The Middle Stage: On DR Nagaraj's Listening To The Loom

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Monday, October 06, 2014

On DR Nagaraj's Listening To The Loom

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The words "modern India" are used today to describe a vast

About Me

nation-state of over a billion people, but they also imply a

particular trajectory of history. They refer to an ancient,
ethnically and culturally diverse civilization that was colonized
from the eighteenth century onwards, that developed a native
intelligentsia that eventually deployed against British colonialism

Chandrahas
I am the author of the
novel Arzee the Dwarf,
(HarperCollins, 2009;
New York Review Books
2013), and the editor of
the anthology of Indian
fiction India: A
Traveler's Literary
Companion
(Whereabouts Press,
2010; HarperCollins
India 2011). I am also
the Fiction & Poetry
editor of the Indian
magazine of politics and
the arts The Caravan.
View my complete
profile

My books:
Arzee the
Dwarf

ideas of nationhood and liberty adapted from thought currents in

the West, and that in 1947 won independence and became a
nation-state ambitiously committed to democracy and
secularism.
But if much has been gained by the ascent, over three centuries,
of modern political ideals and global thought-systems in India,
much, too, about the precolonial Indian past has become
obscure, or entirely fallen away from view. In the new
beginnings either forced upon the country in recent centuries or
else self-consciously fashioned at home, these older knowledge-systems seem to have no place. To
put it another way, in the twenty-first century's speeded-up time and vast platter of choices, the past
seems to have become shorter. What might we do to prevent ourselves from completely becoming
the prisoners of our own categories of time and place?
The Indian intellectual DR Nagaraj, a dazzling and eclectic thinker who taught briefly in America at
the University of Chicago in the nineties before he died tragically young at the age of 44, is bestknown forhis book of essays on Mahatma Gandhi and BR Ambedkar, two intellectual titans of the
Indian twentieth century who often took opposing positions on the great issues of their day, such as
the caste system and untouchability. But Nagaraj was also possessed by a desire not just to see the
Indian past through the lenses of the present, but also to turn history around and inspect the present
through the lenses of the past. If the methods and philosophical positions of present times are fit
and useful to analyse the formulations of several kinds of pre-modern eras, the reverse should also
be true, he writes. Genuinely bilingual -- he wrote in both Kannada, one of the major languages of
the Indian south, and in English -- he possessed the resources to carry this project through. Many
of Nagaraj's ideas about how the dozens of distant Indian pasts could be brought to bear
productively upon the present have just become available in a posthumously published book of
essays, put together by his friends, colleagues, and students, called Listening To The Loom.
Although the book is often difficult going, reading it is like being taken on a whirlwind tour of Indian
intellectual history, the kind of journey that nobody seriously interested in India should deny himself.
I stayed up late into the night with it for several days, stimulated by sense a contact with a mind that
seemed to be living in several centuries at the same time. The effect of reading Nagaraj has been
described very well by the Indian historian Ananja Vajpeyi, who was briefly his student at Chicago:

Named one of "60

Essential Works of
Modern Indian
literature in English" by
World Literature
Today. Shortlisted for
the Commonwealth
First Book Award 2010.

The Caravan
for
December

The Middle
Stage Is
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New and
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DR could teach us about Gandhi, Ambedkar and Nehru, in many ways Indias
archetypal modernists, all the while speaking in a style that suggested that even today, the
Buddha was delivering sermons in Sarnath, and the classical doctrines of Nayyayikas
and Buddhists, Mimansakas and Advaitins, Carvakas and Jainas, Sufis and Sikhs, were creating
the pleasant hum and hubbub of an Indic intellectual world. My hunch is that DR identified, in a
personal way, with the protagonists he constantly returned to: the Buddha, who walked away from

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The Middle Stage: On DR Nagaraj's Listening To The Loom

Published in German
(DTV) and Spanish
(Plataforma)
translations in 2012

India: A
Traveller's
Literary
Companion

3/2/15 8:48 PM

worldly attachments, only to find it supremely difficult to actually detach himself; Nagarjuna, a
Brahmin who turned Buddhist, the South Indian from Andhra whose texts brought Buddhism to
Tibet and China; Ambedkar, the modernist obsessed with premodernity; Gandhi, who had to
wrestle as hard with his own indefatigable appetites as he did with the mighty British Empire.
DRs catholicity, his capacious hunger to master Pali and Sanskrit, old Kannada and classical
Tamil, Continental philosophy and postmodern literary theory, challenged every stereotype about
radical intellectual politics.
Nagarajs painstaking and perceptive editor, Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi, who's tenured at San
Francisco State University, compares him to that of the ancient Indian pauranika: the storyteller
who organises the knowledge and wisdom of a culture, and guards against the slide into intellectual
amnesia. But what exactly did Nagaraj think Indians were losing sight of?
For Nagaraj, as for several other prominent modern Indian thinkers working in different modes
(whether Jawaharlal Nehru in his book The Discovery of India, or the framers of the Indian
constitution) the first fact of Indian history was its pluralism, its diversity of viewpoints and knowledge
systems some exceedingly arcane, but nevertheless philosophically rigorous and linguistically rich
humming in dialogue or tension with one another. This history meant that no one religion, ethnic
group, or languagecould enjoy a specially privileged place in the new Indian nation.

Salman Rushdie,
Vikram Chandra,
Bibhutibhushan
Bandhopadhyay and
more! (Whereabouts
Press, USA, 2010;
HarperCollins India,
2011)

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But at the same time, the modern nation-state, with its vast hunger for centralization and
homogenization, invariably tilts towards a public sphere composed of majorities and minorities,
insiders and outsiders, us and them or what Nagaraj calls identity narratives of the religiousnationalist kind. Almost every nation-state that has emerged from the shadow of colonialism
continues to wrestle with this problem.
This majoritarian tendency is seen in modern India in the right-wing Hindu project that wishes to
pummel Hinduism into a unified field and to represent minorities (Muslims, tribals, agitating lowercaste groups) as misguided, unpatriotic, or aberrant. (Both aspects of this tendency can be found
in a rant by the Indian politician Subramanian Swamy last year.) Nagarajs brief, tenchant critique of
the Hindu right-wing movements use of the figure of Rama the hero of the ancient Indian epic the
Ramayana as a symbol for its political aspirations will have to serve here as a representative
instance of his own method. The movement reached its apotheosis in 1992, when Hindu agitators
destroyed a mosque, the Babri Masjid, in the north Indian town of Ayodhya, since the site was
considered the birthplace of the historical Rama. (An excellent eyewitness account of the sacking of
the Babri Masjid and a meditation on its fallout in Indian life can be found in the Australian foreign
correspondent Christopher Kremmer's book Inhaling The Mahatma.)
But this fixing of Rama in both history and geography, argues Nagaraj, elides the hundreds of other
sightings of Ram and the other major protagonists of the Ramayana reported in legends from all
across India and not only the north. The power of Rama in Indian history, as expressed in its art and
its legends, was that he was not there, speaking from remote Ayodhya, but
always here, somewhere close to home. (Diana Ecks magisterial recent book India: A Sacred
Geography illuminates Hinduisms persistent instinct for duplication of global stories in local
contexts).
But with Hindu nationalism, says Nagaraj, history and faith are being made to share the same bed
-- somewhat like with creationism in America. What might be an antidote to such divisive readings of
the Ramayana? For Nagaraj, the answer lay in not just a scolding based on the ideals of the Indian
constitution (a point of view which sounds patronising to many right-wing Hindus), but a turn instead
of the many folk Ramayanas of India, which often poke fun at the central characters of the epic,
and see their stories as aesthetically malleable structures to be continuously reinterpreted, not set
down in stone. For Nagaraj, the recovery of difference is an effective way of overcoming those
threats posed by the essentialist use of symbols. The pluralism of the Indian constitution might be
seen as just the codification, in the modern language of rights, secularism, and democracy, of the
natural pluralism of Indian history.
In a tribute to Nagaraj shortly after his death, the scholars Sheldon Pollock and Carol Appadurai
Breckinbridge offered an assessment not just of the range of Nagaraj's intellectual gifts but also of
the diverse, and sometimes disquieting, life experiences he brought to his work. Just as Charles
Dickens as a boy had done time in a blacking factory, so too Nagaraj, born in a notionally free India,
had as a boy spent some time weaving in bonded labour. Pollock and Breckinbridge wrote:

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When D. R. became a visiting professor at the University of Chicago in 1996, he had gained a

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The Middle Stage: On DR Nagaraj's Listening To The Loom

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3/2/15 8:48 PM

reputation as one of the leading cultural critics in India, and perhaps the foremost thinker of the
politics of cultural choice among those he would refer to as historically humiliated communities,
including dalits (those formerly called untouchables) and artisanal castes known as shudras. If this
were all D. R. had to give, it would have been gift enough. But D. R. approached the problem of
subaltern cultural choice from a perspective broadened not only by familiarity with contemporary
metropolitan thought but also by profound study of the living cultures of rural India and of the
precolonial past. It was especially in that past -- the fact that so many South Asian intellectuals no
longer had access to it was for D. R. an enduring catastrophe of colonialism -- that he found
important resources to recover and theorize. And he did this in a spirit neither of antiquarianism
nor indigenism. D. R. understood that social and political justice cannot be secured without
reasoned critique, and that the instruments of critique in postcolonial India had to be forged anew
from an alloy that included precolonial Indian thought and culture -- but only after being subjected
themselves to critical inspection. In exploring these resources he showed the remarkable
intellectual reach and curiosity that enabled him to speak across every disciplinary boundary and
to explore an astonishing range of conceptual and ethical possibilities.

Courtly Encounters
by Sanjay
Subrahmanyam

To put it another way, while many prominent modern Indian thinkers have sought to expand Indian

Asia Literary
Review

pluralism from above, in dialogue with ideas from the West, Nagaraj sought to expand Indian
pluralism from below by sifting through the best of India's native traditions and recovering their
vocabulary and concepts. The Clay Sanskrit Library (now the Murty Classical Library), an ambitious
new Indic publishing project aiming "to make available the great literary works of India from the past
two millennia in scholarly yet accessible translations", would have excited Nagaraj greatly as just the
kind of gateway to the past that he tried to supply in his essays. One of the things that we most
closely associate with the condition of being modern is the range of choices guaranteed to us in
relationships, vocations, consumer goods. Through a book like *Listening To The Loom*, we see
that what we are given as moderns is also an unprecedented ability to transcend our historical
moment and inhabit the pasts from which our world has emerged.

Henry James:
Portrait of A Novel
by Michael Gorra

Posted by Chandrahas at 8:27 AM

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