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Subalternity and Religion
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Subalternity and Religion
This book explores the relationship between mainstream and marginal or subaltern religious practice in the Indian subcontinent, and its entanglement with ideas of nationhood, democracy and equality. With detailed readings of texts from Marathi and Hindi literature and criticism, the book brings together studies of Hindu devotionalism with issues of religious violence. Drawing on the arguments of Partha Chatterjee, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, the author demonstrates that Jndian democracy, and indeed postcolonial democracies in general, do not always adhere to Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality, and that reiigion and secular life are inextricably enmeshed in the history of the modern, whether understood from the perspective of Europe or of countries formerly colonized by Europe, There~ fore subaltern protest, in its own attempt to lay claim to history, must rely on an idea of religion that is inextricably intertwined with the deeply invidi~ ous legacy of nation, state, and civilization. The author suggests that the co~exjstcnce of acts of social altruism and the experience of doubt born from social strife-"miracle" and "violence"-ought to be a central issue for ethical debate. Keeping in view the power and reach of genocidal Hinduism, this book is the first to look at how the religion of marginal communities at once affirms and turns away from secularized religion. This important contribution to the study of vernacular cosmopolitanism in South Asia will be of great interest to historians and political theorists, as well as to scholars of religious studies, South Asian studies and philosophy, Milind Wakankar teaches in the Department of English, SUNY Stony Brook, USA. He received his PhD in English and Comparative Literature and Postcolonial Theory from Columbia University. His current work involves a monograph on Ramchandra Shukla and a critical commentary on the Dnvaneswari.
r Intersections: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories Edited by Gyanendra Pandey Emory Vf/iversi!]; VS" ....:ditorilll Advisory Board: Partllo Chatterjee. Columbia University/Calcutta; Stev('ll Hahn. University of Pennsylvania; David Hardiman, University of Warwick; Bruce Kf/au/t. Emory University; Rajeswal'i Sunder Rajan, New York UnivcrsilylB anea se ~assertlon If d r b" has purity as its ground, dalil action as daHl s . '. a It su lecthood f ~bJecthood IS already historical, fraught, overdetermined AnOlh erwayo saymgth' . th d r ' . are fundamentally compromised b th . . . ~s IS at a Its as subjects but that dalit subjecthood rests y elf insertion mto the realm of politics. accounted for. In short we on a,n essence or,ground that remains to be h ' can no anger remam content 'th . t c past, for alternative historical accounts of the sub I Wi turnmg to as we discover to our constern'lti 'f a tern past, for that past d' ~n IS 0 ten merely a prelude to the cata~ strophic aspects of our mo enuty Rather than' h f . accounts of the modern in the t'" scarc or alternative understanding of the past that', pas, It IS perhaps time we looked for an Ol Instead, it requires us to develop"n"e ,acc,esslblje to historical reconstruction, ' , w 00 S ant concepts to gra th' d sp IS un er~ stan d mg III the very immediacy w'th h' h . some point in the past- -hence th It' w, IC , It ~rocecded to ground itself at ' e ascillation III this book 'Ih Ih'd ' 1h e a bsO'act in Kabir wh,'ch prov,'d 'h WI e I ea ot . es us wit sam th' I'k h of contemporary protest. e 109 let e prehistory This book revolves around Kabir becaus e' . . , was able to articulate this understa d' ~ hh alone among daht thlllkers dalits, but this was a wisdom that h: ~ng 0 ~ ~ abstract--~e alone among and communities adopted Kabi b t th q~eat. e ?nly to dahts, Other castes U of Hindu tolerance within a H:'d ~y saw,m him only an ecumenical idea ' III U ulllversahsm' Kabir wa ' them to congratulate themselves 101' th el.r : s an occasion for were unable to detect the precious I. . expansive ~ons~ience. And so they latter exceeds any self-aggrandizin~ i~~:I~i~(~:~) 01, sapl~nce in Kabir; the are two aspects to this wisdom grant d' f ance. I,WIII argue that there e an insight into the violence innicled o~nth~n~< ~y ~abll', to da.lils; it impli.es a mode ofamrmation a form ofb I' flh ,[ It a one, but It also entails e Ie at embraces the world' 't t d • If .1Il I S en erness. the previous comportmenl is one of 'k .. i~sight into the abyssal nature of violence S t~:tlcls~n ~n.d :usp~cion !it is an discovery (it is an insight into divinity) K)\,' ~ I~t~.r IS a stance of JOY and lor this reason: this was the luminous hea;t ~/~. a It.e~ the cel~ter precisely saw and Il'ul!cd "R "I Istoneal expenence that he , am, w 10 was not the Ram o f ' , . To pre~empt the central thesis of this book' h mal,nst~eam Hmdu r.ehgion. w 'b'l at I Will tlY and prove III these pages is that Kabir's wisdom was I f access! e to dalits alone bec' h tie Irst to c~mprehend the co-existence 0/ the ex erie ' ' . ~l~se e was expenellce oj f'iolence in dai/r life Brah ' h P nC{ oj dlVlntty and rhe gled to assert their idea ofGod"'-~the ave of course known and strugits cause. And non~brahmins (th y y eve~ .have martyred themselves for but lill'll! thc lowest rung o'f theo~:~~n~:~~llItles who are not untouchable violence. B~t it is the assertion of this book ther; dill? ~elJ ha~e experience? ua . ~ Its a one. will have expenenced the slIIgular coexistence of mira I was Kabir's gift to the m, c e an VIO ellee. ThiS understanding
11:IIIS
Cll~p
9
I should hasten to add that it is a feature of present~day dalit thinking that it is often negligent. in the very pull of its counterclaim on the future, of the specific ways in which Kabir inaugurated not just a religion lor dalits but a new idea of religion, As we will see in Chapter 5, when the dalit critic, Dr. Dharmvir. denounced in the late 1990s the "brahmanical." high Hindu account of Kabir elaborated in the modern Hindi literary~eritical tradition, he tacitly endorsed the lattcr's deification of the saint~poet. The rcason this dalit intervention failed is because it uncritically affirmed, despite itsc1L thc high Hindu idea of "popular religion" in the work of the llindi thinker, Hazariprasad Dwivedi. There. individual spiritual seeking was lirst elaborated in the 1940s as the locus of social protest, providing the ideological template for the notion of an ecumenical Hinduism capable of embracing dissent. The power and the danger underlying Dwivedi's argument was in ib running polemic against Indian Islam. to whose radical social message he oppost-d Hinduism's freedom to believe, which he argued can eo~exist with an affirmation of caste distinctions. Setting aside Kabir's relation to Islam as a convert. Dwivedi argued that the saint*poet should be understood as the very instance of what Hinduism had to olfcr to the challenge of Islam. The problem is that in taking issue with Dwivedi's idca of a spiritual Hinduism, Dharmvir ignored thc peculiar way in which low~caste philosophers such as Kabir "turned away" from such spiritualism by recognizing the historical truth of upper~eastc violence. Such a misreading implies a severance between radical medieval traditions and contemporary caste dissent (all too willing. it would seem. to embrace the dominant Hindu frame) that has alarming implications for the politics of religion, For. the last decade has borne witncss to the increasing complicity of dalits and tribals in organized upper~caste violence of a genocidal tenor against Indian Muslims. We need to bear in mind, for this reason, the simultaneity of subaltern complicity and subaltern emancipation in contemporary Indian politic~ This is another instance of the dalit counterclaim of historical ambition onto the future. The severance of the tie between subalternity and emancipation, one that radical historians as well as radical dalits would need to examine with renewed critical rigor and skepticism. is a sobering effect of the transformations brought into play by political society. For in some sense, subaltern communities will already have pushed away the insight into the violence at the heart of the social (they will have "forgotten" the searing. unsettling quality of what it rcvealed to them over the ccnturies) and moved on, using the languages of empowerment made available to them by political society. But because that insight was always close to them. the very mode of their denial of this insight in actual political practice implies that we can detect a furrow, a trace, a shadow of that older practical reason in the very moment of the individuation of their political will. With this idea of complicity in mind, we can now turn to the new idea of religion implicit in the poetry of Kabir. What are its origins? What implications docs it havc for our understanding of the vcry relation between
.~ 10
Introduction
philosophy and religion? If the dalit critique in its moment of counterclaim does not hesitate to ally itself with all that is darkly ominous about contemporary religion, how is it that we can nonetheless find in it an instance of a new.concePtion of religion, one that is prior to historical religion as we kno,,": It? (We should perhaps retain the word "religion," if only because it desc.nbes so. well. th: pull toward the future that unbinds social groups from t~e Idea of mfimty III the past, binding them anew to the darker underpinmngs of popular struggles.) I spoke of Kabir's Ram as our clue into the prehistory of the popular. I described this insight as the recognition of the coexistence of miracle and violence. Both those terms of course need some explanation. By "miracle" I do not mean a specific supernatural event that can serve as a theological proof for the existence of God. Miracle is understood in this book as a mark of temporal immediacy: it is the moment when a poet such as Kabir has an insight into the nature of divinity, into the t~nderness with which it is p~ssible to embrace the world. Conversely, by Vlolence I do not mean the kind of agony inflicted on Christian martyrs, wh~re suffering can itself serve as a mark of insight into the divine. The notIOn of violence used in this book is indebted to historical studies of violence visited on subaltern groups. This violence, which is sudden, unprecedented, devasL:lting- anonymous in origin but singular in its choice of victim--is therefore also an instance of temporal immediacy. What is c?mmon to bot~ miracle and violence understood in this sense is that they smgle out a partICular human being, a nesh-and-blood instance of suffering, who manages to hold in one idea their nearly unthinkable co-incidence This holding t.o~et~er does not found a new religion, uphold martyrs.. ra~ify a creed. It IS III Itself a schema for how to live a life, how to time the time of on~'s life..'nasmuch as Kabir is able to hold these two instants together his philosophical stance can be seen as a schema of time that speaks of two simultaneous origins in miracle and violence, rendering freedom and unfreedom, God and death as "equally primordial." rt is a token of Kabir's insight into the "equiprimordial" basis of time.
! 2
Moral rite before myth and law Death in comparative religion
What then is the dalit idca of the past? And what would be the link between that dalit past and the task of a daHt historiography? How can one support the claim that a history of what grounds dalit politics is not recoverable within historiography? Let us turn here to another instance of such an insight into time as Kabir's, one which could also suggest for us a new understanding of religion in its moment of institution. It will provide us with a picture of dalit antiquity, but a picture severed from any ties with the merely archaic. Here I have recourse to a relatively recent attempt to write a prehistory of the popular. The attempt yielded a generative account of the possible links between Kabir and earlier traditions of heterodoxy and radicalism in the Indic seene such as that of tantra and yoga. I am referring to the work of David Lorenzen. I want to show how Lorenzen opened up the very idea of prehistory in ways that can no longer be limited to the historical bases of caste dissent or protest. The uncovering of these bases thwugh archival and ethnographic means, exploring the earliest traces of iow-caste dissent in the past while also inhabiting the life-worlds of the present-day lollowers of Kabir, the Kabirpanthis, has been the basis of his wide-ranging oeuvre. We know from an early and justly celebrated work by Lorenzen that the basis of Shaivite (Shiva-worshipping) Kapalika belief lies somewhere in the magico-religious past of lodic antiquity. The Kapalika is of interest because the visibility of the marks ofmouming he bears has some kinship to "race" as a violent ~rchival and textual inscription of the body. This is already very different from caste, whose markings range from the open body to something that is locked into hidden mechanisms of habit and character (caritra). To mark as low-casle is to mark the untouchable not merely as a being that lives and dies like other beings in the world of karmic cycles. It is to mark him or her in the abject loneliness of dying itself. It is almost as though the mask of death had been lifted to reveal the unmasked face overcome with a tragic yearning to speak and to be born again, to bring to speech an incendiary, silent rage. Keeping apart the histories of slavery and caste, but yet bringing them together within a kind of infinitesimal proximity, the Kapalika is the figure of a lonely, horrific dcath that has left no trace. This lonely, vanished
12
Introduction
experience is prior to the politics of "race" and caste: and this priority draws
us again to the question of ~ prehistory. The Kapalikas are so called because they could be easily recognized as mendicant bearers of the bowl shaped like a kapala (skull), and for the other signs of death and profanation that they exhibited on a daily basis. They themselves did not make the historical transition to the ethnographic state in colonialism, which specialized in the enumeration of marginal practice in cults.. sects or castes; they do not survive today as a living tradition but nonetheless give us some clue into the vestigial links between the heterodox and the subaltern. providing evidence of the medieval bases of modern caste dissent. But if (as we will sec) the Kapalikas' origin itself is moot, what can we say of the later history of caste resistance Lorenzen seeks to uncover here and in his work on the latter-day Kabir sects? Among the more inscrutable practices of the Kapalikas recorded in the wide range of texts Lorenzen surveys staning out from late antiquity. is the Great Vow. the Maha-vrala. I take the liberty of quoting at length Lorenzen's discussion of this !lmta. The Maha-vrata penance of the Visnu-smrti and other law books bears an unmistakable resemblance to the observance of the Kapalikas. These ascetics lived in the forest, wore loincloths or animal skins. carried a khal~'anga [a club made of shards of skulls] and a skull bowl. obtained their lood by begging, and polluted those with whom they came into contact. Given the pervasive tantric motif of the identity or conjunction of opposites. the relation betwcen the penance of the law books and the vow of the Kapalikas is not inexplicable. The Kapalikas, we suggest. adopted this vow precisely because it was the penance for the most heinous of all crimes, the killing ofa Brahmin. They were at the same time the holiest of all ascetics and the lowest of all criminals. As in the case of the [untouchable] dombi (and the Kapalin) of Kanhapada's songs, that which is lowest in the realm of appearance becomes a symbOl for the highest in the realm of the spirit. Furthermore, if the Kapalikas were in reality already guiltless, the performance of this penance would result in an unprecedented accumulation of religious merit and hence of magical power (siddhi). The paradoxical identity of Kapalika saint and [Brahmin-killing] sinner finds its divine archetype in the curious myth of the beheading of the god Hrahma by Shiva. This also introduces the essential ingredient of Shaivism which is lacking in the law book penance.
[- --J Every ritual has a divine model or archetype, and the penance Shiva performs is the model of the Mahavrata penance for the killing of a Brahmin. [... ] Although the myth is religiously prior to the legal prescription, the historical precedence is uncertain. The law books are in general much older than the [mythic] Puranas, but both classes of works are based on earlier sources which are now lost. ... The relative priority of the
Death in comparative religion
13
Shaivitc myth and the Kapalika ascetics themselves is also uncertain. Did the Kapalikas invent the myth in order to provide a divine model for their ascetic observation, or did they model the observance on the myth? The evidence is inconclusive. (Lorenzen 1991 [1972]: 76,,80) I place this extended quotation from Lorenzen's book here because it describes what is to my mind a momentous temporal crossroad (disciplinary. historical. theological, and political all at once) at which high Hinduism and the esotericism of tantra branch out, but which is more critic'lily a place where both law and myth as two possible origins of caste are calIed into question. Tanlra itself can be understood here as the intuition (widespread in Indic tradition as a whole but rarely addressed except in tantric moments) that there is in I~"lct no ethical basis for caste in myth or law. Caste has no origin but is itself a series of descriptions of the caste subject that base themselves on the notion of a permanent atonement for an original profanation. a tcrrible encroachment of the sacred. And by the same token what we know as Tantrism is itself the point of absolute incommensurability ·,-which is paradoxically the point of total commensurability, and the supposed basis of thc caste-transcending reach of Ilinduism-- ·between the highest of the high and the lowest of the low. between the "holiest of all ascetics and the lowest of all criminals." Now this is of course a time-tested formula that virtually encapsulates Hindu ecumenicism, which is the idea that Hinduism is in essence a radical assertion of the will against religious codes and doctrine. and that for this reason this religion will always have been conscious of the genuine godliness of those who stand on the lowest rungs of the social ladder. We will encounter this myth in its most rigorous lormulation in our discussion of Hazariprasad Dwivedi's book on Kabir in Chapter 4. Worth noting there is the strange affinity between Dwivedi's Hindu ecumenicism and those dalit critics who faulted him lor ignoring Kabir's greater claim for taking dalit thought outside the frame of Hinduism. In making this point these critics merely affirmed the old claim for Hinduism as a religion of tolerance, for they could only repeat what Dwivedi had already stated, that the "lowest of the low is really the highest of the high." The dissimulation of this fundamental claim of a Hindu universalism-the tendency to ignore their own debt to it-is of course one of the ever present dangers and pitfalls in contemporary dalit thought. as we will have occasion to note. A similar perplexity awaits us in our reading of Lorenzen. Our task would be to understand caste as something whose origins in practice are perhaps earlier than the ethic ofkarma (wherein one is born into caste,jatl). But let us postulate some point in the past at which caste will have been instituted. Here the story of the vow (vrata) is a useful memory aid. We can speculate that it denotcs a sacrifice which is at once a killing and a penance; the murder is so unutterably profane that it must be brought quickly back by means of the penance to the realm of the sacred. But the sacrifice (killing and penance)
I
-Ie
14
Introduction
itself is a fiction; it exists only in the realm of the mythico-Iegal. It follows that the bringing together of the sacred and the profane, the high and the ~ow is hardly a ~atter orrec?nciliation; this bringing together is perpetually m process, leavmg the co~nlct between those opposites very much in play. ThiS would of course reqUIre us to question the very ide;t that religion is the "identity or conjunction of opposites." It could be argued that much of Eliade's work on religion (which Lorenzen cites at the end of the passage w: have read), and in particular his work on yoga and tantra, is based on a mistaken understanding of Nicholas of eusa's idea of the co-incidence of many vectors of prayer with one locus of divinity that is itself hidden (de Certeau 1987: 11-12). Nicholas referred us not to the reconciliation of these vectors but to an incessant plurality from within the gaze of the divine, which is itself hidden. Lorenzen himself is committed to the recovery of radical tendencies in modes of popular practice that predate and yet go on to hold up the dominant philosophical and ethical understanding of action in the Indic scene. In the instance of the passage above, he is undecided about the priority of myth to observance. Understood as a dilemma, Lorenzen's indecision is easily attended to by prioritizing either the tale or the custom----- which is to say, by assimilating it, and by that token the Kapalikas themselves to archaic Shaivi.s~, or to the archaic understood as originally ordered by Shivaworship. But a deeper and more momentous crossroad may underlie this textual forking of ways. We should remember that the passage in Lorenzen is first about a death and then about a penance. It is therefore a passage that places moral practice at center stage. Now what is moral practice if not the art of dying for another's death, the distinction between one's own life and another's death, the possibility of an afterlife as a way of expiating for one's role in another's death? One could argue that moral techniques are fine-tuned at the threshold of their future incorporation into religion, or prior to their "ethicization" in religious prescription. The anthropologist and philosopher of religion, Gananath Obeyesekere, follows Weber in defining "ethicization" a.s the point at which "a morally right or wrong action becomes a religiously right or wrong action" (2002: 75). Here is one account of the institution of religion. This happens when moral art is retroactively rendered as "religious," overlooking the very relation established in earlier traditions between life as lived toward-death and the act of dying for another. It is here that the vow of the Kapalika can help us imagine a singular death in a radically different way. We could argue that the disquisition on death implicit in the practice of the Kapalikas is an instance of a low-caste mi~d.set .on its ~ay from myth to law. opening up a chasm in the path of ethlclzatlOn. ThiS too is subalternity at the cusp, but one which is at once the cusp of death and of religion. For, one can wcll imagine that the Kapalikas embraced death (exile and austerity, the dread visuality of the marks of death on their bodies) as an atonement for another's death. Like the grief of the headhunter which we have tended since Montaignc to explain away as
Death in comparath'e religion
15
cannibalism. their manti practicc of atonement for killing another human being may well have been "ethicized" (written o.u~, eclipsed, push.ed away), which is to say postulated retroactiveJ.}" as the killmg of a brahmm. Wh.ere once there was mourning for a friend (for the role one plays, the persecution one imposes on oneself~ for his death), thcre was now penance for the death of an enemy. Where once there will have been desire for the friend, there was now fear as the basis of caste hierarchy. In a truly violent origination of 'ustice as religion, the aporia of "how to mourn" (dukha) in aboriginal moral ~rt was turned into the dilemma of "how to atone" (prayascita) in myth and ritual, and was thereby made to serve as an alibi for caste (sec OJivelIe 2?05: 174---6). For, could one not argue that when we render "dukha" as "sufferlng" following established philosophical tradition in Buddhism and Hinduism, we push away yet again the prehistory that conne~ts "dukha" to .mo~rning? It is this history of an original moral practice ailled not to retnbuttve but to melancholic justice in vanished cultures of mourning, that has left a trace in Lorenzen 's ~ccounl of the KapaJikas. The point is that that other history of practice is not available except as an already postulated "ethiciz,ation" of deatb at the intersection of myth and law. What are the lessons that we can derive from this historic superseding of moral art by a religious ethic? We will first need to shed more light on the notion of "melancholic justice." Though religious insight is often credited with an understanding of the nature of human comportment in the face of death, I would argue that it does not give us a sense of how death nece~s.itates a moral. or more strictly speaking a pre-ethical stance of aC\:ountablhty to other human beings. Religion in its historical form tends to neglect the per~ ennial question at the heart of any "ontological" inquir~. This ·'ont.ologic~I" question is: what is the relation between the singular history that IS my hfe and history in general? Without denying the importance of the study of religion, it is no longer possible for us to avoid the unpleasant fact that religion itself is often unable to locate itself outside history i~ the general sense: this means that it continues to ignore the problem of the smgular death experienced by a particular person. Now, religion is adept at. providing~ gloss on death in general. But when it comes to the unique death It seems cunousl.y indifferent. There lies the individual on the verge of death, but an we hear IS the noise of custOill and usage. This is true even if the final end of a custom such as public burial or cremation is to return the body to the earth, where the latter is understood as the origin and end of individuality itself, not just an individual in death. What is lacking in religion in general is therefore a structure of accountability, which is always more than conscience and good actions, morc than an ethic. H is from Immanuel Levinas that we have learned to ask this qucstion of" "responsibility" before and beyond religion, but also before and beyond philosophy. A believer might well voice a dissenting note by saying, "My own f(mn of bclicr docs not necessarily adhere to the tenets of my religion in its larger ex:prcssion." But such a dis~v?,:"al in mere terms of conscicnce cannot outweigh thc shccr onus of responSibility. The latter has all
t 6 Introduction
the qualities of a relentless "persecution" by the other to whom I am responsible. This persecution i.s not retributive; it is as we noted earlier, entirely "melancholic." Were responsibility to succeed in casting off any vestige of complicity for the other's death, mourning would come to an end. Such an absolution is unthinkable in the very structure of responsibility, which is interminable and relentless in its haunting. One could well compare it to the eternal return of the self-same traumatic memory. I am generalizing across cultures here. in large part because the colonial experience has been definitive. Philosophically and theologically, Hindu nationalists see Hinduism as a historical religion much in the same way as Christianity has understood itself in the aftermath of Hegel. When we respond as students of Hinduism to their genocidal programs by pointing out that Hinduism has a history, or when we draw attention to religious amity in the past, we perhaps weaken our case. For the idea of history has been so thoroughly internalized in Hindu nationalism since the epoch of anti-colonial nationalism that to make a historical argument against it is redundant. As a religious movement. it is nothing ifnot ideological. historical, and committed to the European idea whereby nations must plot themselves on a scale of spiritual and material progress. Its impulse is to demand from the West a recognition of its claim to speak for the Indian nation, a claim it sees as having been denied in the colonial and postcolonial period bec.:'luse of the West's inability to understand Hinduism from outside a Western frame, from within Hinduism's own terms. It is with this impressive wherewithal. fullv conversant with science, Vedanta and the critique of Western Orientalisn;, that it proceeds to slaughter Indian Muslims under the very eye of the state. The event of this slaughter always appears retributive (it is always in answer to a recent occasion where "Hindus" have been killed); but the fact remains that Hindu nationalism's basic premise is one of restitution. It is a kind of hidden Zionism which argues that history has already attested to the Hindu's displacement from his own land in the long period of "foreign" empires in India. Indian Muslims who chose to remain in India rather than flee to Pakistan after Partition. must not prevent the rightful restitution of thc Hindu to India. It is not hard to see how this argument is relentlessly "historical." It would seem as though the idea of religion here is not only thoroughly comprised by its association with a long historical past marked by collective misfortune; religion here is taken as the ground for the possibility of a Hindu resurgence along the lines of technology, modernization and global capital. It is the strangest of paradoxes that the academic study of Hinduism, which responds to this specter by arguing for a complicated historical account of the past, is unablc in its very historicism to take into account this idea of history implicit in Hindu nationalism. We are unaware that this is what makes Hinduism a historical religion; we neglect to take into account its historicity. Now what if we were to take another tack with regard to the problem of historical religion? What if we tried to argue that religion must give way to philosophy, must surrcnder its idiom. its intuitions, its inner struggle to the
Death in comparative religion
17
persistence of a secular as oppose.d to ~eligious ~o~e of questioning? What if we responded to the Hindu natlonahsts by pomtmg out that they do not philosophize, that they know philosophy ~erely as so man~ paraph.rased doctrines and schools, so that the only genume challenge to Hmdu natIOnal. m is the cultivation of philosophical rigor? Can we move seamlessly from a ~istoricism such as that of the Hindu nationalists, in which religion is kept in place uncritically, to philosophy? It is with something of a shock that we find a similar failure in the secular realm of "ontology." We turn to the latter because it is self-avowedly the most radical attempt we know in philo~ophy to understand the loneliness of a death. I have in mind the redoubtable m~t~nce of a philosophical critique of historicism and b?, the same token reilglon, which is Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (Heldegger 1996 [1927]). In the simplest terms this text represents Heidegger's attempt to rea.rient r,:~igious notions of death on the basis of the philosophical understandmg of Impossibility" implicit in Aristotle. I need hardly add that the text's extremely ~ne grained movement between religious and philosophical concepts ma~es It. an absolutely essential jXlint of reference for any attempt to go beyond hlstoncal religion. It is worth recalling that the logical paradox that "one cannot die one's own death" makes the problem of death a key paradigm in Heidegger's privileging of "ontology" in that text. The problem for us, h?wever, is how ~o forestall (if only analytically) that momentous reorientatIOn whereby philosophy here reMinscribes the religious vocabulary of death in the interests of ontological rigor, using religious terms ~uch as "anxiety" by ~edef~?ing. t~em in existential terms. I do not mean to Imply that we must save rehgIOus terms from philosophy. But does the ontological frame, guided by thc. a~bi tion that philosophy in its ontological moment must surpass and aSSImIlate religion, necessarily yield that insight into the singular exper.ience of death that we are seeking? What if one were to argue that what IS exceeded by ontology is not merely religion, but religion in its own. assimilatiOl~ at its inaugural moment of pre-existing traditions of m~ral ~Ite an~ habit? Thc point is that a major reversal such as Heidegger's re-mscnbes phil?~op~lCally the religious vocabulary of death but only after the ~oment of elhlclzatlO~ of moral practice into religion, only after a moral flte has been pushed mto history to become an ethic at the level of a "world religion:: It was Derrida who told us in the luminous pages of his book, Aporias (Dernda 1993), of the need to question Heidcgger's distinction betwecn an aut~entic uD(je:stal~ding of death along ontological lines and our physically, SOCially and ~Istoflcally (and therefore religiously) attested modes of dying. There, Dernda asked: what if there is onlv this vulgar, everyday mode of dying which is yet unique . ' to every individual in her death? From our point of view, we will need to go a step turther, departmg here from the account of everyday dying in Heidegger and its critique in Derrida. It is not just that Heidegger attempts here (as Derrida shows with u?equ~lled gentleness) to denigrate everyday modes of dying, corrupted as they mvanably
'r" I ,
18
Introduction
are by religious custom, by describing them as vulgar, indifferent forms of action, and then proceed1\. to extol instead the resolutc stance one would adopt toward an "authentic" dcath. The problem is that the very separation favored by Heidegger of the ontological understanding or death from the social history of dying is premised on a prior assimilation of moral to religious action, one that presupposes the notion of religion as ethicized rite. This has the effect of bringing philosophy and theology, Christianity and metaphysics closer and not apart, dcspite I Ieidegger's own assertions to the contrary. Reversing the Heideggerian formulation, one might say: it Is not religion that presupposes and requires philosophy; it is philosophy thai requires and presupposes religion as ethicization. With the result that just as there is always history at the heart of religion, there is always historical religion at the heart of philosophy. We do not find here, either in lleidegger or Derrida, an aa;:ount of a singular death prior to history or religion, before historical religion. Ifmoral rite and habit is lost to religion (reduced to a mere vestige in it), it is also lost to "ontology" when it seeks to supersede religion. What is more, in "ontology" we encounter a double loss and a double assimilation of moral habit prior to religion. (I have been putting "ontology" in quote;, thus far so as to distinguish the Hcideggerian notion of ontology from the history of philosophical ontology in general, since his account can be seen to encompass that tradition and bring it to crisis.) What then does ethicization entail? Let us follow Obeyesekere, in whose thought there is a perennial return to the Weberian link betwcen religions as "theodicies" and notions of death. It would appear that a religion in its inaugural moment takes the form of a system defined around the limits and possibilities of human existence, a system seeking in the main to understand the experience of death. The latter was central to Weber's lifelong research into the changing history of leben~fuhrung, the deliberative conduct of life (see Hennis 1988). The theme of suffering (dukha) in "world religions" such as Buddhism is for this reason recognizable as a foundational religious concept one that helps "comprehend" death by placing it at the intersection of myth and law, lodged in practice and precept as the originating point of a new ethic. If what transpired earlier with the Kapalika was a lived philosophy, a mode of conducting oneself in the world that followed the pattern of a thought, what ensued was its assimilation and superseding by religion, working from concepts generated by a new religious ethic. In this respect. the assimilation of the older notion of dukha as mourning by "habit" (both rite and garb for the Kapalika, as we saw) to dukha as an ethic of suffering-··-·here religion exceeds philosophy,,--in our current aa;:ount of ancient religious thinking needs to be looked at more closely. for this is exactly congruent (if in reverse) with the more recent attempt exemplified in Heidcgger, to assimilate the religious idea of "anxiety" as dread to an ontological notion of "anxiety" as the fundamental possibility unto death of existence itself-here philosophy surpasses religion. Now what is arguably at stake in Heidegger himself is an extraordinary reworking of Hcgel's Christology. To take just
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19
one example among many, witness his recurrent usc or words that are variations on the idea of a "falling" into flesh; except that for Heidegger death is already presaged in everyday worldly goals in that there is always the incalculable chance that those goals may rail awry. What interrupts everyday life and what comes at the end of life arc both unpredictable; we fall into the neglect of the ineluctable decay of our world, as we do at the end of our life. But it is in the falling itself that the meaning of being, as well as the decisive break from this fall that inallgllrate~ a new turn in history, it is here that these central indices of "ontology" (i.e. meaning, decision and history) disclose themselves. I provide this summary here with some impunity. There is no substitute for a dose and patient reading of Beillg and Time. My point if> to highlight in what we have seen above an astonishing congruence as though in a camera obscura. one where Western and non-Western, or "philosophical" and "religious" modes of analyzing death find themselves reflected unto each other in our modern epoch. On the one hand, there are the "world religions" in the way we understand them today. where it is a question of death as such abstracted from the custom and ritual that frames it, distanced from the moral rite that originated in the living philosophy of the Kapalika. By this token, we cannot reduce Hindu or Buddhist notions of death to their legal or customary frame; we have recourse invariably to Hindu or Buddhist "scripture," which in the case of Ilinduism would imply turning, quite correctly, to the idea of death in the Vedas and the Upanisads. On the other hand, there is the Judeo-Christian crux of the "death of Jesus," abstracted as it is in Hegel (and in f-1eidegger who attempts to surpass Hegel here, but is working broadly from within the same tradition) from the very distinction between the spiritual and the fleshly typical of theology. More strictly, we might say that it is abstracted from abstraction itself. For what is common to both regardless of whether one privileges religion and the other philosophy, is the "transcendentalization" of death, severing it from everyday forms of self-conduct. We can now see how fruitless the attempt has been to adjudicate philosophical boundaries with the assumption thai "the West has its philosophy, the East its religion." For death is understood in both through the lived world but also always above it as the horizon of transcendence-for is not a transcendental idea of death the goal of abstraction in either case? Whereas what transpires in the case of the Kapalika is the worldly act of mourning for a death one may have played a role in. With the Kapalika we are inside the world; we are pitched into the interior crypt of mourning. For his grief is nothing less than the inner kernel of yoga and tantra, their perduring secret. to be suborned for all time in the grand schemas of Buddhism and Hinduism. Our present~day dalit Buddhism and dalit Hinduism in so far as they remain negligent of the Kapalika, would appear to merely rehearse that ancient foreclosure. It is almost as though the problem of pre-ethical tmdition~ those that have been pushed away to make room for religious or philosophical eoncept~ exceeds the very distinction between Western and non-Western religion,
20
Introduction
Western and non-Western philosophy. There must then be something prior to the contest of religions aftd philosophical nationalities since the nineteenth century. for one thing, it must work at an angle to what attracts us in "nonWestern religions," which is where religion appears to have replaced philosophy, promising to heal and save. Conversely, this something prior to the very divide between our religion and theirs must also resist the claim that philosophy in the modern age has successfully surpassed religion; it would not accommodate itself to the Western "ontological" tradition from Hegel to Heidegger, according to which religion must make way for philosophy. This something must then always have preceded the supposedly unsurpassable divide between Jerusalem and Athens, or between the "religious" and the ·'philosophical." More crucially, this divide seems increasingly untenable today if it is taken to mean the basis lor the distinction between the religious and the secular, or the theological and the political. At the level of this prehistory we are already at some distance from the problem of cultural difference in religious studies. Whether the West has tended to fHlme non-Western religion in a certain way, whether it has been unable to take into account religious practice from anything other than a strictly Christian theological standpoint (these arc questions taken up in the work ofS.N. Balagangadhara (1995] and Tomoko Masuzawa (2005], among others)-these questions leave unaddressed the fundamental assimilation to history and to theology of all religions East and West in the age of colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism. To return to our problem of a singular death: such questions merely restate (tacitly affirm and endorse, despite themselves) the elective affinity between (Judeo-Christian) theology in its philosophical apotheosis as "ontology," and non-Western religious thought in the modern era. I would argue that this affinity is not only "ontological" when it is in force. We can think of "ontology" as fundamentally a mode by which history in genera!, i.e. the problem of a Eurocentric modernity as is sketched with the greatest clarity in Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe, and history in particular, which is the particular instance of personhood with death as its limit, are both thought together. And if we comprehend "ontology" as grounded in a theological understanding of history, we can then use Heidegger's somewhat weighty term, "the onto-theological" to describe the whole pattern of failures by which historical and religious projects have only exacerbated the loneliness of the lonely de.:1.th. What is a "theological" account of history? It is the assumption that worldly struggle and strife is the redemptive ground within which a transformative future would be ushered into the present; however unpredictable that future, its lineaments would be clear in advance (its requirements invariably a language, a nation-state, progress), and its work would be in the present. This is the implicitly theological notion of historical religion I will explore at some length in the next section, where we will see how philosophical ideas of language and love come together with a historical idea of JIinduism in the work of the historiographer
Death in comparative religion
21
Rajwade and the critic DwivedL Here we should bear in mind that ontotheology is not solely Christian or Judaic. It is the very means by which the historical self-understanding of Christianity, its basic idea of history, has been replicated in Hinduism. Islam, Buddhism and so on. In this sense, every religion today is a historical religion. If we are to detect somewhere in the dark, benighted domain of historical religion something like a spark of light that would illumine a face in pain, we would have to turn elsewhere to a time belore religion. It is therefore not without a presentiment of despair that we revert to the idea of a prehistory. It is fitting that we began our discussion of religion with a reference to Nicholas of eusa. I want to emphasize here the difference between the traditions inaugurated by the Kapalika and Cusa's "negative theology." What Nicholas does is to posit the negativity of God at the end, within an allencompassing notion of God. This is why this notion of "negative theology" is often merged seamlessly with that of tantra, yoga, and by association with Kabir's abstract Ram. I would argue that the analogy with negative theology is mistaken. FOI; the Kapalika and Kabir teach us first, that the negativity of God is not at the end but at the beginning; second, they refer us to the specificity of God when placed next to a specific idea of the world and a specific idea of man (Le. the coming of God in a violent world, coming down to the tlesh-and-blood human being) not to some universal idea of the Godhead: hence the absolute distance of the Kapalika and Kabir from either negative theology or a universal account of religion (ontotheology). At most, what we have gained from Nicholas is an account of the mutual mirror within which historical religions have come to see themselves under the sign of universality. Our excursus through Lorenzen's account of the Kapalika has yielded in one figure the event of violcnce and miracle, Violence, because of my responsibility lor another's death. And miracle, because in seeking to mourn lor the lost friend I seek to imagine him in the very aspect of divinity. His is the face Iiong for; his is the forgiveness I seck. In his unique death I find the culmination of all that is unique in my own end, my own death. The coming together of miracle and violence generates in the Kapalika. as in Kabir, a feisty radicalism fighting from the margins, but also an unstinting tenderness. I remarked earlier that only dalits have or can experience this tenderness in KabiL I have been using the terms "authentic" and "pure" all too loosely, making myself open to the charge of exceptionalism, In gencral terms my point has been that dalit modernity, because it encapsulatcs the limits and possibilities of the cusp. offers future guidelines not just lor dalits but for the idea of the social in India. This is why the dalit critique is of paramount importance and interest for non-dalits (brahmins and non-brahmins) who take seriously the problem of caste. I laid the ground for a prehistory of dalit emancipation in the previous chapter by alluding to the work of Kabir. And through Kabir we encountered the flgme of the Kapalika. Reversing our trajectory, we can say that it is the Kapalika's extraordinary moral act of absolute penance for the dcath of
22
Inlroduction
a~other tha.t makes him the basis of a whole tradition of expansive otherdlrccted achon. The Kap~Jika's is a suprcme worldliness that compels him to adopt as a garb the death-face which the other (the mourned one) wore on his death. imposing on himself a terrible exile, virtually inhabiting the realm of death. Not even the sanctioned ascetic impulse of the Indic renouncer could brook such a melancholic regimen. This was the worldly life of the selfaccursed K~palika tl?at would later be misread as the penance for the killing of a brahmlO. as a killd of skeptical renunciation of social mores, and so on. But what it gave to Kabir and to daHts today was the magnanimity they needed to embrace the world anew; this was a renunciation of renunciation. We will see .in Chapter 8 precisely how Kabir made sense of this gift. I'or him and for dahts today the scene of violence is the social world. which can turn on the