Abstract
A characteristic of the oeuvre of Michel Foucault who is regularly invoked in the volume under review is that the absorption in the archive is such that references to ‘secondary’ work is scant, if not absent. By contrast, the editorial introduction as well as this set of essays, by and large, explicitly locate their work within a specific, almost ready made theoretical landscape. For instance, the Introduction speaks of the essays as moving away from ‘Enlightenment Humanism’ (p. 3) and ‘Kant’s interiorization of ethical practice’ (p. 4) so as to ‘elucidate diverse aspects of ethics in South Asia’ (p. 5), even as the latter are put into ‘conversation with Aristotelian, Christian, and liberal political traditions’(p. 2). The inquiry into the South Asian domain is propelled so as to broaden available languages of the moral and ethical, and a specific focus is on ethical practices, contrasted with the Universal and Rational allegedly characteristic of the modern West.
While this is not the place to discuss Kant (do the paralogisms or practical reason allow for interiorisation?), there is a clear mismatch between the value and position of an argument (Kant, Enlightenment Humanism, the ‘universal’ and the ‘rational’ in distinction to which the work under review proposes itself) and the space devoted to its exploration and justification (practically nothing). This is echoed in some of the essays when, for instance, a ‘phrase’ such as ‘practical, that is, in something like the Aristotelian sense’ (p. 69), is thrown in without any explication or elaboration on issues that are complex and on which there has been as much controversy as commentary. The inadequate development of a problematic punctuates the individual essays since one is not always clear why a particular archive is being detailed beyond the mere fact that it exists (or is Asian).
The essays address a diversity of archives, historical as well as contemporary. They focus on the pre-colonial, the colonial conjuncture, the contemporary, and their shifting and mutually constitutive relations. Daud Ali’s scholarly treatment of the subhasita—short stand-alone verses in Sanskrit but literally meaning ‘beautifully said’—take as their thematic a moral inquiry within a scholarly domain that cannot be subsumed into moral injunctions, thereby allowing a diversity of perspectives in fundamental issues, such as, the relative importance of birth and disposition. Bhavani Raman’s study of tennai schools in Tamil Nadu on the cusp of the early colonial period prior to the successful institutionalisation of colonial ‘reforms’ argues that memory functions as a mode of the cognitive that is in interplay with the world (where material objects and moral values associate with one another), rather than the reduction of thought to the mechanical; the latter was an accusation that colonial administrators levelled. Verse served as an introduction to basic vocabulary, computational skills as well as virtue at the same time, so while the content of a verse might outline a virtue, each line would begin with a different vowel arranged in the right sequence. While both Ali and Raman underline that these circles of learning were clearly socially demarcated, the implications of this for a larger social (alluded to by Raman) are insufficiently explored.
James Laidlaw, Charles Hallisey and Ajay Skaria study the archive in South Asia and Southeast Asia for an ethical practice that might well broaden our available languages of the ethical. Laidlaw investigates what are in effect concealed tensions beneath the translation of Jain arguments for non-violence into contemporary ecological and animal rights movements. Hallisey focuses on a text composed by a Cambodian monk in the early 20th century, so as to recover a ‘moral creativity’ in a subject that is not a good example of the ‘autonomous agent so typically assumed in much of modern Western ethics’ (p. 150). Neither Laidlaw not Hallisey carry out a sustained engagement with the complex philosophico-epistemological traditions of Jainism and Buddhism which are indexed in far too cursory a manner; not unlike their invocations of Foucault and Ricoeur. Similar is Skaria’s use of categories, such as ‘humanism’ (and its ‘modern liberal iteration’), against which, in a now familiar modus operandi, the singularity of Gandhi is proposed, but the proposal in so far as it has conceptual content is marooned by the prose all too quickly. In explicating his crucial and operative phrase ‘equal to his death’ illustrating the Gandhian warrior, Skaria writes: ‘this is a life where perseverance in being is no longer dominant’ (p. 232); little defence or exploration is made of such a life where perseverance in being is no longer dominant. We are left with little inkling of the enormity of perseverance involved in reflecting on being and non-being, even as carried out in any text or tradition.
The essays by Ritu Birla and Dipesh Chakrabarty focus on the site of colonialism in the reproduction of the modern. Birla convincingly argues, with strong archival backing, that while much has been written about the ‘revolution in values’ (p. 95) that led to the formation of the individual entrepreneur and contract relations unmoored from culturally conditioned status, colonial jurisprudence in fact produced a collective cultural agent as an anachronism even while it was unable to accommodate ‘vernacular business practices’ that did not conform to its distinction between public well-being and private interest. Practices where profit making was simultaneously considered charitable (a temple being the site for free meals with its lands being rented out) were explicitly categorised as ‘private’, simply because profits existed and thereby not eligible for tax exemptions that charities (always defined as gifts given in perpetuity) were otherwise eligible for. Chakrabarty takes us through a trajectory from Ranke, Bloch and Collingwood, to Jadunath Sarkar and the establishment of the Indian History Congress (referred to as a ‘vulgar tamasha’ (p. 124) by Sarkar). Interesting hints about the relationship between source criticism and historical objectivity, between ethical aspirations and universal claims, universal history and universal institutions, their avatars in metropolis and colony are no doubt given, but the essay is not quite equal to its rather modest self-perception:
I have tried to suggest the role of different figurations of democracy; the rise in importance of the idea of the ‘history of common people’, the rise of mass education in the West and elsewhere, and the global processes of decolonization after the war. One could add the roles that nationalism and the modern media have played in the process (p. 131).
Leela Prasad’s contribution is a richly evocative account of multiple tellings of a ‘local’ event in Sringeri. It finds its own voice so as to narrate what is involved in, and how involved, narration in fact is. Veena Das takes as her field the lives lived by Hindus and Muslims in low-income neighbourhoods. Not systematic reflection but the fact of their ‘shared banalities’ (p. 233) form a site and vantage point for this essay, along with an insight from Wittgenstein: The fact of having a word on hand to describe what is (otherwise) considered a different world speaks of what is shared, however ‘problematic’ the specified content is at different times. But the existence of a word—bhagwan might traverse the communal naming—one has had to describe others, has never prevented exterminations and one cannot but ask for an interlocution with what has been explored as the ‘banality of evil’, given its role in orchestrated violence. Other themes covered in the volume include the Tamil public sphere (Bernard Bate), the figure of the wrestler across the medieval world (Emma Flatt), ‘corruption’ and student politics in contemporary India (Craig Jeffrey) and transplant victims (Lawrence Cohen).
The lack of sustained attention to developing a problematic is a disappointing feature in several essays in the collection (including the Introduction). The assumptions inbuilt into the characterisation of the modern Western traditions—the promised engagement with ‘Aristotelian, Christian and Liberal traditions’ (p. 2) remain little more than promises and are treacherous jumping off points for exploring an ethical continent. The latter is ‘discovered’ as terra nullius, with little reference to the rich secondary literature on philosophical traditions of the region, from which the ethical cannot be sequestered. The erstwhile critique of naive empiricism or the natural archive/field has ironically returned in the treatment of ideas and practices as though they were fact-like, ‘poor in the world’, untrammelled by the need for argument or reflection.