Abstract
A critical exploration of values calls for a simultaneous engagement with the predominant discursive framework of modern knowledge systems. The dominant episteme of our times has somehow ensured the banishment of ‘values’ from the modern kingdom of social sciences. ‘Values’ have been made to look for new habitats—new religious movements, new age gurus, varieties of spiritual practices, fundamentalism of all hues and sundry other domains and practices that are not modern. In disciplines, such as ethics, metaphysics, social and political philosophy, ‘values’ appear in their sanitized academic garb. In a way, modern scholarly disciplines are ill-equipped to engage with values. Instead, they live in perpetual fear of the invasion of values lest their hard-earned modernity gets contaminated and unsettled with their contact with values. The ‘presence’ or ‘absence’ of ‘values’ in modern disciplines is a complex outcome of the history and epistemology characterizing modern social sciences.
The idea of rational debate, free from the residual categories such as emotion, belief and values, has been an abiding characteristic in social science. The fear of value is synonymous with the disdain of ‘inferior epistemes’ in the scheme of hierarchized epistemology. Familiarity with modernity, science and socio-historical emergence of social science provides us with a clear conception of divides in the body of knowledge. The famous, or rather infamous, Cartesian dualism between pure intellect and sensuous body is merely a tip of the iceberg. It assumes sophisticated firmament, despite the bouts of sceptic and romantic as well as conservative critiques, in the trajectory of scientific epistemology. The divides in the body of knowledge have been manifest in the form of cognitive binaries, reason and emotion, science and non-science, secular and religious and so on. This is the scheme which attempts to push aside any source of value as dubious, spurious and misleading component in order to maintain the claim of prejudice-free science or scientific epistemology. But then, another turf of debate surmounts the conventional scheme of binaries in the age of epistemological pluralism and emergence of global south in scholarship. In this wake, the binaries are critically revisited and the question of values is restored.
Curiously, there is a link between colonial history and epistemological exclusion of values. The discursive framework which banished the category of value subsumed the split between emotion and reason as an inalienable part of the philosophy of social sciences. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) suggests that this split between reason and emotion is part of the story of colonialism in India. Scientific rationalism, or the spirit of scientific inquiry, was introduced in colonial India from the very beginning as an antidote to (Indian) religion, particularly Hinduism. It is this simultaneous coding of (Western) knowledge itself as rational and Hinduism as something that was both a religion and a bundle of superstitions that launched the career of a certain kind of colonial hyper-rationalism among Indian intellectuals who self-consciously came to regard themselves as modern. Though the attempted dialogue between science and religion and its influence on the nature of modern academic knowledge formations in India is in its early stages (ibid., p. 25), it does reveal that the binaries, howsoever untenable and problematic, such as tradition/modernity, rational/non-rational and intellect/emotion, have haunted our self-representations in social science language since the nineteenth century. In Chakrabarty’s reading, the split between the analytic and the affective is something that is itself produced by the colonial discourse and that marks forever the speech of the colonized intellectual. Put differently, hyper-rationalism turns out to be a marker of the intellect of the colonial modern.
This is the discursive context, with inherent absence of value, or an advocacy to maintain the absence of values, that is humbly questioned in this special issue. The absence of values was indeed a by-product of a value-driven framework in social sciences. It was only bolstered with the advent of modernity in the colonial societies. This special issue makes a modest attempt to depart from the predominant discursive framework and engages with the idea of value. The objective is to open up various possibilities of reflecting upon the local materials. Indeed, there have been such attempts as reflected in the global South Asian as well as in post-colonial scholarship. But then, there seems to be a need to critically reflect upon the predominance of the Western canon upon the engagement with the indigenous stock of knowledge. As Vinay Lal remarks:
the subaltern historians are comfortable with Marx, Hegel, Heidegger, Jakobson, Habermas, Foucault, Barthes, and Derrida, as well as with French, American, and British traditions of social history, but the interpretive strategies of the Indian epics or Puranas, the political thinking of a Kautilya, the hermeneutics of devotional poetry, the philosophical exegesis of Nagarjuna, and the narrative frameworks of the Panchatantra or the Kathasaritsagara, are of little use to them, and even the little literature of the countless number of little traditions, such as proverbs, ballads, and folk tales, seldom enters into their consciousness. (Lal, 2003, pp. 206–207, emphasis in the original)
In a related vein, Dipesh Chakrabarty articulates the predicament of modern generation of scholars in the humanities and social sciences,
Faced with the task of analysing developments or social practices in modern India, few if any Indian social scientists or social scientists of India would argue seriously with, say, the thirteenth-century logician Gangesa or with the grammarian and linguistic philosopher Bartrihari (fifth to sixth centuries), or with the tenth-or-eleventh-century aesthetician Abhinavagupta. Sad though it is, one result of European colonial rule in South Asia is that the intellectual traditions once unbroken or alive in Sanskrit or Persian or Arabic are now only matters of historical research for most—perhaps all—modern social scientists in the region. (Chakrabarty, 2000, pp. 122, 123)
In the same breath, this is also imperative to pronounce the problematic of engagement with indigenous in reaction to the dominance of the Western canons. Leading, or perhaps misleading, to intellectual nativism, such readings of local texts, or engagement with contextual thematics, are largely due to the subscription to the protocols of canon making. Such a reactionary discursive framework slides into ‘blinded navel-gazing’, ignoring the need to underline the universal significance of debate on values. Such an approach may assume a revivalist tendency and make overtures towards retrieving the so-called lost glory of past. Needless to say, this emanates from an allegedly misplaced liturgy of lament about the status of values in contemporary social scheme. The inevitable consequence of such approach, an epistemological nationalism, is by no means an objective of the exploration of values which this issue of the journal embarks upon.
The special issue aimed at critical exploration of value consists of six main essays and five book reviews. Each essay unravels the issue of value with peculiarity of an exclusive domain of enquiry. Thereby, the collection of essays comes across as a bewildering conglomerate of disparate schemes of reasoning. This is in a way a tacit proposition this special issue intends to offer: Exploration of values in the contemporary scholarship ought to be in the disparate domains of enquiry coming together! This is the essence of the interdisciplinary approach to the question of values that the special issue upholds. And this serves the objective of deriving optimally, yet not to say exhaustively, of looking at values through a discursive prism for myriad meanings. What else could better characterize an interdisciplinary exploration unless we tend to reduce interdisciplinary into a literal oversimplification! Each essay in this volume adds a new leaf to the larger trope of discussion and occasions an implicit conversation between the essays.
The organization of each essay is suggestive of a shared spirit of comprehending values without falling prey to the anachronistic notions or romantic utopias that the term value may connote in an interdisciplinary framework. While they deal with familiar rhetoric, they also tend to engender a possibility of significant departures. Also, the decision to place the essays in a particular order is suggestive of a conscious plan for beginning and end. To begin with, a socio-historical account connecting value with colours and end with a typical theoretical exploration is part of the plan. This implies a modest subversion of the common sense about the beginning of a discourse with theories, empirical data in the middle and synthesis in the form of conclusion. The special issue aims at innovating ‘order of appearance’, creatively responding to the hackneyed modes of discussions in social sciences. It is also imperative in the wake of a discussion on values, which belong to both realms at once, theoretical and empirical, grand narratives and micro-narratives, extraordinary institutions and ordinary everyday lives. The idea is also that social history of value through the vector of colour is an appropriate beginning in a framework where contestation of values is a foregone conclusion. Social history is not devoid of political concerns and hence it is duly followed by an essay which unravels the idea of democracy and political debate on Uniform Civil Code (UCC) in India to underline value orientation in the domain of politics. The third essay assumes a liminal fragment in the neatly organized whole, as it furthers the discussion of value through the category of intergenerational care, a more precise expression of inter-subjectivity, so to say. The configuration of value in the scheme of nostalgia and order, represented in the cinematic texts, highlights the constraints to and potential perpetuity of relational notion of value. The fourth essay, seemingly an entirely unique domain of enquiry, adjudges the value implications in neuroscientific discussion on self, cognition, reason and emotion. The fifth and sixth essays lead the special issue towards a befitting conclusion. The fifth essay poses a disruptive epistemological question: How do we know? Though primarily focused on ethnographic knowledge construction in the disciplinary confinement of social anthropology, this essay has a larger implication for any pursuit of knowledge. It holds ‘time’, as value, in maintaining the distance between the knower and the known, self and other, and thereby power dynamics in the field of knowledge construction. And the sixth essay systematically traverses an eclectic selection of theoretical propositions pertaining to value orientation arising from the vast track of modernity. The six essays are followed by five carefully selected book reviews, equally significant signifiers of the objective of the special issue. The reviews put together, by various young scholars, create a sense of recent publications overtly or covertly dealing with the question of values in the contemporary world. In sum, the whole of the special issue enables for a further reasoning in possibly more exhaustively disparate domains of enquiry and arrives at more detailed terrain of contested values.
Seemingly, there is a curious thickness of the discursive register which determines this special issue. The thickness is owed to diversity of materials, the analytical bedrock, of the essays. And it is due to this idiosyncrasy that the compilation of essays may solicit more attention from anybody keen about the question of issues in contemporary India. It is significant to briefly engage with key thrusts of each essay in this issue. Value acquires a synchronic and diachronic significance in the sociocultural scheme. And, in a convincingly innovative analysis, there is a possibility to argue that value is seldom colourless. Sadan Jha’s article ‘From Sacred to Commodity and Beyond: Colour and Values in India’ unravels social history of ‘transformation in the value regimes that go into the making of colours in Indian milieu’. It unfolds a genealogy that gives rise to a complex where colour, colonial investment in the economy of colours (with an aim at capitalizing colours as commodities), values and experiential dynamics enshrined in the imageries and practices associated with colours all come together. To fathom the relation among colours, aesthetic experiences, the question of value, social fabric and politics, this essay summons a wide range of registers, written as well as pictorial, archival as well as literary. The changes in the predominance of sacredness imbued in colours and becoming of colours as commodities are the two key coordinates in this essay. The sacredness of colours changes across textual ages, the yugas, such as, the Brahmanas and the Mahabharata. A distinct colour surfaces as an indicator of the values of a distinct social group. Thereby, colour of an age becomes anchorage through social history. Furthermore, the Natyashastra presents colours in relation with emotions. This scheme of analysis highlights the ‘descriptive as well as prescriptive deployment of colours’. In the same vein, Ain-i-Akbari treats colours in terms of properties such as heat, cold and dryness. This is indeed a different spell of life for chromatic conceptualization of values. It begins to transform with the steady becoming of colour into commodity. A drive to systematically accumulate and classify knowledge about the production and commercial significance of colours surfaces in the second half of the nineteenth century. A political economy of colours, and thereby of values, advents a new historical epoch and thus twists in the narrative of colours in India. Besides, changing habits and customs also affect the social status of colours along regional and religious lines.
Jha’s essay efficiently sets in a notion of polychromatic value, in correspondence with the commodities of colours, in the age of pluralism. With this, it becomes imperative to chart the political terrain. ‘Democracy as Civil Religion: Reading Alexis De Tocqueville in India’ enunciates a stimulating question: ‘If democracy is itself a moral world or what has been referred to as a “civil religion”, how do other moral worlds—especially religious—claim their place in it?’ The article debates the value configuration of democracy with reference to the UCC in India. With an extensive and nuanced reading of Tocqueville’s magnum opus ‘Democarcy in America’, adequately punctuated with Bellah’s concept of ‘civil religion’, this article argues that ‘the concept of democracy rooted in the ideal of governance by and for people, evokes a quasi-religious belief’. This entails the dyad of ‘liberty’ and ‘morality’, reason and faith, power of people and societal restraint. Democracy thereby is a ‘unique synthesis between religious values and political liberty’. However, democracy also manifests a paradox qua ‘tyranny of majority’, caused by ‘custom rather than law’. A resolve for this paradox is ‘independence of judiciary and principle of plurality of conscience’. By juxtaposing the discerning perusal of the concept of democracy with the debate on UCC in India, the article unravels the complexities of civil religion character of democracy. The ‘new sacred’ of democracy reflects in the Constitution of India too, which according to Baird (quoted by Chakrabarty) is ‘a religious document’. It is the religion of Enlightenment and progress that defines the value orientation of the Constitution of India. The spirit of UCC was present since the drafting of the Indian constitution. This means that the UCC debate signifies a theological belief in equality, justice and national integration. However, this belief unfolds in the scheme of binary opposition: obscurantism versus progress/justice! In short, the bewildering pluralism of values surfaces for consideration in the wake of advocacy for UCC.
The idea of value is not confined to the domain of politico-juridical institutions alone. It is also possible to explore its manifold meanings at the interface of reel and real, cinematic and social. Value surfaces as a key concern in the narrative trope of nostalgia. Deblina Dey’s article titled ‘The Nostalgia of Values: Popular Depictions of Value-crisis towards Ageing Parents in India’ underlines the relational configuration of the value of care. Engaging with the popular cinematic representations, mostly an eclectic selection of Hindi cinema, and select advertisements, Dey emphasizes the usage and cultural politics of nostalgia and its relation with social order. It amounts to the scheme of compassionate versus ‘bad modernities’ in common sense as well as in cinematic texts. The popular sigh on ‘woh kya daur tha’ (the good old days) is duly questioned in cinema while there is also a perpetual reaffirmation of the liturgy of lament. Volumes of portrayal of ‘disintegration of joint family narrative’ notwithstanding, there is also a breed of cinema resonating with the hope to find extra-familial relations of care. The relational value of care thus does not vanish from the scene of society, as it were. It reappears, though with differential nature and scope, in the novel avenues of contemporary society.
Sangeetha Menon in her essay critically peruses ‘embodiment theories’ and invites for an engagement with cognitive sciences to fathom the issue of value. The importance of subjective experiences to understand cognition and the significance of sociocultural context in the process of knowing is the basic premise upon which Menon builds up a critique of the growing trend in cognitive sciences, particularly in affective neurosciences. The trend is to reduce the experiential self to a nonentity. Her critique shows that the apparent goal to highlight the inner qualitative nature of experience is misleading. The implication of the trend is that the outer body becomes the inner self. Conversely, the inner self becomes the outer body. The nature and functions of the self are founded on the body by theorizing embodiment as an alternate to neural reductionism. This article argues that one of the negative consequences of embodiment theories is that age-old concepts of free will, character and moral choices become flimsy and fleeting in the process of embodying cognition.
Ratheesh Kumar effects a curious disruption in the discursive trope of values by underlining ‘temporality as a value’ and revisiting the asymmetry of power between the knower and the known. Any pursuit of knowledge entails the distance between the self of seeker of knowledge and the object/subject of knowledge. Unsettling the given, the essay ‘Temporality as Value: Ethnography and the Question of Time’ traverses the specialized epistemological terrain, backdrop of researching, knowing, documenting and writing in social anthropology. It revisits the construction of the other through the prism of ‘time’. The latter determines the divide between the self and the other. Kumar suggests that there is a conscious strategy to ‘keep the other outside the present of the self’. In other words, the self of a researcher is temporally distanced from that of the other, qua the researched. The political and historical underpinnings of this divide, and of maintaining the value of temporality, are crucial in the ethnographic construction of knowledge. There are examples in the history of social anthropological enquiries in India as testimonials for the critical analysis this article present. The ‘inward gazing’, ‘indo-centric’ social anthropological documentations in India amounted to the creation of ‘inferior other’ and ‘superior other’. There has been seldom an attempt to delve into the field of enquiries with a notion of ‘equal other’ in India as well as elsewhere. Perhaps, this critical logic could be extended to any domain of knowledge wherein the distance between the knower and the known is instrumental. The twain shall not meet, as it were, in the interest of the conventional theorizing, methodology and construction of knowledge. The power relation between the knower and the known thereby seems a fait accompli prevailing upon even the institutions of teaching and pedagogic practices. However, Kumar asserts the transformative possibility by reading Fabian’s propositions on dialogue between the knower and the known. This could, by and large, replace the value of temporality with ‘value for equality’.
Renu Vinod’s essay furthers the theoretical exploration of value in the chequered canvas of modernity, locating reflexivity as the key mover, a kind of value. ‘Negotiating Values in Modern India: A Theoretical Exploration’ begins and ends on the premise that ‘modernity is an unfinished project’. Be it in Europe or in non-European societies, the value orientation pertaining to modernity seems to have been in a flux. And in the Indian context in particular, ‘value spectrum is constantly evolving, influenced by the discourse between master narratives of modernity and those of indigenous value systems’. Vinod tacitly alludes to the contested domain of indigenous value systems too. The state-led modernity (in the wake of modernization in colonial and post-independent India) and the subaltern challenges are two broad characteristics in India’s tryst with modernity. It is the subaltern responses to meta-narrative that amount to a notion of value in the contemporary scheme of reasoning with modernity. To arrive at this proposition, Vinod presents lucid perusal of the chief discursive strands on modernity and surmises some of the key features of modernity, apparently allusion to values, such as reflexivity, risk and movements (radical engagement). This is arguably owed to reflexivity that modernity finds new discursive avatars: multiple modernities (Esienstadt), alternative modernities (Goankar), cultural modernity (Taylor), etc. In this wake, it is only inevitable to encounter perpetually contested values. Vinod underlines the activism of civil society and confusions in identities as reflections of the contestation. The ultimate expression of the contestation is ‘hybrid modernities’ as it were. And lastly, Vinod implies that the contestation of values is only for the better health of a reflexive modernity in the contemporary world at large.
These essays, individually and collectively, are thus a modest invitation to a dialogue, that more competent scholars may carry forward with added rigour and zeal. They, at least, accomplish this task of underlining the urgent necessity of such a dialogue. Moreover, they do make the subtle point that geopolitics of knowledge production in our times is deeply intermeshed with the epistemological dominance of the West. The quest for epistemological diversity demands that we bring ‘values’ back in as an arena of serious scholarly investigation in the field of humanities and social sciences.