Original Publication: Quentin Skinner, ‘The Idea of a Cultural Lexicon’, Essays in Criticism 29, no. 3 (1979): 205–24, https://doi.org/10.1093/eic/XXIX.3.205.
Revised version summarised here: Quentin Skinner, ‘The Idea of a Cultural Lexicon’, in Visions of Politics: Regarding Method, vol. 1, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 158–74. Google Drive Link
Texts in monotype are notes that might be useful.
The essays concerns the use of and disagreements over what Skinner calls “appraisive terms”, i.e., terms which are socially/morally significant. The attempt is to analyse the manner in which, or more specifically the various levels at which, there can be disagreement over the use of these terms. Additionally, to examine how such disagreements illuminate the connection between the “language” or “words”, Skinner also speaks of “vocabulary”, that we deploy and (our perceptions of or attitudes towards) the “social world” or “reality” which these words describe or appraise.
I
“What can we hope to learn about the processes of social innovation and legitimation by studying the key words we use to construct and appraise the social world itself? This is the question I confront in the course of the present chapter.”
Skinner takes up this “vast and intractable” question by engaging Raymond Williams’ Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Williams’ Keywords was first published in 1976 which Skinner reviewed in his original essay of 1979. Skinner’s revised essay from Visions of Politics, vol. 1 (2002) takes into account the revisions Williams incorporated in his revised and extended second edition of 1983. I cull out all references to this text in this summary not because they are irrelevant but because they would make turn the summary into something much longer.
II
Now, it might be objected straightaway that we are worrying about the wrong unit of analysis. It might be said that the way in which we see, construct or appraise the social world are not mediated by “key words” that we use but by “concepts” we possess.
One might simply reply that to possess a concept is to know the meaning of a word. But this simple answer will not do. For in order for me to possess a concept, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for me to “understand the correct application of a corresponding term”. Firstly, assume that we are interested in knowing if John Milton took the concept of originality to be important for a poet. It seems he did, for he emphasises at the beginning of Paradise Lost (Book 1, lines 15–16) that his composition “pursues/Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme”. But note that Milton did not need the term “originality” — i.e., it is not necessary for Milton to understand and use the term “originality” — to convey the concept. Secondly, it is possible that “a whole community of language users may be capable of applying [such highly general terms as being or infinity] with perfect consistency” without there being a corresponding concept.
The relationship between words and concepts is difficult to capture. Nevertheless, we may say at least the following.
The surest sign that a group or society has entered into the self-conscious possession of a new concept is that a corresponding vocabulary will be developed, a vocabulary which can then be used to pick out and discuss the concept in question with consistency.
Of course, this involves generally “to understand the meaning of a corresponding term”. But this, as I have noted, is neither necessary nor sufficient.
III
“What exactly are we debating about a word when we find ourselves debating whether or not it ought to be applied as a description of a particular action or state of affairs?” We could be disagreeing about at least three different things.
First, it “is necessary in the first place to know the nature and range of the criteria in virtue of which the word or expression is standardly applied” (emphasis added). Take the appraisive term courageous. A good explanation of the term would include “the various criteria that serve to mark the word off from similar and contrasting adjectives, so providing it with its distinctive role in our language of social description and appraisal”. These criteria would include the following: “that the word can be used only in the context of voluntary actions; that the actor involved must have faced some danger; that they must have faced it with some consciousness of its nature; and that they must have faced it heedfully, with some sense of the probable consequences of undertaking the action involved”.
Second, it is necessary to know its range of reference. This is to say: to know “the nature of the circumstances in which the word can properly be used to designate particular actions or states of affairs”. Such knowledge will give one the skill to “pick out just those actions which are properly to be called courageous, and to discuss the sorts of circumstance in which we might wish to apply that particular description, or might wonder whether we ought to apply it rather than a different one”. So that if someone describes as courageous the fact of x facing a painful death cheerfully, it might be replied that the circumstance involved no danger and that it x might be said to have faced death with fortitude, not courageously. Indeed, if someone describes x stepping into the circus to deputise for the lion tamer as courageous, one could retort that such an action is heedless and ought rather to be describeed as reckless.
Here, Skinner speaks in passing of the first as sense and the second as reference (p. 162). The terms have an important and interesting history. Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), the German mathematician and logician, and among the most significant modern thinkers, made the famous distinction between “sense” (Sinn) and “reference” (Bedeutung) in an article in 1892 (“Über Sinn und Bedeutung”). Given the complexity involved in understanding these two rather technical terms and their connection to the word “meaning”, I avoid using them in the summary. For those interested, there are any number of books on Frege containing the words “sense” and “reference”.
But for appraisive terms, in addition to the set of criteria and the range of reference, we need a further element. One needs to know “what range of attitudes the term can standardly be used to express. For example, no one can be said to have grasped the correct application of the adjective courageous if they remain unaware of its standard use to commend, to express approval, and especially to express (and solicit) admiration for any action it is used to describe. To call an action courageous is not merely to describe it but to place it in a specific moral light. I can praise or rejoice at an action by calling it courageous, but I cannot condemn or sneer at it by describing it in this way.”
Now, we are in a position to answer the question raised at the start of this section. When we are disagreeing and debating about a word concerning whether it may or may not be used as the description of an action or a state of affairs, we might be disagreeing and debating at least one of three different things: (a) about the criteria for applying the word ; (b) about whether the criteria are present in the given circumstances, or; (c) about “what range of speech acts the word can be used to perform”.
When Skinner talks of “speech acts”, he is referring to and drawing upon J. L. Austin’s How to do Things with Words? (1962). Austin showed that “the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action — it is not normally thought of as just saying something”. To utter a sentence is also to do something, to act; hence, speech-act. Austin uses the term performative sentence (pp. 6–7). Sentences are not only, that is to say, used to describe or to assert but to do or perform certain things, such as to commend or to condemn (as we shall see in the rest of the summary) and any number of other things (as we shall see in the passage quoted just below). It is this performative aspect that Skinner wants to especially stress. For a great example of how emphasis on this aspect may illuminate a text, consider Skinner’s analysis of a famous passage from Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince.
If you turn to or if you remember Chapter 18 of The Prince, you will find Machiavelli arguing, in what is probably the best known observation in that well-known work, that the political leaders who aspire to fame and glory must learn to imitate la volpe ed il lione [the fox and the lion]. Now, how is that passage best interpreted? The usual answer is that Machiavelli is claiming, that’s to say he is affirming the belief, that success in politics depends on realistically recognising the unavoidibility of force and fraud. That unpacks the metaphor and states the belief. I certainly don’t want to deny that that appears to be what Machiavelli believed. What I want to ask is how adequately you can hope to interpret that passage if you approach it with that as your basic question in mind?
Machiavelli’s contention was afterall not launched into a cultural void; it was part of an extensive Renaissance literature of advice books for rulers in which everybody had agreed that glory is indeed the proper goal of princes and that the means to acquire glory is to cultivate the quality which was called in the Renaissance writing, virtus in the Latin, or la virtu in the Italian. And by the use of that term, they sought to denote not merely the moral and political virtues but also took virtus to be obviously the defining quality of the vir — the Latin for man [Latin of course less sexist than English has two words, does it not?, homo means man or woman, but vir means man by contrast with woman, source of the English word ‘virile’]. So the Rennaisance writers are making it a defining characteristic of successful leaders that they should possess distinctively manly qualities.
Machiavelli, by contrast, is telling that if you want to achieve glory as a ruler, you will have to cultivate beastly qualities; so manly–beastly, we are back in the metaphoricality of the passage. So, he is thus opposing, in the passage I have quoted, the hitherto undoubted humanist piety that qualities of manliness form part of the key to political success. He is thereby questioning the adequacy of humanist accounts of virtue, and he is redefining what it means to speak of virtue as the name of the attribute that brings princely glory.
Furthermore, he launched that critique into a culture in which, unquestionably the most widely known and read treatise on political leadership was Cicero’s De Officiis and there Cicero had laid it down, I quote — I am translating obviously — “There are two ways in which injustice may be done. Either by force or by fraud. Both methods are bestial and unworthy of mankind. Force, because it belongs to the lion. and fraud because it belongs to the cunning fox.” So, Machiavelli, in the passage I cited also turns out to be quoting Cicero; thereby reminding his readers of the most respected authority on the question of political virtue while at the same time, repudiating, and indeed you hear the tone now, ridiculing Cicero’s moral earnestness.
In what sense are these linguistic disagreements also disagreements about our social world itself?
As noted, we might be disagreeing about the relevant criteria for applying an appraisive term. This is both a linguistic as well as a social debate. Consider the instance of Marcel Duchamp who used to designate such familiar everyday objects such as coat-pegs and lavatory bowls as works of art and then have them exhibited in galleries. While some have lauded these as significant works of art in that they sharpened our awareness and appreciation of everyday objects, others protested that one cannot simply designate something “readymade” [Duchamp’s word] a work of art.
Marcel Duchamp, The Fountain (1917)
At the linguistic level, the disagreement is about whether a certain critierion — the exercise of skill — should be considered necessary for the application of a term of appraisal — a work of art. But at the social level, the disagreement is about what kinds of objects ought or ought not to be treated as having a rather elevated status and significance (as works of art are). What is interesting at this level is that “a term such as art gains its meaning from the place it occupies within an entire conceptual scheme”.
“To change the criteria for applying it will thus be to change a great deal else besides. Traditionally, the concept of art has been connected with an ideal of workmanship, has been opposed to the ‘merely useful’, has been employed as an antonym for nature, and so on. If we now endorse the suggestion that an objet trouvé or a manufactured article can count as a work of art, we at once sever all these and many other conceptual links. So an argument over the application of the term art is potentially nothing less than an argument over two rival … ways of approaching and dividing up a large tract of our cultural experience.”
V
Even if we agree about the criteria for applying a term, we might disagree that the circumstances in question do not yield those criteria. Such disagreement will, again, not merely be linguistic but also social. For what is being contended in effect might be that a refusal to apply the term in a certain situation may constitute an act of social insensitivity or a failure of social awareness.
Consider the contention that wives in ordinary middle-class families at the present time can properly be described as suffering exploitation, as being an exploited class. The social argument here would be that it should be obvious to all right thinking persons that the circumstances of contemporary family life are such that this strongly condemnatory term is appropriate term of appraisal. And if a person cannot see this, he is wilfully refusing to perceive the institution of the modern family in its true and baleful light.
This disagreement is not about the criteria relevant for the use of the term exploitation but about whether the circumstances fit those criteria. This is often confused by moral and political philosophers. Consider Stuart Hampshire’s imagined debate between a Marxist and a Liberal which he presents in Thought and Action (1959). Hampshire notes that the liberal will be likely to be ‘startled to find that actions of his, to which he had never thought to attach political significance, in his sense of “political”, are given a political significance’ by his Marxist opponent. That is to say, the disagreement, according to Hampshire, is about the criteria for using the term “political”. The liberal has a different sense of the political than the Marxist.
But this cannot be so. “It is not clear that the Marxist can even be said to be arguing with the liberal if he is simply content to point out that, as Hampshire puts it, he has a different concept of ‘the political’, with the result that he and the liberal are both confined to ‘the largely separated worlds of their thought’. It is even less clear, if this is all that the Marxist wishes to point out, why the liberal should feel in the least discomfited by the argument, given that it amounts to nothing more than a declaration of an intention to use a certain appraisive term in an idiosyncratic way.”
“If the Marxist is genuinely seeking to persuade the liberal to share or at least acknowledge some political insight, he needs in effect to make two points. One is that the term political can appropriately be applied to a range of actions where the liberal has never thought of applying it. But the other — which his application of the term challenges the liberal to admit — is that this is not in the least due to a disagreement about the meaning of the term, but rather to the fact that the liberal is a person of blinkered political sensitivity and awareness.”
This is important to stress because for such arguments (as those of the Marxist) to work, the appraisive words in question — in this case, the concept of the political — should be offered in virtue of their accepted sense as an apt way of describing situations which have not hitherto been described in such terms. If such an argument is successful, the result will be that the range of reference of that term will be expanded. New social perceptions will arise such that the the relevant appraisive terms will then be applied with unchanged meanings to new circumstances”. If such arguments fail, new meanings will arise.
For example, consider the appraisive term religious which emerged in the later sixteenth century as a means of commending merely diligent and punctilious forms of behaviour. The aim of the enterpreneurial/merchant class in advocating such a use was clearly to suggest that the ordinary criteria for applying the strongly commendatory term religious were reflected in such actions, and thus that the actions themselves should be seen essentially as acts of piety and not merely as instances of administrative competence.
For more on the history of the term “religious”, see “Moral Principles and Social Change” in Visions of Politics: Regarding Method, vol. 1, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 145–57, at 153–55. Skinner is drawing upon Max Weber’s Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (1904–05; firt translated into English in 1930 by Talcott Parsons as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism).
“This audacious move was partly successful, but only partly. The extent to which the proponents of commercial society may be said to have overreached themselves was eventually reflected in the emergence of a new meaning for the term religious — the meaning we still invoke when we say things like ‘I attend my departmental meetings religiously.’ It seems clear that the need for this new lexical entry originally arose out of the incapacity of many language users to see that the ordinary criteria for religious (including the notion of piety) were present in all the circumstances in which the term was beginning to be used.”
VI
Even if we agree about the criteria and the range of reference, we might still disagree about the nature and range of the speech acts that the term can be used to perform. Again the dispute will also be social in the sense that a group of language users may be open to the charge of having a mistaken or an undesirable social attitude.
Such disagreement can be of two general kinds. We might dissent from an orthodox social attitude by employing an appraisive term in such away that its standard use to perform a particular range of speech acts is weakened or even abolished. We might do this by dropping the term altogether from our evaluative vocabulary. Consider terms like gentleman (earlier used to commend) or native (increasingly seen as condescending). Or, we might continue to use the term of appraisal but make it contextually clear that the term is being used merely descriptively/neutrally. Consider terms such as black or queer which were earlier used with condescension and cutlure or civilisation which were earlier used to commend.
We can also dissent from orthodox social attitudes by seeking to the direction of the evaluation of the appraisive terms concerned. This can also be achieved in one of two ways. We might use a term normally used to condemn to actually commend. Consider the term myth. In a more confidently rationalist age, to describe an explanation as mythological was to dismiss it. But in recent times, the term has often been used to extol the mythological ‘version of reality’ as ‘truer’ and ‘deeper’ than more mundane accounts. Conversely, we might indicate our disapproval making it contextually clear that, although the term we are using is standardly employed to commend, we are employing it to condemn what is being described. Consider terms such as elite or liberal, erstwhile commendatory terms, which are increasingly used in certain quarters to denigrate.
VII
“I have now tried to furnish at least a preliminary response to the very large question I raised at the outset. I asked what kinds of knowledge and awareness we can hope to acquire about our social world through studying the vocabulary we use to describe and appraise it. I have answered that there are three main types of insight we can hope to achieve: insights into changing social beliefs and theories; into changing social perceptions and awareness; and into changing social values and attitudes.”
Having shown this, we can now face an even more difficult question. Are we now in a position to say anything about the nature of the role played by our appraisive vocabulary in the process (and hence the explanation) of social change? In otherwords, what is the connection between our appraisive vocabulary and social change?
“It must be a mistake to portray the relationship between our social vocabulary and our social world as a purely external and contingent one. It is true that our social practices help to bestow meaning on our social vocabulary. But it is equally true that our social vocabulary helps to constitute the character of those practices. To recognise the role of our evaluative language in helping to legitimate social action is to recognise the point at which our social vocabulary and our social fabric mutually prop each other up.”
Moreover, “to recover the nature of the normative vocabulary available to us for the description and appraisal of our conduct is at the same time to identify one of the constraints on our conduct itself. This in turn suggests that, if we wish to explain why social agents concentrate on certain courses of action while avoiding others, we are bound to make reference to the prevailing moral language of the society in which they are acting. This language, it now appears, will figure not as an epiphenomenon of their projects, but as one of the determinants of their behaviour.”
Sudipta Kaviraj, “Dark Genealogies: Ambedkar’s Struggle with Historical Past”, Distinguished Lecture Series, Delivered at the Sir C. V. Raman Auditorium, University of Hyderabad (5 April 2019).
Disclaimer
The section divisions and the notes in monotype are all mine. The transcript has not been vetted by the speaker. Readers must consult the lecture itself whenever in doubt.
I shall speak about a question that I find fascinating in the study of Indian thought: the question of history. Ambedkar has a distinctive place in this tradition precisely because, although the lack of historical records is a general problem for Indian history, the Dalit perspective that Ambedkar brings to it enters into very different kinds of questions about our relation to our past. What I shall talk about this evening is a bit unusual for my subject, political theory. In reading political theory we enter into a world primarily of augmentation, of clear statements, clarifications, counter-arguments, and conclusions. Today’s subject is more akin to the study of literature themes, of aesthetic judgment, and historical melancholia. Yet it is also about a major political theorist from modern India and about a major concern he carried throughout his life, a question that has a peculiar eruptive presence in his writings because it is a question that he cannot resolve and yet cannot abandon.
Looking at the paintings of artist, like let us say Caravaggio, we cannot avoid an overwhelming and looming sense of the darkness of his palette. The metaphysical darkness at the core of his world seems always trying to burst onto the canvas. We often have that sense in reading the work of poets that human existence is tinged with an indelible layer of melancholy, a predominant rasa that permeates not a single work but the totality of their production. Reading Ambedkar, one can feel the presence of a similar ineradicable tone of grief, a tone in both senses of the world: like an aural tone of music or a tone of color in painting. But because of some reason strongly related to the internal features of political theory as a genre of reflection, there is a strange obstruction in the path of expression of this grief. My paper seeks to understand the nature of this obstruction and its transcendence in Ambedkar’s long reflections, always interrupted and always resumed, on the elusive history of untouchability.
We cannot read political theory entirely divested of the techniques of reading literature. Though we always feel this is less important, all works of political theory are written in the philosopher Frege’s sense, in a particular tone. By preliminary distinction between sense and tone, Frege separated all questions not related to sense and quarantined them into a residual concept so that they did not intrude into his subsequent analysis of how language carried different meanings.[1] This distinction immediately opens up an interesting prospect for readings of political theory.
Frege speaks of the “colorings and shadings [Färbungen und Beleuchtungen] which poetic eloquence seeks to give to the sense”. See Gottlob Frege, “Sense and Reference” (originally published in 1892), The Philosophical Review 57, no. 3 (1948): 209–230, at 213. This is what Frege’s great interpreter, Michael Dummett describes as “tone” in Frege: Philosophy of Language (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), pp. 83–89. On Frege’s rather sparse discussion of the notion of “tone”, Dummett remarks: “The carelessness of Frege’s treatment of tone was due to his lack of interest in it: for him it is a very secondary feature of meaning” (p. 88).
Clearly, in addition to the readings we subject them to, texts of political theory could be read in terms of tone as well. When we read Hobbes and Locke, for instance, we encountered a clear tone distinction between Hobbes is defiantly provocative mocking tone against the dominant Christian ideas about the nature of man, the presence of God, the impact of religion on human life and Locke’s utterly different tone of acceptance of the deep reasonableness of Christian doctrines, like the world as a gift of God to all men in common, only to be entirely transcended by the powerful renunciation of a theory of unlimited accumulation of property in the next few pages of that chapter [Chapter 5 of Locke’s Second Treatise]. Tone is a perfectly possible subject of analysis in reading political theory and if we decide to supplement the reading of theoretical sense with the reading of linguistic tone, we can supplement our conventional reading by the techniques of the literary theory. In the case of Ambedkar and the kind of critical theory that he represents, an analysis of tone leads to more fundamental theoretical insights.
Among modern Indians, Ambedkar was undoubtedly a most skilful user of the liberal language of political thinking. What I mean by language here should be explicated more clearly. Language is not something that we use voluntarily and optionally when we are taking steps in a particular process of actual reasoning. Language in this sense refers to something more underlying and profound, something that both enables and limits our thought. It’s a fundamental way of conceiving of what the political world is really like what can be done to it and in what ways. Politics in Ambedkar’s world are dominated by at least three different languages.
First there is a fundamental distinction between a pre-modern and the modern language which are entirely asymmetric. A pre-modern language drawn from the concepts and arguments developed through which texts like the Arthaśāstra, the Manusmṛiti, the Śukranīti, the Kāmandakīya Nītisāra, etc., develop their thinking and their judgments is evidently inadequate, lacking in conceptual resources for thinking through the modern world. From Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, we are irrevocably in a world of modern thinking in which it’s perfectly possible for authors to adopt an anti-modernist stance but their intellectual tools are drawn all from modernist languages, not from the depleting vocabulary of pre-modern reflection because the nature of modern power is so profoundly different from the ontology of the political world about which they thought and offered judgments. That leaves us with the important linguistic universe which was the universe that Ambedkar made his own.
Specialists consider the Śukranīti to be quite a late production, composed as late as the 19th century. Lallanji Gopal concludes (consult his references as well) that:
The present Śukranīti was the work of a man of the nineteenth century who had a thorough knowledge of the regulations, administrative measures, and policies of the East India Company, especially those of the Bombay coast, and who was well-informed on Maratha history.
“The ‘Śukranīti’ — A Nineteenth Century Text”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 25, no. 1/3 (1962): 524–556, at 551.
To characterize an author like Ambedkar strictly, we have to discern the defining features of his thinking. First, it is entirely modern. Ambedkar was had a total irreverence towards the antiquity of his society, except Buddhism. He believed that there was little valuable, serviceable, or morally defensible in the heritage of Hindu thought. Inside the universe of modern politics, Ambedkar is clearly in favor of the language of liberalism. That is the language of his unmistakable choice. That is the heritage that he draws upon and exalts in his polemics against nationalist doctrines that give priority to the political over social reform. That is the language that he wields to denounce the practices of caste in Hindu society. The language he uses masterfully in the detailed and constantly shifting context of constitutional deliberations. And the language he deploys with precision and foresight in the great opportunity he gets in shaping the Indian Constitution. His relation with Western liberalism however — I would be happy to have a discussion about this — is not quite straightforward. It required constant refinement and modification. But I am concerned with something that appears to me to be both more elusive and more profound in his thinking.
Ambedkar’s writing shows two types of affiliation to liberal thought. Like many of his contemporaries he was clearly attracted by the high rationalistic tradition of the Enlightenment emphasizing particularly two strands of thinking: of uncompromising rationalistic critique of religion and the high liberal fervor for the expansion of liberty. Ambedkar’s affiliation to the liberal language of political thought comes very early and is entirely decisive and irreversible. Ambedkar saw Indian Marxism as a form of thought entirely trapped in a Eurocentric obsession with economically defined class unable to recognize the obvious and profound form of inequality in their own society present in caste. Eventually Ambedkar became a real master of the theoretical language of liberalism. Dewey’s influence at Columbia seems to have been profound and methodologically critical because Dewey was an innovative thinker of liberal doctrine and applied it to new questions and fields of inquiry. For instance, Dewey was very interesting thinker about the connection between the liberal society and education. This seems to have shown Ambedkar that the meaning of being a good liberal was not an obstinate repetition of its catechisms but elaboration of his central moral principles towards new analytical domains. So he did for India what he thought Dewey was doing in the American context. He did more than anyone else to construct a radical form of liberal politics in the context of Indian political life.
For a valuable history and analysis of the intellectual connection between Dewey and Ambedkar, see Scott R. Stroud, The Evolution of Pragmatism in India: An Intellectual Biography of B. R. Ambedkar (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2023).
The question of Ambedkar’s relation not to the doctrine but to the language of socialism is however an interesting one. Liberalism is less outraged by inequality than socialism is and I believe that though doctrinally Ambedkar rejects Marxism there is a subterranean presence of language of outrage that draws from a socialist vocabulary and the socialist tone. That’s why, to my mind, the tone is very important. On one question, however, the two languages of liberalism and socialist thinking were fundamentally similar. Both languages of modern political thought emerge from a shared secular tradition but secularity works here in a peculiarly fundamental sense. In the great early modern thinkers like Hobbes, the business of politics in increasingly conceived as mundane in an intensified sense. Generally these thinkers did not question the existence of God or his perceptible presence in the world but it seemed clear to them that divine presence is not regarded as a reliable protection from the possible predations of the modern state. In a sense, the whole business of political theory and constitutionalism which was at the center of a Ambedkar’s thinking emerged from this gap, absence, or flaw, in the world’s mundane arrangements to secure political justice. To find protection against a state turned hostile, the presence of a hidden God was not reliable remedy.
As a modernist, Ambedkar assumes that rules of morality must be marked by a form of what can be called Kantian universalism: a tenet that is good for one person must be good for all. Otherwise, it did not qualify as a moral rule. Drawing on this line of thought, he could argue that the detailed instructions of differential punishments, for instance, in the Manusmṛiti was a travesty of the very conception of a moral rule. The Manusmṛiti, in particular, was outrageous not because its rules were degrading and discretely indefensible but because it was premised on a monstrous misconception about the nature of morality itself. He could have gone forward and claimed, alongside his startling claim that Hinduism did not constitute a society, that Hindu texts of this kind also did not have a conception of morality.
It is often noted that philosophical materialism leads to a kind of experimental-experiential presentism. Since what is happening to us in the present moment has an immediate effect on us in all senses materially and intellectually, it gets a natural preponderance in our attention. Abstractly, the past and the future might be an equally significant part of time conceived in the abstract sense. But in this sense they’re less materially present than the time of the present. If we can notice this uneven emphasis on different segments of time — past, present, and future — we could say that we can detect an underlying latent structure of temporality in every kind of political theory about how the treat past present and future differentially. I am using temporality in a special narrow meaning. Temporality in my use in not just a fancier name for time but the way time, which is necessarily abstract, is given a structure something akin to a shape by stressing some of its parts at the expense of others. It will be seen in that modern political theory and both its dominant forms of liberalism and Marxism are futuristic in a rather narrow sense. In the sense that because the present is still happening and the future is yet to happen, the political activity of seeking justice and social equality must be oriented towards these two segments of time, particularly the present.
At times, this bias in favor of present experience and materiality, this prejudice in favor of the simple existence itself, seem to have troubling consequences in liberal judicial rules. I’ll give you a notorious English example. Two young boys of 10 and 12 bludgeoned a toddler to death. In their trial and afterwards, the entire orientation of the judicial process seems to be to ensure that the perpetrators, these two boys who killed the toddler, were treated with the care we owe to children, hastening their rehabilitation as moral persons so that they can enjoy a successful human life when they come out of prison. The mother of the toddler agitated against the entire procedure because she thought that the justice for her child, who was also a moral person, is sacrificed. But the argument goes down to a brutal rock-bottom where the basic point of persuasion is that the lives of the two perpetrators are still existent in the present and possibly in the future while the life of the toddler unfortunately is impossible to continue. Therefore, there cannot be a reasonable extension of moral considerations of care towards him as he is now incapable of being cared for.
An argument that is at bottom very similar would be advanced by both liberals and socialists here implicitly regarding questions like instances of atrocities in the long irrevocable past. Both theories would, according to their lights and to their respective principles, demand the politics of justice for groups who are wronged. Liberal theory would recommend social initiatives and state action to counteract practices of social injustice like caste and socialists would invoke them to counteract poverty but both types of social theories are secular and materialistic in this common sense. That they would strain every nerve to eradicate such practices. Think of slavery in the modern West and the continuing degradation and denial of equal rights to people of color and women in the West. Liberal and socialist theory carried on the real moral crusades against these social wrongs, eventually to some success.
Yet these theories are indifferent towards the past. At most, they might regard the evidence of the past subjection of groups to inegalitarian atrocity as a deplorable aspect of the societies history but eventually they have a deep active orientation towards society. Their central question, after after the necessary work of moral judgment is concluded is, what can be done now, what can we do to right these wrongs. The trouble with history is the irreversible inaccessibility of the past to present action and the fact that, because of that pastness, somehow the crucial phrase “what can we do about it” becomes another inoperative and ineffectual. Action is rendered impossible simply by the obstructing tense of the case. Action is barred, deflected. The demand for action rebounds in a sense from the temporal surface of the historical past. The eventual attitude of futuristic future-oriented and action-oriented theories is to accept silence. This was true of social theory in Ambedkar’s time, though, in recent times, new speculation has begun on some of these questions.
A reading of Ambedkar immediately reveals two things. Ambedkar’s fluent and mastery of the language of liberalism as I said but also his deep melancholy at the idea which that language seems to force upon us, that which will necessarily accept the silence that I considered just now. Consider three of his texts which circle backing explicitly to this question of origin and the injustice of this silence. The first is probably the most academic piece “Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis, and Development” — I would want you to look at it literally because every word has a weight: their Mechanism, Genesis, and Development — presented for the ethnology seminar at Columbia with Alexander Goldenweiser in 1916, later published in Indian Antiquity in 1917.
Twenty years later, he wrote the Annihilation of Caste as a lecture to be delivered at the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal reform organization which demanded in treating and dropping some passages they found unacceptably radical making him refuse their invitation. But precisely for it is uncompromisingness that issue remains a major statement of Ambedkar thinking. In 1946, he published Who Were the Shudras? which was linked to the extension of this historical inquiry into the further question about origins of untouchability published after independence in 1948 [The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables?]. So what I shall do is I have a very long paper in which I go into all these different texts in great detail. I don’t have time to go into all that so I’ll simply give you the example of the first text and then go on to make the other more theoretical remarks.
In the introduction to his to this essay there is a subtle insertion of a move that marks a departure from the accepted methods of the discipline he was studying at Columbia. I quote Ambedkar:
In my opinion a student of Ethnology, in one sense at least, is much like the guide [to a historical site like Pompeii]. Like his prototype, he holds up (perhaps with more seriousness and desire of self-instruction) the social institutions to view, with all the objectiveness humanly possible, and inquires into their origin and function.
[B. R. Ambedkar, “Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development”, Indian Antiquary 46 (1917): 81–95, at 81 (hereafter cited in text).]
The sentence seems some unremarkable yet it contains a surplus or supplementary question that was entirely outside the normal science methods of anthropology of his time. To understand how a social institution works, of course, scholars must grasp how its constituent elements actually function and explore, if possible, how its way of functioning came into existence. So there are two questions: one is the question of functioning and the other one is the origin of that functioning at some point in history. We must remind ourselves that when he was writing this paper, Ambedkar had been studying anthropology in Columbia, one of the premier institutions in this field at the time, for three years presumably absorbing the methodology that demarcates this field off from two neighboring disciplines which also studies human societies and their institutions, the conventional discipline of history and the more recent one of sociology.
At their origin disciplines tend to be particularly sensitive and insistent about their methods because because these precisely separate them off from other competing ones. Why did academic knowledge need a discipline called ethnography or anthropology when it already had these two others? The answer has to be methodological. Ambedkar himself notes without expressing any discomfort that the seminar was concerned with the fundamental distinction between “primitive” and “modern” societies and it was now his turn to “entertain” his coparticipants with the paper which showed the mechanism, genesis and development of castes in India. Yet, the primitiveness of societies which ethnography dealt with was of a special kind, precisely the kind of society which had continued for long spans of time yet which did not have reliable records of how this time was spent: societies that were record less, “without history”, and consequently, in these societies, the primitiveness had to be read off from a kind of timeless, that is time-suppressing, present. “Primitive” is a technical term of methodological art. “Primitive” is not equivalent to “ancient”. The use of the term “ancient” implies that it’s a state that they left behind followed by something else which acts as a foil to give the term “ancient” its precise semantic content. History deals with ancient societies; ethnology has to resolve the puzzle of primitiveness.
Anthropologists did not produce history; they produce an alternate for historical knowledge by showing how these societies had a structure, how exactly its parts were linked to each other, and how these were functionally connected — a method which would be called structural functionalism later on. This was, of course, the privileged method for studying the working of societies which were presumably primitive but whose lack of history deflected the historical question. They lived in an unhistorical time, lapse of time without evidence of change. The self knowledge of these societies had a surface or character from which historical questions such as “when”, “why” and “how” bounced off without bite. Techniques of history did not have materials they could grasp. Therefore these had to be subjected to the methodologies of a freshly-minted discipline. History and anthropology did not compete or intersect in their epistemic fields or their cognitive methods. They did quite different things. For a student who had studied under under the discipline of Franz Boas — because Goldenweiser was a student of Boas in one of the first departments of anthropology — this move was not part of normal science.
On the connection between Ambedkar and Boas, see Jesús Francisco Cháirez-Garza, “B.R. Ambedkar, Franz Boas and the Rejection of Racial Theories of Untouchability”, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 41, no. 2 (3 April 2018): 281–96.
The paper’s actual analysis first addresses the question of mechanism: how the institution functions in the strong and peculiar sense that the discipline of anthropology was conferring on this verb. After critically assessing several authors who sought to define caste by some special defining characteristic, Ambedkar follows the work of Dr. Ketkar who is, in his words, “both a native and has an open mind” to make two arguments (Ambedkar 1917, p. 81). The first, which is remarkable at this very early stage of anthropology, is his conviction that trying to define caste by some special feature or a single principle is inadequate. Caste is a structural fact. What creates caste, to deploy much later terminology, is the dominance of a structure. As you know, this is a term I take from Louis Althusser. He also makes a second argument which partly chimes with the insight of the structural character of the caste order. Caste depends on endogamy and endogamy is the only characteristic that is peculiar to caste. But this is followed by an odd methodological claim and I quote him, “if we succeed in showing how endogamy is maintained, we shall practically have proved the genesis and also the mechanism of caste” (Ambedkar 1917, p. 84).
Ambedkar recognises that there are great many pitfalls in the paths of those who try to unfold the past and caste in India to be sure is a very ancient institution. This is especially true where there exists no authentic or written records or where the people like the Hindus are so constituted that, to them, writing history is a folly for the world for the world is an illusion. But the methodological technique to use in case of such obdurately ahistorical cultures to is to import the scientific techniques of paleontology. I quote him:
As often as not, customs and morals are like fossils that tell their own stories. (Ambedkar 1917, p. 97)
Although Ambedkar doesn’t use the word “paleontology” in this early essay, he explicitly uses the term in The Untouchables (1948, p. vii).
The task is one of gathering survivals of the past, placing them together and making them tell the story of their birth. The task is analogous to that of the archaeologist who constructs a city from broken stones or of the palaeontologist who conceives an extinct animal from scattered bones and teeth or of a painter who reads the lines of the horizon and the smallest vestiges on the slopes of the hill to make up a scene. In this sense the book is a work of art even more than of history. The origin of Untouchability lies buried in a dead past which nobody knows. To make it alive is like an attempt is to reclaim to history a city which has been dead since ages past and present it as it was in its original condition.
He notes that that the question of origin is always an annoying question and in case of caste, this question had been sadly neglected. Later, Ambedkar clear sightedly acknowledges the limits of the historical explanation. He wants to elucidate the mystery of the growth and development of caste.
Unfortunately, a direct answer to this question is not within my power I can only answer it indirectly. (Ambedkar 1917, p. 89)
The indirect answer he gives to this question again comes in two parts. Discounting the great man theory of history which would attribute an act of a Solonian inscription to the edicts of Manu, he concludes that the spread and growth of the caste system is too gigantic a task to be achieved by the power or cunning of an individual or a class. Rather, the task of anthropology is to show the falsity of the attitude that has exalted religious sanction to the position of scientific explanation. Simply describing the śāstric injunctions of the modality does not constitute an explanation of the caste system, simply a demonstration of the availability of recondite justifications from the brahmins. Brahmins in order to ensure purity of blood at some point institute endogamy within themselves sealing the boundary between themselves in the rest of society.
Subsequently following the Tardian an example principle of hierarchy — I think he was familiar with Gabriel Tarde because he was a major French sociologist of his time — that is the emulation of the customs of superior groups by their inferiors in a social scale, other castes imitatively adopt endogamy generating the familiar system of a completely impermeable system of social differences. [Ambedkar (1917, p. 92) actually quotes Tarde’s Laws of Imitation (originally Les lois de l’imitation, 1890).] Interestingly, despite its intellectual sophistication, the paper used the methodological techniques of early stage structuralist anthropology which can and does address only the question of mechanism. Ambedkar’s search for history in a sense fails. The question of genesis is turned from a historical question of origins to a structural elaboration of functions. Fails not in the sense that Ambedkar fails, it actually shows that it is a question to which it’s very difficult to find an answer in principle. The question of how caste originated remains unanswered in the early academic writing.
When we go through Ambedkar’s repetitive forays into the past, we detect an iterative structure: iterative in the sense that he comes back again and again. For any historical event or institution which is the fact of a different kind, the question of origin when and how did it come about is an entirely legitimate one. The discipline of history has the specialized task of answering questions of this kind reliably with the evidence from its archives. Of course there is no guarantee that all historical questions can be satisfactorily answered according to the standards of epistemic validation. When intellectuals begin to think about the past, there are many significant occasions when though the question is paramount for some historiographic need, an answer does not seem to appear to be possible. That is the reason for the iterative constantly repeated attempts by the same author to try something different from the arguments deployed earlier. These are questions that the author cannot answer but also cannot let go.
I want to turn now to some consideration of this question. As positivist history advanced and its methodological structures and rules were explored and elaborated, it became clear that the cognition or exploration of the past was an internally heterogeneous activity. Many different methodologically distinct cognitive projects were subsumed under general appellation of history. Positivist historical science of 19th century sought to deduce the cluster of these diverse approaches to the past and reserve the title history only to the modern enterprise of knowing the past with clarity and accuracy with the help of specific types of evidentiary rigor. Alongside the demand for accuracy and chronological precision, additional methodological requirements were announced. The use of any method implied the separation between subjectivity of the enquirer and the abstract truth of the cognitive process. Following a specified method ensured that different knowing subjects could fit into the cognitive subject positions and carry on the enterprise uncontaminated by the conditions of individuality and space-time variability.
Nietzsche’s philosophical speculations disturbed the symmetries of this early methodological orthodoxy of positivist history. And not surprisingly much of the recent questioning of history and methods has been carried on under Nietzsche’s banner. To carry the argument forward, I want to use an argument related to Nietzsche — it doesn’t come from Nietzsche himself. This is about genealogy.
In his well-known late work Truth and Truthfulness [2002, Princeton University Press], the analytic philosopher Bernard Williams made a bold suggestion about the meaning of genealogy. Williams’ discussion of the concept is linked to a reading of Nietzsche that I do not find in entirelly textually persuasive. So my point is not that Williams’ reading of Nietzsche is right but what I am saying is that what Williams then says about the content of the term genealogy I find very evocative and helpful for understanding a whole lot of context. He evidently thought that this is what Nietzsche meant by the use of the term. By genealogy, Williams thought, Nietzsche meant a question that bears a logically historical form which is highly significant for some people for understanding something crucial about themselves but which could not be answered by accepted techniques of historical inquiry. This description should be seen to be fairly similar to what I have described as Ambedkar’s puzzle about the past.
Interestingly Williams does not treat this mode of thinking as a failed historical enterprise, as history that has gone wrong or wavered and inquiries that began as a historical understanding but lost its way and ended up elsewhere at an unexpected and inappropriate cognitive destination. To Williams, it’s a separate kind of cognitive enterprise. He treats this as a form of thinking used by thinkers who have an insistent past related question for resolving which cognitive resources of conventional positivist history are not sufficient. That he takes this kind of thinking seriously is attested by the illustration he offers for this mode of thought. As an example of such genealogical thinking, Williams offers one of the most influential figures of thought in the tradition of western political theory, the idea of the state of nature and social contract.
At the time of the rise of the modern state, Western political theories face two related questions. The first was a generalized historical puzzle: how did we get here in the Western modern societies to this particular condition. The second was related but narrower question: how did the state come to be or how did it emerge in history. To none of these questions did Western political theory as a philosophical discipline offer a credible historical answer. The great answer provided to this question, which we have all read in the endless in a reading of political theory, which were both historically significant and intellectually fascinating was through a fable of a social contract. The question was how did something like the modern state so vital to social functioning and political experience of human beings come into existence.
A historical answer in the positivist sense would have patiently tracked the prior stages of time through the feudal state towards Roman and Greek antiquity and if possible beyond. In fact, the “answer” supplied by contract theory followed an entirely different methodological procedure. Clearly, this was not an historical answer by any definition. However, this answer remains plausible because of the ambiguity of the original question: how did this come to be, how is it possible. Because ambiguous, this question could be first interpreted in two ways and then answered. The first reading of the question is historical: what are the concrete events and stages to which the state of affairs came to exist in the world. But a second interpretation of the question admits of another kind of construction. The group that asks this question must find a way of giving it an answer that makes sense and so produces an interpretation of its own present condition.
The fable of the state of nature from which humanity emerged through a contract was a para history which showed how this state emerged with the additional advantage that it showed its development process in a way that made a constitutional agreement with state or royal power possible and necessary. This was a substitute for history or para history that the liberal constitutionalist line of thinking gave to itself to justify its future condition as the liberal state. I think Ambedkar’s reflections on the origins and history of untouchability are in some ways similar. It is easy to see that at every stage Ambedkar asks a question that is historical: how did untouchability as a social institution come into existence. But it becomes clear as well that the historical path to answering this question is obstructed. Ambedkar himself constantly laments the lack of record and archive that makes it possible to give it a truly reliable answer, the only kind of answer that history admits.
But from acknowledging this impulse, we as readers of social history can follow to interpretive options. The first would view some of Ambedkar’s surmises as unsuccessful history, as historical hypotheses, that lacked the evidence to bear them out. The second, which is often suggested in a postmodern embrace of uncertainty, is to suggest that history is given by different groups to themselves, that all history is similar irrespective of evidentiary support, and that this is their history because this is the history that values Dalits give to themselves. I want to avoid this second line. First, because it undermines one of the basic defining features of the historical enterprise in spite of all its admitted imperfections and limitations. Secondly, this is also subtly patronizing: it is a condescending idea that although this would not qualify as the history of other groups, this will do for lower castes or untouchable. Treating these as genealogy in this sense helps avoid these two positions. Possibly because Ambedkar was a student of political theory, above all, this kind of reasoning was familiar to him. When the path to direct evidentiary history was obstructed, he took recourse to this alternative route.
Ambedkar discusses Nietzsche in a number of places, but especially in essays like “Philosophy of Hinduism” and “The Hindu Social Order: Its Unique Features” in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, vol. 3 (Bombay: Govt. of Maharashtra, 1987).
I wish to end by raising another theme in this study of Ambedkar thought. Returning to the theme of historical melancholia, I’ll try to show how as the leading interpreter of Dalit experience in his time Ambedkar wanted to transcend the futuristic limitation of liberal and Marxist thinking. Despite a temporal positioning or orientation that instructed him to look at the present closely and keep his face turned firmly toward the future, he turned often disconsolate with an ineffable sadness towards the past. That is what these genealogical fragments in his writing inserted in the middle of structural sociology or constitutional theorizing are doing. He cannot help but turn back and face the past although it is clear, he knows, that this is not his task at hand at that moment.
One could argue that this is strange out of step moves for someone like Ambedkar. An obsessive fascination with the past is more understandable when it is nostalgia. I want to make this point precisely because you know this is not nostalgic in the technical sense. It is nostalgia when the writer believes, like Gandhi, that there is something of unsurpassable value in that past that was lost or is threatened with the loss forever. But Ambedkar’s relation to the past is in a precise sense totally antinostalgic. He is attracted to the past not because it contains something is something of a fading paradise. On the contrary, he is drawn to the past because it shrouds an unchronicled historical atrocity, hides a dark stain of suffering on a massive scale. This feeling of shock and wonder gives rise to what Indian aesthetic theory would call a camatkāra, a perception that produces dark and perverse wonder around the entirely legitimate question: how was this possible? Camatkāra can be propelled by sense of the rasa of bībhatsa. In a sense, this could be an appropriate and profound illustration of how the sentiment of jugupsā — repugnant, abhorrent or hateful — can create a deep and a binding wonderment in the reflecting human mind.
For a discussion of camatkāra, see David Shulman, “Notes on Camatkāra”, in Language, Ritual and Poetics in Ancient India and Iran: Studies in Honor of Shaul Migron, edited by David Shulman (Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 2010). For a general introduction to rasa, see Sheldon Pollock “Introduction: An Intellectual History of Rasa”, in A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics, translated and edited by Sheldon Pollock, Historical Sourcebooks in Classical Indian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). For a brief discussion of bībhatsa and jugupsā, see the entries in Maria Heim, Words for the Heart: A Treasury of Emotions from Classical India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022).
But again, I think we should subject this gesture despite his fragmentariness, to a serious theoretical analysis. That would reveal a line of reasoning that is hardly sentimental or vague or ambiguous. Rather it carries an intense emotion that pursues precisely and clearly defined cognitive object. Justice is the central value of all Ambedkar’s social thought. and justice in the wider sense involves a global accounting of all human experience. So, I emphasize global, global meaning not merely spatially but temporally global including all that belongs to the same category in past time. It is the search for justice that drives the powerful argumentation for inclusive nationalism, for constitutional representation, the purpose of deployment of the power of the state apparatus to end untouchability and discrimination.
But this global accounting of suffering frustratingly can apply only to the present and the future. Modern theory advises us not to feel sentimental about the past because there is simply nothing that can be done to redeem those lives. But in Ambedkar’s view, there is something deeply defeating and monstrous about this resolution to forget. History represents, in its ideal form, a global narrative of human experience. This will mean that there will be there will be forever a huge hole in the middle of the historical record of India. The suffering of human beings in the present might be eradicated which would mean that probably that would not exist in the future but there would remain the past in which the human suffering of untouchability was not only not eradicated but, in deeper travesty, not even remembered. The people of the present, Ambedkar fears, would wipe away the collective guilt of the society by a colossal act of forgetting in the name of the unavailability of historical record. Ambedkar treats this as a kind of false accounting. If that happens, history would precisely betray its promise. That is why, despite all the difficulties in the path of history, this record of suffering ought to be memorialised so that people whom he called the “broken men” are not treated to the ultimate insult or forgotten.
Political democracy bears the responsibility and a connection to history. The present must make a new accounting of the past from which silences and forgetting can be removed. So that at least, this forgetting is removed. Ambedkar’s writings in these passages are not failed history or history in a lower register, but a discourse that is not history but the lost genealogy of untouchability. It is history’s permanent neighbor and scourge which follows history like a shadow and reminds it constantly of the moral responsibility lying at the heart of its cognitive failures. Sometimes Ambedkar’s writing reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s. One connection is easy to grasp. Both Benjamin and Ambedkar, writing around the same time in two corners of the world were fascinated by the constitutive presence of structural violence in their social order, a violence so pervasive and unalterable that it did not have to be manifested in violent acts.
I want to draw your attention to a different aspect which I think is simpler and has not been very pronounced in Ambedkar writing, again I think because of his theoretical modernism. Benjamin and Ambedkar wrote about the experience of two human groups with the longest and in some ways the history of exclusion known to humanity yet Benjamin had a resource that Ambedkar did not. Once I taught a course on Benjamin with a very distinguished colleague at Columbia, Prof. Dan Miron, a great scholar of German and Jewish literature. Teaching a class on the Theses on the Philosophy of History [Über den Begriff der Geschichte or, literally, On the Concept of History] I wondered at the strange linguistic coloratura at play in the famous passage that describes the angel of history in Benjamin. Benjamin semantics imagination was playing around a rather small a typically enigmatic Paul Klee sketch which he had in his possession. I’ll read the passage from Benjamin. It’s a very famous passage which I’m sure most of you would have read it. I quote:
A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
[Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn, edited and introduced by Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), pp. 259–60.]
Benjamin discovered in the small and spare interior of that sketch an amazing meaningfulness. The angel had its wings spread out; it could not close its wings because the storm was long from paradise; it was looking in dismay at the debris of civilization collecting at his feet. I had for long loved that passage offering it an uncomprehending admiration; uncomprehending because I did not understand where the camatkāra of that passage was coming from. No ordinary Marxist could write that passage which evoked a storm from paradise, an angel with wings, its eyes gaping in wonder at the destruction of the world, and also his back turned towards history. Think of a Marxist who can write that without embarrassment! This is certainly not something many men got from the mandatory optimism of the Marxist tradition. Prof. Miron, who was teaching with me, solved the puzzle very easily. It was the language Benjamin received through the Jewish prophetic tradition.
For thousands of years, European Jews faced a long unceasing historical disaster. As the people of learning and subtle intelligence, they had stocked and refined their experience of suffering in a vocabulary of a prophetic language for which the world was always at the edge of an apocalyptic end. More than other Marxist, Benjamin became the witness to the end of the Western civilization in the 1930s and 40s precisely because of this precious unusual heritage, the legacy of a pre-modern deeply religious language which was familiar with the secrets of human suffering and saw suffering as the great thread running through human history. Modern languages with their compulsory optimism and futuristic orientation lack the capacity to express this melancholy; only a religious and aesthetic language code can do so. Although despised, marginalized, and forced to exist outside the village as outcasts — recognise the similarity between the Jews and the Dalits here — still the Jews had a treasure that was denied to the Indian untouchable. Jews may not have had an exact monopoly of the history of the persecution, but they had a literature, above all, a literature which captured the essence of the experience of history.
Denial of education was like a withdrawal of all but the most rudimentary speech. Ambedkar comes back to this again and again. The Dalits lost history from two sides. They had no place in the history that was ever written because they were not central to that history. But they did not have the resources to write their own in which there would have been at the center. That does not mean that there is no way of reconstructing the Dalit past. There is the work of Narayana Rao and David Shulman that points out that literature is a great resource but I am talking here narrowly in this about history.There is no oblivion greater than being written out of history so that after a thousand years there is no record that you had ever existed. This was at the heart of Ambedkar’s struggles with history. The Dalit Panthers, a few years after his death, opened up a new horizon of expression of the Dalit experience by harnessing the power of the poetic language. I think these concerns played a role in Ambedkar’s embrace of Buddhism at the end of his life, an unexpected turn from the limited prosaic languages of modern politics into a language that was vaster, more manysided and much more colorful and a language that declared dukkha to be at the heart of the human world.
Ambedkar thought a revitalised Buddhism would require a Buddhist “Bible” which would not present its teachings in the form of “abstract dogmas” or “as narrative or ethical exposition” but in the form of “an incantation” whose style must be “lucid, moving and must produce an hypnotic effect”. See B. R. Ambedkar, “Buddha and the Future of His Religion”, The Maha-Bodhi 58 (1950): 117–18, 199–206, at 204. Ambedkar’s attempt at writing such a book would culminate in The Buddha and His Dhamma (1957).
This is the last of this series of posts on Indian Political Thought. They are transcripts of lectures delivered recently by Bharati. Each lecture will be divided into a number of parts and published separately. Bharati has not only endorsed their publication but also checked and improved the transcripts; for which, the blog renders its gratitude. However, yours truly and their good friend are responsible for tracing, checking, and arranging the references. These references are neither authoritative nor exhaustive; treat them simply as the attempts of two cluelesss students at helping themselves and other clueless students understand the lectures just a little better. Often they are pointers to material that might interest the slightly more advanced reader. Some are simply interesting (we hope) pieces of trivia.
20. So, the moral of the Mahābhārata can be said to be the centrality of the relationship between brahma and kṣatra. There are also several dharma related ideas and cruelty is one of them. The Sanskrit word for cruelty is nṛśaṃsa (नृशंस). Now nṛśaṃsa is actually an adjective and it describes a person who wilfully causes injury to others, who inflicts mindless violence on others. That kind of person is called nṛśaṃsya and from that word, a new word, ānṛśaṃsya (आनृशंस्य), seems to have been coined by the authors of the Mahābhārata. Ānṛśaṃsya is an abstract noun. It means non-cruelty. So nṛśaṃsa describes a person who is cruel, anṛśaṃsa (अनृशंस) is one who is compassionate, and ānṛśaṃsya is non-cruelty, or the virtue of non-cruelty.
21. What is the difference between non-cruelty and non-violence? First, remember that most of the key normative ideas in Indian philosophy are negatively formed. And it is something of a puzzle why these have been negatively formed. (I must confess that initially I had taken ānṛśaṃsya also to be a negative and formed in a similar way. But that was a mistake. The word starts with “ā [आ]” and not “a [अ]”.) Take the word ahiṃsā — non-violence. Take the word asteya — non-stealing. Aparigraha — non-holding (non-attachment, non-possession).[15] All these are virtues which are supposed to be virtues that everyone must cultivate regardless of the gender or varṇa. And therefore these are virtues which are prescribed by what is called sāmānyadharma. The word dharma has many meanings. But the meaning that I have in mind here concerns the distinction between sāmānyadharma and varṇāśramadharma. Varṇāśramadharma is that which is specific to your varṇa and your āśrama: your birth and status and the stage of life you are at; whereas sāmānyadharma, which can be loosely translated as universal or general dharma, is something which is valid for everybody.
22.Asteya, aparigraha, ahiṃsā and ānṛśaṃsya, which is to say non-stealing, non-holding, non-violence and non-cruelty are supposed to be valid for everybody and therefore they are part of sāmānyadharma.[16] The śāstric position on the relationship between varṇāśramadharma and sāmānyadharma is rather disappointing. Because having said that everyone should follow non-killing, non-cruelty, etc., the śāstras say that in case of conflict between varṇāśramadharma and sāmānyadharma, varṇāśramadharma prevails. If you are a king, you cannot say that the sāmānyadharma has told you not to kill, therefore you will not go to war or that you will not punish. Because as a king it is your duty to kill and punish. It is only when the two are not in conflict that sāmānyadharma is relevant. All the important virtues which are part of sāmānyadharma are for some reason negatively formulated and anṛśaṃsya is also one of them.
23.It has been speculated on the basis of some stories from the Mahābhārata that cruelty can be of two forms if we provisionally define cruelty as taking pleasure in actively inflicting pain on others.[17]If you happen to be in pain for reasons which have nothing to do with me and I take pleasure and I take pleasure in witnessing you pain, then I can only be called a sadist and there may be something very perverse about that but that is not cruelty.[18] But it is only when that pain has been inflicted by me actively and I take pleasure in witnessing your pain and your agony that I can be called a cruel person. Some of the stories from the Mahābhārata indicate that according to it, cruelty may be of two kinds. It may be cruelty of hand, and cruelty of speech. Let me dispose of cruelty of speech quickly because I don’t want to say much about it. Cruelty of speech can be indistinguishable from humiliation because humiliation of a particular kind uses words. You use derogatory words to insult somebody for example. That is cruelty by speech. And since cruelty by speech and humiliation are indistinguishable, I will keep that aside as not a special case at all. I am simply calling it a form of humiliation.
24. Let us look at cruelty by hand. There is a story in the Mahābhārata which shows one poor but learned Brahmin — a trope that recurs frequently in the tradition with the implicit idea that the poor but learned and virtuous Brahmin must be respected — called Kaśyapa is walking on the road, a rich and powerful and arrogant man’s ratha or chariot goes past him and as it goes past him, it dashes him on the ground and he falls down. The injury is not severe but the fact that the arrogant man should have done this to him is what really hurts him. That is when he starts really lamenting his life and his being born in this world at all. I am a learned Brahmin. But what do I get out of being learned? Why do I have to live such an impoverished, appalling life?
25. This is when Indra takes the form of a jackal and comes and whispers in the ear of Kaśyapa: don’t you think that you are luckier than me? Look at me, I don’t have hands but you do. And therefore there are a lot of things which you can do but I can’t. If I am injured, I can’t actually take care of myself where as you can.[19] Therefore, even if you are blaming your whole life and your being born in this world, I think you are luckier than me. Human beings are luckier than birds or animals.
26. And then there is a discussion about the paradoxical gift of hands. Hands distinguish you from animals and birds because with hands you can do things which animals and birds cannot. (Incidentally, modern science also tells you that a lot of cognitive development is actually connected with our being able to use hands.) So that is something which sets us apart. But having hands also makes it possible for us to indulge in cruelty, which most animals and birds cannot because they do not have hands. So hands have a kind of paradoxical role to play in human lives.[20] They can distinguish us from other creatures, make us superior to them in every respect, but they can also make us morally inferior to them because with our hands we can do things which are cruel and perverse. We find very few stories both in literature and in scientific discourse of cruelty by birds and animals on each other and those remain unconvincing stories. Whereas stories of cruelty by human beings are innumerable.
27. In the American war on terror, they used a prison with special means of torture. You must have heard about it.[21] ‘Terrorists’ were rounded up and tortured there. There was an infamous incident of a woman soldier, Private Lynndie England, who was on duty there and who not only tortured the prisoners but also filmed the act of torture. The torture was aimed at dehumanising the targets of torture but in the process she actually divulged herself as a human being, though a particular kind of human being. She uses her hands to humiliate and dehumanise them.[22] This reminds us of the Mahābhārata story where hands are supposed to be that part of the body which makes us human both in the perverse sense and also in the flattering sense.
28. While it is true that depending on the theory or conceptual framework that you want to use, your understanding of cruelty will be different, there are certain things which seem to be quite obvious. Judith Shklar has pointed out that cowards tend to be more prone to inflicting cruelty on others and yet, as Machiavelli would have told you, with examples, those who are brave and courageous are not free of the vice of cruelty.[23] The opposition between cowardice and bravery doesn’t seem to give you a clue about who will be cruel and who will not be. In fact, what seems to be happening is that an idea emerged in early modern Europe that maybe a certain aristocratic code of valour and nobility will inhibit or discourage cruelty. But even if it is true, it comes at the price of a certain power relationship.
29. The problem is either you institutionalise violence in the form of certain relations of property and authority or you allow cruelty in an uncontrolled way. There seems to be an either/or here. Institutionalisation of violence and uninstitutionalised forms of cruelty. You either have one or you have the other. And sometimes you have both. You have any number of examples of cultures which have effectively discouraged cruelty, given no sanction to acts of cruelty, and yet which have institutionalised forms of violence. So there seems to be a problem here. You either have institutionalised forms of violence or you have uninstitutionalised forms of cruelty. There has been a great deal of research both from philosophers and psychologists about the mind of a person who indulges in cruelty. That is a big area. And since we are looking at Indian Political Thought we are not going into it.
30. Erich Fromm and Bertrand Russell, to take two examples, have tried to analyse human nature philosophically and psychologically to explain what the sources of cruelty in human nature are. But what you find in a text like the Mahābhārata or some of the other Indian texts is that they are distinguishing between non-violence and non-cruelty. They do it in an interesting way. The difference is not of degree or of the element of perversity. It is as follows.
31. It has been said that to live in this world is to be implicated in some form of violence or other. Violence is unavoidable and that therefore non-violence in the literal and most rigorous sense is impossible. At least it is impossible for ordinary human beings: for the householder, the king, etc. So non-violence is the higher ideal. Whereas non-cruelty is something of a lower order and achievable. The distinction is that non-violence is meant only for those who have renounced this world. It is a typical value of the renunciatory path. It is a value of those who have started saṃnyāsa whereas non-cruelty is something which is achievable for a householder or even a king.
32. In the last class when I talked about some of the stories of King Aśoka constructing a prison for torture — and mind you the story I was narrating was from the Buddhist sources which is what is so strange. Now this is something that needs to be avoided. A king cannot follow complete non-violence. But the punishment need not be cruel. It need not be of the kind that Arthaśāstra prescribes. It does not have to be setting on fire parts of the convict’s body. This can be and should be avoided.
33. You might argue that what we regard as inhuman is something which changes from time to time and place to place. And that is of course true. But if we are going to talk about the here and now, then we know by convention and by discussions of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable that certain forms of state action degrade human beings. As long as there is state, there is law and there is punishment and some people will be punished, etc. But you must ensure that there is due process and that the punishment is proportionate to the offence. This is broadly speaking what the hundred-year old human rights movement in different parts of the world has made us believe in. So not being cruel is entirely compatible with being a state functionary or a ruler or a householder or performing any of the roles and functions that you have to perform in this world.
34. Early on in this course, I said that within Indian thinking — and I deliberately said Indian thinking because Brahmanical, Buddhist, and Jaina thought seem to have converged on this point — a distinction was made between the householder and renunciate. The renunciatory path was meant only for a few people because it is extremely hard to give up this world, to give up comforts, to give up pleasure, to ultimately give up even your life because you may be a mendicant and beg for food but eventually you are supposed to even reduce your food intake and finally starve yourself to death. Jainism has an elaborate procedure for what we outside the Jaina tradition might clumsily call religious suicide.[24] Buddhists have talked about it. The ultimate aim of the renunciatory path is that of ending your life or worldly existence. It reaches a point when you end your life. Along the way you are supposed to follow a life style which has not only no ordinary forms of violence but requires practicing ever higher forms of non-violence.
35.It is a common sight of Jaina munis covering their mouth and nose and not practising agriculture,[25] and in both cases it is the idea of non-violence, of not causing injury or harm to other creatures. You also have the familiar description of a Buddhist monk using a cloth as a filter in order to remove small insects from the water. Microbiologists might smile at it. You find all sorts of extreme ideas and extreme practices of non-violence on the renunciatory path. And I think the reason why Gandhi got into all kinds of muddles and perplexities is because he kept on insisting on a literal and extreme meaning of non-violence which neither he nor his associates nor anyone in the world could have possibly followed.
36. He said he will not drink cow’s milk because in doing so, one is depriving the calf of its mother’s milk. That amounts to causing injury. Fair enough. Then he falls ill. Doctors say: he has become so ill that he must at least drink milk. But he says no. And then it is his wife who was probably more practical than he was who says, the vow you have taken is about cow’s milk. What about goat’s milk? And Gandhi agrees!! [laughter] Suddenly I think the lawyer in him got the better of him!
37. But when he narrates it… well, you know how in certain kinds of autobiographical narrations, the author is dripping with guilt and remorse and everything. So Gandhi says that he felt bad, that he felt he was cheating himself, but he became desperate, and didn’t want to displease his family and so he started drinking goat’s milk.[26] The problem arose because he was using the term non-violence in the most absolute sense. No Jaina — with all respect to the practitioners of that faith — can survive without eating agricultural produce. It is one thing to say you will not indulge in agriculture because it involves violence. But you are still eating food-grain which comes from someone else doing the violent act for you. Someone else is taking on their head the sin of causing injury to the insects in order to keep you alive. So whenever people take non-violence literally, they get into all kinds of puzzles.
38. But if you say, yes, my life is full of violence, so is yours and everybody else’s, without violence we cannot live. But what I will try to avoid is cruelty. Cruelty by speech and cruelty by hand so that you can say that you have never indulged in cruelty. If someone were to say this, then it would be a plausible account and it would be a goal worth pursuing. Because non-violence, even non-cruelty is something which is still so remote in this modern world that to posit that as a goal won’t be a bad idea at all.
39.39.What the Indian tradition has done is to distinguish between two paths: that of the householder where you perform your duties, pay your debts, perform you sacrifices, etc., and the path of the renunciator who is supposed to practice non-violence which is the more rigorous and harder goal. It is the householder and king who is supposed to follow non-cruelty: both by hand and by speech. And that amounts to not inflicting pain on others wilfully and not taking pleasure in inflicting pain on others wilfully.
40. But there is a small problem which remains. Can we say indifference to other people’s plight, pain, tribulation, injury is a form of cruelty? (To relish food, drinks and delicacies while the hungry ones look on is cruelty, says the Mahābhārata.) Because the moment you say yes, a lot of things become instances of cruelty. In today’s world where every form of suffering is immediately circulated through modern technology — on YouTube, on WhatsApp, etc. — there is every possibility that you won’t be able to spend even a single day without actually coming across some form of suffering somewhere. If you were to respond to each of these, then you won’t be able to live a normal life. You will have to become a 24-hours activist trying to lessen somebody’s pain all the time. You cannot go to a restaurant without noticing someone somewhere hungry or suffering. So how do you reconcile these things whether it is ‘normal’ day to day living or occasional indulgence in pleasure with the fact that you are confronted by news or visuals of suffering practically all the time?
41. There is no way you can shut yourself completely from news about suffering. If you say I will go ahead and do whatever I am doing, then you are guilty of indifference. If you are guilty of indifference, the question is if that indifference is a form of cruelty, and if indifference is a form of cruelty, then we are back to square one. We left the higher ideal of non-violence saying that it is too exalted to follow because we are householders in some sense of the term. We are not renunciates, or activists. Therefore, we settle for a lower objective or goal of non-cruelty which we define as not taking pleasure in inflicting pain on others. We think that it is something which is possible for us to achieve. And then suddenly this idea that maybe indifference is a form of cruelty comes up. But if indifference is a form of cruelty, and indifference is our defense mechanism, there is no way you can live normally in this world today without having a bit of indifference to protect you from sights or discussions of suffering. If that is the case, then living in a non-cruel way seems to be as difficult as living the life of a non-violent person. And therefore the distinction made by some of the Indian texts between non-violence and non-cruelty where one is supposed to be achievable for normal human beings and the other is not seem to collapse in the 20th and 21st century situation — a situation which is as much a politico-economic form of life as it is a phase constituted by modern technology.
42. About 50 years ago, the world was probably as saturated with suffering as it is today but it is just that there was a delay in the occurring of suffering and the impact that it had on you. There was no internet, computers or mobile phones. But today that is impossible. Leave aside the world, just take South Asia. Suppose you say you are going to be open to all the audio-visual messages that come to you. I don’t think you will be able to spend even a day without getting affected by somebody’s suffering somewhere in this big country. Whether it is the technology or whether it is a certain phase of modernity, (I don’t want to go into that because that is a larger and more complicated question) whatever is the cause, the situation that we find ourselves in is that practicing ānṛśaṃsya, i.e., living in a non-cruel manner, is, or seems to be, as challenging as following ahiṃsā or non-violence in a rigorous manner.
Footnotes
[15] These ideals are common across tradition. Along with satya [“veracity”] and brahmacarya [“chastity”], these are the give great vows (mahāvratas) that Jainism identifies for ascetics. The same five normative ideas form the five restraints (yamas) of (the subsequently elaborated) Yoga (Yogasūtras 2.30, trans. Rāma Prasāda, p. 155). See also next note.[^]
[16] The Arthaśāstra (1.3.13, trans. Patrick Olivelle, p. 68) mentions six: non-injury (ahiṃsā), truthfulness (satya), purification (śauca), lack of malice (anasūya), compassion (ānṛśaṃsya), and forbearance (kṣamā). The Manusmṛti (10.63, trans. Patrick Olivelle, p. 211) mentions five: Abstention from injuring (ahiṃsā), truthfulness (satya), not stealing (asteya), purification (śauca), and mastering the organs (indriyanigraha).[^]
[17] See Mukund Lath, ‘The Concept of Ānṛśaṃsya in the Mahābhārata’, in The Mahābhārata Revisited, ed. R. N. Dandekar (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1990), 113–19; Arindam Chakrabarti, ‘Non-Cruelty of Speech and the Hand: Hopes for Humanity Inspired by the Mahābhārata and the Buddha’, in Global Forum on Civilization and Peace (Seoul, South Korea, 2009).[^]
[18] The term “sadism” derives from Marquis de Sade (1714–1840), the French nobleman who is infamous for his literal acts and literary works that combines pornography with violence and pain.[^]
O brahmana! Without hands, I cannot take out the thorn that is paining my body. For those who possess hands, the gods have given them ten fingers. They can use these to uproot the insects that are biting their limbs. They can act so as to save themselves from the cold, the rains and the heat.They can cheerfully obtain food and enjoy these in beds that are safe from the wind. In this world, they enjoy cattle and employ them to carry burdens. They employ many other means to bring them under their subjugation. Those without hands and those who cannot grind with their tongues do not live for a long time. They have to tolerate many hardships.[^]
There is no doubt that those with hands obtain riches and are powerful. Men use these to reduce other men to a state of servitude. They repeatedly use these to torment, slay, bind and afflict others. They take pleasure in deceit, sport and are happy. Accomplished in their learning, those spirited ones control others through the strength of their arms.[^]
[21] While Quantanamo Bay (Cuba) is more well-known, another was Abu Ghraib (Iraq), and it is at the latter that the incident to be mentioned (see below) took place.[^]
[22] The facts and images of torture inflicted on prisoners at Abu Ghraib (including pictures that show Private England pointing to naked male prisoners and posing with her thumbs up) are documented and archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20161016003840/imgur.com/a/C6mLO[Warning: The pictures and descriptions are extremely graphic and disturbing.][^].
[24] This is called itvara or sallekhanā. It is described, for instance, in the Ācārāṅga Sūtra 1.7.6 (trans. Hermann Jacobi, p. 71–73)
If this thought occurs to a monk: ‘I am sick and not able, at this time, to regularly mortify the flesh,’ that monk should regularly reduce his food; regularly reducing his food, and diminishing his sins, he should take proper care of his body, being immovable like a beam; exerting himself he dissolves his body.
Entering a village … a monk should beg for straw; having begged for straw he should retire with it to a secluded spot. After having repeatedly examined and cleaned the ground, where there are no eggs, nor living beings, nor seeds, nor sprouts, nor dew, nor water, nor ants, nor mildew, nor waterdrops, nor mud, nor cobwebs — he should spread the straw on it. Then he should there and then effect (the religious death called) itvara.
This is the truth: speaking truth, free from passion, crossing (the saṃsāra), abating irresoluteness, knowing all truth and not being known, leaving this frail body, overcoming all sorts of pains and troubles through trust in this (religion), he accomplishes this fearful (religious death). Even thus he will in due time put an end to existence. This has been adopted by many who were free from delusion; it is good, wholesome, proper, beatifying, meritorious. Thus I say.
The Ācārāṅga Sūtra is the first of 12 Angās that form part of the Agamas, the Jain sacred canon.[^]
[25] Interestingly, the Manusmṛiti (10.63) says that agriculture is violent.
A Brahmin, or even a Kṣatriya, who earns a living by the Vaiṣya occupation, should try his best to avoid agriculture, which involves injury to living beings and dependence on others. People think that agriculture is something wholesome. Yet it is an occupation condemned by good people; the plow with an iron tip lacerates the ground as well as creatures living in it.[^]
[26] M. K. Gandhi, An Autobiography, or, The Story of My Experiments with Truth: A Critical Edition, trans. Mahadev Desai (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), pp. 432–33.[^]
References
Chakrabarti, Arindam. 2009. ‘Non-Cruelty of Speech and the Hand: Hopes for Humanity Inspired by the Mahābhārata and the Buddha’. In Global Forum on Civilization and Peace. Seoul, South Korea.
Debroy, Bibek, trans. 2010. The Mahabharata. 10 vols. Penguin Books.
Gandhi, M. K. 2018. An Autobiography, or, The Story of My Experiments with Truth: A Critical Edition. Translated by Mahadev Desai. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Jacobi, Hermann, trans. 1884. Jaina Sutras, Part 1; The Acharanga Sutra, The Kalpa Sutra. Sacred Books of the East 22. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Lath, Mukund. 1990. ‘The Concept of Ānṛśaṃsya in the Mahābhārata’. In The Mahābhārata Revisited, edited by R. N. Dandekar, 113–19. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.
Olivelle, Patrick, trans. 2013. King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India: Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra. New York: Oxford University Press.
Olivelle, Patrick, and Suman Olivelle, trans. 2005. Manu’s Code of Law: A Critical Edition and Translation of the Mānava-Dharmaśastra. South Asia Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Prasāda, Rāma, trans. 1912. Pātañjali’s Yoga Sūtras. The Sacred Books of the Hindus 4. Allahabad: The Panini Office.
This is part of a series of posts on Indian Political Thought. They are transcripts of lectures delivered recently by Bharati. Each lecture will be divided into a number of parts and published separately. Bharati has not only endorsed their publication but also checked and improved the transcripts; for which, the blog renders its gratitude. However, yours truly and their good friend are responsible for tracing, checking, and arranging the references. These references are neither authoritative nor exhaustive; treat them simply as the attempts of two cluelesss students at helping themselves and other clueless students understand the lectures just a little better. Often they are pointers to material that might interest the slightly more advanced reader. Some are simply interesting (we hope) pieces of trivia.
1.When I think of cruelty, one of the scenes from Tarantino’s film Kill Bill — I can’t now recall whether it was Part I or Part II — comes to my mind.[1] It is a scene where a member of a gang called Elle, who has a patch on one of her eyes, brings a bag full of currency notes for the other member called Budd. The reason is that Budd has sold Elle a very precious sword made by a Japanese master. He is gleeful as he opens the bag because he has fallen on hard times after the disbandment of the gang. He works as a bouncer in one of the clubs where his relations with the boss have not been very good. He has also become an alcoholic. You can see that he is someone who is unable to make ends meet. Naturally he is very happy to see the wads of currency notes. He has probably never seen so much money.
2. He opens the bag, looks at the money, and starts taking those currency notes one by one, and suddenly from under the notes, a deadly snake jumps at him and bites him on his face several times. The snake is supposed to be very poisonous and as soon as the snake bites him, Budd collapses and starts convulsing as the poison takes effect. At this point, there is an extended sequence in which Elle, who has actually placed the snake in the bag, talks to him. And for me, that sequence, especially the way she talks to him… Here is a man who is close to death, but Elle is completely composed. She has no remorse, no excitement. In a tone of mock politeness she says: “I am very sorry about this rudeness; I should have introduced you to the snake”. She goes on: “Budd, this is Black Mamba; Black Mamba, this is Budd”. By this time, Budd is on the floor, writhing in pain.
3. And then she says: “you know, before I planned this, I did some research on the Internet about the snake. And this is what it says”. She takes out a small note-pad and reads out: “In Africa, there is a saying: An elephant can kill you, a leopard can kill you, and a black mamba can kill you; but it is only with black mamba that death is most certain”. Then she starts describing the effects of the venom of black mamba on the nervous system: If the snake bites you on the face or on the torso, then you will suffer paralysis within twenty-minutes. “This is something you should listen to carefully”, she says to Budd, “because this concerns you”. And she goes on: “With every bite, the amount of venom injected by the snake into the human body is gargantuan”. At this point she stops, and then says: “You know what” — she is talking to someone who is in unbearable pain and who is about to die — “I always wanted to use that word. You rarely get such an opportunity. The amount is gargantuan, and the victim will die within twenty minutes”.
4. This whole sequence, and particularly the manner in which Elle’s coldblooded manner is presented, is for me one of the best visual depictions of cruelty. (Or is it sadism?) In about three to five minutes, it gives you an unforgettable account of what cruelty can mean. Elle wanted to kill Budd, but it is not just that she wanted to kill him. It is his pain that she is so casually indifferent to. What is cruelty? Is it indifference to someone else’s pain — especially pain inflicted by oneself — or seeking pleasure out of it? In any case, there is a difference between violence and cruelty. But how to make that distinction? Every era, every culture has its own way of conceptualising violence and cruelty. Violence and cruelty do not exist independently of the conceptual framework in which or through which people talk about them.
5. You will find western philosophy talking about both violence and cruelty. There is a famous essay by a scholar by the name Judith Shklar.[2]I am not sure if your course instructor mentioned this very fine work on Rousseau by her when you did your Western Political Thought course.[3]She has also written a book called Ordinary Vices.[4] The whole book is about Ordinary Vices: one chapter on hypocrisy, another on betrayal, and another on cruelty. In the essay on cruelty, Shklar uses the framework derived from Montaigne and Montesquieu.[5] It would be worth your while to try and read that article not because you will find points about cruelty in a ready to use form, but what it will inform you is that thinking about violence or cruelty or thinking about any of these concepts is a matter of specific intellectual traditions within which or through which you talk about them. By intellectual tradition I mean not only ‘philosophy’ but also ‘literature’. For example there is a discussion of violence and cruelty in the Mahābhārata.
6. Before I come to that, let me give you a little background as to why we are discussing this. Last time, I read out a passage from the Mahābhārata where Bhīṣma is saying to Yudhiṣṭhira: “Be the king. Win heaven. Protect the virtuous and kill the wicked”. And I said that the distinction between the wicked and the virtuous is very problematic. There are many occasions where you are perplexed as to how to distinguish between the two. The textual tradition that we are looking at, and which consists of the śāstric texts, the epics, and the Purāṇas, has often talked about demons or asuras. In fact, the sixteenth chapter of the Bhagavadgītā is all about the distinction between the devas and asuras. The distinction, at one level, is completely stark. There are godly people and demonic people. They are so completely different from one another as to be each other’s polar opposites. After discussing the godly people and their characteristics and behaviour[6], the rest of the sixteenth chapter is about the demonic people. They are described in such negative terms[7] that the conclusion that therefore they must be killed, or that they must be subdued, follows without any further argument or justification.
7. We must pause here and look at the targets of this textual tradition. Who are the people who are being called demonic? And you will notice that within the context of the Bhagavadgītā, the epics, or the Purāṇas — I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the purāṇic stories, and I am sorry I will have to explain to you what a “Purāṇa” is[8] — these stories operate with a binary of good people and bad people, those who follow dharma and those who are wicked. Underlying all these stories, underlying the śāstric texts, and underlying the epics, there is a certain process which for the sake of convenience I will call a process of demonization. Whoever is on the other side of the divide is regarded as a demon. The targets of demonisation can be varied. For example, Lokāyatas, the materialists or Cārvākas who believed that this world is all that there is and that enjoyment of worldly goods or worldly matters is desirable. There were also the practitioners of tantric rituals. So you can see that the targets have been different from time to time.
8. But the process whereby they come to be represented as demons is the same. You have the same vocabulary, the same kind of rhetorical strategies to present some people or certain groups as demons. And since demonisation as a process is the same with only the targets varying, you can’t simply say that the wicked should be punished. You have to ask whether violence in the name of suppressing the wicked is justified at all. But the question of cruelty goes beyond violence.
9. There is a story of a king called Vena. The story recurs in various Purāṇas across centuries. The way Vena is described is standard. In each of the Purāṇas, his evilness is described by saying that he did not respect Brahmins, did not adhere to the Vedas, prohibited vedic rituals and sacrifices in his kingdom, and he said instead of offering sacrifices to the god Indra, offer sacrifices to me, I will give you whatever you want. All this made him an evil king. Then the Brahmins ganged up to kill him. Once they kill him, they produce two beings out of his body, one of whom is dark and resembles forest dwellers [Niṣāda], and the other is resplendent, fair, and brave; he becomes the king [Pṛthu] who rules the earth in a righteous manner for several thousand years.[9]
10. This story is quite revealing because it makes no attempt to conceal the reasons why some people are called demons. It makes no attempt to justify the killing of Vena. It is simple: Vena did not accept the authority of the Vedas and the Brahmins and he would not allow vedic rituals or sacrifices in his kingdom and therefore he had to be killed. It is as simple and transparent as that. When you come across stories like this, you wonder whether the distinction between the godly and the demonic, gods and demons, devas and asuras, Pāṇḍavas and Kauravas, itself is something which needs to be problematised.
11.Since we have talked about Kauravas and Pāṇḍavas, let me quickly explain why the Mahābhārata tends to be open to so many interpretations.[10] We must remember that the Mahābhārata is something which operates at many levels at the same time. And each of these levels is superimposed on another level. At the most basic level, it is a story of the war between the Kauravas and Pāṇḍavas. But that war and that conflict have been activated, in narrative terms, by an old enmity between Drupada and Droṇa.[11] The strained relationship between Drupada and Droṇa, which initially was one of friendship, is what activates the conflict. A word about Drupada and Droṇa: one of them (Droṇa) is a Brahmin and the other (Drupada) is a Kṣatriya. And therefore you can see that in this story of a friendship turning into enmity is also a kind of symbolic narration about the relations between Brahmins and Kṣatriyas. In talking about Drupada and Droṇa, the authors are also talking about the relations between Brahmins and Kṣatriyas as classes.
12. But in talking about this relationship, the authors can also be seen to be talking about the relationship between brahma and kṣatra. There are these abstract powers or forces: one is called kṣatra and state power is its worldly tangible form, and the other is brahma which is exemplified by a virtuous Brahmin who represents knowledge and wisdom.[12] So, at one level, the Mahābhārata is also a story of the relationship between these two abstract forces, the force of state power, or kingship if you like, kṣatra, and the power of wisdom and knowledge.
13. At a higher level, it is a story of the play of the forces of preservation and the forces of destruction. In Indian mythology, the forces of preservation are represented by the deity called Viṣṇu. Viṣṇu, whose human form is Kṛṣṇa, represents the force of preservation, whereas Shiva represents the force of destruction. Therefore, whatever actions are attributed to Shiva and Kṛṣṇa in this epic can be seen at an abstract level as the play of the forces of preservation and destruction. The philosophical discussion of this is that Time has both creation and destruction as its phases, and at the end of each epoch or yuga it is Shiva’s destructive force which comes into play and destroys the entire world in order to renew it. One way of looking at the story is to say that the war between the Kauravas and the Pāṇḍavas occurs at a point when the phase of destruction has begun and that therefore it is Shiva — although he is not visible in the story — whose actions have been extremely crucial in taking the narrative forward.
14. You will probably know that the Mahābhārata ends with the destruction of almost all the Kṣatriyas. Very few are left and the way this is explained is by saying that this therefore is a story of the complete destruction of the Kṣatriyas and a renewal of the world by renewing the Brahmin–Kṣatriya relationship. Remember, one of the reasons why the conflict occurs is the enmity between Drupadaa and Droṇa. If they represent brahma and kṣatra then the explanation as to why this happens is that crises occur because the powers of kṣatra and brahma start drifting apart from each other. That they start diverging is the reason why the conflict between Kauravas and Pāṇḍavas starts at all. And once they have diverged so far as to have no chance of reconciliation, the only way you can bring them back is by completing annihilating the world, the entire Kṣatriya class.
15. The trope of wiping out the Kṣatriyas is not new or unique to the Mahābhārata. There are many stories inside and outside the Mahābhārata talking about the annihilation of the Kṣatriyas. That is a trope you often find in Brahmanical texts. Paraśurāma is a well-known example of someone who is supposed to have eliminated all the Kṣatriyas from this world.[13] The Brahmins are supposed to have been so powerful that within the narrative of these texts — but not historically, mind you —they eliminated Kṣatriyas. So the ideal of the Brahmanical world is that kṣatra and brahma work together, work in conjunction with each other. That kṣatra or state power willingly subordinate to wisdom or brahma and that kingship is legitimate only when the king has subordinated himself to the priest or the Brahmin. This is the Brahmanical ideal.
16. When actual society starts deviating from this ideal, there is a possibility of crisis and that crisis is what unfolds in the Mahābhārata war. But then Kauravas and Pāṇḍavas can also be seen as devas and dānavas, and therefore you can have yet another interpretation of what is going on. In addition, there is Draupadī’s story woven into the narrative of the Mahābhārata. You know that Draupadī was born out of a sacrificial fire. What is the symbolic significance of Draupadī having been born out of this sacrificial fire? She was not the one that her father, Drupada, was actually praying for. He had not asked for her. He had asked for a son who will be so powerful that he will be able to defeat Droṇa’s side. And that is why the sacrifice was performed. But in a way, Draupadī is born out of that fire in an unasked manner. The way Draupadī is described is significant. She has a dark hue and therefore she is called Kṛṣṇa. And she also has a golden hue which symbolises the goddess of prosperity, Śrī. So Draupadī is supposed to be the human or earthly form of the goddess Śrī.[14]
17. If prosperity is what Draupadī stands for and if she is coveted not only by the Pāṇḍava brothers but also by some members of the Kauravas, then the entire story becomes actually a story of pursuit of artha or prosperity, and kāma, or satisfaction of worldly desires in the form of coveting Draupadī. Thus when the Kauravas start coveting Draupadī, it is supposed to stand for pursuit of artha. Therefore, the symbolic meaning of the role played by Draupadī in the narration of the Mahābhārata is that when the pursuit of artha happens in an unrestrained manner, you have Mahābhārata like tragedy.
18. So you can see that, first, you have the Kauravas and Pāṇḍavas fighting over the kingdom. Then you have the level of Drupada and Droṇa as individuals having enmity and that enmity activating Kaurava–Pāṇḍava enmity. On that you have Brahmin-Kṣatriya conflict. At an abstract level above that you have brahma and kṣatra diverging from each other. At yet another higher level, you have the idea that when brahma and kṣatra start diverging from each other, it is the destructive phase of time which has started and all this must get destroyed through war or annihilation. That is represented by Shiva. Though Kṛṣṇa, who is the earthly form of Viṣṇu, who represents preservation is visible throughout, it is actually Shiva who is instrumental in all this because the Mahābhārata period is called the yugānta and the yuga which is ending is supposed to be the yuga in which Kṣatriyas have become too arrogant, have started overreaching themselves, and have started pursuing artha in the form of Draupadī or kindgom in a manner unrestrained by dharma and therefore they may be said to have gone away from brahma. When kṣatra and brahma start diverging from each other, you know that Shiva has to come into play and it is the destructive phase of time which has started. So in a way, the Mahābhārata war was inevitable.
19. There are many stories within the Mahābhārata – of diplomacy, of various efforts to avoid war. But it was inevitable. The Mahābhārata war which leaves hardly anybody alive except half a dozen people was bound to happen because at that time in the revolving of the yugas a phase had come when everything had to end. So in a way the Kaurava–Pāṇḍava war is nothing but an instrument through which Shiva turns the cycle of time into a destructive phase so that the earth is renewed and you have a new set of Brahmins and Kṣatriyas and once again the ideal relationship of kṣatra and brahman is established. This is what the Mahābhārata is about. And it is because of these different levels that it is open to several different interpretations.
Footnotes
[1] The scene is from Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004). It can we viewed on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsaG8rJGlyQ. Quentin Tarantino is known for, amongst many others, his memorable dialogues and extravagant use of bloody violence; and infamously for shots of bare feet and immoderate use of the n-word. Most of his films, in addition to the two Kill Bill movies, are modern classics: Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), Inglourious Basterds (2009) Django Unchained (2012), etc. However, yours truly has a soft spot for the lesser known (and certainly not a classic) but extremely fun Jackie Brown (1997).[^]
[2] ‘Putting Cruelty First’, Daedalus 111, no. 3 (1982): 17–27.. Later published in Ordinary Vices.[^]
[3]Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).[^]
[4] (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984).[^]
[5] Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) who is famous for his Essais (Essays) — he popularised the genre of essay writing — and Montesquieu (1689–1755) who is famous for his L’Esprit des lois (The Spirit of Law) and his theory of the separation of powers. Shklar’s citations are from these works.[^]
[6] The daivic (according to the Bhagavadgītā 16.1–3, trans. Bibek Debroy) are characterised by “absence of fear, pureness of heart, steadiness in jnana yoga, donation, and control, yajnas, self-study, practice of austerities and simplicity, absence of injury to others, truthfulness, lack of anger, renunciation, tranquillity, lack of criticism of others, compassion towards beings, lack of avarice, gentleness, sense of shame, steadfastness, energy, forgiveness, perseverance, cleanliness, absence of hatred, absence of ego.”[^]
[7] The asuric are characterised by (Bhagavadgītā 16.4) “Arrogance, insolence, egoism, anger, cruelty and ignorance”. They do not (16.7) “know about inclination and disinclination. In them, there is no purity, nor righteousness, nor even truthfulness”. And then (16.8–9): ‘They say the world is full of falsehood, without basis, without God, created without continuity and with no reason other than to satisfy desire. Resorting to such views, with distorted minds, little intelligence and cruel action, they perform evil deeds. They are born to destroy the world”. And it goes on for several verses more.[^]
[8] Literally, “old”. According to James G. Lochtefeld’s The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Hinduism (New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, 2002). p. 532, the Purāṇas comprise;
An important genre of smrti texts, and the repository of traditional Indian mythology. According to one traditional definition, a purana should contain accounts of at least five essential things: the creation of the earth, its dissolution and recreation, origins of the gods and patriarchs, the reigns of the Manvantaras, and the reigns of the Solar and Lunar Lines. In practice, the puranas are compendia of all types of sacred lore, from mythic tales to ritual instruction to exaltation of various sacred sites (tirthas) and actions. Individual puranas are usually highly sectarian and intended to promote the worship of one of the Hindu gods, whether Vishnu, Shiva, or the Goddess. By tradition the major puranas number eighteen, but there are hundreds of minor works.[^]
[9] For one version of the story, see the Bhāgavata Purāṇa 4.15 and 4.15 (trans. Tagare, vol 2., pp. 10–19). Sanjay Palshikar, “Demons and Demonisation,” in Evil and the Philosophy of Retribution: Modern Indian Commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita (Delhi: Routledge, 2014), 25–57.[^]
[10] The reading that follows is proposed by J. L. Mehta, ‘The Discourse of Violence in the Mahabharata’, in Philosophy and Religion: Essays in Interpretation (New Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 1990), 254–71.[^]
[11] The story can be read at Mahābhārata 1[Adiparva].121–122.[^]
[12] This spelling follows Mehta (note 10). However note that it is the same as the “elemental cosmic power” called brahman which is introduced in Lecture 2, Part 3.[^]
[13] As many as twenty-one times. At Mahābhārata 12[Śāntiparva].48 [trans. Bibek Debroy, vol. 8, 1376(48)]. Bhīṣhma says to (Paraśurāma is called Rama in the quote.)
O Partha! There, in the distance, you can see the five lakes created by Rama. Earlier, he used the blood of kshatriyas to offer oblations to his ancestors. On twenty-one occasions, the lord emptied the earth of kshatriyas. It is only now that Rama has refrained from that task.[^]
[14] At Mahābhārata 1.[Adiparva].61 (trans. Bibek Debroy, vol. 1, [61]), Draupadī is described thus:
A part of Shri herself was born on earth out of love. She was born as a faultless daughter in the house of Drupada, from the middle of a sacrificial altar. She was neither tall nor short, and had the fragrance of a blue lotus. Her eyes were long, like lotus leaves. Her hips were well formed. Her hair was long and black. She had all the auspicious marks on her body and she had the shine of lapis lazuli.[^]
References
Debroy, Bibek, trans. 2010. The Mahabharata. 10 vols. Penguin Books.
———, trans. 2019. The Bhagavad Gita. Gurgaon: Penguin Books.
Lochtefeld, James G. 2002. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Hinduism. 2 vols. New York: The Rosen Publishing Group.
Mehta, J. L. 1990. ‘The Discourse of Violence in the Mahabharata’. In Philosophy and Religion: Essays in Interpretation, 254–71. New Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research.
Palshikar, Sanjay. 2014. ‘Demons and Demonisation’. In Evil and the Philosophy of Retribution: Modern Indian Commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita, 25–57. Delhi: Routledge.
Shklar, Judith N. 1969. Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
This is part of a series of posts on Indian Political Thought. They are transcripts of lectures delivered recently by Bharati. Each lecture will be divided into a number of parts and published separately. Bharati has not only endorsed their publication but also checked and improved the transcripts; for which, the blog renders its gratitude. However, yours truly and their good friend are responsible for tracing, checking, and arranging the references. These references are neither authoritative nor exhaustive; treat them simply as the attempts of two cluelesss students at helping themselves and other clueless students understand the lectures just a little better. Often they are pointers to material that might interest the slightly more advanced reader. Some are simply interesting (we hope) pieces of trivia.
39. I take the point that for its time, the Arthaśāstra may have been revolutionary. It was in a way saying: leave aside these dharmaśāstric considerations, we just want to discuss what is necessary for the king to be successful. Now that kind of assertion of pragmatic and this-worldly considerations was probably something very revolutionary for that time. The dharmaśāstric tradition continued, and the quasi-autonomous nīti tradition also continued, with complicated relations between them. When it comes to today’s reception of Arthaśāstra and Manusmṛti, it becomes difficult for us to reject one, i.e., Manusmṛti, saying that it is discriminatory, and accept the other, by saying that it is devoid of dharmaśāstric considerations and it is all about pragmatic matters. Because today, in our modern political common sense, we have come to reject not only birth-based discrimination and status hierarchy, but we have also started questioning this entity called the state.
40. The Mahābhārata has this… you know, Yudhiṣṭhira was perpetually in doubt. He always happened to be asking the question: should I be doing this? Bhīma never had any doubts and that is why he is someone who is liked by a lot of people, probably by Draupadī also. Bhīṣma warns Yudhiṣṭhira:
Nothing great can be achieved through pure compassion. People do not respect you if you are too gentle and too noble. … Be the king. Win heaven. Protect the virtuous and kill the wicked (MBh 12.76.18–35).[23]
41. That is the advice given by Bhīṣma to Yudhiṣṭhira. And Arjuna tells Yudhiṣṭhira much later when the war is over and once again Yudhiṣṭhira is in doubt:
Beings or creatures live upon creatures, the stronger live off the weak. … Everything that is moving or stationary is meant as the food of life. (MBh 12.128.28–29)
42. This is the kind of advice that Yudhiṣṭhira gets. On one level it is a very robust advice. Anyone who wishes to accomplish something in this world will be greatly impressed by this advice. But if you revisit the last line of what Bhīṣma says — Be the king, win heaven, protect the virtuous, and kill the wicked — and ask a very simple question, which is a question which did not arise for them, naturally, but which can and must arise for us, namely: How can we distinguish between the wicked and virtuous? How do I know or decide that this person is wicked and this person is virtuous? If you give a very simple and obvious answers like: here is a robber, or rapist, or someone who has assaulted me, then it seems to be an easy matter to distinguish between the good and the bad.
43. But you know that life, particularly social life but also personal life doesn’t give you easy classifications of good and bad people. Good and bad often boils down to us and them. Nobody is going to say we are wicked and they are good. Everyone says we are the good party and they are the wicked party. That they are the aggressors and therefore we must teach them a lesson. And mind you they are also saying the same thing about you. So how do we decide? Is there a normative or moral Archimedean point where you can stand and impartially decide who is guilty and who is right?[24] You cannot. Because if you examine your life — individual as well as collective life — you will notice that nobody is completely free of guilt. You may say that you haven’t deprived anybody of anything individually, and that might be true. But there are social and economic processes, and by virtue of these processes you get something where you haven’t literally deprived anybody of anything but the process itself has actually been such that it has amounted to the deprivation of some people.
44. Take a very simple example. Like many middle class people, I live in a gated community where I have a flat. I can always say that I paid money which I earned honestly and saved up and therefore what I am enjoying is not because I have deprived anybody of anything. But if somebody asks me a simple question about who I bought it from and I reply that I bought it from the builder, it might be asked where the flat is constructed? On a piece of land which the builder purchased. How did the builder get that land? I would not know the answer because I don’t know if the means used by the builder or the ‘developer’ to acquire the plot of land and to get all kind of permissions were fair. Sometimes the land is an agricultural land. In law there is a distinction between agricultural and non-agricultural land and you are not supposed to use agricultural land for commercial or residential purposes.
45. But there are ways of changing the status of the land from agricultural to non-agricultural and make the whole thing quite legal. A person who owns that land… probably there are ten farmers who own portions of that land… if you as a builder want to amalgamate them so that you can construct a gated community, how do you do it? You negotiate with each of them. The asymmetry between you and them is such and given the way agriculture has become economically unviable, the money you are offering to them seems to be so attractive (though it is not going to be enough for the rest of their lives), at the moment it seems great to them, they accept it. Sometimes, coercion is used. So all kinds of things happen in the process by which gated communities come up which then someone like me becomes a beneficiary of.
46. In a legal sense, I have not done anything wrong, but I have been a beneficiary of a process which is not fair. There may be even illegalities involved in it which I am not aware of. Many more examples of this sort can be given. If only you are impartial, if only you have the courage to accept that maybe I am as guilty as a robber or a thief, you realise that the distinction between the virtuous and the wicked is not at all easy to make. I don’t even know whether one should be using these categories at all. People are not virtuous or wicked by choice. It is not because someone is a bad human being that he indulges in crime. A huge amount of work by sociologists and economists and psychologists has come to tell us that crime is more an alternative mode of living than a function of somebody’s wicked state of mind.
47. Given these complexities, the distinction between the wicked and the virtuous is not at all easy to make or maintain. They might be both these coexisting in each one of us. So how do we decide who is wicked and who is virtuous? If we cannot, then Bhīṣma’s advice to Yudhiṣṭhira is not so unproblematic. Whom shall I protect? Whom shall I kill? Even if we don’t take the words protect and kill in the literal sense, whom do I side with? The division between us and them seems to be basic and we superimpose the other normative division between the virtuous and the wicked on it because by definition we are virtuous and those who are our adversaries are wicked. And unless we are convinced of this we will not be able to fight them. And unless we are willing to fight them, we will not be able to preserve what we have got. This is how the social world goes. So Bhīṣma’s advice which is steeped in the dharmic tradition is not helpful.
48. The Arthaśāstra discussion of statecraft as a purely pragmatic matter — whatever helps the state or whatever secures my success should be done — also doesn’t seem to help. So the point I am making is that the interest that we have in these texts which is not a purely historical critical interest but also an interest with a viewpoint of the present — what are today’s problems and do these texts give us any moral or ethical advice at all, whether Buddhist or non-Buddhist — is a question which, if taken simplistically will yield equally simplistic answers. Because they seem to be offering something which our contemporary political consciousness is not able to accept or assimilate.
49. But if we do, we will have to admit that we have a partisan view. You cannot possibly have a non-partisan view and also accept the Arthaśāstra kind of reasons of state position. If you are a partisan of the state, and say, look I am on the side of the state, and therefore whatever helps the state protect and preserve itself is alright with me, then Arthaśāstra’s advice will be acceptable to you. But you will have to admit that you have first taken a position which is an ideological position: you have sided with the state. And then, within that context, approved of the Arthaśāstra like pragmatic discussion. So you are not actually doing something which is not in the nīti tradition. You are discussing the efficacy of certain means where the end is somehow ideologically, already accepted by you. You have already accepted that the state is right. You are on the side of the state. And therefore, whatever protects the interest of the state whether it is forms of punishment, use of torture for information, use of spies, using a person sentenced to death for a dangerous mission: all this is fine. But provided that the ultimate aim, namely the state, is something that you have already accepted.
50. These are the problematic positions you land when you pluck an old text out of its context and try to make it normatively ‘relevant’ for our times. While I agree that a purely historical or contextual discussion is not all that can be done with a text, and that it is possible to go beyond that, it cannot be simply a matter of looking for advice to negotiate situations which the authors of those texts had no inkling of. This is what I wanted to stress and make the point that the choice between a purely historical interest in these texts and a philosophical or normative interest cannot be reduced to a choice between the nīti and dharma traditions. In fact I don’t know what it would mean to ‘choose’ a tradition, and that too in an altered world. The other point which I want to reserve for the next class, which I have already signaled by reading out certain parts of the Mahābhārata, is the theme of cruelty. The Sanskrit word for non-cruelty is ānṛśaṃsya. I will talk about it in the next class. And with that I will conclude our discussion of ancient India.
Q&A.
51. Q. When we are trying to distinguish between the wicked and the good, it is all about the subjectivity of the observer and it is very difficult to make the distinction. But when we are living in a society, for pragmatic reasons, somehow the society has to come to an objective conclusion about right and good.
52. A. I agree that at any given point, we will have to have some notion about what is legal and what is not, what is acceptable and what is not. And to that extent, the Mahābhārata kind of advice can be seen as useful. But what modern social science has taught us is that what is established at a given time is not the ultimate. That we can have an alternative view on what is good and what is bad. And that history actually shows us that there has been a succession of ideologies and regimes where the latter finds the former or the previous faulty and defective. If it is the case that what is established is not final, then should we be resorting to extreme forms of violence? And I am not talking about imprisonment, or detention. I am talking about capital punishment for example or use of torture. Can we use these forms for the sake of what today we regard as right or legal or acceptable because we know from history that tomorrow, not literally tomorrow but after a certain period, we might come to regard that as unacceptable? So the emphasis is on extreme forms of violence or extreme forms of action. And that is where I want to connect this discussion to the discussion of cruelty. Cruelty and not violence seems to be the problem. Because no tradition — Buddhist, Jain, or Brahmanical — has been able to demonstrate to us convincingly that you can live without any violence.[25] In modern times, you have Gandhi being obsessed with this idea of non-violence and being perplexed on many occasions about certain kinds of violence which he thought were unavoidable. So that shows that nobody has been able to demonstrate to us that you can absolutely and literally be nonviolent. So if violence to a certain extent is unavoidable, then should we perhaps not be focusing on minimising it? Should we not try to avoid gratuitous, disproportionate, and sadistic forms of violence? That is actually the question.
53. Q. You are critical of the historians who are celebrating pragmatism and who are critical of the theological. That was the point made. If there is a theological content which is the realm of imagination, and a pragmatic content which is the realm of rationality and reason, don’t you think a realm of imagination has a danger of justifying a realm of propaganda because Manusmṛti has elements which actually accepts the power hierarchies in the society whereas Arthaśāstra being pragmatic doesn’t talk about those. Don’t you think adhering to such a theological realm will justify injustice? Aren’t there more risks than pros?
54. A. There is a misunderstanding that I am actually weighing in favour of the “theological” or the dharmaśāstric and condemning the other. I have no doubt that the content of the dharmaśāstric texts is something that we, in the era of democracy, cannot accept. So for me, it is not a question of accepting either Arthaśāstra or Manusmṛti. It is not a question of accepting the nīti or the dharma tradition. That is not the question at all. I have not said that one is acceptable while the other is not. You are absolutely right in pointing out that norms or ideals are historical, transitory, and subject to change. Today, what we regard as acceptable is not something that is eternally valid. It keeps changing and yet, this is my tentative answer to the question, at each point in time and history, we have to have some norms. How we derive those norms is a debatable question. Whose norms we accept is also debatable. But we will have to have some norms for our political actions: whether it is the state action or individual political action. All these will have to be governed by or at least circumscribed by some idea of what is right and wrong. But that would be different from superimposing simplistic ideas of Good and Evil on Us and Them.
55. If you ask me how we arrive at this idea of right and wrong, I have no answer. Because while it is easy to say that these should be democratically arrived at, we don’t know how in practice that can be done. So the procedure or the manner in which you arrive at universally acceptable forms is a process we don’t know much about. We simply don’t have a device by which we can do that. All I am saying is that the celebration of the artha tradition today should not amount to the celebration of instrumental rationality and a celebration of the reason of state argument. Because that is dangerous. That is the limited point I am making. I am with you that norms change. But just because they change doesn’t mean that we cannot have any norms at all. Where they are going to come from; who is going to give us these norms; and how do we arrive at those norms are extremely difficult questions of much modern social and political theory has taken pains to resolve. I am not going into these. I recognise the difficulty of these questions and leave it at that. All I am saying is that there has to be some norms. Those cannot come from the elite; nor do we have an electoral mechanism with which to arrive at them.
56. These norms, I stress again to avoid misunderstanding, cannot come from the dharmaśāstric texts. The dharmaśāstric position on the differential status of different classes of the society based on birth is something that we will, for once and for all, forget and not hope to revive. For me, the source of these norms is not the dharmaśāstric texts. What else can that source be? I really don’t know. The limited question that I am asking is: having gotten rid of dharmaśāstric texts as unacceptable in today’s democratic world, and being led only by Arthaśāstra-like nīti texts, can we only have a celebration of instrumental rationality which is in the service of the state. And that too because I notice that there is a danger in mistaking Subrahmanyam and Narayana Rao’s enthusiasm regarding Arthaśāstra-like texts.[26] And therefore I am responding to that by saying well, the pragmatic advice of those texts, abstracted from the intellectual and historical context of those texts, amounts to reason of state position.
Footnotes
[23] Quoted from Upinder Singh, Political Violence in Ancient India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), pp. 74–75.[^]
[24] Named after the ancient Grerek mathematician Archimedes who is supposed to have said something like the following: “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world”. René Descartes speaks (in his Meditations on First Philosophy) of this Archimedean “place” as one which is “firm and immovable”. Given how “first class levers” work, this “place” would literally have to be another world. As Plutarch reports it (in his Lives of Pelopidas and Marcellus), Archimedes said that “if there were another world, and he could go to it, he could move this [world]”. This conveys the sense, as Simon Blackburn puts it in his useful Dictionary of Philosophy, of ‘Archimedean point as a point outside of space and time, outside of our one’s culture or context, a God’s eye view, or a view from nowhere, etc. from which “a different, perhaps objective or ‘true’ picture of something is obtainable”.[^]
[25] In fact, during the freedom struggle, many nationalists enlisted the epics, especially the Bhagavadgītā, to argue for and justify the use of violent action in fighting against the colonial masters. Sri Aurobindo writes:
To shrink from bloodshed and violence under such circumstances is a weakness deserving as severe a rebuke as Sri Krishna addressed to Arjuna when he shrank from the colossal civil slaughter on the field of Kurukshetra. Liberty is the life-breath of a nation; and when the life is attacked, when it is sought to suppress all chance of breathing by violent pressure, any and every means of self-preservation becomes right and justifiable.
Tilak says the following:
But, it is nowhere stated by our moral philosophers, that if protection against evil-doers cannot be obtained by saintliness, one should not give ‘measure for measure’, and protect oneself, but should allow oneself tom become a victim of the evil-doings of villains; and it must be borne in mind that, that man who has come forward to cut the throats of others by his own evil-doings, has no more any ethical right to expect that others should behave towards him like saints.
See Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram: Political Writings and Speeches, 1890–1908, vol. 6 & 7, The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, 2002), p. 278; Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Śrimad Bhagavadgītā-Rahasya or Karma-Yoga-Śāstra, trans. Balchandra Sitaram Suthankar, vol. 1 (Poona: Tilak Bros, 1924), p. 554.[^]
[26] And this is probably a good place to point out, even though Bharati doesn’t draw attention, that it is not not just this one article. Recently the popularity of the Arthaśāstra has seen a rise among domestic International Relations scholars who argue for a the relevance of the text for contemporary foreign policy. The Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) website hosts a great deal of material on the issue. Incidentally, the text has also become very popular among self-help and motivational gurus who peddle its timeless secrets for gaining success.[^]
References
Blackburn, Simon. 2008. ‘Archimedean Point’. In , 2. ed., rev. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Descartes, René. 2008. Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies. Translated by Michael Moriarty. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Singh, Upinder. 2017. Political Violence in Ancient India. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sri Aurobindo. 2002. Bande Mataram: Political Writings and Speeches, 1890–1908. Vol. 6 & 7. The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press.
Tilak, Bal Gangadhar. 1924. Śrimad Bhagavadgītā-Rahasya or Karma-Yoga-Śāstra. Translated by Balchandra Sitaram Suthankar. Vol. 1. Poona: Tilak Bros.
Clueless Political Scientist 
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