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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Books |
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Review |
“Let Poetry Be a Sword!”
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| How DR Nagaraj changed the way we read Gandhi and Ambedkar |
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Published : 1 January 2011 |
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| I |
T WAS BEFORE DAWN on the morning of 12 August
1998. I sat up, confused by an unexpected sound. My
first cellphone, a large, unwieldy purple-coloured Nokia,
was ringing away on a table across the room. I struggled
to get out from under the mosquito net tied to the
ancient, uncomfortable four-poster bed I was sleeping on,
in a draughty inhospitable bungalow
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belonging to a Parsi family in the Pune Cantonment. Rules about noise, sleeping, waking, phoning and such matters were pretty strict, even for a guest like me. My caller, a grown man, was crying. DR Nagaraj, thinker, friend, teacher, and possibly one of postcolonial India’s five greatest intellectuals, had died late that night of a heart attack, at his home in south Bangalore. He had been up past midnight, drinking with his friends, eating rich food that was specifically disallowed to him. He had been in great spirits. He was 44.
That awful morning, I stood in the darkness, thinking
I was having a nightmare, and if I only waited a few moments,
I would wake up from it. The Parsi family forgot
their rules about disturbance and gathered round, trying
to console me. More than 12 years have passed, and like
all those who knew and cared about DR, I am still inconsolable.
When I now read the last sentence of his essay,
‘The Lie of a Youth and the Truth of an Anthropologist,’ it
seems to me cutting, unfair, breaking the bounds of irony
and bordering on tragedy: “Politics teaches us to live, not die,” he wrote. So why did he have to die?
The answer might lie in the slogan that DR gave to the
new Dalit and Shudra literary movement in Karnataka in
the 1970s: “Let poetry be a sword!” Prithvi Datta Chandra
Shobhi, a former student of DR and editor of this new volume
of his published and unpublished work, spells out
the unusual manifesto in its entirety: Khadgavagali kavya,
janara novige midiva pranamitra! Poetry, or literature, in
this conception, was to be both a dear friend and a protector
of the people. When I try to rationalise his death, I tell
myself perhaps it was inevitable that someone who based
his politics on the power of poetic language would not live
very long on this earth.
Chandra Shobhi, I and a handful of others were DR’s
graduate students at the University of Chicago, just before
his untimely death. He landed like a missile on the Hyde
Park campus, in the freezing spring quarter of 1997, exploding
our usual methods of Indology and philology, anthropology
and literary criticism, area studies and political
theory. The university was no stranger to Kannada culture:
AK Ramanujan, UR Ananthamurthy and Girish Karnad
had all been in and out of Foster Hall from the 1980s onwards. But even that long institutional relationship with
Karnataka had not prepared us for the brilliance, the irreverence,
the eccentricity, the charisma and the originality of
DR Nagaraj.
We studied Gandhi with Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph,
caste with Ronald Inden, colonialism with Bernard Cohn,
religion with Wendy Doniger, Sanskrit with Sheldon
Pollock, modernity with Arjun Appadurai, and historiography
with Dipesh Chakrabarty, for starters. As overworked,
overwrought, ambitious, arrogant, multilingual and slightly
unhinged Chicago South Asianists, we thought we had it
all. Little did we know, signing up for DR’s new course on
Dalit Literature, that our bearded, bespectacled, maverick
visiting professor—with a grand reputation and no publications,
with his bizarre English and his disarming friendliness
outside the classroom—was about to sweep away all
our assumptions and certainties as an irresistible current
might so many mud embankments.
Ashis Nandy, Chandra Shobhi and Rukun Advani have
done a great service to the ongoing study of social change
and cultural politics in India by bringing out this volume
of DR’s writings and talks. Both Nandy in his preface and
Chandra Shobhi in his introduction remind readers of what
we all knew about DR: he was as disorganised as he was
brilliant, as lazy as he was insightful. The task of finding,
completing, systematising and publishing his work after
his sudden death was never going to be easy. Indeed, it took
a dozen years, even with Nandy’s deep personal regard for
and dedication to the memory of DR, along with Chandra
Shobhi’s unparalleled native knowledge of Kannadiga history
and society, not to mention his closeness to DR. The
project has also received support from DR’s wife, Girija
Nagaraj, his mentor UR Ananthamurthy, his former colleague
and friend Sheldon Pollock, and Ramachandra Guha,
who must have felt Bangalore’s intellectual life irreparably
impoverished by DR’s passing.
In his home state, DR had been recognised from his early
days as a student activist and a literary agent provocateur.
At the time of his fatal cardiac arrest, he was juggling at
least three positions: at Bangalore University, at the Centre
for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi and at the
University of Chicago. DR, himself born into an extremely
impoverished and backward weaver caste, gave a new kind
of voice to Dalit and Shudra identity struggles: compassionate,
confident, comfortably learned, and equally critical of
both upper-caste humbug and Dalit self-pity.
| B |
UT HOWEVER SIGNIFICANT HIS ROLE in the Dalit
Movement in Karnataka and outside, his most lasting
legacy will prove to be his utterly original reading
of Gandhi, Ambedkar and the complex relationship between these two founders of modern India in the early
part of the 20th century, especially as regards their—apparently—
conflicting views on |
the caste system and on the problem of untouchability. DR’s seminal essay, ‘Self-Purification versus Self-Respect,’ first published in The Flaming Feet in 1993, cannot but alter any reader’s understanding of Gandhian and Ambedkarite positions on the untouchable and on the meanings of caste in Indian modernity. If DR had written nothing else besides this piece, it would not have lessened his intellectual and ethical contribution—I suspect that at some level, he knew this.
| COURTESY OF AMULYA NAGARAJ |
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DR Nagaraj, possibly one of post-colonial India’s five
greatest intellectuals. |
This essay—echoed in a few related pieces that also
appear in the new volume—describes how Gandhi and
Ambedkar changed one another through their long and
intense engagement, and their “intimate enmity”—an idea
that DR, like everyone else in Indian social science, learned
from Ashis Nandy. DR examines Ambedkar’s efforts towards
having the British create separate electorates for
untouchables, and Gandhi’s fast against this eventuality,
culminating in their notorious Poona Pact of 1932; their respective
tank and temple satyagraha mobilisations, aimed
at securing access to public goods like drinking water and
entry into places of caste Hindu worship for untouchables;
and their shared desire to produce a change in upper-caste
consciousness so as to end the centuries-long oppression of
the untouchables.
DR’s stroke of genius is to see that the ‘self’ in Gandhi’s
project of ‘self-purification’ is the upper-caste self; the
‘self’ in Ambedkar’s project of ‘self-respect’ is the lower-caste
and untouchable self. The two political projects, thus, unfold upon different subjects, even as they appear to both
address one and the same social evil, namely, untouchability.
For Gandhi, it is the upper-caste person who must purify
his being of the ‘sin’ of untouchability through a variety
of spiritual practices; for Ambedkar, it is the untouchable
who must reject the entire history of his humiliation at
the hands of caste society and embrace equal citizenship.
Gandhi’s motivation is his deep religiosity; Ambedkar’s is
his thoroughly political understanding of human life and
human dignity. Gandhi comes to the problem of untouchability
from the side of tradition; Ambedkar’s approach is
radically modern.
The very terms ‘Dalit’ and ‘Harijan’ which ultimately
come to be associated—in Ambedkar’s case, retrospectively,
after his death in 1956—with the two critiques of untouchability,
capture the separate and to some extent even opposed
types of affect that are associated with Gandhian
and Ambedkarite politics. ‘Dalit’ (crushed) evokes the unrelenting
structural violence against the untouchable in
caste society, and consequently elicits a reaction of righteous
anger. ‘Harijan’ (God’s creature) suggests not concrete
social equality but a sort of vague existential parity in the
eyes of the Maker—bestowing an inherent and inalienable
value to the life of the untouchable that it is left up to the
upper-caste person to acknowledge.
One category allows for a politics of anger and resistance;
the other depoliticises even its beneficiaries into mere
‘Congress Harijans’ who quickly, within Gandhi’s lifetime,
lose the respect of the very communities they are supposed
to represent, and cease to provide the leadership that the
Dalit Movement evolves for itself over the course of the 20th
century. Like their unfortunate brethren, the ‘Congress
Muslims,’ Harijan leaders are domesticated—and effectively
defanged—by the mainstream, liberal, secular and
self-congratulatory pieties of the post-colonial caste Hindu
ruling classes. In a story DR tells repeatedly, a Harijan boy has to be reborn as a Dalit youth: a kind of fast-track political
education that tellingly comes out of his transformative
encounter with Gandhi (and not Ambedkar), an outcome
that even the Mahatma himself did not correctly predict.
As I revisit DR’s writings, I remember well this anecdote,
of the untouchable boy who did not turn up with the requisite
orange to break Gandhi’s fast at the appointed time.
DR’s gift for storytelling was an inseparable part of his
pedagogic method. He had perfected the art of finding the
right parable to illustrate every social scientific or historical
claim that he made. Those are the sorts of lessons that
one never forgets.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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notrelevantnow
8 February 2011
03:21 PM
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Thank you Ananya Vajpeyi for this wonderful article. This is a touching homage to a teacher who is clearly missed and much loved.
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notrelevantnow
8 February 2011
03:21 PM
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Thank you Ananya Vajpeyi for this wonderful article. This is a touching homage to a teacher who is clearly missed and much loved.
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chandra
31 December 2010
03:02 PM
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Great essay!! I completely enjoyed the reading. It poses one to ponder certain way of thinking as DR has written. Thanks for the nice narrative of his contribution to the Indian literature.
chandra
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