Religious Studies scholars are required to be neutral and objective in the US academia. Nevertheless, life prompts reflections in scholars that cannot always be penned in academic journals. That is when a scholar begins to write a memoir, perhaps. In Why Religion?, we see Elaine Pagels, New York Times bestselling author of The Gnostic Gospels, write from the heart, capturing the questions that drove her long academic career in plain and simple language and also acknowledging a variety of experiences and reflections that allow her to ask non-academic questions.
Academic scholars are so used to scientific writing that it is not always easy for them to shift to an engaging narrative mode. Pagels cracks this tough nut, and her sentences flow effortlessly. She focuses on two life-changing events, while weaving in and out questions regarding religion that bothered her throughout the course of her life. It’s a fascinating method of memoir-writing and requires a fine balance. Too many details could bore the reader, while too few make for dull reading. Mere personal stories with little focus on important events distract, while too many stories scatter the reader’s attention. These problems, however, do not blight Why Religion?, which reads almost like a work of fiction, interjected with just the right amount of descriptive and analytical prose.
It’s worth noting that the two life-changing events that Pagels focuses upon are quite depressing: the death of her little son, Mark, from terminal illness and the death of her husband, Heinz Pagels, from a horrific hiking accident. Unlike an author of fiction, who could be reproached for such subject matter, readers can only wonder at how Pagels has gone through two unbearable deaths of loved ones and continued nevertheless. Pagels describes her failing courage at several junctures and, even as we see her overcome her many obstacles to happiness, her grief is starkly painted.
Pagels titles her book after the question many have asked her when she would introduce herself: Why religion? Her interrogators were curious, interested people she could meet anywhere, but also included her husband. Religion, as she defines it, is hardly the textbook version of religion, one that is binding, belief-based, dogmatic, punishing, guilt-causing, confession-driven and restrictive. She captures the collective mood of our times by mentioning how many of us today prefer to identify as “spiritual, not religious.”
The first chapter captures her parental and extended families and their many quirks, as well as a brief flirtation with religion that starts with Billy Graham’s preaching. Painting large, deft strokes of Palo Alto in the late 1940s, the chapter shows how religion can be an attractive alternative for someone who grows up without it. The theme of mortality is quick to appear through the death of a friend, Paul, in a car accident. Quickly, we move to the university Pagels registers at and the many sexist practices institutionalized within. By then, Pagels has begun to wonder about religion and “how such movements began?”
Pagels was at Harvard when the Secret Gospels were discovered. She illuminates Saying 70 — “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you”— by writing, “We’re not asked to believe this; it just happens to be true.” Pagels writes with much excitement about the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi library. Asking aloud of herself, “Am I religious,” she answers: “Yes, incorrigibly, by temperament, if you mean susceptible to the music, the rituals, the daring leaps of imagination and metaphor so often found in music, poems, liturgies, rituals and stories—not only those that are Christian.” She continues to clarify: “Like most people, I used to think that religion was primarily a matter of ‘what you believe.’ But I’ve had to abandon that assumption seeing how the particular circumstances of Christianity’s origin led certain leaders to equate ‘true religion’ with a set of beliefs, especially since the fourth century….”
To the question of Why Religion from her husband-to-be, a question she herself was asking then, they find answers together years later on their travels in Egypt, Israel, and Sudan: it has an impact on our world, just as the Sciences do. Upon taking LSD once, she writes how she managed to say after five hours, “I guess that solves the dying problem.” We “seemed to resolve into a deeper unity of the whole.”
After this biographical foray, she delineates how and why sexuality and gender became important considerations in her research work. In chapter 3, we see Pagels’ friend perform a “Ritual for an End of Bitterness,” after which, a single question forms in her mind: “Are you willing to be a channel?” ending with another sentence: “You don’t have to do this; it does itself.” It is after this ritual that Pagels get pregnant after many years of trying. These are the rituals that Pagels is referring to, when she answers a question about her being religious in the affirmative.
Suffering from anxiety and driven to alcohol upon the discovery of her son’s terminal illness, Pagels who had published Gnostic Gospels the previous year, tell us, “now I had to practice the insights I’d recognized in them.” The night before her one-year-old son Mark’s first surgery, she is at the hospital when she senses as if in a vision that she is surrounded by a group of women “seated in a circle, holding hands.” Recognizing her friend in this inexplicable experience, she later writes her a note. But before that note has reached, her friend has written to her saying how her “sister circle” had actually met to pray for Mark.This and instances wherein Mark would speak of his own death refer to an unknown that we cannot quite define. Such an unknown is what Pagels often means by religion.
When her husband dies by accident, Pagels hears him say things that she could not have made up in her own mind—meaning, she hears him. Throughout this tumultuous personal journey, we see Pagels ask pointed questions about why “suffering feels like punishment” and echoing the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Interweaved in all this is her journey of writing books that critiqued Augustus’ claim of original sin and taking on fellowships and grants and prestigious research positions. Earlier, too, her life threw uncanny coincidences so often so that she ends up in the same home where her friend Paul had lived years ago. And now, actively seeking therapy and ending up in a Church, she feels waves of energy moving toward her as others pray for her. Pagels analyzes the Book of Job, asking important questions all along and analyzes a number of other stories and their inconsistencies to draw the following conclusion: “So far, we’ve been looking at negative consequences of religious traditions, crucial for understanding their impact on Western history. But I’ve come to see that there are other aspects of these complex, cultural traditions—even stories about Satan—that also may help people cope with reality; may even offer practical ways to confront it.”
Coping with her husband’s death, Pagels recalls of a stage of suffering:
Now, working hard to stay steady, or seem to, I could no longer afford to look through a lens that heaps guilt upon grief. Although I wasn’t a traditional believer and didn’t take such stories literally, somehow their premises had shaped my unconscious assumptions. Now I had to divest myself of the illusion that we deserved what had happened; believing it would have crushed us. Instead, I turned again to what Heinz often had said about chaos theory and randomness, and I shifted more toward his understanding of nature.
Pagels’s analysis of biblical stories gains different interpretations, as she begins to “feel with” the stories. The result is a remarkable analysis of Mark’s gospel. She writes:
Troubling as others found Mark’s original version, I preferred it. What he wrote sounded more like the world in which we live…Mark apparently felt that the old script—things turn out well for the righteous, badly for evildoers—no longer worked. …Mark had no intention of writing “bad news,” as the philosopher Nietzsche later mocked him for doing. Now I began to see that Mark’s decision to include Satan in the story does more than demonize people. Paradoxically, it also changes his vision of the supernatural world to show that evil is far more powerful than previously imagined.
Pagels ends her intellectually rich and emotionally intense memoir with a description of her receiving an honorary degree from Harvard with her two adopted children and their families by her side—a happy image for the reader to take home.
Published in Women's Review of Books, Vol 36:1. (2019)
2015. Review of Gandhi: A Spiritual Biography by Arvind Sharma. New Haven & London, Yale University Press, vii+252 pages. ISBN 978-0-300-18596-6
For Philosophy East and West, 65:2. April. University of Hawaii.
Reviewed by
Sushumna Kannan,
San Diego State University.
[email protected]
As is evident from the title of the book, Gandhi: A Spiritual Biography, Arvind Sharma in his latest book, aims at tracing Gandhi’s life from the perspective of spirituality. Sharma begins by suggesting that some aspects of Gandhi’s life find explanation when viewed through prisms that qualify human beings as “spiritual beings having a human experience” and then argues that the thesis that the source of Gandhi’s strength and leadership was spiritual is a strong one, worthy of investigation (4). The context for Sharma’s project is well-prompted in the face of many understandings of Gandhi as an individual accessing Hinduism in unique and intuitive ways as well as evolving spiritual principles in a religion-neutral manner. Recently renewed interest in Gandhi has tapped his writings for a variety of purposes; his ethical alternatives, non-western ideas of humanism, understanding of political responsibility and leadership and his solutions for a peaceful world from both his strategies in India as well as in South Africa. New works on Gandhi infuse ideas and categories from different disciplines such as political science, religious studies and history while earlier studies remained somewhat focused on particular aspects, his complex justifications less explored. While for years, a popular rubric for public debate has been Gandhi’s relevance for modern India, today, few will debate the urgency with which Gandhi’s thought must be understood, appreciated and even adopted. These changes in approaches to Gandhi are also a result of the increasing failure of different political and economic systems in ensuring well-being for all. The genre of biography aids a more holistic discussion of Gandhi and thus this book should be grouped under new works on Gandhi that makes his philosophy more accessible.
Structurally, the book is divided into two parts. The first part describes and discusses all that could be considered spiritual in Gandhi’s life in his own words, i.e. through his autobiography. This part provides details of the significant events in Gandhi’s life. The second part is analytical and picks specific themes that prompt understandings of Gandhi as a spiritual person, explicating the kind of spirituality he could be seen as upholding.
The first part uses questions at pertinent points of time, enriching content and defying what could otherwise have been a monotonous narrative. Most of these questions are to do with Gandhi’s ideas, the nature of their formation and his influences. In his autobiography, Gandhi views his actions in retrospect and interjects his story-telling with thoughts such as, “God in his infinite mercy protected me from myself,” which Sharma, as the spiritual biographer, duly notes and contextualizes. (19) Here, analyzing Gandhi’s spirituality through the Hindu understanding that spirituality gains greater relevance in later life could have provided an apt context. Sharma however, draws on comparative ideas from the Islamic tradition (“God turning his face toward us”) widening the referential potential of spirituality across religions. (20) Yet, a theory of the uniqueness of the Indian spiritual traditions from times prior to Gandhi, may have offered a richer view. Sharma does, however, offer many small general clarifications that shed light on Hinduism and at times locates its uniqueness in contrast to both practical wisdom and also enlightenment logic that re-defined the ideal place of God and man. For instance, Sharma notes that “even hostility toward God can lead to salvation.” (23) Concepts of dharma and satya are explained through their unique usages in Gandhi and these help the non-Indian reader in navigating the book. The only drawback of the first part of the book is its excessive reliance on Gandhi’s autobiography. Other perspectives from archival documents could have been used to avoid this. However, occasional reliance on other biographies helps in alleviating this problem to some extent.
Gandhi’s travel abroad and his subsequent realization of Hinduism’s place in the context of world religions are described through the prism of a contemporary traveler’s experiences. This contemporizing approach works well to cull out the issues involved. Gandhi’s Christian and other influences are duly recorded here. Sharma’s understanding that different movements from elsewhere “led him [Gandhi] to further explore his own Hindu background” lends greater credibility to the general experience of Indians traveling westward. (38) That theosophy’s influence on Gandhi “re-introduced…a major text of his own tradition, the Bhagavad Gita” and “disabused him of the notion, fostered by the missionaries, that Hinduism is rife with superstition” is convincing and compatible with cross-cultural experiences of the well-traveled. (39) Again, Gandhi’s shame at not having read the Gita in either Sanskrit or Gujarati resonates perfectly with the modern expatriate experience. It is as a result of such experiences that Gandhi writes in his autobiography that the archetypal stranger reveals the treasure hidden at one’s own hearth, notes Sharma, attempting to unravel Gandhi’s thought process by connecting his ideas and life-events.
Sharma locates Gandhi’s specific interpretation of certain aspects of Hinduism as Gandhi’s own unique contribution. For instance, Gandhi tells his caste council that it was not against Hinduism to go to England. However, when viewed from the larger context of Hinduism’s diverse, non-normative, plural commentarial history, what emerges is that each of its participants has almost always been allowed the freedom to interpret and understand texts and traditions according to his/her terms. Thus, the credit in this instance should perhaps go to Hinduism than to Gandhi.
The culling out of the “hermeneutical principle” that Gandhi formulates with reference to defining meat-eating is brilliant and introduces some of Gandhi’s principles in clear prose. Gandhi’s ideas on rights (“all rights to be deserved and preserved came from duty well done”) as well his experiences in the “religiously plural environment” in South Africa are detailed next. (43) Raychand, a traditional shatadvani/shatavadhani Sanskrit scholar’s influence on Gandhi is assessed. Gandhi is seen as being led to make a comparative study of religions. Sharma’s view that Gandhi’s advocacy of fasting as a nonviolent form of protest drew from the Hindu tradition wherein it was used by “priests and housewives” seems unique and ingenious. (51) Sharma’s use of Gandhi’s different biographers provides a much-needed context for the reader to distinguish between the general perception of Gandhi and the authorial voice. Another biographer, Payne’s understanding that “Ideas came to him [Gandhi] occasionally through books but chiefly through his own acts” is the closest answer we see in this book to the question whether and why we should see Gandhi as an independent thinker and not as influenced by the urgency of responding to the British. (53) While Sharma does not take up this question that is highly relevant to any study of the nationalist thinkers and the Orientalist stances they are known to adopt, the study of influences on Gandhi should be seen as an acknowledgment perhaps of the complexity involved in addressing this.
The evolution of the different principles of satyagraha through Gandhi’s role as an immigration lawyer and public leader in South Africa is traced well in chapters 7 and 8. His realization of the challenges that Indian lifestyles posed to the laws of the land led him to challenge “specific acts of injustice.” Chapter 8, titled Spiritual Warfare describes the use of satyagraha with the British, upon Gandhi’s return to India. The understated account of events evoke a chilling effect in the reader, for the brutal nature of the British attacks on Indians appear with great clarity here. The chapter reads like a firsthand account of the experience of colonialism sans theorizing and Gandhi’s own towering persona forms for the reader. Chapter 9 provides a rich context to the many meetings Gandhi held with the British and also presents his version of humanism. In this chapter that mainly deals with theme of ‘untouchability,’ Sharma shows, drawing from Gandhi’s Hindu Dharma, how his views on ‘untouchability’ were “not the product of western education” but a result of the study of scriptures, especially the Bhagavad Gita, which sees the ‘untouchables’ as “constitutive of society” or as on par with the Brahmin. (87) This could well be Gandhi’s critique of orientalism, through which he refused to view ‘untouchability’ as “intrinsic to Hinduism” and responded to an administration that misunderstood not just the fabric of Indian society, its practices and traditions, but also its texts. (85) Sharma’s elucidation of Gandhi’s stance on caste as positive could have included a number of other issues. A discussion of migration theories of caste (not necessarily Aryan migration), colonial constructionist/orientalist theories and dalit critiques of Gandhi’s stance could have offered both better justification as well as critique.
Substantive discussion begins in the second part of the book, where we see a discussion of the utilization of spiritual resources for India’s political freedom. Gandhi and Ramana Maharshi are compared raising a number of thought-provoking issues. However, the sanyasi revolution, which is the first and most directly available instance of an attempt to gain India’s freedom, is made conspicuous by its lack of mention. Chapter 12 raises more questions through a comparison of Gandhi’s ethics with that of other spiritual practitioners’ of the time. Does social reform and seva amount to spiritual sadhana is one such question. The next few chapters discuss Gandhi’s views on vegetarianism, celibacy and the Bhagavad Gita. We see Gandhi founding a vegetarian club while in London, confessing to lapses in the celibacy he followed since 1901 and referring to the Bhagavad Gita as his mother. Sharma argues that Gandhi’s understanding of brahmacharya was complex and that “experience preceded his awareness of scriptural testimony.” (137) Gandhi’s emphasis on sexual abstinence, his resistance to birth control methods, his approach to women and his testing of himself with his niece and related problematics are discussed in a balanced manner, with facts weighing both ways, duly provided. The discussion here could have been more fruitful if Sharma drew on works of scholars in the field, like Veena Howard, who argues that Gandhi’s creative use of brahmacharya facilitated women’s entry into the public sphere. Gandhi’s insistence on the connection between his chastity and the partition of India reveals some of his beliefs that are largely perceived as counter-intuitive.
A comparison with Ramakrishna locates Gandhi’s position on issues of spirituality. That Gandhi viewed Bhagavad Gita’s message as “the yoga of selfless action,” following Tilak, while possibly also realizing the irrelevance of selfless action “for a people struggling for independence” are less-known facts we find mentioned. (148) Sharma argues that Gandhi understands the Bhagavad Gita allegorically; the battle of Kurukshetra, is more a battle between the good and evil than Kauravas and Pandavas and the ideal spiritual person is, the sthita prajnya. A summary of Godse’s understanding of this text, Gandhi’s assassinator, makes up several interesting paragraphs.
Gandhi’s identification of truth with God and his insistence that the moral responsibility for actions lies with humans, brings out the complexity of the differences between Gandhi and Tagore; the latter viewed Gandhi’s views on earthquake, for instance, as unreason. That Gandhi’s understanding of Hinduism does not necessarily privilege theism and indeed enlarges the universal relevance of his thought is well-brought out. However, the discussion of faith in this context seems to overlook the nature of inquiry, method and experience emphasized within Hinduism, which is somewhat different from Gandhi’s stated quest for truth; satya often has nothing to do with verbal truth or promise-keeping. While it has meant different things in different periods of Indian history, it refers to the irreducible essence of being in its advaitic avatar, a discussion contemporaneous to Gandhi through Vivekananda. The account of matter versus spirit as being science versus religion posited by Sharma seems inadequate in so far as it simply buys into the enlightenment discourse of Europe. In chapter 19, however, Sharma pits religion and spirituality as opposed to each other prompting a careful read.
Chapter 18 offers a demythologized view of Gandhi by comparing his efforts to achieve India’s independence with those of Subhas Chandra Bose. Sharma clarifies that Gandhi was not solely responsible for India gaining its freedom, a corrective measure in history-writing. Gandhi’s critics are addressed by pointing to the strange kinds of consistencies arising from the unpopular aspects of Gandhi’s life. A contemporizing discussion of Gandhi’s built-in checks in the search for truth and an elucidation of the need for nonviolence, assess his relevance for the modern world. Gandhi’s view of morality as the essence of religion could have been elaborated more through the discipline of ethics and its history rather than situating it solely as a comment on practicing religion. Perhaps engaging with other critical works on Gandhi, like that of Akeel Bilgrami, Ajay Skaria and Ashis Nandy would have been meaningful. The greatest strength of this book is its balanced view and analysis; there is neither a defensive moment nor any judgmental tone. Repetition is used as a technique to develop themes over the course of the book and its jargon-free and accessible style can work well as an engaging textbook. The book is recommended for undergraduates, researchers in South Asian history and for lay readers of biographies.
2015. Review of Religious Cultures in Early Modern India: New Perspectives. Ed. O’Hanlon and Washbrook (eds.) London and New York: Routledge, 2012. v + 210 pages. For International Journal of Hindu Studies, 19.2. April.
Dr. Sushumna Kannan
San Diego State University
San Diego, California, USA
The book is a collection of eight essays on the under-researched area of precolonial Indian religious cultures and focuses on the early modern period. Though the essays that comprise this book deal with issues from the Hindu and Islamic traditions, they share similar historiographical starting points as they attempt to negotiate the numerous tensions between transcendent religion and time-bound history. In regards to the Orientalist history of Hinduism, the book argues that “The tradition of Brahmanic scriptural exegesis, for example, was deliberately designed to obliterate distinctions of time, forging exercises in commentary directly linking together authors located in different centuries and millennia as if they were standing in the same scriptorum” (1). These eight essays thus attempt to come to terms with those Orientalist scholars who denied the history and historiography of South Asia and focused, instead, on the timelessness that appears in the region’s strictly “religious” texts. Additionally, many of the essays share theoretical and methodological approaches, expressing concern for the position of the “subaltern” as opposed to the “elite,” as the authors return to categories of class, caste, religion and secularism.
Muzaffar Alam, in his essay on Sufi critiques of religious law in Mughal India, records arguments from Chishti Sufism as providing a new definition of Islam in the 17th century. Though this definition significantly provides the Sultans of the time with an ideological rationale for the inclusive politics of Mughal India, Alam asks why “this view has found no place in South Asian Muslim history and memory” (20). Alam’s discussion of the conflicts and resolutions between Sufis and the Shariah jurists acts as a response to Ashis Nandy’s argument about history and memory, wherein history reminds one of communal violence, even though memory may have long suppressed it. By bringing forth instances of communal harmony in the Indian past, Alam’s history acts as a corrective measure to the violence caused by history to those people for whom memory and lived culture is more important than texts.
Monika Horstmann, in her “Theology and Statecraft,” argues that the “process of state building was accompanied by ambitious projects of religious legitimation” (52). To do this, she analyzes correspondence between Savai Jaisingh and the scholars of Pushtimarg and Gaudiya Vaishnava sects. Her archival material, consisting of sammatipātras and shāstrārthas, highlights the interaction between the two parties that is modeled on the dharmaśāstric notion of kingship, especially of patronage. The author suggests that the question of sectarian differences may have had personal significance for Jaisingh, whose adherence to dharma, as seen through other sources, is manifest in the divergent philosophies of sectarian texts, and is located aptly within the native context of his exegetical concern.
Christopher Minkowski’s “Advaita Vedānta in early modern history” aims at producing a social history of Advaita Vedānta before it was subsumed by “Hinduism,” as happened in the early nineteenth century. This essay focuses on those literary texts produced between the fifteenth and early eighteenth centuries that travelled among networks of families and monastic orders between Banaras and the south. These literary texts engage in arguments with other schools of thought, repeating well-known Advaitic arguments and eventually attempting a synthesis towards the end of this era. Minkowski argues that in the north, discussions were less between Shaivite and Vaishnavite doctrines and more about the Dvaita and Advaita philosophies, especially those of four particular authors – Nrisimhāshrama, Appaya Dīkshita, Bhattoji Dīkshita and Rangoji Bhaṭṭa – who sought to elaborate on the social embeddedness of Advaita.
And, Christian Lee Novetzke, in an essay on the Brahminical construction of anti-Brahminism in precolonial Maharashtra, argues that Brahmins took the lead in critiquing the concept of “Brahminism” to deflect or diffuse criticism being leveled against them. Looking at the devotional public theatre that addressed social, moral, political and theological issues, Novetzke asserts that we can find a “forerunner to the modern critique of caste” through the “Brahmin double,” a rhetorical strategy deployed by Brahmin performers, in which a “bad Brahmin [is] portrayed as foolish, greedy, pedantic or casteist” (101-3). Though we might consider these caricatures to be part of a traditional bhakti critique of mechanistic Brahminical ritual and bhakti rhetoric that serves as a glorification of the sants rather than as a denigration of Vedas, Shastras and Purāṇas, Novetzke argues that the pre-modern Brahmin double “presages forms of modern political action” (108). That these caricatures can be seen as an internal critique of the traditions is in keeping with the glorification of gurus and the emphasis on experiential sādhana – as opposed to rote learning and empty philosophizing – that we find throughout South Asian texts and performances.
The essays in this book dealing with the construction of South Asian sacred spaces (especially those of O’Hanlon and Pauwels) and texts allow us to move “beyond simple paradigms of Hindu-Muslim antagonism” (147) and allow us to appreciate the ingenious solutions arising from within a variety of traditions to the challenges of accommodating plurality. These essays analyze archival data and offer interpretations of a wide range of issues equipping the reader with a better understanding of the processes of South Asian historiography. This book will be useful for researchers working on South Asian history, Hinduism and the bhakti traditions of north and south India.
Dr. Sushumna Kannan
San Diego State University
San Diego, California, USA
The book is a collection of eight essays on the under-researched area of precolonial Indian religious cultures and focuses on the early modern period. Though the essays that comprise this book deal with issues from the Hindu and Islamic traditions, they share similar historiographical starting points as they attempt to negotiate the numerous tensions between transcendent religion and time-bound history. In regards to the Orientalist history of Hinduism, the book argues that “The tradition of Brahmanic scriptural exegesis, for example, was deliberately designed to obliterate distinctions of time, forging exercises in commentary directly linking together authors located in different centuries and millennia as if they were standing in the same scriptorum” (1). These eight essays thus attempt to come to terms with those Orientalist scholars who denied the history and historiography of South Asia and focused, instead, on the timelessness that appears in the region’s strictly “religious” texts. Additionally, many of the essays share theoretical and methodological approaches, expressing concern for the position of the “subaltern” as opposed to the “elite,” as the authors return to categories of class, caste, religion and secularism.
Muzaffar Alam, in his essay on Sufi critiques of religious law in Mughal India, records arguments from Chishti Sufism as providing a new definition of Islam in the 17th century. Though this definition significantly provides the Sultans of the time with an ideological rationale for the inclusive politics of Mughal India, Alam asks why “this view has found no place in South Asian Muslim history and memory” (20). Alam’s discussion of the conflicts and resolutions between Sufis and the Shariah jurists acts as a response to Ashis Nandy’s argument about history and memory, wherein history reminds one of communal violence, even though memory may have long suppressed it. By bringing forth instances of communal harmony in the Indian past, Alam’s history acts as a corrective measure to the violence caused by history to those people for whom memory and lived culture is more important than texts.
Monika Horstmann, in her “Theology and Statecraft,” argues that the “process of state building was accompanied by ambitious projects of religious legitimation” (52). To do this, she analyzes correspondence between Savai Jaisingh and the scholars of Pushtimarg and Gaudiya Vaishnava sects. Her archival material, consisting of sammatipātras and shāstrārthas, highlights the interaction between the two parties that is modeled on the dharmaśāstric notion of kingship, especially of patronage. The author suggests that the question of sectarian differences may have had personal significance for Jaisingh, whose adherence to dharma, as seen through other sources, is manifest in the divergent philosophies of sectarian texts, and is located aptly within the native context of his exegetical concern.
Christopher Minkowski’s “Advaita Vedānta in early modern history” aims at producing a social history of Advaita Vedānta before it was subsumed by “Hinduism,” as happened in the early nineteenth century. This essay focuses on those literary texts produced between the fifteenth and early eighteenth centuries that travelled among networks of families and monastic orders between Banaras and the south. These literary texts engage in arguments with other schools of thought, repeating well-known Advaitic arguments and eventually attempting a synthesis towards the end of this era. Minkowski argues that in the north, discussions were less between Shaivite and Vaishnavite doctrines and more about the Dvaita and Advaita philosophies, especially those of four particular authors – Nrisimhāshrama, Appaya Dīkshita, Bhattoji Dīkshita and Rangoji Bhaṭṭa – who sought to elaborate on the social embeddedness of Advaita.
And, Christian Lee Novetzke, in an essay on the Brahminical construction of anti-Brahminism in precolonial Maharashtra, argues that Brahmins took the lead in critiquing the concept of “Brahminism” to deflect or diffuse criticism being leveled against them. Looking at the devotional public theatre that addressed social, moral, political and theological issues, Novetzke asserts that we can find a “forerunner to the modern critique of caste” through the “Brahmin double,” a rhetorical strategy deployed by Brahmin performers, in which a “bad Brahmin [is] portrayed as foolish, greedy, pedantic or casteist” (101-3). Though we might consider these caricatures to be part of a traditional bhakti critique of mechanistic Brahminical ritual and bhakti rhetoric that serves as a glorification of the sants rather than as a denigration of Vedas, Shastras and Purāṇas, Novetzke argues that the pre-modern Brahmin double “presages forms of modern political action” (108). That these caricatures can be seen as an internal critique of the traditions is in keeping with the glorification of gurus and the emphasis on experiential sādhana – as opposed to rote learning and empty philosophizing – that we find throughout South Asian texts and performances.
The essays in this book dealing with the construction of South Asian sacred spaces (especially those of O’Hanlon and Pauwels) and texts allow us to move “beyond simple paradigms of Hindu-Muslim antagonism” (147) and allow us to appreciate the ingenious solutions arising from within a variety of traditions to the challenges of accommodating plurality. These essays analyze archival data and offer interpretations of a wide range of issues equipping the reader with a better understanding of the processes of South Asian historiography. This book will be useful for researchers working on South Asian history, Hinduism and the bhakti traditions of north and south India.
A Frame of Intelligibility for Feminist History in India
2015. Review of: Roy, Kumkum. ed. 2011. Insights and Interventions: Essays in Honour of Uma Chakravarti. New Delhi: Primus Books. Vi+ 191 pp. ISBN 978-93-80607-22-1. IIAS, Leiden.
Insights and Interventions is a collection of essays and narratives totaling to 9 pieces of research and writing dedicated to pioneer feminist historian, Uma Chakravarti. Kumkum Roy’s introduction to this book provides the much-needed frame of intelligibility for understanding Chakravarti’s major works as well as numerous other scholarly works produced in the last few decades in mainstream Indian feminism. If works in this area have been less explicit about their methodologies or too jargonistic, Roy’s introduction makes up for them. Roy chronologically culls out Chakravarti’s arguments and her significant ideas with clarity. She points out through an analysis of The Social Dimensions of Early Buddhism that “the picture that emerged was one of complexity if not troubling contradictions” and that Chakravarti “resisted the temptation to erase these and construct a more simple, comforting, if not populist understanding of a tradition…” (1) Roy points out that Chakravarti recognized that the relationship between Brahmanism, Buddhism and other renunciatory traditions “was not simply oppositional” and that there was dialogical relationship, with Buddhism attempting to “redefine the nature of the ‘true’ Brahman.” (3) That Chakravarti was “critical of regarding the [Buddhist] tradition as a primarily urban phenomenon” is noteworthy. (2)
Chakravarti’s work on Pandita Ramabai apart from taking up a whole host of other questions important to feminist history, also, writes Roy, analyses the “enormously complicated, difficult and uncertain worlds that stare in the face while attempting to visualize women’s agency.” (8) In Gendering Caste, Roy sees a “trenchant critique of the romanticized upper caste perspective” that caste was based “on relations of interdependence.” (10) Chakravarti’s understanding that compositions of the Bhakti saints fall short of structural critique are useful today, as they can be read in a whole new light depending on our understanding of caste as an institution and the role of bhakti in the Indian traditions. That she questioned “the tendency to valorize the pre-colonial” (10) and “consign the early centuries of history to the misty realms of myth and spirituality” indicates clearly, not only a stance that is current among historians, but also as to what epistemes and methodologies Chakravarti was responding to and hence what we must take her work as representing. (12) Roy’s introduction is a highly recommended piece of writing for young feminists and historians who seek to understand feminist concerns of the 70s and related decades.
The three parts of the book each have writings by scholars on various topics. In the first part, titled, “Debates,” V Geetha’s essay draws on Chakravarti’s Vedic-dasi essay and asks questions about the self-respecting women of Tamil Nadu who went missing soon after the political triumph of Dravidian nationalism. The first few sections of Geetha’s essay also recap Chakravarti’s contributions in so far as she calls “attention to the mediating role the historian plays in settling the terms of the relationship between past and present” especially in the context of “the nationalist obsession with the chaste, companionate and brave Hindu wife.” (26) Again, the contextualization allows the critical reader to articulate for a feminist project that goes beyond critiquing nationalist history. Geetha argues that the “Dravidian self-determination derived its truth claims” (34) from literature by constructing the earlier Sangam period as ideal and consequently during the DMK’s rule “…justice and injustice were defined in highly sexualized terms.” (35)
Contemporary Histories of Gender and Caste
Sharmila Rege’s “Women’s Studies since the 1990s…” is a brilliant essay that clearly lays out the beginnings of the discipline, charting the political and intellectual changes up to the latest University Grants Commission regulations that brought changes to its nature and functioning, while declarations are rife that higher education is in a state of crisis. The essay evaluates the various changes of the discipline and its relationship especially with activism, autonomous women’s organizations and other institutions in higher education. Considerable energy is spent learning the definitions of women’s studies over time. The delineation of how “empowerment” became a catchword as well as how the categories of caste, community and class enriched feminist discourse while challenging the reduction of equality to education, are truly valuable. Rege’s attention to the changing composition of students, researchers and teachers and her examination of differences in pedagogical practices such as those that explore “Phule-Ambedkarite feminist perspectives” while retaining an emphasis on “a culture of pedagogy based on truth-seeking” is commendable. “Conversations on Caste,” an essay by Rashmi Paliwal describes and conceptualizes her experiences with working on caste issues, with especial reference to the current working of notions of ritual pollution within the mid-day meal scheme in government schools. She records conventional attitudes about who should cook for whom play out in a world of cut-throat competition. Her ethnographic analysis shows a rare sensitivity that is not masked by political urgency or politically correct discourses. Her question whether her casteist interlocutor is given to the urge to “to grope for closure, to see if the world can make sense in a different way” has the potential to reopen the concept of culture in new ways. (84)
The second part of the book, titled “Narratives” presents three different stories by Bharati Jagannathan. Of these, the first two stories “Crime and Atonement” and “Nobody Must Know” appear to be somewhat ideological in comparison to the third, “The Goddess of Palai” which is an impressive and effective rendering of Draupadi’s story in a modern setting. This third story is recommended for use in class projects. The third of part of the book, titled, “Texts and Traditions,” begins with Naina Dayal’s longish essay on Valmiki’s Ramayana and its external and internal audiences. The essay comments on the transmission of the epic, its language and aesthetic style and analyses the varying importance of the Ashvamedha, to its many characters, a ritual sacrifice, during which the story of Ramayana is first performed by the young twin-sons of Rama, Lava and Kusha.
Ancient History Revisited
Meera Visvanathan’s “Comology and Critique” draws on Chakravarti’s work on Buddhism and traces the reference to Purusha Sukta’s myth of the four castes emerging from Purusha, in dharmashastras as well as Buddhist texts. However, the author uses the Buddhist critique of Hinduism as a sort of concluded argument. As we know, this is not the case, and scholars like Shankara presented further arguments in response to the content and tenor of Buddhist critiques. Without presenting the other side of the argument, the essay lacks what is needed to draw conclusions. Although well-written and persuasive, the assumption that Vedic assertions about the nature of the world as cosmos and their acceptance over time was indeed about reality, overlooks the possibility that the Vedic texts represent the cultural experiences of accomplished seers. Further, the nature of sacrifices is itself left untheorized, tilting the balance in favour of an anti-caste analysis, like that of Ambedkar’s, which is also cited by Visvanathan. A mere “sacrifice serves to link the realms of humans and gods” limits our understanding to aspects peculiar to the Semitic religions, while the Hindu textual traditions find themselves in a world inhabited by Gods and humans at the same time, within which, as the Purusha Sukta itself reveals that the sacrifice is a tool to create. (147) The quotation from Nasidiya Sukta (“…who can say whence it all came, and how creation happened”) prompts the reader to ask why a theory of the cosmos-myths cannot be evolved, keeping both positive-descriptions such as those found in the Purusha Sukta, later trajectories of Shakti-centrality, as well as the open-ended inquiries found in texts like the Nasidiya Sukta. (146) It is possibly only natural that positive-descriptions of one kind found credibility in dharmashastric texts that statedly sought to establish an orderly society. The spirit of inquiry and also arbitrariness, however, as any cursory reading would show is not entirely discarded in dharmashastric texts. Kumkum Roy’s essay, the last in the book, collects all the stories to do with friendship in the Jataka Tales. It performs one of the historian’s primary tasks: categorization. The essay is marginally analytical of the material recorded. On the whole, the essays in the book under review make for an informative and useful read for researchers in the field of South Asian history and feminism. It is recommended for teaching in courses under the rubric of Women and Hinduism and Feminist history.
Published on January 20th, 2015, New Asia Books, IIAS, Leiden.
2015. Review of: Roy, Kumkum. ed. 2011. Insights and Interventions: Essays in Honour of Uma Chakravarti. New Delhi: Primus Books. Vi+ 191 pp. ISBN 978-93-80607-22-1. IIAS, Leiden.
Insights and Interventions is a collection of essays and narratives totaling to 9 pieces of research and writing dedicated to pioneer feminist historian, Uma Chakravarti. Kumkum Roy’s introduction to this book provides the much-needed frame of intelligibility for understanding Chakravarti’s major works as well as numerous other scholarly works produced in the last few decades in mainstream Indian feminism. If works in this area have been less explicit about their methodologies or too jargonistic, Roy’s introduction makes up for them. Roy chronologically culls out Chakravarti’s arguments and her significant ideas with clarity. She points out through an analysis of The Social Dimensions of Early Buddhism that “the picture that emerged was one of complexity if not troubling contradictions” and that Chakravarti “resisted the temptation to erase these and construct a more simple, comforting, if not populist understanding of a tradition…” (1) Roy points out that Chakravarti recognized that the relationship between Brahmanism, Buddhism and other renunciatory traditions “was not simply oppositional” and that there was dialogical relationship, with Buddhism attempting to “redefine the nature of the ‘true’ Brahman.” (3) That Chakravarti was “critical of regarding the [Buddhist] tradition as a primarily urban phenomenon” is noteworthy. (2)
Chakravarti’s work on Pandita Ramabai apart from taking up a whole host of other questions important to feminist history, also, writes Roy, analyses the “enormously complicated, difficult and uncertain worlds that stare in the face while attempting to visualize women’s agency.” (8) In Gendering Caste, Roy sees a “trenchant critique of the romanticized upper caste perspective” that caste was based “on relations of interdependence.” (10) Chakravarti’s understanding that compositions of the Bhakti saints fall short of structural critique are useful today, as they can be read in a whole new light depending on our understanding of caste as an institution and the role of bhakti in the Indian traditions. That she questioned “the tendency to valorize the pre-colonial” (10) and “consign the early centuries of history to the misty realms of myth and spirituality” indicates clearly, not only a stance that is current among historians, but also as to what epistemes and methodologies Chakravarti was responding to and hence what we must take her work as representing. (12) Roy’s introduction is a highly recommended piece of writing for young feminists and historians who seek to understand feminist concerns of the 70s and related decades.
The three parts of the book each have writings by scholars on various topics. In the first part, titled, “Debates,” V Geetha’s essay draws on Chakravarti’s Vedic-dasi essay and asks questions about the self-respecting women of Tamil Nadu who went missing soon after the political triumph of Dravidian nationalism. The first few sections of Geetha’s essay also recap Chakravarti’s contributions in so far as she calls “attention to the mediating role the historian plays in settling the terms of the relationship between past and present” especially in the context of “the nationalist obsession with the chaste, companionate and brave Hindu wife.” (26) Again, the contextualization allows the critical reader to articulate for a feminist project that goes beyond critiquing nationalist history. Geetha argues that the “Dravidian self-determination derived its truth claims” (34) from literature by constructing the earlier Sangam period as ideal and consequently during the DMK’s rule “…justice and injustice were defined in highly sexualized terms.” (35)
Contemporary Histories of Gender and Caste
Sharmila Rege’s “Women’s Studies since the 1990s…” is a brilliant essay that clearly lays out the beginnings of the discipline, charting the political and intellectual changes up to the latest University Grants Commission regulations that brought changes to its nature and functioning, while declarations are rife that higher education is in a state of crisis. The essay evaluates the various changes of the discipline and its relationship especially with activism, autonomous women’s organizations and other institutions in higher education. Considerable energy is spent learning the definitions of women’s studies over time. The delineation of how “empowerment” became a catchword as well as how the categories of caste, community and class enriched feminist discourse while challenging the reduction of equality to education, are truly valuable. Rege’s attention to the changing composition of students, researchers and teachers and her examination of differences in pedagogical practices such as those that explore “Phule-Ambedkarite feminist perspectives” while retaining an emphasis on “a culture of pedagogy based on truth-seeking” is commendable. “Conversations on Caste,” an essay by Rashmi Paliwal describes and conceptualizes her experiences with working on caste issues, with especial reference to the current working of notions of ritual pollution within the mid-day meal scheme in government schools. She records conventional attitudes about who should cook for whom play out in a world of cut-throat competition. Her ethnographic analysis shows a rare sensitivity that is not masked by political urgency or politically correct discourses. Her question whether her casteist interlocutor is given to the urge to “to grope for closure, to see if the world can make sense in a different way” has the potential to reopen the concept of culture in new ways. (84)
The second part of the book, titled “Narratives” presents three different stories by Bharati Jagannathan. Of these, the first two stories “Crime and Atonement” and “Nobody Must Know” appear to be somewhat ideological in comparison to the third, “The Goddess of Palai” which is an impressive and effective rendering of Draupadi’s story in a modern setting. This third story is recommended for use in class projects. The third of part of the book, titled, “Texts and Traditions,” begins with Naina Dayal’s longish essay on Valmiki’s Ramayana and its external and internal audiences. The essay comments on the transmission of the epic, its language and aesthetic style and analyses the varying importance of the Ashvamedha, to its many characters, a ritual sacrifice, during which the story of Ramayana is first performed by the young twin-sons of Rama, Lava and Kusha.
Ancient History Revisited
Meera Visvanathan’s “Comology and Critique” draws on Chakravarti’s work on Buddhism and traces the reference to Purusha Sukta’s myth of the four castes emerging from Purusha, in dharmashastras as well as Buddhist texts. However, the author uses the Buddhist critique of Hinduism as a sort of concluded argument. As we know, this is not the case, and scholars like Shankara presented further arguments in response to the content and tenor of Buddhist critiques. Without presenting the other side of the argument, the essay lacks what is needed to draw conclusions. Although well-written and persuasive, the assumption that Vedic assertions about the nature of the world as cosmos and their acceptance over time was indeed about reality, overlooks the possibility that the Vedic texts represent the cultural experiences of accomplished seers. Further, the nature of sacrifices is itself left untheorized, tilting the balance in favour of an anti-caste analysis, like that of Ambedkar’s, which is also cited by Visvanathan. A mere “sacrifice serves to link the realms of humans and gods” limits our understanding to aspects peculiar to the Semitic religions, while the Hindu textual traditions find themselves in a world inhabited by Gods and humans at the same time, within which, as the Purusha Sukta itself reveals that the sacrifice is a tool to create. (147) The quotation from Nasidiya Sukta (“…who can say whence it all came, and how creation happened”) prompts the reader to ask why a theory of the cosmos-myths cannot be evolved, keeping both positive-descriptions such as those found in the Purusha Sukta, later trajectories of Shakti-centrality, as well as the open-ended inquiries found in texts like the Nasidiya Sukta. (146) It is possibly only natural that positive-descriptions of one kind found credibility in dharmashastric texts that statedly sought to establish an orderly society. The spirit of inquiry and also arbitrariness, however, as any cursory reading would show is not entirely discarded in dharmashastric texts. Kumkum Roy’s essay, the last in the book, collects all the stories to do with friendship in the Jataka Tales. It performs one of the historian’s primary tasks: categorization. The essay is marginally analytical of the material recorded. On the whole, the essays in the book under review make for an informative and useful read for researchers in the field of South Asian history and feminism. It is recommended for teaching in courses under the rubric of Women and Hinduism and Feminist history.
Published on January 20th, 2015, New Asia Books, IIAS, Leiden.
Enabling Decolonised Feminist Critiques
EPW, Vol - XLVIII No. 32, August 10, 2013
Empire, Media and the Autonomous Woman: A Feminist Critique of Postcolonial Thought by Esha Niyogi De (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), 2011; pp xxvii + 246, Rs 745.
Sushumna Kannan ([email protected]) is affiliated to the San Diego State University, US and Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, India.
A host of popular as well as scholarly discourses today endorse some or the other version of liberalism. Even as most of us are caught quite unescapably in the spectrum of tradition and modernity, judging and being judged, what we are primarily debating it seems, is simply, our version of liberalism. And it would not be wrong to say that liberalism in numerous discourses today is seen as a kind of autonomy. It is in this context that the book under review draws our attention to indigenous works (literature) located in the colonial period and cultural works (dance-drama, films) produced by activist-thinkers in the postcolonial period that recast the limitations of liberalism. In doing this, the book allows us a brief glimpse into the psyche of precolonial India and helps us understand colonial India – as an active player – even when under the empire’s influence. Through the latter, it widens the scope for a critique of postcolonial and feminist theory, challenging postcolonial theories that cast the colonised as hopelessly conquered. The preface provides the theoretical context and the introduction enables a good understanding of the chapters. The book is divided into two parts and has five chapters including the conclusion.
De begins by telling us that the book began thus: "…from a perplexity that would nag my reading of certain cultural works produced by activist thinkers in India. The works invoked the Enlightenment vocabulary of individual autonomy while elaborating the concepts in ways that did not fully accord with the common understanding. I noted this anomalous practice especially in works which focused on gender, women and sexuality." (p vii)
Commonly, says De “we have come to associate such core concepts of liberalism as autonomy and free choice with separatist and territorial notions of the human being.” In contrast to this she sees that “indigenous works…departed from this model in at least two ways” (p viii). “…they invoked autonomy to challenge the separation of people, bodies, societies into unequal groups…” and they selectively recast Enlightenment language “such that the ‘individuals’ they imagined were not completely bounded and separated from others and the world” (p viii). To argue this and “develop a critical apparatus to justify such accounts” De looks at the works of Monomohini Dasi, Binodini Dasi, Rabindranath Tagore, Manjusri-Chaki-Sircar and Aparna Sen. Her question is: “in what specific ways the Enlightenment notion of the autonomous self enters, alters, or indigenises within textualisations of gender justice in modern cultures related to Bengal”.
De’s terms “activist thinkers”, “non-western activists” and “indigenous activist individuals” can be initially very confusing although she provides a definition for activism. The unique themes she invokes in reading the activists, however, sustain the interest of the reader: the filial order, the inconsistency within feminism in claiming a liberal conception of the self while also critiquing it, the nature of the changed sense of personhood in mid-19th century or humanist Indian thought, residual non-subjective traditions from precolonial India and so on. In taking on scholars who argue that all agency under the empire is suspect, De asks “how do we explain that many histories of intellectual and social movements have improved some material and conceptual conditions for women and the marginalised, in modern India and elsewhere in the world?” (p xvi).
Filial Order and Agency
Chapter one “Ownership on Sexual Margins: Bodies, National Media, and Autobiography” looks at Monomohini Dasi who “pleads for the institution of physical exams for the male customers of prostitutes” (p 52) and at Binodini Dasi, who claimed her legal autonomy even as she pawned her body, so that her theatrical “family” could look forward to more autonomy of its own. The argument is that their agency emerged divergently. Recognising the filial as important has not been common to historians; in making it a criterion for analysis De is definitely productive. Recall, for instance, Sarojini Naidu’s metaphors in her political speeches, of “setting the house right” and being a daughter of the nation. But De’s understanding of the filial order is that it places the male higher in the hierarchy. Is this accurate? Although in most feminist analyses this would be considered so, a different view could be in order. For instance, texts that endorse the filial order assign different roles to the three sexes and each is asked to fulfill duties and responsibilities. It is also possible to read the filial order as granting women equality in the light that her household activities were worthy of moksha, the highest aim of human life as per the tradition that housed it.
De demonstrates how Binodini Dasi is enabled by the Indian Evidence Act and the Indian Contract Act and asks for a contract. The point is that, narrative moments such as these “dismantle the dominant filiative or paternalistic national order of family life” (p 71). Through her literary choices, Binodini Dasi is seen as “attentive to some of those indigenous practices of autonomy vis-à-vis community which emerge from different personal struggles for survival amidst uneven change” (p 72). Thus, Binodini Dasi not only emerges as agentic, she is also communicating and building communities in unexpected ways as she engages with enlightenment vocabulary. De’s conclusions on agency do not locate subversion alone, but allow for greater complexity. De recognises another key issue – where does the agency of the activist scholar come from? Thus the discussion of agency is nuanced and students of history will find this relevant.
Throughout the book, De notes the usage of traditional concepts such as self-advaita monism and bhakti. Her recognition of spirituality and the agency arising from it furthers that of Dipesh Chakrabarthy and is novel, but it could have been pursued more fully so that her analysis may have explained another figure from the period, Rashasundari Devi, who taught herself to read, to read the Chaitanya Bhagabat. De reads the Manusmriti as an authoritative text that codifies Hindu law prescribing women to be chaste and submissive. However, scholars have argued that this text is not authoritative and does not represent law. De could have responded to such scholars; she could reassess this aspect of her thesis, which is in reality, an assumption that affects the identification of change with the onset of modernity.
In Chapter Two, “Nation and Individuation: Manhood and the Aesthetics of Female Desire”, De reads Tagore as an aesthetic activist who developed an aesthetic response to European civil society by offering contesting desires and imaginations. In his woman-centred works, Tagore does not merely reject the nationalist themes of motherhood but engages with them to produce a wide array of characters that is every woman and also human. De situates Tagore’s version of humanism in opposition to “postcolonial models which take the anti-Enlightenment position to be a solid foundation for all readings of the Indian modern self”. This ensures that the theoretical inconsistencies that could have resulted from viewing modern institutions as exclusively detrimental are avoided. This also does not rule out, as far as I can see, an interesting thesis of “continuation” of history from precolonial preoccupations. While distinguishing Tagore’s notion of reform from that of Vivekananda’s, De is able to nuance the picture; she points out the differences in Vivekananda’s speeches in India and the West. De also contrasts Saratchandra Chatterjee, characterising him as a Hindu/Victorian nationalist writer, to Tagore’s character Malati from Ordinary Girl who “wants to be represented as a woman on the path to success…such that she is able to compete with her liberated European rivals” (p 89).Chitrangada, another work of Tagore is read to conclude that the work “refuses to reduce personal autonomy to atomism” (p 104). In retaining the different paths that Tagore’s different women characters follow, once shaking the filiative order and once engaging with it through humanism, De says she practises a “realistic textual approach” that does not reduce texts into singular and linear strands.
Chapter Three “Autonomy as Reproductive Labour: The Neoliberal Woman and the Visual Networks of Empire” begins with an analysis of Amra (We), a telefilm to show that “Amra is one among the large number of feminist stories in circulation today which finds no conflict between a woman’s autonomy and her feminine roles as a self-sacrificing homemaker and a (son’s) mother” (p 117). Core enlightenment concepts of personhood and autonomy are seen as extending themselves into the unlikely roles of motherhood and the feminine self-sacrificing woman.
Canons of Womanhood
Examining the relationship between canons and hegemony, De concludes that “two contradictory canons of Indian womanhood – the woman with choice and the woman with familial obligations – are currently gathering aesthetic capital amidst Indians worldwide” (p 119). She views the contradiction as “opposite poles of the sexual division of labour under the neoliberal global market” (p 121) that although being the product of a local imagination intersects with the located histories of empire and liberation. Through an analysis of one adaptation of Tagore’s Raktakarabi(Red Oleanders) staged in the US, De touches themes of immigrant life, identity, sexuality and individualism, recording their trajectories and changes. She then reads Chandalika, a Kuchipudi dance drama, compares it with Tagore’s portrayals of the desiring woman to conclude that it resolves the conflict that Tagore produces.
Chapter Four “Agency under Networks: Belonging and Privacy in Feminist Visual Culture”, in the context of “a person’s range of choices…curiously homogenised” (p 151) asks if the visual images that uphold this make the indigenous activist-intellectual “refuse the humanist ethic of choice in favour, say, of a non-subjective ethic of self-surrender drawn from the indigenous past?” De answers in the negative citing that “the comparatively fluid non-subjective selves of precapitalist Indian society are unavailable today in their form – that is unmediated by some variety or another of modern self-reflexivity” (p 152). While this is largely true, not all historians would accept that every look at texts from India’s past has to necessarily suffer from anachronism.
De, next, points out the two-fold agenda for feminist intellectuals, especially since they are faced with the “deployment of ‘Hindu’ values by communal and misogynist nationalists” (p 152) which is mapped through an analysis of Chandalika. First, they must choose life-paths unmediated by neo-liberal patriarchal canons of feminine choice and then break apart available beguiling yet mortified imagery of women’s self-development such that the gendered contradictions beneath are exposed.
In contrast to Tagore, we are told, today’s feminists articulate women’s agency through the practical activities they engage in and critically think through the social frameworks that have been defined since the inception of anti-colonial modernity. De chooses to show how the work of Aparna Sen and Manjusri Chaki-Sircar break out of the specular gaze on women’s autonomy. Manjusri dialectically interweaves "the humanist relationship of an autonomous self with community into the pre-modern Hindu conception of ‘dividual’ personhood, which assumes that the person is both psychologically and biologically open to nature and the cosmos” (p 156).
De’s reading seems to assert that the pre-colonial notion herein, is employed at the service of a feminist agenda. Instead, it could very well be the other way round. That is, De may be under-estimating the potential held in precolonial, non-pure, non-subjective traditions. In this context, we could say that the book does not address works on gender and religion that address some of the issues, by neither reducing the traditions nor their understanding to those who use them. Some of De’s arguments appear to be justifications provided for feminism in retrospect, this is also her stated aim, yes, but they could be attributions of feminist intentions while indeed they are merely cultural responses mired inevitably in responding to, the contemporary “nature and cosmos” so to speak. The project of rescuing feminism takes up more of her energy, instead of which she could have expanded the scope of her project. A transcultural process similar to that of Sircar’s is noted in Aparna Sen’s films as well. The chapter concludes by calling for an awareness of “enabling teleologies of our political economy” that “can reroute humane alternatives and recolonise autonomy” (p196).
Enlightenment Critiques
While De’s portrayal of cultural activists as “not perfect but rather conflicted transhistorical thinkers” is very agreeable, her insistence that “None other than this speculative idea of autonomous worth can enable the fight for sexual justice within heterosexual and patriarchal frameworks” could meet with disagreement. Especially since she maintains that “indigenous activist-intellectuals” cannot but invest in the Enlightenment’s gendered ethic of the autonomous person. The disagreement could take the following form: delineating an indigenous response to Enlightenment ideas is valuable, but at the same time, a critique of enlightenment ideas in their own context as well as elsewhere is necessary. For instance, enlightenment ideas incorporated many aspects of the west’s historical developments; they were in response to Christianity and its interaction with pagan traditions. Hence, how such ideas merit an indigenous response in a different cultural context and how those are agentic in the true sense are questions that need to be pursued some more.
Also, in order to more fully delink the idea of the autonomous individual from the Western Empire, a more textured and layered history of the west may need to be written. In fact, the thinkers that postcolonial thought depends heavily upon are Foucault and Derrida, who provide a critique of the philosophical trajectories of the west while viewing each of its aspects as linked to and manifest in others. Recall Foucault’s works on the prison, the hospital, the church and so on.
De’s book will immediately appeal to those scholars who have believed in the independence of the arguments of a Vivekananda, Gandhi, Tagore, Savarkar or Ambedkar and visualise a multiplicity of responses from the colonised to the coloniser: collaboration, resistance, rejection, acceptance, awe, shock, intrigue and so on. Like Javeed Alam, who argues in India: Living with Modernity, that modernity can be separated from its tangled history to be used for bringing about a socially just society, De views autonomy as a precious tool we must never forego.
Empire, Media and the Autonomous Woman: A Feminist Critique of Postcolonial Thought by Esha Niyogi De (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), 2011; pp xxvii + 246, Rs 745.
Sushumna Kannan ([email protected]) is affiliated to the San Diego State University, US and Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, India.
A host of popular as well as scholarly discourses today endorse some or the other version of liberalism. Even as most of us are caught quite unescapably in the spectrum of tradition and modernity, judging and being judged, what we are primarily debating it seems, is simply, our version of liberalism. And it would not be wrong to say that liberalism in numerous discourses today is seen as a kind of autonomy. It is in this context that the book under review draws our attention to indigenous works (literature) located in the colonial period and cultural works (dance-drama, films) produced by activist-thinkers in the postcolonial period that recast the limitations of liberalism. In doing this, the book allows us a brief glimpse into the psyche of precolonial India and helps us understand colonial India – as an active player – even when under the empire’s influence. Through the latter, it widens the scope for a critique of postcolonial and feminist theory, challenging postcolonial theories that cast the colonised as hopelessly conquered. The preface provides the theoretical context and the introduction enables a good understanding of the chapters. The book is divided into two parts and has five chapters including the conclusion.
De begins by telling us that the book began thus: "…from a perplexity that would nag my reading of certain cultural works produced by activist thinkers in India. The works invoked the Enlightenment vocabulary of individual autonomy while elaborating the concepts in ways that did not fully accord with the common understanding. I noted this anomalous practice especially in works which focused on gender, women and sexuality." (p vii)
Commonly, says De “we have come to associate such core concepts of liberalism as autonomy and free choice with separatist and territorial notions of the human being.” In contrast to this she sees that “indigenous works…departed from this model in at least two ways” (p viii). “…they invoked autonomy to challenge the separation of people, bodies, societies into unequal groups…” and they selectively recast Enlightenment language “such that the ‘individuals’ they imagined were not completely bounded and separated from others and the world” (p viii). To argue this and “develop a critical apparatus to justify such accounts” De looks at the works of Monomohini Dasi, Binodini Dasi, Rabindranath Tagore, Manjusri-Chaki-Sircar and Aparna Sen. Her question is: “in what specific ways the Enlightenment notion of the autonomous self enters, alters, or indigenises within textualisations of gender justice in modern cultures related to Bengal”.
De’s terms “activist thinkers”, “non-western activists” and “indigenous activist individuals” can be initially very confusing although she provides a definition for activism. The unique themes she invokes in reading the activists, however, sustain the interest of the reader: the filial order, the inconsistency within feminism in claiming a liberal conception of the self while also critiquing it, the nature of the changed sense of personhood in mid-19th century or humanist Indian thought, residual non-subjective traditions from precolonial India and so on. In taking on scholars who argue that all agency under the empire is suspect, De asks “how do we explain that many histories of intellectual and social movements have improved some material and conceptual conditions for women and the marginalised, in modern India and elsewhere in the world?” (p xvi).
Filial Order and Agency
Chapter one “Ownership on Sexual Margins: Bodies, National Media, and Autobiography” looks at Monomohini Dasi who “pleads for the institution of physical exams for the male customers of prostitutes” (p 52) and at Binodini Dasi, who claimed her legal autonomy even as she pawned her body, so that her theatrical “family” could look forward to more autonomy of its own. The argument is that their agency emerged divergently. Recognising the filial as important has not been common to historians; in making it a criterion for analysis De is definitely productive. Recall, for instance, Sarojini Naidu’s metaphors in her political speeches, of “setting the house right” and being a daughter of the nation. But De’s understanding of the filial order is that it places the male higher in the hierarchy. Is this accurate? Although in most feminist analyses this would be considered so, a different view could be in order. For instance, texts that endorse the filial order assign different roles to the three sexes and each is asked to fulfill duties and responsibilities. It is also possible to read the filial order as granting women equality in the light that her household activities were worthy of moksha, the highest aim of human life as per the tradition that housed it.
De demonstrates how Binodini Dasi is enabled by the Indian Evidence Act and the Indian Contract Act and asks for a contract. The point is that, narrative moments such as these “dismantle the dominant filiative or paternalistic national order of family life” (p 71). Through her literary choices, Binodini Dasi is seen as “attentive to some of those indigenous practices of autonomy vis-à-vis community which emerge from different personal struggles for survival amidst uneven change” (p 72). Thus, Binodini Dasi not only emerges as agentic, she is also communicating and building communities in unexpected ways as she engages with enlightenment vocabulary. De’s conclusions on agency do not locate subversion alone, but allow for greater complexity. De recognises another key issue – where does the agency of the activist scholar come from? Thus the discussion of agency is nuanced and students of history will find this relevant.
Throughout the book, De notes the usage of traditional concepts such as self-advaita monism and bhakti. Her recognition of spirituality and the agency arising from it furthers that of Dipesh Chakrabarthy and is novel, but it could have been pursued more fully so that her analysis may have explained another figure from the period, Rashasundari Devi, who taught herself to read, to read the Chaitanya Bhagabat. De reads the Manusmriti as an authoritative text that codifies Hindu law prescribing women to be chaste and submissive. However, scholars have argued that this text is not authoritative and does not represent law. De could have responded to such scholars; she could reassess this aspect of her thesis, which is in reality, an assumption that affects the identification of change with the onset of modernity.
In Chapter Two, “Nation and Individuation: Manhood and the Aesthetics of Female Desire”, De reads Tagore as an aesthetic activist who developed an aesthetic response to European civil society by offering contesting desires and imaginations. In his woman-centred works, Tagore does not merely reject the nationalist themes of motherhood but engages with them to produce a wide array of characters that is every woman and also human. De situates Tagore’s version of humanism in opposition to “postcolonial models which take the anti-Enlightenment position to be a solid foundation for all readings of the Indian modern self”. This ensures that the theoretical inconsistencies that could have resulted from viewing modern institutions as exclusively detrimental are avoided. This also does not rule out, as far as I can see, an interesting thesis of “continuation” of history from precolonial preoccupations. While distinguishing Tagore’s notion of reform from that of Vivekananda’s, De is able to nuance the picture; she points out the differences in Vivekananda’s speeches in India and the West. De also contrasts Saratchandra Chatterjee, characterising him as a Hindu/Victorian nationalist writer, to Tagore’s character Malati from Ordinary Girl who “wants to be represented as a woman on the path to success…such that she is able to compete with her liberated European rivals” (p 89).Chitrangada, another work of Tagore is read to conclude that the work “refuses to reduce personal autonomy to atomism” (p 104). In retaining the different paths that Tagore’s different women characters follow, once shaking the filiative order and once engaging with it through humanism, De says she practises a “realistic textual approach” that does not reduce texts into singular and linear strands.
Chapter Three “Autonomy as Reproductive Labour: The Neoliberal Woman and the Visual Networks of Empire” begins with an analysis of Amra (We), a telefilm to show that “Amra is one among the large number of feminist stories in circulation today which finds no conflict between a woman’s autonomy and her feminine roles as a self-sacrificing homemaker and a (son’s) mother” (p 117). Core enlightenment concepts of personhood and autonomy are seen as extending themselves into the unlikely roles of motherhood and the feminine self-sacrificing woman.
Canons of Womanhood
Examining the relationship between canons and hegemony, De concludes that “two contradictory canons of Indian womanhood – the woman with choice and the woman with familial obligations – are currently gathering aesthetic capital amidst Indians worldwide” (p 119). She views the contradiction as “opposite poles of the sexual division of labour under the neoliberal global market” (p 121) that although being the product of a local imagination intersects with the located histories of empire and liberation. Through an analysis of one adaptation of Tagore’s Raktakarabi(Red Oleanders) staged in the US, De touches themes of immigrant life, identity, sexuality and individualism, recording their trajectories and changes. She then reads Chandalika, a Kuchipudi dance drama, compares it with Tagore’s portrayals of the desiring woman to conclude that it resolves the conflict that Tagore produces.
Chapter Four “Agency under Networks: Belonging and Privacy in Feminist Visual Culture”, in the context of “a person’s range of choices…curiously homogenised” (p 151) asks if the visual images that uphold this make the indigenous activist-intellectual “refuse the humanist ethic of choice in favour, say, of a non-subjective ethic of self-surrender drawn from the indigenous past?” De answers in the negative citing that “the comparatively fluid non-subjective selves of precapitalist Indian society are unavailable today in their form – that is unmediated by some variety or another of modern self-reflexivity” (p 152). While this is largely true, not all historians would accept that every look at texts from India’s past has to necessarily suffer from anachronism.
De, next, points out the two-fold agenda for feminist intellectuals, especially since they are faced with the “deployment of ‘Hindu’ values by communal and misogynist nationalists” (p 152) which is mapped through an analysis of Chandalika. First, they must choose life-paths unmediated by neo-liberal patriarchal canons of feminine choice and then break apart available beguiling yet mortified imagery of women’s self-development such that the gendered contradictions beneath are exposed.
In contrast to Tagore, we are told, today’s feminists articulate women’s agency through the practical activities they engage in and critically think through the social frameworks that have been defined since the inception of anti-colonial modernity. De chooses to show how the work of Aparna Sen and Manjusri Chaki-Sircar break out of the specular gaze on women’s autonomy. Manjusri dialectically interweaves "the humanist relationship of an autonomous self with community into the pre-modern Hindu conception of ‘dividual’ personhood, which assumes that the person is both psychologically and biologically open to nature and the cosmos” (p 156).
De’s reading seems to assert that the pre-colonial notion herein, is employed at the service of a feminist agenda. Instead, it could very well be the other way round. That is, De may be under-estimating the potential held in precolonial, non-pure, non-subjective traditions. In this context, we could say that the book does not address works on gender and religion that address some of the issues, by neither reducing the traditions nor their understanding to those who use them. Some of De’s arguments appear to be justifications provided for feminism in retrospect, this is also her stated aim, yes, but they could be attributions of feminist intentions while indeed they are merely cultural responses mired inevitably in responding to, the contemporary “nature and cosmos” so to speak. The project of rescuing feminism takes up more of her energy, instead of which she could have expanded the scope of her project. A transcultural process similar to that of Sircar’s is noted in Aparna Sen’s films as well. The chapter concludes by calling for an awareness of “enabling teleologies of our political economy” that “can reroute humane alternatives and recolonise autonomy” (p196).
Enlightenment Critiques
While De’s portrayal of cultural activists as “not perfect but rather conflicted transhistorical thinkers” is very agreeable, her insistence that “None other than this speculative idea of autonomous worth can enable the fight for sexual justice within heterosexual and patriarchal frameworks” could meet with disagreement. Especially since she maintains that “indigenous activist-intellectuals” cannot but invest in the Enlightenment’s gendered ethic of the autonomous person. The disagreement could take the following form: delineating an indigenous response to Enlightenment ideas is valuable, but at the same time, a critique of enlightenment ideas in their own context as well as elsewhere is necessary. For instance, enlightenment ideas incorporated many aspects of the west’s historical developments; they were in response to Christianity and its interaction with pagan traditions. Hence, how such ideas merit an indigenous response in a different cultural context and how those are agentic in the true sense are questions that need to be pursued some more.
Also, in order to more fully delink the idea of the autonomous individual from the Western Empire, a more textured and layered history of the west may need to be written. In fact, the thinkers that postcolonial thought depends heavily upon are Foucault and Derrida, who provide a critique of the philosophical trajectories of the west while viewing each of its aspects as linked to and manifest in others. Recall Foucault’s works on the prison, the hospital, the church and so on.
De’s book will immediately appeal to those scholars who have believed in the independence of the arguments of a Vivekananda, Gandhi, Tagore, Savarkar or Ambedkar and visualise a multiplicity of responses from the colonised to the coloniser: collaboration, resistance, rejection, acceptance, awe, shock, intrigue and so on. Like Javeed Alam, who argues in India: Living with Modernity, that modernity can be separated from its tangled history to be used for bringing about a socially just society, De views autonomy as a precious tool we must never forego.
Review of The Gift of a Bride
Nanda, Serena & Joan Young Gregg
2009 The Gift of a Bride: A Tale of Anthropology, Matrimony, and Murder. Lanham, Maryland: AltaMira Press.
Notes: 295 p. ; 23 cm. ISBN: 9780759111493
Reviewed 31 Jan 2013 by:
Sushumna Kannan <[email protected]>
San Diego State University, San Diego, California, USA
Medium:Written Literature
Subject Keywords:East Indians (New York, United States); Anthropology Fiction; Diaspora India; Arranged Marriage; Violence Against Women; Indian Family
ABSTRACT: Set in India and the United States, this provocative and substantive novel provides a serious look at the Indian diaspora and how women are mistreated sometimes violently within patriarchal societies.
This book is located at the cusp of anthropology and gender studies. More interestingly, it does a cross-over act between a textbook and a novel. It incorporates the character of an anthropology professor, Julie, in a fictional university to voice the gender-related concerns of the Indian diaspora in the USA. Through Julie and her interactions, a comparative view of both American and Indian cultures emerges in a variety of hues. The plot revolves around Anjali, a newly married Indian woman, her move to the U.S. along with her husband, and the challenges she faces as a young bride in a joint family and in a different culture. By the end of the novel, Anjali is murdered at the direction of her mother-in-law and other crimes and criminals are revealed. While the experimental nature of this book is praiseworthy, two things need our attention—the theoretical beliefs of the authors and believability of the characters in it. Only towards the end of the book do the authors state some of their theoretical beliefs overtly: "We hope that our story will broaden the understanding of all our readers—students, social work and law enforcement personnel, and the professional and volunteer staffs of supportive agencies for women—about the issue of violence against women in all its forms and how it can more effectively be addressed" (p. 293), and we cannot miss their awareness-raising intention. And although the book does offer theories of various phenomena--patriarchy, power, and domestic violence, its consideration of social workers and supportive agencies brings it closer to a practical approach to the problem of violence against women. This approach is close to the spirit of feminists everywhere, including Indian feminists who are, both in their theorizing and ‘doing,’ practice-based.
The major setting of the book—the arranged marriage—is a very worthy subject for exploration since this persisting institution is often severely critiqued and dismissed by the west as embodying choicelessness. The arranged marriage is perhaps a contemporary substitute for a practice like sati and causes the kind of outrage that sati previously invoked. It is possibly a dominant and current, Orientalist image of cultures like the Indian. By choosing to depict a couple who married through the arranged route, and giving a voice to the bride about why she allowed it, The Gift of a Bride manages to break the hostile response this subject generally receives. The western reader is introduced to the amount of choice the groom (despite his mother’s reservations) and bride exercise quite realistically, and is shown that marriages are fixed through websites of late. We see the anthropologist, Julie, mulling over how her own views on arranged marriage had changed over the years. She rightly recognizes the huge risks a young couple would bear if they married for love. Such contextualizations provide the reader a checkered picture of life in India and its diaspora. The book rightly records how, in the case of the diaspora, marriages are often arranged with great speed, leading to particular kinds of complications and images in the minds of those involved.
However, the book fails to deconstruct 'choice' in all its complexity and as it would make sense within an Indian family. Choice, in this analysis, it seems, is outside the context itself. For instance, when Julie concludes thus, "Or perhaps marriage as an ideal forces an awful lot of big feet into glass slippers never meant for everyone" (p.67), she is not really attempting to further understand the usefulness of marriage as an institution or the values it represents in some cultures. Choice instead could also be seen as something one makes within the constraints of one’s circumstances and culture. This has been argued by feminists themselves in other discussions. But here, the lead character seems harassed from beginning to end in different sorts of ways and appears more victimized than a well-theorized understanding of choice would allow. Perhaps such a narrative is an extreme event within the changing times all tradition-bound societies are indeed going through.
The 'gift of a bride' (or kanyadaana) is both the title and an image in the book. Kanyadaana is taken to imply that daughters are seen as giftable and that this is unjust for women. However, this could only be a somewhat literal understanding. I say this because the larger context of the self-effacing nature of the gift-giver and the gift-receiver, and their respective duties in traditional Indian culture of which marriage rituals are a part, is entirely missed. The traditional contexts of self-effacement and gifting have given way to some modern beliefs that often only lead to great confusion. Violence against women, however, is a harsh reality, even if there are no traditionally sanctioned justifications for it. An understanding of violence does not require a source outside women at all. Violence can be identified merely by listening to women’s voices and valuing their experiences. And it is in this context that what the book finally achieves is of importance. It gives a voice to women, different women and invokes scenarios of tradition and modernity that play out in India and adds another dimension by relocating them in yet another culture. Thus, different timeframes and cultural practices meet and allow readers/students to question, ponder, and get creative, especially within a classroom atmosphere.
A second theoretical belief in the book, and one that I find to be simplistic, relates to the clarification that Julie offers her class about the Indian goddess Kali. A student raises questions and a believable scenario is painted, in which Julie responds: "one of the important ways we learn about the gender ideology in any society is to look at how men and women are portrayed in mythology, religion, and folktales" (p. 18). This, although not entirely misplaced, is a somewhat problematic statement. It mixes non-historical texts with life in India in a direct way, overlooking the numerous layers of mediation that makes texts, especially those that are mythological and religious. Further, this approach even leads to textualization of cultures, something that also occurs in Orientalist readings. A theoretical belief different from the one in the quote would allow one to view texts as not mere witnesses to one's cultures but as also embodying a particular way of thinking within it. In not doing this, the book I think, retains a touch of the old anthropological approach, with its given methods and set ways of reading. And although the authors in their note write that cultures are never static, this understanding, it seems, is not borne out in the content of the novel.
The book, nevertheless, captures many other aspects of India’s diaspora culture precisely; for instance, the relational nature of the self within India. The relevance of family connections in India is explained well: "without those a couple would be completely dependent on only one other person for personal happiness" (p. 67). Through accurate contextualization, it reveals the kind of power that is wielded by women in specific roles, ages and domains. The mother-in-law, for instance, does wield power because of her seniority. And some women are powerful in the private domain and never can be in the public domain. The multiple mediations of patriarchy are not missed by the book since it addresses the contradictions in Indian society, with female Prime Ministers and Goddess worship, yet relatively very low status for common women.
The book rightly recognizes the role of filial piety within the Indian family. The Indian family usually does put the daughter-in-law in awkward situations since she is always expected to make adjustments for the others in the family. Thus, a craving for the mother’s house where she was once free and relatively equal is a commonly found nostalgia in India. This nostalgia is complicated in Anjali’s case by her residence in the US; she misses her parents and the familiar culture. The book thus deconstructs the rosy picture that many young brides and brides-to-be have of a life in America. In contrast, the plot brings out how "The boys have it so much easier than the girls. That’s why so many boys agree to an arranged marriage, especially with a girl from India" (p. 139).
That Anjali’s parents-in-law hold custody of her jewelry and incessantly expect her loyalty and submission to her new family, amounts to an oppressive atmosphere at home, is subtly brought out. The book brings to light the fact that even when in the West, the Indian community displays conformity to gender roles wherein "men dominate both the household and the community, while women mostly play domestic roles and care for the children" and "Immigrant women, especially, also play a central role in maintaining and transmitting Indian culture to the next generation" (p.32). This arrangement leads to women’s inability to protest effectively against domestic violence. They also face severe criticism by the community if they attempt to leave the husband and are mostly rejected at their parental home. Through Ruma, the social worker, the book asks us to see that "domestic violence destroys not just families but whole communities" (p. 36).
In general, the book speaks to those cultural aspects mystified by the Western eye and offers clarifications. For instance, the difference in styles of dressing and outfits depicted through Anjali’s initial hesitation is remarkable (see p.151). A brief discussion of Hijab much earlier also discusses why women of a minority community tend to dress more traditionally when located in the West. The discussion of Anjali’s dressing in India is also very interesting, since it almost suggests that she had greater freedom with regard to that, in India than she does in the US. This is so, because she has to conform to the American way of dressing, while in India she could have dressed in jeans or churidars with equal comfort.
The book also presents multiples perspectives on each issue and verbalizes the internal logic of the characters from the perspective of that culture. Thus, the "host society’s cultural stereotypes and power structures that also bear on the subject of violence against women, both within and outside the family" (p. 293) are captured well. Equally importantly, the book is sensitive to the recent changes occurring within both Indian society and its diaspora community. It records that second marriages are more easily acceptable, men who earlier never set foot in the Kitchen do so now, and young brides yearn for the intimacy with their husbands that characterized marital affection in the West and so on.
"Although our novel is an informed fiction, it is fiction" (p. 293) write the authors. When assessed as such, The Gift of a Bride, can evoke different impressions in the minds of the readers. Indeed, the writing is sometimes very direct and more text-bookish than would suit such a work. There is not much scope for the imagination of the reader, although there are lengthy descriptive passages. The presence of an anthropologist who interviews people and a social worker made to speak quite literally could be seen as a strong point and a weakness. Seen in another way, academic work passing off as fiction is not unproblematic. It can invoke dangerous assumptions about its method and theory, while its narrative could appear merely politically correct. However, there are also times when the expectations and hopes of the characters are well-presented. But then, this book is designed for a classroom quite explicitly, so should we even apply the criteria for evaluating a good work of fiction here? This is a question that each reader must answer for herself. On a more serious note, we could look at the book as a depiction of theory influencing life, and vice versa, and the thin lines we tread when we speak of society, reality, truth and concepts, and their references.
The book’s experimental nature is also testimony to the changes anthropology as a discipline has seen; its methodological self-reflexivity and the way it has questioned itself with great vigor. The shift from informant to interlocutor is duly recorded. The book could also be seen as capturing the erosion of disciplinary boundaries that the more effective analysis of subject matter has prompted.
The murder mystery in the plot is maintained well towards the end, with subtle clues offered every now and then, keeping the reader hooked. It is this that gives life to the book as a work of fiction. Advantages include the careful and slow engagement with a culture, even as the reader finds herself right in the middle of the culture. The anthropologist is made to think aloud, voice her doubts, verify her facts, and even rework her assumptions. In other words, this book shows an anthropologist at work, and in this sense, this is a how-to book. It even takes learning about a culture through stories to a new level. Readers will find it enamoring to read a novel in order to learn about a culture.
Ethnography when presented in the form of fiction also allows for wider speculation by the reader which is the most useful result of the book. The purpose of the book, I think, is defeated if it is used as a textbook that only presents the 'reality' of another culture. It should instead be seen as an account of possible instances of how oppression could occur within a particular set of cultural beliefs. A useful list of sources and "points for discussion" at the end of the book will facilitate lay readers and students alike. This book explains Indians to Americans, by showing what comes to them as culture shocks when they migrate to the west (America’s individualism for one). The book is helpful to Indians as well because it speaks of what the West thinks of 'other' cultures. But with its Western setting, the book is best-suited for the American-student. The book provides a good pretext for an elaborate classroom discussion of a whole host of issues related to culture, gender, violence against women, marriage, and the comparative study of cultures.
To cite this review, the American Anthropological Association recommends the following style:
Kannan, Sushumna. 2013 Review of The Gift of a Bride: A Tale of Anthropology, Matrimony, and Murder. Anthropology Review Database January 31, 2013. http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=3784, accessed January 31, 2013.
Published in Anthropology Review Database, 31.1.2013
2009 The Gift of a Bride: A Tale of Anthropology, Matrimony, and Murder. Lanham, Maryland: AltaMira Press.
Notes: 295 p. ; 23 cm. ISBN: 9780759111493
Reviewed 31 Jan 2013 by:
Sushumna Kannan <[email protected]>
San Diego State University, San Diego, California, USA
Medium:Written Literature
Subject Keywords:East Indians (New York, United States); Anthropology Fiction; Diaspora India; Arranged Marriage; Violence Against Women; Indian Family
ABSTRACT: Set in India and the United States, this provocative and substantive novel provides a serious look at the Indian diaspora and how women are mistreated sometimes violently within patriarchal societies.
This book is located at the cusp of anthropology and gender studies. More interestingly, it does a cross-over act between a textbook and a novel. It incorporates the character of an anthropology professor, Julie, in a fictional university to voice the gender-related concerns of the Indian diaspora in the USA. Through Julie and her interactions, a comparative view of both American and Indian cultures emerges in a variety of hues. The plot revolves around Anjali, a newly married Indian woman, her move to the U.S. along with her husband, and the challenges she faces as a young bride in a joint family and in a different culture. By the end of the novel, Anjali is murdered at the direction of her mother-in-law and other crimes and criminals are revealed. While the experimental nature of this book is praiseworthy, two things need our attention—the theoretical beliefs of the authors and believability of the characters in it. Only towards the end of the book do the authors state some of their theoretical beliefs overtly: "We hope that our story will broaden the understanding of all our readers—students, social work and law enforcement personnel, and the professional and volunteer staffs of supportive agencies for women—about the issue of violence against women in all its forms and how it can more effectively be addressed" (p. 293), and we cannot miss their awareness-raising intention. And although the book does offer theories of various phenomena--patriarchy, power, and domestic violence, its consideration of social workers and supportive agencies brings it closer to a practical approach to the problem of violence against women. This approach is close to the spirit of feminists everywhere, including Indian feminists who are, both in their theorizing and ‘doing,’ practice-based.
The major setting of the book—the arranged marriage—is a very worthy subject for exploration since this persisting institution is often severely critiqued and dismissed by the west as embodying choicelessness. The arranged marriage is perhaps a contemporary substitute for a practice like sati and causes the kind of outrage that sati previously invoked. It is possibly a dominant and current, Orientalist image of cultures like the Indian. By choosing to depict a couple who married through the arranged route, and giving a voice to the bride about why she allowed it, The Gift of a Bride manages to break the hostile response this subject generally receives. The western reader is introduced to the amount of choice the groom (despite his mother’s reservations) and bride exercise quite realistically, and is shown that marriages are fixed through websites of late. We see the anthropologist, Julie, mulling over how her own views on arranged marriage had changed over the years. She rightly recognizes the huge risks a young couple would bear if they married for love. Such contextualizations provide the reader a checkered picture of life in India and its diaspora. The book rightly records how, in the case of the diaspora, marriages are often arranged with great speed, leading to particular kinds of complications and images in the minds of those involved.
However, the book fails to deconstruct 'choice' in all its complexity and as it would make sense within an Indian family. Choice, in this analysis, it seems, is outside the context itself. For instance, when Julie concludes thus, "Or perhaps marriage as an ideal forces an awful lot of big feet into glass slippers never meant for everyone" (p.67), she is not really attempting to further understand the usefulness of marriage as an institution or the values it represents in some cultures. Choice instead could also be seen as something one makes within the constraints of one’s circumstances and culture. This has been argued by feminists themselves in other discussions. But here, the lead character seems harassed from beginning to end in different sorts of ways and appears more victimized than a well-theorized understanding of choice would allow. Perhaps such a narrative is an extreme event within the changing times all tradition-bound societies are indeed going through.
The 'gift of a bride' (or kanyadaana) is both the title and an image in the book. Kanyadaana is taken to imply that daughters are seen as giftable and that this is unjust for women. However, this could only be a somewhat literal understanding. I say this because the larger context of the self-effacing nature of the gift-giver and the gift-receiver, and their respective duties in traditional Indian culture of which marriage rituals are a part, is entirely missed. The traditional contexts of self-effacement and gifting have given way to some modern beliefs that often only lead to great confusion. Violence against women, however, is a harsh reality, even if there are no traditionally sanctioned justifications for it. An understanding of violence does not require a source outside women at all. Violence can be identified merely by listening to women’s voices and valuing their experiences. And it is in this context that what the book finally achieves is of importance. It gives a voice to women, different women and invokes scenarios of tradition and modernity that play out in India and adds another dimension by relocating them in yet another culture. Thus, different timeframes and cultural practices meet and allow readers/students to question, ponder, and get creative, especially within a classroom atmosphere.
A second theoretical belief in the book, and one that I find to be simplistic, relates to the clarification that Julie offers her class about the Indian goddess Kali. A student raises questions and a believable scenario is painted, in which Julie responds: "one of the important ways we learn about the gender ideology in any society is to look at how men and women are portrayed in mythology, religion, and folktales" (p. 18). This, although not entirely misplaced, is a somewhat problematic statement. It mixes non-historical texts with life in India in a direct way, overlooking the numerous layers of mediation that makes texts, especially those that are mythological and religious. Further, this approach even leads to textualization of cultures, something that also occurs in Orientalist readings. A theoretical belief different from the one in the quote would allow one to view texts as not mere witnesses to one's cultures but as also embodying a particular way of thinking within it. In not doing this, the book I think, retains a touch of the old anthropological approach, with its given methods and set ways of reading. And although the authors in their note write that cultures are never static, this understanding, it seems, is not borne out in the content of the novel.
The book, nevertheless, captures many other aspects of India’s diaspora culture precisely; for instance, the relational nature of the self within India. The relevance of family connections in India is explained well: "without those a couple would be completely dependent on only one other person for personal happiness" (p. 67). Through accurate contextualization, it reveals the kind of power that is wielded by women in specific roles, ages and domains. The mother-in-law, for instance, does wield power because of her seniority. And some women are powerful in the private domain and never can be in the public domain. The multiple mediations of patriarchy are not missed by the book since it addresses the contradictions in Indian society, with female Prime Ministers and Goddess worship, yet relatively very low status for common women.
The book rightly recognizes the role of filial piety within the Indian family. The Indian family usually does put the daughter-in-law in awkward situations since she is always expected to make adjustments for the others in the family. Thus, a craving for the mother’s house where she was once free and relatively equal is a commonly found nostalgia in India. This nostalgia is complicated in Anjali’s case by her residence in the US; she misses her parents and the familiar culture. The book thus deconstructs the rosy picture that many young brides and brides-to-be have of a life in America. In contrast, the plot brings out how "The boys have it so much easier than the girls. That’s why so many boys agree to an arranged marriage, especially with a girl from India" (p. 139).
That Anjali’s parents-in-law hold custody of her jewelry and incessantly expect her loyalty and submission to her new family, amounts to an oppressive atmosphere at home, is subtly brought out. The book brings to light the fact that even when in the West, the Indian community displays conformity to gender roles wherein "men dominate both the household and the community, while women mostly play domestic roles and care for the children" and "Immigrant women, especially, also play a central role in maintaining and transmitting Indian culture to the next generation" (p.32). This arrangement leads to women’s inability to protest effectively against domestic violence. They also face severe criticism by the community if they attempt to leave the husband and are mostly rejected at their parental home. Through Ruma, the social worker, the book asks us to see that "domestic violence destroys not just families but whole communities" (p. 36).
In general, the book speaks to those cultural aspects mystified by the Western eye and offers clarifications. For instance, the difference in styles of dressing and outfits depicted through Anjali’s initial hesitation is remarkable (see p.151). A brief discussion of Hijab much earlier also discusses why women of a minority community tend to dress more traditionally when located in the West. The discussion of Anjali’s dressing in India is also very interesting, since it almost suggests that she had greater freedom with regard to that, in India than she does in the US. This is so, because she has to conform to the American way of dressing, while in India she could have dressed in jeans or churidars with equal comfort.
The book also presents multiples perspectives on each issue and verbalizes the internal logic of the characters from the perspective of that culture. Thus, the "host society’s cultural stereotypes and power structures that also bear on the subject of violence against women, both within and outside the family" (p. 293) are captured well. Equally importantly, the book is sensitive to the recent changes occurring within both Indian society and its diaspora community. It records that second marriages are more easily acceptable, men who earlier never set foot in the Kitchen do so now, and young brides yearn for the intimacy with their husbands that characterized marital affection in the West and so on.
"Although our novel is an informed fiction, it is fiction" (p. 293) write the authors. When assessed as such, The Gift of a Bride, can evoke different impressions in the minds of the readers. Indeed, the writing is sometimes very direct and more text-bookish than would suit such a work. There is not much scope for the imagination of the reader, although there are lengthy descriptive passages. The presence of an anthropologist who interviews people and a social worker made to speak quite literally could be seen as a strong point and a weakness. Seen in another way, academic work passing off as fiction is not unproblematic. It can invoke dangerous assumptions about its method and theory, while its narrative could appear merely politically correct. However, there are also times when the expectations and hopes of the characters are well-presented. But then, this book is designed for a classroom quite explicitly, so should we even apply the criteria for evaluating a good work of fiction here? This is a question that each reader must answer for herself. On a more serious note, we could look at the book as a depiction of theory influencing life, and vice versa, and the thin lines we tread when we speak of society, reality, truth and concepts, and their references.
The book’s experimental nature is also testimony to the changes anthropology as a discipline has seen; its methodological self-reflexivity and the way it has questioned itself with great vigor. The shift from informant to interlocutor is duly recorded. The book could also be seen as capturing the erosion of disciplinary boundaries that the more effective analysis of subject matter has prompted.
The murder mystery in the plot is maintained well towards the end, with subtle clues offered every now and then, keeping the reader hooked. It is this that gives life to the book as a work of fiction. Advantages include the careful and slow engagement with a culture, even as the reader finds herself right in the middle of the culture. The anthropologist is made to think aloud, voice her doubts, verify her facts, and even rework her assumptions. In other words, this book shows an anthropologist at work, and in this sense, this is a how-to book. It even takes learning about a culture through stories to a new level. Readers will find it enamoring to read a novel in order to learn about a culture.
Ethnography when presented in the form of fiction also allows for wider speculation by the reader which is the most useful result of the book. The purpose of the book, I think, is defeated if it is used as a textbook that only presents the 'reality' of another culture. It should instead be seen as an account of possible instances of how oppression could occur within a particular set of cultural beliefs. A useful list of sources and "points for discussion" at the end of the book will facilitate lay readers and students alike. This book explains Indians to Americans, by showing what comes to them as culture shocks when they migrate to the west (America’s individualism for one). The book is helpful to Indians as well because it speaks of what the West thinks of 'other' cultures. But with its Western setting, the book is best-suited for the American-student. The book provides a good pretext for an elaborate classroom discussion of a whole host of issues related to culture, gender, violence against women, marriage, and the comparative study of cultures.
To cite this review, the American Anthropological Association recommends the following style:
Kannan, Sushumna. 2013 Review of The Gift of a Bride: A Tale of Anthropology, Matrimony, and Murder. Anthropology Review Database January 31, 2013. http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=3784, accessed January 31, 2013.
Published in Anthropology Review Database, 31.1.2013
Review of Prithaviyallodagida Ghatavu…Karnatakada Ninnegalu
Excerpt: Prithviyallodagida Ghatavu presents an interesting history of Karnataka in 4 succinct chapters. It is interesting for both the new findings and the flowing, accessible style of writing. The author's Kannada is indeed enjoyable and just the title is enough to enthrall us on that count. Manu Devadevan looks critically at earlier historians and their work and contemplates the process of history-writing. He sees each period of time as marked by a certain intellectual fervor under which people function, which then needs to be probed into by the historian. This, he insists, needs to be done if we are to know how we have come to be what we are. Devadevan distances himself from the several ideological schools of history-writing and sees historical materialism and the study of meaning production as the only method worth using. All chapters provide such theoretical clarifications keeping the reader interested.
Review: Prithviyallodagida Ghatavu presents an interesting history of Karnataka in 4 succinct chapters. It is interesting for both the new findings and the flowing, accessible style of writing. The author’s Kannada is indeed enjoyable and just the title is enough to enthrall us on that count. Manu Devadevan looks critically at earlier historians and their work and contemplates the process of history-writing. He sees each period of time as marked by a certain intellectual fervor under which people function, which then needs to be probed into by the historian. This, he insists, needs to be done if we are to know how we have come to be what we are. Devadevan distances himself from the several ideological schools of history-writing and sees historical materialism and the study of meaning production as the only method worth using. All chapters provide such theoretical clarifications keeping the reader interested. Extraordinary story-telling skills allow for a smooth transition from chapter to chapter, and sometimes even manage to keep us on the edge.
Devadevan’s expertise in several languages shows, and has been put to good use in this book: he makes some interesting connections with words across several south Indian languages and their etymological origins and draws conclusions about the relationships they indicate. He relates the histories of some communities to the present taking us along a journey of changing words and this makes for a very interesting read (community histories of Solankis, Gaurs and others, Pg 32). But one doesn't know how seriously the presence or absence of words should be made to stand as evidence for an interaction between regions and their languages. Devadevan just says, that there began an interaction between languages which triggered new intellectual systems. While this is an interesting way of seeing India’s past, especially since we tend to think that the linguistic division of states brought about a divisiveness in a unified India, more detail is required for us to believe Devadevan’s thesis. We are not told exactly how or why such interactions led to newer intellectual systems. Or perhaps there is something here to do with the historian’s domain that needs to be clarified, that a person trained in cultural studies, such as I, cannot clearly see.
The Territory Thesis:
Devadevan proposes a thesis about territories aiming to show to us that there was an interaction between the different regions of India. What is achieved by such a thesis is not very clear. He also sees a later development where chieftaincies become states (pg 20) and tells us of their hierarchical nature. The Natyashastra mentions regions therefore there were regions, we are told. Similarly, just the mention of Magadha, Kosala and Avanti (pg 12) in texts makes him propose the existence of states. There is just not enough evidence and much is unconvincing here. Then again he begins by talking of production relations which were lineage-centered or “kin-based” (pg 12) and goes on to talk of their changes, but not enough proof is presented to establish either what existed or how it changed. Devadevan differentiates between identity issues/problems as we talk of them today (which he sees as very recent) from those of the territorial interactions. Although this is a very interesting theoretical and historical differentiation, it suffers from lack of substantiation with regard to the historical territorial interactions and their significance.
The Power Thesis:
Devadevan also gives us a power thesis. He tells us that texts like Ramayana were given importance because of the prevalent divine rights system. Why is it not the other way round? And why is it that for Devadevan, kavya goes for history? Devadevan historically traces the relationship between kavya and power through the book. This is a very redundant reading. It simply assumes that all of history was a quest for power and excludes any notion of the everyday. While a lot of scholars use texts like the Manusmriti and Shatapatha Brahmana to show India’s past as degenerate, Devadevan uses them to draw very mundane conclusions. This is a surprise, but in itself there is no particular virtue in approaching these texts in a value-neutral way. I say this, because the greater problem persists: how do we know that these texts represented the life and society of their times? How can the complex relationship between life and literature be estimated?
It is as if every piece of text is automatically ‘evidence’ for the historian. What I see in Devadevan is a proud belief (and I see this in most historians) that whatever relics or texts are available today are enough to write a history of India; and this, even when we know that thousands of texts have been lost to us forever. Why is it so difficult to admit --“we don’t know and possibly cannot know?” Have we indeed become so dependent on finding a narrative that should explain all of us? Have we become like the west, ignoring the virtues of forgetting that we once practiced, aspects of which Ashis Nandy reminds us in his essay, “History’s Forgotten Doubles”?
If the itihasa-purana tradition is seen as historically true here, then several questions need to be asked. What of the Buddhist sources that Devadevan is referring to, let’s say, the Jataka tales? What happens to the reincarnation story that gets narrated at the beginning and end of each tale? Does reincarnation get the value of historical truth or not? Traveler’s accounts, kavyas, puranas and dharmashatra texts share the same space and receive the same analysis, how? It would have been helpful if Devadevan provided exact references each time he referred to “Bauddhara krUtigaLu” (Buddhist writings, Pg 12).
The Divine Rights System:
Devadevan classifies certain periods of Karnataka’s past as one where the king was seen as divine/god. Descriptions of ‘devate’ and ‘arasu’ are very similar, he says. I am not sure why that cannot be? He uses Manusmriti and Arthashastra to draw conclusions about state formation because, he says, they contain notions of chakravarti (pg 21). Evidence in this context is very shaky, he seems to be saying: kavya texts mention divine rights; therefore there were divine rights (pg 46)! Devadevan provides instances of the King’s security guards burning themselves or committing suicide upon the King’s death, he refers to this as ‘prabhu nishthe’ and possibly takes from Foucault’s work for the further analyses he provides. But it would be far more beneficial if the “divine rights” system was seen as revealing something about our gods, instead of concluding that we had a strong system of sovereignty. The question to ask here is about the epistemological value of the gods. What I instead see Devadevan as doing is this: comparing one object/practice of a culture to a similar one in a different culture and concluding that the object/practice of the latter culture is same as the former’s. This constitutes being anachronistic, but more importantly there is no guarantee that the same object/practice is ‘related to’ in the same way in a different culture. The same mistake is made when he identifies the state-religion/temple/priest nexus in Karnataka’s past. The question we really need to ask is: what kind of state did we have in India’s past, and also, did we even have one? Whereas, all that Devadevan is doing is, writing the history of Karnataka by overwriting it upon the history of the west: and a protestant history of the west at that. Looking back to find what we want is a temptation every historian must resist. Unfortunately, Devadevan only succumbs to it. The State-religion/temple/priest nexus is simply a history of the west. It is a framework through which the west has seen us, judged us and written histories of us. Why would Devadevan produce yet another Orientalist history? Couldn’t the sovereignty-like practices found in India’s past be a product of the traditional value attached to self-effacing, to selfless service? Why or how do we know, that it does not come from the same sentiment that asks to be crushed underneath the chariot of Puri Jagannatha? Why is it not similar to the bhakta’s yearning to be killed by her/his beloved god/dess?
A Partial (Secular) history?:
Devadevan offers an interesting take on the vachanas when he says that they are part of a deeksha tradition and only therefore do not care for caste or gender. The question that remains however is: who gives deeksha and how, and what knowledge is it that one is being initiated into? But this question does not seem to be of interest to the author at all. For all practical purposes, he is writing a secular history of Karnataka. So then, how does deeksha fit in, how do the related miracles and prophecies fit in? These questions remain unanswered and I am not sure if Devadevan even sees them as valid questions. And without considering these questions valid, Devadevan’s proposition about the vachanakaras being a part of the deeksha tradition, although interesting, reads like a surface-level claim with no serious intellectual investment in the tradition or its philosophy.
On pg 54, Devadevan points out, that scholars have unnecessarily exoticised “rta” of the Rigveda and says that it instead simply means “prakrutiya taala” or rhythm of nature. He says rta (as rhythm of nature) which is mentioned many more times than dharma is to be found because of the undeveloped agricultural society of the times. We do not know why we should believe this. It just seems like a bad reading of a tradition that might have indeed taken nature’s order of things into account while denying mankind's perceived agency. Such trivializing readings of the Indian traditions will remind the reader of Wendy Doniger’s work where everything in the Indian traditions, we are told, is about food and eating[1]. Devadevan continues by saying that what scholars see as peethas (archaeologically) are simply “rubbuva kallu” (grinding stones), nothing to do with the linga. Much justification is required if these points are to be taken seriously and it is lacking in the book as of now.
Devadevan tells us that the Vijayanagara Empire was not the golden period in Karnataka’s history; he says it was the worst because it forced people to be constantly on the move. He also tells us that Aurangzeb, along with other Muslim rulers had given gifts and grants to Shiva temples. These are new and valuable findings that other historians specializing in the period should respond to. Devadevan comes up with many such new findings through a thorough study of the archives. He is right in showing the flaws of the subaltern studies group of historians and his critique of Marxist historical analyses is valid. These critiques were long-anticipated and have reached the Kannada reader effectively through Devadevan.
Devadevan clarifies many issues to do with India’s pre-colonial past that many scholars in the social sciences don’t even see as a period worthy of study. He tells us that India wasn't feudal and that taxes started to be levied only after the 13th century; this finding resonates somewhat with Dharampal’s work on pre-colonial India and I find this point fascinating. Devadevan is again right when he says that for no reason at all, an Attimabbe (pg 56) and a Mahadeviyakka come to be seen as feminists. Devadevan, however, urges us to see India’s later confusions about love and lust, as not a result of Victorian morality but as a result of India’s own progression in terms of life and ideas. I think there is, less of probing and more naturalization of historical processes, in such an urging, but that’s a fairly big debate in History now.
Devandevan's intimate knowledge of the many Indian texts he refers to, definitely deserves, credit. The history of Karnataka he writes is often a rich mix of detailed natural-geographical descriptions, literary theoretical discussions, conceptual issues and theoretical insights, and is precious for each of these. ‘What is History?’ and such other basic questions about the discipline of History are things that Devadevan can clarify, which is a prerequisite to being a good scholar and writing a work of significance, which is what this book is.
[1] See her work on the Vedas and the Manusmriti.
Review of Prithaviyallodagida Ghatavu…Karnatakada Ninnegalu by Manu V Devadevan. Published In Journal of Karnataka Studies. Issue May 2007 - April 2008, 4-2, 5-1.
Journal link: http://journalofkarnatakastudies.org/prithviyallodagida-ghatavu-karnatakada-ninnegalu-by-manu-v-devadevan-sushumna-kannan
Review: Prithviyallodagida Ghatavu presents an interesting history of Karnataka in 4 succinct chapters. It is interesting for both the new findings and the flowing, accessible style of writing. The author’s Kannada is indeed enjoyable and just the title is enough to enthrall us on that count. Manu Devadevan looks critically at earlier historians and their work and contemplates the process of history-writing. He sees each period of time as marked by a certain intellectual fervor under which people function, which then needs to be probed into by the historian. This, he insists, needs to be done if we are to know how we have come to be what we are. Devadevan distances himself from the several ideological schools of history-writing and sees historical materialism and the study of meaning production as the only method worth using. All chapters provide such theoretical clarifications keeping the reader interested. Extraordinary story-telling skills allow for a smooth transition from chapter to chapter, and sometimes even manage to keep us on the edge.
Devadevan’s expertise in several languages shows, and has been put to good use in this book: he makes some interesting connections with words across several south Indian languages and their etymological origins and draws conclusions about the relationships they indicate. He relates the histories of some communities to the present taking us along a journey of changing words and this makes for a very interesting read (community histories of Solankis, Gaurs and others, Pg 32). But one doesn't know how seriously the presence or absence of words should be made to stand as evidence for an interaction between regions and their languages. Devadevan just says, that there began an interaction between languages which triggered new intellectual systems. While this is an interesting way of seeing India’s past, especially since we tend to think that the linguistic division of states brought about a divisiveness in a unified India, more detail is required for us to believe Devadevan’s thesis. We are not told exactly how or why such interactions led to newer intellectual systems. Or perhaps there is something here to do with the historian’s domain that needs to be clarified, that a person trained in cultural studies, such as I, cannot clearly see.
The Territory Thesis:
Devadevan proposes a thesis about territories aiming to show to us that there was an interaction between the different regions of India. What is achieved by such a thesis is not very clear. He also sees a later development where chieftaincies become states (pg 20) and tells us of their hierarchical nature. The Natyashastra mentions regions therefore there were regions, we are told. Similarly, just the mention of Magadha, Kosala and Avanti (pg 12) in texts makes him propose the existence of states. There is just not enough evidence and much is unconvincing here. Then again he begins by talking of production relations which were lineage-centered or “kin-based” (pg 12) and goes on to talk of their changes, but not enough proof is presented to establish either what existed or how it changed. Devadevan differentiates between identity issues/problems as we talk of them today (which he sees as very recent) from those of the territorial interactions. Although this is a very interesting theoretical and historical differentiation, it suffers from lack of substantiation with regard to the historical territorial interactions and their significance.
The Power Thesis:
Devadevan also gives us a power thesis. He tells us that texts like Ramayana were given importance because of the prevalent divine rights system. Why is it not the other way round? And why is it that for Devadevan, kavya goes for history? Devadevan historically traces the relationship between kavya and power through the book. This is a very redundant reading. It simply assumes that all of history was a quest for power and excludes any notion of the everyday. While a lot of scholars use texts like the Manusmriti and Shatapatha Brahmana to show India’s past as degenerate, Devadevan uses them to draw very mundane conclusions. This is a surprise, but in itself there is no particular virtue in approaching these texts in a value-neutral way. I say this, because the greater problem persists: how do we know that these texts represented the life and society of their times? How can the complex relationship between life and literature be estimated?
It is as if every piece of text is automatically ‘evidence’ for the historian. What I see in Devadevan is a proud belief (and I see this in most historians) that whatever relics or texts are available today are enough to write a history of India; and this, even when we know that thousands of texts have been lost to us forever. Why is it so difficult to admit --“we don’t know and possibly cannot know?” Have we indeed become so dependent on finding a narrative that should explain all of us? Have we become like the west, ignoring the virtues of forgetting that we once practiced, aspects of which Ashis Nandy reminds us in his essay, “History’s Forgotten Doubles”?
If the itihasa-purana tradition is seen as historically true here, then several questions need to be asked. What of the Buddhist sources that Devadevan is referring to, let’s say, the Jataka tales? What happens to the reincarnation story that gets narrated at the beginning and end of each tale? Does reincarnation get the value of historical truth or not? Traveler’s accounts, kavyas, puranas and dharmashatra texts share the same space and receive the same analysis, how? It would have been helpful if Devadevan provided exact references each time he referred to “Bauddhara krUtigaLu” (Buddhist writings, Pg 12).
The Divine Rights System:
Devadevan classifies certain periods of Karnataka’s past as one where the king was seen as divine/god. Descriptions of ‘devate’ and ‘arasu’ are very similar, he says. I am not sure why that cannot be? He uses Manusmriti and Arthashastra to draw conclusions about state formation because, he says, they contain notions of chakravarti (pg 21). Evidence in this context is very shaky, he seems to be saying: kavya texts mention divine rights; therefore there were divine rights (pg 46)! Devadevan provides instances of the King’s security guards burning themselves or committing suicide upon the King’s death, he refers to this as ‘prabhu nishthe’ and possibly takes from Foucault’s work for the further analyses he provides. But it would be far more beneficial if the “divine rights” system was seen as revealing something about our gods, instead of concluding that we had a strong system of sovereignty. The question to ask here is about the epistemological value of the gods. What I instead see Devadevan as doing is this: comparing one object/practice of a culture to a similar one in a different culture and concluding that the object/practice of the latter culture is same as the former’s. This constitutes being anachronistic, but more importantly there is no guarantee that the same object/practice is ‘related to’ in the same way in a different culture. The same mistake is made when he identifies the state-religion/temple/priest nexus in Karnataka’s past. The question we really need to ask is: what kind of state did we have in India’s past, and also, did we even have one? Whereas, all that Devadevan is doing is, writing the history of Karnataka by overwriting it upon the history of the west: and a protestant history of the west at that. Looking back to find what we want is a temptation every historian must resist. Unfortunately, Devadevan only succumbs to it. The State-religion/temple/priest nexus is simply a history of the west. It is a framework through which the west has seen us, judged us and written histories of us. Why would Devadevan produce yet another Orientalist history? Couldn’t the sovereignty-like practices found in India’s past be a product of the traditional value attached to self-effacing, to selfless service? Why or how do we know, that it does not come from the same sentiment that asks to be crushed underneath the chariot of Puri Jagannatha? Why is it not similar to the bhakta’s yearning to be killed by her/his beloved god/dess?
A Partial (Secular) history?:
Devadevan offers an interesting take on the vachanas when he says that they are part of a deeksha tradition and only therefore do not care for caste or gender. The question that remains however is: who gives deeksha and how, and what knowledge is it that one is being initiated into? But this question does not seem to be of interest to the author at all. For all practical purposes, he is writing a secular history of Karnataka. So then, how does deeksha fit in, how do the related miracles and prophecies fit in? These questions remain unanswered and I am not sure if Devadevan even sees them as valid questions. And without considering these questions valid, Devadevan’s proposition about the vachanakaras being a part of the deeksha tradition, although interesting, reads like a surface-level claim with no serious intellectual investment in the tradition or its philosophy.
On pg 54, Devadevan points out, that scholars have unnecessarily exoticised “rta” of the Rigveda and says that it instead simply means “prakrutiya taala” or rhythm of nature. He says rta (as rhythm of nature) which is mentioned many more times than dharma is to be found because of the undeveloped agricultural society of the times. We do not know why we should believe this. It just seems like a bad reading of a tradition that might have indeed taken nature’s order of things into account while denying mankind's perceived agency. Such trivializing readings of the Indian traditions will remind the reader of Wendy Doniger’s work where everything in the Indian traditions, we are told, is about food and eating[1]. Devadevan continues by saying that what scholars see as peethas (archaeologically) are simply “rubbuva kallu” (grinding stones), nothing to do with the linga. Much justification is required if these points are to be taken seriously and it is lacking in the book as of now.
Devadevan tells us that the Vijayanagara Empire was not the golden period in Karnataka’s history; he says it was the worst because it forced people to be constantly on the move. He also tells us that Aurangzeb, along with other Muslim rulers had given gifts and grants to Shiva temples. These are new and valuable findings that other historians specializing in the period should respond to. Devadevan comes up with many such new findings through a thorough study of the archives. He is right in showing the flaws of the subaltern studies group of historians and his critique of Marxist historical analyses is valid. These critiques were long-anticipated and have reached the Kannada reader effectively through Devadevan.
Devadevan clarifies many issues to do with India’s pre-colonial past that many scholars in the social sciences don’t even see as a period worthy of study. He tells us that India wasn't feudal and that taxes started to be levied only after the 13th century; this finding resonates somewhat with Dharampal’s work on pre-colonial India and I find this point fascinating. Devadevan is again right when he says that for no reason at all, an Attimabbe (pg 56) and a Mahadeviyakka come to be seen as feminists. Devadevan, however, urges us to see India’s later confusions about love and lust, as not a result of Victorian morality but as a result of India’s own progression in terms of life and ideas. I think there is, less of probing and more naturalization of historical processes, in such an urging, but that’s a fairly big debate in History now.
Devandevan's intimate knowledge of the many Indian texts he refers to, definitely deserves, credit. The history of Karnataka he writes is often a rich mix of detailed natural-geographical descriptions, literary theoretical discussions, conceptual issues and theoretical insights, and is precious for each of these. ‘What is History?’ and such other basic questions about the discipline of History are things that Devadevan can clarify, which is a prerequisite to being a good scholar and writing a work of significance, which is what this book is.
[1] See her work on the Vedas and the Manusmriti.
Review of Prithaviyallodagida Ghatavu…Karnatakada Ninnegalu by Manu V Devadevan. Published In Journal of Karnataka Studies. Issue May 2007 - April 2008, 4-2, 5-1.
Journal link: http://journalofkarnatakastudies.org/prithviyallodagida-ghatavu-karnatakada-ninnegalu-by-manu-v-devadevan-sushumna-kannan
Meaningful Encounter
One of Balagangadhara's most important works, “The Heathen in his Blindness…”, has been translated into Kannada
Smriti-Vismriti: Bharateeya Samskruti
Translated by Dr. Rajaram Hegde
Akshara Prakashana, Rs. 415.
Balagangadhara's “The Heathen in his Blindness…Asia, West and the Dynamic of Religion” …has indeed prompted an intellectual revolution of sorts and those who have engaged with the questions he raises in the book cannot escape engaging with the answers he provides as well. To put it strongly — any scholar in the field of cultural studies and its related disciplines, will have to respond to his work. The answers in “The Heathen…” are methodically derived and lucidly explained. The book shows how, “in the name of science and ethnology, biblical themes become our regular stock-in-trade…” (226-7). It traces the history of the two encounters of European culture with other cultures and empirically shows that the existence of religion was assumed both these times. It argues that the ‘universality of religion' is a falsifiable assumption and that religion is not a cultural universal. While a lot of people assert that Hinduism is not a religion, this is the only book that proves the same theoretically. And so, the consequences of such an argument are unlike what has followed from the assertions others have been making; the book makes available new research problems. “Smriti-Vismriti” is a simple translation of “The Heathen…” by the scholar-historian Rajaram Hegde and should help the many eager Kannada readers who were awaiting it. Hegde's short introduction to the “Smriti-Vismriti…” gives the reader a good idea of how the book should be received and also discusses issues of translation. Hegde notes the interesting, but complex phenomenon of borrowing between languages and the usage of different words for different purposes within a language. He brushes off the oft-spelt complaint, which sees the usage of English, very simplistically, as ‘polluting' Kannada. He shows that within Kannada, we use Sanskrit words in spiritual discussions and Persian, Arabic and Marathi for administrative purposes. Hegde says that to this extent “Smriti-Vismriti” does contain English words but that it will not deter the reader in anyway and will only serve as another way of learning the subject-matter.
Hegde talks of the importance of retaining some words in English, because otherwise communicating the arguments of the original would be, according to him, impossible. This is because words are steeped in their conceptual frames and carry the baggage of the culture they come from, shorn of which they cease to make meaning. Some words simply cannot be translated into Kannada, asserts Hegde. Religion, doctrine, secular, faith and belief are examples of such words. His usages of some words however, he indicates, acquire a certain degree of translation along with the varying usages in the argument of the book. He asks the reader to watch out for such differences. Hegde, in the very beginning, tells the readers of translation of certain words that remain consistent throughout the book. Additionally, he offers the translator's footnotes that lend even more clarity.
Hegde insists that he anticipates the reader of “Smriti-Vismriti” to refer to the English original wherever necessary. This forthright and honest introduction indeed helps the first-time reader of the book; the English version itself is known to require many readings before it is fully understood, for it introduces several new concepts. “Smriti-Vismriti” is a must-read for those who feel the need to read between Indian and western cultures.
SUSHUMNA KANNAN
Published in The Hindu, Friday Review, 31. 12. 2010.
Smriti-Vismriti: Bharateeya Samskruti
Translated by Dr. Rajaram Hegde
Akshara Prakashana, Rs. 415.
Balagangadhara's “The Heathen in his Blindness…Asia, West and the Dynamic of Religion” …has indeed prompted an intellectual revolution of sorts and those who have engaged with the questions he raises in the book cannot escape engaging with the answers he provides as well. To put it strongly — any scholar in the field of cultural studies and its related disciplines, will have to respond to his work. The answers in “The Heathen…” are methodically derived and lucidly explained. The book shows how, “in the name of science and ethnology, biblical themes become our regular stock-in-trade…” (226-7). It traces the history of the two encounters of European culture with other cultures and empirically shows that the existence of religion was assumed both these times. It argues that the ‘universality of religion' is a falsifiable assumption and that religion is not a cultural universal. While a lot of people assert that Hinduism is not a religion, this is the only book that proves the same theoretically. And so, the consequences of such an argument are unlike what has followed from the assertions others have been making; the book makes available new research problems. “Smriti-Vismriti” is a simple translation of “The Heathen…” by the scholar-historian Rajaram Hegde and should help the many eager Kannada readers who were awaiting it. Hegde's short introduction to the “Smriti-Vismriti…” gives the reader a good idea of how the book should be received and also discusses issues of translation. Hegde notes the interesting, but complex phenomenon of borrowing between languages and the usage of different words for different purposes within a language. He brushes off the oft-spelt complaint, which sees the usage of English, very simplistically, as ‘polluting' Kannada. He shows that within Kannada, we use Sanskrit words in spiritual discussions and Persian, Arabic and Marathi for administrative purposes. Hegde says that to this extent “Smriti-Vismriti” does contain English words but that it will not deter the reader in anyway and will only serve as another way of learning the subject-matter.
Hegde talks of the importance of retaining some words in English, because otherwise communicating the arguments of the original would be, according to him, impossible. This is because words are steeped in their conceptual frames and carry the baggage of the culture they come from, shorn of which they cease to make meaning. Some words simply cannot be translated into Kannada, asserts Hegde. Religion, doctrine, secular, faith and belief are examples of such words. His usages of some words however, he indicates, acquire a certain degree of translation along with the varying usages in the argument of the book. He asks the reader to watch out for such differences. Hegde, in the very beginning, tells the readers of translation of certain words that remain consistent throughout the book. Additionally, he offers the translator's footnotes that lend even more clarity.
Hegde insists that he anticipates the reader of “Smriti-Vismriti” to refer to the English original wherever necessary. This forthright and honest introduction indeed helps the first-time reader of the book; the English version itself is known to require many readings before it is fully understood, for it introduces several new concepts. “Smriti-Vismriti” is a must-read for those who feel the need to read between Indian and western cultures.
SUSHUMNA KANNAN
Published in The Hindu, Friday Review, 31. 12. 2010.
Review of Women and Social Reform in Modern India
Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar, eds. Women and Social Reform in Modern India: A Reader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. vii + 550 pp. $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-22049-3; $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-35269-9.
Reviewed by Sushumna Kannan (Centre for the study of culture and society)
Published on H-Asia (July, 2010)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha
Reader on Social Reform
Women and Social Reform in Modern India isa two-part book that contains twenty-eight essays. The first part presents research in the field of social reform with twenty-three essays; the second part allows five texts from the period to speak. The introduction discusses the common lopsided textbook view of social reform and questions this view while pointing to work that shows another approach. Reform in the textbook view, the editors write, has always been about upper castes, women, and customs but never about lower castes, Muslims, or the limitations law places on reform.
The introduction raises many questions and emphasizes the need for more research. Some of its questions are made possible by the work that is to be found in the book while others are proposed by the editors. The introduction’s open-endedness allows readers to access the essays on their own terms. Its balanced view comes across in the following statement: “The vast majority of girls--like their male counterparts--were deprived of literacy because of dire poverty” (p. 4). I see this statement as balanced because much of the social sciences in India invariably carry an assumption that precolonial India was necessarily patriarchal, both intentionally and effectually; and ironically almost exactly patriarchal in the way the British deemed us to be, nothing more, nothing less.
The introduction, however, is not fully informative or facilitative and carries assumptions. For instance, the editors write: “We need to know ... what exactly was written about reforms in the newspapers, novels, and tracts, how the matter was performed in public theatre, how public opinion was formed, pluralized, made contradictory and fractured, swerving people away, finally, from the rule of prescriptive texts and commands that may have been diverse but which, certainly, were authoritative and compelling” (p. 2). There is a loose notion of “performance” involved here that is unexplained, and a student of social reform will be puzzled at the hinting of an idea of reality and representation that is not fully spelled out. The above sentence also subscribes to a version of social constructionism that sees the “social” as though it were an agent separate from the phenomenon talked about, but also as simply unidentifiable or too intricately connected to the phenomena. Then again, the role of prescriptive texts and commands is seen as authoritative and compelling while this role is actually seriously contested by an increasing number of scholars who wonder what exact effects and roles texts played in precolonial India. But instead of presenting this as a debate, and as a problem for history, wherein competing theories are placed alongside each other for comparison and discussion, the book simply avoids the debate. What one finds here is simply many interesting questions and then a quick resolution of what is still an ongoing debate. There is an evident apathy toward identifying scholars with different views and theories and setting up a conversation among them.
This glossing over historical debates occurs when the authors discuss women’s writing of the period. While current debates have struggled to find out if women’s writings of the social reform period can be considered agentic at all, the book simply presents them as agentic. Our debates have considered possibilities of submissiveness or coercion in these writings and have asked if the subaltern can speak, but here they are simply agentic without the struggle to know “how we can tell.” It quotes Tarabai Shinde and sees the job as done. How do we know Tarabai Shinde’s questions were not an integral part of indigenous culture? Do we know enough to say that her ideas cannot be a part of indigenous ways of thinking and being?
Unfortunately, the difference in the characterization of the nineteenth century between Tanika Sarkar’s and Partha Chatterjee’s work is not set up adequately for the student/reader to see, think, and discuss, despite the fact that the difference is acknowledged in some parts of the book. Furthermore, the authors never make clear what “debate” meant, what the larger domain of gender relations was that allowed the sanctification of immolation, or what regional differences existed in privileging custom over scripture and vice versa. And it is not still clear why we distinguish revivalist from liberal reformers; or what effect the colonial context had on the acceptance of social reforms.
The book’s approach as noted in the introduction is that it does not seek explanations to pointed questions but simply asks for a history of a period or a theme to be written. In some cases, this focus leads to individual essays on regional histories that lend nothing to the larger picture of social reform. Or at times, an overarching idea explains away regional differences. Most individual essays try to set out the concepts they work with, the theories they agree with, and so on, and so it is important that the reader read each essay independently and carefully to understand its basis. It is useful to see the book as a corpus that brings together many different researchers under one roof, so to speak.
This book is precious no doubt, because the social reform period is still hazy in our imagination and is rift with gaps in knowledge. But, although not underresearched, the book is not systematically researched and lacks a problem-oriented approach. This, I suppose, is common in books that aim to serve as “readers” on a certain theme or field of study, and bring together the work of many scholars. The essays are each useful but few of them, in the changes they try to capture, explain “change from what.” New patriarchy, yes, but what did the “old” patriarchy look like and why was it the way it was? It is not clear what discussions actually got distorted by the use of the category of women in the social reform period. Can these discussions be restaged?
What marks out modernity from “tradition” is not clear either, so the reference to the “modern” in the title of the book must only be a chronological division that historians make, between ancient, medieval, and modern India. Although many scholars point out that there were constraints on thinking in the social reform period, exactly what kinds of constraint and why does not become clear. Orientalism’s influence on the discussions by social reformers is also not clearly considered by many essays in the book. Subscription to the idea of an “invented tradition” is seen in many essays but its problems are noted by few.
Essays by Lata Mani, Sumit Sarkar, Madhu Kishwar, Tanika Sarkar, and others, along with the original writings of Ram Mohan Roy, Tarabai Shinde, and others make this volume a rich one that students of cultural studies, women’s studies, and history should possess.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.
Citation: Sushumna Kannan. Review of Sarkar, Sumit; Sarkar, Tanika, eds., Women and Social Reform in Modern India: A Reader. H-Asia, H-Net Reviews. July, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23924
Reviewed by Sushumna Kannan (Centre for the study of culture and society)
Published on H-Asia (July, 2010)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha
Reader on Social Reform
Women and Social Reform in Modern India isa two-part book that contains twenty-eight essays. The first part presents research in the field of social reform with twenty-three essays; the second part allows five texts from the period to speak. The introduction discusses the common lopsided textbook view of social reform and questions this view while pointing to work that shows another approach. Reform in the textbook view, the editors write, has always been about upper castes, women, and customs but never about lower castes, Muslims, or the limitations law places on reform.
The introduction raises many questions and emphasizes the need for more research. Some of its questions are made possible by the work that is to be found in the book while others are proposed by the editors. The introduction’s open-endedness allows readers to access the essays on their own terms. Its balanced view comes across in the following statement: “The vast majority of girls--like their male counterparts--were deprived of literacy because of dire poverty” (p. 4). I see this statement as balanced because much of the social sciences in India invariably carry an assumption that precolonial India was necessarily patriarchal, both intentionally and effectually; and ironically almost exactly patriarchal in the way the British deemed us to be, nothing more, nothing less.
The introduction, however, is not fully informative or facilitative and carries assumptions. For instance, the editors write: “We need to know ... what exactly was written about reforms in the newspapers, novels, and tracts, how the matter was performed in public theatre, how public opinion was formed, pluralized, made contradictory and fractured, swerving people away, finally, from the rule of prescriptive texts and commands that may have been diverse but which, certainly, were authoritative and compelling” (p. 2). There is a loose notion of “performance” involved here that is unexplained, and a student of social reform will be puzzled at the hinting of an idea of reality and representation that is not fully spelled out. The above sentence also subscribes to a version of social constructionism that sees the “social” as though it were an agent separate from the phenomenon talked about, but also as simply unidentifiable or too intricately connected to the phenomena. Then again, the role of prescriptive texts and commands is seen as authoritative and compelling while this role is actually seriously contested by an increasing number of scholars who wonder what exact effects and roles texts played in precolonial India. But instead of presenting this as a debate, and as a problem for history, wherein competing theories are placed alongside each other for comparison and discussion, the book simply avoids the debate. What one finds here is simply many interesting questions and then a quick resolution of what is still an ongoing debate. There is an evident apathy toward identifying scholars with different views and theories and setting up a conversation among them.
This glossing over historical debates occurs when the authors discuss women’s writing of the period. While current debates have struggled to find out if women’s writings of the social reform period can be considered agentic at all, the book simply presents them as agentic. Our debates have considered possibilities of submissiveness or coercion in these writings and have asked if the subaltern can speak, but here they are simply agentic without the struggle to know “how we can tell.” It quotes Tarabai Shinde and sees the job as done. How do we know Tarabai Shinde’s questions were not an integral part of indigenous culture? Do we know enough to say that her ideas cannot be a part of indigenous ways of thinking and being?
Unfortunately, the difference in the characterization of the nineteenth century between Tanika Sarkar’s and Partha Chatterjee’s work is not set up adequately for the student/reader to see, think, and discuss, despite the fact that the difference is acknowledged in some parts of the book. Furthermore, the authors never make clear what “debate” meant, what the larger domain of gender relations was that allowed the sanctification of immolation, or what regional differences existed in privileging custom over scripture and vice versa. And it is not still clear why we distinguish revivalist from liberal reformers; or what effect the colonial context had on the acceptance of social reforms.
The book’s approach as noted in the introduction is that it does not seek explanations to pointed questions but simply asks for a history of a period or a theme to be written. In some cases, this focus leads to individual essays on regional histories that lend nothing to the larger picture of social reform. Or at times, an overarching idea explains away regional differences. Most individual essays try to set out the concepts they work with, the theories they agree with, and so on, and so it is important that the reader read each essay independently and carefully to understand its basis. It is useful to see the book as a corpus that brings together many different researchers under one roof, so to speak.
This book is precious no doubt, because the social reform period is still hazy in our imagination and is rift with gaps in knowledge. But, although not underresearched, the book is not systematically researched and lacks a problem-oriented approach. This, I suppose, is common in books that aim to serve as “readers” on a certain theme or field of study, and bring together the work of many scholars. The essays are each useful but few of them, in the changes they try to capture, explain “change from what.” New patriarchy, yes, but what did the “old” patriarchy look like and why was it the way it was? It is not clear what discussions actually got distorted by the use of the category of women in the social reform period. Can these discussions be restaged?
What marks out modernity from “tradition” is not clear either, so the reference to the “modern” in the title of the book must only be a chronological division that historians make, between ancient, medieval, and modern India. Although many scholars point out that there were constraints on thinking in the social reform period, exactly what kinds of constraint and why does not become clear. Orientalism’s influence on the discussions by social reformers is also not clearly considered by many essays in the book. Subscription to the idea of an “invented tradition” is seen in many essays but its problems are noted by few.
Essays by Lata Mani, Sumit Sarkar, Madhu Kishwar, Tanika Sarkar, and others, along with the original writings of Ram Mohan Roy, Tarabai Shinde, and others make this volume a rich one that students of cultural studies, women’s studies, and history should possess.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.
Citation: Sushumna Kannan. Review of Sarkar, Sumit; Sarkar, Tanika, eds., Women and Social Reform in Modern India: A Reader. H-Asia, H-Net Reviews. July, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23924
The forgotten double?
Prithviyallodagida Ghatavu: Karnatakada Ninnegalu is an important book presenting an interesting history of Karnataka
Prithviyallodagida Ghatavu: Karnatakada Ninnegalu
By Manu V. Devadevan
Akshara Prakashana, Rs. 115
Prithviyallodagida Ghatavu presents an interesting history of Karnataka: interesting for both the new findings and the flowing, accessible style of writing. Devadevan looks critically at earlier historians and their work and contemplates the process of history-writing. He sees each period of time as marked by a certain ideology under which we function, which then needs to be probed into by the historian: we must do this to know how we have come to be, what we are. All chapters provide such theoretical clarifications keeping the reader interested. Good story-telling skills allow for a smooth transition from one chapter to another and sometimes even manage to keep us on the edge.
Devadevan's expertise in several languages has been put to good use in this book: he makes some interesting connections with words across several south Indian languages and their etymological origins and draws conclusions about the relationships they indicate. But one doesn't know how seriously the presence or absence of words should be made to stand as evidence for an interaction between regions and their languages.
Devadevan historically traces the relationship between kavya and power (Pg 49). This is a very redundant reading. It simply assumes that all of history was a quest for power and excludes any notion of the everyday. While a lot of scholars use texts like the “Manusmriti” to show India's past as degenerate, Devadevan uses them to draw very mundane conclusions. While that is a surprise, in itself there is no particular virtue in approaching these texts in a value-neutral way. I say this, because the greater problem persists: how do we know that these texts represented the life and society of their times? How can the complex relationship between life and literature be overlooked? It is as if every piece of text is ‘evidence' for the historian. What I see in Devadevan is a proud belief (which is true of many historians) that whatever relics or texts are available today are enough to write a history of India; and this, even when we know that thousands of texts have been lost to us forever. Have we become like the West, ignoring the virtues of forgetting that we once practiced, as Ashis Nandy reminds us in his essay, “History's Forgotten Doubles”?
Devadevan offers an interesting take on the vachanas when he says that they are part of a deeksha tradition and only therefore do not care for caste or gender. The question that remains however is: who gives deeksha and how, and what knowledge is it that one is being initiated into? But this does not seem to be of interest to him at all. For all practical purposes, he is writing a secular history of Karnataka. So how does deeksha fit in, how do the related miracles and prophecies fit in? These questions remain unanswered and I am not sure if Devadevan even sees them as valid questions. Devadevan tells us that the Vijayanagara Empire was hardly the golden period in Karnataka's history; he says it was the worst because it forced people to be constantly on the move. These are new and valuable findings that other historians specialising in the period should respond to. He is right in showing the flaws of the subaltern studies group of historians. This is a critique that was long-anticipated and has reached the Kannada reader effectively through Devadevan.
‘What is history', and such other basic questions about the discipline of history are things that Devadevan can clarify, which is a prerequisite to being a good scholar and writing a work of significance, which is what this book is.
SUSHUMNA KANNAN
Published in The Hindu, Friday Review, 30. 5. 2010.
Prithviyallodagida Ghatavu: Karnatakada Ninnegalu
By Manu V. Devadevan
Akshara Prakashana, Rs. 115
Prithviyallodagida Ghatavu presents an interesting history of Karnataka: interesting for both the new findings and the flowing, accessible style of writing. Devadevan looks critically at earlier historians and their work and contemplates the process of history-writing. He sees each period of time as marked by a certain ideology under which we function, which then needs to be probed into by the historian: we must do this to know how we have come to be, what we are. All chapters provide such theoretical clarifications keeping the reader interested. Good story-telling skills allow for a smooth transition from one chapter to another and sometimes even manage to keep us on the edge.
Devadevan's expertise in several languages has been put to good use in this book: he makes some interesting connections with words across several south Indian languages and their etymological origins and draws conclusions about the relationships they indicate. But one doesn't know how seriously the presence or absence of words should be made to stand as evidence for an interaction between regions and their languages.
Devadevan historically traces the relationship between kavya and power (Pg 49). This is a very redundant reading. It simply assumes that all of history was a quest for power and excludes any notion of the everyday. While a lot of scholars use texts like the “Manusmriti” to show India's past as degenerate, Devadevan uses them to draw very mundane conclusions. While that is a surprise, in itself there is no particular virtue in approaching these texts in a value-neutral way. I say this, because the greater problem persists: how do we know that these texts represented the life and society of their times? How can the complex relationship between life and literature be overlooked? It is as if every piece of text is ‘evidence' for the historian. What I see in Devadevan is a proud belief (which is true of many historians) that whatever relics or texts are available today are enough to write a history of India; and this, even when we know that thousands of texts have been lost to us forever. Have we become like the West, ignoring the virtues of forgetting that we once practiced, as Ashis Nandy reminds us in his essay, “History's Forgotten Doubles”?
Devadevan offers an interesting take on the vachanas when he says that they are part of a deeksha tradition and only therefore do not care for caste or gender. The question that remains however is: who gives deeksha and how, and what knowledge is it that one is being initiated into? But this does not seem to be of interest to him at all. For all practical purposes, he is writing a secular history of Karnataka. So how does deeksha fit in, how do the related miracles and prophecies fit in? These questions remain unanswered and I am not sure if Devadevan even sees them as valid questions. Devadevan tells us that the Vijayanagara Empire was hardly the golden period in Karnataka's history; he says it was the worst because it forced people to be constantly on the move. These are new and valuable findings that other historians specialising in the period should respond to. He is right in showing the flaws of the subaltern studies group of historians. This is a critique that was long-anticipated and has reached the Kannada reader effectively through Devadevan.
‘What is history', and such other basic questions about the discipline of history are things that Devadevan can clarify, which is a prerequisite to being a good scholar and writing a work of significance, which is what this book is.
SUSHUMNA KANNAN
Published in The Hindu, Friday Review, 30. 5. 2010.
Review of Rethinking Sexuality
Diane Richardson, Rethinking Sexuality. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2000. 176+ix pages. 18.99pounds.
This book in detail scans through almost all the debates that feminism, queer theory and citizenship have had in relation to sexuality. The originality of the book lies in its stringing together of various strands from feminism, citizenship and theories of sexuality. The aim as is stated in the book is to examine the new ways of understanding sexuality and ‘sexual politics’ that are emerging, through a critical awareness of some of the major theoretical and political debates in the last thirty years. The book focuses on the rethinking of sexuality around the three themes of heterosexuality, citizenship and AIDS. Rethinking sexuality, as the book is well aware, is a larger project than the focus one gets here. The purpose of examining citizenship and AIDS language though not made clear, the relationship between feminism and queer theory is a concern well brought out. The book draws its examples largely from Britain and the USA for its arguments and focuses essentially on feminisms in the west.
Chapter 1 in part 1, of this well-chapterised book, attempts to identify theoretical histories of sexuality, highlight continuities, as well as differences, in past and present understandings. This effort is made from the theoretical location of dissatisfaction with prevalent social constructionist understandings of sexuality. The argument of the chapter is to theorize heterosexuality. This can be read as an alternative effort to accomplish complex understandings of sexuality to ‘simplistic’ social constructionist understandings. While the lack of theorization of heterosexuality is traced in feminism and queer theory, the queering of the sexual is reversed to shift attention to theorizing the heterosexual. However it remains a puzzle as to why in a section called Sexual/social worlds and in some subsequent parts of the book the author has to engage precisely in tracing sexuality as a social construct while she has deemed it simplistic. In an attempt to theorize heterosexuality the public and private boundaries are effectively examined. Chapter 2 traces the sexual politics and social changes about sexuality in recent queer theory. In this context the author identifies and discusses three key areas: assimilation versus transgression, essentialism versus fluidity and space as is encoded in the public/private binary. Chapter 3 strings together queer theory and feminism, through an examination of the often-expressed oppositional terms in which they relate, the opposition being stark especially with radical feminism. Richardson here discusses new feminisms and argues about the need to theorize the representations of feminisms themselves. She maps the consistent (mis)representations of radical feminism and cautions that we may lose a complex history of feminism in the typifying and classified (mis)representations of feminism. A deeper analysis would have required not merely an adjudging of representations as misrepresentations but to ask as to why such representations would repeatedly occur. The representations by feminists belonging to different types of feminism tend to look upon radical feminism in a stereotypical manner, this can be seen as a certain disjunct or incommensurability. To speculate on the incommensurability would have implications for the histories of both queer theory and feminism and would require as the author suggests for history an examination of the conceptual underpinnings, also perhaps an elaboration on the relationship between theory and practice, knowledge and politics.
Part 2 of the book is called Sexual citizenship. Chapter 4 sets out to connect citizenship and sexuality differently from the traditional and dominant model of citizenship as a set of civil, political and social rights. This and even more recent theories of citizenship, for Richardson are based on a politics of assimilation and toleration. The public-private divide is seen by her as an exclusionary that the state cashes on effectively. It is argued in the light of feminists’ overemphasis on the relationship between the personal and the political that the divide needs to be made fluid so as to displace some of the state’s control mechanisms and benefit conceptually. The chapter draws from numerous instances of court judgements (mostly from the US and the UK) to say that heterosexuality is still a necessary basis for full citizenship. Chapter 5 details the extending of the relationship between citizenship and sexuality by looking at the feminist engagements with the question of sexual/intimate citizenship. Chapter 6 draws attention to the crucial aspect of citizenship: sexual rights. Here are some of the interesting points of the book where the complexities involved in theorizing sexual rights are talked about. The characterization of sexual rights in terms of conduct-based rights claims and identity-based rights claims is rich in its elaboration.
Part 3 is divided into 3 chapters. Chapter 7 looks at the question of feminism and the challenge of AIDS and seeks to speculate as to why AIDS was not indeed politicized by feminists as it was by queer groups. For feminists, the questions of sexuality were questions even before the AIDS movements took ground. This and the initial belief that only men can contract AIDS it is speculated must have lead to a lack of feminist theorization or politics with regard to AIDS and women.Chapter 8 deals with the task of gendering AIDS and with the invisibilization of women in the AIDS discourse. The invisibilisation, it is argued, is related to the ‘good woman’ and ‘bad woman’ representations of women. Surely pregnancy, family responsibilities, dependants complicate the AIDS situation for women in different ways than it does for men.The myths about men and women, whether heterosexual or homosexual in the AIDS discourse is chalked out in a following section. The last and 9th chapter relates in a worthwhile effort sexuality and identity to talk about risk groups. This is discussed in terms of three phases in conjunction with medical notions of risk and assessments: ‘High-Risk’ women, Lesbians are safe and Assessing women’s actual risk.
The writing style of the book although clear, engages too much in a summarization of previous debates making it rather difficult to see what the author’s critical contribution is. What the book misses out is on locating its own arguments in terms of what prompts its attempts to make the connections that are made. This book’s significance lies in the connections made on an ‘inter-movement’ level, where conceptually the preoccupations of each are examined in conjunction.
Sushumna K
Published in Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 12:1 (2005), p 129-131.
This book in detail scans through almost all the debates that feminism, queer theory and citizenship have had in relation to sexuality. The originality of the book lies in its stringing together of various strands from feminism, citizenship and theories of sexuality. The aim as is stated in the book is to examine the new ways of understanding sexuality and ‘sexual politics’ that are emerging, through a critical awareness of some of the major theoretical and political debates in the last thirty years. The book focuses on the rethinking of sexuality around the three themes of heterosexuality, citizenship and AIDS. Rethinking sexuality, as the book is well aware, is a larger project than the focus one gets here. The purpose of examining citizenship and AIDS language though not made clear, the relationship between feminism and queer theory is a concern well brought out. The book draws its examples largely from Britain and the USA for its arguments and focuses essentially on feminisms in the west.
Chapter 1 in part 1, of this well-chapterised book, attempts to identify theoretical histories of sexuality, highlight continuities, as well as differences, in past and present understandings. This effort is made from the theoretical location of dissatisfaction with prevalent social constructionist understandings of sexuality. The argument of the chapter is to theorize heterosexuality. This can be read as an alternative effort to accomplish complex understandings of sexuality to ‘simplistic’ social constructionist understandings. While the lack of theorization of heterosexuality is traced in feminism and queer theory, the queering of the sexual is reversed to shift attention to theorizing the heterosexual. However it remains a puzzle as to why in a section called Sexual/social worlds and in some subsequent parts of the book the author has to engage precisely in tracing sexuality as a social construct while she has deemed it simplistic. In an attempt to theorize heterosexuality the public and private boundaries are effectively examined. Chapter 2 traces the sexual politics and social changes about sexuality in recent queer theory. In this context the author identifies and discusses three key areas: assimilation versus transgression, essentialism versus fluidity and space as is encoded in the public/private binary. Chapter 3 strings together queer theory and feminism, through an examination of the often-expressed oppositional terms in which they relate, the opposition being stark especially with radical feminism. Richardson here discusses new feminisms and argues about the need to theorize the representations of feminisms themselves. She maps the consistent (mis)representations of radical feminism and cautions that we may lose a complex history of feminism in the typifying and classified (mis)representations of feminism. A deeper analysis would have required not merely an adjudging of representations as misrepresentations but to ask as to why such representations would repeatedly occur. The representations by feminists belonging to different types of feminism tend to look upon radical feminism in a stereotypical manner, this can be seen as a certain disjunct or incommensurability. To speculate on the incommensurability would have implications for the histories of both queer theory and feminism and would require as the author suggests for history an examination of the conceptual underpinnings, also perhaps an elaboration on the relationship between theory and practice, knowledge and politics.
Part 2 of the book is called Sexual citizenship. Chapter 4 sets out to connect citizenship and sexuality differently from the traditional and dominant model of citizenship as a set of civil, political and social rights. This and even more recent theories of citizenship, for Richardson are based on a politics of assimilation and toleration. The public-private divide is seen by her as an exclusionary that the state cashes on effectively. It is argued in the light of feminists’ overemphasis on the relationship between the personal and the political that the divide needs to be made fluid so as to displace some of the state’s control mechanisms and benefit conceptually. The chapter draws from numerous instances of court judgements (mostly from the US and the UK) to say that heterosexuality is still a necessary basis for full citizenship. Chapter 5 details the extending of the relationship between citizenship and sexuality by looking at the feminist engagements with the question of sexual/intimate citizenship. Chapter 6 draws attention to the crucial aspect of citizenship: sexual rights. Here are some of the interesting points of the book where the complexities involved in theorizing sexual rights are talked about. The characterization of sexual rights in terms of conduct-based rights claims and identity-based rights claims is rich in its elaboration.
Part 3 is divided into 3 chapters. Chapter 7 looks at the question of feminism and the challenge of AIDS and seeks to speculate as to why AIDS was not indeed politicized by feminists as it was by queer groups. For feminists, the questions of sexuality were questions even before the AIDS movements took ground. This and the initial belief that only men can contract AIDS it is speculated must have lead to a lack of feminist theorization or politics with regard to AIDS and women.Chapter 8 deals with the task of gendering AIDS and with the invisibilization of women in the AIDS discourse. The invisibilisation, it is argued, is related to the ‘good woman’ and ‘bad woman’ representations of women. Surely pregnancy, family responsibilities, dependants complicate the AIDS situation for women in different ways than it does for men.The myths about men and women, whether heterosexual or homosexual in the AIDS discourse is chalked out in a following section. The last and 9th chapter relates in a worthwhile effort sexuality and identity to talk about risk groups. This is discussed in terms of three phases in conjunction with medical notions of risk and assessments: ‘High-Risk’ women, Lesbians are safe and Assessing women’s actual risk.
The writing style of the book although clear, engages too much in a summarization of previous debates making it rather difficult to see what the author’s critical contribution is. What the book misses out is on locating its own arguments in terms of what prompts its attempts to make the connections that are made. This book’s significance lies in the connections made on an ‘inter-movement’ level, where conceptually the preoccupations of each are examined in conjunction.
Sushumna K
Published in Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 12:1 (2005), p 129-131.
Translating Models: A Review of Awadheshwari.
Awadheshwari. By Shankar Mokashi Punekar. Trans. P P Giridhar. 2006. Bangalore: Sahitya Akademi. 408 pages.
By
Sushumna K
In times when tradition and modernity persist as crucial issues in all of our scholarship in literature as well as the social sciences, the translation of Shankar Mokashi Punekar’s Awadheshwari, by P P Giridhar is an apt venture. The novel is a creative take on the political life in Vedic times. Written in 1987, the novel won itself a Sahitya Akademi Award. For all of us now, such a novel and its translation into English rakes up a series of questions. How can one reconstruct the Vedic times? What are resources available to do so to creative writers? How does a reconstruction of the Vedic times in the 1980s look like, would it look any different or similar now? How would a translation of Vedic times, so to say, into English look like?
Does the translation of Vedic times involve a translation of concepts of the life-world of a certain time-space or does it demand a reconfiguring of language or even meet with dead-ends and involves in struggles against prevalent idioms of the present? In what sense exactly were the Vedic times different from ours? Is it only the case that sometimes translations into English end up merely sounding anachronistic or western-Christian or do they even distort meanings. Is it possible that to a native audience even these anachronistic-sounding renderings make meaning only in a context-specific sense? Further then, can practices/rituals be understood as concepts? Surely, these are interesting questions spanning various fields of inquiry; I will speculatively answer some of them summarily in this review article, by taking up the novel first and issues of translation next.
A novel?:
Awadheshwari is a peculiar novel, (to retain the term), not just for its brave attempt to creatively reconstruct the vedic times, it is so for other reasons as well. For instance, in the foreword, the author goes into researches current in his time and into scriptures and seals and tells us about a unified theory of oriental paleography. Our current understanding however, (of seeking out scriptures or judging practices like incest, both inventions of 19th century anthropology), is that it is a result of British colonization and that prior to colonization we related differently to ‘scriptures’ and that our life-worlds were composed differently. Although Punekar in his other writings was sensitive to issues of colonization and writing, it is often less known as to what exactly we mean by colonization or even modernity, all we can say is that he felt the unease that many of us still struggle with. Then again the author also puts forward the thesis that “they are like us”. He also exemplifies literature over ritual, “…To give it a sacrificial-spiritual interpretative, because it is a Rigvedic hymn is to do disservice to his poetic prowess”. A sort of paradox emerges between the author’s claims and what the novel actually accomplishes. While for the author then, our pasts can be rewritten or opted out of and life can be led on ideological or belief-based stances, the novel presents us with more complex instances. This raises a set of unanswered questions about colonization, modernity, passage of time etc or even anachronisms and other debates in historiography. In the limited space of this article I will show that these anachronisms reveal more about our issues and terms of contention and that the issues may themselves demand different treatment.
In form:
Surely then, if I were to read the novel and not the author’s promises, then we are confronted with peculiar things. A series of unrelated plots, lengthy sub-plots: the sheer number of it almost blinding us to the need or aesthetics of it. On the whole, the large number of plots cannot be missed by any reader at all. This leads us to ask, if then Awadheshwari is a novel at all. The numerous unrelated plots should perhaps be understood in terms of the story-telling traditions in our contexts. Typically, Awadheshwari is like a record of a set of instances. It does not seek to provide experience; fewer stream of consciousness techniques, abrupt shifts from reflections of characters to the development of plot (which can participate in theoretical endevours) and such like mark the novel from time to time.One can see Awadheshwari as working through models (of set of instances) that are set in the form that then relates to us a different life-world. One can read the content of Awadheshwari as a particular understanding of the Vedic time-space, that strangely or perhaps not so strangely after all, offers us story-structures or models that take off from the main plot, never to return or contribute otherwise. Stories than, one could say have more ambiguous roles to play than novels or other forms, particularly in our contexts. A story could aim to merely relate or keep alive curiosity or retain a world, unlike a novel. And throughout Awadheshwari the reader meets with such stories. One could see the effort of the author to capture difference, showing in the form of Awadheshwari more than in say, it’s content, although the content offers to us equally different stuff. This poses to us a unique task, that of translating models, which I will take up in a moment. To see Awadheshwari as a record is even interesting in times where the dharmashastras are understood less as laws or codes and more as records. The lack of the form of the novel in our contexts can be drawn upon here to form interesting hypothesis.
In Content:
The content of this novel is fraught with characters, but these are no characters from a typical 19th century novel! They are characters because they reflective actors and because action can be typified at least in some general ways. The characters’ attitude to action on the whole, the attitude of engagement and negotiation with existing practices and the unabashed pragmatism that is placed within a discourse of right action, contemplative/reflective life cannot be missed at all. With content fashioned in such a way, it is noteworthy that one cannot be proposing that the Vedic times were a degenerate or barbaric time. Thus the novel provides by default and this perhaps has to do with the form, a glimpse into a way of life that we can perhaps with due respect understand as our traditions or inheritances. Read like this the novel does not make us see colonialism as just another cultural encounter that occurred naturally in course of time, but the novel stands for something that can record tradition and show to us the ruptures that colonization set forth.
Translating Models?:
The issues regarding the translation of such a novel then involve awareness of the story form and the models presented therein. However, very interesting questions arise here. Is translation only a task of translating the concepts? Can practices be translated or recreated as concepts? Are there practices that do not lend themselves to conceptualization and translation? And do they remain as practices only because they manage to remain outside of conceptualization? The awareness of the translator in such a case I think is shifted from providing an experience that is nearer or faithful to the original but in preserving the model that the original presents. Thus one has to translate models more than attempting to provide experiences or specific meanings. Here then, with the novel Awadheshwari, we are confronted with a case where language cannot be seen as representing culture in any direct manner. So then, the translator must be cautious not to be ideologically inclined and must translate the meaning of the path or model if at all (because specific meanings are only part of a given path or model). So that, a model preserved and passed on, and numerous experiences within it can become possible. In times when endless ideological translations prevail upon us, even heaped upon us constantly, Giridhar’s translation is more relevant. For instance, his “asked himself wordlessly” and similar phrases point to a particular from of reflection, specific perhaps to our times and contexts alone, the composition of which we can reflect upon. That Giridhar believes that one can be indifferent to ideological positions in the act of translation perhaps best suites the translation of stories in the Indian tradition.
Published in Translation Today Vol.2, No.2. Oct 2005. pp243-247
By
Sushumna K
In times when tradition and modernity persist as crucial issues in all of our scholarship in literature as well as the social sciences, the translation of Shankar Mokashi Punekar’s Awadheshwari, by P P Giridhar is an apt venture. The novel is a creative take on the political life in Vedic times. Written in 1987, the novel won itself a Sahitya Akademi Award. For all of us now, such a novel and its translation into English rakes up a series of questions. How can one reconstruct the Vedic times? What are resources available to do so to creative writers? How does a reconstruction of the Vedic times in the 1980s look like, would it look any different or similar now? How would a translation of Vedic times, so to say, into English look like?
Does the translation of Vedic times involve a translation of concepts of the life-world of a certain time-space or does it demand a reconfiguring of language or even meet with dead-ends and involves in struggles against prevalent idioms of the present? In what sense exactly were the Vedic times different from ours? Is it only the case that sometimes translations into English end up merely sounding anachronistic or western-Christian or do they even distort meanings. Is it possible that to a native audience even these anachronistic-sounding renderings make meaning only in a context-specific sense? Further then, can practices/rituals be understood as concepts? Surely, these are interesting questions spanning various fields of inquiry; I will speculatively answer some of them summarily in this review article, by taking up the novel first and issues of translation next.
A novel?:
Awadheshwari is a peculiar novel, (to retain the term), not just for its brave attempt to creatively reconstruct the vedic times, it is so for other reasons as well. For instance, in the foreword, the author goes into researches current in his time and into scriptures and seals and tells us about a unified theory of oriental paleography. Our current understanding however, (of seeking out scriptures or judging practices like incest, both inventions of 19th century anthropology), is that it is a result of British colonization and that prior to colonization we related differently to ‘scriptures’ and that our life-worlds were composed differently. Although Punekar in his other writings was sensitive to issues of colonization and writing, it is often less known as to what exactly we mean by colonization or even modernity, all we can say is that he felt the unease that many of us still struggle with. Then again the author also puts forward the thesis that “they are like us”. He also exemplifies literature over ritual, “…To give it a sacrificial-spiritual interpretative, because it is a Rigvedic hymn is to do disservice to his poetic prowess”. A sort of paradox emerges between the author’s claims and what the novel actually accomplishes. While for the author then, our pasts can be rewritten or opted out of and life can be led on ideological or belief-based stances, the novel presents us with more complex instances. This raises a set of unanswered questions about colonization, modernity, passage of time etc or even anachronisms and other debates in historiography. In the limited space of this article I will show that these anachronisms reveal more about our issues and terms of contention and that the issues may themselves demand different treatment.
In form:
Surely then, if I were to read the novel and not the author’s promises, then we are confronted with peculiar things. A series of unrelated plots, lengthy sub-plots: the sheer number of it almost blinding us to the need or aesthetics of it. On the whole, the large number of plots cannot be missed by any reader at all. This leads us to ask, if then Awadheshwari is a novel at all. The numerous unrelated plots should perhaps be understood in terms of the story-telling traditions in our contexts. Typically, Awadheshwari is like a record of a set of instances. It does not seek to provide experience; fewer stream of consciousness techniques, abrupt shifts from reflections of characters to the development of plot (which can participate in theoretical endevours) and such like mark the novel from time to time.One can see Awadheshwari as working through models (of set of instances) that are set in the form that then relates to us a different life-world. One can read the content of Awadheshwari as a particular understanding of the Vedic time-space, that strangely or perhaps not so strangely after all, offers us story-structures or models that take off from the main plot, never to return or contribute otherwise. Stories than, one could say have more ambiguous roles to play than novels or other forms, particularly in our contexts. A story could aim to merely relate or keep alive curiosity or retain a world, unlike a novel. And throughout Awadheshwari the reader meets with such stories. One could see the effort of the author to capture difference, showing in the form of Awadheshwari more than in say, it’s content, although the content offers to us equally different stuff. This poses to us a unique task, that of translating models, which I will take up in a moment. To see Awadheshwari as a record is even interesting in times where the dharmashastras are understood less as laws or codes and more as records. The lack of the form of the novel in our contexts can be drawn upon here to form interesting hypothesis.
In Content:
The content of this novel is fraught with characters, but these are no characters from a typical 19th century novel! They are characters because they reflective actors and because action can be typified at least in some general ways. The characters’ attitude to action on the whole, the attitude of engagement and negotiation with existing practices and the unabashed pragmatism that is placed within a discourse of right action, contemplative/reflective life cannot be missed at all. With content fashioned in such a way, it is noteworthy that one cannot be proposing that the Vedic times were a degenerate or barbaric time. Thus the novel provides by default and this perhaps has to do with the form, a glimpse into a way of life that we can perhaps with due respect understand as our traditions or inheritances. Read like this the novel does not make us see colonialism as just another cultural encounter that occurred naturally in course of time, but the novel stands for something that can record tradition and show to us the ruptures that colonization set forth.
Translating Models?:
The issues regarding the translation of such a novel then involve awareness of the story form and the models presented therein. However, very interesting questions arise here. Is translation only a task of translating the concepts? Can practices be translated or recreated as concepts? Are there practices that do not lend themselves to conceptualization and translation? And do they remain as practices only because they manage to remain outside of conceptualization? The awareness of the translator in such a case I think is shifted from providing an experience that is nearer or faithful to the original but in preserving the model that the original presents. Thus one has to translate models more than attempting to provide experiences or specific meanings. Here then, with the novel Awadheshwari, we are confronted with a case where language cannot be seen as representing culture in any direct manner. So then, the translator must be cautious not to be ideologically inclined and must translate the meaning of the path or model if at all (because specific meanings are only part of a given path or model). So that, a model preserved and passed on, and numerous experiences within it can become possible. In times when endless ideological translations prevail upon us, even heaped upon us constantly, Giridhar’s translation is more relevant. For instance, his “asked himself wordlessly” and similar phrases point to a particular from of reflection, specific perhaps to our times and contexts alone, the composition of which we can reflect upon. That Giridhar believes that one can be indifferent to ideological positions in the act of translation perhaps best suites the translation of stories in the Indian tradition.
Published in Translation Today Vol.2, No.2. Oct 2005. pp243-247
Signs of Inconsistency: A Review of The Sign: Vachanas of 12th century
The Sign: Vachanas of 12th century, 2007. Edited by O L. Nagabhushana Swamy and translated by O L Nagabhushana Swamy, Laxmi Chandrasekhar, Vijaya Guttal. Hampi: Prasaranga, Kannada University.
By
Sushumna K
Sometime in 2002 at Neenasam, the cultural centre at Heggodu, S N Balagangadhara and a few others[1] questioned the interpretations of the vachanas of the 12th century as anti-caste literature. They had prepared statistics for each of the 14 volumes of vachanas (published by Kannada Pustaka Praadhikaara) along the following lines—How many vachanas from each vachanakaara contained vachanas that had the words or speak of ‘jaati’ and ‘kula’? And how did these vachanas speak of jaati or kula? They argued that the interpretations that modern Kannada scholars have thus far given us were based on a simplistic formula in which anti-brahminism equaled anti-caste (anti-brahminism=anti-caste) and since the vachanas supposedly were anti-brahmin, they were anti-caste too. Contrary to this formula, they demonstrated that vachanas that could count as anti-shudra and those that abused people who did not worship the Linga outnumbered the vachanas that were supposedly anti-brahminical. The anti-shudra vachanas had not been used by the Kannada scholars to make any argument at all and their interpretations were based on selective readings. Possibly, these selective readings were influenced by orientalist scholars. S N Balaganagadara (Prof. Balu) and others working from within his research programme have shown that our understanding of ‘brahmin’, ‘caste system’, ‘shudra’ etc are based in the West’s experience of us, while Indian scholars have tended to take the west’s experience of us for objective descriptions of our realities. To my mind, any book on the vachanas must engage with this significant breakthrough. Unfortunately the book under review, The Sign: Vachanas of the 12th century, 2007 does not do this.
It however displays a certain amount of awareness regarding the possibility of anachronistic readings and the preoccupations that influence the selections and readings of the vachanas by its various editors. This awareness is somewhat new with regard to the vachanas and is possibly the most refreshing aspect of the book. Postcolonial critiques like Lata Mani’s (1991), Vishvanathan (1989) and even historical criticism of the traditional Literature Studies have all possibly led to this awareness. Also worth recalling here is Tejaswini Niranjana’s Siting Translation (1991) that showed to us how Ramanujan’s translations of the vachanas was shaped by notions of modernist poetry that anticipated a Western Christian appreciation. The introduction demarcates three categories of translations of the vachanas. The first was influenced by linguistic fervour, religious zeal and nationalistic tendencies. The second was a compilation based on theological point of view and the third gave importance to their ‘secular’ nature. And,
[d]uring the 20th century the vachana discourse was understood from four important standpoints: as an important source of Veerashiavism, as an expression of the main concerns of Hinduism in Kannada language, as the finest example of poetry according to the ideals of the modernist movement in Kannada literature, and as ancient texts inspiring the fight against social inequality and annihilation of caste system (5).
The Sign itself, we are told is guided by, among other things, the preoccupation “to foreground the vachana expressions instead of attempting to bend the texts for the Anglo-American readership.” (16-17).
The Sign gives translations of about 468 vachanas of 60 vachanakaras along with an introduction and an index of first lines. The selection has vachanas that are rare as well as a few familiar ones and includes vachanas that are socially relevant as well as philosophically so. In this sense, the selection is not biased against including some vachanas or vachanakaras and excluding others, as have some recent activists; say by asking for anti-shudra vachanas to be boycotted while retaining the anti-brahminical ones. The editorial displays openness towards new readings and different meanings and this is definitely one of the virtues of the book. But one is not sure if this approach has contributed anything new to the translations.
Keeping the Kannada language syntax in the translation is an interesting move, but is more relevant for Indian readers rather than for the international South Asian Studies departments who are part of the readership aimed at. Indian readers, particularly those who are endowed with language syntaxes similar to that of Kannada will benefit from this move. Retaining the Kannada syntax possibly offers the reader a somewhat literal translation and allows for different and new interpretations. This choice is slightly different from saying that translations are always already ideological, wherein meaning cannot be deferred. However, the following quote shows a problem peculiar to the vachanas. We do not understand the vachanas and must begin to do so. “We believe that translation is a process of understanding and interpreting a text, and each act of translation is a creation of a new and tentative text.” (18)
There are obviously advantages and disadvantages to retaining the Kannada syntax; however mistranslations or good translations are not issues that can be fully discussed until one has a theory about the vachanas. Unfortunately, the scholarship available thus far has so many inconsistencies that they can hardly be called theories. The ideas about spirituality/bhakti and the claims about the caste system are two areas where one can clearly see the lack of rigor. The lack of a theory of vachanas is somewhat recognized when in the introduction we are the following: “All that one can safely state here is that 12th century Karnataka was a site where differing ideologies and philosophies were in dialogue and vachanas reflect this dialogue” (6). But do we really know what the dialogue was about? For example, in the famous Akka-Allama conversation is it clear to us that Akka has ‘answered’ Allama’s question? Or how is Akka’s mere saying-so, with the help of a metaphor, proof enough of her knowledge? Exactly how is it that Allama is convinced? We do not have answers to these questions and therefore it is not clear if we know that these were dialogues or if there were ideologies and philosophies then in the same way in which we understand them now, as if they continuous in time and space, from then and now and from India and the rest of the world.
The introduction to the Series says, “The new occupation-based communities seem to have been the backbone of the movement for an egalitarian society based on monotheism, i.e., worshipping of Shiva” (xii) and then proposes that it is a decentralized monotheism where different personal gods exist. Incomplete speculations about the caste system and the 12th century society influence the conclusions about occupation-based communities, while ethnographies have revealed for at least two decades now that caste system was not based on occupations. And monotheism was anyway a reading imposed on the vachanas by the oriental scholars. We would not be able to say what is different between a Basava encouraging the worship of Shiva only and a Shankara encouraging the worship of six gods only. And then again, the assumption that Indian society was a barbaric one and needed egalitarianism is direct pull-off from oriental scholarship that was, in mapping the time lag of India’s civilization, saw bhakti as a protest movement parallel to the protestant revolution in the history of the West. Thus one can see that theses that claim that bhakti was about the triumph of the regional language versus Sanskrit and the lower-caste versus the upper-caste unthinkingly pursue an orientalist preoccupation that is irrelevant to Indian society and scholarship. One will find it shocking to see the numerous Sanskrit words and descriptive phrases in the vachanas and numerous critiques of ‘lower-caste’ people, as of ‘upper-caste’ people. Part of this book acknowledges the problem but not entirely, because the introduction to the vachanakaras is caught up in labeling them along very problematic frameworks. So it could be said that in the actual translation, this awareness has been futile. See for example this quote where we are told that the vachanas do reject discrimination based on caste, but consist prejudices. Thus the speculation about caste system is saved while the vachanas themselves are sacrificed and declared inconsistent!
Though vachanas unambiguously reject discrimination based on caste and uphold social equality, we also find in the vachanas intolerance about those who are not within the sharana fold, prejudices against gods and religious practices of ‘other’ communities (8)
There is also inconsistency in so far as the vachanas are considered as “personal reactions to this-worldly life brief utterances” and then are also “didactic” in nature and then again also as that which “evolved as a distinct mode of expression as part of the Veerashaiva followers’ desire to propagate a new philosophy, and through it effect social change, in the process foregrounding their subjectivity and personal experience in their utterance” (1). And then all over again, we are told that the vachanakaras, “…have expressed themselves in these vachanas using their every-day experience to communicate their thoughts on religion, philosophy and society” and that “their Vachanas express the trauma of change of faith” (2). If the vachanas are all of these at once, then do we have the critical resources required to differentiate each? The answer is no. All of these are merely speculations floating around, none of which we need to believe, unless we can arrive at a sociological elucidation of what enlightenment is, without mystifying it wherever we lack understanding.
The questions I am raising can be best illustrated through an examination of the translation of Basava’s vachana “Kalabeda, Kolabeda…” which sounds like the laws of Moses. The translation has rendered normative what is only ethical or instructional.
You shall not steal
you shall not kill
you shall not lie
you shall not get angry…(122)
[1] Vivek Dhareshwar, J S Sadananda and Rajaram Hegde were scholars who were part of this group.
Published in Translation Today, Vol 4, Nos 1 & 2, 2007.
By
Sushumna K
Sometime in 2002 at Neenasam, the cultural centre at Heggodu, S N Balagangadhara and a few others[1] questioned the interpretations of the vachanas of the 12th century as anti-caste literature. They had prepared statistics for each of the 14 volumes of vachanas (published by Kannada Pustaka Praadhikaara) along the following lines—How many vachanas from each vachanakaara contained vachanas that had the words or speak of ‘jaati’ and ‘kula’? And how did these vachanas speak of jaati or kula? They argued that the interpretations that modern Kannada scholars have thus far given us were based on a simplistic formula in which anti-brahminism equaled anti-caste (anti-brahminism=anti-caste) and since the vachanas supposedly were anti-brahmin, they were anti-caste too. Contrary to this formula, they demonstrated that vachanas that could count as anti-shudra and those that abused people who did not worship the Linga outnumbered the vachanas that were supposedly anti-brahminical. The anti-shudra vachanas had not been used by the Kannada scholars to make any argument at all and their interpretations were based on selective readings. Possibly, these selective readings were influenced by orientalist scholars. S N Balaganagadara (Prof. Balu) and others working from within his research programme have shown that our understanding of ‘brahmin’, ‘caste system’, ‘shudra’ etc are based in the West’s experience of us, while Indian scholars have tended to take the west’s experience of us for objective descriptions of our realities. To my mind, any book on the vachanas must engage with this significant breakthrough. Unfortunately the book under review, The Sign: Vachanas of the 12th century, 2007 does not do this.
It however displays a certain amount of awareness regarding the possibility of anachronistic readings and the preoccupations that influence the selections and readings of the vachanas by its various editors. This awareness is somewhat new with regard to the vachanas and is possibly the most refreshing aspect of the book. Postcolonial critiques like Lata Mani’s (1991), Vishvanathan (1989) and even historical criticism of the traditional Literature Studies have all possibly led to this awareness. Also worth recalling here is Tejaswini Niranjana’s Siting Translation (1991) that showed to us how Ramanujan’s translations of the vachanas was shaped by notions of modernist poetry that anticipated a Western Christian appreciation. The introduction demarcates three categories of translations of the vachanas. The first was influenced by linguistic fervour, religious zeal and nationalistic tendencies. The second was a compilation based on theological point of view and the third gave importance to their ‘secular’ nature. And,
[d]uring the 20th century the vachana discourse was understood from four important standpoints: as an important source of Veerashiavism, as an expression of the main concerns of Hinduism in Kannada language, as the finest example of poetry according to the ideals of the modernist movement in Kannada literature, and as ancient texts inspiring the fight against social inequality and annihilation of caste system (5).
The Sign itself, we are told is guided by, among other things, the preoccupation “to foreground the vachana expressions instead of attempting to bend the texts for the Anglo-American readership.” (16-17).
The Sign gives translations of about 468 vachanas of 60 vachanakaras along with an introduction and an index of first lines. The selection has vachanas that are rare as well as a few familiar ones and includes vachanas that are socially relevant as well as philosophically so. In this sense, the selection is not biased against including some vachanas or vachanakaras and excluding others, as have some recent activists; say by asking for anti-shudra vachanas to be boycotted while retaining the anti-brahminical ones. The editorial displays openness towards new readings and different meanings and this is definitely one of the virtues of the book. But one is not sure if this approach has contributed anything new to the translations.
Keeping the Kannada language syntax in the translation is an interesting move, but is more relevant for Indian readers rather than for the international South Asian Studies departments who are part of the readership aimed at. Indian readers, particularly those who are endowed with language syntaxes similar to that of Kannada will benefit from this move. Retaining the Kannada syntax possibly offers the reader a somewhat literal translation and allows for different and new interpretations. This choice is slightly different from saying that translations are always already ideological, wherein meaning cannot be deferred. However, the following quote shows a problem peculiar to the vachanas. We do not understand the vachanas and must begin to do so. “We believe that translation is a process of understanding and interpreting a text, and each act of translation is a creation of a new and tentative text.” (18)
There are obviously advantages and disadvantages to retaining the Kannada syntax; however mistranslations or good translations are not issues that can be fully discussed until one has a theory about the vachanas. Unfortunately, the scholarship available thus far has so many inconsistencies that they can hardly be called theories. The ideas about spirituality/bhakti and the claims about the caste system are two areas where one can clearly see the lack of rigor. The lack of a theory of vachanas is somewhat recognized when in the introduction we are the following: “All that one can safely state here is that 12th century Karnataka was a site where differing ideologies and philosophies were in dialogue and vachanas reflect this dialogue” (6). But do we really know what the dialogue was about? For example, in the famous Akka-Allama conversation is it clear to us that Akka has ‘answered’ Allama’s question? Or how is Akka’s mere saying-so, with the help of a metaphor, proof enough of her knowledge? Exactly how is it that Allama is convinced? We do not have answers to these questions and therefore it is not clear if we know that these were dialogues or if there were ideologies and philosophies then in the same way in which we understand them now, as if they continuous in time and space, from then and now and from India and the rest of the world.
The introduction to the Series says, “The new occupation-based communities seem to have been the backbone of the movement for an egalitarian society based on monotheism, i.e., worshipping of Shiva” (xii) and then proposes that it is a decentralized monotheism where different personal gods exist. Incomplete speculations about the caste system and the 12th century society influence the conclusions about occupation-based communities, while ethnographies have revealed for at least two decades now that caste system was not based on occupations. And monotheism was anyway a reading imposed on the vachanas by the oriental scholars. We would not be able to say what is different between a Basava encouraging the worship of Shiva only and a Shankara encouraging the worship of six gods only. And then again, the assumption that Indian society was a barbaric one and needed egalitarianism is direct pull-off from oriental scholarship that was, in mapping the time lag of India’s civilization, saw bhakti as a protest movement parallel to the protestant revolution in the history of the West. Thus one can see that theses that claim that bhakti was about the triumph of the regional language versus Sanskrit and the lower-caste versus the upper-caste unthinkingly pursue an orientalist preoccupation that is irrelevant to Indian society and scholarship. One will find it shocking to see the numerous Sanskrit words and descriptive phrases in the vachanas and numerous critiques of ‘lower-caste’ people, as of ‘upper-caste’ people. Part of this book acknowledges the problem but not entirely, because the introduction to the vachanakaras is caught up in labeling them along very problematic frameworks. So it could be said that in the actual translation, this awareness has been futile. See for example this quote where we are told that the vachanas do reject discrimination based on caste, but consist prejudices. Thus the speculation about caste system is saved while the vachanas themselves are sacrificed and declared inconsistent!
Though vachanas unambiguously reject discrimination based on caste and uphold social equality, we also find in the vachanas intolerance about those who are not within the sharana fold, prejudices against gods and religious practices of ‘other’ communities (8)
There is also inconsistency in so far as the vachanas are considered as “personal reactions to this-worldly life brief utterances” and then are also “didactic” in nature and then again also as that which “evolved as a distinct mode of expression as part of the Veerashaiva followers’ desire to propagate a new philosophy, and through it effect social change, in the process foregrounding their subjectivity and personal experience in their utterance” (1). And then all over again, we are told that the vachanakaras, “…have expressed themselves in these vachanas using their every-day experience to communicate their thoughts on religion, philosophy and society” and that “their Vachanas express the trauma of change of faith” (2). If the vachanas are all of these at once, then do we have the critical resources required to differentiate each? The answer is no. All of these are merely speculations floating around, none of which we need to believe, unless we can arrive at a sociological elucidation of what enlightenment is, without mystifying it wherever we lack understanding.
The questions I am raising can be best illustrated through an examination of the translation of Basava’s vachana “Kalabeda, Kolabeda…” which sounds like the laws of Moses. The translation has rendered normative what is only ethical or instructional.
You shall not steal
you shall not kill
you shall not lie
you shall not get angry…(122)
[1] Vivek Dhareshwar, J S Sadananda and Rajaram Hegde were scholars who were part of this group.
Published in Translation Today, Vol 4, Nos 1 & 2, 2007.
Review of Excursions
Jackson, Michael. 2007 Excursions. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. Notes: xxvii, 295 p. ; 25 cm. ISBN: 9780822340546
Reviewed 05 Dec 2008 by: Sushumna Kannan <[email protected]>
Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore, India & University of Jean Moulin, Lyon, France.
Medium: Written Literature
Subject Keywords: Philosophy, Modern - 20th century Intellectual life - 20th century
ABSTRACT: Excursions discusses issues of identity, agency, labor, society-state, subjectivity, violent histories, and colonialism. The discussions are interwoven with the author's experiences, conversations with friends, students, and colleagues; in locations as diverse as London, Sierra Leone, aboriginal Australia and New Zealand. It carries a focus on the 'human condition' and the challenges presented in intercultural encounters.
Recent times have seen enormous skepticism about what ethnography can achieve. Ethnography could easily pass for a venture where ‘anything goes’, with categorical, conceptual and ethical accountability taking a beating. Empirical research in general and ethnography in particular run the danger of becoming pre-designed encounters where the data proves the hypothesis, predetermined categories produce facts and questions shape answers: ‘what is found is thus, what one went looking for’. In this kind of research, the results confirm the initial assumptions, which might well be valid if a book is illustrative of earlier researches, but not so if it aims at original enquiries. We are more alert today to the very impulse behind 19th century disciplinary developments in the social sciences, but there are few methodologies available to help track our own biases. That said, ethnography is still a significant way in which problems of reference and language can be confronted. Michael Jackson’s Excursions is refreshing in that it understands this predicament in our disciplines and voices its dilemmas very clearly, so that readers could assess the cognitive and theoretical moves made.
Excursions is interested in the human condition in general, and the challenges presented in the encounters of different cultures. It recuperates the idea of 'human nature' from the otherwise excessively historicized contexts, and attempts a balanced view of human dispositions and historical determination. The twelve chapters are each dedicated to take up specific issues like identity, agency, labor, society versus state, subjectivity, violent histories, and colonialism. Discussions of these issues are interwoven with the experiences of the traveling author in various geographical locations and cultural spaces. As the author tells us –the book originates from three kinds of conversations –a dialogue with authors who have captured his imagination and conversations from ethnographic fieldwork in Sierra Leone, Aboriginal Australia and New Zealand and conversations with friends, students and colleagues. Excursions travels not just through various cultural spaces, but also across different disciplinary conventions. Its inter-disciplinarity is not simplistic in ways that might reduce the complexity of the concerns raised in any of the disciplines, but is achieved by writing that is clear and jargon-free; presenting us with a perceptible chain of thought.
Throughout the book, Jackson effectively juxtaposes the "voice of modernity that is predicated on the assumption that we can make history the way we want it to be and through knowledge, democracy and foreign aid bring humanity from the dark ages of sectarian hatred and civil strife..." and "the contrary view that we can never legislate away intolerance, or through scientific innovation bring an end to suffering, or through punishment prevent crime, or through remembering history alter its course" (pp. 36-37). Instead of weaving conspiracy theories about how the 'State fails people everywhere' (p 48), Jackson brings the domain of the cultural to the fore and draws our attention "to bear witness to how people endure their lot, affirming life in the face of death". While emphasis on cultural misunderstanding and cultures enabling life-affirming action is a good move, Jackson does see the nation-state as constitutively problematic rather than as functionally so. Thus the new themes introduced by Jackson still use older theorizations and concepts as necessary foundations. This is disappointing since the conclusions that Jackson draws from his new facts and ethnographic accounts are finally very different from what these theorizations were meant to account for.
Jackson’s methodology; what he calls ‘poetical thinking’ in his Preface, affords him a flexibility to draw analogies between Kuranko pragmatism and Taoist images of "the river’s force placing a limit on the oarsman’s ability to navigate" (p. 36). One could take these analogies further and hypothesize about similarities in all Asian and aboriginal cultures and their differences from the European west. Jackson’s reassurance in following Benjamin’s path to the Pyrenees—"One must abandon any conception of what one is doing in order to do it"—only corroborates such a hypothesis, since the emphasis on concept-less action is primarily eastern. But he does not venture there and instead aims to recuperate the reasoning of the east as one that can be placed on par with any other worldview. My discomfort here is that Jackson mediates the east for us and argues for "a stoic or defiant acceptance of fate, after the fact", (p. 38) while any coherent understanding of the east should render it as already being about reflections that begin after the fact. "That what enables us to bring life also enables us to destroy it", is 'tragic irony' for Jackson, but this would be the very starting point of the reflections of non-European cultures, a fact from which to begin to go about life.
A problem arises because Jackson does not consider this possibility; the East is now ascribed with another worldview. Its modes of concept-less action, one hopes, will be effectively captured by Jackson's call elsewhere in the book, to emphasize 'lifeworld rather than worldview'. A similar neglect leads Jackson to ask, (borrowing from Sen 2005) -"why should Arjuna's dilemma be dismissed as illusory?" while it is actually not dismissed as being illusory. What is actually suggested in the Mahabharata is the inevitability of action, which ironically is only what Jackson would agree with as we see in other parts of the book.
The exploration of conversations with mining laborers and Warlpiri notions of work in chapter 4 is one of the best in the book. The following observations are the highlights of this chapter: "labor is experienced not simply as action of an individual subject on inert matter but as an intersubjective relationship that simultaneously transforms both object worked on and the worker himself", "It is important to remind ourselves that in traditional societies, 'work' includes a range of actions that we in the West would designate as ritual, magical, or even social action, as though these were secondary or surplus to the supposedly primary activities of gardening, herding, farming, hunting, or gathering" (p. 72).
The ways in which reason is construed in this book seem somewhat confusing and limited. By saying that there are "limits to which existence can be subject to reason", or: "...I repudiate the notion that enlightened thought operates solely from the standpoint of reason" (p. 151), it seems that Jackson is mistaking reasons for causes and concepts. For, reason can function at various levels: even in situations of considerable ignorance, there is still the possibility of proceeding, with the situations themselves providing reasons. So when Jackson says that to understand Aua, (Knud Rasmussen’s Igulik Eskimo informant) "we require wit and wisdom rather than reason..." (p. xxiv), he is suggesting that Aua’s world is not one of reason. Could it not be that reason is exactly that which compels Aua to see the world as he does? If reason is construed as a process involved in acting (although there might be instances where rationalization predominates), then it is concepts (or dogmas) that need to be abandoned and not reason.
In chapter seven, Jackson examines New Zealand’s aboriginal tribes and their ways of relating to nature, and also the ways in which the Kuranko come to terms with technological advancements of the west, or the landing on the moon. While Jackson provides us here with various hues of functional and other interpretations of Kuranko actions, there is yet another way in which these very data could be interpreted. It is possible to argue that Kuranko cultures indeed proceed scientifically, but do so mainly with the powers of observation alone, given the absence of technological tools. This does not mean that we need to conclude that they are mythical. Thus stories around the thunderstorm could be a secondary level of knowledge systematization and dissemination rather than those that can be debated for truth-value. This rearrangement does not disallow that through observation one has sensed the ‘energies’ (nature) of either the ‘bush’ or the ‘thunder’. As Jackson himself points out, the problem’s solution is in activating the analogies or stories. But it still surprises him that the practical action of burning grass tree logs to shoo away the storm is indeed undertaken. For a historical (and not philosophical) study, understanding reason as part of action would be far more helpful here than otherwise. Jackson calls the Kuranko’s ways ‘magical reasoning’ in chapter eight—he need not –Would he not be mysticizing the Kuranko by doing so?
The description of the African diaspora in London in chapter six is very sensitive and layered. Both "the untruth of identity" and underlying cultural issues are beautifully captured here. The important aspects of 'immigrant imaginary' that consist of various emotions, thoughts, feelings, and dreams including intense self-consciousness, fear, guilt and 'taking everything personally' are duly recorded.
In chapter eight, we find an interesting discussion of divination. Here we are told that "it is the immediate subjective effects of the spells that really matter" (p. 152) and that "...that these psychological and existential changes are immediate and positive, and that the ultimate outcome of any prognostication or sacrifice does not necessarily inspire retrospective interest in the truth or falsity of the diviner’s original propositions" (p. 169). Jackson also reconfigures the notion of agency alongside to produce a new understanding; "But the notion of agency also covers actions whose effects are felt inwardly rather than manifest outwardly...", "the effects of this logic and the consequences of this action are to be measured in relation to a person's changed experience of his or her relation to the world—the extent to which it encourages the belief that a person makes the world to the same extent that it makes him or her" (p. 214). Jackson thus carefully renders either a Kuranko or a Maori world sociologically understandable and in such a way that their statements about the world begin to sound valid and insightful to a modern-western audience that would have otherwise rejected them as mystical or superstitious. But despite his efforts, Kuranko or Maori cultures come across as possessing insights at best and not truth. That is, that either divination or medicine 'works' is not seen as representative of the possibility that they possess truths about the world (even if partial), but as a way of coping with the world. Here is where perhaps future research questions must begin. They must aim not just sociologically describing, and at recovering indigenous scientific reasoning, but also seek truth by re-examining them via western scientific methods and indigenous/eastern spiritual methods if necessary. It is at least not clear at this point of time that we can be sure that these insights do not also constitute truths.
Jackson's record of the various reasons why the Maori were drawn to Christianity is extremely valuable, given the fact that the academia has often been plagued by believers in nothing less than Liberation theology. Unlike the oft-posed thesis of complete victimhood, we see here that there were choices made in response to what the outsider offered: "When the missionaries came we consented to them because we thought they were a law of life to the body" (p. 241).
Jackson's observation of "the paradox of human evolution that has adapted us to life in small groups" (p. xxvii) is capable of opening up questions of race, caste and class in truly meaningful ways. Most importantly, this book provides empirical grounds to both familiar and new arguments and alerts us to the dangers of reducing life to language. Its reading of Anthropology as symptomatic of the human impulse to wander off the beaten track, although interesting for present times, cannot evade the fact that anthropology was a particular kind of enterprise embedded in the European worldview, that eventually violated the cultures it studied, via the categories imposed and the judgments passed: "What is anthropology but a systematic implementation of this impulse to open up dialogue with others, to call into question the parochial view that one’s own world is the world, and all others a diminished version or demonic corruption of it?" (p. 222). Thus the changing history of this discipline provides an enormous fund of lessons to learn from, as do Jackson's ways of reusing its frameworks for different purposes.
Excursions also engages with debates taken up by disciplines like Philosophy and Cultural Studies, so this book will be useful for students and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities and even for lay readers.
To cite this review, the American Anthropological Association recommends the following style:
Kannan, Sushumna
2008 Review of Excursions. Anthropology Review Database December 05, 2008. http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=3174, accessed January 5, 2011.
Published in Anthropology Review Database. 5. 12. 2008.
Reviewed 05 Dec 2008 by: Sushumna Kannan <[email protected]>
Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore, India & University of Jean Moulin, Lyon, France.
Medium: Written Literature
Subject Keywords: Philosophy, Modern - 20th century Intellectual life - 20th century
ABSTRACT: Excursions discusses issues of identity, agency, labor, society-state, subjectivity, violent histories, and colonialism. The discussions are interwoven with the author's experiences, conversations with friends, students, and colleagues; in locations as diverse as London, Sierra Leone, aboriginal Australia and New Zealand. It carries a focus on the 'human condition' and the challenges presented in intercultural encounters.
Recent times have seen enormous skepticism about what ethnography can achieve. Ethnography could easily pass for a venture where ‘anything goes’, with categorical, conceptual and ethical accountability taking a beating. Empirical research in general and ethnography in particular run the danger of becoming pre-designed encounters where the data proves the hypothesis, predetermined categories produce facts and questions shape answers: ‘what is found is thus, what one went looking for’. In this kind of research, the results confirm the initial assumptions, which might well be valid if a book is illustrative of earlier researches, but not so if it aims at original enquiries. We are more alert today to the very impulse behind 19th century disciplinary developments in the social sciences, but there are few methodologies available to help track our own biases. That said, ethnography is still a significant way in which problems of reference and language can be confronted. Michael Jackson’s Excursions is refreshing in that it understands this predicament in our disciplines and voices its dilemmas very clearly, so that readers could assess the cognitive and theoretical moves made.
Excursions is interested in the human condition in general, and the challenges presented in the encounters of different cultures. It recuperates the idea of 'human nature' from the otherwise excessively historicized contexts, and attempts a balanced view of human dispositions and historical determination. The twelve chapters are each dedicated to take up specific issues like identity, agency, labor, society versus state, subjectivity, violent histories, and colonialism. Discussions of these issues are interwoven with the experiences of the traveling author in various geographical locations and cultural spaces. As the author tells us –the book originates from three kinds of conversations –a dialogue with authors who have captured his imagination and conversations from ethnographic fieldwork in Sierra Leone, Aboriginal Australia and New Zealand and conversations with friends, students and colleagues. Excursions travels not just through various cultural spaces, but also across different disciplinary conventions. Its inter-disciplinarity is not simplistic in ways that might reduce the complexity of the concerns raised in any of the disciplines, but is achieved by writing that is clear and jargon-free; presenting us with a perceptible chain of thought.
Throughout the book, Jackson effectively juxtaposes the "voice of modernity that is predicated on the assumption that we can make history the way we want it to be and through knowledge, democracy and foreign aid bring humanity from the dark ages of sectarian hatred and civil strife..." and "the contrary view that we can never legislate away intolerance, or through scientific innovation bring an end to suffering, or through punishment prevent crime, or through remembering history alter its course" (pp. 36-37). Instead of weaving conspiracy theories about how the 'State fails people everywhere' (p 48), Jackson brings the domain of the cultural to the fore and draws our attention "to bear witness to how people endure their lot, affirming life in the face of death". While emphasis on cultural misunderstanding and cultures enabling life-affirming action is a good move, Jackson does see the nation-state as constitutively problematic rather than as functionally so. Thus the new themes introduced by Jackson still use older theorizations and concepts as necessary foundations. This is disappointing since the conclusions that Jackson draws from his new facts and ethnographic accounts are finally very different from what these theorizations were meant to account for.
Jackson’s methodology; what he calls ‘poetical thinking’ in his Preface, affords him a flexibility to draw analogies between Kuranko pragmatism and Taoist images of "the river’s force placing a limit on the oarsman’s ability to navigate" (p. 36). One could take these analogies further and hypothesize about similarities in all Asian and aboriginal cultures and their differences from the European west. Jackson’s reassurance in following Benjamin’s path to the Pyrenees—"One must abandon any conception of what one is doing in order to do it"—only corroborates such a hypothesis, since the emphasis on concept-less action is primarily eastern. But he does not venture there and instead aims to recuperate the reasoning of the east as one that can be placed on par with any other worldview. My discomfort here is that Jackson mediates the east for us and argues for "a stoic or defiant acceptance of fate, after the fact", (p. 38) while any coherent understanding of the east should render it as already being about reflections that begin after the fact. "That what enables us to bring life also enables us to destroy it", is 'tragic irony' for Jackson, but this would be the very starting point of the reflections of non-European cultures, a fact from which to begin to go about life.
A problem arises because Jackson does not consider this possibility; the East is now ascribed with another worldview. Its modes of concept-less action, one hopes, will be effectively captured by Jackson's call elsewhere in the book, to emphasize 'lifeworld rather than worldview'. A similar neglect leads Jackson to ask, (borrowing from Sen 2005) -"why should Arjuna's dilemma be dismissed as illusory?" while it is actually not dismissed as being illusory. What is actually suggested in the Mahabharata is the inevitability of action, which ironically is only what Jackson would agree with as we see in other parts of the book.
The exploration of conversations with mining laborers and Warlpiri notions of work in chapter 4 is one of the best in the book. The following observations are the highlights of this chapter: "labor is experienced not simply as action of an individual subject on inert matter but as an intersubjective relationship that simultaneously transforms both object worked on and the worker himself", "It is important to remind ourselves that in traditional societies, 'work' includes a range of actions that we in the West would designate as ritual, magical, or even social action, as though these were secondary or surplus to the supposedly primary activities of gardening, herding, farming, hunting, or gathering" (p. 72).
The ways in which reason is construed in this book seem somewhat confusing and limited. By saying that there are "limits to which existence can be subject to reason", or: "...I repudiate the notion that enlightened thought operates solely from the standpoint of reason" (p. 151), it seems that Jackson is mistaking reasons for causes and concepts. For, reason can function at various levels: even in situations of considerable ignorance, there is still the possibility of proceeding, with the situations themselves providing reasons. So when Jackson says that to understand Aua, (Knud Rasmussen’s Igulik Eskimo informant) "we require wit and wisdom rather than reason..." (p. xxiv), he is suggesting that Aua’s world is not one of reason. Could it not be that reason is exactly that which compels Aua to see the world as he does? If reason is construed as a process involved in acting (although there might be instances where rationalization predominates), then it is concepts (or dogmas) that need to be abandoned and not reason.
In chapter seven, Jackson examines New Zealand’s aboriginal tribes and their ways of relating to nature, and also the ways in which the Kuranko come to terms with technological advancements of the west, or the landing on the moon. While Jackson provides us here with various hues of functional and other interpretations of Kuranko actions, there is yet another way in which these very data could be interpreted. It is possible to argue that Kuranko cultures indeed proceed scientifically, but do so mainly with the powers of observation alone, given the absence of technological tools. This does not mean that we need to conclude that they are mythical. Thus stories around the thunderstorm could be a secondary level of knowledge systematization and dissemination rather than those that can be debated for truth-value. This rearrangement does not disallow that through observation one has sensed the ‘energies’ (nature) of either the ‘bush’ or the ‘thunder’. As Jackson himself points out, the problem’s solution is in activating the analogies or stories. But it still surprises him that the practical action of burning grass tree logs to shoo away the storm is indeed undertaken. For a historical (and not philosophical) study, understanding reason as part of action would be far more helpful here than otherwise. Jackson calls the Kuranko’s ways ‘magical reasoning’ in chapter eight—he need not –Would he not be mysticizing the Kuranko by doing so?
The description of the African diaspora in London in chapter six is very sensitive and layered. Both "the untruth of identity" and underlying cultural issues are beautifully captured here. The important aspects of 'immigrant imaginary' that consist of various emotions, thoughts, feelings, and dreams including intense self-consciousness, fear, guilt and 'taking everything personally' are duly recorded.
In chapter eight, we find an interesting discussion of divination. Here we are told that "it is the immediate subjective effects of the spells that really matter" (p. 152) and that "...that these psychological and existential changes are immediate and positive, and that the ultimate outcome of any prognostication or sacrifice does not necessarily inspire retrospective interest in the truth or falsity of the diviner’s original propositions" (p. 169). Jackson also reconfigures the notion of agency alongside to produce a new understanding; "But the notion of agency also covers actions whose effects are felt inwardly rather than manifest outwardly...", "the effects of this logic and the consequences of this action are to be measured in relation to a person's changed experience of his or her relation to the world—the extent to which it encourages the belief that a person makes the world to the same extent that it makes him or her" (p. 214). Jackson thus carefully renders either a Kuranko or a Maori world sociologically understandable and in such a way that their statements about the world begin to sound valid and insightful to a modern-western audience that would have otherwise rejected them as mystical or superstitious. But despite his efforts, Kuranko or Maori cultures come across as possessing insights at best and not truth. That is, that either divination or medicine 'works' is not seen as representative of the possibility that they possess truths about the world (even if partial), but as a way of coping with the world. Here is where perhaps future research questions must begin. They must aim not just sociologically describing, and at recovering indigenous scientific reasoning, but also seek truth by re-examining them via western scientific methods and indigenous/eastern spiritual methods if necessary. It is at least not clear at this point of time that we can be sure that these insights do not also constitute truths.
Jackson's record of the various reasons why the Maori were drawn to Christianity is extremely valuable, given the fact that the academia has often been plagued by believers in nothing less than Liberation theology. Unlike the oft-posed thesis of complete victimhood, we see here that there were choices made in response to what the outsider offered: "When the missionaries came we consented to them because we thought they were a law of life to the body" (p. 241).
Jackson's observation of "the paradox of human evolution that has adapted us to life in small groups" (p. xxvii) is capable of opening up questions of race, caste and class in truly meaningful ways. Most importantly, this book provides empirical grounds to both familiar and new arguments and alerts us to the dangers of reducing life to language. Its reading of Anthropology as symptomatic of the human impulse to wander off the beaten track, although interesting for present times, cannot evade the fact that anthropology was a particular kind of enterprise embedded in the European worldview, that eventually violated the cultures it studied, via the categories imposed and the judgments passed: "What is anthropology but a systematic implementation of this impulse to open up dialogue with others, to call into question the parochial view that one’s own world is the world, and all others a diminished version or demonic corruption of it?" (p. 222). Thus the changing history of this discipline provides an enormous fund of lessons to learn from, as do Jackson's ways of reusing its frameworks for different purposes.
Excursions also engages with debates taken up by disciplines like Philosophy and Cultural Studies, so this book will be useful for students and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities and even for lay readers.
To cite this review, the American Anthropological Association recommends the following style:
Kannan, Sushumna
2008 Review of Excursions. Anthropology Review Database December 05, 2008. http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=3174, accessed January 5, 2011.
Published in Anthropology Review Database. 5. 12. 2008.
