Chandrahas - On DR Nagaraj's Listening to the Loom

3/2/15 8:48 PMThe Middle Stage: On DR Nagaraj's Listening To The Loom

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Monday, October 06, 2014

On DR Nagaraj's Listening To The LoomThe words "modern India" are used today to describe a vastnation-state of over a billion people, but they also imply aparticular trajectory of history. They refer to an ancient,ethnically and culturally diverse civilization that was colonizedfrom the eighteenth century onwards, that developed a nativeintelligentsia that eventually deployed against British colonialismideas of nationhood and liberty adapted from thought currents inthe West, and that in 1947 won independence and became anation-state ambitiously committed to democracy andsecularism.

But if much has been gained by the ascent, over three centuries,of modern political ideals and global thought-systems in India,much, too, about the precolonial Indian past has becomeobscure, or entirely fallen away from view. In the newbeginnings either forced upon the country in recent centuries or

else self-consciously fashioned at home, these older knowledge-systems seem to have no place. Toput it another way, in the twenty-first century's speeded-up time and vast platter of choices, the pastseems to have become shorter. What might we do to prevent ourselves from completely becomingthe prisoners of our own categories of time and place?

The Indian intellectual DR Nagaraj, a dazzling and eclectic thinker who taught briefly in America atthe University of Chicago in the nineties before he died tragically young at the age of 44, is best-known forhis book of essays on Mahatma Gandhi and BR Ambedkar, two intellectual titans of theIndian twentieth century who often took opposing positions on the great issues of their day, such asthe caste system and untouchability. But Nagaraj was also possessed by a desire not just to see theIndian past through the lenses of the present, but also to turn history around and inspect the presentthrough the lenses of the past. If the methods and philosophical positions of present times are fitand useful to analyse the formulations of several kinds of pre-modern eras, the reverse should alsobe true, he writes. Genuinely bilingual -- he wrote in both Kannada, one of the major languages ofthe Indian south, and in English -- he possessed the resources to carry this project through. Manyof Nagaraj's ideas about how the dozens of distant Indian pasts could be brought to bearproductively upon the present have just become available in a posthumously published book ofessays, put together by his friends, colleagues, and students, called Listening To The Loom.

Although the book is often difficult going, reading it is like being taken on a whirlwind tour of Indianintellectual history, the kind of journey that nobody seriously interested in India should deny himself.I stayed up late into the night with it for several days, stimulated by sense a contact with a mind thatseemed to be living in several centuries at the same time. The effect of reading Nagaraj has beendescribed very well by the Indian historian Ananja Vajpeyi, who was briefly his student at Chicago:

DR could teach us about Gandhi, Ambedkar and Nehru, in many ways Indiasarchetypal modernists, all the while speaking in a style that suggested that even today, theBuddha was delivering sermons in Sarnath, and the classical doctrines of Nayyayikasand Buddhists, Mimansakas and Advaitins, Carvakas and Jainas, Sufis and Sikhs, were creatingthe pleasant hum and hubbub of an Indic intellectual world. My hunch is that DR identified, in apersonal way, with the protagonists he constantly returned to: the Buddha, who walked away from

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Chandrahas

I am the author of thenovel Arzee the Dwarf,(HarperCollins, 2009;New York Review Books2013), and the editor ofthe anthology of Indianfiction India: ATraveler's LiteraryCompanion(Whereabouts Press,2010; HarperCollinsIndia 2011). I am alsothe Fiction & Poetryeditor of the Indianmagazine of politics andthe arts The Caravan.

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worldly attachments, only to find it supremely difficult to actually detach himself; Nagarjuna, aBrahmin who turned Buddhist, the South Indian from Andhra whose texts brought Buddhism toTibet and China; Ambedkar, the modernist obsessed with premodernity; Gandhi, who had towrestle as hard with his own indefatigable appetites as he did with the mighty British Empire.DRs catholicity, his capacious hunger to master Pali and Sanskrit, old Kannada and classicalTamil, Continental philosophy and postmodern literary theory, challenged every stereotype aboutradical intellectual politics.

Nagarajs painstaking and perceptive editor, Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi, who's tenured at SanFrancisco State University, compares him to that of the ancient Indian pauranika: the storytellerwho organises the knowledge and wisdom of a culture, and guards against the slide into intellectualamnesia. But what exactly did Nagaraj think Indians were losing sight of?

For Nagaraj, as for several other prominent modern Indian thinkers working in different modes(whether Jawaharlal Nehru in his book The Discovery of India, or the framers of the Indianconstitution) the first fact of Indian history was its pluralism, its diversity of viewpoints and knowledgesystems some exceedingly arcane, but nevertheless philosophically rigorous and linguistically rich humming in dialogue or tension with one another. This history meant that no one religion, ethnicgroup, or languagecould enjoy a specially privileged place in the new Indian nation.

But at the same time, the modern nation-state, with its vast hunger for centralization andhomogenization, invariably tilts towards a public sphere composed of majorities and minorities,insiders and outsiders, us and them or what Nagaraj calls identity narratives of the religious-nationalist kind. Almost every nation-state that has emerged from the shadow of colonialismcontinues to wrestle with this problem.

This majoritarian tendency is seen in modern India in the right-wing Hindu project that wishes topummel Hinduism into a unified field and to represent minorities (Muslims, tribals, agitating lower-caste groups) as misguided, unpatriotic, or aberrant. (Both aspects of this tendency can be foundin a rant by the Indian politician Subramanian Swamy last year.) Nagarajs brief, tenchant critique ofthe Hindu right-wing movements use of the figure of Rama the hero of the ancient Indian epic theRamayana as a symbol for its political aspirations will have to serve here as a representativeinstance of his own method. The movement reached its apotheosis in 1992, when Hindu agitatorsdestroyed a mosque, the Babri Masjid, in the north Indian town of Ayodhya, since the site wasconsidered the birthplace of the historical Rama. (An excellent eyewitness account of the sacking ofthe Babri Masjid and a meditation on its fallout in Indian life can be found in the Australian foreigncorrespondent Christopher Kremmer's book Inhaling The Mahatma.)

But this fixing of Rama in both history and geography, argues Nagaraj, elides the hundreds of othersightings of Ram and the other major protagonists of the Ramayana reported in legends from allacross India and not only the north. The power of Rama in Indian history, as expressed in its art andits legends, was that he was not there, speaking from remote Ayodhya, butalways here, somewhere close to home. (Diana Ecks magisterial recent book India: A SacredGeography illuminates Hinduisms persistent instinct for duplication of global stories in localcontexts).

But with Hindu nationalism, says Nagaraj, history and faith are being made to share the same bed-- somewhat like with creationism in America. What might be an antidote to such divisive readings ofthe Ramayana? For Nagaraj, the answer lay in not just a scolding based on the ideals of the Indianconstitution (a point of view which sounds patronising to many right-wing Hindus), but a turn insteadof the many folk Ramayanas of India, which often poke fun at the central characters of the epic,and see their stories as aesthetically malleable structures to be continuously reinterpreted, not setdown in stone. For Nagaraj, the recovery of difference is an effective way of overcoming thosethreats posed by the essentialist use of symbols. The pluralism of the Indian constitution might beseen as just the codification, in the modern language of rights, secularism, and democracy, of thenatural pluralism of Indian history.

In a tribute to Nagaraj shortly after his death, the scholars Sheldon Pollock and Carol AppaduraiBreckinbridge offered an assessment not just of the range of Nagaraj's intellectual gifts but also ofthe diverse, and sometimes disquieting, life experiences he brought to his work. Just as CharlesDickens as a boy had done time in a blacking factory, so too Nagaraj, born in a notionally free India,had as a boy spent some time weaving in bonded labour. Pollock and Breckinbridge wrote:

When D. R. became a visiting professor at the University of Chicago in 1996, he had gained a

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reputation as one of the leading cultural critics in India, and perhaps the foremost thinker of thepolitics of cultural choice among those he would refer to as historically humiliated communities,including dalits (those formerly called untouchables) and artisanal castes known as shudras. If thiswere all D. R. had to give, it would have been gift enough. But D. R. approached the problem ofsubaltern cultural choice from a perspective broadened not only by familiarity with contemporarymetropolitan thought but also by profound study of the living cultures of rural India and of theprecolonial past. It was especially in that past -- the fact that so many South Asian intellectuals nolonger had access to it was for D. R. an enduring catastrophe of colonialism -- that he foundimportant resources to recover and theorize. And he did this in a spirit neither of antiquarianismnor indigenism. D. R. understood that social and political justice cannot be secured withoutreasoned critique, and that the instruments of critique in postcolonial India had to be forged anewfrom an alloy that included precolonial Indian thought and culture -- but only after being subjectedthemselves to critical inspection. In exploring these resources he showed the remarkableintellectual reach and curiosity that enabled him to speak across every disciplinary boundary andto explore an astonishing range of conceptual and ethical possibilities.

To put it another way, while many prominent modern Indian thinkers have sought to expand Indianpluralism from above, in dialogue with ideas from the West, Nagaraj sought to expand Indianpluralism from below by sifting through the best of India's native traditions and recovering theirvocabulary and concepts. The Clay Sanskrit Library (now the Murty Classical Library), an ambitiousnew Indic publishing project aiming "to make available the great literary works of India from the pasttwo millennia in scholarly yet accessible translations", would have excited Nagaraj greatly as just thekind of gateway to the past that he tried to supply in his essays. One of the things that we mostclosely associate with the condition of being modern is the range of choices guaranteed to us inrelationships, vocations, consumer goods. Through a book like *Listening To The Loom*, we seethat what we are given as moderns is also an unprecedented ability to transcend our historicalmoment and inhabit the pasts from which our world has emerged.

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