Abstract
Avijit Pathak’s little book reminds us that sociology and the social sciences are actually meant to help us deal with life. Our everyday existence has many contradictions and we are surrounded by social structures that create apparently unsurmountable walls and limitations. Their study is commonly done within the format of what Zygmunt Bauman has called the science of unfreedom. This examines the constraints on our lives and reifies them by only seeking to explain why we are compelled to do what we do. But critical theory and many other traditions like feminism and psychoanalysis have sought another and emancipatory path. For them the point is not what our constraints may be but how we may overcome them. It is down this path that Pathak’s book leads us. It takes up a very Indian discussion of some fundamental human concerns and the way sociology can offer us directions and pointers for them. For this he walks us through the classics of social theory, down the rich green garden of Advaita and Sufi philosophies and across vast pastures of fiction and poetry. Consciously shunning the old positivist rules that insist sociology must speak only through ‘hard’ evidence he puts together a series of ingredients which evoke sharp smells and vivid images. The book does not skirt the vicious realities of human society. And yet it is infused with a tone of hope and optimism.
The book begins appropriately enough with the theme of work, productive creation and recreation of the material conditions of one’s existence, which is at the core of being human. For many, though, it is a source of unhappiness, alienation and exploitation. The Bhagavad Gita may urge us to work in a selfless manner without seeking rewards, but can this be a suitable response when confronted by structures of endemic exploitation? Pathak argues that the Gita does not mean by this that we abandon the judgement of good and bad. Drawing from the Marxist critique of labour, he says that our dharma is actually a struggle for a more humane, creative work, which fulfils our potential. The dharma of seeking good work necessarily means creating a good society, too, for without it work cannot be changed to anything other than oppression and dehumanisation. Power structures that restrict and control us through Foucauldian surveillance prevent the flowering of human creativity. It is not that all power is bad, though. From Gandhian Swaraj we get an example of power that comes from individual self-control and enables human beings and does not stunt them. But how does one avoid the temptation of dominating others? This draws Pathak to a central theme of the book, the importance of love as the key balancing the force of life. He agrees with Gandhi that an orientation of love, of a sense that one is an indivisible part of a much larger entity, is always necessary. Without love any attempt to build a better world will slide again into what it had wanted to change in the first place.
Pathak does not avoid asking blunt questions about the possibility of love in today’s world. If love is about the dissolution of boundaries, then the socially created inequalities of our society challenge it in a very fundamental sense. Is love then just a mirage, a false vision that is always somewhere beyond the horizon? The tussle between classes, caste violence and snobbery and the hidden chains of patriarchy may all be deterrence to the work of love, but Pathak cites Ambedkar and Gandhi to say that without compassion and love there is no future for the struggle to create social equality. The search for social justice must be through an ever-expanding practice of love, else it will remain only at the level of laws and regulations.
Love has not received in social sciences the attention it deserves. Perhaps it still makes academics feel a little unsettled with its implications of emotion and passion, all those things which make the cognitively inclined fear that they will lose control. Avijit Pathak looks at the works of Emile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons to recover from them an understanding of love in society. Durkheim had emphasised that without bonding and solidarity, which are all closely linked to love, social life would not be able to exist. Speaking against what we would call today market fundamentalists, he had argued that solidarity was the foundation of all important exchanges and remained just as relevant in industrial societies. Even religions were actually sites which gave expression to this human characteristic, offering spaces for people to bond and join in the effervescence of fusion through the symbolism of the sacred. Talcott Parsons pointed to the integrative functions of bonding, love within the family and elsewhere. The conservative leanings of Parsons, in particular, were responsible in the second half of the twentieth century for a reaction in social theory against the processes that bind. Merely arguing in favour of bonding and stabilising whatever was going on in the society was little but status quo and it is not surprising that positions like those of Frantz Fanon gained popularity, through his posing anger and hatred as the knife which could cut through entrenched domination. This was quite the opposite of the role of love and its integrative function. Pathak does not quite repudiate the arguments of Fanon but only points out that all those who wish to build something new would still need integrative processes for that new entity. Even a world based on creative freedom and not domination would still need love to hold it together.
If love is central to human existence, then so are desire and ego, which also raise several dilemmas for us. Our recognition of our needs and our actions in search of their satisfaction are an inevitable aspect of being human. But consumerism as an engine of globalisation actually works through the promotion of desire. Our needs seem to get only a temporary satisfaction before we again begin to search for the next generation mobile phone. Similarly membership of groups is what gives us our specificity and our sense of context. The politics of identity strengthens those who have no other resources to support them. But identity politics can also lead to hatred, fear and endless wars between ‘communities’ and ‘nations’. How can one overcome these? Pathak’s answers echo Aurobindo’s call for a cultural evolution, a shift in the grammar of culture in the direction of simplicity and lightness of our footprint on this earth. He also recalls Tagore’s interpretation of nationalism and identity, where one was an Indian primarily so as to become a better human being, not so as to draw and take shelter behind boundary walls of hatred.
The book concludes, appropriately, after talking about work, power, social stratification, ego and desire, with the theme of fear and particularly fear of death. Fear, too, holds us back in our journey of moral evolution. The western existentialism of Camus sees life as meaningless and death even more so. All is crushed by the iron boot of bureaucracies and development. In this era of disenchantment, which modernity has wrought, why should one strive for moral and cultural goals rather than for promotions, money and consumer goods? For Pathak this is the revolutionary potential of love, which can unleash a vast imagination that provides innumerable possibilities. The myth of Nachiketa’s dialogue with Yama depicts a way of seeing death as the transformation of human existence, not its pointless, purposeless ending. Death in this tradition is the ultimate dissolution and fusion with eternity, to be celebrated the way the Sufis celebrate an Urs, which literally means the marriage of the self with the divine.
Reading the book is an intense experience in itself, carried along by its gentle questioning of fundamental issues and beguiling narrations of classic stories and myths. It raises questions that are at the heart of sociology because they are actually at the heart of being human. An important contribution of the book is its bringing love and solidarity back into the way we imagine our struggles for emancipation. This emphasis as well as the author’s use of Indian literature and mythologies to make his point exemplifies a way of swinging away from a Eurocentric social science. A fault, if one may call it that, is that the book is too short with many issues inviting much greater elaboration. How, for instance, does Pathak look at the way Niklas Luhmann engaged with Parsons’ theme of social integration as an essential ingredient of human society? Has love meant different things in a feudal society from a modern one? What have Indian traditions other than Advaita and Sufism had to say about social integration? It would have been wonderful to also reflect upon the dilemmas of social organisations, which lie somewhere in between the individual and the society as a whole. Perhaps, to be left with more questions cannot be said to be a fault. Where the book scores, is in its indefatigable optimism. It demonstrates that sociological insights into the many chasms which spear through our contemporary world need not only be a source of despair.