent philosopher Ramchandra Gandhi. In his poignant and brilliantly evocative account, Gandhi harnessed the mythic to suggest that the crime of Ayodhya, the sever- ance of the Babri masjid from the Sita-ki-Rasoi, literally Sita’s Kitchen, a building standing

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next to the mosque in the same complex, is not only a form of ‘secessionism and hege- monism’ but a ‘violation of cultural and spiritual ecology’.16 It is Sita-ki-Rasoi, which

Gandhi describes as a grove of aboriginal fertility where the feminine principle was given its proper due, and not the interpretive moves of historians and other social scientists, which gives us the cues we require to unravel the meaning of Ayodhya. The house of disciplined knowledge, which also disciplines its recalcitrant and rebellious inhabitants,

can seldom be a home to those who seek to inhabit a more equitable and pluralistic world.

A prolegomenon to future histories and epistemologies of India

In the popular culture of the West, how-to-do manuals have been proliferating for one hundred years. This has been particularly true in the United States, where the ethos of

self-reliance, and the mild contempt for expertise, made everyone potentially capable of becoming a mechanic, plumber, electrician, or carpenter. Though the American male’s fondness for tinkering with machinery is still evident, while the South Asian immigrants

appear to have wholly ‘bookish knowledge’, it is indisputably clear that the traditions of self-reliance and Yankee vigor have been very substantially eroded. The indifference to

expertise is now more commonly experienced as a reverence for experts of all hues and colors; and the market counterpart to academic expertise appears in the form of books that promise magic recipes, such as the five (or is it six?) steps to unadulterated happiness outlined by Deepak Chopra (now-resident expert in spiritual affairs), or the equal number

of steps to better health, physical fitness, instant success, or even astronomical greed. This phenomenon has already made its way to India, where only in the last few years

has Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends relinquished its near-absolute hold over the aspiring middle-classes, and where some Indians are now discovering that the Kama Sutra

might have something of an edge, insofar as the typology of sex is a consideration, over Alex Comfort’s manuals on love-making. What can be the future of dissenting histories and epistemologies when the hegemonic structures have created a stranglehold, whether in the supposed confines of the ivory-tower university, or in the public sphere? Here are

some thoughts on how the disciplinary regimen of Western knowledge systems can be put into question and how Indians can be brought to a serious engagement with their own intellectual traditions and cultural practices:

More of the rest, less of fhe West

Since at least the middle part of the nineteenth century, Indian intellectuals and thinkers have allowed their vision of the world to be shaped by the West. In the period under

colonialism, this was quite understandable; but the end of colonial rule, and fifty years of ‘independence’, have done little to render the Indian intellectual’s world more cosmopolitan. For a vast majority of them, India and the West continue to define the two points

of their existence and intellectual horizon. Everything else in the ‘middle’ is a blur, undif- ferentiated, inconsequential. There is a similar tendency, to offer an analogue, in much of Indian social thinking: everything revolves around the categories of the Brahmin and the Sudra, as though social stratification could be comprehended by considering its two ends. It has been forgotten that long before India encountered the West, it had for centuries had contacts with other civilizations. Members of the Indian trading castes plied

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their ships on Indian Ocean trading routes; abiding ties were forged with what is now the Middle East, and Indian settlements were founded in what are now Ethiopia and Somalia. Through centuries of interaction with the Middle East, South-east Asia, and the

east coast of Africa, histories became intertwined and indistinguishable, and the possibilities were created for a more pluralistic Indian civilization.

All ‘multicultural’ encounters have not been bloody, though European colonialism has seduced us into believing otherwise, and not all nations have been keen on acquiring an overseas empire. The Chinese had extended their influence over the entire Indian

Ocean area by the middle part of the fifteenth century, and were poised for further west- ward expansion, but then desisted from a course of action which before the end of the century would lead to the genocide of the native of the Americas at the hand of Europe-

ans. The author of one study of Chinese history ascribes the unwillingness of the Chinese fleets to further extend their dominance to the proverbial Chinese ambivalence towards foreigners, to their ‘sullen’ retreat into ‘isolation’,” but ambiguity towards the foreigner

is surely to be preferred to hatred of the foreigner. Perhaps the Chinese were more inclined to respect the notion of ‘limits’, and with what confidence can we speak of a people who certainly knew far more of the world than did the Europeans as isolationists?

Similarly, it is a mistake to suppose that the story of British colonialism in India is the narrative of European cosmopolitanism engulfing Indian provincialism. The west coast

of India became cosmopolitan much before Bengali intellectuals began to engage with Western modernity, and it did so without being crippled by anxiety, or without becoming

enslaved to the West’s world-view and being reduced to mimicry. There is a world out- side the West, and Indians need to enter into a more serious engagement with other suppressed histories and cultures. Most particularly, Africa must be brought into the con- sciousness of Indian intellectuals. That might conscientize Indians to their own forms of racism, and to their willingness to embrace, in the manner of the West, a dualist epistem- ology; it might also alert them to those specious ethnologies whereby they persist in

thinking of themselves as Aryans or Caucasians, and which prevent them from having any engagement with black people in most parts of the world. To adduce one more example: all too often, ignorant of the history of slavery in the Greek world or among

the Arabs, Indians are prone to associate black people with the history of slavery, and it comes as a surprise to them to find that Indian indentured laborers were treated no better

than slaves.

A West for the rest

Paradoxically, though the world of the Indian academic and intellectual is entirely filled by India and the West, few Indians have ever attempted the systematic study of the West, and there is almost no institutional apparatus in India for the study of Western culture and history. There are, predictably, studies of English literature by Indian scholars, now injected with post-colonial, feminist, or post-modern fervor; there are also the occasional stray studies of Marx and Weber, and even ruminations on Plato (since he is seen as having resemblances to Indian philosophical schools) or Bertrand Russell (he being con- strued as a peace-maker). At some Indian universities, there are centers for European and American history, and here professional scholars dutifully add to the vast sum of knowledge that exists about these societies. Few Indian historians of Europe or the US in India

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have left their mark on these fields; and almost no Indian has ever dared to write an

anthropology of Western societies. The study of the West can no longer reliably be left only to academics and

researchers in the West. To argue this is by no means to embrace an Occidentalism, or to suppose, in a form of reverse Orientalism, that the West is not positioned to know itself as well as others know its contours and history. As the work of the Indian sociologist

Iit Singh Uberoi shows,‘* an Indian perspective on Europe is essential not only for a

revisionist view of the West, but for Indian self-understanding. The West has undoubtedly marginalized many of its own dissenting, vernacular, prophetic, folk, and ‘unscientific’ traditions of knowledge, and it is these traditions with which Indians might seek to ally themselves, or from which they might seek succor to sustain models of universalism not contingent on Western modernity or the narratives enshrined by the Enlightenment. The only West that Indians have known is the West of colonialism and oppression, and these

are not the terms on which one civilization must encounter another civilization, or on which a just and equitable future can be built. Most Indians are unaware, for instance,

that many of the major buttes and peaks of the Grand Canyon, which remains among America’s most beloved and well-known national parks, are named after Hindu gods- Vishnu, Shiva, Brahma, Rama-and Chinese sages; and this transpired not a few years

ago in the name of some multiculturalism, but in the 1880s without any fanfare.19 Herein is a caveat that India’s engagement with the West must not be along the lines of modern- day multiculturalism, which is only another pretense for expanding the consumer’s options, but from the standpoint of illuminating those histories of the West which the West itself seeks to ignore, or which would help to illuminate the contours of its own civilization. The West, too, must be humanized, and its own dissenting, recessive, and

vernacular traditions, which have not already been appropriated by academics and other professionals, must be put into a dialogue with Indian traditions. India and the rest of the world needs a West with which other people can cohabit.

The India beyond India

In recent years, Indians have become sensitized to the presence of an India beyond what they know as the ‘motherland’. The circumstances under which they have acquired an awareness of Indian populations living overseas are by no means benign. Indians living overseas, particularly in the United States, Canada, and Britain, have been investing in India and are otherwise seeking to influence the direction of the Indian economy and

policy-making. The NRI (Non-resident Indian) factor has been a largely detrimental force in India politics. There is much work to suggest, for example, that substantial financial support for the Hindutva movement, whose adherents instigated the destruction of the Babri Masjid, came from affluent Hindus living in the West; likewise, many of the most

ruthless proponents of Sikh secessionism are comfortably settled in the West. These Indi- ans, whether Hindus, Muslims, or Sikhs, have in general a less ecumenical idea of their faith than do their religious brethren back in India, and they are similarly less equipped to understand the complexities of their particular faith and the manner in which it has cohabited with other faiths20

The Indian diaspora, fortunately, extends far beyond the Indian populations of the English-speaking countries which, for the most part, have their origins in the aftermath of World War ll.2’ Once in a rare while this diaspora makes its presence felt in India,

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such as during the recent ascendancy of Basdeo Pandey, a descendant of former inden-

tured laborers, to the office of the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago. But the wider Indian diaspora ought to command our attention for a variety of reasons, for in every realm-literature, religion, politics-it presents enriched possibilities for envisioning the meaning of Indian civilization; and indeed no understanding of Indian civilization is now complete without an understanding of the lives of Malaysian Indians, Fijian Indians,

Mauritian Indians, and indeed of Indians wherever else they have come to constitute a community with distinct mores and cultural practices. The Hinduism of these Indians is often gentler, more ecumenical, and more self-confident than the bloated Hinduism of the affluent NRI-elite in the United States and elsewhere in the West; it is a Hinduism

that shares the same space as do Islam, and African and Afro-Caribbean religions. These are the Indians who have had a living and fruitful engagement with the Ramayana, rather

than turning it into a text with which to beat Muslims into submission. The Ram/i/a in the Caribbean has always been an occasion for Muslim-Hindu solidarity; in the Muslim countries of Southeast Asia, the Ramayana continues to be the source of creative inspi-

ration. The literature of this wider diaspora, likewise, provides eloquent testimony to the poverty, pain, and suffering of those who braved the voyage and fashioned a life for themselves: one thinks, for instance, of the powerful sketch of life on the plantation by Harold Sonny Ladoo,22 his own life cut short at 28 years, or of Satendra Nandan’s moving portrayal of the troubled existence of Indo-Fijians. 23 Indians in the wider diaspora, too,

have their uses of the Ramayana, the Gita, and the stories of Draupadi, Nala, and Damay- anti; they, too, draw on the epics, and perhaps they can point us to the manner in which

discursive, epigrammatic, and mythic modes beyond the merely ‘historical’ can be used to sustain a civilization.

The nation-state and the civilization

The modern scholarly apparatus exists to serve the nation-state in disciplined, devoted,

and disturbing homage to the old axiom, ‘Knowledge is Power’. The relationship of col-

onialism to Orientalism has now been explored in dozens of scholarly studies, and the place of oriental studies, anthropology, ethnography, cartography, and numerous other specialized fields of studies in consolidating and enhancing colonial rule is both clear from the manner in which the colonial state gave precedence to its epistemological imperatives and from how it sought to reify the image of India as an ancient and traditional civilization long since mired in misery and degradation. Nor has the dissolution

of colonial empires brought forth very substantive changes: oriental studies was transfor- med into area studies, and anthropology may have taken a post-modern and self-reflexive turn, but the anthropologists and the subjects of anthropology still remain in a hier- archical, wholly one-sided relationship. Oppressors who become more sensitive remain oppressors nonetheless. The consequences of this disciplinary regimen are there to be seen: thus many educated Indians derive their idea of Islam not from the lived practices of Muslims around them, but from the ideas made popular by a few generations of West- ern scholars of Islam, from Hamilton Gibb to Bernard Lewis. As the nation-state must insist on its boundaries, so the urban intelligentsia in India often peddles with cavalier confidence an impoverished view of Islam and of the Indian past-a past where ‘Hindus’ and ‘Muslims’, as though these were always distinguishable categories, were engaged in inevitable and bloody conflict.

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It is understandable that, with the achievement of the independence, the nation-state should have become the principal focus of research across many fields. But the nation-

state is not equipped to resolve conflicts; to the contrary, it usually exacerbates them,

and it is almost certainly hostile to the idea of pluralism. Though it would be premature to write the obituary of the nation-state, in India the idea of civilization must surely take precedence. While the legal and juridical apparatus of the nation-state must work to

assure distributive justice and enhance moral values, the nation-state cannot have a cen- tral place in fulfilling this charge. The events of the last fifty years have surely demon-

strated that the state cannot manufacture affection, and it cannot compel us to have a moral vision or to be expansive in our inclusiveness. It is the civilizational view, on the other hand, which provides insights into the manner in which Indians developed, to

borrow a phrase from E. P. Thompson, ‘customs in common’, or forged a unique devotional literature that repudiates distinctions of religion and class. It is the same civilizational view which suggests why Indians, forgoing narrow loyalties of national attachment

for a cosmopolitan pluralism, opened themselves to attack from Europeans, or why they were unable to understand that the depredations of the Portugese signalled the arrival of

a new element of violence and self-aggrandizement in India. Our future histories should point to a far more nuanced understanding of the oft-mentioned syncreticism of the Indian past. Of this syncreticism we know too little; it may not always have been harmonious, but this is by no means an invariably desirable trait. It may even have had in it an element of the agonistic. Our future epistemologies, likewise, will have to point to the element of agonism in Indian syncreticism, and show how Indians were able to put various

(seemingly disparate) elements into an inclusive playfulness, a productive tension.

Modernity and its categories

We should be reminded that the meaning of civilization is never far from civilite, civility,

and civilitas, the art of government, just as the meaning of state is never far from statistics, the science that keeps the state afloat. In the first half of the nineteenth century, a fetish for numbers swept Europe, and the development of modern statistics can be traced to

this period. A passion for categorization, classification, and enumeration was henceforth to characterize the colonial enterprise as well. Once Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and others began to be counted, it was no longer possible, at least in the eyes of the state, to be both Hindu and Muslim, or even Hindu and Sikh. Now modernity had irreversibly crept into India, and modernity is sworn to nothing as much as it is sworn to enumeration and

the strict maintenance of boundaries. This explains, in part, why a people like the gypsies have suffered persecution in every European state where they are to be found: a constantly itinerant people, being neither here nor there, they defy easy classification and enumeration, and are a nightmare for the mandarin. Though pre-modern India does not appear to have had any acute difficulties with the hijras, described by one Indian anthropologist

as the ‘third sex’,24 and appears even to have bestowed on them various forms of liveli- hood,25 modern India is uncomfortable with, and unable to place, those who are neither males nor females. What does a census taker do with a hijra?

Much of contemporary scholarship in India, following the West, takes it as axiomatic that India is moving from tradition to modernity. Though some of the evils of modernity are clearly there to be seen, its purportedly more numerous benefits are not so easily renounced. The most undesirable elements of modern Indian life, from dowry deaths to

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the corrupt behavior of Indian politicians, are seen as residues from the medieval Indian past, or explained as the acts of individuals still living in the feudal era. (It is only an academic consideration that, strictly speaking, India never experienced feudalism of the European variety). Though the vast majority of Indian scholars and intellectuals remain committed to the view that tradition precedes modernity, a few have been seduced by

Lyotard’s proposition that post-modernism preceded modernity.26 However, a post-modern critique of modernity has not entailed any reconceptualization of the pre-modern, and certainly few thinkers have been willing to entertain the view that modernity may itself have preceded tradition. While it is widely recognized that traditions are often

invented, are we prepared to yield to the idea that the pre-modern world may, in fact, have been more modern than our supposedly modern world? This is certainly one of the

burdens of Amitav Ghosh’s brilliant foray into the world of the Indian ocean trading

system,*’ and as Ghosh’s book so movingly suggests, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries might have been considerably more civil and cosmopolitan than our own age of jet-set bankers and scholars. Ghosh’s work calls upon us to question our easy acceptance of the categories of the traditional and the modern; and if the traditional has too much trace of oppression, it should not push us into conflating the traditional with the non-modern.

The reification of categories, the freezing of identities to the point where a devout Hindu now hesitates to worship at the shrine of a Sufi saint, or where a Muslim forswears partici- pation in the Hindu festival of Diwali, is a sign not of tradition but of the modern. There

is nothing particularly modern about our modern age, except our allegiance to total forms

of violence, domination, and knowledge.

The victims of history

The colonizers colonized their own people before they set out to commit mayhem in the rest of the world. In his little and yet magisterial book on colonialism, Ashis Nandy forcibly argued that victory is more catastrophic and traumatic for the victors than it is

for the vanquished. 28 This insight, too, has been trivialized into the axiom that we are all victims in our own fashion, and the media pundits thrive on such banalities. Nonethe-

less, since freedom is surely indivisible, the search, in Nandy’s words, ‘for humane futures for the victims of history cannot ignore the oppressors.‘2p A West that has been rendered more humane and plural can, as I have previously suggested, be brought into fruitful conversation with India. Conversation has very much been the (forgotten) idiom of Indian civilization-witness the characteristic form of the teachings of Indian saints, from Buddha and Shankaracharya down to Sri Ramakrishna and Ramana Maharishi, or the

jugalbandhi form of Indian music-and this itself points to the possibilities for radical

freedom that must ensue once parity has been assured. So far Indian historians and social thinkers have been concerned mainly with the

repression under colonial rule, while the media devotes most of its attention to the plight of women, child laborers, tribals, the urban poor, and numerous other disadvantaged groups. To the victims of old tyrannies and forgotten feuds one can add the victims of government policies and grandiose schemes of what nineteenth-century English reformers called ‘improvement’. While Indian scholars and critics need not devote their labors to a detailed enumeration of victims, they must undoubtedly move towards a more expansive understanding of the nature of modern-day oppression and the place of dominant knowledge systems in creating hegemonic structures, just as they must look more to the future

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to assure the plurality of knowledge. The historical mode may have to be compelled into

submission to pave way for the mythic, the prophetic, and the customary; the scientized

platitudes of much social science discourse will at the very least have to be brought into an engagement with folk and vernacular forms of knowing; and the claims of universality will have to be adjudged against the strengths of local knowledge systems. Future histories and epistemologies of India will direct us, one can only hope, towards a praxis that makes

us capable of being reenchanted with the world around us.

Notes and references

1. 2.

3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

Bauman, Z., Modernity and the Holocaust, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1992. The narrative of ‘German exceptionalism’, which persists in treating Germany as the perennially sick man of Europe, can ironically be turned to yield a rather different political argument. What is exceptional about Germany is only that the Germans dared to extend the theory of the master-race, which European powers unabashedly deployed to colonize and brutalize the rest of the world, to other Europeans; and so the dominion that European powers forcibly exercised over others variously termed as savages, primitives, brutes, uncivilized, or underdeveloped, was sought to be extended over white people themselves by the Germans. It is in this manner that the Germans broke one kind of barrier, carrying into the heart of Western civilization the violence that had been almost routinely visited upon native peoples in the Americas, Australasia, and Africa. Rubenstein, R. L., The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future, Introduction by Wil- liam Styron. Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1987, pp.6, 21, and 31. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, op tit Ref 1, p.35. Nandy, A., The future university. Seminar, 1995, 425(January), 95. Risley, H. H., The study of ethnology in India. journal of the Royal Anthropological institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1890, 20, 235-263. See Das, V., The anthropological discourse on India: reason and its other. In her Critical Even&c An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1995, p.34. Turner, B., Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism. Routledge, London, 1994, p.8. Barthes, R., Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard. Hill and Wang, New York, p.138. Kishwar, M., Why I do not call myself a feminist. Manushi, 1990, Cl(Nov.-Dec.), 5-6. Lal, V., Dowry deaths in India: modernity, violence, and the cultural politics of ‘bride-burning’. Forth- coming in College Literature (June 1998). For a detailed discussion of how history came to the forefront in the dispute over the mosque, see Lal, V., The discourse of history and the crisis at Ayodhya: reflections on the production of knowledge, freedom, and the future of India, Emergences, 1993-l 994, 5-6, 4-44. Mallon, F. E., The promise and dilemma of subaltern studies: perspectives from Latin American history, American Historical Review, 1994, 99(5, Dec.), 1491-l 515, and Cooper, F., Conflict and cooperation: rethinking colonial African history, American Historical Review, 1994, 99(5, Dec.), 1516-l 545. Thompson, E., The Other Side of the Medal, Hogarth Press, London, 1925, pp.27-28. For a detailed consideration of the ahistoricism of the Indian sensibility, see Lal, V., History and the possibilities of emancipation: some lessons from India, louma/ of the lndian Council for Philosophical Research, Special Issue: Historiography of Civilizations, 1996, June, 95-l 37. Gandhi, R., Sita’s Kitchen: A Testimony of faith and Inquiry, Penguin Books, New Delhi, 1992, p.110. Levathes, L., When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 7405-1433. Oxford University Press, New York, 1994, p.21. Singh Uberoi, J. P., Science and Culture, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1978; idem, The Other Mind of Europe: Goethe as a Scientist, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1984. See Lal, V., Ambiences of Hinduism in the wild west of America: perspectives on Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon, Suitcase, 1997, 2(1-2), 84-97. Some will point to the presence of Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaui, Amitav Ghosh, Hanif Kureishi, Anita Desai, and other writers in the West, or to the films of Kureishi, Mira Nair, Gurinder Chadha, Srinivas Krishnan, and Pratibha Parmar, or to the emergence of eclectic forms of music (bhangra rap in Britain, classical fusion in the United States), as indicative of the great reservoir of South Asian talent in the West. Though their achievements are quite extraordinary in some respects, they have conferred what can at best be considered mixed blessings. The most notable exception to this is, of course, the migration of Indians to the West Coast of the United States and Canada 100 years ago. A succinct account of the Indian presence in the United States is

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22.

23. 24.

2.5.

26. 27.

28.

29.

furnished in Daniels, R., History of lndian Immigration to the United States, Asia Society, New York, 1989. There were a miniscule number of Indians in Britain even as far back as 1700: see Visram, R., Ayahs, Lascars, and Princes: lndians in Britain 7700-7 947, Pluto Press, London, 1986. Ladoo, H. S., No Pain Like This Body, Anansi Press, Toronto, 1972; reprint ed., Heinemann, Caribbean Writer Series, London, 1987. Nandan, S., Lines Across Black Waters, Academy Press/CRNLE, New Delhi, 1997. Nanda, S., Neither Man Nor Woman: The Hiiras of India. Wadsworth Publishins. Belmont, California,

V.

1990. Preston, L. W., A right to exist: eunuchs and the state in nineteenth-century India. Modern Asian Studies, 1987, 21(2), 371-387. Lyotard, J.-F., The Post-Modern Condition, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1984. Ghosh, A., In an Antique Land, Ravi Dayal Publishers, New Delhi; Granta, London, 1992; Alfred Knopf, New York, 1993. Nandy, A., The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1983. See Nandy, A., The defiance of defiance and liberation for the victims of history: Ashis Nandy in conversation with Vinay Lal, Emergences, 1995-1996, 7-8, 3-76 at p.10.

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