Torn Between Tradition And Modernity

byMakarand Paranjape-May 4, 2017 04:51 PM +05:30 IST

Indians

Snapshot

• How are we to engage with contemporary reality in a purely traditional idiom? The
first of a three-part series.

Indian modernity is Janus-faced, even schizophrenic. On the one hand, it looks to

the West and to the future, but on the other hand, it looks to India and its past.
Arguably, the single most significant problematic in recent Indian intellectual
history is that of tradition vs modernity. After nearly 200 years of debate and
discussion, it seems fairly clear that India can have neither pure tradition, nor
uncontaminated modernity. Whatever we are or have become has to be some
combination or amalgamation of both. But in these contestations between tradition
and modernity, it is not always clear what tradition is or what it stands for. In this
and the following columns, I attempt to redress this lack.
It might benefit us to engage with the idea of parampara, which is the Sanskrit
word, also used in many other Indian languages, for what we call tradition in
English. While tradition is not exactly an equivalent, it is also quite resonant.
Methodologically, it is useful to make key concepts across cultures and meaning
universes to converse with each other, rather than subduing or supplanting each
other—in our case, the Western idea superimposing and superseding ours. There
may be some real, not merely cosmetic, advantages for retaining key Indian
concepts which are not so much untranslatable as lacking in adequate English
equivalents. But right at the outset, the question we may ask is how
does parampara influence, even shape individuals and in what ways do individuals
carry it forward, break, or re-shape. More specifically, I try to explore what happens
to Indian traditions in modern times. Should they survive or die and under what
circumstances? I walked bang into this conundrum in a rather unusual way.

Tradition and Modernity in Contemporary Indian Arts

It was with such questions in mind that 20 years ago I confronted the eminent
danseuse, Leela Samson, who went on to become the director of Kalakshetra,
Chennai. In a meeting in which both of us were speakers, I asked her if
Bharatanatyam— or for that matter any other “classical” dance form — seemed
rather static and repetitive. Samson was not pleased with my question. “I couldn’t
disagree with you more,” she replied. “Haven’t you been observing all the formal
and technical changes that have taken place over the last few decades, not to speak
of this whole century? I myself don’t dance the way I used to 10 or 15 years back.
We are constantly changing, constantly innovating. If you watched how
Balasaraswati danced and compare it with the way I dance today, you’ll see such a
great difference. What we were taught at Kalakshetra when I was a student is quite
different from what is taught there today or what I teach my students.”
“Yes, yes,” I admitted hastily, “but I was not referring to the formal aspects. I mean
the content, the narrative—the stories that you perform—seem to be rather typical.
They are, moreover, all mythological stories. I have never seen a Bharatnatyam or
Kuchipudi performance on a modern text or even on a modern situation. Can you,
for instance, depict the divorce of a couple or a murder mystery through a classical
dance form?”

Samson paused for a moment. “Well, as you know, there have been some attempts
to modernise the content of our traditional dance forms. Mallika Sarabhai or
Chandralekha, for instance, have used it to depict modern themes like feminism…”

“But, usually, don’t they do this only by giving a modern interpretation to a

traditional story, like Sarabhai’s Draupadi, for example?”

“True. But, let me ask you a counter-question. Why should my dance be used to
depict what every TV serial shows these days? Why should it engage with
contemporary reality? I think I perform a more meaningful and important service
for my audiences. They leave the performance enhanced, not diminished. Only a
classical art form can give you that, no?”

“Yes, but can’t it do both? I mean, why can’t it be contemporary as well as

traditional? Why should there be this break, this barrier between them? I know, of
course, that Tagore’s or Bharati’s works have been performed in Bharatanatyam.
They were contemporary poets, so you see it can be done. But not very often.”

“What you’re asking for is very, very difficult,” Samson sighed. “Kumar Gandharva
could do it. He could innovate so effectively as to evolve a new style of singing. But
how many Kumar Gandharvas have there been?”The conversation had to be
abandoned; the issue remained in a state of uneasy suspension, without our
differences being fully resolved. The conversation reminded me of the problem that
I had been grappling with for years—the relationship, almost schizophrenic,
between tradition and modernity in India, one instantiation of which was the split
between my own criticism and creative writing.

Both these anecdotes illustrate the great difficulty, if not impossibility, of reconciling
or harmonising tradition and modernity in Indian creative arts. In literature, this
was especially the case because the break between the two was most definite and
far-reaching. The colonial intervention severed forever our tenuous ties with the
older sacred literature of India as, indeed, it did the society which supported it. In
its place, secular modernity, aided by the printing press and the invention of prose,
gave rise to a new wave of creativity in what the British called our vernaculars.

The literature written In these new languages was usually modelled on European
works and its content quite different from traditional compositions. Writing in a
purely traditional manner is now impossible; how are we to engage with
contemporary reality in a purely traditional idiom?

Unless a certain form of literary modernism actually attempts precisely such an

“impossible” option. In poetry, the name of Sri Aurobindo comes to mind
immediately. Savitri, one of the longest poems in English, is also perhaps the only
contemporary epic which is read and recited daily in a manner reminiscent of a
traditional sacred text. It is indeed regarded as a modern Veda by the devotees of
Aurobindo and the Mother. Eliot also tried to produce sacred literature in modern
times; at first the best he could do was to offer us The Wasteland lamenting the loss
of the sacred, but later in “Ash Wednesday” and Four Quartets, something of the
sacred is restored. Yet, Eliot’s works, though universally acclaimed, are still literary
texts, whereas Aurobindo’s, though known and admired only by the select, have
acquired the status of sacred, even cultic texts. In fiction, the name that comes
most readily to mind is Raja Rao. The Serpent and the Rope, The Cat and
Shakespeare, and The Chessmaster and His Moves are all about the near-
impossible quest for the ultimate reality in the 20th century.

For Raja Rao, all writing was sadhana, a means to self-realisation. His books are not
read as sacred texts, but he was one writer who unabashedly sought the
transcendent and tried to invent an answerable style to such a lofty purpose. In
Chessmaster, he even tried to go beyond language itself in his attempts to invoke
the sacred beyond all religious utterances.

Yet, which us would like to write like Sri Aurobindo or Raja Rao—the two are of
course very different—even if we could? Instead, don’t we all want to write like
Salman Rushdie or Amitav Ghosh, or, to mention more recent and somewhat less
exalted examples, Chetan Bhagat or Amish Tripathi? In my novels, The Narrator
(2005) and Body Offering (2013), I too tried to write clever contemporary books, not
sacred texts. Perhaps, the result failed to satisfy either the traditionalist or the
modernist faction. A typical reaction came from a young admirer who, after taking
the trouble to read them, exclaimed, “What strange novels you’ve written—the less
said about them the better!”

Taking her advice to heart, I shall mention them no more.

(To be continued)
Sruti, Smriti, And The Individual
byMakarand Paranjape-Jul 1, 2017 03:16 PM +05:30 IST

To construct the entire past as an area of darkness is both counter-intuitive and Counter-factual, not to speak
of counterproductive.

Snapshot

• We live in smriti-less times. They offer unhampered freedom to each individual

without offering guidelines for the best use of this freedom.
In the first part of this series, “Tradition And Modernity (Swarajya, May 2017)”, I
illustrated the difficulties in reconciling or harmonising tradition and modernity in
Indian creative arts. In literature, this was especially the case, because the break
between the two was most definite and far-reaching. Perhaps, the colonial
intervention severed forever our tenuous ties with the older sacred literature of
India as, indeed, it shattered the society which supported it. In its place, secular
modernity, aided by the printing press and the invention of prose, gave rise to a
new wave of creativity in what the British called our vernaculars. The literature
written in these new languages was usually modelled on European works and its
content quite different from traditional compositions. Writing in a purely traditional
manner was now impossible.

Yet, the question remains: how are we to engage with contemporary reality in a
purely contemporary idiom? This is a question that exercised all major modern
writers from Bankimchandra to Ananthamurthy. Without parampara, aren’t we lost,
cut off from our nourishing roots, floundering in a world which is not of our making
and in which we find ourselves as interlopers, not full citizens? The issue at the
heart of Part II of this series is the relationship between the individual and tradition.
Is tradition a source of knowledge or is it a source of oppression? Does the
individual, in his or her creative journey, discover new truths or merely reaffirm old
ones? Finally, how can the individual benefit from the wisdom of the past without
being stifled by it?

Confronted with opposing possibilities: on the one hand, we have a traditionalist

position, which sees tradition as the repository of truth and virtue. According to this
view, we would lose our way and end up destroying ourselves if we did not have the
help and support of our traditions. As opposed to this, we have the modernist view,
which basically sees tradition negatively, as the carrier of much that is dead and
destructive. According to this view, tradition is the source of most of our present
ills. It embodies false thinking which cripples us, binds us to social inequality and
superstition. This latter view is dominant among a variety of modernists including
Marxist, Dalit, feminist, secularist, and other “hard” modernists. These, first of all,
seek to destroy and disavow, or, at any rate, reshape, traditions so that space may
be created for something new to emerge and flourish.

It Is only by breaking the oppressive shackles of tradition, say such modernists, that
new creation can take place. Some, like Dr Babasaheb Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar,
invoke alternate pasts, alternate traditions such as Buddhism, to oppose what they
see as the source of their oppression.

The West influenced, even shaped, Indian literary and cultural modernism. But a
pioneering Anglo-American modernist like TS Eliot exemplifies the paradox of being
the greatest champion of tradition. In his seminal and much-cited Tradition and
Individual Talent, Eliot argued that individual talent was shaped, informed, even
directed by tradition. By tradition, Eliot meant something timeless, synchronic, even
contemporary in its essential genius. It is what is living in us that is tradition, not
what is dead and gone. He gives us the image of all the great writers of English
sitting together, around a table, in front of the poet about to write a poem. Yet,
when it came to his immediate predecessors, he certainly rebelled against them,
both in the theme and form of his poetry. Eliot, no doubt, was a modernist poet,
but he was also an arch-conservative. In fact, critics never tire of reminding us how
politically reactionary, elitist, and closed modernism was. In effect, though Eliot
longed to write the kind of poetry that Dante, Shakespeare, Donne wrote, he ended
up totally rejecting his immediate predecessors, the fin-de-siècle poets. For Eliot,
when a good poet wrote or innovated, he had the weight of the entire tradition
behind him, pushing him forward. As opposed to this view, Harold Bloom advanced
his famous neo-Freudian thesis of The Anxiety of Influence in which every poet had
to grapple with the strong predecessor and supplant the latter before he could
really find his own voice.
Apart from an exaltation of tradition or its summary rejection, there is a third,
somewhat intermedial position which looks at tradition merely as what is handed
down from generation to generation, whether it be good, bad, or indifferent. This, I
believe, is one of the obvious, but somewhat superficial, understandings of
parampara. The difficulty with this position is that it does not offer grounds for
judging what is harmful or useful. These grounds must be derived either from
tradition or from modernity themselves, hence are already compromised. So this
apparently neutral position actually leads us to a critical conundrum to solve where
we must question tradition as we do modernity.

To me, it is this critical mediation that is crucial; that is what saves us from the
extremes of binary oppositions, hasty judgements, and dialectical oppositions.
While such a critical attitude may appear somewhat modern, per se, it need not
necessarily do so. Such a critical stance is both historical and contemporary,
available to us as it also was to our ancestors. The quality and aims of critical
rationality may change; indeed, criticism itself must not be trans-valued, whether as
a transcendental or transhistorical mode of being in the world. Rather, it is
grounded and situated in its own time and place. Yet, criticism, which is the ability
to discriminate and make qualitative distinctions, belongs properly to the human
faculty of thought or buddhi, which we cannot deny to our predecessors. To
construct the entire past as an area of darkness is both counter-intuitive and
counter-factual, not to speak of counterproductive. Certain periods in history may
encourage criticism, but it cannot be totally absent from others, even though it may
appear subdued or curtailed.

From where we are located, however, which is a predominantly modern terrain,

both critical modernist and critical traditionalist positions have a special
significance. They imply not only an attitude to the past, but also to the present.
Because modern Western civilisation, which may be considered to be about 200
years old, builds upon a rejection of the past. To be critical modernist or critical
traditionalist implies that we are neither totally opposed to the past nor to the
present; likewise, we may not wholeheartedly endorse either. A critical traditionalist
position, thus, makes one a critic of modernity, but also of tradition. It affords us
the freedom to appreciate certain aspects of modernity as it does to criticise and
modify tradition, without going so far as to reject it altogether.

This is what Sanatana Dharma in its broadest and most fundamental sense implies.
We accept the validity of the sruti, of the Veda itself, but not only of the Veda. We
believe that the possibilities of revelation or realisation are in our midst right now,
not only in the ancient scriptures “seen” by the rishis. The Veda, ultimately, refers
not only to a group of texts, but also to transcendental knowledge itself. Therefore,
while the texts called the Vedas embody this knowledge, they do not exhaust it. The
knowledge is not trapped or confined to the texts; it ranges free of its captivity in
the world. To that extent, the truth is not word made flesh; it remains beyond the
flesh, even as it incarnates as flesh. It is both in and before and beyond the word. It
is embodied in and by the sign, but escapes the totalising force of signification. It is
available to us, within our grasp, but cannot be captured or controlled by us.

Moving from sruti to smriti, we cannot help but recognise the importance of
memory, of mnemocultures, in constructing traditions. Even if everyone has direct
access to sruti or the ultimate reality, most of us are quite unconscious of it on a
daily basis. We content ourselves with its description and recording. We are quite
willing to take someone else’s word for it, to receive it second hand as it were, but
few venture, as the Gita says, to acquire it; fewer still succeed. Though this second-
hand record is not a substitute for the real thing, it does help those who wish to
have a roadmap before actually undertaking the journey. Moreover, smriti governs
our more mundane actions and orders society. It is what we learn when we are
instructed not to steal or kill. A society, which has no smriti, then, is in great danger
of moral annihilation. In more recent times, the destruction of smriti has lead to
relativism and confusion. Law has taken the place of dharma or ethics. We don’t
worry if a thing is right or wrong, only if it is legal or illegal. We are enjoined only to
conform to the letter of the law. As to what is right or wrong, who can judge?
Modern times, in a sense, are smriti-less times because they offer unhampered
freedom to each individual without offering guidelines for the best use of this
freedom. This freedom, needless to say, is contingent, even subservient to multiple
protocols. Ultimately, it is a form of coercion, compelling us to consume after
enslaving us to the economic. In the guise of freedom, everywhere, the spirit is
actually in chains.

What, then, is parampara? In my view, it is made up of a combination of sruti and

smriti, in the broadest sense of both terms. The former supplies the inspiration, the
latter the momentum to carry it forward. In periods when the former goes
underground, the latter offers guidance. Yet, we cannot survive too long only on
memory. That is why a re-injection of sruti is necessary and must occur to keep a
tradition healthy. Indeed, it is impossible to draw a very clear line of separation
between them. Where sruti ends and smriti begins is thus indeterminate. They slide
and merge into one another. At the very moment of realisation, another faculty of
the mind starts recording it, turning it into memory, for future use. Actually, they
are akin, if not identical; the distinction is only for our convenience. They are both
shades, grades, of spirit. The spirit is alive and well, still with us. It has not vacated
our world and gone elsewhere, abandoning us to our own follies and to an
uncertain future. Nor did it show itself once—and for all—in some far away, distant
past, never to seen again. It is right in our midst, in the here and now, should we
wish to acknowledge it. Parampara means the flowing of the spirit in present times.
Obviously then, the real challenge is how to keep smriti in consonance with sruti.
Every now and then, smriti seems to get corrupted and falsified, thus losing its
capacity to guide and direct; it becomes rigid and ossified, an iron law to grind us
and curb the spirit. Then it has to be destroyed. Such destruction is actually
creative. Better if a continuous cleansing process were possible.

But often, what happens is corruption, fossilisation, paralysis. Then breaking free of
smriti, overturning it becomes imperative. On the one hand, the individual must
keep him/herself open to the possibilities of sruti, and on the other, strive to keep
its memory fresh and uncorrupted. For the latter, a special class of dedicated
keepers of the word was established. Now that that class has been dislodged for its
betrayal and disloyalty to sruti, all of us have become, to the extent possible,
keepers of the word.

Ultimately, the individual is both the product and the creator of tradition. Just as
our genes are already given to us, our traditions have already left their mark on our
minds. This is true also of traditions of discontinuity and rejection, such as
modernity, as it is of traditions of affirmation and continuity. And yet, our genes do
not exhaust the possibilities of our physical and mental existence. They provide the
base, but not necessarily the limits. Therefore, each individual recreates his
tradition in the light of his own experiences. This re-creation often involves a
rejection of some aspect of the inherited past as it does a reorientation of others.
Socially, too, this process happens, as we shall see in the next part of this series,
sometimes smoothly, at other times violently, in a cataclysmic rupture.
Why Traditions Must Evolve To Stay Relevant

By Makarand Paranjape-Aug 3, 2017 06:53 PM +05:30 IST

Interference may be superseded by direct experience, sruti, the advaita nature of

our consciousness absorbs all dualities in a grand continuum of cosmic experience
across space and time.

Snapshot

Only a society entirely constituted by enlightened beings can afford to dispense

with smriti. All other societies need both sruti and smriti.

Last month (Sruti, Smriti, And The Individual), we saw how the individual is both the
product and the creator of tradition, though the latter possibilities are often denied
to most ordinary people. But just as our genes are previously given to us, our
traditions have already left their mark on our minds. This is true also of traditions of
discontinuity and rejection. That is why it is possible to argue for a tradition of
modernity, which we may characterise as disruptive and contra-distinctive from
traditions of affirmation and continuity. Though tradition, in the broader sense of
the totality of genetic information, does not exhaust the capacities or possibilities of
our physical and mental existence. It provides the base, but not necessarily the
limits. Therefore, each individual must reprocess his tradition in the light of his own
experiences; some merely pass it on, while others change it, even to the extent of
effecting a mutation. Any process of re-creation thus involves a rejection of some
aspect of the inherited past as it does a reinvention or revitalisation of others.
Socially, too, this process happens sometimes smoothly, at other times violently, in
a cataclysmic rupture.
In Hindu culture, the relationship between the individual and parampara was
regulated by a set of codes or purusharthas—dharma (virtue, ethics), artha (power,
profit), kama (desire, pleasure) and moksha (freedom, transcendence), signifying
the four-fold expression and general thrust of life itself. In our traditional
understanding, they were seen as a unity, in continuum, not fragmented or divided.
Thus, there was no dichotomy between moksha and dharma, on the one hand, and
artha and kama, on the other. The opposition between the sacred and the secular,
spirit and matter, was inadmissible. That is why paramartha (ultimate value)
includes, not rejects, artha (immediate value), even in the manner in which the
words are constructed. Paramartha, then, is quite different from anartha or
wickedness and chaos. Artha is the base, the material foundation upon which we
raise the edifice of self and society. If we agree that such paramartha or ultimate
value is what calls for the persistent application of ourselves, then the question is
how do we attain it? What are our resources? Where do we begin?

Again, there are different approaches to this problem. One approach regards a
direct apprehension of truth, anubhava, as the bedrock of attaining paramartha. In
some religious traditions, such a moment has occurred in the past, at the very point
of origin or foundational moment of the religion. This is then encoded and
enshrined in one or more sacred text, which in turn becomes a smriti, the official
record book of the faith. Thereafter, the emphasis of most religions is to conserve
the original purity of the inspiration or to keep going back to it; that is why most
religions are usually conservative and backward looking. The grand, transformative
moment has already passed; now what remains is to (re)connect with it. That is why
tradition becomes so important. It consists of what is handed down from
generation to generation, the wisdom and knowledge of the past, without which
the present and the future become meaningless.

But can the handed-down record, however sacred, yield the original inspiration?
What about the attendant problems of interpretation and mediation? The truth was
revealed, perhaps, but how do I reach it? How do I connect myself to it? Hence
priests, churches and all the paraphernalia of intermediacy. To overcome this
difficulty, each revelation is also characterised by unique claims to truth,
accompanied by assertions and exclusions.

In contrast, in other religious traditions, the revelation itself may claim the special
capacity to extend and renew itself through time, thus maintaining its eternal
presence. That is what the idea of Sanatana Dharma implies. The Vedas refer, as I
said earlier, not just to a limited clutch of sacred texts, but also to transcendent
knowledge or gnosis itself. The latter is greater than the former. This, however, is
the esoteric meaning of the Vedas; the common, exoteric meaning does take us
back to the texts. And yet, because these texts were to be recited and heard, they
had constantly to be renewed and drawn into the present, not frozen into some
book. They were, in that sense, not texts at all, certainly not scripture, but
performance, invocation of presence. The same is the case with the medieval
“Veda”, the Guru Granth Sahib, whose contents are a compilation of wisdom songs,
to be recited, not merely preserved or fetishised as an object of worship in the form
of a book.

Sruti, which refers to direct knowledge of ultimate reality, is the basis of most
religious traditions. At its radical best it implies that each individual experiences or
apprehends truth for himself or herself. But history has shown that such a direct
experience is not claimed for everyone. Only a few gifted individuals have access to
it or, to put it in another way, even if everyone can, not everyone does recognise it
or is transformed by it. Most must content themselves with the record or the
memory of someone else’s truth.
Even the Vedas, if they do not become our own experience, remain merely smritis,
remembered truths, derived second hand from books or heard from others, but
not understood. All knowledge, the moment it is encoded, put into words,
automatically passes into smriti.

For Krishnamurti, smriti, memory and tradition are problems; that they interfere
with reality, but such interference may be superseded by direct experience, sruti.

Our normal experience is that that is what we have at our disposal — smriti —
second-hand knowledge, accounts of someone else’s primal experience. We
perceive the world, as J Krishnamurti would put it, through the veil of conditioning,
which is millions of years old. This is received knowledge, not fresh perception. We
cannot see ourselves as we are and the world as it is because of this interference of
the past. In Krishnamurti’s scheme, then, smriti or tradition is the obstruction, the
veil, the screen between reality and ourselves. It is only when we rend the veil,
when we begin really to see things in their true light, are we liberated. All past, all
received notions, all smritis, whether good or bad, are ultimately limited and
binding. Nothing short of a radical rupture from our past will release us into the
eternity of the present — smriti is caught up in the movement of time, while only
sruti is the release into timelessness.

For Krishnamurti, smriti, memory and tradition are the problems; it is they that
interfere with reality. But such interference may be superseded by direct
experience, sruti, just as the actual taste of the proverbial pudding is in the eating. If
sruti is more powerful than smriti, then we need not see the latter as the villain.
Moreover, without any direction or understanding from the past, many feel
disoriented and confused. Finally, who is utterly free from conditioning, from
memory, from the burdens of the past? No one—to that extent, being immersed in
the moment can be only that, momentary. Then the action of memory, of the past,
re-establishes itself.

We are, once again, inserted into older narratives, subject once more to the tyranny
of time. That is why sruti and smriti are not dichotomous or oppositional but
complementary and continuous. Sruti, direct perception, is primary, while smriti,
memory, is secondary. I interpret Krishnamurti’s work as an attempt to restore this
rightful order even if entails a radical denial of tradition. Krishnamurti reminds us
that sruti is available to each of us, if we are alert. He warns us not to be contented
merely with smriti. Such denial itself, inevitably, sets itself into another sort of
tradition. After his passing, most of Krishnamurti’s followers get by with listening to
his tapes and reading his books. It is smriti which is available; sruti remains beyond
their reach. In time, some of these followers, listening and reading his work, also
form their own rigid interpretations, including some who exclude others from their
sampradaya (sect). In the name of radical freedom, freedom comes to be denied.

In direct opposition to Krishnamurti’s position, the Bhagawad Gita in Chapter 2 says

that loss of memory leads to the destruction of the intellect, which in turn results in
total annihilation. Here, memory refers to the seed of enlightenment, the
knowledge of our own ultimate nature, which we already possess. It is anger that
leads to delusion, delusion to memory loss, which in turn leads to utter destruction.

Directly linked to sruti, memory or smriti reminds us who we are and arrests our
fall from grace. Smriti here is saviour, not sinner. The present is, after all, that which
replaces not the past, but another present, which has, from the point of view of
time, just elapsed.

We therefore have two distinct views of the relationship between sruti and smriti.
One view implies continuity and consonance between the two, while the other,
discontinuity and opposition. The former is, to my mind, the traditional view, while
the latter is the modern one. Both are, to varying degrees, justified. When smriti
works against sruti, as is often the case, then the modern view is right. Then we
need a Krishnamurti to cleanse and deconstruct tradition so that something new
may emerge. The stream of sruti cannot flow if its course is dammed or overrun
with obstacles. Someone must perform the task of desilting the channel so that the
flow or sruti resumes.

Who will cleanse the channels of grace, throwing all the soil and mud out? The
critical modernist does such a job. However, the revolutionary or radical modernist
goes too far in destroying too much, good as well as bad. But when smriti transmits
what is right and good, then to overthrow it would be not just disruptive, but
undesirable. The traditionalist defines parampara as that which is the custodian
and conveyer of truth, wishing to preserve it at all costs. By the latter definition,
anything that departs from smriti also departs from tradition. Our view of the
problem will depend, as I said earlier, on which of the definitions we accept.

I think that the most useful and enabling position is one that allows us to see
tradition as the repository of both good and bad, both the positive and the
negative. A critical traditionalist, while leaning to the good in his tradition is,
nonetheless, critical of what is bad, whether it is really a part of his tradition or goes
by that name. Similarly, a critical modernist will have the capacity to critique
modernity when it departs from its proclaimed objectives. A traditionalist, when he
critiques tradition, will have to take recourse to either tradition or modernity;
likewise, when a modernist critiques modernity, he will have to find alternatives
either in modernity or tradition. In either case, the two do not function
dichotomously, but dialogically.
In a certain sense, sruti itself is the ever-new, if not the modern, because it is the
contemporary, the immediate, the instantaneous, while smriti properly belongs to
the old, the remembered, once contemporary, but now historical. However, while
modernity, not of the Indian (that is, traditional) but of the Western variety, always
needs something to oppose, something to Other, something to destroy, sruti is
inclusive and self-sufficient. Similarly, tradition in its original, wider sense as
parampara is self-renewing, self-critical, and self-regulatory. Made up of both sruti
and smriti, it is a broader system of integrated wisdom, which includes both
tradition and modernity. That is why parampara cannot be identified with tradition;
properly understood, it has no Other.

Only a society entirely constituted by enlightened beings can afford to dispense

with smriti. All other social arrangements need both sruti and smriti. Some think
that they can function only on the basis of smriti, remaining content with some
revelation in the past. Such societies, too, are doomed to failure because they have
lost the capacity to renew themselves or critically examine their pasts. A healthy
society combines the riches of both sruti and smriti. The possibility of “new” sruti
should always be present, even if its vanguard consists of a few chosen individuals,
while smriti can be collective as well as individual.

The problem of tradition can be solved If we see it as the basis of our own
realisation, not if we regard it as the sole custodian of ultimate truth. Tradition can
guide us, but merely repeating what we have inherited will not suffice. We have to
add to it, to grow beyond it, to discover our own truths. Tradition is, indeed, the
repository of truth, but it does not restrict or close truth’s domain. In fact, it yields
itself only to someone who undertakes the discipline to understand it. This process
of tapas or askesis serves to duplicate or at least to replicate the conditions which
made the original revelation possible. Thus, tradition is renewed; sruti flows again;
smriti is revitalised. Unless such renewal takes place periodically, tradition is lost.
Like a path on which no one walks anymore, it will be covered with weeds and
brambles.

(To be continued)
India’s Swaraj Parampara – The Tradition of Self-Illuminating Independence

By Makarand Paranjape

5th Sep, 2017 at 7:31 PM

Swaraj is not a form of narrow nationalism or jingoism. Instead, it is a special,

cooperative and pluralistic way of being in the world.

Though we have completed 70 years of independence, it is obvious that the

struggle for swaraj is far from over. To me, the central purpose of understanding
our parampara or tradition is to bring us closer to swaraj. That is because swaraj is
more than political independence; it is the reassessment and reassertion of our
civilisational genius.

To achieve this, we must try to overhaul our entire intellectual infrastructure, not
just seek a new vocabulary to accomplish this. Such an overhauling would mean, at
the least, the realignment of our intellectual enterprise with what we have truly
sought and valued for millennia – the pursuit of self-knowledge, truth, virtue,
beauty, and, of course, happiness – and the organisation of our material resources
in such a way that our daily life conduces to these aims. In the previous sections in
this series, we saw how this orientation was provided by our pursharthas, the
cardinal aims of life – Dharma, Artha, Kama, and, ultimately, Moksha.

But in our attempts to regain our parampara, merely substituting English by, say,
Hindi or Tamil, will not do. These languages are almost as colonised as Indian
English is. Therefore, changing the medium alone will not be sufficient, just as
sprinkling some Indian words into English will not do. The work of colonisation and
enslavement was also done in our own languages, as it was in English. At the same
time, English was also used for swaraj-ist purposes.
Indeed, it has been consistently used, against the grain as it were, for the past 150
years or more in India and elsewhere for swaraj. Language chauvinism is not the
answer to our language problems. English dominance and anglocentrism may be
opposed, but not necessarily the language English itself. We need to change our
minds. This fundamental transformation is far more crucial than the superficial
changes that are usually advocated by language, religion, or cultural nationalists.
We need multicultural or multilingual registers of exchange in India, not to
substitute one monoculture or monolingualism with another.

Once we understand that swaraj is the issue, we see parampara not in dialectical
opposition with its other, adhunikata (modernity), nor is Bharatiyata (Indianness) a
mere opposition to Pashyatikarana (Westernisation). Parampara, instead, is whole,
integral, not just fragmentary or antithetical. Not a knee-jerk reaction to the
domination of Western categories over Indian ones, but a deep understanding of
the difference will take us forward. This can be done, as we have seen, by opening a
dialogue between Bharatiya parampara and Western modernity to create new
spaces of knowledge and swaraj. In this discussion itself, while I have used both
parampara and tradition, I have never tried to find a substitute for swaraj. Some
words and concepts, which form the cornerstone of our thinking and culture, must
not be substituted, while the rest of our discussions can be carried out, arguably, in
any language.

What is Swaraj?

Swaraj is a very old Vedic word, but comes into the vocabulary of modern India in
the nineteenth century. Some say Dayanand Saraswati’s Satyarth Prakash (1875)
contains its first modern usage, but I have not been able to find it. Dayanand
quotes the Vedic “Yah svayam rajate sa svarat”, but does not apply it to political
independence from Britain.
The earliest modern use is probably in Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar’s pamphlet
Shivajir Mahattva (1902), republished two years later as Shivajir Diksha. Deuskar
was a friend of Sri Aurobindo, who also began to use the word. In a few years, with
the struggle for freedom acquiring momentum especially because of Lord George
Curzon’s partition of Bengal in 1905, it became the most evocative and popular of
indigenous words for political freedom, whether purna or total, or partial within the
British Empire.

Several important political leaders like Dadabhai Naoroji, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and
Aurobindo used the word, as did Mahatma Gandhi, who also adopted the word,
making it a household mantra.

Book Cover and First Page Gandhiji’s Hind Swaraj

Hind Swaraj (1909) is not only one of his most important books, but also a
comprehensive statement of the aims and methods of non-violent revolution. In
the discourse of the freedom movement, though swaraj mostly signifies political
autonomy, Gandhi meant much more by it. Perhaps, he and others were intuitively
aware of its etymology, though they did not explicitly explain it.

Actually swaraj is an adaptation and shortening of the Sanskrit word swarajya,

which is an abstract noun. The word is a compound of swa + raj; swa means self
and raj means to shine (the etymology being raj deepnoti). Hence the word means
both the shining of the self and the self that shines. The root raj gives us many
words associated with power including raja, rex and regina.

The work of British colonisation and enslavement of India was also done in our own
languages, as it was in English.
The symbology of light is very important in the Vedas because it suggests the sun of
higher consciousness — tat savitur verenyam, as in the Gayatri Mantra.It is to that
sun, savitur, that Aurobindo refers in his great poem Savitri. So swarat is a self-
luminous person, and swarajya is a state of being swarat or enlightened. We might
actually say that swaraj is a very ancient word for enlightenment, the power and
illumination that come from the mastery of the self. When applied to a single
individual, its form is swarat, an adjective. It is a word that occurs many times in the
Rig, Sama, and Yajur Vedas, as it does later in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
In the Upanishads, it can be found in the Chandogya, Taitteriya, and Maitri. But
what is this swarajya and who is swarat?

It Is in India that political independence came to be expressed even in modern

times in terms of enlightenment and self-illumination, not merely political power or
independence. Opposing the colonisers and imperialists was thus the external
aspect of swarajya; the internal aspect was to have a good, just, and beautiful state,
an enlightened social order.

Swarajya is therefore the principle that aspires for better self-management, more
effective inner governmentality, because illumination comes from internal order,
not oppression. Originally, swarajya refered to the inner management of a person’s
powers and capacities, of the senses, organs and of all the different constituents of
the person. When these were well-governed, the person too would be all-powerful.
For Gandhi, the homology between the individual body and the body politic was a
useful metaphor if not a self-evident truth.

But what of swa, from the same root as the Latin sui? Self-rule also means the rule
of the self — but which self? The id, the ego or the superego, to use the Freudian
set? In traditional Indian psychology, unlike in Freud, there was not only the
unconscious self but also the super-conscious, the higher self, what may be termed
the “divine” self. In common with pre- and post-Christian Gnostics, Sufis and
mystics in other traditions, the ancient Hindus too believed in an unfallen, mighty,
spiritual self as constituting the core of each individual. So swaraj would mean the
rule of that self within us.

Swarajya is the state of self-mastery; the master of senses is swarat. He or she is

nothing less than the yogi perfectly poised in himself or herself. What is the
opposite of swarat? It is anyarat – anya, other – ruled by others. These others could
be the British, the Americans, the Chinese, the dominant or upper classes, our
bosses, superiors, fathers, mothers, lovers or even our own internal demons, sins,
addictions, habits, propensities, errors, whether we are Brahmins or Dalits.

Synonymous with liberty, freedom and independence, swaraj thus suggests a host
of possibilities for inner illumination and self-realisation. The word swaraj is
preferable to decolonisation because swaraj is not anti- anyone else. One’s own
swaraj can only help others and contribute to the swaraj of others.

In swaraj, the personal and the political merge, one leading to the other, the other
leading back to the one. I cannot be free unless all my brothers and sisters are free
and they cannot be free unless I am free. Swaraj allows us to resist oppression
without hatred and violent opposition. To fight for swaraj, Gandhi developed the
praxis of satyagraha or insistence on truth or truth-force for the rights of the
disarmed and impoverished people of India.

The swarat Is a person who has command over his own body, mind and senses or
good internal self-government. Gandhi applied it to the body politic. Simply
speaking, he argued that we do not want to be ruled by others; therefore, we
should not try to rule over others either. Swaraj, as mentioned earlier, therefore
implies self-restraint, self-regulation and self-governing. If we are self-governing,
the state as we know it will wither away. For Gandhi, an ideal society consisted of
highly evolved, self-regulating individuals, who respected themselves and others.
Such a society would not need law enforcers because each citizen would look out
for the welfare of his fellows.

Swaraj thus means self-restraint, forbearance, refusal to rule over others. One of
the clichés about India is that no matter how powerful the country was, it did not
send expeditions of conquerors to countries outside the peninsula, huge armies to
conquer, colonise, and bring back pelf from overseas expeditions. This is how the
Arabs, Mongols, Turks, Persians, Afghans, Portuguese, British, Dutch, French and
the others behaved, coming to India to conquer or plunder, but there is no record
of Indian armies doing the same in other lands. There are no narratives of Indians
bringing back loot from China, Egypt, Tibet, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia or
Malaysia, sending out huge ships to conquer and plunder. Or out-rigging land
expeditions, to bring back elephants or camels laden with the spoils of war.

There was a large sphere of Indian influence, most of it not through armed
conquest, but cultural osmosis and exchange. The historical record of India does
not show a desire to go and rule other people, to enforce its will on them, to
trample them, to exploit them economically, to oppress them, to crush them — that
is not, it would seem, the Indian way. But, by the same token, to be ruled by others
is also unacceptable to the Indian spirit; Indians, like other self-respecting peoples,
fought against it.

The Parampara of Swaraj

Throughout Indian history, the struggle for swaraj has continued, often unrecorded.
We have innumerable instances of villagers protesting against emperors, blocking
roads, refusing to pay taxes, fasting and so on. In the 150 years of British rule, there
was a revolt practically every single year in India. Some part or the other was always
up in arms against the British rule. So Pax Brittanica was a great illusion. How could
there be? If you are an imperialistic power, you can only enforce your rule with the
force of arms. In today’s context, how can you have peace in Iraq or Syria, where
every other day people die by explosions, executions, bullets and bombs? For
lasting peace, you need swaraj.

Swaraj is a political ideal that comes from a deep spiritual ideal. Despite settling for
Westminster-style parliamentary democracy, Gandhi never quite gave up the effort
for swaraj. Writing in his paper Harijan a year before Independence, Gandhi
outlined his vision of a good society:

“In this structure composed of innumerable villages, there will be ever-widening

never-ascending circles. Life will not be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the
bottom. But it will be an oceanic circle whose centre will be the individual always
ready to perish for the village, the latter ready to perish for the circle of villages, till
at last the whole becomes one life composed of individuals, never aggressive in
their arrogance but ever humble, sharing the majesty of the oceanic circle of which
they are integral units. Therefore the outermost circumference will not wield power
to crush the inner circle but will give strength to all within and derive its own
strength from it.”

Gandhi in his paper Harijan

In Gandhi’s model of oceanic circles, we have a way of relating to one another and
to political authority which is very different from the pyramidical paradigm. In the
latter, a few people on top rule the rest; as you go higher and higher, the number is
smaller and smaller, until at the very top, you have only one person. In Gandhi’s
model, the individual is the centre of the oceanic circle, but continually expands his
world to include his family, his neighbourhood, his village, his state, his country and
so on.

What is wonderful is that Gandhi allows each person to be the centre of his or her
cosmos.

What is wonderful is that Gandhi allows each person to be the centre of his or her
cosmos, a centre that wishes to expand and include. So the self in swaraj is not a
limited but an expanding, potentially unlimited self, which can stretch to embrace
the whole world till, ultimately, the self alone is; there is no other. The Gandhian
model is not one of conflict, but of cooperation. Progress does not necessarily
come though clashes of opposites as in Hegelian and Marxian dialectics, but
through sacrifice and transformation.

While swaraj has an inbuilt anti-imperialistic orientation, it also evokes a culturalist-

nationalist position in which one’s civilisational heritage is owned up, even
embraced, rather than discarded. In that sense, it suggests not a Western type of
universalism, but a colourful cosmopolitanism, rooted in a radically different notion
of “self”. But there is nothing “communal” or fanatical about this project. That is why
I believe that Gandhi took great pains to emphasise that swaraj is not a form of
narrow nationalism or jingoism. Instead, it is a special, cooperative and pluralistic
way of being in the world, as this quotation shows: “My nationalism, fierce though it
is, is not exclusive, is not devised to harm any nation or individual.”

In this context, it would be useful to notice how words which nowadays denote
secular phenomena have deeply spiritual roots in India. We have already seen this
with the word swaraj. The other word that is frequently used for political
independence is swatantrya or swatantrata. Both these words are central to the
eschatology of Kashmir Shaivism or trika philosophy. Metaphysically and
epistemologically, Shiva, the ultimate reality, is free or utterly independent; so his
self-forgetting or self-restricting as well as his self-remembering and self-realisation
are signs of his total independence. Since the jiva or the individual is the “same” as
Shiva, we too are ignorant or wise as the case may be out of our own free and
(un)conscious choice. When we suffer, we forget ourselves and our own self-
perfection; when we are happy, it is because we have regained our original nature.

Similarly, we might argue that colonialism overcomes us, as Gandhi himself said in
Hind Swaraj, because we “give” our freedom, not to mention wealth and well-being,
to others; decolonisation, then, is only a reclamation of what is ours, a recognition
and reassertion of who we are. Never fully colonised in the first place, we now
merely assert our right to be free again.

Meaning-making, thus, depends not so much on the sign or on the object under
consideration, but on the consciousness of the thinker or perceiver. As our
consciousness is, so the world appears to us. But the task of changing our
consciousness is not easy. It requires a continuous engagement with the material
realities that surround us. What the tradition does show us is that these material
realities are not fixed, but determined by the level of consciousness we can bring to
bear upon them.

Regardless of our political or intellectual inclinations, most of us are obsessed with

Project India. Perhaps, the only thing that proponents of all shades of political
opinion from the extreme Left to the extreme Right are agreed upon is that this
project is still unfinished. The Left thinks that Independence was partial, if not false,
because it brought about a bourgeois not a proletarian revolution. The
Hindutvavadis believe that the dream of the Hindu Rashtra has not yet been
fulfilled. We often forget that the frail old Mahatma also thought that our “tryst with
destiny” was not all that glorious. While Jawaharlal Nehru was taking his oath of
office in a glittering ceremony in the Viceroy’s palace, the stubborn apostle of love
and non-violence was trying to bring peace in the blood-soaked streets of Calcutta.
Obviously, the coming of Independence was not as momentous to him as the
wrenching reality that swaraj was still a distant dream.

That which harmonises our personal and political aspirations is the swaraj that
Gandhi was after. In it is constituted our true sovereignty, as individuals and as a
people. Swaraj does not mean political independence alone, but a certain vision of
society free from exploitation, oppression, violence and unhappiness. It will not be
a society of the haves living at the expense of the have-nots or a society wherein
the individual is dwarfed and crushed by the government, nor will it be a society in
which making money and indulging in sense pleasures are the be all and end all of
life. Just as each individual seeks swaraj, so does each nation, society or country. I
shall sum up in Gandhi’s words, “I submit that swaraj is an all-satisfying goal for all
time… It is infinitely greater than and includes Independence.”

If debates on globalisation, sovereignty and culture are ultimately debates about

which way we want India to go, it is clear to me that both modernity and post-
modernity represent paths which we should not buy into fully. At best, they provide
convenient points of entry to the real questions that shape our lives. Because these
paths have made inroads into our own life and consciousness, they must be
examined, understood, possibly appreciated from a distance, but ultimately
negated or incorporated into the broader quest for swaraj.

I am convinced that our anxiety over how to cope with the latest intellectual assault
from the West will be mitigated once we understand better who we are. This
requires a radical dislocation of our subservient fixation upon the West and a
realignment of our intellectual energies to serve our own civilisational enterprises.

The Persistence of Parampara

Before I close, I would like to mention the extraordinary sense in which Dr

Baidyanath Chaturvedi, then associated with the Indira Gandhi National Centre,
explained the concept of parampara to me. According to him, parampara can never
die because it predicts its own decline, even death. Because of this foretelling, the
breakdown of the parampara becomes a part of the parampara itself. In that sense,
parampara signifies the ultimate reality or truth, beyond or outside which no
meaning-making is possible.

He cites as example the Puranic foretelling of the decline of dharma. In Kali Yuga,
so the legend goes, the bull of dharma stands only on one leg. That is why in Kali
Yuga people forget the dharma. There is wickedness and chaos everywhere. Moral
values are uprooted; social and family norms lose their meaning. There is
disharmony, degradation and corruption. What happens to dharma in such a
situation?

Only a few wise ones, who are aware of the parampara, are able to follow dharma.
The rest go astray. Even when a particular epoch comes to an end, as in the
metaphor of pralaya or flood, which submerges all life, the Vedas or the gnosis they
embody is saved for the next yuga, the next cycle of creation. In this manner,
parampara reigns across the times of its own demise, linking the broken-down and
bygone order with a new birth.
In this extraordinary sense of the word, parampara signifies that which transcends
itself, transcendental of the transcendent, which can only signify the movement of
supreme reality itself, simultaneously immanent and supernatural, in time and
beyond time, situated and spaceless.