Books

THE DHARMA OF JUSTICE IN THE SANSKRIT EPICS: Debates on Gender, Varna and Species by Ruth Vanita, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2022.

OUR fascination with the two foundational Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, has only grown and grown over the 3,000 years since their composition. They were a vital part of the mainstream cultural tradition in India during the ancient times when Sanskrit was the language of power in the Indian subcontinent as also the master-language of the wider ‘Sanskrit cosmopolis’, in Sheldon Pollock’s formulation, that extended from Afghanistan to Java.

In the medieval or ‘early modern’ period (as it is called now), from c. 1200 to 1800, versions of the two epics proliferated in the ‘vernaculars’ – or Modern Indian languages, to use the fairer postcolonial nomenclature – and reached a far wider readership or audience. And since c. 1800, in the modern period, translations into English and the other European languages have yet again annexed for these perennial classics a new readership and attracted the attention worldwide of both western and anglophone Indian scholars.

Ruth Vanita in her study considers both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata taken together, a rare exercise in western scholarship but a natural enough bracketing for common Indians; they are often referred to as a hyphenated entity, Ramayana-Mahabharata, rather like Veda-Purana. But Vanita adheres to the western scholarly mode in basing her study on the Sanskrit texts, read largely in their modern English translations, than on the vernacular versions which have been far more widely circulated over the last half-millennium.

For example, countless literate and illiterate persons in North India have for centuries moulded and regulated their lives not according to what Valmiki wrote in Sanskrit but in the guiding light of a compendium of quotable quotes for all occasions from Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas written in Awadhi. As if to acknowledge this, Vanita adds a last chapter here in which she looks at the filtered responses to the two Sanskrit epics by several prominent bhakti poets mostly from Hindi, many of whom themselves could not read Sanskrit: Kabir, Jnaneshwara, Raidas, Mira, Rahim and Tulsi.

The focus of Vanita’s book is indicated better by her subtitle than her paradoxical title, The Dharma of Justice, which seems to ask whether justice can always be in consonance with dharma and implies that dharma may not always be just. This is especially so in the polyphonous Mahabharata where even the most righteous characters such as Bhishma and Yudhishthira, the ‘Dharmaraja’ or Dharma-King himself, interpret dharma differently in different times and situations.

The subtitle, Debates on Gender, Varna and the Species, has a more modern ring and frames these three themes with contemporary concerns: gender in the light of current feminist theory, varna in terms of caste and the shudra/Dalit discourse, and ‘species’ with reference mainly to non-human living beings, i.e. animals and birds. As a human could be reborn as a bird or animal when his/her stock of good karma ran out, there is a seamless continuity between these three species.

Animal Rights may be a new tern of discourse in the West but in our traditional world of the epics and the puranas, there was thus only a thin dividing line between the humans and animals and that line was shifting with each rebirth, so one never knew which side of it one had been on in one’s past births or was going to be on in one’s future births. But this wonderful parity could also confuse matters most confoundedly, at times.

In an episode Vanita chooses to highlight, a man hits a dog, and the dog goes complaining to King Rama who promptly sentences the man to death! But the dog now pleads that the man may instead be appointed the head of a religious order. This is because in its previous birth, the dog says it was a human being and indeed the head of that same order and lived most virtuously – and yet was reborn as a dog. So, that guilty man too will be reborn as a dog.

Rama loves the logic, but I must confess that I failed to see it altogether despite the dog’s elaborate exposition and Vanita’s wholehearted endorsement of it. Is rebirth as a dog worse than instant death – especially when a long and virtuous life may lead to being reborn as a dog anyhow? Is this really ‘Justice for Animals’, Vanita’s radical rubric for this discussion (pp. 195-98)? Or is this, rather, a fudging of the whole issue through the inscrutable processes of rebirth?

For the modern reader, there are numerous such episodes in Vanita’s book whose resolution seems archaically arcane or just implausible. I suppose it depends partly on how one tells it and where one wishes to go with it. A major recent book titled The Mahabharata: An Inquiry into the Human Condition (2006) by Chaturvedi Badrinath is thematically more comprehensive than Vanita’s book, is twice as long, and carries a familiar stamp of authority by copiously quoting Sanskrit as Sanskrit, in the Devanagari script.

In its discourse, Badrinath’s book is even more complex and dense as it quotes frequently from other Sanskrit texts such as the Upanishads and the Panchatantra, but it is ultimately less perplexing. It stands four-square, and makes forthright logical deductions not always flattering to the epics. Badrinath says, for example, that in the Mahabharata, dharma is ‘often used, cynically but effectively, as an intellectual and convenient escape from the morally difficult situations.’ Vanita, in contrast, works with a finer ethical comb, letting tangles remain tangles, and happy to move on from one irresolution to the next. In her book, aporia is all, and to that extent, it is a book perhaps more suited to our postmodernist intellectual climate.

It is with gender that Vanita is on her home turf; it has been her long suit ever since 1996 when she published a break-through book on Sappho, Virgin Mary, Virginia Woolf and same-sex love. In this latest book of hers, ‘gender’ or ‘sex-change’ occurs in the title of six chapters out of twelve. Perhaps the longest-running single episode here is focused on gender: the saga of Amba’s resolutely plotted revenge on Bhishma, especially in her disguise as first the female Shikhandini and then the male Shikhandi (pp. 17-52), and passim). But here too, ‘inchoate feelings… from former life-times’ complicate the issue, and an apotheosis is achieved only when Bhishma, finally dead of his own volition, is not reborn but ‘returned to his divine status.’ (p 152)

Presumably to make these complex matters easier to swallow, Vanita divides each chapter into bite-sized subsections which are often only one or two pages long and bear appetizing titles: ‘How Feminist is Revenge?’, ‘Revenge and Gender’, ‘Amba’s Uncertainty’, ‘Asceticism to Kill’, ‘Forgiveness and Gender’ (p 118, 119, 127, 129, 133) At the inconclusive conclusion of the chapter, she says she has ‘examined ambiguities of revenge’, and shown how ‘hard to decide’ these matters are. (p 134)

These are, in all fairness to Vanita, matters not easy to resolve. If we cannot quite wrap our heads around Vanita’s book, it may be because she has herself found it hard to wrap her head around the two epics. But she has certainly given us a fresh and unsettling perspective on her chosen themes. It is said, in the Mahabharata itself, that what is not contained in the Mahabharata does not exist in the world. That vainglorious boast is here seen to include some tough ethical issues which are left hanging in the epic, as perhaps they often are in real life. And in her non-judgemental and patiently expository way, Vanita seems to go with the flow.

Harish Trivedi

Former Professor of English

University of Delhi

POLITICS, ETHICS AND THE SELF: RE-READING GANDHI’S HIND SWARAJ edited by Rajeev Bhargava. Routledge, 2022.

GANDHI’S Hind Swaraj is the most significant document to have emerged from the anti-colonial movement against the British in India which seriously challenged the cultural and civilizational premises of the colonizing mission and questioned its moral legitimacy. Its relevance has not diminished in these post-colonial times when the culture of colonialism has hardly given way to a decolonised mind. Presented in a simple dialogic and conversational form Hind Swaraj mounts a hard hitting critique of the other as much as that of the self. Politics, Ethics and the Self: Re-reading Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj edited by Rajeev Bhargava consists of nineteen essays thematically collected under five sections viz., (i) The truncated ethic of modern civilization; (ii) Empire politics and violence; (iii) Colonization of minds; (iv) Cultivating self; and (v) How to read Hind Swaraj, which take a fresh look at Gandhi’s foundational premises and praxis for social regeneration. It has essays by some of the eminent Gandhian scholars who take a fresh look at Gandhi’s text from several perspectives. The volume grew out of the proceedings of a conference organized by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in 2009 to commemorate the birth centenary of the masterpiece which Dennis Walton has called ‘a proclamation of ideological independence.’

The central argument of Hind Swaraj , as Rajeev Bhargava perceptively notes in his introduction ‘opposition to modernity, Empire, and the self-understanding they generate. Putting emphasis on modernity foregrounds the civilizational and cultural aspects of his argument – and stressing on empire, its political dimension.’ (p 3)

Recalling in 1921 about his visit to London in 1909 Gandhi said that he had met a group of Indian expatriate anarchists who followed the ideology of political terrorism and that he had decided to write a book ‘in answer to the Indian school of violence.’ By the time Gandhi came around to writing Hind Swaraj, he was already convinced that violence was not the Indian way of fighting injustice, and that it was the necessary, even if unintended, fallout of the modern industrial civilization as it was taking shape in the west. He wanted to convince the misguided patriots that ‘the use of violence, covert or open or both’ was not needed to emancipate India.

Gandhi translates Hind Swaraj (originally written in Gujarati) as Indian Home Rule (in English). By using the word India in the title of his book Gandhi emphasizes the underlying idea of one nation (ek praja) on the presupposition that the transformation of India is to be founded on its unity. It is quite clear that Gandhi was without any doubt one of the most original minds of India. This is further brought home by Anthony J. Parel who remarks in his essay that the originality of Hind Swaraj lies in as much as it sets its argument within an Indian intellectual framework. It is a work of ‘genuine Indian political thought’, since it uses Indian intellectual framework to advance its argument.

In the early 1930s when Winston Churchill, Gandhi’s adversary, succeeded in blocking a parliamentary act giving India dominion status, he had argued, echoing James Mill, that India needed British rule because Indians were incapable of governing themselves. He expressed the fear, unfounded of course, that without British rule, the country would descend into anarchy and violence. It became the basis of his staunch attack on Gandhi who had waged a relentless struggle for India’s inde-pendence. Churchill’s views were in line with the views of James Mill. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Rudolph in their essay critique Mill’s view on civilization which stressed that India was a barbarian country which could only be redeemed by British intervention. The Rudolphs also take note of the fact that the liberal and rationalist approach such as Amartya Sen’s in The Argumentative Indian has its own limitation since it disregards the non-rationalistic traditions such as Gandhi’s which brought new modes of perceptions and deliberation in the political domain of India.

Despite the brutality of British colonialism, colonial humanism nevertheless seemed to many of the colonized providing the resources to criticize colonialism and affirm humanism. For the ‘reader’, what is retained when the Englishmen are driven out is not English rule without the Englishman but rather a universal, modern civilization, of which the English are imperfect bearers. In that sense the Hind Swaraj is not merely a nationalist pamphlet; it is a global statement that critiques a pervasive and triumphant modern civilization and advances an alternative to it. Gandhi’s voice in Hind Swaraj therefore is hybrid and cosmopolitan. It draws on European ideas of the ‘other’ West, the ideas of Tolstoy, Ruskin, and Thoreau, and on Indian ideas of non-colonized minds shaped by India’s great texts – the Gita, the Upanishads and the Ramayana. It speaks to and for the civilized living everywhere.

Akeel Bilgrami in his essay takes issue with those who maintain the view that Gandhi was a reactionary who opposed modernity. Such reading, however, does not show sympathy for Gandhi’s comprehension of his deepest intellectual and political motives. It also rules out the possibility that one might interpret his anti-modernism as itself being progressive. Satish K. Jain gives an outline of the normative structure of Gandhian thought with reference to Hind Swaraj. Gandhi’s criticism of the institutions of the state is that while in theory the institutions exist to realize the objectives of a welfare state their ability to perform well is far from being satisfactory or is severely undermined in practice.

With regard to Gandhi’s views on the question of technology what underlies his thinking is the proposition that although there is no deterministic relationship between technology and values in the sense of technology determining values or values determining technology, the two are related and that modern technology is essentially inconsistent with some of the most cherished values, particularly non-violence. Jain remarks that Gandhi’s opposition to modern technology is premised on the assumption that it has purely instrumental role. He saw a link between the poverty of Indian masses and the spread of industries based on modern technology.

Rajmohan Gandhi, on the other hand, eloquently argues in his essay ‘Empire and Violence, or the Foes in Hind Swaraj’ that Gandhi’s view in Hind Swaraj is not as much a challenge to modernity as it is to Empire. If modernity is assailed in Hind Swaraj, that is because modernity is a weapon of Empire, in fact Empire’s most seductive weapon and since Empire is closely allied with violence in Hind Swaraj violence is as much Gandhi’s foe as Empire. Rejecting both Empire and violence, Gandhi clearly and confidently presents in Hind Swaraj his novel theory of satyagraha, which he had already tried out successfully in South Africa.

However, empire is much more pervasive than one would suppose. One has to be wary of not only the external powers dominating India but also of the domination of weak Indians by the strong bullying Indians reflecting an attitude which works even within India itself. Therefore, Gandhi wishes to fight all domination and subjugation, whether practised by Europeans or Indians. This template, as Rajmohan Gandhi remarks, is potentially applicable the world over and hence Gandhi’s continuing impact on Native Americans, Blacks in the United States, Africans, Latin Americans, Okinawans, Arabs, and others who felt the heat of European domination.

In his essay ‘Political Self-Rule: Gandhi and the Future of Democracy’, Fred Reinhard Dallmayr maintains that Gandhi is crucial to the understanding of democracy in as much as its idea is not restricted to subjugated or colonized people but to friends of democracy everywhere. In Hind Swaraj Gandhi formulates a conception of ‘self’ and ‘self-rule’ (swaraj), which forms the core of democratic politics. It differs sharply from prevalent reductions of democracy to individual self-seeking or the unhampered pursuit of private self-interest distinguishing it from current ideologies of liberalism and neo-liberalism. Dallmayr calls it ‘minimalist democracy’ (p 137). For Gandhi, the goal of swaraj could not be obtained by simply replacing British rulership with Indian rulership, (‘English rule without the Englishman’) but through fundamental transformation in people’s attitudes and objectives.

Jeremy Webber in his essay writes about Gandhi’s nationalism. In contemporary India there is an overt tendency to associate nationalism with its xenophobic and chauvinistic manifestations in which the national community is limited to a single cultural or ethnic group, which then seeks to advance its interests in opposition to every other group. It has come to be identified with narrowly religious definitions of nationhood – with Hindutva, or with the Muslim separatism that gave rise to the partition of India. In this sense Gandhi was emphatically not a nationalist since he was committed to the inclusive spirit of all religions and worked relentlessly for Hindu-Muslim unity. He drew widely on other religious traditions and incorporated their insights into his own world view. Gandhi’s famous debate with Rabindranath Tagore in 1921, over the non-cooperation movement, was centred on the question of nationalism. Webber believes that for Gandhi Indian nationalism was entirely consistent with internationalism, and that ‘national swaraj was the precondi-tion to international engagement’ (p 182).

Shail Mayaram revisits K.C. Bhattacharya’s ‘Svaraj in Ideas’ debate by outlining the topography of intellectual decolonization as envisioned in Hind Swaraj. She underscores the swarajist vision as manifest in the writings of Ramakrishna, Ramana, Aurobindo, Vivekananda, and Narayana Guru and animating the work of Tagore and Gandhi, Vinoba Bhave, Jayaprakash Narayan, Rammanohar Lohia and Bhimrao Ambedkar as they struggled with inherited and established conceptions of nationalism, and conceptions of the political and social in contemporary India. The project finds contemporary resonance not only among intellectuals but also with activists and social groups challenging the continuing colonial institutions and structures of power as well as traditionally inherited social institutions. Their efforts have also met with commendable success. One can also refer to the Right to Information Movement as a satyagraha. Such social movements are deeply imbricated with the functioning of democracy and renewal of swarajist social contracts.

Shasheej Hegde in ‘Could Hind Swaraj presuppose a theory of judgment?’ considers the normatively structured dialogue between a newspaper editor and a reader and incorporating, accordingly, ‘a ratiocinative capacity to reason and a relational intersubjective recognition of that capacity’ (p 274). In reading Hind Swaraj Hegde suggests the view that the text inscribes an epistemic theory of judgement conforming to certain rules and principles required for a change of perspective incumbent upon social engagement.

Gangeya Mukherji’s essay stresses Gandhi’s pragmatic view of non-violence as a ‘religious ideal’ even as it was not fully realizable ‘in the flesh.’ Such ideals as this derived their energy from the ‘ceaseless quest’ they involved.

Hilal Ahmed takes into account the afterlife of the text of Hind Swaraj as can be seen in the socially and politically productive Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha (CMM) and finds parallels between Gandhi and his political activism and Shankar Guha Niyogi and his political activism associated with his organization the CMM. The continuities demonstrate a distinctive intertextual relationship between Hind Swaraj and the CMM as the text of Hind Swaraj gets transformed into a lived political experience. The possible way to understand the afterlife of texts like Hind Swaraj is to juxtapose the existing political ideas with the established political categories.

Sudhir Chandra’s essay deals with the impact of Gandhi’s week-long fast in Yervada jail in September 1932 which ended with the famous Poona Pact much to the resentment of caste Hindus as well as the Ambedkarites and subsequently the 21 day fast in May 1933 at the call of his conscience as a self-purificatory act divinely ordained albeit with no tangible objective. Chandra wryly observes that although nothing worthwhile was achieved, it, however, underscored the point that ‘the struggle for freedom could not be an exclusively political project.’

In his essay ‘Reading Hind Swarajya/Swaraj in Two Languages’, Tridip Suhrud proposes that Hind Swaraj is a bilingual text. It is Gandhi’s only work in Gujarati which he himself translated into English and exhibits a bilingualism characterised by the simultaneity of two parallel texts suggesting a ‘process where an idea is conceived and thought in one language and expressed in another, where it becomes possible to speak of a concept, a notion, alien to one linguistic/semantic universe through another tongue.’ (p 337)

With views from diverse perspectives on empire, democracy, citizenship, violence, social harmony and normative structure of Gandhian thought the present volume is a useful guide that should enable us to navigate through the present times when Gandhi as the foremost protagonist of India’s freedom movement and decolonization is being pushed to the background overtaken by forces inimical to his thought.

Satish C. Aikant

former Professor and Head, Department of

English, H.N.B. Garhwal University;

Former Fellow, IIAS, Shimla

THE NATURE OF ENDANGERMENT IN INDIA: Tigers, ‘Tribes’, Extermination and Conservation, 1818-2020 by Ezra D. Rashkow. Oxford University Press, India, UK, 2023.

EZRA Rashkow’s recent work offers a range of rare historical insights. It shows that the ideas of ‘endangerment’ and ‘extinction’, usually applied to define ecological vicissitudes, can create epistemological incongruities when rampantly invoked to understand the conditions and life-ways of the indigenous communities. Without being anachronistic, this book engages thoroughly with the ‘present’ and ongoing public discourses that often connect the issues of the rights of the indigenous communities to the ecological degradation at face-value. This work argues that such interlinking tendencies are historically produced and they are anything but innocent. To present this problem, this work goes back and forth in time (not arbitrarily) and unpacks the historical genealogies of some key ideas and terminologies that are commonly attributed to the Adivasi communities in India.

Rashkow argues that the ideas that equate the conditions of indigenous people with the precarity of other nonhuman species, generate and perpetuate degrading and self-defeating rhetoric that reeks of racial ideologies of colonialism. Steeped in the studies of indigenous communities of Western and Central India, his work makes it a point that in no way the plight and challenges faced by the indigenous communities can be compared to the ecological threats that the nonhuman lives encounter in these regions. To consider the indigenous communities essentially ‘isolated’ and inherently attached to their ‘traditional’, ‘forest-dwelling’ livelihoods in close proximity with the wildlife that are on verge of biological extinction, for him, is an act of deeply problematic fetishization.

The book attempts to underline the root cause of such problems. It shows how these communities, under the aegis of the British Empire, were ‘dehumanized’ by being perpetually described and defined in the light of ‘animalistic’ traits, a practice which found institutional moorings in the (pseudo)scientific discourses. Rendering these communities as subjects of exclusive control or protective benevolence was prominent in the chauvinistic and paternalistic narratives of the British Empire. Similar tropes, as Rashkow shows, dominate the ideals, rhetoric and precepts of the contemporary social justice movements that aim to ‘protect’ and ‘preserve’ the ‘tribal values’ that are viewed to be threatened due to the intrusion of extractive industries or the projects dedicated to wildlife conservation. It strongly suggests that not only the so-called ‘elite’ and ‘educated’ civil-society activism capitalizes on these ideals, but scholarly communities across disciplines have also been resorting to such simplistic equations, abstraction and uncritical essentialism pertaining to people’s identity and lifeways.

This book asks a fundamental question: how come the ideas of ‘human endangerment’ or the ‘cultural diversity loss’ received so much currency for the communities that have been demographically expanding so strongly and are prominently visible in the public discourses especially in the South Asian context.1 To answer this, the first few chapters neatly set the stage in terms of locating various context-specific ‘global’ examples through which the idea of ‘endangerment’ became commonly associated with indigenous communities. Rashkow elucidates that even at the global level such ideas have been perpetuating a great deal of colonial stereotypes that have been synonymizing indigenous communities and ‘endangered’ nonhuman species. Through a succinct analysis of the British imperial discourses in India, it shows that chronologically the concerns of ‘tribal extinction and endangerment’ predated the concerns of wildlife endangerment and only in the mid-19th century the idea against wildlife extermination and notions of ‘preservation’ started to be enmeshed with that of the ‘tribal endangerment’. It shows further that the already existing rhetorical overlaps of the ‘tribal’ and the ‘animal’ were further strengthened in the conservationist agenda of British India that continued to be reverberating in the post-Independence scenario.

The narrative that the author presents in many instances gets interspersed by the author’s own critical and self-reflexive experiences in the field. This is especially true for the last two chapters as they cumulatively present a potent example that the oral testimonies coming from the concerned indigenous communities do not necessarily corroborate either the narratives of the government, rhetoric of the activist groups or the contemporary formulations prevalent in the mainstream media. The penultimate chapter shows that the ‘lived experiences’ of the people of Bhil community are far more complex than the simplistic notions through which their plight and challenges have been portrayed in the narratives of the Narmada Bachao Andolan. The oral testimonies from the representatives of the communities do not necessarily reduce them as ‘victims’ but present them as potent negotiators.

The last chapter takes up the case study of Kanha National Park that is unanimously considered as one of the most successful tiger sanctuaries in India and reflects critically on the contentious policies of carving out an ‘ecological niche’ for the Gond and Baiga communities that have been facing challenges due to the conservation-induced reordering of the forests. It pertinently raises a crucial point that the idea which delineates a particular spatial identity as an exclusive ‘niche’ for any ‘threatened’ indigenous community reeks of ‘racist animalization’ that seeks to situate a certain species to a certain ‘habitat’. This chapter draws heavily from the archival materials pertaining to the dynamic nature of Gond monarchy and carefully juxtaposes the field-work experiences that show that in the recent times the conservation-induced ‘displacement’ has garnered myriad of responses within the communities and such experiences cannot be reduced to popular categorizations of ‘tribal alienation’ or ‘tribal extermination’.

For a reader interested in finding a more prominent voice and representation of the indigenous communities, it would have been more intriguing if the work paid greater weightage to the oral records in most of the chapters. This book is consistently and intentionally critical of the ‘animalizing’ tendencies that continue to inform the ways in which Adivasi communities have been portrayed and represented. Therefore, it would have been interesting to know in greater detail about the author’s views and reflections on the interdisciplinary scholarship pertaining to Human-Animal Studies or Critical Animal Studies, the burgeoning field that aspires to destabilize ‘anthropocentrism’ but gets affected by the currents of animal advocacy and activism that often tend to blur the complexities and nuances of human-animal entanglement.

As a whole, the work is a significant intervention that demystifies a great deal of misconceptions
and generalizations that often dominate and dictate public sentiments and the so-called ‘intellectual ferment’ around the ecological ruination and the rights of marginalized indigenous communities. Such tendencies, as the book shows, can weaken the policies and the politics that aim to ascribe much needed dignity to the marginalized and the oppressed.

Aritri Chakrabarti

Doctoral student

Ashoka University

Sonipat

Footnotes:

1. One might find the conceptual prelude for this monograph more prominently in this particular essay by the author. Ezra D. Rashkow, ‘Making Subaltern Shikaris: Histories of the Hunted in Colonial Central India’, South Asian History and Culture 5(3), 2014, pp. 292-313.