Zara Dheere Se

For the on-going debate, please see the RHS bar under Also See

"Only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars" 

Martin Luther King, 1968

On January 15, 2004, Rajiv posted his second note (RMN2), for which, thanks. There is a hint of impatience init ("Let us face the issues, please") [Published  by outlookindia.com as Is Hindutva The Indian Left's 'Other'?]and a desire for straight answers for what RMN2 sees asstraight questions. Unfortunately, a samvad such as this is not an interrogation where there might indeed beclear questions and to which there might be simple answers. Our discussion will wend its way, providing leadsfor further discussion, questions that might make us think about other things. Surely Rajiv, you can't want totrash teleological, Baconian thought and then insist upon it in our discussion!

About what you call "name-dropping": my citations are offered as a way to both give evidence for thewider range of scholarship than the caricature of Marxism. My use of citations is not to rest on the authorityof others, but to give you an opportunity to widen your sense of what Marxism is and has been.

There are a few issues to which I have some summary responses, and then there are three themes that I want todevelop at some length (elitism, the state of the US academy, Hinduism and Political Economy).

(A) "Left/Right" 

"Left/Right" is not the best lens to interpret India, as RMN2 indicates. That is his claim, notmine. Left and Right are useful analytical distinctions that help us to differentiate between politicalvisions and organizations. In his extended account of the idea of Left and Right, the Italian politicaltheorist Norberto Bobbio argued that the distinction "corresponds to the difference betweenegalitarianism and inegalitarianism, and ultimately comes down to a different perception of what makes humanbeings equal and what makes them unequal." 

He concedes, and I agree, that equality "has the effectof restricting the freedom of both rich and poor, but with this difference: the rich lose a freedom which theyactually enjoyed, whereas the poor lose a potential freedom." Martin Luther King liked to quote thefollowing: "The Law in its majestic equality says that no-one can sleep under the bridges at night,neither the rich nor the poor." 

In other words, formal juridical equality often discriminates against thepoor. This is the precisely the kind of arena where the Left-Right distinction makes all the difference,because the "Left" in general pledges itself to equality and liberty (what Bobbio calls equaliberty),whereas the "Right" is more prone to liberty and less to equality (or else to formal juridicalequality only). Hence the value of the Left/Right distinction (Bobbio's book is called Left and Right. TheSignificance of a Political Distinction, and it is available from Polity Press).

I am intrigued by this suggestion and I hope that it takes on a life of its own.There are, of course, many liberation Hindus - Gandhianism, in its largest incarnation (that is, not justGandhi), is an obvious starting point, so is the corpus of classical texts and commentaries on them, andindeed, one can draw from the important dialogue and struggle between Brahmanism and Sramanism, the input ofnot only the Carvaka movement, but also Buddhism. 

As we move into the present, it would be worthwhile to studythose Liberation Hindus who are eager to struggle for the widest equality of all people, and for those whooppose the misuse of religion, such as the late Pujari Laldas of Ayodhya who opposed the RamjanambhoomiMovement and then was killed for his views, or else the formidable pujari of Hanumangarhi, Mahant Gyan Das(who says, "Bhagwan Ram is just a polling agent for the Sangh Parivar. But those of us who understand alittle bit about dharma, the very thought of terrified women and children fleeing their homes is shameful.[The Sangh Parivar] has nothing to do with either god or dharma. They are rakshasas"). 

When LiberationTheology appeared in South America, it had to combat a very recalcitrant Catholic establishment and itcontinues to swim upstream against the Vatican and Catholicism's own version of the Dharam Sansad. I recommendthat interested folk read Gustavo Gutiérrez' Theology of Liberation (1971).

(C) History-centrism. 

At a theoretical level, RMN2's statements on the revelation and the teleologicalreligions are correct. However, RMN2 does not account for the immense variety within the so-called Abrahamicreligions: there have always been dissenting and liberationist groups within these religions that do not paymuch heed to the aspect of being within the chosen or final religion. 

I have in mind the traditions in Islamthat draw from such interesting figures as Al-Hallaj - Sufis, Unitarians, Quakers, Reform Jews and others arewithin the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition and yet they are not given to literalism, etc. The hallaqasof the Sufis are indeed more like Buddhist sects than madrassas. 

Similarly, Hinduism is not entirelyoutside the tow of history-centrism: there are many traditions that now coalesce around Hindutva, many thatdraw from a literalist reading of the Gita - or to make, as you say, a Jerusalem out of Ayodhya. Someof these traditions predate the 1980s. Your notion of Liberation Hinduism is a good corrective to the"history-centric" trend within Hinduism, just as Liberation Theology, Reform Islam and ReformJudaism are already correctives within these traditions.

(D) Indic Way of Change. 

To speak of an "Indic Way" is to resort to absolutes that are not useful.Why is one tradition more "Indic" than another? There are lineages for different ways to be"Indic," and given that India has been open to the world for millennia, it is historicallyinaccurate to believe that we have a tradition untouched by interaction. A closer approximation to our realityis to speak of competing traditions, of which you may favor one or the other. 

There are absolutist Indictraditions that draw from the Gita, where the Divine enters the world to instruct humans that their ownactions are already pre-determined, and that the end is already fortold by the Gods. The original Gitaprovided the foundation for Ramanuja's Vaisnavism, but it is quite separate from the sublime Gita-govindaof Jayadeva, or the Vaisnavite reforms of Bengal's Caitanya. 

To speak of an "Indic Way" that existsover millennia is to deny our history its many contradictions and changes, its progress and its regressions,its visions and its reality. Such a view also does not engage with the reality of interaction and culturalgrowth that comes from India's engagement with places far afield, from Indonesia to Africa and Europe. Theseare part of the fabric of "Indic thought" and they cannot be wished away by a return to an originin, say, the Vedas.

So, now, onto the three issues that I want to develop at some length.

(1) The Ones who Crossed the Waters.

RMN2 closes with several quotations from Ramachandra Guha's The Ones Who Stayed Behind. Guha begins his essay with a long quotation from an invitation to participate in a symposium on thestate of South Asian Studies that assumes that it is only in the last two decades that scholarship from SouthAsians has made any contribution (the symposium, including Guha's essay, is collected in Jackie Assayag andVeronique Benei's At Home in Diaspora: South Asian Scholars and the West, 2003). 

The invitation, henotes, suggests "an amnesia that, unfortunately, is quite widespread." Those who think about SouthAsian Studies today have forgotten the crucial period of the 1950s-1970s when scholars and journals withinIndia truly defined the debates and projects for the study of India. Guha mentions several of the scholarsthat I had cited in my previous contribution: "Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib and Ashin Dasgupta in history;S. C. Dube, Andre Beteille and M. N. Srinivas in sociology; Amartya Sen, K. N. Raj, V. M. Dandekar and KrishnaBharadwaj in economics; and Rajni Kothari in political science." 

He notes that if scholars outside Indiawanted their work to be part of the discussion they published in India-based journals such as IndianEconomic and Social History Review, Contributions to Indian Sociology and Economic and PoliticalWeekly (whose stalwart editor, Krishna Raj, left us last Friday).

The "amnesia" of the invitation received by Guha, he asserts, is driven by the NRI scholars whoreside mainly in the US, write in an idiom more in dialogue with European theory than with Indian reality, andwhose journals and collective volumes now define the debates and concerns of scholars even in India. Thecenter of gravity of Indian Studies, in other words, has shifted, Guha insists, from India to the USA.

Guha readily concedes that his argument is overblown for emphasis, for things are not "completely blackand white." There are any number of scholars within India whose agenda is dominated by the interests ofEuropean theory and not of the materials of Indian life. And, many of those who claim to be scholars in theindigenous vein are also prone to European jargon, and to draw their theoretical apparatus from Europe. I'mthinking not only of Ashis Nandy and his cohort, but also of Rajiv's own use of terms like emic and etic.

Guha's strong article is not really about elitism and the class basis of knowledge producers, but it is aboutthe shift in the center of Indian Studies and in the turn to European theory over Indian sociology. Thecontext of Guha's remarks is separate from the concerns expressed by RMN2. The scholars from the 1950s-1970soften came from more exalted classes than those who work in the USA today, and most of them wrote almostentirely in English. So the shift from India to the US is not a shift of the class basis of scholars on Indiaor their investment in English. These are two problems raised by RMN2, and I think they need to be dealt withby themselves. Guha's essay is a polemic against theory, not one that favors the democratization of knowledgeproduction itself.

In the section on "Academic/Activist Elitism," RMN2 raises two points that I want to address: theuse of "Ivy League Literary Theory" as the "yardstick to determine who gets certified andlicensed to speak with adhikara in prestigious secular circles," and the "role of English" (hementions call centers, but I want to remain with scholarship to prevent flitting about here and there).

a. Ivy League Literary Theory.

The most exhaustive critique of the use of  "Ivy League Literary Theory" has come from theIndia-based Marxist critic Aijaz Ahmad (in his book In Theory, London: Verso, 1992) and the US-basedTurkish historian Arif Dirlik (in his book Post-Colonial Aura, Westview, 1997). Dirlik, in an articlefrom 1994 that is the heart of his book, notes, "I would suggest that postcoloniality is the condition ofthe intelligentsia of global capitalism." 

What Dirlik does is draw from Ahmad's first two chapters tomake the strong claim that migrant intellectuals parlay their homeland class prestige into "nativeinformant" status in the advanced industrial states, notably the USA, and then both speak for thehomeland and trash it. This postcolonial intellectual, in Dirlik's formulation, has no national loyalty eventhough the national bred him/her. It is, furthermore, theoretical language that functions as the newGreek-Latin-Sanskrit, to provide a cover, in a sense, for the class origins of the intellectual.

There is much to this critique and it has made an impact on the academy, even though those who felt targetedby it defended themselves and their positions. There is no denial of the obvious fact that the NRIintellectual is of the privileged or near privileged classes - few of us have our locations among theimpoverished. We have the same class origins as all those NRIs who came to the US between 1965 and 1977 - 83%of us came here with advanced degrees. We do not share our class origins with more recent migrants: of Indianswho migrated to the US between 1987 and 1990, a fifth had no high school education, a tenth remain unemployedand a fifth live in poverty.

Both the NRI intellectual and the NRI professional claim to speak for India, but most of us have littleinvestment in the lives of the impoverished and working-class NRIs or the impoverished and working-classIndians. There is little special about the class blindness and false representations of the NRI intellectual -the NRI professional shares all these problems: the NRI professional forms organizations to represent India,invites Indian and US politicians for photo opportunities and then uses the post of "president" orwhat not to leverage power in "mainstream" society as the "leader" of the Indians. All ofus who have been part of one or another NRI organization know exactly what I am talking about. So I won'tallow us to make the NRI intellectual bear the burden of a problem that is rife in our community.

Furthermore, I believe that RMN2 (and to an extent Dirlik) misstates the problem: it is not simply the classorigins of the intellectual, but it is the more serious claim made by some of the NRI intellectuals toauthenticity. The academy, both in India and in the US, is the hive of the air-conditioned class: for the USacademy two books illustrate the class origins of scholars and the problems faced by those scholars who comefrom the US working-class (Michelle Tokarczyk and Elizabeth Fay's 1993 edited collection, Working-ClassWomen in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory, and Barney Dews and Carolyn Law's 1995 ThisFine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class). I do not know of any accountssuch as this for the Indian academy, but from my experience, the metropolitan colleges and universities arenot dissimilar to the US academy on this score.

The trouble begins with the claim to authenticity, whether that only one from a certain culture can teach ofthat culture, or else that experience is the only basis for knowledge about social relations. Here the NRIintellectual who espouses authenticity is not far from the indigenista who demands, for instance, that only aHindu can teach Hinduism or that only a dalit can teach dalit studies. The claim of cultural authenticitymasks the class factures that rend national culture - is there one Hinduism, or is Hinduism itself not a widerange of practices that are different for people of different regions, genders, classes, etc.?

Authenticityimagines that a culture is a thing and that a people have a culture that they can then represent. I have beenover the problems of this position in my previous note, so I won't belabor it. But one more point: that thedemand that experience is the only knowledge for a teacher is often used by some NRI intellectuals in the USas a mask for our class and racial privilege. If you want to know more about that, I invite you to readKarma of Brown Folk.

Now, it should be said that one of the reasons for the solipsistic turn to oneself and to semi-autobiographyamong some NRI intellectuals has been the discovery that one cannot authentically represent anyone else thanoneself. Much of postmodern self-doubt comes from the very correct critique of representation. Gayatri Spivakhas warned about this problem in most of her essays: "an unquestioning privileging of the migrant,"she writes in her 1999 bookCritique of Postcolonial Thought, "may also turn out to be a figure ofeffacement of the native informant."

The use of the phrase "Ivy League Literary Theory" is a red herring, because many of those who wouldhave been guilty of the worst excesses of what Guha charges them, are now aware of the problems of LiteraryTheory, have read the critiques and the counter-critiques, and are now in the process of producing a new rangeof literary and historical work. I recommend, again, that those who have little experience of this worldsimply go to the website for the Madison conference and see the list of papers given last year.You will find that many graduate students and young assistant professors are already some ways from the agendaof the 1980s, and they do not conform to the heuristic developed by Ram Guha.

Those of us who are critical of authenticity are not all in the business of epistemological paralysis: many ofus do, as Dirlik recommends: "The question is not whether this global intelligentsia can (or should)return to national loyalties but whether, in recognition of its own class position in global capitalism, itcan generate a thoroughgoing criticism of its own ideology and formulate practices or resistance against thesystem of which it is a product." I shall return to this later.

b. The Role of English.

The power of English is a problem not just in the NRI academy, but also in the Indian academy and indeed inIndian social life. Nothing "important" is done if it is not said in English. The demise ofscholarly journals in languages other than English is a serious matter and one that many scholars have puttheir energies toward. I am struck that the work funded by Infinity is almost all in English.