• Subalternity and Religion

This book explores the relationship between mainstream and marginal or subaltern religious practice in the Indian subcontinent, and its entanglement with ideas of nationhood, democracy and equality. With detailed readings of texts from Marathi and Hindi literature and criticism, the book brings together studies of Hindu devotionalism with issues of religious violence.

Drawing on the arguments of Partha Chatterjee, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, the author demonstrates that Jndian democracy, and indeed postcolonial democracies in general, do not always adhere to Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality, and that reiigion and secular life are inextric­ably enmeshed in the history of the modern, whether understood from the perspective of Europe or of countries formerly colonized by Europe, There~ fore subaltern protest, in its own attempt to lay claim to history, must rely on an idea of religion that is inextricably intertwined with the deeply invidi~ ous legacy of nation, state, and civilization. The author suggests that the co~exjstcnce of acts of social altruism and the experience of doubt born from social strife-"miracle" and "violence"-ought to be a central issue for ethical debate. Keeping in view the power and reach of genocidal Hinduism, this book is the first to look at how the religion of marginal communities at once affirms and turns away from secularized religion.

This important contribution to the study of vernacular cosmopolitanism in South Asia will be of great interest to historians and political theorists, as well as to scholars of religious studies, South Asian studies and philosophy,

Milind Wakankar teaches in the Department of English, SUNY Stony Brook, USA. He received his PhD in English and Comparative Literature and Postcolonial Theory from Columbia University. His current work involves a monograph on Ramchandra Shukla and a critical commentary on the Dnvaneswari.

Intersections: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories Edited by Gyanendra Pandey Emory Vf/iversi!]; VS"

... .:ditorilll Advisory Board: Partllo Chatterjee. Columbia University/Calcutta; Stev('ll Hahn. University of Pennsylvania; David Hardiman, University of Warwick; Bruce Kf/au/t. Emory University; Rajeswal'i Sunder Rajan, New York UnivcrsilylB<lngalore: and Ann Stoler. New School of Social Research

This series is conceflled with three kinds of intersections (or conversations): first, across cultures and regions, an interaction that postcolonial studies have emphasized in their foregrounding of the multiple sites and multi-directional tralfic involved in the making of the modern; second, across time, the conver~ sation between a mutually constitutive past and present that (){;Curs in ditfer~ ent times and places; and thirdly, between coloniat and postcolonial histories.. which as theoretical positions have very different perspectives on the first two "intersections" and the questions of intellectual enquiry and expres~ sion implied in them. These three kinds of conversations are critical to the making of any present a.nd any history. Thus the new series provides a forum for extending our understanding of core issues of human society and its self~rcpresentation over the centuries.

While focusing on Asia, the series is Opel) to studies of other parts of the world that are sensitive to cross~cultural. cross~chronological and cross~ colonial perspectives. The series invites submissions for single~authored and edited books by young as welJ as established scholars that challenge the limit~ ations or inherited disciplinary, chronological and geographical boundaries.. even when they focus on a single. well~bounded territory or period.

1. Subaltern Citizens and their Histories Investigations from India and the USA tailed by Gyanendra Pandey

2. Subalterllity and Religion The prehistory of Dalit empowerment in South Asia Mi/ind Wakallk(ll'

r

Subalternity and Religion The prehistory of Dalit empowerment in South Asia

Milind Wakankar

,~ ~~o~:~~~fi~ LONDON AND NEW YORl<

First published 2010 by Routledge

•

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Slmultaneously published in rhe USA and C· . d· by Routledge ,11M a

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Rou:~dge is an imprint of the Taylar & Francis Grout> an tnJorma business r'

ij 2010 Milind Wakankar

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All rights reserved. No part of this b<lok be . reprodu:e<l Of utilized in any form or by :';elec:~~ted or mechanIcal. or other means, now k""w • f • . td· I ' "" nor"ereater m~en e ,inC tidIng photOCopying and r d' -In/ormation storage or retrieval ecor mg, or In any writing from the publishers, system, WIthout perrmsslO11 in

British Library Cataloguing ill PubliCa/ion D I

A catalogue. record for this book is available a a from the Bntish Library

WLibrary ofG'onf!!ess Catafoging-in-Publicmion Dala

akankar_ M!imd_ Subalternity and religion' the t' >

South Asia f Milind Wilk1;nkilte

Hstory 01 Dalit empowerment in

r~~I~d~/ ~~~~i~;~~~~i~\~~~~;::i~~J~ POds.tood lonial histories; 2) IRI"' . "Unmex_

" e 19J.on and SOCial status--Indiil-Histori ' . Historiography. J. Dalils-S ial d" ography. 2, Dahts-life, L Title. oc con lflOns_ 4. Dalits-,--ReligiOlls

BUOI S.s6W35 201 0 2.00,86'940954- -Je22 2009031781 294.5'48693--de22 2009031560

ISBN 10:0-415--77878--6 (hbk) ISBN 10: 0-2W-85965-0 (ebk)

ISBN U: 978-0-415-77878-7 (hbk) ISBN 1 J: 97&· 0--203 -85965--0 (ebk)

Contents

preface

PART I Introduction: the question of a prehistory

Subaltemity at the cusp: limits and openings of the dalit critique

2 Moral rite berore myth and law: death in comparative religion

3 The time of having-found (God): languages of datit hearsay

PART II The vici~'Situdes of hl .... torical religion

4 The anomaly of Kabir: historical religion in Dwivedi's Kabir (1942)

5 The pitfalls of a dalit theology: Dr. Dharmvir's critique of Dwivedi (1997)

6 System and history in Rajwade's "Grammar'" for the Dnyaneswari (1909)

PART III The prehistory of historical religion

7 The suspension of iconoclasm: myth and allegory in the time of deities

vii

3

11

25

37

39

75

93

125

127

'" Contents

8 Miracle and violence: the allegorical turn in Kabir. Dnyaneswara, and Tukaram

• 9 Deity and daivat: the antiquity oflight in

Tukaram

Noles Bibliography Index

147

17l

188 195 201

r

, j

i'

Preface

The analyses in this book arc grounded in my conviction that the origins of religious experience are worth renewed critical scrutiny. Those origins may well lie at some remove from the current unraveling of historical religion the world over, and especially in South Asia. I am intrigued by the possibility that older ways of understanding divinity are couched in the everyday idioms of the subcontinent's many languages. I have tried here to write a history of the traditions of daHt (untouchable) sapience, which is to say the mystic tradi­tions that are associated with the poetry of low-caste peoples. In instances such as the "Kabir" corpus, which has grown over five centuries, it is often thc case that the line between the work of the original poet and the scribes who sign their poems in his name is blurred. The scribe and the poet are not the same individual. It is just that the scribe is often a votary of mainstream forms of religion such as Vaishnavism, or of low-caste movements that havc acceded to brahmanism. such as the Kabirpanthi sects. He writes a poem modeled after the original poet and signed in the lauer's name, but inflccted with the religious or political needs of the moment. I imagine this scribe as reaching toward political empowerment. That is to say. that I detect a con­tinuity between these scribes and contemporary empowered dalits who claim Kabir as a daHt god. (The task of tracing the itinerary of the scribe is outside the scope of this book. Scholars of Kahir such as Charlotte Vaudeville, Linda Hess and David Lorcnzen have made major contributions in this regard. Sheldon Pollock and others have brilliantly traced such networks across the subcontinent over vast epochs of time.) The focus here is on the murky histor­ical moment at either end of that movement: which is to say, the poet and the empowered dalit who claims him as his own, he who countersigns the seal of the poet. I see in the laUer's practice a "reference" to the enabling wisdom of the original poct. In a sense what I have attempted here is a history of signature and countcr-signature. I want to describe what happens when thc same precious seal is vouched for once again, but with a difference. The relay involved can bc one of stereotype (prejudice); but it could also be one of an ancient form of generosity and care.

So what I have attempted herc is only minimally difierent from a history of mainstrcam Inrms of Hindu devotionalism such as bhakti. My point is that

viii Preface

the low~caste forms of mystic speech I describe in these pages are als t f that larger story ~f deitjes, temples, pi~grilTIages, religious natiollal~s~~r B~t my concern here IS to see how there IS an ever so sli ht t mainstream religion in the work of these low-caste oe~ Th~rn. aw~y ~rom departure from the mainstream is crucial Th h P .'1 IS ~~fiflltesllnal book rests on it. This is what saves the c . e r ctanca ambition of this "miraclt;" and "violence") from appc ~ncepts used here (such as "hearsay," b h -anng as mere verbal c ", I Id e s eef effrontery to pretend that .' oncel s. t WOll For it can only ever be supplement (~le;,tn clrc~mVellt the history of bhakti. this agenda is complicated by the rae t ·th.r~~ a hterary-critical point of view. pocts is borrowed from the larger o~ na

t" e ~?nceptu,al,vocabulary of these described as the reliance 0 h' e Ie tlddltlon, ThiS IS a tendency I have

, 11 earsay on the fact of "h ' I commg of God" The Ian h' aVlllg Icard of the r ' guages t at embrace th' t ( IVerse; they may even be discolltinu ' h IS even are many and the veillacular and the cosmoporl,ow'hwlt each other, Between registers of 'f ' I an t ey refer us to the 'd " atlOn 0 the holy It IS crucial' b ' ' , gran trallsfigur-

h ' 0 cal III nund one fund I t e book: that there is nothin I 'd I amenta assumption in

g ou Sl e tIe already com 'd d pr~lematicdomain of historical religion, promIse an deepb'

, ne cannot but proceed in these investigati ' I ' With regard to emancipatory projects that inv~ns w~~ 10~t an lIl,n~te pessimism I am also skeptical of the ex I " ' ' Ive hlstoncal religion or nation.

pan,. 01 y promIse of phi] I I analyses here address the limits or th I' osop lY or t leory; the the "ethical" problem that is implic't~ory, can see no ?ther purpose behind decide if the poets here have had to ~:k:t::.or~ here. It I~ ~E to the reader to has once again trounced works 'th d'ffi. Y lor theory, 11 Western thought let that all critical work on td" a I~ elentprovenance."Thisisthegaunt_ R ' 0 lao Iterature has had t '

aJwade and Shukla through to F 'dl I H' 0 negotiate, fmm Inspired though it is by those towe~~g Ie ~~ ardy and ,Dipesh Chakrabarty, likely to have many shortcomings It' t~C ~~vements. tillS book is nonetheless claim that it has not "let nar 'II os here orealt the more susceptible to the

Ive lOUg t speak for its If" Th I essential and productive dilemma of II ' I" e . e atter is the of COlonialism. And so this work, a 'brec u atlOn marked by the experience Th ooem races the taint oft h' d

e stigma of betrayal recurs like th "I ra Ison es clercs, at the very least productive of e

l ete,rna return of the same," and is thus

, new va uatlOns of ideas be" 'h mto the gloaming The way 'h . lore ey too recede , e poets appear h "t If '

stake, I do not quote liberally from wh t ,ere IS t se a sign of what is at of pOems that can be used to a h ~re III any case contested collections thought of one poem treating :,aY

a anyt lllg a,nd everything; I stay with the

h 's a potent mcantator 't Th h t, roughout this book is on the "singular" ex" ~, n:, ,,~e.mp asis VIolence) of the "saint-poet" d pellence (the selhsh lllstght into the gathering of devotees Ther

as, o~pos~ to th~ collective devotionalism of

presume to speak of the d'alit sC: IS af

so t lhe question of whether this book can k ne rom t e outside I offi th I

to en of my belief in and debt t th ' . '. er ese ana yses as a ent in the daHt critique, I am Ofo'h e g~e~t epIstemologIcal possibilities inher-

, , e OpmlOn that the surest , 'b to It IS through persistently criti I way 0 contn ute ca engagement.

P 1

Preface IX

I referred above to the wholly compromised field of religious practice, And yet something like the positivity of moral rite and moral conduct is indeed discernible therein, This is because the form of belief I have in mind refers to an experience of divinity in the past, not in the future, The future has already been written into the trajectory of nation and historical religion, This book casts a backward glance to that fleeting past, and in this way tries to describe an allegorical or narratival mindset that "looks back," (I use the term "narratival" after the later Schelling and Rosenzweig, two thinkers whose influence on this book is incalculable.) The term "mindset" is not used here condescendingly: I have in mind ancient systems of memory and recall as they have been described in the seminal work of Frances Yates (1966), To make this point, I often use the phrase "mind imprint'· interchangeably with "mindset." It is worth noting that "looking back" is the inverse of nostalgia: it is about a finding (of God). not a mode of loss--even ir that finding has itself receded into the past. For this reason, the imperative is to grasp what is a form of transcendental self-exposure at the heginninK, I speak or a back­ward gklnce: it seems to me too that. like the poets I write about. one can only ever east a glance from one's standpoint in the present. That is to say. from a religious scene that is nothing if not historical.

It is for this reason that the two terms I usc to describe Kabir's funda­menwl insight. viz .. "miracle" and "violence," are flol taken from the onto­logical lexicon of Kabir himself. The first term is theological. although it is linked lor me with the critique of theology in Spinoza and Lessing, It is a reference to the event of the coming or God to man; it does not refer to miracles that guarantee the historical transformation to be wrought by a particular religion, The second term is taken from the wide array or work on violence and counter-insurgency. exemplified by the writings of Gyan Pandey. Both terms enable us to place Kabir in the ruins of the modern, Thi:. is where we see him practice his peculiar lorm of "living death." I argue that this form of "living death" is of millennial significance. It harks back to what ( will describe as the death-rite of the Kapalika, is prefigured in Dnyaneswara. finds echoes in Tukaram. and helps provide today the ground before politics ror the dalit subject on the cusp of political society, Kabir's '-'living death" takes place at the luminous center of an age-old tradition, It i:, here, at the hollowed out core of the social world that Kabir's God.. his abstract "Ram" dares to rejoin violence with tenderness (kautuka), ardor (cada), affection (avad) and lightness (sadh)·-··to use Marathi terms irradiated with the spirit of Dnyaneswara, Namdeva, Kabir. Eknath and Tukaram, The critical labor of this book works between terms used by the poets themselves and concepts taken rrom historical religion (such as "miracle" and "vio­lence"), The challenge is to conceive or a "logic" that can account at once for the philological specificity of the fonner and the historical provenance of the latter. It seems to me that this is one way or rejuvenating our vernacular "science," modes of thinking that perdure in marginalized tongues,

All around us there are signs or that one great monument of our modernity.

x Preface

which is rcally the idol, the eidolon of Out . d·ffi . h . , In I ercnce·-we pnde ou 1

on avmg set up an "inner world" ofreli io '. rse yes protect, preserving DUll desires and wills

g fr:::'ha~ w~ can raise barners to and our very own worlds, with our deities at th wlthm so as to ~ut into effect ments. From such an indifferent int . . e chenter of these Willed environ~

·11 d enonty t at merely puts' I WI e worlds and proceeds to mak d" . III P ace our outer, let us try to turn aw e IstmctlOns between the inner and the

body, not just the empowe%~~;~I~e~~It~res of mirac.le that .tell the whole directedness (a "non-indifference") It • ow to prachce an Inward other· away from precisely the "turning i~war~'~~ seem strange that I seek a turn having achieved in the Indo-Isla· .11 h~t we congratulate ourselves on . mle mt enmum before ad' I' Ism. We think of this as the great tide of 0 ' '" n since co oOlal· the south in the seventh centur and bro: pul~~ religIOSity that came from bhakti was only a placing of cast~ at th e ~an lers of caste and creed. But that understood itself in the reg d e~e~ttl,atthevery~eartofaHinduism religion. Bhakti turned the barrie:: ol?ln;i~~ a~d Judaism as a historical a cordon around the inner region of heart aw mwa.rd ~nd set them up as as the bhakti religion of the so I that .' We unthlllkmgly celebrate this Hindu~sm, rendering it modern ~lld enlire£~;enated an effete an~ legalistic severe III this myth of a Reformation in J-li~du~ed, or at least we like to per­away from this religion in order to turn towar~mh T~day we ma~ ~ave to !.urn to ~ut a .new comportment in place. It is to th "t e "orm ~f poht.lcs reqUired as It reSides in our historical me d e f~ct (gothl) of this furn away wills that. I dedicate the following :;:s.an Continues to operate within our

A verSion of Chapter 2's discussion of the K . explicit reference to issues of "ra" d' ~pah~a where I make more Question of a Prehistory" in C ce d an mdlgenelty, appeared as "The , . ' Jyanen ra Pandey ed "$ b It C' .

Special Issue of Interventions 10'3 (N b ., u a ern Itlzens," presented at the second conferen~ on ~~~:~a~r .200,~): 285-·302. It was first ies," at Emory University during December 7_.t;tn Citizens and their I-listor~ Lal, Gyan Pandey and Laurie Patton for th' .2007. I am grateful to Ruby

Chapter 6's analysis of Rajwade's "G elr co~ments on that occasion. appeared in essentially the same fo . r~mmar for th: Dnyaneswari has Aquil eds, History in Ihe Vernaclila/~~~hi' a~tha Chatterjee and Raziuddin read at a con terence at the Centre for Studieer~a~en.t Bla~k, 2008). It was during December 28-30 '004 1 t t h kS

III Social SCiences, Kolkata. , - . wan 0 t an S'b .. B dh

engagement with the paper. I aJI an opadhyay for his

A fragment of Chapter 4 appeared as "Th A . and Canonicity in Indian Modernit "in M se nomal~ of Ka?lr: Culture and A'a Sk' . ~" y,. . S. PandJan Shall Mayaram

J y ana ~s, Subaltern Studies: Volume XII (Delh·' p' 2005). I. ennanent Black,

I would like to thank Rajkamal Prakash' . . granted to translate large scctions of Hazari ra:~d t~ ~er";1,lsslon. gracefully

This is the place to make note of some Old~r d . Wlvedl s Kablf~book. Ganesh Joshi, Mccnakshi MUkhcrJ'e R' r B ebts. R. D. Thakur, Chandra

c, 1m I hattacharya, Ania Loomba,

f

Preface xi

Suvir Kaul, Soumyabrata Choudhury, Shiva Kumar Srinivasan. But also with gratitude Aamir Mufti, Colleen Lye, Tim Watson, Benedict Robinson and Janaki Bakhle; Joy Hayton; Dorothea von Miicke, Rob Nixon. Gyan Prakash, E. Valentine Daniel, Homi Bhabha and John Archer. Ram Bapat and Gobind Purushottam Deshpande, Maharashtra's most eminent thinkers, graciously agreed to look at early versions of Chapter 6 and a fragment of what is now Chapter 9. Meera Kosambi provided early encouragement and help. Anne Feldhaus, Lee Schlesinger and Eleanor Ze\liot were always enthusiastic and forthcoming in the early stages of this project. Dattatreya Deshpande helped bring the three·volume set of the Mangalurkar·Kelkar Dnyandel'i from Mumbai. I am grateful to Gauri Viswanathan for her great generosity and encouragement. The American Institute for Indian Studies, Chicago. provided a generous fellowship for a year in Pune in 2004 .. 5. Peter Manning made it possible for me to take that year off; he and my other colleagues at the English department, Stony Brook, and Martha Smith in the Chair's office, have been untiringly supportive; Nancy Lannack at the ISSO ensured that my documentation passed muster; the uncomplaining and always courteous staff at Melville Library's Inter-Library Loan Oll\ce made available the US's vast holdings of Indian literature. The circle of my uncles and aunts, Ashok and Jaya Chandorkar, Sumati and Srikant Tambt; Madhu­sudan and Jyoti Wakankar, Neelima Wakankar, Jagdish and Suman Srikhande, my grandparents Rajaram and Shantabai Wakankar, and my sister Radhika suspended over this work the veil of their sympathetic magic; the much lamented Srihari Khanwelkar would have read this with interest and openness; Sunanda and Satish lIulyalkar, Madhusudan and Virna] Hulyalkar, Vibha and Vaman "Chandu" Kale, Srinivas Wakankar. Nishith "Gundya" Dadhich, and Srikant "Kantya" Botre extended friendship and conversation. Sitaram Wakankar. man of many pseudonyms, remained a perennial source of inspiration. Sanjay Krishnan's example as a thinker, writer and friend informs this book in many subtle ways. I want to acknow­ledge here the critical input of Qadri Ismail, Teena Purohit, Sunil Agnani, Nauman Naqvi. Anupama Rao, Chenxi Tang, Ravindran Sri ramachandran, Rajan Krishnan, Jyotsna Uppal, Nermeen Shaikh. Saurabh Dube, Ishita Bannerjee·Dube, Sudipto Sen, Rama and Karuna Mantena. Sanjay Reddy, Aditya Behl, Christian Novetzke, Ruby Lal and Ajay Skaria. A reader who preferred to remain unnamed provided me with the first incisive appraisal of this work. Dipesh Chakrabarty took the time to read and comment on an early version of the last chapter: I am in debt to him for his encouragement and interest at the time. Gil Anidjar read the manuscript with the magnanim· ity and concern that friends know is characteristic of him. The rigor and seriousness of Rajeswari Sunder Rajan's work has served as a constant source of illumination while this book was being written: she has wished this project well from its inception. Gyan Pandey's wisdom and kindness, and the rare privilege of his friendship are for me unexampled in academic life. The philosophical and literary-critical adumbration of "hearsay" as it is

xii Pr~race

attempted here received its first impetus from the work and personal example of Partha Chatterjee and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: the prescn(."C of these two eminent thinkers in Atherican and South Asian intellectual life continues to have worldwide reverberations. This book would not have been possible without the generosity. love and Support of my parents. Gajanan and Neela Wakankar. The book is dedicated to them. Asmita. and Nayantara who arrived lately. continue to remind me of all that connects this work of ten years to the quiet passage of the hour as much as the many scusons gathered in its arc.

Part I

Introduction The question of a prehistory

•

, ,

1 Subalternity at the cusp Limits and openings of the dalit critique

This book tries to imagine what it means to intercept a mode of thinking at the CUSp,1 Its subject is the poetry of three medieval saint-pocts from northern and western India. The work of at least two of these poets, Tukaram (1608-50) and Dnyaneswara (d. 1296) is little known outside India. and is certainly altogether unfamiliar to South Asians who know very little about western India. The key figure in this book, the fifteenth century weaver­poet Kabir (d. 1518) who was a convert to Islam, is known both in the English-speaking and Perso-Arabic world as a mystic poet whose poems arc often placed alongside those of great Sufi poets such as Rumi. In India, Kabir was for long seen as a poet who defied caste and religious distinctions in his impassioned verses; he was taken to be the very embodiment of Indian secu­larism before and after the time of Nehru. Yet the recent history of Kabir, and by the same token Dnyaneswara and Tukaram, requires me to do more in this book than introduce the reader to the writings of these extraordinary poets. For, in the last decade or so a resurgent datit (untouchable) movement has sought to claim for Kabir the status of a dalit god, or a dalit thinker. "Datif" or downtrodden, is how empowered untouchables prefer 10 address them­selves. Kabir's dalitness stems from his "loss of caste" as a weaver, a julaha, but also from his explicit references to caste distinction in his poems.

This resurgence of dalits needs to be understood not just as a major South Asian phenomenon but as an event which bears great affinity with political movements among migrants and indigenes all over the world. A unique feature of these movements is what I will call their "insistent immediacy." Such movements are "insistent" because of their rapid and quite remarkable entry into the political field. More crucially, they deploy their self-recognition as social groups whose specific sense of being rests on a notion of divinity that is "immediately" prior to their historical experience. This experience may be one of having found (God) but it need not take the form of theology per sc. In this book, I will adopt the practice of placing the word "God" in brackets so as to make the point that divinity has receded in the history of religion. (This point about the pervasive "atheism" of mainstream religion could have been made by crossing out the word in every instance. placing it under erasure.) The memory of having-found is for such groups a lesson in a

4 Introduction

kind of primordial generosity, an ancient form of other-directed behavior. Its effect is to instill in tbem an extra-human notion of tenderness that is ever solicitous of their fellow human being. This ethical stance precedes their entry into politics as self-empowered groups, but it nonetheless imbues their actions with a sense of mutual accountability that cannot easily be ex.plained by the schemas of myth, religion and archaic belief to which it is usually ascribed. What is crucial is the anteriority of such an ethical comportment to their political practice. An important concern in this book is the problem of how to write a prehistory of political empowcnnent understood in this sense; it entails an attempt to turn to a lorm of historical experience that, because it involves a conception of the infinite, necessarily resists historiographical recovery.

What could be the motivation to envisage such a form of counter-memory from out of the available historiographical and philological evidence? It arises from the need to understand the often dubious ways in which political empo~erment transpir~s in the electoral arena. One need not necessarily ~oncelv~ of such a prehistory as a corrective to the sometimes alarming polit-1cal chOices these groups make. often in defiance of traditional conceptions ?f ideology. The ambition behind the prehistory attempted in these pages is IOstead to "supplement" the political agenda of such groups with an account of what underlies the idea of the social that is at stake for them. It is my c?nte~tion th~t this primordial ground refers us to a "past" that often escapes hlstonographlCal or theological gestures among these groups themselves. What is needed here, it seems to me. is an awareness that their own sense of c.ommunity and social accountability stems from ancient forms of moral prac­tice that predate the dawn of religion per se. I want to insist that despite the religious Jeanings of stich groups (whether they turn, as in the case of Indian indigenes, known in India as ·'tribals" [see Devy 2006]. and dalits to resurgent Hinduism or Buddhism), their sense of human being in the world is indebted not to religion but to its prehistory. Rather than rcject the findings of the History of Religions. this book works through some of its representative works in order to uncover a prehistory of religious sentiment. The fact that a prehistory of religion can also be a prehistory of contemporary politics is a "co-incidence" this book will examine at length. It will be an integral aspect of my attempt to undo the distinction between the religious and the secular. This book's thcsis is intentionally hyperbolic. For it does not shrink from claiming that the secularization of religion did not happen merely in the modern age. It happened at the moment religions themselves were instituted at some point in the distant past. Moreover. the problem of secularization applies not just to the history of Western but also to the history of non­Western religions, greatly attenuating the distinction between thc two. This explains the persistent attentiveness in this book to the question of antiquity, which has yielded the peculiar feature of Indian mystic speech that I will describe in the next chapter as the instinct for "hearsay."

Let us return to the dalit scene once again. The analyses presented in these

Subalternity at the cusp 5

pages are for the most part in sympathy with t~e work of such contemporary dalit intellectuals as Gopal Guru, Kancha IIhah, Chandrabhan Prasad and Anand Tellumbde who, in a very crucial sense, inhabit the cusp, It is no doubt a truism to say that at a time when the insertion of Indian society into global capital through the workings of the free market !s rapidly u~~erw.ay, ~ore and more hitherto subaltern communities are makmg the tranSitIOn 1Il~0 hnes of mobility, as is evident from the growing mobilizations among dailts and tribals in the electoral scene. "Hitherto subaltern" implies that they formerly had no access to lines of upward mobility; the lack of access to mobility is a minimal description of what it means to be "subaltern." What these formerly subaltern groups now lay claim to is the individuality needed to affinn t.he ceaseless negotiation between community and state that Partha Challel)ee (2006) has described as the basis of "political society." Using the break-up of populations along lines of caste and religion (among other markers of identity) since the colonial census in the late nineteenth century. these group~ play the electoral number game with unpredictable, often alarming.resul~s. II we look at the murkiness of electoral strategy from thc perspective 01 the ideals of democratic emancipation since the French and German Enlighten­ment it would seem as though dalit politics exemplifies a "decline" in civic virtu; common to non-Western democracies. But from the point of view of these groups themselves democracy is an occasion lor what Chatterjee describes as the chance to "give to the empirical form of a population group the moral attributes of a community" (2006: 57). "Insistence" perhaps best describes this affirmation of a protean political will which wavers. depending upon the representational or political stake in question, between claiming a universal or a particular pertinence for dalit identity.

It should be borne in mind that the current insertion of low-caste and tribal communities into empowerment has not etTaced their experience of centuries of caste oppression. By analogy with the prt.--dicament of the tragic hero we might say that these communities work between silence (the horror of c~ste discrimination) and speech (empowerment as caste communities in electoral stakes).2 In other words, we can point to the persistence in con­temporary low-caste politics, of older forms of community that can now be invoked cannily in the new political scene. To think at the cusp or of the cusp is to seek to capture the tumult of this individuation: to catch a lonn of political will on the make. A unique aspect of this movement Of. com­ml.mities across the threshold of disempowerment into empowerment IS that it inverts our presuppositions with regard to the Indian modern. The cri­tique of the Nehruvian account of modernity, a sllspicion with regard to technological progress or central planning and of the relation between the state and the free market, in addition to the recent turn toward vernacular histories in an effort to reverse the homogenizing of linguistic usage in globalization-these. in the most basic terms, have been the guiding p.r~n­ciples of scholarly Indian debate in thc social scienccs and the humanities in the last few dccades. The new dalit and tribal intellectuals are not

, , .1 .J

6 Introduction

unfamiliar with these criticis L . intransigence and critique hav~ m~~ a~~~gs~anJmg tra~i~ions of subaltern modernity What is p~uliar t t~ y. t, em for a ent.cal encounter with

:;:~~ep~~~o~~::w ~~, :~~~~~',~ ~~~i~~~~::~,;~~~~:e;~~si~~a~i:':;~ ~~o~e~ to the,emancipatory goals of the Euro c'an En I, go ,they remain commiUed sometimes endorse the idea of . P hghtenment Not only do they

f an Incessant modernization ( d th r.­re use to take seriously clitiques of the d. an ere ore claim that colonialism itself was a b ~o er~), they can go so far as to it gave them the economic and POI~~:I ~h~:ht\~n1 nonb*brahrnins, since brahmanical dominance. eWI a to reak away from

. Rather than express bemusemcilt at what can sive strain in daHt rhetoric we should I b r appear to be. an oddly regrcs­protest, one that kee s in' '. e.leve, evolve a new Idea of subaltern idea of the future b~th orin;:. t~le daht Idea of the past as well as the dalit Here the notion of "immedia~ :~. turn. ~roTuhlld th~ problem of the present. "im-mediacy" be . y I~ cruCIa . e daht present is a condition of

cause Its ground IS the idea of a d I"t . looking at the world, at history th t' . . a 1 essence. a daht way of that political moment when d : a .IS I? a ve~y .Important sense "prior" to to the historic juncture at Wh~~tSt~:~ec~fY th~l.r Immediate needs. It is prior enter into the ~bjective game ofnumbe~ ;; t. IS or t~at mode. ~f solidarity, pation. (The latter, as we have noted m s at IS es~nt1a1 t.o poittlcal emanci­some of the failed '. . ,~y even entail a dehberate espousal of

projects ot modernity) The form 1 t' h' previous sentences will be easier t d· d u a Ion couc ed m the h 0 un erstan once we break it . t I

:h~~s ~;:s~~~la:~:tC~~:~~~~~~ ~f da daHt m~d~rnity. The first ~:t~~ ;~s~~ subjectivity, The second axis is that n essence; It l~ the basis of a "pure" dalit ized this as th " . of the present. I have already character-

e expelIence 01 the cusp or threshold th h·, movement from out of subalternity b, , . h ' e ex I arating '. , u no Wit oui a recognition f h

prevIOus SOCial constraints remain in lace' '. 0 ow third and potentially most troubli .P. h III th~ n~w dispensatIOn. The ambition into the future. More ~;i:~IS I~ prOjection of daHt desire an?

preoo::up~tion with memory, its claim\n th~se aV:: assume that t~e d~ht

~~:~~~~:: ~~0~~i~::unn~;;c1;~c~~ t~l~n~~rst!~~'h~;ro~~~n~~ ~~~:~~~T occurs in the third version of Schell' , "ure, e term counterclallll' (2000 [1815]" 59) mg s Ages of the World" fragments reversion fr~m th:

s gegen~rf! "c~unter-throw." It refers us to a deliberate

~:~e~e\:;;~;n~~~£~~;:~~i~~S,hh!I~~~~, o~:f;t~r~~~c:~::~:I~I~~o~U~~I~a~~O~ e rea m 0 co-optation pe h f moral compromise and ineluctabl . . ',r aps even 0

lect the ethical instances of the ~acs~n;.~~clty, bwhere sub~ltern gr~)llps neg-

~~~/~~I:~~ fs°~~~~:~:e~~i~a;:~~;ev~:;~~ft~~ b~: t~~~~:~l~ ~:~~:e!~ii~ the popular since the medieval pedod. (C~:p~e:i~ees,entat,',on at the heart.of

ow a empts to proVide

Subalternit), at the cusp 7

a philosophical and literary argument lor this tall into compromise in the form of the emergence in this period of a popular allegorical mindset.)

Dalit energies are therefore "insistent" because they represent a remarkable instance of the process by which communities will themselves into being as communities. Dalit identity is not an inel1, historically neutral and passive form of "existence." Let us stop for a moment and look at that last word more closely. Dalits are thrown out of their way of life as existent beings through the sheer violence of caste: their "existence" is best represented as "ek-sistence," where the prefix "ek-" has the same character of violent expul­sion as it has in the word "ek-static." But in order to avoid the awkwardness of the phrase, let us stay with the word "insistent," which bears a similar connotation while also carrying the added sense of force and intervention. We can attend to this semantic undertow with the help of the following formulation: dalits are thus thrown OUI of their way of life ("ek-sistence") and thrown into politics ("in-sistence"). Now dalit energies are "immediate" because their mode of being is grounded in the immediacy of an absolute, an absolute ground for subjecthood. Both ground and subject have to be under­stood in terms of their specific features, in separation and in relation. Even as dalit energies are insistently on its way, ever in process or pull toward a specific and determinable emancipatory end, dalit subjecthood returns continually to the immediacy of a pure origin. In this sense dalit subjecthood shares in the historical comportment of subaltern communities the world over, in that it dares to inhabit the tumult and tempest at the center, the maelstrom generated by the movement between the primordial "ground" of prehistory and the necessarily objectifying embrace of a historical "subject­hood," It is unfortunate that this prehistory is often read as permanently immured in mysticism, arcana, and occult. What we tend to neglect is this rapid and heady movement from the ground, which exemplifies the insight such groups have into the infinite and the eternal, toward the inevitably limited condition of specific historical subjects. In Chapter 7, I relate this idea of the center to the Platonic account of the khora, which is something like an unlocatable origin prior to the origin of the universe.

My reference to the idea of a "pure" daHt subjecthood may give cause for alarm. We easily assent to the idea that the subject is a locus of action; but one must always proceed to point out that the acting subject works under specific historical and social constraints. To argue for a "pure" subject would seem to fly in the face of our current consensus with regard to the limits and possibilities of human action. The very idea of purity can seem insupport­able, given that subjects act always within certain limits. My point is that the history of subaltern communities offers a remarkable instance of an "immediate" grasp of their own historical essence. This recognition is always prior to the objectifying languages of transcendence in which they will quickly proceed to couch it; it persists until such time as it withstands the lure of religion, nation, or ethnic belonging. The recognition is pure because it is fundamentally transient. It is pure because it is an act of abstraction, a

8 Introduction

glimpse into the abstract, one that will soon be k' . . ways of being in the world Th f fa en up mto more objective

. e memory 0 this abstract i 'd essence is at the heart'bf dalit ex rien '" . an~ pure 1 ea of by the "insistent" pull toward hpe"ol ' ",' bU,ft that e.xpenence IS also marked

.> anea se ~assertlon If d r b" has purity as its ground, dalil action as daHl s. '. a It su lecthood fraught, overdetermined AnOlh f ~bJecthood IS already historical,

. erwayo saymgth' . th dr' are fundamentally compromised b th .. . ~s IS at a Its as subjects but that dalit subjecthood rests y elf insertion mto the realm of politics. accounted for. In short we on a,n essence or,ground that remains to be h ' can no anger remam content 'th .

t c past, for alternative historical accounts of the sub I Wi turnmg to as we discover to our constern'lti 'f a tern past, for that past strophic aspects of our d' ~n IS 0 ten merely a prelude to the cata~

mo enuty Rather than' h f . accounts of the modern in the t'" scarc or alternative understanding of the past that', pas, It IS perhaps time we looked for an Instead, it requires us to develop"n"e

Ol ,acc,esslblje to historical reconstruction,

d ' , w 00 S ant concepts to gra th' d stan mg III the very immediacy w'th h' h . sp IS un er~ some point in the past- -hence th It' w, IC , It ~rocecded to ground itself at h b ' e ascillation III this book 'Ih Ih'd '

1 e a sO'act in Kabir wh,'ch prov,'d ' h WI e I ea ot . es us wit sam th' I'k h of contemporary protest. e 109 let e prehistory

This book revolves around Kabir becaus ' . . , was able to articulate this understa d' ~ hhe alone among daht thlllkers dalits, but this was a wisdom that h: ~ng 0 ~ ~ abstract--~e alone among and communities adopted Kabi b t th q~eat. e ?nly to dahts, Other castes of Hindu tolerance within a H:'d

U ~y saw,m him only an ecumenical idea h ' III U ulllversahsm' Kabir wa '

t em to congratulate themselves 101' th . : s an occasion for were unable to detect the precious I.

el.r

expansive ~ons~ience. And so they latter exceeds any self-aggrandizin~ i~~:I~i~(~:~) 01, sapl~nce in Kabir; the are two aspects to this wisdom grant d' f ance. I,WIII argue that there an insight into the violence innicled

e o~nth~n~< ~y ~abll', to da.lils; it impli.es a mode ofamrmation a form ofb I' flh ,[ It a one, but It also entails

If • e Ie at embraces the world' 't t d ness. the previous comportmenl is one of 'k .. .1Il I S en er-i~sight into the abyssal nature of violence S t~:tlcls~n ~n.d :usp~cion !it is an discovery (it is an insight into divinity) K)\,' ~ I~t~.r IS a stance of JOY and lor this reason: this was the luminous hea;t ~/~. a It.e~ the cel~ter precisely saw and Il'ul!cd "R "I Istoneal expenence that he

, am, w 10 was not the Ram of' , . To pre~empt the central thesis of this book' h mal,nst~eam Hmdu r.ehgion. pages is that Kabir's wisdom was 'b'l w at I Will tlY and prove III these I f access! e to dalits alone bec' h

tie Irst to c~mprehend the co-existence 0/ the ex erie ' '. ~l~se e was expenellce oj f'iolence in dai/r life Brah ' h P nC{ oj dlVlntty and rhe gled to assert their idea ofGod"'-~the 11:IIIS

ave of course known and strug­its cause. And non~brahmins (th y y eve~ .have martyred themselves for but lill'll! thc lowest rung o'f theo~:~~n~:~~llItles who are not untouchable

violence. B~t it is the assertion of this book ther; dill? ~elJ ha~e experience? enced the slIIgular coexistence of mira I ua . ~ Its a one. will have expen­was Kabir's gift to the c e an VIO ellee. ThiS understanding m,

Slibalternity at the Cll~p 9

I should hasten to add that it is a feature of present~day dalit thinking that it is often negligent. in the very pull of its counterclaim on the future, of the specific ways in which Kabir inaugurated not just a religion lor dalits but a new idea of religion, As we will see in Chapter 5, when the dalit critic, Dr. Dharmvir. denounced in the late 1990s the "brahmanical." high Hindu account of Kabir elaborated in the modern Hindi literary~eritical tradition, he tacitly endorsed the lattcr's deification of the saint~poet. The rcason this dalit intervention failed is because it uncritically affirmed, despite itsc1L thc high Hindu idea of "popular religion" in the work of the llindi thinker, Hazariprasad Dwivedi. There. individual spiritual seeking was lirst elabor­ated in the 1940s as the locus of social protest, providing the ideological template for the notion of an ecumenical Hinduism capable of embracing dissent. The power and the danger underlying Dwivedi's argument was in ib running polemic against Indian Islam. to whose radical social message he oppost-d Hinduism's freedom to believe, which he argued can eo~exist with an affirmation of caste distinctions. Setting aside Kabir's relation to Islam as a convert. Dwivedi argued that the saint*poet should be understood as the very instance of what Hinduism had to olfcr to the challenge of Islam. The prob­lem is that in taking issue with Dwivedi's idca of a spiritual Hinduism, Dharmvir ignored thc peculiar way in which low~caste philosophers such as Kabir "turned away" from such spiritualism by recognizing the historical truth of upper~eastc violence. Such a misreading implies a severance between radical medieval traditions and contemporary caste dissent (all too willing. it would seem. to embrace the dominant Hindu frame) that has alarming impli­cations for the politics of religion, For. the last decade has borne witncss to the increasing complicity of dalits and tribals in organized upper~caste violence of a genocidal tenor against Indian Muslims.

We need to bear in mind, for this reason, the simultaneity of subaltern complicity and subaltern emancipation in contemporary Indian politic~ This is another instance of the dalit counterclaim of historical ambition onto the future. The severance of the tie between subalternity and emancipation, one that radical historians as well as radical dalits would need to examine with renewed critical rigor and skepticism. is a sobering effect of the transform­ations brought into play by political society. For in some sense, subaltern communities will already have pushed away the insight into the violence at the heart of the social (they will have "forgotten" the searing. unsettling quality of what it rcvealed to them over the ccnturies) and moved on, using the languages of empowerment made available to them by political society. But because that insight was always close to them. the very mode of their denial of this insight in actual political practice implies that we can detect a furrow, a trace, a shadow of that older practical reason in the very moment of the individuation of their political will.

With this idea of complicity in mind, we can now turn to the new idea of religion implicit in the poetry of Kabir. What are its origins? What implications docs it havc for our understanding of the vcry relation between

10 Introduction

philosophy and religion? If the dalit critique in its moment of counterclaim does not hesitate to ally itself with all that is darkly ominous about con­temporary religion, how is it that we can nonetheless find in it an instance of a new.concePtion of religion, one that is prior to historical religion as we kno,,": It? (We should perhaps retain the word "religion," if only because it desc.nbes so. well. th: pull toward the future that unbinds social groups from t~e Idea of mfimty III the past, binding them anew to the darker underpin­mngs of popular struggles.) I spoke of Kabir's Ram as our clue into the prehistory of the popular. I described this insight as the recognition of the coexistence of miracle and violence. Both those terms of course need some explanation. By "miracle" I do not mean a specific supernatural event that can serve as a theological proof for the existence of God. Miracle is understood in this book as a mark of temporal immediacy: it is the moment when a poet such as Kabir has an insight into the nature of divinity, into the t~nderness with which it is p~ssible to embrace the world. Conversely, by Vlolence I do not mean the kind of agony inflicted on Christian martyrs, wh~re suffering can itself serve as a mark of insight into the divine. The notIOn of violence used in this book is indebted to historical studies of violence visited on subaltern groups. This violence, which is sudden, unprecedented, devasL:lting- anonymous in origin but singular in its choice of victim--is therefore also an instance of temporal immediacy. What is c?mmon to bot~ miracle and violence understood in this sense is that they smgle out a partICular human being, a nesh-and-blood instance of suffering, who manages to hold in one idea their nearly unthinkable co-incidence This holding t.o~et~er does not found a new religion, uphold martyrs.. ra~ify a creed. It IS III Itself a schema for how to live a life, how to time the time of on~'s life .. 'nasmuch as Kabir is able to hold these two instants together his philosophical stance can be seen as a schema of time that speaks of two simultaneous origins in miracle and violence, rendering freedom and unfreedom, God and death as "equally primordial." rt is a token of Kabir's insight into the "equiprimordial" basis of time.

2 Moral rite before myth and law Death in comparative religion

What then is the dalit idca of the past? And what would be the link between that dalit past and the task of a daHt historiography? How can one support the claim that a history of what grounds dalit politics is not recoverable within historiography? Let us turn here to another instance of such an insight into time as Kabir's, one which could also suggest for us a new under­standing of religion in its moment of institution. It will provide us with a picture of dalit antiquity, but a picture severed from any ties with the merely archaic. Here I have recourse to a relatively recent attempt to write a prehistory of the popular. The attempt yielded a generative account of the possible links between Kabir and earlier traditions of heterodoxy and radicalism in the Indic seene such as that of tantra and yoga. I am referring to the work of David Lorenzen. I want to show how Lorenzen opened up the very idea of prehistory in ways that can no longer be limited to the historical bases of caste dissent or protest. The uncovering of these bases thwugh archival and ethnographic means, exploring the earliest traces of iow-caste dissent in the past while also inhabiting the life-worlds of the present-day lollowers of Kabir, the Kabirpanthis, has been the basis of his wide-ranging oeuvre.

We know from an early and justly celebrated work by Lorenzen that the basis of Shaivite (Shiva-worshipping) Kapalika belief lies somewhere in the magico-religious past of lodic antiquity. The Kapalika is of interest because the visibility of the marks ofmouming he bears has some kinship to "race" as a violent ~rchival and textual inscription of the body. This is already very different from caste, whose markings range from the open body to something that is locked into hidden mechanisms of habit and character (caritra). To mark as low-casle is to mark the untouchable not merely as a being that lives and dies like other beings in the world of karmic cycles. It is to mark him or her in the abject loneliness of dying itself. It is almost as though the mask of death had been lifted to reveal the unmasked face overcome with a tragic yearning to speak and to be born again, to bring to speech an incendiary, silent rage. Keeping apart the histories of slavery and caste, but yet bringing them together within a kind of infinitesimal proximity, the Kapalika is the figure of a lonely, horrific dcath that has left no trace. This lonely, vanished

.~

!

12 Introduction

experience is prior to the politics of "race" and caste: and this priority draws us again to the question of ~ prehistory.

The Kapalikas are so called because they could be easily recognized as mendicant bearers of the bowl shaped like a kapala (skull), and for the other signs of death and profanation that they exhibited on a daily basis. They themselves did not make the historical transition to the ethnographic state in colonialism, which specialized in the enumeration of marginal practice in cults.. sects or castes; they do not survive today as a living tradition but nonetheless give us some clue into the vestigial links between the heterodox and the subaltern. providing evidence of the medieval bases of modern caste dissent. But if (as we will sec) the Kapalikas' origin itself is moot, what can we say of the later history of caste resistance Lorenzen seeks to uncover here and in his work on the latter-day Kabir sects? Among the more inscrutable practices of the Kapalikas recorded in the wide range of texts Lorenzen surveys staning out from late antiquity. is the Great Vow. the Maha-vrala. I take the liberty of quoting at length Lorenzen's discussion of this !lmta.

The Maha-vrata penance of the Visnu-smrti and other law books bears an unmistakable resemblance to the observance of the Kapalikas. These ascetics lived in the forest, wore loincloths or animal skins. carried a khal~'anga [a club made of shards of skulls] and a skull bowl. obtained their lood by begging, and polluted those with whom they came into con­tact. Given the pervasive tantric motif of the identity or conjunction of opposites. the relation betwcen the penance of the law books and the vow of the Kapalikas is not inexplicable. The Kapalikas, we suggest. adopted this vow precisely because it was the penance for the most heinous of all crimes, the killing ofa Brahmin. They were at the same time the holiest of all ascetics and the lowest of all criminals. As in the case of the [untouch­able] dombi (and the Kapalin) of Kanhapada's songs, that which is lowest in the realm of appearance becomes a symbOl for the highest in the realm of the spirit. Furthermore, if the Kapalikas were in reality already guilt­less, the performance of this penance would result in an unprecedented accumulation of religious merit and hence of magical power (siddhi).

The paradoxical identity of Kapalika saint and [Brahmin-killing] sin­ner finds its divine archetype in the curious myth of the beheading of the god Hrahma by Shiva. This also introduces the essential ingredient of Shaivism which is lacking in the law book penance. [- --J

Every ritual has a divine model or archetype, and the penance Shiva performs is the model of the Mahavrata penance for the killing of a Brahmin. [ ... ]

Although the myth is religiously prior to the legal prescription, the historical precedence is uncertain. The law books are in general much older than the [mythic] Puranas, but both classes of works are based on earlier sources which are now lost. ... The relative priority of the

Death in comparative religion 13

Shaivitc myth and the Kapalika ascetics themselves is also uncertain. Did the Kapalikas invent the myth in order to provide a divine model for their ascetic observation, or did they model the observance on the myth? The evidence is inconclusive.

(Lorenzen 1991 [1972]: 76,,80)

I place this extended quotation from Lorenzen's book here because it describes what is to my mind a momentous temporal crossroad (disciplinary. historical. theological, and political all at once) at which high Hinduism and the esotericism of tantra branch out, but which is more critic'lily a place where both law and myth as two possible origins of caste are calIed into question. Tanlra itself can be understood here as the intuition (widespread in Indic tradition as a whole but rarely addressed except in tantric moments) that there is in I~"lct no ethical basis for caste in myth or law. Caste has no origin but is itself a series of descriptions of the caste subject that base themselves on the notion of a permanent atonement for an original profan­ation. a tcrrible encroachment of the sacred. And by the same token what we know as Tantrism is itself the point of absolute incommensurability ·,-which is paradoxically the point of total commensurability, and the supposed basis of thc caste-transcending reach of Ilinduism-- ·between the highest of the high and the lowest of the low. between the "holiest of all ascetics and the lowest of all criminals." Now this is of course a time-tested formula that virtually encapsulates Hindu ecumenicism, which is the idea that Hinduism is in essence a radical assertion of the will against religious codes and doctrine. and that for this reason this religion will always have been conscious of the genuine godliness of those who stand on the lowest rungs of the social ladder. We will encounter this myth in its most rigorous lormulation in our discus­sion of Hazariprasad Dwivedi's book on Kabir in Chapter 4. Worth noting there is the strange affinity between Dwivedi's Hindu ecumenicism and those dalit critics who faulted him lor ignoring Kabir's greater claim for taking dalit thought outside the frame of Hinduism. In making this point these critics merely affirmed the old claim for Hinduism as a religion of tolerance, for they could only repeat what Dwivedi had already stated, that the "lowest of the low is really the highest of the high." The dissimulation of this funda­mental claim of a Hindu universalism-the tendency to ignore their own debt to it -is of course one of the ever present dangers and pitfalls in contemporary dalit thought. as we will have occasion to note.

A similar perplexity awaits us in our reading of Lorenzen. Our task would be to understand caste as something whose origins in practice are perhaps earlier than the ethic ofkarma (wherein one is born into caste,jatl). But let us postulate some point in the past at which caste will have been instituted. Here the story of the vow (vrata) is a useful memory aid. We can speculate that it denotcs a sacrifice which is at once a killing and a penance; the murder is so unutterably profane that it must be brought quickly back by means of the penance to the realm of the sacred. But the sacrifice (killing and penance)

I -I-e

14 Introduction

itself is a fiction; it exists only in the realm of the mythico-Iegal. It follows that the bringing together of the sacred and the profane, the high and the ~ow is hardly a ~atter orrec?nciliation; this bringing together is perpetually m process, leavmg the co~nlct between those opposites very much in play. ThiS would of course reqUIre us to question the very ide;t that religion is the "identity or conjunction of opposites." It could be argued that much of Eliade's work on religion (which Lorenzen cites at the end of the passage w: have read), and in particular his work on yoga and tantra, is based on a mistaken understanding of Nicholas of eusa's idea of the co-incidence of many vectors of prayer with one locus of divinity that is itself hidden (de Certeau 1987: 11-12). Nicholas referred us not to the reconciliation of these vectors but to an incessant plurality from within the gaze of the divine, which is itself hidden.

Lorenzen himself is committed to the recovery of radical tendencies in modes of popular practice that predate and yet go on to hold up the domin­ant philosophical and ethical understanding of action in the Indic scene. In the instance of the passage above, he is undecided about the priority of myth to observance. Understood as a dilemma, Lorenzen's indecision is easily attended to by prioritizing either the tale or the custom----- which is to say, by assimilating it, and by that token the Kapalikas themselves to archaic Shaivi.s~, or to the archaic understood as originally ordered by Shiva­worship. But a deeper and more momentous crossroad may underlie this textual forking of ways. We should remember that the passage in Lorenzen is first about a death and then about a penance. It is therefore a passage that places moral practice at center stage. Now what is moral practice if not the art of dying for another's death, the distinction between one's own life and another's death, the possibility of an afterlife as a way of expiating for one's role in another's death? One could argue that moral techniques are fine-tuned at the threshold of their future incorporation into religion, or prior to their "ethicization" in religious prescription. The anthropologist and philosopher of religion, Gananath Obeyesekere, follows Weber in defining "ethicization" a.s the point at which "a morally right or wrong action becomes a religiously right or wrong action" (2002: 75). Here is one account of the institution of religion. This happens when moral art is retroactively rendered as "religious," overlooking the very relation established in earlier traditions between life as lived toward-death and the act of dying for another.

It is here that the vow of the Kapalika can help us imagine a singular death in a radically different way. We could argue that the disquisition on death implicit in the practice of the Kapalikas is an instance of a low-caste mi~d.set .on its ~ay from myth to law. opening up a chasm in the path of ethlclzatlOn. ThiS too is subalternity at the cusp, but one which is at once the cusp of death and of religion. For, one can wcll imagine that the Kapalikas embraced death (exile and austerity, the dread visuality of the marks of death on their bodies) as an atonement for another's death. Like the grief of the headhunter which we have tended since Montaignc to explain away as

Death in comparath'e religion 15

cannibalism. their manti practicc of atonement for killing another human being may well have been "ethicized" (written o.u~, eclipsed, push.ed away), which is to say postulated retroactiveJ.}" as the killmg of a brahmm. Wh.ere once there was mourning for a friend (for the role one plays, the persecution one imposes on oneself~ for his death), thcre was now penance for the death of an enemy. Where once there will have been desire for the friend, there was now fear as the basis of caste hierarchy. In a truly violent origination of 'ustice as religion, the aporia of "how to mourn" (dukha) in aboriginal moral ~rt was turned into the dilemma of "how to atone" (prayascita) in myth and ritual, and was thereby made to serve as an alibi for caste (sec OJivelIe 2?05: 174---6). For, could one not argue that when we render "dukha" as "sufferlng" following established philosophical tradition in Buddhism and Hinduism, we push away yet again the prehistory that conne~ts "dukha" to .mo~rning? It is this history of an original moral practice ailled not to retnbuttve but to melancholic justice in vanished cultures of mourning, that has left a trace in Lorenzen 's ~ccounl of the KapaJikas. The point is that that other history of practice is not available except as an already postulated "ethiciz,ation" of deatb at the intersection of myth and law.

What are the lessons that we can derive from this historic superseding of moral art by a religious ethic? We will first need to shed more light on the notion of "melancholic justice." Though religious insight is often credited with an understanding of the nature of human comportment in the face of death, I would argue that it does not give us a sense of how death nece~s.itates a moral. or more strictly speaking a pre-ethical stance of aC\:ountablhty to other human beings. Religion in its historical form tends to neglect the per~ ennial question at the heart of any "ontological" inquir~. This ·'ont.ologic~I" question is: what is the relation between the singular history that IS my hfe and history in general? Without denying the importance of the study of religion, it is no longer possible for us to avoid the unpleasant fact that religion itself is often unable to locate itself outside history i~ the general sense: this means that it continues to ignore the problem of the smgular death experienced by a particular person. Now, religion is adept at. providing~ gloss on death in general. But when it comes to the unique death It seems cunousl.y indifferent. There lies the individual on the verge of death, but an we hear IS

the noise of custOill and usage. This is true even if the final end of a custom such as public burial or cremation is to return the body to the earth, where the latter is understood as the origin and end of individuality itself, not just an individual in death. What is lacking in religion in general is therefore a struc­ture of accountability, which is always more than conscience and good actions, morc than an ethic. H is from Immanuel Levinas that we have learned to ask this qucstion of" "responsibility" before and beyond religion, but also before and beyond philosophy. A believer might well voice a dissenting note by saying, "My own f(mn of bclicr docs not necessarily adhere to the tenets of my religion in its larger ex:prcssion." But such a dis~v?,:"al in mere terms of conscicnce cannot outweigh thc shccr onus of responSibility. The latter has all

t 6 Introduction

the qualities of a relentless "persecution" by the other to whom I am respon­sible. This persecution i.s not retributive; it is as we noted earlier, entirely "melancholic." Were responsibility to succeed in casting off any vestige of complicity for the other's death, mourning would come to an end. Such an absolution is unthinkable in the very structure of responsibility, which is interminable and relentless in its haunting. One could well compare it to the eternal return of the self-same traumatic memory.

I am generalizing across cultures here. in large part because the colonial experience has been definitive. Philosophically and theologically, Hindu nationalists see Hinduism as a historical religion much in the same way as Christianity has understood itself in the aftermath of Hegel. When we respond as students of Hinduism to their genocidal programs by pointing out that Hinduism has a history, or when we draw attention to religious amity in the past, we perhaps weaken our case. For the idea of history has been so thor­oughly internalized in Hindu nationalism since the epoch of anti-colonial nationalism that to make a historical argument against it is redundant. As a religious movement. it is nothing ifnot ideological. historical, and committed to the European idea whereby nations must plot themselves on a scale of spiritual and material progress. Its impulse is to demand from the West a recognition of its claim to speak for the Indian nation, a claim it sees as having been denied in the colonial and postcolonial period bec.:'luse of the West's inability to understand Hinduism from outside a Western frame, from within Hinduism's own terms. It is with this impressive wherewithal. fullv conversant with science, Vedanta and the critique of Western Orientalisn;, that it proceeds to slaughter Indian Muslims under the very eye of the state. The event of this slaughter always appears retributive (it is always in answer to a recent occasion where "Hindus" have been killed); but the fact remains that Hindu nationalism's basic premise is one of restitution. It is a kind of hidden Zionism which argues that history has already attested to the Hindu's displacement from his own land in the long period of "foreign" empires in India. Indian Muslims who chose to remain in India rather than flee to Pakistan after Partition. must not prevent the rightful restitution of thc Hindu to India. It is not hard to see how this argument is relentlessly "histor­ical." It would seem as though the idea of religion here is not only thoroughly comprised by its association with a long historical past marked by collective misfortune; religion here is taken as the ground for the possibility of a Hindu resurgence along the lines of technology, modernization and global capital. It is the strangest of paradoxes that the academic study of Hinduism, which responds to this specter by arguing for a complicated historical account of the past, is unablc in its very historicism to take into account this idea of history implicit in Hindu nationalism. We are unaware that this is what makes Hinduism a historical religion; we neglect to take into account its historicity.

Now what if we were to take another tack with regard to the problem of historical religion? What if we tried to argue that religion must give way to philosophy, must surrcnder its idiom. its intuitions, its inner struggle to the

Death in comparative religion 17

persistence of a secular as oppose.d to ~eligious ~o~e of questioning? What if we responded to the Hindu natlonahsts by pomtmg out that they do not philosophize, that they know philosophy ~erely as so man~ paraph.rased doctrines and schools, so that the only genume challenge to Hmdu natIOnal­. m is the cultivation of philosophical rigor? Can we move seamlessly from a ~istoricism such as that of the Hindu nationalists, in which religion is kept in place uncritically, to philosophy? It is with something of a shock that we find a similar failure in the secular realm of "ontology." We turn to the latter because it is self-avowedly the most radical attempt we know in philo~ophy to understand the loneliness of a death. I have in mind the redoubtable m~t~nce of a philosophical critique of historicism and b?, the same token reilglon, which is Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (Heldegger 1996 [1927]). In the simplest terms this text represents Heidegger's attempt to rea.rient r,:~igious notions of death on the basis of the philosophical understandmg of Impos­sibility" implicit in Aristotle. I need hardly add that the text's extremely ~ne­grained movement between religious and philosophical concepts ma~es It. an absolutely essential jXlint of reference for any attempt to go beyond hlstoncal

religion. It is worth recalling that the logical paradox that "one cannot die one's

own death" makes the problem of death a key paradigm in Heidegger's priv­ileging of "ontology" in that text. The problem for us, h?wever, is how ~o forestall (if only analytically) that momentous reorientatIOn whereby phil­osophy here reMinscribes the religious vocabulary of death in the interests of ontological rigor, using religious terms ~uch as "anxiety" by ~edef~?ing. t~em in existential terms. I do not mean to Imply that we must save rehgIOus terms from philosophy. But does the ontological frame, guided by thc. a~bi­tion that philosophy in its ontological moment must surpass and aSSImIlate religion, necessarily yield that insight into the singular exper.ience of death that we are seeking? What if one were to argue that what IS exceeded by ontology is not merely religion, but religion in its own. assimilatiOl~ at its inaugural moment of pre-existing traditions of m~ral ~Ite an~ habit? Thc point is that a major reversal such as Heidegger's re-mscnbes phil?~op~lCally the religious vocabulary of death but only after the ~oment of elhlclzatlO~ of moral practice into religion, only after a moral flte has been pushed mto history to become an ethic at the level of a "world religion:: It was Derrida who told us in the luminous pages of his book, Aporias (Dernda 1993), of the need to question Heidcgger's distinction betwecn an aut~entic uD(je:stal~ding of death along ontological lines and our physically, SOCially and ~Istoflcally (and therefore religiously) attested modes of dying. There, Dernda asked: what if there is onlv this vulgar, everyday mode of dying which is yet unique to every individual in her death? . '

From our point of view, we will need to go a step turther, departmg here from the account of everyday dying in Heidegger and its critique in Derrida. It is not just that Heidegger attempts here (as Derrida shows with u?equ~lled gentleness) to denigrate everyday modes of dying, corrupted as they mvanably

18 Introduction

are by religious custom, by describing them as vulgar, indifferent forms of action, and then proceed1\. to extol instead the resolutc stance one would adopt toward an "authentic" dcath. The problem is that the very separation favored by Heidegger of the ontological understanding or death from the social history of dying is premised on a prior assimilation of moral to religious action, one that presupposes the notion of religion as ethicized rite. This has the effect of bringing philosophy and theology, Christianity and metaphysics closer and not apart, dcspite I Ieidegger's own assertions to the contrary. Reversing the Heideggerian formulation, one might say: it Is not religion that presupposes and requires philosophy; it is philosophy thai requires and pre­supposes religion as ethicization. With the result that just as there is always history at the heart of religion, there is always historical religion at the heart of philosophy. We do not find here, either in lleidegger or Derrida, an aa;:ount of a singular death prior to history or religion, before historical religion. Ifmoral rite and habit is lost to religion (reduced to a mere vestige in it), it is also lost to "ontology" when it seeks to supersede religion. What is more, in "ontology" we encounter a double loss and a double assimilation of moral habit prior to religion. (I have been putting "ontology" in quote;, thus far so as to distinguish the Hcideggerian notion of ontology from the history of philosophical ontology in general, since his account can be seen to encompass that tradition and bring it to crisis.)

What then does ethicization entail? Let us follow Obeyesekere, in whose thought there is a perennial return to the Weberian link betwcen religions as "theodicies" and notions of death. It would appear that a religion in its inaugural moment takes the form of a system defined around the limits and possibilities of human existence, a system seeking in the main to understand the experience of death. The latter was central to Weber's lifelong research into the changing history of leben~fuhrung, the deliberative conduct of life (see Hennis 1988). The theme of suffering (dukha) in "world religions" such as Buddhism is for this reason recognizable as a foundational religious concept one that helps "comprehend" death by placing it at the intersection of myth and law, lodged in practice and precept as the originating point of a new ethic. If what transpired earlier with the Kapalika was a lived philosophy, a mode of conducting oneself in the world that followed the pattern of a thought, what ensued was its assimilation and superseding by religion, work­ing from concepts generated by a new religious ethic. In this respect. the assimilation of the older notion of dukha as mourning by "habit" (both rite and garb for the Kapalika, as we saw) to dukha as an ethic of suffering-··-·here religion exceeds philosophy,,--in our current aa;:ount of ancient religious thinking needs to be looked at more closely. for this is exactly congruent (if in reverse) with the more recent attempt exemplified in Heidcgger, to assimilate the religious idea of "anxiety" as dread to an ontological notion of "anxiety" as the fundamental possibility unto death of existence itself-here philosophy surpasses religion. Now what is arguably at stake in Heidegger himself is an extraordinary reworking of Hcgel's Christology. To take just

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J)eath ill comparative religion 19

one example among many, witness his recurrent usc or words that are vari­ations on the idea of a "falling" into flesh; except that for Heidegger death is already presaged in everyday worldly goals in that there is always the incalculable chance that those goals may rail awry. What interrupts everyday life and what comes at the end of life arc both unpredictable; we fall into the neglect of the ineluctable decay of our world, as we do at the end of our life. But it is in the falling itself that the meaning of being, as well as the decisive break from this fall that inallgllrate~ a new turn in history, it is here that these central indices of "ontology" (i.e. meaning, decision and history) disclose themselves.

I provide this summary here with some impunity. There is no substitute for a dose and patient reading of Beillg and Time. My point if> to highlight in what we have seen above an astonishing congruence as though in a camera obscura. one where Western and non-Western, or "philosophical" and "religious" modes of analyzing death find themselves reflected unto each other in our modern epoch. On the one hand, there are the "world religions" in the way we understand them today. where it is a question of death as such abstracted from the custom and ritual that frames it, distanced from the moral rite that originated in the living philosophy of the Kapalika. By this token, we cannot reduce Hindu or Buddhist notions of death to their legal or customary frame; we have recourse invariably to Hindu or Buddhist "scrip­ture," which in the case of Ilinduism would imply turning, quite correctly, to the idea of death in the Vedas and the Upanisads. On the other hand, there is the Judeo-Christian crux of the "death of Jesus," abstracted as it is in Hegel (and in f-1eidegger who attempts to surpass Hegel here, but is working broadly from within the same tradition) from the very distinction between the spiritual and the fleshly typical of theology. More strictly, we might say that it is abstracted from abstraction itself. For what is common to both regardless of whether one privileges religion and the other philosophy, is the "transcen­dentalization" of death, severing it from everyday forms of self-conduct. We can now see how fruitless the attempt has been to adjudicate philosophical boundaries with the assumption thai "the West has its philosophy, the East its religion." For death is understood in both through the lived world but also always above it as the horizon of transcendence-for is not a transcendental idea of death the goal of abstraction in either case? Whereas what transpires in the case of the Kapalika is the worldly act of mourning for a death one may have played a role in. With the Kapalika we are inside the world; we are pitched into the interior crypt of mourning. For his grief is nothing less than the inner kernel of yoga and tantra, their perduring secret. to be suborned for all time in the grand schemas of Buddhism and Hinduism. Our present~day dalit Buddhism and dalit Hinduism in so far as they remain negligent of the Kapalika, would appear to merely rehearse that ancient foreclosure.

It is almost as though the problem of pre-ethical tmdition~ those that have been pushed away to make room for religious or philosophical eoncept~ exceeds the very distinction between Western and non-Western religion,

20 Introduction

Western and non-Western philosophy. There must then be something prior to the contest of religions aftd philosophical nationalities since the nineteenth century. for one thing, it must work at an angle to what attracts us in "non­Western religions," which is where religion appears to have replaced phil­osophy, promising to heal and save. Conversely, this something prior to the very divide between our religion and theirs must also resist the claim that philosophy in the modern age has successfully surpassed religion; it would not accommodate itself to the Western "ontological" tradition from Hegel to Heidegger, according to which religion must make way for philosophy. This something must then always have preceded the supposedly unsurpass­able divide between Jerusalem and Athens, or between the "religious" and the ·'philosophical." More crucially, this divide seems increasingly untenable today if it is taken to mean the basis lor the distinction between the religious and the secular, or the theological and the political.

At the level of this prehistory we are already at some distance from the problem of cultural difference in religious studies. Whether the West has tended to fHlme non-Western religion in a certain way, whether it has been unable to take into account religious practice from anything other than a strictly Christian theological standpoint (these arc questions taken up in the work ofS.N. Balagangadhara (1995] and Tomoko Masuzawa (2005], among others)-these questions leave unaddressed the fundamental assimilation to history and to theology of all religions East and West in the age of colonial­ism and anti-colonial nationalism. To return to our problem of a singular death: such questions merely restate (tacitly affirm and endorse, despite themselves) the elective affinity between (Judeo-Christian) theology in its philosophical apotheosis as "ontology," and non-Western religious thought in the modern era.

I would argue that this affinity is not only "ontological" when it is in force. We can think of "ontology" as fundamentally a mode by which history in genera!, i.e. the problem of a Eurocentric modernity as is sketched with the greatest clarity in Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe, and history in particular, which is the particular instance of personhood with death as its limit, are both thought together. And if we comprehend "ontol­ogy" as grounded in a theological understanding of history, we can then use Heidegger's somewhat weighty term, "the onto-theological" to describe the whole pattern of failures by which historical and religious projects have only exacerbated the loneliness of the lonely de.:1.th. What is a "theological" account of history? It is the assumption that worldly struggle and strife is the redemptive ground within which a transformative future would be ushered into the present; however unpredictable that future, its lineaments would be clear in advance (its requirements invariably a language, a nation-state, pro­gress), and its work would be in the present. This is the implicitly theological notion of historical religion I will explore at some length in the next section, where we will see how philosophical ideas of language and love come together with a historical idea of JIinduism in the work of the historiographer

Death in comparative religion 21

Rajwade and the critic DwivedL Here we should bear in mind that onto­theology is not solely Christian or Judaic. It is the very means by which the historical self-understanding of Christianity, its basic idea of history, has been replicated in Hinduism. Islam, Buddhism and so on. In this sense, every religion today is a historical religion. If we are to detect somewhere in the dark, benighted domain of historical religion something like a spark of light that would illumine a face in pain, we would have to turn elsewhere to a time belore religion. It is therefore not without a presentiment of despair that we revert to the idea of a prehistory.

It is fitting that we began our discussion of religion with a reference to Nicholas of eusa. I want to emphasize here the difference between the tradi­tions inaugurated by the Kapalika and Cusa's "negative theology." What Nicholas does is to posit the negativity of God at the end, within an all­encompassing notion of God. This is why this notion of "negative theology" is often merged seamlessly with that of tantra, yoga, and by association with Kabir's abstract Ram. I would argue that the analogy with negative theology is mistaken. FOI; the Kapalika and Kabir teach us first, that the negativity of God is not at the end but at the beginning; second, they refer us to the specificity of God when placed next to a specific idea of the world and a specific idea of man (Le. the coming of God in a violent world, coming down to the tlesh-and-blood human being) not to some universal idea of the Godhead: hence the absolute distance of the Kapalika and Kabir from either negative theology or a universal account of religion (ontotheology). At most, what we have gained from Nicholas is an account of the mutual mirror within which historical religions have come to see themselves under the sign of universality.

Our excursus through Lorenzen's account of the Kapalika has yielded in one figure the event of violcnce and miracle, Violence, because of my responsibility lor another's death. And miracle, because in seeking to mourn lor the lost friend I seek to imagine him in the very aspect of divinity. His is the face Iiong for; his is the forgiveness I seck. In his unique death I find the culmination of all that is unique in my own end, my own death. The coming together of miracle and violence generates in the Kapalika. as in Kabir, a feisty radicalism fighting from the margins, but also an unstinting tenderness. I remarked earlier that only dalits have or can experience this tenderness in KabiL I have been using the terms "authentic" and "pure" all too loosely, making myself open to the charge of exceptionalism, In gencral terms my point has been that dalit modernity, because it encapsulatcs the limits and possibilities of the cusp. offers future guidelines not just lor dalits but for the idea of the social in India. This is why the dalit critique is of paramount importance and interest for non-dalits (brahmins and non-brahmins) who take seriously the problem of caste.

I laid the ground for a prehistory of dalit emancipation in the previous chapter by alluding to the work of Kabir. And through Kabir we encountered the flgme of the Kapalika. Reversing our trajectory, we can say that it is the Kapalika's extraordinary moral act of absolute penance for the dcath of

22 Inlroduction

a~other tha.t makes him the basis of a whole tradition of expansive other­dlrccted achon. The Kap~Jika's is a suprcme worldliness that compels him to adopt as a garb the death-face which the other (the mourned one) wore on his death. imposing on himself a terrible exile, virtually inhabiting the realm of death. Not even the sanctioned ascetic impulse of the Indic renouncer could brook such a melancholic regimen. This was the worldly life of the self­accursed K~palika tl?at would later be misread as the penance for the killing of a brahmlO. as a killd of skeptical renunciation of social mores, and so on. But what it gave to Kabir and to daHts today was the magnanimity they needed to embrace the world anew; this was a renunciation of renunciation. We will see .in Chapter 8 precisely how Kabir made sense of this gift. I'or him and for dahts today the scene of violence is the social world. which can turn on the <.Ialit woman. the Indian Muslim. singling them out for collective acts of vengeance. Unlike the Kapalika, this is a violence that Kabir himself has experienced, as have dalits in generaL The Kapalika sought to mourn because he thought himself responsible for another's death; Kabir mourned the death of t~e. social worl~. when kin turn on kin. It is not of course a question of f<:rglvmg or e~cusmg such violence: it is a matter of how to respond to the v\Olen~e tha~ IS at the heart of social experience. Kabir responds, as did the Kapahka, With tenderness. Again, we should note that the self-inflicted suf­fering of the Kapalika is in effect a rehearsal of the lonely death of the other person. But what this has produced in the Kapalika and those who come aft:r him is a ten<.l.erness and care unique in its source, secured as it is only for dahts. and yet available to the world at large. It is unfortunate that it would be misinterpreted later as a jealous secret (the lunar necromancy of the rantric. the gory pe~ance of the Kapalika: archaic Shaivism). And in the high Hindu account of Its own history, this misreading woul<.l provide the grounds for ar~uing that the tra~itions of secrecy must necessarily have given way at some pomt to the openly JOyous and loving embrace of deities such as Krishna and Rama. Such claims ignore the fact that in the dalit tradition of mourning there can no longer be any room for the ecumenical idea of a high Hindu tolerance for the I~eek. ~his is the key to the daHt "ecumene," the expansive­ness that comes With havmg paid the ultimate price for a violent act one mar have committed. It is because of the Kapalika's insight into the nature or"a singular death that daUts could do more than protest their own victimage: they were now in a position to take on the world.

What such a conception of daHt ethics-for that is what we can now call it·-implies is a curving line of solidarity that embraces the widest reaches of the subaltern world. Redounding from those subaltern traditions, dalits hear the echo of what they have set out to do. In Chapler 8 we will detect a fundamental affinity between Kabir and the Western Indian saint-poets ~~yanes~ara and T~'karam. This is why the latter's specific caste background IS In the final analYSIS of secondary importance. We know that Tukaram was not a daHL He was a non-brahmin, a grocer (vam) by trade; he was not a dalit but suffered throughout his life both from his own inability to rise above his

Death ill ("omparal il'e r('li~ion 23

poverty and from the harassment ofbrahmins in his con~m.unity. Dnyanes~ara was a brahmin, but he along with his parents and Slbhngs was ostracized because his father had reverted (on the advice of his gUfll) to the life of a house­holder after his confirmation as an ascetic at Banares. They had violated the sanctioned order of life sequences or ashrams (celibate student. to house­holder. to ascetic. and finally renouncer) prescribed in Hindu codes, an<.l had therefore corrupted the ashram system, had become ashram-bhrashta. His parents took the fatal step of ritual suicide by drowning as a mode of atone­ment leaving DnyaneswMa and his gifted siblings to fend for themselves (Joshi 1997). Both Dnyaneswara and Tukaram arguably share with Kabir hi~ marginality, but not his dalitness. And yet the curving line?f daJit tenderness in Kabir irradiated the work of Tukaram. and he and Ius great precursor Dnyaneswara find an echo in KabiL From this ~rspec~ive. we can r:define "subalternity" itself as the irradiation of an enttre SOCial expanse With the tenderness and care implicit in mourning. Subalternity is historically a form of protest and force, but it is grounded in an unprecedented affectiveness. a transcendental capacity to be affected. With Kabir and the other poets we see all of literature dedicated to the task of this melancholic justice. (The latter is always prior to the mainstream religious traditions, such as Vaishnavism. to which the work or these poets would later be assimilated.)

A singular death, and a singular mode of mourning for that death. If this is the essence of a dalit antiquity, it is possible for us to relate this singular experience in the past to the challenge for dalits of individuality in th: ne;-, politics. Using the terms of liberal political theory redefined by Hegel 111 hiS Philosophy of RighI, we might say that this singular experience precedes the modem individual. Yet, in an important way that experience fuljiL~ the indi­vidual by grounding the latter in the ethical horizon of the state-the State of which any actually existing monarch or sovereign polity are merely inadequate instances. It is worth recalling that the terms Hegel uses to underscore the ethical gap between the particular and. the universal, the individual and. .the ethical absolute of the State are clearly opposed to each other, at the same lime as they are placed in a line of progressive abstraction. l.::ar the individual who brings his win to the contract, Hegel ~ses the substantive "der Einz~lne.:: Fo~ the ethical horizon of the State he IS careful to use the substantIVe Indl­l'iduum". Our commonplace notion of "individualism" (Individualitdl) is implicit in the transition from "de,. Einze!ne" to "Individuum." Wrote HegeL

[I' the state is confused with civil society and its determination is equated with the security and protection of property and personal freedom. the interest of individuals [der Einzelnen] as such becomes the ultimate end for which they are united; it also follows from this that the membership of the state is an optional matter.···-But the relationship of the state to the individual [Individuum] is of quite a different kind. Since the state is the objective spirit, it is only through being a member oftbe state that the individual [Individuum] himself has objectivity, truth and ethical life.

24 Introduction

Unio~ as such i~ it.s~lf the true content and end, and the destiny [Bestlmmung] of mdlv.lduals [Individuen] is to lead a universal life .... ~onsidered i~ the abst~act, r~tionality consists in general in the unity and mterpenetratlon of ul11versahty and individuality [Einzelheit].

(Hegel 1991: 276)

The lndividual (Individuum) as an abstract ideal is by this token the domain ~here the whole range of ethical presuppositions starting out from the indi­vidual through the family to civil society, and culminating in the ethical life of the state would come to rest. It would not be entirely inappropriate for us to say that Hegel points us here to a domain of politics in which this ideal horizon of the state (as the State) is worked. Politics is in a sense closer to this horizon than what we have traditionally called "civil society," a realm of social action occupying a midpoint between the individual and the state. The ~eld.ofpolitics, messie~ than civil society and yet operating under the regula­tl~e Id~a.1 of the s.tate, IS ~rguably what Chatterjee calls "political society" in ~IS. revl~lon of this Hegeltan theme. Now if we were to say that the singular inSight mto a lonely death (as we saw in the Kapalika) "precedes" the inser­tion of dalit individuals into political society, we would have to imagine this prece~en~ as not merely ~hronological but logical. We might say that the Ka~ahk~ ~ form .o~ mo~rm.ng (relayed to us via Kabir) is always implied in daht pohttcs. This Implicat10n is perennial, traversing a great span of time. Coming from the antiquity of the Kapalika through the medieval mystic speech of Kabir to the modern daHt it can almost be thought of as millennia! an ancient rupture waiting to happen again. Unlike the theological notion of the milienniaL this is not a violent rupture; it signifies the recurrence of the epoch ofdalit tenderness. It is the final transfiguration, as though in a kind of relay through the centuries. of the lonely death of the other person lor which the Kapalika mourned. In the singularity of that death. in the terrible soli­tu~e ?f ~~rde~ed dalits, dalit individuality today finds its eternal ground. ThiS mdlvlduahty can never forget that singular death. Understood in this sense. the tradition of mourning inaugurated by the Kapalika is a millennial supplement to political society. [t is the perennially renewed ground of daHt subjecthood because of the "purity" of that ancient glimpse into the momen­tou~ coming together of miracle and violence in an act of mourning. As the punty of an absolute se1f~subjection. it is prior to the self-subjection of the devotee before his god. It is a forceful. energetic self-subjection, cognizant of its own limits. but yielding Lo the world a transfiguration of violence. one that is essentially radiant, benign and caring.

'IF '1 I

3 The time of having-found (God) Langnages of dalit hearsay

We saw in the previous chapter how contemporary dalit empowerment, while entirely historical in its bearing. is rooted in a ground that is in a sense prior to history. More strictly. it returns perpetually to a moment when history itself was instituted (as myth and law. or as caste). How has the daHl tradition attended to this unique instance of memory, which is the memory of an insight into divinity? How is daHL thought a pattern of this return 10 the past, of this perennial recourse to an ancient discovery? This chapter looks closely at the transmission of that older sapience through daHt speech. The latter is an 100 often mistaken for a kind of mystic delirium. In reality. il refers us to a form of action closely related to thought and feeling but which nonelhcles5 consists of a "mechanical" retention of the past.

Memory here is made up of sediment upon sediment of hearsay. but it is hearsay taken as true fact. Luise White (2000: 34) provides us with a compel~ ling account of popular hearsay in her field work in West Africa. where she explored the popular apprehension in the 1920s that colonial authorities were really vampires. The word "mindset" does not quite capture this ruse of reason. "Mind imprint" would perhaps better describe the response of one informant to White. who explained: "If I am stealing bananas and they talk about me, they say I always steal bananas. But can they talk about somebody they don't know, and say he is stealing? Now I have seen this recording machine. If I had not seen it. I wouldn't be able to talk about it. but because I have seen it I can talk about it." By the same token, as more true stories accumulate across time and space. speech itself comes under the thrall of the incremental as words from languages spoken in each other's neighbor­hood now become expansive in meaning, wholly promiscuous. opening them­selves outward. Much like the language(s) of the weaver·poet and convert to Islam, Kabir. that covered the vast swathe of North India in the transition from Hindavi to Hindi over four centuries and embraced a new. hitherto unprecedented idea of a God for dalits (untouchables) alone. For hearsay _._­or doxa. which was for the ancient Greeks a necessary. initial step in the path to sophia-is formulaic. derivative of what "they say." It is a peculiar feature of such hearsay that it refers to a self-present. transparent "fact." as though the statement, "they say that so-and-so exists," were enough to serve as a

26 Introduction

guarantee of the authentic. The origin of such an authentic "fact" is moot, betraying no higher truth t,!lan itself. And we are correct to treat with some suspicion the credentials of a truth that is not something we have verified ourselves on the basis of our independent exercise of reason, but is rather something others have confirmed for us.

We know since Foucault's late writings (2005) that the imperative to "know thyself" coexisted in the Greek understanding of practice along with the incentive to "care for the soul," even if the idea of knowledge implicit in the former gave rise to the ambitions of philosophy and the notion of self­modulation couched in the more mundane tones of the latter, remained sec­ondary. The imperative to care for the soul has direct links with the Stoic turn toward the translormation of oneself on the basis of a mechanical adherence to formulas handed down from the past. Pierre Hadot (1998: 37-8), whose work is in many respects very dose to the late Foucault, describes these practices as "memory exercises" that seek to imprint "dogmas" or topoi on the body's orientation in the world. The dogmas are as theoretical as the body's own orientation is pretheoretical: after all, to cite a figure from Kant, we do not carry about a compass with us to determine what is to our right and to our left. We have a feel for these directions that is prior to our con­scious grasp of our world. In much the same way the dogmas help Marcus Aurelius reorient himself within the terms of the historical and social deter­minants of his time. We should also remember that when the caste system imposes itself as the law in the great brahmanical treatises, it does so precisely in this way, not as ideology or unconscious impulse, but as an orientation that low castes as well as high castes take for granted in their busy involvement in the everyday. Marcus tells himself at one point in the Meditations that "The nature of the good ... is moral goo<.l (to ka/on); while that of evil is moral evil (to aischron)." This "condensed form," Hadot remarks, is "sufficient to evoke the theoretical demonstration of which they were the subject, and it allows the inner disposition which was a result of his clear view of these principles-·· that is.. the resolution to do good--to be reawakened within his soul" and "to produce an effect in himself." It is because of this deliberative but internal transformation that there is a measure of involution implicit in this process, making it very different from the grand movement of philosophical dialectic upward from the mundane world that we discern in the works of Plato.

And yet, as opposed to the leisurely but regressive movement of the trad­ition of the "care of the soul" there is in the mode of hearsay that we find in Kabir an affinity to some aspects of the Platonic dialectic, which is to say the notion of a dramatic "return toward oneself," palama. Except that his avow­edly yogic mode of involution is committed first and foremost to an inner retention, a regressive and backward return into oneself, and thereafter to a turn upward to the region where one attempts to perceive the transcendent essence of things. There is in Kabir a return to a truth taken for granted and yet rediscovered; this involves a mode of recapitulation that in its joyous sense of "having found (God)" departs in some measure from the arts of knowing

r f/ i

I,anguages o/dafit hearsay 27

and of transforming oneself. One could describe this as the art of discovering not oneself, for that would appear to be virtually inconceivable, but to find again a certain truth within oneself. We should remember that this is not a "spiritual" process by any means; it involves no concerted effort by the mind or heart (man) to overcome the body (deh); instead of an intellective, epistemological notion of overcoming, what transpires here is a form of self­overreaching that overtakes the entirety of the body understood as a locus of self translormation.

This truth is so radically empirical that it precedes all forms of empirical perception, retrieves (without necessarily upholding them) some of the dominant currents of Indic philosophical speculation in antiquity, and goes on to affirm a mode of understanding that is peculiar in its deliberate ·'abstraction" from all available modes of abstraction. And nevertheless all those languages of speculation find their register in Kabir, almost as though his form of thought involved a "mechanical" recapitulation of the entire tradition; in Chapter 5 I will attempt to characterize this as a form of radical encyclopedism. There is in Kabir an impetus toward a relentless accumula­tion of notions, themes, modes, concepts, metaphors taken from the Indic tradition and Sufi tradition as a whole. Let us take as an example the Kabir poem below.

My being's not stay-at-home It strays abroad. Ditching home it squats out there Sad to see one home is two. At every stop trial, travail Illness, death in agony redoubled. Says Kabir, this servant's at your feet Making home your bliss beyond being.

Man thir hoi na ghar vhai mera Ihi man ghar jare bahutera. Ghar taji ban bahan' hyau bas Ghar ban doun deshaun IIdas. Jahanjaunlahan sog santap Jura maran kau adhik vilap. Kahai kabir caran tohi banda Ghar mai ghar de parmananda. '

(Translation mine)

Here the frantic self-evasion characteristic of life, its concerns in the face of death, the death one dies for another (the home one has strayed away from is the home one returns to, but it is now the home of the other, which is the bliss beyond being) is couched in the everyday idiom of medieval North India, from which we can derive man, bahutem, dOlin, maran, banda, caran,

28 Introduction

parmananda as so many debased concepHnetaphors, tried and tested frames in which low-caste practice,.has traditionally elaborated itself:

Now we do not in the normal course of our ethical speculation associate mechanism with deliberative behavior, with the purposive way of acting in the everyday world amid speech-acts (IOgOlJ directed to actions and objects. Nor do we associate such an apparently "unthinking response" with the modes by which we are accustomed (through hexis. lwbitus) to establish our­selves as speaking beings in the worlds that we bring into being. We would think of them as instances at best of a debased form of deliberation (phrone­sis), at some remove from the freedom implicit in decision-making. In their mechanical grasp of philosophical cliches the poets of hearsay remind us of what we have traditionally taken to be the hallmark of allegory: a form of correspondence between word and meaning that is not generative but involuted. fixed, lacking in symbolic depth, like that of an allegorical wood­cut. But it is precisely this idea of allegory as mechanical retention that we will have to revise in order to make better sense of the recursive nature of this low-caste mindset. This is the task to which we will turn in Chapter 8.

Still more dubious from the standpoint of practice is the peculiar atrirm­ation in such low-caste imaginings of a God that. while inaugurating the sensuous. historical religion of the north that we know as blwkti ("participant devotion"), nonetheless keeps to ibelf, hides. retreats from history, abstracts itself. This is the peculiarly reticent God chanced upon in their historic "find," which is again no find at all but a return to something that was alwavs already there. Hearsay doubtless has amliations with the aural guarant~e (sruli. "all that has been heard") at the basis of the high tradition of Indic thinking since the Vedas; in its insistence on the authenticity of that which has been revealed in sound. there is undoubtedly a phonocentrism at work in hearsay too. But what hearsay does is to return to the original empiricism of the older texts; this implies a recourse not to the latter-day investment in these texts as sources of the high brahmanical tradition but to an ancient form of radical empiricism that tries to understand the world from within its con­crete manifestations in language. But here again what Kabir gleans from this older mindset prior to its installation as tradition is the idea of language as primarily a language of God (and therefore necessarily "concrete" in its very abstraction from the very distinction between the abstract and the concrete) and only secondarily a language of man. Thc low-caste mindset appears to make a distinction between the plenitude of concrete understanding in God (which only appears to us as abstract because we look back at it from our standpoint in the human world) and the language ofman-,·for it is only with the latter that the emergence of the need for communication and mediation is keenly felt (see Benjamin 1986: 314-32). We call this a human language because for the low-caste mindset that we have called "hearsay" it can have none of the pristine concreteness of the divine language, and because it necessarily gives rise to the vcry distinction between abstract and concrete thought. The face of God comes to man in the language of God, but we access it

Languages of daHt hearsay 29

only through the language of man, that is to say in the historical religion of Ram and Krishna worship that has gone into the making of today's genocidal Hinduism.

Dalit hearsay: the double maneuyer of skepticism

We need not endorse the notion of a "fall" from divine to human language to gain a sense of the original skepticism implicit in hearsay. For what seems to us to imply such a fall is really a double gesture that we hope to elaborate at length in this book. This involves at the outset an affirmation of the original concreteness of the world in God's language: but we should remember that that concreteness is itself from our point of view in human language, entirely abstract. The gesture of affirmation is followed by a movement of negation, a turn away from that original concreteness toward the world of sensuous religion of Ram and Krishna worship which. conversely, from thc point of view of the concrctc language of God, is entirely abstract. If our reading is accuratc, we will attempt to reverse our conventional understanding of popu­lar religion as it has come to us from the era of nationalism. Instcad of arguing that the popular religion of the lasl millennium (which we often describe as the cra ofbhakti, or participant devotion) is based on a movemcnt away from Upanisadic abstraction and toward a concrete, sensuous interface with God in Ram and Krishna worship. we will try to highlight a unique feature of the 10w-c.1.ste mindset we have alluded to above. For the "fact" (gothi) i~ that hearsay is invested in returning to the original concreteness of the language of God in the older forms of thought prior to the institution of tradition; more crucially, hearsay only lays claim to the high religion of sen~ suous worship after it has already pointed out the abstract, ideational aspects of that sensuous rcligion. [n short what hearsay accomplishes is not a regres­sion from the concrete to the abstract. as though it had some kind of fascin­ation for involuted and secretive forms of thought, but the exact reverse: that is to say, it too negotiates a traditional movement from the abstractness of the divine (the "concretc" in divine retrospect) to the concreteness of historical religion (the "abstract" ill divine retrospect), but not without re-marking the very notions of abstract and concrete inversely. Precisely what it is that it understands as "concrete" in this momentous, primordial and wholly visceral way, is what we will examine in Chapter 8 as the "secret" of Kabir, his peculiar insight into how miracle and violence belong together. This is no doubt a "con­crete" beginning but one that is prior to the origin of religion,·-it is precisely as this origin before origin that Kabir's Ram stands for him as a mark of the good before being. By this token, the key breakthrough in hearsay is the understanding of the sensuous religion of bhakti ("participant devotion") as abstract; it should be said that hearsay is quite prepared to turn to the notion of radical empiricism implicit in the pre-traditional forms of thought in antiquity in order to make this point· ,but with this point it "abstracts" itself dramatically. momentously from thc high tradition of sensuous worship.:'

30 Introduction

Therein, we might argue, lies the key to the peculiar skepticism of this sub­altern mindset-it affirm§. the tradition in its pre-traditional aspects, but breaks away from it in its traditionalism. Which is why it would seem to break away from our inherited notions of the modern altogether, and goes so far as to uphold a transformative account of antiquity; it redefines antiquity not as the font of tradition but as the basis of the prehistory of the modern, or the premodern; in its remarkable contemporaneity with the original philo­sophical vocation of antiquity, it provides us with what is perhaps the only possibility available today tor a genuine renewal of philosophy, taking us back to the question of the relation between language, being and God.

From a standpoint outside the low-caste mindset, from the perspective of Hindu nationalism or of brahmanism, we could well see this as its dependence on the cultural core of the dominant tradition; but from the point of view of low-caste intransigence this is nothing but an original skepticism that places the tradition as a whole in a critical embrace (what the Varkaris call cad, "affection"), making use of its most radical forms of empiricism and (if only for the moment, before it too affirms sensuous religion) pushing aside that tradition's conceptual and theoretical ambition; for it seeks to return to the concrete prior to concept and theory. From this perspective what the new dalit thinking can glean from hearsay is not a new conceptuality or theory but an understanding of the limits of theory as well as the libratory possibilities inherent in radical empiricism. The God of low-caste communities is not a "hidden" God serving as the mere basis of revelation; the low-caste God, of which Kabir's Ram is the exemplar, is really the concrete God of originary plenitude, of the wholeness of the whole (aghava). It is secretive or hidden only from the point of view of sensuous religion. And for this reason we should define "divinity" itself as an originary skepticism that seeks to return to the idea of the divine prior to historical religion,

Orality and type

It is a scandal in our conventional account of ethics and politics (for some this is a mark of the successful ideological reach of the dominant tradition) that this low-caste mindset should "hold on" steadily and in a machine-like way to the idea of "having found God." The road that leads from Tamil passivity in late antiquity to Dnyaneswara and Namdeva through Tukaram the kunbi to the bhagat Kabir of the Guru Granth is already strewn with tidings of a God discovered miraculously in the otherwise carefully enclosed interiority of the Indie self, a discovery at once indebted to the high tradition of rigorous philosophical analyses of atman, maya, and vac, and yet prior to them. The poet Tukaram who was as I have mentioned before a tiller and grocer by caste, marveled at the fact "That God is-one holds thus to this becoming."J The news of this becoming-God has traveled along the paths of hearsay for close to 400 years since Tukaram and was current in the time of Dnyaneswara in the thirteenth century. It moved on through the generations

Languages o/da/it hearsay 31

because it was thought to be true. For what is "thought to be true," what is talked about as fact must be true, and if it is true it must be passed on. What has passed on is the idea of this becoming of God patterned in verse, making orality not the Homeric relay of oral formulas, but the guarantee, transcen­dental, because it stands outside language, that a particular speech aet is true to its type,

Another way of saying this is that the mechanism of subaltern memory tries to bring type closer to truth. So that in memory as hearsay, orality is heterogeneous to itself. The type is what I stamp with my seal and make mine but it has been there before me and will remain after me, such is its otherncss. It is a matter of shifting the "J" that speaks to a place-the nowhere (khora) where God has vanished,- -to a locus immediately prior and proximal, in an irreducible way, to the "1" that knows and sets out to command.

Three turns of plot come together in the speech of the "they say." First, there is the signing of a verse by the sam, not the saint but he who by signing off with a "Tukaram says" or a "says Kabir,,4 certifies the "said to be true" (in witness, sakhi). Second, there is the "type" of speech act (at once verse and aphorism, poesy and axiom) that preserves the singular mark of the sant yet paradoxically allows itself to be countersigned by each wandering scribe, who writes a verse true to the type but countersigns it yet again as "Tuka manhe" or "kahat Kabir." And third, there is a peculiar co-incidence in each verse of the singular poet, the uniquely placed scribe (who further certifies what has already been certified as true), and the underivable, lost origin of this saying itself that is God (deva). The following Marathi verse (Ab~a.nga 3446) by Tukaram--the name is itself a kind of seal binding in trust ongmal author and itinerant scribe-reminds us of the power of this triangulated event between poet, scribe and a divinity that has had to make way for historical religion.

God marks with His visit his home Whose being in the world cracks up. God marks the ruin Of what is mine, what is yours. God marks the knot, untied, of hope Weave no more the noose, fond attachment. God marks the knot, untied, of speech CIiIlg no more to muck, untruth, God marks a rent in the web of the seeming Has the world wholly in thrall. See how He alone holds sway on site Tuka bristles with these signs, the whole which is His.

Devaci ie khun a/ajyacya ghara Tyacya pade cira manushyapana. Devaci te khun karaven vatolen

32 Introduction

Apna veg/en koni nahin. Devaci te khun gunton N.edi asha Mamtecya pasha shivon nedi. Det'aci te khun gunton nedi raca Lagon asatyaca mala nedi Deraci Ie khun todi mayajala Ani hen sakal jag hari. Paha dfwn Imci halkm'ilen slhala Tukyape sakal cinhe tyacin.

(Tukaram 1973: 570 [Translation mine))

"Ilis (jvacha) home marked (Ie khun) by God's coming." It is especially dif­ficult to play host if the guest has always already left God's arrival1caves a mark that is itself a mark: in arriving God. will have departed. Let us not be too hasty in <lscribing ethical values to this mark in advance. For by then Tukaram's God will have come: he will have recedcd. retreated. leaving less a trait than the trait of a trait, a palimpsest. What is crucial then is not the mark of God but the movement by which the idea of God begins to mark the world. "Te klulfI" is not a mark or the mark: it is that (Ie) which marks, or the "that-ness" of the mark. To mark is to "nwnstratc," to show (up) as a sign. but of what?

The movement of this becoming reaches backward into the prehistory of thc Indie world. before shaslric (Hindu juridical) doctrine and law, prior to the landmark philosophical cxpositions of the self and soul, and more crucially prior to the installation of its central "devotional" themes. Prior, that is to say. to the inauguration of the entire cultural repertoire of the Hindu popular-letting theology run its invariable course. in a passiveness prior to passivity----tul"lling away a\:i did Kabir from that vast edifice of aes­tiletic Of sensuous phenomena and yet in the starkest of ironies holding 0111 for il as did Tukaram. The tradition of becoming-God defines a move­ment of unprecedented "passivity" in the worldly life of a society. For it draws attention to a moment transformcd by an affect issuing from e1se~ where: unaccommodated. naked, exposed to the order of an agency outside that of the subject; and exposed in a time within and yet out of time when cultural norms are fetumed to their original moral vocation prior to myth, law, religion and ethics. theology and 01 the same time reinstalled. verified, justified, and ratified in those terms in popular practice. This "at the same time" marks thc peculiar temporality of the "having heard of God;" it seeks with historical Hinduism the right not to be coeval but anterior: it strives for becoming-God as a perpetual state of being-prior to Hinduism. Within that infinitesimal fold in the historical timeline of Hinduism, Ram is not yet the protector; he merely extends his benefaction toward all creation, and is for that reason not yet maryadapurushottam, upholder of the high Hindu Way, Krishna is not yet thc cowherd regaling with "traumatic" Love his ecstatic milkmaids in the timeless pastoralism of Vrindavan; nor is he the Lord in his

Lt1ngut1ges ofdalil hearsay 33

pedagogic role as the instructor of Arjuna in the Gita----this Krishna is merely the sentinel of a creation at peace with itself. The pilgrim in hearsay is much, much less than the empowered, militant votary (devotee, hhakta) of the gods and goddesses of the high Hindu pantheon. The bearer of hearsay whose (jyaca) home is marked (Ie khun) by God's coming, his being in the world (tyacya manushyapana) irreversibly incised (pade ciro) ... he whose home is visited by God, he whose hospitality is surpassed by the Lord's sllrreptition, finds his worldliness (manushyapana, lit. "humanity") split open in a radical dehiscence (pade cim). This child of hearsay who would feed the mangy dog hungrier than himself. is that singular being whose very abode is re-marked inwardly by God like a crypt with its secret sprung open and yet secretly re-inscribed, he it is whose world is rent.

These pages provide some indication of a modc of thinking that is in many ways indebted to, yet in other ways substantially breaks away from what we habitually bring together under such terms as theology, mysticism. bhakfi, dcvotioll. Those who think in this very djjferent way are mostly low-castes (dalits and non-brahmins), tribals. migrant labor, and transhumant peoples who follow in the wake of seasons. They are nothing if not itinerant. In some traditions such as those of the Varkaris of Marathi-speaking Western India, what we have come to understand aner Paul Gilroy's work on the Middle Passage as the markedly diasporic convergence of"routes and roots" is amply illustrated: instead of a movement toward roots and away, there is what amounts to a virtual transfiguration of the sacred space of pilgrimage. What is crucial is not the site of pilgrimage but the encircling movement whereby the site becomes the locus of an annual migration done mostly by fool. The poetic sagas gathered around the Varkari sants. Dnyaneswara, Namdeva, Eknalh and Tukaram, provide the songs of the road lor these pilgrims. In coming from their homes to these distant sites they virtually redraw the map of marginality that has produced them. Though what lies in wait lor them at the site is usually a form of mainstream religion (where the god of the dhangar-shepherds. Vitthaln, has become Krishna), it is nonetheless the song lines themselves that are crucial. During the cour:.e of this annual migration, theology is no doubt the horizon--to the extent that all local mindsets of other-directed ness have been assimilated to the mainstream pantheon of high gods-- but the God in their sights is the God who is not there. Il is a God that hides, making their wanderings a pattcrn of the becoming (hidden) of that God, The place of origin of this God is theref(m; a non-place. not renlly a sllwla, and for this reason the idea of God implicit in this practice is not a theology at the origin, even if it is ineluct.ably a theology at the end.

Following Plato's Timaeus, we can deHne this "theology at the origin" as a theosophy; let liS not think of the latter as a ttlrm of mystic communion with the irrationaL but as a name we give to a movement. a theiology. in which hearsay comes into play. This movement transpires :IS the coming~into-being of God, who is then not some abstract, substantial/licolI, but the mark of a historical process, t"doll. In this way I want to draw attention to its tentative.

34 /lltroducliol1

fleeting. and gnostic account of the past as a "non-place" where God ha~ been. When we speak of tkis happening of pilgrimage every year, we should bear in mind two transverse lines of historical force that meet at that "non­place" of a vanished deity. The first is the annulation of the pilgrims who return to Pandharpur every year starting out in small bands from differ­ent parts of the region. The second is the historical "being raised by the divine" that has entailed the Vaishnavization of the area's folk deity. This "installation" with Vitthala at once elevated and annulled (in Erhebung and Aujhebung), has resulted in his transfiguration into Krishna.

If the raising up to the high pantheon evokes the historical mystagogy of mainstream Hinduism, the annual return of the ring around Pandharpur prac­ticed by the Varkaris is a circular movement throwing in and throwing out the arc of time. In this circle opening into circle of outwardly expansive religios­ity, we should not lose sight of the poet who is at the core, and the penumbral marks of the individual scribes who countersign the unsubstitutable signa­ture of the poet. We should remember that even as the scribes wait "outside" so to speak, to set out on their travels there is yet at the core of the circles of pilgrimage, sitting with the deity who rules at the center, the poct himself or herself. It is for this reason that the annual pilgrimage of the Varkaris is also a movement whereby the effigies (the feet) of TUkaram and Dnyaneswara are placed finally after a nearly month-long trek in mist and rain from Dehu and Alandi beside the beloved effigy of Vitthala in Pandharpur. We could not ask for a more telling image of the co-incidence of poet and deity; for the poet reminds us of the God that has receded and for this reason gains his stature as a sant;5 the deity prefigures the onset of historical religion (Vaishnavism) of which the Kabir and Tukaram scribes will be the bearers (the deity is already Krishna-Vitthala). If the circles of pilgrimage prefigure the opening of religious influence and power outward in worldly conquest, the circles of poetic inscdption move in toward the center. There is the inversion of a poetic saga such as the Gatha of Tukaram or the Granthamli of Kabir toward the hagiocentric idea of the singular poet-saint with a unique "personality." And correspondingly, as though in exact reversal, there is historical religion with its expanding lines of territorial influence, its typically centrifugal impetus. The movement between the poet at the origin and the deity at the end is of course the warp and woof of the dalil practice of memory, The gift of the saint-poet to dalits (I have in mind Kabir) is the secret of individuation, the elaboration of the empowered "I" that will broach a future in political society. And in a sense the shuttle between poet and deity perfectly describes the arc of individuation itself It is almost as though the deity is the culmin­ation point of the process; hence the present-day danger inherent in a daHt embrace of mainstream religion. This is all the more alarming when see how the traditions of suffering inaugurated by the saint-poets are quickly assimi­lated, often by dalits themselves, to the individual self-surrender of the devotee before her deity. The ambient passiveness of popular religiosity often does not allow for any backward reference to those older traditions.

Languages of dali! hearsay 35

In the three chapters that constitute the "Introduction to the Question of a Prehistory," we have traversed the fuil range of dalit religiosity. We paid close attention to the daHt account of the institution of religion (and of myth and law) as it can be derived from the practice of the Kapalika. We also sought to underline the peculiar form of "rhetoric as hearsay" characteristic of dalit poetic expression. At every stage in this analysis, I bave drawn attention to the extraordinary pull of the dalit tradition toward an ambient Hinduism. I described this as a form of counterclaimed desire. a necessary feature of contemporary dalit empowerment. In the following section of this book we will examine in greater detail the components of what I have called the "his­torical religion" of Hinduism. It is my hope that this wit! provide us with a clearer picture of the datil projection into the past. and its counterclaim on the fulure, Chapters 4 and 5 seek to trace the blueprint of historical religion, its specific truth-claims as well as its fundamental anxieties. I close the section with an analysis, presented in Chapter 6, that counterpoints at each stage the relation between historical religion and nationalism on the one hand, and between the modern and the premodern on the other. The three chapters in the section focus on the modern critical reception of our two medieval poets. Kabir and Dnyaneswara.

•

r I Part II

The vicissitudes of historical religion

~ :

• 4 The anomaly of Kabir Historical religion in Dwivedi's Kabir (1942)

It has been remarked that human and divine language differ in one significant way, in that while God's names apply properly to each individual thing. human language tcnds to "over-name" things (Benjamin 1986: 330). The corpus bearing the signature of Kabir is a singular instance of this Adamite curse, which bears the secret both of creative expression and of the loss of original meaning. "Kabir" points us to the idiomatic core of a language's history, where there is a ceaseless struggle between competing claims for nation in such terms as tradition, history and community. By the same token, Kahir draws our attention to that recalcitrant strain in language in general which, by refusing to remain still, helps turn the act of speech and the move­ment of writing into an untimely resource for marginalized groups such as untouchables, who describe themselves today as dalits ("the downtrodden") and tribals. Couched in the many ways in which Kabir is sung, his Word (shabd) rises like a vast rumor from the western to the eastern reaches of north India and garners in this way new signatures, verses and meaning:.. Enough to say there has never been a more adaptable body of work than Kabir's in the caste-riven society of the north, giving it an afterlife in popular song and cult very much like that of the ceaselessly transformable epics and romances of old.

For this reason in the canon of Hindi literature, in the history of medieval Indian religion, and in the annals of the secular vision of history on which the Indian state bases its idea of what it is to be modern, Kabir's place is a pre-eminent one. The pan of obscurity surrounding the historical Kabir has given way in the modern period to the light of controversy and debate. The name "Kabir" has today become synonymous with a typically postcolonial question in India: can there be an indigenous modernity, indebted to but at the same time different from the idea of Europe? The historical energies that have since the time of nationalism continued to delve into the past in an attempt to uncover the hidden bases of the Indian modern. clutch again and again at the handful of things marked by Kabir· -his simple but powerful verses. his lowly background and his position as a convert.

It is worth our while to try and understand why. Kabir's central place in the debate over the modern in India should recall us to the nature of Indian

40 Vicissifudes of historical religion

historical perception itself. History here in the modern era has been the voca­tion of missionaries. colon.ial bureaucrats, Orientalist scholars (indigenous and European). and bourgeois nationalists, both liberal and Marxist; it has very rarely been written by those who belong to the vast majority of ~nto~chables. peasants. women. and tribals. The latter appear instead as sub­Jects III what can be called the "history of the popular," a whole genre of elite writing that. beginning in the late nineteenth century, drew both scholar and dil:uante to. the d~nse archive of popular practice in ritual, religion and behef extendmg as tar back as antiquity. This archive was available to those amo~g .thc colonial bureaucracy who practiced a kind of ethnography by classlfylllg for the purposes of the census the vast array of castes and reli­gions. And it was also of interest to two groups who played a central role in helping shape colonial policy with regard to language and education in the late colonial period. These comprised of amateur scholars among colonial bureaucrats and European Orientalists on the one hand and nationalist writers. critics and indigenous Orienta lists, on the other. Both sets of scholars had hegun to lay great store by the idea that a nation's distinctive traits could be discerned in the lived. everyday practices of the mass, as opposed to the often more eclectic and esoteric cullural practices of the elite. The notion of the popular implicit in their work was that of a complex "life-world" com­prised of ritual, custom and practice that could serve as a valuable index of the deep roots and extraordinary diversity of an authentically "Indian" cul­tu!'e. The word "10k," lor instance, recurred often in debates on the popular in Hllldl and other north Indian languages, and referred to "the people" as well as to "the worldly."

Why read the text of h.istory for the popular? The colonial mission, with ;Vhom such allliquarianism was compiicit, was of necessity invested in gain­mg gr~ater. con.tn~1 ov~r its subjects with the facility of greater ethnographic an~1 .hlsto~J(.:al lIl.slght II1to their varied cultures. For such scholars, complex religIOUS formatIOns such as the worship of the Hindu god Vishnu. also known as Vaishnavism and widespread in north India, provided the ground on which to establish "scientiiically" via philological and historical method a relation between Hinduism. for them the dominant faith in the land and Christianity. Kahil', /01' instance. already drawn by European scholar; into this Vaishnav tradition, seemed to them to be comparable to Luther, while his verses had the power of the Gospel of John (Vaudeville 1974: 3-36; Dalmia 1999: 3_~8-424).1

What drew indigenous scholars and thinkers to the inexhaustible archive of popular religion was the idea that had begun to establish itself of the nation as an age-old community of many faiths and creeds. India's hetero­geneity of tradition appeared as a great barrier to national unity, and was lamentoo by reformists from Ram Mohan Roy in the early decades of the nineteenth century to Dayanand Saraswati. the founder of the rationalist Arya Samaj in 1875, which strove to return to the original message of the ancient scriptures of J-linduism, the Vedas, by debunking popular myth and

-r-- . /

I I

I

The aJ10maly of Kabir 41

idol-worship? By then, a newly emergent bourgeois nationalism, still in the process of asserting its claim to the nation as a whole, had found in the idea of "one culture" a convenient bulwark both against the powerful intellectual legacy of the West introduced in India by colonial rule, and against all those "fragments" of the imaginary nation (sects, castes, tribe~ localities) that seemed resistant to the call to unity. The history of the popular was thus the point from which to seek in the distant past the origins of the greater national community that was to be reinstituted in the future. when foreign rule would be brought to an end.

This ecumenical project of Indian nationalism thus had its own goal. which was to derive from the popular in its many practices. precepts and doctrines. that primitive accord between subaltern and elite, hard to come by in the present. that would hold Indian society together. The attempt to read the text of the popular for this ancienl alTlnity was of the greatest moment in the colonial formation of disciplines. in that it gave rise to a new rJeld in the cultural projcct of nationalism, which is to say, criticism. Why did criticism become the central force field in which the ideological strife over the soul of the nation would come to be waged? The answer has to do with the very significant fact that the rise of criticism in thc modern Indian languages was contemporaneous with the growing interest in the history of the popular. While the role or criticism in the nationalist frame was to discover in the newly canonized literature of the past ami the present the key to a new idea of community. it was the task of antiquarian research by nationalists (very much in sync with European Orientalists) to lorge a new dcfinition of religion.

The two projects often came together in the same scholar, so that one can imagine the great influence exercised in the evolving nationalist public sphere in the early 1900s by a strange hybrid, a combination of literary critic (or historian) and historian of religion, whom we can call the "historian of the popular." This was because the literary canon the former was helping to construct via commentary and critical edition overlapped to a considerable degree with the canon of religious texts from the vernacular Middle Ages that the latter. the historian of religion, was attempting to establish at the core of Indian religion. In his vision of the modern, this historian remained com­pelled by the pull of the Indian past, seeking by the labor of critical practice in texts that were at once "literary" and "religious" to transmit the obscure seed of the popular to the soil of a nascent nationalist project. The latter could now base on strong areh.ival grounds its claim to speak for the nation as a whole, which is to say for "the popular" itself shorn of its complex history. This will to interpretation of nationalist criticism directed itself toward clearing the space of the popular for an elite public ideal of tradition and meaning, a process that involved pushing aside the more obscure and opaque aspects of the popular itself, and ignoring its origins in radical low caste protest and resistance. It is hard to understand the growth of criticism in the modern Indian languages without the mediating function of this

42 Vicissitudes of historical religion

specific kind of thinker and writer, who brought together moreover the esoteric strains of Orientalist research and the popular local traditions (themselves in the process of construction) of which the emerging indigenous literary canons seemed natural offshoots.

The Hindi critic Ramchandra Shukla's reading of Kabir in the I 930s is an illuminating instance of this coincidence of aims.) Whether as a critic of literature intent on establishing Hindi's claim to the popular north Indian tradition, or a historian of religion invested in the legacy of Hinduism to the nation, Shukla invariably had recourse to medieval traditions of bhakti ("par­ticipant devotion") (Schomer and McLeod 1987: 1-·20). Shukla was himself instrumental in pulling together the conventional account of this movement. By this account, this movement had a lasting effect on literary, philosophical and ethical thinking in various regional languages and cultures. Its influence extended not just to elite circles of priests and literati, but emerged more generally from, and revitalized the existing traditions of, low-caste protest. Bhakti was indebted to many different strands ranging from popular tra­dition of yoga to the materialist and atheist aspects of various schools of Buddhism, and in the Middle Ages to the influence of Sufi currents brought to India by its Muslim rulers. It had emerged in the South in the Tamil-speaking region in the seventh century in protest against rigid caste rules and the obsession with ritual in a Sanskritic and brahmanical society and had spread over a wide area of North India by the seventeenth century. Bhakti set aside the clerical prestige of Sanskrit, calling in verses of great power in a whole range of emerging vernaculars for human dignity and for the appeal to human community implicit in the idea of divine love. And it had gradually found its way across southwestern India into the north, bringing together traditions of the worship of the Hindu gods Shiva (Shaivism, historically much older, and with stronger popular roots), and Vishnu (Vaishnavism, which was directed itself toward the avatars of Vishnu, Ram and Krishna, and went on to constitute the dominant tradition in north India). Its evangelists were poets and philosophers drawn equally from the upper and the lower castes. In the north, bhakii came to be associated most closely with the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century verses of Surd as, Tulsidas. Mirabai and Kabir.

No more fruitful field of research could have been imagined for the idea of an "Indian" religion of great antiquity that could also serve as the basis of the historical promise of the nation. But for Shukla the "modernity" of bhaktt", which is to say its place in nationalism's story of its own hoary ori­gins, lay not in its tone of radical upheaval, but in its elaim to tradition. Tradition then became the touchstone for what was truly worth preserving in literature and religion. Responding in an implicit way to the missionary and Hindu reformist blitz against the so-called "irrational" practices of popular religion, committed to the rational Enlightenment ideal of social transpar­ency and discipline, and influenced by the European Orientalist attempt to assimilate bhakti to Christianity, Shukla sought in bhakti the seeds for an cnlightened national idea of devotion to a greater causc.

The anomaly ofKabir 43

It was while trying to read into the text of the popular precisely this idea of tradition that Shukla came up against the problem of Kabir. Shukla~s pecu­liar interpretation of Kabir is a thread running through the entire range of his literary historical and his longer polemical essays. The interpretive ambition that underlay Shukla's poetics will be easier to comprehend if we take this concrete, and in fact very representative, instance of his critical discrimin­ation. Shukla's bhakti poets of choice had been Surdas (1478-1) and Tulsidas (1532-1623), the critical editions of whose works he had begun to prepare in the 1920s. ~ Representing the tradition of worshipping a god with attributes, known as sagun ("determinate") bhakti, the late fifteenth-century poetry of Surdas drew an idyllic picture of the childhood of the Vishnu avatar Krishna, while the late sixteenth-century poetry of Tulsidas extolled the grace and valor of the other Vishnu avatar Ram in his relations with his wife and family, and in his battle against the demon-king of Lanka, Ravana. Both poets drew their protagonists from the popular epic traditions in ancient Sanskrit (Ram and Krishna figure prominently in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata). Their story-lines were the stuff of legend. Their ideals rested in the hollow of a pan-Indian spirit of love, amity, and courage. And their poetry, written in the Brajbhasha and Avadhi dialects of modern Hindi, could serve as a com­pelling argument for the long ancestr-y of Hindi traced back to the early Middle Ages, a time that saw the extraordinary flowering of vernacular litera­tures in India. Here then were two poets who brought Hindi in line with the most widely disseminated traditions of bhakti in north India, and who at the same time brought Indian religion, exemplified in bhakti, in tune with the ideal of a rationalized and natural theology directed toward the soul of the modern nationalist subject. Here too was evidence that modern Hindi's (or khari-boli's) roots lay in the flourishing dialects of Avadhi and Brajbhasha in which poetry continued to be composed up until the late nineteenth cen­tury, before the rise of modern Hindi itself. Here, moreover, was proof that the kind of immediate embrace of a manifest god represented by the still dominant traditions of Ram- and Krishna-bhakti was far from being what European Orientalists and missionaries thought was a vulgar and mostly arcane mode of fetishism, one whose philosophical origins lay in high Hindu abstraction. It found instead its strongest expression in the popular legends and lore from which Surdas and Tulsidas derived their story-lines.

And therein. in truth, lay the problem with Kabir. For the religious, lin­guistic and literary idiom of this early fifteenth-century poet of low caste origins, placed him at a great and seemingly unbridgeable distance from the later poetry of Surdas and Tulsidas. The latter was closer to the dominant (mostly upper caste) traditions of north India in terms of literary technique, religious aspiration and language. Whereas the "crude" unfinished verses of Kabir, written in a mixed dialect that was straightforwardly neither Brajbhasha nor Avadhi, and nor Bhojpuri, Punjabi or Rajasthani belonged in tone and texture to what was known as "Hindavi." The latter was the popular language spokcn widely in medieval northern India up until modern times,

44 Vicissitudes of historical religion

before colonial bureaucrats and language nationalists in the nineteenth cen­tury began to promote the .. idea of two separate languages (with two distinct scripts), Urdu and Hindi, derived artificially from the common Perso-Arabic and Sanskritic fund of spoken Hindavi. The conflict between Urdu and Hindi had by Shukla's time become synonymous with the colonial and nationalist commonplace that the Urdu-speaking Muslims and the Hindi-speaking Hindus represented two distinct and incommensurable cultural and national streams in northern India (see Dalmia 1999: 146 ··221). So that from Shukla's perspective in the 1930s.. Kabir's idiom, redolent of the cosmopolitan era of medieval Hindavi when the modern idea of a homogenous (Hindu) national tradition had not been current, and still bearing traces of ecumenical Sufi and Islamic influence, seemed suspiciously "mystical" and "foreign" to the generally accessible, more "Hindu" (and therefore more "Indian") values enshrined in the work of Surd as and Tulsidas.

Moreover, Kabir's god was not a determinate (sagun) avatar of Vaishnav bhakti such as Ram or Krishna, accessible collectively through love and devo­tion in a narrative and ritual mode, but was an indeterminate (nirgun) god lacking in attributes.. who could be reached individually by casting aside doubt (bhmm) and embracing knowledge ([{van). More intolerable for Shukla was the fact that Kabir was clearly under' the influence of older traditions of Shiva worship in yoga (especially those practiced by the "Nathpanthi" sect) and /antra, which in their obscure metaphysics and sexual symbolism appeared arcane, illicit and other-worldly to the rationalist historian of the popular. representing marginal currents of belief and ritual that (for Shukla) had long since been superseded in the north by the dominant traditions of Ram and Krishna worship. Kabir's modern adherents moreover were low caste groups.. mostly peasants and tribals.. whereas Tulsidas and Surdas were the favored saint-poets of the landed proprietor class in his native Northwest provinces whom Shukla saw as the nation's "warrior-caste" (kshatriva. in formal caste terms ranking above brahmins) in the fight against the British. And most significantly, though rarely referred to explicitly by Shukla, there was the incontrovertible fact that Kabir himself belonged to the weaver (julaha) caste of COnvelis to Islam, placing him outside the pale both of the identifiably Hindu and the Muslim world.

Bearing this triple stigma of the foreign, the esoteric, and the subalternity of caste. Kabir's corpus understandably did not fare well in the canonical stakes of the Hindi enlightenment. Shukla returned 10 the problem of Kabir in essay after essay, and sought to derive his own highly complex idea of the popular from the texts of Surdas and Tulsidas, using Kabir very much as a counterfoil. Shukla's polemical attitude toward Kabir informed his reading and reconstruction of the Hindi "tradition" as a whole. The object of his ire was always the current of popular enthusiasm and mystery in the past---{)oe than ran from yogic mysticism ofthe ancient Nathpanthis, of which he found telltale echoes in the medieval poetry of Kabir, through to Sufism, and extending well into his own time in the guise of the Indian romanticism of

The anomaly of Kabir 45

Chhayavad ("chiaruscuro"), represented by the poetry of Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, Sumitranandan Pant, Jayashankar Prasad and Mahadevi Verma (Singh 1979). For Shukla, Chhayavad was merely a symptom of a pernicious current in Western thought, that of a kind of aestheticist individualism (vyakti-vaichitryavad) that he detected in Blake, in the work of the Decadents, and in Croce's theory of expressionism.

Kabir's resurgence in the history of the popular, and his rehabilitation in the Hindi canon would have to wait until I-Iazariprasad Dwivedi's Kabil" (1942), a book that with great passion and sheer force of argument. backed by an impressive knowledge of the high Hindu as well as the popular trad­ition, catapulted Kabir to the center of the Hindi canon. Long considered the finest scholarly monograph in Ilindi, it also established Dwivedi's own repu­tation as the chronicler of an alternative tradition. The latter had the virtue of being able to link the vast corpus of ancient and medieval lore of popular thought and practice with the democratic strains underlying much ofthe ne .... kind of writing in Hindi. The novel, which Premchand had established as a mode of social critique from the 19l0s onwards. and the Indian Romanticism of Chharavad in the 1 930s were powerful instances of these new trends. The Marxist' account in Hindi criticism, which had drawn for at least three dec­ades after Shukla's death in 1941 011 his vision of a radical communilY of devotee-subjects of bhakfi, working to rid the nation of foreign yoke. now needed to be revised.

Yet the most eloquent and powerful plea for such a fe-thinking of the Hindi canon, one that used Dwivedi's Kabir as its point of departure. would come almost forty years later. shortly after Dwivedi's death in 1979. The renewal of the debate around Kabir was precipitated by the pUblication in 1983 of a seminal work by Namwar Singh. Singh's book (1983), Dusri par­ampara ki khoj ("In Search of the Other Tradition") became a touchstone for serious attempts to critique the history of canon-formation in Hindi. building on the history of what Singh referred to as the communitarian ("jatiya") tradition in the Hindi~speaking region of north India. The book undertook moreover a wide-ranging critique of the Marxist tradition in Hindi criticism, and sought to revive all those aspects of the Hindi canon that Shukla had declared o~f limits. More crucially, Singh sought to underscore the importance of Dwivedi's research into the popular for the Hindi tradition as a whole.

What precisely was new and strikingly original in Dwivedi's reading or Kabir? There had after all been signs of awakened interest in Kabir in writerly circles as far back as 1916 when the poet "Hariaudh" published the firsl selection of Kabir poems in Hindi. And in 1928, the venerable Hindi aca­demic Babu Shyam Sundar Das had written a long critical introduction to his edition of the western Indian manuscripts of Kabir, the Kabir Granthavali. However, a tone of upper-caste disdain and a condescending attitude to the quality of Kabir's verse considerably marred the critical fallout of these col­lections. Nevertheless, in the climate of increased nationwide violence in the

46 Vicissitudes o/historical religion

1930s between Hindus and Muslims, it was not long before Kabir was claimed by the left-leaning sections of the Indian National Congress, and by writers associated with the"Progressive Writers' movement, as a symbol of "communal" amity and peace between the two religious communities, refer­ring the national tradition back to its syncretic and tolerant roots in antiquity. Yet Kabir's growing role as a political icon for the Congress's ideal of a secular nationalism that could speak for the majority Hindu as well as the minority Muslim community, did not alter the status quo in the centers of canonical debate in Hindi, Banares and Allahabad, where Surdas and Tulsidas remained the quintessential saint-poets of the dominant north Indian tradition.

Born to a high brahmin family in Ballia, the easternmost of the Northwest provinces, and educated at the conservative bastion of Hindi studies, the Banares Hindu University (established in 1916), Dwivedi's alfective and intellectual roots had also been nourished in this tradition. His first book, Sur-Sahitya (The Literature 0/ Surdas), written in 1936 when he was 29, had attempted to reinterpret the ethical tradition in bhakti in the Hindi-speaking north in terms of the message of love (prem) in Surdas which (unlike in Tulsidas's more conservative account of the social) sought the radical tran­scendence of social barriers (see Dwivedi 1973 [1936]). Reading Kabir's work very much within the tradition of Surdas.. but finding in the former the qual­ities of abandon, play and social intransigence that were (for Dwivedi) the essence of the radical popular tradition inaugurated by blwkti in the north, Dwivedi sought to argue for the idea of Kabir as a romantic rebel. a skeptic for all seasons, one who like Diogenes could brook no false word, amrm no false doctrine and could be identified with no given tradition, sect or creed. Dwivedi wrote,

Why people should want to think of Kabir as a syncretist (sarva-dharm­samanvayakart) of the Hindu and Muslim religions is hard to fathom. Kabir's own path was quite clear. He wasn't one to merely bring together these faiths by paying each a token tribute. He was more like the revo­lutionary who tore through the web of ritualized conduct and custom. Compromise was by no means his path.

(Dwivedi 1993 [1942]: 147)5

Dwivedi's Kabir then stood in an antipodal relation to the notion of secular toleration for all faiths endorsed by Indian nationalism's vision, formulated most influentially in the writings of Jawaharlal Nehru, for the independent secular state of the future. Instead, Kabir (in Dwivedi's estimation) referred his readers to longstanding subaltern traditions of dissent and resistancc in Indian society. As a figurchead for this radical undercurrent in the popular, Dwivedi's Kabir represented rebellion, protest, and the task of a radical upheaval in moribund social norms. Juxtaposed against the Nehruvian idea of the modcrn Indian nation as an imagined comity of faiths (so that for

The anomaly o/Kabir 47

Nchru ilindu~Muslim riots could only be vestiges of pre-modern habits of mind), Kabir's Word stood instead for a relentless criticism of all tradition and conduct, and implied a kind of freedom of belief that refused to affirm anything but its own ideal of an indeterminate (nirgun) god. It should be said that Dwivedi's own transformed understanding of Kabir and bhakti as a wholc was indebted to the extraordinary energies being directed toward rescarch into the history of the popular at Tagore's university at Shantiniketan (near Calcutta), known as Vishwa Bharati, which Owivedi joined as a Hindi instructor and scholar-at-Iarge in 1930.6 The ecu~eni~al pan-Indian thrust of research at Shantiniketan, working under the lllSPII'­

ation of Tagore, had already attracted a whole cross-section of European philologists and historians of religion and art such as Sylvain Levi and Stella Kramrisch. Tagore's close associate. Kshitimohan Sen had brought out a rOUl'-volume critical edition in 1910 of Kabir songs taken from the Bengali oral recension of the Vaishnavism-inflected western Indian tradition of Kabir. And Tagore himself translated into English a selection from this edi­lion, which remains the most widely available edition of Kabir in the.West, One Hundred Poems 0/ Kahir (1914), with a critical introduction by Evelyn Underhill, an authority on Western mysticism. Openly acknowledging his debt to Tagore, Dwivedi's Kabir often had recourse to the former's poetry and ideas, and in this way followed Tagore in opening the history of the popular to marginal and sub-cultural forms of social protest in the pas~. .

Posited as this principle of radical autonomy in the tradition. OWlvedl's Kabir could not easily be assimilated to the dominant traditions of protest and historical action in north India. For where earlier scholars such as Shukla had looked in the work of Surdas and Tulsidas for the ideal of a national community in action, Dwivedi pushed Hindi criticism's nationalist invest­ment in socially purposive literature in the direction of the radical individual, the singular and "dangerous" instance to whose specinc protest the ideal of national community would have to respond, inaugurating a new ethics of the individual in nationalism. In this way, Dwivedi emphasized for the first time the "personality" (vyaklitwl) of Kabir himself, and argued forcefui1y for both the power of Kabir's verse (c..'liling him famously a "dictator with language"), and for Kabir's status less as a Vaishnav devotee like Surdas and Tulsidas, than a guru in his own right. To cite a well known passage from the conclu­sion to Kabir, for Dwivedi

Kabir was a religious guru [dharmguru]. Which is why the spiritual sap (ras) of his sayings should alone be savored. Scholars.. however, ha~e used and studied Kabir in various ways. traditionally choosing to see him as a poet, social ref()fmer, preacher of religious s~ncretism [samanva~], arbiter of Hindu-Muslim unily, upholder of a specllk sect, and as a thmker and interpreter aftcr the traditions of Indian philosophy that follow from the Vedanta ... [They tend to forget that] there has never been a personality [~'yt1klifV{/]like Kahil' in the thousand-year history of Ilindi ... Abandon

48 Vicissitudes of historical religion

[mastiI, a rebellious [phakkarana] spirit and the acuteness that comes with a castigation of all thiQgs, [such qualities] make Kabir the most singular individual [advitiya vyakttl in Hindi literature. What extends its spell over the range of his utterances is [the force of] this all-conquering personality

(Kabir, 170)

We will return to the implications of this notion of a "unique individual in the next section. Here it should suffice for us to note the crucial relation implied here between the historical project of Hindi and the idea of Kabir's unique personality ("there has never becn a personality [vyaktitva] like Kabir in the thousand-year history of Hindi"). Which of the two terms serves as a basis for the other? It is clearly the inexhaustible depth ofthis personality in Kabir. its potential for interminable interpretation that makes meaningful all of a sudden the Hindi millennium. That is to say that it is the force of Kabir. transformativc in its goal and opening up an abyss in time, which makes the past history of Hindi understandable·-·-understandable, that is, within the terms of the interruption that Kabir represents. Dwivedi's quest for an insight into Kabir's "personality" then has the hallmarks of both an interpretative and a historical agenda.

With Dwivedi the history of popular, which the new discipline of criticism had arrogated to itself as its chief and only object, can be seen as having entered a new stage, which we can c.:'lll the stage of "interpretation." In Shukla, the popular had been read in terms of its proximity to dominant longstanding ideas of belief and community; so that whatever eluded the "discipline" of Shukla's rigor had to bear the brunt of his condescension: Kabir was one significant casualty of this (Shukla) phase in the history of the popular. His pioneering and still influential account of the popular had been "disciptinary" in two senses. First. in the sense of laying the ground for a new area of knowledge ("criticism") in the colonial contest of disciplines. wherein nationalism sought to lay claim at once to a universal idea of knowledge and to objects of knowledge different from that of West. (The idea of an "Indian" history of the popular as the uniq ue object of criticism takes precedence here.) And it was disciplinary too, in the sense that certain "decisions" had had to be made with regard to what could and could not constitute the Hindi canon, especially since the latter was being forged in close adherence to an idea of a popular tradition (exemplified in Tulsidas and Surdas) in the north. To this process whereby the popular came to disciplined, Dwivedi counterposed another practice, which was to read the popular in terms of its irreducibility to the mainstream. The divide between elite and subaltern, dominant and marginal became crucial here, and continues to inspire the progressive stream of Hindi criticism today. Here Dwivedi would rely on his romantic account of Kahir to argue that the popular was the locus of a carefree, uninhibited individuality. This version of "the popular" now con­tained within itself the seed of what was seen to be an age-old Indian idea of freedom from social and personal restraint: Dwivcdi's challenge was that the

The anomaly of Kahir 49

dominant national tradition in the north would have to revise its cultural assumptions in order to embrace a marginal tradition of transgressive and rebellious (phakkar) behavior. Only then, argued Dwivedi, would a truly "national" tradition emerge as the locus of the cherished primitive accord between subaltern and elite that remained compelling both to Dwivedi's nationalism and to critics who followed in his wake.

This momentous transition from a disciplinary to an interpretive idea of the popular had its own peculiar repercussions. Now that the popular had become the locus of an interpretive agenda, and had begun to be read for its opaque and obscure features, there was always the danger of "over­interpretation." Dwivedi's own investment in the marginal was after all propelled by an ideal that was strictly nationalist in two specific senses; it sought to assimilate to the Hindi tradition, and hence to the national trad­ition as a whole to which Hindi was now arrogated, vast areas of popular practice accessible only to the archivist, the philologist and to the historian of religion. Such a project was also nationalist in the sense that it sought to establish on the basis of the popular the grounds for one single homogeneous Hindu tradition, which could then serve as the religious core of national culture. The case of Kabir alone is enough to remind us that such an ambi­tion is reductive in the extreme; for neither in terms of literary form, nor language, and certainly not in terms of religion, is it easy to write Kabir into any monolithic idea of "literature" or of "religion." But it was because the popular had become an archive "for" interpretation that such a conflation was possible in the first place.

It is precisely this tendency to underplay all that is truly inassimilable to the so-called "religious" tradition, that is to say, aspects of the popular that represent a serious challenge to the dominant brahmanical tradition, that has made Dwivedi, and by the same token, the entire tradition of Kabir-criticism, and of dominant traditions of criticism in Hindi as a whole, the target of a powerful recent critique by the tlalit scholar, Dr. Dharmvir. 7 For Dharmvir, not only does Dwivedi assimilate Kabir to the high Hindu tradition that the latter worked against all his life, but he disregards the lauer's truest achieve­ment, which was to establish "another religion," of which he was both god and messiah, and which he founded for Dalits alone.

There are two highly provocative but related claims here. First, there is the allegation that Dwivedi remains a high Hindu (brahmanical) scholar wishing to assimilate dalit thinking to the Hindu fold--this, despite the unfaltering rigor and astuteness of Dwivedi's analyses, and despite his caution both against reading Kabir in token secular or syncretic (samam'Oyvadl) terms. So that where Dwivedi's text on Kabir had seemed to radical left scholars such as Namwar Singh to inaugurate and unveil an alternative tradition in the Hindi-speaking region of the north, it is quite clear to Dharmvir that Dwivedi remains unmistakably within that dominant high Hindu tradition in which the histories of low-casle peoples rarely receive adequate attention. Dharmvir's second accusation, made against the backdrop of the increased

50 Vicissitudes of historical religion

mobilization along religious lines of what was until the mid-19XOs a lal'gel~1 secular project for an Indian nationalism. is even more provocative. For to argue in the present political conjuncture in India for an alternative religion for dalits, with Kabir at its head, is already to say that there is a genuine need for a "religious" as opposed to a merely literary or literary-critical revival among dalits.

We might well join Dharmvir's detractors in Hindi studies and the History of Religions in putting to him the following set of questions. To begin with, is this not yet another attempt of Dharmvir's to read as religious what is really the secular vocation of a great medieval poet? Kabir did after all work all his life as a weaver, His poems continue to be sung by low-caste landless peasant and tribal converts to the Kabirpanthi sect and are still part of the folk wisdom of agricultural peoples in huge swathes of north India including Gujarat, Rajasthan. Punjab, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. More so, his quite apparent aversion to religious bigotry and ritual of any kind establishes him as a modern and secular "Indian" before his time. Does not Dharmvir's account of Kabir's religion derive its central tenets. in however negative and oppos­itional a way, from the very tradition that he seeks to estrange Kabir from? They will argue further: to detach the figure of Kabir from the dominant. high Hindu tradition is commendable. but docs not the move to extricate him from the tradition as a whole, its dominant and radical tendencies included, forgo the possibility of a solidarity with marginalized popular traditions within the Hindu fold? What would be the shape ofthis radical dalit religion, which would place itself at such an absolute and non-negotiable remove from the social history of the popular? Where then would this "other" tradition situate itself, this tradition which would have to be understood now (pace Namwar Singh, who speaks of following Dwivedi in going In Search of the Other Tradition) as the other of the "other tradition",? And how would one speak of If rom it? What, in sum, is the notion of represent.:'ltion (in the sense of both speaking of and speaking for the other) implied in Dharmvir's think­ing. and how does it extend the idea of a modern dalit awakening in litera­ture, social science, in the domain of affirmative policies. in employment and education and in electoral politics--to the domain of the theologico-political?

In order to address these questions. we will need to return to Dwivedi's Kabir, which apart from being the text on Kabir in the last century (there has not been a more forceful attempt in any Indian language to argue for Kabir's place in the national tradition). constitutes Dharmvir's own point of depart­ure. The latter's method consists of reading Kabir for its relentless assimila­tion of Kabir to the high Hindu tradition. In this respect Dharmvir's is very much a daHl polemic in the tradition of the dalit leader and constitutionalist Bhimrao Ambedkar, in that it attempts to recover from the historical and cultural mainstream of national culture, the wherewithal for an autonomous daHt tradition, The possibility of the latter rests on the political fiction of an absolute opposition between the high "brahmanical" and the low caste "dalit" currents in Indian history. And the strategy of such a dalit critique is

111C allOmOrl' of Kabir 51

hrst 10 expose the ideological means by which hrahmanical thinking seeks to elide the reality of caste oppression, and then to provide an alternative account of the nation's history. one written from the point of view of dalits. Where Ambedkar had turned to a philological rereading of the Buddhist and Hindu traditions (he was later to convert to Buddhism). Dharmvir stays with a close almost legalistic reading of the text. on the basis of which he seeks to indict Dwivedi for his hrahmani~m.

Nonetheless. Dharmvir's own Kabir emerges fmally in the likeness of Dwivedi's. Like Dwivedi's Kabir. he too is a religious (dharm) guru and a messiah of love (prem): and he too is intransigent to the dominant traditions of nation and culture in north India. Yet in arguing for a "religion" of Kabir of which the latter is himself the presiding deity, Dharmvir can be seen to have taken the debate in the direction of a new vision of the popular. one that roots it in a community that is not here in the present (in religion or nation). Nor is it superseded by the romantic individualism that Dwivedi reads in Kabir. I lis is in fact a dalit community that "is to come," a community whose blueprint remains to be drawn. With this the history of the popular will have reached its third stage. which is to say the point at which it can narrativize itself. author its own history. and by laying claim to theoretical and philo­sophical method, broach a critique of its own ethical assumptions.

Here we will attempt to read Dwivedi's text in the spirit but not the letter of Dharmvir's critique. This is because our interest lies in what Dharmvir makes available to us, which is a wholly different reading of the ties between the nationalist project and the history of criticism. He makes it possible for us to read this critical tradition for its inability to account for the place of the Indian Muslim in the nationalist account of the past. and to draw a relation between this elision of Islam and the traditions of dalit protest. In seeking to read Kahir as a point of entry into a critique of the idea of community in nationalist criticism, and in drawing attention to the ways in which he constantly reminds us of the t:<11I of the marginalized and downtrodden, we have adopted for heuristic reasons the perspective of the "convert." Now conversion and dalitness refer in the case of Kabir to the same marginal status: Kabir, as we will have occasion to see in the next chapter, is indeed at once a COllllert and a dalil. Yet our own use of the idea of "conversion" is (Gauri Viswanathan 1(98) akin to a critical device; we seek to read the text of Kabil' for the subject-position of the convert, one who cannot assume a given religious. social or economic identity. and must remain temporally forever "in-between" all ascription of place, location and identity. It is the pathos of this unfinished aspect of the convert's journey that opens a breach in our given scripts for the future. olfering us hope for a dilTerent idea of com­munity, one that would argue for the radical autochthony of the Muslim and the dalit in Indian history. In other words, closely related and yet distinct (they merge in Kabir), the figure of the convert and the figure of the dalit can be scen to intersect at a point of critical intensity that intro­duces a serious rupture in the idea of the nation. It is from this minimal and

52 Vicissitudes oj historical religion

intermediate space inhabited by the convert that we shall negotiate the read-ings that follow. ~

Dwivedi's Kabir: violence of the event

We learned in the previous section that the shifting place of Kabir in Hindi modernity has something like a relation to the history of the popular. We defined the popular in a preliminary way as the interpretative frame within which scholars and antiquarians sought in the late colonial period to draw a relation between the essential traits of national character and the varied and heterogeneous "life-worlds" of the mass. We made the argument that there was a crucial link at the turn of the nineteenth century between the rise of ethnography and the emergence of criticism. The critical and ethnographic determination of the popular in this period seemed to us to be a crucial node in the burgeoning domain of culture. What has been missing in our character­izations of the popular so far has been an extended account of the element of history. For it was the historical project thtlt ultimately served as a foundation lor both the ethnographic and the critical project in Indian nationalism. The crucial point is that the whole range of conceptual indices we have used so far to delimit the popular---life-world. ritual, everyday, mass, etc.-refer in the final analysis to a transformative idea of history. The notion of history implicit in the idea of the popular refers to the sense of a transformative moment in the past that could just as easily serve as an indicator of a possible transformation in the present. The "history" of the popular then looks at once to the past and to future; it seeks to find in the past a way of understand­ing and confronting the dilemmas of the present. There is no doubt that the writing of history always bears within it this reference to the present. Recognizing that a historian's relation to the past is an "interested" one that stems from the needs of the historian's own present is after all an essential aspect of the critique of historiography. Yet in a sense, history has tradition­ally tended to direct its energies to the past; its vision of the future is under­written by a predilection for the past. With the "history of the popular," we encounter the obverse of this tendency, which is to define the present in terms of the past. To delimit the present in this way is also to guard the present, protect it, and translorm it in carefully modulated ways. The history of the popular therefore has an investment in the idea of historicity, which is the coming into being of history. It is worth remarking that the potential for a ceaseless transformation of the present is implicit in this idea of history; hence the interest and stake in the immediacy of the everyday and its network of practices.

Dwivedi's Kabir in many ways exemplifies the element of historicity in the history of the popular. For the figure of Kabir taken up for extended explica­tion in this book is not simply that of a major "saint-poet" (santkal'i) without whom it would be impossible to write a history of the pre-modern period in India. Moreover, Dwivedi's interest in Kabir is not historical in the sense of

The anomaly oj Kabir 53

antiquarian, although his book on Kabir was an early milestone in his life­long research into obscure cults and practices. Nor is Dwivedi invested as Shukla was, in counterposing an Indian idea of rational religion to a Western one, and in striving to prove that it was the West that had fallen from its own primordial connection with the advent of reason in the human world. Shukla's project remained in this sense historicist; his aim was the avowedly nationalist one ofrec1aiming for India a place in the global history of Reason. For if Europe could have developed its own idea of religion, Shukla seemed to say, so could we. Dwivedi's book represents what is a radical departure from such historicism, for its stake lies in inaugurating another idea of his­tory altogether, one that would remain at a distance from Shukla's rational theology. This new and altogether more generative idea of history has as its central theme the movement of Love (prem) through history, which is grounded in the unsettling presence of the deity in this world, and has as its locus the figure of Kabir.

Why Kabir? For it would be in Kabir's call for a radical negation of all identity and of all prescriptions for seilltood and community that Dwivedi would discover a principle of absolute transformation in history. Let us pause briefly to complicate our picture of this transformative project. We will encounter such a transformative vision of history in Chapter 6 in our discussion of Rajwade. But there the nature of historical enquiry is directed toward the end of intervening in the present by means of a reorienta­tion of idea of language. Dwivedi's notion of transformation is similarly attuned to transforming the present; it is for this reason that his work has been so enabling lor the radical trend in Hindi criticism represented by Namwar Singh; it is also what makes Dwivedi's quest for an "other" trad­ition in Hindi a "political" one. Yet the ditTerence between Dwivedi and the earlicr historians of the popular such as Rajwade and Shukla is his recognition of the need not just for a principle of transformation in the present but also. more crucially, the necessity lor an alternative account of historical change.

It is for this reason that the accent in Kabir is consistently on the notion of the "unique personality" of Kabir himself. For Kabir is unique not just because there is no one in the bhakti tradition like him. He is unique because he functions as the locus at once of self-translonnation and of historical translormation. "Historical transformation," or, which is the same thing, the "transformation of history": the latter phrase should be understood in its subjective and objective genitive sense. The translormation associated with Kabir is at once a transformation within history and a transformation of the idea of history itself. Such a transformation would be "absolute" because it involved (for Dwivedi) at once a relentless skepticism toward every worldly tie and an unconditional surrender before an abstract God (Kabir's Ram). As a mode of being-fragile, this implied laying oneself open to the Love that was God's, 11 Love that was at once redemptive and excessive. Kabir's mode of self-transformation was therefore intensely personal and productive of a

54 Vicissitudes o/historical religion

multiple range of elfects within Kahir's highly elaborate physiognomy of the soul; it nonetheless had th~ potential to bring about fundamental shifts in historical understanding. Dwivedi's "Kabir" thus becomes the irreducible locus for a mode of historical critique that, by sheer dint of individual will, redefines the nature of historical understanding itself, and inaugurates an idea of history based on the necessary recurrence of such self-transformation. But for such a historically effective transformation to take place, Kabir would have to be placed on the historical stage. That is to say that his historical agency would have to be staged in a certain way as being in excess of history. For the emergence of Kabir in history is for Dwivedi at once a break with and a continuation of the past. "History" itself needed to be staged and undone in Kabir; Kabir himsclfwas both a historical actor and founder of a new idea of history. For this re.:1.son, I would argue that the centerpiece of Dwivedi's book is its historical chapter, called "The Place of Kabir in India's Religious Quest" (bharafiya dharm-sadhana men kabir ka sthan), which deals with the advent of Islam in India. Where a great portion of Kabir is dedicated to a commentary on and explication of Kabir's central concepts by drawing on the vast archive of premodern practice and thought, the historical chapter seeks to define in the most authoritative manner the "nature" of Kabir's historical mission. Who or what was this mission directed against? How did it succeed in producing a range of shifts at the personal, social and political level? In what follows we will examine at length the central arguments of this historical chapter of Kabir. Our method will be to read closely a series of nearly consecutive passages so as to uncover Dwivedi's idea of history. If my claim that the historical chapter in Kabir is its centerpiece is borne out by my analyse~ then it should be possible to extend its implications to the varied and inexhaustible exposition of Kabir's religion that Dwivedi presents in his book taken as a whole.

I will begin at the start of the chapter. which quickly sets the stage for the advent of Kabir in Indian history. Here it becomes apparent that Kabir's advent is for Dwivedi a response to another prior advent, that of Islam. Dwivedi write~

The epoch of the emergence of Kabir was preceded by an unprecedented event [ahhutpurva gha/na ghati thl1 in the history of India [bharatl'ar.l'h ke itihas men]. This was the advent of the highly integrated creed [su.\"(m~ gafhif samprada.~a] that was Islam. The event violently shook religious thought and SOCial arrangements in India. [Is ghatna ne bharativa dharm­mal aur ~amaj-I'yal'astha ko burf tarah se jhakjhor dfya.] Its s~pposedly unchangmg caste system was dealt a heavy blow. The sense in India was one of being beside oneself with anxiety [sankshubdha (hal The scholarly [pandiljan] response was to look for the causes of this stupefaction [sank­shobh] and to find ways of handling [sambhafne] [this crisis in] Indian society and religious thinking [dharma-mat].

(Kabir, 136)

The anomaly a/KaMr 55

Dwivedi is then a historian hecause he thinks after "the" event. To think artcr is, first. to come after in a temporal sense, so that one can say, the event has passed by. By this token, Dwivedi will have located himself in the lateness (the posteriority) of his own moment having arrived late on the scene of Kabir's advent. Yet his own late-coming is not enough to disqualify him for the role of chronicler of the event. For us this ought to give rise to a series of related questions. How can one demarcate this event, its beginning and it:;:. end'? What makes it possible for Dwivedi to return to this event? Can he continue to inhabit the event el'en as it passes before him? Or can such a sense of the event -'as a whole" require the retroactive gaze that comes with being able to situatc oneself in a point in time that is "absolutely" posterior to the event in ques­tion? But to "think after" is also to think the event itself: it is to wonder after the nature of this event, and "its" own historical emergence. What makes Dwivedi a historian in this sense, which is to say a philosopher of history, is his asking here not just for the meaning of the event. but for the non-event that precedes this event of Islam -- makes this event what it is, cannot be, will have been. What is this prehistory? Dwivedi himself has a stake in answering this question.

Let US understand how the very next passage in thc historical chapter in Kabir lays the ground for this prehistory, for an account of the status quo prior to the disturbance of Islam. The passage is worth quoting at length, both for its complexity and because we will have occasion to return to it in the ensuing discussion.

India is not some new country. Great empires have been interred in its soil, great religious proclamations have resonated in its skies, great civil­izations have arisen and gone to seed in its every corner. and their trace~ [smriti-chinha] still stand lif(:~less, as though the yelping goddess of victory had been struck by lightning. Innumerable castes (jaliyon], tribes. lin­eages [nasIon] and wandering nomads have come here in packs. For a while they unsettled [vikshubdha bhi banaya hm1 the mood in the country. but in the end they could not remain other [paraye] for long. Their gods would usurp [dakhal) one of the 33 crore thrones [available here to divin­ity], and find themselves revered like the older gods -,- sometimes cam even greater respect than them. It has been a unique feature of Indian culture that the internal social order [samaj-I'yavastha] and religious beliefs (dharm-mat] of these tribes, lineages and castes were never inter­fered with [hastkshep] in any way, and were yet made entirely Indian. There is a complete list of such tribes in the Bhagvata Purana (2: 4-18) proving that they became pure after accepting God. This includes the Kirat, Hun, Andhra, Pulind, Pukkas, Abhir, Shung, Yavan, Khas, Shaka and many other such tribes [jatiyan] that are not mentioned by the author of the Bhagm'afe. Indian culture could assimilate these guests (alith(von ko apna saki thi] because its religious quest has from the beginning been subjective (vaiyaktik]. Each person has the right to his own kind of

56 Vicissitudes of historical religion

spiritual seeking. You can come together festively, but not to sing praises of God, in which case..every person is obliged (jimmedar] to fend for himself. The most important thing is not the worship of any particular religious idea [dharm¥matJ or god but purity of conduct and character [achar-shuddhi aur ca,.itrya]. If a man stands by the faith [dharmJ of his forefathers, remains pure in character [caritraJ, doesn't care to emulate another caste or person's conduct but prefers to die for his own creed [swadharm], and is honest and truthful, he will most certainly have stat¥ ure [shreshtha haiJ, whether he is from the lineage of Abhir or from the line of Pukkas. To be high-born is a mark of one's previous life, but character (caritryaJ is a sign of deeds done in this life. The gods do not belong to one tribe [jaii]; they are everyone's and have the right to every kind of worship. But that the gods may themselves wish that a particular caste or person should be the medium of their worship was never a problem for Indian society. The brahmin will pray to Matangi devi, but through the medium of the Matang. So what if the Matang were the [untouchable] Chanda!! If the god Rahu makes grants only to Dams, so be it: all of Indian society will make gifts to the Dom to ward off the unjust shadow on the eclipsed moon. In this way Indian culture has assented [swikar kar liya] to the entire gamut of castes, along with their peculiar features. But up to now no "creed" [mazhab] had come at its door. It [Indian culture] did not have the strength to digest this [hajam kar sakne ki shakti nahin rakhta thaI.

(Kabir, 136--7)

What is this event that gives rise to the need for the narrative of a prehistory, or the fiction of a past? It is the advent, we will recall, of the "creed (susan¥ gathit sampradaya) that was Islam." Placed next to Dwivedi's characteriza­tion of the old MaratvlIrsh as "not new," this helps evoke an idea of India as loose, undifferentiated, unorganized, the very antithesis of a "highly inte¥ grated" society. The accent that Dwivedi will give to this older vision of India is that of an extraordinary openness to the new. a quality that for him inheres in the old. Though the themes evoked in the passage recur often in the litera¥ ture of Indian nationalism since Nehru's Discovery of India, Dwivedi's vision of this "prehistoric" India is nonetheless sweeping in its embrace.

The writing of prehistory therefore begins with the assertion in this passage that: "India is not some new country:' (Bhar(llI'arsh koi naya desh nahin haL) India, Maratvarsh, therefore is perennially the "not new," and it cannot, if it is to remain itself. cast aside the regime commanding the repetition of the same, to take on all of a sudden the character of something entirely "unprecedented and new (abhutpurva ... aur navin)." India as a historical object would appear to be definable in terms of its persistence as a non¥event, eternally in and beyond time. This prehistory of India as an eternal instance orthe "not new" gives us a sense of Dwivedi's stance with respect to the idea of tradition. The temporal dimension implicit in this idea of tradition derives

The anomaly of Kab;r 57

after all from the notion of historicity at the basis of his thinking. The impli¥ cation would seem to be that the event that had the temerity (jhakjhor dena speaks to the folk etymology of "temerity" in Latin, which is "to shake up") to leave us in a daze, stupefy us, came to us from "some new country." This vulgar time came from the outside and unsettled our own, turning our more authentic time inside out. The event was so great that it rendered into a mere blip what came before. Nonetheless, as a blip (but the entire heritage of India or bharatvarsh, the immemorial march of eons beyond number, is gathered in this blip) it is the infinitesimal threshold of historical time, making possible the chasm that is about to open. A mere blip: it appears (as old bharall'arsh) even as it recedes hurriedly from sight self¥elfacing, but resilient. What lends Dwivedi's India this labile, this self¥replenishing power? What is the secret of its spontaneity (sl'abhavikla), which Dwivedi will go on to celebrate in the following pages as the gift of Kabir to Indian society? What makes the pre¥ Islamic culture of the subcontinent so adaptable, shifting, nomadic·-and yet so secure?

For Dwivedi it lay in the essence of Indian tradition to assent [swikar kama] to the new; but for the very first time. it could not assent to this "intrusion," the trauma of which can be detected everywhere in these lines. Docs Dwivedi mean to say that India taught itself to "give assent" to the newness of Islam? The answer is in the negative. The old ecumenical culture associated with the Hindu/Indian tradition was unable. so Dwivcdi seems to say, to revise its idea of openness and assent. for the very possibility of internal critique and reassessment had been put to rest by the traumatic advent of Islam. It is at this point that Kabir becomes crucial for Dwivedi's historical argument, providing him at once with a principle of change and of continuity. For at the very end of this discussion in Kabir. as will be seen, its eponymous hero will be celebrated for what he gave to Hindu society: accord¥ ing to Dwivedi. this was the courage for a new kind of dissent (aswikar ka sahas], not assent. Dwivedi writes,

Casting aside with untold courage all external forms of conduct. Kabir arrived on the scene of [spiritual] seeking. It is not as though mere dissent is of value here or simply refusing assent. But to refuse to assent to [religious] barriers for a grcater cause is truly an act of courage. Purpose­less protest can entail destruction, but protest driven by a noble end must ever be the motive of the valiant.

(Kabir,146)

The structure of Dwivedi's argument in this later passage (to pre¥empt my own analysis in what follows) gives us a particularly acute sense of the link between Dwivedi's notion of an Indian skepticism and his account of the popular. Kabir, Dwivedi appears to say, refused everything, which is to say that Kabir debunked both the detritus of ritualized Hindu life as well as the legalism of Islam. But the great paradox is that Kabir's

58 Vicissitude~' of historical religion

skepticism. in Dwivedi's view. only confirms his inextricable link with the central themes of Indian/Hi.ndu culture. We do not gain any insight here in Dwivedi's text of the radical skepticism of the daHt Kabir, whose unique way of saying "no" is understood by Dwivedi historically as Hindu society's negative response to Islam. Kabir refused everything, Dwivedi would appear to be arguing, and in this way (paradoxically) he enabled Hindu society to say "no" to Islam. Hindu society, by Dwivedi's account, had not known how to say no until Kabir faced up to Islam! Kabir as this Hindu dissenter now turns his skeptical gaze to the enemy without. All of a sudden, and again by Dwivedi's account, there appears to have been a closing of ranks in IIindu society. Kabir's radical critique of caste society would have had to be shelved. For there was a greater enemy waiting at the gates of India or bharal­l'arsilu. The birth of Indian/Hindu skepticism, which is to say that singular coming together of the brazen (akkhar) and the rebellious (phakkar) attitudes exemplified in the stance of Kabir toward all ritual and norm, coincided (so [)wivedi seems to say) with the historical "refusal" (nakama) of Islam. Indian skepticism (aswikar ka sahas) thus came into being for Dwivedi when ecumenical Indian/Hindu culture ceased to remain open to new inl1ucnces.

Strangely, Kabir's radical skepticism is in the final analysis (for Dwivedi) an affirmation of Indian/Hindu tradition. But how can a skeptical stance as unrelenting and intransigent as Kabir's, turn into an endorsement of trad­ition? The idea of a partial skepticism is after all logically untenable. yet it would seem to be essential to the notion of historical transformation Dwivedi aUempts to read into Kabir. There is clearly a need in Dwivedi to modulate Kabir's skepticism in such as way as to render it amenable to the discourse of trauma and recovery implicit in his accounl of the encountcr between Hinduism and [slam. In sum Dwivedi's understands Kabir's skepticism. com­ing (It the end of a dark night of doubt and questioning, as one that helps to transform history along the lines of a personal affirmation of Indian/Hindu culture in its essential spiritualism. Doubt and then faith, skepticism and then affirmation: yet what will have been transformed by means of this most rea­sonable skepticism? What is the historical substance that is to be subjected to the arduous labor of allirmation? The notion of skepticism that Dwivedi attempts to derive from Kabir is labile enough to encompass radical change and managed continuity. It is here that the question of the "subjective" (voiyaktik) conditions of Kabir's skepticism becomes absolutely crucial. For implicit in Dwivedi's romantic account of Kabir is not just the idea of a historical transformation but the birth of [ndian subjectivity. The idea of an "Indian" skepticism identifiable with Kabir serves as the threshold for a genealogy of "Indian" subjectivity, one that is at once intensely personal and innately social. What brings together the personal and thc social into a single idea of individual atrect? It is Dwivedi's history of trauma, which is also a theory of trauma, whose roots he begins to uncovcr in the passage we have been discussing.

The anomaly uIKabir 59

Hinduism and radical evil

To examine more closely the language of trauma associated with the advent of Islam in Dwivedi's text, let us now return to the passage at the start of his historical chapter, which as we saw painted a picture of an ecumenicism at the heart oflndian culture. Here Dwivedi's use of the nearly synonymous terms, sankshobh and vikshobh to describe the nature of this trauma is particularly significant For the psyche of India appears to Dwivedi to have undergone two kinds of crises with respect to Islam, closely related in kind, but different in degree. Dwivedi's initial charaeteriZ<'ltion of India's plight is that of "being beside oneself with anxiety," for which he uses the adjectival form of sank­shobh. i.e. sankshubdha. This is the pressing situation that India's scholarly class (presumably the priesthood) sets about trying to "get a handle on" (sombhalna). Yet clearly this initial description docs not adequately compre­hend the exact nature of the trauma that Dwivedi has in mind, for he then resorts to the word closely related to sankshobh, which is vikshobh and its adjectival form, vikshubdha. Now vikshobh refers more alarmingly to the upheaval associated with the very first encounter with the other: it is in fact the exacerbation of a merely "anxious attending~to" (sankshobh). Vikshobh is a condition much worse, more unsettling, bordering on madness.8 How is India to cope with this sudden experience of madness?

Therc have been times before this that the stranger or madman has been in the house. These lines from the passage quoted above delimit the possibilities of assimilation in Indian society:

Innumerable castes (jatiyfanj), tribes, lineages (nas/fen) and wandering nomads have come here in packs. For a while they unsettled (vikshubdha bhi banaya hai) the mood in the country, but in the end they could not remain other [paraye] for long. Their gods would usurp [dakhal] onc of the 33 crorc thrones [available here to divinity], and find themselves revered like the older gods--sometimes earn even greater respect than them ... [they] were never interfered with (hastkshep] in any way, and were yet turned entirely Indian.

(Kabir,136)

But those occasions only serve to further illustrate for Dwivedi the assimila­tive embrace of Indian culture at large: "Indian culture could absorb these guests (atithiyon ko apna saki thi) bccause its religious quest has from .the beginning been subjective (vaiyaktik)" (Kabir, 136). Historical Islan~ IS a threat precisely to this assimilative idea of individuality, one that had m the past enabled the Indian/Hindu to recover quickly from outside intrusion, and to work through the trauma (vikshobh) of violation.

The accent on the subjective (vaiyaktik) should remind us of one of the oldest alibis of modern organized Hinduism, forerunner to today's Hindu nationalism, that "customary Hindu life" is. despite and in fact because of

60 Vicissitudes of historical religion

the caste system, fundamentally individualistic, whereas Islam is character­ized by the enthusiasm of Jhe group. From the revivalist Arya Samaj who sought to institutionalize a beleaguered Hinduism in the nineteenth centurv to the great conservative and comparatist student of the caste system, Loui's Dumont, author of the epoch-making book, Homo Hierarchicus (1966) for whom as is well known caste constitutes the civilizational divide between India and the West, this idea has been put to a range of different us~s. The accent has always been on the problem of individuality in the group. For Dumont, as Nicholas Dirks points out in his account of the Indological idea of cast~ Indian/Hindu society worked along the lines of a fundamentally hierarchical order, one so innate and deep-rooted that it delled historical change and transition (Dirks 2001: 58-9). The necessity of caste distinctions was beyond question. The only available avenue for protest and social critique lay in a renunciation of society altogether. a form of rebellion whose wide appeal is evident in th~ proliferation in late antiquity of s~cts practicing a form of radical asceticism. The great virtue of the lndic order (as laid down in the Indological archiv~) was to sustain the social division of labor within the social at the same time as a great premium was placed on the value of the individual renouncer or rebeL Writing within the line of thinking that pro­ceeds from Dumont, Jan I-Ieesterman sums up thus the Indological (and by the same token social scientific or anthropological) theme of individuality as a counterpoint to the social rigidity of the caste system:

Here we touch the inner springs of Indian civilization. Its heart is not with society and its integrative pressures. It devalorizes society and dis­regards power. The ideal is not hierarchical interdependence but the indi­vidual break with society. The ultimate value is release from the world. And this cannot be realized in a hierarchic.1.1 way, but only by the abrupt break of renunciation .... Above the Indian world, rejecting and at the same time informing it, the renouncer slands out as the exemplar of ultimate value and authority.

(Dirks 2001: 58)

With Kabir, who (as we will note below) belonged to the ostracized caste of renouncers who had fallen back on their householder status, Dwivedi will have found the very emblem of the free-spirited renouncer living in a caste­divided world. Such a figure is at once the lowest of the low, always at an angle to mainstream, and at the same time the exemplary instance of Indianl society's respect for the place of individual protest (which is always a care­fully defined place) in caste society,

How then, by Dwivedi's account, could Kabir have responded in his highly individualized (and yet socially conservative) skepticism to Islam's radical new social message? It is worth noting here that the notion of individuality that Dwivedi read into Kabir had its origins in the scholar's early studies of Surdas. which culminated in his book, Sur Saliilya (The Literature o/SlIrdas).

The afloma~v of Kabir 61

published in 1936, six years before Kabir. More crucially, as Namwar Singh points out in Dusri Parampara ki Khoj.

The [early] search for the origins of Krishna-bhakti [in Surdas1 necessar­ily took Dwivedi in the direction of lantra-inspired practices. One motive for this detour in tantra may have been formulations about bhakti by scholars such as Grierson, who wrote that it spread far afield all of a sLH.klen "like a nash of lightning," and went so far as to ascribe its emer­gence to the advent of Christianity in India. To this Dwivedi's retort was that this so-called "lightning flash" was preceded by the "hundreds of years that it took for clouds to build up for it." Moreover, he needed to show that the notions of evil in Christianity and in the beliefs of the Hindu bhakls were radically different. In his words, "Surdas and the other hhakt-poets believed that evil was heteronomous or exogenolls (bahya ya agan/llk), whereas among Christian bhakls evil lurked within the interiority {of their souls] as so fundamentally natural to man (i.e. autonomous) that it was deep-rooted, radical (antar aur svabhavikl." The crux of [Dwivedi'sj rejoinder is that "Surdas among others did not ascribe any radical evil to his soul. [Swdas adi apne IIpko sl'abhQlltaha papalrna nahin sanJqjhle]."

(Singh 1983: 6W

What Namwar Singh provides us with here is an insight into the basic motiv­ation of Dwivedi's researches. For Dwivedi's was clearly a search for the origins of Indian subjectivity. whose roots he wished to trace to the devo­tional surge of bhakti proper, so as to ensure its historical precedence over the advent of Christianity in India. (Grierson had tried to show that medieval bhakti could not but have had Christian roots and affiliations.)

More crucially, what Dwivedi derives from these earlier practices is the idea of an interiority that exceeds and in fact renders facile a Christian hermeneutics of the soul. Given that Dwivedi's theme is Christian moral­ism. radical seems preferable to "natural" or "spontaneous" as a translation of "svabhavik" in this context. Moreover, by the logic of Dwivedi's phras­ing, "heteronomous" and "exogenous" ("bahya aur agantuk") arc clearly used here in antithesis to "autonomous" and "radical" (antar aur svabha­vik). By the same token, evil (in Dwivedi's reading of Surdas) originates from a point outside the sovereign consciousness of the devotee; the devotee's relation to such evil is marked by a skeptical and critical distance. Here again the basis of IndialHindu skepticism is the ability to stand at a distance from social norms by embracing a certain marginality (both Surdas and Kabir were marginal figures in this sense) and to embrace the larger Hindu ecumene. Indian subjectivity, it follows, is for Dwivedi the external­ization of evil or otherness; evil by this account is always out there. What does this ou/ (here (bahya) refer to? Presumably, the "out there" can mean the array of superstitions and false beliefs which provoke the social critique

62 Vicissitudes of his lori cal religion

of the bhakti poet; but it can also mean every entity that threatens to disrupt the equanimity of IJldian/Hindu life. The Christian idea of radical evil generates in Dwivedi the notion of an open-ended skepticism, one that operates within the limits of Indian/Hindu religion. Where the book on Surdas had initiated a shift in Dwivedi's thinking toward the historicity of bhakti, the book on Kabir brings out with astonishing power the message of love and critique implicit in the bhakti tradition. For Dwivedi Surdas's message was that of an all-embracing love, whereas in Kabir he could see the unprecedented coming together of love and a much more skeptical attitude. The locus of this mediation is Kabir's "unique personality," which resonates for Dwivedi with all that is spontaneous, authentic, and ultimately unimpeachable about the Indian/Hindu world-view in its embrace at once of change and continuity. Contrary to the inwardness of the Christian idea of radical evil, Dwivedi seems to say, Indian/Hindu culture upheld radical freedom and individuality in a social and worldly way, endowing it with an implicit openness that only further strengthened its (India or Hinduism's) historical project.

An earlier moment in nationalist thought (of which the Bengali novelist Bankimchandra and the Arya Samaj's Dayanand are representative instances) had witnessed the elaboration of a natural theology for Hinduism by virtue of its relentless rationalization, drawing a sharp line between the mythic and the historico-philosophical (or practical) elements in the saga of Krishna or in the corpus of the Vedas. Dwivedi's own recourse is instead to the popular origins of bhakti in esoteric doctrine and practice, and to the notion that this gave rise in the end to bhakti as a religion of the spirit, the essence of India's spiritual quest, dharm-sadhana. The idea of this religion is couched in the romantic idiom of protest and personal rebellion, but it is nonetheless the prolongation of the ideal of the rational, thinking kind of bhakli-rasa that we sec in Shukla, extended now to the new theme of interiority that Dwivedi inaugurates with his reading of Surdas.1O The theme of this other kind of interiority (svabhavikta), posited at a great remove both from the radical evil of Christian askesis and (as we will discover) from the proscriptive (varjanat~ mak) religion of Islam, is endlessly malleable, and lends to Dwivedi's "Indian culture" the kind of resilience that is required for it to emerge unscathed from the historical encounter, extending back through colonialism and the accom­panying proselytizing work by missionaries to the early M iddle Age~ with the Peoples of the Book. Dwivedi suggests the idea ofthis triumphant suppleness in the tradition by deploying with the greatest ease and panache the word "svabhav" (radical, natural, spontaneous, interior, inner, referring also to behavior and character). Svabhav then works on the register of the individual as well as the collective, and refers to individuality, spontaneity, openness, and in the final instance, to the very basis of Indian/Hindu subjectivity. A passage from Dwivedi's Background to Hindi Literature (1940), which comes between The Literature of Surclas and Kabir, gives us a better idea of how spontaneity (svabhav) functions for Dwivcdi as the quintessence of social

The anomaly of Kabir 63

individuality. Here Dwivedi reiterates a point made earlier in the book on Surdas about the authentic spontaneity of Indian individualism, but extends it in the direction of the social. Dwivedi states,

The Indian scholarly world had already during the millennium after Christ begun to lean quite naturally [svabhavtaha] toward the popular [10k] in the realms of thought, conduct, and language. Even if the exceed­ingly important event that was the eminent growth of Islam had not taken place, it [the Indian scholarly world] would nonetheless have gone the way of the popular. It was its inner strength [bhitar ki shakfl1 that pushed it toward this natural [svabhavik] path. 1l

Clearly, what enables the greater tradition to survive the jolt that is Islam is its tendency, which had set in place long before the jolt itself, to incorporate the most radical elements of the popular. Commenting on this passage, Namwar Singh points out that the use of svabhav (natural) and svabhavtaha (naturally) both reflect a concern in Dwivedi for that which is essentially, authentically, and more crucially, spontaneously, the tradition's own. It is the "own" of this "ownmost" that is at work in the "sva-" of Dwivedi's svabhav[taha]," and is expressly opposed to the idea of toreign (Islamic) influence. Clearly, as Namwar Singh notes, "it is the force of the popular [lokshakit1 that [lor Dwivedi] impels this tendency in scholasticism [shastraJ toward itself. And it is moreover quite apparent that the 'inner strength' of the popular in its very force propels Indian history to evolve in this way" (Singh 1983: 78).

The primordial root of the spontaneity (svabhavikta) that bestirs and pro­pels the tradition as a whole is then undoubtedly the popular. The latter becomes in Dwivedi's account the locus of a complete social whole, in which the singular individual and the larger socius appear as elements within the unity of caste Hindu society. The prehistory of the popular that Dwivedi attempts is made necessary by that other prehistory of crisi~ dovetailing with a corresponding "post-history" that is to manage the crisis, which is the prehistory of the Islamic "intrusion" (cklkhaJ). It is the strangest of paradoxes that the prehistory of the popular (/okdharm, lokshakti) can also be the pre­history of the elite! (Dwivedi makes reference to this elite alternately in terms of hrahmanical scholasticism, scholars, intellectuals, Indian society, Indian culture [shastra, pandiljan. vidvaljan. bharatiya sarnaj, bharatiya sanskritl]' etc.) Arguably what saved mainstream India from cultural extinction was the great inner spontaneity of the popular. This of course begs the question: did the popular benefit at all from its own incorporation by the elite? Which is to say, what does the popular stand to gain by giving a helping hand to high Hindu casteism in its hour of peril? The question clearly troubles Namwar Singh too, for Dwivedi will himself go on to speak of how bhakti in the end benefited by its translation into the elite, especially in terms of the greater reach into the mainstream that the latter lent it. "In this respect," Singh writes,

64 Vicissitudes of historical religion

it is worth our while to rethink Dwivedi's notion that it was the prop [sahara) of schoiasticisill [shastra) that helped widely to disseminate the new creeds. This is something he has said with respect to both Kabirdas and Surdas. In a similar vein, going so far as to extend his thesis to the latcr epoch of courtly poetry [riti kavya], Dwivedi writes: "in this specific period scholastic thinking had begun to assume the forms of popular thought [shastra chinta '0k chinfa ka rup dharan kame lag thi], and the old popular poetry. having mingled with classical thought grew from strength to strength until it became widespread [vishal rup grahan kar gaw).'·

Now even if we were to endorse the idea that shastra [to which bhakti in its popular form was fundamentally opposed) aided in the spread of bhakti, it doesn't necessarily follow that the intluence of scholasticism ilself did not affect adversely the future of the popular [lokdharm]. From Dwivedi's own sense that the great strength of the nirgun creeds that worshipped an indeterminate God lay in their eschewal of sIJastra, it is clear that he was at least aware of the adverse eflt."Cts of such brahmaniza­lion. Yet if we find him somewhat forgetful of this in other contexts, we can attribute this to the force of the most vital current [pran dhara] of llindi literature.

{Singh 198:l 7R)I~

Spontaneity. or the vital currellt of subjectivity

If we were to think that this "vital current" in Indian culture is opposed only to the radical evil preached by the Christian missionary in tandem with certain phases in the project of colonialism, we nced only to return to the passage in question in Kabir. We discover there that the agitated (I'ikshubdha) soul of India has very early found a way in the Middle Ages to distinguish and therefc)re protect itself from the interference of Islam. It is after all only returning the compliment:

Before the coming of Islam, this vast populace had no name. Now it was given the appellation, "Hindu." Hindu, that is to say Indian. which is to say a non-Islamic creed. Clearly within this non-Islamic creed there were all manner of other creeds, some were followers of Brahma, some believed in the cycle of karma, some were Shaivile, some Vaishnava, some Shakla, some Smarta, and who knows what else. Ranging through a hundred initiatives, and spread out over a thousand years, the ideas and traditional beHefs of this populace stood like an expansive jungle.

(Kabir, 138)

Since it was Islam, Dwivedi seems to say, that exercised its nominalistic regime over us by reducing the heterogeneous body of Hindu beliefs to one single idea, that of Ilinduism, we the members of this loose populace

The anomaly ofKabir 65

(jansamuha), (but how loose can Hinduism can be if it is still, in the final analysis, Hinduism?) we too will seek to name Islam. It is in this procedure of rigorous othering that the ideology of svabhal' is put 10 use.

The elfects of this procedure of contradistinction are dual in that they affect both the thing named and the subject doing the naming. But the elem­ents of the argument had already been put in place earlier in the passage we have read, and which begs repetition here.

Indian culture could assimilate these guests (atithiyon ko apna saki thi) because its religious quest has from the beginning been personal (vaiyak­tik). Each person has the right to his own kind spiritual seeking ... every person is obliged [jimmedarJ to fend for himself. The most important thing is not the worship of any particular religious idea [dharm-mat] or god but purity of conduct and character [achar-shuddhi aur caritrya]. If a man stands by the faith [dha/'m] of his forefathers. remains pure in char­acter [carifra], doesn't C'ire to emulate another caste or person's conduct but prefers to die for his own creed [swadharmJ, and is honest ,1Ild truth­ful, he will most certainly have stature [shreshtha hai1, whether he is from the lineage of Abhir or from the line of Pukkas. To be high-born is a mark of one's previous life, but character {carilrya] is a sign of deeds done in this life.

The whole range of personologieal terms----personal. each person, his own, fend for himself, purity of conduct, character, a man, pure, own creed, stature-are opposed here to the power of the collective, to its ability to cancel the individuality of the one in favor of the absolute power of the whole. These are the terms that will soon engender the great personalistic doctrine of bhakti.

But not before Ilinduism as the creed of the singular has been opposed to Islam as the tymnny of the general. At this point the range of oppositional terms in Dwivedi's text grows uncontrollably. There is a marked agitation (vikshobh) in his own text. He continues:

What is a "mazhab"? A mazhab is a well integrateu religiolls creed [dharm-mat]. A great many people believe in only one god, and adhere to only one mode of conduct, and when they accept a person from a race, tribe or caste into their integJ'<lted group they do away with the peculiar characteristics of that person. and insist that he accept only that par­ticular credo {matvad]. Here [in Islam] religious seeking (dharm-sadhllna] is not individualist [I'yaktigat], but collective [samuhagal]. And religious {dharmic] and social {samajikJ rules and norms {l'idhillishedhl are con­lounded [gunthe hue lIain]. Indian society was the outcome of the com­mingling of many castes [jatiyan]. A person {I'yakti] from one caste cannot transfer to another, but a mazhab is the exact opposite of this. A maz.hab makes the person a part of the group. A caste in Indian society is the agglomeration of many [distinct] persons, but the persons in a

66 Vicissitudes of historical religion

mazhab are parts of the larger group. In [a caste] the person has a separ­ate standing [hastl1 bu\. cannot detach himself from his caste; in (the mazhabJ a person can detach himself from his mazhab, but cannot have any separate standing.

The Muslim religion [dharm1 is a "mazhab." Within [the general trend toward] social structuring in India, its own structuration was completely opposite. Indian society posited the specificity of caste even as it favored individual [vyaktigal] religious seeking, whereas Islam dissolved the specificity of caste and preached that religious seeking should be collect­ive [samuhagat). One was centered 011 character [carilrya1, the other on religious creed [dharm-ma/]. It was an attested fact in Indian society that whatever might be someone's belief[vishvas], it was a person's character that lent him stature, no matter if he belonged to a caste [phir chahe vaha kisijati ka bhi kyon na ho]. In Muslim society [samail on the other hand, there was a [firm] beJief[l'ishvas] that the person who has given his assent to the religious creed [dharm-mai] preached by Islam will alone attain eternal bliss, while he who does not accept this religious creed [dharm­mat] is condemned to eternal damnation. India had no experience of such a creed [mat]. It found it hard to believe that [Islam] saw its chief purpose [to lie] in dispelling the unbelief [kufra] of any religion [jati] that disregarded its own conduct and belief: That this could be someone's chief duty too, [Indian society] had not known until then. This is why when this new religious creed [dharm-mal] pledged to eradicate unbelief from the world, and employed every means available to do so, India [bharatl'arsh) was unable to understand this adequately. For some time its ecumenizing mind [samanvayatmika budd/1I1 went numb. India became out of joint [llikshubdha-sa]. But the creator could not tolerate this stupe­faction [kunlha] and agitation [vikshobhl for long.

(Kabir, 137)

What precisely bestirs Dwivedi here is the unprecedented need for a new alliance. We can recall here that in the passage from SUI" Sahitya cited by Namwar Singh, Dwivedi had sought to respond to the Orientalist scholar Grierson's characterization of bhakti as an outcrop of the advent of Christi­anity in India. There Dwivedi had made an argument for bhakti's antiquity (the whole of Sur Sahitya is in fact a rejoinder to Grierson in this regard). But here in Kabir, six years later, why are the words of the Englishman repeated verbatim without comment, as if in endorsement? The words reappear in a passage that tries to determine the exact role of bhakti, and especially Kabir's bhakti, in India/Hinduism's response to [slam. Dwivedi writes, on the verge of raising the curtain prior to Kabir's entrance, and a mere couple of pages after the passage abovc-

It was at this time that there was the advent in the south of Vedanta-inspired bhakti, which spread from this end of this vast Indian subcontinent to

The anomaly 0/ Kabir 67

the other. Dr Grierson has said, "like a sudden nash of lightning, there came upon all this darkness a new idea. .. This new idea was that of bhakti."

(Kabir, 139)

In the text on Surdas, Dwivedi had been quick to oppose Hinduism's notion of individuality to the idea of radical evil in Christianity. There (as expressed in Surdas's text and brought out in Dwivcdi's reading) Hinduism's most significant quality was to have generated an open, rebellious notion of individuality that faced challenges in the world at large; this was a secular. worldly individuality, one that asserted the right to criticize, object. pro­test. Where the idea of individuality in Christianity was one given to inten­sive spiritual introspection, Indianlliindu individuality was, by Dwivedi\ account, strictly worldly, heteronomous (bahya) and exogenous (agantuk). What accounts then for the volte face whereby, by the time of the Kahir book six years later, Dwivedi quotes in unq ualified approbation the very same passage from Grierson that he had been quick to object to in the Surdas book? There Hinduism had been the religion of the spirit where Christianity had been religion of the souL for the very same reason, Dwivedi had argued for the relative antiquity of Hinduism when compared to Christianity. But by the time Kabir was written-one could speculate that Dwivedi was also responding to the increasingly tense communal situation in Bengal--the dis­tinction between Hinduism and Christianity, and the argument for the for­mer's historical precedence had grown to be less crucial than the need to understand and comprehend the challenge presented by the historical mis­sion of Islam. For when it comes to the encounter with Islam, it is not very difficult for the radical individualism of the Hindu and the missionary or Orientalist's Christian hermeneutic of radical evil to march ill step. At this point. Hindu and Christian subjectivity join ranks (without merging into each other) in order to stand up to the new order of the subject inaugurated by Islam. This encounter (staged on the cusp of the premodern in India, as Islam began its inroads and Kabir rose to IndialHinduism's rescue) is a com­plex and multifaceted one. It is triangulated along the lines of a religion of the law (Islam), a religion of the soul (Christianity), and a religion of the spirit (bhaktl). In his book on Surdas, the threat of Christianity seamlessly produced its counterpoint in Dwivedi's notion of the secular individuality implicit in Surdas's bhakti. When it is a matter of an encounter with this historical Christianity, sueh an antithesis between an inner (radical) evil and Hinduism's secular worldliness is entirely possible, even natural. But when it is a matter of the relation to Islam, sueh antinomies collapse into each other and produce another opposition altogether, this time between Hinduism and Christianity on the one hand, and Islam on the other. This is because with Islam the argument is compelled to move from the realm of interiority to the realm of the sociological. The debate with Christianity is conducted at the level of the heart; the debate with Islam at the level of the Law. The latter is

68 Vicissitudes of historical religion

the very image for Dwivedi's Hindu of the stern Semitic law that governs the proselytizing tribe. ..

If we return to the passage above in Kabir where Dwivedi first distinguishes between Hinduism and Islam, we come upon in the first line of the second paragraph evidence of a momentous decision with regard to Islam. "The Muslim religion [dharm] is a ·mazhab.'" [n a simple act of translation, Dwivedi accomplishes a political gesture at once linguistic, philosophical, religious, and social, which tears "Hindi" away from its shared ancestry with "Urdu." A basic divergence is implicitly announced here in what was the hybrid popular language of the medieval north, between the stream that flowed from Sanskrit into Hindi (reflected in the word, dharm), and that other stream flowing from Arabic into Urdu (the word, mazhab). This is already a strange tautology. Dwivedi does not mean to say merely that the Muslim religion is a religion. After all, he does not say, "Islam bhi ek dharm hat' ("Islam too is a religion"). The implication seems to be on the other hand that the Muslim religion is less a religion like any other, but is in fact a "religion" ("mazhab") like no other in times past. For it is as though the simple naming of the Muslim religion as mazhah is not enough. Dwivedi's scare quotes around mazhab indicate a much more fundamental foreclosure of the Muslim in our midst. The fact is that for him Islam cannot possess either an appropri­ate notion of the religious or that of the social. Neither one nor the other, Islam is a religious "creed," a monstrous dharm-mat, whereas Hindu society­religion is bolstered by the existence within itself of that absolute unit of sociality, which is the individuatedjati, or caste. The latter is always., before any systematic development or structuring (sanghatan) already social (sama­jik); what has ensured that its religious quest (sadhana) has remained relent­lessly social, has been its good fortune (suyog) to have had its lite-blood eked from the vast body of the popular. It would seem as though Dwivedi needs to put ma::hab in quotes because of the peculiar, very sp..x::ific meaning that he wants to give it. Given that the accent throughout this passage is on the idea that Islam is a dharm-mat (religious creed) and not a dharm (religion), the weight of this Dwivedean nuance is borne entirely by the word "mat" (creed). Hinduism and Islam as dharms are like two parallel lines that cross each other and diverge in the infinite time of history at a point of absolute difference, which is /1Ult. Beyond that limit of commensurability between societies and between cultures, which mat is, lies the death of the personal, the bloodthirsty (or nirdaya, 138) justice of the group, which is mazhab. Why must Islam consistently be labeled a creed or mat? So much appears to hang on this little monosyllabic word! Now the lexical drift of both "creed" and "mat" is in the direction of a certain systematicity. A creed or mat, as the OED tells us. refers to a "fundament of faith. a body of words that authoritatively sum up the belief of a faith." It is clearly this systematic aspect that seems to Dwivedi to quite radically distinguish Islam from Hinduism.

Such a basis in doctrine or doxa is for Dwivedi anathema to Hindu society. For, he goes on to say, where Islamic society "was proscriptive (vmjanshil) in

The anomaly of Kabir 69

religious matters but accepting (grahanshil) in social matters, Hindu society was on the other hand accepting in religious terms but proscriptive in social matters" (Kabir, 138). What is the singular quality that makes Islam such a strong adversary (pratidvandVl)? It is of course the idea, a great problem for Dwivedi, that Islam was accepting at the level of the social where Hinduism was not. In the contest for acolytes., it mattered little in the final analysis if one religion believed in the individual right toward spiritual seeking, and the other believed in the religious creed of the group. At the level of religious seeking, the individual could well be opposed to the collective, the individual spirit opposed to the scorn of the group. Again and again, Dwivedi drives home the single idea that Hinduism's great strength lay in its firm belief in the power of the individual seeker after religion (dharm). The problem of course is that this is, for him, not enough. Could Hinduism come up with an idea of social acceptance or tolerance, as opposed to merely religious tolerance? Clearly, the answer to this is no. For if it had, its condition before the arrival of Kabir would not have been one of shock. And it is at the level of the social that we find Dwivedi's religio-spiritual edifice breaking down.

The irreducibility of caste

For what slips out in the encounter with Islam, in the great ethical project of other-directedness in hhakti which commences (for Dwivcdi) with the advent of Kabir, is the problem of caste oppression, the ineradicability of Hindu social sanction. Dwivedi seeks to read the text of bhakti ethically tor its response to Islam as historical adversary-Kabir is a monument to this effort--but what continues to interrupt this movement of Hindu ecumeni­cism is the essential wound (an absolutely difterent chot than the virahagni [pain of separation] or Rama- or Krishna-Bhakti) at the heart of Dwivedi's high Hindu society, which is caste. This is because the opposition between religious quest (dharm-sadhana) and creed (mat), acceptance (grahanshilta) and proscription (varjanshilta), and individual (vaivaktik) and social (sama­jik) in Dwivedi's text all privilege the ecumenicism of caste, but from within its closed bounds. The perennial achievement of Hindu society (for Dwivedi) was that it had subsumed the problem of the social within the principle of tolerance toward individual spiritual and religious seeking. So that what is finally being opposed to mat in Dwivedi is really the essential holism of the Indic metaphysics of caste, which is now the religious agglomeration (sam­mishran) of self-existing monads, all seeking God differently. It is this idea, involving the elision of the actual conditions of caste, which makes it possible lor Dwivedi to attempt a prehistory of Hinduism prior to the advent of Islam.

Ir Islam is a creed for Dwivedi, Hinduism is exemplified by its idea of jati, caste. Since his emphasis is always the idea of the person in the jati, this has the effect of leaving a great gap between the individual and the whole. What mediatcs between the two? Jati, which Dwivedi places in exact antithcsis to

70 Vicissitudes oIhi5toricai religion

mat, contains the key to this originary sociality in Ilinduism: it is the third lerm that mediates betweenothe religion of the group and the religious seeking of the person, between dharm~mat and dhannsadhana. The word jari, which as has often been said with reference to north Indian languages, can range in meaning from tribe to race, caste, region, and nation, is used polyvalently here too, The pluraljatiyan is used every time there is a reference to Dwivedi's cherished ecumene ("Innumerable castes [jatiyonJ, tribes. lineages [naslenJ and wandering nomads have come here in packs. Indian society was the outcome of the commingling of many castes [jatiyan]" (Kabir. 176·7). But even as jati means everything from tribe to caste, referring to a primitive miscegenation, a vast and primordial hybridity in Indian society, it cannot but signify what for Dwivedi is in the final analysis the absolute divide between religion and society. By this schema, the essential reflexivity of religion (dharm) helps interjects spiritual striving (sadhana) into the conduct of living (acar). In this way it "translates" seamlessly each into each the potent anarchy making up the various aspects of "the social." And the latter must itself remain separate from the domain of concrete social practice. While the concept of the religious is ceaselessly labile, the idea of the social is beyond negotiation.

For it was precisely the "violence" with which Islam had shaken India's "religious and social arrangements," that opened quite unexpectedly theques­tion of the social. "Jati" refers here to the iron laws governing inclusion and exclusion. Woe betide Hinduism if it were ever to "confound" (gunth[anaJ) the separate domains of "religious [dharmic] and social [samajik] rules and norms [vidhinishedhJ." It is of course Islam that has "confounded" these by insisting that religion be put to work socially as the embrace of the socially diverse and the marginal within one single creed. It is in fact for this single reason that it is a creed, and not a religion. But with Hinduism, you cannot ever be anything less than a historian of religion. cartographer of the soul! For within that hard borderline that separates caste from caste, there is some~ thing like an ethical life of the spirit that sustains historically the unsurpass~ able relation between individual and social life, almost as though a modus vil'endi has been found wherein the idea of caste can mediate without remainder between the private, familial life of the individual and the iron law of the State: "In [a caste] the person has a separate standing [hasll1 but cannot detach himself from his caste; [in a mazhabJ a person can detach himself from his mazhab, but cannot have any separate standing." It is the guarantee of this "separate standing" despite social coercion, a surety unavailable or perhaps even unattractive to the Muslim, that is the gift of caste to the individual. And it is this that ensures that the personal spiritual quest will not be overridden by the tyranny of the collective. finally, the problem is one of deciding which is prior to the other. Is it the individual that overrides the social, or is it the social that includes the individual without negating his personhood? The distinction between the two (the social lost, the social regained) is crucial for Dwivedi, for the secular idea ofthe skeptical individual

111e anoma~r of Kabir 71

that he has been seeking. to discover in the figure of Kabir is one that at once denies and affirms caste Hindu society. Dwivedi makes a similar distinction in the preceding chapter in Kabir dedicated to "The Personality [v.vaktilva] of Kabir," between on the one hand the extreme brazenness (akkharta) of the Nathpanthi yogis who openly flouted the excessive ritualism of brahmanical codification, and the rebelliousness (phakkarta) of Kabir on the other. We will return to this alleged phakfwrta of Kabir. But it is worth pointing out that the akkhar Nathpanthi attitude was (according to Dwivedi) inadequate pre~ cisely because its mode of outright rejection could neither find popular acceptance nor distinguish itself from the older modes of renunciation that had been influential since the time of the Buddha (Kabir, 139). Dwivedi clearly has another (a phakkar) mode of rebellion in mind, one which despite everything upholds that unsublatable relation between the individual and the whole through which caste (as a totalized social fact) can continue to exercise its cryptic sway.

Dwivedi's Kabir thus cancels within himself the distinction between the social and the religious. He does this not in order to produce another religion at the level of the social as does Islam, and as docs Dharmvir's dalit Kabir albeit differently, but in order to retain and keep in place the idea of the social as the very clearing of the Truth (paramsatya) of the social in the religious. Thus stands Dwivedi's relentless social advaitism. It is a philosophically high Hindu nondualism transferred to the "social" as the self-presence of the One (Brahma) in the world. His Kabir renders the social beautiful by irradiating it with the sharp rays of his soul. This gives us a sense of the aesthetic means by which Dwivedi writes out the theological and political project of the dalit. This Kabir replies on behalf of Hinduism to Islam's message of social dissent and religious assent, but by inverting the equation, making it his life's project to assert individual spiritual dissent while assenting to the laws of the Hindu social system. The great paradox in Dwivedi is that his Kabir is rebellious in spirit, but reactive in social terms.

The question of character

I-Iowever, we have yet to discover the hidden secular substance of this surpass­ing, which is to say that basic "thing," a kind of minimal residue of the materiality of the socius, which gives itself over to this historic writing~out. This rudimentary constituent of the socius, this thing that dissolves, sacrifices itself"in" caste, erases caste from the foreground, and brings to fore the great rebellious individual (Dwivedi's Kabir) cannot be what for Dwivedi are the more general overly codified aspects of Indic sacrifice upholding caste-rules, rituals, rigid codes of conduct, and certainly not the taboo on miscegenation (varna-sankar). These are expendable in any case, and their eradication does not constitute the genuine upheaval within Hinduism that would push it toward selr~analysis. auto-critique, in its hour of peril. for Dwivedi in his triumphalism reaches beyond these antinomies in the idea of ritual, and

72 Vicissitudes of historical religion

proceeds to the Indic essence of caste, whose image can be seen beyond ritual on the far side of the individl!!lal·in·every-Hindu. The answer is already there in the first of the passages we have read so far:

The most important thing is ... purity of conduct and character [achar­shuddhi aur caritrya]. If a man stands by the faith [dharm] of his fore­fathers, remains pure in character (caritra] . .. he will most certainly have stature [shreshtha hal1, whether he be from the lineage of the Abhir or from the line of the Pukkas.

This already refers liS to the smallest. essentially fungible unit of caste, also the minimal unit of the ethical life of the jati, which is "character" (caritra). R. S. McGregor's Hindi--English dictionary gives us four standard meanings of this word. caritra: behavior, conduct, manner, ways; an account of a person's life or biography; character, nature; and a character in a novel (McGregor [993: 306). The range of meaning that inheres in the word lends to it in Dwivedi the ~'Cnse of a life-world, which is to say, the <-'Ustomary way of life (implicit in the Sanskrit root car at the basis of caritra) of individuals (I'yakti) in a seamless social world. Again. "if a man stands by the faith (dharm) of his forefathers. remains pure in character ... prefers to die for his own creed (swadharm) and is honest and truthful, he will most certainly have stature (shreshtha hai)." The custom (habitus) sustaining this mode of "liv­ing" rests in its attentiveness to the monadic individuaL here "individual" or "person" (vyaktt) and "way of life" are really metaphysical notions taken from the Indic tradition, and closely allied to the caste system (varnashramd­harln). Clearly at this level there is something in caste itself that renders caste distinctions unimptwtant. Abhir or Pukkas, Chamar or Chandal. you are yet an individual (vyakti). Vour stature (shreshlha) or standing (hasti) has already been ensured by your unquestionable place in the hierarchy. What you have to aHirm is the ancient way ofjati, which looks to you as a person, pays hced to your individual spiritual needs. But you must not question this way of life. lor to do so would be to confound religion and society. Your task is to work on your caritra. not on your karma. For "to be high-born is a mark of one's previous life, but character is a token of deeds done in this life."

The romanticist phenomenology of svabhav in Dwivedi, the range of Indic personological terms here (personal. each person, his own, responsible for himself. purity of conduct, character. a man, pme, own creed. stature), the very idea of a tradition that is integral to Hinduism. rests on the idea that there is fundamentally a personal. individual. unique, and quite singular mode of living that is the essence of the popular, or of the aura of the popular. and by the same token of the Makti tradition as a whole. relying as it does on the popular. But that lived experience of caste oppression, that other carilra (story, person, life experience, hidden transcript of oppression) that gave rise to the "dalit religion" of Kabil' is nowhere to be found in lhis attempt (which is Dwivedi's Kabir) to resllscitale this "other" tradition in

The anoma~v of Kabir 73

north India. In other words, the vital spirit (prandhara) of the tradition (which is the svabhavikta inherent in popular bhakll) lives on in the subjective being of caritra, which is also the onto-phenomenological essence ofjati as a seamless life-world (ethos) outside history.

In the strife between Islam and Hinduism, between the social (samajik) and the individual (va~vaktik), it would seem as though the latter, caste (jatt). is now for Dwivedi the only ultimate n,"Course for the histori(;;1.lIy th~atened aura of the individual. Even as the vaiyaklik takes the place now of the samajik. and surpasses it in jati, the daliCs own concretely wliyaktik experi­ence ofsamajik discrimination is left behind as just another remainder on the high spiritual road ofjali. So that the popular (/okdharm) is the emanation of jaIl in the realm of public culture, whereas jati is the working through of the spirit of the popular (lokdharm) from within actually existing society, with its Procrustean requirements intact. This absolute reciprocity beyond history between the (lntic world of /okdh(lrm and the ontology of/ati preserves the metaphysics of the vaiyaktik from the gelluine I'aivaktik anger of the dalit. and ensures that the Indic metaphysics of caste remain firmly in place. In this way, Dwivedi's notion of the immanence of "character" (caritra) in caste (jati) lorecioses the experience of the datit in the idea of the I'ail'aklik. The failing in Dwivedi's Kabir is that we know only of the individual in caste, not of the individual for whom caste is a terrible enclosure. This latter individuaL whose interiority is always already social, and of whom the daHt Kabir is a singular instance, has no plaee in Dwivedi's self-sustaining life-world of the jati. We are a tong way yet from the radical social protest inherent in the individual struggle (this is another I'l'(lktivad) of the convert. This latler form of protest implies not the individual in the "ethos" of the social (which is the hierarchical web ofjat!), but the individualism in political society of the dalit and his god. It is a far cry from the failed populism of the radic.,l Hindi public sphere which Dwivedi exemplifies.

The pragmatic line of difference cutting through the ideology of caste from the other side, cleaves Dwivedi's idea of the individual into two. It opens the way to a reading of caste and of Kabir from the opening created by this divergence. Such a way would arguably lie beyond the romanticist individual­ism that Dwivedi reads into Kabir, as well as the self-adaptability of the caste system in the event of social crisis. This way would lie through an ethical engagement breaking through the problem of the individual on to the prob­lem of the advent of the singular, that other who is wholly other. Por this kind of ethical thinking what would be required is to attend to the violent means by which the individual appropriates the world to himself. just as Dwivedi's I'yakti, equipped with the ritual status of carifra. proceeds to lay claim to his individuality by pushing out the dalit from the imagined life of thejati. In Chapter 8 we will detect in Kabir's "loneliness" the dalit experi­ence of the singular.

With this Dwivedi's staging of historical Islam comes to an end, and he h now free to turn to the remarkable new belief exemplified in Kabir. The stage

74 Vicissitudes of historical religion

is now sct for the advent of this very emblem of the "other" tradition. The typecasting implied in this ilippage between character and person implies a typographic vision. for Dwivedi's Vaishnava scheme of things begins to appear as the history of the succession of so many avatars (Krishna, Ram) and their devotees (Kabir, Surdas, Tulsidas), crossing through the history of the nation. This vision excludes that other history where religion is experienced in and as protest.

5 The pitfalls of a dalit theology Dr. Dharmvir's critique of Dwivedi (1997)

Let us recall the image at the close of the previous chapter of Kabir's arrival on the scene of a triangulated religious contest in medieval India between Hinduism and the religions of the Book. What made this representation possible was the late colonial idea of an ecumenical castc-based Hindu society, broad enough to embrace the nation as a whole, but narrow enough to resist social change. Paradoxically, it was when the actual conditions of caste (jati) were written out of history and experience and raised to the level of the imagined ideal of a seamless IndianlHindu community--which is to say, it was only after caste had been dehistoricized-that the historical stage was set for the arrival of Kabir in medieval times. The idea of history implicit in Dwivedi was that of the possibility of change at the level of the individual tKabir) and the necessity of a continuum at the level of the collective (Hindu society, or India as a nation). Kabir's individual spiritual quest, so Dwivedi seems to argue, provided the ground for the longevity of the Hindu idea of social. But the effects of such a dramaturgy were debilitating for the modern legacy of Kabir, given that dalit critics today such as Dr. Dharmvir consider this fifteenth century low-caste weaver (julaha) and poet of Banares, a convert to Islam, to be the daJits' own god. Debilitating, because when Kabir arrived in Dwivedi's Kabir as its eponymous hero, he seemed neither daHt nor Muslim, and appeared unmarked by caste or religion; it was instead his uniquely Hindu and Indian way of being that was proclaimed by Dwivedi as the great event in Indian history, one that marked the birth of the modern Hindu subject.

We should understand this notion of subjectivity as a significant departure from previous characterizations of community, love and subjoctivity in bhakti of which the work of Ramchandra Shukla is a cardinal instance. True, like the other bhakti poets such as Surdas and Tulsidas who were valorized by Shukla as exemplars of the Hindi canon, Dwivedi's Kabir too works on himself by exposing himself to the message of love in the divine. But unlike these poets, Kabir played yet another quite unique role in the twentieth cen­tury political imagination, one that entailed producing and disseminating a new identifiably "Hindu" subjectivity for the nation as a whole. Let me express this contrast in another way. Modern critical accounts of Tulsidas

76 Vicissitudes o/historical religion

and the other poets in the Hindi bhakti tradition merely adopted these saint·poets as symbols of tr41ditional values. Shukla's image ofTulsidas is a case in point. But in Dwivedi's account of Kabir we encounter, for the first time, the production of subjectivity, one that is opposed to tradition, and in fact revitalizes all that is moribund in national culture and tradition. Does the daHt notion of subjectivity derived from Kabir and reconstructed by Dharmvir then constitute a break with Dwivedi's notion of an Indian! Hindu/Hindi idea of subjectivity?

Shadow of the census

Let us historicize Dwivedi's idea of a flexible but iron law of castc by relating it to the social and cultural legacy of the successive censuses in colonial India after 1872. Caste became a key rubric in the census of 1901. and thenceforth the growth of colonial ethnography furthered the idea of a uniquely flexible and at the same time fixed "ethos" peculiar to Indian society. The logic behind including caste as the basis of the census was that this "ethos" inher­ent in caste would guarantee the evolutionary dynamism for Indian society which was a necessary prerequisite if India was to become the beneficiary of the liberal reforms (English education. etc.) introduced by the colonial stale. In discussing the work of Herbert Risley, Census Commissioner for the 1901 Census, and author of The People 0/ India (1908), an influential colonial document on caste, Nicholas Dirks writes that caste seemed to Risley to be "simultaneously a barrier to national development and an inevitable realitv for Indian society in the foreseeable future." For it seemed nonetheless t~ have the potential to "accommodate and shape a gradually developing class society, perhaps even softening its potential conflicts and antagonisms." In doing so, it provided a "model in its (idealized varna version) for the articula­tion of an all·embracing ideology that might work at a general level to con­found and even counteract the fissiparous tendencies of t:.:'lste as a specific social institution" (Dirks 2001: 51). Thus, what is "all·embracing" about this modern ideology of caste is precisely its ability to overrun the fundamentally changing nature of identity with its own putative (and much celebrated) adaptability.

The colonial census therefore furthered not just the rigidity of class iden­tity; it also promoted both the idea that caste is the very essence of Indian society and that it is the key to the dynamic processes of conversion and upward mobility taking place in Indian society. Which is to say that, while fixing caste identity into specific molds at the level of the individual caste, colonial governance operating through the census nonetheless emphasized the living and vital spirit of caste as the historical agent of change and growth in Indian society. It is precisely this notion of an essential dynamism in caste that we see reflected in Dwivedi's use of the wordjali as the expression of the fundamental spontaneity (svabhavikta) of the popular.

Kabir in fact begins with an extended discussion of the contemporary

Pitfails 0/ a dalit theology 77

history of the weavers (julaha) caste. What is worth noting is that a text dedicated to the "idea" of caste begins on a note of ethnographic realism~ Dwivedi turns to the census for "evidence." Not surprisingly, he has recourse here to Risley's The People o/India for extensive documentation of the present­day status of the julahas~ he concludes that "despite becoming Muslim, this julaha caste did not give up its previous ethos (purvasanskar), nor did it manage to raise its social standing" (Knbir, 18). Of these, the second prop­osition implies a disagreement with Risley, who had argued that the motive behind the conversion to Islam of the julahas had been upward mobility; Dwivedi stresses instead the lowly status, continuing to this day, of this group of converts, drawing on Kabir's own attitudes to this caste (his own caste) as can be extrapolated (in however problematic a way) from his verses, as well as the range of still prevalent popular attitudes that poured scorn on their so·called idiocy. The question of a possible "motive" for conversion then begins to take on for Dwivedi the form of a conundrum: why do low·castes convert, if they do not stand to gain anything by this action? The answer (for Dwivedi) is of course caste envy: "In Hindu society the lowest of the low considers himself to be of higher status than a person of a still lower caste" (Kabir, 18). So conversion takes place not because low·castes (nichijafi ke log) want to improve their social standing (samajik maryada), but because they want to compete for prestige:

The strange thing is that it has often been found to be a peculiar feature of weaving castes that they do not like to represent [praslut] themselves as subsisting at that social level at which they have been placed. They repre­sent their origins and history variously, and extol the superiority of their own lineage. They even go so far as to call themselves brahmins.

(Kabir,19)

The secret of conversion then at the level of the "lowest of the low" (nichi s(' nichi jati) could be construed in terms of what would be called today in Indian sociology (after M. N. Srinivas), the sanskritizing desire of these castes for ritual and social mobility by token of brahmin·envy.' Alternatively, con­version could also be explained in the idiom of the political "science" of the Cambridge school of histOlians of India as the impulse between castes at each level to compete for prestige and for origins in a brahmanism both lofty and age-old. In either case the modular nature of brahmanism, as the locus and point of departure for all deviance, tends to be taken for granted. The problem with both these readings is that they presuppose conversion as necessarily derivative of the master text of brahmanism.2 On the contrary, the task of the dalit critique is to broach an alternative history of dalit life. one that takes brahmanism not as its point of arrival but as its point of departure. Such sociological images of caste ignore what is often the intransigence of lower castes in their struggle for recognition and autonomy, Por it would be no exaggeration to say that to sever all ties with Hinduism is the radical

78 Vicissitudes of historical religion

(and often unfulfilled) aim of the modern dalit movement, a goal exemplified by the tension between the dalit struggle lead by Ambedkar in the 1930s and the Gandhian idea of an ecumenical Hinduism which would heal internally the wound caused by caste oppression. The complex relationship between dalit politics today (in electoral contests, in the demand for job quotas, and special lines of mobility in education) and Hindu nationalism provides another instance of this tension between low caste protest and the Hindu! Indian idea of the nation. For brahmanical Hinduism, however, the identity of the convert who has left the fold can only ever be understood as being always on its way toward "reconversion." The idea of conversion as an alibi for "reconversion" was evident earlier in the century among revivalist groups such as the Arya Samaj. Beginning in the I 890s the Samajis organized a series of reconversion initiatives to promote what they called sllllddhikaran or the purification of low--castes who had converted to blam; the aim was to reintroduce the latter into the Hindu fold. Reconversion is then lor Dwivedi the key to the irreducible problem of Kabir's identity. 1

Reconversion as a response to Islam

The census thus contains within itself all the seeds of it potential reconversion to Hinduism, which would seem to be the only viable religion of Hindustan. Dwivedi's ethnographic chapter at the beginning of Kabir demonstrates his effort to seek traces of a (an always already Hindu) Kabir in the colonial archive of religion. But the more explicit link between Kabir and the threat of conversion (to Islam) is made in the historical chapter toward the end of Kabir which stages Kabir's entrance on to the historical scene of medieval India. We recall that neither the Nathpanthi rejection of scripture, nor the "expansive way of/ove" of Sufism was able to find a correspondence (saman­ja.<;ya) with a Hinduism newly ritualized (acarpravan) from the encounter with Islam.4 "For the very first time" in the history of this country, writes Dwivedi, the "caste order (varnashram-vyavasthaJ had to face a truly difficult situation, outside the pale of common experience [ananubhutpurva vikat paristhifll" (Kabir, 139).5 Until now, he goes on to say, "it [this caste system1 had had no adversary [pratidvandvI]." Those "who defaulted in the [ritualized world of] conduct (acarbhrashtJ were expelled from society, after which they would institute a new caste." In this manner, ·'despite the creation of thousands of castes and sub--castes, the caste system in some sense continued along its way (Is prakar saikdonjatiyan aur upjatiyan srisht hote rahane par bhi rarnashram vyavashtha ek prakar se chalti hija rahi thi)." Now ranged belore it was "a redoubtable adversary (I.e. Islam], a society that was benl on converting [angikar kama] every person and every caste." Its "only wager was that (this person or caste] should athrm its [own] specific religious creed [dharm-mat]." The socially penalized outcaste person was ·'no longer without recourse." He could easily turn to the "well-integrated society" which was Islam.

For Dwivedi it is not just Kabir who finds himself at such a dangerous

r I,

Pitfalls ofll daW theology 79

crossroad. Indeed. ii is Hindu society in its entirety. Who would come to its rescue in its hour of suprcme danger, at a time when the future of the caste system (varnashram vyavastha) hung in balance? Islam could only be confronted by an entirely new and in fact very modern protagonist, but one who had to have emanated from within the Hindu fold. He would have to be a member of that group of marginalized Hindus who, by turning back upon their own renunciation of the world had "defaulted in ... conduct" (acharbhrasht) and had been "expelled from society" (Kabir, 139). for this expulsion had aHorded to them the freedom to "institute a new caste." Many such castes could be founded without disturbing the movement of karma, which is to say the cosmogonic sanction for the order ofcastc. Now Hinduism had realized much to its alarm that its low-castes had the choice, the only one available to them, to join the ranks of the Islamic invader. and to affirm his creed. As Dwivedi notes. "The socially penalized outcaste person was no longer without recourse. lie could on a whim turn to the well-integrated society" that was Islam. What is crucial here is that the hero must arrive from within the threatened citadel itself. But this hero must himself have lived at the margins of the social order, must have attempted to convert to another order without much success. His ethos (st/flskar), deviant from and yet in essence very much in line with caste hierarchy, must have remained within the Hindu social order. From within the margins of the Hindu tradition arrives therefore the savior of the caste system under the dread specter of forced conversion to Islam.

What are the songs of praise sling at the gates before this savior conducts his momentous entrance into the inner Jerusalem of the caste Hindu heart? There is of course the song of Vedanta-inspired bhakti flowing upward from the South, lauded by Grierson. This manifested itself (alma-prakash kiya) in two forms:

The worship of a god with attributes (sagun upasna] derived from the Puranic avatars (i.e. Krishna and Ram], and the love- or prem-bhakti direcied toward a god without attributes (nirgun], derived from the absolute God wiihout attributes [nirgun-parabrahma] of the yogis.

This is the point in Kabil" at which one would have to draw attention to the two arguments at work in Kabir like the ends of the vice in which the fugiti~e figure of Kabir is caught and held fast in caste society. At one ~nd there. IS

Dwivedi's argument that Kabir is a nirgun bhakl, a devotee of an mdetermm­ate god without attributes. (Dwivedi's counterpointing of nirgun and sagun, indeterminate and determinate, in the following passage is elaborate as a filigree; we will therefore leave the two terms un translated in this passage.) At the other end is iJwivwi's "scientific" argument, indebted to Risley's meditations on the census. Let us stack these two arguments side by side.

[Saglln] worship soaked thcarid [ritualized] outer forms [of Hindu society]

80 Vicissitudes of historical religion

with inner love, making those outer forms piquant [rasmaya], whereas [nirgun] seeking did awV' entirely with this aridness. One took the route of compromise, the other [i.e. nirgun seeking] that of intransigence; one fell back on the scriptures, the other on experience: one relied on faith as its beacon, the other on knowledge; one adopted asagun god, the other a nirgun god. But the way of love was common to both; both hated [mere] arid knowing; mere outer form was anathema to them: both believed in an inner calling of love; both thought disinterested bhakti feasible; and the unconditional surrender to god was their commonly adopted means (of reaching Him]. In all these matters they tended to be similar. But the greatest difference lay in their attitudes toward [divine] play (fila]. Both believed in the love-play fprem-lilaJ of god. Both sensed that god kept up (sambhafe hue] this worldly apparatus for his play. But the basic differ­ence lay in the fact that the devotees who were moved to sing in a sagun way gleaned their rasa by gazing at him from a distance, whereas those who were moved to sing in a nirf(un way believed that the god who resided within themselves [a1'ne 01' men rame] was alone capable of clrect.

(Kabir, 141)

And let us stay close to the second argument thal comes two pages later. jllst after another celebration of the arduous labor with which sagun Mak'i elaborated the faith of the Puranas by exploring the fullest possibilities of the scholastic (shastric) tradition.

But Kabirdas's path was an exactly opposite one. Fortunately the time was perfectly opportune [unhe saubhagym'ash suyog bhi achha mila thaJ. Whatever modes of ethos (sanskarJ that could have fallen his way were closed to him. He was a Muslim without actually being a Muslim. Hindu without being a Hindu, an ascetic without being an ascetic (= non-householder [sic]), a Vaishnava without being a Vaishnava, a yogi without being a yogi. He was sent by god to be different [sabse nyare] from everything. He was the human counter-image of Vishnu's "man­lion" or Narasimha avatar. Like Narasimha. he appeared at the meeting point of seemingly impossible conditions. [The demon king] Hiranya­kashyapu had asked for a boon that his own killer would be neither man nor beast; his death would take place at a time neither during the day nor the night: at a place neither on earth nor in the sky; by a weapon of neither metal nor stone·-etc. Which is why to kill him was both an impossible and an awe-inspiring thing. And which is why Narasimha chose a meeting point [a pillar] at the center of these different categories [kotiyan] [from which to emerge and disembowel Hiranyakashyapu]. For an impossible task, god perhaps required precisely such a mutually contradictory set of determinants [kotiyan], and Kabirdas stood precisely at such a meeting-point. Where IIindutva emerges from one side. and Musalmanatva from the other; and between knowledge on the aile hand

Pitfalls of a daht theology 81

and untutoredness on the other; where there is the way of yoga on the one hand and the way of bhakti on the other; where there is 'nirgun aftectivity here and sagun seeking there; on that supreme crossroad stood Kabir. He could look in either direction and clearly detect the flaws and high points on either side. This was a god-given piece of fortune. And he made good use of it too.

(Kabir, 144)

Here, poised at the intersection between Hindutva and Musalmanatva, know­ledge and untutoredness, yoga and bhakti. and sagun and nirgun, Kabir "could look in either direction and could clearly detect the flaws and high points on either side." The problem is that the great god-given fortune to find himself at this crossroad cannot have been the dalit Kabir's. For a dalit, work acts as a constraint within the social division of labor sanctioned by caste, not as a mark or the freedom to choose social roles. The freedom to choose and to lay claim to an Archimedean point outside the social could only have been that of the Narsimha-Kabir who intervened to save the day for caste Hindu society. And this too, given the danger at hand, was an "opportune moment" for such an avatar to incarnate himself, sent down from god to defy every contradiction. Sent here on a mission to prove that the nirgun god whom Kabir quests after as a bhakt can as well grant him the gift of "conversion without qualities," a kind of nirgun mode of conversion. which leaves the outcaste dalit in a historical vacuum in the midst of caste Hindu society. This is because, since "every kind of ethos [sanskarJ" is "closed to him," it is clear that Kabir must inhabit for Dwivedi a kind of degree zero of culture, a point exactly originary to it, which would be the point of essential Hindu-ness, prior to historical Hinduism (prior to the caste system), at which caste Hindu society can undertake an auto-regeneration of itself, and face its historical adversary. It is as though only a dalit shorn of history, of all historical attrib­utes [kofiyan], a truly nirgun Kabir. can stand up to the "creed'· (i.e. Islan~) that dares to ignore that history and "ask for converts." But for such daht scholars as Dharmvir, it is not the nirgun saint·poet Kabir of the "history of religions," but Kabir's own nirgun (indeterminate) god who is crucial for a dalit "religion." This is a point to which we will soon return.

Dwivedi's anachronistic gesture here is to read the complex history of the present in terms of a putative past, and then to read the past back into the present. so as to imply that "the julahas have always heen like this. lowly and outcaste." Such a necessary marginality will. as we will see below, be an essential requirement for Dwivedi's Kabir. This Kabir is always the rebellious (phakkar) "outcaste," never what Kabir is for the dalit critic, which is to say, precisely, a dalit, out-caste, downtrodden, denied a history. Kabir as a roman­tic rebel transcends caste as part of what caste itself has to offer; Kabir as a dalil is a victim of caste. and points always to the inequity in caste itself, against which the dalit has Kabir's religion. One gesture, the brahmin critic's, writes out caste; the othef, the dalit critic's, brings it to fore. Why accuse

82 Vicissitudes of hislorim/ religioll

Dhannvir of starting a caste polemic, when it is Dwivedi who has Illonu~ mentalized caste? Is it Dham1Vir who "reduces" Hinduism to brahmanism, or is it in fact Dwivedi who reduces Hinduism to the idea and not to the reality of caste? For a marginal Kabir represents a Hinduism bet{)re history that is at the same time an "archival" Hinduism replete with historical layer­ing. It is at this degree zero of "Hindu' . history. at once blank slate and dense archive ·-truly a reservoir of traits· that Kabir's revolutionary energies will regenerate Hinduism by facing up to Islam, and thus assist the Hindu social order in laying claim again to history and modernity. The question we have to ask is: do these two passages in Dwivedi about Kabir's indeterminate (Ilirgun) god and his marginality mirror each other? An affirmative answer to this question would imply that the very idca that indeterminate (nirgun) bhakri is the obverse of determinate (sagull) bhakli is a product of the idea of caste within the colonial census. This ni/gun god is not the abstract Ram with the help of whom the daHt Kabir had his historic insight into the violence at the heart of the Hindu idea of the social.

The new vernacular of a datit politics

Let us now turn briefly to the notion of a dalit "religion" inherent in Dharmvir's conception of Kabir. Dhannvir's sllstained engagement with Dwivedi is clear from the fact that since 1997 he has written four books on Kabir dedicated almost entirely to examining Dwivedi's assimilation of Kabir to bhakti in Kabir (1942).6 The key fe<lture of Dharmvir's insurgent practice is to read Dwivedi's text ngainst the grain and thereby to stake a territory for Kabir by storming one citadel of modern brahmanism. which for Dharmvir is the tradition of modern scholarship in Hindi on Kabir. Since Dwivedi's Kahir is the imposing outwork of this citndel, Dbmmvir circles it again and again.nnd stakes this territory for his daHt Kabir in Kabir itself. His is therefore a persistent interloping. a kind of circumspection that critically disassembles Kabir brick by brick. Dharmvir\; mode is to draw from this Kabir the stuff for a dalit politics. Why would a dalil thinker pay so much attention to a literary-critical text when there is clearly so much more work to be done in the field of politics itself? Clearly, this is not simply something we could attribute to "cultural politics," as though culture were a specific sector of politics. Instead we should see Dharmvir's project for what it is, which is to sayan attempt to develop a new notion of the daHl individual using Kabir as a figurehead. It is a question therefore of turning the individual access to prem elaborated in Dwivedi's text toward ajoyous daHt access to the political. It is a question, in short, oflurning the idiom of historical religion toward the dalit, and ensuring that that religion speaks in all its ardor and intensity to the political interests of the dalit. There is a need here for a new alliance between the individualized romantic Kabir who stands for a self-critical Hinduism and the individuated dalit who enters into the political process with all the self-awareness of that Hinduism but at a distance from it. with all

Pi~falfs oIa dalit the%gr 83

its traces of a historical religion (in Ram and Krishna worship) removed. But this also means that Dharmvir in his commitment to the age 'of the individual in political society is unable to take into account the trace of prehistory in this empowered Kabir, and to look carefully at the nature of Kabir's Ram.

For Dharmvir, Kahir is neither a bhakl (a Vaishnava devotee) nor a saint­poet within the bhakti tradition. Kahir is a god who founded a new religion for dalits. Of Dharmvir's many claims with respect to Kabir. this has met with the greatest resistnnce among Hindi scholars. For legend has for long had it that Kabil" had been initiated into the "name" of Ram (the Ram of the Ramayana) by the grent Vaishnava sage and philosopher Ramanand (b. 1299). The story goes that the sage was known to frequent a certain ghat in Banares. [n nn draft to gnin his blessing at any cost. Kabir lay prone on one of the steps leading down to the Ganges. Startled upon realizing that he had stepped on someone, Ramanand exclaimed, "Ram!" This was benediction enough f{)r the untouchable Kabir, who thenceforth became a devotee of Ram. the son of King Dashratha, hero of the Ramayana. While the authen­ticity of this story itself has been entirely discredited today (Vaudeville 1974: 110), it continues to exercise a great inlluence in popular accounts of Kabir. In Kabir however, Dwivedi takes legend for fact. and repeats the story to emphasize the extent to which Kabir belonged to the Vaishnava tradition of Ram and Krishna worship. Against Dwivcdi's rehearsal of the Ramanand legend, Dharmvir's point is to insist that Kabir's Ram is nothing less than his own indeterminate (nirgun) god. one who is both worldly (Iaukik) and material (Mautik) (Dharmvir 2000b: 13-27). lie wants to insist that "Kabir's nirgulJ is not the Ineffable of the Vedanta. If he is indifferent he is absolutely inditTerent. and if he is non-dual he is absolutely non-dual" (Dharmvir 2000b: 151).J In which case the indeterminate (nirgulI) god of Dhamvir's Kabir falls within a hyperbolic utterance that is at once within and without the high Hindu conception of metaphysics. The Word of this Kabir (i.e. the Word that is Kabir's Ram) refers in this sense to a redoubling, a kind of secondary negation of the negativity already represented by Dwivedi's brah­manical (indeterminate) nirgun god. Dwivedi had thought that Kabir's idea of the indeterminate deity could only help to raise the determinate (sagun) deity of popular worship to the level of divine play in Love. (-<or Dwivedi t.herefore Kabir's Ram exemplified the rational kernel of bhakli. which was divine reason slaked with Love (prem), a knowing-loving in transcendence. The indeterminate god of the dalit Kabir is however "in-determinate" in the extreme. and alfirms the material world in a gesture of love toward every entity (ghali-ghati Ram).

In this way Dwivedi's idea of Kabir, coming to us via Tagore as a rational­ized kernel of Love, finds in Dharmvir a secondary reversal. The high Hindu theme or Love is negated yet again. leaving us with a question, which is: to what extent can one speak of an original dalit mode of thought in Kabir? Clearly, Dharmvir's dalit Kabir is greatly indebted to Dwivedi's Kabir.

84 Vicissitudes of historical religion

For the secular rationality that emerges in Dharmvir as the apotheosis of Kabirean Love is really an appropriation, after the fact, of what is already a considerably problematized idea of Love in Dwivedi's Kabir. Dharmvir's notion of Kabir's historical task is expressed most succinctly in this passage.

Kabir had a connection with that Ram whom Dashrath's son Ram him­self quested after. In another context, Kabir would have been called a prophet or a messiah. Brahmin thinking has cleverly assimilated the indeterminate [nirgun] god of the datit to the [brahmanical] sagun god with attributes and his devotees (bhakts] . ... The fact is that the gods of the dalits are absolutely incommensurable [atulniyaJ. They cannot be measured against anything else-,,·not the least with the devotees [bhakts] of the brahmanical sagun god with attributes. ... From this point of view, how can one possibly compare Tulsi and Kabir? If Kabir had been born among the twice· born (i.e. brahmins and other upper castes], he would have had a hundred devotees [bhakts] of the likes of Surdas and Tulsidas. Which is why it is clear that Kabir has all the qualities that one associates in India with a god, and elsewhere with a prophet. He did not go like a devotee [bhakt] in quest of god. but like god came to search lor himself [apna apa khoj kar gaye hainJ. A god does not speak in a scriptural language; he comes bearing his own scripture. He curses the language of scripture [shastra] using the language of the popular classes. Kabir carried out this task with great skill right up to the end. Such a god will have no truck with any scripture, but ranges himself against the old and established scriptures. This is what happened with Kabir. It should be said again that there is no devotee [bhakt] in Kabir's idea of the indeterminate [nirgunJ, only a god. Kabir's indeterminate [nirgunJ idea is not tantamount to a determinate [sagun] god with attributes. When Kabir's indeterminate [nirgun] turns back upon itselt: it pervades every entity in the world. [Jab kabir ka nirgllfl palat khata hai to sansar ke kan­kan men phail jata hai.] This god does not call for an embodiment [sharir dharan] in Dashrath's son Ram or Vasudev's son Krishna.

(Dharmvir 2000c: 110 [Translation mine))

Kabir's gospel is then that of a different, incommensurable god, one who cannot be assimilated to the high Hindu structure of bhakti. True. the lan­guage that Dharmvir uses here. with its relerence to devotees. scripture, etc .. is very much within the idiom of historical religion. Yet, by insisting on the divinity of Kabir, Dharmvir introduces a significant shift in the modern history of subjectivity in bhakti. Hitherto, in the dominant traditions stem­ming from the work of Tulsidas and Surdas, the subject of bhakti had been the devotee who exposed himself to the searing phenomenal manifestation of the deity. It was within the affective impetus of bhakti that such a subject would go on to serve as the model for the Hindu nationalist. This masochism of the devotee (bhakt) had as its flip side the praxis of the nationalist.

T Pitfalls of a dalit theology 85

This was one phase in the history of colonial bio-power. With Dharmvir's Kabir perhaps. a new postcolonial phase has begun. Here, for the first time, is a subject who does not restore himself unto himself through the historical encounter with the deity, but instead gives himself over to the experience of the indeterminate (nirgun). Dharmvir's Kabir is a god because he leaves him­self open for this experience of the indeterminate. The experience itself is described in the simple terms of a reversal: "He did not go like a devotee [bhakt] in quest of god, but like god came to search for himself [aplla apa khoj kar gaye hain] . ... When Kabir's indeterminate [nirgun] turns back upon itselC it pervades every entity in the world." Kabir is then a dalit god because he seeks himself. And in this way the modern reign of the self-surrendering subject that had flourished in the era of nationalism tinds itself reversed, albeit minimally, in a new ·'religion." This happens when the other-dircctedness of the devotee turns into the holy restlessness of the convert in se.'lrch of a self, a new individuality.

The historical religion of love from a dalit standpoint

We are in a position now to confront Dwivedi's notion of Love with the idea of Love in Dharmvir's daHt "religion." The question is: how could Kabir, the lowest of the low, too lowly to be Hindu and too lowly to be Muslim, become in Dwivedi's reading the very emblem of the highest of the high? Which is to say, how was the high tradition of Ram and Krishna worship to make room for Kabir's revolutionary idea of divine Love? Dharmvir's confrontation with Dwivedi in lour closely argued books exposes the hidden transcript of Dwivedi's narrative of the popular, and in this way unveils in one stroke the fundamental gaps in the Hindi/Hindu vision of the social. We have seen how this vision was unable to determine the Indian Muslim or dalit as anything but an invader or convert reverting back to the fold. For when Dharmvir asks after a daHt god who is Kabir, he is not about to add a daHt avatar to the Hindu pantheon. Nor is Dharmvir merely saying that Kabir has founded a new religion for dalits. Such a reactive idea of religion, derived from the colonial contest of identity in census after census, and one that merely reflects the dominant religion of caste Hindu society, would only run counter to daHt politics by implicating it in the old idea of community as the national religion of the Hindus. If Kabir is the new god and Kabir's nirgull the new "religion" for dalits, Dhannvir must mean that Kabir's imperative opposes itself to the theme of avatars in determinate (sagun) bhakfi. It opposes itself also to the romantic theme of individuality in bhakti inaugurated by Dwivedi, that severs Kabir from his link with the world of the daHt's social struggle. For Dharmvir, Kabir's imperative must institute a new relation beyond an idealized vision of the social, which hides the reality of caste, and beyond an individualized subjectivity, which disregards the liminal position of the con· vert. It cannot seck to dissolve into each other the "subject" (as individual consciousness) or the "social." Dharmvir is not invested in forming yet

86 Vicissitudes o/his/orim/ rciigion

another Kabir sect nor does he want 10 celebrate Kabir as the rebellious individual thai Dwivedi waRts him to be.

Dwivedi's chapter on "The place of Kabir India's religious quest" in his Kabir has served so far as a convenient point of entry into these issues. The reason for this is clear; it is here in Kahir that Dwivedi's dramaturgy of "re-conversion" is laid out with the greatest rigor. Indeed. the remarkable tension in his prose in the final chapters of the book has often been remarked upon-the language is steeped in hyperbole and begins at this point to mime thc ecstatic. Clearly, more is at stake here than a mere recapitulation of the history of Vaishnava bhakri. For at this point bhakti is put to work to gener­ate a response at the level of the Hindu idea of the social to the problem of identity thrown up by the colonial government of identities. What seems crucial to Dwivedi is to have recourse to two figures of alien ness. There is the threatening, intractable figure represented by Islam. And there is the "almost-Hindu" convert to Islam, Kabic. In other words the figure of the other in Dwivedi has two faces referring two temporal phases in the history of the caste Hindu subject, one that represents "conversion" (Islam), and another that represents the "converted" (the dalit who is now Muslim) on the threshold of reconversion. This is tantamount to a kind of "switch" whereby the external, historical developments represented by Islam and conversion are now internalized in the soul of the Hindu subject as a perilous spiritual crossing from conversion to reconversion. It is this interior timeline of (re)conversion that begins to determine the caste Hindu unconscious in Dwivedi. The urgent question for him is. how can Kahil' be made to respond to Islam's "gift," which entails a wager of great significance for Dwivedi's "caste Hindu society," a wager offering social emancipation in return for absolute submission to Islam? Now Islam bears in its clenched fist an offer that is difficult for the dalit to disregard. (This gives rise to Dwivedi's anxiety with regard to census "evidence" of mass conversion to Islam.) Hence the need for another olfer, another wager, extended to the would~be convert. the dalit. This is the wager of reconversion. What does this wager entail?

Such a wager of reconversion involves first the arduous labor of redeeming Kabir from what Hindi critics prior to Dwivedi had tended to see as the taint of ecstatic or mystic communication. Disagreeing with this assumption but continuing nonethcless to adhere to Hindi's investment in a "popular" trad­ition close to dominant forms of belief and poesy in n0l1h India, Dwivedi·s entire effort is to demonstrate that Kabir is in fact the very figurehead of Dwivedi's radicalized version of Hindu modernity--not mystic and other­worldly but rebellious (phakkar) and irrepressible (akkhar) to the core. This Kabir is at once testy and thoughtful, quick to take offense but equally ingenuous in his message of love. He is "neither Hindu nor Muslim," but in fact the epitome of a secular mode of hclief, at once social and personal. In describing this contradictory set of qualities, Dwivedi's language parallels that of Shukla in the latter's own descriptions of the classical reconciliation of opposites in Tulsidas's Ram, juxtaposing softness with harshness, and

T Pi(fulls of a datil theo/OKY 87

warmth with force. But in Dwivedi the reconciliation is really between the old idea of a Hindull lindi tradition and the problem of Hindu/Hindi modernity. It is at this level. within this particular dialectic of the modern. that a wholly new idea of divine pleasure (ananda) is made to stand in for the place of suffering in the world. But what is asked of the dalil in return for this radical Hindu retrieval of dalit intransigence? What is asked is that the daHt return to the Hindu fold.

The greatest impediment to (re)conversion is the dalit's historical experi­ence of trauma. How to respond to this wound? The historical religion of Hinduism. in claiming to speak for and represent the daliL would have to respond precisely to this trauma. acknowledge it, make it fungible, heal it. and turn it to its own purposes. The question of trauma is taken up at the point in the text where we left otf earlier, which was the point at which Kabir enters the historical stage of conversion. We read the two long passages that frame this entrance: first. the passage that lays out the distinction between the determinate and indeterminate, the Silgun and nirgun god of blwkfi. Second. the passage closer to the end of the chapter, which proclaims Kabir as the new man-lion (Narasimha) avatar, poised at the crossroads of lfinduism. We had suggested that while the first passage assimilated Kabir to the sagufl-nirgufl distinction in bhakti which became current in the late nineteenth century, the second located Kabir at the historical point of reconstruction, the degree zero, of Hindu society. The two passages therefore imply a crucial link between issues of bhakli and issues of caste. In other words. Kabir is reconverted en route to this passage between love and reason. between (Kabir's) nirgun bhakti and his rational (gyanatmak) standpoint, outside and beyond the Hindu-·Muslim divide. If the Kabir at the beginning is a Kabir given over to feeling, the Kabir we have at the end is the rational, thinking Kabir. model for the modern Hindu. !-low did this conversion (or reconversion) take place? And what of the dalil's trauma of casle?

The wound of love (prcm)

In the intervening passage between the two excerpts we have seen. Dwivedi elaborates an idea of love as trauma. At this point. having distinguished between sagun and nirgun forms of addressing the deity (the one sought the deity outside the self, the other within). Dwivedi goes on to invert the critical commonplace about Kahil', exemplified in Shukla. which was to inveigh against the esoteric mystical current in Kabir's thinking. Unlike Shukla. who denounced Kabir's mysticism as otherworldly, exclusive or forgetful of his­tory and social commitment, Dwivedi at this point raises mystery to the status of the central ethical principle in Kabir. For Dwivedi mystery or mysti­cism in Kabir is merely a sign that for Kabir, as with the Vedantic tradition, the world itself is less an illusion than a fiction (maya). And Kabir's mystic utterance is a response precisely to the "lack" of certitude implicit in a world made up of a range of competing fictions, those of caste. religion and group.

88 Vicissitudes of historical religion

This lack of certitude leads to suffering, which is really the experience of lack. Kabir's mystic response to suffering is to "work" with the fictiveness of the world by overwhelming it with the absolute fiction of divine love; Kabir's mystical utterance is in this sense a rejoinder to the "play" (lila) of the Lord, which is the original source of the fictive world. Dwivedi redefines Kabir's mystic message of love within the terms of a transcendental vision of suffering.

But love [prem] fills in every flaw. A son may have many defects, but his mother will hold him to her bosom. Because a mother's love fills in every gap. The lover fills every lack with love ... hell is after all the name for these forms of Jack; suffering is merely the lack of wellbeing, and the divine weapon of love should suffice to ward it off. Poverty, agony, and lack refer to the same thing, and poets and thinkers have becn saying for millennia that the only force capable of dispelling the sway of lack is love ...

(Kab;r, 141)

Here in Dwivedi it is as though the gap left by the traumatic experience of lack is "filled in" (Marna) by the community of dcvotees who like Kabir also experience divine love, which will supplement this lack by both filling it in and exceeding it, For the excess inherent in divine love leaves a wound (a chot or trauma) in the heart ohhe lover or devotee, Here is Dwivedi's account of this wound in the very next passage:

[God] himself spreads out the mesh of his play, because clearly he hun­gers for love [prem]. There is no use in asking what it is that God himself lacks that He should feel this hunger. For all this comprises his play. those who experience Ihis become desperate. They hear a desperate call. This call rends the entire body. As though one's lover teasingly threw oul [the likes 011 such a call that its wound became hard to cope with, There is no medicine. no mantra, no herb, no root that can tend to it--what can the poor healer do? This kind of wound overwhelms him who suffers from it. God or man, sage or passerby, a pir or an allliya all find it hard to get a grip on themselves. Kabirdas is witness that the man who is wounded with the color of the Lord becomes steeped in every color, and yet finds that color [the Lord's] different (nyara] from all the rest. Kabirdas himself had been colored. He had been wounded by this inexplicable call of love [prem]. And it was in this desperate state that he approached the true guru and asked for a way out:

Maharaj, True Guru, The Lord has sprinkled color [rang] on me. The wound of the Word Has pierced my mind.

Balm and root are of no use, What can the poor healer do? Gods, men and sages, Cannot handle it. Saheb Kabir is steeped in every color,

Pitfalls of a dalil theology 89

But this color is different from the rest [sabse nyara]. (Kabir, 141)

Let us try and determine the temporal structure of mystic cpiphany by dint of which Dwivedi attempts to reorder the contours of modern bhakti along individualist lines. The first moment in this experience is that of the wound (cho!) or trauma inherent in worldly suffering. which we can understand after Dwivedi as itself a symptom, albeit a negative one, of God's play (li/a). One can understand trauma in Dwivedi as the experience of lack in this world. The response to this trauma is to repeal it within the experience of divine love; in the repetition, therc is excess. for God's love has the capacity to produce, in excess. a "wound" or trauma (chot). The ecstatic madness of the mystic is a symptom of this wound. If we turn from the psychic to the social aspects ohhis wound, we realize that its effect is twofold. There is on the one hand a sense in which the trauma of a lack experienced in this world becomes an aspect of the self-narrative of the devotee. In this way. trauma becomes the mode of interiorization that privileges, and thereby does not rcally challenge, the sovereign consciousness of the devotee,

But thc wound opened up by the love of the Lord (sain) is likewise at once a moment in the individual self-narrative of the devotee and an ethical moment whose import is to open the psychosocial world of the devotee, indeed the dominant high Hindu tradition of bhakti in north India. to the experience of the convert. This is a hyperbolic, excessive moment in Dwivedi, and one that threatens to open the Hindi/Hindu idea of nation and community to the encounter with another. It is the point at which the voice of the convert leaves its mark in the interstices of this passage in Dwivedi's text, between his paraphrase or translation, along the lines of Tagore, of Kabir's bhakti, and the verses associated with the historical Kabir. This ethical moment in Dwivedi is a product of a union between a rationalized idea of bllakti and a romantic structure of feeling.

We can then understand Dwivedi's reading of Kabir's notion of divine Love as an instance of a certain idea of community, one that supplements social iniquity by infusing it with an ethics of love. The transcendental play of the divine is reflected in the play of love in love, self in other, coloring in this way the whole range of human being-together. Grounded in Tagore, Dwivedi's metaphysical idea of community implies the work of love in love, a task directed toward absolving all finiteness, and producing in turn the figure of divine absolution. All finite things, including the world at large find themselves raised via the community of Love, which is the community of devotees who have experienced the "wound," or chot, of divine Love. to the

90 Vicissitudes a/historical religion

level of the infinite. The "trauma" of Islam, as well as the trauma of untouchability, which is implij;it in Kabir's Word, is transmuted into the perennial wound that is divine Love. Kabir's song, in Dwivedi's account. inaugurates a community of devotees as tlnite beings transfigured (absolved. translated) into the infinity of a future community of the (caste Hindu) nation guaranteed by Love.

Yet, which trauma is being gestured at here? That wound that came with the "intrusion" (dakhaf) of Islam, the wound that suddenly uncovered the great chasm at the heart of Hindu society, that very trauma of caste has found a response here in the hydraulic motion by which divine Love fills in a lack and thereby exceeds it. The movement by which a trauma (that of Islam) is converted into a wound is the selfsame process by which the untouchable Kabir is made to embody the historical mission of Hinduism. Where there was a lack (apurnata, truti, kami, abhav). there is now excess. Where there was agitation (sankshobhlvikshobh) there is now an ecstatic madness (nahi koi para). It is strange that it has taken an untouchable's word, the song of Kabir, to cover up the abyss left in Hinduism by caste and uncovered by Islam.

The dalit Kabir before dalit politics

Now there is a sense in which Dharmvir is correct to point out the hidden wound of caste beneath the trauma of Love (prem). And he is entirely justi­fied in drawing attention to the way Kabir's nirgun "turns back upon itself' and "pervades every entity in the world." But both Dwivedi and Dharmvir, the "brahmin" and the "dalit" in this contest for the soul of Kabir, lose sight of what we will see is Kabir's greatest achievement, which is to have broken out from within the very impasse between nirgun and sagun. For we have seen how this distinction is virtually the schema for the institution of historical religion; it is at the basis of its claim to have united within itself the abstract and the concrete. So that Hinduism can argue at once for the access of the dalit to the concrete traditions of Krishna and Ram worship and insist on its own claim to an abstract and rational understanding of God. Does not Dharmvir's attempt to claim the nirgun Ram for dalits amount to a simple legitimation by reversal of the nirgun·sagun opposition? And by the same token (though it would seem counter-intuitive to imagine it) is this not the augury of an alliance at the core of Hinduism between brahmin and dalit? Is this not a coalition at the tempestuous heart of its inner currents, at the precise center that we have for so long described as the "interior religion" of bhakti? The fervent, loving angst of the devotee is here (with troubling impli· cations) no longe,. answerable to the charge of Brahmanism. For, brahmanical ccumenicism and dalit intransigence, the two great Ambedkarite fictions that were of such compelling heuristic value for Dharmvir, collapse into each other to produce the very example of systematicity in the historical religion of Hinduism, which is now the nirgun God of Kabir. We can find no more telling sign that the allegory of Kabir's involuted return to the abstract Ram

, !

Pitfalls 0/ a daliltheology 91

has found its own reversal in the systematicity of this nirgull God. With this, Dharmvir anoints Kabir as the new deity, as if the figure of the living, striv­ing and singular being in Kabir had now found its humanized image in this deity. And Kabir will thus have been assimilated to Hinduism not by means of a "brahmanical" maneuver, but (herein lies the great paradox of political society) by a dalit theology! At the "end of history" when Hinduism will have rediscovered its philosophical vocation in a rational nirgun that is avid. grasping, theoretical, so that it can now find the figure of the good at the very limits of its movement of self-understanding through history- at the high point of its most radical self-interrogation when all the figures of its past rush before it in the grand conflagration unto death of its sensuous life· there will it have installed Kabir's nirgun as the essence of the new Hinduism of polit· ical society. In a Love or prem that is at once sensuous and abstract, a poten· tially genocidal Hinduism is discovering (as we sVC<"lk) its worldly task. And in this way the dalit critique will have entered political society by flattening the peculiarly resistant aspects of Kabir thought. It will have humanized Kabir by turning him into an image of the individual. which is to say a new deity. Is this not what Dwivedi the "brahmin" had been saying all along? Perhaps we should couch this in the following terms: Kabir is now a god because he makes it possible for the dalit critique to turn from character (caritra) to individuality (vyaklitva) and lay claim to the center stage of political society.

But we will see in Kabir in the following chapters a grasp of the abstract at the outset, prior to the very distinction between abstract and concrete. sagun and nirgun. And from the point of view of this concrete grasp of the abstract, we will see how everything in historical religion seems abstract and fleeting. though not any less compelling. Love itself now seems to be the very idol of theory; it is another name for the will of the devotee which brings into being the willed deity. From the perspective of historical religion. in which Dharmvir and Dwivedi are grounded albeit in different ways, Kabir's nirgun Ram is merely the final instance of a desiring and willing that must ground itself in its rational ground, render reason to itself, so that it is prepared to ignore its own tie with the living, striving devotee that is Kabir himself. But that dalit Kabir is prior to dalit politics: he is a devotee of the good before being, of a Ram who introduces in the world the idea of color, rang. We will see how the phenomenality of rang is not assimilable to the phenomenal itself. The prephenomenal impetus of color which precedes the visual field appears fleetingly before the vast and ambient image-repertoire of historical Hinduism. In the passage from Kabir we get a sense of this late instance of color in a line in which Dwivedi quickly ascribes to historical Love: "Kabirdas himself had been colored. He had been wounded by this inexplicable call of love (prem)." Now, this color is elearly in the poem itself entirely other (nyara) to Love as premo It is truly "different from the rest." It is a difference that anoints this indifferent Love with the tender "touch" of the non·indilferent, the tender: what is nyara in rang absolves absolutely. for color is not in space

92 Vicissitudes of historical religion

or time. It introduces into the relentlessly changing pattern of the infinite the mark of a prior good. And it is to the secular, presensuollS world of such "deities" as Kabir and Vitthala that we now turn so as to explore the new humanism of the dalit standing outside the Hindu fold. Let us begin our journey to the South, where the streams of Kabir and the Varkari tradition commingle.

T

6 System and history in Rajwade's "Grammar" for the Dnyaneswari (1909)

The lowly traditions of yogic alchemy that became the stock in trade of Nathpanthi lore in the early Middle Ages, and the baroque physiognomy of Kabir's inner world they went on to inspire had at least this much in com­mon: both involved less the transformation of the world than an elaboration of the soul. What was mystical about these writings was not their otherworld­liness but their adumbration of an interior time straining to stand still. their eschatology of a dissembled self-extinction, the dramaturgy of a death at once embraced and thrown asidc. This scene of the soul grappling with itself was saturated with the idiom and image-reperloire of high Vaishnavism: but that agon persevered-- if only on the sidelines or such lexts, silent. unobtrusive, as though in secret trespass on the ostentatious Ways of the panths and sampradayas they would help inaugurate and uphold. It was broached in a gesture of self-transformation that did not reject history so much as choose to return to a kind of prehistory of historical action. We have of late tried to understand the premodern in terms of the emergence of the figure of the state in the languages of the subcontinent at least a few centuries prior to the dawn of Euroccntric historiography in early colonial India (see Subrahmanyam ef at. 2(02). To the chronicles and local histories that are more typically the subject matter of this school of historical research, 1 wish to bring into view here texts of a literary and philosophical disposition that do not refer explicitly to historical events but seem instead to be invested in an involuted and interiorized address to a God who "will have come." Such texts elaborate a momentous "pastness" that describes the coming of God from out of a hidden past into the open. Their proximity to subaltern traditions of pilgrimage and anti-brahmanism makes this corpus of texts an important basis for asking: how do millennial traditions of low-caste "passivity" none­theless go into the making of more easily recognizable forms of active protest and caste-critique? I want to prepare the ground for a larger question: does the subaltcrnity of low-caste mystic speech precede and supplement from a vanished past our present-day politics of dalit or low-caste empowerment? To establish this precedence or priority, as I hope to begin to do here, is to do away with the distinction between passivity and power, subjectivity and agency, or perhaps even between the religiosity of Bhakti and the politics of

94 Vicissitudes o/his/oricaf religion

caste. To ask if the past (moral action before ethics or religion) supplements the present by 11lling in and .. exceeding its gaps, is to insist that a dalit idea of moral action (a dalit philosophy prior to dalitness) must always, in each and every case, be the basis for a questioning of dalit politics.

By the same token. I will seek to uncover in these traditions an interiority that prt.'Cedes the rich "interior lifc" historians of religion associate with the spiritual quest; nor can it be reduced to the ascetic militancy of a range of sectarian traditions starting from that of the gosain and the Sikh Panth after Nanak. The hard pragma of love that holds up such an interiority is equally hard won; it is staked against the ineluctable tendency of the soul to fortify itself by turning toward aggression and militarism. The soul that seeks to become "fluidly equilibriate" or samarasa with itself seeks to uncover the sources of eternality in lived time-··it reverses passion and desire netherward, embracing in this way the specter of immortality; it does so not from the perspective of human timc but from that of the eternity of miracle. There is something markedly millennial (a rupture waiting a thousand years to happen) about this tendency of low-caste thought to undertake a critique of time at the very heart of the great ecumenical currents of the medieval period, for there high Hindu thought had already elaborated a historicity of a~atars-· Ram and Krishna were always already transcendentalizations of secular time; their historical intervention in situations of worldly distress was designed to raise worldly time to the eternality of kat-whereas low-caste critique sought in however alchemical a fashion, to understand and transmute worldly time itself into the condition for eternity.

Here I have recourse to Dnyaneswara, the poet who wrote in 1290 an epic verse commentary in Old Marathi on the Gita, known as the Dnyaneswari. In the Maharashtrian (Western Indian) tradition of pilgrimage, i.e. the trad­ition of the pilgrim Varkaris we encountered in our introductory chapter, Dnyaneswara is often considered the basis (paya) of a line of four heterodox sants that ends with Tukaram in the seventeenth century. Tradition has it that his place in brahmin society was seriously compromised when his father turned back from the life of a renunciant to that of a householder, earning the opprobrium of his upper-castc peers for flouting the regulated order of stages (varnashrama dharma) in a brahmin's psychobiography. The fact of his being an "outcaste" in this sense, along with his (still unproven) authorship of scores of verses in honor of the Vitthala/Krishna of Pandharpur has made him an object of reverence and even worship among the Varkaris. Where those verses display some of the caste ecumenicism of the Varkaris, the Dnyaneswari itself is a text that on first impression re-elaborates (albeit in glorious verse) the fundamentally caste-conservative vision of the Gita. For this reason the place of this text in the Varkari tradition today is at once foundational and ambiguous.

Yet this text is crucial for what I have described thus far as "traditions of hearsay" (those that celebratc their "having heard" of the coming of God) because it posits in an inaugural way the idca that the political idiom of

Rajwade's grammar 95

action and inaction, force and passivity that one finds in resurgent religious nationalism today is itself based on an earlier, irreducibly anterior passivity, which is the passivity of death at the heart of the yogic comportment. We should recall here what a spate of recent research has sought to establish: that the Indo-Islamic millennium was marked by the militarization of the entire sub-continent, a trend that had extraordinary consequences for the evolution of castes, classes, courtly culture and indeed for the elaboration of forms of "vernacular" expression (that is to say, literary production under the shadow of cosmopolitan languages such as Sanskrit and Persian). It could even be argued that the traditions of hearsay are themselves indelibly marked by the experience of migrancy, exile and displacement that followed the opening of a vast military market in the era of successive empires. This was a time when, as Dirk Kolff (1990) has speculated, the distinction between active and passive modes of life may have derived from the unpredictability of livelihood for the vast majority of low-caste peoples, for many of whom the tillage of a small plot of land, endemic vagrancy, a life of plunder and semi~permanent employment in local or regional armies could all make up the arc of a single lifetime. KoHrs work helps us understand why a political idiom of activity and passivity continued to be favored by nationalist critics and thinkers writing in the late nineteenth century, for many of whom the resurgence of a belligerent Hinduism was necessary if the future nation was to define itself as Hindu as against Muslim, and as Indian as against British or European.

In the Marathi-speaking region it was not uncommon for such critics to deride the Varkaris as proponents of a passive accession to God, and to argue that such later poets as Ramdas in the seventeenth century, traditionally associated with the legendary warrior-king Shivaji, provided for the lirst time a whole program for a militant asceticism tied to the project of the Marathi state against Muslim rule. Ironically, it was one of the leading votaries of this nationalist school of thought, the historian V. K. Rajwade, who went on to publish the first critical edition of the Dnyaneswari. What attracted him to this text was less its content than its ·'Iook." Rajwade claimed to have discovered the oldest extant manuscript copy of Dnyaneswara's text. The discovery of the original text, shorn of later sectarian redactions made it possible for him to argue that the language of the Dnyaneswari established the continuity of Marathi with ancient Sanskrit. The correspondence between the two was something he sought to establish by means of a "grammar" of the Dnyaneswari.

Grammar and history

The notion of grammaticality that Rajwade used to provide the scholarly scaffolding for his edition of the text was itself based on Panini's monu­mental fourth- to fifth-century B.C.E. grammar, the Ashladhyayi. Here, witbout going into thc details of Panini's grammar {which has continued to

96 Vicissitudes ojhistoricai religion

fascinate linguists and philosophers in our time for its anticipation of several key issues of reference and meaning) I wish to underscore the brahmanical basis of Panini's text, whose ostensible purpose was to bring together the grammar of post-Vedic life and the grammar of language into one systematic arrangement of rules graduating from the sentence to the verb to the verbal root. The fundamental idea in this and the other grammatical projects that followed it in late antiquity was that "linguistic units are non-products, hence eternal, and their relationship with meanings arc eternally given" (Matilal 1990: 36). Now in some sense the rigor and complexity of Panini's master­work enables one to leave aside-- except for explicit references to caste in some of his examplcs---the political aspects of his work and focus instead on the philosophical issues involved. A ccrtain fundamentally conscrvative idea of post-Vedic brahmanieal culture is so basic to this text that drawing atten­tion to it would scem redundant. Yet this is not the case when one takes up Rajwll{\e's attempt 10 read Paninian rules into Dnyaneswara's thirteenth­century Old Marathi. It is clear that. as I will indicate below, Rajwade's attempt is to assimilate Dnyaneswara to the history of the Marathi (or Indian/ilindu) state; to trace Old Marathi back to Sanskrit is in this sense to argue for the hoary lineage of contemporary Marathi as well as to prepare the grounds for the retrospective autochthony of Marathi in an uncontamin­ated Hindu antiquity. In short, to read Dnyaneswara as premodern it was crucial to presuppose Panini as the cultural high point of a pre-medieval. pre-Muslim past. But in strenuously recasting the premodern as the pre­medieval (and by this token producing the figure of a redoubled late antiquity) Rajwade provides us with an insight, despite himself. into what in Dnyaneswara and the cultures of hearsay as a whole is not really reducible to an endorsement ofa culturally or religiously prescribed way of understanding the relation between words and life, speaking and living.

Less than a hundred years after the Christo logy of Hegel and the compara­tive philology of Bopp a new kind of project came to incise the traditional understanding of texts that had for close to sevcn centuries supported the low-caste affirmation of a becoming (hidden) of God. One could even argue that this radically new line of inquiry was of greal moment for history, for the history of language and the history of the writing of grammars, indeed for the very origin of the notion of a "historical grammar" in India. The essayist, linguist and historian Vishwanath Kashinath Rajwade (1863-1926) who is known for his massive editions of the sources of Marathi history, had in 1896 begun looking across the length and breadth of Western India for old Marathi manuscripts and books. The tenacity with which Rajwade con­ducted these searches is now the stuff of legend. In 1903, while visiting the MukundaraW muth (shrine) of Patangan near the city of Bhid, he stumbled upon what seemed to him with almost immediate certainty to be the oldest manuscript yet of the Dnyaneswari, copied soon after Dnyaneswara's death in 1296, a manuscript older than Eknath's fabled edited version of 1584 which had for so long served as the (now untraceable) basis of a great many

Rajwade's grammar 97

sectarian (sampradayik) editions. It was as though he was staring at a whole new world of possibilities for the history of the Marathi language. Rajwade himself was as electrified (made ''l'ilakshana'') by this discovery as· were Cortez and his men gazing wild-eyed at their first vision of the Pacific- in Keats's words, "silent, up on a peak in Darien." What made this manuscript startlingly unique in Rajwade's eyes was that the Old Marathi inscribed on its miraculously well-preserved pages harked back to the language that Dnyaneswara and "the urbane Marathis of (eE. 1290] actually spoke" (Rajwade CW 6: 55). There was for Rajwade absolutely no doubt that the language of this Mukundaraji MS was the "unmiscegenated urbane Marathi language [nirbhei nagar marathi bhashaJ" of that time (CW 6: 55). For the next decade or so Rajwade would attempt to work through the implications of his find. Soon after he published his edition Rajwade attempted to have this MS ratified by the Mats at Alandi and Pandharpur; the story goes that these priests who were understandably inured to the relatively more familiar Marathi of the latter-day redaction of the text (wbich is to say. the Varkari sant Eknath's lost edited version), proceeded to rebulThim. In a fit or pique this temperamental high-Brahmin of markedly anti-Muslim, anti-low-caste leanings took hold of his remarkable discovery (all 322 of its lovingly described pages "measuring each a length of9 inches and a breadth of 4 and three-fourths of an inch ... with 12 to 14 ot'is on each page") and threw it into a running stream somewhere in southern Maharashtra. 2

The historian and stcr(,'{)type

What is worth noting is that Rajwade appended to his edition of the Dnmneswari not just an extensive ··historical" Introduction or Prastm'al/a (CW 12: 1--86) but also an essay published alongside it as "The Grammar Wl'akamn] of the J)nyane.nmri's Marathi" (CW I: 153-276).' Now it i~ a matter of some agreement lhat Rajwade's fame in the Marathi-speaklllg world is based on the wide-ranging historical and historiographic spe­culations that accompanied his 22-volume Sources of Mar(llha History. Rajwade's own term lor these lengthy exergues was "Historical Introduc­tions" (Aitihasika Pmstamna; CW 10). We will soon have occasion \0 examine one instance of these Introductions. which is the one Rajwade wrote to accompany his edition of the oldest Marathi chronicle or bakhar, the Bakhar of Mahikavati in the Konkan. But what is intriguing is that the inlrodudiofl to his 1909 edition of the Dnmneswari does not bear the adjective, "histor­ical;" nor does the title of the accompanying grammar. Yet in both texts can be found an explicit attempt to address the need for two kinds ofhislories. the history of the Marathi language and the possibility of a historical grammar for Marathi. It could of course be argued that in desisting from using the descriptive term "historical, ailihasik" for these texts, Rajwade was adhering to his own personal organon lor historical research. A statement of method that appears at the start orhis 1924 Introduction to the Bakhar ofMahikavati

98 Vicissilud('s of historical reliKion

should suliice as an indication of his general approach to such issues. Here he writes, ..

How the quarrels of kings and the rise or fall of kingdoms transpired and how these events had an impact on the history of North Konkan, these were not the issues that necessarily preoccupied [the compiler of this Bakhar, Bhagwan] Datta. Instead, the relative ranking of castes [jatis] and other such social and religious issues [samajika ani dharmic bab] were the points of inquiry motivating Datta's project of compiling the Bakhar. He goes so far as 10 describe his prose preamble to the Ba khar as a history of lineages ... Since social and religious issues were his key focus there is evidently very little confusion in the text with regard to matters of place, time and person nor for the same reason did Datta succumb to the temptation to generate it. [fhe later compilers of the Bakhar followed the same agenda] which was religious and social, not political [rajakiya]. The tide of Muslims [mlechharnava] having led to the wrecking of ties of kinship [dnyataJ, dharma and conduct [amra] lin recent memory, it was left to the earlier compilers of the Bakhar] to undertake a narratival reconstruction [nirupana] of 18 lineages [khuma] of castes [jatis] along with their caste-identity, dharma and conduct: in the natural course of things they included in the flow of their nirupana the political happenings and social transformations of the period of 310 years between Saka 1060 and 1370. [ ... ] These being their objectives, they were careful, fortunately for us, to record unequivocally the names of persons involved in the political history [rajakiya itihas] of the kingdom of Mahikavati between Saka 1060 and 1422.

(CW 12: 357-8)

A curious feature of the empiricism implicit here (which is reflected in the emphasis on the quality of factual evidence) is the fact that the distinction between social and political history is in the final analysis merely a method­ological fiction. The contributors to the Bakhar at the various stages of its evolution make no secret of the fact that their focus is neither merely political nor strictly socio-religious: it is in fact both at once. The opening verse sections of the Bakhar deal with the history of the ruling lineages of the area: the local history that the Bakhar then proceeds to provide in prose begins with the founding of the principality of Mahikavati (or Mahim in the Konkan, not in Mumbai) in 982 but is clearly cued toward the tale of recur­rent violent intrusions that followed after a period of relative prosperity and peace (occasionally disturbed by internecine local wars) lasting 300 years.. first with the advent of the Turks in the Konkan (1292) and then of the Portuguese in the ensuing centuries.

Rajwade himself betrays the reason for his fascination with this particular Bakhar when he calmly ventriloquizes the language of the text in saying above that "the tidal wave of Muslims [mlechharnava]" had led to the "dissolution

Rajwade's grammar 99

[budne] of kinship [dn),flll1}, dharma and conduct." These words rdlect the sentiments of one of the bakharkars of this text, Keshavacharya, who wrote a few decades after 1292 of the state of affairs in the Konkan al the time:

Meanwhile this royal house having fallen The soldiers, nobles, peasantry Capitulated to the exalted Sheikh Alauddin A great many foreigners [yavana] came to the [KonkanJ. The spirit of the state came to naught [rajya abhimana sandIa] Arms fell by the wayside Farming became the only recourse [ ... ] Everywhere there was a falling off from conduct [acarahinajale] The knowledge of lineage and ancestry declined Knowing this and intent upon securing [rakshaya] Maharashlra dharma. The de~'i came to Rajashri Naikorao in a dream.

(CW 12: 492)

Rajwade t'entriloquizes Keshavacharya: one could argue that is a kind of a relay between that premodern chronicler and this great historian who never wrote a history, who remained a "historiographer," a compiler of texts, a commentator on the state of the archive. This was in a strict sense a historico­topological relay--understanding that term as the running thread of a tale that changes hands without significant alteration ---a relay involving the handing down of a fantastical formula, a sort of IOpos determining the advent of the foreigner into the region, a prejudicial seal that can be stamped and re-stamped interminably, opening up the possibility of a future national­ism pledged toward weeding out the stranger. It is implicit in the Bakhar itself that something like the "spirit of the state" (rajya abhiman) came under threat with the advent of Alauddin in the Konkan in 1292, and that what was at stake in the variolls mobilizations against him that followed was the securing (rakshaya) of"Maharashtra dharma." For Rajwade the "securing, rakshaya" (rakhane. from the Sanskrit root, raksha) of the state following the mlechha incursions is no doubt essential, but with the proviso that for him a successful securing would occur only with the historic compact between Guru Ramdas and Shivaji in the late sixteenth century, which as legend goes was when those heroes actually committed themselves together to the restoration (punarruchchar) of Maharashtra dharma. In making these leaps across time with only the shifting fortunes of Maharashtra dharma in view, Rajwade shows that he is in explicit disagreement with those of his contemporaries such as Mahadev Govind Ranade and Rajaram Shastri Bhagawat who had tried to argue for the relation between Maharashtra Dharma and the radical religious vision of a reformist Bhagwat Dharma (CW 10: 270). What Rajwade wants to suggest is that the term "dhanna" in the phrase refers not to a kind of vocation before god (a "devadharma") but to one's duty or "karfavya" toward Maharashtra.

100 Vicissitudes of historical religion

The transcendental homelessness of the Aryans

The emphasis on duty (ka~tavya) stems from a fundamental distinction Rajwade makes in his Introduction to this Bakhar between two kinds of altitudes toward historical change, pravrUlti-dharma, a culture of striving or negotium, and nivrutti-dharma, a culture of leisure or otium. These attitudes find their expression (for him) in the historic mission of warriors and priests, kshatriyas and brahmins since antiquity, which is to look to the establishment of the state; whereas the historic mission of the lower castes is confined to the satisfactions implicit in a eudaemonic state of social existence. The argument is made along the following lines:

two kinds of peoples have set about their business in this land since ancient times. On the one hand, there were an expropriated (bahistha: "finding their stance or property outside"], pauperized people scroun­ging desperately for food who came to run the machinery of the state, and on the other hand were those overfed, self-appropriated (antyastha: "finding their stance or property here inside"] people who charted their course in history by generating great stores of food grains.

(CW 12: 436)

The coming of the Aryans is the key event in the balance of active and inert lorces in this land. For the Aryans themselves came from Europe, home to perpetual shortages of food. Europe is for Rajwade the land where citified Cain wanders the face of the earth in search of the nourishment that evades him (Le. Europe is the land of exilic questing), while bharatvarsha is the land of eternal satiety, where a sedentary Abel lives contentedly, never anxious for the morrow. It is clear to Rajwade that the people who brought the institu­tions of the state to India were the arya brahmins and kshatriyas who came from Europe. Thc racist and caste-contemptuous myth of an Aryan incursion into a tribal homeland is greatly enabling lor Rajwade's etiology of the state in Indian antiquity. For it was this immigrant peripatetic horJe that first gave a name to India's trading or l'ish castes: "pish refers to people seatcd, or lying on a spread meant lor husbanding or exercise" (CW 12: 436). The whole of this excursus on otium and negotium, propertied and unpropertie<.l, warrior dharma and merchant dharma is organized around the idea that the state refers to the installation of "securing, " rakhanc. at the heart of the social.

Rajwade's argument here moves smoothly along strictly etymologicallincs, imputing an arche-paternal origin to the lineage of the state. "The institution of raja (king) and praja (subjects) was brought to India by brahmins and kshatriyas. Every father is the king of his subjects or progeny. The king is he who secures (rakshana karnara). The verbal root of the word 'raj' is ·raksha.'" By the same token, Rajwade argues that the originally satiate inhabitants of India. the vish, were not the original subjects of the Arya kings-those subjects could only have been the members of their (the kings')

1

Rajwade's grammar 101

lineages, the various offshoots of their own progeny. The vish became not the praja but the dnsas of the kings, because dasa meant "those who gave,"'w~ich is to say those who paid taxes for the privilege of being protected by kings (CW 12: 436); half a century later the word "dnsa" would translate as "slave" or premodern daHt (as it does for such non-brahmin thinkers as Sharad Pati\)o In Rajwade's theory of the state then there is a fundamental oppos­ition between the masochism of the indigene and the aggression of the tyran­nus (usurper-king) on horseback, between a passive autochthony and an active, transformative allochthony, between all that is other and self same, alios and autos, in the travails of historical dharma as the spirit of the state. For, hunger and despair lay at the sordid basis of state-formation. And the subject races were sedentary peoples who had in an attitude of political quiescence "turned their face from the state [had become rajaparamukha], socially non-committal, renunciant and fundamentally Vedantic" in t~eir attitudes (CW 12: 437), Now if we refer back to the passage about the chOices faced by the writers of the Bakhar of Mahikavati it is dear that tor Rajwade they could not but have written a history of social and religious devclopm~n~s while only secondarily paying attention to "political" developments. ThiS IS

because a genuine installation of Maharashtra dharma was yet to take place at the time. From this point of view the history of Maharashtra prior to Shivaji and Ramdas was "pre-political." Up until that time it was not. as though there had never been kings or potentates in Maharashtra. The per~od before the advent of Alauddin had been a time of peace and plenty allowmg tor considerable continuity in political regimes. But that lor Rajwade is pre­cisely the problem. Until such time as blissful satiety pervaded the land there could not have been any motivation for "securing" the state. Such a task was best left to those who came from the outside. And so lor him it is almost inevitable that the state should have been for Maharashtra (in extrapolation from the Konkan) an eternally heteronomous entity. The idea of the State as the horizon of the social came from the outside in the destiny ofa desperate, starving people who had had to learn how to be canny under open ski~s. They had experienced a primal uncanniness (homelessness, bahisthapana) 10

the hard passage over continental roadsteads. And they introduced that transcendental homelessness (to borrow a phrase from Lukacs) into these teeming native hearths, homes that had never seen such resoluteness writ large in the brute face of the state-for the newcomers quickly channeled their desperate "scrounging" into the canny requirements of statecraft. They were now "at home" with their uncanny ways, having translated their skills at struggle and strife into the art of governmentalily. The outsider became the insider, the "out-standing" was now the "in-standing"-the bahi-stha became the antva-stha. The outside was installed in the inside, but always as the 0utside~ of the inside. For the state was always in some sense on the horizon, about to be re~installed at the heart of sociality itself, at its center. The state both belonged to the center and remained eternally at its threshold, so that lor Rajwade it would seem as though Indian history was nothing but a long

102 Vicissitudes of historical religion

wait for the institution of the state. But this long wait was what made the state paradoxically more native tO'this land than any other institution. It provided the alibi for the invocation ofMaharashtra dharma in the era of anti-colonial nationalism. For Maharashtra dharma was nothing if not this waiting that placed the future of Maharashtra under the sign of the subjunctive.

One could argue therefore that when Rajwade neglected to place the adjec­tive "historical, aifihasik" in the titles of the introduction and grammar to his edition of the Dnyaneswari the implicit reason could have been what seemed to him to be the undoubted historicity of the text itself. This histor­icity did not have to be announced in any title or preamble: it was clear for all to see in the very pages of the Mukundaraji MS. This text was in itself the very embodiment of Maharashtra as a historical entity. For if the Marathi language was the very instance of what it meant to be Maharashtrian, and if the MlIkllndaraji MS made it possible for the first time for that language to be accorded a history, there could be no doubt at all that Maharashtra was itself a "hist01;cal entity." But how could one prove beyond a doubt that the language of this text, Old Marathi, had descended from Sanskrit on one side and provided the basis for modern Marathi on the other? This would have to be done via the new science of the historical verification of a language, which is to say by means of a historical grammar. For the latter would establish once and for all the essential continuity of a language through time, even if that continuity was often concealed under a spew of apparent discrepancies.

It is Rajwade himself who tells us right at the outset in his Grammar (Vyakaran) appended to the Dnyaneswari, that to determine "the ways (padhati] in which a designated people [I'ivakshita taka1 speak and write (assuming that they know how to write) a designated language at a designated place and time" in keeping with a "set of norms [myamsaranine] or shastric principles" is assuredly to write "the grammar [I'yakaran] of the language of that place, that time and that people [fatsthalina, fafkalina va tallokiya I'yaka­ran)" (CW 12: I). The principle of historicity implicit in this formulation resh on the idea of what we can call a "project," a projection from this people­time-place designated according to "niyamsaranaya or shastric principles" to that specific people-time~place. This is without doubt a theoretical projection that assumes that historical specificity can and should be determined accord­ing to a set of carefully defined presuppositions. The theoretical moment. we may surmise, consists in the work of the grammarian, the vyakarankar himself: he it is after all who "pulls away (I'va) severely (a) to make certain (verbal root, kri)." It is he who pulls away from historical fact to sustain an objective standpoint from which to return to reassess that fact. Rajwade is aware that this projection is essential if one is to generate the "aiiihasik vyakaran" (historical grammar) of a particular language. Yet what precisely is aitihasik about the Old Marathi of the Mukundaraji MS? For him this "aitihasik-ness" would appear to lie in its supposedly "urbane [nagarikaJ" quality. Now there would seem to be something fundamentally tragic about this urbanity, since it comes into being (for Rajwade) at a point between the

Rajwade's grammar 103

dark ages following the decline of Sanskrit and Prahit in late antiquity and the dark times that are soon to follow with the first incursions of Alauddin Khalji.

Language as monument

The Mukundaraji MS is thus in Rajwade's mind a monument to the persist­ence in Maharashtra of the arVG culture of the classical period. Two telltale signs of this link to an older past establish the preeminence of this MS for him. There is first the fact that this MS is not written in cursive. modi--as were so many texts in Marathi after that language came into contact with Persian ate scripts. One central concern for Rajwade is to try and prove that what was fundamentally Marathi in Western Indian culture remained unaltered during the period of Muslim rule in the region. There is, second. a more crucial point, one that has a great deal to do with the immediate visual impact of the MS, viz. its striking resemblance to Paninian Sanskrit. It would take Rajwade six years to make sense of this discovery and to move his thinking toward the still tentative summation that is the 1909 Grammar. The path he traveled is clcarly recounted in this passage from an essay written three years later.

It has been close to twenty years now since I began investigating the origin [ugama] of the Marathi language. With every old text I came across I would attempt to deduce the differentiating features of the Marathi unique to that text. Having returned time and again to these finds I began to realize that present-day Marathi retained traces of many of the forms of Old Marathi. It was while I was on to this that I discovered [in 1903] the Mukundaraji MS of the Dnyaneswari. After looking at this and other contemporary texts I found that present-day Marathi does indeed have its origins in the language of the Mukundaraji Dnyaneswari. From then on I proceeded on the basis of a working hypothesis [kamachalau sidh­hanta], that present-day Marathi evolved successively [paramparene] from the Marathi of the Dnyaneswari, Apabhramsha, Maharashtri. Sanskrit and Vedic [Sanskrit). Very soon I set about putting this working hypoth­esis to the test. It was while attempting to verify this hypothesis that I found [ could make very good use of the Grammatik der Prakril­Sprachen [that had been published in Strassburg in 1900] by a German gent called [Richard1 Pischel [1849--1908] ... If Pischel's work had not come to my notice I would have had to do on my own what he has done for us, which is to compile and analytically differentiate [in a prithhakkarana] the treatises of such Prakrit grammarians as Vararuchi, Katyayana, Hemchandra etc as well as other available Prakrit texts and epigraphs. I had already begun to do this when Pischel's Grammatik appeared. It became to clear to me after reading this text that it provi­ded a most happy link between Old Marathi on the one hand and

104 Vicissitudes of historical religion

Apabrahmsha and Maharashtri on the other. But it also became increas­ingly clear to me that .. relying on the forms of Apabhramsha and Maharashtri most closely resembling Marathi that Pischel had provided would not exhaust all the forms of present-day Marathi. It was then that I began to compare Marathi with Paninian Sanskrit. And I begin to realize that each and every [present-day] Marathi word whether short or long has its equivalent in the divine Panini's Ashtadhyayi; it was also clear that Pischel's Grammatik had many flaws (not the least of which was] his lack of knowledge of Panini's shastra ... Which is why when I wrote my Grammar for the Dnyaneswari in 1909 I continued to turn toward Prakril. One outcome of this was that I managed to uncover many subtle issues that underlie the idea of a Marathi vyakaran. But it is also true that many such issues remained to be unearthed at that time. The present work [on Moro Krishna Damle's Classical Marathi Grammar, Shasfriya Marathi Vyakaran (1912)] is finally an attempt to address precisely those issues by relying entirely on Paninian principles.

leW L 425)

A confirmed votary of Panini toward the end of his life. Rajwade was around the time of the Grammar for the Dnyaneswari still to go all the way. The reluctance to do so was not merely personal. Its reasons may well have had something to do with the very idea ofa historical grammar, aitihasik vyakaran. What was clearly paradoxical was that a grammar (~'yak(Jran) written along the lines of Panini could at the same time be historical, aitihasik. This is not to say that Panini's Ashtadhyayi does not contain the elements of a historical linguistics covering a range of linguistic changes in Sanskrit since Vedic times. Bul the fact is that Rajwade's own access to I-'anini was informed by the growing rise in contemporary indology of the science of phonology.

The scene had therefore already been set for a strictly "phonological" or (what was the same thing for Rajwadel "phonetic" account of the Marathi language. using Panini's analysis of swaras and varn(lS to inaugurate a com­prehensive phonological analysis of the Old Marathi of the Mukundaraji MS. While the analysis of the historical changes in the language since Panini was conducted in the ambitiously wide-ranging Introduction, the Grammar was to serve as the setting f(H an attempt to uncover the phonological ground-rift (Gnmd-riss) or blueprint of the Dnyaneswari. The lack of fit between the objectives of the two supplements to his edition of the text itself should be obvious. For strictly speaking phonological principles enabled an assessment of the structural features of language at "its" moment. The very order of Rajwade's analyses in the Grammar is telling enough. "Varna­itihasa." phonemic analysis has a preeminent place in terms of procedure, as does ·'Nama-I'ibhakfi-pratyapa-itihasa." the declension of nouns and "Kriva­vibhakti-prafyaya-itihasa," the declension of verbs. The running compari~on with Panini's text is also a key feature of the Grammar, even if it strays from the order of analysis in thai text in succumbing to the requirements of

Rajwade's grammar 105

contemporary Western grammars. At its methodological heart is the idea that "phoda" (declinability) is the basic motor of language change. Declin­ability itself entailed that language could be continuously analyzed from the level of the sentence to the word and from the word to the basic phonemic element. The idea of semantic accretion implicit here is different from that of the cultures of hearsay such as that of the Varkaris we have discllssed previously; declinability is tied to the semantic preservation of etymological origin (though my etymology is usually just as good as yours) whereas in cultures of semantic accretion Ihere tends to be a movement away from etymological essence to a wide variety of linguistic interface. We can imagine that when he caught sight of the Mukundaraji MS Rajwade saw a version of Old Marathi that seemed to give itself precisely to declinability as one of the key constituents of a Panini-informed niyamasarani, organon.

Where Dnyaneswara's text (as we will see in the next section) virtually inaugurates the tradition of becoming-God in Maharashtra, shifting it away from an affirmation of the simultaneity of caste and state, Rajwade read~ that very text as an instance of Indic and brahmanical resilience in the face of Islamic imperialism. Where Dnyaneswara's is a grammar of yogic involu­tion postulated at a point just bdore the atllrmation of Vitthala/Krishna, Rajwade's is an attempt to establish Dnyaneswara (and by that token the Varkari tradition ibell) as a bulwark for the brahmanism of the Hindul Marathi state. It is crucial for him to "see" in Dnyaneswara's Old Marathi a persistent sign posting of etymological roots in the eternality of Sanskrit. Whereas in Dnyaneswara. as we will see, there are no roots, only routes. only practices: it is for this reason thai the DnyuJ1eswari can be seen to have pro­vided for what in the Varkari tradition was, for the first and perhaps for the last time (there is no sant after Tukaram) a grammar of hearsay bringing together elite and subaltern in one field of speech.4 And even though such a large portion of both the Grammar and the Introduction are taken up with the varying forms of Marathi through time and over spacc. and although there is indeed an emphasis in both essays on an analysis of language according 10

historical (aitihasik) requirements, yet in some sense the encounter with the Mukundaraji MS is mediated by what can be described as a "visual" dimen­sion. There is of course the visual specificity atTorded by a manuscript whose characters were not drawn in Persian-informed cursive, modi; the physical appearance of the text was that of it series of discrete (ba/bodh) characters. But there is also the additional attraction that the text appeared to "freeze" in time and even slow down the evolution of Marathi. announcing a direct and (for Rajwade) unmistakable ancestry with Paninian Sanskrit. Rajwade, who is in this instance at once grammarian and historian, a vyakarankar and an itihaskar, "pulls away severely to make certain" but only to give greater prior­ity to a "theoretically" grasp, a seeing and objectifying gaze that makes historical principles give way to structural needs.

To the extent that Rajwade attempts to assimilate Panini to the history of the Marathi/Hindu nation, we might say that his interest lies in using the

106 Vicissitudes of historical religion

notion of declinability and roots in the Ashtadhyayi to argue for the essential coming together of a brahlpanical/Hindu way of life and a grammatical notion of meaning underlying Vedic speech and going back to the pre- Vedic period. One can fault him for presuming to criticize Panini himself(and Yaska) for having neglected the lived speech of the pre-Vedic period. And one could easily disagree with Rajwade when he indicts Panini for his inability to understand language ·'historically." For. Dnyaneswara's own use of the words "nagar" and "marhali" show that more was at stake than simply the developed "pre-medieval" or Paninian urbanity of Old Marathi prior to Muslim rule. (It is clear, for instance, that for Dnyaneswara "marhatt' is a reference to the epistemological work performed by metaphor and idiom in Marathi. to the aesthetic ruse by which the dialogue of God with man in the Gita can be brought before the listener by the beatific poet.) If there is noth­ing specifically "pre-medieval" or "urbane" in the Dnyaneswari to endow it with the imprint of the MarathilHindu premodern, and if urbanity is lived. everyday speech it would by the same token be hard to argue for the elision of pre-Vedic speech in Panini. Yet this elliptical passage in Rajwade from the modern (nationalism) to the premodern (Dnyaneswara) and from the premodern to the pre-medieval (Panini) is worth attending to, despite the persistent brahmanization of Vedic thought. Rajwade's implicit philosophical assumption is that the sayings of the Vedic seers are literally "drawn" from (the idea of a) pre-linguistic. metaphysical essence of the pre-Vedic period and are therefore in themselves in origin neither metaphor nor concept but both at the same time; they establish the ontological basis of a certain lived way of life, inaugurating an understanding of nature and speech that is radically empirical. That is to say. they refer directly to the practical every­day concerns of the Vedic period, where words like maya could only mean "an amazing skill or power," and not "illusion" (as it was later ethicized in Vedanta; see Gonda 1959). That Rajwade should sec in Panini, Dnyaneswara and in the Marathi of his own time an essential pre~linguistic continuity in the care of the soul is remarkable, and provides an important insight­perhaps Rajwade's greatest-into the persistence in the heavily compromised domain of the Indic of older forms of conducting oneself in the world, forms not reducible to the dominant understanding of knowledge or power in lndic philosophical exegesis. But that he should see in all this the sign of an original brahmin/Hindu/Marathi speech restores his text to the age of nationalism.

Structurally, the two aspects of his Grammar, which is to say the idea of an earlier way of life still available as an ideal in language on the one hand, and his need to argue for Maharashtra Dharma on the other hand----the coming together in Rajwade of a grammar of life as speech on the one hand, and of the Law on the other hand as the continuity of caste/nation, can be seen as an instance of a juridico-grammatical understanding of tradition as Hinduism, one where all of life is patterned after the Law. But what we see in Dnyancswara himself is less the self-presence of the brahmanical view of the world than the idea that all of life (all the dimensions of Man and World) is

Rajwade's grammar \07

derived not from an older way of speaking that evokes a Vedic or brahman i­eal ethos, but from a systematic priority of God to the World. Which is.to say that Dnyaneswara's thought cannot be derived from the larger history of Shiva, Vishnu worship and Nathyogi practice (a staple of Dnyaneswara scholarship still focused on "religion") but is the celebration of an anterior speech. Sueh a way of thinking is closer to the thought of a "system" that presupposes the "derived absoluteness" of God, a God whose origin is always prior. In this respect his is a system that works with an idea of God as the principle of negativity at the origin; it is not a philosophical attempt (such as Hegel's) to explore the ways in which negativity is at last restored to itself in the state or in the Spirit--this idea of a negativity at the origin brings him closer to eusa. Bruno and the later Schelling, those thinkers of the "ground without ground" who remain marginal to the tradition of ethico-historical thought from Kant through Hegel to Heidegger.

Hearsay in Dnyaneswara

For the unprecedented coming of God (in the form of Vitthala in the verse collections, and as Krishna in the Dnyancswan) is understood in Dnyaneswara as the coming of God to man, and therefore as the unsurpassab\e trace of God in man_ The opening lines of the Dnyaneswari work through this theme from the very first word.

Omnamo adya Vedapralipadya fai svasamvedya Atflwrupa lilli'

Bow before the am at the origin Of which the Vedas lay the ground Hail the "I" that knows itself in itself As the figure of the self.

(Dnyaneswari 1909 1: 1 [Translation mine))

Dnyaneswara begins by deferring all beginning, all origination to a prim­ordial, immemorial past. "Om namo adya," he commences, inscribing a moment whose tensing is originary, referring to a past before all pasts, and whose aspect is in the imperative, signaling a commandment prior to all commands: "Give yourself over (namo)," he seems to say, "to the beginning of all things (adya) which is am," that is to say to the Onkar, Pranava, the Word, Shabd. the Saying. In this giving oneself over one obeys an injunction to institute beginnings. Especially since the Gila itself is a treatise on how to install oneself at the beginning, how to move the root stha toward the sub­ject's self-installation in Karma as an active (praxis-directed) subject,

108 Vicissitudes o/historical religion

sthhithapradnya. Yet the instituting itself, the happening at the origin, what we might call the adya-sthhapCUila already draws the text back toward to its own dark origination, one greatly removed from the grand cosmogony of Karmic Sacrifice of which Krishna is the eikon par excellence in the Gila. Instead, here at the start of the Dnyaneswari, in the very act of coming into the light, something has already withdrawn. Something that remains vedapratipadya: the Vedas. repositories of the already-known (the already-vid) cannot, try as they might the text seems to say, attain the ground without ground at the origin. The Vedas are only a ground-laying but one that is always incomplete tpralipad-ya, a pratipadan ever underway), never quite enough. That which retreats toward itselr even as it inaugurates the knowable, the sva-sam-vid. nonetheless traces its t()rms in the field of all that is knowable. It imprints itself in history and then withdraws. What makes knowing possible is this re-traiC arma-rupa or the am, the Saying at origin and end. From this perspective, we can render Dnyaneswara's opening verses in this more specific way:

Give yourself over to the always-already-begun-saying (Om) Never quite worked over by the already-said (Vedas) But as knowing coming to itself from itself Tracing in its wake the outline of its self-receding.

In the very next ovi there is the celebration of all becoming as sakaf-artha­mati-prakashu.

Deva tun chi ganeshu Sakalarthamatiprakashu Mhane nivruttidasu Avdharijo.

Lord, you too like Ganesha All meaningful being bathed in light Says the follower of Nivruttinath I take for true.

(Dnyaneswari 1909 I: 2)

Here "sakal "-a word that recurs in Varkari-speak-implies "the whole." being-in-general or Being. "Artha" refers us to the meaning of being. "Mati" occurs here and elsewhere as the institution of logos (speech we direct purposively to the objects around us) as vid. And finally "prakashu," the lighting or clearing registers the difference (that always recedes or with­draws) between being in general (God) and beings in particular (as singular beings in themselves), So that we eould render this verse in stricter terms as:

You, like Ganesha The whole gathered in meaning as light.

1

I follow Nivrutti's Word In "holding for true."

Raj'A-'(1de's grammar 109

Here again we are given a sense of a form of "systematic" thinking that retreats from the world and attends to a more original becoming in the recesses of the sou\. The link between this poet and the Varkari tradition of which he is said to be the founder has something to do with this inaugural speech in the Dnyaneswari of prayer in praise of a vanished God. It is this speech that Dnyaneswara olfers to the Vitthala/Krishna of Pandharpur.

Dnyaneswara was a Varkari, one of the pilgrims of the tradition of hearsay who made periodic varis or pilgrimages to the shrine of Vitthala. For him the persistent tracing and re-tracing of sakal-artha-mOfi-prakashu (ontico­ontological difference, system and history) leaves behind as a trace the atma­rupa of the adya. a trace that is magical, mysterious. soteriological in promise. More crucially for him the event of the retracing-retreating of the adya in atma-rupa (itself departing from itself) signals the advent of Vitthala. This "event" olfers a silhouette (a virtual icon if not an icon itself) of that beloved deity, Vitthala anns akimbo, standing on a brick in the city ofPandharpur on the banks of the Chandrabhaga, inaugurating with his stance (his incontro­vertible "ubha" -ness) the Varkari tradition itself. The yearning of that tradition rests less in ecstatic communion than in joyous welcome, a chorus of praise ror the ancient mystery that called lor Vitthala to stand firmly on the brick for "28 epochs" (atthavis yuga). The utterance of the Varkaris treats ofViuhala's coming as the love or prem that withdraws. To be sure, Vitthala as prem "is" this saying am to which the Varkaris have for the past 700 years rejoined a huge corpus of poems. Vitthala's very coming into being is guaranteed by the am to which Dnyaneswara gave himself over at the origin, adya. These together comprise the Varkaris, infinitely loving, adoring acts of having-said­of -V itt hal a-in-praise, their own "vedas."

Now, where Dnyaneswara is thus invested in a turning back to God, Rajwade's goal lies in the assimilation of this Varkari sanl to the larger destiny of the state as it can be detected in the history of the Marathi lan­guage. We could well ask why there is this insatiate desire to prove the histor­icity of a language. After all, we do not in our everyday linguistic practice resort to sueh historical arguments: that we speak a language and use it to communicate suffices as a motivation for all our metalinguistic explorations ranged around linguistic meaning. But why this need here to prove that the language one is speaking has its very own antiquity? The answer lies only secondarily, to my mind, in the realm of linguistic pride and nationalism. It has much more to do with the attempt to install history itself at the heart of language, to try to prove that a language and a history are co-terminous. It is to establish that language, in short, is historicity. And to have a language, to have language as part of one's having-being, is to be historical. If the 1924 Introduction to the Bakhar of Mahikavati was to be about installing the state as the future at the heart of the nation, the introduction and the grammar

110 Vicissitudes of historical religion

accompanying the 1909 edition of Dnyaneswara implied the need to insinuate a history at the heart of a.. language's past. Underlying both aUempts is the problem of the outside coming in to generate an inside; for there could not have been a history of Marathi without at the same time a history of Persian (there is arguably at least one Persian word in the Dnyaneswari, pace Rajwade), of the many local dialects of Marathi, and of loans from Kannada, Konkani and Telegu. To install history at the heart of Marathi was to introduce a historical principle essentially alien to a living and vital Marathi. The historicization of Marathi entailed the excising of one history ami the introduction of another.

The history of a language

Marathi had never had, has never needed a history per se. After all, I do not speak the "history of Marathi" when I speak Marathi: its historical aspects are part of the "feel" I have for this language; the history of Marathi cannot be derived from Marathi itself; its history is "underivcd," part of the sets of reflexes that make my access to that language historical without that histor­icity necessarily having to be thematized. Just as I do not "think about" the historical being of a hammer as I move it resolutely IowaI'd a nail, I do not "thematize" a language's historicity. When do I suddenly come face to face with the sheer fact of the hammer as an object to be gazed at, theorized, grasped, thematized? This happens when the hammer or the nail becomes abruptly useless by falling into disrepair. interrupting my unthought activity by suddenly drawing attention to itself. This may provide some sense of what may have produced the inclination in Rajwade toward a historical grammar for Marathi. For that language as it was spoken in the first decades of the twentieth~century was nothing if not miscegenate, bearing traces of both the languages of the North and of the South. This bhasha now needed to be shorn of its demotic elements and restored to its roots in the original cosmo­politanism of Paninian antiquity. The great effort on Rajwade's pari was to ensure that his researches helped to uncover a certifiably hieratic (shishta) and urbane (nagar) language whose history could be written in terms of clear-cut temporal axes, which is to say its basis in the past of Panini's Sanskrit, its present in the Marathi of the post-I 296 Mukundaraji MS and its future in a comprehensively historicized Marathi that was to serve as a new stand­ard. A pretheoretical, prethematic "feel" for Marathi had to be transformed into a theorized Marathi "language" uncovered in grammar and objectified in history.

Two crucial implications should be drawn from Rajwade's analyses here. First, the heteronomy of the state as it is posited in the historical semantics of the introduction to the Bakhar of Mahikavati finds its exact counterpoint in the heteronomy of historical principles implicit ill Rajwade's scholarly scaffolding for his edition of the Dnyaneswari. One could go even further and argue that the installation (implicit in the Sanskrit root sthha in sthapana)

Rajwade's grammar III

of the state at the heart of the nation and the instalJation of history at the basis of language rested on a fundamental alienation, for what had been installed in that inner citadel of nation and language remained in plaGC only ever as the outside of the inside. Far from being an authentic (authenticated) inside. that inner core harbored the necessary presence of foreign bodies. which is to say the presence of the state and of history brought in from the outside, Botn nation and language rested on this necessary alienation, on a productive and enabling alienation at their core. If the origins of the state were violent and the origins of language miscegenate there was a senSe in which history had a way of throwing them outside themselves even as it restored themselves to themselves. It is hardly a conundrum that Rajwade should lay such store by the idea of raklwne (with its root raksha) or "securing" as the basis of Indian state-formation. For the State as an idea in Rajwade was nothing but the technology (technics) of securing, grasping, harboring. placing in storage the potentially translormative energies unleashed by History understood as transcendental homelessness. llistory as coming-into­being began with frantic detours across the face of the earth and ended when the carpetbagger buckled down. promulgating his civility via a state erected swiftly in situ.

An impasse in the Gita

Where the luxuriant verdure of the Konkan generated in Rajwade's work the thesis of the lazy indigene, the graphic correspondence of the Mukundaraji MS with Panini's language brought about the crucial insight that language needed to be bistoricized if it was to be brought close to the horizon of the State. Language without a Stale is for Rajwade merely the sign that history is yet to be inaugurated. History itself "is" violent transformation with Lan­guage and the State as its ethical motors. In short, Rajwadc's nationalism is based not on a principle of Ilutonomy as is routinely assumed but on the precisely antithetical notion of a constitutive heteronomy at the heart of the historical. Ilistory in his work is nothing if not the movement of Language (itself the logos [speech, uUerance, self-narrative] of a being-together­through-history)--language moving through history and precipitating itself before the telos of the State, the latter understood always as an end determin­able very much ill advance. Language ItH him refers us to the necessarily violent and traumalic onto-teleo-fogy of the State through history.

Paradoxically, the text that Rajwadc used to drive home his thesis with regard to language was a text (Le. the Dnyaneswari) that, as we will sec. could have provided the grounds for a wholly different notion of the State. of Language and History taken as transcendentally regulative entities. But we should also not target that the !)nyaneswari is after all a verse commentary (if an extraordinarily "imaginative" one) on the Gita, and that the latter text is the locu,~ dassicus of the idea of securing, raksha in millennial discourses on the State. This is in large measure bccause it is dcdic.,tcd to raising historical

112 Vicissitl/des of historical religion

experience to the level of the transcendentaL'; The existential situation of Aljuna in the Gila itself, a~ is well known, is very quickly written into the trans-historical schema of universal history, of which Krishna becomes the awe-inspiring figure in the Eleventh Book. In strictly ontological terms, all historical action (denoted in the text by a range of words derived from the verbal root in Sanskrit for movement, krt) is subordinated to the eternal path of the negative (denoted by a range of words such as varIate, anuvartate. pravarlilam derived from the key verbal root for eternity as a "turning of the eternal", vrl). By this logic. all phenomenal action within historical being­human is placed under the sign of history as the movement of eternity. a movement that was first installed by dint of the cosmogonic rite of Karmic sacrifice (vadnya, with its the verbal root ya) indicating gift and coullter-gift between man and God as part of the eycle of karma or physis; and with sacrifice installed in turn as the origin of the caste system in the parna division of labor). As a figure for the movement of Time taken in a transc.:cndental sense. it is to subsume within it a1i historically specific ac.:tion.

The transcendentalization of the tigure of Krishna in that text as the very instance of the universe in motion is to serve at the same time as a historical intimation---to the effect that the Lord will return in epoch after epoch to install and fe-install dharma (dharma-sthhapana). Arjuna as a phenomenal instance of creation gradually finds instituted in himself this figure of abso­lute otherness. of which his own bcing is reduced to a mere moiety. But the stature of that text rests not just on its insistence on the itinerary of Krishna as an instance of the State but also on its invocation of the self-overreaching inherent in yogic seeking. Oddly for a text that places so much emphasis on absolute (cosmic, metaphysical) heteronomy, there co-exists in its pages the unprecedented counter-balance of a relentless project of self-autonomy. The tension between the two movements of absolute heteronomy and unrelenting autonomy lends to the Gila the ambivalence that has made it the focus of a host of interpretive traditions of which those of Sankara and Ramanuja are only the most well-known because they are the most influential.

System and history

Another way of saying this is that there is in that text both the "system" that is yogic self-overreaching and the "history" that is Krishna as Karma. The injunction to Arjuna in the text is to break through the possible impasse between the two and broach action (the verbal root kn) in the world but in a selfless manner. Why an impasse? Because the animal-machine of Time or kal could potentially hurtle onward without in any way affecting history with transformative potential; especially if the householder-mimansaka were to adhere to a nearly atheistic self-abnegation in his commitment to the ritual every day. or if the yogi chose total renunciation. Alternatively, human mortality may well ensure an irreversible plunge into the temptations (bhoga) orthe phenomenal world. Arjuna's selfless action is meant to break through

Rajwade's grammar 1\3

these dilemmas and resolutely address the necessary and impending annihila­tion of his clan. As we can no doubt infer from important latter-daY'inter­pretations by nationalist critics such as Tilak, Shukla and Gandhi, the Gila is the text that inaugurates for the first time in antiquity the idea of the state as an originary (historically enabling) instance of transformative violence. It is the text that announces at the outset of the post-Buddhist world (i.e. installs for the first time as a potentially genocidal red-thread running through the tradition) the deeply disturbing ethical proposition that violence is at the heart of any fungible notion of the social.

The paradox is that Rajwade was one of the first critics to provide rigorous rules for studying the language of the Dnyaneswari. But he was also an unstinting critic of what he described as the "pangu" -ness or sanctioned pusil­lanimity (CW 10: 270) of the Varkari tradition with its anti~political emphasis on passiveness (nivrutti-dharma), the very same Varkari tradition, that is, of which the Dnyaneswari has historically been considered the foundation (pava)! Ifactiveness,pravrutti. entailed the drive toward the installation of the state, nivrulli or passiveness meant a complete repudiation of any relation to the idea of a transformative history. To use the terms I have been discussing above. we might say that the tradition of which Rajwade was an advocate was the Maharashtra dharmi tradition he associated with Ramdas (l608-82), a tradition that worked toward the institution of the state's violent heteronomy at the heart of the sociaL Ramdas was not a Varkari (the sampradaya COll­

tinues to deny him a place in their four-pillared pantheon of Dnyaneswara­Namdev-Eknath~Tukaram); he did not endorse the Varkari way, which insists on the relentless self-overreaching of the yogi working through the unprecedented gift of Love that is Vitthala. Rajwade's reading of the chron­icle (Bakhar) of Mahikavati convinced him that the historical reasons for the quick (:';"l.pitulation before Alauddin of the local raja of Devagiri was precisely the culture of bhakti-informed devotionalism popular in the Konkan at the time. Dnyaneswara himself lived in Devagiri (Daulatabad) in this period and was at least nominally a subject of Ramchandra Yadav (1271-1311), the Yadava king who was forced to bow before Alauddin. So that whereas in his introduction to his 1909 edition Rajwade is moved to use Dnyaneswara's text as an instance of the urbanity and cosmopolitanism inherent in the Marathi of the period, a quality it was to lose quickly with the coming of Alauddin, in other places in his work he tcndcd to see those very same q ualitics as a sign of Maharashtra's vulnerability to foreign incursions. What the incipient nation needed at the time, he argues, was a firm avowal of a warrior ethic, kshalriva­dharma. What transpired instead was that a lotus-eating populace remained helpless against thc power and reach of the stranger.

The State in millennia) time

I spoke of the millennial discourses of the State; I had in mind the alarming manner in which the idea of Maharashtra dharma dovetails with the notion

114 Vicissitudes o.(hislOrical religioll

so dear to llindulva and 10 the imperial ambitions of the twentieth-ccntury United States that the last millennium has seen the perpetual and violenl renewal ofa primal conllict between two opposed entities. On the one hand. there is a Hinduism retroactively Orientalized during the course of the nine­teenth century, a globalized Christianity. and a racist Zionism. On the other hand. there are the lransnational networks of a resurgent Islam. From the point of view of Maharashtra dharma this long epoch that began with the Muslim incursions into the Konkan can only ever end with the expulsion or complete extel'luination of the Indian Muslim. But thcre perseveres in the Maharashtrian scene an important aspect of this millennial notion that tends to undercut the idea, inherent in such a millennia I schema. of a perpetually Manichean opposition between Hindu and Muslim throughout this historical period. This potentially oppositional ,lSpect is already evident in Rajwade's introduction to the Bakhar of Mahikavati. The idea that Maharashtra lacked the leading role played by kshatriya-dharma in this millennial context enables us to detect in Rajwade's use of this particular topos of Indian antiquity a typically modern gesture. There he remarked that the founders of the idea of the state in Indian antiquity were "brahmins and kshatriyas;" their tax­paying subjects were the dasas. Rajwade is clearly less interested in the origins of the state in antiquity than in the extent to which caste-identity did or did not scrve Maharashtra in good stead in medieval Konkan. His work is classically elite-nationalist in that it uses a caste-argument about the para­doxically normalized "tyranny" of those put.'1tive early usurper-kings, the brahmins and kshatriyas taken together, to make a point about the need for a proto-nationalist response to the advent of Islam. As is often the case with nationalist thinking in this period. there is an attempt at once to evade the question of caste altogether and to draw attention to the fact that before everything else the fall of immemorial Hinduism, sanatana-dharma ought to have fused aU Hindus together regardless of caste and led to the overthrow of Muslim rule. In the long period of Indo-Islamic militarism (Le. "the struggle against Muslim rule"), it would seem. caste was merely an indicator of where in the socius would lie the possible sources of genuine historical transformation for future nationalist ends.

Now if we were to turn to the work of writers in the non-Brahmin tradition in and around Rajwade's own time. a very different picture comes to view. Like Maharashtra dharma lwith its implicit focus on a new warrior ethic. kshatriya dharma for brahmins) this dalit and non-brahmin tradition too is often enough centered on the figure of the non-brahmin hero. Shivaji. But with a very crucial difference: the warrior ethic. kshatriya dharma of the dalit and non-brahmin movement docs not focus on the conflict between Hinduism and Islam in the era of Indo-Islamic militarism but trains its sights on another much older conAict. that between the dalits (untouchables) and non-brahmins on the one hand and historical brahmanism on the other. With the phrase "historical brahmanism" (and its political fiction of an absolute opposition between dalils and brahmins in history) wc leave the topos of

R({;wade's grammar 115

Indo-Islamic militarism altogether and broach another genealogy of the conflict at the heart of the Indian social, which is now recognizably a caste conflict with its own peculiar forms in antiquity. in the era of militarism and in the epoch of nationalism. For if this conflict between dalits (and non-brahmins) and brahmanism is to be discerned in the Indo·Islamic era of so-called militarism. it would have to be seen less as a time of proto­nationalism than as a time when Islam provided a radical critique of caste society. one that ojfered dalits an unprecedented way out of institutionalized caste-Hinduism. For the weaver-convert Kabir. for instance. the critique of the Hindu idea of the social otfcred by Islam opened the very possibility of his poetry. In sum. where the warrior ethic, kshatriya-dharma in the brahmanical tradition of Maharashtra refers to the permanent militarization that nationalists perceived (again, retroactively) in the Indo-Islamic world. kshatriya-dharma in the dalit (and non-brahmin) tradition of such nineteenth­century activists as Phule refers to the struggle against the effeets of brahmin Jominancc since antiquity. The coming together of these seemingly hetero­geneous concepts-a low-caste ethic, a warrior ethic. the ethic of Krishna Love (shudra-dharma, kshatriya-dharma, bhagwat-dhal'ma)-in the work of sllch critics of historic.'1l brahman ism as Phule. Rajaram Shastri Bhagwat, Vitthala Ramji Shinde. Ambedkar, and more recently in Sharad Patil­uncovers an Indo-Islamic millennium that is less about militarism and the contest between Hindu and Muslim than about the long-running low-caste movement. going back to ancient times. against the brahmin conception of the social.

Is there then some conception of this low-caste intransigence in the Dn.raneswari itself? The conventional understanding of the so·calJed Bhakti texts of Ihe medieval period subsists on the belicf that these texts maintain. if al all, pmclically no connection with the political world. The notion is that they lend to turn away from worldly affairs and prefer to attend to the task of singing praises of their particular deity. Bhakti texts, we are told. transcend religion. caste, and politics; they embrace an ecumenical vision of liberal tolerance toward all expressions of dissent and difference. This interpretive tendency is even at its most rigorous merely a symptom of the retroactive projection that the inAuential bilingual elites of the decades after and before Partition exercised on the texts of the medieval era. These elites prided them­selves on their urbane and secular approach to issues of identity; they sought to detect in the traces of the past the threshold for their own liberal tendency to ignore caste and religion as merely instances of backward forms of social organization. The texts of medieval bhakti remained for them instances of a reformism that was radicaliy opposed to caste and religious prejudice. Such modernists embraced the contemporary dalit movement in the belief that it had in point of fact renewed an older "pre-modernist" attack on the effete and decadent remnants of an older world. For them, the dalit recovery of the modern would place dir\,,'Ctly on track what mattered most to their sense of historical change. which was the hope that a secular. caste-free society would

116 Vicissitudes of historical religion

inaugurate in India a genuine modernity. The historical experience of the last few decades has considerably_attenuated the already slender link between this elite modernism and its vanguardist notion of the modern. For one, the diverse tendencies of the daHt movement did not, as it turned out, foster the abandonment of ideas of caste and religion despite having won through the years a series of constitutional guarantees for affirmative discrimination in their favor-to the contrary, they have gone on to further exacerbate the identitarian climate of our times. Under such conditions it would serve little purpose to turn to the Dnyaneswari merely to rehearse the ecumenical vision of an Indian modernism that is in many respects out of step with contemporary political realities.

Interior scene of the anti-state

There is however a reference to "war" in a section of this text. The reference is couched in an elaborate allegorical device borrowed from a traditional yogic physiognomy of the soul. The shfoka from the Gila motivating this passage extols those who "exert themselves with fortitude [yatantascha drid­dhavratha)" in trying to attain the Lord. The reference to working on oneself ought to alert us to the links between this passage and the persistence of character (as that which precedes individuality) in late antiquity. Here is the couplet from the Gita: "There are those who, always yoked to devotion [bhak­lya nityayukta], adore me and glorify me, while exerting themselves with fortitude, and pay homage to me" (§9: 14; van Buitenen 1981: 105). Here is Dnyaneswara '8 gloss on the nature of this self-disciplining. He writes that this species of devotee, the yogis in particular

Take great care always to Direct the five senses and the mind Spreading outside like a fence of thorns The technique of Restraint, yama-niyama. They set up inside as an enclosure the Adamantine Posture, vujras(IJIQ Placing above like catapults Modulations of the Breath, pranayama. That done the Serpentine Feminine's, the kundalini's, Reversing-power.

ulhata-shakti, lights up The Mind-Spirit~Breath, mana-pavana, moves out and up Staunching in preparation for the siege The seeping nectars of the Seventeenth Level of the Pericarp, satrava. Then the Retraction. pratyahara, comes into its own. It neutralizes the lure of the phenomenal world [I'ikara] By lassoing the senses that are like calves insatiate at the udder Turning them as they forage abroad, into the heart of the citadel

[hrudaya antu). They lay claim then to Stasis, dharna, by Turning the earth-water-fire-wind-sky into sky

Rajwade's grammar 117

Routing and triumphing over the four-flanked army of the understanding.7

I\t length they go on to heed through Meditative "Ocus, dhyana The bugle-cry of the Unsounded Sound, anahafa nada The passionately shining, circumambient And inexhaustible Concord, samadhi. Which in turn endorses Thc self reaching out to the self, Regnant in instituting a State of peace [atmanubhava-rajyasukha] Bringing forth a vision of the coronate [pattabhisheku dekhan] At-onc-wilh-itsell~ Fluidly Equilibriate, samarasa.

(Dnyaneswari 236: 211--17)

What Dnyaneswara provides us here is the portrayal of an agricultural soci­ety preparing for a siege. One would think that here we have the very picture of Rajwade's "pangu" (pusillanimous) Konkan world, unable to take up arms but quick to move into a defensive posture. Yet the nature of this defensive activity, steeped in the concept-metaphors (for they are both concept and metaphor at once) of yoga and the school of Sankhya, has very specific aims and carefully ordered ways of attaining them. The goal of the exercise is to fortify the powers of the mind in order to attain samadhi (derived from Sanskrit sam ["bring together"] and the root dha ["to place"]) or "con-cord," an aim that is attained when we arrive at the "At-one~with*itself' in the final line. The theme of the placing-inside-of-what-has-strayed-outside contains only one explicit account of warfare, which occurs when the mind "routs" the "five-flanked army of the sankalpas." But in as much as the mind-the cen­tral actor of the entire psychodrama or more strictly, psychomachia-in this narrative is perpetually at war with itself. we might even say that the theme of the passage is a kind of "crypto-militarism" that internalizes war ami places it inside itself. This reversal, passing through the stages of this yogic physi* ognomy of the soul (yamaniyamana-pranayama-ulhatashakti-pratyahara­dhurna-dhyana*samadhi-samarasal, produces the triumphal self-narrative of the mind trafficking in a certain peace with itself. What we hear throughout the passage is not a "rumor of a hidden king;" that which is to come is not a revelation. Since the argument is taking place at the level of the soul it is highly unlikely that the allegory will make reference to historical events or persons. Comparisons with Augustine's substitution of the inner conflict of the soul lor the grand theater of Virgil's epic of Roman empire-building, or Dante's transposition of the politics of contemporary Florence to an imagined underworld would both be out of pi ace, for unlike Augustine, Virgil ,llld Dante there is no ligural humanism implicit here, no figurae similar to those predicting the triumph of Rome or of Christendom. The historical vectors of Dnyancswara's allegory are pointed resolutely inwards toward his~ tory not as ·'violent transformation" but as ethical, other-directed ·'reversal" (ulhat). flaving passed through the technology of rcvcrsal (a relro-technics of

11 g Vicissitudes q( historical religion

the body). the mind finds itself very much in control of itselC If anything. the efTort has been to modulate (not destroy) the senses, to undo its somewhat concupiscent pull toward external objects and to draw the mind into itself.

The suspicion of allegory

To this cnd. various modes of askesis are employed toward the "modulation" (niyamana) of the senses, chief among which is the technique of pratyahara, which involves "moving toward the sensuous world and then taking oneself away" (pratyahara is derived from the prefixes prati and a, along with the verbal root hd ["take away"]). After having outlined a series of external measures from yamaniyamana to pratyahara, the text moves on to more internal forms of self-modulation, such as dharna and dhyana. At the end of this procedure, having restored the senses to the inner world and drawn them from out of the outer world, the mind is enthroned in the inner citadel, where mourning (dukha; lit. "suffering") has been able to expel the mourned object it had incorporated (sukha; lit. "peace"), leading to the final State of equi­librium, concord (samarasa, SOIMdhl), Clearly the securing (the root raksha) mentioned here is different from its use in Rajwade. For what has been accomplished is "neither the rejection nor the spurning" of the body but in fact its fortification and its becoming free from disease.~ In "securing" the body in this way via a process of repeated reversals carried out at various levels of the yogic system, the objective is to institute the perpetually renewed autonomy of the mind against the possibility of its own wavering. (IfRajwade's is an ontO-ideo-logy of the state in history, Dnyaneswara's is a de-onto-teleo­logy of the mind as the source of self-modulation and as the locus of a "state" of inward peace.) For the citadel is to be guarded against the influx of distracting thoughts, and to aid it in this difficult exercise the first thing that the mind does is to draw in the senses. The passage is thus a classic instance of allegorical narrative in the dynamic sense, possessing as it does the capacity for potentially interminable narratival involution. At the same time, what Dnyaneswara gives us is not a picture that points in the direction of another reality, as would be the case if its allegorical signs merely corresponded in a mechanical manner to meanings fixed in advance, In other words, it would be premature to describe this inner landscape as "symbolic." This is not by any means a static picture of the soul at work, as in an allegorical woodcut. Instead what we have here is the concerted "artificial" use of mental pro­cesses, a memory exercise (taken from traditions of hearsay) dedicated to the mechanical "retraction" of the soul. War and siege are not "metaphors" used by Dnyaneswara-they are concepts just like the philosophemes that he draws from the vocabulary of yoga. The latter is always an allegorization of death as the "ceasing to be" of the body, the point at which ethicizedlreligious notions of dying as the transmigration of the soul etc, are preceded by the passivity of an inner "ab-solute" which we cannot re-solve into metaphor or

Rajwade's grammar 119

concept hut which is the posture or "nct" (asantl: (~vlI(/mi,\') thnt nlienates the soul in the body, bringing to it an experience of otherness.

Neither concept nor metaphot~ neither merely symbol nor sign, what then do we make of the self-overreaching in death of the yogic mind, of which this entire passage is a portrait? In Rajwade there was the idea that the Slate must be installed at the inside as the "outside of the inside" ---a perpetual otherness or heteronomy that generated history as transtormative violence. The great models for this violent historiographic state, the state in Hegel (Rajwade was familiar with his theses on history and nationhood in The Philosophv of His/ory, but not perhaps with his unraveling of the state in the grealtreatise on Rightt and in Heidegger (whose indispensable texts are traversed by the discourses of fascism) come immediately to mind. Indeed there much that is "llegelian" in this larger sense in Rajwade's idea of the State as the agency for historical change, and as the horizon of the social. Yet it was Rajwade who first made it possible for us to read Dnyaneswara text in the way we have just attempted. These lines arc taken from his edition of that text, still the most crucial aid to our understanding of the text as an instance of the Varkari tradition. It is Rajwade's edition that takes us closer to Dnyaneswara than any other; there have been more than a dozen scholarly editions of that text in the last century. Yet in that closeness to Dnyaneswara we can detect in Rajwade a form of interpretive engagement that bears some resemblance to

critics in other languages, such as Shukla and Dwivedi in Hindi. who 100

were working on the texts of "medieval bhaktt' (madhyayugin dharmasad­haM) at the time. Rajwade is drawn to this text partiy because ofhs stature as a perennial monument to a Marathi-speaking society awaiting its final eman­dpation in the era of Shivaji and Ramdas. As the sign of a society awaiting the future installation oCthe state, the Dnyaneswari is for Rajwade very much like a sarcophagus housing the precious remains of Old Marathi, pointing back to "Aryan" antiquity and to a future Maharashtra dharma athwart Muslim imperialism, In the somewhat emasculated society of medieval Konkan, a society that was unable to stand up to Alauddin, Rajwade seems to say. there was nonetheless the extenuating circumstance that Dnyaneswara's text could preserve for the future a Marathi essentially unadulterated, "unmiscegenate," We can imagine that with the coming of Shivaji that sarcophagus would kcep within itself the body of the Marathi state, melding state and language into one assertive cultural entity,

If the Dnyaneswari is for Rajwade a sarcophagus for language in its rela­tion to a people and a state, this text itself would seem to be dedicated to a different kind of secretion. What is the "secret" of the Dnyaneswari? What does it "keep" inside itself? We saw that what it keeps is nothing but the self­overreaching of the yogic mind, In the "simplest" terms (so simple that.1ike Poe's Purloined Letter, we cannot see what is right in front of us) we might say that this yogic regimen involves "placing the inside back (palat, ulhata] in the inside." For the nationalist critic accustomed to think of culturc as the source of a specular imagc of one's own national identity, this kind of "inside

120 Vicissitudes of historical religion

within an inside" has the aspect of a hall of mirrors. Instead of one's self­assured sense of self there i~ the chance that the mechanical replication of the self may introduce an element of the abyssal into the unplumbed depths of this interiority, the region of the "unsounded sound" (anahat nada). Yet for the yogi himself this exercise is not abyssal: just as "a-porias" must be "pored through," that is to say decided in one way or another, the encounter with the abyss of non-meaning requires the immediate and retroactive institu­tion of meaning; the abyss calls to be crossed over, covered, making abyssality transient. unsustainable in itself. What is crucial here is that the abyssality issues from the ungroundedness of the regimen itself. Such a regimen has no origin or end. It merely brings about reversals. And this infinite reversibility is endlessly "secretive" in that it involves a momentous involution of the psyche, drawing it deeper and deeper into its inner recesses. At the same time, this drawing-in has none of the features of New Age commercial spirituality in the Western world, because it is prior to religion, prior to the age of religions in which non-Western religions can only be ethnophilosophical adjuncts to rationalized life in late capitalism; as part of this "retraction," no inherent symbolic value can be accorded to mind or soul, to the senses or the body, all of which remain alterable, dispensable aspects of the technique itself. It implies the involution of yoga itself toward an ancient oblivion of the right to mourn.

No wonder then that the nationalist critic detected a mystery, secret or pusillanimity where there was only this inner journeying. No wonder. more­over, that such critics tended to be deeply suspicious of the allegorical sche­mas in which such journeying would be couched; after all, the philosophical vocabulary of such texts as the Dnyaneswari, as I have suggested above. has a semantic range reducible neither to concept nor to metaphor. There is no name for allegory in Indic criticism-yet this handing down of the selfsame message is not uniq ue to cultures of hearsay. As Rajwade himself seems to suggest in his seminal essay on the "fantastic" (adbhut), Sull-inspired allegor­ies such as that of Jayasi and the fascination Dnyaneswara and Kabir display for the yogic landscape of the soul, are lorms of memory that relay a kind of preserved stereotype conveying the force and newness with which new empires were built in South Asia in this period. Allegory is mechanical reten­tion, but its mechanism gives us an insight into the apocalyptic and utopian dimension of popular memory. For the critic invested in the construction of a nationally available symbolic image-repertoire from out of the narrative strategies of medieval texts, this tendency in the Varkari saints, in Kabir and in Jayasi, toward a potentially endless generation of meaning was troubling. In contrast, Tulsidas, Surdas, and Ramdas seemed immeasurably more "democratic" because the exoteric quality of their tableaux of Ram and Krishna in action was so much easier to ascertain. And yet in some sense these critics were nonetheless drawn toward what they saw as the "esoteric" texts of "medieval bhakti." The fascination with such a secretive corpus became the basis of their productive encounters with these texts. In the final

Rajwade's grammar 121

analysis the "secret" of Varkari hearsay or for that matter of Ram, the name for the becoming-God of Kabir, is less what is secreted in these traditions of silence; it is very much more the origin one ascribes to a text in a necessarily willful fashion, as the start of a hermeneutic project seeking to bring out if not the secret itself then most certainly the fascinating, obsessive possibility of a journey toward that secret in one's critical labors. Nationalist exegesis, in its encounter with "bhaktitexts" bearing evidence ofa connection with popu­lar yogic practice (there are strong connections between Nathpanthi practice and the thinking of both Dnyaneswara and Kabir) is in the final analysis not about these texts themselves than about the interpretive dilemmas of the critics that engaged with them. The fascination with popular esoteric practice as reflected in this sector of the hhakli archive co-exists in the work of these critics with a certain eilizenly olltrage directed at authors whose secrets none­theless eluded them. In other words, the popular both attracted and repelled their gaze. That is the secret these texts keep for LIS, who have inherited those older perplexities.

Toward a narratival history

The question remains: do systems make reference to history? The chronicle (Bakhar) of Mahikavati is historical not just because it contains a narrative of events whose historical basis can easily be ascertained (as it was by Rajwade) by turning to other contemporary sources: the Bakhar is "historical" also because it makes a point about the decline of Maharashtra Dharma. thus locating itself (at least in Rajwade's mind) in the still incipient history of the state in Maharashtra. One could argue for the Bakhar as a historical docu­ment, but is Dnyaneswara's text historical by the same token? A text that seeks to establish its origins in a time without origins. that lays out a complicated paradigm for the self-overreaching of the soul would seem to have very little to do with history in the way the Bakhar quite obvi.ously does. Rajwade was correct to focus on the language of Dnyaneswara, for the latter's use of the spoken Marathi of the time is arguably the only explicit link his text has with historical evidence in the conventional sense. Where the Bakhar provides evi­dence of the timing and narration ofaetual historical events, Dnyaneswara's text offers instances of the state or the Marathi language at the time. of the ti.ming of the Marathi language in history as it moved from its origins in Sanskrit-Prakrit-Maharashtri-Apabhramsha to its transmutation into the Old Marathi spoken in the Konkan. circa 1290. Still, what are we to make of that other "timing," the timing oryogi.c overreaching which generates in the text the endless allegorical expanse of levels, sites, destinations. crossings, the epic dimensions of an inner life that seems to Ilee from any connection with history? And yet, interiority is nothing if not a meditation on the question of time. Rajwade projected his "Hegelian" framework back into the distant past and thereby insti.tuted the historiographic episteme in Maharashtra, lodging it firmly ill the annals of the Maharashtrian state. Dnyaneswara. on the other

122 Vidssitudes of historical religion

hand, appears to eschew historical reference lor a meditation on the question of temporality, the timing of a life as yogic involution, Is there then any connection at all between history understood as translormation and time understood as the work of the soul, between the exteriority of historical occurrcnce and the interiority of inner~worldly time? For, in exteriority the other of history is the state; in interiority the other of the soul is the phenom­enal world, whose apotheosis (remindful of the eskhaton in an Eleatic register, and paravac or parakashta in the tones ofShaivite Medieval Kashmir) is in the moral act of dying beJore religiously sanctioned death.

The idea of freedom implicit in Rajwadc was that of a freedom secured by means of the Stale as the final horizon of historical striving. The violence inherent in the radical heteronomy of the state implied it alone was to be the motor of historical change in the service of nationalism. The "system" of freedom in Dnyaneswara on the other hand would appear to be static, mech~ anica1. Repetitive-·but in keeping with the great allegorical systems of this period and later (one thinks again of Kabir and Jayasi) there is a sense in which reversibility ensures that a new history of the soul will have been broached. This system presupposes dilference-it addresses at thc outset the issue of the tendency of the senses to turn toward the sensual world----but it seeks to reverse this constitutive heteronomy by means of a movement of translormative autonomy. Moreover where language in Rajwade entailed the principle of declinability, the necessary "finitude" of words, language in Dnyaneswara sought to address the "infinitude" inherent in saying: for "Om" is here the infinitive par excellena, addressing the question of being from a position of perpetual movement and change.

In conclusion, we can say that two pedagogies of the will have co-existed in lhe Indo-Islamic millennium, the ineluctable drive toward action and the desire to welcome the aniconic, non-anthropomorphic figure (daivat) of the God who will have come. Both forms involve change and translormation but whereas one form involves inciting action in the subject to change the world, the other involves action to change oneself; one is a self-subjection oriented to the world, the other is a self-subjection geared toward itself. Is not the heteronomy of the self (the idea that oneself is for another) far more enabling than the heteronomy of the state (the state as the other of the socia])? The traditions of the becoming-God as they are as inaugurated in Dnyaneswara, Kabir and Tukaram are precisely about the "mourning" that ordains this self­transformation; for in self-transformation there is also the important recogni­tion that every other persall is unique, irreplaceable and different from me. The God in him holds me to account, asks me to mourn for him. He is not the third person (whom I can then proceed to represent and use as an alibi) who demands justice, violence, dominance, This practice of the "returning" of the soul olTers an account of practical reason that makes use of terms from the religious lexicon as various topol (dogma in the pre-ecclesiastical sense) but only lor mechanical retention. Could this be a threshold for a low-caste prac­tical reason severed from the internal auto-critique or ethical soul-searching

Rajwade's grammar 123

of Hinduism? In embracing hearsay (return, retention, retraction), defiantly this side of theology or love as eros, such a practical reason would .clearly have announced its own "hegemony over the social" (Gopal Guru)---a social attained not merely by laying claim to the state but by addressing the problem of a past that is older than the time of history even as it makes it possible, a past beatifically mediated via the notion of the "divinity of the divine" of which the Varkaris" Vitthala and Kabir's demotic Ram are signs taken for wonder. lO

In the three chapters that constitute this book's section on "The Vicissitudes of Historical Religion," we looked closely at reconstructions of medieval devotional traditions in the era of anti-colonial nationalism. We also turned to a recent reappraisal of this critical legacy from the dalit point of view. The texts we examined represent what is to my mind a high point in Hindi and Marathi modernity. The extraordinary power of these analyses nonetheless reveals a fundamental resistance to the idea of divinity in Kabir and Dnyaneswara, What they uncover is a foreclosure of daHt hearsay; this is arguably the case with a dalit critic such as Dharmvir. One response to our I1ndings could have been to stop here, Wishing to preserve the strangeness, if not the sanctity of this fund of wisdom from the prcmodern period, we could have remained content with the metacritical clTort of these last chapters on Dwivedi, Dharmvir and Rajwade. Yet, it is incumbent upon us to tread fur­ther; it would not suffice to merely point to an altcrnative mode of thought and of life, stopping short of embracing that alternative with all the interpre­tive dangers that any intimacy with it would necessarily imply. This book aims at a prehistory of dalit empowerment. My point is to show how what came before contemporary daHt politics was not a time of inertness or "unfreedom." I have argued in Chapters 1 and 2 that the period we know as the age of bhakti is also the basis of a dalit ecumene no longer indebted to Hinduism.

For this reason we are in a sense "accountable" to the premodern, It is a mark of the boldness and originality of the critics we have discusscd that they brought out these genuine insights into the texts of the bhakti period just as quickly and surely as they dissembled them. It is in fact prcciscly their failure to address the specificity of the texts of dalit hearsay (Kahir and Dnyaneswara in particular) that is also a sure sign of their unimpeachable stature. Mystic speech called to them, pulled them toward itself, beatified their own lives. This "pull" helped produce in the very texture, in the subtle warp and woof of their own texts a grandiose indifference to that originary calL (J have characterized this avocation as that of the primordial traditions of melancholic justice), And so they were supremely "non-indifferent" despite themselves to a tradition that ought to have been seen outside and beyond any retroactively espoused idea of the "pre-modern," This is their ambiguous ethical legacy to us in ollr present moment even as we too return to the texts of the "premodern." Thai ambivalence does not call lor the kind of hand-wringing that serves only to assuage one's own conscience (mcrcly

124 Vicissitudes a/historical religion

lamenting that we no longer have the "right" to read these texts). nor does it call for a form of complacen,cy (in experiencing our modernity as a necessary alienation from the premodern). Our "pul!" loward the premodern should serve instead as the mark of decisions that we must (cannot not) make. There is no alternative. One must proceed to read the texts of hearsay themselves.

Part III

The prehistory of historical religion

l , • 7 The suspension of iconoclasm

Myth and allegory in the time of deities

Despite the weighty rubric, the idea of "allegory" I associate with Kabir and examine in this chapter is easily characterized. I refer to the constant shuttle involved here between worldly and ethereal, Ileshly and spiritual. For alle~ gory, these are all sites of involuted and repetitive thinking. Yoga and !antra were rich sources for such imaginings. Allegory necessarily poaches on sys~ tcrns; it is from the point of view of the popular a mode of intellectual brigandage. Above all, it is a form of surreptitious speech. It flits effortlessly between the real and the imagined. In what follows I make the argument that the installation of deities as loci of emotional yearning in the age of bhakti is based on this idea of allegory. The deity in bhakti is set up in the interior region of the soul, but it can as well exist as an object. The "subject" of bhakti, I want to suggest, is the emotive individual who can practice a perpetual transience between the deity lodged inside as an imago and the deity out there who can be the object of devotion. I do not make distinctions between bhakti and the Sufi Way while making this point. It seems to me that the tendency to establish an object as at once the inner source and the outer aim of an emotional attachment is widespread in the Indo-Islamic era, tra­versing both high and low forms of culture. I conclude this particular thread of my argument by discussing the possible effects this allegorical tendency has had in the realm of politics today. The embrace of deities is not however the only aspect of allegory. In the next chapter I show how the work of allegory is two-fold. If it embraces mainstream religiosity, it also turns away from it to affirm involuted modes of interiorization. This refers us to the inner crypt of allegory.

The thought and poetics of the saint-poet Kabir exemplifies this turn toward and turn away from the popular. Kabir's Ram is not the Ram of the epic; his is an abstract Ram. But it is nonetheless to be found in the interjor region of the soul. And for this reason it is complicit with the regime of deities, for which there is a continuum between the inner world and the deity installed out there. The most significant claims on Kabir's work prior to the dalit critique made different uses of this interiority, as we have seen in previous chapters. Ramchandra Shukla castigated Kabir's imaginings as mystical, and looked to the rcign of deities for an instance of thc popular. Hazariprasad

128 Prehis!ory oj historical religion

Dwivedi thought of this interiority as a sign of what is inherently radical in the Hindu tradition. T1tis was a radicalism prior to deification, but a I-lin<.lu radicalism nonetheless. Now inasmuch as Kabir embraces this interi· ority. and speaks of it in a Vaishnava idiom, he is complicit with the reign of deities. My task here and in the following chapter is to point this out. but also to extricate Kabir's idea of interiority from its association (however implicitly) wilh the reign of deities. In Ihis manner, Kahir is the paradigm for the movement of claim and counterclaim that I have described as the essence of <.Ialit hearsay an<.l dalit politics. Allegory "is" dalil skepticism par excel­fence to the extent that it is a double movement toward and away from llinduism.

Let me turn hcre to the question of how allegory puts to work a peculiar idea of temporality. The historiographer Rajwade. whose work I discussed in the previolls chapter, was also a literary critic of great perspicuity. His sem­inal 1902 essay (Rajwade 1967: 266--94) on the Marathi novel ("Kadambari") provides us with an important glimpse into the temporal vocation of allegory. Rajwade's purpose in the essay was to deride the idea of verisimilitude at the basis of Marathi naturalism, of which the novelist 1·lari Narayan Apte was then the leading exponent. The essay laments that novelist's lack of attention to the older Marathi tradition of popular fl'lntastic tales. 1'"01', had Apte turned to these he would have imhued his own works with the utopian and fahular energies inherent in the fantastic (adbhuJ). From this local polemic, Rajwadc proceeds to discern traces of the fantastic in every aspect of the world, since it is for him an integral part of "the imagining [kalpalla} of God in religion, of the highest good in ethics, of the Ultimate Good in the Vedas, of the ideal polity in history. of the zero in math, of the non-happening that happens in theater, of the beautiful in painting, of right in law" (269). But more important for our purposes than the ubiquity of the fantastic is Rajwade's attentivencss to its transience. It was clear to him that whcreas everyday life tended to follow regulated notions of clock time, the fleeting quality of the fantastic made it a locus of utopian experience. The point was that the idea of the fantastic couched in the Marathi tradition of the talc had the potential to provide the key to popular modes of memory and imagin­ation. For what the popular imagination sought to undertake was an implo­sion of the idea of time itself. But since this was not always possible within a society defined by ils commitment to ritualized and highly regulated modes of life and death, the implosion of time often gave way in the popular mind­set to an involution of experience. For Rl'ljwade, this explained the fabulous inner vistas of the fantastic tale, with its aUegorical spaces elaborating in an interminable fashion the temporal trajectory of the tale. He had in mind medieval das!ans, but also the fable which had its predecessors in the Pancha­tantra and in Aesop. In general, Rajwade wanted to make the point thai the novel in Marathi had taken the wrong turn; it had followed the soul­deadcning path of the English, and not the romantic yearnings of the Russian or French novel; but more alarmingly, it had chosen to ignore the popular

l' i Suspension oj iconoclasm 129

penchant for fantastic tales which continued to draw a wide readership in latc nineteenth-century Maharashtra.

Again, Rajwade's analysis is not exhausted by his brilliantly conceived geneaology of the tale in world literaturc. What is absolutely essential is his insight into the popular. For it was clear to him that the popular as a mindset shuttled between the world of the fantastic and world of the everyday. This was the way in which it conceived of the substitutability of the real and the imagined. His emphasis on the transience of the fantastic is for this reason fundamental. The fantastic is everywhere and nowhere, perpetually in transit between the real and the imaginary, precisely because it contains within itself the inverted image of utopian time. It is a fleeting window into a world transmuted. But it is in its efficacy necessarily minimal, supplemental. Simmel (1997 (1904): 43) once described the function of religion in social life as that of a "limb and a whole organism at thc same timc--·a part of our existence, and yet also thl'lt whole existence itself on an elevated spiritual plane." Religion is a part of every aspect of human activity, but is "yet ... raised above life." It was here, in describing religion aJ ils limit in the t(lllow­ing sentence that Simmel came closest to Rajwa<.le's notion or the fantastic: "Therefore, in its moments of greatest intensity, it is raised above itself in the reconciliation of all the conflicts that it entered as a single clement of life," It is not, in the final analysis, relevant that Rajwade speaks here of Ihe fantastic (adbhul) and Simmel of religion. (The congruence is interesting, though, for the reason that both texts date from the early 1900s.) The facl is that both thinkers allude to the limit of social life. This is the point at which, at "its moments of greatest intensity" the social bond is raised above itself: but also (we might say) thrown outside the circle of social existence. Rajwade and Simmel both refer us here to an element of popular perception that. with the hindsight of the last century, we can no longer celebrate as utopian and emancipatory along the lines or Todorov's work on the fantastic tale. For, the limit of social life that they point to is also the threshold for violence. The fantastic is transient in much the same way that religion is. The latter surfaces in every facet of life too. What both the fantastic and "religion" (in Simme\'s sense) do is to bring time and experience together. Where that happens is most often the space of violence. When it happens the world is experienced within a kind of aceelcrated time. The "thought" produced as a result, al some point between concept and intuition, is in reality an image. There is a cineml'ltic, or kinetic, element to this image which is evident in the quote from Rajwade above. It is like the retentive shadow that passes between the rapidly flipped pages of a picture-book. This image is etfected al the intersection between history and memory, time and experience, and by the same token between the real and the imagined. The crucial point is: it is this image that is "taken lor real." Again, the word "mindset" does not quite capture the notion of retention implicit here. Something like "mind imprint" may be more appropriate. The mind impl·int or allegory reworks dead ideas and stereotypes in ways that ean be dangerous or liberating; but il provides

130 Prehistory of historical religion

(in the work of Jayasi and Kabir, lor instance) the surest "register" of the changing scene of the Indo-1slamic age. We perceived the spectral illumin­ation of allegorical stereotyping in Rajwade's work in the previous chapter. A key concern in the following pages is to demonstrate the fatal tie between allegory and violence.

The "wisdom" of Kabir

Kabir's Ram is, on the face of it, precisely this mental imprint lodged equally in the region of the world and the region of the spirit. In this sense, his idea of Ram is a readily available model for the allegorical way of looking at the world. To take two instances at opposite poles, it is troubling that we can move without great effort from Kabir to Jayasi (with his allegorical landscape), or from Kabir to Tulsidas (with his world made concrete in the epic Ram's actions), In either case it is an imperturbable movement from the interior to the exterior. Like Jayasi's Padmini, Kabir's Ram is a goal at once abstract and concrete. Like Tulsidas's Ram, Kabir's Ram serves as a way of transmuting the world from within an inverted image of exemplary action. And yet, Kabir's Ram is a break with Jayasi's Padmini and Tulsidas's Ram, with the world of intellectually or emotionally accessed deities. Thinking that emotion is of greater value than intellection, Shukla was dismissive of alle­gory when it appeared in Kabir, deriding it as intellective, arid (shushk). (He was more forgiving of Jayasi!)' He could not see how Kabir tore away from a mindset common to intellection and emotion, which is the tendency to set up a deity that one has oneself willed into being. At that level, an intel­lectual and emotional grasp of the deity, is nonetheless "theoretical." I define "theoretical" here in the sense of Greek word, theorein, which can refer to the gaze that "looks" longingly at and the subject that "knows" its object. and in knowing grasps and dominates the world. Theoreticism is inimical to any response to the death of the other person, to an other-directed ethics. The shadow of such an avid and grasping theoreticism falls on Kabir too. Despite my criticisms of Dr. Dharmvir, I am in sympathy with the dalit claim on that sage. And so I will attempt in this and the following chapter to help avert this shadow from the weaver of Banares.

I want to argue that Kabir's way of grasping the abstract as such, laying claim to the absolute at the start, is a paradigmatic instance of dalit hearsay in its double movement of "turning toward and turning away." This is the essence of his "wisdom," his enabling sapience. One could go so far as to say that if Kabir partakes of a certain divinity today for dalits it is not because he is a man of god, a devotee, a guru, or a saint. How does one ascertain the divinity of a sanf, a saint-poet? [t is essential that we think of him as first and foremost a "sage" in the sense that that term was used in Greek antiquity, Plato was just such a figure for those who followed the example of Plotinus. Z

There are deeply sensuous images in Plato of a movement away from the lived world upward into an ethereal and joyous encounter with truth. But the sage

T Suspension (?f iconoclasm 131

who fascinates us today as he did the Neo-Platonists was the worldly being who saw that the idea of the "good" precedes the human quest for truth, without nullifying it. Kabir was like Plato a thinker after this priority bf the good in the human world; he did not believe the good was a thing-like object that human conduct could fall back on in moments of spiritual crisis.. nor did he think that the "Unseen that has no Blemish" (alakh niranjan) was merely an ethical ideaL There is an enabling "intransigence" to historical action in Kabir, a return to a good not beyond but be/ore being. This glimpse of the good prior to the philosophical quest for truth should remind us of the problem of the origin before origins (the khora) of the universe in the Timaeus. Accompanying this recognition of a prehistory of the good is the shared willingness in Kabir to address the paradox that while this origin before origins is unknown, it can nonetheless be lhouf(hl. Knowing this origill as dark and unfathomable and yet thinkable does not entail falling into the abyss of the irrational. Nor does this have very much to do with mystery. That this "good prior to being" is accessible to Kabir between what can be thought and what can be known comes to him in something like a "hunch," a "feel" for thinking that is not thinking itself, which enables him to orient himself with some degree of freedom from systematic Indic or Indo-Islamic notions of being in the world-this feel before feeling or knowing is what he calls "Ram."

When Kabir seeks after the good before truth or being, he appears to dare to go back before the origins of the universe itself The question of origin is understandably fraught with dread for this untouchable convert to Islam, for the idea that the universe works according to kartn(l (Physis) provides a cosmogonic justification for the iniquities of caste. There is a peculiar "indefiniteness" in the cosmogony of karma that preserves the particular person in his or her particular social place but only as a particular. This is what makes it possible for an "ontology" of karma to bring within its reach all living beings, and to describe itself as the being of all beings. The particu­lar being can in karma be just about anyone, but it is always that "anyone" in his particular place. This is how Krishna in the Gita argues for the particular­ity of each being in karma, To this working "anonymity" of the social, whose effects we see in political society today where low caste communities fall back on the security of enumerated notions of caste in order to protect themselve~ against violence, Kahil' counterposes (as we saw in Chapter 5) the idea of a beatific, incalculable anonymity which he calls rang, from within a metaphys­ics of "color." We know the calculable, dominant form of anonymity as the sensuous religion of Ram and Krishna worship; the name we give it is bhakli ("participant devotion"), involving the particularizing and desiderative link between devotee and deity. There, too, it is a particular devotee who wills a particular deity into being. But for Kabir this is precisely the anonymity through which the vocation of rang (color) wanders in the world indefinitely until it finds the one singular. definite being that is the object of a look coming downfrom on high, the look ofKabir'sabstract Ram (not the Ram of the epic).

132 Prehistory of historical religion

In the timing of rang (within a markedly providential account of anonymity) there is no longer a karmic~ink between nature and the social world. Here human existence is not just a particular aspect of the universe. Instead the human is the center where divinity comes to effect its nearness. The singu­lar human being becomes the link between anyone and the whole world.

But we should note that Kabir's insight lends itself very swiftly to the sensuous worship of Krishna and Ram. For the abstraction in Ram is as we saw (in Chapter 5) incised by the message of rang that is both concretc and worldly. turning fondly toward the singular visage of the human being here before me. In its concrete working through of redemptive anonymity it cannot but have recourse to the languages of love already available in the religion of the North. Following a late nineteenth-century tendency, we mis­take this transition as a movement from abstract to concrete, as a fall of spirit into language, of indeterminacy (nirgunatva) into determinacy (sagunatm). But we should not lorget that this Ram is a concrete instant of worldly experience, an instance grasped in its entirety as concrete, despite its being abstract, whereas, it is the workaday human world that now seems abstract, requiring language to make itself concrete. This abstract (calculable and therefore compromised) anonymity, as it now appears, of the sensuous world is the necessary worldly stage for the singular address of the loving look of Ram. This stage can also be the stage of violence, which can often take the form of the anonymous. as I will explain below.

Here we have an insight into the great paradox of the sensuous world that Linda Hess (1983: 52) first uncovered in the Kabir poems current among the Kabirpanthis of eastern India. a poetry of sudden mysterious turnarounds, the tenebrous yet lucid logic of which is evident is such lines as "Mouse in the boat, cat at the oars: frog sleeping, snake on guard; bull giving birth. cow sterile: calf milked, morning, noon and night: lion forever leaping, to tight the jackal." Clearly, what happens with Kabir's abstract Ram is that the world is turned upside down, so that its very concrete sensuality seems abstract when seen from the point of view of a providential anonymity. For nothing can be more concrete (Kabir seems to say) than the singular address of the abstract Ram. This problem of a lived but abstract world has some bearing on the relation between the two poles of allegory. For allegory is nothing if not this transient, unpredictable passage between the abstract and the concrete.

The historical Kabir

What can it mean then to think with Kabir in his divinity? Not to report on this corpus of poems, theorize thc means by which we access it, 110t (0 make him speak to us as a contemporary, but to think with him in his present, in its very immediacy, and in a way that makes us question our understanding of our own present, our own historicity. We know that the name "Kabir" has been associated with a proliferating set of songs composed over the past 500 years in north India, sung to this day in gatherings (bhajall-mandalis) of

Suspension of iconoclasm 133

low-caste peasants and landless laborers. They are also chanted in the monas­tic orders of Kabirpanthis set up by the latter-day followers of Kabir.3 The realm of popular memory is by this token one likely place to begin. Conversely, the labors of generations of scholars have helped verify the evolution of the manuscripts of the Kabir poems over the last few centuries and the movements of the itinerant scribes who composed them while travel­ing east across the Indian landmass, countersigning each poem with its trademark "says Kabir" (kahat Kabir). The details about the historical Kabir himself are understandably sketchy and have been gleaned in contrary ways from his poems themselves (Lorenzen 1991: 18). Kabir often describes him­self as an untouchable or dalit weaver of Banares, since the Middle Ages the north Indian citadel of upper caste Hindu (brahmanical) scholasticism and caste hierarchy. He belonged to the weaver community of converts to Islam who still call themselves "Julahas" (Pandey 1992). His dates are uncertain, but it is probable that he lived, working at his loom and composing his verse at some point in the fifteenth century. To supplement the record of popular memory there is therefore the alternative of a thorough philological and historical examination of the manuscripts themselves. One could add to his­torical inquiry the investigation into the history of forms of religious belief The implication of the Kabir corpus in a host of religious currents from Shaivism to Vaishnavism, and from Nathyoga to Sufism makes it imperative that we make use of all the knowledge we have of the practices involved in these forms of worship, and since so many of these practices impinge on the realm of the popular, we would also be required to enter into the question of the relation between the popular and the elite. [n the final analysis, we will have arrived at some kind of reconciliation of the conflicting claims of mem­ory and history; for we will have used the idea of memory to push the limits of historical inquiry, and we will have used history to explore the often obscure reaches of memory. emboldening ourselves to delve into its dark investment in hate, prejudice and the thirst for vengeance.

Yet there is a sense in which thinking with Kabir brings apart this working reconciliation of memory and history. For Kabir was a devotee of an abstract principle that he called "Ram" and that had nothing whatsoever to do with the epic hero of the same name whose heroic deeds were celebrated in Valmiki at the close of antiquity and by Tulsidas at a point closer to Kabir's own time. As an abstraction, Kabir's Ram would seem to havc very little to do with mainstream religious currents, although in his celebration of his abstract Ram, Kabir does fall back on the available sensual means of worshipping a deity from within the traditions surrounding the figure of Krishna. Again, inasmuch as he is an abstraction from the social, this Ram does not offer any insight into the cherished themes of popular memory, especially with regard to heroic narrative. Kabir did not lead a peasant or tribal revolt, organize an insurgency from a hideout in the hills, line up a marauding army. Nonethe­less, he represents a style of life, a posture, a way of thinking that popular struggles have found compelling. The face of pre-modern artisanal culture

134 Prehisforv ofhi~torical religion

that Kabir presents to us. for which the craftsman's prehellSile relation 10 tools is the tenor and the mystic poet's act of speaking the pehicle, encourages LIS to imagine Kabir time and again as a living personality of enormous charisma and personal courage. This relation between work and speech is also, as we shall see. the face of caste oppression and conversion. Yet the idea of Kabir that comes to us after centuries of hagiographic accounts. sectarian glosse~. modem commentary, and the more recent appropriation within the untouch­able movement, remains a schizoid one.4 The icon of Kabir in currency today has two dimensions. There is on the one hand the skeptic Kahir who negates everything, belongs to no one, affirms no identity. On the other hand, there is Kabir, the god of the dalits, who affirms everything by negating it.

And yet there is the Kahir who has experienced something like a miracle. We gain some sense of this from one of the oldest poems in the Kabir corpus. of which we will provide here a tentative and quite cursory translation:

The anxiety of life and death at an end One's being suffused without effort with color Light manifest, dark dispelled I-laving found the Ram-jewell move on. [Rest (Refrain)] In bliss. knowing now to keep off sorrow To flood one's being with the light of this jewel. All that transpires is known to you He who knows this is one with truth. The dirt inside me washed away My being keens into the life of the world.

MaranjiJ'an ki sanka nasi Apun rang; sahaj pargasi Parga!i joti mitia andhiara Ram ratanu pain karat vicara. [Rahau] 1aha anandu dukhu duri paiana Man mafUlku fiv tantu lukana. 10 kichhu hoa su (era bhafUl 10 iu bhuja; su sad samana. KalUltu kabiru kilvikh Mae khina Manu bhaiajagjivanu lina."

Let us take what seems to me to be the key line here. Maran jivan ki sanka nasi. Here the word "sanka" is crucial. I will translate it variously as anxiety. doubt, and skepticism. Kabir says: the sanka of dying-living (is now) undone. Sanka is not simply the fear of life as it hurtles toward death (maran jil'an). Much more than doubt, anxiety, the experience of nothingness. it is the sketch in which these moods hang together. the total history of a life in outline. Death will no doubt complete the outline itself, but at that point the outline itself would fade away- --for surely I cannot live my dcat h. I will

Suspension of iconoclasm 135

describe the tradition of speculation (both Western and Indic) with regard to death as the most rigorous fonn of skepticism. This is important because. by analogy with race (especially race in apartheid). I believe we should think of caste as the most rigorously developed aspect of Indic/Hindu thought. II is not simply an aspect of brahmanical stupidity or folly. It is only when we treat the Indic tradition as fundamentally philosophical in its emphases. only when we see this entire tradition as "complicit" with caste despite its claim to universality; it is only then that we place ourselves in a position to recognize the radical ness of Kabir's philosophical intervention as a dalit. For Kahir broke away not just from the explicit caste discrimination practiced by upper caste society. He broke away from the tradition's hidden complicity with caste; hc tore through the veil of its humanism. its tolerance for low-castes, its embrace of the downtrodden. lie engaged not just with the brute face of upper caste society (in its perpetration of violence) but with its infinite "cun­ning" (in the sense of Phule's "dhurt"). He took it on in its most benign and supposedly magnanimous aspect. at the point of its greatest self-criticism, at the summit of its skepticism with regard to itself. at the point where this skepticism acceded to divine love. Kabir met up with the tradition at its height: in short. he wrestled with its idea of death, with its allocation of myth and law. We gained some hint of this in our discussion Lorenzen's Kapalika in Chapter 2 and of Dwivedi's idea of Love in Chapters 4 and 5. What is radical in Kabir therefore is the event involving the nas (negation) of the grandiose sanka (skepticism) at the heart of the lodic tradition. At its limit this is a skepticism with regard to the question of death. For this reason, this skepticism opens itself to divine love, the sublime trauma, chot. of which Dwivedi spoke so eloquently. But fUlS (negation) itself entails death. annihila­tion. ruin. So that Kabir's "Maran jivan ki sanka nasi" could well imply something like the death of death, an annihilative procedure addressed to an ineluctable annihilation. It could mean the negation of a negation. the negativity of yogic self-modulation (askesis) applied to the absolute negativ­ity of the end. a kind of practiced ceasing-to-be, or "de-cease." We have seen the virtual paradigm for this in the Kapalika's death-habit in Chapter 2.

This is in every respect a "living death" as Charlotte Vaudeville described it (Vaudeville 1964), but to what end1' By no means is this a sacrifice that would redeem the world. Nor is it merely a merger of body and mind as though they were two indifferent entities. And neither can it be understood as a form of ecstatic communion with some transcenJent object characteriLed ali too loosely as "the One." By the same token this suspension of an imminent death in Kabir, his very effectual turning back (palalfUl. which is maghare in Dnyaneswara) from sanka (skepticism) does not rest on a conscious decision in favor of an authentic, as opposed to an inauthentic. death. Neither an assimilation into the One nor a heroic, existential leap into some form of genuine death, neither communion nor suicide, his nas (negation) would have to be understood in terms of the historical self-understanding it implies. What is that historic backdrop, and to what extent does Kabir partake of it?

136 Prehistory of historical religion

What are its loci of I:'lscination? How does Kabir endorse this percept­ual world and at the same titne turn away from it? These questions require a detour through the world awash with the splendor of spiritual and fleshly idols.

Living death and Indo~Islamic allegory

I-Iere then is one possible description of Indo-Islamic allegory. I present it here in precisely the mechanical, retentive form that it appeared in such poets as Kabil'. Let us attend here to the powerful transformation of time into experience that this allegorical mindset made possible. For we can imagine that the event of Kabir's "living death" took place at the limits of the Indo-Islamic world, a world with all its paths so immured in the soil. its lines of struggle and flight, care and decision so thoroughly enmeshed that the grand vocation ofa secular, worldly "rJealing with God" would seem to have presided amid equal noise and circumstance over circle upon circle of wan­dering fisherfolk. shepherds, traders, robbers, Sufi divines, yogis, warriors on hire, religious envoys and saints on a mission to spread their particular Word. God was "everywhere" (and this is why "bhakti" straddles the period from the late medieval to the early modern) but in a very specific sense, Suffering in the world was often acceded to as God-given, within a kind of theodicy. Conversely there were instances, as in Tukaram. ofa struggle and debate with God. The emergence of this very anthropomorphic intlection of devotee and devotional object in the languages and techniques of transcendence is per­haps the reason why the saint-poets of the period proved fascinating for the progressivist romanticism closer to our time. Yet this worldliness in suffering, and along with it the individuation of the devotee as a desiring subjcct was of earlier origin. In Tamil country since the seventh century there was already the retroactive aesthetic delineation of thc folk and its landscapes wherein Ceyon, the prince of the mountain mists, became Mayon of the ambient pasturcland, giving the rise to the aesthetic and libidinal pleasures or separ­ation (I'iraha) (see Hardy 2001 [1983]). Krishna and Ram werc to come. or had pcrhaps already arrived. Here the lover's art of yearning for the absent god and the Sufi preceptors who appear in the dream visions of the rJis­traught Afghan soldier Dattu Sarwani. responding as they do to the dispersal of the Indo-Muslim world in thc wake of the Mughal conquest, were all ofa piece (Digby 1965).

Where the imagined world and the lived world of the devotee/lover inhabit the self-same time and place. where "aesthetic" and transcendental issues are intermeshed. therc is bound to emerge a kind of kinship between meta­physical schemes and allegory. Systematic thinking is no longer merely con­ceptual but has recourse to the narrative involution specific to allegory; by this logic the system of ascending steps to truth and divinity can be narrativized along the lines of a romancc, one wherein the Padmini of Malik Muhammad Jayasi's Avadhi epic, the Padmal'at (1540), is at once the

~\'uspension of iconoclasm 137

worldly goal of Prince Ratansen and the transcendent soul with which his secular being seeks to reconcile itself.

It will not suffice for us to understand allegory as simply the correspond­ence between a hidden semantic level and the tangible (phenomenal) aspect of a symbolic landseape. Allegory is not merely a kind of "key," for instance, that would inform us of Ratansen's standing in for the questing soul, Padmini as the knowledge of God, etc. The question is not merely the indif­ferent bringing together of hidden and apparent meanings, spiritual frame and narrative involution. but refers us to a central epistemological issue: what does it mean lor a form of thought to retain within itself a certain undecid­ability between symbol and schema? This distinction was important for Kant, who suggests in the scetion "On Beauty as the Symbol of Morality" in the Critique o.f'Judgemel1t (1987 [1790]: 228 9), that a schema involves an anomalous lorm of experience, one where the "concept that the understand­ing has formed," as well as the "intuition" corresponding to it is "given a priori." For an idea to emerge midway between the {/ priori frames of the mind (the understanding) and physical experience is rationaL But for both concept and intuition to emerge from the mind, in total denial of physical experience, is aberrant. Whereas the order of thc symbol implies "a concept which only reason can think. and to which no sensible intuition can be adequate," but to which we supply an "exhibition" (hypOlyposis) or expres­sion in words or signs by virtue 0[' analogy. Kant supplies us with the following example of the latter: "a monarchy ruled according to its own constitutional laws would be presented as an animate body, but a monarchy ruled by an individual absolute will would be prcsented as a mere machine (such as a hand mill)." What judgement performs here is the function of "applying the concept to an object of a sensible intuition" and then applying the "mere rule by which it reflects on that intuition to an entirely dilTerent object, of which the former object is only the symbol." The problem with schemas, Kant explained in a footnote in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1960 [I 793J: 58-9), is that they mistake a "concept intelligible to ourselves" for a quality or predicate of the physical object itself. For Kant this is the abyss which, if overleapt (in metabasis), gives rise to the anthropomorphization of God.

Now in some sense such an anthropomorphic impetus is indeed a feature of thc Indo-Islamic age in its insistence on the objective being-present­before~oncself of that which one has oneself willed into being. ror this reason Indo~Persian allegory is not simply a privileging of a deep semantic key as opposed to the sensual emplotmcnt of actions that we see before us in a talc. Both levels have equal value: both are oddly objective emanations of the mind. To be able to keep them in hand (both concept and intuited object) as objectifications is a unique invention of this age, one to which Kabir himself was greatly indebted. and one that arguably gives rise to the very possibility of systems (whether Sufi or bhakti. whether late Advaila Vedanta or Bhedabheda Vedanta) in this period, These systems perform the

138 Prehistory of his to rim I religion

philosophical labor of re~allocating these objects, confounded in allegory, to the mind or the world. ..

It is striking that the "aesthetic" treatises do not prescribe this conflation of concept and (physically) intuited object. They insist on sustaining a tem~ poral hiatus between the two, a tension that is all the more pleasurable in its prolongation. This is the case with the ninth~century aesthetic treatise Dhvan~ yaloka (1990). At stake here is a temporal hiatus between literal and figurative meaning, for in a sense dhvani "is" this hiatus. When one speaks of the aesthetic here, the reference is to the poetic achievement of pleasure by (the poet's) ensuring that the conditions giving rise to rasa do not intrude on the rasa~effeet as such. But as soon as rasa enters the domain of bhakti it is no longer a question of a hiatus. Instead what is required is the simultaneity of artifice and effect, devotee and deity to produce bhakti~rasa. Aesthetic time in its hiatus must give way to devotional experience in its transience. But then again, one might argue that this simultaneity (as opposed to aesthetic tempo~ ralization) is not peculiar to Makti. It is in fact a mark of a widespread allegorical way of looking at the world. I would argue that it is common to the pull toward deities in bhakti as well as the elaborate schemes of Sull allegory (such as in Jayasi). Allegory as the desire for the elaboration of time between the inner and the outer worlds was less an individual's whim than it was a habit (hexis; habitus) peculiar to the mindset of the age. It was akin to what Erwin Panofsky described as the practical mental frame of the monks who built the great Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages. Indo~lslamic

allegory was far from static. This perceptual habit involved the ability to recognize a continuum between interiority and exteriority.

It is significant that there is a register of this tendency in the realm of philosophy. Here I have in mind the work of Paul Hacker on the schools of Vedanta in the 1950& Drawing from the thought of Max Scheler, Hacker attempted to locate an ethical understanding of worldly existence in Sankara, which is to say some form of distinction between worldly life and the avoca~ tion of ethical behavior. He could not find any evidence of this in Sankara himself and therefore attempted a history of the Vedantic tradition as a whole to look for openings in the unjustly neglected works of those who came before and after Sankara. Hacker was aware of Sankara's debt to the school of yoga, to Vaishnavism and to various Buddhist schools. Yet, when it came to providing an aecount of Sankara's procedure he could not but repeat what had been said earlier by Hegel and Rosenzweig with regard to lndic thinking. Which is, that the absolute division between reality and essence, speaking in general terms. in Sankara generates a "static ontology" incapable of heeding the call of conscience. It is enough for us to note the astonishing con~ temporaneity of Sankara, who lived roughly between C.E. 650--750, on the one hand, and the devotee newly committed to devotion ("devotionalized," so to speak) between the seventh and the fourteenth centuries on the other hand, for us to dispel any doubts on this score; perhaps "monism" is itself a misnomer. In fact the idea of monism that seeped into the traditions of

Suspension of iconoclasm 139

devotion was anything but "static." Hacker's need to see "the inherence of acts and intentions in the nature of the person" in Advaita Vedanta made it difficult for him to trace the emergence of the idea of personhoodc' in the world that surrounded the proponents of that school in the first millennium CE., and that left a permanent mark on the allegorical ambitions of the Indo~ Islamic age that followed. That Advaita Vedanta "immersed itself into the self, saw no "second" reality apart from it. and experienced such awareness as the ultimate truth [das Wahre des WahrenJ" is itself a sign that a mode of reaching into oneself and finding an inner absolute had by then been firmly established (Hacker 1995: 161--4). It was left to the Indo~lslamic millennium to evolve a relation between the objectivity of this inner absolute and the world out there. In the final instance, Hacker was unable to see how the idea of the One (in the popular redaction of Vedanta) and the idea or the deity in popular devotionalism could co~exiSI. This is because he could not account for the possibility that "emotion" (the addictive desire lor the deity) and "theory" (the supposedly arid monism of popular Vedanta) were in practice aspects of the same mindset. The devotee's gaze in the age of Makti was at once loving and grasping, emotional and theoretical, self~surrendering and self~aggrandizing.

The illusion of this objectivity was necessarily diffuse, so that it was often not possible to decide between the palpable presence of the inner world and the sheer unreality of the outer. For we know from Hacker's own landmark essay, Vivarta (Hacker 1953), that the problem of illusion must be understood from within the history of the doctrine of errancy (Jrrtumslehre). Which is to say, that there is a certain continuum between the elaborations of the idea of truth from the Upanisads to late Advaita Vedanta. since both take seriously the fact that some form of erroneous perception is an essential aspect of everyday life. Errancy, or the history of ontological error, ensures that the distinction between the seeming and seen cannot be rigorously upheld. Cer~ tainly, in the realm of the popular such a distinction represented less a final limit than a thin line that could be crossed with impunity. But outside and above the popular too, the situation was not very different. We learn from Hacker that in the range of thinkers from Bhartrhari to Prakashananda there was a marked tendency to acknowledge, however grudgingly, the reality of the phenomenal---even if these very authors affirmed at the same time the indisputability of a principle of truth that could serve as a principle or ground of reason. This was the fertile region of ambiguity where Kabir would gener~ ate his own radical grasp of the abstract, as we will see. For he too relied upon one peculiar effect of this pervasive recognition of necessary error. This was the productive undecidability between the inner quest of the Vedantin and the affective pull of the devotee (bhakta) toward his or her deity.

But Hacker's work does more. The fact is that he also showed us how to arrive at the hcart of the popular mindsct of deification, with its emotional and theoretical elements (both in reality part of the same mindset) very much in place. It was Icft to Friedheim Hardy, the author of an important work

138 Prehistory oIhisiori('af religion

philosophical labor of re~allocating these object~ confounded in allegory, to the mind or the world. •

It is striking that the "aesthetic" treatises do not prescribe this conflation of concept and (physically) intuited object. They insist on sustaining a tem­poral hiatus between the two, a tension that is all the more pleasurable in its prolongation. This is the case with the ninth-century aesthetic treatise Dhvan­yaloka (1990). At stake here is a temporal hiatus between literal and figurative meaning, for in a sense dhvani "is" this hiatus. When one speaks of the aesthetic here, the reference is to the poetic achievement of pleasure by (the poet's) ensuring that the conditions giving rise to rasa do not intrude on the rasa-effect as such. But as soon as rasa enters the domain of bhakti it is no longer a question of a hiatus. Instead what is required is the simultaneity of artifice and ellect. devotee and deity to produce bhakti-rasa. Aesthetic time in its hiatus must give way to devotional experience in its transience. But then again, one might argue that this simultaneity (as opposed to aesthetic tempo­ralization) is not peculiar to bhakti. It is in fact a mark of a widespread allegorical way of looking at the world. I would argue that it is common to the pull toward deities in bhakti as well as the elaborate schemes of Sufi allegory (such as in Jayasi). Allegory as the desire for the elaboration of time between the inner and the outer worlds was less an individual's whim than it was a habit (hexis; habitus) peculiar to the mindset of the age. It was akin to what Erwin Panofsky described as the practical mental frame of thc monks who built the great Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages. Indo-Islamic allegory was far from static. This perceptual habit involved the ability to recognize a continuum between interiority and exteriority.

It is significant that there is a register of this tendency in the realm of philosophy. Here I have in mind the work of Paul Hacker on the schools of Vedanta in the 1950& Drawing from the thought of Max Scheler, Hacker attempted to locate an ethical understanding of worldly existence in Sankara, which is to say some form of distinction between worldly life and the avoca­tion of ethical behavior. He could not find any evidence of this in Sankara himself and therefore attempted a history of the Vedantic tradition as a whole to look for openings in the unjustly neglected works of those who came before and after Sankara. Hacker was aware of Sankara's debt to the school of yoga, to Vaishnavism and to various Buddhist schools. Yet, when it came to providing an account ofSankara's procedure he could not but repeat what had been said earlier by Hegel and Rosenzweig with regard to Indie thinking. Which is, that the absolute division between reality and essence, speaking in general terms, in Sankara generates a "static ontology" incapable of heeding the call of conscience. It is enough for us to note the astonishing con­temporaneity of Sankara, who lived roughly between C.E. 650-750, on the one hand, and the devotee newly committed to devotion ("devotionalized," so to speak) between the seventh and the fourteenth centuries on the other hand, for us to dispel any doubts on this score; perhaps "monism" is itself a misnomer. In fact the idea of monism that sceped into the traditions of

Suspension of iconoclasm 139

devotion was anything but ·'static." Hacker's need to sec "the inherence of acts and intentions in the nature of the person" in Advaita Vedanta made it difticult for him to trace the emergence of the idea of personhood, in the world that surrounded the proponents of that school in the first millennium C.E., and that left a permanent mark on the allegorical ambitions of the lndo­Islamic age that followed. That Advaita Vedanta "immersed itself into the self, saw no "second" reality apart from it, and experienced such awareness as the ultimate truth [das Wahre des Wahren)" is itself a sign that a mode of reaching int.o oneself and finding an inner absolute had by then been firmly established (Hacker 1995: 161-4). It was left to the Indo-Islamic millennium to evolve a relation between the objectivity of this inner absolute and the world Out there. In the final instance, Hacker was unable to see how the idea of the One (in the popular redaction of Vedanta) and the idea of the deity in popular devotionalism could co-exist. This is because he could not account for the possibility that "emotion" (the addictive desire for the deity) and "theory" (the supposedly arid monism of popular Vedanta) were in practice aspects of the same mindset. The devotee's gaze in the age of bhakti was at once loving and grasping, emotional and theoretical, self-surrendering and self-aggrandizing.

The i1iusion of this objectivity was necessarily diffuse, so that it was often not possible to decide between the palpable presence of the inner world and the sheer unreality of the outer. For we know from Hacker's own landmark essay, V(varta (Hacker 1953), that the problem of illusion must be understood from within the history of the doctrine of errancy (lrrtumslehre). Which is to say, that there is a certain continuum between the elaborations of the idea of truth from the Upanisads to late Advaita Vedanta, since both take seriously the fact that some form of erroneous perception is an essential aspect of everyday life. Errancy, or the history of ontological error, ensures that the distinction between the seeming and seen cannot be rigorously upheld. Cer­tainly, in the realm of the popular such a distinction represented less a final limit than a thin line that could be crossed with impunity. But outside and above the popular too, the situation was not very different. We learn from Hacker that in the range of thinkers from Bhartrhari to Prakashananda there was a marked tendency to acknowledge, however grudgingly, the reality of the phenomenal--even if these very authors affirmed at the same time the indisputability of a principle of truth that could serve as a principle or ground of reaSOn. This was the fertile region of ambiguity where Kabir would gener­ate his own radical grasp of the abstract, as we will see. l~r he too relied upon one peculiar effect of this pervasive recognition of necessary error. This was the productive undecidability between the inner quest of the Vedantin and the affective pull of the devotee (bhakta) toward his or her deity.

But Hacker's work does more. The fact is that he also showed us how to arrive at the heart of the popular mindset of deification, with its emotional and theoretical elements (both in reality part of the same mindset) very much in place. It was \cft to Friedheim Hardy, the author of an important work

140 Prehistory of historical religion

on early Tamil devotional poetry (2001 [1983), to discern this with great philosophical acuity. HardY"Pointed out that it was really in his work on the Prahlada myth of the Bhagwat Purana that Hacker broke out of this interpretive frame,

The abyssal reaches of the Prahlada myth

In the myth. Vishnu in his man~lion avatar breaks through certain antinomies of space and time to secure his child-devotee Prahlada against the latter's unbelieving demon~parent Hiranyakashyapu. The extraordinary feature of the myth is Prahlada's commitment to an abstract notion of Vishnu---his pronouncements on the ideality of Vishnu are steeped in the language of Vedanta----despite the fact that the myth'S denouement lies in the Grand Guignol physicality of Vishnu's disemhoweling (as a man~lion) of I-liranya~ kashyapu. Hacker saw how the myth showcd a pronounced clement of Vcdantic rhetoric. Yet it seemed clear to him that the Vedantic clcment (of which Prahlada's utterances <,ue the best instance) was not rigorous enough. Conversely. a pronounced Vedantism would have seriously undercut the myth's investment in the emotional connection with the dcily. Vishnu. For this reason. "thc myth's "philosophical teaching agrees with the monistic Vedanta to a great extent. ... but although it shows an unmistakable leaning fOl'lYlrds the philosophy of the Advaila school. yet it docs not appcar to be simply idenlicalwith any branch of this school." It is clear, he went on to say. that the pull toward the deity in bhakti does

not allow for a heightening of monism and illusionism up to those extremes which were customary in the school of Sankara: [for] in the most radical monism the interest in the vis~a~vis of the soul to God. and the interest in the emotion of devotion [Emotion der Hingabe1 which is stressed by the Bhagwat [Puranaj, is lost.

(Hacker 1959: 536; trans. Hardy's)

Hacker at first brings myth and metaphysics within a prox.imal distance of each other. The figure of Prahlada necessitates this. But there is of course a limit to this prox.imity, since the searing flame of Prahlada's devotion would repel the intellective ambition of monism.

Yes there is an clement of undecidability in Hacker which has the potential to lead us toa revaluation of the very category of myth. I want to suggest that it is possible to read the Prahlada myth as the paradigmatic instance of an iconological impasse. The fact is that this myth is unable to decide between the transcendent world of many gods. and the theocent.ric world of the one humanized deity. We often assume too readily that the world of deities is merely a token of the anthropomorphic impulse in belief. But the fact remains that this anthropomorphism (the need to humanize a deity, stamp it with the imprint of man) encounters its own limits in myth. "Prahlada" is a

Suspension of iconoclasm 141

case in point. The tension between the intellective and the emotional aspects of bhakti give rise in the myth to the unprecedented intervention of Vishnu as man~lion (narsimha). His emergence from out of a pillar in circumvention of the antinomies of time and space that had so far protected Hiranyakashyapu. is an event that takes place at the limits of the phenomenaL It is an altogether anomalous occurrence. If we read the myth from the point of view of Vaishnava bhakii we would see in it a wondrous sign of Vishnu's divinity. But from the point of view of Prahlada there is in the coming of Vishnu a fundamental cacsura bctween Vedantie concept and Vaishnava emotiveness. And therelnrc to inhabit the center of this myth as did Prahlada is deeply disturbing, fraught with the danger of falling into a void. The death of Hiranyakashyapu brings to an end this impasse. I do not mean to imply that Prahlada himself experienced this dark night of the soul. For. Prahlada does not doubt that Vishnu is lodged in his heart; he is absolutely certain that Vishnu will protct:t him in every instance where he is tested by I-liranya~ kashyapu. who mocks Vishnu's might The point is that it is we. the subjects committed to organizing a regime of deities around us, avid for the one deity we can bow hefore. it is we who inhabit the iconological impasse hetwecn concept and (sensuous) intuition. spirit and flesh. We need the death of the demon parent to be able to cross the gaping hole underneath us and espouse devotion. The theological impulse in Vaishnavism would of course want to see in the myth the destiny of Vishnu (a triumphal '·mono~theism." so to speak). I-liranyakashyapu dares to challenge this centrality of Vishnu. His hubris makes him look as though he belongs to the older world of deities (to a retreating "poly~theism." so to speak). To put this differcntly, Hiryanyakashyapu's historical being is quickly rewritten as the prehistory of Vaishnavism. (It is for reason that dalits read this myth as the tragedy of I firanyakashyapu, who is then comparable to Phule's Baliraja. and to Ravana.)

The myth would have us think that the movement from Hiranyakashyapu to Vishnu via Prahlada is inexorable. Modern~day Hindu nationalists too read the Ram myth as complete. sealed for good as the history of onc active. intervening God. And to some extent, given especially the Christological basis of their very idea of the deity, they are correct. (Hence my deliberate use of the terms. "monotheism" and "polytheism" which are marked hy a Chris~ tian apologetics. No matter how many alternative Ramayanas we present as counterpoint, the Hindu -nationalists' historical grasp of a monadic Ram is uncircumventiblc. There is only one Ramayana for them, only one Ram.) But they do not take into account the possibility that the myth can itself be ambivalent. They want to stamp the myth with the anthropomorphic notion of one single world~altering deity.

Reading Hacker against the grain of his own concerns, we come to a difter~ ent conclusion. This is, that the anthropomorphization of Vishnu is in fact impossible. since he represents within the myth itself the fullest narratival. which is to say allegoncal, elaboration of Vedanta. In this sense the Hindu

142 Prehistory of historical religion

nationalists inhabit the abyss of idolatry as did Prahlada. Whereas the older tradition (rendered o(per by virtue of the power of the new) is, or was, iconoclastic. Iconoclastic, not in the sense ofimage~breaking, but in the sense of a suspicion of the human imprint on deities. How long can Hindu nation~ alists sustain in their idolization of Ram the suspension of this primordial iconoclasm? The emphasis on the emotional tie to the deity in bhakti is based on this suspension. It is only when Iliranyakashyapu dies that it comes into effect for us. Since the time of Shukla, we have come think less of rasa than of bhakti~rasa. Today, we have reached the limit (much blood has been spilled in the process) of the suspension oficonoclasill.

Now regardless of whether bhakti here is to be associated with a personal god or toward the atman that is unified with God (as was argued by critics of Hacker such as Adalbert Gail), the crucial point is that Friedheim I-Iardy is intrigued by the possibility of juxtaposing the two. He is skeptical that such a connection can be assumed, and yet arrives at this important conclusion, full of implications for what 1 have described above as the iconological impasse of bhakti.

We ... have identified a fundamental motive behind a struggle that runs right through medieval Hinduism and expresses itself in the many attempts to formulate "modified" lorms of advaita Vedanta. This motive would be that, since a particular religious approach (emotionalism) has revealed "separation" as the basic relationship between man and the absolute, the totality of being could not simply be subsumcd in one ultimate principle, and that an element of "separation" (philosophic.11ly "differentiation") had to be assumed as essential to the nature of the absolute itsell: In this case, the fact that all these forms of "modified" or "dialectical" advaita postulate a personal absolute who is conceived orin mythicallorms and assumed to be known solely from revealcJ scripturcs, could only be regarded as a secondary motive, and the conventional description between strict and "modified" forms of advaita as a contrast between "reason/verifiable experience" and "belief/dogma/myth" would lose much of its usefulness' The primary contrast would be between different types of human experience[s] .. , of reality.

(Hardy 2001 [1983]: 546-7; final emphasis is mine)

Hardy gives us here an important hint with regard to the coming together of Vedantic rationality and a normed emotiveness in one structure of object~ ification. I want to underscore here this coming togcther of thought and feeling, theory and affect in one drive, which is the desire f()r a deity that one has oneself set up. For what we can learn from these gaps in Hacker's thinking, and from Hardy's own insight, is the extraordinary lorce by which the new devotee, working here very much like thc Vedantin, sought to ascer­tain the objectivity not of the world as such, but the world that the devotee herself had willed into being in the inner region of the heart, wherein lay thc

T

I

Su.~pef/siun oficonoc/a,l-m 143

basis of her desire to set up a deity. I have used the phrasc "the suspension of iconoclasm" to characterize the desire for the deily. The point is tbat the devotee's own will is only one part of the drive ]()f deities' The other is the desire to ensure that the deity present itsclf as though its own emergence was unconditional, as though the devotee had not conditioned it into being. The suspension of iconoclasm, which resolves the iconological impasse at the heart of Indian myth, refers us to this peculiar "conditioned unconditional~ ity" of the deity.

The deity-effect and the ctcrnality of devotion

We can sec that the enormous popular reach of devotional ism was not merely on account of its "emotional" response to Ilindu dogma. Far from being the unstaunched flow of emotion, it was in fact the di~'ciplining of emotion lor the sake of a grasping, theoretical gaze. (The parallels with the disciplinary work of psychoanalysis are instructive.) For the passionate, empowered devotee the idea of an ioner absolute could not but have proved to be greatly enabling. This devotee strove against the greatest odds to represent her deity (and by the same token the Vedantin, his or her notion of truth) to herself, and therefore established at once the thesis that she exists and that her God (or the Vedantin's being of beings) does too. In other words, she was the subject of this representation who in turn brought into clfect the objecthood of the deity (in the case of the Vedantin, the objt.'Ct which is the self, atman). (More precisely, the monadic "subject" of this representation of the deity is the "devotee" as the coming together of <l will and the clrect of that will.) This is never simply a mental act, an intcllectual game. What has happened here is of epochal significance since the ellccting of this subject, its subject effect, implies that where the devotee was a living, striving being prior to discourse, theory or system, she is now empowered by virtue of her desire to will the deity, to understand herself as an acting, effecting subject--- in bringing together theory and will, she has generated the existent reality of her world.

This is where we can sec how the allegorical mindset characteristic of the popular found the pull of devotional ism irresistible. All experience had now been loaded with the expansiveness of a whole range of affective vocabular~ ies. Moreover, the allegorical mindsel could now go so far as to seek a glimpse into the cternality of devotional experience. Looking around theoretically at the world she had brought into being, the devotec could, like Mirabai, now have the joyous sensation of thinking of it as eternal, and of thinking of herself as immortal (see Spivak 2001). This glimpse into eternity is itself derived from the fact the devotee's sense of her own being in the world now seems secure and certain. The "I" of the devotee grounds the "I" of the deity. To use the Sanskrit root for the selling~up or thesis of the subject we encounter in the (iila, it is the slha of the devotee (her being sthitapradnya, rectitudinal) that lays the ground for the stha of the deity {the latter's sthapana, installation}.

144 Prehistory oIhistorical religion

Once the allegorical mindset has established the existence of the objectified world in this way, it proceeiils to relish this new certainty, this new assurance. This falling back on the certitude of the objects devotees have brought into being explains the cult of "single-minded" devotion. It could be the occa­sional insight people have, around which they proceed to cultivate a lifelong comportment. This insight is that, if one theoretically gazes long enough at an object that one has oneself effected as part of a larger historical will to bring objects into existence, the sheer persistence of one's gaze may well "accommodate" itself to the eternity of the changing world. Such an idea of certainty is similar to the regularity of the seasons that one can take for granted, and on which the sublime naYvete of such literary genres as the riLU­chakra and the barahmasa is based. And this is perhaps one reason why watching the child Krishna at play has for centuries generated from out of Vrindavan afee! for life that is at once sensuous and planetary. discernible in the many seasons of the blue-limbed god in miniature painting. With this insight into eternity achieved and with such a realized reality set in place such devotees believe they have already run through the entirety of their lives and so prepare to die well in advance of death, facing this image of the eternal. Moving and poignant as their courage is, they do not SlOP to think that their insight has an experiential basis which is historically far in excess of their own "experience." And it would he a rude shock for them to know that their address to their humanized divinity, the deity, is nothing if not theoretical. It is possible to argue that Kabir's Ram too is marked by the eternality that one ascribes to a willed, objectified deity.

Two meanings of representation

We have so far been exploring one of the two possible axes of allegory in the long period that I have denoted "the Indo-Islamic millennium." This axis refers us to the drive to set up deities. In the next chapter, we will examine the other axis of allegory, which is its involuted tum into itself. We will encounter there the Kabir who has turned away from the world of deities. But here in conclusion I want to present a sketch of the Indo-Islamic modern. I wish to suggest that there is a continuum between the objectification of the world one associates with deities. and the realm of politics that we have described (after Partha Chatterjee) as "political society." As I have argued in Chapter I. this is the realm of politics "at the cusp," containing the line of force where formerly subaltern communities access the political. This new scene is the domain of a ceaselessly transformative, expansive general will, which is to say "democracy." It is there that the drive for deities continues to effect itself. no longer in the field of the devotee's representation of the deity but in the realm where right is transferred by proxy to elected representatives. Two senses of "representation" come into play here. This could be understood as a transi­tion from representation as the portrayal of the certainty of one's ability fo effect the rea! (i.e. allegory) on the one hand, to representation as the

T I , Suspension of iconoclasm 145

expansion of the limits to which the reality of the real can be effected (i.c. electoral contests). In other words, this is a switch from the portrayal of the system that wills itself into reality to the realm of the effecting of the real by proxy (see Spivak 1987: 276-7). The movement from deification to political society is less qualitative than quantitive. What has transpired is a greatly enhanced investment in the desire to deify (I.e. the suspension of iconoclasm). What the modern itself implies here is the unprecedented manipulation of the technology of desiring deification, with the latter now turned toward political society.

Effectively, this implies a movement from speaking of to speaking for the real. At the level of the world as representation whose systematic basis we have just detected in the premodern, political society is the space of com­mand and power. This is where both elite and subaltern remain invested in expanding the limits of a reality to whose effectuation they dedicate a range of systematic initiatives, working within a freedom whose limits they seek to trespass. It is the realm where the state is effected, willed, placed before us as an unimpeachable reality. In the domain of practical reason, we might say, in that aspect of life where we regulate the conduct of our lives, we see nothing but a seamless movement from the setting up of deities to the setting up of the state. It seems to me that this insight into the technology of deification provides us with a clearer picture of what is at stake in the realm of desire than the notion of the "secularization of religion." The point is not that religion has been debased in the modern era by being assimilated to politics; my key emphasis here is that politics (political society) is merely the prolonga­tion of the premodern regime of deification. Political society is the apotheosis or what I have been calling the "suspension of iconoclasm."

Yet our understanding of the relation between allegory and the religion of deities would be inadequate if we neglected to ask after the factor that motivates not just their coming together but also their falling apart. Nor are we any closer to gaining a sense of precisely where Kabir steps away from Indo-Islamic allegory or precisely where a dalit mode of tbinking veers away from the installation of the representational frame in South Asia. For, alle­gories are not just foci of energetic striving. They are characteristically self-referential, involuted. given to an inwardness that we are hard put to associate with historical reference; from the viewpoint of the era of national­ism they seem curiously "spiritual," if not "mysticaL" The elaborate yogic physiognomy of the soul of which Gopinath Kaviraj was perhap~ the last great explicator and practitioner, is a readily available instance. How can allegories strive after realizing the world as a reality and yet seem to withdraw altogether into themselves, as though there were a vertiginous slide into some deep inner abyss? This, even as the momentum of so much overreaching in these systems is, at least in terms of the final desired outcome. upwardly as well as outwardly inclined. I would argue that this double movement is typical of allegory, and refers us in the final analysis to its redemptive function.

146 Prehis(orJi of historical rcfigio/1

In describing the volitional origins of the pull IowaI'd the deity, wc spoke of the dcvotee's willing into bt!ing the deity that is the particular object of her gaze. Given the work that such a gaLe performs in installing the represen­tational framework within which something like "religion" comes into being, we wcre perhaps justified in using a vocabulary of agential motivation (though we did not speak of "motives" or "consciousness"). Devotees will deities into being not because they are always conscious su~iects who alter history according to their own desires. It is because in this particular area of social action that involves the raising lip of indigenous deities into the pan­theon they can indeed be seen as active, willing subjects who inaugurate the existent limits of their own world. They are subjects of action in (hal world which is theirs alone. And for this reason, the turn away from the systematic domination of world through deification is itself imaginable only through the cultivation of a new ethical stance. In the next chapter I follow Kabir's elaboration of an ethic of tenderness, forged between the experience of violence and the insight into miracle.

8 Miracle and violence The allegorical turn in Kabir, Dnyaneswara, Tukaram

The face of the lord in J)nyan('Swara

I have referred to the affinity between the Varkari tradition and Kabir. One sure sign of that relation is their shared turn away, if only momentarily, from the ambient culture of deities. We gained a glimpse of this tendency when I alluded to Ihc living, striving devotcc prior to religion, the flesh-and-blood devotee, unsubstitutable with another devotee in communal prayer. Like an arrowshot into the future, there is a figure of this kind in Dnyaneswara, This is the singular, indefatigably ardent AJjuna who can in the Dnyancswari (C.E,

1290). Dnyaneswara's monumental rejoinder in Old Marathi to the Gira, engender in the Lord a peculiar dilemma. (I render the verses here in the order of the originaL) II~ as the logical outcome of my discourse, muses Krishna, Arjuna were to relinquish his particular being (Vipaye ahambhava veyacajail) and rediscover his singularity in the ground that I am (min fen ci jari Jw hoiJ), I would be left to face the prospect of an eternal solitude (tari kai kUail, ckleyall). In which case. where would I find the face I long to set my eyes on (Dithi Ii palla/an niI'Ue), who would I yearn to speak to without reserve (kan fonda bharuni bol(je), whom would I crave to hold in a tight embrace (datun khcl'an deUel, who else if not Arjuna (aisen kavana aile)? How can that which settles into the inner reaches of my being (Apulera mana baravi), this unconllnable tale told to Arjuna (ie asamai gothijivin), how can this happy chatter be confided to him (te kal'anensin maga cavala~'i) were he and I to merge into my universal nature, become one with each other (iari aikyajalen)? With such plaintiveness (kakula/i), comments Dnyaneswara. in such an abject posture did Janardana Krishna contrive within the very terms of his general homily on the merits of the yogi (in this section of the Gila) to embrace in speech his own beloved Arjuna (bolamajhin mana manen, alingun sarlen), himself the exemplary yogi (Dnyaneswari 6: 116~19).1

Now what is worth noting here is the uncompromising "directness" of this meditation on the part of Krishna, a rectitude that includes not just the pro­tagonists of the dialogue that is the Gila (Krishna and Arjuna together in saml1ada) but also Dnyaneswara himself. But this directness is not unaccom­panied by an obliqueness which is equally crucial if the state of rest that the

148 Prehistory o/historical religion

dialogue seeks (what Dnyaneswara calls "samvadasukha") is to be attained. The obliqueness is reflected-in what Dnyaneswara calls his marhali, his Old Marathi speech (hol). whose rhetoric contrives (kavatiken) to tear through the veil between speaking and listening (holad valipa phedije) and win a wager with nectarine sweetness, surpass in tenderness a resonant note, pierce through the piquancy of fragrance, let rise in the ear a host of tongues avid for rasa, and make the senses swirl with delight at the touch of speech. For where the fullness of a poetic pada transpires, where its rekha (a word rich in meaning, which we could tentatively render as "figure," "outline") beguiles the gaze with its beauty, one's being rushes out in eagerness to embrace (aJingaveya) that pada. Clearly it is not only the poet who must contrive to make his speech, his poetic utleranee in marhali, convey the freight of Gita doctrine (which is not to say that the Gila is merely doctrine) as wei! as the plaintive~ ness (kakufali) of Krishna's love for Arjuna; Krishna himself is forced to take this oblique path so as to be able to look adoringly into the adoring face of Arjuna. For if he (Krishna) were to adopt a strictly philosophical. doctrinal perspective, he would have to forgo the particular historical being of Arjuna as it receded into his own universality (into Krishna himself, who as God is the origin of all singularity). In short, the alingana or embrace that the poet contrives between being and speech finds its counterpoint in the alil/gana God himself contrives in his dialogue with Arjuna.

The ruse of Marhati

What are we to make of the link this text makes between the ruse of artifice which is kavatika and the loving embrace of the singular Arjuna? We can use the word "loving" here quite freely sincc the doctrinal and metaphysical ambition of the Dnyaneswari, like the Gila, does indeed involve the unveiling of a certain kind of "love" (prem), a Bhagwat Dharma between devotee and deity. But the juxtaposition of ruse and rectitude, metaphor and concept generates in the idea of divine embrace a certain "un-embraceability," so to speak, which makes the exactitude of the embrace unattainable in itself. Krishna himself despairs that such an exact, correct, philosophically rigorous embrace would entail Arjuna's disappearance as a friend and devotee on the narrative surface of the text, ensuring his reappearance on that surface as a "de-humanized" concept supplying merely the idea of human love for the divine. At this point allegory and system collapse into each other, reminding us that there are allegorical and systematic impulses in both the "mortal" and "immortal" aspects of Krishna's address to Arjuna. In this sense the curving of the direct embrace is necessary and presumably cannot be circumvented, except perhaps by circumvention! The allegorical (call it metaphorical, rhet~ orica!) suspension of the doctrinal system is necessary if the specific address of the divine is to be heeded.

Now the task of allegory here is not simply to embdlish the system; the Dnyoneswari is not merely an ornamental arch raised above the Gila, nor is it

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the space ofa contcst between Old Marathi (marhatl) and Sanskrit for greater access to the divine, and neither is there any evidence that Dnyaneswara is motivated hcre by a desire to get across in simple vernacular to god~fearing humble folk the cerebral mysteries of the Gila. There are very specific reasons why the "vernacular" (as opposed to Sanskrit) worked to bear the freight of such a detour through the literary, reasons that have very little to do with the critic.'ll commonplace that those who wrote in the vernacular intended to revolt against the brahmanism of Sanskrit elites. Instead, one could argue that the "vernacular" is the place where the Sanskrit address to alterity "lives on" as a ruse. Another way of saying this is that Dnyaneswara wrote in Old Marathi because the address of the Lord to At:iuna in the Gila, wherein it was a question of portraying the coming of God to man, needed to be sup~ plemented by the "prolongation" of this ruse in Old Marathi, where it was now a question of depicting the "love" of God for man. The rhetorical recourse to Old Marathi instead of Sanskrit was a theological supplement to the older text, miming that text in complex ways. and never really repudiating its still valid claims. We can state this more explicitly in the following terms: Old Marathi was not simply the language Dnyaneswara used to make the Gila acccssible to a vernacular audience; instead, Old Marathi was itself the new rhetoric. It was the field of play where Sanskrit forms of poetic address were given the space to circulate, but this time as the very instantiation of "rhetoric as ruse." In other words, this was an instance of the love of God for man as the very ground of the secular world, which was now the space of rhetoric, ruse, narrative, time. This work of time which Old Marathi performs is thus the very instance of allegory understood as ruse; its worldly task is not very different from what Erich Auerbach (1965: 314, 309) tried to understand throughout his life as the ground of Dante's poetic vocation. He thought of allegory as the work of divinity working through the world. It is a mark of its seclI!<tr voc<ttion; "a way of finding .a place in the divine order for the historical here and now of human destinies and passions," a way of "project­ing" one's own "experience" and "will into the kingdom of God," and to "represent" one's own will "as God's will."

In much the same way that we cannot directly access nOllS (divinity) because il is the regul;:tiive ideal for human life. and just as we speak of Uheoreill) and speak to (legein) objects, addressing things as things, and thereby try and attain nons through speech (logos) in our everyday life and through Ihe varied meanS of practice, deliberation and understanding· in just the same way the allegorical basis of speech (bol) in Dnyaneswara upholds a way of working through the world toward nous. Speech is the means by which we work through the workaday world, willing it into exist~ ence li)r our cnds, with some working notion of eternality in hand as an object, an objertive nous standing up against us out there. The kinship between speech (hol) and the notion in Kashmir Shaivism of the ascending levc/s of rae is worth noting hcre, for both refer to the necessary passage "through" the secularity of speech (l'aikhari) to the divinity of the divine

150 Prehislory of historical religion

(para\'ac), to the unknown or unknowable (see Padoux 1990). Neither the Marhati hoI nor Sanskrit \'(7(" allow themselves to be rendered in terms of the industrious everydayness of the Greek logos (mere speaking to) or Iheorein (speaking of, seeing as). Yet both are dianoiefic; the prefix "dia-" indicates a "meaning-laden thoroughfare"; the presence of this prefix in "dia-fogein" and "dia-noien" reminds us of the necessity of the detour through speech and theory for humans as beings whose being is limited to the worlds they will inlo existence.

But what hoI as speech does here is to refer us not forward to the worldly ambitions of deification, to the historical and secular agency of Krishna as Karma, or Krishna as Arjuna's counselor and so on-it refers us hack to allegory, metaphor, rhetoric, indeed to an involuted, self-absorbed mode of communication that is nonelheless committed to thought. What is the pivot around which an epistemology of the concept turns into an aesthesis (we should hesitate to call this an aesthetics) of rasa? The impossible embrace of system and allegory, concept and metaphor seems to turn here around the tale (gothi), referring us to the curving line of oblique speech that crosses through the rectitude of the Gila's systematic theology of the secular world. The gothi could also be the pithy moral at the heart of a tale, but why is this tale unconfinable (asamai) to the innermost being of Krishna? Why must it be brought out into the light of "dialogic release" (the samvadasukha of which Aljuna is the unique beneficiary)? What motivates the untied knot of the gothi in the first place, inaugurating the sublime address of the Gita, inspiring the still resonant marhati bol of Dnyaneswara?

Gothi: the narratival origins of the universe

Something in Krishna asks to come into the open as a tale (gothi) but this opening into the world is not the inaugural moment we associate with Revela­tion, which looks forward to Redemption and looks back at Creation; for the tale looks back instead to the singularity of the Arjuna, the sole object of Krishna's gaze. That gaze was different from the theoretical gaze of the devotee; it was an adoring, affective gaze that sought to find in its object (Arjuna) a trace of the d.evotee prior to theory; for it sought the flesh-and­blood Aljuna, a beloved friend to tarry and chat with (c(ll'alavO on a great civilizational crossroad, on the eve of the cataclysm that would envelop the Kuruvansha. In the Gila itself this friendliness is subordinated to the terrify­ing glimpse of the unknowable Krishna as the universe itself in the eleventh book; the text virtually authorizes Arjuna to gaze theoretically at the form of the divine. so much so that he chides himself for having taken God for a friend, trespassing the line between mortals and gods. But in Dnyaneswara there is a noteworthy inversion of perspective: here it is Krishna who yearns for the singular Arjuna before him; his dialogue with Arjuna is in some sense a "narrative" (gothl) that is itself a procrastination of the time when Arjuna would be assimilated to himself (Krishna) as singularity itself, as the wholly

Miracle and r'io/cllce 151

other. Conversely. it would seem as though in Dnyancswara the entire weight of the Vaishnava edifice of the Gila. the worldly vocation of Krishna, 1S made to ask after the singular Arjuna. This does not entail the detranscendentaliza­tion of Krishna as much as it implies that Dnyaneswara's text tries to glimpse in Arjuna himself the markings of that transcendental alterity with which only he (Arjuna) has the good fortune to enjoy a certain proximity. In this way, the Marhati Arjuna is no longer, or at least not yet, the self-empowering devotee of the Sanskrit text. The detranscendentalization of radical alterity transpires not by the bringing down to earth of Krishna (which in a way is already an aspect of his work as an avatar with a mission, determined to preserve caste)! but by the bringing down of Aljuna to the level or the as yet unaceommodated, subhuman man prior to the historical humanity or Vaishnava religion. Man does not go up and proceed to conjure the Lord into being; it is God who comes to man, but to the man who is able to remain subhuman if only for the moment, lacking in the ability to will the workings of deification. entirely frail.

But let us remember that even as the tale (go/hI) looks back at this singular Arjuna in this way. it is nonetheless invested in looking forward to the histor­ical time of deities. By this token, it inaugurates a knowable World willed into existence, an approachable God as deity, a willing human being or Man ai. devotee. Were the tale (gothi) not to seek to redeem the world in some way. it would not be the basis of the sensuous religion that we have alluded to above. which is in turn a key element in contemporary political society. The Dnyaneswari, it should be remembered, is the great paya. foundation of the Varkaris, Bhagwat Dharma. Indeed it is only from the retrospect of actually existing religion that we are able to appreciate the poignancy of the singular Arjuna's liminal status, existing as he docs on the cusp of the histor­ical religion of Krishna that will soon enable the devotee to will its deity into being. Again, from this concrete. historical perspective the flesh-and-blood Arjuna can only ever appear as an abstraction; whereas from the point of view of this flesh-and~blood Arjuna, it is historical religion that appears abstract. Yet, it is this very Aljuna toward whom the entire allegorical machine of the Dnyaneswari turns back even as it moves forward to celebrate the sensuous and systematic cultic religion of Krishna-worship. Allegory "switches" back and forth between abstract and concrete, generating a giddy shift in perspective, and opening a hall of mirrors at the heart of the visual field.

The two vectors of this allegorical device in its prospective embrace of system and retrospective positing of the singular Arjuna provide us with some insight into the mechanics of allegorical involution. It should be clear from this that the singularity of the other-directed address of Arjuna is logically prior to the individual other-directedness of the devotee to which he lays claim as a devotee. The introverted investment in a singular address to God which introduces the epiphany of the adoring face of Krishna in Arjuna, of God in man may provide some evidence of what "motivates"

152 Prehistory 0/ historical religion

allegorical reference in the first place. For the Arjuna at the origins is not the Christ at the end of history." Abstract and concrete do not merge in him absolutely in some speculative Good Friday. Instead, they remain "indiffer­ent" to each other in him: he is not the unity o/abstract and concrete; he is a unity prior to the very relation between abstract and concrete. nirglln and sagun. The sensuous, adoring look that Krishna directs at Arjuna is in many important and crucial ways prior, it would seem to us, to the sensuous religion of Krishna-worship. This is a token perhaps ofa sensuousness before sensuousness, a transcendental nudity that breaks through allegorical time and space and retum~ if only momentarily, to an ancient epiphany of the face of the adoring Lord.

Allegory is this historical reflection of what was in a sense always already there, which is the singular flesh-and-bones devotee equi-primordially exposed to the primordial epiphany of the face in God, Reflection (refiexio) is pre­cisely this turning back on to itself of which the yogic palatna so widespread in the Kabir corpus is prime instance. For turning back generates a will prior to the will seeking to deify. And in this sense allegorical self-reflection is the force, the incalculable force. that turns away from what is an equally powerful allegorical pull toward the world of deities.

Having found (the Ram-jewel)

Kabir is located very close to this allegorical return to Arjuna. His claim in the poem we read in the previous chapter was: "maran}ivan ki sanka nasi." Not only did the sanka (skepticism) of dying-living come to a nas (end), it ended now, at this moment, in a trice. So Kahir Seems to be speaking from a point in time that is temporally ambiguous: nas-; could have happened today; it may already have happened, will have happened. or perhaps is yet to happen. The subjunctive tenor of the "-i" ending reminds us that what Kabir has seen or has found remains undecidable in terms of its historical present. What has transpired is in any case the nas of sanka, the negative of the negative as we surmised above. And following this nas is the epiphany of the abstract Ram who is not the Ram of the epic. Let us follow the steps leading up to that moment. There is after the nas of sanka a surge of color into the "1" which then effortlessly emerges as a clearing bathed in light (apun rang; saha}i pargasi). Now the coming together of the clear light of truth and the sensuousness of color are significant: clearly, neither light-as-concept nor color-as-metaphor is wholly adequate in itself. Here again concept and meta­phor must cohabit the same figural space for a cel1ain spontaneity or will to self-generation (sahaJ) to begin to operate. Once this happen~ a light (joti) prior to the lit-up clearing of light (which was pargas in the previous line) comes into eRect, introducing for the first time the possibility of manifest­ation (pargatl). The penultimate moment involves the dispelling of darkness (andhiara) with the onset of manifestation. The whole movement is attuned to the emergence of light from out of darkness, but it seeks to go back to the

Miracle and violenCl' 153

light before the light of conceptual truth, back to the origins of singular being in saha). And then comes the final moment: Kabir has found the Ram-jewel (one surmises that it does not scintillate in the same way as the light of truth) which is a reflective. introspective, darkling light, as though the poem were reflecting on itself(ram ratanu paia). With this, Kabir proceeds to take on the world (karat vicara).

Let us recapitulate the stages in this late discovery: the end of sanka, color as a kind of light prior to space and time, the threshold of an emergence. the birth of a light prior to truth, the first glimmer of manifestation amid the darkness of that emergence, and finally the finding of the Ram-jewel. That last find is, it would seem. by no means serendipitous. For th~ "-a" ending in paiu (having found) draws it closer to the temporal indeterminacy of nasi. One could well suspect that the Ram-jewel was already there, waiting to be found: so that the entire trajectory we have just charled can be described in terms of a transformative movement toward having-found-(Ood). The poem itself occupies the minimal gap between the will-havc-happened of the cataclysmic nas and the will-have-found of the jubilant paia. The movement of the having-found leaves behind the phenomenal-sensuous quest for a tran­scendental essence in the realm of sanka. and broaches the possibility of a truth prior to essence, prior to light. Color (rang) is precisely this phenomenal threshOld of the non-phenomenal. One can imagine that not finding the Ram-jewel would have meant the end of the line for the living Kabir, standing at the limit of his life as a whole. ror sanka in the Kabir corpus is akin to bhram. which is really "doubt" writ large as the frantic wandering over the earth that we do with our ceaseless business in mind; it is not an occasional lack of certitude but describes the tenor of a life taken as a whole. Quixote was in this sense bhramishta, scurrying over the pages of medieval romance like a cipher (in the image from Foucault). concerned to the very end about pushing the very logic of his self-delusion.

ludic thought as a history of skepticism

But then again, neither Kabir nor his Ram is wholly unmarked by the se\f­restoring history of skepticism, skepsis. that is Indic thought. If we under­stand skepsis in its etymological sense of "having-seen." we arrivc at an understanding of brham that is closely related to the seeing, theorizing, inspecting, watching over the willed world that we have described above as the representational legacy of the Indo-Islamic world. Again, brham is not just occasional doubt about the existence or otherwise of Ood, to be eclipsed by some form of ecstatic reunion with the deity; it is the foundational skepticism. the original rigor, the relentless questioning of the system, of all systemic attempts to work out an understanding of the existent world and the place of language, law and myth in it. In other words, brham as skepticism is the "auto-encyclopedic" movement that brings the tradition in full circle: for at the end of the circle is the condition of having-seen that brings to

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completion the history of the lorms of consciousness thai is also the history of Indie thought. In Kabir, .. brham or skepsis consummates all Ihe varied possibilities inherent in a life of restless questioning, preparing the ground for a death that would embrace the eternity of the changing world. This is very much like the mimansuka of old who chose a life of everyday ritual sacrifice as an end in itself, thinking that it would open itself to the sacrificial move­ment of the universe. In this sense, the entirety of the Indic world and all its systematic philosophical ventures finds its consummation, its closure in Kabir's brham. If this is a skepticism fundamental to the tradition as a whole, providing a rigorous, highly rationalized and elaborate argument for caste with all its horrilk consequences, it is possible for Kabir to understand the history of ImJian thought as a history of skepticism. Skepticism, it would seem to him, is that tradition's claim to tradition, to a historicity that is capable of grounding and justifying itself and laying claim to a commanding view over the world. Kabir is plagued with this Skepticism, but the paradox is that he responds to skepticism with skepticism, almost as though he wants to displace the rigor of lndic thought with a mode of thinking that is equally skeptical, but "encyclopedic" of what, garnering the insights of which counter-tradition?

What it nonetheless produces is the anomalous positivity of Kabir's God. The latter is not to be mistaken for the cullic religion of Shiva- or Krishna­worship, but locatable at a poinl logically prior to it. What could be so singular about this Ram given that so much in Kabir is indebted to those very schools of Indic thought such as Vedanta that in the final analysis uphold the centrality of caste, or at the very least do not question it explicitly? The answer may lie in that aspect of Kabir that makes him the mirror image of Dnyaneswara's Arjuna. We saw how in Dnyaneswara the movement toward the higher religion ofthe pantheon is preceded by a fleeting backward look toward the devotee prior to deification; we remarked upon the abstrac­tion that SHch a devotee represents-because that devotee is always already an active participant in historical religion, it is paradoxically his flesh-and­blood nature that is an abstraction: we can never hope to encounter such a person on the street, but we are nonetheless aware of the "fact" of faith, or something like the "idea," the fleeting memory of his Infinity in us. Yet the "fact" of such a devotee's living, striving existence is indeed that singular origin that scems to provide a kind of guarantee outside the world of deities; it is what puts to work the manifold ruses (kavatiken) of allegory. There the Arjuna whom Krishna wants to talk with awhile is a specific, irreplaceable Arjuna, but he is an abstraction nonetheless, for the system of the Gila is invested in turning him into an epiphenomenon of the final phenomenal instance. of the transcendental essence itself, whieh is to say Krishna. Even if it is Arjuna who is the origin of the desire for Bhagwat Dharma in this instance, he is an abstraction that we return to only retroactively, from the backward glance we cast in his direction, grounded as we ourselves are in historical religion, amenable to the pull of the community of dcvotees

1 Miracle and violefu'e 155

mutually replaceable with each other. For, were he to cease to remain an abstraction (if we could, for once, "see" him as a flesh-and-blood devotee be/ore devotion), our own tendency to insist on the historicity of the religious vocation would be under threat. Which is to say that, our interest in raising historical religion to the highest possibility of thought and in turn to return thought itself to its basis in historical religion·--this essential aspect of our habit (habitus) in the world belore the deity would be jeopardized.

The abstract Ram and the pos.."ibility of violence

What is truly unsettling in this sense is that Kabir attempts to bring about what is tantamount to an exact inversion of this procedure. This is the minimal difference between him and Dnyaneswara. For he has the temerity to seize the abstracl at the outset, and only then to work himself back into the historical religion put in place by Indic thought. What does it mean to "seize the abstract"? And does this imply a denial in Kabir of the bistorical destiny of religion? In which case, does this justify our present-day understanding of Kabir as the emblem of daHt protest? For a Kabir removed from history could by no means serve as the basis of the historical insight that dalit protest has into itself. Moreover the remove from history would entail a severance from the heart of the social. Let us recall that the dialogic releast; the sukha of the krislmarjuna samvada that is the Gila generates in that text a dynamic inner core that is also a locus of selfless social action. In general terms, the latter is a means of breaking through the aporia betwccn ritualism as an end in itself and the many snares of the phenomenal world. But more crucially for our purposes is the fact that the eore of the text is social; if one chooses to act in this way, the text seems to say, one would be in a position to uphold and protect caste society, working and striving at the center of one's world. Action here encompasses the entirety of the social act, making meaningful every social gesture in rite, speech, clothing, exchange, and so on. More cru­cially, this makes the inequities of caste itself meaningful within a kind of moral economy of gift and counter-gift between the upper and lower castes, generating by this token Dumont's "englobed" world of which sacl"ifice is the paradigm for all movement (karma; physis) in the universe.

It is worth noting that the Kabir who utters the phrase "says Kabir" (kahatu kabir) at the end of our poem is the Kabir who has "of late" in a temporally indeterminate moment found the abstract Ram. The saying that is our poem as a whole in a sense finds its guarantee of authorship in that abstract Ram, a Ram abstracted from the historical religion, with its resulting social centeredness, of the Indo-Islamic world. At this remove from the social center, the tumult of the agora, the busy marketplace where the social world is transacted as an invidious but viable world in the everyday, we stand wilh the Kabir of the abstract Ram and experience a peculiar form of agoraphobia. We stand away from the systemic skepticism of thc verbose marketplace, lcaving behind every ecumenical attempt 10 impose a system on

156 Prehistory of historical religion

the world and make sensc of it. At this nadir of social being, it would be difficult for us to tum to tbc themcs of secular amity and cocxistence we have projected back on to the past from our position as modern subjects committed to secularism. We shall have to severe all ties to Bhagwat love, Sufi transcendence, and so on. We find ourselves at that location which is from the point of view of the social center no centcr at all, a place that is neither sectarian nor non~sectarian, consisting neithcr of Kabir as local rebel among other rebels nor Kabir as the mystic poet risen above social strife, but is a threshold for the undoing of the social itself. It is the degrce zero ofthc sociaL It is a point of such absolute neutrality that it could easily bc mistakcn for a locus of absolution in some larger frame guaranteed by historical rcligion. As we saw earlier in this book, from his perspcctivc within the historiCt'l1 mission of Hinduism in its response to the challenge of Islam, and at a crucial point in his 1941 book on Kabir, Ha/.ariprasad Dwivedi came upon precisely this figure of Kabir at the crossroads. "Where hindulwl emerges from one side." wrote Dwivcdi.

and mu.mlmanalva from the other: and between knowledge on the one hand and untutoredncss on the other: wherc there is the way of yoga on the one hand and the way of bhakti on the other; where there is lIirgun affectivity here and sagun seeking there, a God without traits here, with traits there; on that supreme crossroad stood Kahil'.

But what precisely is the nature of this crossroad if it does not allow for philosophical or theological reconciliation? It is with some reluctance that we set aside our Romantic fascination with the beatnik Kabir. Better here to think of him as the wise man in talters with a piercing look in his cyes, whom urchins harry because they mistake him for a wretch. This arguably has a truer ring than medieval paintings depicting him in languid rarefaction. within an idyll of the hut and the loom.

Shahid Amin (2005: 266) has recently suggested that we look carefully at thc traces of popular memory in our historical account of the Indo-Islamic millennium. He asks that we turn to the need for "non-sectarian histories of sectarian strife, conflict and conquest of the past." This is, it would seem. the only way for us to remain aware of the lack of fit betwecn the histories that we write and the nature of popular memory. For the latter appears to retain prejudicc and stereotype like so much sediment. In this sense to usc our non~ sectarian standpoint like a plumb line is perhaps justifiable. The running eddies of historical experiencc would fall on both sides, and we would be carried into a sense of history more attuned to the anxiety inherent in the popular. But when we abstract ourselves from the "sectarian" world. \eave aside its hatred, suspicion, distrust, paranoia with regard to the neighbor, the stranger, the madman, the other, we find ourselves no longer 011 some secure non-sectarian platform far above the fray. We discover ourselvcs at a point where the social unravels itself and generatcs the violence that had been

Miracle and violence 157

seething for generations at its heart, but that had been kept in check by the very traflsactability of gift and counter-gift, the everyday economy of living together. At this place that cannot be located in the social as we live it every day, at this "locus" where the Kabir of the abstract Ram stands I see how it is possible for me to kill today the man from the other community with whom I had friendly businesslike relations for decades. I liked the man because he was civil, warm. even affable but I always knew that he was not to be trusted. For, one never knows what "they" might do if they decide to act as a group. Thercfore today. when we have all comc together let me preempt him. sho,» him up for the stranger that he is.

It is here. standing with the Kabir who has just spokcn (kahal) of the abstract Ram that we enter into the unbearable intensity of social strife. almost as though our conceptual and allegorical ediftcc (to which we gave the name "the Indo-Islamic millennium") has fallcn to the ground: we look dir­(.'Ctly into thc heart of violence and expcricnce thc dizziness that comes with having no human being 10 hold on 10, no human value for solace, no human word that could carry the weight of our newfound knowledge of human cruelty and miscry. And yet we will gain all these momentarily. Mourning will give rise to melancholia. We will go on to work with our incorporated objects of loss, moving between the fear of losing thcm and rage at their betrayaL We will negotiate our represented world in terms of the "love" that we experi­encc for the objects around us. And from the depressive positioning of this love in our psychic economy we will live on. We will assist in raising up the deities that love us. and whom we in turn love (Melanie Klein 1987: 142).

But not without remembering that Kabir has afforded us an insight into the abyssal reaches of violence. For this would seem to be the precious alem­bic of his wisdom. the reason that for centuries he has remained for subaltern communities the one singular being who helped them experience viscerally the "living death" at the heart of the social world. This is the world that allocated to them their own workable, everyday, and nonetheless unendurable subalternity. What is this living death? The answer may lie in the ambiguity of the copula "is."

For what Kabir says after having gained the abstract Ram is: "I am dead:­There is an inherent heterogeneity in this utterance that makes it inimical to our received account of human reason. Our normal day~to-day judgments are in the Kantian sense synthetic as well as a priori. They arc synthetic because they make some claim to the lived, intuited. sensible world. But they are also a priori becausc we make sense of our lived world through more original structures of understanding that precede our sensible expcrience. So in thc phrase "the table is brown" the copula "is" brings together both the ideal determinants of"table~ness" or brownness (quality, quantity and so on) and the sensible qualities of this table. In this sense the subject that grasps the proposition "the table is brown" is anchored in the copula "is." But when Kabir says "I am dead" the rules of synthetic or analytical logic no longer hold. For by the rigor of that logic 1 cannot experience my death as such: by

158 Prehistory ojhisforical religion

the same token the delimitation of human reason postulates that death is an unknowable ideal just like Gq.d, Man and World, possessing value only to the extent that it regulates the ends of my life. As opposed to this account of reason, the phrase '" am dead" brings together the sensible and the ideal in a possible and impossible manner. It gives rise to the wholly anomalous notion (at once abstract and concrete, historical and ahistorical, material and yet theoretical) ora "lived death." Now this death is unverifiable according to the criteria of evidcnce-giving rise in the Kabir legends to compelling visions of the prodigy (aeambhau) that was his disappearance "at" his death. He became immortal because he left behind no bodily remnant (amar bhayo eMutyo na shariru). His disciples found only flowers where there should have been his corpse (Kabir Paracai, 13: 5; Lorenzen 1991). Nor is this "living death" explicable in terms of the indices that govern speech; for one would assume that death involves the eclipse of speech. making the utterance "I am dead" impossible and uncanny. as though one were present at the scene of one's death and given the privilege to speak of it!

When Kabir says "1 am dead" his proposition is "magical" in the richest sense of the word. Now, a magician may be the vilest trickster who ever inveigled his way into our credence. Yet popular belief is known to take seriously the magical act itself. The folk may question a magician's motives but it is accepting of his aims. (The folk is never gullible and is quick to detect a scam). This insight into popular attitudes gave rise to Mauss's (2001 [1902J: 152-·3) classic characterization of magic as "poorly analytical, poorly experiential and almost entirely a priori." "All over the world." he observed, "magical judgements existed prior to magical experience." But the great paradox is that "experiences occur only in order to confirm them and almost never succeed in refuting them." Here. it would seem, lies the key to the power, the maya (magic) of Kahir. Here then is what Kabir gleaned from his Ram-jewel; herein lies the secret of that abstract alchemical essence, the precious distillate of mercurial assimilation, which is to say, the abyss at the heart of the social world that Kabir experienced in its abstraclion. "or the Ram-jewel will soon make itself available to the sensuous welcome of Ram in the weJl known opening verses of the standard corpus of his poems where Kabir becomes the expectant bride welcoming Ram the eternal bridegroom. J

And from there virtuaJly guaranteed is the return to the sensuous religion of Vaishnavism and the movement of the itinerant Kabir scribes eastwards to where they would inspire the mystic enunciation of the bau!. The social world will find him. place him on the path of the sel toward the deity, pitch him into the political society of the present. He will be restored to the working skepti­cism of sankalbrham, to the runaround of living and dying, anxiety with regard to death and the involvement in care and concern in the world as a way of evading death.

But to that eycle of living-dying that can be grasped within the terms of human reckoning as a "synthetic and a priori" understanding of the world. to that living and dying he opposes an idca of livcd death that is strangely

Miracle and violence 159

"almost entirely a priori." Again, this living death is neither material nor ideal; it is the point at which the social could potentially pivot over into the non-social, generating the catastrophic violence that lies at its heart. I always suspected that my neighbor worked against my interests in stealth; but when I transacted with him in the marketplace I pretended as though he meant well, partly out of fear and partly in the hope that my fair dealings with him would in the long run turn his disposition toward me in my favor. But now these dealings are at an end; his witchcraft must be exposed for what it is; where his witchcraft was bearable because [ thought I could make it favor me, I now find his witchcraft unbearable. I must name the witch and kill him. What is the name that unravels the social in Kabir? It is "Ram," the name that contains the secret of the "living death" behind the saying (kathan) of Kabir, which is the y-ogic return to the condition that describes itself as "I am dead."

Naming "Ram" allows us to understand how neighbor turns into witch, unleashing the violence that found its most traumatic expression in recent times in the Partition of the subcontinent. Here the history of language plays a cruel joke on us. For in Hindi "bhakti" (participant devotion) and "vib­hajan" (Partition) share a common root in the Sanskrit "bhar which entails partitioning, apportioning, being a part of a whole but remaining a part. It refers to a kind of accursed remainder inassimilable, at least for the moment, to the whole. In violence, the social person and witch are (in the words of James T. Siegel) "pasted together"----but they come apart (bha)) (Siegel 2006: 92).4 This is why we cannot entirely do away with the idea of religion under­stood etymologically as that which "binds" the social world. But we need to understand the "bind" as immensely fragile. Violence unveils the element of fragility in social being: it is less a perduring "bind," than a tenuous "pasting together."

There's no denying that everyday forms of language and social interaction have a way of making dilferences "workable," so to speak. Another way of defining this everyday philosophical work of language is as follows. In the marketplace where I pedal my wares, I "point toward" them in logos and theoria. The whole world of hearsay and proverbial talk, the vast cacophon­ous marketplace of medieval North India, is encapsulated in the act of pointing out things in words. From the argot of the daily hustle, speech moves quickly to distinctions between the material or intellectual, worldly or metaphysical. The popular poetry of the Varkaris (especially that of Eknath) is marked by this rich everydayness (vaikhari). Like some well known poems in the Kabir corpus, it is replete with references to Hindu and Turk, Shaivite and Vaishnavite and so on. At the level of rhetoric I may declare that such distinctions don't matter in the realm of my faith, my willed deity. I could even make a plea for tolerance. But in the moment of "agora~phobia," when the garrulity of the market reveals its terrible logic, the crowds turn on me. (Agoraphobia is the fear of crowded spaces, but it is also conversely the fear the crowd has of the lone stranger in its midst. To experience agoraphobia is to be lonely before the bloodthirsty crowd.)

160 Prehistory of historical religion

There is a form of difference that resides within social difference, which opens differencc out to itself. It is this "indifference" that turns the social body against me. The social in its "living death" is now opposed to mc. (-<or I myself may be a witch just as well as the neighbor. Who knows if he whom I named as a witch is not I myself? In Kabir's "I am dead" I become other to myself; I am myself perhaps the witch. Violence (the fear of phantasmal strangers, madmen, witches, perpetrated as violence on Indian Muslims, dal­its, tribals) in its anonymity always finds the singular being that I am. But this "am" in "I am dead" is apocalyptically always on the brink, always in oscilla­tion between the social person and the witch, between the "ego" of social science and the victim addressed in civil inquiries into pogroms (see Pandey 1006). I must pay for my "indilference," my "unsocial" behavior, my "selfish­ness" with a horrific. visible death. limbs hacked to pieces, a corpse left burning, my kin similarly marked and dishonored by rape.

At this low point of social existence we perceive the loneliness of the vic­tim/survivor. not because such suffering is necessarily incommunicable (some measure of it is indeed conveyed the moment social relations are restored), but bee<luse he or she is marked in this way by indillerence, unsociality, selfishness, as though he or she "haJ it coming," as though the victim/sur­vivor descrved this end. And it is this terrible singularity that. it would seem, should be placed at the origin of the allegorical-systemic impulse that ush­ered in the representational framework of the Indo-Islamic world. In that teeming and busy world. loneliness is a mark of character (caritra), not individuality or personality.

For individuality was taken care of then by implicating the willing and desiring person in a host of networks of belonging. The untouchable too was in this sense taken up into a "fuzzy" sense of belonging. This is to modify somewhat a formulation of Sudipta Kaviraj's (1992), for whom this pre­modern fuzziness in belonging, disperscd over locality, region. caste, kinship, language tends to abate under the enumerative impulse of the modern state. Instcad. we could say that the modem supervision of whole populations as so many biological statistics pitched on the order of the universal (birth, death. infant mortality, etc.) docs not attenuate but only takes up this fuzziness onto another level altogether, keeping its basic elements in place. lIere the indi­vidual is now caught up in specific political initiatives taken up by com~ munities to promote their individual ends. But since no community is alone there is always the likelihood of alliance and coalition, of which fission and discord are themselves only negative signs, The individual (I'yakti) of political society is in this sense a personality that has evolved from the nature of subaltern protest in the last century. That individual is never alone. in much the same way that no dramatic exposure of abject destitution in the privacy of an apartment takes place in Dostoevsky's St. Petersburg without being swiftly enveloped by the murmur of large groups of people peeping in, loitering ncar the landing, listening in on the steps, spilling out on to the streets.

Here we must come to terms with the ineluctable nature of caritra, char-

Mirade and l'iolence 161

acter, a term whose terrifying valence we encountered in Dwivedi's brah­manical schema for Kabir (in Chapter 4), As opposed to the substitutability of the individual (I'yakti) in community and nation, character (caritro) is a sign of a disposition of a singular nature-it is the stigma ofa lonely dcath. It is the legible sign of untouchability: violence means that what was under the surface as enforced habit (servitude) now emerges as a bodily sign of char­acter. For to mark someone with the "character" of untouchable is to mark not his or her biological. universal self but a (supposedly) innate. peculiar disposition (Jaimon). The idea of the interior word in Indian nationalism was forged on the basis of a perceived continuity, between character and in­dividual, caritra and l'yakti. Dalit thought. on the other hand, never lost sight of the gap-the unsurpassable caesura-·- between the two. It saw carifra as an enabling -'facL"

The coexistence of miracle and violence

Yet in the moment whcn we experience with the aid of Kabir's Ram-jewel the agony of character around which violence seethes like a cauldron, we are witness nonetheless to a miracle. The irony is that this miracle co-exists with the violence that unveiled the harsh destiny of character. The "happening" of the miracle is temporally as hard to determine as the moment of the undoing of doubt. the nas of sanka. There the inversion of skepticism revealed the Ram-jewel; at a point exactly contemporary with this inversion there is also the event of miracle. The fact that it is surrounded by violence only further reinforces the possibility of miracle. like the kind visage that helps find our way out of the benighted forest or from the din of battle. whom we discover afterwards to have been a spirit from the dead. In our Kabir poem the new­fangled light of the Ram-jewel en<lbles Kabir's bliss to gain a view of sorrow from a distancc (duri); the gaze of God illumines his being with the light of the jewel: only the bearer of the gaze can know (Mana) what has happened: he who has grasped this as truth is himself now truth (saci samalla). This is what Kabir has to say: with the dross (kift'ikh) of one's liIe washed away. one's being is now one with the living world (jagjivanu). All the elements of the "selfish," "indi/Terent," lonely Kabir come together in these lines. From the "unsocial" perspective of his terrifying vision of the social world. he now sees the world as suffcring, dukh, and his own condition as one of beatitude, anand. But this is a bliss won from out of sorrow. which nonetheless remains an aspect of everyday expericnce. He has found a way into the living world, into the perpetual eourse of living and dying nature, inlo the eternity of this sorrow. But this insight itself comes to him from within the gaze of the Lord. And with this the poem lurns back to the event of the finding of the Ram­jeweL which is the originating point of his new practical habit with reg<lrd to the world, his new mindset. a redeflned ethos (vicara).

But crucially what has happened here is the unprecedented coming together of miracle and violence, both of which occur at the very moment thilt Kabir

162 Prehistory of historical religion

tinds Ram and proceeds 10 stamp this finding with the seal of charactcr which is "kahat kabir" (says Kabir~. The stamp. the imprint of character bearing the singular historical destiny of the living, striving Kabir, helpsform the simul­taneity of miracle and violence. We should not understand this formative "shaping" as merely aesthetic (it is not a form imposed on content, morphe on hyle). For the forming is more like a relentless stamping, imprinting. indi­vidualizing movement from out which of Kabir discovers a new .\Tstem of freedom. We could always ask: how can there be a "system" of freedom. given that we assume freedom is precisely freedom from system, from the "unfreedom" implicit in system, as though freedom were a bird yearning to be freed from a cage. But we know from our discussion of allegory and system that a systematic expansion of the possibilities of freedom has been at the heart of the epoch of representation. We assume today in political society that our freedom is an aspect of our will to deify, of the "suspension of iconoclasm." Unfreedom for us is merely what comes in the way of our relentless raising up of deities into the pantheon. But in Kabir. there is a vision not of a commanding freedom that thinks of itself as having neutral­ized "unfreedom." Instead there is the contradictory belonging togethcr of freedom and "un freedom" within the same historical moment.

Just as the question of the coexistence of good and evil generates in the­ology the problem of freedom for the human being who has a propensity toward evil, in much the same way the question of the bind between miraclc and violence brings about a new system of freedom in Kabir's Ram. He begins to perceive the miracle of this singular Ram in every singular being. coexist­ing with the violence that all character is subject to. There is an acutely somber, historically self-aware pantheism implicit here: Kabir does indeed find God "everywhere," but not in a fatalistic, indifferent sense. TIle fact that Ram is in every singular being (ghati ghafi ram) is a sign that the dire occult­ation that marks character with miracle and violence, with the stigmata of untouchability, is itself grounded in Ram. Another way of saying this is that the system offreedom in Kabir works its way outwards from the finding (not installing) of Ram in oneself. But the crucial finding. the secret of Ram is the necessary coexistence of miracle and violence. freedom and "un freedom."

This realization is not merely a way of saying: human beings can be evil but in the end they always affirm God, or that belief and prejudice always hang together. We would be hard put to understand this as a humanism that under­stands man as fallen from his God-given height. Nor would it be enough to affirm that religion, despite its saving mission, will always already have been secularized and abased, permanently locking belief in prejudice. (This is what has given rise lately to anti-religious tracts in the wake of Darwin.) What we see in Kabir is a far more unsettling revelation: that the divinity of Kabir's Ram is the basis not just of the idea of freedvm but also and at the same time the idea of "un-freedom." There is in the latter a certain pessimism that is a mark of the long vigil of character over a millennial dalitness. Again. Ram grounds miracle and violence, but they do not come together in the

1

I !

M trade and I'io!ence 163

unity of a sanctimonious humanity that can proceed to devotion and prayec and then avidly cultivate a conscience.

It is almost as though Kabir were to say: human beings regardless of whether they turn to evil (commit violence) or affirm a god are always willing, desiring beings who tum willing~v away from the problem of divinity itself. This willingness to go astray is not reducible to the will of an individual: it is perhaps more anonymously the work of the "suspension of iconoclasm." which refers us to a pervasive way of looking at the world and framing it. It refers us to a technology of will and affect, of which the deity (be it Ram or Krishna) is an end. The origin of individuality, Kabir seems to say. is this maelstrom where miracle and violence generate the historical "I-hood" that will rise to the surface to command its world. We detected in the imprint of "kahat kabir" (says Kabir) precisely this movement toward individuation. ltinerant Kabir scribes have for five centuries signed their names to the Kabir poems in this way, but this signing has quite understandably only furthered the hagiographic and Romanticist fascination for the "personality" or vyak­fitva of Kabir. We can think of these scribes as those who participate in imprinting the coexistence of miracle and violence with the seal of individual­ity, in raising up the deity (bhagwan) Kabir. I am not arguing that the seribe~ and the dalits (and Kabirpanthis) who lay claim to the daHt Kabir can be reduced to each othec Let us just say that the scribes make the imprint legible. From there it is a short distance to the contemporary daHt deification of Kabir (as we saw in Chapter 5. with Dr. Dharmvir). Here then arc the two sides of the Kabir coin: it has on one side the tragic face of character (dalit­ness) in Kabir, and at the other end the figure of the feisty charismatic indi­vidual that is also Kabir. The proliferation of Kabir legends and icons is a feature of precisely those possibilities opened up for the individual in "hold­ing together" in one thought miracle and violence, stamping that thought with the new "I" that will one day go on to lay claim to a daHt politics. that will in turn claim Kabir as its new deity (bhagwan).

It should be immediately clear that the imprint of the individual is imposed on the coexistence of miracle and violence: inasmuch they remain inas­similable to each other prior to this imprint, they help us imagine a form of belonging together prior to the assimilative impulsc of the scnsuous, domin­ant religion of a hyper-rationalized Hinduism. This is why Kabir's ability (derived from yogic retcntion) to "hold together" mechanically both miracle and violence has historic jinplications. AI the same time. it provides us with some insight into precisely what transpires whcn low~eastes, poor landless peasants, and tribals move the onus of their own subalternity from one religious community to another. One very concrete outcome of this is the predicament of the convert who (as Gauri Viswanathan has shown) is caught in the neutral ground between two possible allegiances; the pathos and poignancy of the convert lies in the persistence of his or her subalternity despite altered conditions. We made use of this idea of conversion when we discussed the work of Dwivedi in Chapters 4 and 5. I have sought in this and

164 Prehistory o/historical religion

the previous chapter to locate Kabir at the cusp of the great process by which mainstream religion assimilates marginal tradilions to itself. Kabir's role as a convert to Islam was central to our underst.anding of his anomalous position in modern debates centered around the nation. But with the insight into violence and miracle we have arrived finally in the realm of prehistory. This is where we are compelled to apply ourselves to the origin of the new freedoms laid claim to in contemporary political society. My basic point so far has been that contemporary daHt empowerment, in its attempt to shake off decades of social and economic exploitation, continually falls back on an older insight into the coming together of freedom and "un~freedom." In Kabir, this takes the form of the coming together of miracle and violence. I am trying to argue that though present~day dalit resistance is an attempt to shake off the his­tory of violence and subjection, its older instincts lie not in a history of "unfreedom" (for that would mean that there is no dalit history until there is dalit empowerment) but in an insight into how "un-freedom" and freedom come together in an instant as miracle and violence. DaHt resistance today may involve violence in deeply disturbing ways. Not long ago, daHt resistance was about miracle; it was also about tenderness.

Such an unprecedented idea of divinity as Kabir's Ram. which "holds together" violence and miracle and yet "holds on" to the possibility of mir­acle in God cannot but have found an echo elsewhere. The Indo-Islamic millennium conceived of the telepathy of ideas in dream visions recounting visitations by distant men of God, dreams that tended to shift the course of a life dramatically as though by accident. compelling people to loro rivers, clear their way through jungles, take to the physical travails of the pilgrim's way until they had found the source of the miracle, dedicated their lives to it. woven around it whole prodigies of prayer. In much the same way we might imagine some lorm of telepathy between Kabil' and Tukaram; the scribes who put together these collections of poems were wont to imagine such a link.' It was foreordained that the question of character should bring them close to each other but the meeting of minds, if it ever took place, was nonetheless momentous. Let us recall that Kabil" became a major source of inspiration for subaltern groups over the centuries because he found an abstract Ram within himself, a Ram that could hold together violence and miracle. His response to his own find was to "hold on to" the idea of the divinity of Ram. We saw how the force of this sudden clarity was something Kabir experienced in the lone­liness of his character; this was in every sense an interiority, but one thai should not be mistaken for inwardness, inner consciousness, spiritual insight and so on: we have tried to describe its historical features under thc rubric of "selfishness." Inwardness is really only a misnomer for the involution of allegorical reference; this is the reason why yogic involution. with its grcat images of stasis and death, has such markedly allcgorical features. Some idea of this non-spiritual inwardness (antari) made its way down to Tukaram; the conduit could have been the fourteenth-century poet NamdCV<1 (Callcwacrt and Lath 1989), whose Hindi padas are marked by a turn toward thc inner

Miracle and violence 165

world; conversely, Dnyaneswara may have been the paya (foundation) not just for the Varkari tradition, but also for the idea of the turn to the divinity in oneself that finds its fruition in Kabir. Instead of tracing these links by draw­ing ideas together in an indifferent juxtaposition, let us think historically and try and imagine the miraculous force or "pull" that drew styles of thought together like so many individual sites of magnetism. In Tukaram there is clear evidence that inwardness does not refer to internal consciousness. For one cannot "hold on" (dharne) to spiritual insight in the way that one holds on to the miracle of inwardness (antan). "Spirituality" only ever retains the separ­ation between the mind thinking the insight and the insight itself.

Miracle: birth unto light in Tukararn

Now in Tukaram there is a marked insight into the temporal immediacy of miracle; but unlike spiritual insight the latter requires that one employ the entirety of one's being, not a mind indifferently separated from the object to be thought, in sustaining a handle on the miraculous. There is a vivid intuition of this in the paJa 111 of Tukaram's Abhangagatha.

Now have my eyes opened Not to have realized this as yet Is to lie in the depths of your mother Like a rock in her womb The human body is a reserve To work away at the working through until salvifically worked out To awaken to the vigil The sants cross over The boat is on the bank of the Chandrabhaga Standing at Pundalika's door Hands held at the waist Standing, stooping and calling out Tuka says., entirely for free Fall at his feet or hug him You get up, get raised up Swiftly to the other shore.

Alan ughadin dole Jari adyapi na kale Tari matedye khole Dagad ala porasi Manusyadeha alsa nidha Sadhili Ie sadhe siddha Karuni prabodh Sant par utarle Nava chandrabhage tirin

166 Prehislory ofhis/orien! reliKion

Uhhi PUllrialikace dwarin Kara dharuniyan karin .. Ubhaubhill palavi Tuka manhefukasathin Payin ghatli ya mi/hi HolO ulthaullhi La~'kari ca Ulara.

(Tukaram 1973: 16)

Here, all of a sudden, is the event whereby one's eyes have opened (alan ughadin dole). To not know the miracle when one sees it is to emerge stillborn from the depths of a womb (dagad ala potasi). As opposed to this false inwardness (khole) there is the interiority of the human body as a whole (manushyadeha), which is a reservoir (nidha) of traits. Tukaram prepares us for the miracle that is Vitthala, the deity standing on the banks of the Chandrabhaga, at the door of his own beloved devotee Pundalika, waiting to take people across in a boat. A simple but compelling idea of crossing the river of life is implied here. But much more is at stake in Tukaram's use of words. The posture ofVitthala is unique, for he stands with his arms akimbo; more strictly, he holds (dharuniyan) his hands at his waist (kati) and stands there calling out (palavl) to wayfarers to join him in the journey across the river. If we wish to speak of the work of Vitthala we should look carefully at the posture: what is involved is holding on to the body, calling out, pointing out the right direction to the potentially wayward. More crucially one sees in him a way of holding on to one's body that practically exemplifies "holding on" to God. The Sanskrit root for the word "dl!ame" (holding on) is dhri. And in the poem the line about human interiority understood as manushya­deha (the human body as a whole) shows the poet attempting a kind of rill' on words ending with the "dh-" sound (manushyadeha aisa nidh, sadhili Ie sadhe sidha; karuni prabodh, sallt par utarle).

Some crucial notions are re-marked in this way half way between language and meaning. To begin with, the human body is described as an inexhaustible reserve (nidha), but of what? The body asks to be touched lightly but in a very specific manner: one touches Iight~v the light touch and leaves it n'er so lighl~l' touched in its lighllless (sadhili te sadha siddha); in short. a touch that embraces intimately. in an absolute proximity that is also an absolute dis­tance. this preternatural. pre-phenomenal lightness. We should not hasten to translate "sadl!" here as "to make perfect," enlighten, save. salvage, purify or as effort, endeavor. resolute striving, for what is involved here is instead tender. delicate, fragile, easily thrown by the weight of notions that imply a too eager absolution. Now what is the touch that is being referred to? It could only be the posture of Vitthala; there may be somc trace in this posture of a folk hero who fell while protecting his village's cattle from thieves; but quile significantly the hands that clasp his waist do not do so in a posture of defiance. The fingers grasp the sides but lightly, and the body returns to the

i

I Miracle and violence 167

fingers an equal lightness. Together fing.ers and waist produce a redoubled. salvific lightness (siddha) in the holding on (dha/"uniya). This may provide some insight into the next phrase, which is about the movement into cogni­zance (prabodha). We note the unprecedented "lightness" involved in holding on, dharne, and we recognize the affinities of this light touch to sadha, pra­bodha, and to nidha. Conversely, nidha now appears to be a reservoir of traits.. marks of difference, that have been subjected to this light touch. Images of purification, washing, cleansing come to mind but "lightening," we should note, does not quite efface these traces. It would be too easy to call this a kind of "enlightenment" that places the historical experience of character (carirra) intellectively above and beyond any idea of difference. Oddly, despite some minimal reference to "lighting up the dark" implicit in prabodha, the word that gives us our modern-day term for the Enlightenment in Marathi. prabodhana, there is in "lightening" (sadh) nonetheless an insistence on the miraculous slightness of touch, which itself occurs somewhere between intel­lection and tactility. Does this light touch preserve or efface these marks of difference?

At the end of the process the sants ford the river of life (sal/ta para Ularfe). In the final line, this is the experience that Tukaram seals with the phrase. "Tukaram says" (tuka manhe): whether you fall at Vitthala's feet or embrace him you gain (utara) the other shore; you gain it swiftly (/avkari ca) and for free (fukasathin). One might imagine that reaching the othcr shore is by no means a matter calling for arduous labor. Swift, free, light--there cannot be anything more tender than this "holding on" (dharne) that enables the sants to cross over. Now the sants arc figures of the holy because they are masters of this lightness. working with the allegorical-metaphorical underpinnings of experience but not under the lure of aesthetic delight, or for the sake of mastering the allegory in favor of the modern individual. Unlike saints whose lives arc worth following as example. the sants are not men and women of exemplary bearing; their lives have been anguished, even sordid, full of travail; mocked at every step, they steal away from their homes in the haze of the workaday afternoon to be alone, to be with their deity. They are figures less of purity and wisdom than of destitution in times of famine and pestilence. But what characterizes every sant is this lightness (sadha). Kabir speaks ofa "lightening" (sadh) of social differences. In describ­ing the mode of the sant, Dnyaneswara gives us the immeasurably sensuous image of the feet of a swan touching ever so briefly the surface of a lake before taking to the sky. Yet these are not just "images" that we can glean from Kabir, Tukaram and Dnyaneswara, and then place next to the image­repertoire of Ram and Krishna in the historical religion that is yet to come. In their "lightness.." their tender grasp they precede a purely phenomeno­logical access to the image, for such an access is nonetheless theoretical; there is in this tenderness something that cannot be assimilated to the visual field where we access our gods.

Lightness (sadh) is then neither a "metaphor" for light nor a "concept"

168 Prehistory ofhistorkal religion

generative of a sensuous access to the deity. It nonetheless comprehends something, if only in an uncempromisingly tender hold, in an apprehension that is never just graspingly prehensile. There is an ever so slight difference between grasping and holding; both involve being aware of and laying claim to the world around us actively and theoretically, but in holding there is a willingness, a "counter-will" so to speak, to let the held thing (whether it is god or eternity) resist our hold, if ever ::;0 lightly. There is in that minimal resistance of this thing to our hold the merest possibility, but a crucial and indispensable one, that our theoretical grasp of the world may experience a temporary reversal, reminding us however uncomfortably of a memory we have left behind in the zeal to historicize our present and make sense of it. There may be in this merest reversal ofa reversal a new way of "returning" to our being at the end, when the skctch of our lives has come full circle in the certainty, which is also the uncertainty of death. I spoke of the temporal indeterminacy that accompanies the nas of sank a, the negation of skepticism. There I wanted to ensure that we recognize Kabir as breaking not from the so-called ignorance and superstition of the mainstream tradition; I wanted us to sec Kabir as departing from the tradition in its greatest rigor, at the height of its philosophical astutcness. I described those heights as "skepticism." When Kabir broke from the tradition in its moment of skepticism (not merely its moment of credulity or prejudice), he laid claim to those philosophical heights, only to break away from them, only to negate them. The manner in which Tukaram broke from the tradition is somewhat ditTerenL In the poem above there was clearly a sense that one's eyes had opened at some moment in the present; this moment coincided, one would imagine, with the vision of the humanized divinity (daivat), Vitthala, to whom we will return in Chapter 9. ft is Tukaram who teaches us how to distinguish the dail'al from the deity.

The divinity of the folk

Between the "kahat kabil''' (says Kabir) of the Kabir corpus and the "tuka manhe" (Tukaram says) of the Tukaram corpus as though in a forge, the millennial impetus of the act of sealing violence in its coexistence with mir­acle has continued to exercise its sway. This is the tradition of lightness, tenderness, care which the dalil tradition gave to the world. That tradition perhaps reaches out to something older. We could well wonder with Jan Gonda (1970) and after him rricdhclm Hardy if this coming together, in one divine name, of miracle and violence has its origins in Vedic and Upanisadic thinking; it is a tribute to their rigor that they did not seck these antecedents from out of a trifling curiosity about the birth in lndic antiquity of the humanized Vishnu or Shiva. Instead they make it possible for us to speculate further along these lines. Instead of serving as an anthropomorphic, animist prelude to genuinely conceptual thought, mythic gods may well inhabit the cusp of a transition from the epiphany of God in man (which gave rise to the speculative impetus of those early texts) to the imprint of man in God,

1 Miracle and violence 169

bridging miracle and violence. The tendency of the folk to make much of the solace one gleans from rivers and ponds is not a figment of its yen for thc "sacred." Nor arc these really "temples" where the gods have fled, They are regions of the earth where the gods returned to their unapproachable realm before man brought them down; they are the anvils where the last fateful tie was struck between the holy and the human, The folk is concerned with how to preside over the calm center within which the tie between gods and men endures, before it becomes soulful, inward, devotional and affirms historical religion. This is why tradition has it that Khiluba, the Dhangar (shepherd) devotee of Vitthala and Biroba, laid out a blanket on the surface of the river Chandrabhaga and then, surrounded by his four devotees, "sat in the middle." He laid claim to this middle point, an unlocatable kho/'a prior to the spatial and temporal certainties of sensuous religion. This place in the gathering currents was where he became the emhlem of the striving, living devotee prior to the devotee who wills a deity into being. Having done so, he gave to the Koli fisherfolk a new way of' orienting themsclves in the world. lie declared: "my right (man)," and by this token the right of the lowly Ko1is to be taken across this river for free for their annual pilgrimage,

witl last as long as the sun and the moon rise in the cast and set in the west. My right should last as long as the Narbada and the other rivers take their normal course and flow from above to below. My right should last as long as the Raval mountain stays in its place, When the moon and the sun rise in the west and set in the east, then my right should come to an end. When the Narbada and the other rivers flow backward, then my right should come to an end. When the Raval mountain starts moving, then should my right come to an end.

(Sontheimer 1989: 75)

This is why we would have to reverse the notion of the tragic inherited from German Romanticism between H61derlin and Heidegger that has long obscured this tie. For the future of historical man was thought to be of a tragic cast lending itself with terrible consequences to the worship of the sacred home from which the gods have fled, inaugurating a nationalism of the volk, but his past may well lie in an older "look" coming from on high that pierced through his tragic silence. The imprint of human command on the changeability of the world is indeed ancient (we can sec traces of our will to representation in a text as old as the Gita), but the holding together of violence and miracle is primordial and perhaps older, as old as what Eliade, Padoux and Lorenzen call "tantra." coinciding with the retreat of divinity into the past.

It is no doubt true that miracles have a predictive value. So that we can well see how the miraculous "lightness" (sadh) of the sanl helps usher in all that is compelling in the sensuous reach of historical religion, Yet in contrast to its value as an indication of the triumphal future, there is also in miracle a gothi

•

170 Prehistory ofhi~·torical religion

(narrative) that speaks of what was already there in the past, which was the living, striving devotee prior, to historical religion. The prayer of the sanl reaches backward into the past in this specific sense, making that sant an empirical historiographer of sorts, transcriber of an ancient and self-present discovery. The dalit Kabir who detccts in his character (carilra) by means of the abstract Ram the mingled currents of violellce and miracle, is able to "hold on" to this recognition, savor its sap (ras), reli.eve its ardor with the lightness of his touch. Miracle enables him to draw a cordon around this violence. He does not hold it in reserve, to be deployed on the eve of some future calamity afflicting our social bond. Instead, he is able to "lighten" its effects by returning his being toward an older epiphany of the face of God, to a miraculous birth before the runaround of birth and death. Then, light of step, he ventures out to embrace the world (karat vicara).

9 Deity and daivat The antiquity of light in Tukaram

Kahir was, as we saw, the sage who recorded the happening of an ancient event. This was the advent of the abstract Ram. The event denoted the unprecedented coming together of faith and knowledge, God and death-in the terms I have been using to denote these irreconcilable entities, he experi­enced the unique time of "miracle and violence." The Varkari tradition of Western India commemorates another advent: this is the event of the coming of Vitthala prior to his installation as Vitthala-Krishna at Pandharpur. This tradition produced four outstanding saint-poets who radically altered the scope of the Marathi language. These were Dnyaneswara, Namdeva, Eknath, and Tukaram. The tradition thought of Kabir as the "fifth sant." This is why it was possible for me to argue that Kabir, Tukaram and Dnyaneswara are in the neighborhood of each other. They were all masters of daHt hearsay. This may not make much sense chronologically, but the tradition nonetheless sees them as allied. Tukaram represents the culmination of this line of daHt radic­alism. He was the first to see the face of Vitthala in abstraction from its Vaishnava trappings. With him the world-altering destiny of Varkari poetry came to an end. It is fitting then that this book should conclude its discussion of the idea of divinity in Dnyaneswara and Kabir with an analysis of the face of Vitthala in Tukaram. If Kabir's work is about the rang (color) that marks the person uniquely addressed by God (an abstract Ram that calls for tender­ness), Tukaram's oeuvre is about the luminosity ofVitthala's face. It is about the comportment that can see in color the origins of light. It is also apt that this book, which began with a critique of Hindi modernity, should end with a return to the antiquity of light. Our task is greatly aided here by the visionary example of 1. A. B. van Bunenen.

Vitthala was for Tukaram and the Varkaris their daivat. What is the dis­tinction between daivat and deity? I will argue in this chapter that the daivat refers us to the primordial tie with "the folk," Jok. Now the 10k in Marathi has traditionally referred to the historical experience of the indigenous peoples of the Deccan; it refers to their being "already-there" but in ways that we will have to investigate further. By emphasizing sources of moral authority out­side the human but not necessarily in God the folk is at once more and less than religion. In thc work of the philosopher Dinkar Keshav Bcdckar

172 Prehistory of historical religion

(1910-73; see 1977a, 1977b), the dharmapraya ("pre-dharmic"; lit. "para­dharmic") tradition of the folk was often counterposed to a dominant religious (dharmic) tradition. Moreover, Bedekar's notion of the dharm­apraya has had a very productive resonance in the work of the foremost contemporary Marathi historian of the folk, Ramchandra Chintaman Dhere (b. 1930; see Dhere 1998). ReHe{;ting their common debt to the revisionist Marxist, D. D. Kosambi, the corpus of writings on religion associated with Bedekar and Dhere does not affirm the nationalist reading of Maharashtrian cultural history indebted to Bal Gangadhar Tilak and V. K. Rajwade. From our point of view the centrality of the gesture by which the folk returns to its own prehistory finds its most fruitful elaboration in Marathi debates on the problem of deification (daivalikarana).

In Dhere's work taken as a whole the question of the prehistory of the 10k. the enduring fascination with 10k sahifya and 10k parampara (folk literature and tradition) remains a guiding motive just as it was for Dhere's major European interlocutors, Gunther-Dietz Sontheimer (1998) and Guy De1eury (1992). It was their work in the 1960$ and 1970$ that had first established the case for the Deccan as the historic scene of a gradual Vaishnavbltion of folk idioms. Between Deleury, who wrote an early inOuential work on the cult of Vitthala at Pandharpur and Sontheimer, who underscored in a lifelong ethnographic endeavor the pastoralist origins of the deity, Khandoba. the tendency was to write the cultural history of Maharashtra in terms of a transition from the traditions of community among folk peoples to the dominant cultic emphasis on one "synthetic" deity implicit in mainstream Maharashtrian bhakti. Both historians gave us a picture of Marathi culture as an irreversible movement from morality-based customs to religion-based institutions. Despite their vastly sympathetic understanding of the folk, they were unable to see the practical ethical reflexes of folk peoples as interacting with (not just being superseded by) dominant idioms of Hindu practice.

For Dhere too, it is finally in the traditions of the 10k that mainstream bhakti finds its basic vocation and original provenance. His work, while in explicit dialogue with these ethnographers, differs from them in that his insistence is on the modernity of the folk. In Sri Vitthala: Eka Mahasamanvaya (1984), his now classic work on the folk origins of the Vitthala of Pandharpur, Dhere attempts to highlight the simultaneity of folk elements in the Vitthala­Varkari tradition. His aim is not merely to point to the "anteriority" of the 10k-Leo in arguing that Vitthala is a latter-day Vaishnavized form of a dcity beloved to the Dhangar pastoralists-···but to insist that folk traditions remain defiantly contemporary. To this end his emphasis is on an idea of samanvaya less as a syncretic assimilation than what we can describe, after Raymond Williams (1977: 121-,7) as a tripartite "con-figuration" of dominant, vanish­ing or residual and still emergent forms of culture. From this perspective, Dhere sees the folk and the dominant idioms of Hindu religiosity at Pand­harpur as both coming together and often intransigently remaining separate within the cultural present---which is also the modernity--of the Vitthala

1 Deityanddaiva/ 173

tradition. Crucially, this provides us with an entirely new way of reading the work of the poets of the Varkari tradition such as Dnyaneswara, Namdeva, Eknath and Tukaram who wrote between the thil1eenth and the seventeenth centuries. For bhakti sahitya (literature) can now be seen to have derived its distinct idiom of literary nuance and social critique from the confluence of the folk and the dominant in popular traditions--not merely from the indi­vidual seal (mudrika) of poetic genius. The notion of a samanl'aya t."ln then be used as a literary-critical tool, to be deployed heuristically as an index or the shifting social and rhetorical "address" of bhakti poetry.

Dhere's work moreover has the singular merit of reminding LIS that Makti poets such as Tukaram, though non-Brahmin by caste, often adopted the "posture" of a dalit. This establishes the case for a relation not just between folk traditions and the literature of bhakti. but also between Makli and the question of a dalit literature. It is this relation between the folk. bhakti and dalit tradilions---each singular and irreducible to the other--that gives us a picture of the vernacular bases of Marathi modernity. Now it is no doubt true that dalits would arguably be uncomt<.lftable with Dherc's notion or a mahasamanvaya of folk, bhakti and dalit streams in Maharashtra. Despite Dhere's insistence on samallvaya not as an indifferent assimilation of diverse currents but as a particularized "configuration," they would be quite justified in discerning in such an ecumenieism the traces or a kind of benevolent crypto-brahmanism. At the same time there can be no question that the relation between dalit thinking and the '0k is at the heart of the issue. It would seem as though the possibility for a dalil re{;onceptualization of the idea of subalternity lies not inside but outside dalit experience itselr, in the experience or the 10k. Clearly there is more to the 10k than Dhere's idea of a Maharashtrian mahasamanvaya would lead us to believe. In what particular domain of Maharashtrian life would one be able 10 detect the features of a pe{;uliariy dalit practical reason, but one that is determinedly attuned to the question of the folk (10k)?

I will argue that it is the tradition of hearsay implicit in the poetry of the Varkaris which gives us some access to this alternative mode of daHt think­ing. The caste subalternity of some of these poets is not the sole reason for this. A more crucial fact is the mode of Varkari enunciation, which at every step mimes a possible dalit conceptuality. I want to insist that this mode of enunciation is one that consistently indicates the trace of the 10k; I will go so far as to say that the very possibility of the mystic speech of the Varkaris is guaranteed by the recognition of this trace-thi~' is what it means to be accountable to the 10k in its disappearance. The stance or ubha-ness of Vitthala is not merely the theoretical-practical gesture of "action" that seeks to bring the world securely within the will of the devotee; Tukaralll and the poets before him inaugurate a radically new notion of the stance--the stance is now grounded in the "feet" (paya) ofVitthala that are the refuge (thdVa) of the devotee. The latter as the "basis" ofViUhala's "stance" do not refer to the "thesis," to the Sanskrit root, stha implicit in the idea of the sfhifapradnya

174 PrehislOl:V o/historical religion

(reclitudinal) subject as devotee; the feet of Vitthala as a refuge refer to the 10k because they are a ground without ground, a trace of a stance that will have been. The feet of Vitthala, planted for "some 28 epochs (yuga)" on the brick in Pandharpur allude to the ab-origin of the 10k. They do not represent as truth or establish as thesis. The pull of the poetry of hearsay to these feet implies a break with the metaphysics of karma. It is a question of attending to the "trace" of the 10k, the trace that is the 10k. In attending to this trace, we see the possibility of a new humanism signifying an accountability toward the {ok.

The work of the last major Varkari poet Tukaram is an exemplary instance of both this miming of a future dalil practical reason and this "vigilance" over the trace of the 10k. Tukaram's exemplary st.1.tus can also be gleaned from the growing sheaf of recent writings that attend to his work and to his place in Marathi cultural history. In what follows I will juxtaposc Dhere's work with that of the two most important recent studies ofTukaram, those of Dilip Chitre (1990) and Sadanand More (2001). It is worth pointing out that what unites Dhere, Chitre and More is their fascination with the Varkari tradition as a whole, and in particular with the possible origins in the {ok of the chief deity of that tradition, viz, ViUhala. But before entering into this set of writings, let us ascertain the mode of hearsay implicit in the Varkari tradi­tion as a whole. Tukaram, as we have mentioned above, was not strictly speaking a datit; his occupation was that of a small farmer or kunbi, one who sometimes described himself as a shudra. The fact that Tukaram was a kllnbi, a non-Brahmin, is a matter of enormous significance if one bears in mind the history of the non-Brahmin movement in Maharashtra from Jotiba IlhuJe to VithaI Ramji Shinde--it was the non-Brahmin movement originating from a critique of the productive relations stemming r.·om the inequalities of the agrarian (shetkan) world that lirst sought to unite shudras and atishudras (or dalits) within one common front (see G. P. Deshpande 2002: 1- 21). Reading Tukaram as a "dalil" implicitly assumes that the larger focus of dalil mobili­zation ought to be not just the mobilization of untouchable communities but also other non-Brahmin groups situated at a "higher" level in the structure of varna-related violence. In the reading of Tukaram olfered here, we follow Vitthala Ramji Shinde in his epoch-making essay "Bhagwat dharmaca vikas" in seeking to imagine datit thinking as one that presents the possibility of inaugurating a new Bhagwat Dharma (Shinde 1963: 1,-62). Such a Bhagwat Dharma in daHt thinking does not refer us to a new religion or creed but to a dalit "practical reason" that is, in a sense, still to come.

Indigeneity: the stance on the brick

A host of different currents come together in this grand conliguration, but we should recall that the impetus is always the raising up of deities into Krishna or higher Vaishnavism. The icon of Vitthala itself is shot through with a profoundly moving and ardently Vaishnava mode of address, and this comcs

i Oeilyandd{Jil'{J1 175

through in every element of his attire (Tulsi band, Makar earrings, Pitambar­yellow of silk, Kaustubh gem) as it is lovingly caressed in each line of this poem by Tukaram, the second abhanga of the Gatha:

The beauty of that gaze, the stance (uMe] on the brick Hands held at the waist. On his neck a Tulsi band, yellow orthc silk around his middle Everlasting pull [al'ad] or that tigure [rupal Sheen of pendant Makar-fish on his cars Gem of Kaustubh athwart his neck. Tuka says, thus is my comfort entire Thus willi gaze longingly [al'adinen] at his visage incandescent

[srimukha].

Sundara te dhyane ubhe vi/evari Kara katal'ari lhel'uniyan Tulsihara gala/ase pitambar Avade nirantara len ci rupa Makarkundalen tafapli sravanin Kanthin kaustubhmani I'irajil Tuka manhe ma)hen hen ci sarva suklw Pahina srimukh(/ Ql'adinen.

(TukarambaI'UfU'WI Abhanganci Galha, 1973: I)

As More reminds us, this poem figures at the start of the Varkari's daily round of prayer (nityapath) in praise of the aUributes of Vitthala-Krishna. The opening line is particularly significant because it brings us directly to the question at hand, which is to say: who or what is it that stands on this brick and generates in the dhyana of those who gat.e upon it the idea or the thought of the sundara? What it is, this installed Vitlhala, is a being defined by a certain primordial rectitude, an ubha-ness as it were, whose very being-there is the unprecedented gift to which the poet offers the counter-gift of hearsay. The ubha Vitthala is a call for speech; but the poet's speech necessarily falls short of that originary source of speech, Vitthala himself. If Vitthala refers us to the eternal present of a having found (God), it is also true that this is a having-found that asks to be negated. canceled, betrayed, denied in the lan­guage of the poet that seeks to adequate it, for that language already accesses iconicity, historical religion, the vast edifice of the sensuous in dominant Krishna-worship. What is crucial is this necessary betrayal. In stricter terms, we could say: Varkari dharma is turned toward he.:'tfsay (and turned away, if only momentarily, from the mainstream Vaishnav dharma) because it yearns to ask after what has been said (in hearsay) of the having-found (the miracle) of what was already there (the divinity of the folk). The Vitthala standing on the brick refers us to the irreeuperable distance between miracle, the height and uprightness from which the silent Vitthala asks to be responded to, and

176 Prehistory o/historical religion

hearsay, which is the response of the poet. Between the miracle and hearsay, saying and said, there is an..impossible ncgative moment, one that does not foreclose but in fact welcomes the hyperbolic praise, the joyful prayer of the poet.

Now the ubha Vitthala is in many respects a classical theme in Marathi thought. It is worth recalling here that the essayist Durga Bhagwat was the source of some of the most influential formulations with regard to the folk: her essay "Pandharica Vitthoba" (1969) in Pais was the point of departure both for Sontheimer and for Dhcre. Here is a passage that comes toward its end (Bhagwat 1999 [1970J: 32-43):

We arrived at the limits of the village. A swarthy adult shepherd, his dovi draped over his forchead, was headed toward the village. With him were his four goats. His color was that of black stone: jet black .... His leg~ were tbick. like those of a pillar, but alive [jeevanta]. Wherever they stood. they would in all likelihood have taken a stand [TOvali/a]. and where they took that stand, they would take root [rujatila]. The patently humanized gaze [manavi dhyana] of the Vitthala or the Brick was bodied forth, moving through the world [aihikatuna calla hO/a]. Until then I could not fathom why Tukaram had descrihed this singularly misshapen idol in such terms as "the beauty oflhal gaze" [slindara Ie dhyanaJ but J now began to grasp why [um«;a padle1. For what is vital is what is spon­taneous. and what is spontaneous is truly beautiful: to bring out that beauty what is needed is a simple and unblemished poetic [mind] such as Tukaram's. [10 asa ki sajiva teea svabhavika aste and svabhavika few khare sundara asle ani te sallndarya umagayala Tukaramasarkheca sadhe ani nishpapa kavimana lagta.] ... The black rock holding dominion over the black soil had suddenly come alive. It had become an icon of man [manavamurlill

The anecdote accompanying this account of a momentous pilgrimage is worth telling again. Before the Vitthala of Pandharpur himself Bhagwat had felt numb; the surge (umala) of emotions devotees tend to feel on such occa­sions completely escaped her. In this formless (nirakara) state of mind, she could feel neither sadness nor joy. What was needed was a principlc of vitality that would bring this moribund Vitthala back to lifc. Everything changed with the encounter with the returning dhangar-shepherd on the banks of the Chandrabhaga, who then became for her the very instance of vitality, spontaneity and beauty (sajivpana, svabhavikpana, sallndarya). The sheer imperturbable stolidity of the shepherd's legs made them look as though they had always stood firm and planted themselves in the soil. And for this reason, the shepherd helped stamp Vitthala himself with the imprint of humanness. In short, what the shepherd made possible is for Vitthala to become "iconic." Iconic, that is to say, of a primitive tie between the folk and the mainstream. Putting this in strictly personological terms, Bhagwat saw the living iconicity

Deity and daivat 177

of the dhangar as that which imprints the essence of individuality (the essence of spirit. soul. soulfulness) on the body of Vitthala; in short, the dhangar helps make the daivat Vitthala a person. We can imagine that what BMlgwat had experienced in the shrine, the deul of Pandharpur itself had been the stark materiality of Vitthala, the untested salvific powers of which her family had been bereft of for three generations due to an ancestral vow. Now all of a sudden in this dhangar the startling iconicity of Vitthala himself comes to lore. an iconieity steeped in meaning, teeming with references to the pillar that affords pais, a kind of expansive solace, to the river of sorrow (dukha­kalindl), to the black soil of the Deccan-it is in the dhangar that, in sum, the fundamental autochthony of the great icon of Vitthala as manavamurti comes to life. What is murta (manifest) in the murti (the icon that mimes the history of this manifestation) is autochthony understood as an emergence from out of the soil, which is the history of a vanished indigeneity. But this icon of the black soil, stamped with the impress of an even more original, an ab-original autochthony nonetheless restores to its vital presence the original family deity (kula~daival) of Bhagwat herself: for this is how the essay ends: "U was as though a new dawn had cast its glow on the inner tie between the Vitthoba ofPandharpur and my ancestors" (Pandharicya vitthobaca va majhe pidhyance anlarika nate navyane ujalle). And that inner tie (nate) between kula and daival, woven in the likeness of man, anthropomorphizes, indeed autoch­thonizes the block of stone that is Vitthala.

Yet, in another sense the search for the prehistory of the popular as the basis for the elite is very much part of Bhagwat's project; at stake is less Marathi nationalism than the quest for an archeology of belief, one that is disposed toward greater and greater belonging, rootedness. staying-in-place, going to so far as to find that rootedness in the incessantly peripatetic figure of the dhangar. Hers is a quest lor the originary source of autochthony in Maharashtra. the single instance of pure. specular self-cognition whereby Maharashtra recognizes itself in itself in the face of the mainstream Vitthala which is at the same time the face of the dhangar, It is the mysterious coeval­ness (an "at-the-same~time-ness," so to speak) of the dhangar that guarantees the act of inscription whereby Vitthala becomes the source for Bhagwat for what can be called the ab-origin of the nation, a resting-spot or pais where the ceaselessly turning maelstrom of Maharasthra's various currents appears to come to rest: at this originary point the icon of Vitthala appears to offer an absolutely original belong-fogether of folk and elite, personal and familiaL

Man and world

If we turn at this point to More and Chitre. we find that neither of them is invested in the aulochthony of the iconic Vitthala. More's project in his Tukaram Darshan is to provide less a history of Vitthala than of what it is like to live a lije before Vitthala. For this living of a life befilre Vitthala is precisely what suggests the space of prayer from which emerges the miracle of

178 Prehi.HOr.1' ofllis/ori("o/ religion

having-ti)und (God) in Tukaram. More reminds us that this living of a life before Vitthala, in the proximity of the gift of Vitthala's unutterable, improb­able being-there. suggests morc than a hio-graphy (the writing of one's self as another) or hagio-graphy (a writing of the holy) of Tukaram. It is also about the caste subalternity of Tukaram, who was as we have noted before not a daHt but a kUl/bi, and often described himself as a shudra. For that life lived before Vitthala was lived with others, Tukaram's wife, brothers. kinsfolk, admirers, tollowers, detractors in his own time, followed by those who came later and were touched by Tukaram, such as the shaira poets of the Peshwa period. converts to Christianity such as Reverend Tilak, and much laler a whole range of nationalist scholars and thinkers from Bhandarkar to Vitthala Ramji Shinde, and down to More himself as a latter-day descendent (van­shaja) of Tukaram. Why is the life of Tukaram also at the same time the history of Maharashtra'l More would argue that Tukaram's life is of epochal significance precisely because it was a life defined in a fundamental being­with-others. This being-with-others generated a prodigy of enormolls power and significance, which is to say, not just the prodigy that is Tukaram's three thousand or so abhangas but also the scores or abhangas written by members of his family. More's Tukaram Darshan is then a history of the work of miracle in the being-together-before-Vitthala of the Varkari sampradaya itself Sampradaya ought to be understood not as a "sect," a disciplinary shibboleth betraying the Weberian heritage of the history of religions. Instead sampradaya, laken etymologically as sam-pradatla, should be seen a:. the "gift of speech, or more stlictly the 'pmdana' (from the root pra) of the gathering-together (from the prefix sam) ofspcech as ~'ac." And inasmuch as this being-together-before-Vitthala is for More the very instance of Marathi modernity, we can go so far as to say that the Varkari-sampradaya gives us access to a community of lives lived before Vitthala, a community that was, that is, and that in some futuraL utopian sense, is also a community t(J

c(Jme. Which is why the Bhagwat Dharma of the Varkaris in More's account is less that of the samprada.va as s('c/ than of the singular beings to whom God comes in the anonymity of the Vaishnav address, and who are then rendered bare and frail as so many flesh and blood devotees exposed in a tenderness prior to religion. Unlike Chitre, whose intellectual debts lie in the civil rights movements of the 1960s, More's more typically contemporary attention to issues of community emanates from his exhaustive analyses of caste subalternity and dalit community in Marathi life over the last two centuries.

In sum, More's Tukaram [)arshan is about being before Vitthala as a com­munity of singular beings all comported differently, Only Tukaram can be Tukaram, just as Tukaram cannot speak for his brother Kanhoba. Now More's own conviction with regard to Tukaram's uniqueness in this sense bears obvious debts to Chitre's portrayal in his Punha Tukaram of Tukaram as the very instance or modern Maharashtrian man in his existentially fraught essence; much in the manner of Dwivedi's Kabir, it is Cititre who

1 Deity and daiva/ 179

gives us a sensc of the character or "personality" of Tukaram in political society; it is Chitre who helps insert the icon ofTukaram into the "individual­ity" of political society, It would seem as though More and Chitre supple­ment each ()ther (fill in and exceed the gaps in each other's thinking) and provide us with a composite Tukaram, a man-of-the-world hefore Vitthala in Chitre's existential-humanist account, a man-in-the-world-with-others before Vitthala in More's account ofTukaram from within the Varkali sampradaya. In short, if Chitre gives us a sense of the great trauma underlying the relation between man and the world with Villhala as the transcendental guarantee of this bond, More gives us an account of the relation between the world and Vitthala where man in community speaks, writes, sings, dances, performs the ceaseless and endlessly nuanccd task of dhyana, of praise from within the space (the being-together) of prayer. Where Chitre gives us a sketch of Tukaram in the historical religion of Vaishnaivism, More gives us a sense of what it means to inhabit historical religion from the perspective of the traditions of dali! hearsay.

Man and the World (manus and prapanca) in Chitre, the World itself and God (prapt/Ilea and daivat) in More: it is to Dherc that we must turn to gel a sense of that most deeply unsettling of relations, that of Man before God (i.e. manus and dail'al). (--or the Vitthala of Dhere's SriVilthala: b'ka Mahasamalll'a.1'a is not the face-to-face Vitthala of either Chitre or More but is the being greater than me who is both more and less than god, and more and less than man. Dhere's Vitthala is less the Vitthala of sundara te dhyana. in which it is nonetheless invested. than the Vitthala standing on the brick (ubhe vi/evart). It is Dhere who asks the question of the relation between man and God, the third question as it were, on the far side of the existential relation between man and the world (as in Chitre), and the communitarian relation between man and man mediated via God (as in More). Just as it is in SriVitlhala: Eka MahasamQnvaya that we come to terms with a Vitthala whose ubha-ness, whose stature is greater than mine, so that I am moved to ask the question: who is this Vitthala who stands before me. and what does he demand of me? How can I stand before him, stand before his uprightness, counterpose my will to erect and install my deity to his wilL without establish­ing, installing, arrogating to myself the fundamental cause (the "that he is there") of his being-as-Vitthala. For this is a Vitthala who does not stand therefor me. Instead, it is [ who stand here at this time, in this place for him. It is not my being cast astra/in the world. being pitched into it among others -the theme of existential and communitarian trauma in Chitre and More that is at stake here. It is the fact that I can no longer stamp this daivata with the imprint of humanness; the fact that I cannot anthropomorphize him; the fact that I cannot turn him into an icon of autochthony. Dhere's Vitthala is relentlessly aniconic, scrupulously suhhuman, operating at the level not of the individual but that of the singular being before God.

180 Prehistory of historical religion

The prefiguration (mularupa) of miracle

This insight tinds its most c';mpelling elaboration in the" Vira·gala" or "Hero-Stones" chapter of Dhere's book. Clearly, the import of this chapter is to prove the failure of the attempt by Reverend Deleury and the philolo-­gist Shankar Gopal Thlpule to tracc Vitthala's pose (his arms akimbo) to village memorials commemorating the heroic death of local cattle-protectors. Dhere argues that there is in the final instance no such link between folk hero cultures and Vitthala. We should remember that such a connection would have given Deleury and Tulpule and by the same token ourselves the where­withal to establish the fundamental iconicity of Vitthala, drawing him in much the same way as does Durga Bhagwat to the popular tradition as a whole. The tie with the hero figured in a hero-stone would have lent to Vitthala the humanized figure (or the figural humanity) needed to establish him as a daivat in both history and prehistory. For unlike a god or deva, a doivala is the materiality of an icon stamped with the impress of the human (manvikarana). The historical destiny of such an icon rests on its links with earlier forms of worship, as well as to the perpetually assimilative, which is to say the relentlessly anthropomorphic movement of Indo-Islamic allegory. A de~'a (god) is for this reason not the same thing as a daivat.

Dhere is himself committed to the raising up of Vitthala toward Krishna; this commitment is much in evidence in SriVitthala: Eka Mahasamanvaya, in which he attempts to write a history of Vitthala from within the domain of the popular itself, and not from some neutral, disinterested standpoint. But it is here in the "Hero-stones" chapter (" Vitthala ani Virgala") that he provides us, perhaps despite himself, with an important insight into what separates definitively the daivar from deity, and daivatikarana from deification or embodiment. He argues that if there is really no tie between the hero-stone and Viuhala. we cannot establish that an original daivafikarana will have taken place at all. But what if, we may ask, daivatikarana in itself is always necessarily a partial failure?

When a particular dah'ata attains the highest standing [uchchatama pra­fishtha], then ifits ur-figure [mularupal is kept in reserve [tikuna raMIe] in the space set aside to sit in worship [upasanakaksha] before it, every effort tends to be made to give it a semiotic precedence fpratikatmaka agra­mana] by those who can master the handiwork [dakshata) to raise lip the god [unnayana sadhnaryana kadunaj. If the hero-stone found opposite the main door were the original Vitthala then almost certainly within the raised up [llf/nata] Vitthala's order of worship [upasanavyavastheta], it would have received its semiotic precedence and some story [ka/hal clari­lying that precedence [mana] would have been included [samavishta] with some shrewdness [caturya] in the Pandllrangamahatmya [the miraculous history of the deily, PandurangNitthala].

(Dherc 1984: 179-80)

1 !

Deityanddail'at 181

Clearly, what has happened in the case of the hero-stone is that a dail'atika­rana has not taken place. There is in the end. or should we say at the origin or mula, no primordial link between the culture of the folk and the unprecedented configuration (mahasamanvaya) of traditions Dhere associates with Vitthala. Vitthala may well have arrived on the threshold of history as Maharashtra's folk deity (lok-daivtll), but the fael remains that the daivG.tikarana of th~ folk as 10k would appear to be inconclusive. irreducible, unvenfiab1e. Where m the final analysis is that precious tie with the autochthonous that would give this mahasamanl'aya its fundamental connection with the lolk? For there has been no "semiotic precedence" that would bestow an inexhaustible iconicity on to Vitthala, making him the basis of Marathi culture as that culture's ma~ter icon: for something remained prior to this priority, as though the allegoncal had retained its anteriority to the symbolic. Yet some such connection with the lolk is nonetheless hinted at in the text of Dhere's characterization of daivalikarana itself. The key word is UfJn(lyana. especially here in the sentence that describes the agents of dail'atikarana: "those who can master (sadhne) the handiwork (dakshafa) to raise up the god (Uflnayana)." Now who are these agents of daivatikarana but we ourselves as those who will the deity into being, who set to work the sadh (efTect) in the sadhne (effecting), who can master the will to bring deities into being? What else is dakshata if not a reference to the mastering of allegory in the in lerests of system? It is dakshata after all. that through handiwork brings into being the worlds in which deities are deified an<.l made handy, in which gods are thrown together with all the clutter and design of a world always ready at hand in command and will. We are the unnaVlIna sad/mare, we who arrogate to ourselves the right to turn this Vitthala st~nding on a brick into our peTsonalized daivat, we as beings alone in the world (Chitre), we as beings who live with others in the world (More). Yel the Word of Vitthala as it echoes in the dhyana of Tukaram is that of an impersonal, aniconic god, one in whom this unnayana or "uplift­ment" into the iconic has failed, remained incomplete. What then of thc precious trace of the folk? Is there something more originary (mula) than the ur-lorm (mularupa) of Vitthala, a mlilarupa of a mularupa, ur-Iorm of an ur-form?

Trans-figuration, or mahasamanl'Uya

The c1uc 10 the unveritiable tt'ace of the lolk in the movement of Maharash­Irian conllguralion (mahliSainam'l1.va) can be detected in the idiom of Dhere's Marathi itself: And here if we look closely at the word "unnayana" we see in its prefix "lid" two somewhat opposed valences: a first movement uP:,~rds, upon or above, and a second movement "implying separation and diSJunc­tion" (Monier-Williams 1981: 46) and therefore a turn away from or apart. At once a dialectical and a diaretical impulse, "ud" is doubly marked as a transcending-discriminating tcndency in history. With the verbal root "nr' we encounter a third valence, which is that of an affirmative, "to lead," almost as

182 Prehistory of historical religion

though "ullflayano" implied that "one cannot no! raise up and thereby push away" the gods. This triple structure in the word generates a tension between deity, daivat and ur~form, as though davitikarana were composed of three distinct and untotalizahle elements, with daiva! as a kind or historical thresh­old between ur-form and deity. Much like the German coneept-metaphor Au/llebung, we can understand the Marathi unnayana at once as a negation that raises what has been negated to a higher level, and a negation of a negation, that is to say of a final moment in the unnayana proeess whereby what has been negated. lost and suppressed at the point of its being raised to something greater than itselr reappears as the trace of something that is yet to be accounted for: in other words, as a remainder, or the traee or a trace. It is in this sense that Dhere's daivatikarana refers us to what in Vitthala's uMa­ness, his "stance" cannot be rererred to in terms either of origin or end. arche or telos, but which continues to elude the daivatikaralla to which it nonethe­less contributes. The folk as the trace or the trace, as something that makes speech possible but only rrom within the impossible relation between miracle and hearsay, is at once the ground and the lack of ground for Vitthala as dail'at. And in this sense, as the ubha Vitthala who makes mc responsive to the rolk, the essence of the great configuration (mahas(lIttaIH'a)JQ) that is Maharashtra can be understood to have been not the synthesis but the grand frans-figuration (the Aujhebung/re/evelunnayana) or the folk. its maha~ samam'aya in the text of Vitthala bhakti. 1 Dhere's Vitthala is the Vitthala before whom we stand accountable, fundamentally and unrecusably, to the rolk. The folk here would refer not to autochthony, not to the simple objective being~there of the dhangar-shepherd, but to what in language remains as a trace. as a reminder of that which has always already been written out. pushed away. It is in this sense that in Dhere the ur-form or mularupa of Vitthala cannot and for the same reason cannot not be the hero~stone (vira~gala).

The space for the clearing of the holy, the clearing of which he is the genius loci. makes Vitthala the lord of the field where his Way is conducted under certain directive~ which then come to be known as Varkari~dharma, or Bhagwat Dharma. It is the kshetra orhis dharma, the sole demesne where his rule, his hegemony is in place. But it is also the surrace for the transfiguration of Vitthala, of which Dhere himself is but the latest local historian, stha­lapuranakara. This kshetra then is not just the silent focus of the grand samanvaya involving the "assimilation" of the rolk with the elite: the dhar­makshetra of Vitthala is instead a mark of the continued samanvaya as "trans~figuration" of the folk between something like the "premodern" on the one hand, and a modernity which can only ever ensure the disappearance or the folk, on the other. A disappearance however. which is not at the same time unmarked by the gift of the rolk which Vitthala. as the object of the centuries~old dhyana of the Varkari's tradition of hearsay, retains within himself as a trace. The word samanvaya, which we often misread as "assimila­tion," rerers fundamentally to the "right way." In the order of the sentence it

1 IJcify and doh'lIt 183

refers to the succession of words in syntagm: in the order of I~lmilial succes­sion it directs us to the ethical progression of descendents, to race and lin­eage; in the order or being it alludes to something like physis or karma as the movement of the world unto infinity (Monier-Williams 1981: 46). The Sanskrit verbal root "i" implies a vectored movement. which is "to proceed. to go" in a certain direction. Samanvaya could in this way be rendered more rigorously as what it means "to bring together (sam) the succcssion (anI') of movements (i)" by which man moves in t.hc world through specch. and in generation and regeneration adequates thc infinite changeability of the world. And since thc tie between speech and thc infinite world, bctwecn Man and World, is guaranteed by an idea of divinity (which excecds Man and World), we might think of samallvaya as marked through and through by the coming of God to man. In which case. the grand configuring or lI1ahasamall­vaya of the world in Dhcre cannot but be underwritten. from the point of view of Varkari hearsay. by a trans~figurational line of rorce that crosscs through the successiveness of human worlds, incising all movement (in thc verbal root "i") that we know as karma and caste, but in an exactly backward. retrospective, entirely rccapitulative gesture. in a maha-stlll1anvaya. The po~­sibility of such a gesture was not unavailable to the Indic tradition in its most radical strains. Turning for a moment to Kashmir Shaivism and ils legacy to Dnyaneswara, we could well refer here to its notion of "prafyabhijna" which Andre Padoux describes as the point at which "consciousness turns back upon itself, recognizes itself (pratyabhijna). and bccomes not only aware of itself but also or all that exists paradigmatically in it ... [as] the Supreme Word" (Padoux 1990: 176). If we could push this idea or self~rec()gnition to its origins in a narrative (gothi) of having~round God. we may well be able to break out of the epistemological presuppositions implicit in Padoux's notion of "consciousness" here; this much is enough fiJr us to det<..'ct in pl"atl'ahhijna itself this transfigurational account of what it means to be human.

Luminosity: the face of Vitthala

With this notion of transfiguration in mind, we could well argue that the folk (10k) as a trace remains unassimilated to the inevitable, even ineluctable move~ ment or history as deification when understood specifically in its moment of daivalikarana. And to this extent. it would seem to lie at the farthest remove rrom the "comparative'" destiny of Au/71ebung as the movcment of the European "spirit" and wmayana as the movement of a (Orientalized) Hinduism self-same with the spirit or India. We will need to elaborate in a more rigorous manner how the folk both makes possible and yet resists AuJ: hebung and unnayana, reminding us or what is untranslatable and "un~ transfigured" in history, but yet available to narrative (gothi).

Here is one answer to the problem of comparative religion. If, as we saw in Chapter 2. religions East and West arc both unablc to account for the loneli­ness or death (the problem or how to mourn the death of another), it is

184 Prehistory of historical reLigion

incumbent upon us to attempt a prehistory of religion. One way of doing this is to inhabit the agonistic realm of translation. It entails working between Aughebung and unnayana in an attempt to find a form of conducting one's life that precedes "raising up" itself, prior to deification. Tukaram's com~ portment before Vitthala is the virtual enactment of such a prehistory. Now if we return to these lines in the poem by Tukaram

On his neck a Tulsi band, yellow of the silk around his middle Everlasting pull [avad] of that figure [rupa1 Sheen of pendant Makar-fish on his ears Gem of Kaustubh athwart his neck. Tuka says, thus is my comfort entire Thus willI gaze longingly [avadinen1 at his visage incandescent

[srimukha1·

we can see how the transfiguration ofVitthala unto Krishna is not unaccom­panied by a backward. vanishing movement of what has not yet been trans­tlgured. For the gaze of the devotee-Tukaram scans the icon ofVitthala and re-marks the marks of Krishna as so many elements of his attire. But Tukaram is also drawn irrevocably toward Vitthala in avad or avadi, which is a central concept-metaphor in Varkari speech. To be drawn to something, touch something tenderly, caress it minimally, nourish and harbor it, all these aspects are implicit in avad; and in avadne ("to be drawn toward") we find from Dnyaneswara to Tukaram the implicit sense of "semblance" or "to shine forth as" (Tulpule and Feldhaus 2001: 71). Now there is the "everlasting pull" (avad) of the "figure" (rupa). And Tukaram, finding his comfort (sukhal complete in Vitthala, proceeds to gaze "longingly" (m·t/dine) at "his visage incandescent" (srimukha). Even belore we can chart the trajectory of this pull toward the figure ofthedaivat, we are compelled to take seriously what it is in the figure that is being gazed at. For Tukaram's dhrana is only apparently theoretical: in its perspectival impulse it asks after something else, which is the face of the Lord. his srimukha. And although "sri" is commonly used as a prefix denoting the preeminence or excellence of Vaishnava deities (as in "srikrishna"), its juxtaposition with mukha or face tells us that behind the humanized face of Vitthala there is something like a reference to divinity. In his Sanskrit-English lexicon. Monier Monier-Williams seems to suggest that "sri" is a reference to a light prior to spirit or idea: it indicates a name mingled in cooking (implicit in the root "sra"), and refers to "burning, flame, diffuse light" and by the same token to "diffusing light or radiance," to "light, luster, radiance, splendor, glory, beauty, grace, loveliness," and finally to markers of wealth and prosperity (Monier-Williams 1991: 1098). Now we have seen how Kabir turns to the light (pargas) that is prior to the light of reason just as does Plotinus in his understanding of Plato. This light is a kind of prior good. In just the same way, and in an exactly antithetical gesture to the theoretical gaze which by looking wills a deity into being, Tukaram directs to the daivat

Deity and daivat 185

Vitthala a specific form of desire (avad), eliciting in its luminous visage (srimukha) an inexhaustible radiance. Almost as though in the eons that make up a life, a hundred worlds were to send out a diffuse light and only then bring into being the world willed and commanded as a coruscation of truth. (fhuman command and will is driven by the light of reason, the light oflight (Sri) returns us to a moment before the raising up (unnayana) of local deities, prior to the Aujhebung whereby reason pursues its itinerant course through history. For in the srimukha which will soon be Krishna there is a death prior to the death of Christ or the penance for a death which is Hindu myth and law. as we saw in our discussion of the Kapalika. Its future is the dark augury of spirituality and spirit, but its past is a burning up of worlds not available to the Arjuna who gazes theoretically at the imploding of all creation in the universalized Krishna of the eleventh book of the Gita, an image that reminded Oppenheimer of the terrible force of a nuclear holocaust. Instead. its past is the origin of the universe in a brief tale (gothi) of diffuse light, lodged thereafter as the glancing beam of a gaze in the depths of the beauti­ful (sundam te dhvana).

Color and light in van Buitcnen

Whal then is the nature of the transition from color and light on the one hand, to emotion and will on the other? In his generative work on the early theory of gUMS (sat/va, rajas and lamas) in Indic antiquity, especially in the texts of Sankhya. van Buitenen took great care to point out that sattva and rajas, usually translated in such abstract terms as "being" (Wesen) and "dirt, clinging to the world. spiritual defilement," were from another perspective radically empirical in origin. If sattva referred 10 the procedure by which truth emerges from out of untruth, sat from out of amt, rajas referred to the "atmosphere" as the threshold of transcendence; it alluded to space as such, derived as rajas is from "raj~" which means "to stretch, extend." In the case of rajas in particular, it is worth noting that at some point in antiquity, the original cosmological significance of rajas as a kind of transcendental idea of space gave way to the psychological notion of "passionate attachment;" rajas became a raga or fundamental mood, and from here it was possible to attach to it the color traditionally associated with raga, which was red (just as lanws, which referred to the "earth," came to be denoted by the color black, imply­ing insensibility. unconsciousness and so on).

Now the crucial point is that the allotment of color is the earliest instance in the texts (van Buitenen refers here to the Rig Veda, the early Upanisads. and the Moksadharma of the Mahabharala) of a truly cosmogonic point of origination. As van Buitenen shows in his reading of the sixth chapter of the Chandogya Upanisad, this implied that an "original being called sat produces (ejas, apas and annam, which are the red, white and blaek forms (rupalll) of the world to be" (van Buitenen 1957: 93, 89). Clearly, the psychological notion of attachment (raga) was preceded in the early texts by what was really

............... ------------~Q .. -----------186 Prehistory of historical religion

the preeminence of space; and~space itself was something that, according to these texts, could only have evolved out of an originary notion of color. For this reason we emlnot understand the three gunas solely as "products, elements, evolulcs or constituents;" they are in fact all of these because they refer to the movement by which color gave way to emotion or mood, and cosmology was superseded by psychology. And in this sense, inasmuch as they refer to modes of individuation, the gUllas afe really monads, bearers of the "suspension of iconoclasm," the process by which the radically empirical is rendered abstract and desire, will and command come into being as fun­damental moous of human being in the world. They prefigure with extra­ordinary clarity the humanization of our drive~ desirc~ styles of life, of our cultivation of the care of the soul, which is why Dnyancswant himself returns to them in the later chapters of his great work.

As the cartographer of this emergence of the will from out of color, van Buitenen was perhaps the pre-eminent thinker after the anthropomorphic imprint of man on the world in Indic antiquity, and for the same reason his speculations on the emergence in antiquity of the Indian modern were as untimely as thosc of Bernard Cohn for the colonial period. For van Buitenen, the gunas did not initially refer to some abstract emotion leading to self­absorption, activity, or sloth (as in the sattra, rajas and lamas of the last cantos of the Gila); sal lor instance implied not some abstract notion of "being" but a "concrete, existing thing" (van Buitcnen 1957: 104). For this reason, we cannot re.:ld Tukaram's poem as merely a description of the traditional accoutrement of Krishna, as though Vitthala were merely a prel­ude to Krishna. Tukaram is drawn in avad toward the light prior to light, which is the face of the Lord (srimukha); in each instance what comes to fore is something that resists being assimilated in its entirety to the idea of love in traditional iconology. For amd is not the emotion (bhava) of love; Tukaram's gaze or dhyana is, as we pointed out above, not a theoretical gaze. This C<lution is important, for we should remember that from the point of view of dominant Vaishnavism all emotion is theoretical. What precisely then is the link between the pull toward the luminosity of the face and the face itself if not, as Varkari/BhagwatlVaishnav dharma tells us, an emotional, passionate, loving bond, a bond that readers of Tukaram, Surdas, and the bhakti poets cannot but be moved hy?

A fundamental turn away from the link between emotion and will is required here if we are to arrive at the prehistory of our own fascination for bhakti love and deification, with its implicit afllrmation of willed deities, and ofthc self-congratulatory, wholly self-aggrandizing passion of the empowered devotee (bhakt). What is necessary is a rigorous overturning of our invest­ment in interior religion. tor, if we were to approach the problem of emotion with van Buitenen we discover what can only be the anteriority of color to emotion. It is almost as though there is in human experience something prior to the light practical fit between bhava and rasa, an aesthesis prior to aesthet­ics. a universe of Kuna:> (monads) which precedes bhavas (emotional states).

Deity and ddil'al 187

Now the gaze of Tukaram is as a gaze directed toward the icon drenched in color and then to the face steeped in light Avad is a loving gaze, but it is also an instance of the fundamental empiricity, the "fact" or gorhi, of Vitthala as a being that stands there prior to the emotional pull of the devotee. In the empiricity of the icon, of which color is a mark of the prehistory of emotion, we detect a trace of the divinity that recedes into the past to make possible the ardent desire of the devotee. Vitthala is a product of that will (he iS800n to be raised up into Krishna) but he is not any less a reference to all that in the daNal is not available to the will to bring deities into being. For in the light before light ofVitthala's face, Tukaram discovers an element of the everlast~ ing (nimntara). At the point at which color (rang) finds its origin in light, both Kabir and Tukaram turn to the peculiar iconicity of "Ram " and Vitthala and find there the God of an always incomplete daivalikarana, the perpetually unfinished coming into being of the daivat. They are masters of memory, sages who worked from the long tradition of dalit hearsay, commemorating in glorious verse what they had heard of the finding of God in the remote past. Hearsay is this turn away from the instinctual or psychic apparatus of emotion from within which the machine of bhakti works its way into history, even ifhearsay cannot but affirm that machine in the end; for the "SUbject" of hearsay would not be possible without such an affirmation. But we can no longer assume that the extinction of all desire or emotion can provide any guarantee of new traditions ofthe care of the soul in the age where deities are willed into being as part of lived, graspable, manipulable worlds. Only the priority of all that is radically empirical in the coming of God to man, uncovering as abstract and atheistic our very notion of religion, can in a sense "save us" from the dangerous tie between emotion and will. This much we can learn, must learn from the traditions of hearsay. This much the dalit critique itself, in its own attempt to aceess the folk, to lay claim to Tukaram and Kabir as daHt poet~ dalit god~ must remain accountable to. We continue to mistake this for the love of man for God, not the adoring look that can sometimes pierce through the visual field of representation, set aside whole traditions of aesthetic thought and give rise to an epiphany of light in color playing about the face of the daivat.

Notes

1 Subalternity at the cusp

Gayatri Spivak (1999: 309) ha~ perhaps something like this in mind when she addresses the problem of how to enter into the subal1ern mindsct at the moment or cusp of decision, which is also the momenl when history and critical practice find it retroactively; here. in response to a question raised by feminist critics such as Abena Busia about whether the subaltern "can speak:' she responds with the following formulation: "All speaking, even seemingly the most immediate, entails a distanced decipherment by another. which is at best. an interecption_ That i~ what speaking is."

2 One of the "oldest examples" or such a continuity between speech and silence (Benjamin has in mind the Ore.I'leia and Oedipus Tvrannus\ is the substitution "of the execution of the victim at the altar, with his escape from the knife of the sacrificial priest: the destined victim thus runs around the ahar. finally seizing it." So that "the altar becomes a place of refuge. the angry God a merciful God. the victim a prisoner and servant of God" (Benjamin 1990: \07).

2 Moral rite before myth and law

As Lorenzen proceeds to sa~"

The sources in which the myth first appears, the Punma~, abo mcntion human Kapalikas, and there are no references to thc ascctics significantly earlier than these works. In some respects this question lof priority] is a needless one. Since both thc penance for the killing of a Brahmana and thc association of Shiva, the god of death and destruction, with skulls undoubt­edly antedated the Shiva-Kapalin myth, Shaivite ascetics who obscrved the Mahavrata might also have antedated it. Whether or not such ascetics existed or whether they themselves invented this myth, it is certain that the later Kapalikas adopted it as their divine archctype. The ultimate aim of the Kapalika observance was a mystical identification or communion with Shiva. Through their imitative repetition of Shiva's performance of the Mahavrata. the ascetics became ritually "homologised" with the god and partook of. or were granted, some of his divine aLtributes. espccially the eight magical powers (siddhis) (1991 [1972]: 80).

3 The time of having-found (God)

See pada 62 (S49) in Callcwaert et al. (2000: 183). 2 The nature and emphasis of this "abstraction," which figures in studies of hhakll'

NOles 189

as the low-caste investment for a njrgwJa God without traits, explains why scholars of the esoteric and mystical aspects of Hinduism were drawn to such traditions of hearsay--the tradition of scholarship that studies the ties between the arcane and the popular has always in some way or another aligned itself with heterodoxy and dissent, as we will see in Chapters 5 and 6 in the work of Hazariprasad Dwivedi. One should not neglect to mention here the pioneering effort of Pitambardatta Barthwal (1901--44) (see BarthwaI1978),

3 "Vishwas to deval mlianuni dhariyela bhava;" Abhanga 3500 of Tukaram's Gatha (Tukaram 1973: 578--9). Tukaram's verse form of choice, the lIbhanga. and [)nyaneswara's ovi's. arc closely relatl.-d modes of popular composition, wide­spread in Marathi since the thirteenth century. Dilip Chitre describes the m'i as typically consisting of "four lincs, of which the first three are rhymed and the last one is left 'open' or unrhymed with the rest. The number of syllables in the first three lines may vary from eight to ten while the last one may vary from four to six" (see Chitrc 11990: 6]). Similarly, the abhanga consists typically of six lines with three syllables each (see Rajadhyaksha [2002]: 200). allowing for a great number of variants. In my forthcoming work on Dnyaneswara I hore to pursue at greater length the question of the link between the versatility of the ovi-ahha1lg form and the force of rhetoric. given especially the tight fit between versification an(1 hearsay.

4 When Kabir or Tukaram spcak they embrace longstanding traditions of popular sententiae; holding their own ground at some half-way point between lesson and mystcry, exemplary tale and fabulous narrative. such proverbs arc themselves the thrcshold for a wholly incalculable accretion of meaning --the Marathi and Hindi words for "proverb" ("malma" and "kahavat" respectively) are implicit in Kabir"s "Kilhat Kahir" and Tukaram's "Tuka man he."

5 Purushottam Aggarwal's work on Kabir (see his forthcoming monograph) is instructive in its refusal to relinquish the relation between Kabir and the world. which he tries to bring together under the notion of thc "poetic vocation" (kahir hataur kavi) of Kabir as a poet-saint working creatively through a range of social. existential and aesthetic issues. Aggarwal is quite understandably wary of those aspects of the daHt critique (especially in the work of Dharmvir) that affiliate it to strains of Hindu nationalism.

4 The anomaly of Kabir

1 This is the place to register my profound debt to Vasudha Dalmia and her sem-inal work on Bharatendu.

2 See Vaudeville (1974: 3-36); Datmia (1999: 338 A24\. 3 For the major essays see Shukla (1992; 1970). 4 For a fuller account of their poetry, see McGregor (] 984: 76-80; 109--17). Shukla's

introduction. "Goswami Tulsidas," to his edition of the Tulsi Granlhavali was published in 1923, the introduction to his Jayasi Granthlll'ali in 1924, both by the Sabha. fiis edition of Surd as's Bhramar-git Sar was published in 1925.

5 Subsequent references to this tcxt will be denoted by its title, "Kabir" and page number.

6 Dwivedi spent the most productive twenty years of his life at Shantiniketan, moving to Banares Hindu University in J 950 for a brief but troubled tenure as the Head of its Hindi department. During his two decades at Shantiniketan, Dwivedi edited the Abhmav Bharati Granthmala and the Vishwa Bharali Patrika. for these and other details of Dwivedi's career, see the Sahitya Akademi's biographical pamphlet, Tiwari (1996: 13).

7 Dr. Dharmvir is a civil servant who has written books on the dalit leader Ambedkar, the playwright Vishnu Prabhakar. and the saint-poet Raidas, The

190 Noles

b?ok that place? him in the. center of controversy was Kablr ke Alochak (Dharm­vIr 1997), 1Il wInch Dharmvll' launched an attack on the entirc tradition of critical writing in Hindi on Kabir, and accused it of "brahmanizing" Kabil". Apart from the key chapter on Dwivedi in Kabir ke Alochak, we now have Dharmvir's extended three-volume engagement with Dwivedi'~ Kablr, entitled Kabir: Nai Sadi Men (Kabir in the New Era). The titles of the three volumes, all published in the sa~e year, are as. follows: Kabir: Doctor Hazariprasad Dwivedi ka Prakshipl Chmlan (Dharmvlr 2000a); Kahir aur Ramanand: Kimvadantian (Dharmvir 2000b); Kabir: Baj bhi, Kapol bhi. Papiha bhi (Dharmvir 200Oc).

8 Standard .Hindi dictionaries unhelpfully equate sankshohh and vikshobh, despite the very dilTerent valences of the prefixes "sam-" (placing together) and "vi-" (tak­i~g away). Since Dwivedi's.Hindi diction tends to abound in Sanskrit phrases, and gIven that he was somethmg of a Sanskrit pandit, one could well turn to Carl Cappeller's Sanskril-Worterhllch (Cappeller 1955: 465, 402), which glosses sank­shob as "Erschiitterung" (shake severely), and vikshob quite differently as "he/lige Beweguflg. AIl/regWig. Verwirrung" (broadly speaking, confusion or bewilderment).

9 Th~ refere.nce .is to. Sur-Sahity,a (Dwived~, 1973 (l93~]: 7 ~). The <,:irierson essay whIch DW1Vedl partIcularly object to was Modern Hmdulsm and Its Debt to the N~stor!ans," Jou~nal 0/ 1~le Royal A~iatic Society. (1907) 311-35. III her analysis of thIS. article, Da.lmm expl~ms that <,:inerson had tned to argue that the third century Synan Nestonan Chnstmns had mtroduced the religion of love into Hinduism in south India, from which poim it had been taken up in the Bhakti movement. The impulse behind this move was to insist that Bhakti was analogous to the Protestant Revolu.tion in that it had rebelled agai~st the hegemony of high brahmanism by pre~chlllg a pOl?ular g~spel of I?ve .. Gnerson was one of the main exponents of the Idea of a ulllfied Valshnav HlildUlsm that was at the same time "monotheistic" (Dal~ia 1?99: 401.-8); the line that Dwivedi cites from the "Nestorians'" essay is also CIted III Dalmla (402). George Abraham Grierson (1851-1941) was trained as a linguist and worked in many middle-level administrative positions in Bihar for a number or years. Before long, he developed an appreciation of Bhakti literature and of th.e bhashas in which it was written (i.e. Avadhi and Braj, which he under­stood as lIltcgral aspects of Hindi). His prolific output of grammars, vocabularies and studies of dialects culminated in the multi-volume Linguistic Survey of Indi<l, begun in 1898, of which he was editor-superintendent. But his most important contribution was his propagation of a monolithic idea of Bhakti in Orientalist circles (Dalmia 1999: 139-·40).

10 The extent of Dwivedi's familiarity with Shukla's work is moot, and one can thererore adduce merely a family resemblance in their thinking here. Shukla's late and most ~roducti.ve pha~ ov~rlaps wit~ Dwi.vedi's early youthful work leading up ,'0 Kabl~, but smce DWlvedl spent thIS penod away from the Hindi-speaking regIOn: .whlCh. texts of Shukla m~y have come to his attention in raraway Shantllllketan IS hard to ascertain (Smgh 1983: 17).

11 Dwivedi, Hindi Sahitya ki Bhwnika (cited in Singh 1983: 77). 12 ~am~ar. Singh himself d~aws this discussion to a close with the following sugges­

tl~n: . It IS perhal?s for thiS .reason that the assurance with which Dwivedi pursues tlus ~llal current 1Il all. of ~lIIdi literature does not extend in terms of clarity to the ambIvalences undcrlymg ItS undercurrents. Another reason [shayad iska ek /wran yaha bhi 110] may lie with the increased literary value of the later Bhakti texts wtitten under classical influence. This too is a strange paradox, that from a social st.andp.o!nt th~ grc.:ter the ree.ourse to e~c1usive {/ok-l'Iirmkh] and anti-popular [Iok­vlfo~h.l] Ideas III thIS shaslra-mfiected literature, the greater was its rhetorical and styhstlc finesse. It would be interesting to examine the transition from Kabir to Jayasi, Surdas and Tulsidas from this perspective."

1 , Notes 191

5 The pitfalls of a dalit theology

I For "sanskritization," see Srinivas (1962: 42 .. 62). Dirks argues, in what is an extremely nuanced account of Srinivas's work, that the latter was unable in the final analysis to step outside the normative stranglehold of brahmanism in his social thinking. "And yet," Dirks writes, despite his longstanding interest in backward caste movements, "Stinivas never came to terms with the extent to which the theory of sanskritization was not merely exemplified by struggles around the census but was also in large part produced by them" (Dirks 2001: 252). A similarly universalized "brahmanical" point of view, it could be argued, under­pins Dwivedi's sociological pronouncements here.

2 "''Or a perceptive critique of the Cambridge School, see Dirks. "Coda: The Burden of the Past: On Colonialism and the Writing of History" (Dirks 2001: 303-16).

3 For an account of these movements, as well a discussion of the myths surround­ing conversion, see the essays collected in Gyanendra Pandey t'ti., Hindus and Others (Pandey: 1993).

4 The gradual ritualization of medieval Hindu society was for Dwivedi the mixed outcome of the scholastic project that brought about the compilation of legal treatises (nibandhagranthas) in this period.

5 The remaining quotes from Kabir in this passage are also from p. 139. 6 Apart from the key chapter on Dwivedi in Kahir ke Alochak, we now have

Dharmvir's extended three-volume engagement with Dwivedi's Kabtr, entitled Kabir: Nai Sadi Men (Kabir in the New Era) (see Dharmvir 2000a; 2000b: 2000c).

7 In Hindi, "Vaha ahhed hai 10 pura ahhed hai aur advait hat to pura advall hai."

6 System and history in Rajwade's "Grammar" for the Dnyaneswari(1909)

I Mukundaraja (circa C.lL 1300) was the Shaivite author of the Vivekasindhu. For an account of the controversies surrounding the dating of Mukundaraja and his work as well as his relation to the Nathpanthis and to the Mahanubhavas, see Joshi (1977: 251-,60).

~ Rajwade's tantrum nonetheless met with some historical justice, though only years later, and by critics who would doubtless have earned very little gratitude from him had they been his contemporaries! If the continuing critical fascination with it is anything to go by, it can be said that Rajwade's edition of his Dnyaneswari in 1909 based on that misbegotten MS retains its sheen to this day. The pellucid strokes of the Rajwade-prata (as it is more widely known) make up a ghosted palimpsest, like a photograph none the worse for a negative unaccount­ably lost. Nor has the stature of his edition been necessarily displaced by the offi?ial (Maharashtra State-sanctioned) corrected edition of his text, published amId great fanfare in 1960. In disputing a number of the decisions taken in the 1960 edition, the distinguished edition of the Dnyaneswari by Arvind Mangru­lakar and Vinayak Moreshwar Kelkar (Dnyandevi 1994), has restored Rajwade's text to the eminencc that it deserves. My forthcoming translation and commentary on this text uses Rajwade's edition as its point of departure.

3 Refences to Rajwade's Collected Works (Rajwade 1995-8) will be denoted by "CW" followed by volume and page number.

4 I am grateful to the Marathi playwright, Sinologist and Marxist critic G. P. Desh­pande for the suggestion that the Varkari tradition is a unique instance of this coming together of elite and subaltern (personal communication).

5 In ,attempting to translate this and other passages from the lJnyaneslVari, I have rehed on the vast archive of secondary material on the text. In the interests of economy I wil1 defer a discussion of that material here. The edition of the text I have used in this paper is Dnyaneswari (1909). References to this text will be

192 Notcs

denoted here by the title of the work, followed by canto and page number. I should add that my translations teng to emphasize the verbal movemcnt of Dnyaneswara '5

thinking; my scruple is to avoid abstract, substantializing words that merely freeze concepts. Conventional translations of this text abound in such "metaphysical" terms as "the Universal," "the One," the "All-knowing," etc.

6 The edition I have used here is J. A. B. van Builenen (1981). See especially §3 and §4, pp. 81--9.

7 Sankalpa, which brings together the prefix sam and the verbal root klrp, implics "what one brings together, i.e. mana-buddhi-chitta-ahamkara" so as to deter­milll.'dly "take-to" the world_

8 lowe this point to Madhukar Vasudev Dhond (1991: 35). For the rendering of samarasa as "fluidly cquilibriate," I am indebted to David Gordon White (1996: 218).

9 See Rajwade's essay on "Ramdas," published in hisjoufllal, Granthmala, around 1906 (the exact date is unavailable), and republished in the RaJwade Lekhasallg­raha (Rajwade 1967: 229 65). The discussion of Hegcl in tllis essay occurs in two scctions entitled "Hegel's Philosophy of History," 257 <149. and "A Comparison belweenllegersand Ramdas's Ideas," 258 -60.

10 Gopal Guru used the phrase "hegemony over the social" in an oral presentation of his paper, "Theoretical Brahmins, Empirical Oalits," at the Southern Asian Institute, Columbia lIniVl..'fsity. New York in March 2000.

7 The suspension of iconoclasm

In his edition of the Jayasi Granthavali, Shukla admired Jayasi for not "furthering the envy and insolcnce which leads an interior caste [nimna Jatl1 to mock and criticize what is customarily treated with respect" and (the reference again is clearly to Kabir) "to attempt to found a separate sect [religion, panfhJ." This is to say, in contrast to Kabir, whose "mystical bent and tendency to seek and find God insidc himself cannot cohere with the way in India." Aftcr aI!, "because of the prestige of the idea of avatars, the traditional Indian bhakt seeks his deity as established within the world, not in the solitary region of his heart." Now Jayasi does seem (to Shukla) to possess at least in some measure the qualities of a "beautiful and picturesque nondualist [advaitl mysticism," largely due to his explicit embrace of affectivity (bhavukta). The fact is that (for Shukla) the elabor­ation of nature in Jayasi's poetic craft is much greater than that in Kabir: "Jayasi was a poet and an Indian poet at that. Indian poets, in comparison to their Persi­anate counterparts, tend to range more widely in the direction of natural things and processes, and to inspect more closely their affecting forms." In this way Jayasi is "able to give us somc sense of that mystical order of things (rahasyamayi salla) by using scene-signs, narratological billboards [drishya-sanketJ that tcnd to be 'both picturesque and affecting:" Kabir's "pictures [chitra] (imagery)," on the other hand, "lack such a variety of forms [anekruptaJ and such tenderness [mad­hurtal." (All citations from Shukla in this note are taken from Dhannvir (1997: 65-72J.)

2 See Pierre Iladol's seminal account of Plotinus (iladot 1993). My understanding of Plato's Tim(lellS is informed by Jacques Oerrida's On the Name (Derrida 1995); and in crucial ways by John Sallis, Chorology (SalliS 1999)_

3 Sec Lorenzen 1981; 1987; 1995; 1996. 4 The standard text for the "Western Recension" of Kabir is now Charlotte Vaude­

ville's Kabir- Van; (Vaudeville 1982). Vaudeville's text brings together the sectarian recensions gleaned from the Oadu Panthi (founded by Dadu Dayal (1554-1603]) and Niranjani sects in Rajasthan and the Sikh Panth (the Guru Granth) in Punjab. The Rajasthani (exts were first put together by Shyam Sundar Oas, a leading t lindi

T Notes 193

activist of the Nagaripracharini Sabha and the critic Ramehandra Shukla's men­tor, collaborator on the first Hindi lexicon, the Sabha's KoslI, and colleague at the first Hindi department at Banares Hindu University in the I 920s. Das's edition, known as the Kabir Gran/havafi (Oas 1928), has been the canonical text of Kabir in Hindi departments to this day. The standard text for the "Eastern" or Kabir Panthi recension, compiled in eastern Uttar Pradesh andlor Bihar in the late nine­teenth century is Kabir Bijak, Shukdev Singh ed. (Singh 1972). See the English translation by Linda Hess, The Bijak of Kabir (Hess! 983). Large sections of these "sectarian" recensions are now considered by philologists to be "spurious" (inau­thentically Kabir's). In the second edition of her translation of the Western Recen­sion, after a reappraisal of the original manuscripts, Vaudeville has drastically reduced the number of poems attributed to Kabir (see Vaudeville (993). For the reading of Kabir attempted here I rely on the excellent collation of thc Kabir manuscripts put together by Winand M. Callewacrt in collaboration with Swapna Sharma and Dieter Taillieu in The Millenium Kabir J1mi: A Collection of Pad-s (Callewaert 2000). For an informative discussion of the current scholarly COll­sensus with regard to the Kabir corpus., see Vinay Oharwadker's "Introduction: Kabir, his Poetry and his World" to his book of Kabir translations, Kabir: The Weaver's Songs (Dharwadkar 2003: 1-96). Oharwadker's argument has the inestimable merit of having taken into account the recent lindings or scholars working on the origins of the central text of the Sikh canon, the Guru Grandi Sahib. The Kabir poems in the Gramh have been translated by Nirmal Uass as Songs of Kabir from The Adi Gran/II (Oass 1991). Dass's rendition is so astute and profound that doingjustice to it would require another chapter in itself

5 Patin 289 in Callewaert et af. (2000), which is Pada 7 in the Govindval POlhis (Mohan Pothi) of 1570--2, and Pada 1349: I in the Adi Granth of 1604. Any stu­dent of this early set of poems will be in debt to Gurinder Singh Mann, The Govindval Pothis: The Earliest Hxtant Source of the Sikh Canoll.

6 "The Yogis called the 'living dead' Uivallmukta) the ascetic who had succeeded in 'conquering the mind' and thus freeing himself from his empirical self. Kabir borrows this idea of the 'living dead' from them and applies it to the mystic engaged in the Way of Love, who has sacrificed his earthly life. But this "death, is. in reality, the condition for the true 'life' in God; 'If I burn the house, it is saved, if I preserve it, it is lost) Behold an astonishing thing: he who is dead triumphs over Death!! Death after death, the world dies, but no one kuows how to die,/ Kabir, no one knows how to die so that he will no longer die.' The astonishing sYJlthesis of mch disparate elements shows the originality of Kabir" (200).

8 Miracle and violence

F-or the lines cited in the next para, sce 6: 25-6. 2 Although of course the reason lor his wanting to intervene in the world in this Wily

is irreducible either to will or necessity. 3 "Dulhanin gavahu mangalcarl ham ghari ho raja rani l!harlar;" sec Pm/II I Vaude­

ville, Kabir-vani (Vaudeville 1982: 107). 4 This entire section on violence, and my understanding of Mauss's hook on

magic, bears the mark of the mature and insightful analyses in Naming Ihe Wi/I'h (Siegel 2006).

5 See abhangas 92, 190, 2820, and 4299 in 7i1karambavancyo Ablumganci Gil/lUI (Tukaram 1973).

194 Notes

9 Deity and dahat: fhe antiquity of light in Tukaram

I "Re/eve" is Derrida's renaering of Hegel's "Aufhebung" in French; for Derrida's usage, see the translator's footnote to Derrida's essay, "Differance" (Derrida 1982: 19-20). What is crucial is the asymmetry between the movement of negation and the movement of conservation implicit in Aufhebung; conventional English render­ings of the term as "supercession" or "sublation" do not quite capture the itinerary of the trace of the trace. Unnayana, Aufhebung and reIeI'e all point to that which is lost or pushed away and preserved as a trace in the movement of "raising up. ,.

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Index

adbhut. fantllstic 128 -30 AggarwaL P. 189 agoraphobia 159 allegorical invo[utioll lSI anonymity, structure of the providential

131 Auerbach. E. 149

Balagangadhara. S. N. 20 Barthwal. P. 189 Bedckar, D. K. 171 Benjamin, W. 28,188 Bhagwat, D. 39, 176 Bopp, F. 96

CalleWilcrl, W. e/ at 188, [93 Callewaert, W. and Lath. M 164 Cappeller, K, 190 caritm. character II. 71 J (see also

svahhavik) Chakrabarty, D. :W Chatterjee. P. 5 Chitrc. D. 174,177-9 coexistence of miracle and violence

160-3 counterclaim. gegellwllrf, notion in

Schelling 6 crilicism 41 eliSa, Nicholas of 14.21 CllSp. definition of :5

daht mode of time: immedi,lcy 6: existence 73; individuality 23: millennia] supplement 24

Dalmia. V. 40, 44. 189 Damlc, M. K. 104 Das, Babu S. S. 45 Dass, Nirmal 193 Deleury, G 172.180

Dcrrida.1. 17 18,192.194 Dhoud, M. V. 192 Dharmvir.Dr. 9.50 1.8291.189-90 Dllarwadkar. Y. 193 Dhere. R. C. 172 84 Dhvallyaloka 138 Digby. S. 136 Dirks. N. 76.191 Dllyancswara 94 DnymlCswari 107 9,116 19.147-53.

191 J)umonl, L. 60

Eknatl1 96 cquiprimordiality 10 ethicizafion 14-15.106

Foucault. M., notion of care of the soul 26

Gita 112 -13 Gonda.1. 106 gothi x: Guru. G 5,123.192

l-iacker.l~ \38--43 Hadot. P. 26, 192 Hardy, F. viii. 136 43 Heesterman.1. 60 Hegel. G W. F 23 Heidegger. M. 17 liennis, W, 18 Hess, L. vii, 132. 193 Hindu nationalism: ccumcnicism 13:

historicism 16 historian of the popular 41 history of the popular 40

Joshi. "Tarkatheerthu" L. S. 191

102 Index

Kabir: palama in 26; sanka 134; idea of freedom 162; living death 135,155--RR

Kant, I 137 Kapalika 12 Kaviraj, G. 145 Kaviraj, S. 160 Klein, M. [57 KollT, D. 95

Lessing, G. W. ix Levi nas, I I 5

Marcus, A. 26 Masuzawa, T. 20 Matilal, B. 96 Mauss, M. 193 Monier-Williams, M. 181 More, S. 174,175,177-9

Namdeva 164 Narsimha-avatar 80---1

Obeycsekere, G. 14

Padoux, A. 183 Pandey, G. 133,160,191 Panilli 95 Pischel, R. 103 Plato 130 Plotinus 120 poet-saint 34 Pollock, S. 7

prehistory 32, 56, 69 prem, wound of divine love R7 -90

"race" II radical evil 61 Risley, H. 76 Rosenzweig, E ix

sagun-nirguna distinction 79 -80 Sankara 138 seal or the poet 31 Siege[,J. T 159,193 Simmel, G. 129 Singh, S 193 skepticism 30,58 Sontheirncr, G.-D. 172 Spinoza ix Subrahmanyam, S. 93

Tagore, R. 47 Tulpule, S. G. 180; with Feldhaus

184

Varkaris 33-4, 109 van Buitenen, J. A. B. 185--6,192 Vaudeville,C 135,40,189 Visw<\llathall, G. 51,163

Williams, R. 172 White, Luise 25

Yates, Francis IX

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