NEW DELHI -- Ashis Nandy has a big idea about "loss and recovery" in the history of colonialism. The bumpersticker version is that the conquerors and colonists lose in the end; the vanquished victims win. He is talking, of course, about England and India. By chance on the day of our conversation, England's new prime minister David Cameron was visiting New Delhi -- hat in hand, shopping for deals in the land that now owns Jaguar autos and most of British steelmaking, the only place (we read in the papers) where British Petroleum might find a bailout buyer, if it had to. But Ashis Nandy is keeping score not of capital accounts but, in effect, of moral and spiritual well-being. Taking many subtle measures of "post-colonial consciousness," he finds India mending and Britain still warped and wounded by its old habit of domination. But colonialism, as Nandy observes it, does not end when the colonists are finally forced out. The "hidden message of colonialism" and the beguiling message of Ashis Nandy's most famous book, The Intimate Enemy, is that "what others can do to you, you also can do to your own kind." In the deep emotional compact that is colonialism, native elites learn to play by the rules of the hegemon's game -- the game known today, in a word, as "development." With the result that in our post-colonial world, "the colonial mantle is now worn by native regimes" on most of the planet, "who are willing to do what the colonial powers did."
Ashis Nandy is a widely beloved independent scholar, a social-psychological theorist, a prolific writer and talker "beyond category." Our conversation, too, roams beyond borders and disciplines:
AN: Malcolm Muggeridge once said that Indians are the only surviving English in the world. I would go further. I think that only in India will you find Victorian England surviving in pockets so confidently that you can consider it, in museumized form, the last remaining vestige of Victorian England. Agatha Christie and P. G. Wodehouse, forgotten in England, survive here as the standards of detective and comic novels. There are people here who can give you street directions in London without ever having been there...
CL: Barack Obama will be coming to India in November. What would you want him to know about this country in a young century?
AN: I'd say he would be wise for him not to take the middle class as the be-all-and-end-all in India. The first principle is that he must take into account how the majority of Indians think about public life and global politics... Indians are looking for a more human and compassionate regime. Indians are not accustomed to impersonal government which works like a well-oiled machine, which gives them high growth rates but cannot take care of the more obscene forms of poverty and destitution. Actually, if you look at it, poverty is not a problem in India. Many sectors of Indians have lived in poverty for a long time, and their needs are very little. That is why most surveys show that most Indians are happy with their economic state though large sectors live in poverty. I think our problem is not so much poverty as destitution, what you might call absolute poverty where, if you don't have the money you starve to death. You don't starve to death in a tribal society for want of money. Only if the whole community doesn't have money do you starve to death. I suspect that instead of trying to pull people above the poverty line, if we could directly attack this kind of destitution, we shall go much further.
CL: How would you attack it?
AN: By providing direct support to impoverished families -- instead of a process of trickle-down effort where, by the time it trickles down, the bottom 10 percent will die perhaps, so you will eliminate poverty by eliminating the poor. Actually this has happened in many countries. I don't want it to happen in India. I don't think Obama can do anything about that, but he can at least be aware that the Indians he will be talking to are not the whole of India. They are a small minority.
A compassionate society is not impossible in India. It is tacitly accepted that it would be better that way, and an open society gives you scope to fight for it. But these battles are delegitimized by new power structures that Indians are not accustomed to handling. For example India never had multi-national corporations. They never had this plethora of billionaires who bestride Indian public life now in such a flamboyant manner, pontificating about everything. Indians are not used to this kind of heavy media exposure. They have not developed the kind of skepticism that Americans have after watching television for 60 years; Indians have seen it only for 15 years or so. Their judgments are too influenced by media. The newspapers are trying to imitate television now, becoming entertainment dailies instead of newspapers.
So it looks as if this is all of India: information technology; this proliferation of engineers and technical education of all kinds; the large number of Singapore-style malls you see in all Indian cities; the fashion parrots; Bollywood. These seem to be the New India, but it is not the New India.
New India is those who embarrass you by scratching their backs with forks, sitting in Parliament. That's the New India, and you don't like to recognize them because they're new to power, new to the urbanity to which you are accustomed. Even that embarrassment that the middle class feels about these crude, slightly rustic hillbillies coming to power -- that represents something of the New India, because they've expanded political participation and released new energies from the bottom of the society. New kinds of political leaders will come from these people, or at least from their children. This is the price you pay for democracy and an open society. The challenge is not to close up society and hand over initiative only to the technocrats. The challenge is how to allow to allow greater political participation and listen to the voice of the people.
EXTRACT FROM THE INTIMATE ENEMY (PART II)
The Uncolonized Mind:
A Post-Colonial View of India
and the West
I
Rudyard Kipling (1862-1936) thought he knew which side of the great divide between imperial Britain and subject India he stood. He was certain that to be ruled by Britain was India’s right; to rule India was Britain’s duty. He was also certain that, as one with a knowledge of both their cultures, he had the responsibility to define both the right and the duty. But is it the whole story? Or is it the last line of a story which began years ago, in Kipling’s childhood in India?
Angus Wilson begins his biography of Kipling by saying that Kipling was ‘a man who, throughout his life, worshipped and respected … children and their imaginings.’1 Kipling’s early life provides a clue to the childhood he worshipped and respected. He was not merely born in India; he was brought up in India by Indian servants in an Indian environment. He thought, felt and dreamt in Hindustani, mainly communicated with Indians, and even looked like an Indian boy.2 He went to Hindu temples, for he was ‘below the age of caste’, and once, when he visited a farm with his parents, he walked away holding the hand of a farmer, saying to his mother in Hindustani: ‘Goodbye, this is my brother.’
Young Kipling was deeply impressed by the romance, the colour and the mystery of India. And the country became a permanent part of his idea of an idyllic childhood, associated with his ‘years of safe delight’ and his private ‘garden of Eden before the fall’ .3 To speak of this memory as the core of his adult self may seem overly psychological, but certainly no other non-Indian writer of English has equalled Kipling’s sensitivity to Indian words, to India’s flora and fauna, and to the people who inhabit India’s 6oo,ooo villages. The Indian peasantry remained for him his beloved children throughout his life .4
As against this affinity to things Indian, there was his close yet-distant relationship with his Victorian parents. He interacted with them mainly when he was formally-and somewhat ritually-presented to them by the servants. When speaking to his parents, his autobiography states, he ‘haltingly translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamt in.’5 Overtly, his love, respect and gratitude to his parents, specially his mother, were immense. Yet, at least one biographer has pointed out the gap between ‘the elevated, almost religious concept’ of a mother’s place in a son’s life, as found in Kipling’s stories and verses, and his own relationship with his mother.6 Mother Alice Kipling was not apparently a woman who encouraged much emotionalism.
Also, it was through his parents that Rudyard was exposed to the most painful experience of his life. After six idyllic years in Bombay, he was sent with his sister to South sea in England, to one Aunt Rosa for education and ‘upkeep’. Mrs Rosa Holloway belonged to an English family of declining fortunes, and with her husband, a retired army officer, she kept boarders. On the surface everything went smoothly. Some visitors found Mrs Holloway a loving guardian to Rudyard and she did relate well with his sister. But it transpired after Kipling’s death that his years at Southsea had been a torture. His posthumous autobiography describes Mrs Holloway’s establishment as a ‘House of Desolation’, characterized by restrictions, bullying, persecution and some sadism. The malefactors included both Aunt Rosa and her young son.
It must have been a lonely, hateful world for someone brought up in close proximity to nature, in a free yet capsulating world, peopled by kindly, warm, non-parental figures. To Mrs Holloway, on the other hand, Rudyard was a stranger. Sold to the Victorian and Calvinist concept of a sinful childhood that had to be chastened, she must have found the strong-willed, defiant, uninhibited child particularly spoilt, unsaved and reprobate. Perhaps there was an element of jealousy too. At least one chronicler suggests that both Mrs Holloway and her bully of a son might have sensed that the arrogant deceitful little boy had spent his time in a world quite beyond their dreary horizon.7
To young Rudyard, the ill-treatment at Southsea was a great betrayal by his parents. To requote a passage by his sister made famous by Edmund Wilson in the 1940s:
Looking back, I think the real tragedy of our early days, apart from Aunty’s bad temper and unkindness to my brother, sprang from our inability to understand why our parents had deserted us. We had had no preparation or explanation; it was like a double death or rather, like an avalanche that had swept away everything happy and familiar … We felt that we had been deserted, ‘almost as much as on a doorstep’. . . . There was no getting out of that, as we often said.8
Some have argued that such banishment to England was normal in those times and must be considered well-motivated. Anglo-Indian parents did live with the fear of servants spoiling their children, introducing them to heathenism and encouraging in them sexual precocity. Also, Alice Kipling’s third baby had died and she was anxious about her surviving children.
But the issue is not whether Rudyard was justified in feeling what he felt about his parents, but whether he actually harboured such feelings. His sister was the only person to know, and her evidence in this respect is conclusive. The other, and more serious evidence is the fact that he finally had at Southsea a ‘severe nervous breakdown’, made more horrible by partial blindness and hallucinations.9
At last, Rudyard was taken away from Southsea and put in a public school which catered for children of families of a military background, mainly children planning to enter the navy. The school emphasized the military and masculine virtues. Ragging was common, the cultural compulsion to enter sports enormous. But Rudyard was a sedentary, artistically minded child who hated sports, partly because of his dangerously weak eyesight and partly because he was already sure that he wanted to live a life of the mind. In addition, Kipling looked noticeably a non-white (at least some Indians have observed that Kipling had a tan which could not be explained away as a result of the Indian sun). The result was more misery. If his parents showed him the other side of English affection and Mrs Holloway the other face of English authority, the bullying and ostracism he suffered as an alien-looking ‘effeminate’ schoolboy gave him another view of the English subculture that produced the ruling elites for the colonies.
In sum, reared in the company of doting Indian servants who desanitized the Victorian though non-Calvinist and non-church-going Kipling family, young Rudyard found England a harrowing experience. It was a culture lie could admire-the admiration was also a product of his socialization-but not love. He remained in England a conspicuous bicultural sahib, the English counterpart of the type he was to later despise: the bicultural Indian babu. Others sensed this marginality and the resulting social awkwardness, and this further distanced him from English society in England and subsequently in India. His writings were to reflect this remoteness later, and he never could write about England as captivatingly as about India.10
Yet, his oppressive English years inevitably gave Kipling the message that England was a part of his true self, that he would have to disown his Indianness and learn not to identify with the victims, and that the victimhood he had known in England could be avoided, perhaps even glorified, through identification with the aggressors, especially through loyalty to the aggressors’ values.
Kipling himself had been effeminate, weak, individualistic, rebellious and unwilling to see the meaning of life only in work or useful activity (he was bad at figures in his school at Southsea and could not read till he was six). These were exactly the faults he later bitterly attacked in Westernized Indians. Almost self-depreciatingly, he idealized the herd and the pack and the kind of morality which would hold such a collectivity together. He never guessed that it was a short step from the Westernized Indian to the Indianized Westerner and he never realized that the marginality he scorned in the pro-Indian intellectuals and the anti-colonial liberals was actually his own.
What were the links between the two Kiplings: between the hero loyal to Western civilization and the Indianized Westerner who hated the West within him, between the hero who interfaced cultures and the anti-hero who despised cultural hybrids and bemoaned the unclear sense of self in him?
It was blind violence and a hunger for revenge. Kipling was always ready to justify violence as long as it was counter-violence. Edmund Wilson points out, with a touch of contempt, that much of Kipling’s work is remarkably free of any real defiance of authority and any sympathy for the victims.11 Actually there is more to it. Kipling distinguished between the victim who fights well and pays back the tormentor in his own coin and the victim who is passive-aggressive, effeminate, and fights back through non-cooperation, shirking, irresponsibility, malingering and refusal to value face-to-face fights. The first was the ‘ideal victim’ Kipling wished to be, the second was the victim’s life young Kipling lived and hated living. If he did not have any compassion for the victims of the world, he did not have any compassion for a part of himself either.
But Kipling’s literary sensitivities did not entirely fail him even in this sphere. He knew it was not a difference between violence and nonviolence, but between two kinds of violence. The first was the violence that was direct, open and tinged with legitimacy and authority. It was the violence of self-confident cultural groups, used to facing violent situations with overwhelming advantages. The second was the violence of the weak and the dominated, used to facing violence with overwhelming disadvantages. There is in this second violence a touch of non-targeted rage as well as of desperation, fatalism and, as the winners or masters of the world would have it, cowardliness. This violence is often a fantasy rather than an intervention in the real world, a response to the first kind of violence rather than a cause or justification for it.
In Kipling’s life, the first kind of violence happened to be the prerogative of the British rulers in India; the second that of Indians subjugated in India. Kipling correctly sensed that the glorification of the victor’s violence was the basis of the doctrine of social evolution and ultimately colonialism, that one could not give up the violence without giving up the concept of colonialism as an instrument of progress.
The cost of this moral blindness was enormous. The centre piece of Kipling’s life was a refusal to look within, an aggressive ‘anti-intraception’ which forced him to avoid all deep conflicts, and prevented him from separating human problems from ethnic stereotypes. Remarkably extraversive, his work stressed all forms of collectivity, and saw the bonds of race and blood as more important than person-to-person relationships. As if their author, he hoped that the restlessness and occasional depression that had dogged him since the Southsea days could be driven off-scent by the extraversive search for cultural roots, through the service he was rendering to the imperial authority. He lived and died fighting his other self-a softer, more creative
and happier self-and the uncertainty and self-hatred associated with it.
Simultaneously, the only India he was willing to respect was the one linked to her martial past and subcultures, the India which was a Dionysian counterplayer as well as an ally of the West. Probably, at another plane, like Nirad C. Chaudhuri and V. S. Naipaul after him, Kipling too lived his life searching for an India which, in its hard masculine valour, would be an equal competitor or opponent of the West that had humiliated, disowned and despised his authentic self.
Some critics have spoken of the two voices of Kipling. One, it seems, has even named the voices the saxophone and the oboe. The saxophone was, one suspects, Kipling’s martial, violent, self-righteous self which rejected pacifism and glorified soldiery, went through spells of depression, was fascinated by the grotesque and the macabre, and lived with an abiding fear of madness and death. The oboe was Kipling’s Indianness and his awe for the culture and the mind of India, his bewilderment at India’s heterogeneity and complexity, her incoherence and ancient mystery’, her resistance to the mechanization of work as well as man, and ultimately her androgyny. The antonyms were masculine hardness and imperial responsibility on the one hand, and feminine softness and cross-cultural empathy, on the other. The saxophone won out, but the oboe continued to play outside Kipling’s earshot, trying to keep alive a subjugated strain of his civilization in the perceived weaknesses of another.
II
This long story tells us a number of things about the world of the men who built, ran, or legitimized empires, about the experienced violence which became in them a lifelong fear of and respect for violence, and about the attempt to give meaning to private suffering by developing theories of extraversive violence. This in turn, underneath all the attempts to identify with the aggressor and despite singing the praise of the powerful, was also a matter of ‘turning against the self’: a defence touching in this case the very margins of self-destructiveness. Such processes provide vital clues to the fates of polities and cultures.
For the moment, however, I shall focus on a dilemma in Kipling’s personal life which was common to all colonial ideologies and could be so to most post-colonial awarenesses. This dilemma is important because while the economic, political and moral results of colonialism have been discussed, its emotional and cognitive costs have been ignored. Arid as Freud has reminded us in this century, what we choose to forget has a tendency to come back to haunt us in ‘history’.
Kipling’s dilemma can be stated simply: he could not be both Western and Indian; he could be either Western or Indian. It was this imposed choice which linked his self-destructiveness to the tragedy of his life: Kipling’s avowed values were Western, his rejected under-socialized self Indian, and he had to choose between the two. Had it been the other way round, he might have managed as a brown sahib or as a babu at least to acknowledge his bicultural self and reconcile however crudely the East and the West within him.
This apparently trivial, hypothetical difference is the first clue to the way colonialism tried to take over the Western consciousness, to make it congruent with the needs of colonialism, to take away the wholeness of every white man who chose to be a part of the colonial machine, and to give him a new self-definition which, while provincial in its cultural orientation, was universal in its geographical scope.
In retrospect, colonialism did have its triumphs after all. It did make Western man definitionally non-Eastern and handed him a self-image and a world view which were basically responses to the needs of colonialism. He could not but be nonEastern; he could not but be continuously engaged in studying, interpreting and understanding the East as his negative identity.12 The ‘discovery’ of the Orient, which Edward Said has so elegantly described ‘13 was designed to expel the other Orient which had once been a part of the medieval European consciousness as an archetype and a potentiality. That other Orient, too, was sometimes seen as an enemy but it was respected, even if grudgingly. It was seen not merely as the habitat of an alternative world view but also as an alternative source of knowledge about the West. Voltaire’s China, for example, was not the modern anthropologist’s East; it was the humanist’s alter ego of the West. The medieval Middle East was the place where many Europeans went to study Aristotle. And even among the first generation of colonialists in British India among those who were actually the greatest empire builders there were those like Warren Hastings who felt that they had more to learn from the civilization they ruled than they had to teach.
This other Orient ‘ the Orient which was the Occident’s double, did not fit the needs of colonialism; it carried intimations of an alternative, cosmopolitan, multicultural living which was, to change the context of Angus Wilson’s expression, beyond the dreary middle-class horizons of Kipling and his English contemporaries. They forced themselves and every bicultural Westerner to make his choice.
On the other side, colonialism tried to supplant the Indian consciousness to erect an Indian self-image which, in its opposition to the West, would remain in essence a Western construction. If the colonial experience made the mainstream Western consciousness definitionally non-Oriental and redefined the West’s self-image as the antithesis or negation of the East, it sought to do the reverse with the self-image of the Orient and with the culture of India. Colonialism replaced the normal ethnocentric stereotype of the inscrutable Oriental by the pathological stereotype of the strange, primal but predictable Oriental-religious but superstitious, clever but devious, chaotically violent but effeminately cowardly. Simultaneously, colonialism created a domain of discourse where the standard mode of transgressing such stereotypes was to reverse them: superstitious but spiritual, uneducated but wise, womanly but pacific, and so on and so forth. No colonialism could be complete
unless it ‘universalized’ and enriched its ethnic stereotypes by appropriating the language of defiance of its victims. That was why the cry of the victims of colonialism was ultimately the cry to be heard in another language-unknown to the colonizer and to the anti-colonial movements that he had bred and then domesticated. That is why the rest of this analysis has to seek to understand the colonial legacy in post-colonial India in a language which, while it incorporates the language of the modern world, also tries to remain outside it. The shifts from the past to the present tense in the following pages, and from the present to the past, is a part of the same effort.
India is not non-West; it is India. Outside the small section of Indians who were once exposed to the full thrust of colonialism and are now heirs to the colonial memory, the ordinary Indian has no reason to see himself as a counterplayer or an antithesis of the Western man. The imposed burden to be perfectly non Western only constricts his, the everyday Indian’s, cultural self, just as the older burden of being perfectly Western once narrowed-and still sometimes narrows-his choices in the matter of his and his society’s future. The new responsibility forces him to stress only those parts of his culture which are recessive in the West and to underplay both those which his culture shares with the West and those which remain undefined by the West. The pressure to be the obverse of the West distorts the traditional priorities in the Indian’s total view of man and universe and destroys his culture’s unique gestalt. It in fact binds him even more irrevocably to the West .14
In this respect, there is a perfect fit here between many versions of Indian nationalism and the world view of the Kiplings. Both share what the Mddhyamika might call the tendency to absolutize the relative differences between cultures.15 Both seek to set up the East and the West as permanent and natural
antipodes. Both trace their roots to the cultural arrogance of post-Enlightenment Europe which sought to define not only the ‘true’ West but also the ‘true’ East . And both have produced social critics who share the naīve belief that the resulting cultural poverty has hurt the East more than the West.
Yet, if there is another India, there is also another West. If the former has been the forgotten majority, the latter has been, even more tragically for the globe, the forgotten minority. If the former has been the never-fully-defeated East, the latter has been, at least in this century, the fully subjugated West. That West survives as an esoterica in the West and perhaps, just perhaps, as a living reality at the corners of the non-West. ‘Indians are the only surviving Englishmen’, Malcolm Muggeridge once reportedly said, in equal exasperation and derision. It can read as an unwitting recognition that the Indian society has held in trusteeship aspects of the West which are lost to the West itself.
Let us, however, for the moment, shelve the problem of the West and concentrate on the Indian predicament and on that other India which is neither pre-modern nor anti-modern but only non-modern. It is the India which has survived the Western onslaught. It coexists with the India of the modernists, whose attempts to identify with the colonial aggressors has produced the pathetic copies of the Western man in the subcontinent, but it rejects most versions of Indian nationalism as bound irrevocably to the West-in reaction, jealousy, hatred, fear and counterphobia. That other India lives as if it recognized that, culturally, it is a choice neither between the East and the West nor between the North and the South. It is a choice-and a battle-between the Apollonian and the Dionysian within India and within the West .16 As this century with its developed ability to translate utopias into reality has shown, if such a distinction does not exist in an oppressive culture, it has to be presumed to exist by its victims for maintaining their
own sanity and humanness. Thomas Mann, I am told, affirmed after the Nazi experience that there were not two Germanies but one. Perhaps it is for the Manus to own up the singleness of Germany. For the victims of Germany, at some plane there have to be but two Germanies interlinked if necessary by a single cognitive and ethical discourse.
In the modern West, this battle between the Apollonian and the Dionysian has only marginally involved the East-whether it should have involved the East or not is an altogether different issue. In the East the battle has involved the West. Mainstream Indian culture does implicitly recognize that, in terms of the themes central to it, it is not a matter of adjusting to or fighting the might and the world view of the West as an outside agency. Because while the West, in spite of all its theories of martial races and ignoble and noble savages, does not probably incorporate India, India does incorporate the West. T. K. Mahadevan quotes an odd statement of Gandhi which dramatizes this predicament:
Everyone of the Indians who has achieved anything worth mentioning in any direction is the fruit, directly or indirectly, of western education. At the same time, whatever reaction for the better he may have had upon the people at large was due to the extent of his eastern culture.17
The absolute rejection of the West is also the rejection of the, basic configuration of the Indian traditions; though, paradoxically, the acceptance of that configuration may involve a qualified rejection of the West.
This is the underside of non-modern India’s ethnic universalism. It is a universalism which takes into account the colonial experience, including the immense suffering colonialism brought, and builds out of it a maturer, more contemporary, more self-critical version of Indian traditions. It is a universalism which sees the Westernized India as a subtradition which, in spite of its pathology and its tragi-comic core, is a ‘digested’ form of another civilization that had once gate-crashed
into India. India has tried to capture the differentia of the West within its own cultural domain, not merely on the basis of a view of the West as politically intrusive or as culturally inferior, but as a subculture meaningful in itself and important, though not all-important, in the Indian context. This is what I meant when I said that Kipling, when he wanted to be Western, could not be both Western and Indian, whereas the, everyday Indian, even when he remains only Indian, is both Indian and Western.
If the East and the West never seem to meet in India, as both Kipling and E. M. Forster seem to argue, it is because of this internality of the West at different levels and areas of Indian life.18 Familiarity can breed distance, too. If most of the society is spared the problem of handling the West at the deepest levels of consciousness, if there exists a prior endogenous West or a West with its own limited place in Indian cosmology, there is no reason why the Westerner should be seen as a total intruder or, for that matter, as the all-important intruder. Nor is there any reason why the cultural conflict between the East and the West should be seen as the central conflict in Indian life. True, in the process the exposed sections of Indian society have been left to themselves to work through their fears of liminality and rootlessness-’awkwardly suspended between two worlds’, as V. G. Kiernan puts it. It is also true that the low concern with the East-West issue in large parts of the society has left these exposed sections doubly concerned with the differences between the Indian and the non-Indian, and the ‘us’ and the ‘they’ and forced them to fight a running battle with their feelings of self-hatred and powerlessness. But even the exposed Indians, with nearly four hundred years of exposure to the West, have not been fully deprived of their self-confidence vis-a-vis the West; even they carry the intimations of an inner conviction that they would not be swept off their
feet and that they could use the Occident for their own purposes. Even the crafty babus, as Kipling recognized in utter disgust, know how to use the white man: they too have a theory of the West.
Only recently have we caught up with the full implications of this. I find J. Duncan M. Derrett saying in 1979:
It was supposed, and the author of this paper used to suppose along with his elders and betters, that Indians had learnt English ways and values as they had learnt the English language, and that, as a race of would-be parrots they ‘have done remarkably well. . . .’ One perceived with pained surprise the conflict between profession and performance. Indians trained almost exclusively in Western arts and sciences reacted as irredeemable orientals in any crisis. They reinforced this feeling again and again by their lack of confidence when faced with a new problem, their pathetic desire for foreign advice (which they would shelve when they had paid for it), and their ‘going through the motions’ like a tight-rope walker who walks his rope for the sake of walking it, or like a somnambulist, avoiding desperate accidents but unable to say why…. Very late in the day the present writer woke up to what he believes to be the fact, namely that Indian tradition has been ‘in charge’ throughout, and that English ideas and English ways, like the English language, have been used for Indian purposes. That, in fact, it is the British who were manipulated, the British who were the silly somnambulists. My Indian brother is not a brown Englishman, he is an Indian who has learned to move around in my drawing room, and will move around in it so long as it suits him for his own purposes. And when he adopts my ideas he does so to suit himself, and retains them so far and as long as it suits him.19
Derrett could have added, ‘In right understanding (dharmdndm bhataprayaveksa) not only is revealed the determinate as determinate but there is also in it the indeterminate or the unconditioned.’20 Like all devious Orientals, the Indians, even when they seem totally controlled, do retain some indeterminateness and freedom. It is another matter that the carriers of the tradition of the babus, the lowest of the low among the brown sahibs, whom Kipling so obviously hated, could never take
pride in the fact that while they could dare to be part-Kiplings, Kipling could never dare to be a part-babu.
What about the subcategory called the martial Indian, the one who was Kipling’s truest Indian? And what about Kipling’s authentic imperial ruler, the over-burdened white man, with his civilizing mission and his fear that, unless careful, he would regress into the savagery of the people he was ordained to rule? Were there native constructions of them, too, or were they merely seen as strange, archetypal anti-gods who had become a part of one’s fate? Evidently, there does exist within the living traditions of India the Dionysian aspect of the modern West as an identifiably Indian subtradition, as the demonic self or asura prakrti:
-
Idamadya maya labdhamidam prapsye manoratham,
-
Idamastidamapi me bhavisyati punardhanam.
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Asau maya hatah Satruh hanisye caparanapi,
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lsvaro’hamaham bhogi siddho’ham balavdn sukhi
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Adhyo’bhyanavdnasmi ko’nyo’sti sadrso maya.21
Asuratva may be generally a negation of virtues in Indian society, but it can be seen sometimes as the pathology of Ksatriyahood. It is a Ksatriyahood which has run amuck.22 Probably this is the framework within which Kipling’s imperial consciousness-including the British construction of the native ideology of the martial races-was fitted. Kipling, provincial more by choice than by circumstance, thought that the ideology of Ksatriyahood was true Indianness, apart from being consistent with the world view of colonialism. He missed the limited role given to Ksatriyahood in traditional Indian cosmology and
the vested interest his kind had in denying these limits in a colonial culture organized around violence and counter-violence, manhood and maximized potency, and a tbeory of history that saw all civilizations in terms of the high and the low and the justifiably powerful and the deservedly weak. It is the different weightages given to the martial and the non-martial in the Indian culture that Kipling knew but required to forget.
III
Consistent naturalism or humanism is distinct from both idealism and materialism, and constitutes at the same time the unifying truth of both…. Only naturalism is capable of comprehending the action of world history.
Karl Marx23
I have argued that the Kiplings sought to redefine, on behalf of the modern West, the Indian as the antonym of the Western man and the Western man as a legitimate conqueror and a ruler. I have also argued that unlike in the West, these new definitions were not deeply internalized by most Indians who already had their native analogues of the modern Western man. They saw the Western man as a transient ruler who like all transient rulers tended to live with illusions of permanence. However, the imperial consciousness did manage to take over some parts of Westernized Indian consciousness. I shall now briefly tell one part of that story, using as my example the way the experience of colonialism has forced the Westernized Indian to first split the Indian self-image and then reconstitute it by showing one part of the image to be false.
India has ‘always been a separate world, hard for any outsider, Eastern or Western, to penetrate.’24 Such a culture becomes a projective test; it invites one not only to project on to it one’s deepest fantasies, but also to reveal, through such self-projection,
the interpreter rather than the interpreted. All interpretations of India are ultimately autobiographical. Predictably,a subgroup of Kipling’s Indian brain-children have set up the martial India as the genuine India which would one day defeat the West at its own game. They wait for that glorious day and are quite willing to alter the whole of Indian culture to bring that victory a little closer, like the American army officer in Vietnam who once destroyed a village to save it from its enemies. They demystify the ordinary Indian as a pseudoalternative to the Western man: hypocritically spiritual while being shrewdly materialistic, violent and self-interested; neither a dedicated counterplayer of the West like Japan, trying to defeat the West at its own game, nor clearly Oriental like Confucian China, which, while manifestly hostile to the West, shares with the West some basic values like performance, organization and instrumental rationality; neither a person who meets the norm of civility in the West, nor openly a noble savage. The cultural ideal of these new Ksatriyas is a hard Indian state backed by tough this-worldliness.
In reaction, others have identified the spiritual India as the real India. To them, therefore, all deviance from spiritualism is a deviance from Indianness itself. As against the materialism of the modern West, they see India providing an axis for a dissenting global consciousness. The West, according to this view, is already defeated by the superior Eastern civilizations; it only obstinately refuses to admit the fact.
Is the perception of such contradictions undetermined by culture? Must a society always choose between materialism and spiritualism, between hard realities and unreal dreams? Or is the perception of such a choice itself a product of Kipling’s imperial mission?
True to the description of ethnocentrism in some contemporary studies of the authoritarian personality, the British colonial attitude to Indian culture was always inconsistent. On the one hand the British saw the Indian as overly this-worldly exceedingly shrewd, greedy, self-centred, money-minded. On the other hand, they also despised the Indian as overly other
worldly-not fit for the world of modern science and technology, statecraft and productive work. (The colonizer in India thus proved, if such a proof was necessary, that an oppressive system seeks legitimation in all available ways. Spiritualism in British India was never the only opiate.) This is a split which has persisted in India’s modern sector. Once other explanation’s of India’s problems are exhausted, the modern Indian is always tempted to fall back upon either the stereotype of the spiritual Indian or on that of the pseudo-spiritual.
It is doubtful if most Indians look at India this way. India is not merely its spiritual self. The society does give an important place to spirituality, but it is hardly the overwhelming aspect of Indianness. The plethora of empirical studies done from Marxist as well as structural-functional vantage grounds should have at least made us aware that underlying much Indian spirituality lie this-worldly choices, hard self-interest, and reality-testing. This however has not stopped anyone, not even the scholars who have done these studies, from exhorting the Indians to be more this-worldly and more realistic. Even a scholar as erudite as D. D. Kosambi has a touch of innocence about him when he accuses the Gita in the same paragraph of ‘slippery opportunism’ and of admitting that ‘material reality is a gross illusion’.25 Similarly with Indian materialism. After all the materialist interpretations are exhausted, there remains an irreducible element of spiritual concerns which informs the toughest materialism in India. Sometimes this element is seen as the residual irrationality of a person whose flesh is willing but whose heart is weak-a reversal of metaphor which has its own story to tell. Sometimes it is seen as simple hypocrisy, a political compromise with the superstitious Indian masses who have more power than acumen. But the fact remains that from rationalist social critic Rammohun Roy’s (1772-1833) prayerful last days at Bristol to agnostic Jawaharlal Nehru’s (1889-1964) mystical last will and testament it is the same story of time travel through the asramas of life.
Perhaps only in a Cartesian consciousness does the India of Ananda Coomaraswamy and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan negate the India of D. D. Kosambi and Devi Prasad Chattopadhyaya, only within the modern awareness do the two Indias become two ideologies competing for the minds of men, instead of being two strains within the same life style, dialectically interrelated and complementary. 26 This is another way of saying that the two Indias which the ideologies project are both products of Western intrusion and both are attempts to reconstruct Indian culture according to categories which would seem internally consistent to the modern Western mind. Both are attempts to convert levels of living-or aspects of selfhood- into types of ideology.
In the Indian world view, as in most world views once we have unlearnt to see them as objects of professional study, even the most recalcitrant of ideologies can be read as a level or phase of living or as a response to a specific ontological or existential problem. A plurality of ideologies can always be accommodated within a single life style. Fittingly so; a living culture has to live and it has an obligation to itself, not to its analysts. Even less does it have any obligation to conform to a model, its own or someone else’s. Modern scholars of course have their own obligation to their disciplines; they cannot afford to grant the convertibility between life styles and ideologies. They have to reconcile the self-created ‘contradiction’ between the materialist and the idealist India by unmasking one of the Indias as false.
Thus one is caught in a peculiar dilemma in modern India.
On the one side, there are the modern cult figures who stress the spiritual India to exclude the materialist India from India. As they themselves become commodities in the Western marketplace of spiritualism and instant salvation, as they become more and more dependent on major structures of the modern world, as they legitimize ancient thought through modern science, and as they adapt traditional knowledge for solving modern problems at the risk of trivializing both, these gurus reportedly rediscover for the Indians their true spiritual destiny!
On the other side are those who ‘see through’ Indian spiritualism and find underneath only second-class materialism. Only by debunking the spiritual India can the Nirad C. Chaudhuris and the V. S. Naipauls become the counterpoints to the modern maharsis and acaryas.27 Only as professional debunkers are they a part of the modern world of the professional godmen. Like the godmen they reject, they also use the modern world to propagate their versions of India. Only instead of selling the spiritual India and explaining away the materialist, they vend the materialist India and debunk the spiritual. Being inverted modern gurus, they cannot forgive India for not being either a true copy or a true counterplayer of the West. They hate the confused self-definition of the Indian more than what they see as the society’s major failures. The Hindu, for instance, is aggressive while talking of pacifism, dirty in spite of his ideology of purity, materialist while preaching spiritualism, and comically Indian when trying to be Western.28
Persons can be hypocrites. Can cultures also be so? Does the hypocrisy of cultures on closer scrutiny turn out to be a contradiction in the human condition itself? For that matter, is a hypocrite only a casual cheat? Or is he someone who reaffirms the basic human values in a world hostile to such values, while himself succumbing to worldly temptations? Is a hypocrite an unwilling critic of everyday life whose personal failure signals a larger cultural crisis?
Probably the answers are less complex than the questions. India after all is not outside the world. Certainly, for centuries, it has mounted the same chaotic, part-sincere search for a humane society that other parts of the world have mounted. Certainly, many of India’s experiments in civilized social life, too, have been makeshift efforts to survive enormous odds. Many of these experiments have failed and many of the culture’s dreams, too, have turned into nightmares.
In addition, in recent centuries, the society has had to make major compromises with outer forces of oppression, backed by the powerful ideology of modernity and by an all-conquering technology, and it is still struggling to work through that experience. It has been forced to cultivate the creative self-protection which the victims often show when faced with an inescapable situation: a slightly comical imitativeness which indirectly reveals the ridiculousness of the powerful; an instrumental use of the ways of the powerful, which overtly grants their superiority yet denies their culture (this may involve the rejection of values such as work, productivity, masculinity, maturity or adulthood, rationality and normality); an uncanny ability to subvert the valued skills or traits which may ensure one’s adaptation to the ‘system’ (such as intelligence, creativity, achievement, adjustment, personal growth or development); an over-done obsequiousness which indirectly seeks to limit the options of the target of ingratiation; and a stylized other-worldliness which can disarm at least those who see it as a denial of self-interest.
The pathology of the Westernized Indian’s personality, which Kipling so cleverly identified, was rooted in India’s encounter with the ego-ideals of Kipling in the first place. The Chaudhuris and the Naipauls are not only critics of an inevitable mode of self-defence, they are also a part of it. They provide ‘secondary elaborations’ of a culture designed to hide
the real self-the deepest social consciousness of the victims from the outsiders.
The determinate is not that determined after all.
IV
Probably in such a world, once the codes of both Indian materialism and Indian spiritualism are cracked, both can be shown to share the same or complementary concerns. Let me examine this mutuality in the life of Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), who in many ways was a counterpoint to Kipling. I hope to show that between Kipling and Aurobindo, the latter’s response to colonialism included a cultural self-affirmation which had a greater respect for the selfhood of the ‘other’ and a search for a more universal model of emancipation, however sick or bizarre that search may seem to many of us. In fact, it could be argued that the ‘sickness’ or the ‘bizarreness’ was itself a product of the colonial culture, telescoped deep into the personal life of Aurobindo. Aurobindo’s spiritualism can be seen as a way of handling a situation of cultural aggression and to that extent it was a language of defiance, seeking to make sense out of the West in Indian terms. It is a matter of judgement how far the attempt made sense to his society and how far it remained a reductio of the West’s version of the otherworldly Indian.
Kipling was culturally an Indian child who grew up to become an ideologue of the moral and political superiority of the West. Aurobindo was culturally a European child who grew up to become a votary of the spiritual leadership of India. Kipling had to disown his Indianness to become his concept of the true European; Aurobindo had to own up his Indianness to become his version of the authentic Indian. However, while both could be seen as products of the psychopathology of colonialism, Aurobindo symbolized a more universal response to the splits which colonialism induced. He, after all, did not have to disown the West within him to become his version of an Indian. To the end of his life Western culture remained a vehicle of his creative self-expression and he never thought the West to be outside the reach of God’s grace. Even when he spoke of race and evolution, two of the most dangerous themes in Western cosmology, not once did he use the concepts to divide humankind; he always had the human race and human evolution in mind. And during the Second World War, when he made the stunning claim that his yoga was determining the course of the war in Europe and deciding the fate of Japan, he knew on which side in the climactic battles he wanted to be and which strain in which civilization he wanted to save through his psychic powers. Nazi Germany to him always remained a satanic force and, though the rebirth of Asia was one of his fondest dreams, he abhorred Japanese militarism to the end.29 One is forced to conclude that, compared to Kipling’s ‘sickness of soul’, Aurobindo’s sickness of mind was a superior cognition of the human predicament and it did show, long before the R. D. Laings entered the scene, that even the deepest feelings of grandeur and depersonalization could carry intimations of an alternative political morality.
The point can be made in another way. While Aurobindo belonged to the tradition of the most deeply reactive of the Indian responses to colonialism-the one which partly drew inspiration from Bankimchandra and Vivekananda-he always had, like Bankimchandra and Vivekananda, a genuine place for the West within Indian civilization. For Kipling on the other hand, India was not a civilization which enjoyed equal rights; it was a geographical area one could love and a sociological
space where you, if you were a real ‘man’, could find yourself. This certainly was not accidental. Aurobindo was above all a victim who had fashioned out of his victimhood a new meaning for suffering and a new model of defiance. As a victim, he protected-and had to protect-his humanity and moral sanity more carefully because, while the colonial system only saw him as an object, he could not see the colonizers as mere objects. As a part of his struggle for survival, the West remained for Indian victims like Aurobindo an internal human reality, in love as well as in hate, in identification as well as in counter-identification.
Aurobindo Ackroyd Ghose-the Western middle name was given by his father at birth-was the third son of his parents. The Ghoses were urbane Brahmos from near Calcutta and fully exposed to the new currents of social change in India. Father Krishnadhan, a doctor trained in England, was in government service. He was well known among his friends and relatives for his aggressively Anglicized ways. He forbade his children to learn or speak Bengali; even at home they had to converse in English. Their dress and food, too, were English. In addition, Krishnadhan was an atheist and he tried hard to protect his children from the ill-effects of Hinduism. For some reason, young Aurobindo was the favoured object of his father’s zealous social engineering. Krishnadhan ‘took the greatest care that nothing Indian should touch this son of his.’30
Mother Swarnalata, about whom ‘official’ biographers seem reticent, was the daughter of Raj Narayan Bose, the renowned scholar, religious leader, social reformer and nationalist. She herself was known mainly for her beauty. Though coming from a reformist family and married to a highly Westernized man, Swarnalata was an orthodox Hindu, and it is almost certain that she did not fully relish the Western manners of her husband. Nor must she have enjoyed the charade of communicating through English in the family. However, what disturbed human relations in the family more than the oppression of language was the illness Swarnalata fell prey to early in Aurobindo’s life. Called hysteria by her contemporaries, it was obviously the early stage of something more serious. Though her father took her to his house at Deoghar to convalesce, she gradually became more and more ‘unmanageable’. Meanwhile Krishnadhan installed a mistress at home.
Time has erased the details of Swarnalata’s illness; we merely know that her side of the family had a number of ‘hysterics’ and that her illness was associated with occasional bouts of violence towards her children. (There was at least one instance when young Aurobindo stood, stupefied and fearful, witnessing his mother beating his elder brother .31) We also know that either as a response to her or as a general response to the environment at home, young Aurobindo showed signs of mutism and interpersonal withdrawal, which his admirers were to later read as an early sign of spirituality.32
The West continued to oppress Aurobindo in other ways, too. When five, he was sent to a totally Westernized, e1ite convent at Darjeeling with an English governess who served as a surrogate mother. His co-students there were mostly white. English was the sole medium of instruction and the only means of communication outside school hours. The resulting sense of exile found expression, even at that age, in a statement made in the third person: ‘In the shadow of the Himalayas, in sight of the wonderful snow-capped peaks, even in their native land they were brought up in alien surroundings.’33 When he had his first paranormal experience at Darjeeling, it carried the impress of this loneliness and depression. He had the vision of a heavy, palpable darkness speedily descending on to earth and entering him. The darkness stayed with him for the next fourteen years.
Aurobindo was seven when his parents took him and two of his brothers to England and left them there. They were now to be exposed, not to the Westernized life style of Indians but to the Western ways of the English. At London, the brothers were put under the tutelage of an English couple, the Reverend and Mrs Drewett, who were given ‘strict instructions’ not to allow the children ‘to make the acquaintance of any Indian or undergo any Indian influence. These instructions were carried. out to the letter.’34 The Drewetts were also told by Krishnadhan to spare his sons all religious education. (The Reverend Drewett’s mother, however, being more consistent in her Christian evangelism, worried about Aurobindo’s soul. One Sunday she did manage to get him duly baptized as a Christian.)
During his days with the Drewetts and later at an e1ite school at London, Aurobindo was exposed to the classical heritage of Europe, especially to Latin and Greek. He also began to write and publish poetry in Latin, Greek and English.35 Afterwards he took a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, where, too, he did brilliantly in the classics, winning all the relevant prizes for one year. He also dutifully learnt French, some German and Italian. There was still no rebellion in the air.
Scholarly success however was no protection against the deep economic and nurtural anxieties to which Aurobindo and his brothers were sometimes subjected in England. Their father, though wealthy, stopped sending them money for no clear reason- And the three brothers lived in acute poverty. Added to this was Aurobindo’s loneliness; he had no close relationship with anyone in England.36The result was an ‘inward depression’ which in middle age Aurobindo was once to mention casually.37 The other result was more predictable. For years he had been taught to view England as an ideal society; now England was re-invoking his early anxieties associated with the West.
At last Aurobindo began to look for alternative ways of handling the Occident and to defy the model of success associated with the Anglicism of his father.38 Thus, after taking the first part of the Classical Tripos with a first class, Aurobindo did not take the degree. And worse, though he did very well in the Indian Civil Service examination, he missed the riding test and got himself disqualified, knowing fully that ‘his father was very particular’ about the examination.39 Finally, Aurobindo delivered a few fiery nationalist speeches at the Indian Majllis in Cambridge and got involved with an incipient secret society pursuing the cause of Indian freedom.
As if to symbolize his break with the West, Aurobindo dropped the Ackroyd from his name during this period of his stay in England.
After fourteen years in England and after thorough denationalization-the expression was his-Aurobindo came back to India. He found his father dead; he had died heart-broken on hearing the rumour that the ship carrying Aurobindo home had sunk. And Aurobindo was soon to find out that his mother, now in an advanced stave of insanity’ could recognize him only with difficulty. However, by this time he was already moving towards new parental figures. Already, on touching the soil of India, the darkness that had haunted him since his Darjeeling days had lifted and he had had the experience of being enveloped by a deep calm and silence.40 After all, he had come back
to his motherland, to learn his mother tongue and, as we shall soon find out, to discover the primal authority of the mother.
Aurobindo started his life in Baroda as a bureaucrat and a language teacher. He had learnt some Bengali and Sanskrit in England from an English scholar; he brushed these up in Baroda and also picked up Marathi and Gujarati. He had been always good at languages and public speaking; now, as he turned quieter in personal life, he became more expressive in his formal communication. He began to write for nationalist journals and gradually became a ma or public figure. It was at Baroda again that he first found out his spiritual powers. Once he saved himself from an accident when a divine, luminous self separated itself from his own body and took control of his horse-drawn carriage; another time he saw a living presence in an icon of Kali.
In 1901, Aurobindo got married. His bride Mrinalini Devi was, to go by her father’s account, an attractive but otherwise ordinary girl of fourteen. She was made to pay for her ordinariness. Though Aurobindo chose her himself, he was soon to lose interest in her-when it became clear that she would be unable to live up to his expectations. Mrinalini died childless, lonely, heart-broken and perhaps unlamented in 1918, some years after Aurobindo renounced the world. By that time, she had suffered from Aurobindo’s long absences from home and from expectations that he would come back and take her into his new life. Till the end, she was innocently to try to become acceptable to him through her religious activities, relying on his vague hints that he might return to her.41 He never did. The pathetic essay which her father wrote after her death, though doctored by the Aurobindo Ashram, brings out the tragedy of a simple, doting wife, crushed by forces of which she had no comprehension.
Neither his spiritual quest nor his marriage stopped Aurobindo from being drawn into the vortex of the nationalist movement and he soon became an important leader of the groups fighting for the violent overthrow of British rule. He also became the editor of an important nationalist periodical and the principal of a nationalist college in Calcutta. Simultaneously, he worked out the rudiments of a political ideology. It was built around a vague form of populism in which ‘the proletariat’ was ‘the real key to the situation’42 and around a mythography of India as a powerful mother, Sakti, who was being oppressed by the West and had to be liberated through blood sacrifices made by her children.
I know my country as Mother. I offer her my devotions, my worship. If a monster sits upon her breast and prepares to suck her blood, what does her child do? Does he quietly sit down to his meal … or rush to her rescue? I know I have in me the power to accomplish the deliverance of my fallen country…. It is the power of knowledge, Brahmatej founded in Jnana. This feeling is not new to me … with this feeling I was born … God has sent me to earth to do this work . . .. 43
The imagery was of course partly borrowed from Bankimchandra Chatterji, the first to introduce the theme of the great mother into Indian nationalism. Aurobindo admired Bankim as much for this as for the hope Bankim’s work gave of being able to drive out the English language, Krishnadhan’s beloved English, from India and install his mother-tongue at its place.44
Aurobindo’s revolutionary politics ultimately landed him in jail and involved him in a prolonged, dramatic trial on charges of sedition.45 His year in jail, particularly the time spent in solitary confinement, made a great difference to him spiritually. He practised yoga, read the Gita and the Upanisads, spoke to Vivekananda over the barriers of death and even saw Lord Krsna in the jail. Once in a while he broke the monotony by levitating.46 Even the graces for which he was most thankful were ones he found in jail in 1908: ‘the silence’ and the ‘emptiness’.47 From then onwards, ‘whatever else came, came in the emptiness’, and he ‘could at any time withdraw from activity into the pure silent peace.’48
In May 1909 Aurobindo was acquitted. Sedition in British law was fortunately defined by principles compatible with the philosophy of John Locke, and what in our times, following Isaiah Berlin, we have learnt to call the idea of negative liberty; sedition was not defined under the guidance of the philosophical forebears of Sigmund Freud, or of those of this narrator. Thus, the Oedipal meanings of the private crisis of authority in Krishnadhan’s son-through all his political defiance, trial, acquittal and conformity-could remain buried under legal documents. On the other hand, the government was not taken in by Aurobindo’s other-worldly rhetoric or by the court order. The threat of re-arrest persisted.49 Probably, Aurobindo too was not taken in by the liberalism of British law. His mysticism had a pragmatic side and it explicitly included the secular.50 So, in 1910, on receiving orders ‘from above’, he moved to Pondicherry, then a French colony in India. There he started a life as a renunciate, to the chagrin of many and yet, in a strange way, following the path traversed by a number of the Bengali terrorists of his time. A small band of followers collected around him in Pondicherry and they lived simply and informally, practising a form of yoga which would free not only India but everybody everywhere. As Aurobindo himself clarified, he now sought brahmatej, brahmanic potency obtainable through asceticisms and penances, in the place of ksatratej or martial potency.
This could be the end of the story, but the West had one more decisive intervention to make in Aurobindo’s life. In 1914 Mira Paul Richard, at that time an attractive Frenchwoman of thirty-seven, joined Aurobindo, leaving behind her home, husband and children. Aurobindo and Mira had known each other through yoga before they actually met; they had been working together since the dawn of history to carry on the human evolution .51 (Though their joint work had spanned centuries, they still differed in style: Aurobindo made all his claims part-metaphorically; Mira more literally.52 Even in occult matters she was more down to earth.) Appropriately enough, she soon took over the organization of the Ashram and was given the title Sri Ma, the Mother, by Aurobindo.
To start with, the group at Pondicherry had been an association of equals, albeit with a charismatic leader. Mira Richard imposed on it formal discipline, a clear hierarchy and ended its laissez faire ambience.53 No pretension of equality was allowed any more;54 Aurobindo was now the supreme guru and the final key to salvation. Simultaneously, Mira became his new means of communicating with this-worldly others.
As he put it, she had ‘to come down towards the lower consciousness’ because most people sought an authority which was not too abstract, too distant and too ‘severe’.55 Conceivably for their benefit, her heavily brocaded figure and even more heavily made-up face stared down from the walls of the Ashram as consistently as Aurobindo’s.
With the acceptance of Mira as his sakti in 1926, Aurobindo withdrew further into silence and seclusion; only Mira and a few disciples had close contacts with him and met him regularly. As for the others, he made four brief appearances a year. The rest of the time he was kept busy by his yogic attempts to bring down the supermind to the earth and to produce a new race of supermen.56 This seclusion allowed the Mother’s control to become tighter and, after Aurobindo’s death, absolute; much of the open-endedness and imagination of Aurobindo’s mysticism was slowly but surely removed by her. The Ashram. itself became, under her powerful presence and efficient guidance, highly status-conscious, politically conservative and a means of oppressing the people around. After Aurobindo’s death, for a while it even opposed the decolonization of Pondichery.57 Increasingly and inevitably, it acquired the trappings of a well organized modern cult and of a church-as-corporation.
The historical reality of a person, however, is never a good guide to the meanings that are associated with the person. Thus, for Swarnalata and Krishnadhan’s quiet, unprotesting, long-suffering son, the depth of his relationships with the powerful, committed woman from Europe had an altogether different meaning. For him, the freed East had at last met the non-oppressive West symbolized by the Mother. And thenceforth his East was incomplete without the Mother’s West and his West was partial without her East. The West once separated him from nearness, love and nurture. Now a part of the West had returned to put him in touch with them. ‘There is one force only’, he declared, ‘the Mother’s force-or, if you like to put it that way, the Mother is Sri Aurobindo’s Force.’58 And ‘if one is open to Sri Aurobindo and not to the Mother it means that one is not really open to Sri Aurobindo.’59 Gradually, discovering the East in oneself by losing oneself in the East-in-theWest became a transcendent goal and a practical possibility. The last stage of perfection became complete surrender-’when you are completely identified with the Divine Mother and feel yourself to be no longer another and separate being, instrument, servant or worker but truly a child and eternal portion of her consciousness and force.’60
Perhaps Aurobindo did after all find a protection against failures of intimacy and nurture, against meaningless silence and emptiness, and against the innermost separations and disjunctions the West had induced in him.
V
It is impossible to read the life of Aurobindo without sensing the ‘inner’ pain which went with imperialism in India. Much of the pain was inflicted and much of the destruction of his cultural self undertaken within the confines of his family. This further ensured that his suffering passed as education, upbringing or development. It was a total system which young Aurobindo had to confront. Rebellion in such a case was bound to seem hopeless and the ‘exotic’ alternative he found to it in mysticism was probably the only one available to him. The challenge was to keep the mysticism humane and politically nonconformist. For a long time Aurobindo, within limits, did manage to do that. (It was the organizational edge Mira Richard brought to his spiritualism which turned the language
of spirit into a modern technology of salvation and Aurobindo into India’s first modern guru. It was in that guise that Aurobindo spoke of ‘intervention in world forces’ the way his co-professionals today speak of ‘alliance with natural laws’. At this plane, Aurobindo was defeated by the West.)
This could be put in another way. If Aurobindo’s life story and his spiritualism was a statement of pain it was also an interpersoRal withdrawal to protect values which he would have had to give up in the light of conventional reason. And echoing Freud on art, he could have said, only in spiritualism has the omnipotence of thought-and, hence, the political potency and moral vision of the dominated-been retained in our civilization. It was an ‘insane’, ‘irrational’ attempt to preserve the ideas of the oneness of man, and of man as a part of an organic universe. In that universe, what a necrophilic war machine did to the Russians at Stalingrad or to the British at Dunkirk, called for intervention by a middle-aged Bengali yogi who had once tried to organize an armed rebellion against the Raj he was now defending. All oppression is one and each man bears his responsibility.
Did Aurobindo symbolize the larger suffering of his society under colonial rule ? Did his attempt to speak in a new language parallel his society’s attempt to express-and yet protect-its secret awareness of its suffering? No final answers are possible but a few guesses can be made.
First, to protect its self-esteem in the face of defeat, indignity, exploitation and violence, Indian society has indeed evolved a model of autonomy that its victimhood has defined for it. It has evolved a theory of suffering in the form of a set of metaphors which speak through cultural ‘absurdities’ and moral ‘contradictions’: the absurdities which spring from an overdone moralism, hiding the pain of protecting values in a world hostile to such values; the contradictions of a victim whose world has been fractured by his need to survive a split authority, part traditional and part imposed. It is the world of a bank-clerk who secretly writes poetry and either hides it from
a prosaic world or comically affirms it from the house-top to establish his intellectual superiority. To some, poetry is only poetry and clowns are only clowns and both should be judged as such. To others, poetry-and fooling-could also be a secret defiance, a reaffirmation of the right state of mind in a hard ‘ masculine, anti-poetic world.61 Defiance need not always be self-conscious. It need not be always backed by the ardent, murderous, moral passions in which the monotheistic faiths, and increasingly the more modern and nationalist versions of Hinduism, specialize.62
To the Kiplings and Naipauls such defiance is an obfuscation.Especially as it blurs the lines between the violent and the non-violent, the victorious and the defeated, the past and the present, the material and the non-material. But the victor, insecure in his victory, and the court poet, insecure in his self-repression, have both reasons to absolutize relative differences. The defeated, and the poet who, heeding Albert Camus’injunction, sings of the victims of history, have lesser reasons to do so. Thus, what looks like obfuscation and compromise with evil may be seen also as a truer understanding of the oppressors whose suffering and decadence is ‘ for once, taken seriously by their victims, who bear the responsibility of being both the subject and the object of ‘history’.63 What looks like a failure to make cognitive distinctions may in fact be a recognition that the popular modern antonyms are not always the true opposites. This century has shown that in every situation of organized oppression the true antonyms are always the exclusive part versus the inclusive whole-not masculinity versus femininity but either of them versus androgyny, not the past versus the present but either of them versus the timelessness in which the past is the present and the present is the past, not the oppressor versus the oppressed but both of them versus the rationality which turns them into co-victims.
In his own odd way, Aurobindo did try to recognize this on behalf of his culture. To trivialize both the English language and the categories popularized by nineteenth-century Western social criticism, one could perhaps say that in the chaos called India the opposite of thesis is not the antithesis because they exclude each other. The true ‘enemy’ of the thesis is seen to be in the synthesis because it includes the thesis and ends the latter’s reason for being. It is Sankara’s Vedanta, carrying the clear impress of Buddhism, which finished Buddhism as a living faith in India, and not either Brahmanic orthodoxy or any state-sponsored anti-Buddhist ideology.64 Successfully or unsuccessfully,
Aurobindo did try to evolve such a response to the West.
Only prolonged victimhood could give depth to such a view of life, even when the view happens to be rooted in ancient wisdom and inherited cosmology. Only the victims of a culture of hyper-masculinity, adulthood, historicism, objectivism, and hypernormality protect themselves by simultaneously conforming to the stereotype of the rulers, by over-stressing those aspects of the self which they share with the powerful, and by protecting in the corner of their heart a secret defiance which reduces to absurdity the victor’s concept of the defeated and his unspoken belief that he is morally and culturally superior to his subjects, caught on the wrong side of history.
Almost unwittingly I seem to have come back to Gandhi who was one of the few who successfully articulated in politics the consciousness which had remained untamed by British rule in India. He transformed the debate on Indian hypocrisy into a simultaneous text on British self-doubt. In spite of his occasionally strident moralism, he recognized that once the hegemony of a theory of imperialism without winners and losers was established, imperialism had lost out on cognitive, in addition to ethical, grounds. To the Kiplings this was a threat. They liked to see colonialism as a moral statement on the superiority of some cultures and inferiority of others. For this reason, they were even willing to accept that some had the right to speak of the superiority of Indian culture over the Western. Cultural relativism by itself is not incompatible with imperialism, as long as one culture’s categories are backed by political, economic and technological power.
Gandhi queered the pitch at two planes. He admitted that colonialism was a moral issue and took the battle to Kipling’s home ground by judging colonialism by Christian values and declaring it to be an absolute evil. At the second plane he made his ‘odd’ cognitive assessment of the gains and losses from colonialism a part of his critique of modernity and found the British wanting in both ethics and rationality. This threatened the internal legitimacy of the ruling culture by splitting open the private wound of every Kipling and quasi-Kipling to whom rulership was a means of hiding one’s moral self in the name of the higher morality of history, in turn seen as an embodiment of human rationality. A naive French imperialist once said in the context of Africa:
I know that I must take pride in my blood. When a superior man ceases to believe hmself, he actually ceases to be superior…. When a superior race ceases to believe itself a chosen race, it actuality ceases to be a chosen race.65
Gandhi attacked both the cognitive and moral frames of -this insecure, fragile sense of chosenness.
In this respect he differed from the other anti-Kiplings to whom colonialism was a moral statement. The final morality to them, too, was ‘history’ and the immorality of colonialism for them, too, was mitigated by the historical role of colonialism as an instrument of progress. Either through a cultural renaissance set off by the impact of a more vigorous culture (as many of the ninteenth-century social and religious reformers in India and recent modernists in our times have described it) or through the growth of modern capitalism on the way to full-blown liberalism or communism (a la the utilitarians and Karl Marx), the modern idea of history has implicitly accepted the cultural superiority-or at least the more advanced cultural state-of the colonizing power.66 It has thus endorsed one of the major axioms of the colonial theory the Kiplings advanced. As against this, Gandhi reaffirmed an autonomous world view which refused to separate facts from values and refused to see colonialism as an immoral pathway to a valued state of being. Instead of meeting the Western criterion of a true antagonist, he endorsed the non-modern Indian reading of the modern West as one of the many possible life styles which had, unfortunately for both the West and India, become cancerous by virtue of its disproportionate power and spread.
It is this awareness which is the strongest-and the strangest enemy of modernity in Indian traditions, neither the ‘radical’ critiques of West nor the aggressive affirmation of Indianness. Modernity, like modern science, could live with everything except an attenuated status and a limited, non-proselytizing social role for it.
The awareness has allowed both insiders and outsiders to define or redefine India and yet refused to force the non-modern Indian to alter his priorities to prove or disprove the cross-sectional ideas of India held by Indians and non-Indians. This is the other way by which the culture has protected its core-by using the dialectic between the continuous attempt by some small groups and persons to define Indianness and large groups to live their life as if such definitions were irrelevant. It is true that traditionally the main instances of Indian creativity, often the main expressions of Indianness, have come from those aspects of Indian consciousness which are nationally and culturally less self-conscious. But it is also true that they can come, less frequently, from the margins of the culture, from among those who can capture in their personal life or in their self-expression something of this cultural tension between selfdefinition and unselfconsciousness .67
The word’Hindu’, T. N. Madan has again recently reminded us, was first used by the Muslims to describe all Indians who were not converted to Islam. Only in recent times have the Hindus begun to describe themselves as Hindus.68 Thus, the very expression has a built-in contradiction: to use the term Hindu to self-define is to flout the traditional self-definition of the Hindu, and to assert aggressively one’s Hinduism is to very nearly deny one’s Hinduness. (Rabindranath Tagore’s novel Gora, possibly based on the life of the turn-of-the-century nationalist-revolutionary, Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, remains a magisterial study of the nature of this compromise and the underlying cultural and psychological dilemma in the Indian middle-classes .69) Fortunately, most Hindus have lived without such self-consciousness for centuries. They certainly did not need an exclusive concept of Hinduism till the nineteenth century when some modernist Hindu religious reformers thought otherwise. They are the ones who tried, in response to the faith of their martial rulers, to indirectly Christianize what they saw as emasculated Hinduism. Appropriately, these modern Hindus saw contemporary Hinduism not as permanently inferior to the Semitic creeds but as a once-great-but now-fallen religion which had possibilities. So they tried to improve the Hindus and modernize their faith. They sought a sense of community as Hindus and a sense of history as a community.70
For better or for worse, mainstream Indian culture has learnt to deal with political defeat and instability differently. The sense of community or history which comes from an overlap between religion and nationhood has never been an important constituent of Indian selfhood. The culture has mostly rejected the national self-consciousness which the modern West has tried to foist on it, often through India’s own modern spokesmen. Instead, the culture protects itself-against cosmologies which are proselytizing, hegemonistic and committed to some secular or non-secular theories of cultural evolution-by projecting the idea that the Indian is compromising; he has a fluid self-definition, and he is willing to learn the ways of his civilized brethren unconditionally, provided such learning is profitable. Some cultural traits can be used both as ethnopsychological categories and as protective stereotypes. Thus, like some other cultures caught in an oppressive system, the Indian too does not protest, conforming to the dominant concept of masculine protest, particularly if the cost is too high .71 But he retains his latent rebelliousness and turns even the standard stereotypes others have of him into effective screens and means of survival. The alternative to Hindu nationalism is the peculiar mix of classical and folk Hinduism and the unselfconscious Hinduism by which most Indians, Hindus as well as non-Hindus, live. It is that liminality which Kipling resented. It is that liminality on which the greatest of Indian social and political leaders built their self-definition as Indians over the last two centuries.72
No better example can be given than that of the ‘comic’ and ‘absurd’ mix of the folksy and the canonical, and of the ‘hypocritical’ mix of effective protest and the ‘minimum gesture of protest’ in the political style of Gandhi, a man sometimes compared to Charles Chaplin and Micky Mouse less seriously than one wishes. General Jan H. Smuts (1870-1950), South African prime minister and one of Gandhi’s staunchest enemies and admiring friends, unwittingly admitted the power of this mix in a tired, exasperated comment on Gandhi’s departure from South Africa. ‘The saint has left our shores’, he said, ‘I sincerely hope for ever.’ And here is Richard Lannoy’s description of the Salt March, built on snippets garnered from a number of sources. I hope it provides a clue to the exasperation of both Smuts and his brain-children in modern India with a man and a method which rejected not merely ksdtratej but also, it seems, brahmatej:
The Salt March makes its point through richly tragi-comic incident(s) . . .
Gandhi marches for twenty-four days from his ashram in Ahmedabad to Dandi, 241 miles distant on the seashore, there to pick up salt in defiance of the Salt Laws imposed with crushing effect on the Indian peasant by the British Raj. After defying the laws he withdraws from the action….
Behind the Salt March lie years of patient preparation…. The Satyagrahis are taught how to obtain strength through perfect weakness, or, if one likes, how to do nothing…. In a tropical climate salt is a staple food; Gandhi had already renounced the eating of salt for six years. In advance, he announces his intention to break the law himself by writing to his ‘Dear friend’ the Viceroy of India, Lord Irwin….
The image of Gandhi marching in a loin-cloth to the seashore with a motley band of seventy-eight workers set on picking up a pinch of salt is deceptively anachronistic, even in 1930. The march was to last sufficient time for the eyes of India and the world to be riveted on the frail old man of sixty-one plodding on under a merciless March sun.. . . ‘On the Salt March he fully entered the world of the newsreel and documentary. Henceforth we have many glimpses of him flickering in black and white, a brisk, mobile figure, with odd but illuminating moments of likeness to Charlie Chaplin’ (Ashe). As Gandhi Marched, behind him ‘the administration was silently crumbling as three hundred and ninety village headmen resigned their posts’ (Ashe).
…’And there was Gandhi, walking along, with his friends round him it was a sort of terrific anti-climax. There was no cheering, no great shouts of delight, and no sort of stately procession at all, it was all rather, in a sense rather farcical … there I was, seeing history
happen in a strange anti-climax way: something completely unEuropean and yet very, very moving’ (Bolton).
When they reached Dandi they camped for seven days, eating parched grain, half an ounce of fat, and two ounces of sugar daily. On 6 April Gandhi rose at dawn, took his bath in the sea, and then walked over to the natural salt deposits. Photographers at the ready, he picked up a treasonable pinch of salt and handed it to a person standing at his side. Sarojini Naidu cried out, ‘Hail deliverer!’ and then he went back to his work.
The news flashed round the world and within days India was in turmoil; millions were preparing salt in every corner of the land. Vast demonstrations were held in every large city in the country, from Karachi to Madras. Women in purdah mounted demonstrations in the streets. Like automata, the British administration responded with blind and incoherent action of extreme violence. The army and police moved as if hypnotized into a response from which all meaning had vanished. Indians were beaten, kicked in the groin, bitten in the fingers, and fired on by vindictive constables. They were charged by cavalry until they lay on the ground at the horses’ feet. . . . Between 60,000 and 100,000 non-violent resistors went to jail. Save for one small incident at Chittagong, Bengal, no Indian struck a violent blow. Gandhi was arrested after midnight sleeping under a tree in camp near Dandi and sent to jail. On his release eight months later he concluded the Gandhi-Irwin pact, after which the government abandoned its repressive measures and released political prisoners. This was the occasion when … Nehru wept.
… Louis Fischer concludes his account of the Salt March with a crisp comment: ‘India was now free. Technically, legally, nothing had changed.’ 73
At some plane, Lannoy has caught the spirit of the ‘halting, stop-go’ style of creative politics in India:
Everything is for ever going wrong, in Satyagraha as in the myths. Yet, . . . one cannot help drawing the conclusion that Gandhian Satyagraha is peculiarly well suited to permit the transformation of setbacks into what Zimmer describes as ‘miraculous development’, jolting the movement from crisis to crisis. Zimmer ascribes this familiar ‘muddling through’ in the Puranic myths to insight into the essential
nature of the contending forces…. Ultimately, this rests on … acceptance of suffering…. Under certain Indian conditions this ‘passivity’ is probably more effective …74
Let me sum up in the words of an English character from A Passage to India who says, perhaps influenced by her experience in India, ‘there are many kinds of failure, some of which succeed.’
The differentia of Indian culture has often been sought by social analysts, including this writer, in the uniqueness of certain cultural themes or in their configuration. This is not a false trail, but it does lead to some half-truths. One of them is the clear line drawn, on behalf of the Indian, between the past and the present, the native and the exogenous, and the Hindu and the non-Hindu. But, as I have suggested, the West that is aggressive is sometimes inside; the earnest, self-declared native too, is often an exogenous category, and the Hindu who announces himself so, is not that Hindu after all. Probably the uniqueness of Indian culture lies not so much in a unique ideology as in the society’s traditional ability to live with cultural ambiguities and to use them to build psychological and even metaphysical defences against cultural invasions. Probably, the culture itself demands that a certain permeability of boundaries be maintained in one’s self-image and that the self be not defined too tightly or separated mechanically from the not-self. This is the other side of the strategy of survival-the clue to India’s post-colonial world view-which I have discussed above.
I remember Ivan Illich once recounting how a group of fifteenth-century Aztec priests who, herded together as sorcerers by their Spanish conquerors, said in response to a Christian sermon that, if as alleged the Aztec gods were dead, they too would rather die. After this last act of defiance, the priests were dutifully thrown to the war dogs. I suspect I know how a group of Brahman priests would have behaved under the same circumstances. All of them would have embraced Christianity and some of them would have even co-authored an elegant prasasti to praise the alien rulers and their gods. Not that they would have become good Christians overnight. Most probably their faith in Hinduism would have remained unshaken and their Christianity would have looked after a while dangerously like a variation on Hinduism. But under the principle of apaddharma, or the way of life under perilous conditions, and the principle of oneness of every being-the metaphysical correlate of what a well-intentioned Freudian modernist has called projective extraversion born of extreme narcissism75- they would have felt perfectly justified in bowing down to alien gods and in overtly renouncing their culture and their past. The Hindus have traditionally felt burdened with the responsibility of protecting their civilization not by being self-conscious, but by securing a mythopoetic understanding-and thus neutralizing-the missionary zeal of their conquerors. What looks like Westernization is often only a means of domesticating the West, sometimes by reducing the West to the level of the comic and the trivial. As the’Hindu Puranas repeatedly seem to suggest, blind, straight courage is all right for individual piety and immortality, not for ensuring collective survival.76 And there is also perhaps the feeling, legitimized by more canonical texts, that the Dionysian can be internalized and then contained by the wise. It need not be always fought as an outside force.
-
Yastu sarvani bhutani atmanyevanupasyati
Sarvabhutesu catmanam tato na vijugupsate77
At a more mundane plane, our hypothetical Brahmans would be splitting their personalities. To them, the conversion and the humiliation would be happening to a self which is already seen and felt as somebody else or as somebody else’s. This is a self from whom one is already somewhat abstracted and alienated. Such splitting of one’s self, to protect one’s sanity and to ensure survival, makes the subject an object to himself and disaffiliates the violence and the humiliation he suffers from the ‘essential constituent’ of his self.78 It is an attempt to survive by inducing in oneself a psychosomatic state which would render one’s immediate context partly dreamlike or unreal. Because, ‘in order to live and stay human, the survivor must be in the world but not of it.’79 (In the final analysis, this has been one of the major psychological responses of Indian spiritualism to the West, whatever be its metaphysical content. Using the ancient distinction between what could be called the existential consciousness or atman and the attribute consciousness, which modern psychologists mainly study, most schools of Indian spiritualism give meaning to a controlled inner schism which, instead of threatening mental health, contributes to a peculiar robust realism. It helps one, to use Ananda Coomaraswamy’s language in an altogether different sense, to master fate and transcend necessity and to ‘become the Spectator of all time and all things’.80) For all we know, the Indian’s alleged weak grasp on reality, his weak ego, his easy transference to political authorities and his vague presence in social situations howsoever deeply rooted in traditional child rearing they may seem to be-are also the inescapable logic of a culture experiencing problems of survival over generations. To fit the logic to the experience of another victim at another time, these ‘personality failures’ of the Indian could be another form of developed vigilance, or sharpened instinct or faster reaction to man-made suffering.81 They come not from ‘a fundamental submissiveness to authority’ which breaks through some of Kipling’s more shameless apologia for the Empire, but from a certain talent for and faith in life.82 To borrow a picturesque image from Kipling’s account of his own oppressed childhood in England, some people are fated to live long stretches of time like hunted animals and to keep their senses perpetually on the alert to escape from the toils of the hunters.83
Ever since the modern West’s encounter with the non-Western world, the response of the Aztec priests has seemed to the Westernized world the paragon of courage and cultural pride; the hypothetical response of the Brahman priests hypocritical and cowardly. But the question remains why every imperialist observer of the Indian society has loved India’s martial races and hated and felt threatened by the rest of India’s ‘effeminate’ men willing to compromise with their victors? What is it in the latter that has aroused such antipathy? Why should they matter so much to the conquerers of India if they are so trivial? Why could they so effortlessly become the antonyms of their rulers? Why have so many modern Indians shared this imperialist estimation? Why have they felt proud of those who fought out and lost, and not of those who lost out and fought?
At one plane the answer is simple. The Aztec priests after their last act of courage die and they leave the stage free for those who kill them and then sing their praise; the unheroic Indian response ensures that part of the stage always remains occupied by the ‘cowardly’ and the ‘compromising’ who may at some opportune moment assert their presence. And then, there is the added advantage that the Aztec priests set a good precedent for-and endorsed the world view of-the lower classes of the colonial societies which have to serve as the foot-soldiers of colonialism. There is, thus, a vested interest in the simple courage of the Aztec priests.
But another answer to the question can also be given. It is that the average Indian has always lived with the awareness and possiblity of long-term suffering, always seen himself as protecting his deepest faith with the passive, ‘feminine’ cunning of the weak and the victimized, and surviving outer pressures by refusing to overplay his sense of autonomy and self-respect. At his heroic best, he is a satyagrahi, one who forges a partly coercive weapon called satyagraha out of what Lannoy calls ‘perfect weakness’. In his non-heroic ordinariness, he is the archetypal survivor. Seemingly he makes all-round compromises, but he refuses to be psychologically swamped, co-opted or penetrated. Defeat, his response seems to say, is a disaster and so are the imposed ways of the victor. But worse is the loss of one’s ‘soul’ and the internalization of one’s victor, because it forces one to fight the victor according to the victor’s values, within his model of dissent. Better to be a comical dissenter than to be a powerful, serious but acceptable opponent.84 Better to be a hated enemy, declared unworthy of any respect whatsoever, than to be a proper opponent, constantly making ‘primary adjustments’ to the system.85
In order to truly live, the inviolable core of Indianness seems to affirm, it might be sometimes better to be dead in somebody else’s eyes, so as to be alive for one’s own self. In order to accept oneself, one must learn to hold in trust ‘weaknesses’ to which
a violent, culturally barren and politically bankrupt world some day may have to return.
V1
… national liberation is necessarily an act of culture.
Amilcar Cabral86
In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.
Thomas Szasz87
Those who have found the foregoing a loose-ended, old-style narrative may read the postscript as the moral of the story.
I have examined, under different rubrics, four sets of polarities which have informed most discourses on the East and the West in colonial and post-colonial times. These polarities are: the universal versus the parochial, the material (or the realistic) versus the spiritual (or the unrealistic), the achieving (or the performing) versus the non-achieving (or the non-performing), and the sane versus the insane.88 I have also touched upon a fifth set which cuts across these four: a self-conscious, well defined Indianness versus a fluid open self-definition. At one plane, I have tried to show that the two ends of these polarities meet if the central problem is coping with-or resistance to oppression and not the scholarly understanding of a civilization. At another plane, I have tried to show that the parochial, the -spiritual, the non-performing and the insane can sometimes turn out to be better versions of the universal, the realistic, the efficient and the sane.
At neither of the planes, however, have I tried to reverse the standard stereotypes to create a neo-romantic ideology of the irrational, the mythic or the renunciatory. Nor have I tried to legitimize the populist imagery of an all-knowing common man. My concerns here are unheroic rather than heroic and empirical rather than philosophical. The argument is that when psychological and cultural survival is at stake, polarities such as the ones discussed here do break down and become partly irrelevant, and the directness of the experience of suffering and spontaneous resistance to it come through at all planes. When this happens, there emerges in the victim of a system a vague awareness of the larger whole which transcends the system’s analytic categories and/or stands them on their head. Thus, the victim may become aware that, under oppression, the parochial could protect some forms of universalism more successfully than does conventional universalism; that the spiritualism of the weak may articulate or keep alive the values of a non-oppressive world better than the ultra-materialism of those who live in vision-less worlds; and that the non-achieving and the insane may often have a higher chance of achieving their civilizational goal of freedom and autonomy without mortgaging their sanity. I imply that these paradoxes are inevitable because the dominant idea of rationality is the first strand of consciousness to be co-opted by any successful structure of institutionalized oppression. When such co-optation has taken place, resistance as well as survival demands some access to the larger whole, howsoever self-defeating that process may seem in the light of conventional reason and day-to-day politics. This, I suspect, is another way of restating the ancient wisdom-which for some cultures is also an everyday truism-that knowledge without ethics is not so much bad ethics as inferior knowledge.
