INDIA’S GREATEST MINDS. Spiritual Masters Philosophers Reformers. Mukunda Rao. Hachette India. April 2022. 520 pages
Ashoak Upadhyay
I
n her lecture “The Danger of a Single Story” the Nigerian writer and feminist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie put it well enough to bear testimony to how people in the global South are shown the virtue of a homogenizing ethos, mocking their traditions as part of ‘savage’ histories that need erasing. But that was not just the White Man’s Burden; in our own times, despotic regimes fueled by brutalizing nationalisms too have embraced what Adichie decries: The Single Story.
“So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.”
And further:
It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is “nkali.” It’s a noun that loosely translates to “to be greater than another.” Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power.”
Adichie’s words should ring out loud in an age anchored to a globalising hegemonic discourse where homogeneity is the abiding principle for oligarchic capitalism partnered and abetted by State power driven by an agenda of societal transformation into a Hindutva-driven majoritarianism. The ‘single story’ coin has two sides: a homogenized consciousness chained to a globalizing capitalism and a communal schism that erases the rich diversity of faiths and beliefs/lifestyles. The Single Story project positioned as “Metonymic Reason,” (Boaventura Sousa Santos) is declared necessary for modernizing backward peoples supposedly befuddled by their diversities that turn them cross-eyed and incapable of marching down the straight and narrow path to the kind of future the West has had. At the risk of repetition, it is hardly surprising that such metonymic reasoning segues into the majoritarian agenda that would like to both swipe clean India’s rich multiverse traditions and, also by the way, weed out the weak and poor as roadblocks holding up ‘Progress’
And yet the Single Story project fails: on both counts. The telos of ‘Progress’ through oligarchic capitalism is vehemently opposed by grass root movements as is the majoritarian project of wiping out diversities. The recent history of civil disobedience movements, ranging from the satyagraha by the sants of Matri Sadan opposing sand mining in the Ganga at Haridwar, the Shaheen Bagh movement, the refusal of young students in Karnataka to bow to the demand not to wear the hijab and countless other protests and the resurgence of community-based social service witnessed since the lockdown, all bear testimony of resistance to the Single Story of majoritarian identity as the building block for this country and its toxic/ repressive agenda of clobbering a multi-varied and dialogic consciousness into a silent and acquiescent one.
But our histories still speak to us, betokening an enduring opposition to and dissent from the idea of a Single story. South Asia, and one uses this handle deliberately to include all the modern states in the region, has been the breeding ground of rich dialogue. Amartya Sen gave us just a glimpse in his Argumentative Indian, Ashok Vajpeyi elaborated and more accurately called it Dissent through the ages. But perhaps both appellations fall into the trap of the Single Story syndrome.
Reading Mukunda Rao’s compilation of what his book describes as “India’s Greatest Minds” should lead the reader to Mikhail Bakhtin’s use of the dialogic tradition that helps understand the rich heterogeneities of conversations that mark south Asian histories through the ages. These conversations cover the range of human communication with existential anxieties, hopes and almost every emotion even the satirical: conversations between the erotic and the ethereal, the sacred and the secular, renunciation and reform, an almost infinite archive of articulations and representations through poetry, sculpture philosophical ruminations and social reform agendas that override and transcend social divisions to offer us a mirror of our multiple selves that we are being bulldozed into abandoning as savage or obstacles to ‘vikas’
Rao makes clear a point that sets the tone for a departure from those compilations that want us to remember our legacies of argumentations and dissent. The story of human existence is not just one of struggles for survival but equally “and perhaps more importantly, “the relentless search for answers to existential and metaphysical questions…” But the search for answers could become aimless perhaps irrelevant in the absence of the quest for the right questions.
That search sets in motion the restless spirit, the unending quest that may not lead to answers but to more questions. And as the ‘Minds’ that Rao lists with his brief profiles of their inquiries attest, conversations form the very backbone by which the often tortuous journeys begin. There is no monologic, talking-down ‘Mann ki Baath’ but a dialogic engagement that seeks to illuminate the fraught relations between the reticular Self and the Universe .
Leaf through any profiles that Rao provides and the dialogic discourse shines through as liminal journeys of self-examination and comprehension. Kanaka Dasa (1599-1609) born into a shepherd caste, becomes a disciple of Vyasaraya Swami much to the chagrin of his Brahmin disciples who threaten to leave. Dasa volunteers to sit away from them while the teacher discourses on the nature of Brahma in the Upanishads. Swamy then puts his disciples to a test. He offers each disciple a banana and asks them to find a spot in the forest where no one can see them eating it. The disciples return boasting of their success. Kanaka Dasa comes back with his uneaten banana, places it at his guru’s feet and tells him that he could not find a spot where Brahma did not exist and where his divine eye could not see him. Once the ‘classes’ were over. Swamy inquires if any student is ready to meet Lord Vishnu in his abode at Vailunta. A dilemma surely for the students who remain silent: to say yes would appear arrogant and a negative answer would imply they had learnt nothing. Kanaka Dasa replies, “”Swami I may go if ‘I’ can go.” Figure that out: its awesome metaphysical and almost cosmic answer of a self-awareness and humility before the power of the Divine.
Such dialogic demonstrations of the questing spirit marked the life of the great ‘Minds’ that Rao lists, not as original pieces of research but as simple reminders to the post-modernist reader of the tradition that she should be proud of, a tradition rich not just in profound questions they raise for posterity to ponder but in the ambiguities that distinguish human consciousness, rendering it capable of holding more than thought, one story, claiming, as Borges would say, the universe as its patrimony.
So next time the devout reader makes a pilgrimage to Shirdi, she should remember to pay her respects to Sai Baba’s foremost disciple, a Muslim whose sarcophagus is prominent within the complex but usually skirted around. The historical narrative of Sai Baba and the sage’s conversion into a Hindu deity evidenced in the garish splendor of his inner sanctum has wiped out the record of his spiritual quests, his healing the weak and the vulnerable that flocked to his Spartan dwelling site. And his faith?
“ He talked about the Ramayana and Bhagvad Gita to Hindus and Quran to Muslims” speaking in parables and allegories.
“Sai Baba was a compassionate saint as much as a harsh critic of religious orthodoxy and the artificial, denominational division between the Hindus and the Muslims. He believed that the central message of Hinudism and Islam was the same: love, service and freedom. [He] himself acknowledged both religions : he chanted the name of Rama and often called out ‘Allah Malik hai.’” (261)
While the book offers the reader an introductory tour of the rich traditions that may be unfamiliar to many reared on Meera Bai, Kabir and other Sufis and saints that have been almost glamourized, one does tend to feel uncomfortable at the inclusion of “reformers” such as Lokmanya Tilak and a somewhat cursory profile of his complex journey from a radical Swaraj is to Home Rule advocate. He was, as Rao admits against social reform and his idea of Swaraj was a simple political one not like the extremely complex one that Gandhi would adopt as evidenced in “Hiind Swaraj” and his actions subsequently.
For this reader no section captures the dialogic imagination as vividly as the one called “Christian Ashrams”. The idea that the advent of Christianity in India could have been anything but violent, given its savagery in Latin America has never quite left the Hindu imagination and now finds expression in an ideological antagonism towards Christianity fueled by exaggerated if not false news of “forcible conversions” of innocent, babes-in-the-wood Hindus, maybe of the lower castes untouchables no less, but still. It’s an act of colonizing terror, right? No, wrong. Rao’s description of the encounter between the votaries of Christianity and India is unique in its dialogic and cultural conversational experiences. Basically, for Christian missionaries the encounter with Hinduism was an experience that would create a rich terrain for what Rao terms “Christian inculturation” a concept used by many theologians to mean the adoption by Christianity of local customs and practices including art forms, music and the like. The process of inculturation begins as early as the seventeenth century when Robert de Nobili (1577-1656) did not simply wear saffron robes and expound the Christian doctrine in Hindu terms using terms such as ‘guru’ and avatar when referencing Jesus, introducing Tamil words to describe various practices but even resisted the criticisms of his superiors to strile out on a path that would lead to a glorious inter-cultural journey for that religion in India. .
The inculturation was to gather pace and become more significant as the years rolled on with missionaries adopting the concept of ashrams to inculcate a a life of sharing and the ‘commons’, not just in terms of ascetic living, as in the monasteries but embracing a philosophy of cooperative living. . In Bengal late nineteenth century, Brahmabandhab Upadhyay (1861-1907) a Hindu Brahmin no less, converted to Christianity when he turned 30 years, dressed in saffron robes and called himself a Hindu Catholicm leading the life of a sanyasi. But it was in the southern part of India where a more profound cultural immersion, representing dialogic exchanges between the Christian religion and Hindu scriptures would mark a unique chapter in India’s multiverse histories of learning and restless questing. That an alien religion using the sword and the gunboat to spread terror and its word of Jesus in other parts of the Third world would in India itself experience a syncretic transformation should speak volumes; not about the superiority of our scriptures over the alien ones but about the capacity they held for that dialogic encounter, an encounter that proved a sort of casement to a more self-fulfilling one of self-examination.
To be sure, Hindus were proselytized; not so much as to wipe out Hinduism as Christianity did native faiths in Latin America. Marginally to be sure; what is not stressed is the impact Hinduism had on the missionaries, many learning Sanskrit and Pali apart from the common man’s languages such as Tamil, Kannada and Telugu and Malayalam in order to study the Upanishads, the Gita and essentially not just preach but also practice a life of contemplation and eventually, of renunciation.
Bede Griffiths (1906-1993), an Oxford educated upper middle class Englishman perhaps best exemplified this spirit of syncretism most vividly. Alan Richard Griffiths would come to India in 1955, ‘to discover the other half of my soul’ he wrote to a friend. He took the name of Swami Dayananda, learnt Sanskrit and studied not only Hinduism but also Taoism, Gnosticism “and was well acquainted with modern physics and the New Age thinking that grew up [sic] in the Western world during the 1970s.” In 1968 he took over the leadership of the ashram Shantivanam turning it “into a meeting place for East and West in an effort to go beyond binaries. Rao quotes him thus:
“We cannot return to the past forms of Catholicism or Buddhism or Confucianism or Hinduism or Islamic orthodoxy. Each religion has to return to its source in the eternal religion.”
This is a profound testimony to the power of both the diversity and unity of all religions; of the potency of dialogic exchange that keeps all faiths in a state of dynamic movement, its eyes on a source that is common to all. And in a rich tribute to the power of cultural conversations that had impacted even a hard-core religion like Christianity:
“It is no longer a question of a Christian going about to convert others to the faith, but of each one being ready to listen to the other and so to grow together in mutual understanding.” (454)
An earnest plea to the post-modern millennial searching for a lamp in this fog of toxic illusions: Read this book!
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