Moving in the Double Bind

issue 22: winter 2020

Moving in the Double Bind: Reconfiguring Indian Reflective and Creative Traditions Today

“Whenever freedom is no longer determined as power, mastery, or force, or even as a faculty, as a possibility of the ‘I can’ ..., the evocation and evaluation of democracy as the power of the dēmos begins to tremble. If one values freedom in general, before any interpretation, then one should no longer be afraid to speak without or against democracy.”[1]

“Thought will be transformed only through thought that has the same origin and determination.”[2]

Philosophical anthropology requires configuration of cultural difference. How do cultures differ from each other? How do they articulate this difference? (Needless to say that unifying and differentiating categories like anthropology and culture themselves are already rooted in a particular cultural thought about thinking and living as such in general.)[3] European intellectual history distinguishes and demarcates its identity in the name of a unique spirit, its ability to nurture questioning as the piety of thought, [4] its self-conscious and self-critical reflexivity, its universality, its ability to birth the science of rationality, purvey democracy to the world and achieve all these in the thinking of the human as such.[5] Such is the autobiographical narrative of European sovereignty. This narrative continues to be hegemonic even in determining cultural differences.[6] We are all variously caught in the webs of this narrative even when we risk configuring cultural difference of “India.”

The future of philosophical anthropology, contends S.N. Balagangadhara, depends on the questions that we forge about man from our “backgrounds.”[7] (It may be said in passing that Balagangadhara thinks that Indian reflections on self are not entirely human-centred.) In response to such a call, though not entirely on the lines of his inquiry, this essay ventures to speculate on Indian cultural difference. As what is thought is contingent upon the ways and modes in which it is thought, this inquiry focuses on the epistemic status of communicational modes (and forms) that have retained privileged status in Indian cultural formations over millennia. While outlining the nature and work of the preferred mnemocultural modes of Indian cultures, this essay offers a sketch of the nurtured dispersals through which these modes sustained and flourished historically and the rupture they suffered in European epistemic violence. While reflecting on the epistemic-existential implications of these embodied modes (against the implicit background of the European narrative of self) the chapter puts forward a reflective-pragmatic teaching and research project, which, it is hoped, will contribute to re-kindle and reorient thinking about our singular inheritances in the intellectually destitute postcolonial Indian context.

Reflective and creative compositions in Indian cultural formations preferred speech and gestural modes, musical-recitational and performative forms over millennia. Oral-gestural compositions showed indifference to writing even when this technique and technology was available. What is rather most intriguing in our context is that such phenomenal persistence of the embodied modes (speech and gesture) has not provoked any significant thought so far from the experience of changing communicational modes or systems. Why was there, for instance, such a cultivated indifference toward writing and recording systems even after writing became available in antiquity (by the time of Panini at least)?[8] Although there were no injunctions against writing (such as: thou shall not inscribe), why was writing slighted for centuries?

But more curiously, even when writing made decisive inroads into Indian cultural practices why is it that vocalic utterance, acoustic elaborations of compositions and embodied performatives continued to regulate creative reflective work even to this day? This question gains even more significance when one notices that the Indian scribal output surpasses all the archives of ancient and medieval Europe put together at least by 1000 times.[9] Why is it that even after writing or literacy has come to prevail, it has not generated repositories and their custodians, that is, centralized archives[10] and archons to gather and regulate reflective and creative energies of kavis and śāstrakāras and others for centuries? Why is it writing and literacy have not paved the way for a unified or normative law and a universalisable theoretical discourse (called philosophy) as they were supposed to have done in European cultural history? Why is it that the science of interpretation – hermeneutics – a science essentially based on written documents – has had no place in Indic reflective traditions? To my knowledge there is no single work in the Indian context which tracks the effects of writing on Indic reflective and creative traditions;[11] there is no account that tells us, as is claimed in the European context, whether and in what way Indic consciousness (if there is such a thing) was affected by the incursion of writing and literacy.

This extraordinary phenomenon – the persistence of acoustic, recitational, performative force in composition and in dissemination – even after the proliferation of scriptive modes, and indeed through them, requires extended study and reflection. The phenomenon impels us to undertake at least two tasks: (i) receive and respond to the acoustic and performative currents in the most extended ways possible in our changed communicational contexts (which extend from the oral to digital modes and more importantly, resuscitate and reorient the surviving embodied and enacted cultural forms of memory; (ii) above all, develop reflective theoretical accounts based on the experience of locally generated acoustic and scribal compositions, or, in a word, mnemocultures. As can be noticed these tasks are oriented toward practical and reflective goals; these tasks, however contradictory this claim might appear in what follows, can be undertaken today only in the context of the colonially established institutions like the university.

Speech and gesture articulate memory-traces. Scribal culture and its subsequent avatars (print and mimeograph) attempt to reduce them for the purposes of externalized articulation in tangible (lithic) forms. Yet the persistence of these alithic forces of the sign indicates that they can escape the reductions of the scribal power; they survive in the intimacy of the body – blurring the border between the enacted, embodied and externalised, objectified memories. Writing and its extended avatars (print, image, digital creations) are irreducibly disembodied and externally retained (from the codex to database forms) articulations of memory. The legacy of literacy in the related form of scribality, law and property, continues to have hold on the archive in general even (more) to this day. Gesture and speech, bare elemental forces of the hand and face, and essential substrate of all materialised memories are still measured by the scale of literacy. They are framed as the figures of the origin retrospectively. Archives in this regard hope to be preservers of the past presences.

The memory-traces and the reiterated learning that the Sanskrit tradition represents created a kind of “textual” (from textere – weaving) tradition; this tradition is replete with citations, repetitions, condensations and elaborations of what others have said, unravelling, supplementing and recomposing the heard and the inexhaustible: an interminable response and rendering of one’s duty (vidhi) to what is received.[12] It looks as if every composition is predominantly a re- capitulation and re-citation (smaraņa/dhāraņa) of the inherited. In all this intense bodily activity, palpable indifference prevails toward scribal craft, the lithic technology and the archival repository. In fact a 10th century composition on literary inquiry emphatically renders reading as an act of re-citation, and enumeratively specifies the varied effects of different “readings” (as recitation). Further, the same composition, while acknowledging the prevalence of writing and writing material, identifies the poet as the one who does not (himself) write. The poet (kavi) is not the scribe.[13]

As is well known in the context of India, colonialism introduced the concept of the archive and inaugurated the practice of the centralised accumulation of documents. In a way colonialism can be described as initiating a colossal conflict of the archives. It’s a conflict of two distinct modes of remembrance and articulation of heritages. It can be said that colonialism is a decisive encounter between an un-archival tradition and a mnemotechnical civilisational programme. Indeed it’s a conflict between the scribal culture of monotheism (which began with Moses and the lithic script of the Commandments) and the dispersed enactments of mnemocultures. Colonialism (with its mnemotechnical-archival heritage) ruptures this mnemocultural performative ethos.

In the conflict of the archives, the civilisational pedagogic model accomplished its task by two powerful modes: (i) by displacing or reducing the prevailing immemorial traditions of speech and gesture; and (ii) by instituting “new” modes of teaching and “new” materials for education. These new initiatives measured the tradition (or reduced it) in terms of scribal or print systems – systems that formed the bedrock of monotheism. (Translation and printed circulation of the Bible exceeded any single text in the history of human kind). Retrieval and standardisation of “reliable” manuscriptural texts became the noblest vocation of the civilisational archival mission in the 19th century. A plethora of “pandits” (among others), as will be shown below, serving as native informants functioned as scribes and lent themselves to the making of the colonial archive for in-scribing and “fixing” the tradition. (Initiated into the civilisational pedagogic programme, the “new” pandits began to emerge from the second half of the 19th century.)

Almost every scholar/critic working in the field of Indic studies is aware of the alithic or mnemocultural system and substance of the Sanskrit heritage. Yet rarely (almost never) does the system and mode receive epistemological attention. The substance of the heritage gets often a historical/linearised treatment in the hands of Indological scholars. Often scholars like Bothlingk (to Olivelle), disregarding the proliferative force of the mnemic heritage, sought to squeeze out single “critical” editions of specific texts. In such an enterprise the pluridimentionally circulating texts first get reduced to the newly gathered scribal mode and substance – and then they are – after the “correction” – get subjected to the newly emergent print mode. Once the print mode makes over the routes of epistemic circulation, the proliferative mnemocultural force gets displaced. For the mode brings forth an unforeseen category of addressees who begin to stake claims over the heritage. Indology as a print dominated mode of inquiry remains a communicative network among the new inheritors. Their inquiry is conditioned by and functions as a response to the lithic/print mode of organising / circulating inheritances. Once the print mode became the dominant vector of organising and disseminating the past, even the heterogeneity of scribal (manuscript) mode (later collected, preserved in centralised archives through systematic institutional and administrative channels) seldom receives attention.[14]

Archival impulse is the legacy of colonial modernity. Wherever colonial institutions took root – this impulse gripped all those who crossed their precincts. Thus we can broadly sketch, in the context of Andhra, at least five generations enveloped by the archival impulse. The archival-retrieval drive has captured five generations of learned men from the coastal Andhra from the end of 18th century. If Mackenzie and the Kavali brothers[15] begin the first period, Brown and his (lowly paid) team occupies the second generation; Manavalli Ramakrishna Kavi and Veturi Prabhakara Sastry[16] and such others’ collections and classifications, their organisation of manuscripts and corrected editions form the crucial third phase; in a modest but significant manner B. Ramaraju’s contribution is also a noteworthy effort in this context.[17] We need to await the concrete outcomes, in the fifth phase, of the explorations of the IGNCA and the National Mission for Manuscripts in the coming years. These two organisations already indicate the challenges and the tasks awaiting a new generation of competent intellectual labour.[18]

When one looks at this entirely novel archival drive – spanning across over two centuries (the period of colonial modernity and our contemporaneity) - what strikes one is its resolute tone-deafness, its decisive separation of the scribal from the acoustic. Such a separation was unheard of in the entire stretch of Indic cultural formations. It is not just the question of practical limitations (lack of audio-recording facilities in the early phases) that is the issue here. What is at stake here is the decisive alteration of reflective practices through the new apparatuses (like the archive and museum) in the colonial civilisational programme.

What receives the centre of attention here is the centralised object called the “text” – a scribal artifact resulting from sifting, filtering manipulative mechanisms of the expert reader or group of readers. Once such an object is brought forth into existence it reduces all the multiple versions of the composition from circulation – if these versions are not already captured in some prohibitive archive. Thus, for example, we barely get to know about the fifty and odd manuscripts of Vemana once Brown’s edition emerges.

Apart from this resolute birth of the text the more decisive casualty of archival imperative is the waning of the voice. None of the Vemana or Potana[19] editions can give us the experience of the immemorial acoustic reflective traditions that enabled these compositions. Colonial archives are deaf and dusty – for this institution emerged from a culture that for centuries silenced or broken away from the haunting melodies of immemorial voices and resonances. The point that needs emphasis here is not (just) about Indic indifference to writing – but to the more specific colonial fabrication of the centralised archive which wrenches the “text” away from the voice and denigrates the latter (Max Muller’s contempt for the “babble of idiots” – recitations of the Brahmanas – is well known;[20] and Brown had no sympathetic ear for the metrical melodic compositions of the Telugus; he thought he can do away with the musical modes of reflection easily).[21]

Unlike the British colonial authorities, one wonders, what the foot- soldiers of these new granaries of knowledge thought about what they were serving to consolidate; one wonders what someone like Veturi Prabhakarasastry or Vedam Venkatarayasastry22 – with their gifted voice and celebrated teachers from the formidable tradition of acoustic reflective learning – thought of their work; what did Veturi think of his labour when he was so intensely, indeed feverishly involved in collecting, classifying and commenting on the manuscripts in Madras –when he was reduced to a mere copyist? Unlike Umakanta Vidyasekharulu or Sripada Subramaniasastry (formidable critics of colonial culture in the first half of 20th century), Veturi may not have experienced any rupture between his archival passion and his traditional vocalic learning. (Ironically even the two learned Telugus were captured in the colonial institutional structures – the former – Umakanta – in Madras Government College and the latter – Sripada[23] – with printing press).

Veturi’s gifted voice and learning remained with him even as he worked on the manuscripts – the voice probably guided him; he listened to what he read. But the archive would separate the voice from the script unless the “reader” is gifted with the voice and is not ashamed of its call (for modernity muffles one’s throat). But the archive that these savants were pouring their life into has no space for the reverberations of the voice which these foot-soldiers nurtured. Didn’t this fate bother them? Weren’t they disturbed by this throttled destination of the recitational- performative mnemocultural heritage to which they were the worthy heirs? Weren’t they sensitive to the colossal price that colonialism was squeezing out from them even as they laboured indefatigably? The snares of scriptoria and its archival passion suddenly, in just a generation, seem to have entrapped scores of Sastrys, Sarmas, Murthys, Acharyas and a host of others nurtured in the mnemocultural vāngmaya (pervasive utterance) traditions.

III

But surely colonialism did not initiate scribal collections? Indeed Jain Bhandaras, sectarian mathas, temples and above all regional kingdoms did maintain personal, cult or royal collections. Mongols were said to have destroyed Nalanda “libraries”; Bahamanis did this to Vijayanagara empire; Mughals are said to have burnt the libraries of Chithodgarh; the British East India company acquired Tippu Sultan’s acquisitions; the Nayakas and the Marathas are reputed to have maintained scribal collections. Even individuals like Kavichandracharya of Kasi is said to have had a collection of 2192 manuscripts in the 17th century (and this collection is said to have moved into Raja Anupasimha’s repository in Bikaner). Yet the nature of these collections in the first (mainly Buddhist and Jain) and the second millennia (Perisan, Islamic) is very different from the systematic and institutionally expanding archivisation drive of European colonialism. In the new cultural politics of British rule the archive is the source of knowledge and power – it is the most powerful informational passage to grasp the native mind. The very concept of the archive is deeply shaped by the conception of nation. The pre-colonial scribal collections had no institutional status; nor were they conceived as sources of power and knowledge. Above all, no unifying conception of nation brought them forth.

The cherished pasts of the feudatory or princely estates for example, of Telangana appear to have little to do with the scribal accumulations of these regimes. Neither Gadwal, Jataprolu, Amarachinta, Papannapeta nor Vanaparthy are remembered for their manuscript collections. Although Gadwal and Vanaparthy acquired printing presses (almost a century after Madras got them) and published books – their reputation has little to do with the print technology. Each of these modest estates (with a few hundred tiny villages in their regimes) has for centuries organised periodic kavya, sastra gatherings and contestations. These gatherings are essentially performative sites where the learned and creative offer or perform their novel compositions. Such performative exposures are open to contestation and provocation.

Each such estate nurtured and sustained individual kavis (poets) gāyakas (singers), sāstrakaras (composers of sastras) and vayyākaranis (analysers of language formations). Although these estates were modest (Gadwal’s value was about 12 lakhs by the end of 19th century) – they were not only hospitable to savants from far off centres of learning and creativity (such as Kashi, Jodhpur, Maharashtra, Bengal); these estates also sustained pandits who moved across the country to take part in agonal debates on kavyas, sastras and sangeeta (musical performances). Celebrated pandits from Gadwal, Surapuram – such as Bukkapattanam Srinivasacharyulu, Brahmatantra Parakala Yateendrulu are reputed to have moved across various learned and contestatory arenas with accolades.[24] And, it must be emphasised here, none of these activities was driven by any literacy fever or archival passion. None of these estates appears to have either accumulated or organised surveys for manuscripts in their centuries long existence. On the contrary, what gets emphasised is the fact that the entire literary agonal debates were essentially articulated in sonic acoustic medium. Historians surmised that hundreds of thousands of on-the-spot (ashu) poems, poems composed in response to the situation at hand – were irretrievably lost.[25] The historian’s lament has no matching sentiment in the poet’s compositions; for the poet, unlike the historian, has no use for archived texts; he performs mnemoculturally.

There were about 400 such estates by the middle of the 18th century in Andhra; and of which at least a hundred were actively involved in the literary cultural activities indicated earlier.[26] The story of such estates provides the essential clue to the heterogeneity of cultural creative and reflective formations of India. It is from one such modest Papannapet or Domakonda (Medak) estates that the celebrated Mallinathasuri received Kalidasa across a millennium and responded to him singularly in the 15th century. The legacy of Mallinatha is warm in the memories of the (Telangana) region. Scores of such receptions, responses and communications across millennia and from hundreds of miles distance and difference can be grasped from such territorially small but culturally vibrant domains of this region. Manthena, Chennur, Dharmapuri, Domakonda, Kaleshwaram[27] are just the hazy contours of this sprawling mountainous region. Despite political debacles of empires (Chalukyan, Kakatiya, Vijayanagara), the lively undercurrent of creative reflective force spreading across refiguring its contours from time to time can be sensed here. Gadwal and Vanaparti sustained such currents until the formation of the Indian nation in the middle of 20th century.

It is surely plausible to assume that the creative reflective life of these estates is not outside the literacy of scribal culture; surely the poets and śāstrakāras were familiar with scribes and palm-leaves (let’s recall Srinatha’s contempt for scribes.)[28] Some of them even might have had their own copies of various compositions of their interest. Yet nowhere do we come across any reference or sense of a common repository, a centralised archive under the control of any royal power which the kavi- panditas frequented. The scribal compositions were dispersed – individually received or circulated; we are yet to come across any reference to Rajarajanarendra acquiring any Mahabharata palm-leaf collections for Nannya for his Telugu translation in the 11th century. Although, however, Kautilya refers to “akshapatala” – a repository of documents –these are apparently revenue records; curiously he does not refer to any “department” that managed any of the literary reflective collections.[29] The routes through which these scribal artifacts circulated appear to be through the dispersed but connected nodal points of region or princely state-specific, and periodic literary reflective gatherings.

These gatherings enlivened and provoked and recouped the savants. Such gatherings not only offered challenging occasions for creativity but they enabled critical reception and response to what one is exposed to. No wonder Gadwal received the celebrated appellation – Vidvadgadwala – the learned or enlightened Gadwala (or the Gadwala of the learned or enlightened). Even after colonialism clamped its talons on cultural India (as archival work went on intensely) elsewhere, Gadwal was hosting its learned mnemocultural gatherings; pandits and poets from various parts of India participated in these gatherings.

Colonial organisations such as Asiatic Society, Oriental Institutions (Madras, Mysore, Maharashtra), Deccan College, Bhandarkar Institute and other archivally driven establishments began to displace the diversely interlaced circuits of performative learning and responsive receptions of the traditions. The scribal-philological identity of these institutions (as was the case elsewhere) is contingent upon their severance from mnemocultural performative sources. The Oriental Manuscript Library of Madras had no use for Veturi’s metrical-tonal performative competence or his resonant acoustic memory. As foot-soldiers of the archival empire, they were required to compile or “correct” the anti-acoustic words on the page (at the rate of five rupees for copying 100 anushtup slokas/verses in the 1930s;[30] the copying did not require the copyists to know how to recite such slokas).

What we have elaborated so far can be formulated in a single sentence: despite the circulation of writing before colonialism, there is no simple continuity between Indic scribal cultures and the archival institutions of colonial empire. Mnemocultural performativity structured the scribal cultures earlier for millennia. Both the critical factors of embodied memory and lively performativity were either silenced or effaced in the imperium or the scriptorium of the archive. The question as to who possessed the manuscript does not appear to have much significance earlier;[31] what mattered in the mnemocultural milieu was how one responds to the received in the acoustic-performative mode without the aid of memory surrogates (texts).

Many of the pandit-poets, sastrakara-vayyakarani-kavis, even when they had manuscripts or books, rarely referred to them in their dialogues and goshtis (gatherings). These “texts” were of no use in their performatives. We can notice this even in contemporary performances of Dakkali32 Jambapurana. Although they bring forth their palm-leaf manuscript from time to time, nowhere does the performance get controlled or regulated by the reading from the text. The mnemocultural force brings the Purana into life. No wonder manuscripts in the earlier scribal cultures remained scattered and dispersed across individuals, families, mathas and estates. Should it surprise one that when Ramaraju declared that “the Telangana is a treasure trove of palm leaf manuscripts”?33 With the famed Kakatiya empire and scores of cultural nodes spread out across Telangana, the dispersal of palm leaf manuscripts in the region is certainly a plausible phenomenon. Even to this day, copies of unpublished manuscripts are said to survive among the descendants of the estates and families of the poets and pandits.34 Ramaraju’s indefatigable searches yielded him rich rewards – and one among them was the famed stylus of Mallinathasuri in Medak.

Whatever their existing conditions are, colonial institutions like the archive, museum and the university have come to stay. One cannot, however, say that they have become worthy replacements for the earlier dispersed but connected networks of cultural nodes. For these institutions are transplants from a different cultural milieu. In Europe where these institutions paved way for a whole range of activities (search for origins, originals, obsession with certainty and authenticity of the artifact, authorial identity, interpretative manoeuvres to establish the relation between the text, the author and the world, myth and history, possessive preservation of the relics of the past, professionalisation and institutionalisation of scribal practices and products, etc.,); the church as the singular centralised institution oversaw and regulated them. As suggested earlier, these institutions are the calibrated vectors for initiating epistemic rupture in the colonised cultures. Predictably these vectors have lured generations of eminent pandits to become foot-soldiers or lowly- paid coolies in consolidating those very structures that ruptured the cherished modes of responsive reception – modes that nurtured and enhanced variedly the cultural formations of India. These institutions turned mnemocultural acoustic performative energies into muffled voices condemned to dark and dusty shelves in barely accessed centralised repositories.

The cruel irony of the situation is that these institutions (especially, the archive and the museum [the latter received the name – “dead college” – among some copyists])[35] devoted to archival passions should deploy those very heirs; for these scribal coolies had no sense of an externalised retentional system (archive) in their immemorial past; and precisely these very mnemocultrually learned were drawn to embalm their lively heritage in the silent vaults of privileged possession (now designated with the lovingly repeated cliché “wealth of India” – on NMM website).

Yet the colonial institutions cannot be wished away; at this stage there is no alternative to the continuity of these institutions. But we need to be sensitive, without succumbing to cynicism, to the fact that these institutions continue to perpetrate cultural violence – the violence of fundamental alteration of cultural orientation from outside with force: mnemocultural scribal modes are forced into anti-acoustic, non-performative institutions. The second major programmatic effect of this epistemic rupture is the foreclosure or even denigration of the marked body that invigorated and spread across heterogeneous cultural formations of India over millennia. As is well known, the creative and reflective forms and formations of India are entirely contingent upon the internally differentiated non-unifiable biocultural formation called the jāti.

In a word, in the “Indian” context (although not limited to it) – one cannot think of culture without the sense of the multiple singularities of community and their idiomatic articulations and inheritances. Neither these communities – which are themselves intricately differentiated internally and in relation to their counterparts– nor their articulations can be subsumed under a normative discursive order. No wonder European human sciences could either respond to the call of these simulacrally deliriously varied singularities or could they vouch any responsibility for them. With cultivated disregard for the unknown other, they violently imposed normative schemas on these formations. They fabricated a system of caste and erected a religion called Hinduism.

As a part of their protocols of representation these human sciences tried to circumscribe the proliferating multiplicity of jātis by manuscripting, codifying and recording them; centralising their mnemocultural forms and formations by prosthetic means through primitive accumulation modes for archives, normed standards for them in forging “critical editions”. It is impossible to think of the spread of the human sciences without the replication of the normative order and without the powerful reiterative techniques of scribal and print mechanisms globally.

“Caste” vindicates the limits of European sensitivity and responsibility to what does not conform to European cultural referent. Caste exposes European failure to respond to the most unique opportunity it has had to overcome Eurocentrism – a colossal epistemic failure to respond to something radically different. Unfamiliar with, insensitive to profoundly heteronormative currents of life/living, European irresponsibility stigmatises what it dubbed as caste on the eve of colonialism. Colonial institutions aim at cleansing the Indian cultural heritage of its jāti springs that generate and disseminate it variedly. Alternatively, jāti is configured as a unified system of oppression.

Consequently the constitutive relation between jāti and culture as productive and singular source of Indic distinction and difference gets barely discussed. No wonder NMM has no space for the newly emerged artisans of scribal culture: scribes, calligraphers, palm-leaf makers and the metal workers (surely, these vruttikaras would have found differentiated but distinct space for them among the catalogue of the 64 “arts” – the chatushshastikalas).[36] Unlike in other cultural formations, in the Indian context artisans and “service” groups are not merely anonymous workers or labourers as such. Each of these groups is a culturally configured and differentiated non-cohering collective. Jātis as distinct biocultural formations wove the varying hues and fibres of Indian reflective and creative traditions.

The archival catalogues that are quintessentially the product of colonial institutions stand eloquent testimony to the fact that they are cleansed of the jāti provenance of the material gathered. To put it more starkly – there is no Jāti census of the catalogued material.[37] The fact that before scribal material was driven into the centralised archives – it was brought forth and circulated via the jāti circuits makes the epistemic rupture more palpable (that is precisely how a Savara elder or a Dakkali elder carries his palm-leaf inheritances intimately.) Here once again the stark asymmetry between European and Indian entry into modern institutions can be pointed out. Almost every scholar who contributed or participated in the formation of modern scholarship and institutions in Europe was driven by a specific religious allegiance or antagonism (Catholic, Jew, Protestant [Lutheran, Calvinist], Jesuit – Renaissance, Restoration, Republic of Letters, Enlightenment). In other words, no epistemic rupture structures the transition from Christian (or Jewish) cultural ideational forms to modern institutional forms in Europe (though, ironically, “epistemological break” and “dissociation of sensibility” were hastily derived from the conflict between Catholics and Protestants.)[38] Whereas these very institutions, wrenching and severing the material from practices, disregarding the relationship between jāti and heritage erupt an epistemic violence in the colonial context. If culture in the form of religion provides the dynamic in Europe,[39] the latter undermines and denigrates culture as jāti in our context. Today we continue to live this ruptured legacy even when we talk about our “national wealth.”

The rupture between jāti and culture plays out most blatantly in the domain of ethnography and folklore; this throws into abyssal doubt the nature and purpose of these human sciences in our context. For, the collectors and the custodians of these cultures in the newly emerged colonial institutions never had the privilege to receive those divergent cultures. Unlike in the case of scribal heritage the radically heterogeneous mnemocultural inheritances of divergent jātis have never had (nor can they ever have one – despite the catachrestic label of Hinduism) any single, unified cultural institutional space for their convergence or representation (there is no single temple that brings together all jatis and janjatis of India). The strength of their longevity and the source of their lively survival appear to be the result of the absence of any sovereign commanding and controlling institutional force. Jātis sustained and replenished their cultures autonomously. The immemorial guardians of cultural memories are internally differentiated liminal figures – the excluded insider figures of various jātis. They alone are the mnemocultural custodians and innovative disseminators of the acoustic and performative idioms of divergent singularities of jātis; they are the inheritors of the cherished Suta-Bharata-Seer tradition which opened up for the entirety of jati clusters the itihasic-puranic, performative and song-poetic cultural forms. These lively heritages are unquantifiable and immeasurable.

Whereas ethnographic folklore, emerging from the devastating disruptions of industrial onslaught (in Europe), is an urban vocation about rural cultures; the addressees and agents of ethnographic folklore (including ethnomusicology) are, as in the case of Indology remain urban professionals of modern institutions. These emergent professionals aimed at capturing and recording the mnemocutlural creations of communities that were vanishing rapidly into the industrial urban complexes. These communities were mainly identified as artisans, husbandmen, servicemen and peasants in European cultural history. As new professions and disciplines emerged, the immemorial custodians of mnemocultures disappeared in the European context.

Whereas the Indian scenario presents a fundamentally contrasting view to that of Europe. As pointed out earlier, cultural forms and practices of India are deeply filiated to singularities of jāti. Despite radical upheavals (Islamic invasions, British imperialism, Christian religious and capitalist industrial onslaughts) the enigmatic cultural string called jāti survived tenaciously (albeit with alterations) in the Indian cultural formations. The divergent jāti strings wove the cultural fabrics of India. In response to the siren calls of colonial institutions, Indian academics retrieve and recorded tonnes of “folk” material and consolidated ill- thought disciplines called folklore studies. It is not just textualising mnemocultres of divergent communities that one notices here; these studies perpetrate the even more astonishing wrenching apart of jāti and culture in a heritage that is essentially built on the intricate weaving of jātis and cultures. Even today, it is impossible to come across a narrative, song, performatives of a community without becoming aware of the provenance of these forms in profoundly differentiated jātis. Thus we know that the Jambapuranamu cannot be associated with Kurmas and Madel cannot be reduced to Sugalis. But this fundamental filiation between jāti and culture has not yet received any serious theoretical- reflective attention.

It is impossible to believe that pioneers in Telugu folklore like Ramaraju, Donappa, Nayani Krishnakumari were unaware of the jāti provenance of the “lore” they were passionately collecting and writing about. Their classifications, descriptions, thematisations and commentaries (in short, their “methodologies”) have little to say about the relation between jāti and culture. Thus Ramaraju, for instance, proceeds to classify his “data” in terms of singer (male, female, or child), themes (historical, mythological, otherworldly, and religious) and mood/motif (heroic, ferocious, wondrous, humorous, erotic etc) – a classification without any source in Indian reflective creative traditions. Ramaraju devotes exactly 15 pages (chapter 15) in a volume of 850 pages to give a descriptive list of some eight jātis. None of these cultural jātis and forms offers any insight to think about Indian cultural distinction or specificity in this work.[40] That is the measure of the disciplinary violence.

Similarly Nayani Krishnakumari has exactly two pages of description about kulas in her Janapada Geyalu – Samghika Charitra (Folk songs and social history), which she edited with Ramaraju.[41] This 400 page anthology (of about 19 recorded works) by default as it were cleanses the song forms from their jāti provenances. We never get to know which particular jāti or jātis weave and nurture the songs, ballads or Puranas retrieved by the anthologists. Following the colonial programming, these pioneers unify the heterogeneous jātis into “folk”, peasants and beggars. Pathos, and anxiety, typical of ethnographic folklore – sense of remorse at the presumed loss of the lore of the folk pervade the pioneers’ work: “It is worthy to uplift (retrieve) and preserve all that orally available folk literary wealth.”[42] This is the ethnographer’s credo.

If culture is what we do and what we or others say about what we do, colonialism – through new discourses, modes and institutions – ruptures the relationship between our experience and what we say about what we do. In privileging speech and gestural media, Indian cultural formations preferred embodied modes of articulation; they remained, despite the prevalence of scribal technologies, alithic in their orientation. Such an orientation remains indifferent to externalised storage of memory in surrogate bodies like the archives and museums. For none of these can become effective substitutes for the materiality of the body. And existence requires that we grapple with and (at)tend (to) the body as such. From very early on one notices an intense engagement with the question of the body in Indian reflective traditions. Yet the body here is not seen as a mere physical entity; nor was the human body given any privilege in these reflections (human remained one manifestation of pashu – animal). The body in these traditions appears to be a temporal-phenomenal entity – composed of heterogeneous elements: physical and non-physical other (para). Indian mnemocultural formations can be explored on the basis of these fundamental or foundational reflections on the body complex. Neither material nor immaterial but nestles in the material; neither physical nor substantial but circulates in the physical; neither temporal nor finite but woven into the temporal and finite; neither originary nor terminable but located in the circle of origin and cessation; neither destructible nor threatened but caught in the ephemeral and the vulnerable: para’s non-relational intimacy with the shareera cannot be plotted either in exclusive or reductive terms. Temporally and spatially immeasurable, para lends itself to the temporal and phenomenal: That is the enigma of the embodied existence of the body complex.

Yatta dadreśya magrāhya magotra mavarņa
Machakśuh śrotram tadapāņi pādam
Nityam vibhum sarvagatam susūkśmam
Tat avyayam yadbhūta yonim paripaśyanti dhīrah [43]

(Para is ungraspable by the senses as it is without birth, has no gotras – kulas (home) -, has no properties, no colours, without eyes and ears, without organs and eternal; spreads everywhere, absolutely subtle, without end, source for all elements: that is the a-kshara para [the imperishable other] and thus the thoughtful sense it)

Yet one’s presumptions about a conscious/cognitive apperception of what can be called para are discounted; one’s presumed agentive – self- conscious – command is undermined.

Yasyā matam tasya matam
Matam yasya na veda sah
Avijnātam vijānatām Vijnātam avijānatām44

(Those who learn that para (brahma) cannot be known are able to learn of para. Those who presume that they have known para know nothing of ‘it’. Those who wish to know para are unable to learn about it. Those who have not learnt about para alone are able to learn of it.)

Here experience or learning is distanced from perception and knowledge. No resolve of the will-to-know can be an effective mode of experiencing para. Experiential learning is in asymptotic relation with epistemophilia and conscious mastery. Para appears to force itself into and comes forth as the material and measurable entity, but cannot be reduced to or identified with calculable entities. Yet at the same time all discussion – or the entire reflective orientation – concerning para is invariably articulated in the context of the shareera (the body).

Ya deveha tad amutra
yadamutra tadanviha[45]

(Para that nestles among all the elements manifests in accord with the resources of the body that comes forth and appears different from par. This body that appears to turn into is itself the common one; and that common appears to be this very embodied para.)

In short, the realm of para’s circulation is the discrete and the phenomenal multitudes. In other words, para’s non-relational relation to shareera, the force’s relation to form, is based on a generative impulse which seems interminable and inexhaustible. Para appears to generate or morph itself into the phenomenal and dwells in the abode of the phenomenal – remaining irreducible to the latter. This morph of para (vivarta) is co-emergent with time and space and this sets in motion the machine of iteration. The coming forth of these complicit contraries as irreducible differences but intimately woven emerge as spatio- temporalities must be experienced in and as the body.[46] The body as such is at once immemorially durational and at the same time ephemerally instantial.

The instantial is the effect of the durational; the durational comes forth in the instantial. Neither the instantial nor the durational can be made sense exclusively nor can they be opposed to each other. The relation between the durational/instantial has effect for the question of the agential. The instantial cannot severe itself from the durational and cannot claim absolute autonomy from it. Yet the instantial has to live on in its own as it were – which is what ineluctably happens. When one forgets that the instantial, discrete existent, is the effect of the immemorial durational, and indulges the instantial as the absolutely autonomous, such existent condemns itself to machinic repetition; such existent equals death. This is bound to occur as the instantial (the individuated and discrete beings) and the durational (the immemorial and extensive) are seen as entirely exclusive.

Mrutyossa mrutyumāpnoti
Ya iha nāneva paśyati[47]

(Such a life/death [which disavows para and confuses it with multiplicity of discrete beings] cannot move toward the path of emancipation.)

The durational moves on as an immeasurable rhythm of varied repetitions. Para cannot be reduced to this repetitive rhythm. Yet, it must be pointed out, that the intimations of para can only be discerned in its (para’s) generative effect — in its manifestation in the radical heterogeneity of the instantial.[48] In other words, the generative impulse sets in motion differential instantiations. The intimations of para and the work of the durational must be realised and responded to in the singularity of the instantial.[49] The call of para must be responded to only by putting to work the gift/curse of the singular instantial, the finitudinal existent. How to live the instantial/durational pulls in the double bind of shareera-para is immensely important but tacitly and praxially reflected upon question in Sanskrit traditions.

Given that para’s articulation of the temporal-phenomenal is an effect of a generative impulse, it has the immense power to multiply heterogeneous entities and their modes of being in existence. The janas or jātis/ “communities” (without community) proliferate and along with these their modes of symbolisation multiplies too. In short, the generative impulse disseminates textual-sexual forms in time and space. Moving on with a differential impulse the jātis disseminate divergent narrative, performative and visual genres of symbolisation. All these formations – generic, jāti-generative – are essentially mnemocultural; and they embody these intimations and put to work the body as the most efficacious mode of living on. This mode of living on of the finitudinal existence and the mnemopraxial cultivation of response in the instance of being are common to everybody. It is impossible to reduce the mnemocultural intimations of the double bind of existence to some unifying and totalising categories. Yet, the response requires – even as one praxially forges response in the singular context – one to serve the passage beyond the singular, the differential, the generated or determined. The response will be ineffective – despite its actual emergence in an instance of being – if it is aimed at sublimating a particularity of mode or being. Mnemopraxial responsibility is enacted across the heterotopia of these jātis and genres.

Colonialism aimed at permanently altering the filiation between the modes of being and the paraxial accounts of modes and being, between what we do and what we say about what we do. Colonial institutions like the archive, museum and the university are the entrenched apparatuses of this epistemic rupture. We are all caught, in different ways, in the machinations of these apparatuses and their discourses.

While caught in these rupturing institutions and activities, we need to begin to learn that all the work of these discourses, archival accumulations (acquired through questionable means), and institutions are inversely related to the jātis and cultures. The more and more we possess them, the less and less we can sustain them and let them proliferate in their creative modes. For the essential generative impulse of these heterogeneous cultural forms is the immemorial gift of these divergent jātis. While jāti as a biocultural configuration enabled cultural generation here, our new institutions, as they foreclosed the jātis, make us turn cultural formations into museumised cultural wealth – a sort of frozen capital.

The diversely spread out cultural nodes and formations on the one hand and a modestly established feudatory or princely estates sustained and nurtured these cultural generative impulses. They affirm eloquently (without saying so) the fact that culture fundamentally is differential and local. Whereas the modern colonial implants are by definition not oriented toward nurturing such cultural generativity. On the contrary as they figure culture as a frozen past, they are yet to explore the ways of rekindling and reinvigorating the generative impulse of cultural formations of the jātis.

VII

Mnemocultural work involves precisely the living on – the embodied or enacted endurance of the idiomatic singularities of existence, in speech and in gesture. The countless proliferations of the idioms of image, music, and text domains in the Indian context are a testimony to the circulation of the mnemopraxial impulse. The singular-plural living on of these idiomatic modes of survival – not as exemplary instantiations of any normative model, but as an interminable play of the figural and the empirical, the finite and the infinite –is the only absolute passage for each and every genos and species. None – not even gods can escape these idiomatic workings of the home-dwelling-body complex. It is indeed this rigorous – (im)possible, singular-plural structure of the idiomatic- bodies/genos that has brought forth the extraordinarily heterogeneous mnemocultural Vidyas (verbal learning) and Kalas (visual creations) of the Indic subcontinent.

The endurance, tenacity and survival of the idiom depend on its paradoxical undecidable and indeterminable movements, its conservative and transgressive proliferations. Thus every genos that emerged from the infringement of the excluded insider Sudra and the dis-inherited woman – forged staggering range of verbal and visual idioms that remain hospitable to the figure-name configurations of the Sanskrit mnemotextual episteme. This remains truly extraordinary phenomena of Indian cultural formations.

It is precisely such contrapuntal impulses that turn the proliferating generations – and their idiomatic mnemotexts into excluded insiders of the Indic mnemocultures. Otherwise, one cannot make sense of the most “excluded” (insider) Dakkalis forging a Puranic idiom of distinction and rendering it with idiomatic visual scrolls forged by another distinguished genos – the Nakashis; one cannot make sense of the Muslim Manganiyars and Langas of Rajasthan and the Patuas of Bengal composing songs on the Ramayana and the Mahabharata for their proximate but distancing and differentiating communities. The proliferation of the idiomatic textual- generational complexes, it must be affirmed, are not governed by any common normative belief as such. This is dissemination without Mnemocultural work involves precisely the living on – the embodied or enacted endurance of the idiomatic singularities of existence, in speech and in gesture. The countless proliferations of the idioms of image, music, and text domains in the Indian context are a testimony to the circulation of the mnemopraxial impulse. The singular-plural living on of these idiomatic modes of survival – not as exemplary instantiations of any normative model, but as an interminable play of the figural and the empirical, the finite and the infinite –is the only absolute passage for each and every genos and species. None – not even gods can escape these idiomatic workings of the home-dwelling-body complex. It is indeed this rigorous – (im)possible, singular-plural structure of the idiomatic- bodies/genos that has brought forth the extraordinarily heterogeneous mnemocultural Vidyas (verbal learning) and Kalas (visual creations) of the Indic subcontinent.

It is precisely such contrapuntal impulses that turn the proliferating generations – and their idiomatic mnemotexts into excluded insiders of the Indic mnemocultures. Otherwise, one cannot make sense of the most “excluded” (insider) Dakkalis forging a Puranic idiom of distinction and rendering it with idiomatic visual scrolls forged by another distinguished genos – the Nakashis; one cannot make sense of the Muslim Manganiyars and Langas of Rajasthan and the Patuas of Bengal composing songs on the Ramayana and the Mahabharata for their proximate but distancing and differentiating communities. The proliferation of the idiomatic textual- generational complexes, it must be affirmed, are not governed by any common normative belief as such. This is dissemination without universalism, movement without normativity. Idiom and belief are not necessarily in continuity in these mnemocultural practices. Otherwise it would be impossible to think of the extraordinary range of the open-ended musical traditions (say that of the Hindustani) whose idiomatic singularities emerge from the vigour and sense of the bodies marked by Islam. Each of the excluded-inside communities (Sarada, Baindla, Chindu, Savara, Bhaat, Dakkali, Budagajangama,[50] etc., the list can proliferate endlessly) – has singular idiomatic mnemotexts of narrative, performative and visual cultures across the heterogeneous India. These n+1 communities continue to re-cite the immemorial mnemocultural imports in a million voices and gestures in idiomatic variations. The singular- multiple genre that crosses the borders and moves across in unforeseen ways is the mnemotextual composition ithiasa-purana.

The immeasurable proliferation of the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and the Puranas across a staggering variety of idioms and idiomatic genres (Telugu, Hindi, Kannada, Gondi, Tulu, Marathi etc.; Yakshaganas, grinding-mill songs; pounding-rice songs, geet-bol, lullaby songs, pravachanas, etc.,) is an obvious testimony to the textual-sexual dispersals. As the symbol survives in discontinuity with the body that brought it forth or circulated, the idiom can remain in discontinuity with any norm or belief.

VIII

One can hint at the magnitude and sheer simulacral diversity of mnemocultures when one notices a certain textual demarcation of vidya and kala in the tradition. A Sanskrit text of rather disputed origin, Śukranītisāra[51], in a rather unusual definitional move pronounces the mnemocultural significance of vidya and kala with simplicity and clarity. It must be noted that this “definition” and enumeration of vidya(s) and kala(s) takes place here in a section that begins with the drift and proliferation of generations:

Vidyāhyanantāschakalāh sankhyātum naiva śakyate Vidyāmukhyāscha dvatrinshachatushashti kalāh smrutāh

(It is impossible to count the vidyas and kalas as they are infinite. Yet it is remembered that the more significant vidyas number thirty-two and the kalas sixty-four.)

Enumeration is a compositional strategy of mnemotexts. But nowhere is this technique used to totalise or norm any ideal injunction. Enumeration suggests the irreducible possibilities of differentiation without end; enumeration is one of the finite ways of hinting at the infinite and inexhaustible. No wonder the Śukranītisāra, in referring to incalculable proliferation of generations affirms:

Jātyānantyam tu samprāptam tadvaktum naivaśakyate
(4:3:11, p. 284).[52]

(Generations emerging from the infringed relations result in infinite jātis. It is impossible to recount them).

After confirming the impossibility of exhausting the number of Vidyas and Kalas, the Śukranītisāra offers a figural-generative account of (“definition”) of vidya and kala that captures in an unprecedented way the mnemocultural work of the face and the hand, of speech and gesture:

Yadyatsvādvāchikam samyakkarma vidyābhisanjnakam
Shakto mūkopi yatkartum kalāsanjnam tatsmrutam (4:3:24, p. 286)

(Anything that is properly, efficiently organised/composed by Vak (“speech”) goes under the name of vidya. That which even the speechless (dumb) can perform without the use of the mouth goes under the name of kala).

Through these enactments of the body, in speech and in gesture – mnemocultures proliferate. It is difficult to assume a rigorously conceptual definition of either vidya or kala in the Sanskrit traditions. Vidya, it is true, is learning but it cannot be easily assimilated to the concept of knowledge (episteme) that gets systematically theorised in Greek thought. If a certain kind of meta-positional demonstrative deployment of reason aimed at building a normative system is the vocation of knowledge – vidya seems to imply a learning – whatever may be the complexity of the domain explored– which is entirely oriented toward a mnemopraxial performativity, an embodied enactment in the forms of speech and gesture. Vidya, unlike knowledge, is not oriented toward an epistemophilic end: vidyas and kalas are modes of liveable learning. The centrality of the body and the imperative of the body’s trans- formation are absolutely critical in these mnemocultural practices and textualities. Living on with a doubly composed singular body, mnemopraxial textuality and responsibility are moved by the interminable, but variedly repeated ālāp – what do you do with what you have!?

Caught in the disorienting colonial institutional structures that deny or efface our experiences but impel us to fabricate accounts of them – what can be done in our postcolonial situation? Most fundamentally we need to learn to see the disruptive asymmetry between what we do and what we say about our practices. Here it must be pointed out once again that the modern implants, while they wrenched culture from jāti, have forged, as pointed out earlier, a dubious narrative about jāti “system” as an oppressive structure (it is impossible to turn jatis into a system). This unexamined fabrication whips up communal animosities and chokes cultural generative impulses. Cowered either by unexamined guilt or armed by ill- thought rage jātis are barely in a position to reconfigure their passages to their creative pasts beyond the disruptive colonial work for an unforeseen future.

The epistemic rupture (between our experience and what we/others say about it) continues to entrench us within the derivative structures and discourses of colonial institutions. The disastrous consequences of this rupture are surging forth more and more stridently and genocidally (in the sense of erasing the genus) in the functioning of these colonially transplanted institutions today. For as “new” cultural institutions they have barely any continuity with the mnemoculturally oriented heterogeneous cultures and jātis. Colonial institutions are yet to offer any innovative ways and modes of reorienting the generative impulses of our lasting biocultural formations. As the diversely spread sources that nurtured and sustained these jāti-cultural forms and formations have been liquidated, and as the colonially implanted new institutions have little comprehension or concern for these formations, the heirs of the jātis (distanced from creative impulses) see these institutions as only sources of upward mobility.

Yet, the disruptive institutions are here to stay. Political expediency (“democracy”) has increasingly undermined the regulative procedures of access to these institutions. Predictably, public institutions witness mounting demands for access to whatever the dwindling resources that these institutions appear to promise. But these institutions are yet to be equipped to face the groundswell of demand from divergent jātis. What to teach, how to teach, what to archive, should one archive at all, how to train, what to impart these new generations are the most challenging and grave questions; but they are barely confronted in the context of our colonially entrenched institutions today. In the absence of viable alternatives access to these alienating institutions cannot be denied to any.

How to negotiate with this aporetic predicament? Can this situation of impossibility be turned into a situation of possibility? Perhaps it might be possible to turn this impossible impasse into a possible passageway to our varied pasts. In order to think through and move beyond (via) the violent colonial implants one needs to take radical risks. One such risk is to rearticulate the relation between jāti and culture as vigorously and openly as possible. This risk makes one notice the incongruity between the unified, centralised, top-down, normative colonial institutions and the radically heterogeneous, non-normative, differently dispersed jāti-cultural formations. We notice that no sovereign normative order oversees the emergence, continuity and dispersal of these jātis and formations. These latter far exceed and go beyond the reach and grasp of the colonial institutions.

In this regard the radical contrast between the heteronormative, non- cohering cultural nodes and their networks in the pre-colonial cultural circuits and the colonial institutional structures is instructive. But today these institutions (mainly academic) are increasingly peopled by the distanced inheritors of the divergent communities. When we pay attention to the student composition of our classrooms – with a sense of diverse genealogies of Indian cultural formation – we might become alert to the tasks we need to undertake. These first generation entrants into the university must be exposed to the complex cultural fabric of India and the ways in which each of the jātis composing the class(room) has woven its strings and made its singular space in the texture of Indian formation. This reorientation to cultural pasts may aim at affirming the jāti genealogies and their singular and incomparable cultural creations. In other words, one must aim at rekindling a sense of responsibility among the distanced inheritors toward their ruptured and denigrated inheritances. As jātis alone have access to the singularity of their generative impulse, jātis must be made responsible for resuscitating and transforming their cultural forms and formations.

Although this might sound contradictory, the very colonial institutional sight of the university must be made the venue or arena for this rethinking of jāti-culture filiation and their interanimation; the university must be made the source for rekindling responsibility to cultural singularities and the general reorientation of cultural formations in the Indian context. For it is this rupturing institution that must itself be reoriented to suture the jāti-cultural fabric which it has violently torn apart. The university must enable the singularities to experience their generalisable potentiality and their relation to the cultural formations in general.

The university – while learning to be hospitable to the jāti-cultural filiation – will have the double task of nurturing cultural creative singularities and articulating the generalizable force of the singular. In order to render these tasks the university must immerse itself in the cultural formations of the region in which it is located. Depending on the number of universities and the jāti-cultural formations in the region – the universities can form into clusters. While each of the universities attends to the jāti-cultural formations singularly and collectively (in the clusters) – what will be common to the university in general is its task of articulating the general through the singular (where the relation between the singular and general is neither oppositional nor hierarchically sequential but supplemental.) Practical and theoretical modules and tasks can be designed to be shared and tested across units, clusters and constellations. Further the university must be made to play the catalytic role of initiating radical epistemic comparatological inquiries across singular Indian jāti-cultural formations and other European and non- European cultural formations.

However dangerous (risks must be taken!) and retrograde this might sound, in all the above activities jātis as the stakeholders of the region and cluster must be involved as role players in the common pursuit of cultural resuscitation in the Indian context. Given the formations of jāti and culture in the Indian context the way to reorient and innovate cultural inheritances cannot ignore the critical space of jāti. Therefore modern institutions must unlearn their colonial dogma about jāti as a system of pure oppression and learn to work with its cultural creative impulses and resources. Otherwise colonial consciousness will aggravate the rupture between what we do and what we are programmed to say about what we do. Colonial institutions will continue to deprive us of our experience. It is against these paralysing determinations that we must learn to strive and reinvigorate our heterogeneous mnemocultural, scribal, performative and genealogical inheritances. Only through such future anterior praxial mode can we hope to reconfigure a different future for our varied inheritances today. Such a task would perhaps enable us to reconfigure philosophical anthropology from outside the ipsocratic traditions of Europe and envisage a future anterior democracy to come.

[1] Jacques Derrida, “The Other of Democracy,” in Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005,) pp. 40-41.

[2 ]Martin Heidegger, ‘“Only a God can Save Us”: The Spiegel Interview,’ trans., William J. Richardson, S. J.,.

[3] Therefore, the categories with which we think – say, “metaphysics and politics” – themselves are part of the problem that one needs to think through.

[4] Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt, (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977, p. 35.

[5] Rodolphé Gasche, Europe, or the Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp.1-20.

[6] Such differentiation is what Jan Meulenbeld, exploring the medicinal traditions of India, calls the “demarcationist principle” – which models scientific inquiry on European experience. Such an account contends that “Western science alone can be regarded as a system of knowledge based on rationality and directed at the structure of reality.” Cf., Meulenbeld, “Reflections on the basic concepts of Indian pharmacology,” in Studies in Indian Medical History, ed., G. Jan Meulenbeld and Dominik Wujastyk, (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2001), p. 1.

[7] “I beg, therefore, to submit to you that the future of philosophical anthropology does not lie in giving an Asian, African or an American-Indian answer to the Western (religious) questions about man. Rather, the quest for man involves, in the first place, raising Asian, African, and American-Indian questions about ‘man’. To do so, I suggest, is what makes philosophical anthropology ‘topical’...Whether intellectuals from other cultures and groups are up to this task, however, is a totally different issue..” Cf., S.N. Balagangadhara, “The Reality of Elusive Man?”, accessed on 20 May 2013.

[8] Richard Solomon, “On the Origin of the Early Indian Scripts,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, No. 115.2, 1995, pp. 271-279.

[9] This number is suggested by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts; whereas the National Mission for Manuscripts suggests about 5 million manuscripts as the extant Indian scribal collection. Cf. Sheldon Pollock, “Literary Culture and Manuscript Culture in Precolonial India,” in Literary Cultures and the Material Book, ed. Simon Eliot, Andrew Nash and Ian Willson, (London: The British Library, 2007), p. 87. Also cf., Sudha Gopala Krishnan, “Introduction,” Tattvabodha, Vol. 1, ed. Sudha Gopalakrishnan, (Delhi: National Mission for Manuscripts and Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 2006), p. ix. David Pingree is said to have observed that the world-wide spread of Sanskrit manuscripts runs into 30 million. Cf., Mail from Dominik Wujastyk on 19 March 2009 available at INDOLOGY@liverpool.ac.uk on LISTSERV.LIV.AC.UK)

[10] K.V. Sarma, a renowned scholar on Indian mathematics and astronomy, observed (in 2005) that “a very large number of science manuscripts in Sanskrit” lay dispersed in manuscript libraries and in private possession and that 90-95 percent of this scribal material is not available in print (and in translation). K.V. Sarma, “Sanskrit and Science, A New Area of Study,” in Mathematics and Medicine in Sanskrit, ed., Dominik Wujastyk, (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2009), p. 16. A Japanese scholar has identified some 18 manuscript libraries so far in India (including Nepal) as accessed on 25 March 2013.

[11] Sheldon Pollock’s paper mentioned earlier is mainly aimed at contending that print, as in the case of Europe, has had no significant impact in Indian cultural history. Consequently he emphasises in this paper and elsewhere in his work, the predominance of manuscript (or scribal) culture in India. However, when one examines this claim more closely in Pollock’s paper, one cannot fail to notice that even manuscript culture could not undermine the power of the acoustic or recitational orientation of Indian cultural formations. Secondly, Pollock, while aimed at critiquing the universal claims of print culture pays no attention at all to the universalist claims made in European tradition regarding the impact of literacy or writing. If writing was such a crucial “technological” development in the Indian context as Pollock claims, how do Indian scribal cultures differ from those of the West? Among the various works that deal with the impact of writing in Greek antiquity, cf. Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato, (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1963.) For a critique of Havelock see G.R. F. Ferrari. “Orality and Literacy in the Origin of Philosophy,” in Ancient Philosophy, No. 4. 1984, pp. 194-204.

[12] Interestingly, Sankara, in his bhasya-response to the Bhagavadgita differentiates between vidhi and anuvāda. Vidhi in this tradition of responsive reception brings forth something different and new; whereas “anuvāda” re- presents the already existent for a specific purpose. Commenting on the word “yuddhyasva” Sankara points out that his counsel to Arujuna to commence the war was only a reminder of his pre-given activity and not an incitement to do something new. Krishna was only clearing the obstacle (formed by ignorance) coming in the way. “Yuddhyasva iti anuvādamātram; na vidhih.” Srī BhagavadgītāŚānkarabhāśyam: Āndhrabhāśāvyākhyāyā Bālānandinyā samanchitam, translated with a commentary by Pullela Sreeramachandrudu, (Hyderabad:Arsha Vijnana Trust, 2001,) p. 64. Viewed in this light, what Sankara does in his bhāyaśyās is a vidhi (bringing forth something new) and not an anuvāda.

[13] Rajasekhara, Kāvyamīmāmsā, translated by Pullela Sreeramachandrudu, (Hyderabad: Sri Jayalakshmi Publications, 2003), p. 158.

[14] For a symptomatic celebratory account of the arrival of print which completely forgets or disavows the surviving acoustic cultures of memory in the provincial Indian context of Madras cf., A. R. Venkatachalapathy, The Province of the Book: Scholars, Scribes, and Scribblers in Colonial Tamilnadu, (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2012). The symptom of colonial-ideological frame can’t be missed in the very opening sentence of this book: “In the beginning was the word. And then came print, adding immensely to its fascination.” The book has little to offer in reflection on these crucial terms “the word” and the “the beginning” in the Indian cultural reflective context.

[15] Colin Mackenzie as an engineer, surveyor and above all collector of manuscripts of the East India Company meets two brothers (Borrayya and Lakshmaiha) in Andhra. These two brothers, as native informants, served Mackenzie in gathering, translating and interpreting the local scribal output in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. cf. Arudra for a celebratory account of the trio in his “Mackenzie and Kavali Brothers,” in Telugu Vaitalikulu (collection of essays) Vol. III, ed., Devulapalli Ramanuja Rao, (Hyderabad: AP Sahitya Akademi, 1979,), pp. 133-158.

[16] Manavalli Ramakrishna Kavi (1866-1957) is a renowned scholar, collector and curator of manuscripts in the first half of 20th century. He is known for his discovery of Abhinavagupta’s Abhinava Bharati which he edited. Cf. P.S.R Appa Rao’s introduction to his translation (into Telugu) of Bharata’s, Natya Sastra, (Secunderabad: Ajanta Printers, n.d.), pp. 10-11. Veturi Prabhakara Sastry (1888-1950) too is well known for his work on manuscript collections and studies in folklore. He worked with Manavalli Ramakrishna Kavi at Government Oriental Manuscript Library in Madras. Cf., Veturi Prabhakara Sastry by Pochiraju Seshagirirao, (Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1999).

[17] Biruduraju Ramaraju (1925-2010) is a pioneer in Telugu folklore studies. He has also extensively collected manuscripts of the Telugu (especially in Telangana) region. Cf., “Telangana Talamanikam: Biruduraju Ramaraju,” by Devulapalli Prabhakara Rao, Prajatantra, February-March, 2010, pp. 8-9.

[18] Here I have not included many Euro-American Indological archival projects. Among the most recent ones one can mention the grand project — Sanskrit Knowledge Systems on the Eve of Colonialism. This (now) Columbia University based project aimed at achieving: “four linked tasks: inventory the intellectual production in seven disciplines during this period; collect unpublished manuscripts and documents from archives in South Asia; create a bibliographical and prosopographical database derived from printed and manuscript sources; study selected Sanskrit works according to a uniform analytical matrix.” The project (spread from 2001-2004) was funded by NEH and NSF. Cf., as accessed on 23 May 2013. A more recent one is the US (Columbia)-Germany (Heidelberg) bilateral project of SARIT: (‘SARIT’, a Sanskrit word for "river") proposes to create a corpus of Sanskrit Search and Retrieval of Indic Texts texts focused on three areas: Buddhist philosophy, Vedic hermeneutics, and literary theory.” This project integrates its archival initiative with the ongoing projects of the Heidelberg and Columbia (Sanskrit Knowledge Systems). Cf., NEH site as accessed on June 6 2013.

[19] Vemana is a 17th century poet and Potana composed his Telugu rendering of the Bhagavata in 15th century.

[20] Max Muller cited in, “Neurobiology, Layered Texts and Correlative Cosmologies: A Cross Cultural Framework for Premodern History,” by Steve Farmer, John Henderson and Michael Witzel, in Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, No. 72, 2000, p. 6.

[21] When he was exposed to the traditional pandits, Brown’s reaction was that: “Were we to submit entirely to their guidance we should learn little that is profitable. They [native pandits] exhort us to learn by rote long vocabularies framed in meter; but I rejected these, preferring the European method of study.” C.P. Brown quoted in C.P. Brown, by Kothapalli Veerabhadra Rao (1963; Hyderabad: Andhra Pradesh Sahitya Akademi, 1988), p. 133, f.n. 2.

[22] Well-known Sanskrit Telugu poet, playwright, translator and critic (1853- 1929).

[23] Umakanta VIdyasekharulu was a Telugu-Sanskrit scholar and critic who collected folklore; Sripada Subrahmanyasastry is a celebrated short story writer. His autobiography, Anubhavalu Jnapakalunu, (1955) is a milestone in modern Telugu literary history. They both belong to early 20th century.

[24] In the Telangana context the contribution of Srivaishanava pandits to Telugu and Sanskrit vangmaya in the second millennium is a worthwhile undertaking. Cf. Seshadri Ramana Kavulu, “Purva kavi Parichayamu,” in Golaconda Kavula Sanchika, ed., Suravaram Pratapa Reddy, (1934; Hyderabad: Telangana Jagruti, 2009), pp. 389-393.

[25] Keshavapantula Narasimhasastry, Samsthanamula Sahitya Seva, (Princely Estates and their Literary Service), (Hyderabad: Andhra Pradesh Sahitya Akademi, 1975,) p. 29.

[26] Tumati Donappa, Andhra Samsthanamulu Sahitya Poshanamu (Princely Estates of Andhra and [their] Nurture of Literature), (Hyderabad: Andhra Viswakala Parishattu, 1969), pp. 17-18.

[27] These are all bustling towns in Telangana.

[28] On Srinatha’s disparagement of scribes, cf. Thirumala Ramachandra, Mana Lipi Puttu Purvottaralu, (Our Script –Its Genesis and Antecedents,) (1957; Hyderabad: Vishalandhra Publishing House, 1993), p. 253.

[29] Kautilya, Arthaśāstramu, translated into Telugu with commentary Pullela Sriramachandrudu, (Hyderabad: Sri Jayalakshmi Publications), 2.7.1 p. 132.

[30] Thirumala Ramachandra, Hampinunchi Harappadaaka, (from Hampi to Harappa), ed. A. Ramapatirao, (Hyderabad: Ajo-Vibho Prachurana, 1997), p. 296.

[31] Lest one should presume that the epistemic conflict of memory and archive as a problem of “Sanskrit Knowledge Systems”, one must recount an anecdote from a Savara (aboiriginal) mnemocultural experience. A Savara elder from Araku valley (in Vizag) when compelled to part with his ancestrally inherited palm-leaf medicinal manuscript (for an English man), simply made yet another copy on palm-leaves with a stylus and kept the inherited one with himself and gave the copy to the Englishman. But when asked whether he was not losing his inherited medicinal learning and knowledge, the 80-year old Savara laughed and said: what is there in that book, if he needs herbs he will have to come to these mountains and slopes and recognise these leaves and roots. The Savara, who was rapidly losing his eye-sight, identified his plants and roots with his touch and smell – and not by turning the palm-leaves. Cf., Jayadheer Tirumalrao, “Arakulo Chillodi Kondappa,” in Tovva Muchchatlu, (Hyderabd: Spruha Sahiti Samstha, 2013), pp. 44-48. Mnemocultural memories get articulated entirely through the medium of the (acoustic and gestural) body.

[32] Dakkalis compose the community (jāti) called the Madigas (of the Scheduled Castes) among the Telugus.

[33] B. Ramaraju, The Contribution of Andhra to Sanskrit Literature, (Hyderabad, 2002), p. vi.

[34] Ibid., pp. xiv-xv; and Golaconda Kavula Sanchika, op.cit., pp. XI-XXII. pp. 350- 351

[35] Thirumala Ramachandra, Hampinunchi Harappadaaka, op.cit., p. 294.

[36] Here one must place on record the work of Jayadheer Thirumala Rao on the material culture of Telugu scribal world. Cf. Telugu Raatapratulu, (Telugu Manuscripts), (Hyderabad: Chelimi Foundatino, 2012).

[37] Cf., For the current modes of cataloguing manuscripts on NMM site, (accessed on 25 January, 2012).

[38] Here, among many other works, one can mention the rather celebratory work of Anthony Grafton. Cf., Bring out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), and Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009). As is well known, the phrase “epistemological break” is associated with Althusser (though he draws it from Bachelard); and the phrase “dissociation of Sensibility” is T.S. Eliot’s account of European modernity.

[39] Cf. For an admirable work of critical insight, Alasdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition, (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009).

[40] B. Ramaraju, Telugu Janapada Geya Sahityamu, (Telugu Folksong Literature), (1958; Hyderabad: Janapada Vijnana Prachuranalu, 1990), pp. 791-807.

[41] B. Ramaraju and Nayani Krishna Kumari, Janapada Geyalu – Samghika Charitra, ed., B. Ramaraju and Nayani Krishnakumari, (Hyderabad: Andhra Pradesh Sahitya Akademi, 1974), pp. lx-lxi.

[43] Mundakopaniśad, translated into Telugu with commentary by Brahmasri Kompella Dakshinamurthy, (Hyderabad: Sri Sitarama Adi Sankara Trust, 2003), 1: 6, pp. 50-54.

[44] Kenopaniśad, translated with commentary into Telugu by Pullela Sreeramachandrudu, (Hyderabad: Surabharati, 1984), 2:3, pp. 107-8.

[45] Kathopaniśad, translated into Telugu with commentary by Kompella Dakshinamurthy, (Hyderabad: Sri Sitarama Adi Sankara Trust, 2001), 2:4:10, pp. 266-270.

[46] In the context of such a co-constitutive logic of the existent, casual declarations about inherent lacks in Indian thought seem absurd. Inquiring into Hegel’s proclamation that “man...[as such] has not been posited” in India, Halbfass contends that one cannot find any anthropological reflection or universalistic thought concerning man/human as such in Indian traditions. Man as a “master and owner of nature”, as an organising and calculative being remains absent in India, argues Halbfass: “No rigorous anthropocentrism or human self-elevation, even of a soteriological type, can develop...” in Indian thought. Cf., Wilhelm Halbfass, Tradition and Reflection: Explorations in Indian Thought, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), pp. 272-273. Indian thought lacks concern for the empirical, contends Agehananda Bharati: “None of the scholastics of the Hindu tradition was concerned with the empirical self in any manner resembling that of psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and even poets in the West.” Cf., Agehananda Bharati, “The Self in Hindu Thought and Action,” in Culture and Self: Asian and Western Perspectives, ed., Anthony j. Marsella, George DeVos and Fancis L.K. Hsu, (New York: Tavistock Publications, 1985,) p.189. More surprisingly, even J.N. Mohanty has this to say: “Just when philosophical interest in ‘man’ was about to emerge, we find Indian thought displacing it by another powerful concept, the ātman.” Cf., J.N. Mohanty, Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought: An Essay on the Nature of Indian Philosophical Thinking, (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1992,) p. 194. Consequently, India has developed a transcendental notion of the subject on the one hand and a “weak” concept of the person on the other (where the concept of person is related to the “mundane and empirical physical existent” (198). How come for two centuries (since Hegel at least) such a consensus about Indian thought persists? Should one look into Indian traditions more closely or should one inquire into the presuppositions or frameworks that govern these modern observers? Perhaps both these tasks must be undertaken. The Christian-spiritualist-humanist framework that underlies the modern critics’ pronouncements has begun to receive critical interrogation: The concept of spirit “plays a major organizing role in the transcendental teleology of reason as Eurocentric humanism.” Such an ethnocentrism has grounded the discourse of the human sciences in the modern world. “The history of modern metaphysics, which determines the essence of man as animal rationale, divides as follows: There are two symmetrical sides to understanding subjectivity: rationality of spirit on the one hand, animality as body on the other.” Cf., Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, tran. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989, p. 73. This sovereign power of human spirit, Derrida goes on to show elsewhere, is in the ultimate analysis derivative of a theocratic source, which brings together force and legitimacy (“ipsocracy” implicit even in democracy) cf., Derrida, Rogues, op.cit., pp. 11-18. From a very different trajectory, Balagangadhara’s critique of religion resonates deeply with this (Derrida’s) account. In his discussion on “moral domains”, Balagangadhara explicitly questions the primacy of the self/subject (“presence”) in the Western moral theory and exposes its human-centric approach: “That creatures other than human beings, under such a view [where the self is not a sedimented and pre-given core but a hollow, meaningless bundle of actions which only gain meaning contextually and through others], end up having ‘selves’ is not only not a problem, but also a recognised consequence.” Cf. “Comparative Anthropology and Moral Domains: An Essay on Selfless Morality and the Moral Self,” Cultural Dynamics, vol. 1, 1988, p. 103. The template of animal rationale, as I have been implicitly suggesting, is of no use in the thought of mnemocultures: para- shareera relationship cannot be subsumed under the humanistic logic of the violent hierarchy-rationality versus animality. Sanskrit traditions, it seems to me, repeatedly affirm the need to reflect on the complicity of the heterogeneous only in the spatio-temporal formations of the body complex. There can be no alternative to this rigorous practice of moving and living on in the double bind of existence.

47 Cf., Kathopaniśad, op.cit., pp. 266-268.

48 This is what Sankara in his poetic thinking composes as:
Nānopādhivasādeva jātivarņāśramādayaha
Ātmanyāropitāstoye rasavarņādi bhedavat.

(Water in its original purity has neither colour, taste nor odour. But as it draws in them we project such qualities on it. Similarly para’s sheltering in name, jati and the ashrama codes make us project them on to atma. Cf. Ātmabodha of Sankara, translated into Telugu by Jagannatha Swamy with a commentary, (Hyderabad: Ramakrishna Math, 2010,)), sl. 11, p. 9.

[49] The arena of such a realisation is none other than the body itself says Sankara:
Panchīkruta mahābhūta sambhavam karma sanchitam
Śarīram sukhadukhānām bhogāyatana muchyate.

(Based on the actions and the commingling of the five elements, the body gets formed. This body is said to be the space for experiencing pleasure and pain.). Sankara, ibid., sl. 12, p. 10.

[50] Various jatis from the Telugu regions.

[51] Śukranītisāramu, translated (into Telugu), by Kandlakunta Alaha Singaracharyulu, (Nalgonda: Sahiti Sanmana Samithi, 2002), 4:3:23, p. 236. Page references for subsequent quotations are given in the main text.

52 The lines preceding the quoted one are more explicit about infringement:

Chaturthā bheditā jyātir brahmaņā karmabhih purā
Tattat sāmkaryasāmkaryāt pratilomānulomataha (4:3: 11, p. 284).

(Consequent upon the actions rendered previously, jātis are divided in four ways by Brahma. Due to mutual infringement among these jātis and further contamination among these mixed jātis result from anuloma and viloma relations.)

This essay first appeared in India and the Unthinkable: Backwaters Collective on Metaphysics and Politics (Oxford University Press, 2016), edited by Vinay Lal, and is reprinted here by kind permission of the author and the editor.

D. Venkat Rao teaches at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. In addition to books in English and Telugu he has published several articles in national and international journals. His recent work is Critical Humanities from India: Contexts, Issues, Futures (Routledge, 2018), and his other publications include Cultures of Memory in South Asia (Springer, 2014), In Citations: Readings in Area Studies of Culture (1999), a translation of Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy into Telugu (2005). Earlier he translated into English a Telugu intellectual autobiography called The Last Brahmin (2007, 2012, 2017). He has a full-length work on literary-cultural criticism in Telugu entitled, Saamskritika Chaanakyaalu. His areas of interest include literary and cultural studies, image studies, epic traditions, visual cultures, comparative thought, translation, and mnemocultures. He has designed several courses interfacing areas of culture, technology and literary and cultural studies. He is the editor of the Routledge Series on Critical Humanities Across Cultures (forthcoming).

issue 22: winter 2020

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