Books

THE DISOBEDIENT INDIAN: Towards a Gandhian Philosophy of Dissent by Ramin Jahanbegloo. Speaking Tiger, New Delhi, 2018.

IN November 1936 Basil Mathews asked M.K. Gandhi, ‘where do you find the seat of authority?’ Gandhi pointed to his breast, probably to the very same spot through which one of the bullets entered and lodged itself in his body, and replied, ‘It lies here. I exercise my judgement about every scripture, including the Gita.’ Gandhi was only pointing to what Socrates called his daimon/daemon, his inner voice. If the inner voice or the conscience is the source of authority, it is the source of all judgement of truth, if it is the measure of things then disobedience of what is repugnant to it becomes not only an imperative but that capacity defines such an individual, the very idea of human vocation.

Ramin Jahanbegloo’s meditation on the possibility and the need for dissent is premised on the human capacity to distinguish between truth and lie, between virtue and evil, between that which affirms life and that which while seeming to preserve life and order destroys the very purpose of it.

Ramin Jahanbegloo is no stranger to dissent, to disobedience and the freedom that it accords even while, or perhaps only in captivity. Marshalling allies from Socrates to Heidegger, via Thoreau and Albert Camus, he brings us to Gandhi to ask a question: why do we disobey? In seeming to answer this question he poses a more basic question. What is it that we obey in the act of disobedience? And our answer to this question would, he suggests, defines for us the realm of politics and its relationship to human action.

There are many possible answers to this question. One could be that we obey God. This requires us to believe that God can and will save us. But if we do not have faith in divine intervention to save us, the act of obedience would have to take a more secular, this worldly, form. And this we believe is the realm of the political, a realm that asserts that human beings are integral to common life and can and have to realize their freedom through common life. And this common project could be that of human autonomy. Ramin Jahanbegloo suggests that if our obedience is to the common life attained through autonomy then we are duty bound to challenge and defeat the ‘twin corruptions to democracy: Imposed conformism and normalized complacency’ (p. 43). The challenge to the corruptions of democracy for him is posed through moral capital, not just ethical behaviour but our capacity to wrestle with the place of violence in a challenge to political evil. This wrestling enables us to discover our own nature as humans and the nature of the world that we inhabit. This discovery is what Gandhi called swaraj, as both self-recognition and self-rule. Such disobedience creates the possibility of swaraj.

If that were the only concern of the book, we could have perhaps dispensed with reading it. But the book proceeds to question the primacy of the realm of the political. This he does by opening up the idea of solidarity, solidarity as ‘a reciprocated sense of empathy and a consciousness in the commitments of others to shared purposes’ (p. 57). By bringing the concern of the political from organization of order, from the question of power to the possibility of acting and living in solidarity, in ethical awareness of the limits to power, we create a ground for collectively, for common cause that is not rooted in an exercise of self-interest to the exclusion of all others. Ethical awareness of common cause allows us to fight all forms of inequities – of gender, wealth, colour, of Empire and slavery. It creates a public realm of which all of us are trustees. In this sense an act of disobedience becomes an act of trusteeship.

This brings us to Gandhi, who Jahanbegloo calls a ‘disobedient mind’. He knows that for Gandhi the act of dissent is not an act of wilfulness, but one of deep obedience, obedience to non-violence which alone can create the fabric of freedom through solidarity, empathy and a quest for freedom through common cause. He knows that for disobedience to create freedom it requires a delicately tuned breast that recognizes the distinction between the voice of Rama and that of Ravana.

Ramin Jahanbegloo alerts us that disobedience is an act of trusteeship. As trusteeship each individual act of disobedience – even while seeming to fail in face of the world which is After Virtue to use Alasdair Macintyre’s phrase – expands the scope of trusteeship, both as trust, as solidarity, as empathy and as common cause. These philosophical meditations are a primer and primary for all those perturbed by the authority of the lie in our times.

Tridip Suhrud

Professor and Director Archives, CEPT University, Ahmedabad

 

ASHIS NANDY: A Life in Dissent edited by Ramin Jahanbegloo and Ananya Vajpeyi. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2018.

THIS is a difficult volume to review, not only because of the sheer number of essayists who celebrate the polymath Ashis Nandy on his eightieth birthday, but also because of the diversity of themes they engage with. Some of these essays offer personal tributes to Ashisda as he is known. Amitav Ghosh authors a short story for the birthday boy, and Aseem Shrivastava speculates on a dialogue that might perchance occur if Rabindranath Tagore were to visit us today. Shiv Visvanathan contributes a short piece on the pleasures of walking, and T.M. Krishna writes on the aesthetics of classical music.

Almost all the contributors agree that Nandy’s ideas inhabit a space between the demise of verities and a return of the age of doubt. And all express fulsome admiration for a man who has inspired imaginative explorations of the malaise of the present. Reading Ashis Nandy, writes Richard Falk, is always an encounter with the unexpected. For Lydia Liu, Nandy delivers brilliant and often counterintuitive analysis of Indian society and of the contemporary world. Douglas Lummis argues that Nandy belongs to a group of philosophers who see irony as method. For David L. Blaney and Naeem Inayatullah, the man simply knows something that others do not.

Fred Dallmayr, Richard Falk, and Ziauddin Sardar reflect on the body of work produced by Nandy’s indefatigable mind. Dipesh Chakrabarty sees Nandy as pivotal to his own intellectual move from a consumer of an unreflective and almost positivist Marxism, to the world of the subaltern. Raghuramaraju recounts the influence of Nandy on his own academic trajectory. Venkat Rao suggests that for Nandy academia and research is not an answer to but part of a wider problem. And Dallmayr argues that though Nandy does not disown the textual tradition that forms the anchor of most research, he uses it creatively to demolish binaries and the neat certitudes of modernity

Nandy is, of course, the eternal dissident. Jahanbegloo focusing on precisely this quality suggests that when we look towards a future, we require conviction, but we also require Socratic rebels of the mind. Falk’s special term for Nandy is ‘master of contrarian reason’. John Cash acknowledges that Nandy’s ideas helped him understand the role of the psychological in the realm of the political in Northern Ireland. Phillip Darby speaks of the need to cultivate a new sensibility for the muscular discipline of International Relations, through the lens of Nandy’s focus on everyday forms of suffering. Lydia H. Liu acknowledges that our public intellectual enabled her to comprehend how souls are decolonized. And Venkat Rao chronicles his ability to challenge academic polemics.

Nandy, writes Tridip Suhrud, gleaned from Gandhi a new cultural iconography – that of hyper-masculinity. This trait he found in Gujarat, which today shapes imaginations in the country from consumerism, rendering Dalit and Muslim voices irrelevant, unembarrassed display of wealth, sheer pragmatism, and above all the forgetting of Gandhi. Arindam Chakrabarti takes up Nandy’s notion of the future to ask a question – how do we deal with a time that has yet to come? He finds an answer in ‘deep true coolness’ or the slowing down of thought. In Kashmir Saivism, the idea of repose represents the final form of freedom or liberation. Rudolf Heredia locates Nandy in the purported, but arguably spurious division between academics and activism. T.N. Madan honours our academic rebel by revisiting the work of M.N. Srinivas. And finally, Ananya Vajpeyi authors a delightful piece on Ashis Nandy’s love of music.

Some of the most creative minds in intellectual circles admire Ashis Nandy and see in him a guide for negotiating a world that is both unpredictable and frightening. Yet his belief in the ability of Indians to live together in a certain degree of harmony, in abstraction from a toxic political context, is both touching and Utopian. His faith in the capacity of human beings to show compassion and love is equally moving, given that today Indian citizens either lynch the vulnerable, or stand around filming the repulsive act on their mobiles. And other fellow citizens consume the dissemination of revolting violence on the social media. We can excavate the strengths of our culture to help us live a good life. Still a good life can only be led in a good society, and good societies are forged through political contestation. We must be dissenters, but we also must understand the limits of dissent in a society that has abdicated its claims to tolerance. The context of culture is, after all, politics, which is occasionally creative, often unbearably ugly, and more often than not unpredictable, chancy and contingent.

Neera Chandhoke

Former Professor of Political Science, Delhi University

 

IN DIASPORIC LANDS: Tibetan Refugees and their Transformation Since the Exodus by Sudeep Basu (with a foreword by Samir Kumar Das). Orient Blackswan, New Delhi, 2018.

Sudeep Basu’s book In Diasporic Lands: Tibetan Refugees and their Transformation Since the Exodus sets out to examine and present the multilayered dynamics in the lives of people in exile, and how they individually and as a collective engage in ‘wayfinding’ in alien urban lands and make meaning out of their lives anew. The study contributes to showing new perspectives in the almost banal, forced migration studies. Basu’s book shows rays of possibilities in engaging and injecting intelligent conversations between theory and the field, and in doing so he unearths a rich socio-ethnohistographic account of communities in the trans-Himalayas, who over the decades due to multiple factors have been compelled to move beyond their traditional settings and engage with vexed notions of ‘home’, ‘place’, ‘lives’, and ‘being themselves’ (‘being Tibetans’/‘Tibetanness’). The book in this sense injects fresh vigour into the dry documentation exercise of ‘forced migration studies’ in India, South Asia. The book comprises seven chapters and a postscript that has been previously published in various journals and as a chapter in edited volumes.

Chapter 1, Tibetans as Refugee Diasporas and Chapter 3, The Tibetan Excilic Paradigm opens up a panoramic encapsulative reading of the Tibetan people in exile in Darjeeling, India. These chapters bring to the fore the contested nature of the host territory (vis-a-vis the protracted Gorkhaland imbroglio in the state of West Bengal) and the heterogeneity of the hegemonic resident identity, namely the Gorkha identity.

Chapter 4, The Tibetan Question: A Reappraisal, in various ways question policy postures and policy overtures, projected imageries relating to the Tibetan refugee in India, Nepal and elsewhere. The chapter dabbles with a highly contentious gaze of the westerner vis-a-vis the Chinese gaze on issues like the representational issue of the Dalai Lama (pp. 80-82), or the image of the Tibetans as ‘intrinsically non-violent people’ (p. 77), or ‘what constitutes ‘Tibet’ (pp. 82-90), contested histories, conflicting histories of the region from Trison Detsen to the 1959 Revolt (pp. 92-106). This chapter is the strongest part of the study in terms of spanning the historical kaleidoscope and vexed ethnicities that it engages with to revisit and contextualize the contemporary excilic Tibetan people living and torn between global and local callings. The chapter augments the notion of ‘ethnosymbolism’ in exile and how a multiversal and seeming polarized notions of ‘being Tibetan’ in diaspora and contested frames of Tibetanness, becomes a meaningful engagement for those ‘far from home’ and trying to find a home in themselves, or in other words ‘taking their home with and within themselves’.

The fifth chapter, Organising for Exile; chapter 6, Preservation, Integration and the Pragmatics of Diasporic Identity and chapter 7, Dwelling and Movement in Exile follows the preceding chapter and provides a description of the ‘home making’ and multiversal ‘organizing exercise’ as a lived experience of the Tibetans in India. The ingenious negotiations of ‘wayfinding’ and circumventing the perplexed state of ‘being homeless’, ‘refugeeness’, possible ‘repatriations’ and ‘homing practices’ are documented in these chapters through Basu’s discussions of the pre-excilic Tibetan hosts, the Bhutias in Darjeeling town (pp. 201-213). The three chapters contribute effectively to a sociological understanding of ‘home and the outside’ in the context of refugees or those in the diaspora.

The Postscript: A Mediatising Tibetan Diaspora and Beyond ganders the unsettledness of identities and the predicament of belonging and detachment among the Tibetans in Darjeeling and by way of extension to all Tibetans in the diaspora. The unsettledness of identity formation and evolution unleashes exasperations and insatiable aspirations of becoming at multiversal spaces from real to virtual. The virtualization of the diaspora Tibetan (pp. 216-219) provides a space for the disparate Tibetan communities to reconnect, reinvent and reconfigure their indelible yearning and nostalgia for the ‘lost home’ (i.e., Lasha, Tibet) and create ‘newer homes’ (i.e., ‘Little Tibets’) in unusual geographies from Nepal, India, America to elsewhere. As Samir Kumar Das notes in the Foreword: ‘The Tibetans are not global nomads... Tibetan refugees of Darjeeling or elsewhere are at home in Darjeeling. Theirs is not a celebration of homelessness, but rather the celebration of making the outside their home. But to the extent they develop relationships with multiple homes, the singularity of home back in Tibet disappears, making room for movements across many homes’ (p. xvii).

The book unsettles our notions of fixities of identities and reaffirms the understanding that ‘we endlessly choose to become something new’ and in doing so skilfully put the rhythm of connectivities into motion among the disparate Tibetans in diaspora.

The methodological improvisations/innovations (chapter 2, Methodology and Imperatives in Refugee Research) creatively crafted by the author in the field and the bibliography is undoubtedly a treasure trove for future academic engagements. The innovative seaming of multiple methods gives flesh to the dry study of refugees as mere digits and brings to the reader a picture of the refugee as a vibrant subject, one oozing with the colourful radiance of ‘live worlds’ (for instance, chapter 7, Dwelling and Movement in Exile, pp. 200-203, 205). A sectional discussion dedicated to Tibetan Muslims and their ways of enduring ‘Muslimness’ and Islam while being ‘Tibetan’ could have augmented the work further. This collection should interest students, research scholars, policy makers and implementers, activists, lawyers and those interested in the trans-Himalayas.

Anup Shekhar Chakraborty

Assistant Professor, Netaji Institute for Asian Studies, Kolkata