Ramanujan, A. K.; Vinay Dharwadker (ed.); Stuart H. Blackburn (ed.);
The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan
Oxford University Press 1999/2004, 656 pages
ISBN 0195668960
topics: | essays | india | poetry | lit | myth | culture | social | religion
Browsing through this book, I came across the arresting essay "Is there an Indian way of Thinking?". It presented a cogent and very perceptive and erudite argument that the western concept of equality before law may not be acceptable in Indian thought. Men are fundamentally different, and their circumstances must be treated differently. This puts the entire ethic of democracy and so many other institutions at risk. But we already are unequal in so many ways - we try to help others who have obvious, physical, iniquities. And even under law, you can establish mental sickness and you will be treated differently; only Manu says that states of excessive emotion - anger, fear etc - may also deserve special treatment. Perhaps what is being said here, while startling, may not be far from what is practised anyway.
General Editor's Preface VINAY DHARWADKER vii Introduction: Two Tributes fo A.K. Ramanujan MILTON B. SINGER xii EDWARD D. DIMOCK JR., AND KRISHNA RAMANUJAN xiv --I. General Essays on Literature and Culture-- vi Introduction by WENDY DONIGER 111 1 Where mirrors are windows: Towards an anthology of reflections 2 Is there an indian way of thinking? An informal essay 3 Towards an anthology of city images 4 Food for thought: Towards an anthology of Hindu food-images 5 Language and social change: the Tamil example 6 Some thoughts on 'non-western' classics: with Indian examples
Introduction by VINAY DHARWADKER 7 Three hundred ramayAnas: five examples and three thoughts on translation 8 Repetition in the mahAbhArata 9 Classics lost and found 10 Form in classical tamil poetry 11 On translating a Tamil poem 12 From classicism to bhakti (with Norman Cutler)
Introduction by by JOHN B. CARMAN 13 On women saints 14 Men, women, and saints 15 The myths of bhakti: images of Shiva in shaiva poetry 16 Why an allama poem is not a riddle: an anthological essay 17 Varieties of bhakti 18 On Bharati and his prose poems
Introduction by STUART BLACKBURN and ALAN DUNDES 19 The clay mother-in-law: a South Indian folktale 20 Some folktales from India 21 Hanchi: a Kannada Cinderella 22 The Indian Oedipus 23 The prince who married his own left half 24 A flowering tree: a woman's tale 25 Towards a counter-system: women's tales 26 Telling tales 27 Tell it to the walls: on folktales in indian culture 28 Two realms of Kannada folklore 29 On folk mythologies and folk purANas 30 Who needs folklore?
One way of defining diversity for India is to say what the Irishman is said
to have said about trousers. When asked whether trousers were singular
or plural, he said, 'Singular at the top and plural at the bottonl.' This is
the view espoused by people who believe that Indian traditions are
organised as a pan-Indian Sanskritic Great Tradition (in the singular) and
many local Little Traditions (in the plural). ...
The official Indian literary academy, the Sahitya Akademi, has the motto,
'Indian literature is one but written in many languages.' I, for one,
would prefer the plural, 'Indian literatures', and would wonder if
something would remain the same if it is written in several languages,
knowing as1 do that even in the same language, 'a change of style is a
change of subject,' as Wallace Stevens would say.
I would like to suggest ... that cultural traditions in India are
indissolubly plural and often conflicting but are organised through at
least two principles, (a) context-sensitivity and (b) reflexivity of various
sorts, both of which constantly generate new forms out of the old ones.
What we call brahmanism, bhakti traditions, Buddhism, Jainism, tantra,
tribal traditions and folklore, and lastly, modernity itself, are the most
prominent of these systems. They are responses to previous and surrounding
traditions, they invert, subvert, and convert their neighbours.
Reflexivity takes many forms: awareness of self and other, mirroring,
distorted mirroring, parody, family resemblances and rebels, dialectic,
antistructure, utopias and dystopias, the many,ironies connected with
these responses, and so on. In this paper on Indian literary texts and
their relations to each other ('intertextuality', if you will), I will
concentrate on three related kinds of reflexivity. I shall call them (1)
responsive, where text A responds to text B in ways that define both A and
B; [co-texts] (2) reflexive, where text A reflects on text B, relates
itself to it directly or inversely; [counter-texts] (3) self-reflexive,
where a text reflects on itself or its kind. [meta-texts]
TO [native commentators and readers] texts do not come in historical
stages but form 'a simultaneous order' [T.S. Eliot, Tradition and
Individual Talent], especially until the nineteenth century.' Modernity
disrupted the whole tradition of reflexivity with new notions of
originality and the autonomy of single works. ...
the printing press radically altered the relation of audience to
author and of author to work, and it bifurcated the present and the past so
that the pastness of the past is more keenly felt than the presence of the
past.
Where cultures are stratified yet interconnected, the texts of one stratum
tend to reflect on those of another: encompassment, mimicry, criticism
and conflict, and other power relations are expressed by such reflexivities.
Self-conscious contrasts and reversals also mark off and individuate the
groups - especially if they are closely related, like twins. Closely related
sects, like the terikalai (southern) and vatakalai (northern) sects of Tamil
Sri Vaishnavism, serve even food in different orders, and self-consciously
list 'eighteen differences' (Govindacarya 1910).
The rather grossly conceived Great Tradition and Little Traditions are
only two such moieties: as suggested earlier, bhakti, tantra, and other
countertraditions, as well as Buddhism, Jainism, and, for later times,
Islam and Christianity, should be included in this web of intertextuality.
I shall draw here only on earlier Indian literatures for my instances.
Stereotypes, foreign views, and native self-images on the part of some
groups all tend to regard one part (say, the brahmanical texts or folklore)
as the original, and the rest as variations, derivatives, aberrations, so we
tend to get monolithic conceptions. But the civilisation, if it can be
described at all, has to be described in terms of all these dynamic interrelations
between different traditions, their texts, ideologies, social
arrangements, and so forth. Reflexivities are crucial to the understanding
of both the order and diversity, the openness and the closures, of this
civilisation. One may sometimes feel that 'mirror on mirror mirrored is
all the show'.'~uch an anthology can be made about other aspects of the
culture, like ritual, philosophy, food and sociolinguistic patterns, or
across them (see chap. 4, 'Food for Thought', below). Let me begin with
small-scale examples and move to larger ones.
[The concept of universalization] - putting oneself in another's place - it
is the golden rule for the new testament, Hobbes' "law of all men" - "do not
do unto others what you do not want done unto you." The main tradition of
Judeo-Christian ethics is based on such a premise of universalization - Manu
would not understand such a premise. To be moral, for Manu, is to
particularize - to ask who did what, to whom and when. - p.426
[LATER, quotes Blake]
"one law for the lion and the ox is oppression." -435,
[also]
Gandhi quoted Emerson, that consistency was the hobgoblin of foolish
minds. [436] The highly contextualized Hindu systems are generalized into 'a
Hindu view of life' by apologues like Radhakrishnan for the benefit of both
Western and modern Indian readers. [436]
[Even truth may be relative - leading to western, and 'modern' Indian
assessments of hypocrisy among Indians - e.g. Kissinger ]
An untruth spoken by people under the influence of anger,
excessive joy, fear, pain, or grief, by infants, by very old men,
by persons labouring under a delusion, being under the influence
of drink, or by mad men, does not cause the speaker to fall, or as
we should say, is a venial not a mortal sin. [Gautama, paraphrased
by M\"uller 1883] - p.426
[Manu:] A king who knows the sacred law, must imagine into the laws
of caste (jAti), of districts, of guilds, and of families, and [thus]
settle the peculiar law of each' - p.407
baudhAyana enumerates aberrant practices peculiar to the Brahmins of
north and those of the south. [Reminiscent of Borges?]
There is a difference between the [Brahmins of the] South and the
North on five points. We shall describe the practices of the
South: to eat with a person not having received Brahmanical
initiation: to eat with one's wife; to eat food prepared the
previous day; to marry the daughter of the maternal uncle or
paternal aunt. And for the North: to sell wool; to drink spirits'
to traffic in animals with two rows of teeth' to take up the
profession of arms; to make sea voyages. - p.427
The most important and accessible model of a context-sensitive system
with intersecting taxonomies is, of course, the grammar of a language.
And grammar is the central model for thinking in many Hindu texts. As
Frits Staal has said, what Euclid is to European thought, the
grammarian pAnini is to the Indian. Even the kAmAsutra is literally a
grammar of love -- which declines and conjugates men and women as one
would nouns and verbs in different genders, voices, modds and aspects.
Genders are genres. Different body-types and charcter-types obey
different rules, respond to different scents and beckonings.
In such a world, systems of meaning are elicited by contexts, by the
nature (and substance) of the listener. In the br^hadAraNyaka
upanIshad, adhyaya 5, brahmana 2, Lord prajApati speaks in thunder
three times: "DA DA DA": When the gods, given to pleasure, hear it,
they hear it as the first syllable of damayata, "control". The
antigods, given as they are to cruelty, hear it as dayAdhavam, "be
compassionate". When the humans, given to greed, hear it they hear it
as dattA, "give to others". (Hume, 1931) - p. 434
Even space and time, the universal contexts, the Kantian imperatives,
are in India not uniform and neutral . . . Certain yugas breed certain
kinds of maladies, politics, religions (e.g. kaliyuga). A story is
told about two men coming to YudhiShThira with a case. One had bought
the other's land, and soon after found a crock of gold in it. He
wanted to return it to the original owner of the land, who was arguing
that it really belonged to the man, who had now bought it. They had
come to YudhiShThira to settle their virtuous dispute. Just then
YudhiShThira was called away (to put it politely) for a while. When
he came back the two gentlemen were quarrelling furiously, but each
was claiming the treasure for himself this time! YudhiShThira
realized at once that the age had changed, and kaliyuga had begun.
- p. 432
[In Indian writings] the Levi-Straussian opposition of nature-culture
makes [little] sense; we see that the opposition itself is
culture-bound. There is another alternative to a culture vs nature
view: in the Tamil poems, culture is enclosed in nature, nature is
reworked in culture, so that we cannot tell the difference. We have a
nature-culture continuum that cancels the terms, confuses them even if
we begin with them.
Such container-contained relations are seen in many kinds of concepts
and images: not only in culture-nature, but also god-world,
king-kingdom, devotee-god, mother-child. Here is a bhakti poem which
plays with many such concentric containments:
My dark one
stands there as if nothing's changed
after taking entire
into his maw
all three worlds
the gods
and the good kings
who hold their lands
as a mother would
a child in her womb --
and I, by his leave,
have taken him entire
and I have him in my belly
for keeps.
Tiruvaymoli 8.7.9 [430-431]
[name in Nammalvar: My Lord, My Cannibal]
Indians are materialists, believers in substance: there is a
continuity, a constant flow (the etymology of saMsAra!) of substance
from context to object, from non-self to self . . . [432]
[FEELING] In the realm of feeling, bhAvas are private, contingent,
context-roused sentiments, vibhAvas are determinant causes, anubhAvas
are consequent expressions. But rasa is generalized, it is an
essence.
[MEANING = sphoTa] In the field of meaning, the temporal sequence of
letters and phonemes, the syntactic chain of words, yields finally a
sphoTa, an explosion, a meaning which is beyond the sequence and
time. [435]
One might see 'modernization' in India as a movement from the
context-sensitive to the context-free in all realms: an erosion of
contexts, at least in principle.
The new preferred names give no clue to birth-place, father's name,
caste, sub-caste and sect, as all the traditional names did: I once
found in a Kerala college roster, three "Joseph Stalin"s and one "Karl
Marx." [436]
Poet, translator, and folklorist, A.K. Ramanujan has been recognized as the world's most profound scholar of South Asian language and culture. This book brings together for the first time, thirty essays on literature and culture written by Ramanujan over a period of four decades. It is the product of the collaborative effort of a number of his colleagues and friends. Each section is prefaced by a brief critical introduction and the volume includes notes on each essay as well as a chronology of Ramanujan's books and essays. ---blurb Poet, translator, and folklorist, A.K. Ramanujan has been recognized as the world's most profound scholar of South Asian language and culture. This book brings together for the first time, thirty essays on literature and culture written by Ramanujan over a period of four decades. It is the product of the collaborative effort of a number of his colleagues and friends. Each section is prefaced by a brief critical introduction and the volume includes notes on each essay as well as a chronology of Ramanujan's books and essays.