Vivdhareshwar
The past is a site of learning for one culture. The relationship between truth and the past is anaphoric (literally referring back) and itihasa enacts that relationship. For another culture the past is a temporal entity, another country (as the phrase goes), whose “truths” historiography seeks to narrate to produce history. Comparative science of cultures, which investigates the role of itihasa in Indian culture and the role of history in Western culture, cannot possibly use historiography and history except as a social structure that needs to be conceptualized as a product of Christianity. The starting point is the way many westerners persistently noted the absence of history in India and criticized Indians for lacking a sense of history. The pattern here is the same as or analogous to the search for religion in India and the observation about the immorality of Indians. The former leads us to investigate the role of religion in Western culture and latter makes us interrogate the nature of the moral domain in the West. What is this history and why is to so important for the Christian West?
Without doubt Balu’s ICHR paper is a difficult one despite its deceptively lucid style of presentation. The issues are as deep as they come and the arguments subtle and in places perhaps elliptical, needing greater elaboration and explication. The major source of difficulty, the real stumbling block, however, may lie elsewhere. I think it has to do with the fact that historical consciousness is an important and particularly invidious component of colonial consciousness. I am wondering if it is due to historical consciousness that we (or at any rate I) found it difficult to get away from the idea that the past is in essence a temporal entity. So while it is undoubtedly true that the anaphoric kind of relationship between itihasa and adhyatma or past and truth needs a great deal more elaboration (what kind of relationship is that? Logical?Syntactical?Temporal? Or something entirely different from any of these), we need to undertake an analysis of the ways in which historical consciousness has become part of colonial consciousness.
These questions, ill-defined may be at the moment, indicate an area for comparative science of cultures to explore. Perhaps they will illuminate how history begins to destroy the past and perhaps more light will also be thrown on colonial consciousness in so far as historical consciousness is part of it. But a scouring of archives to write a social or intellectual history of the vacana period will not be part of the comparative science of cultures. Such an activity would in fact attest to historical/colonial consciousness. Why cannot we have both history and itihasa is, therefore, not even an issue for comparative science of cultures. It may appear shocking only because of the current configuration of disciplines in the universities everywhere in the world. But let’s remember that the comparative science of culture seeks to provide an alternative to western culture’s description of other cultures and itself and to its account of what it is to offer a description of other cultures. Once such an account begins to be hegemonic, the portrait of disciplines too will get radically redrawn. The core of the human sciences as they appear in the West will get reconceptualized. If the alternative description begins to give an account of history as a discipline and a social structure, the discipline’s self-description will appear in a different light. Let us take another example in order to appreciate why the move—which I had once called offering a meta-theory of western “theories”—is both necessary and feasible despite appearing counter-intuitive and shocking.
It may well be that the destruction of the past goes hand in hand with the destruction of experience, if indeed it is not the same process. The unease felt by this process must have registered at some level and in some form in Western thinking. It is one more strand for comparative science of cultures to pursue as it reflects on the framing effect of philosophy and history on our past and our experience.
Right now in Indian universities the humans sciences—history and philosophy, especially-- have no integrity, their existence justified bureaucratically rather than intellectually. As I said above, once comparative science of cultures becomes hegemonic—as a result of genuine cross-cultural collaboration—the disciplines in the human sciences will get radically redrawn.
The past is a site of learning for one culture. The relationship between truth and the past is anaphoric (literally referring back) and itihasa enacts that relationship. For another culture the past is a temporal entity, another country (as the phrase goes), whose “truths” historiography seeks to narrate to produce history. Comparative science of cultures, which investigates the role of itihasa in Indian culture and the role of history in Western culture, cannot possibly use historiography and history except as a social structure that needs to be conceptualized as a product of Christianity. The starting point is the way many westerners persistently noted the absence of history in India and criticized Indians for lacking a sense of history. The pattern here is the same as or analogous to the search for religion in India and the observation about the immorality of Indians. The former leads us to investigate the role of religion in Western culture and latter makes us interrogate the nature of the moral domain in the West. What is this history and why is to so important for the Christian West?
The historiographical space turns out to be a theological space, opened up to validate the story of Jesus’ Christ nature as a true story. Subsequently the space acquires many “theological” properties such as God’s plan, pattern, directionality, teleology, etc. Within the comparative science of cultures’ ambit, the only way to argue for historiography is to show that historiography does not inherit any property from theology and that it is indeed an intellectual discipline or resource that contributes to the project of comparative science of cultures. The latter is not interested in writing a history of (any aspect of) the West or of India. It has set itself the task of building a story of how a people come to be that people. But that’s a story of how a configuration of learning emerges, what loops that are set up between it and social structures and social organizations. There will thus be multiple contexts of investigations, new heuristics to be generated, place for ingenuity to be displayed in looking for evidences, since no data ever displays on its sleeve what it is an evidence for. There will be many dynamics to be accounted for, the emergence new domains to be explained. In the case of India, it will perhaps be even more complex, having to figure out a how a stable configuration of learning dealt with colonialism and is dealing with (the task of incorporating) a new configuration of learning. One example of what we need to understand here would be the dynamic of stories as a social structure when it meets the dynamic of theories. That is a cognitive task, requiring the engagement of our passion to know. There is not much point in asking whether comparative science of cultures allows for history of say Vijayanagar or for a biography of the mathematician Ramanujan (though we cannot rule out the possibility that some existing history of Vijayanagar or a biography of Ramanujan might actually provide evidence for some local theory within the comparative science of cultures, in the same way as many historiographical works have proved useful for the story that the Heathen narrates (potted history is the phrase used, I think, but obviously history there used not in the sense of historiography).
Historical Consciousness as a Component of Colonial Consciousness
Without doubt Balu’s ICHR paper is a difficult one despite its deceptively lucid style of presentation. The issues are as deep as they come and the arguments subtle and in places perhaps elliptical, needing greater elaboration and explication. The major source of difficulty, the real stumbling block, however, may lie elsewhere. I think it has to do with the fact that historical consciousness is an important and particularly invidious component of colonial consciousness. I am wondering if it is due to historical consciousness that we (or at any rate I) found it difficult to get away from the idea that the past is in essence a temporal entity. So while it is undoubtedly true that the anaphoric kind of relationship between itihasa and adhyatma or past and truth needs a great deal more elaboration (what kind of relationship is that? Logical?Syntactical?Temporal? Or something entirely different from any of these), we need to undertake an analysis of the ways in which historical consciousness has become part of colonial consciousness.
Perhaps related to the task of understanding how historical consciousness is a component of colonial consciousness is the question of how the search for historical truth or the transformation of the past into history creates the kind of problems that we have witnessed—Rama’s birthplace, Basaveshwara’s rebellion or his caste, or at a much larger and diffuse sense, Aryan invasion. Do the problems arise because of the establishment of “truths” or something else? How do the factoids—“Basava tore his sacred-thread”—by themselves create problems? What in the historical narratives has the potential to create problems? I suppose we need to understand in greater detail and depth the mechanism by which history destroys the past. Something that a contemporary skeptic about historical knowledge—Hayden White—says might be worth thinking about in this context. His general thesis is that all historical works at bottom rely on or presuppose a philosophy of history (in the theological sense). He also argues that when historical narratives emplot factoids (say chronicles), they necessarily moralize. Very quickly and crudely, is the historiographical space already a moralized space and that is the reason why collection of truths has the potential to create conflict and violence? But neither factoids or narrative as a device have anything to do with moralization. Where does moralization enter?
These questions, ill-defined may be at the moment, indicate an area for comparative science of cultures to explore. Perhaps they will illuminate how history begins to destroy the past and perhaps more light will also be thrown on colonial consciousness in so far as historical consciousness is part of it. But a scouring of archives to write a social or intellectual history of the vacana period will not be part of the comparative science of cultures. Such an activity would in fact attest to historical/colonial consciousness. Why cannot we have both history and itihasa is, therefore, not even an issue for comparative science of cultures. It may appear shocking only because of the current configuration of disciplines in the universities everywhere in the world. But let’s remember that the comparative science of culture seeks to provide an alternative to western culture’s description of other cultures and itself and to its account of what it is to offer a description of other cultures. Once such an account begins to be hegemonic, the portrait of disciplines too will get radically redrawn. The core of the human sciences as they appear in the West will get reconceptualized. If the alternative description begins to give an account of history as a discipline and a social structure, the discipline’s self-description will appear in a different light. Let us take another example in order to appreciate why the move—which I had once called offering a meta-theory of western “theories”—is both necessary and feasible despite appearing counter-intuitive and shocking.
Philosophy or Adhyatma?
Imagine another talk, this time to ICPR, entitled “What Do Indians Need? Philosophy orAdhyatma?” It would appear that all the branches of philosophy (except perhaps logic) deal with problems inherited from theology. If some of them appear transformed, it’s only because the new background (which derives from a pervasive scientism). Some essential qualifications need to be noted before we examine how the presence and practice of philosophy could be a problem. Unlike historical consciousness, which appears to have sunk roots in the Indian sensibility, philosophical structuring of Indian thought seems to be largely confined to the academic field, such as it is. The filtering of Indian intellectual traditions through the classificatory categories and problem field of western philosophy deforms our access to Indian thought (if we were taking the academic route). This filtering has close links with history to the extent it’s the western historiography of philosophy that influences the classification, thus feeding into and reinforcing the orientalist/indological enterprise of comparing Western theology/philosophy and Indian thought (for example, the study of Indian eschatology). There is yet another strand of Western philosophy that attempts explicitly to shape the historical consciousness, namely Hegelian Marxism. Whether through the scheme of dialectical/historical materialism or through transition and mode of production debates and discussion of class character of the state, history and historical consciousness take explicit philosophical form. Philosophy, then, plays an indirect role in re-elaborating the orientalist picture of Hinduism and its eschatology and spirituality. The separation of adhyatma as philosophy/theology from itihasa as mythology is due in part to philosophy.
It may well be that the destruction of the past goes hand in hand with the destruction of experience, if indeed it is not the same process. The unease felt by this process must have registered at some level and in some form in Western thinking. It is one more strand for comparative science of cultures to pursue as it reflects on the framing effect of philosophy and history on our past and our experience.
Right now in Indian universities the humans sciences—history and philosophy, especially-- have no integrity, their existence justified bureaucratically rather than intellectually. As I said above, once comparative science of cultures becomes hegemonic—as a result of genuine cross-cultural collaboration—the disciplines in the human sciences will get radically redrawn.
Past, Truth and Historical Consciousness