Veena Das-Critical Events_ An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India

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Critical Events A n Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India

VEENA DAS

Acknowledgements I

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have incurred numerous debts during the last six years, while working on this book. I have had fruitful engagements with intellectual communities in Colombo, Delhi, Harvard and Heidelberg and these have helped shape the ideas presented here. Conversations with Andre Bdteille, Upendra Baxi, Richard Burghart, Audrey Cantlie, Diana Eck, Dorothy Austin, Gyanendra Pandey, Ashis Nandy and AIthur Kleinman have been stimulating sources for ideas. I also thank Rita Brara, Roma Chatterji, Martin Fuchs, Lawrence Cohen and Deepak Mehta for their critical comments, offered in the course of discussions. My colleagues and students at the Delhi School of Economics have been a source of great support. The staff of the Ratan Tata Library gave unstinting help in finding references. The office staff of the Department of Sociology was especially supportive and took on many burdens during the three years that I was entrusted with administrative responsibilities. My editor at the O U P has earned my unending gatitude for editorial help and courtesy. Comments by OUP's anonymous referee were very usefill in helping me revise the first draft of this book. Most of all, I know that I would not have been able to work without the firm and affectionate support of my husband R-dnen, whose compelling comments have caused both joy and despair. T o Saumya, Jishnu, Dipankar, and Sanmay, I offer my thanks for making life rnore than deadlines. T o Ram, my thanks for taking over various domestic chores in good cheer, and to Iota for helping to lieep things in perspective. Chapter Five of this book was first published in Contributions

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Critical Events

to Indian Sociologv (n.s.) 1992,26 ( 2 ) .An earlier version of chapter Two appeared in Assessing Cultural Anthropology, edited by Robert Borofsky (McGraw Hill Inc., 1994). Help received in writing particular chapters has been acknowledged in that chapter. Finally, I thank all members of the SSRC Committee on Culture, Health and Human Development for stimulating discussions. A part of the self lies buried in every piece one writes. Thanks to all those who helped the other parts to endure.

Contents I

Introduction

I1

T h e Anthropological Discourse on India: Reason and its Other

I11

National Honour and Practical Kinship: O f Unwanted Women and Children

IV

Communities as Political Actors: The Question of Cultural Rights

V VI VII

Time, Self, and Community: Features of the Sikh Militant Discourse Suffering, Legitimacy and Healing: The Bhopal Case T h e Anthropology of Pain Epilogue

Subject Index Author Index

Chapter One

ln troduction

T

he essays in this book have a double location. They identify certain critical moments in the history of contemporary India, and these moments are then redescribed within the framework of anthropological knowledge. In the process, it is not so much that new anthropological objects are created as that old concepts, being asked to inhabit unfamiliar spaces, acquire a new kind of life. While unfolding this argument I have not resorted to a linear account of these issues, but have preferred traversing forwards and backwards, picking a thread here, dropping a stitch there. My comments in this Introduction will therefore appear fragmentary, and the reader might wish to return to this part of the book later. It is only fair, at this point, to give a brief description of each essay before returning to my reflections on the nature of the anthropological objects which are shown by the experience of living in contemporary India. The ensuing essays are organized around certain major issues: Chapter Two tries to show a rupture in the anthropological discourse on India by revisiting an old controversy between, on the one hand, the French anthropologist Louis Dumont and, on the other, an Indian anthropologist, A.K. Saran. This controversy pertains to the possibility of an Indian sociology. I try to show how controversies in anthropology get reflected in the controversies that constitute public debate in India. Chapter Three takes another look at the events ofthe Partition of India in 1947, focusing on the sexual and reproductive violence to which women were subjected-this violence being the birthmark of two new nations.

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Critical Events

Chapter Four continues the theme of how communities conactors. It examines the discourse on struct themselves as cultural rights, the control over memory, and the right of a community to demand heroic death from its members-as articulated in the well-known cases of Shah Bano and Roop Kanwar. These two cases provide the mirror in which to view all these issues. In Chapter Five I analyse the Sikh militant discourse in order to ask how communities produce violent individuals, and by what symbolic means the sufferings located in individual biographies become transformed into social texts. In Chapter Six I analyse the judicial and medical discourse on victims of the industrial disaster at Bhopal. Here I try to show how these discourses, that are produced by institutions, while functioning as the surfaces of the state, actually appropriate the suffering of victims through the exercise of the parens patriae functions of the state. Suffering here comes to serve as a trope to legitimize the producers of the discourse, and becomes separated from the pain of the victims. Chapter Seven is a meditation on pain. In the final essay I outline my views on deconstructive practices and the possibility of justice. Although I could have followed a different trajectory of events, my reason for choosing these particular events is that they are suff~cientlyheterogeneous, and therefore provide different kinds of mirrors in which is reflected the problematic and practice of social anthropology in contemporary India. There are many different ways in which the traditional subjects of social anthropology can be described, and I have no intention of imposing a uniform description on these. But many anthropologists would perhaps agree with Marc Augk that anthropology has always been an anthropology of the 'here and now'. (L'anthropologie a tojours 4tk une anthropologie de I'ici et du maintenant: Aug4 1992: 16.) By this description Aug4 did not mean to suggest that anthropology has cast its eye only on objects that are near it,

but rather that the mode by which knowledge is produced in anthropology is the mode of intimacy. The 'here' is the society in which the anthropologist must have travelled and lived, while the 'now' refers to the privileged place given to the present. (Although, as I have argued elsewhere, this present is always constructed as a spectral present: Das 1989b.) Paradoxical as it may seem, this mode of producing knowledge, through experience and intimacy, had a unique intellectual object-the exotic Other. This exotic Other was not encountered accidentally, it was sought out as the opposite of the Self. Hence, anthropological knowledge came to be a map of difference, of alterity. The Trobriands exemplified a society that did not acknowledge, or was ignorant of, paternity; the Hindus exemplified hierarchy; the Nuer exemplified the principles of segmentary opposition in feud; the Azande showed the 'rationality' of the socalled irrational practices, such as witchcraft. It is not as if the Western anthropologists who produced much of this knowledge within their different national traditions failed to cast an eye on their own societies. Classical anthropological descriptions of politics in small towns, witchcraft practices, and the religion and folklore of the peasantry in contemporary Western societies are all available. If, nonetheless, reflections on the methodology of social anthropology continued to be informed by theories of the Other rather than theories of the Self, it was perhaps because these studies fitted into the general anthropological framework of cutting up spaces of significance within which society and culture could be conceptualized as totalities. While it is true that, nearer home, sociologists such as M.N. Srinivas and Andre Beteille provided serious reflections on the study of their own societies, and whereas it is clear that the dominant trend in countries like India and Brazil has been for social anthropologists to study their own societies, it is only recently that attempts have been made to conceptualize how the ethnography of modern societies may be written without falling into the trap of an inflexible holism. As Marcus stated, the production of this kind of ethnography 'entails the writing of mixed genre texts . . . in which

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Critical Events

Introduction

e&nographic representation and authority would be variably salient components' (Marcus 1990: 188). Such mixed genre texts, he says, should be sensitive to both 'the inner lives of subjects' and 'the nature of world historical political economy'. Clearly, several kinds of experiments with form are needed to write ethnographies from which the security of an as-if totality has been removed. One way in which we could think of such a postmodern ethnography is to reflect on the nature of contemporaneity and its implications for the writing of ethnography. The investing of particular cultures with 'totalizing visions', in which every individual is seen as representing the whole culture-as Mauss (1938) visualized it-was perhaps never more than an anthropological fantasy. Yet when theywere unable to conceptualize the institutions, the structures, and the expressions typical of modernity-for one can hardly study institutions such as bureaucracies on the analogy of a tribe-anthropologists continued to look in modern societies for residues of tradition, particularly for life worlds that had remained uncolonized by modern institutions such as the bureaucracy, the market, the court of law, and other embodiments of Weberian rationality. Alternatively, attempts were made to portray several disappearing traditions as victims of modernization. In both cases, these studies were stamped by nostalgic renderings of 'tradition'. In an attempt to overcome this kind of nostalgia, with its accompanying vision of social anthropology as the purveyor of dreams, Marc Augk suggests that the philosophical notions which are used to conceptualize the postmodern condition have to be translated into anthropoiogical categories for the study of contemporary societies. In his formulation, the essence of the condition of hypermodernity is the excess experienced in space, time and reference. The global experience of this excess, he argues, puts demands on social anthropology that it should now try to make sense of-not such and such village or such and such lineage as a totality, but 'the world'. Now, obviously, 'the world' cannot be thought of as located

in a particular space in the same way as a village or lineage. The excess or superabundance of time and space in the condition of hypermodernity has meant above all, for Augk, that people are not spatially bound. His description of an international traveller is of someone who can find the same kind of money vending machines in airports everywhere; whose Carte Blanche or American Express Card is recognized in hotels and shops around the world; of one who is reminded of the specificity of a territory only when he hears an announcement that passengers are not permitted to consume alcohol during the halt in Dubai. This brings out one important aspect of the relation between 'hyperspace' and 'location' in the condition of hypermodernity. Seen from the perspective of another culture, however, this effort to make sense of the world takes on an entirely different dimension. The new opportunities provided by global society need to be conceptualized not only with reference to the experiences ofAugk's international traveller, but also, and quite differently, in relation to less happy juxtapositions: for example, the lives of slum dwellers in Bhopal are suddenly shattered because of the location next to their homes of a multinationai factory in. which lethal methyl isocyanate is stored in large quantities. Exposure to this has meant, for those slum dwellers who survived, an apocalyptic relocation of their lives in hospitals and law courts. The hyperabundance of space, equally, must appear in a different guise to black children caught by inner-city violence in Chicago. The relation between the local and the global has clearly altered in ways that pose new challenges to social anthropology. The first description of this book that I can offer, therefore, is that it tries to analyse all these various transformations in space by which people's lives have been propelled into new and unpredicted terrains. I attempt this by focusing on certain critical events in the making of contemporary Indian society. But first let me define what I mean by a critical event. Franqois Furet (1978) defined the French revolution as an event par excellence because it instituted a new rnodaliry of historical action which was not inscribed in the inventory of that situation. None of the events

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Critical Events

Introduction

that I have selected and described as critical compare with the French revolution, but they do have one thing in common with Furet's characterization of that event. This is that, after the events of which I speak, new modes of action came into being which redefined traditional categories such as codes of purity and honour, the meaning of martyrdom, and the construction of a heroic life. Equally, new forms were acquired by a variety of political actors, such as caste groups, religious communities, women's groups, and the nation as a whole. The terrains on which these events were located crisscrossed several institutions, moving across family, community, bureaucracy, courts of law, the medical profession, the state, and multinational corporations. A description of these critical events helps form an ethnography which makes an incision upon all these institutions together, so that their mutual implications in the events are foregrounded during the analysis.

that, in the process of a new agency being invested in the nation state with regard to abducted women and children, family and community become passive. But whereas the individual act of a woman's abduction may earlier have been the cause of a feud between two communities, or may have required decisions to be taken by the family within the framework of kinship norms of female purity and biradarihonour, it is now the nation state which articulates these norms within a public discourse. I do not mean to suggest that concern with the sexuality and reproductive functions of women was earlier exclusively confined to the family: the colonial state had legislated on issues such as the age of consent and the age of marriage, and in fact the regulation of sexuality and marriage was always important in local and regional strategies for defining power and legitimacy. What was new now was that the rationality of the state and the rationality of the family crisscrossed each other to create a unique configuration of events. In this new configuration, first, abducted women came to be defined as the responsibility of the nation. Hence, legislative enactments named them, defined their legal status, and formulated legitimate means by which abducted women and children could be recovered. Second, there was an attempt to redefine values of purity and honour for the family. This was done on the assumption that the women who had been abducted and sexually violated would not be acceptable to their families, and a new genre of public persuasive rhetoric had to be generated whereby families were urged to accept women who had been recovered from their abductors. Third, the modalities of recovery were modelled on a bureaucratic rationality which often conflicted with the life-world of the women. Some of the most poignant examples of this process are provided by an examination of the manner in which the state's construction of the affected victims was cleansed of any ambivalence. I t was assumed that the procedures set down by the state for the recovery of abducted women would correspond completely with women's desire to be restored to their original families. There were, however, cases ofwomen that came up in the tribunals

6

k t me begin with an example of the way in which traditional concepts, regarding the purity of women and the honour of the family, are transformed in the course of one critical event, namely the Partition of India. In Chapter Three I have tried to make a particular incision on the events of Partition by focusing on public debates about abducted women and children. It is well known that Partition juxtaposed in itself a series of heterogeneous moments that together made up the larger political event called Partition. Communal violence and the violence against women has received attention in the social sciences, but what interests me particularly is one strand in the re-description of these events. This strand relates to how the facts of abduction of women and children, and of violence against them, and of the birth of 'unwanted' children, are all dislocated from the status of being events pertaining to family and community, and how they become events which concern the new nations of India and Pakistan. There is an insertion here of the public discourse on abducted women and children, in which the actors are now the new nation states rather than families and communities. This does not mean

Critical Events

Introduction

in which a woman who had been abducted came slowly to be

What about the women who refused to be integrated into these narratives, who chose to 'forget' the facts of abduction and rape, and hence who refused to be 'recovered'? In one formulation, I would say that if they developed a love for these very men, their abductors, then they created the face of the beloved in complete opposition to the image of the state that was trying to impose its own order upon them. By refusing to surrender their love to the overpowering order of the state, they escaped being inscribed in history. If, indeed, there were such women, and the cracks in the Constituent Assembly debates hint at this, then they are evidence of the fact that individual love can escape the constitutive power of the state and the family. But since these women, by definition, escaped being inscribed in history, they must remain an enigma to the orders of the state and the family.

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absorbed in the family of the abductor. She may have become pregnant, for instance, or she may have borne a child and taught herself to forget her past. The state's construction of affect did not permit this forgetting. For instance, it was often stated in the legislative debates on this issue that a woman could never forgive a man who may have killed her husband or father, and who had forcibly abducted her. Hence, the question of such a woman voluntarily remaining with the family of her abductor could not even be entertained. But as we know, emotions which are generated in the experience of living do not always correspond to the manner in which a system of abstract thought seeks to fix them. Testimonies provided by social workers, of a woman who ran away from the camp in order to behold the father of her future child for one last time, and of tall and bearded men who cried like children and pleaded for 'their' women outside the camps in which the recovered women were temporarily housed, a11 suggest moments that were sacrificed to the abstractions and hypothetical emotions constructed by the combined notions of bureaucratic rationality and national honour. In a sense, this particular chapter asks how we might, when constl.ucting an anthropological text, recover these lost moments. My one regret is that I have not been able to insert the voices of the women themselves in this narrative. I have elsewhere enunciated modes of remembrance and forgetting in the voices of women who narrated the traumatic events of Partition, not only as social texts but also as events in their personal biography (see Das 1991). But such women were those who were either able or willing to come back to India without state intervention, and who had been integrated into the institutions of family and kinship in India. Thus, if I was able to give them individual appearances, it was only to the extent that their destinies corresponded with the narrativized functions of family honour and purity, although these concepts stood severely interrogated in their conversations with their own self.

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A very different example of how affect is sought to be created and fixed may be found in Chapter Five, where I describe the Sikh militant discourse. There are many similarities between the way in which motifs are stitched together and a world created through storytelling in the oral discourse of the militants on the one hand, and Walter Benjamin's (1966) description of the storyteller on the other. We need to remember, however, that one of the directions in which the stories are woven in militant discourse leads the individual towards accepting violence. The processes by which this discourse creates the notion of a heroic sclf, the idea of the history of the Sikhs as a series of martyrdoms, and especially the way in which the community serves the function of a conduit to transform individual biography into social text, all collectively create the sense of a community under grave threat. Thus, the imperative of defending the community by acts of violence is morally and existentially framed by the institutionalization of memory in a particular manner. While it is conventional anthropological wisdom to assume that in some socio-historical contexts it makes more sense to ask how communities produce violent individuals rather than search for individual psychopathology behind

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Critical Events

acts of violence, a detailed description of how discourse is or-

ganized in order to direct individuals towards violence has rarely been undertaken. In a recent essay, Peter Loizos (199 1) addresses this issue with great sensitivity. He focuses on an event, in which a Greek Cypriot called Kaijis killed seven Turkish Cypriots, including women and children. Reflecting o n the mode of justification offered by Kaijis for his actions, Loizos says: As this article went through successive drafts, I came to see Kaijis himself as a problem of diminishing interest. It became clear that a relatively small number of men such as Kaijis could do a degree of damage to intercommunal relations which was often irreparable, in the short and medium term. But men such as KaGis had not invented the ideas of Greeks and Turks, that thq, lived, killed and even diedfor.

Who, then, invents these ideas? Loizos speaks of the 'collective memories' of nation states that have been 'created, preserved, and recycled' since the invention of printing by nationalist ideologues, and the clerics who staff the cultural institutions of society. However, it is not only the nation state that tries to institutionalize collective memories in a manner which makes individuals willing to die and kill; there are also communities which, in the process of their emergence as political actors, try to control and fix memory in much the same manner. Among all the processes by which this collective memory comes to be institutionalized, I would give a very special place to the sense of contemporaneity which is established between noncontemporary events on the one hand, and the transformation of individual biography into social text o n the other. It is this process which, as I shall show, allows a particular militant community to valorize acts of violence against hapless victims who either belong to other communities, or who dare to oppose the construction of reality in militant discourse. The creation of community through violence against the Other reflects the dark side of that community. It needs to be reiterated, in this context, there are limits to an analysis that rests

Introduction

11

completely upon discursive practices in the creation of militancy, for clearly the militants who engage in spectacular killings are not produced by that discourse alone. Non-discursive practices, especially the institutional and the pedagogic, exist hand in hand with the discourse to form a heterogeneous totality. It is very difficult for a social scientist to have access to training camps, to the ways in which the infrastructure of militancy is reproduced, and to the structure of decision-malung in the echelons of militant groups. What an analysis of the discourse permits, however, is an insight into how individual acts of violence may be reclassified and reframed as acts committed o n behalf of the community. It is important to note that even in militant discourse the references to violence are framed in ambiguity. Comparable to a stutter in speech and to fatigue at work, they point to areas where language perhaps meets its limits. There are two other cases examined in this book wherein communities emerge as political actors, these being the Muslim and Hindu communities. The first case is a cause celebre and revolves around Shah Bano, a divorced Muslim woman who sought maintenance under Prevention of Vagrancy clauses of the Criminal Procedure Code. In Chapter Four I try to show how this case became a dramatic confrontation. T h e confrontation was between a particular vision of the community, in which the right to conduct personal matters of marriage, divorce; adoption, etc. is vested in laws that codify the customs of the comrnunity, and a conflicting vision propagated by the state in which all the citizens of a country must be regulated by a single legal civil code. The latter view, articulated in the Indian Supreme Court judgement upon this case, was actively supported by several women's groups. It came to be named as the progressive, secular view, while the former vision was often represented as the view of fundamentalist Muslim groups. In my own analysis I have pointed out the difficulties of naming the contests as secularism versus fundamentalism. I have tried to reopen the debate in terms of issues of legal pluralism. The second case which I discuss is that of Roop Kanwar, a

Critical Euents

Introduction

young girl from a small town in Rajasthan who committed, or

on these two cases I have been able to bring into relief the simultaneous location of community in institutions of different kinds. The contested nature of each question puts new demands on social scientists to articulate the issues in a manner which does not simply stem from their having become allies of one or the other position within an antagonistic debate. This raises the whole question of finding forms of writing which displace ethnographic or historiographic authority rather than provide affirmations of this authority. A community trying to claim rights over its own culture can include several different kinds of objects as constituting culture. Thus, objects of culture may include rights to nature (e.g. rights over forests, or land-use rights) and products of the imagination (e.g. folklore) on the one hand, and, on the other, the right to institute memory in the form of the community's histo~yand the right to live by laws that regulate the personal life of its members. In extreme cases the community may even claim the right to. ask . for self-sacrifice, i.e. the right to demand that its members die in order to preserve the moral life of the community. Clearly, each of these objects is of legitimate interest to the state, the community and the individual. For example, it is very difficult to think of a modern state which would give a community the right to decree the death of any of its members, for the state lays sole claim on rights over the life of its citizens. So the contests over 'terrorist' killings and sati, for instance, are among the most intense. In challenging the concept that only the state can deprive citizens of their lives after due process of law, and by decreeing that a community has the right to punish or demand heroic death, the community poses a challenge to the state which strikes at the very core of its being. - Once the notion that the state is the source of all legitimate violence comes to be challenged, one can conceive . . .. of situations where the state's own right to deprive individuals their lives, even with due legal process, is effectively challenged. .. or by This has been done by those opposed to the death penalty,

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to commit, sati. The contests which developed here were between the state-which lays absolute claims over death and therefore does not permit individuals or communities to that power-and sections of the Rajput community which put forward similar claims in order to demand heroic death from its members. Again, it oversimplifies matters to portray these contests as simple struggles between the backward forces of Hindu fundamentalism and the progressive forces of secularism. One can, nevertheless, stand with the efforts of the state, including its legislative labours, on the grounds that in a situation of legal pluralism the effort to protect life must act as a trump against the claims of all other rights, including the cultural rights of communities. What turns out to be more problematic is that the state not only made legal provisions to prevent the recurrence of sati, it also tried to legislate against all customs which valorized the rite of sati, regardless of the form of those customs. In my discussion of this case I examine a subsequent controversy between the trustees of the Rani Sati Mandir in Calcutta and the Janvadi Mahila Samiti over the right to offer worship to the sati mata in the temple. In this particular case the courts took resort to the private/public dichotomy, by which the trustees were permitted to organize worship of the sati mata inside the temple but not to organize a public mela to commemorate her memory. I have argued that what we witness here is a contest between two different kinds of communities on the one hand, and state and community on the other, over the control of memory. The trustees of the temple said that the state did not have a right to obliterate the past, though they did not contest its right to control the future. Such contests over memory are visible in several spheres of public life in contemporary India, and they point to the centrality of time when defining self, community and nation. It should be obvious from this brief summary of these two issues that new formations of community and culture have emerged, and indeed have become the sites of major conflicts in contemporary Indian society and polity. 1 hope that by focusing

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pacifists, but such challenges cannot lead to simple reallocations of such a right to the communir)..

Critical Even t j In other areas of life-in

proposing a plurality of ~ e r s o n a l laws for example, or in the organization of memory-it is possible to think of plural modes of being within the overarching framework of state formations. However, caution suggests that in the very process of investing a community with legal personality there may follow an insufficient recognition of the heterogeneous nature of communities: the fact that communities may be both filiative and affiliative, and that alternative visions of a community may often be repressed by violence, specially when a community first begins to emerge as a political actor in the public sphere. The emergence of communities as political actors in their own right is related in India to changes in the nature of political democracy. W e know that the anti-colonial struggles, as embodied in several local, regional, and national-level movements in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, were about the sharing of power. Yet by the end of twentieth century the nature of representative democracy has itself been put into question, for it has become clear that even when power is exercised in the name of representation it tends to become absolute, and 'to speak in the name of the society it devours' (Tourraine 1992: 131). T h e essays in this book demonstrate, one case after another, the mechanisms by which the power of the state and the market come to be exercised on the grounds of their capacity to represent the best interests of their victims. T h e emergence of new political actors may be seen as experiments in the exercise of disciplining this power precisely when this power speaks 'on behalf of society'. It is this political context ofthe state's assertion and arrogation of authority which explains why so many social scientists have raised powerful voices in support of'tradition', and why they have expressed the hope that alternative visions of life may be available in the form of traditional ways of life, of which diverse communities are the embodiment. Some of these social-scientist voices have been woven into the chapters that follow. While the call for pluralism, and for a recognition of those voices that have been struck dumb by the monopoly that the state tries to establish over ethical

Introduction

15

pronouncements, is a very powerful call, I am not certain that all those who utter such calls, have been able to overcome the seductive nostalgia which informs the concepts of community. T h e need for a recognition of multiplicity and plural ways of life was given passionate expression by Walt Whitman (19 3 1) in

Song of My5elf: Through me many long dumb voices Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves Voices of the diseas'd and despairing, and of thieves and dwarfs Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion, And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of father-stuff And of the rights of them the others are down upon Through me forbidden voices. Recently, Maxine Greene (1992) has evoked this poem to challenge the notion of a canon in aesthetics and literature: For some of us, just beginning to feel our own stories are worth telling, the reminders of the 'long dumb voices' . . . cannot but draw attention to the absences and silences that are as much part of our history as the articulate voices, the shimmering faces, the images of emergence and success. But then the dumb voices, for whom the poet or the literary critic or the anthropologist becomes a conduit, emerge in her essay in the 'central sphere for the operation of the passions', which she locates, following Unger (1984) in 'the rea!m of face-to-face relations'. In my own analysis, however, I am led to conclude that, as political actors, communities redefine themselves and are defined by others not by face-to-face relations but by (a) their right to define a collective past, a definition which homogenizes the different kinds of memories preserved in different visions of the community; (b) the right to regulate the body and sexuality by the codification of custom; and (c) the consubstantiality between acts of violence and acts of moral solidarity. However contradictory this may appear to Habermas or Unger, I would go so far as

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Critical Events

Introduction

to state that the community also colonizes the life-world of the indiridual in the same way as the state colonizes the life-world of the community. An examination of the Shah Bano and Roop Kanwar cases, as well as of the militant discourse of Sikhs, leads me to conclude that while there is a great urge to challenge the monopoly over ethical pronouncements by the state-a challenge which we can see within critiques of the state by all the major communities in India-such critiques exist unfortunately in the same arena of historicity as the organization they seek to oppose. This can be expressed by superimposing the following two diagrams upon each other.

can d o little more than mirror the state's structures. This is why I believe that, unless a very different theory of community emerges, the language of cultural rights cannot help us remoralize those areas of life which have become denuded of meaning by the dominance of technologies of governance within modern states.

Creation of homogeneous national narratives

Monopoly over force

Territorial integrity of the nation state

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Homogeneous community history

(Alrernaative constitution andlegal system

(

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),

/

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Terrorist violence, control of dissent

1'

Clearly, a critique of the state which reproduces the very logic it seeks to contest and which exists in the same arena of historicity

T h e theories of community in the literature of the social sciences and political philosophy are premised upon the idea that the community is the realm of face-to-face relations. It is therefore valorized as a resource for challenging the impersonal, dehumanizing structures of the modern state. All the examples which I offer show that the community is emerging in India's political culture as a political actor which seeks to reshape not so much the faceto-face intimate relations of the private sphere, but control over law and history in the predominantly public sphere of life. A flight of fantasy would suggest, following Unger (1 984), that instead of calling for complete surrender from its individual members, the community can become a revitalizing force within India's public culture only if it recognizes its own paradoxical links of confirmation and antagonism with its members. Collective existence is necessary, for the individual's ability to make sense of the world presupposes the existence of collective traditions. However, equally, selfhood depends on the individual's capacity to break through these collective traditions and to live on their limits. Just as communities need to resist the encompassing claims of the state, individuals need to resist the encom~assingclaims of even the most vital communities as a condition of their human freedom. If we '3ok at the new political actors emerging on the public scene through the cases described earlier, we see that these actors, until their emergence, led anonymous lives, that they then usurped the domain of visibility momentarily (in response to certain critical events), and that they then disappeared. This does not mean that their emergence is not important, it means that we should expect different kinds of political actors to emerge and disappear. T h e

18

Critical Events

most important among these actors are those who search for a voice because they have been inflicted with sudden and inexplicable suffering, such as the gas victims of Bhopal. Such actors demand from us that we address directly the problem of pain and suffering. These subjects form the matter of chapters six and seven of this book. Chapter Six describes professiona! discourses-medical, bureaucratic and judicial-in which the sufferings of the Bhopal victims were articulated. It is my argument that the suffering of these victims acts as a narrative trope in these discourses: it cuts off the experience of suffering from the victims and, instead, becomes a means of legitimizing the producers of the professional discourses. In these final chapters, I am also brought to the limits of the efficacy of my notion of 'voice'. I suppose the idea of using 'voice' to describe the relation of an anthropologist to her subjects had the attractive potential of overcoming the re+-ing notion of 'gaze'. Earlier in this chapter I referred to Marcus' plea that new forms of ethnographic writing sensitive to the 'inner lives ofsubjects' and the 'nature of the world historical economy' be invented. Yet so long as we continue to think of the inner world of subjects as an inward space of representations, this space can only be disclosed as if in a mirror-an inner life objectified under a gaze. In order to cast off this reifjing anthropological gaze, critics of 'vision' show it needs to be supplanted by a 'voice', which is expected to be more open to the fragmented and multiple character of social experience. The anthropologist must appear not in the role of an observer but that of a hearer, and the subject must correspondingly appear in the role of a speaker. By this means the subject is transformed from third person into first person, her relation being mediated now, through the voice, with a second person. But what is one to make of conditions in which the voice becomes silent? It was, above all, the experience of working on the Bhopal disaster which made me aware that the very rules which frame 'voice' in modern professional discourses may silence those

Introduction

19

who have become victims on account of the mysterious functioning of 'world historical and political processes'. In professional discourses on Bhopal themffering of victims was evoked, but in a manner which transformed victims into malingerers, irresponsible litigants and simple frauds. The rules by which a voice could have been given to the suffering were simply not available. Are the procedures for silencing the voices of victims of huge industrial disasters, or even the victims of continuous exposure to industrial hazards, a peculiar product of Indian society? Though it is a pity that no serious theorizing was available on the nature of a society in which the production of wealth and the production of destruction go hand in hand, not even after the Bhopal disaster, the subject has received considerable attention in recent German sociology. For example, Ulrich Beck (1992) has dispassionately examined the complicity of culprits and judgeslexperts in the technology of hazards towards making what he calls a 'risk society'. As he puts it, 'in matters of hazard, no one is an expert-. . . there is no scientific bridge between destruction and protest or between destruction and acceptance', and 'new knowledge can turn normality into hazards overnight'. Industrial hazards are the best example of the power of hard sciences to decide, on the basis of their own standards, what constitutes risk; also to decide how much risk a general population must take in the larger interests of producing wealth; and the best example of how, in this process, other discourses, such as judicial discourse, become allies of the state in silencing the voices of others. When the existence of suffering is taken as evidence of malingering, fraud and guilt, does it still make sense to evoke theodicy as providing meaning to the suffering person? In other words. should suffering always be constituted as happening in a world imbued with meaning? In the case ofvictims of industrial disasters, militant violence and police atrocities, life appears not to be guided by laws of history and society but by a series of contingent events. I have argued, in the last two chapters, that in the face of such suffering which is overwhelmingly experienced as accidentally visited upon the person, a search for meaning only gives legitimacy

Critical Events

Introduction

to the system, even as there is a profound failure to affirm the suffering individual. In such cases, can we think ofgiving irresponsibility a positive sense, in that the existence of undeserved suffering can become testimony to the chaotic nature of the world? Here we run into a conceptual difficulty of great seriousness. Most intuitive notions of a just or meaningful life assume that suffering must be deserved; yet the experience of victims, ranging from women abducted during the riots of 1 9 4 6 7 to the victims of the Bhopal tragedy, is overwhelmingly that the processes by which suffering came upon them were not transparent to them. Life was experienced by them as, essentially, a configuration of accidents. In order to resolve conceptual difficulties of this order, Stanley Raffel (1992) has recently proposed a new way of looking at theories of justice. He points to the essentially limited notion of justice in modern political philosophy which associates justice primarily with methods for enabling society to distribute its scarce resources. This is a limited notion, he argues, because:

Raffel sees clear affinities between his own concept of justice and Dante's visions of hell and heaven. Without recapitulating this fascinating comparison in detail, I shall point to the way in which Dante is evoked in order to state that suffering may be an accompaniment in both heaven and hell. In the case of hell, the suffering takes the form of punishment for sin, that is, the sin itself, seen as i t is, experienced without any illusion. Thus, the person who betrays a close friend (e.g. Judas) is seen as frozen in ice. The lack of warmth symbolized by his cold state does not describe future punishment, but rather his present state. In this case, the sinner has himself created the conditions of his suffering. Raffel contrasts this with the suffering of a seventeenth century figure called Siger, an Averroist who was placed in paradise by Dante despite the fact that he himself was hostile to the doctrines of Averroism. What is the nature of Siger's suffering, as Dante sees it? 'This figure is the light of a spirit who wrapt in grave thoughts found death slow in coming.' Siger found death slow in coming, for he had to face martyrdom for the 'unwelcome truths' which the pursuit of reason led him to establish, and which he himself was anguished to find were contrary to the truths established by faith. Raffel suggests that the tragedy of Siger is that he was led by a relentless search for truth towards conditions which caused him enormous suffering, but it was not reprehensible actions such as betrayals and untruths that contributed to his suffering. In this sense, he did not himself create the conditions for his suffering-events were visited upon him which led to his undeserved suffering. The distinction ~ r o ~ o s ebyd Raffel at least opens out the path for thinking about the contingent nature of the world, of suffering that is simply visited upon us. Can we say that a doctrine of 'undeserved suffering', as Raffel puts it, and of giving 'a positive value to irresponsibility', as I formulate it, can help us come to terms with the accidental nature of the world? Raffel proposes that this conceptual distinction between suffering for which the conditions have been created by one's own actions, and a suffering that has been visited upon us (even if they are difficult to distinguish empirically) may provide resources for

20

What might help us to explore the key difference here is to appreciate that there is something that most certainly would remain in the world even if there were no scarce resources. Surely one thing that would continue to exist, no matter how wealthy a society becomes, would be circumstances or contingencies. Unless there could be such a thing as the same fate for everyone, we think of any society as inevitably involving each of its actors in differentiated circumstances. Furthermore this ioncept of circumstances can be applied both to more general aspects of one's fate . . . and to much more specific, temporary and localized aspects of one's fate. One point about justice which one would say . . . makes it more than merely a concept necessary when resources are scarce is that it is the concept which would enable us to engage in a form of reflection about our circumstances, our fate, everything that, as it were happens to us (p. 91).

Raffel then goes on to propose that this form of reflection would enable us to divide these circumstanca into two basic categories circumstances that we have created, and circumstances that were just visited upon us. He warns that these two categories are not mutually exclusive-the possibility of an overlap always exists.

21

Critical Event5

reflections on one's condition. There are two problems that I have met when applying this distinction to questions of deserved and undeserved suffering. First, as I said, I often encountered suffering as a narrative trope in professional discourses, both judicial and medical, on Bhopal. This made me see that such discourses on suffering which pronounce on its deserved or undeserved nature, are invariably discourses on other peopie > suffering This is comparable to Fabian's (1973) point that death has been studied in the anthropological literature invariably as the death of Others. These discourses then end up by using the notion of suffering to establish their own legitimacy, while simultaneously denying the authenticity of the experience of sufferers. Second, the person who has been visited by unfortunate events has no easy way of formulating how the conditions for her suffering were created. In an earlier work (Das 1990b), I described the case of Shanti, a woman whose husband and four children were burnt alive during the 1984 riots in Delhi. Various patriarchal voices within the community ofsurvivors then gave supposedly authoritative (actually authoritarian) readings of the events, in which the blame for death ultimately came to be fixed on Shanti. Despite some moments of resistance, Shanti herself found she was incapable of escaping feelings of guilt. It is in this context that I have gone against the time-honoured tradition in sociology to look for meaning in the face of suffering, and instead suggested that a theory of chaos may be far closer to the victim's understanding of the world as accidental and contingent in nature. In Chapter Seven I try to construct a genealogy for the problem of pain, not in theories of theodiq, but in the context of a theory of secret connections established between the individual and society through the infliction of pain. Society inscribes its own discourse on the body of the individual ritually, through pain, even in times of normality. In periods of disorder memory is made, as Nieasche (1989) said, by the infliction of every kind of pain and indignity on the body of the individual defined as debtor. For such victims of terror, who cannot rely on articulate and literate accounts but who must live through terror with other kinds

Introduction

23

of languages, what can anthropology offer? If it is the recovery of 'voice', it cannot be a disembodied voice, just as a lament or a dream or a nightmare cannot be a disembodied narration. T o recover such embodied narrations seems to me the only way in which one can resist the totalizing discourses that become evident not only in narratives of the state and narratives embedded in the professional organization of knowledge, but also in the discourses of resistance that use the very logic of the state which they seek to resist. What follows in this book are faltering attempts to arrive at the truth of thevictim, a truth which is made up not of the abstract iniquities of a system but of the daily suffering, the daily humiliation, and the everyday experience of being violated. I hope it will be read not for any sophistication of abstract arguments-there are too many gaps in my thinking here--but by the concreteness of events which make up the lived solipsism of the victim. Hannah Arendt's remorseless realism led her to say that reality needs us to protect it, that we are pardians of the truth. The question is whether we protect the truth which connives with violence, or the truth which is incarnate in the victim-and which is, hence, the only means we have of renouncing both violence and untruth in a single gesture of affirmation.

The Anthropological Discourse on India

Chapter Two

The Anthropological Discourse on India: Reason and its Other

A

L

n understanding of contemporary Indian society through a close examination of certain critical events should begin, I believe, with an enquiry into the framework and practices of my own discipline. While the Eurocentric nature of anthropology, as of several other social sciences, has long been recognized, what is unique about anthropology as a discipline is its use of the 'Other' to overcome the limits of its origin and location. If the traditional anthropological vocation may be described as that of 'cultural criticism' (Clifford 1990), its method of arriving at this position through a study of other cultures has been a scaffold for the construction of anthropological knowledge. This is where we meet our first obstacle, for that which is constituted as the Other of the anthropologist is the Self of the society under anthropological gaze. One must ask, then, what this process of making a society available to anthropological gaze does to its Self? Does the consecration of ethnographic authority completely appropriate the voice of the person being studied? As Fabian (1990) puts the question: how does the praxis 06 writing relate to the praxis of being written about? The last few years have seen an increasing awareness of the contribution of non-Western anthropologists to the malung of anthropological knowledge. Clifford says: Insiders studying their own cultures offer new angles ofvision and depths of understanding. Their accounts are empowered and restricted in unique ways . . . What has emerged fiom all these ideological shifts, rule changes, and new compromises is the fact that a series of historical

25

pressures have begun to reposition anthropology with respect to its 'objects' of study. Anthropology no longer speaks with automatic authority for others defined as unable to speak for themselves ('primitive', 'pre-literate','without history'). Other groups can less easily be distanced in specid, almost always past and passing, times-represented as if they were not involved in the present world systems that implicate ethnographers along with the peoples they study (Clifford 1990: 9-10).

Yet even this recognition does not begin to touch upon the specific question of how the study of Self and Other are brought into a relationship within the anthropological text. My contention is that there is a peculiar double bind which traps the non-Western anthropologist who wishes to relate experience and representation, gained through membership of her own society, when constructing the anthropological text. 1 should not be understood as saying that there is some kind of 'given' or 'neat' experience of their own societies available to non-Western anthropologists. I do believe, however, that a frank engagement with the problem is necess* if the inventories of our subject are to include modes of knowing that are different from those within classic models of studying 'other' societies. In this chapter I examine the Otherness of Indian society and the role it has played in anthropological theory.' In a general project initiated some years age, Henfeld (1987) made the telling point that one has to examine the play of stereotypes in societies like Greece to appreciate how texts of orientalism and colonialism are embodied in the everyday practices of these societies. Similarly, in Indian society one finds controversies of anthropological theory not only mirrored in the ideological conflicts of modern Indim society but also as having provided new spaces for these conflicts to be articulated. I examine only one such refraction by which particular controversy in anthropology found new life in the public arena, in terms of conflicts beween notions of community

'

This chapter does not provide a comprehensive survey of the problem. It only makes certain incisions into the literature of social science to illuminate certain specific problems in the anthropological discourse on Indian society.

Critical Event3 and nation on the one hand, and myth and history on the other. I do not claim to find direct links between the actors in this controversy, but I do claim that just as the practice of literary criticism shows secret connections between different kinds of literary works, so the process of anthropological criticism can reveal secret connections between the construction of anthropological knowledge and the social practices of that society. I shall substantiate this argument by moving towards a philosophy of language rather than of consciousness, i.e. by trying to unravel the explicit and implicit dialogues contained in the anthropological text. I assume that the relationship with the Other, at the conceptual level of the anthropological text, must in some ways be visibly related to our communicative dealings with others. Thus I see the ethnographic2 or sociological text on India as containing at least three kinds of dialogues-that with the Western traditions of scholarship in the discipline; with the Indian sociologist and anthropologist; and with the 'informant', whose voice is present either as information obtained in the field or as the written texts of the tradition. It is the interrelationship between these dialogues that provides the method for our understanding of the anthropological text. Instead of answering this question in general terms, I have chosen to analyse several papers written by Louis Dumont when he was in the process of establishing what he considered to be a way of studying Indian society which would be mindful of its specificity. The authority that Dumont has enjoyed as an interpreter of India to Western scholarship makes his work an appropriate object of study.

I am aware of the admonicions of Fabian (1 770) on the mindless ways in which the term 'ethnograplly' is used, especially in such compounds as 'ethnographic subjects'. Fabian notes that for the layman the term 'ethnographic' has connotations of the exotic. In my own usages in this chapter, there is a slippage between the terms 'ethnographic', 'anthropological', and 'sociological', and I think the reason is that none of the neat divisions often proposed to distinguish between these three kinds of texts could be applied to the disciplines of social anthropology and sociology in India.

The Anthropological Discourse on India

27

Unraveling the W e and the You: The Text of Louis Dumont I begin by asking-to whom is the anthropological text addressed, and does the addressee influence the choice of the object? In formulating this issue, Dumont first tried to characterize the essential character of Indian society which set it apart from Western society. The 'predominant ideological note' of the social system in India (in relation to its morphology), Dumont noted, was that of traditional hierarchy. Hierarchy was then chosen as the appropriate object ofstudy because it constituted an absolutely contrasting pole to what he called 'modern ideology'. The purpose of studying this contrasting pole was 'to isolate our ideology as a sine qua non for transcending it, simply because otherwise we get caught in it as the very medium of our thought' (Dumont 1770: 2). This framing sentence makes it quite clear that, taken as a charter for the legitimacy of anthropological research, the ~ubjects of this research, the 'we', as also the audience to whom the research is addressed, the 'you', belong by definition to societies with 'modern ideologies'. Located spatially in the West, its very 'modernity' puts an obligation on the audience to cultivate an ability to comprehend other values intellectually, even as it is conceded that these are not capable of posing a challenge to the reader's own values. As Dumont states: T h e reader may, of-course, refuse to leave the shelter of his own values; he may lay it down that for him man begins with the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and condemn outright anything that departs from it. I n doing so, he certainly limits himself, and we can question not only whether he is ir, fact 'modern', as he claims, but also whether he has the right to be so-called. In fact, there is nothing her? like an attack, whether direct or oblique, on modern values, which seem in any case secure enough to have nothing to fear from our investigation. It is only a question of attempting to grasp other values intelkctually (Dumont 1970: 2 emphasis supplied).

Within such a description of the anthropological project, what intellectual space can anthropology create for itself in India? Would such an anthropology or sociology be 'Indian' in the sense

28

20

Critical Events

The Anthropological Discourse on India

of providing adjectival qualifications to a general discipline marked by a similarity of theoretical frames and methods? Is it better characterized as sociology/anthropolo~in India, in the sense that India simply provides a location for the observation of cultural difference and its articulation? O r is it preferable to think o f a 'sociology of India', as contended by Dumont, which provides the means by which the Western yearning to intellectually escape the limits ofits ideology are fulfilled?While the subtle implications of every intellectual stance for the manner in which the anthropologist may position herself in relation to Indian society cannot be systematically examined here, some indications towards an answer will emerge. T h e first danger for the Indian anthropologist is that she is vulnerable to the charge of being either 'defensive' or '3:haul,~inist'. O n the first charge, Dumont warns his Western readers thus:

tified the caste system as the fundamental institution of Indian society, to be studied both textually and by observation. T h e identification of caste as the fundamental institution of Indian society, he maintained, allowed India to be conceptualized as one, despite the observed regional and historical variations. Dumont was not unaware of the fact that his assertion of the unity of India lying in its caste system could be construed as both a sociological and a political statement. So, in 1960, he said he feared a misunderstanding of his project by some of his Indian readers:

The third item of our appraisal is this: nowadays Hindus often assert to Westerners that caste is a social and not a religious matter. It is clear that motivation here is quite different; i t is mainly a question of finding some justification for the institutions from a Western point ofview, the point of view usually accepted by the educated Hindu (ibid: 26). It seems the educated Hindu cannot speak with an authentic voice o n matters pertaining to caste or religion since she is condemned to seeing the institutions of her society 'from a Western point of view'. If, however, she speaks from a point of view that may be characterized as 'Indian', or 'Hindu', or 'Islamic', she will be accused of being 'backward looking'. T h e only legitimate orientation to the traditions of one's own society which is permitted, it seems, is to place these traditions squarely in the past. Let us revisit an old controversy between Dumont and an Indian anthropologist in order to appreciate more closely the double bind in which the Indian anthropologist finds herself. In his inaugural lecture on assuming the Chair of T h e Sociology of India in France, in 1955, Dumont initiated the project of establishing a (new) sociology of India which lay at the 'confluence of sociology and Indology' (Dumont 1957). In this project he iden-

Have not some of oar Indian readers found in the affirmation of the basic unity of Indian caste society more than a sociological proposition, something of the kind of a political affirmation, not to say a weapon?. . . To clear up all misapprehension it should suffice to recall that the unity to which we have referred n r t only is not a political unity but is a religious unity. In terms of the 'ends ofaction', arthais made subservient to dharma . . . this means here political disunity for the sake of religious supremacy. And the course of Indian history as a whole confirms this. Seen from this angle, the task of modern Indian statesmen is ~recisely to replace one sort of unity by the other. From a caste society to a nation the way is long, and the political task will look more arduous, the more the nature of the existing unity will be understood. Our Indian friends will forgive us, if, prompted by the desire to avoid confusion of levels, we have here somewhat overstepped our usual bounds (Dumont 1960: 8-9). At this point, let us note two points arising out of Dumont's clarification. First, while for the Western reader the identification of the fundamental unity of India in the caste system was a question of apprehending other values intellectualb, some Indian readers were likely to use this sociological proposition as apolitical weapon. Second, the Indian nation could only be built against the 'course of Indian history'; even at the risk of overstepping bounds it is the solemn responsibility of the Western anthropologist to remind Indian statesmen of their task. Later I shall argue that this concept of the nation-as essentially opposed to the traditions of the society within which it was being instituted, and of a time-

30

Critical Events

consciousness which views the past as a threat to India's future ~oliticalstability-forms an important ideological debate in this country's public culture. It is through these dual notions, first of 'nation' vernrrcommunity (here, read caste), and second of a past which has to be consciously discarded, that a p o l i t i d economy of signs is created. Dumont deals with the political implications of his assertions by two methodological devices. First, a spatial distance between India and the West allows Western scholars to study 'caste' and its values at the level of the intellect, but these 'obsolete' values provide neither political opportunities nor political challenges to the Western reader. T o the Indian anthropologist who lives in societies imbued with these values, the challenge is, according to Dumont, to overcome these traditional institutions and values so as to build a modern nation state. The only attitude that the modern Indian can take to his own traditions is to place them i r ~ the past. It seems that in no case can these traditions offer an intellectual resource to contemporary societies. The functions of spatial distance are performed by temporal distance, so that her own past appears as the Other to the Indian anthropologist. And thus, these signs become part of those discursive constructs through which both modern Indian identity and a theoretical anthropology of India is actualized. Anthropology must therefore share in the Indian state's claims to control and reshape the refractions of that identity. For many social scientists working in contemporary India ir is not the distance between the traditions of a supposedly pre-modern India and the enterprise of modernity that seems striking. Rather, the striking thing seems to be a complex matrix through which the narratives of the modern nation state are implicated in creating and sustaining local codes, from which local codes the state assumes itself to be external. I shall leave this thread of the argumenr here and pick it up later. In 1962 A.K. Saran, the Indian sociologist who has shown consistent concern with the implications of sociology as a Western

The Anthropological Discourse on India dirdpline for the development of India's knowledge systems, wrote a ' d e w of Contributions to Indian .Yociofogy no. IV, in ~nthropologiit (Saran 1962). He argued here that ~ ~claim for ~an external~ view of Indian t society ' which~ was more objective than internal held a positivist trap. An external yim, Sarm said, is nothing other than an interpretation of one the categories of another, alien culture. Saran's jnterroptjtion of Dumont's concept--of an external view which is =rnehow more objective-is neither startling in philosophy nor in m&ropol~gy: indeed, the idea of a reality independent of its daaiption is very difficult to sustain in modern philosophical discourse. As Goodman and Elgin (1988) say incisively:

m~

The hulvof truth are many and grave. Construed as correspondence beween discourseand ready-made world beyond discourse, it runs into double trouble: there is no such world independent of description; and concrpondence between description and the undescribed is incomprehensible. Truth is a useful classification of statements but must be understood in some other way (p. 154). S p d u n g for anthropology, Geertz has commented on the epistemological proximity of ethnography and fiction. He has suggated that the conventions whereby truth is asserted and accepted in ethnography and fiction are all part of a non-fictional narrative tradition which achieves an illusion of transparenq to fact through innocent fiction^.^ Indeed it may almost be considered conventional now to discuss this crisis of representation within a context where claims to ethnographic authority in reiation to an 'objective' or 'external' reality have been dismantled. Dumont's reaction to Saran, when it came (Dumont 1966), was not framed in terms of a dialogue about the nature of the world that the ethnographer creates or represents, but rather was intended t o draw tendentious parallels between Saran's views and the ideology of Fascism. T h e following two quotations speak for themselves: In other words, while the Western social anthropologistlongs for seeing For an analysis of this view, see Websrer (1982).

34

Critical Events

But when Dr Madan deplores the fact that Indian scholars have merely 'imitated' the Westerners in the matter of sociology, the statement is ambiguous. Does he mean that Indian scholars could have madr an original contribution within the framework of ('Western) sociologies and failed to d o s-that may be true-, or does he mean that they should have built up a sociology of their own, ba~icillydifferrnt from (Western) sociology, in which c a n he would be entirely wrong? A Hindu sociology is a contradiction in terms . . . (Dumont 1966: 23).

T h e Absent Other: T h e Brahmin as Uninvited Guest I turn now to another in~portantstrand in Dumont's sociology--his commitment to the notion of totality, to a stable reality, and with it to a stable system of representation.6 I argur that this stability of representation is achieved by privileging one worldview-that which is made up of the (or to be more accurate, one of the) Brahmanic concepts of tradition-and assuming that it can represent Indian society as an 'objective totality' of the world. 1 hasten to add that this objective totality is not for Dumont an empirical or quantitative notion. Rather, he uses the notion of hierarchy to exclude the transcription of contingent in order to grasp the underlying laws of Indian society and history. Let us recall his statement that the wbok course of Indian hisroT confirms the hierarchical relation between the principle of religion, represented by the Brahmin, and the principle of temporal power, represented by the Kgatriya king-'political disunity for the sake of religious unity'. It is the link between the principle oftotality and the principle of hierarchy which allowed Dumont to accommodate criticisms about his neglect of other values in Indian society, by treating them as empirically present but theoretically residual. Thus, the practices of lower castes were contemptuously dismissed with the following remark: 'Because barbers shave one another. someone' 1rollil::allg this r o m m i t m c o t to totalix:~tionis b o cviiic~lrin s . I ~ ; I ~\clci()l~,s ~ g y a. point t o which I shall rctrlrn I;ltt-r.

'.!'his

somcont- clt-arly could nut lay claims cvcrl to a riamc!

The Antk~ropolo~ical Discourse on India

35

would like to conclude that "equality and reciprocity" have the same importance as does hierarchy in the system.' The whole point of drawing attention to those practices of the lower castes which stood in opposition to Brahmanic practices was to interrogate the notion of a system or of a totality which privileged the worldview of the Brahmin, giving this Brahmanic worldview the status of an objective truth rather than treating it as a site of contest. 111 positioning the Brahmin as the only voice, Dumont was in fact participating in the creation of a master narrative of Indian society that saw Brahmanic worldviews as somehow representing the whole of Indian society. W h y has the Brahmanic worldview been so privileged in the anthropological discourse on India? k c h a r d Burghart (1990) gives an interesting reason for the centrality of the Brahmin as the Other in this discourse. H e says that when anthropologists began to look at the Indian subcontinent as an arena requiring interpretation, they discovered 'it was already occupied and defined by local counterparts-Brahmins and ascetics who spoke about the social universe in the name of Brahma.' The encounter between these two modes ofconstructing knowledge-of the Brahmin and the anthropologist-was of interest, according to Burghart, because 'both types of persons totalize social relations as a system in which they act as knowers and in which their knowledge transcends that of all other actors' (ibid: 261). H e then describes the different anthropological modes in which knowledge about India was constructed primarily as a function of different kinds of dialogues between anthropologists and the Brahmanic tradition. These dialogues, he argues, range from an active avoidance of the Brahmanic tradition (as in the work of M.N. Srinivas), to a complete imitation of it (as in the work of Louis Dumont). In Burghart's reckoning, then, far from the Orient being a European projection-as argued by Said (1978), and more recently for India by Inden (1986, 1390)-the subject people who are the objects of anthropological research enter the text of the anthropologist not only as suppliers of raw data but also as people who have actively framed the research project and its outcome. As he says:

32

Critical Events

his own culture-i.e. the culture that at present dominates materially the world-'in perspective', Dr Saran wants to be left alone in blissful possession of his neo-Hindu creed. This is understandable, for Hindu religion and philosophy is a t least as all embracing in its own way as any sociological theory may be (Dumont 1966: 26). T h e ambiguity in this statement is overthrown on the next page: What I find most disquieting is that Dr Saran seems to be unaware of the dangers of the large-scale implications of his stand. We Europeans have had one master who would have taught us the impenetrabiliry of cultures (he said mces);his name was Adolf Hitier. Solipsism is far from incompatible with violence . . . I hope that this much justice may be rendered us: that we have brought some contribution to smoothing the path of understanding, without underestimating the difficulties and obstacles. I should have thought that a scholar of Dr Saran's standing would not lend a hand to neo-Hindu 'provincial' and backward feelings (ibid: 27). In these remarkable passages Dumont seems to construct, in a single moment, both lndia as an anthropological object and the conditions under which (modern?) lndians may lay claims to a legitimate place in the world of anthropological scholarship. For the Western anthropologist, it is a pan of modern enlightenment values to comprehend the values of other cultures intellectually. This is an aid in his attempts to convert ideology into an instrument of scientific reasoning. However, this intellectual attempt poses no threat to his present values, for the 'otherness' of alien cultures can supposedly remain hermetically sealed from the lifeworld of the anthropologist.4 For the Indian anthropologist, howDumont was quite mistaken to imagine rhat 'other cultures' would remain hermetically sealed from modern Western life. In France itself, the decision of Muslim girls to wear the veil to school has created much controversy. The Salman Rushdie affair brought to light the fact that in England, laws against blasphemy applied to Christianity but not to other religions. It seems that i n the context of modem global societies it will become very dilcult to keep c ~ ~ l t u r eapart s in sealed compartments. The otherness experienced in faraway places is already part of one's own life world in European societies. See, for instance, Etienne Balibar (1989) and the discussion entitled 'L'islam face i la Republique' in LC Point, 30 October 1989, Numero 893.

The Anthropological Discourse on India

33

ever, there is no possibility of participation in the demystification of the 'universalist', 'objectified' categories of Western sociology by showing traces of an alien culture in the making of these categories. Thus the possibility of transcending his own ideology through an intellectual appropriation of other values is open to the Western anthropologist, but the Indian anthropologist has no legitimate way of applying the same method to the ideology of his own culture. The knowledge categories of non-western cultures are simply unanchored beliefs, while Western categories have the status of scientific and objective truths. The future of a sociology rooted in the values of a culture different from the West's is alreadyforeclosed, for it is known beforehand that such a sociology is Fascist or 'neo-Hindu', 'provincial' or 'backward'. In this way, the fate of Indian systems of knowledge is sealed. They have a place in the history of ideas; they can be intellectually apprehended to provide the means by which 'we' of the West can transcend the limits of 'our' ideology, but they are not resources for the construction of knowledge systems inhabited by the modern Indian. Other cultures acquire legitimacy only as objects of thought, never as instruments of thought. I do not say that the value of Dumont's work is exhausted by this description, merely that where the Indian anthropologist is the direct addressee of his discourse, her role is limited to that of . ~ conditions for participating in the making of an i n f ~ r m a n tThe a sociological discourse is, for the non-Western anthropologist, an active renunciation of the contemporary possibilities within her own culture. In Dumont's words: If there were no 'excernal view', no comparison, no objectivity, then there might be as many 'so~iolo~ies' as there are different civilizations.

'

The centrality of Dumont's writings 011 India is arrested by several symposia on his work. I reiterate my admiration for his remarkable abilities in bringing together a wide range of materials within a single theoretical frame, but my admiration for his achieverncnts cannot rakc away the pain rhat a n encounter with his forrnularions entails for a n anthropologist who wishes to lay claims to both-the resources of the anthropological tradition and the Indian tradition, traditions or local traditions. both of which can act as

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Critical Events

Bur in his awareness the ethnographer expostfacto surmounts the field, bringing into relation diverse contextual observations, a n d this transcendence persists into the text. Yet can it be said, even of the text, that traces of the object of investigation remain, not as 'raw' data but as framers of that data-foreign agents as it were, lurking benveen the lines of the text (Burghart 1990: 266)?

Applying this insight to an analysis of Dumont's work, Burghart argues that Durnont's Brahmanic counterparts were not passive objects of scholarly perception: they enabled and framed his representation of caste. In fact 'representation' is not even the right word to use in this context, for 'My reading of Dumont starts from this observation and culminates in the view that the singularity of Homo Hierarchicus lies not in Dumont's representing the Brahman's view of Hindu society but in his imitating the Brahmin's representation of Hindu society' (ibid: 268).' In defense of his thesis, Burghart analyses two distinct features of the Brahmanic construction of tradition. The first relates to the constitution of time, according to which the present is an icon of the past. The second is the peculiar relation between text and world. Let us look more carefully at these. In the Brahmanic theory of time, as understood by Burghart, temporal d~ferencesare rendered equivalent by the establishment of a functional equivalence between diverse practices. Burghart gives an example: in the entropic notion of a movement from the first age (the age of truth or iatya yuga&to the last (the age of timeldeath kali yuga), a series of resemblances is established between different kinds of ritual practices. The merit achieved by severe penance in the first age is diluted to repetitions of the name of god in the last age, when people are enfeebled and incapable of severe penance. This particular construction of time, thus, allows the present to be seen as an icon of the past. Now, what was once a Brahmanic rendering of tradition enters anthropological discourse in the guise of a theory of transformation, so that The 'observation' to which Burghart refers here is: 'In shorr, Dumont is a European Brahmin'.

The Anthropological Discourse on India

37

gift, for instance, comes to be seen as isomorphic to sacrifice. The same 'transformation' also appears in the guise of certain metaterms which allow one to speak of concepts such as dharma, karma, etc. within a wide range of contexts, bridging temporal distance and short-circuiting discussions of the relation between term, concept and context. In Burghart's words: T h i s stability has enabled a certain kind of European scholarship to emerge. In the academic division of labour Indologists study classical antiquity, historians the past, a n d anthropologists the present; b u t the Brahmanical structure of tradition enables anthropologists, historians a n d Indologists to discuss H i n d u society as if it were their c o m m o n problem. D u m o n t ' s advocacy for a sociology of India situated at the confluence o f Indology a n d anthropology is a methodological invention in which D u m o n t was enabled by the methodological conventions of Brahmins (ibid: 269-70).

In other words, it is precisely because the Brahmanic tradition sees history as a series of resemblances that Dumont can speak of caste as it appeared in the texts of Manu in the second century AD and caste as it functions in village society in contemporary India as if they pertain to the same ethnographic reality. T h e second point made by Burghart is that in the Brahmanic construction of tradition texts do not derive their authority from experience, but rather from the fact of having been uttered by celestial persons who transcend the vicissitudes of time. 'Texts are authentic in so far as knowledge anticipates the object and narrative precedes event.' Further, texts (including the Dharmashastras, which lay out rules of conduct) do not prescribe behaviour in the sense of laying out areas of obligation as much as describing codes of conduct considered to be exemplary or desirable. This is why the actual governance of conduct came under customary law, and even the king was not entitled to alter the customary law of the people.' Burghart infers from this that, in the Brahmanic conThis is not the place to examine the relevance of such a concept of rule for understanding [he nature of law. However, it does seem to me that by characterizing this as a purely Brahmanic conception, one loses the opportuniry

Tile Anthropo/ogica/ Discourse on India 38

39

Critical Events

struction of tradition, texts did not have to be descriptively valid. This distinction between local circumstances for which customary rules were valid and authoritative knowledge which was only contained in texts was crucial to the Brahmanic construction of tradition. Srinivas came to terms with this disjunction by positing a sharp difference between 'book-view' and 'world-view' in Indian society, reserving the latter as the legitimate domain of inquiry for the anthropologist.'0 In contrast Dumont, according to Burghart, simply imitated this distinction by the hierarchical relation he posited between empirical truths and ideology, allowi~lghim, like the Brahmins, to treat diversity as simply residual in relation to textual truths. Far from India being a projection of the European imagination, then, the Brahmanic imagination manages to shape the European representation of India within an order of mimesis. While Burghart's is one of the most insightful interpretations o f Dumont to be encountered, how far is he correct in charzcterizing Homo Hierarchicus as a case of intercultural mimesis? First of all, Burghart does not explore the question of whether his own formulation of the Brahmanic view of tradition is not already a representation within which a plurality of voices has been worked into a singularity. In the next section, I shall try t o show that this particular view of tradition is not unrelated to colonial notions of how to represent India. Second, in suggesting that the Brahmin lurks like a 'foreign agent' within the lines of Homo Hierarchicus, of treating it as an important conceptual resource. As mmany scholars of jurisprudence realize, there are insurmountable difficulties in treating law as command, for the bulk of legal rules are not in the form of prescriptions. For an incisive critique of law as command, see Hart (1983: 57-62); and the two essays by Dworkin on the model of rules, in Dworkin (1977: Chs. 2 and 3). A.J. Grcimas and E. Landowski have formlllated an interesting conception of law in terms of desire, which is closer to Sanskritic notion of a rule. See Greimas and Landowski (1976) and Das (1983). Unfortunately, the structure of the Dharmashastrashas been taken to be 'peculiar' to Hindu sociery, obsessed with laying out the apaddhnrma (contingenciesof misfortune), so that its potential for helping us to formulate a general theory of rules is hardly ever explored. ' O For a critique of this distinction, see Das (1977).

Burghart pays scant attention to the manner in which D u m o n t builds up a case for the confinement of so-called traditional values and worldviews within the past of these societies, as if they have n o potential for a critique of modernity. But let me close this section with Burghart's concluding statement, and some remarks o n it: My interest in this essay has been to explore the interlinear dialogue rather than the intertextual one, for the dialogue of anthropologist and counterpart has created an inward-looking regional ethnography in which fundamental issues are raised concerning how ethnographic texts can be written and read. How does one write the culture of a people that has already been written by its native spokesmen? By focusing on this interlinear dialogue i t becomes clear that ethnographic texts on Hindu sociecy--even singly authored texts-are products of complex agency. The dialogue berween ethnographer and local counterpart may not constitute the form of the text, but it does constitute the text as a repositoryofartefacts. Moreover, from the meta-anthropological perspective in which this dialogue becomes apparent, it also becomes clear that dialogue is not a postmodern solution to certain problems in the representation of 'ethnographic realicy'. Rather the dialogue comes to light in the failure of all representations of that realicy. But is this failure characteristic of the Hindu context where the ethnographer encounters native spokesmen with a conceptual sense of realism, hierarchical claims to knowledge and nonconsensual views of truth? Or does the failure stem from the poblem of self-representation?Perhaps it is now time for South Asianists to look outward and pursue an intertextual dialogue with their colleagues (Burghart 1990: 277). In earlier sections I have already suggested that, in Dumont's work, this intertextual dialogue is indeed. present but confined to a relationship with his Western colleagues. If Burghart's characterization-f Dumont's work as an imitation of the Brahmanic view of tradition-is correct, then it is all the more interesting that this counterpart of Dumont, the Brahmin, must be located in India's past.1' A sociology that has its roots in the Indian l1

Many Indian sociologists have encountered this difficulry with Dumont.

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Critical Events

The Anthropological Discourse on India

tradition stands in danger of compromising the values of modernity and rationality, and is considered dangerous for the building of an Indian nation-which acts as the touchstone of modern values. The future of such a system of knowledge is not seen as an open one: the outcome is already predetermined. These particular areas of Dumont's work do not concern Burghart, nor does he carry his reflections on people he terms 'native social anthropologists' (e.g. Srinivas) as well as their role in this intertextual dialogue, further. Are these native social anthropologists to be regarded as native spokesmen? D o they earn membership of the anthropological comm~inityon condition that they renounce (not simply transcend) all forms of knowledge acquired through membership of the society of which they now write?12 In asking this question about the nature of interlinear and intertextual dialogues within the construction of social anthro-

pology and sociology in India, I may have unwittingly given the impression that the complexity lies only in the relation between Western and non-Western anthropology. In fact, when Dumont formulated his two contrasting poles in terms of the configuration of hierarchy and caste-representing in these terms the essence of Hindu society as one pole and individualism and nation as the touchstones of modern values as the second pole-he was participating in a political rhetoric with a definite social life within India's public sphere. We shall see in rhe next section how a contrast between values derived from tradition on the one hand, and modern values of the nation on the other, inform both political debates in the public sphere as well as the assumptions of social science research in India.

41

Political Rhetoric and Social Science -

-

Biteille (1991) summarizes [his well, and is worrh quoting at length: 'Dumonr says rhat he has not disparaged India but, in contrasr, "vindicated India in the very aspects chat made her looked down upon by many in the West." I d o not wish to question his good faith, bur it seems to me that what he has tried to vindicate is the world that Indians have left behind, not [he one that they are trying to create. Hc should nor feel too surprised, therefore, if some Indians d o n o t find his attempts at vindicating India entirely to their raste. Dumonr's own sympathies lie with traditional India, and hardly at all with modern lndia. I can see that he has, out of his deep concern with traditional India, tried t o force a method for the study of his own society, bur it is that very method that has stood as an obstacle to his understanding ofcontemporary India.' (Bireille 1991: 246) T h e compulsions of having to signal the entry into the field, as if the field were an alien land, is evident in M . N . Srinivas's account of Rampura. Its most poignanc expression, however, may be found in the work of T . N . Madan, who speaks ofliving intimately with 'strangers'. The strangers were Kashmiri Pandits, members of his own community, in a village not far from where Madan grew up. W e find several interesting reflections in Srinivas of the consequences of being a Brahmin. But whereas the problems of representing rhe Other, who is outside, havc received much attention in the last decade, a similar conccrn with [he Othcr~iessrhat rcsidcs within each of us has hardly rcceived any attcntion. See Madan (1975), and Srinivas (1966: 147-65; and 1976).

Let us examine one contemporary conflict which has been the subject of considerable discussion, both in the public realm and in the social science literature. I do not attempt a solution to this vexed debate, but rather show that much of the social science literature in India shares the assumptions of the modern nation state, and indeed construes itself in response to contemporary political needs. The controversy I refer to is the Ramjanmabhumi-Babri Masjid dispute. As everyone in India knows, it relates to rival claims made by Hindus and Muslims over a sacred site in the city of Ayodhya. Certain Hindu groups claim that, on the basis of historical evidence, they have proof of a temple built on this site to commemorate the birthplace of Lord Rama, the major Hindu deity. They claim that this temple was destroyed by the first Mughal, Babur, who as a Muslim ordered that a mosque be built to commemorate his victory over the Hindu kingdoms in the early sixteenth century. Several Muslim organizations, on the other hand, claim that there is no firm historical evidence of Babar's mosque being built on the exact site of any temple. This issue, which has led to

42

Critical Events

unprecedented mobilization on both sides, has embroiled every major political party. The mobilization of people on either side has been accompanied with so much communal and political violence that this seems the most politically apocalyptic episode of post-Independence India. In this the Muslims have suffered more because of their vulnerability as minorities.13 In the present political context this dispute has taken a volatile and tragic form. Historians have been quick to point out that narratives of this dispute figure in the administrative records of the British. As most social scientists are now aware, administrative records cannot be treated as documentary evidence of an undiluted truth. If the record gives such an impression, this is because it evolved certain conventions for the assertion of truth which were borrowed from and framed by dominant anthropological theories of the time. Accounts of this 'official' truth as really being reflections of British understandings of Indian society are available in recent scholarship on colonial India. Gyanendra Pandey (1990) states the problem succinctly: The modern history of India, in this sense, was first written in colonial times and by colonialists. It was colonialist writers who established the pattern of the Indian past pretty much as we know it today. And in that pattern sectarian strife was an important motif. By the end of the nineteenth century, the dominant strand in colonialist historiography was representing religious bigotry and conflict between people of different religious persuasions as one of the more distinctive features of Indian society, past and present-a mark of the Indian section of the 'Orient' (p. 21). l 3 This is not an updated account of the dispute, which reached a tragic climax on 6 December 1992, when a crowd mobilized by certain militanr Hindu groups such as the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP)the Rashtriya Sevak Sangh (RSS), and the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VH?) razed the mosque to the ground. The whole point of my argument is that it is not the social sciences, such as history and anthropology,which can provide 'correct' solurions to contentious issues, bur political practices which, regardlessof the political practices of the past, can now define the collective goods for a plural polity in India which is faithful to the present.

The Anthropological Discourse on India

43

Pandey and others have shown how this particular representation of India led to crystallized narratives, such as 'the colonial riot narrative', in which there was 'an emptying out of all history-in terms of the specific variations of time, place, class, issue-from the political experience of the people-and the identification of religion, or the religious community, as the moving force of all Indian politics' (ibid: 24). In other words, regardless of when or where a riot occurred, and regardless of the issue (e.g. the desecration of sacred space, the abduction of a woman, protests over government legislation), British official discourse saw the same event-structure in every riot. Given this framework, within which so much of Indian history was viewed, it is not surprising that in the Ayodhya dispute too the British saw themselves as the fair and neutral arbiters of an age-old fight between Hindus and Muslims. It is from this point ofview that the problem of ascertaining the historical merits of rival claims became a major issue for British officials. In the official narrative of the dispute, as it was framed, events which pointed to a co-operation between Hindus and Muslims, to the rivalry between different Muslim groups which tried to establish their own influence and patronage, and most importantly to the role of the British administration in making decisive interventions to alter local power structures and co-opt loyal Muslims within positions of power, are all muted. It is difficult to guess from the official narrative hat the patronage offered by several Muslim nawabs to Hindu worship, as well as rivalries between different Hindu sects, played an important role in the evolution ofAyodhya as a pilgrim centre. The result is a master narrative, evolved by a colonial state, in which this dispute over temple and mosque appears as one more instance of an 'eternal' conflict between Hindus and Muslims, wherein the British appear as neutral mediators. It is not my case that Indians were passive pawns in these events, but rather that there was a complex agency at work, one in which British concepts of Indian society altered configurations of local and regional forces, and in which new ways of defining legitimacy played a role towards evolving this and several similar

Critical Events disputes. Yet the narrative of the colonial state seems constructed in order to give an imprcssion of sealing off local codes of conduct from the encompassing bureaucratic and legal institutions that colonial power had (illegitimately) introduced. It is interesting that the myth of the externality of the state and its institutions from local codes of conduct enters social science discourse in contemporary India in such a manner that it now provides a charter, on 'scientific' grounds, to legitimize the right of the state not just to govern but also to shape the refractions of modern Indian identity. I illustrate this point with help from a discussion on the Babri-Ramjanmabhumi dispute by Sarvepalli G o p d (1991). Gopal sees this particular dispute as reflecting a gcii2rnl sickness in Indian society: 'The Ramjanmabhumi issue . . . brings into sharper focus than at any time since 1947 a sickness which free India has not been able to shake off and demands a reappraisal of many basic features of our society' (ibid., p. 11). This sickness, which comes in the way of 'civilized principles of national cohesion' (ibid., p. 13), is directly related to the entrenchment of religion in Indian soil. 'The logical attitude of getting rid of religion altogether', says Gopal, 'was too utopian for Indian society, where many religions were deeply entrenched' (ibid., p. 13). Thus, the practical solution was not an opposition to religion but a relegation of religion to private life. the expulsion of it from all forms of public life. This is not the place to examine versions of secularism in detail, except to point out that the distinction between private and public is by no means as simple or uncomplicated as Gopal assumes. What interests me here is really the attempt to define religion in a manner entirely consistent with the needs of the nation state. Thus, Gopal goes on to assert: 'it goes without saying that the proclaimed aim of true religion is human fraternity' (ibid.. p. 13); 'to the person moved by the religious impulse, the illtimate truth is one; only to the person exploiting religion for political ends and using it in various forms of mnbilization . . . is religion

The Anthropological Discourse on India seen essentially as a divisive factor (ibid., pp. 13-14).' O n the true nature of Hinduism, Gopal has this to say: But while there is no Hindu religion in the sense in which that term is generally used, there is an atmosphere, a structure of feeling, which governs the different sects and lifts them to higher levels. This common element in the faith which binds together those who call themselves Hindus in the various parts of India is the acceptance of religion as spiritual experience, as the direct apprehension of the reality of the one supreme Universal Spirit. Devotion to truth and respect for all human beings, a deepening of inner awareness, and a commitment to compassion form the essence of the Hindu religion (p. 14).14

Although the construction of this passage is in the indicative mode, as if a timeless truth about the essence of Hinduism is being asserted, clearly what is being asserted is a view of religion consistent with the political needs of the state. A Hinduism emptied of political content and all functions, except otherworldly meditation on the supreme universal spirit, rather nicely frees the political arena for the play of other forces. This view of Hinduism corresponds only to the highly Brahmanic great tradition, in which involvement with this-worldly affairs is suspect. Other definitions of Hinduism would point to its assertions of power, to its involvement in locality and region for the exercise of power, and to its images of nationalism through mythical formulations of the past during the colonial period. Only when we recognize this plenitude can we fol!ow the diverse genealogies of contemporary Hinduism and see it as a major political actor in contemporary Indian polity, and thus learn how to resist its most recent violent constructions. One of the most interesting aspects of this social science of marriage: ' O n c nced not l 4 Louis Mackcy says o f Kicrkegaard's be a cynic (though pcrhaps o n e nccds to hc married) t o rcmark [hnt such a n idyllic relationship could only be imagined by a bachclor likc Kierkcgnard.' Scc Mackcy (1972; 85). I a m tcmptcd to spcculatc that such nn idyllic vision o f religion could only bc imagined by a person rclarivcly ~ t n r o u c h e dby it.

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Criticdl Events

discourse, in which Gopal's view represents one strand, is that it considers all modern forms of community counterfeit, if not illegitimate. Romila Thapar (1989) uses the phrase 'imagined religious communities' to characterize the nature of the community as it was 'imagined' in British administrative discourse. The sense of 'imagined' here is of something which is fabricated, and thus false. It is important to recall here that Anderson (1983), who used this phrase to characterize the nature of modern nations, was interested in capturing the constructednature of nations rather than declaring them counterfeit or false. In proposing the definition of a nation as an imagined political community he also suggested that we treat all communities, with the exception of primordial village face-to-face communities, as imagined, in the sense that they comprised members who did not know each other in their concrete existence and yet, in each member, there lived an image of a larger communion. For Anderson the 'political' power of nationalism is only matched by its philosophical poverty and even incoherence. It seems particularly interesting, then, that despite its philosophical poverty the discourse of nationalism provides images for the shaping of other communities, including powerful religious communities in modern India, who declare all other forms of imagining the nation as counterfeit. T o return to the arguments ofThapar and Gopal, three points seem crucial in their texts. First, the concept of an imagined community is applied to modern forms of religious community but not to the nation. Thus, the claim of the nation state to an eternal status, as something which goes back into the past and extends into the indefinite future, is not subjected to critical scrutiny. Second, they assume that there are somehow 'true' communities which can be juxtaposed as alterities to the nation state, but the moment a community defines itself by the articulation of interests, it becomes a 'false' community. Third, they assume that the social sciences in India derive legitimacy from their alignment with the values of nationalism. 'So the Babri Masjid-Ramjanmabhumi issue is no longer a matter of academic debate. The problem, acute enough already, is gaining in political urgency day by

The Anthropological Discourse on India day and laying siege to the basic concepts on which free India has striven to build herself (Gopal 1991: viii). I said earlier that the discourse of the nation state provides the image on which religious communities in the modern world try to shape their own identities. As counterparts of the nation state, they too create images of communion between people who do not have concrete relationships with each other: for example, in the controversy over temple and mosque, certain Hindu groups came into being whose main agenda was the creation of such images of communion. Notable among these images was a rath pna, a journey modelled on the king's tour to his territories, to '~ the create an awareness of oneness among the ~ i n d u s .Similarly, literature produced by militant Hindu groups emphasized issues l5 P.K. Dutta (1991) made the point that the ratha in the Hindu tradition is associated with Krishna rather than Rama. I t is typical of this genre of writing that it constructs Hinduism in more purist terms than do the Hindu nationalists, as if it is now the burden of history to keep Hinduism authentic in relation to its traditions. This is perhaps another example of the power that history as a discipline has come to occupy in the political discourse of India. Personally, much as 1 find this new kind of Hinduism politically oppressive and its iconography a e ~ t h c t i c a l dispieasing, l~ I cannot see how any religion as a sociological entiry can construct itself untouched by the ~oliticalculture, the pre-eminence of commoditics, and the production of media images that mark the life of the middle classes. A criticism of this entire construction of the self and the world cannot, in my opinion, be launched from some kind of purist definition of Hinduism. I n the latter part of the twentieth c c n t u v , Hinduism has simply failed to provide a moral anchor from which an alternative view of the world can be construcrcd. This is unlike developments in Christianity and Islam, especially the development of thc doctrine of the inhabited world, and the importance of dialogue as opposed to mission in modern Christianity. T h e question o f w h y the repertoire of ideas from Hinduism on rhc nature of pluralism and dialogue has failed to inform critical movements of O L I period ~ needs serious research. I should ~ o i n out, t though, to thc exceptional nature of Itamchandra Gandhi's reccnt book (Gandhi 1992). This tries to find a moral cnergy from the mythic rather than the historic in providing a cririquc of thc Hindu creed proposed by the BJP-KSS-VHP combine, a critique, moreover, that does nor ~ as thc pronouncer of ethical take for granted thc centrality of thc n a t i o ~state values.

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Critical Events

discourse, in which Gopal's view represents one strand, is that it considers all modern forms of community counterfeit, if not illegitimate. Romila Thapar (1989) uses the phrase 'imagined religious communities' to characterize the nature of the community as it was 'imagined' in British administrative discourse. The sense of 'imagined' here is of something which is fabricated, and thus false. It is important to recall here that Anderson (1983), who used this phrase to characterize the nature of modern nations, was interested in capturing the constructednature of nations rather than declaring them counterfeit or false. In proposing the definition of a nation as an imagined political community he also suggested that we treat all communities, with the exception of primordial village face-to-face communities, as imagined, in the sense that they comprised members who did not know each other in their concrete existence and yet, in each member, there lived an image of a larger communion. For Anderson the 'political' power of nationalism is only matched by its philosophical poverty and even incoherence. It seems particularly interesting, then, that despite its philosophical poverty the discourse of nationalism provides images for the shaping of other communities, including powerful religious communities in modern India, who declare all other forms of imagining the nation as counterfeit. T o return to the arguments ofThapar and Gopal, three points seem crucial in their texts. First, the concept of an imagined community is applied to modern forms of religious community but not to the nation. Thus, the claim of the nation state to an eternal status, as something which goes back into the past and extends into the indefinite future, is not subjected to critical scrutiny. Second, they assume that there are somehow 'true' communities which can be juxtaposed as alterities to the nation state, but the moment a community defines itself by the articulation of interests, it becomes a 'false' community. Third, they assume that the social sciences in India derive legitimacy from their alignment with the values of nationalism. 'So the Babri Masjid-Kamjanmabhumi issue is no longer a matter of academic debate. The problem, acute enough already, is gaining in political urgency day by

The Anthropological Discourse on India

47

day and laying siege to the basic concepts on which free India has striven to build herself (Gopal 1991: viii). I said earlier that the discourse of the nation state provides the image on which religious communities in the modern world try to shape their own identities. As counterparts of the nation state, they too create images of communion between people who do not have concrete relationships with each other: for example, in the controversy over temple and mosque, certain Hindu groups came into being whose main agenda was the creation of such images of communion. Notable among these images was a rath yatra, a journey modelled on the king's tour to his territories, to create an awareness of oneness among the Hindus.15 Similarly, the literature produced by militant Hindu groups emphasized issues l 5 P.K. Dutta (1991) made the point that the ratha in the Hindu tradition is associated with Krishna rather than Rama. It is typical of this genre ofwriting that it constructs Hinduism in more purist terms than d o the Hindu nationalists, as if it is now the burden of history to keep Hinduism authentic in relation to its traditions. This is perhaps another example of the power that history as a discipline has come to occupy in the political discourse of India. Personally, much as I find this ncw kind of Hinduism politically opprsssive and its iconography aesthetically dispieasing, I cannot see how any religion as a sociological entity can construct itself untouched by the political culture, the pre-eminence of commodities, and the production of mcdia images that mark the life of the middle classes. A criticism of this entire construction of the self and the world cannot, in my opinion, be launched from some kind of purist definition of Hinduism. In the latter part of the twentieth century, Hinduism has simply failed to provide a moral anchor from which an alternative view of the world can be constructed. This is unlike developments in Christianity and Islam, especially the development of the doctrine of the inhabited world, and the importance of dialogue as opposed to mission in modern Christianity. T h e question ofwhy the repertoire ofideas from Hinduism on the narure ofpluralism and dialogue has failed ro inform critical movements of our period needs serious research. I should point out, rhough, to the exceptional narure of Ramchandra Gandhi's recent book (Gandhi 1992). This tries to find a moral energy from the mythic rather than the hisroric in providing a critique of the Hindu creed proposed by the HJP-RSS-VHP combine, a critique, moreover, that does not take for granted the centrality of the nation state as the pronouncer of ethical values.

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Critical Events

such as the high fertility rate among Muslims and the fear that Hindus would become minorities in their own country. Clearly, this vision of the community as a purely numerical entity can exist only within the framework of a governmentality which takes for granted the collection of regular statistical information about different communities in the 'nation', because it has no other definition of community except a numerical one. Finally, claims about the historicity of the event, namely the destruction of a temple and the building of a mosque, have been severely challenged by several historians who define themselves in terms of their secular ideology: an example of this appears in an essay by Neeladri Bhattacharya (1991), who argues that the claims of Hindu organizations are based on questionable historical evidence. However, unlike positivists, Bhattacharya is not willing to simply dismiss mythical constructions ofthe past; in popular conceptions, he says, myths are a way of constructing the past: W e c a n n o t c o u n t e r p o i s e history t o m y t h as t r u t h t o falsehood. T h e s e are different m o d e s o f knowledge, varying ways o f understanding the w o r l d . . . T h e facts, the events, a n d the social actors referred t o i n m y t h s often have n o 'real' historical existence. Yet m y t h s d o refer t o realiry. T h e y talk a b o u t the w o r l d symbolically, metaphorically . . . (p. 123).

Having conceded the legitimacy of the mythic mode, Bhattacharya then makes a case for myths to be written in a mode which is recognizably mythical: T h e VHP claims a b o u t the R a m j a n m a s r h a n , however, are n o t sustained by reference t o m y t h s a n d beliefs alone. Integral t o t h e w h o l e a r g u m e n t is t h e rhetoric o f history. M y t h s a n d stories a b o u t t h e J a n m a s t h a n are persistently presented as 'history' w h o s e facts c o u l d be established t h r o u g h historical records a n d evidence (ibid: 123). H i s t o r y is called u p o n a s witness t o the events recounted. Ytihassakshi h a i ' i s a phrase often used (ibid: 124). T h e s e a c c o u n t s seemingly c o n f o r m t o t h e practice o f historians; they q u o t e historical records. H e r e the procedure o f citation is considered rnore i m p o r t a n t t h a n the n a t u r e o f the records cited (ibid: 124).

The Anthropological Discourse on India

49

Since Bhattacharya is not unfamiliar with the epistemological of myth and history as modes of constructing the past, or with varying interpretations of what constitutes history in different cultural traditions, his argument seems to be that the distribution of these terms in the discourse of the VHP is illegitimate, because the standards of judging legitimacy should be provided by the need to build a nation state.'"n this reckoning we would have the following distribution: the discourse of the nation occupies the public arena; its dominant mode of constructing the past is to be treated as historical and objective, while the construction of the private and otherworldly concerns of the individual come under the domain of religion, which gives up all claims to the past except those that can be stated in the mythic mode." From the point of view of the nation state, religion occupies an illegitimate space when it lays claims to constructions of the past which conflict with institutionalized memories sacralized by the nation state. What the Hindu groups in this case seem l 6 Bhattacharya, like Gopal a n d Thapar, belongs to the History Faculry of New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University UNU). Only one historian in this faculty, Majid H . Siddiqui (1990), refused to debate the truth or falsiry of the claims made by both sidss to the dispute. H e sraced that 'it is not for historians to "prove" or "disprove" as right or wrong every instance of an assertion made by a political or cultural group as social winds blow this way or that', thus distancing himself and his crafr from the demands made by immediate political needs. l 7 T h e political communiry, one may argue, is always a comm~inityof remembrance. 7.0 that extcnt the power of the nation state is directly rcflccted in its control over the time of the communiry. Rcinharr Koscllcck captures the imperatives of the stare in controlling both, thc past and the futurc. 'The coursc of the seventeenth century is characterized by the destruction of the intcrpretations of the future, however they were motivated. Where ir had rhe powcr, the state pcrsccuted their utterance, such as in the C:cvcnnes uprising, ultimatciy driving them into private, local, folkloristic circles or sccrct ~issociations'.See Kosellcck (1985: 11). See also his ironic comments on the powcr nppropriated by the discipline of history. 'Sincc the French I