Source: Economic and Political Weekly (Bombay, India), July 7, 2001



Breaking the Spell of Dharma:





Case for Indian Enlightenment





by Meera Nanda

I What Is Enlightenment?



A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. I came across one such picture recently that speaks far more eloquently about the roots of the crisis of Indiaís secularism than many a learned tome. I urge you, dear reader, to take a long hard look at this picture ó and weep.



It is a black and white wire photo, first printed in The Times of India on September 14, 1987 and reprinted in Lise McKeanís recent book, The Divine Enterprise: Gurus and the Hindu Nationalist Movement. The picture shows a crude wooden platform, about five feet high, with an emaciated, half-naked and unkempt old man dangling one leg over the wall of the platform. Underneath stands a middle-aged man clad in all white, with his bowed head touching the foot of that leg dangling from the platform. The owner of the leg is a ìholy manî by the name of Sant Devraha Baba of Vrindavan. The bowed head belongs to none other than Balram Jakhar, former speaker of the Lok Sabha. The representative-in-chief of the house-of-the-people of this, the secular-democratic Republic of India, touching the feet of an alleged god-man with his forehead, seeking his blessings.



This picture troubles me. I wince every time I see it. Why? Havenít I seen it all before? Arenít utterly humiliating, hierarchical and non-reciprocal gestures of self-effacement before power ó sacred and profane, in private and in public institutions alike ó a routine part of social life in India? But the very fact that such sights are so commonplace, and that we have continued to accept them as facts of life, is exactly what troubles me. Indeed, the banality, the utter taken-for-grantedness of our elected representatives, in their official capacities, bowing, prostrating and in other ways displaying their helplessness and inferiority before religious authorities ought to trouble all secularists.



I read these displays of public religiosity as signs of a democracy under the spell of dharma ó a democracy without democrats, a secularism without secularists. Unfortunately, whatever little discomfort we felt at such sights is fast disappearing: we do not even play at being secularists any more. Instead, elected representatives bowing before sadhu-sants is being touted as the Hindu ideal of ëdharma rajyaí, where ìthe Rishis, through the authority of dharma, have the right to remove a king who defaults on his dutyî, where ìdharma is higher than both the legislature and the judiciaryî [Upadhyay 1965]. Reality has caught up with our schizophrenic national culture: we no longer profess to be secular in public and intensely religious in our private affairs; we now indulge in conspicuous religiosity in both public and private spheres. What is more, we claim that it is a good thing too!1



Move now, for a moment, from late 20th century India to 18th century Europe. In 1763, Genevaís ecclesiastical assembly ordered one Robert Covelle to genuflectand listen to a reprimand for having fathered an illegitimate child. Covelle refused to kneel and turned to Voltaire, the leading light of the French Enlightenment, for help. Voltaire was outraged at the idea of religious authorities daring to make a citizen kneel: ìAn ecclesiastical assembly that presumed to make a citizen kneel would be playing the part of a pedant correcting children, or of a tyrant punishing slavesî, Voltaire wrote in a pamphlet against genuflection. The rest of the philosophes rallied behind Voltaire, and after six years of agitation, succeeded in having genuflection abolished in Geneva [Gay 1959: 63].



It is of numerous such refusals to kneel before authority that a public sphere worthy of a secular, liberal democracy is created. Because the ëecclesiastical authorityí is dispersed, localised and self-enforced in our society, it calls for many more ó not fewer ó refusals. Where are the million mutinies that we need, every day, at every level to create a society where no one can dare demand, or expect, citizens, or citizensí representatives, to kneel? Where is the outrage against the everyday tyrannies, fears and inhibitions perpetrated in the name of dharma that make our social institutions unfit for a free, equal and democratic people? Where are our Voltaires? Or is the impulse that propelled Voltaire and the rest of the members of the ëParty of Humanityí to take up the cause of critical reason in the service of an open society, a ëwesterní impulse, inapplicable to India, where religion is a ëtotal way of lifeí, a matter of ëinnocentí faith that cannot be questioned without losing the essence of being Indians?



A society where citizens do not kneel before the authority of the church and the state2 did not emerge in the west without a protracted struggle against the cosmopolis sanctified by the church and traditions. The secularist doctrines of separation of church and state and the liberal idea of ërights of maní did not suddenly appear in 17th and 18th century Europe, fully formed, either as an unintended ìgift of Christianityî, or as an expression of ëcultural genesí coding some special western propensity for freedom and individual conscience, as the culturalist from both the west and non-west alike like to claim. Nor was it an automatic unfolding of universal law of progress, as vulgar materialists would have it. Instead, secularism in the west was an eminently political achievement. The liberal idea of rights-bearing individuals, including the right of conscience, had to be fought for against the medieval cosmology of Christianity, against all those institutions that embodied that cosmology, and against the classes whose privileges this world view legitimated. In a sense, human rights, secularism and liberalism are ìpost-traditionalî for they are objects of active effort and cannot be simply derived from any religious doctrine or metaphysics.



Yet, while cultural essentialism is false, culture does matter. Religious and cultural traditions ó and the metaphysics they are rooted in ó are not irrelevant to the content, breadth and depth of acceptance of post-traditional norms. Where cultural traditions and religion do make a difference is how they either aid or impede the struggle for human liberty, equality and fraternity. Religious answers to questions of fundamental human importance ó What the world is like? How has it come about? What makes us human? What is the goal of human life? How best to attain these goals and what errors to avoid? ó constitute a kind of meta-reality or world-image which guide the social and ethical life of individuals, often at an unconscious level [Kakar 1981]. Different religious traditions differ in those elements of the meta-reality which make the idea of equal dignity of all human beings in here-and-now more, rather than less, easily acceptable.



Going against the grain of current trends in Indian sociology, which has either ignored or glorified the role of religion in Indian society, I will argue that there are elements of Hindu meta-reality ó indeed, its central axioms of dharma, karma and moksha ó which continue to impede the development of a liberal and secular civil society which respects the fundamental equality of right-bearing individuals. As the mere mention of the influence of Hindu world view on social life in India raises red flags of ìessentialismî or ìOrientalismî, let me emphasise that I am not arguing that there is a single unchanging Hindu meta-reality which will always and forever override the play of material interests, power, customary laws, other local traditions in society. All I am suggesting is that the multitude of local social institutions in India have had to engage with the central axioms of brahmanical Hinduism, which have set the standards of all that is deemed ideal and desirable, even for those castes and sects of Hindus who do not actually live by these ideals: even the aspiration to achieve these ideals (as in Sanskritisation), to construct an identity explicitly in defiance of these ideals (as in ëdalitisationí) is an indication of the power of these ideals. The ëlittle traditionsí, and their customary laws cannot be adequately understood without understanding their relationship with the ëGreat traditionsí of brahmanical Hinduism, for the former gain their ethical bearings, their sense of right and wrong, from the latter. It is as sources of ideological hegemony, and not as the ultimate, unchanging motor of Indian history, that the content and uses of the central philosophical concepts of Hinduism bear a serious and critical examination.



While cultural meta-reality exerts a powerful influence on the structure of feeling, thinking and relating to nature and society, this meta-reality is not beyond rational examination and critique. A powerful case for the ëreach of reasoní into our sentiments and attitudes has been recently stated by Amartya Sen [Sen 2000]. In a response to those who would rather depend upon the supposedly spontaneous human emotions and the goodness of basic human instincts, than on supposedly cold and harsh light of reason and analysis, Sen argues forcefully that the inner world of unconscious fears and affects can be ìinfluenced and cultivated through reasoningî. Citing Adam Smithís The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Sen argues that even our instinctive reactions to particular conduct rely on ìour reasoned understanding of causal connections between conduct and consequenceÖ[and that] our first perceptions may also change in response to critical examinationÖî Lest one takes such propensity for critical examination to be a uniquely western cultural trait, Sen provides an interesting reading of Akbarís insistence on exposing prevailing attitudes and social norms to critical reasoning. As I will argue throughout this paper, it is this continuous, open and rational critique of a cultureís meta-reality, including its affective reality, and not some relativist gender, class or caste-indexed ìepistemology of the oppressedî that best serves the interests of the oppressed.



Indeed, Sen provides a useful framework to understand the Enlightenment as that period in European history when the reach of critical reason extended into the meta-reality of the age. The 18th-century Europe saw many changes in social manners, modes of address, assembly and social discourse, all increasing the level of civility and egalitarianism in everyday discourse in the public sphere. These changes in social manner were the outward signs of a fundamental change in temper that questioned the validity and methodology of the knowledge of the natural world inscribed in myth, theology and inherited traditions. If there was one single passion that defined the 18th century Enlightenment ó that ìrevolt against superstition,î as Kant called it ó it was a passion for critical reason in the service of demystification of church doctrines, supernatural beliefs, miracles and other such magical-religious practices. The network of otherwise quarrelsome philosophes that extended from France, England, Holland and Germany to the Americas, drew its sense of purpose from a belief in the redemptive power of new ways of knowing the world. The new philosophy of knowledge was exemplified above all by Newtonís great success, and given a philosophical expression by John Lockeís empiricism. It demanded publicly testable evidence based on experience and reason, the natural capacity of which is equally available to all,3 demolishing all claims of a priori knowledge available only to a select few through the grace of god or through their privileged social status. Of course, all people, all societies, at all times, reason, and reason critically, as the critics of Enlightenment like to point out. But the Enlightenment marks a culmination of a process that, through renaissance, the reformation and the scientific revolution and propelled by the forces of nascent capitalism, revolutionised what reason meant and what role it had in how men and women related to nature and to each other. ìThe purpose,î wrote Diderot, the author of the Encyclopedia, the remarkable compendium of the European Enlightenment, ìis not only to supply a certain body of knowledge, but also to bring about a change in the mode of thinkingî [quoted from Cassirer 1951: 14].

This ìchange in the mode of thinkingî lay broadly in a change from a contemplative, deductive reasoning from intuitively-grasped, god and tradition sanctioned a priori beliefs to an insistence on deriving any claim regarding natureís order from the data of experience alone. Knowledge was no longer to proceed from concepts and axioms to phenomenon, but vice versa. At its core, the Enlightenment was an attempt to popularise and institutionalise modest procedural principles of knowledge that insisted on breaking apart all existing claims of cause and effect derived from earlier metaphysical systems and rationalist schemes, and to test them against observation and experiment. If there was a dogma of Enlightenment, it was that there were to be no dogmas, no a priori truths and no privileged ëSources of Affirmationí. All dogmas could be queried by private citizens, who have the right to come together in the public sphere, as equals, to pursue truth through open critical debate.4 Needless to say, in actual practice, these ideals were marred by myriad inequities of class, gender and citizenship. The philosphes themselves were not free from what we would today reject as grossly elitist prejudices. But an exclusive, hyper-critical concern with these contradictions can blind us to the momentous implications of winning public legitimacy for new norms for public reason. These more democratic, naturalistic and secular norms were, in time, to expand to take in the excluded segments of society, leading both towards a more egalitarian and simultaneously a more rationalised, instrumental society.5



Such a change of temper towards nature, knowledge and society was not an automatic response to the change in material conditions ó rising literacy, growing affluence, increasing class mobility ó associated with the coming of industry and capitalism. It is a mistake, commonplace in Marxist writings, and unfortunately in Marxís own writings,6 to reduce the Enlightenmentís view of rights and negative freedoms to an expression of purely material, class interests of the bourgeoisie. This is a serious misunderstanding of the Enlightenment, both because it fails to do justice to the actual concerns that motivated the rising middle classes of 18th century western Europe, especially France, and because such a narrow materialist reading does not allow one to look for homologues of the European Enlightenment in non-European societies. As we shall see in the course of this paper, a class analysis fails to understand the Indian Enlightenment which, I will contend, finds its intellectual and political motivations in the quest for recognition of their humanity by the oppressed castes, as castes, rebelling not merely for their material/class interests, but against the social and existential insults heaped upon them. A purely economic motivation does not explain the hard-fought battle in the cultural realm against the dogmas of the age.



The Enlightenmentís call for reason at the service of ìLiberty, Equality and Fraternityî is best understood as a call to arms in a struggle for recognition of equal dignity of all, regardless of origins and station in life. The Enlightenment counterpoised the idea of honour in the ancient regime with that of dignity: whereas for some to have honour, it was necessary that not everyone has it, the underlying principle of dignity is that everyone shares in it by the virtue of being human [Taylor 1992]. Seen in purely class terms, the interests of the bourgeoisie in France ó the flag-bearers of the French Enlightenment ó were not all that different from the class interest of the nobility. Like the nobility, the rising middle classes of the Third Estate also aspired to accumulate proprietary wealth in land, office or rents, which involved a minimum of risk and could safely be handed down in the family. The capitalist entrepreneur, speculating with borrowed capital and few fixed assets, was not typical of the upper middle classes. What the well-heeled bourgeoisie resented was not so much economic frustration, as social disparagement at the hands of the nobility, which claimed to derived its status from lineage. The rising bourgeoisie were motivated not by a desire to revolutionise the economic basis of society but to dismantle those social ideologies and attitudes that denied them full recognition of their own worth. Not just in France but in most of Europe, the 18th century bourgeoisie revolutions were struggles waged between relatively well-off minorities ó ìa revolt of the privilegedî, as Norman Hampson (1969) calls it ó with hardly anyone contemplating the full enfranchisement of the urban and peasant masses.



The fundamental ideas of the Enlightenment philosophers ó reason as a distinguishing mark of humanity and a basis for entitlement to equal respect, and nature as devoid of divine purpose and hierarchy and amenable to human understanding and control ó struck a chord with the bourgeoisie. These ideas enabled them to challenge the superstitious acceptance of the prevailing order personified by the priests and the king. Man was henceforth, at least in theory, to be free to create for himself the social and political conditions necessary for his own development. True, this ìmanî was cast in the image of white, male and bourgeoisie man. But the underlying conception of reason and nature of the Enlightenment contained within it the seeds for its own self-universalisation. In time, the Enlightenment philosophy has been embraced not just by the labour movement but all those ó including the suffragists, black liberation and anti-colonial movements ó seeking liberal political reforms [Bronner 1995].



European Enlightenment did not emerge out of shadowy mists of western culture or traditions. This movement was deliberately created and set in motion by human beings at a definite point in time, on the basis of a certain theoretical understanding of man and nature. Neither the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century,7 nor the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century,8 alongside the growing forces of industrial capitalism,9 were sufficient for bringing about the displacement of myth and god from social life. It took the principled intervention of public intellectuals of the emerging pan-Euro-American ìRepublic of Lettersîó journalists, pamphleteers, science popularises, amateur scientists, mostly men but some women, some well known and independently wealthy, others provincial and struggling ó to spell out the philosophical and social implication of the advances in scientific knowledge. The great achievement of the Enlightenment was to build a political vision-based upon reason, to transform reason from an arid epistemological position of interest to professional philosophers alone into a social ethic: the refusal to accept anything without demonstration and reason, was simultaneously a refusal to bow to the authority of those who have hitherto claimed a unique possession of truth.