Romila Thapar: We speak, as we do on several other occasions—of the present. Quite rightly we speak of today, yet we seldom realize that there is a yesterday, whose elements are always present in today. We are living in today, but we also have to keep one eye on the past and see what we can do to perhaps improve the link between the past and the present.
My first question is: Are justice and ethics interdependent? Yes, of course, they are, but there is a difference between the idea of justice and the sense of justice. And this dichotomy is what I will stress on in the samples and examples that I will be sharing. I would put it perhaps in a slightly different way and talk about the following two aspects: Is justice always passive, like passing laws such as the Constitution, or is justice also active, such as the practice of law? These two things have to be looked at very closely together.
What is the purpose of justice, particularly in the context of ethics? It is to ensure the equal status of all citizens to their rights. For a historian, this is a very basic question, because in the last so many years, we have gone through a very fundamental change from being a set of kingdoms to a colony to becoming a nation-state—or wishing to become a nation-state. Arguably, we aren’t a nation-state as yet, but that’s the intention. What that means is that Indians from pre-Independence times, who were always subjects—of kingdoms and then the British Empire—became in 1947, after Independence, citizens. Technically, they became free citizens, possessing rights. The intention or the very foundation of historical change is moving from being XYZ to becoming a nation-state and from being subjects to becoming citizens. This transition should be under process, although it is not. So, my discussion or perspective on the question of justice and ethics is partly conditioned by the fact that we are going through this moment of transition.
The second very important question that hasn’t been touched on so far is whether ethics and laws conform to the same society century after century. It is my historian’s bias that I immediately ask the questions: When did this happen and what kind of a society was it? If it was a tribal society, it had certain kinds of laws and justice had a certain meaning. If it was a sophisticated, urban society, it would have had a different set of laws, and justice would have had a different meaning. I think these are important questions that we should keep in mind when we are considering all this. Do justice and ethics, therefore, come out of social relations? Another missing aspect missing is the link between laws and justice and the kind of society we are living in. If they come out of social relations, do they respond to patterns of culture? This is extremely important when it comes to ethics, as ethics is determined by social culture, along with a little bit of idealism. Do we make that kind of differentiation in society between the kind of ethics we are referring to? Can or should laws of justice be applied uniformly as a code to all citizens equally? Are they going to be? Furthermore, the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) that looms before the 2024 elections makes it very contentious.
The second area is how ethics gets so far removed and becomes so full of injustice and power, that there is no compunction in the worst kind of violence, which is killing another human being. Ethnic cleansing is a part of universal mythology. Every religion has stories about how X went out and cleaned out the whole of Y. There are several instances in the Mahabharata, the epics, various other Puranas, all our mythologies. For example, the genocidal extermination of the Nagas (not of the present day). Parashurama who kills all the Kshatriyas, the Haihaya clans who killed all the Bhrigus and the Pandava women. A terribly tragic book of the Mahabharata— Ashramavasika Parva—records the Pandava women being slaughtered while asleep at night. This was because the lineage of the Pandava depended naturally on women. So if you kill all the women, you kill the lineage. There are stories of a little assuage, where a few Kshatriyas managed to escape and the Kshatriya varna was recreated, a few Bhrigus managed to creep through and the Bhrigus began constructing the genealogies. And as for the Pandavas: a stillborn child was brought to life and the Pandava line continued.
I’m not interested in the continuation. I’m very struck by the fact that these myths are told of genocidal extermination of a whole people with a single identity by a people of another identity. One identity gets together and kills another identity in the Mahabharata. The question I am concerned with is: What was the social purpose of this genocide and why is there no commentary on it? Why isn’t there some rishi standing up and saying that this happened and it shouldn’t have happened, or that this was a very good thing to have happened—basically, the question of should it have happened or not.
We have one historical example of a near genocide where there is a reaction. Ashoka conducts a campaign in Kalinga, admits to have killed hundreds and thousands of people, hurting and harming them. But he puts up inscriptions, admittedly not in Kalinga but in other parts of the country, confessing to the fact that he is full of remorse and compassion for those that have died. This is a comment on genocide. He is a historical figure, but the entire mythology is full of condoning the genocide. So, one has to ask the question: in a given culture, what are the ethics of such massive killings? No one seems to condemn them on ethical grounds. Do such mythologies of genocide reflect the societies where they are created and propagated? These are questions that need to be considered, I think.
Then comes the question: Is the need for justice made visible only when there is injustice? Are there laws of justice which everybody knows about, has thought about, has considered, but really not bothered too much about—till there is an act of injustice and the presence of such a law admitted and the realization that something should be done about it? Does, or can, ethnic cleansing of the kind I have spoken of happen without injustice? In none of the aforementioned cases is there gross injustice—even in the case of Ashoka, the Kalingans aren’t accused of some really disastrous thing; it is only Ashoka trying to extend his empire. And as for the others, for example, Parushurama killing Kshatriyas because some Kshatriyas killed his mother—that doesn’t really qualify as a genocide. Then, you have to ask yourself: Is the supposed justice of the act of genocide equivalent to the act of injustice that you just committed? It is generally not so. And is the injustice recognized, and is it linked to the genocide? Or are these questions that people like to think were not raised in ancient societies? The ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Chinese didn’t bother very much about these questions as us, siting intensively day and night in gatherings like this, discussing justice and ethics. You never have any reference to conferences on justice and ethics in the ancient world. So, is there a difference in society? Were people less educated about these things? I don’t think so.
There’s a lot in philosophy—Greek, Chinese, Indian—which considers these questions. Then why don’t they come into ordinary conversation? Or is it social apathy? Even if they come into ordinary conversation today, it is in the wrong way. Now, I am not going into the question of social apathy, because this is a question that I think we can raise later on when we’ve all said our say. But it’s a very interesting question in relation to justice and ethics.
Was there a link between justice and ethics in previous times? Did justice require for its application to be ethical? There is a difference between the Brahminical attitude to this and the Buddhist attitude, which is of course why the Brahmins and the Buddhists never got along. The great grammarian, Patanjali, made a statement in the third century bce that the relation between Brahmana thinking and Shramana thinking [Shramana thinking being Buddhist, Jaina, Ajivika, etc.] is comparable to the relationship between the snake and the mongoose. That is a very telling statement about how they felt towards each other. That sums up almost the whole of ancient Indian philosophy.
Brahminism is full of dharma, a set of laws sanctioned by deities, having no explanation of its function. It’s justice given by the gods, so it carries a religious sanction and is carefully written down in the Dharmashastras and the Dharmasutras. The Buddhists talk about dhamma which is also ethics or virtues. They argue that it arises from a human condition and they explain that human condition. There are no gods in the picture. The initial Buddhists were all atheists. They had no gods on the scene. Dhamma arises from what they call the aryasatyani (four noble truths). What is the problem with the world—dukkha (suffering). How is dukkha brought about—through trishna and kama (thirst and desire). How do you suppress that—by looking for a path that discourages suffering—called marga. Once you’ve found a path, you are on your way to nirvana (enlightenment). One may or may not accept this as an explanation. Yet, the point is, there is a group of important people dominant in society, who are trying to explain why there is a need for justice, ethics and compassion and such values. It’s not all God-given—there is a reason. And I think we would be much happier as a society if we spent a little bit more time reading the Vinayapitaka of the Buddhists rather than the Dharmashastras of the Brahmins—but that’s my opinion.
It raises an interesting question which hasn’t been probed: Does the practice of social ethics require a secular society? Will social ethics be more effective if we say: never mind about the Gods; they may have done what they have done, they may have given us what they have given us, etc.? As far as social ethics is concerned, we are looking for rational, logical, explanations, as were the Buddhists and the Jains. We need not accept their explanations, but remember that there is a procedure they were looking for. That is important. And the mind has to be trained to recognize injustice as well as the need for justice. These two things are extremely important. And then the obvious question, whose mind? Everybody’s, mine, yours, theirs, others? Or do we select a few people and say—Now, you have better minds than we have. You do the thinking and tell us what we should be doing. And this is where the whole business of laws comes in. And of course, it’s disastrous. Because it is a select few who make the laws and then take away all the power that goes with the laws and then we are stuck with another very serious problem.
Coming back to justice and ethics: Can there be freedom without violence, and is there a need for compassion? I think these are important questions. If laws articulate justice, they have to be ethical. Can unethical laws be in conformity with justice? This is another question that we should address because we bypass it every time it comes up. Caste, for example, is deeply based on inequality. You cannot have caste unless you have inequality among human beings. Today we’re talking about citizenship and equal rights. Is there going to be a frontal confrontation between caste and citizenship rights? And what is this Uniform Civil Code that everybody is so silent about? What has this to say on this very important question? Secondly, ethical laws are not permanent. We assume they are, that some laws are permanent, for example, one mustn’t kill another human being. But a whole lot of other ethical laws are not. What do we do with this in permanency? Do we say we convert it into laws? But the laws are temporary and are open to being changed. Who changes them, and in what direction will they be changed?
Here is an example of justice for women on gender relations. Gender relations obviously change but does patriarchy change? Women have problems getting ethical solutions. Let’s take a very typical story that comes up again and again in our literature and mythology—the story of Shakuntala. She is a beautiful woman of the forest, living happily, talking to her deer, trees and creepers. And up comes the dashing King Dushyanta and they fall in love. Now, the story of the Mahabharata and the drama of Kalidasa, who takes the story from the Mahabharata and makes a play out of it, has seeming differences.
The basic question remains the same, although it is a very typical story. Handsome kings riding beautiful horses are always going out hunting and always falling in love with forest maidens who have celestial connections. We all know what that means in caste terms. But then there’s a problem: What do you do with the child? In the Mahabharata, Shakuntala discovers that she is pregnant after Dushyanta been in the forest with her and gone back to his court, promising her that, as soon as he gets back, he will send out his entourage to bring her to him. Nothing happens. She gets more and more pregnant, and the rishis in the ashram are very worried. So, they give her an entourage and send her off to his court. She arrives in the court heavily pregnant. She is mistreated. In the Mahabharata version, she already had her child, so she arrives with a little four or five-year old. The king abuses her, but she is a feisty woman of the forest. So, she abuses him back. And there’s a lovely exchange in the Mahabharata of the two of them abusing each other. It’s one of my favourite passages in the epic. He accuses her of lying, that she is not pregnant by him and she accuses him of having broken his promise. And she threatens to walk out and says—I’m leaving the child here. He’s your heir. I’m going. And as she turns to go, the celestial voice from the heavens proclaims that Shakuntala is telling the truth—This child is your son, acknowledge him—And the king turns around politely and says—I was waiting for the confirmation, and he acknowledges the child.
In Kalidasa’s version, she is heavily pregnant and so, her father sends her off to the court and the king accuses her of lying very politely—Oh, I can’t accept this. It is your story. Anybody can come along and say you got me pregnant, I can’t accept that. And so she leaves. She calls on her mother Menaka, who is an apsara. Menaka comes and opens her arms and takes her away. And the reconciliation takes place right at the end, when the king is returning from a campaign and he goes to the ashram where the child is now four or five years old. Meanwhile, Shakuntala has been cursed by rishi Durvasha. She had been sitting and thinking of the king when the rishi walked past and made a demand which she ignored. The rishi furiously says—The person you’re thinking of will forget you. And she is absolutely distraught and says—How can that happen, my life will be finished. So, he says—I’ll make one concession. That something will happen by which he will finally recognize you. This is the story of the ring. The king had given her his signet ring which she lost while crossing the stream. A fish swallowed it; the fisherman who had caught this fish, brings it to the market. When they slit it open, there’s the signet ring. They take it to the king and immediately all the events of the forest come rushing back to him. And the king, therefore, is not guilty.
Here you have, potentially, a very ethical situation. Who’s promising? Who’s lying? What does all this promising and lying lead to? What are the ethics in these little actions? And why is it, at the end of the day, that it’s not a jury from the court or a jury from the ashram that comes along and says to the king—You’ve promised and now you’ve broken it? Or that the king is lying when he refuses to accept the child? It’s a celestial voice and a supernatural event of the curse, the ring and the fish.
Now, what I’m trying to suggest with all this is that when we look at these stories from the past or historical events like the Ashoka campaign, do we make these connections? Or do we simply say—Oh, nice story, and simply narrate the events that happened. And if we do make these connections, these are ethical questions. Are we making these connections with our lives of today? Are we talking about broken promises and lies, or minor problems of ethics compared to killing people? When teaching a class on Ashoka, this question of ethics—of conducting a campaign and then putting up an edict in selected places only—confessing remorse and compassion can be brought up.
Now, in both the Shakuntala stories, the king, by all standards of ethics, has behaved unethically. He first makes sure that she is of the right caste and lineage. He asks rishis directly about her caste and lineage, and accepts her only when all of this is clarified. He almost forces a gandharva marriage on her. She is very reluctant and suggests seeking her father’s permission first. The king refuses by claiming that Kshatriyas are allowed gandharva marriages that don’t require the father’s permission, only an exchange of garlands. And in the Dharmashastras, this is one of the eight forms of marriage. So, there are no ethical questions there, and nobody brings them up. The basic question remains that whether ethics always is in the hands of the supernatural or also in human hands. So laws that articulate justice must be based on ethics.
But what about violence? We witness that very often. What about the fact that ethical laws therefore are not permanent because they belong to the society that they come from, and societies differ? Are there actions in situations where ethics are not required? Some are, some aren’t. For example, when one goes back to another ritual that concerned women—sati—how would you define the ethics of it? In those days, it didn’t matter because patriarchy was very strong and women were dispensable. It is not so today. So there is a difference of attitudes. And this historical difference needs to be taken into account when we talk about the relationship between justice and ethics.
The question about King Ashoka being very concerned about Kalinga and expressing his remorse is often raised, but it is noteworthy that he doesn’t abolish capital punishment—rather, he is quite in agreement with it. All he says is: anyone who has to suffer capital punishment must be given three days to put his life and world in order. In other words, settle all his business connections before he is hanged or put to death in some way. But it has often been asked: If you are going to talk about nonviolence, what about capital punishment? And the comparison of his statement on capital punishment with the Kalinga edicts is missed. He lists a vast number of animals that are not to be killed. Surely a more appropriate punishment in keeping with ethics would have been to work out some way of punishing people who perform vile deeds, but not actually give them capital punishment? Kautilya in his Arthashastra has a statement where he says that people who commit really heinous crimes should not be killed, but should be branded across their forehead so that everybody knows. That’s one solution.
Violence, of course, is central to ethics and it should be so. There are lovely discussions about violence in the Mahabharata, the Bhagavad Gita and so on. There’s this marvellous passage in the Mahabharata, a long rambling passage of grandfather Bhishma, lying on his bed of arrows for days until he finally dies. And he says to Yudhishthira after the battle is over that he now has to be king, to which Yudhishthira replies that he will never be king because kingship is all about killing—whether it is punishing people or going to war and killing people—and he refuses to be involved in violence. And Bhishma, gradually over many days, talks him out of it and he finally does become king. The Bhagavad Gita, quoted as the great text on nonviolence, very comfortably says that if there is massive evil, then violence is allowed. So, that conditional clause about ethics is very crucial to the Gita, whereas it isn’t to Buddhist texts or to this particular passage of the Mahabharata. What is again curious is that in situations of violence where people are killed, as in the many genocides I suggested, the commentaries on the killing are very few. And very few of these commentaries raise ethical issues.
Do we have to assume, then, that activities relating to power and the control of the state by the rulers were, and are, bereft of ethics? This is a very fundamental question that we should’ve been asking of history from earlier times to now—there are some of us who ask it, some of us lose our way and put in a chapter somewhere on it. But there should be much more of this question: What does the right of the state, the power of the state do to controlling and describing and prescribing ethics?
Laws and what we call rights that relate to the control of society via its institutions are really much more clearly articulated from the nineteenth century onwards. So, are we facing a historical question here? The clear-cut idea about rights and ethics is not clear-cut in premodern times but it’s become clear-cut now. Can we assume that this is one of the positive things about our times of today as compared to yesterday, that these kinds of ethics are becoming more prominent and well defined? The question then is: How permanent are all these laws? The Constitution plays a very important part in this, and we didn’t have anything vaguely like the Constitution in earlier times. Historically it’s a very important question. How do ethics and ethical laws relate to the kind of society that you are? You know there’s a difference between that sense of the law and the actual law. And if we are thinking about societies mutating, as indeed we are, certainly we historians, are constantly thinking about the mutations that societies go through. Let me leave you with another question: Do politics today have less of social ethics than politics in the past? What kinds of communities existed in the past which might have had a greater sense of social ethics than what exists today because the whole nature of the community is very different? And then, of course, the million-dollar question: Is it the lack of ethics that qualifies politics?
Naveen Kishore: Thank you so much, Romila. There’s a lot there to think about and talk about. I think what we’ll do is simply get into Ranjit’s presentation, and then, at the end, we’ll open this up for a conversation with the rest of you and ourselves.
Ranjit Hoskote: Through the course of this conference, we have been haunted by a sense of bleakness and foreboding about the present and the future. I think we’re all drawing on our own memoirs of practice, if you will, and sharing the themes that preoccupy us, to bring some form of annotation to bear on where we might be going. Of course, the foolhardiness of my present endeavour is dawning on me by degrees because I am following Romila Thapar. I’m going to try and make this presentation by reference to the image projected on the screen, and by way of a set of disconnected remarks—which is what I specialize in—but I hope that we’ll arrive at some larger understanding of what is at stake.
I’ll begin with this image from a sixteenth-century illustrated manuscript of the Dastan Kalilah wa Dimnah, which is an Arabic translation of a Persian translation of a Sanskrit cycle of animal fables called the Panchatantra, which is probably one of our greatest exports to the world. Apart from pepper, which went out to Venice and to Nuremberg in the West, and—not to the great joy of the Chinese—opium in the East. But I would position this moment of translation and the passage of cultural values in a particular way because there we have—and we all know this because we grew up with these stories—the figure of the speaking animal. The animal as the locus of wisdom, slyness, shrewdness, worldly attitudes, advice and counsel.
One way of looking at this fabular narrative would involve simply dismissing it as imaginative departure, purely symbolic. But I would ask if there is a way of attending to it under the sign of being attentive to the languages of other species. This is a communicative possibility that has preoccupied me for a number of years. It’s been articulated through a commitment to ecopoetics on the one hand in poetry; also to transdisciplinary projects like the State of Nature series of exhibitions and conferences in collaboration with Ravi Agarwal, an artist and an activist. My preoccupation here is with seeing if we can attend critically to some of the outcomes of the Enlightenment which has rendered us in our own eyes as a sovereign species and brought us to the point where we are today in our planetary crisis. And might we be able, in this way, to form or repair our relationships with other species? Could we work our way towards the possibility of enacting reparative justice towards other species?
I am going to leave the Panchatantra or Kalilah wa Dimnah image here for us as a sort of beacon, if you will, and share with you a set of opening concerns about what is usually described as ‘human–animal conflict’. I’ll then go on, in the second part of my presentation, to dwell on whether one might be able to constitute animals in law, provide them with a locus standi in law. Since law and language are inseparable, and animals are not linguistic subjects, how do we parse them, how do we construe them as legal persons? They are recipients of injustice, but have no recourse, no remedy. Then I’ll pull back and think through with you some of the consequences of the Enlightenment, and how they’ve resulted in a set of default attitudes for us. And I will end with a conclusion that reflects on the possibility of inter-species justice. So to begin with: we are often dealing with the role of social attitudes in conditioning and in some cases distorting the practice of law and in the rendering of justice. I’m going to be preoccupied here with the way in which colonial-era laws have resulted in a certain social conditioning and translated into a very normalized sense of how we see ourselves, other species and the so-called natural world.
My opening examples are obvious to all of us, we’ve all encountered them in one form or another. Bombay, where I live, has the distinction of being a sprawling megalopolis which also has within its boundaries a national park. And every now and again there are headlines about—this seems very banal and everyday but I think we need to situate our problems within the everyday—leopards showing up in human settlements, sometimes killing a dog, and being said to endanger human life. And this, every year or every two years, is seen as some great crisis that represents a territorial threat to our species’ sovereignty. I’m thinking here also of the phenomenon of pineapple bombs—when crackers are stuffed into pineapples to ward off wild boars. This is a practice prevalent in Madhya Pradesh, for instance, and in Kerala, where a couple of years ago an unintended target, an elephant, and not a wild boar, ate a pineapple bomb and came to a very horrific end.
And then of course we’re also familiar with the way in which infrastructure projects—highways, dams and so on—cut right through elephant corridors; for example, in the Shivaliks and through tiger corridors in central India and parts of Maharashtra. I’m concerned that the way we reflect on these scenarios, particularly in the mass media, is premised on extremes. Either we take a ‘pro-people’ or ‘pro-development’ position—whatever ‘development’ might mean, when it comes at the cost of radical displacement for human communities and radical disorientation for animal communities—or, at the other extreme, we assume a ‘pro-animal’ line. So, these seem to be very exclusionary regimes of looking at what is in fact a far more complex situation. When you look at the granularity of these scenarios, you realize that there’s no simple choice to be made. We’re looking often at deeply vulnerable communities, human communities and deeply vulnerable groups of animals here.
It is important to think about where all these scenarios are taking place. In the first place, they are often set in the context of our forests, which are not forests at all. We do not have forests in the classical sense anymore. Most of our forest land is actually colonial-era plantation and is governed by successive Forest Acts from 1867, 1878, 1927 and the current drafts that are in discussion. What that means, essentially, is that these forests have been created either to support, in the nineteenth century, the projects of military expansionism with resources, or they are sources of revenue. And it is out of this regime of control of land, produce and access that the figure of the trespasser or the interloper is conjured up as a threat. Communities that have had real contact with what we would call the natural world for thousands of years, become exiled by a single governmental gesture. This also applies obviously to animals.
We also have well-meaning interference, as when protection is extended to certain species. That produces another set of complexities, for you end up creating a species imbalance, where you have small sharecroppers, typically, being affected by a species that is, frankly, running out of control, with no metric of how it can be kept to its own territory. We’re looking at questions of territoriality in a certain way here, considering access to resources across species lines. Human communities have the capacity to respond to this kind of anguish in some way, through some form of utterance. What would this tragic situation of competition between vulnerabilities look like from the animal point of view? Because if we apply the kinds of categories we apply to vulnerable human communities, it’s fairly identical. Animals too face alienation from their habitat, they face expulsion and resettlement, they confront incarceration and even disenfranchisement. There may be no discourse in which to speak of this yet, but animals are disenfranchised from having any kind of say in where they can settle and how they can continue with their lives. We use this word ‘species-extinction’ fairly blithely and with a certain scientific neutrality. It is actually a form of genocide.
Animals as a particular species are a locus of injustice but they have no locus standi in law. How might this be bridged? Is it even possible to conceive of a way of bridging this? Because animals are not articulate subjects, they have no way of enacting themselves as linguistic subjectivities. They are subjects of legislation but they have no access to recourse or remedy. There are no charters, covenants, accords or treaties or forums in which we might usefully discuss this. What animals might have, at best, are champions or advocates who speak on their behalf. There is no communicative engagement or common discursive ground between humans and animal species.
And it’s at this point that I begin to think that there is very little that is natural about natural justice. A key element of natural justice is the right to be heard. How do we achieve that when we must ask—to paraphrase a very famous formulation—‘Can the animals speak?’ A second key element of natural justice is the duty to act fairly on the part of whoever is the dominant authority. That plainly doesn’t happen; we don’t even recognize that the recipient of injustice is receiving injustice. We simply think that this is the order of things. So, how might animals participate in any form of justice?
This now brings me to the third part of my talk where I want to try and situate these questions. As you’ll see, I have an allegorical purpose here, because I think that, through thinking about animals, one is also able to think about many other forms of suffering and utterance or the absence of utterance on the parts of groups subjected to silence and repression. The human–nature relationship is founded on radical violation. It’s founded on impunity. And from what I would, with all modesty and respect, characterize as an animal point of view: this is a state of emergency. We see the environment through those aspects of the climate catastrophe that affect us and limit our opportunities and our possibilities. But if we see it more widely, we will see that it is in fact a state of emergency across species lines.
The human species has regarded itself for several centuries as a sovereign species while we are the apex predator. And we’re the only species that destroys its own habitat. I say this with some view to thinking about how these questions get discussed, not only from the what-solutions-can-we-reach-out-for perspective, but also from the how-did-we-get-here perspective. We don’t, you know, always realize that there are yesterdays from which these turbulences emerge. We can’t address today without looking back.
Gregory Bateson, the anthropologist and the pioneer of cybernetics, said in 1970, ‘The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.’[1] And that’s a very potent formulation and we need to carry it with us. It demonstrates what is so deeply wrong with our default philosophical position, which is dictated by the Enlightenment. As we all know—and I summarize brutally here—the Enlightenment took the Renaissance humanist idea of man—it always was man, a very patriarchal way of thinking about these things—and placed him at the apex of the chain of creation. It took away the dominant Renaissance fiction of God and placed the entire planet at the service of man, or humankind.
The thought came to me yesterday that, read in a certain way, evolutionary theory could have reinforced our interrelationships with other animals by disclosing our close, even familial linkages with them. But it tended to reinforce instead the idea that we had some kind of exceptional status as higher primates. Which is why a series of legitimizations took place during the Enlightenment. This is not to romanticize what came before it, in terms of ways of living based on traditional obligations or customary feudal duties. But I think the big shift was from the unstated leaps of faith that connected individuals, communities and their environments to what’s been described as a contractarian approach. Under the Enlightenment, the contract linked you to others and to land and to larger collectivities. What undergirded the contract was a propertarian understanding—that private property was sacred.
So, law tended to be pressed into the service of emergent privilege. And everything that was offered to you by the planet had to be instrumentalized and extracted. And I want to quote the philosopher Akeel Bilgrami here. This is a passage from his Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment that I have carried with me for the last few years. Bilgrami writes: ‘1) how and when did we transform the concept of nature into the concept of natural resources? 2) How and when did we transform the concept of human beings into the concept of citizens? 3) How and when did we transform the concept of people into the concept of populations? 4) How and when did we transform the concept of knowledges to live by into the concept of expertise to rule by?’[2]
This mapping shows us how we have gone away from seeing our surroundings as a source of consolation, something with which to achieve communion, something to approach with a sense of responsibility—to a situation when we regard our surroundings purely through our extractivist and exploitative reflexes.
Consider, particularly, how the translation of nature into natural resources seeps into our language. Bombay, where I live, is a set of seven islands cobbled together on the basis of reclamation. I have often thought about the etymology and the semantics of this strange term ‘reclamation’. The suggestion is that the sea has thoughtlessly been in command of terrain which we should reclaim as though we had a sovereign right to it. We have no right to it, we have no claim on it! But the suggestion is that we need to take it back; otherwise, it will just go to waste. We hear the same thing from time to time, in the matter of the dams and the shared waters of the rivers on both sides of our borders—with Pakistan on the one hand and Bangladesh on the other. It’s amazing to hear responsible public functionaries talk about how, without dams and barrages, the water would go to waste or that we could prevent the water from going elsewhere. This is an argument premised on the idea that you can transform nature as you like and there will be no consequences.
I’ll conclude by very tentatively asking whether we need to look, in this case, at something more than a canonical idea of justice that proceeds from preordained norms, an archive of precedence, a methodology of forensics. Perhaps what we need is an evolving ethic, an embedded practice of equity that will require its own leaps of faith. An ethic inspired by a deep impulse towards generosity, a fundamental awareness that we are not the owners of this planet, we are just tenants. Fellow tenants with other species. And this is where I come back to the image from which I started. Perhaps that practice of equity and generosity would be based on listening to sources, figures, constituencies, communities that we would normally disregard, imagining rather arrogantly that they have no voice. The ethic of listening, seeking translation and common ground with what might even be extremely dissimilar communities or people or species, is crucial. This will, going forward, be a very important part of how we conduct ourselves on this planet.
Naveen Kishore: I think I will, by way of not ending or concluding but opening up the discussion, make some concluding remarks, if I may. Clearly, our house is burning, and we need to do something about it. I want to speak about ‘bearing witness’, taking my cue from my dear friend Rustom [Bharucha] and from my own practice of photography. This oft-used term is proactive in seeking the atrocity and recording the circumstance and effects of it immediately—as in, while the events unfold, the mind has had little time to adjust, cope and begin to understand that which it is experiencing. The Partition is still being misunderstood over time, even after 75 years. Journalists, writers, poets, painters, photographers and citizens who see themselves as ordinary folk and thrust into history as it unfolds, misunderstand. The last category has no choice and is involuntarily bearing the weight of this unfolding. ‘Being witness’ to it. Historians also do it. When I take photographs or write poems, I am engaging with the possibility of giving vocabulary to that which I ‘witness’. I may be using the word within quotes, the way you would use evidence. Your discipline teaches you to study the traces, the ones that are all around us—sometimes hard to decipher, at other times bristling with restlessness—and imbue them with voice.
In my case, the restlessness is key. My urge to create prompted me through my practice of photography, images, text—to come up with some kind of a response to what happened in Godhra, for example. Not to find answers but to help me deal with this that moment of personal and national shame. An urge to document without fully understanding the weight of an overwhelming tragedy. There is no game plan at the time of execution. Nor time. Just urgency. But there is thought. That which allows me to think, even reflect. To borrow, rephrase, ruminate, in an Arendt-like manner where she suggests that to think is vital, essential, necessarily more important than to reason.
Particularly in these times when those that lead, teach us to reason, to be convinced about their reasonable understandings and blindly follow ‘the unreasonable’. Or, to put it bluntly, the unethical. To create an enemy within, as so many histories have done over the last seven decades here and over there where it all began. The lessons our current masters imbibe from that architect of the Other, the one that made evil look ordinary, banal, as Arendt would go on to say, the unethical made ethics, made belief, made crusade, made that which needed to be eradicated. My only grouse with the word ‘banal’ is that it is no longer adequate in the way it describes evil. In cannibal times, evil is deliberate malice. Because it is in the hands of a powerful government, legally elected. Therefore battling it with reason as most tend to do is just no longer an option.
So, back to what? Thinking in the dark times or the need to move beyond thinking? Reflecting, heart and soul. The knowledge that thinking can only take us thus far. Let go, perhaps, of thought, or its plural that holds us back, makes us hesitate. To reflect and be intuitive is to listen to your inner voice. That which recognizes the ethical without necessarily having to debate it. That which makes us stand up and simply say—No. No longer will we accept this, just as Socrates said in his Apology, ‘The good life must have reflection as a part of its goodness. The unexamined life is not worth living.’
The role of innocence is another problem. Being an innocent bystander is no longer acceptable. You cannot remain in a state of innocence any longer. Again, previous cannibal times have seen these very problems for the recorders, the bearers of histories. The ethics of innocence—what does it mean to be an innocent bystander in the presence of atrocity? To actively choose not to risk limb, even life, not mere incarceration—as in, being sent to jail, but also the fear that your lack of innocence—as in, your intuitive action in the face of injustice—may cause you physical harm—makes people stay in a constant state of the inactive. You are afraid to act, live, to resist actively.
It strikes me that often we’re on the outside, looking out, while the permutations and combinations of what we have come to recognize as circumstance extend themselves into an indecipherable math—as in, numbers failing to match. This matchlessness in itself may not be of consequence, as our lives continue to sway and bend and work out ways of resisting the vagaries of the court. Which way do the winds of time blow? The surprises that an unfolding history, as it records itself, has in store for us are nothing compared to the shocks we get from each human other.
How just or ethical is it for those in power, in majority, to create the imagined fear of the Other as vermin, to be hounded, crushed? Again, we know of this from other genocides. The pettiness, the aggressive tendency towards violence, the ensuing melancholy, the despair, fear and yes, again that word, matchlessness or mis-fitness of human nature at its mean best. Manipur is a reminder of how history is thrust upon us, turning us all into mute witnesses. Eventually we will justify, explain, rationalize, accept this cleaner, cleansed version of history. But is there ever something called a just genocide? In one of our exchanges, Ranjit said on the presence of justice in the face of recognized injustice and the predicament of ecological and political refugees, that we could perhaps reflect in somewhat Levinas-like mode on our responsibility to this other. On how an ethical responsibility towards another does not always arise from a ground of conventions that is shared but must sometimes be the bridge across unaccountable and even radical difference. This ‘be the bridge’ is the key, and yet none of us see this, or if we do, we leave it to some others to bear the burden of doing. We are too busy burning the very bridges we need to protect.
Question & Answer Session
Audience Member 1: I have a question on the ethicality of justice, where I am looking at justice as: justice for whom, by whom and of whom? In that light, when we are saying ‘for whom’, what you just said about the voice of the oppressor, the voice of the one against whom the injustice has been perpetrated down generations or sometimes even once—can we hear that voice effectively? Because often we see that it’s a historic injustice, be it with the forest legislations, even with the tribal dwellers. The only way of corroborating any evidence is through memory, through a reconstruction from people’s narratives and voices. And that memory itself is fluctuating, because memory cannot be positioned in a fixity. So, we often find that there is a process of obfuscation that is happening to animals or even human beings. There is a problem in the way of processing evidence. And when I’m questioning justice ‘by whom’, isn’t there always this idea, this dichotomy or this bipartite system where we are imagining that there is somebody who’s dispensing justice and there’s somebody who’s at the receiving end of the justice? There is this inherent idea that somebody possesses the acumen to deliver justice. So isn’t there always, in an investigation about justice, this engagement with this bipartite structure? And finally, when we are seeing justice ‘of whom’, who would really pose this, or rather is justice always a kind of postponement? Or, let’s say, a very structuralist sense of meaning that happens. A constant deferment of justice that we can never really achieve. Like, we’re going back to the first day [of this conference] when we heard about the process of attaining justice—it cannot be like the process of attaining nirvana. It cannot be a stasis. So isn’t there always a kind of deferment that is happening? How do we address these three problematics that are coming through?
Romila Thapar: I will only take up one aspect of what you said—historical injustice, which is heard very often. It’s used not only in ordinary life, but also politically. These days, we hear nothing but the historical injustice of what one community did to another community. So how do we handle it? We don’t handle it by saying, ‘Was it unjust or was it just?’ We go into the details of it. Now I’m saying this deliberately because I do realize that as a society we tend not to go into details. We prefer to have somebody say, ‘Oh, I know for a fact that happened.’ Because you can then go on and say to the next person ‘I know for a fact that that happened.’ The point is to give you examples here. One is the recent injustice to historians, when the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) announced that it was going to cut out various segments from the history textbooks. There are two things involved. One is that this is an injustice to the discipline of history. And here one thinks of the arguments that were recently made on the business of human–animal relations and injustice. And two, it’s an insult to the discipline of history. Do the historians view it as an insult? It’s an insult because in our society today, people who are professionals are not given the respect and the interested attention that one demands from society. There’s a tendency to brush all this aside and go back to declaring—I know for a fact. When you analyse this statement, you will find it hearsay or fantasy. When you ask: What’s the evidence? the quizzical answer is, ‘But so and so told me’, or ‘Oh, I read it in the newspaper’. Questions of justice and ethics are too important to be left to this kind of so-called evidence that doesn’t exist.
The second question is the business of historical justification. It’s the same story. We are told that this has been going on for centuries or this is something that has existed for 100 or 200 years. We don’t stop and ask, ‘Sorry, what’s your evidence for that’? Instead, we ask: ‘Where have you read it?’ The reply, generally, is: ‘On the newspaper or a magazine article.’ There has to be a distinction between what is to be taken as evidence—correct, reliable and proven—and chatter. We depend far too much on chatter. And this is one of the problems with an issue like justice and ethics: we don’t go into the reality, the factuality, the actuality and evidence, as we should. And so I have no use for people who come and say that we have a historical justification for this that goes back long years. I usually turn away and say I’m not interested. That would be my answer.
Ranjit Hoskote: A very quick footnote to what Romila said. When you’re talking about a certain distrust and even a disdain for expert culture, it’s not across the board. It’s specifically for disciplines that invite you to think, to be self-critical and to ask for the evidence, and, for lack of another description—that’s usually the humanities. While there’s still a very strong emphasis on technocratic disciplines which tell you that problems are soluble, you need to make crisp decisions and here are the techniques of how this has to be done. This is the situation we are in, but it’s astonishing how there’s a very strong linkage between the technocratic solution-oriented kind of expert culture and this disdain for the evidence that we will take seriously in our discipline. I want to pin these observations to one strand in your question and I’m going to use a term that gets naturalized in the protocols of legal activity: ‘hearing’. It usually arrives with a sense of frustration and postponement, deferral of justice, but I think we need to invest this notion of ‘hearing’ with some energy and attention. This is how we need to gather evidence that has maybe slipped below the radar.
Maybe we need to learn the languages in which that evidence is phrased, and to work through a bricolage of sources, and not to invest the past with some partisan sense of how to act in the present but simply to seek consolation, and if possible, forgiveness and equity. I think these are the concerns one should have instead of weaponizing the past in selected ways. I think this is vital. I’d also draw on what Rustom presented earlier today. You have to seek other forums or platforms, or invent one—again with a certain amount of energy—and whether that eventually translates as actionable justice is uncertain, but it at least becomes a matter of public record.
Audience Member 2: My question is primarily to Professor Thapar and echoes in a certain way to the question that I asked Professor Spivak. Because being a comparatist is a great source of joy for me but it also brings home to me the fact that people are, perhaps, universally horrible. And so I was reminded as she was speaking of something that Toni Morrison keeps echoing in her work: that we are always incapable of dealing with the fact that we have been and always are beneficiaries of violence and injustice. And I was wondering whether the kinds of gaps that you were pointing to in the practice of the story of Indian history writing stemmed from a similar incapacity? The kinds of gaps you identify in history writing and historiography where there aren’t considerations of genocide in the way that you were speaking about—does that also stem from this human incapacity to understand that we are beneficiaries of violence and injustice?
RT: So, in a sense, are you giving importance to incapacities? Are you saying there’s a sense of incapacity? Well, in every history that is written—and I believe this is also true for sciences—there are incapacities. Language is one of them. The number of people who supposedly write ‘history’ without reading the source they are quoting or discussing, are largely those who don’t know what the sources tell. And this is one reason where I sometimes think it’s also a matter of ethics. Because you are claiming that you understand the subject very well on the basis of certain sources. Now, in a sense, this has its parallels with law: Do you judge a case on the basis of sources where your sources themselves are questionable?
In the nineteenth century, all historians were treated as judges. But now we’ve moved from that, we’re all now treated as social scientists. I don’t know what we’ll be treated as next but still, that’s a very important issue: what you base your argument on. Not simply in terms of the argument, but also the evidence that you’re using to support that. And this then brings in the question of counter-arguments.
Incapacity doesn’t refer only to not knowing the texts that you’re using, the sources that you’re using, the objects that you’re looking at if you’re an archaeologist, for example. It also brings in the question of other people’s ways and perspectives of looking at something which the historian now has to consider.
So, when you have something disastrous, like the NCERT saying, ‘We’re doing away with evolution.’ And it’s only the biologists who get up and say, ‘This is terrible.’ We historians are sitting there and shouting, ‘But it affects us too!’ Because there is a certain way of thinking and arguing and using evidence in the theory of evolution, which has some relevance to a historical problem. All historical problems have a beginning, a germ, the next point, relevance, enlargement, etc. So, this reinforces the idea that even when you’re talking about the ethics of an argument, it’s not just the philosophical ethics or the theoretical ethics—you’re talking about bringing in other issues that also have a bearing on that topic. It becomes more complex. One may not like the complexity, but the complexity in the end after all does clarify the question.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: First, I agree that in the humanities we train to learn from the singular and the unverifiable. And the only way in which you can train to learn from the unverifiable—it’s dangerous, it’s incalculable—is the way that you’re talking about. You go as far back as you can, you decide this is your source, you read it in the original language very carefully, remembering that, in fact and by definition, it is unverifiable.
Second, I would make a comment about ethics. Now, I’m not a member of the language police. On the other hand, I deal with languages and am paid to teach in a kind of linguistic way. Some of us think of ethics in a slightly different way. And to the extent that we decide, that deciding of the right or the wrong of something, is ethics. We reduce ethics to what my discipline has taught me to call Sittlichkeit or Zurechnungsfähigkeit. This is not to undermine anything, because the problem of ethics is not the problem of moral dilemma—ethics is bigger. To an extent ethics is unconditioned—it’s not about citizens but human beings. A literary example of this would be the relationship between Captain Ahab and the whale in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. He’s going to kill the whale. It is an ethical relationship. This is how literature gives you the experience of the impossible, the ethical ohoituki, the unconditional ethics which you open yourself to.
As a language person, I tried to go beyond the ridiculous translation of ethics as niti. Niti is Sittlichkeit. Niti is moral rules. And I tried to reclaim the word aparashakti. When I spoke about this, some philosophers who live in their silos, the disciplinary ones who can’t think outside their purview, tried to give me lectures on what aparashakti means philosophically. I would ask you to bear in mind that ethics is not something you can control by deciding right and wrong. This is why the policy-makers ignore us.
The third point would be the Rohingyas. I’m a citizen ambassador of a Free Rohingya coalition. On 15 July, I was at the biggest Rohingya camps: Kutupalong and Balukhali. And I spent a lot of time with them; it is a continuous effort on my part. They form a limit to what I was talking about on the first day: the real point is that the law should become normal, unglamorous of rearranging desires, mindset change in the electoral banks. And that’s long-term work. The largest sector of the electorate can initiate the change. That’s democracy’s arithmetic. The real danger is that it is beginning to become accepted as normal—the conditions of both the Rohingyas and Manipuris. Any woman, including bourgeois feminists in large cities, dismiss focusing on rape by saying: Look, this is war and them being raped is part of war. They think rape culture as part of war is still normal. So, to an extent, this changing of normality is what the goal is.
A final thing about your picture: I was very fortunate to teach the Panchatantra year after year with Hamid Dabashi who knew the Pahlavi translation very well. The funniest thing about the Panchatantra is that it’s dedicated to the Parashars who were from Kanyakubja. I am not a Parashar because I married Talbot Spivak and lost caste. I’m a woman. And as a feminist, am I supposed to claim the right to go into the military? Am I supposed to claim the right to go into temples? Am I supposed to claim the right to become a Parashar? Must feminists become so patriarchal that they don’t see the guilt of their innocence?
So, let’s think about ethics as unconditional, beyond the reach of intention and incalculable. Let’s think about humanities, learning from the unverifiable based on absolutely responsible scholarship. And finally, let’s think about the Rohingyas as historically inhabiting that little sliver of the Arakan before state formation could be thought about, or history can be talked about, and then being redefined as illegal immigrants. The US equivalent of this is Christian theocracy and Puritanism. You go and find the Silk Road in China. The old things are coming back and we don’t know how to recognize them.
Another point to reflect on is how the concept of citizenship come about. Akeel Bilgrami’s thoughts might be referred to. Old Marxists would say the self determination of capital and the 1789 Bourgeois Revolution was the starting point. Bourgeois actually in German is bürgerlich or citizenship, and not the way we perceive it today. The sans culottes, or the ones who didn’t have the right to wear trousers were called citizens. The French national anthem ‘La Marseillaise’ has a line, ‘Aux armes, citoyens’—To arms, citizens. The sans culottes were called citoyen. And that’s where we began to have the bürgerliche gesellschaft, or the bourgeois society. It was in terms of the movement of capital just as in our time territorial imperialism became inconvenient. This led to neo-colonialism and globality.
On the subject of citizenship and human rights, René Zavaleta says that in our motley society we have different frames of mind at the moment. Some of them are not in the past and we are not in the present and future. In fact, rather than fit everything into a Marxist mode, we should think of each of these sections of a motley society as modern. This is a very hard thing to do.
Audience member 3: Do all perceived historical injustices require a remedy in contemporary times, for example, in the context of the renaming of cities?
RT: The renaming of a city is not putting right a historical injustice, because you have to prove that there was an injustice before you can claim it. If the Mughals come along and build the city, and out of their excitement at discovering all kinds of new religious ideas and languages and poetry and literature and thought, which people like Akbar did, they decide to call their capital the City of God, Allahabad—this is not a historical injustice. This is the articulation of a historical event of great magnitude which when discussed at public meetings, somebody gets up and says—Hinduism is an eclectic religion which has inputs from all over. They’re reflecting the kind of thinking which was taking place in the Bhakti movement at that time. They’re reflecting a historical event, not a historical injustice, because Allahabad was not built by destroying an earlier city and then building a new one for no rhyme or reason except personal glory. Allahabad grew gradually on the basis of all these different elements that go into the making of a sophisticated city.
So, first of all, it’s unjustified to say that this is a historical injustice that has been put right. Secondly, surely one’s a little proud of the fact that it was a settlement that did all these great things. Never mind whether it is called Allahabad or whether it is called Brahmanpura, whatever—Allahabad is only reflective of a period of history. Now, that’s one way of looking at it. There are other things which are much more vicious justifications. The one that I have just written about asks this question of whether the Hindus were persecuted by the Muslims in the second millennium. I’m tired of talking about it because I have talked about it all over, but still—and written about it in this book too—the point is: that you make a judgement like that by looking only at the Persian chronicles and those chronicles that are praising the Mughal, the sultanate and their campaigns.
And in the case of the sultanates, it’s quite amusing because every campaign ends up with ‘50,000 infidels were killed, 50,000 were converted’. And the infidels are who? They are the Hindus, they are the Shias, they are everybody who is a non-Muslim, and in the case of the Shias, Muslims who don’t agree with the Sunni. Now, I had a colleague in Delhi University many years ago who sat with these chronicles and added up the figures and said, ‘Therefore, so many Hindus were killed and so many others were converted.’ One of the things that strikes us today is that if you pick up a historical chronicle of the medieval period, it’ll be full of exaggerations, because it is written to glorify a particular personality or dynasty or whatever it may be. So, if you’re going to take that as source material, you have to first of all verify that actually at the end of that campaign: 50,000 people were killed, 50,000 were converted. It must have been an absolutely incredible campaign for 50,000 people being killed.
So clearly that is an exaggeration and the good historian will ask about a complementary source. Now, where a Persian chronicle is saying 50,000 people were killed, 50,000 infidels were converted, you would expect that the Sanskrit sources referring to the Rajputs and the Hindus and the others will also say that it was a disastrous campaign because we lost 50,000 people and 50,000 of our good Hindus were converted into this wretched religion. But the Sanskrit sources are totally silent—they don’t mention a squeak about any of these campaigns. Were they frightened? Or was all that simply a fantasy of the Persian chronicler?
If you look at the Sanskrit inscriptions of the second millennium, about the sultanate and the Mughals, there are inscriptions by the artisans and craftsmen who repaired the Qutub Minar 200 years after it was built—it was struck by lightning and bits fell off. And they put up little inscriptions saying—I, Bhondu, Lalu, Lelu, Hallu, etc., were responsible for repairing this construction which we did under the good offices of Sultan Firoz Shah Tughlaq and we are very grateful to the fact that our devotion to Vishwakarma is what allowed us to complete this work successfully. Vishwakarma occurs in every repairing inscription in the Qutub Minar and the Jaunpur Mosque and so on. Now these are ordinary craftsmen who have got employment, and you can tell by their names that they are ordinary Hindus.
You have traders who issue inscriptions saying—By the good graces of Sultan Balban, who is now sleeping comfortably because of the welfare of his citizens, subjects, we built a well for the welfare of so and so. And this is all around Delhi—water wells built by various merchants, many of whom are Jains. These are all in Sanskrit. And how do they describe the ruler? They say—we first have the Tomars and we have the Chauhans and we have the Shahis and now we’ve got the Turushkas, i.e. the Turks—there’s no mention of those were Hindus and these were Muslim.
Then you have the diary of a Jain merchant called Banarsidas. And the diary is called Ardhakathanak (The Half Tale) where he talks about how he grew up in his Jain family in Agra in the sixteenth century, came to Banaras, joined a huge volley of jewellers minting money, therefore becoming very rich. All Hindu and Jain jewellers were minting money because people were buying jewellery. And the economy of the Mughal period was at an absolute peak as far as international economies are concerned. He talks about the problems he has with Jainism, how he converts to Shaivism, then he converts back to Jainism and so on. It is a fascinating story.
Another similar story from the reign of Aurangzeb—Chandrabhan Brahman who says—I am a Brahmin, I perform all my Brahmin rituals, let no one say that I am not a good Brahmin but we are having a great time with this ruler because we are doing this and we are doing that, he’s giving grants to this temple and that. Now, in a sense, Aurangzeb was bipolar; he destroyed some temples and gave huge grants to other temples.
My point is, when you look at the totality of sources, you say—Wait a minute, where’s the victimization? I don’t know. I don’t understand it. When I look at the Sanskrit sources of the second millennium, I don’t see the evidence for victimization. And this is what I am writing in this book and saying—Please tell me, where’s the evidence? Does it come only from one kind of source, which is dubious. No other source controls it. So this question of historical injustices and messages and so on coming up, you have to always ask the question.
I had, for my students, a category of what I called the ‘Four A-s’. What is the artefact? Is it a book, is it a text, is it an object, an archaeological object—the background. Secondly, who is the author? We don’t just say Kautilya wrote the Arthashastra. We go into the details of who Kautliya was—a major biography on him. Why did he write this book? What was the function and purpose or what I call, my third ‘A’, the agenda of the book? And the agenda is very powerful. In any kind of writing—historical or otherwise—you have to ask: What is the agenda behind this document that I am reading? And then the fourth question, which is equally important, the fourth ‘A’, audience. Who am I writing this for? Am I writing it for the king? Am I writing this chronicle in praise of the king and that he did great things, he killed 50,000 infidels and converted 50,000 others? You have to write that if you are glorifying the king.
But if you’re writing for the ordinary person, as Banarsidas is, for his fellow merchants, then you write a realistic story. The point is that you can’t treat historical evidence or any kind of evidence as—here’s a date and here’s what we’re told happened. That in itself leads to a hundred other questions. And until you have answered those and answered them with some reliability, you cannot talk about the historical continuities of misfortune.
Audience member 4: Was there a fifth ‘A’?
RT: No, there isn’t a fifth ‘A’. You can provide one.
Audience member 5: I have a question here. While we talk about ethics and justice, shouldn’t we also be talking about constitutional morality? Are we trying to differentiate between ethical aspects of the Constitution and constitutional morality? Because the Preamble itself lays down the foundation for ethics, justice and constitutional morality.
RH: To situate the Constitution historically I think it has dimensions that are redemptive, that seek to reform and so on. But the Constitution also encodes a series of compromises. And if we’re looking to the state as some kind of source of morality, I think we’ve already discussed in detail why that is a troubled enterprise. From my perspective, I’m very preoccupied with how what should or could have been an independent state effectively continues to have the reflexes and the mechanisms and processes of a colonial regime. In a very exact sense, in terms of how these protocols of extraction, control, surveillance and so on work. I fear, based on strong empirical evidence that we all share, that this is effectively a neo-colonial state apparatus. In that situation, what forms of dialogue do we have to even expect morality from the state?
And is it not perhaps, then, a situation where we need to think about seeking forms of equity or justice or a more expansive, evolving notion of the ethical but embedded in other kinds of contexts? To seek other forums, literally? For all kinds of very practical reasons, we need to rely on and even defend the Constitution before it turns into something we don’t recognize—to completely place our faith in it might be a mistake. In any case, it was meant to be an evolving document.
As a footnote to what you said, if I may, and to respond to the question about historical wrongs, I am tempted to recite a Sanskrit mantra: ‘Avyaktam ekam Muhammada avatara Mahmuda nripati.’ It’s Sanskrit, but it appears on a coin minted by and for Mahmud of Ghazni, who is typically presented in certain kinds of history textbooks as a villain and disruptor. Now maybe you should ask yourself why, on one of his coins, there is a Sanskrit translation of the kalima: ‘The inexpressible is one, Mahmud is his avatar, in this case and Mohammad is the avatar and Mahmud is the King’?
If you look at the detail of this, there are already questions. Why does someone who, we are taught, destroyed Hinduism and was its great enemy, produce this? Is he deranged? Why is he minting coins with a Sanskrit inscription? Why has he gone to all that trouble and who collaborated with him to produce this line? And what kinds of thought has gone into it? It’s a beautiful act of translation, because there is no phrase such as ‘Muhammadun rasulullah’, meaning that Mohammad is the messenger of God, in this mantra. This is very good Arabic and extremely contextual to the Quranic tradition. It’s meaningless, verging on troublesome, from a feudal, Sanskrit point of view, because the duta is not a very exalted person. He is an intermediary, representing powers, representing authorities. So, you upgrade the idea of the messenger in Sanskrit—it’s not actually a translation—you embed and assimilate an idea that comes from somewhere else into your understanding. Then, completely transforming Islamic theology, you present the Prophet as an incarnation of God.
This coin is sitting somewhere in a museum today and seems to be a silent relic. But if you start asking it questions and listen to what it’s saying, you will then not be tempted into simple binary, polarized, vicious understandings about what history really was or what happened in history.
RT: I’ll just add a couple of things to that because it’s a very interesting point. This is happening in north-western India, and Ranjit is absolutely right in referring to it as a symbol of new power, new authority, new ways of giving power to a new authority. There’s another side which is also very interesting. I’m talking about a time when the Central Asian horse trade with northern India was very important, and I’m saying this on the basis of two sources. One is a fascinating inscription that we have in Pehowa, in Haryana, issued by a group of Brahmins who are horse traders by profession and who state their names, their gotras, the whole works. And they say—We are successful horse traders and have made enough money to be able to make donations to the following temples in Varanasi. It’s a lovely little collection of activities.
Now, this horse trade goes from the Doab, Punjab, across the Northwest Frontier mountains into Central Asia—it’s the other side of the Silk Route. It’s the economic backbone of Asia for many centuries. So, there’s this horse trade going on. What are these coins doing? They’re circulating also as part of this horse trade. Therefore, in order to make the coinage acceptable, you have on it symbols of a kind of a semi-Islam, semi-Hindu nature. Because your Turushka traders from Central Asia will like the references to Mohammad, and the Brahmin horse traders from Haryana will like the references to Mohammad being an avatar. So, that one series of coins is telling you volumes about the history of that period. We choose to pick just one coin, and we sometimes don’t even pick that coin. So, it’s a case of ethically, genocidally, washing out source material from history.
Audience member 6: When we’re talking about symbols, there’s a Gyanvapi survey going on and they seem to have discovered symbols of a trishul and bells and other symbols of Hinduism on the Gyanvapi mosque. Are we awaiting another Babri Masjid episode in Indian history?
RT: The discovery of a few symbols doesn’t make an institutional building into a particular identity. Let’s not forget that symbols are very mixed. They come from all kinds of sources and represent all kinds of ideas. If you were to go around New Delhi, as people will in a few years, looking at the Lutyens buildings and saying: this is old history and the Modi buildings are more recent. If you start looking at the Lutyens buildings as if they represent conquests and destruction, there will be an array of monuments that will have been destroyed to put up those buildings.
The point is: don’t imagine that every building in the past that had a religious connotation—a Hindu religious connotation—was knocked down and converted into a mosque. Remember, there is a multiplicity of buildings of Jains and various other Hindu sects, less important, which are still standing. And there is a multiplicity of buildings in which the features that come into mosques have an element of local features. Why? Because the artisans they are utilizing are artisans who were brought up in the aesthetic tradition of the Tomars and the Chauhans and people like that.
If you go to Saurashtra, for example, to a site called Bateshwar and other sites along the coast where the Arabs first came and traded—not invaded—all the mosques there look like temples because they used the local craftsmen. And they said, ‘Hume to yehi malum hain, yehi bana denge, yehi imarat bana denge, usme kuch laga denge, ye likh denge. Ye likh denge toh Musalmanon ki ban jayegi, nehi to Hinduon ki hi hai.’ (We only know this, we will make this, make this structure—make something on it, write something on it. If we write this on it, it will become Muslim, otherwise it will remain Hindu.) There was a much greater fluidity in all these activities than we are willing to admit. People didn’t come along with flags, saying: I’m a Muslim, therefore you have to build me a mosque like the mosque in Mecca. Who’s ever been to Mecca? Who knows where the hell Mecca is!
There are umpteen of these mixed-up buildings. One mustn’t take it literally and say that because there is a mosque with bells on it, it’s bound to have been a Hindu temple. And even if it had been a Hindu temple converted, is it the right thing today for us to destroy buildings in order to put up new ones? It is a question we have to ask ourselves. This is where ethics comes in. This is a building, is it a building that was put up for an ethical purpose? If you believe in religion and you are a good Hindu, you believe that a temple was put up not just for worship but for an ethical purpose. If you are a good Muslim, you believe that a mosque also has an ethical purpose. Now if there are two buildings or two types of buildings that have ethical purposes, there will be a little mixture somewhere. The purposes will overlap, after all. There aren’t all that many ethical purposes that every religion advocates; there are only a few and those get mixed up.
These are not simple matters. Most lawyers today neither know history nor understand the subtleties and the niceties that go into the making of books, artefacts, buildings and monuments. It’s immensely complex—what goes into the making and design of a monument—that you can’t just settle by asking if it is Muslim or Hindu. If it’s Hindu and there is an element of destruction by the Muslims, we will destroy it. Things aren’t as simple as that. History is not so simple.
Notes and References
[1] Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).
[2] Akeel Bilgrami, ‘Gandhi (and Marx)’ in Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 133.
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