THE Centre for the Study of Developing Societies was simply known as ‘the Centre’ when I was first trying to find my professional feet in the late sixties and early seventies. Rajni Kothari’s works were prescribed readings in our Master’s level courses. There was much excitement in the air as shifts were perceptible from the abstract theorizing in the works of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Manu or Chanakya to the concreteness of behavioural politics. As someone who loved the study of religion, mythology and kinship – in other words, the realm of imagination, intimacy and the lure of language (I had been a student of Sanskrit and a devotee of Sanskrit literature), the understanding of politics, in general, escaped me.

It was also the case that all my radical friends wanted to do something for the poor, but having come out of a familial environment in which, despite the struggle for everyday wants that marked our existence, I had overall found my life to be a joyful one – I was not at home in that discourse. Ironically, it was much later in the writing of Dumezil on sovereignty, Hiltetbeitel on the Mahabharata, and sexual politics in the Ramayana, that I found another door to the field of politics. Though I had listened to Rajni Kothari at a couple of seminars, the Centre seemed too far from my emerging intellectual interests.

The years of the late sixties were ones of a desperate reading of classics (Marx, Weber and Durkheim) for me as I was fully immersed in ‘making up’ for my generally poor education in the classics of social sciences. Freud, I was told did not count! I found myself never fully at home in any of the ‘isms’ through which people were being sorted into categories of engagement or disengagement. I know that the Centre was under heavy attack by card-carrying Marxist scholars for the bourgeois social science they were supposedly cultivating, but all the intellectual quarrels that I overheard in seminars or the endless debates in coffee houses, seemed to me to be coming from some other world. In that environment I found the earthiness of Rajni Kothari and Dhirubhai Sheth (along with that of M.N. Srinivas) more to my taste. But I realized that electoral politics was something I did not take seriously enough – election rallies had been a major source of fun in the years I was growing up in a basti (we children were always marshalled to put up amusing performances as crowds waited for the big men to turn up) and now in early adulthood, I could not engage the work on Congress culture, or factionalism of the Congress Party with much enthusiasm.

 

Initially there were two scholars from the Centre who changed my angle of vision. The first was Gopal Krishna who happened to listen to a seminar I gave (probably in 1968) on the idea of the medieval Puranas I was analyzing as a form of history and got into a conversation on the way I was using ideas from structuralism. I found him to be very learned and his interest in my work to be very affirming of my desire to bring sociology into some kind of relation with Sanskrit. The second scholar was Ashis Nandy, though I believe that but for the pure contingency of having found an apartment in the same complex he lived in, our friendship might have been delayed at least till his book, The Intimate Enemy came out. I must confess that I have found Ashis to be a most creative and brilliant cultural critic, but also the most exasperating scholar on my horizon. If we were sailing calmer seas it would have been nice to address our differences, at least for me to get a sense of how we might diverge precisely at points when we seem to be close. The Buddhist notion of the ‘near enemy’ which refers to the enmity between two concepts that are close to each other such as the concept of ahimsa (non-violence) and anrishamsya (non-cruelty) – yet mark a fine line of difference that is hard to bridge – might well be the best description of how I see Nandy’s and by extension the Centre’s work as it then was, in relation to my own.

 

One crucial difference between the scholars at CSDS and those such as myself could be traced to the different institutional contexts in which we worked. From my corner of the world, scholars at CSDS were writing for a broader audience and they clearly expected their ideas to have immediate effects in the public sphere. Although some of my colleagues who worked at the Delhi School and I wrote for newspapers and popular magazines – for me, at least, the primary audience of my ideas was my students. Ashis Nandy, Rajni Kothari, Dhirubhai Sheth, and some others were people who not only wrote for academically distinguished presses, but also discussed their ideas regularly at places where important journalists, representatives of NGOs and politicians gathered as in the famous Saturday Club at the India International Centre. They could provide stringent critiques of modernity, corruption, or of intellectuals in their ‘ivory towers’ and could interpret emergent events hitting the ground, as it were, running.

The pedagogic context of a university department did not allow me to make such quick judgments. I was always constrained by the fact that my abiding question was to ask: How can I know something? What are the limits to my claims? My audiences were primarily students and I took enormous pride in the way they opened up new areas of inquiry, but the temporality of the two enterprises was entirely different. Even now, in my current work on urban poverty, I find that I could speak much more confidently in the first year of what I was seeing in the slums of Delhi, than in the eleventh year of tracking such issues as how water comes in the areas, what kind of family dynamics interact with dynamics of the state to make some lives more valuable than others, and sundry other topics on urban transformation.

Ashis often chided me for having a ‘first class first’ complex. As I see it, the issue is not of academic competence alone but also, that for me, events and the everyday are attached through tiny tentacles; tracking these connections requires that I cannot settle on explanations quickly, or follow a highway of thought: skepticism emerges at every point as part of my everyday life. I have also realized that although we often measure our success by what books or papers we have produced, we should perhaps learn to be more attentive to more common or dispersed forms of knowledge that we participate in. I see in this vision, if not a common ground, than at least a common thread between the scholars and activists at the Centre and my current work.

 

Sometimes, of course, life requires us to act as if we had clarity and on these decisive moments we will remember those as our true friends who acknowledged our true need. For me, once such moment came in 1984, when as the violence unleashed on Sikhs, with the full connivance of many state officials unfolded, I felt I needed to do something. There were many heroic individuals who were organizing protest marches and documenting atrocities. In a discussion, Ashis Nandy, Dhirubhai Sheth, Manoranjan Mohanty and Ranendra Das immediately agreed to form a group and visit some of the areas. On the basis of our visits, we published the first report on the experience of survivors in The Indian Express. That we were able to publish this report, as the violence was unfolding, was possible entirely due the courage of George Verghese, Editor of the Indian Express, who defied the unmentioned censorship that was operative then.

After the report was published, I continued to work in one of the areas we had visited for more than a year – an enterprise in which other friends such as Mita Bose, Sanjib Datta Chowdhury, Roma Chatterji, provided immeasurable support. I remember the support of all these friends most vividly because after about two years when I first felt I could write again and I presented a paper in the Friday seminar at Delhi School, one of my then esteemed colleagues pronounced after the seminar that such work did not constitute ‘sociology’. To which, Ashis said to me later, ‘That’s too bad for sociology’ – and for once, I did not want more nuanced discussions on the subject.

My work on violence grew in different directions. After a paper that Ashis and I wrote jointly on ‘Violence, Victimhood and the Language of Silence’ in 1985 (which, incidentally, brought the figures of Tagore and Manto as major theoreticians of violence in the social science discussions), we diverged to follow intersecting but separate paths of writing on this very topic. I take that to be the definition of intellectual companionship of the sort that comes between those who are defined not by blind fidelity to each other but by their shared agon (with a bow to Bhrigupati Singh, the dynamic young scholar who also found his intellectual feet at Sarai.) I have watched as new projects and new scholars have come to the Centre, but I sometimes wonder if they too hear the sounds of passionate debates about India, about the world, about traditions of scholarship, about justice, that must be stored somewhere in the walls of the library and in the Director’s room, and in the trees under which we sat – which I was sometimes privileged to be part of.