There is Justice in this Book !
Soumyabrata Choudhury _________________________ Towards the end of its compelling career, Aishwary Kumar’s Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi and the Risk of Democracy, says that Gandhi’s and Ambedkar’s were two incommensurable ways to the question of justice, that is to say, the thought of equality. The book, then, must be about at least three things—the two incommensurable ways and the thought as such. I intend this statement to be more than just a logical inference. It aims to go to the heart of the author’s profound concern with what will appear in the book as an insistent motif, the motif which is also a fundamental problem of “means and ends”. The problem is the following: Even before posing the moral question whether an end justifies the historical means adopted to reach it, one must ask, can there be historical ways and means adequate to an end insofar as that end is a “thought”? That is to say, the thought of equality, if it means anything, must mean the thought proper to a principle. So the basic problem turns out to be—how can there be an empirical, historico-human path, even if as fabulous, singular and, in Aishwary Kumar’s words, “incommensurable” a path as Gandhi’s or Ambedkar’s, to the perpetual pre-existence of a principle and its true thought? For this true thought or thought of the perpetual anteriority of a principle, the book creates another insistent motif, which is the motif of sovereignty, and the rhythm of the insistence is theological. Clearly, theology can provide a kind of model for perpetual anteriority of existence in the form of divine sovereignty or God’s sovereign pre-existence. “Religion” would be the common name of the terribly inadequate means and variously traced ways to the divine end and in accordance with the image and model of historico-human subjection to theological sovereignty. Strangely, the first casualty of such a subjection is the very stakes of the thought in question—the thought of equality. The theological model seems to turn the very passion of that thought towards a power so sovereign, so sovereignly other that it becomes radically unthinkable. And therein would lie its transcendental force to which no thinkable form of a principle can correspond, no principle of equality can be equal to this divine condescension. And yet the author of Radical Equality knows that the subject of his pioneering investigation—I do think he is the first of his kind in a certain field of research, something I will talk about later—is not an affair of mere empirical measurement of a humanist principle in its historical realization. At the same time, the thought of equality is a historical declaration of that thought and opens up an epochal thinking in history that Aishwary Kumar has no hesitation in identifying as revolutionary. He is, indeed, a pioneering archivist of such revolutionary thinking in modern Indian history. The complex formalizing statement to provide overall support for the epochal research is the following: Not only is there a fundamental incommensurability between the ways, means and historical measures of equality; but also there is an incommensurability at the heart of the very thought of equality as such. Which is that the declaration of the principle of equality is an absolute yet utterly immanent interruption of the history of inequalities which is the only history there is. The evaluation and arrangement of the archives of history take place along the axes of differentiation and commensuration. The axis of commensuration institutes historical measures and regimes that articulated with the axis of differention, converts differences into inequality, of which equality is only an empirical and relative variation. The declaration of equality as a principle, on the other hand, to speak like Neitzsche, breaks history in two: the old regime of inequality and a revolutionary epoch for which there isn’t and mustn’t be, measures, indices and proofs of equality; instead there will be post-egalitarian acts and dispositions. It is at this point that the sceptic might as well speak up and ask, is there nothing in-between? Some sort of transitory dialogue or talks of temporary peace at the barricades? Or, what about the history of power, that runs deeper and at a diagonal with respect to sovereignty, whether theological or revolutionary? And aren’t these aspects the really meaningful parameters by which modern Indian history, since the epoch of Ambedkar and Gandhi, needs to be judged in all its radical hypotheses and rotten realities? Let me withhold any comments of my own and try to be the medium for Aishwary Kumar’s possible response to these very crucial sceptical queries. Kumar, to my mind, will cite at least two key phrases here from his book, “egalitarian sovereignty” and “insurrectionary citizenship”, as idiomatic, even contradictory, constructions for the inconsolable betweenness of our times that we sometimes also call democracy. However, it seems the medium has started lending its partisan tonality to the original voice in question; so let me resume speaking on my account. I think that the book declares “radical equality” as a sort of lightning-flash across the archives of history to re-localise the force of the declaration in the materiality and force-field of historical texts—mainly Ambedkar’s and Gandhi’s texts. In this, the author seems to join a line of distinguished writers, from at least D.R. Nagaraj to Arundhati Roy recently, who as it were, stage the Ambedkar-Gandhi sequence in theatre of history as protagonist-antagonist, as duellists wearing their swords, masks and grimaces. Yet it seems to me, Aishwary Kumar is a pioneering departure in that he perforates the borders of Ambedkar’s and Gandhi’s texts, as well as others, to open their constitutive figurations, the play between them, to a performativity, a vector of force, which surpass the commensuration the imagination of a theatre produces between the protagonist and the antagonist. Indeed, Gandhi and Ambedkar, more than dramatis personae, are scintillating effects of Aishwary Kumar’s own singular text. The immanence of the two historical figures to the text is the same as the utter exteriority of the declaration of
The Wind Instruments
HUG Editorial ______________________ # Humanities Studies in India at this Point of Time. There are two sides to it. One, institutional studies of the humanities. By that we mean the study of the languages and letters, arts & aesthetics. We are advisedly narrowing down humanities into certain specific fields—not to restrict its ambit but to highlight a methodological breakthrough and rigour that is missing in the narrow sense to begin with. There are many worthy ways of getting into the question of humanities but we still do not possess a sense of independently gauging and defining what might constitute humanities in the subcontinent per se at this point of time. Nor is there any concerted effort to give it fillip and direction. It is a doubly difficult proposition given the heterogeneity of languages and their internal arguments and hierarchies within the humanities academia itself. In India, the once intense parley between the votaries of philological and hermeneutic approaches on one hand, and the then counter-institutional challenges to canon formation and so on on the other, has largely come to an end. There is a meek sense of mea-culpa among the erstwhile rebels within the academia and a vigorous return of parsing and textual studies as a fodder for nation building simultaneously. The coming together of these twin developments are not an accident. It is as a result and fallout of such a consensual unanimity that fields like digital humanities, area studies, book history, archive building, world-literature and so on flourish. Only a limited few within the academia have any sense of what goes beyond the shibboleths of the seminar hall, projects, the archives and transnational travel. # Why largely Static and Undeviating? Partly, the reasons are external—namely, systematic undermining of existing structures within our universities and colleges and lack of support for independent research institutions that would deal exclusively in the humanities. But external factors are sometimes beyond our control. A more significant reason is the lack of imagination and drive from the scholars themselves to independently or collectively break fresh ground. If seen closely, this is not surprising, for unlike history or sociology, institutional forms of humanities in India have been remarkably conformist and self-consuming. In order to pay lip service to social radicalism, it allowed the social sciences to define its scope, ambit and methods in the final decades of the last century. It was the social sciences which worked as a bridge between hard sciences and the humanities—methodologically speaking. The result was a burgeoning of derivative humanities in the name of critical studies. The term culture studies was a trite and baggy offshoot of the same impulse. Barring some initial success such forays routinely accommodate unoriginality. On the other hand, there began a growing affair with philosophy and medical sciences by way of addressing the question of ethics within humanities. This is also imitative. Worthy as they are, in the long term, these forays could not help humanities reinvent itself. With no genuine critical tool within its own arsenal, humanities was left to flounder when it came to addressing contemporary developments in art and literature. By then, barring a minuscule and privileged fraction of the academic world, humanities studies had relinquished the disciplinary ways of interpreting the subjective and textual elements. It had forgotten the ways to recapitulate of the past and the techniques to churn the ordinary materiality of the senses. As a result of this two things have happened: one, a kowtowing to the social sciences with a shallow lip service paid to that fit-all buzzword: interdisciplinary. One must always remember though that whenever that word is used there is always and always a prioritizing of certain disciplines at the cost of some other. It is never a level playing field. And two, as a corollary to that, the humanities departments have lost touch with the intensity and the edge required of art and literature that would bring generations of students and researchers to study humanities. No amount of rethinking or probematizing around cobbled up refresher courses is going to bring forth any original verve within the academe. It is a fruitful thing to converse and work in tandem with other disciplines as long as you have your own priorities and aims periodically thrashed out from within the boundaries of your discipline. #Are there some Other Ways? Institutional study of humanities will continue to rely on its own routines and practices. That is not going to change soon. An instance: poetry, in many ways, is the defining impulse of humanities. And poets abound. As long as humans live they shall hum and intone. But there has not been any path-breaking study of that primary impulse of humanities by our academic literary critics. We mean truly original and sustained work. None. Not even from beyond the antiseptic world of English studies. This is a fundamental lack. There is only one conclusion to be drawn: that the academia, more often than not, is unable to make sense of animated subjectivity, the imperatives of rhythm and repetition. It likes to play the string instrument which allows one to be the master of oneself. Whereas, flute, pipe or clarinet puts you beside yourself. In her magisterial work Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Susan Stewart has reminded us that the wind instruments are endowed with the force of possession which is a vehicle of transformation and self transformation. The academia is intimidated by the power of the wind. It painstakingly trains itself to be deaf to the voice of the choric, tragic and the lyric. So, we must move beyond the academia in order to relate to our basic impulses. There is a parallel set of places where humanities can be deepened. The market forces understand that parallel world best. So they form ententes with academics, publishers, authors and connoisseurs and give us this periodic jamboree of literary, art and crafts festivals. They give us poetry reading sessions, film appreciation workshops and cultural retreats. These in turn lead
The Edifice
Ranajit Das __________________ Journal Entry I I still recall quite vividly that horrendous moment when my little one realized, for the first time, what a lie is. I remember, face to face with untruth for the first time in her life, those bewildered, derelict eyes of hers. Unfortunately, it was I who had told her that lie. The thing was one among numerous stupid and jocular adult lies: if kids do not sleep at their appointed time, then the police would visit and take them away. My baby, perhaps she used to believe that each material thing in this world is truthful, that every word uttered is authentic. This, my cautioning too she had come to believe. That she used to believe this in all sincerity was a fact because every time this precept was told to her at night, her countenance paled. Unable to leash her natural energetic self, she would look at us—helpless, resigned. May be the little one would be suffering greatly within, for failing truth? Then one day from one of our exchanges, she suddenly realized that this threat was not true at all. With stunned eyes, as she tried tracing the contours of our canny,guilty faces, she discovered untruth. I could see that somewhere behind her dumbfounded visage a whole edifice was crumbling. Perhaps her first universe, her world of verity was abandoning her. Since then, whenever I recall that moment, I begin to turn wood-stiff, queasy. I can feel that in my brain those down-and out, destitute eyes are pierced like a knife. I want to run, like a madman, from that look. But the earth and the soil, light, that sky seeking to converse with the horizon—all seem like an ashen extension of that look. I am unable to evade it and slink away. Journal Entry II We hardly know what truth is. But untruth we do know, unerring, like our shadows. In this lifetime of confusion about truth, the lie is our most manifest realization. In that sense, the lie is our most trusted truth. Our refuge. Our comrade. With a twinkle in his eyes, the one who says that knowing untruth also means knowing the truth, he is Nachiketa. Pig-ignorant we are. Inside our brains meteorites batter constantly. All around us heaps of acorns and saplings. And we—scuttlebutts and scandalmongers of the ancient rocks. It is likely that right from our mother’s wombs we have known untruth. Perhaps in the deepest twilight codes of our genes, the definition and usage manual of the lie is carefully inscribed. Still, for once, in that nerve-wracking moment of our childhood, we are startled by our first encounter with the lie. Only once in our whole life such piercing, woebegone stupefaction. Our first and last celestial moment. *** Ranajit Das is a poet from Bengal. He is writing since 1966. He loves football, cinema and travelling all alone. adminhumanitiesunderground.org