Memory, Time, History: Adi Shankara and Other Stories

Memory,Time, History:Reading Adi Shankara and Other Stories

Sociologists are essentially concerned with the construction of narratives, whether theoretical or empirical. This aspect of writing Sociology is dependent on both value neutrality as well as self aware subjectivities. Clearly, the idea of the charismatic hero evades statistical Sociology, primarily because the aspect is not of numbers and aggregates, the generalizing principle or the question of the average. In this context, it is interesting that fictional histories, whether hagiographies or genealogical charts are of immense interest to us. When the genealogies appropriate the cosmos or divinity, as often happens in caste histories, then the clan ancestor may very well be the sun or the moon. The truth value of these fictional histories are regarded not in terms of their approximation to reality, but they are sacred to people. The line between genealogies and sacred histories pertaining to legends and myths is not very clearly drawn.

When people say that they are the spiritual descendants or the biological descendants of some personality or the other, they are essentially communicating how important the legend is to them. Legends have a historical specificity, a rationale about time as approximate to ours, which then differentiates it from myths, where sacred histories and geographies are much more representational. The question of orality or literacy thus becomes even more specific, since these stories may be passed down by people through the use of hieroglyphics, writing, oral traditions in verse or song, or through painting and other art forms. History  thus takes many aspects in this reorientation to the popular. Local communities may say they emerged from a hole or a tree, but the real intent is to represent their identity in relation to a particular topography. Their maps of arrival may be known to them, or to specific individuals, or may have been forgotten Migration trails thus tell us about forms of co-habitation, as much as it does about symbols of familiarity with local dialects or languages, food, and the customs pertaining to the relations between men and women. Sociologists are familiar with the notion that every one came from  Africa, until such time as the latest researches show that Australia is where human beings made the dramatic evolutionary jump from being tailed and hairy to what we are now, metropolitan men or women.

The question of extinction is thus not just about art forms, but also about moral world views. Each society has its particular preoccupations about what is acceptable, and what is not, and the limits of the discourse are about rules, who fashions them, and why. If we do not follow the rules, then indeed we are ostracized. So, why does the accident of history turn up at odd intervals, and point out contexts of just such inertia, passivity,  possible dread, and the way in which rule breaking brings out a new framework within which the moral code is re-read? Does passivity bring about a certain reordering of the world because the individuals accept the rules without questioning them? Pilgrimage provides us a way of looking at both migration trails as well as an orientation to changes in world view. Historical conjunctions place us in the terrible circumstances of how these are formulated through the work of legends. Synthesis is both a map of the world as lived, and the unificatory principles of assimilation. The world view then represents itself through the questions of the significant other, who draws the myths and legends into a convergence that becomes acceptable to the masses. The process of this assimilation used to be by  fear of the sword, or in our terms, the fear of war and death, but it could also be by the domesticating spaces of love and words. Love in its myriad ways would present itself as if it were the conclusive argument on how people must follow the path. The debates around conversion centre around two aspects: statistical conversion which is about numbers, and may include the exchange of wealth or property, and individual conversion which is centrally about the transformation of the self. Adi Sankara, the novella, looks at all these aspects with the gaze that comes from a severely imposed detachment. The characters are impaled upon each other in terms of the terrifying possibilities that they represent. The mother may swallow the son, the crocodile and the snake may equally kill him. The teacher may protect him from fellow students, but solitude is a better companion. The loving companion is brushed away, and in homology two cohabiting lovers are separated. Negotiating the everydayness of divine absorption, Adi composes verses, where the distinctions between the Gods and Goddesses, and the humans is rendered osmotic, continually blurring, yet manifesting themselves when so desired. The line between dream, poetry and revelation is too fine to be visible. This constant stepping between the worlds is what Adi does in his philosophical work. He accepts the cosmos in its entirety, and the microscopic detail which he looks at the world around him becomes the essence of the fission and fusion that is anticipated as a philosophical process. The map of the world is in the body, the travels engage with the immediate sacralisation of the things around him, people and nature. But they remain things, because it is shunya that beckons most conclusively. What is mapped therefore is biography as journey, and the establishment of the maths (mutt or institution of religious learning and administration), which are then reintegrated into  sanatan dharma as points of significance. They too, as pilgrims, make the journey and see the world Adi saw, they too worship at the shrines where he made his presence known. The map of pilgrimage thus becomes the map of the self, and the possibility of death is never far away, as the ability to make these journeys is imposed on those who have the means to travel these vast distances, be they renouncers or householders. For those who cannot, the verses and the tantric images are sufficient to create the cosmos within the home.

The second novel Beyond the Ferry looks at the mundane aspects of existence, knowing very well that marriage can be the most dangerous of contracts. It uses the stereotype of a young woman married to an elderly man, then places the urbane manner in which exploitation regularly occurs within the household, and the possibilities of an illicit romance  upsetting the apple cart. The young man as intruder who sets to stalk the woman, disturbing her self imposed incarceration within the household, is a trope,  which novelists use often, probably because it exists in reality. The intruder is known in the protagonist’s youth, and while she hides her true feelings for him, which is fear and suspicion, the instinct to love is present as a memory that pervades her. The friend of a friend, he becomes in essence the one who carries the hidden language of adolescence, and mutual contempt turns to friendship. Here, too, the map is of the body, in its various aspects of recovering the self, the individuals never remain constant, there is a bleakness about the known world, and yet there are images of hope and possible recovery. The fact that Christians and Muslims may not marry is underlined by the fact that the childhood love that the protagonist seeks to forget is ever present. The young man’s  existence, within the boundaries of his own Christian community is underlined by a reflexive longing, and a practical denial. The novella questions what is love, and doubts it. However, the optimism which arrives from hope is a constant theme. It does not look towards revenge, but to redressal. It presumes that for the protagonists, the future looks towards the practical realities of their conditioning, to the questions woven by society for its own regeneration. Is there a gargantuan appetite that Society has for its rules, and do people conform to them? When they don’t, we have cause for a novella.

In this work too, I attempt to understand why the maps of our country are made flexible by cultural crossing over. Essentially, we are in the warped space of denying these, the questions of migration trails which are entered into by consent, and which lead to the further domestication of impulses and primordial loyalties to caste and clan. Do Muslims have a caste, and how do they overcome these principles of friendly contempt and familiarity, to enter into dialogue? Is the employee and employer status forged in terms of a pretence of fealty? Is hierarchy ever present in how these fealties become feral, or are in turn conceded to? What is the language of adaptation? The novelist asks these questions primarily because they are ever present. The consent to slavery has been a compulsory theme in my work, only because as a St Thomas Christian by birth, I carry the weight of my forbears, who were often referred to as Thamburan or Thamburatti, only because they owned land several generations ago. Their poverty in a rural landscape was profoundly disguised by their ancestral claim to two thousand years of hegemonic authority over local communities. In these clan biographies, it is necessary to communicate how well versed we are in scriptures, how loyal to the Church, how our adima or slaves, remained ever loyal to us, in ties of love and bondage. Further, we communicated in  lineage histories, that we did not need to engage into enquiries about our ancestors, as occasionally we would find biographies that contested the descent from Brahmin ancestors. Nelycinda reoriented the map to older histories, of both voyage and interculturality, asking serious questions about why voyages for trade or religion would affect the way in which people thought about the world in which they lived. They did not have to be charismatic, to be attributed a biography, fiction gave these probable histories, as Natalie Zemon Davis called it, a provenance of it own. Thus, the metalanguage of fiction provided us illustrations of the past and present as ever contiguous. We believe that they co-exist for that is the nature of the human mind. The abstract drawings of cave dwellers, and tribal communities in the post modern globalized world, seek to dwell in just this contemporaneity. Much of the early twentieth century fiction in Europe sought to draw on this primevalism, which they called "primitivism" to engage with the profundities of what  Claude Levi Strauss called the Unity of the Human Mind. In our search for this contiguity between ourselves and those who live in the Third World, a euphemism for the drudgery and dirt in which  eighty percent of our population continues to live, we chance upon extinction as the solution to their distress.  This enforced extinction is placed on the canvas of expectations of our 70 year old democracy as the "costs of development". Do Suleiman ( a former road worker) and Shazia ( a middle class trader’s daughter in a hypergamous marriage) share in the tribulations of being poor by choice, not destiny? When they jump the ship of their wealthy employers, one from the contract of marriage, the other from the contract of apprenticeship, do they consent to the irregularity of their decision, as they share a meal of sardines sitting on a stone bench at the railway station?

For these urbanites, the map of their city, Benaras, is fathomed only by the anchorage of known places, and the continuous congestion of the roads which they travel by autorickshaw, owned by the elderly trader, and driven by the young educated employee. The task of education is to provide survival skills, and to this generation, no obstacles are perceivable, as they proceed with the task of pushing forward. They have to survive, that is the minimum that is required of them as partners. Will their families of orientation receive them with affection and understanding? The novella works with the limited scope of leaving the future empty of intention. Are these people real, do they have a future…every audience of readers asks this question.

By engaging with the commonplace, I also deal with the problem of how Muslims in India define their world, while negotiating past the stereotype we find in North India, which is terrorist equal to Muslim. This is one of the most painful formulae that self conscious Indian Citizens, who may not describe themselves as Hindu Nationalists face. This denial of martiality, which is after all a cultural custom, among fundamentalist religious groups, regardless of their nomenclature is demeaning to the housewife, who is trying to get through the day with the minimum of conflict. Language becomes the space, where he or she defines the necessity of civility, while domestic abuse comes veiled in many aspects as affection and guile. Shazia’s name is changed to Tazia by her mother in law, and her persona changed from free spirit, rowdy and fun loving to the docile housewife, who secretly reads forbidden love stories. Feminism as deciphering the script of the legitimating aspect of docility as servility is the characteristic tool that I use. Killing the angel in the house, as Virginia Woolf described it, is only one way the novelist describes how literature uses the negative example, as a means by which the protagonist finds freedom. There is no angel, there is only competent housework done equally by men or women, and servitude is not an aspect of this grammar. How, then, to look at the trope of the dominating mother?

All three novels engage with this, dealing with the coinage of the suppression of sexuality, either Oedipal or factual. Where this sexuality is liberated, we find a woman like Shazia’s mother, who is indeed caught in her household duties, but prioritises her relationship to her husband, through the convenience of agreeing with him that the stability of the household depends on the marriage of their children.  The harm that she does to Shazia is not apparent to her, content in her own traditions and security, and their weekly conversations are a balm to the mother, because surely all must be well with the daughter even in another naad (country) if she is well fed and well clothed. The marriage of convenience then benefits the mother of Shazia because the reputation of a wealthy trader is bigger than the questions of his age and his preoccupations, which are aesthetic. Don’t ask too many questions, and cover up for seeming lacunae in the cat’s cradle is the general norm of the secure housewife.

The third novella The Palace Complex attends to the problem of pilgrimage as a site of constant hope, ending in an anticipated tragedy. The protagonists are caught both within the web of their own relationships, where war is the unseen bedfellow, and illness a constant companion. The map of the universe is defined in terms of how individuals know where they live, and where they come from, and how transitory is the passage as they make these crossings by sea and land, as they go from place to place. Kinsmen and women, soldiers, and families. all of them are scattered across a vast map. They live by their dreams and hopes, just as we do even today. They define the warped nature of their emotions in terms of their resistance to the stylized way in which others wish them to behave. The urbanite in medievalism is caught within a vast hinterland of social expectations, and the final resolution lies in their ability to mourn what they no longer have… the possibility of stability.

In History and Truth, (1965) Paul Ricoeur describes History as development, involving decisions, crises and growth. Thus, objectivity becomes an ethical premise. The Philosopher. according to Ricoeur, looks to the ‘advent of man’ in the flux of history. This preoccupation with biography is concerned also with events as they occur and the selection of these by the subjectivity of the historian in the writing of a narrative. There has to be a theoretical framework  which marks out the way in which the view of the world is defined, and how narrative composes it.The essential premise is, then, that of the same and the other: how can we describe the institutions of the past in terms of the present? The historian’s choice   implies looking for something. We must be motivated in looking for something, or we will find nothing. So, history is a kind of composition. Historians are looking for attitudes, human attitudes. Philosophers turn these attitudes into categories. This is the difference between event and advent. Ricoeur writes,

“Our initial dilemma between varying history and the idea of immutable truth henceforth takes on a more subtle form: a neutral sympathy becomes attached to history; engagement and the risk of being mistaken becomes associated with the search for truth.” ( Ricoeur 1965:30)

The contrast between the closure of history is the openness of being. Alongside, or rather mediating this, is the axes of communication. Communication is the structure of true knowledge. This praxis of knowledge is dialogic. All truth must enter into an inter subjective arena, there must be the communication of ideas and interests, and combat is essential in the explaining of oneself.

We must connect this to Max Weber, and the quest for the historical actor, where causality and consequence are integral to sociological explanation. What is the role of the catalyst? How do we understand charisma?  Can we locate our quest for sociological analyses in terms of that which cannot be analysed?

Ricoeur defines our problem set as Theology vs History and Eschatology vs Events.  Following the aspect of Tradition as 'Truth as an Agreement', he suggests that there has firstly to be an agreement of judgement as affirmation, or negation. Do we agree with Tradition? Is there a conclusive relationship between speech and reality? Is there an agreement among ourselves? There are, according to him, truths which are visible, truths which are about dispositions. Some truths appear inseparable from the process of verification, from possibilities of instrumentation, from the particular methodology of a given science. This is different from experimental truth, which includes the very basis of the anticipation of exclusion of all that which is known, and which springs from the conviction of community. The historical novel plays with these possibilities that these subjectivities, so strong, so palpable are ever present.

Ricoeur is interested in the triangular relationship that exists as a dialectic between perception, knowledge and action. The perceived, with its world horizon, encompasses knowledge and action as the vastest theatre of our existence. Laboratories, the applications of science to work, well being, and war, give a perceived presence to science, which is thus woven into our life and death. ( Ricoeur 1965:169) The botanic presence of death, or its entropic manifestation is now returned to us as the formulae of the industry of war and it’s constant manipulation of our psyche. We return to legends to fulfill our sense of prophecy as an integral part of tradition.

Ricoeur confirms in History and Truth (1965) that it is the dialectic that brings institutions into fruition. A value is recognised only by serving it. The universal is the historical. The statistical value of the universal is to be located. Art is also anchored in truth. Art must have coherence. It may not be imitative. It must communicate authenticity to the receiver, the complete presence in the mind of the receiver and creator which dominates and convinces. Yet, this truth of submission is also a truth of doubt and questioning.

The true artist, for Ricoeur, only experiences the motivation which is proper to his/her art and does not yield to any commands, exterior to his or her art. He/She does not popularize the Revolution or submit to the tyrant. Art does not plagiarise from a given social science, but draws from its sensitivity. It is a rupture. Others follow the artist, as he or she reveals, where the Scientist shrouds. By creating figures and myths, the artist interprets the world, and establishes a permanent ethical judgement on our existence, even if he/she does not moralise, and specially if he does not moralise. Poetry is a criticism of life. All the orders of truth are mutually contested and reinstated in an endless order ( Ricoeur 1965:174)

Raziaudding Aquil and Partha Chatterjee in History in the Vernacular (2008) collate the works of several authors, each contributing to our understanding of why the linear Collingwoodian notion of time and history are still evident in the teaching of syllabus, but why genealogies, family histories, biographies, and re-reading of charismatic heroes will embellish how we think of the past. Velcheru Narayana Rao and Sanjay Subramanium argue for the presence of traditional texts called the niti texts. These are essentially directed to the lay reader so that he/she may know the customs and conventions, the political etiquette that are present in any place. It also presumes that people read the legends, or hear them, that they have access to a corpus of learning which are traditionally defined as essential for reading.

 The construction of historical narratives thus locates the way in which ideologies are represented as totalizing spaces. These provide legends and myths with ways by which their endorsement may be continuous as providing security to those who benefit from their claim to legitimation. The sensibilities of communities and individuals are honed by their absorption of these myths, the

call to power and the verification of allegiance is all something we are aware of. Can a poet write about Magadalene if he/she comes from another faith, can a novelist write about Adi Sankara, if not a Hindu? The legitimation of narrative as sacred history in Mircea Eliade’s sense of the term is something which we need to go back to. This double bind of being objective value neutral students of the Humanities or Social Sciences has become problematized by our manifest desire to vehemently espouse citizenship rights, or defend them for those who have no access to the signature so conclusively  representative of freedom. The right to selfhood is marked entirely by self consciousness that enables free thought, and free speech. Let us be clear that if this is denied to us, then there can be no literature.

This obligation to be free is typical of the 21^st century. Atleast, one should have the self awareness that decries subjugation, or the varieties of colonialism that constantly reappear. Migration histories today define how the world is evolving, through war and deprivation. Fifty percent of migrations are  today sea based migrations, and they are of people fleeing from war. Migration for work, as was characterized by the 20^th century is now replaced by terrible circumstances of defining what it means to be human in the most terrible terms. As Malthusianism represents itself, it calls upon humans to define on a day to day bases, how they will view the accidents of history. With global warming, the statistics of death through suicides or starvation are posed as the new symbols of extinction. We know that those who survive will do so because the rampant aspect of annihilation in rapid industrialization is technologically given. Food becomes the symbol of excess, but with it, the chemicals that accompany processing and preserving food are essentially visible. Each civilization attempts to understand seasons and compatible forms of occupation as given to it in terms of its familiarities with its  logic. With climate change, that vocabulary is destroyed. When should the farmer plant, when sow, when reap?

The novelist is essentially  concerned with how the world begins to change with each catastrophe, and offers new insights into how this world will be viewed. The different epochs of time give us a frame from which we can compare our different locations.

Adi understands the cold winters of the Himalayas as a time of both meditation as well as the utmost challenges placed upon his physicality. The anticipation of death is ever present, he fears only that the oscillation between the here and now, and the images of the past will reduce him to a corporeality which cannot be depended upon. The body is freed from these obligations, and the mendicant withdraws into himself, assured that he will be returned whole, or atleast in pristine condition to his waiting audience. Hundreds of years have passed since he walked from place to place, and yet, to those who follow his pilgrimage, the contexts of language and moral codes, stigmatization and exclusion, life and death, unassuaged longing and its converse, fruition and opportunities, are still immediately visible.