Force and Adoration: Ambedkar’s Maitri
Aishwary Kumar In his final work The Buddha and His Dhamma, Bhimrao Ambedkar returns frequently to the concept of maitri, which he most often renders, for the first time in his essay on Marx, as “fellowship”. “Maitri or fellowship towards all must never be abandoned”, he writes in “Buddha or Karl Marx”. “One owes it even to one’s enemy.” In deploying maitri in such a fashion, translating it neither as friendship nor fraternity, and finding its possibility in the actions of the soldier, bandit, magistrate, and even the executioner, the mature Ambedkar departs from the normative rendering of the concept in two ways. Firstly, he understands maitri categorically as that which refuses the foundational distinction between friendship and hostility. Maitri is a gesture that one makes towards the enemy; as such, it militantly exceeds the moral dictates of friendship and fidelity. In his final years, immersed into formulating a rigorously non-humanist and religious critique of religion, Ambedkar deepens the concept of maitri further, including in its ambit not merely the human but also the animal. “Maitri”, he claims in The Buddha and His Dhamma, “is extending fellow feeling to all beings, not only to one who is a friend but also to one who is a foe: not only to man but to all living beings.” Indeed, creaturely life, Ambedkar argues, is most proper to maitri precisely because the normative conception of love (karuna), which human beings express only towards their own species, excludes nonhumans. Maitri, on the other hand, makes both the adversary and animal its intimate subject. It is inclusive in a way that the Christian conception of love is not. Maitri too is religious and quotidian. Yet unlike love, which harbors despite its best intentions a sacrificial hierarchy at its source¾ in a remarkable and paradoxical neologism, Ambedkar calls religious love (bhakti), and the love for religion, “life-force”¾ maitri is anti-sovereignty and non-theological. Acts of sovereignty, manifest in the sovereign’s right to take life in the precisely name of keeping life sacred and safe, whose most violent instance is the death penalty, contaminates the ethical force of maitri. Even if it is marked by an irreducible religiosity, then, maitri resists the pernicious onto-theological alliance between religion and sovereignty. It does not take life in the name of keeping life unscathed. Nor does it give life in the name of charity or pardon. Instead, maitri gives life, even to the enemy combatant, in the name of absolute equality, in the name of forgiveness that refuses to be identified as such. It is this religion without religion that Ambedkar thinks when he recovers the encounter between the Buddha and the dreaded bandit Angulimala in his masterwork. In that encounter, what converts the violent bandit is neither the sudden dawning of guilt upon him nor his momentary exposure to divine luminescence. What converts him instead is the truth manifest in the figure of the Buddha himself. Only this “love of truth” founds the empirical ground of an egalitarian faith and establishes another mode of belief and adoration, one that exceeds both the religious and humanist conceptions of love. Hence Ambedkar’s perennial dissatisfaction with love, affirmed again in The Buddha and His Dhamma, “Love is not enough. What is required is maitri.” Perhaps the proper rendering of what the mature Ambedkar calls maitri, then, is neither fraternity nor friendship, even though he alludes to both throughout the 1940s and the 1950s, but rather adoration; an immeasurable gift of belief and compassion (mudita) across the abyss of species difference. What does this radical reconceptualization of love, this forceful affirmation of life as such, gives us most to think? What might a “religion without religion”, which would, by its very name, also be a religion profoundly aware of its own ineluctable complicity with force and mastery, call forth? In trying to recover Ambedkar’s moral thinking from normative and humanist histories of equality, my intention here is to simply recall that what is living, what exists, and most ontologically, what is, for Ambedkar, is not that which is same but rather that which is wholly other, wholly unequal, and above all, wholly mortal. In this politicization of finitude, this foregrounding of the knowledge of impermanence (sunnyata), Ambedkar does not valorize death or sacrifice in the manner of a satyagrahi, even though he does not renounce the imperative of war and “general mobilization” either. Instead, he recovers in the consciousness of finitude the possibility of an unconditional and collective sacrifice of interest; a sacrifice from which equality amongst mortals might emerge. Thus, in Annihilation of Caste (1936), two decades before his masterwork, and right in the midst of his critique of the antidemocratic structure of Plato’s republic, Ambedkar had already called equality a responsibility towards the “incommensurable”; a responsibility heterogeneous to calculation, substitution, and measure. A responsibility, in other words, that mobilizes force- and what is annihilation (ucched) if not a call to force- in the name of absolute singularity, in the name of the unequal’s irreproducible and each time unique birth and death.[1] It is on this affirmation of life amidst life’s impermanence that the mature Ambedkar’s ahimsaic adoration would come to hinge. In this paper, I offer an archeology of this adoration, of Ambedkar’s radical attempt to formulate the conditions of a love proper and adequate to politics. I will not trace the infinite variations in which this excessive love appears in his itinerary, in neologisms such as “love of truth”, “love of politics”, and so on. I will only attempt, in a necessarily delimited fashion, to follow the rhythms and vicissitudes of this adoration, this egalitarian excess, that the mature Ambedkar eventually calls maitri. Mastery and Measure How does the late recovery of adoration (maitri) turn the thread of Ambedkar’s enduring thinking about force? Does the move away from sovereignty lead to its attenuation? Or is maitri itself the maturation of that militant critique of force that had begun to take shape as early as Ambedkar’s Columbia University seminars in the
Aphorisms Twelve
Abhi Choudhury 1. Actually, every pronunciation has an objective. Some kind of outlandish and beautiful objective. As and when the speaker makes an utterance, every word brings forth a definite meaning to her, since her enunciation of the language has the immediacy and directness of her experience and consciousness. The listeners do not have the onus to maintain any such connection. So, in its finer form, it is impossible to have a real congruence between what the speaker intends and what the listener considers. We speak in a manner of our own and understand in our own sweet way too—but the two may not tally. Hence, before realizing the purport of ‘love’ it is merely a garbled sonic bundle; but after our comprehension it blossoms, rainbow-hued. God knows, every utterance has a strange and beautiful objective. 2. And such is the situation when a woman says to her male companion: “I woke up to this nightmare: that when I wake up I won’t see you again ever. You have gone to your wife.” Some of us may align ourselves with this statement. Others are dumbfounded; they take a lot of time to take it in. Once in a Moscow-bound night train compartment, Mayakovsky assured a young woman travelling alone in the same coach: “I am not a human being but a fleeting cloud in trousers.” But as soon as he uttered these words, he was worried sick about whether the woman would somewhere end up using this deeply potent sonic pattern which was embedded at that point in his mind. We may not easily gather why Mayakovsky was agonizing. But those who know that often writers delve down, down, down and suck out our deepest thoughts, unbeknownst to us, and make them their own will, recognize the source of his fret. 3. To speak ahista does not just imply speaking low. The expression may also implore us not to go too fast in our speech delivery. Both meanings are inbuilt in the root, from Farsi ahista. It beckons humility and politeness. The seemingly equivalent word dhire does not have the same connotation: here, the etymology derives from dhi— a gesture to our self-controlling and rational faculties. 4. After coming across in the day’s newspaper that chewing tobacco is surely carcinogenic, this fierce health freak of a boyfriend curtly advises his partner: ‘Discontinue’. What must be discontinued: tobacco or the newspaper? Can’t be both. 5. The relationship has to work both ways and mutually, the lady wrote to the writer, especially if one is in a relationship of love. The writer concludes that the lady wishes to make the relationship work both ways, for that is what equitability demands. That is what is fair. It is only months later that he realizes that what she meant was that the relationship was not working mutually and no relationship holds firm if not worked at from both ends. 6. If I can clearly comprehend in someone’s receiving an award or a felicitation that he is an accomplished artist or a scholar, then there is nothing foggier in this world than the very word award. 7. Words are sometimes the signs of the subject matter of thought, sometimes they are the signs of that very thought process. It so happens that we are lost for words. There is a constant tug of war going on between the intensity of our emotions, intangible sense of beauty, this utterly colourful world and our existential predicament. I want to tell you this every single time when I tear off the lines that I write to you. ‘When you were not there:’ the note seems just right. Not so with, ‘when you are here.’ We are stunned by these unexpected turns in our mind. And then there are some in this world who are able to express colour and feelings—and create powerful patterns with words which would be impossible with silence. When our cosmos seemed to be engulfed by infinite full-stops and caesura or with relentless tautologies and there was no hope all around, right at that point poet Shankha Ghosh pronounced—‘It may be illusory , but keep hope that something positive will turn up in favour of life; the world cannot sink and slip in this manner.’ And the world changed after such an utterance. Some in this world know the art of fusing the minimum-symbolic hidden in signs and the fleeting, momentary ripples in our existence. 8. ‘I may not turn up’ means I may turn up. ‘Only the heart knows what it seeks’ means that the heart hardly knows what it aspires to. This is not unlike Prince William’s famous statement: ‘After spending a night in the alleyways of London have I realized how people spend nights in this city.’ This means that he is at a complete loss to figure out how people live on the streets of London. 9. ‘The songs of Tagore find a structure in the notations (swara-lipi)’: some revere the truth content in this statement and thereafter seek Tagore in the totality of form with extraordinary love, care and caution. Make it a mission of life. While others value the same statement but add that since the notations direct us to the structure and not to the songs themselves, one must work towards chiselling the notes with our imagination, experience and individual renderings. 10. Mirpur: At the Bijoya Sarani Crossing , for the first time in my life someone handed me a bouquet of flowers and asked for money. 11. ‘Afridi, please marry me!’ Does she, the one in that Dhaka stadium with this placard, know what kind of person Afridi is? Will he take her to Pakistan after the marriage? What kind of husband will he turn out to be? But is marrying Afridi the point here? ‘There is no limit to our desires/Our excitement drive us like lunatics/ No happiness greater than illicit love/No diversion more enchanting than belittling the other man,’ says Jibananada Das. 12.
I’m not a Hollywood Star
Henri Alleg from: The Algerian Memoirs And , since our house was one of the few with a working telephone—the other lines had been cut for lack of payment—people would drop by often to make a call. Children rang the doorbell to bring us plates of festival cakes from their parents. We noticed that some only came after nightfall, as if they wanted to make sure that no one thought they were becoming too close to us… A minor incident ruffled this calm. Jean had returned from Ivanovo and was living with us after a stay with his grandmother in Avignon. Andre had stayed in the Soviet Union and was waiting to start university. Jean was going on eleven and was used playing with the children in the neighbourhood until one day he came home disgusted: “Do you know what Mohamed said to me? He said he spits on Europeans, Jews and Communists! So what the hell am I doing here.” We explained to him that Mohamed was only repeating things he had picked up here and there but that the majority of Algerians did not think like that and that all this would disappear in the new Algeria. But I was surprised. Never in all the years of my militant activity or during my stay in prison among Algerians had I been witness to a racist insult or attack and even less had I been the target of it. The abusive language of the child was a reminder that the old prejudices, fed and aggravated by the colonial system, had not disappeared. Such an attitude would develop like weeds, favoured by strained circumstances, and it needed to be checked. From Tunis, the GPRA had proclaimed that the ‘revolution’—this term was increasingly taking the place of the more apt ‘national liberation war’—was intended to be very deeply democratic and that all those who chose Algeria as their country would find a place in it, regardless of origin or beliefs. Once the country had been liberated, measures would be taken to fulfil these promises. The new policy was confirmed in the resolutions adopted in Tripoli by the highest FLN authority and, after Independence, by the measures legalizing the appropriation of the land of wealthy landowners and of vacant property, the organization of self-managed farming and industrial concerns, the display of sympathy for all liberation movements throughout the world, along with the hospitality extended to militants from Africa, Europe or Latin America, forced to flee their countries and relations of friendship and cooperation established with Socialist states. Rallies of hundreds of thousands of people celebrating the anniversary of the insurrection of November 1954, on May Day, or on the occasion of visits by Fidel Castro, Gamal Abdul Nasser and Zhou Enlai, demonstrated popular support for a political agenda that elevated Algiers to the rank of the capital of the progressive, revolutionary Third Front. I was continually bombarded by visitors from round the world—journalists asking for interviews and representatives of liberation movements and parties, curious to know our point of view on the current situation and the country’s future prospects. Many were from the Soviet Union, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria—countries that had cooperation agreements with Algeria. I noticed that, by and large, they focussed on the positive aspects that substantiated their confidence in the Socialist future of Algeria. I received guests who, as I knew, were travelling with fake Algerian passports—it was an open secret—and came to ask help from independent Algeria for their own struggles for liberation. This was how I came to know, among others, Alvaro Cunhal, secretary of the Portuguese Communist Party, who escaped from Antonio de Oliviera Salazar’s prisons; Manolis Glezos, hero of the Greek resistance who, at the height of the Nazi terror, raised a Greek flag over Parthenon; Santiago Carillo, secretary of the Spanish Communist Party; Enrique Lister, former general of Spanish Republican Army who had to flee Franco’s Spain; and Michael Harmel and Dr. Yusuf M. Daddoo, members of the African National Congress and of the South African Communist Party. I met Che Guevara who stayed in Algiers for several weeks. One evening, he came to see us at the paper and lingered very late into night, talking to the spellbound young editorial staff. They listened to him with emotion and extreme attention as if he embodied the Cuban Revolution itself and was going to divulge the secrets behind his victory. But he was neither a prophet nor a lesson giver. He answered our questions simply and mostly asked a lot of questions himself. From time to time, he would take a small inhaler out of his pocket and spray a dose into his mouth to relieve his asthma. When he was about to leave us, one of the staff asked him to sign his photograph. He pushed him aside curtly: “I’m not a Hollywood star. I don’t give autographs.”I often think of this reply when I see tens of millions of young people round the world avid for a different future displaying his image on posters and t-shirts. I wonder what he would have thought, knowing how adamantly opposed he was to personality cult. We all wondered what he was doing in Algiers and what he expected from the FLN. But the question was taboo and we did not ask him, knowing he would not answer. We learnt, but only much later, that Algiers was but a stop on his way to the heart of Africa, in search of a region where the conditions were favourable for him to carry out his protest of creating a revolutionary guerrilla centre in the continent. —————————————————– Henri Alleg is a French-Algerian journalist and Director of Alger republicain newspaper. His work The Question (1958) turned public opinion in France against the war in Algeria. adminhumanitiesunderground.org
The Political Economy of Reading
William St Clair Last year, some of us were privileged to hear the first John Coffin Memorial Lecture given by Robert Darnton entitled ‘The Devil in the Holy Water.’ In that talk, by offering a close textual and historical study of just one pamphlet, Darnton showed how much could be learned about Paris day by day when the French Revolution was actually occurring. In terms of ‘the history of the book’, that talk was at the micro end of the spectrum. This year I propose to move to the other extreme, the macro, looking at books and reading as a whole and over a long time span. I begin by suggesting some of the big questions that ‘the history of the book’ shouldaddress. What were the conditions within which books came into existence in the form thatthey did, and not in others? How were those books that did come into existence produced, sold, distributed, and read, in what numbers, by which constituencies of readers, and over which time scales? – again asking why these events happened in the ways they did and not in others? And what were the consequences of the reading of the texts that were inscribed in, and that were carried by, the books? What were the effects on the minds of their readers, and on the mentalities of the wider society within which the reading took place. By mentalities, a word adopted from the French, I mean the beliefs, feelings, values, and dispositions to act in certain ways that are prevalent in a society at a particular historical and cultural conjuncture, including not only states of mind that are explicitly acknowledged but others that are unarticulated or regarded as fixed or natural. And although I say ‘books’ for convenience, I include journals, newspapers, and other media. These questions are, of course, not new. However, although there has always been much interest in what certain texts mean, how they came to be written, and in the lives of their authors, less attention has been paid to the processes by which the texts reached the hands, and therefore potentially the minds, of different constituencies of readers. I draw many of my findings from the print era in the English-speaking world, roughly the four hundred years from 1500 to 1900, a long sweep of history with many changes. But, in one respect, that era forms a unity. For, during that time, paper imprinted with words or pictures was the only medium by which complex texts, and therefore complex ideas, could be carried in quantity across time and place. I choose 1900, incidentally, not as the end of the print era, but as a way of conventionally marking the moment when, with the arrival of radio and film, printed paper lost its uniqueness. During those four centuries, almost everyone whose opinions on the matter are recorded believed that the reading of books affected the minds of readers, the mentalities of the people, and the fate of the nation. Whether engaged in politics, education, religion, literature, scholarship, science, propaganda, advertising, or censorship, many of the leading men and women of the past tried to use print to spread their ideas and to advance their aims. This was particularly true during the period from the 1790s to the 1830s, that I have studied in detail, an extraordinary rich and innovative time as contemporaries knew. But, we should ask, were they right to regard books and reading as having power over minds? How can we investigate the validity of the assumption? Literary and intellectual history, two of the disciplines that have traditionally attempted to retrieve historic mentalities, have mainly been written in accordance with what I call the ‘parade of authors’ convention. The writings of the past are presented as a march-past of great names described from a commentator’s box set high above the column. In literature, we see Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth. In philosophy Hume is followed by Adam Smith, Rousseau, or whichever names the writer wishes to include. According to the parade convention, those texts of an age which have later been judged to be the best, or the most innovative, in a wide sense, are believed to catch the essence, or some of the essence, of the historical situation from which they emanated. It is a convention centred on newly written works that, for the most part, denies an active role to readers. Another convention that has come in more recently, I call the ‘parliament of texts’. This presents the writings of a particular historical period as debating and negotiating with one another in a kind of open parliament with all the members participating and listening. Thus, when news of the French Revolution reached this country, there was an outpouring of books and pamphlets that discussed the implications, and took the debate from questions of immediate policy to philosophical issues about the nature of human society, the role of the state, the justifications for political, social, and gender hierarchies, and much else. Under both of these conventions, the historian chooses the texts that march in the parade or sit in the parliament. Both approaches can be linked with critical and hermeneutic analyses of the texts which are not time specific, seeking to understand their rhetorical stance and ideological assumptions, and employing, for example, theories of myth to explain the enduring appeal of certain types of narrative. Some scholars attempt to test the truth of what the texts assert, although, sadly, that is out of fashion. And the texts can be situated in specific contexts. However, as ways of understanding how mentalities may have been historically formed by the historic reading of books, neither approach seems to me to be complete or satisfactory. For one thing, any study of the consequences of the reading of the past ought to consider the books that were actually read, not some modern selection. Nor, in describing the reading of a particular period of the past, can it be enough to draw solely on the texts written during that period, specially significant though these may have been. Much of the reading that took place in the past in the English-speaking world, probably most, was of texts written or compiled long ago and far away. In both parade and parliament conventions, newly written printed texts succeed their predecessors, engage with them, and in some cases defeat