Ex Cathedra Hubris: Academic Fundamentalism, Everyday Mediation, and How to Speak of Rama
Carry That Weight
This thin and flimsy-looking piece of tissue on either side of the passage in this picture has built civilizations. And at the heart of all these debates today even in the careless gaze of Twitter is really this tiny thing, and what it has been called upon to bear, generation to generation, life to life.
I begin with this image for two reasons. In the last few years of his life, my father’s voice developed a permanent, gargling tone, as if he had some cough or cold he could not get over. By contrast, in the video recording I found of him chanting the Yantrodhaaraka Hanuman stotram several years ago, his voice sounds like it used to, clear, confident, kind. That was the voice that compelled my journey last winter to that sacred temple in Hampi, an offering of sorts to all that it has done for me, and does still, as memory. I sat in the Yantrodhaaraka Hanuman temple by the Tungabhadra, and heard his voice chanting that stotram. I had to.
Now for the second reason. I have been on medical leave the past few months since my voice too began to falter. It was then that I saw the picture of a vocal cord, my vocal cord, with a cyst. I had to rest my voice. I could not teach. Suddenly, I realized, speech was not quite the infinite resource we take it to be. I rationed it out carefully, and after months of relative silence and medication, am finally somewhat better now. But I will not forget what it means to be, even if briefly, threatened with a biological equivalent of a mute button.
As we age, we notice weight-bearing parts of our body calling out our use, misuse, overuse; feet, ankles, knees, backbones… and we think so much of our duties in life too in weighted terms, at least in our languages. “Tommidi nelalu mosina talli,” in Telugu, the mother who carried us for nine months. The fathers who carry us till we learn to walk, and then some. And then, at long last, those who live on after we are gone, do us the favor of disposing what’s left of us in that euphemistically called “final journey” to fire and water.
It’s all about weight. And through all our lives, that unnoticed little muscle is bearing the weight of all that all that we carry inside us.
Rama
For several centuries now, maybe longer, across the lands and peoples of many different cultures and languages who make up what we might call South Asia, and Southeast Asia too, across a part of the world obfuscated by empty indicators like size and represented better still only by its humanity, its share of the living world and the world-voice, as it were, one name has been sung from those muscles deep inside the body, from a place beyond the corporeal even deep inside the body.
If you could let your attention flow away like a young river, a Kaveri or Ganga in mountain-heights still, you might be able to see it. Year after year, how they sit by the temples, they weave their garlands, work on the fields, walk on their pilgrimages, eyes closed, eyes open, all at once in one name’s utterance alone.
Why, we might ask, has that muscle strained to produce one name more than any other perhaps in our culture, our music, our daily life? Conversely, why do I think of this rarely talked about organ in this essay on Rama’s name?
If you think of what has mediated a name, one sound, down thousands of years of history, it is, ultimately, a matter of all the conviction that has gone into its utterance through the dance of that fine flesh-filament in the throat alone. It is in the voice of one who believes alone that all of culture ultimately rests. The “content” of that “belief” is secondary. It is rarely immutable. It is mental, secondary, and yes, ultimately a grown-up thing. What I am talking about is here is not even that far ahead. It begins, really, even before birth.
In Rama’s name is a history of mediation, our mediation, I have to assert, off the bat. For there are now other mediations in the air too, and these are about as welcome as that cyst that crippled my voice for nearly a year. It is not for me to speculate on their causes. But I can outline what I see to help us recognize where we are, as lifeforms, as living beings, and as social and cultural and political subjects, and see where we might be going, into what forms of strange distortions and crippling colonizations still lie ahead without course correction.
Let me briefly restate the unwelcome intrusions into our bodily practices and whole-life investments for a moment. Rama, said a person with academic authority, was called a “misogynistic pig” by Sita (“loose interpretation” caveat noted). Hanuman, said another person with academic authority, was a “cute, cuddly, dimwit Ram Bhakt” who has now been morphed by extremists into an “angry Hanuman.” These are just social media posts, but then then these are not the words of random “trolls” from supposed “IT cells” but public intellectuals and professional, credentialed scholars who have chosen to make these claims on their own names. I welcome their courage. I hope there will be honest reflection at least now.
I ask a simple question of them, and us: how do we know what we know when we speak of Rama, and Hanuman, and Shiva, and Shiva’s Trishul, and all the other names and sounds and sights that we have dedicated our whole bodies and lives too, in varying measures of effort, application, and sacrifice, to? There is no simple, single, overarching institution overseeing the hundreds of millions of lives and practices that we broadly call Hinduism. So much so that even the most celebrated (in academia that is) academic observers of Hinduism have proudly stated that there is very little in common among Hindus (Wendy Doniger in The Hindus: An Alternative History).
Yet, one billion lives, human beings, with presumably something like human rights as befit a modern free society and democracy with a constitution and law and something like innocent until proven guilty, are routinely, publicly and savagely branded now for the crimes of one among those billion which are very rarely connected causally, or even casually, with the names and symbols sacred to the rest of that billion.
The comparison has been made, and I needn’t belabor it. No one has convinced us that the double-standard in discourse today is untrue; how a thousand crimes of barbaric lethality done each year under the name, ideology and best past practice of certain religious formations is somehow not about religion, and how any crime committed by any one in India who is not Muslim or Christian is somehow, about Hindu-ism.
Hindus have “very little in common,” except looking like a target for an unchecked, growing, torrent of delusional madness and sickening spite. That is all.
Academia
I am an academician. I find it hard to think of a profession I pursue with reverence and love as a site, or even an enabler, of such hate. I have to think it is a mistake, for my colleagues who have worked as hard as me or even more, cannot be enablers of evil. Not intentionally at least. I hope. I point out things with reason, evidence, and I hope. That is all I can do. And all I can do now, after this new round of recklessly loose interpretive liberty all around us, is point out where these different systems of mediation begin and, I hope, end. There has been much important writing done and placed at the doorstep of academia for those of us inside it to respond already; issues of authority and expertise, insider and outsider voices, and the question ultimately that both critical scholars in academia and concerned public intellectuals outside it are asking, that of privilege.
I will return to the question of privilege and power shortly, for it is indeed the core of all this madness, and has to be laid bare. Before we do that, let us map out where, in our own lives, Rama’s name has come from. I should share at the outset that I do not begin with textual traditions, or conventional historiographies here for a simple, professional reason and I state my limitations. I am not a scholar of such texts or traditions.
I am at best a student of everyday life, a media and cultural studies professor who has learned to look attentively at daily life and meanings as a site for us to observe bigger existential and political questions. And I believe that the fight between different systems of textual tradition and authority will also be better resolved if we were turn to the space in which Hinduism has lived, fought, survived, and lives still, far beyond the coffers of religious conquests and imperial plunders, which seems to be the more prevalent models these days.
It is important to map this everyday dimension out, because increasingly, with time and generational change, we will have, as we do now already to some extent, young Hindus who have no idea at all about what is going on around them beyond their presumptions, let alone “about” something called “Hinduism” and its texts and traditions and contemporary debates. I have seen this fairly consistently now. Students in India questioning my criticism of The Economist’s depiction of the Amarnath Shiva Lingam as a “penis-shaped lump of ice,” for example. “But that’s what it is!” They shouted back at me that day. I had to ask them how they knew that. They named a popular writer who expresses devotion nicely and creatively. To his credit, I doubt he ever used such a crude expression. But that’s the impression people, smart students at that, have been left with.
I then asked them if their grandmothers might be thinking the same way (that’s the way we learn in liberal arts, we ask questions). Do our grandparents and parents think “I am washing Shiva’s pxxxx with milk,” as they perform their Monday abhishekhams? I thought some students got my point, that “expert” interpretation needn’t be always right, even if it’s a paper like The Economist they’ve been told by aspirational elders is very important. But I also thought some students now felt their grandparents were actually uninformed and needed to be enlightened.
I share this microscopic classroom picture because it is important to understand generational transmission carefully in matters of culture. Today, it is not simply the traditional and domestic sources of experience that shape the next generation’s understanding of Hindu thought and culture, but increasingly, the media and academia’s dominant discourses about Hinduism too. In itself, neither media nor academia talking about Hinduism should be a cause for concern. After all, recent Hinduism has been sustained by popular culture and is also independent of top-down meaning-regulations by central Hindu authorities. My concern though is that there is a systemic failure in both these institutions to conduct their work professionally when it comes to speaking about Hindus and Hinduism. Neither peer-review (nor it seems, the rare case of peer dissent in the case of the “misogynistic pig” comment), nor critical self-reflexivity seem to have any bearing on academic opinion. What is operating is academic fundamentalism, an assertion of the supremacy of one’s extremely loose interpretation over all else.
Sources of Hindu Mediation
What is this “all else”? For one thing, it is not what the predictable propaganda backlash to challenges of logic and reason to academic fundamentalism claim. Pointing out that nothing even remotely close to the literal or implied sense of “misogynistic pig” appears in any known version of the Ramayana is a statement of fact, not a Hindutva extremist fantasy as the propaganda inevitably claims. Several versions of the original Sanskrit text of Sita’s admonition to Rama have been shared in the social media these last few days confirming this absence.
However, what I would like to do now is to step back from comparing translations and attempt to lay down a broader conceptual map of the everyday terrain on which the meanings of Rama, Sita, and all our deities/ literary heritage characters/ mythological figures (pick what you like best) live, and live on, generation after generation. Academia, as we can see, is included in this list, but shows up far below. The rest, I believe, are far more accurately representative of all the different sources of mediation that are relevant to a debate about Rama, even to an academic debate; for what is academia if it cannot observe the real world fully and honestly?
Imagine, if you will, the different ways in which one encounters the name “Rama” in the course of one lifetime:
1)Mother’s Voice (Prenatal): Whether this constitutes “learning” in a scientifically agreed upon sense or not is secondary. The fact is that many Hindu women follow traditions and practices that make the name of Rama (or Krishna, or Sita, or whoever), a part of a living being’s physical reality even before birth.
2) Parents’ Voices (Postnatal): unlike most alien “scholars” of Hinduism for whom Rama probably appeared as lines of ink in a book at some late careerist moment of their lives (I don’t mean disrespect here, just a fact), we hear the word “Rama” first in the medium of our parents’ voices. Even before we hear stories and understand them “about” Rama, we are already immersed in a certain kind of experience conveyed in our parents’ voices about him, and other deities. And that experience as we know isn’t always strictly or sternly religious, but just, fun:
3) Love, Beauty, Truth: I turn to an abstract set of qualities here because the name of Rama and all our gods and goddesses is tied up inextricably with these qualities. We do not form dry images of “characters” labeled as either fiction or history and then later in life draw conclusions on what they mean. One billion of us, and all who came before, our parents, our grandparents, our ancestors; how many of them knew the feeling of love first, of beauty, happiness, of the perfection of things, in and around the name of Rama from their parents when they were children? Abstract as these may be, they are the important qualities any student of culture should recognize before jumping into “interpreting” Rama.
4) Temples and Puja: Contrary to the popular misperception among certain poorly informed skeptics who insist that Rama and Krishna were works of fiction (and if you disagree you are a Hindutva fundamentalist who insists on their literal historicity), we know that this is not how they are perceived. Most children in Hindu households have seen that Rama, Hanuman and other deities are given profound attention in the space of one’s home and in public spaces like temples too. And even if Ganesha pandals playfully touch upon contemporary pop culture, there is no confusion about sanctity. There may be Hanuman cartoons and Harry Potter novels. But there are no temples, deekshas, and most of all, fervent appeals made to Harry Potter before writing exams, starting journeys, or dealing with medical emergencies. (Unfortunately, there is a whole intellectual club or clique that in its supposed determination to fight “Hindutva” beliefs in Rama and Krishna’s historicity, insists with great and intolerant normativity that the only way to be rational and secular is to treat them as “fiction”)
5) Elders: it is rarely that only one generation is passing on its experience and understanding of Rama’s name to children; the significance of two different cohorts, two whole chunks of time and history speaking, should not be ignored at all. Yet, the scholars know or speak so little of all this, presuming authority to their names alone…
6) Mother Tongue: as we move from the intimacy of families to wider considerations of culture, we have to recognize that the unique nature of each Mother Tongue (just a reverence-capitalization here) is an important shaper of how each of us thinks of Rama in the course of our lives. As a Telugu-speaker, for example, Bhadrachalam is closer to me in my cultural repertoire than even Ayodhya, and Tyagayya more than Tulasidas. That doesn’t mean they are less important, relevant, or sacred, to me. Mother tongue diversity is perhaps the cultural locus of Hinduism’s integrity and diversity which baffles simpler minds with simpler moral motives perhaps. We can see how we are different, and yet, not draw swords and blood about it. Imagine for a moment how vastly the organic, indigenous experience of Hinduism through linguistic diversity is from the rigidly Eurocentric and European forms several translations that occupy academic high ground are confined to.
7) Visual Arts: If you have not seen a smiling, child-like, child Rama in Chandamana when you are a child, and your eyes’ first ever encounter with Rama is as a college student in some academic polemic criticizing muscular Rama or militant Hanuman, how can you ever know Rama as the people who have sustained him (or representations of him, same thing) know him? I am not saying there is one “true” depiction of Rama. I am quite aware of the “invention of tradition” and the selective, political role of mass printing and photography and the like. But if you have grown up in a home where reverence for the world outside your own self and body is taught through practices like not kicking a book because it is Goddess Saraswati or treating all images of goddesses and gods with some care, what matters is not whether you fell for an “invented belief,” but the fact that you put an enormous investment into your ethical-aesthetic education, very early.
8) Comics, TV, Movies, Music and Popular Culture: It may sound harsh but I have to say that if you have not grown up reading Amar Chitra Katha in the last forty years and you presume to be an expert on Hinduism, then you need to check your assumptions (and privilege, if you haven’t been told this yet). That deficit in cultural education seems to be quite widespread among academicians and activists though. The Atlantic Monthly published an article a few months ago by a South Asian American graduate student accusing the ACK series of ignoring Muslim kings, women, and other cultural crimes (see my refutation, based on a count of actual titles about Muslims, women and others, in HuffPost, here). Given the formidable narrative push towards liberal modernity and diversity that ACK made for my generation (the original ACK cohort, growing up in the 1970s and 1980s waiting for each new title to come out every fortnight), and how it seems to be seen as quite the opposite because of its nationalistic and sometimes complexion-coded depictions now, it seems that the context and generational experience of popular culture is something that scholars would need to understand as well. After all, scholars cannot assume that their concerns about Ramayana and Mahabharata on Doordarshan in the 1980s leading to Hindu nationalism (as many studies argued) also led to othering against Muslims when depicted by Phalke or the Surabhi theaters nearly a century ago! That is as absurd and far-fetched as assuming that there is some instrinsic textual property in Sanskrutam that manifested simultaneous across a two thousand year and two-continental gap as Aryan enslavement of native Dalit-Dravidians in India, and Hitler’s genocide against Jews and others in Nazi Germany (a slightly loosely interpreted summary of Sheldon Pollock’s essay Deep Orientalism). Academia is so far behind on recognizing the meanings of the sacred in the new media and digital cultures, quite frankly, we (engaged Hindus), have to start doing this consciously as well.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the above forms of mediation encompass the ways in which most Hindus “become” Hindus, from birth till the birth of their children and grandchildren! It includes personal and intimate sources of influence like the nature of each parent’s voice, quirks, and personal examples, as well as broader socially shared experiences such as festivals, temples, and modern pop culture Hinduism. This is the ground of the everyday that is absent in the life-worlds of many non-Hindu academic experts on Hinduism, and seemingly invisible to a manifestly disconnected, self-absorbed, marginally delusional group of nominally Hindu (as in they have Hindu names) commentators on Hindu matters in India too.
I preface my blunt words here with an acknowledgment that they are straying into such commentary with the intent of condemning misogyny and violence (which we all share), but are doing so with great ineptitude, if not outright misanthropy of their own. To some extent, they are products of their miseducation about Hinduism. If you are in liberal arts today, chances are that most of the above is simply not addressed, and if you have not made the effort as a scholar and human being to observe a living cultural reality all around you, you will be stuck in your flawed academic blindfold of a supposedly objective academic scrutiny of Hinduism. There is, therefore, the last (in my conceptual framework here that is) form of mediation for us to think about here, and that is:
9) Textual Hinduism. Most Hindus are not perhaps primarily Hindus through textual studies. Except for scholar-monks in various formal Hindu traditions and mathas, I am not sure if lay Hindus are even aware of the systematic intellectual traditions, frameworks, and curricula that exist in our country for the teaching and study of our texts (I did not know quite frankly until just a few years ago, or at least I never quite stopped to think that in addition to the front-office operations of archakas chanting mantras and securing the deity’s blessings for us, there was a whole world, a thousands-of-years-old world, also operating in the mathas and peethas keeping an intellectual backbone, or several such backbones, of our civilization intact). Now there’s another “textual Hinduism” too, and this one is one that the supposed academic experts on Hinduism are steeped in (or some might say, confined to). This is a late-life-entry, limited exposure, and sometimes questionable intent sort of textual engagement in the first place, studying Hinduism or India broadly, as a career choice, with little introspection, noble stated goals such as saving Indian Muslims from Hindu oppression notwithstanding, of why they are going around messing about with fragments of knowledge and assuming expertise (“Jealous-God-splaining”?) over others (colonial others, racial others, subjugated others). It is, simply, a privilege problem, a crisis even. A crisis it is, because Western-trained scholars, despite their self-perception as a small and quietly studious part of the academy, have come to be seen as defenders of a very nasty status quo by Hindus realizing the nature of colonialism’s lingering power slowly and painfully. Their books are sold and celebrated in Indian stores and literary festivals, their ideas drilled into students’ minds in elite universities without an indigenous critical counterpoint, and even their most extreme and brazen displays of lack of professional standards (forget knowledge, just standards) excused, and PR-jobbed as intellectual integrity and courage in the face of Hindutva internet trollery. It’s a broken tradition, and it’s obvious to all seven billion people on the planet but the few stuck in their classes or those of their friends pushing them, that’s all.
Ha, Charade You Are!
Sita does not say “misogynistic pig,” not even close. No version was offered to back this up, and learned writers who asked, even politely, got summarily blocked on Twitter. Credentials were offered, that is all. Ex Cathedra Hubris, or some such notion perhaps, it is indeed Greek and Latin to me. This academy. This failed promise that misled so many who were once just like me and you, just well-meaning young students pained by injustice and falsehood in this world. This failed promise that is now operating like a propaganda arm for a global war-machine without decency. That is the tragic role to which academia has been reduced to.
It should be quite clear that the academic conversation on Hinduism, Hindus, the minority Hindu diasporic communities outside India, and India itself most of all, has violently excluded a vast terrain of experiences, insights, and knowledge about the self and the world by hiding under the fig-leaf (wait, did the Emperor have one, or was that a hoax too?) of academic protocols and such. I should address here a question that was posed on Twitter to my friend Hindol Sengupta, who was among the first people to call out the cruel absurdity of putting 21st century racist-fundamentalist hate into the a timeless, powerful and much-revered woman of color’s mouth: is it “orientalism”?
A short response to that would be yes. Said’s key insight, as I understand it, is about the asymmetry of power, that the colonized cannot do to the colonizer what is being done to them; not even talk about them with the same force and effect as it were. The question of course is whether this is true seventy odd years after colonialism “officially” ended too. Colonization may no longer be simply a matter of one country or race asserting its supremacy over others, but operates in other ways now; through the violent denial of the right of a people to their own meanings, lives, and livelihoods too, in the material end. It denies the Hindu child the love of its mother. It denies the Hindu artist the integrity of his own work. It denies the Hindu peasant the joy of his own festivals. It denies everything for the sake of it’s own profit; love, most of all.
The debate in American academia has shifted to the idea of “viewpoint diversity” and that is very relevant here. I do not doubt that race, class and gender (the classic critical concerns) are important, and need not be erased in order to make way for a color-blind or gender-blind new discourse. In fact, these concerns need to be expanded, and the role of religion (the historically powerful intolerantly monotheistic sorts), also added to these concerns. Unfortunately, we have a peculiar situation today where a hollowed-out shell has assumed the place of genuine representation. Academia and media, even the self-styled democratic new digital media, have become weirdly “post-racist,” including many bodies of non-white appearance in positions of privilege and voice liberally — as long as they sustain the same epistemic violence and brutality spawned by colonialism in the first place (the book Re-Orientalism is an excellent study related to this phenomenon).
Naming the architecture of this formation is important, and even if Said mysteriously failed his own mandate in my view by shortchanging the Indian experience of colonization in his tacit endorsement (or so it seems to me) the views of the “deep orientalists,” his attention to the ways in which colonial discourse sustains itself through the “restorative citation of antecedent authority” is a useful template to follow. There is a choice ahead now for young scholars whether they wish to merely regurgitate the old and narrow path of anointed scholarship, or strive to include in their writing the much larger spectrum of experience that constitutes Hinduism in the real world (and hopefully, my conceptual map above will be of use).
The academic discourse on India has shown itself at its worst these last few days. There is neither professional honor, nor humanity left it seems, but only privilege, and a ruthless defense of it. An admission of one’s limitations, or errors, or even just haste in tweeting (which is a widespread problem as we know), would redeem so much today. Yet, we have only the lie that marches on, secure that between the indulgence of credentialing committees, publishing gatekeepers, and the handy complicity of the clueless brown subject or two by its side, anything can be said at all, just about anything, and passed off as authoritative.
Vyasa Tirtha, or Compassion for the Common Man
But I do not lose hope; in academia, in us as a people smart enough, and god-done it, academically present enough, to effect a course-correction, and most of all in Rama’s name –and all, from the tiniest toddler’s tongue to the largest temples and festivals that have sustained it.
My vocal cord is healing. I use it sparingly still, but use it for what I think is best, to chant the words of Yantrodhaaraka Hanuman Stotram mostly. It is brief, poetic, and associated with a memory of my father, and a holy place of profound beauty, the waters between Hampi and Anegundi.
And when I chant this, I pay attention most of all to the three phrases of practical import in there written by Vyasa Tirtha, an Emperor’s counsel, a university chancellor, a scholar and “practitioner” supreme; three mundane lines that pop out from a bed of cosmology and beauty as if to say, this is what all this, this worship is about:
May the lonely be blessed with family, may the poor be blessed with wealth, may the ignorant be blessed with learning.
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