Eleven Objections To Sanskrit Literary Theory:
A Rejoinder
Kapil Kapoor
August
2001
A debate has been on in this country for quite some time now about the
role of its inherited learning that at present finds no place in the mainstream
education. It has been restricted either to the traditional institutes or
special institutes, ‘sanctuaries’. It is assumed, and argued by its opponents,
that this inherited learning is now obsolete and no longer relevant to the
living realities. This is however counter-factual — the inherited learning not
only endures in the traditional institutes but also vibrates in the popular
modes of performances and in the mechanisms of transmitting the tradition, such
as katha, pravacana and other popular cultural and social practices. And what
is more to the point, the vocabulary of this thought is now the ordinary
language vocabulary of the ordinary speakers of modern Indian languages. The
thought permeates the mind and language.
However, the ‘educated’ Indian has been
de-intellectualized. His vocabulary has been forced into hibernation by the
vocabulary of the west. For him, West is the theory and India is the data. The
Indian academy has willingly entered into a receiver-donor relationship with
the western academy, a relationship of intellectual subordination. This
‘de-intellectualization’ needs to be countered and corrected by re-locating the
Indian mind in the Indian thought. Arguing for Sanskrit literary theory as the
appropriate theory for Indian literary criticism is a part of this larger
enterprise. The 5th century philosopher of language, Bhartrhari, in the
penultimate karika of the second kanda of his celeberated Vakyapadiya says:
“The intellect acquires critical acumen by
familiarity with different traditions. How much does one really understand by
merely following one’s own reasoning only?”(Ka-484) That was the
self-respecting voice of an intellectually confident India with its
interactive, contending yet collaborative traditions of thought beautifully
recalled and critiqued in the 13th century by Sri Madhavacarya in his
Sarvadarsanasangraha. However, in today’s de-intellectualised India, we have to
say:
“What does he know who does not know his own
tradition?” India has powerful, attested, traditions of texts and thinkers in
disciplines ranging from prosody to philosophy and these are enshrined mainly
in Sanskrit. By abandoning this donor Sanskrit tradition, we have become
passive, uncritical recipients of Western theories and models.
Had the classical thought enshrined in
Sanskrit, Pali and Prakrit texts and some of it preserved as adaptation in Old
Tamil texts been made a part of the mainstream education it would have enabled
the educated Indian to interact with the west on a level ground. This tradition
has attested texts and thinkers in a wide range of disciplines — philosophy,
grammar, poetics, prosody, astronomy, architecture, mathematics, medicine,
atmospheric sciences, sociology / ethics (dharmasastra), chemistry, physics,
agriculture, economics and commerce, music, botany and zoology, weaponry and
art of warfare, logic, education, metallurgy. The texts of these disciplines
not only make statements about the respective domains of knowledge but also
enshrine the empirical wisdom gathered by our society over centuries in these
spheres. All this knowledge has been marginalised by and excluded from the
mainstream education system. Efforts to incorporate it or teach it have been
politically opposed and condemned as ‘revivalism’. Europe’s 13th century
onwards successful venture of relocating the European mind in its classical
Greek roots is lauded and expounded in the Indian universities as ‘revival of
learning’ and as ‘Renaissance’. But when it comes to India, the political
intellectuals dismiss exactly the same venture as ‘revivalism’ or
‘obscurantism’. The words such as ‘revivalism’ are, what I call, ‘trap words’.
And there are more, for example ‘traditional’ and ‘ancient’ — the person
working in Indian studies is put on the defensive by these nomenclatures.
‘Tradition’ is falsely opposed to ‘modern’ and the word ‘traditional’ is
equated with oral and given an illegitimate pejorative value. And the adjective
‘ancient’ as pre-fixed — ‘Panini, the ancient grammarian’, ‘ancient Indian
poetics / philosophical thought’ — makes the classical Indian thinkers and
thought look antiquated. No western writer ever refers to Plato, for example,
as ‘ancient’ or Greek thought as ‘ancient’. This psychic jugglery is directed
at the continuity of Indian intellectual traditions suggesting as it does a
break or a disjunction in the intellectual history. There is no such
disjunction in India’s intellectual history but then the Indian intellectual
brought up on alien food must set up a disjunction in Indian history if there
is one in the western history! If at all there is a disjunction it happens with
the foundation of the English education and then too it is a horizontal
disjunction between the mainstream education system and the traditional
institutes of learning and not a vertical temporal disjunction.
Even this disjunction is indefensible — for
those who believe that this knowledge is now archaic would do well to recall
that the contemporary western theories, though essentially interpretive, have
evolved from Europe’s 19th century interaction with Sanskrit philosophy,
grammar and poetics; they would care to remember that Roman Jakobson,
Trubetzkoy and de Saussure were Sanskritists, that Saussure was in fact a
professor of Sanskrit at Geneva and that his published papers include work on
Sanskrit poetics. The structural, formalist thinking and the linguistic turn of
contemporary theory have their pedigree in Sanskrit thought. In this, Europe’s
highly fruitful interaction with the Indian thought over practically the same
time-span contrasts sharply with 150 years of sterile Indian interaction with
the western thought. After the founding of Sanskrit chairs in the first decade
of the nineteenth century, Europe interacted with the Indian thought, particularly
in philosophy, grammar, literary theory and literature, in a big way without
abandoning its own powerful tradition. In the process, it created, as we have
said a new discipline, Historical-Comparative Linguistics, produced a galaxy of
thinkers — Schiller, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Nietszche, Jakobson, Trubetzkoy
and above all Saussure — and founded a revolutionary conceptual framework which
was to influence the European thought for the next century, Structuralism.
Alienated from the roots, caught in the web of conflicting schemas, unable to
interact with western scholarship on a level ground, we have failed to produce
in the last 150 years any thinker or thought. The possible exceptions, Swami
Ramakrishna Paramhansa, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Mahatma Gandhi, are
interestingly those who consciously located themselves in the Indian tradition
and are oriented towards its metaphysical thought. Awareness of this sterility,
and its cause, has slowly grown. There is an increasing assertion in the
country of the need to remedy this state, to reverse this data-theory
relationship between the Indian academy and the western academy by relocating
the Indian mind in its multiple, classical traditions of thought, in what has
always been a donor tradition. This is how we follow up the political and
economic freedoms by the freedom of the mind. In this perspective, in literary
studies, we must re-activate Indian frameworks in the university syllabi.
It is easy to see why one must prefer Indian
conceptual frameworks. Apart from the general instrumentality of freeing the
mind by activating the innate Indian habits of mind, we have noted elsewhere
their superior explanatory adequacy. Theories are culture specific — they are
codes of a community’s expectations from the art form / forms and therefore
more adequately account for that community’s response to the artifacts.
Cultural specificity of theories can
therefore be problematic if the theories of one culture are applied
uncritically to the empirical reality of another culture. There are the Indian
habits of mind and there are the western habits of mind nurtured over time by
the specificity of the community’s experience and these may differ crucially.
It is these habits of mind that are imbricated deeply in the respective
conceptual frameworks. The western linearity of time and thought with its
in-built evolutionary imperative that is implicit in such structures as
‘pre-X-post A’ (pre-colonial, colonial, post-colonial) contrasts sharply with
the Indian schema of cyclicity and simultaneity. Similarly, the western
binarism and the search for certainty differs from the either-or-or both schema
and the uncertainty schema of the Indian mind. The list is long — the
teleological anxiety, the apocalyptic vision, the wait for the millennium, the
redeemer expectation, the anthropological centrism, the conception of man as a
sinner, a vengeful God, an ethics contingent on a personal God — all these
western constructs offer conceptual opposition to the Indian habits of mind, at
least to the non-Hebraic habits of mind.
This applies among others to poetics,
literary theory. Indian literary theories are empirical responses to what still
is an oral culture — even the term for verbal compositions, vangmaya, literally
means ‘that which has existence in / which is permeated by speech’. Literary
theories that are applied to Indian compositions must take into account their
orality and what flows from this dimension — the anonymity or serial authorship
of the texts, and hence the non-pertinence of authorial meaning, the need to
designate the author as ‘composer’ (rather than writer) and the receiver of the
text as ‘auditor’ rather than ‘reader’ (Johnson used the term ‘auditor’ in his
Preface to Shakespeare). There are foundational differences as well. The
concepts of creativity and the creative process are found to be completely
different. The paradigm artist in Indian thought, for example, is the potter as
against the carpenter in Western (Greek) thought. The carpenter cuts, segments
and re-arranges his material reality (the wood) and is therefore a ‘maker’. The
potter’s material reality (the clay) is like water in the ocean not measurable
or segmentable and the potter therefore does not ‘make’ — he merely makes
manifest a form that inheres in the material and is present to him in his mind.
The potter is not the ‘master’ but a sadhaka, a devotee, a Yogi who yokes his
mind to the object and gives form to the substance.
Preferred forms also differ. In Indian
literatures, the dominant form is an aural-visual verse narrative and the
highest excellence has been achieved in the epics. In English literature the
highest excellence has been achieved in drama and in Russian literature in the
novel. Theories should investigate such cultural specificities if they are to
ask relevant questions about the compositions.
In the absence of such an appropriate theory,
Indian literary criticism — both in English and in Indian languages, both about
literature in English and about literatures in Indian languages — hasn’t asked
these culturally specific questions.
The Indian literary criticism has in fact
been marked by severe limitations. It has, all in all, been derivative and
backward. Before PL-480, it was Anglo — and after PL 480 it is a footnote to
the Anglo-American school — even the European frameworks filter through English
translations, commentaries and Anglo-American practices. Besides, it has always
been backward — there is always a time lag between its enunciation in the west
and its emulation here. Hence, the derisive comment about Indian literary
criticism quoted by Prof. CDNarasimhaiah ji — “You mean those carbon copies of
Mathiessen, Blackmur and Leavis?” And it has been seasonal. Every successive
passing fashion in the Anglo-American school has been dutifully applied to the
Indian literary reality — Leavisian Moral, New Criticism, Structuralism,
Post-structuralism, Semiotics and Deconstruction, Postmodernism,
Psychoanalytic, Feminist, Marxist, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism,
Stylistics. Each successive framework has been found to be a perfect fit for
the malleable Indian reality, without any modification or adaptation! What is
the character of this criticism? It is only as much Indian as the word ‘India’
itself. Its theoretical framework is, as we noted above, derivative. The body
of literature it addresses is Metro. There is metro literature written under
the influence of, and often imitating, both the western (Anglo-American)
societal problematic as themes and there is the metro theory that both explains
it and is validated by this body of literature. Its audience is urban (English)
educated elite. There are no western readers for this as the West is not
interested in Indian language literatures or in the Indian paraphrase or
redaction of their theories. (Whatever limited but profitable western audience
is there is of readers interested in being told by India’s ‘colonized’ minds
about India’s colonized mind!) What is excluded in the process?
(i) Theoretical thinking. Indian literary
criticism is by and large applicational — there is hardly any theoretical
thinking which is how in any case it would be in a derivative framework — there
are no attempts to critique or even localize the theory (to use a term from
computational software technology). Theoretical thinking is excluded by the
very enterprise.
(ii) The whole oral / folk (aural — visual)
literature, performances and compositions are out of its range as this
construes literature as writing. This activity is therefore strictly restricted
to the literate context. More importantly, it is in complete disjunction with
the long tradition of
literary thinking, with the tradition of
continuous and cumulative texts from the Natyasastra to Rasagangadhara via
Bhamaha, Vamana, Mahima Bhatta, Anandavardhana, Kuntaka, Abhinavagupta, Mammata
and Viswanatha.
It is not surprising therefore that the need
for ‘Indianness’ of critical practices, of ‘nativising’ the critical discourse
has been voiced/ talked about (though not always rigorously argued). Prof. C.D.
Narasimhaiah ji has been saying this since 1965 when he had organised a
national seminar on “Literary Criticism: European and Indian Tradition”. Not
that there has been no change in the scene. After the initial, well-known
expositions of Indian poetics such as those by Hiriyanna, Krishna Chaitanya,
since the late eighties Indian professors of English have publicly discussed
different Indian theories. Prof. M.S. Kushwaha’s 1988 Indian Poetics and
Western Thought is a landmark in this trend. Secondly, some of these professors
produced tracts/articles outlining the applicational models based on different
Indian schools. Professor R.S. Pathak of Sagar is to be noted for his
contribution in modifying the climate — his introduction to in English to
Kuntaka’s vakrokti theory is an important example of the kind of textual
exposition that is needed. Then, some departments of English initiated research
in Indian English literature using the Indian models. And at least in one
department (Centre of Linguistics and English, JNU, New Delhi) research
applying Indian frameworks to western texts and objects has been consciously
adopted as research agenda since at least 1990. Finally, now, some universities
teach Indian poetics a part of the English syllabus.
But these are sporadic changes as there has
been no policy change at the national disciplinary level, no ‘mind change’, so
to say — not even a formal discussion at the national level about ‘appropriate
theory’ nor a systemic addressing of this issue in the U.G.C. panel for
English. Indian theoretical texts continue to be marginalised in the university
syllabi and most of the effort outlined above has been either in the form of an
argument in defense of or an exposition of parts and portions of classical
Indian poetics. There is not yet much applicational research needed badly to
validate the classical frameworks by establishing their adequacy. As this has
not happened on the desired scale, the Indian theoretical frameworks have not
been evaluated in terms of contemporary literatures. However, these efforts and
this movement have evoked definite critical opposition. In the course of this
relatively limited expositional and applied effort, during and after the
eighties, questions have been raised about what is ‘Indian’, what is ‘Indian
aesthetics’ and what is the ‘appropriate’ Indian aesthetics? What is ‘Native’
aesthetics or theory? Is it the classical Indian (Sanskrit) poetics or is it
‘some’ aesthetics that lies embedded in the literatures of the modern Indian
languages, the vernaculars or is it some tribal aesthetics?
Sanskrit poetics is the natural answer to
both the questions — it is ‘Indian’ Aesthetics and it is culturally,
linguistically and historically ‘appropriate’.
But this position, as we pointed out above,
is strongly contested. The Indian educated elite has been brought up on an
anti-self — more than true to Macaulay’s cheerful submission to his sister, the
educated Indian, particularly the Hindu, suffers from such a deep loss of self
respect that he is unwilling to be recognised as such. He feels, in fact,
deeply threatened by any surfacing or manifestation of the identity that he has
worked so hard to, and has been trained to reject. But it lies somewhere in his
psyche as ‘an unhappy tale’, as something that is best forgotten. It is these
people wearing various garbs — liberal, left, secular, modern — who oppose,
more often than not from sheer ignorance, any attempt to introduce Indian
traditions of thought in the mainstream education system — a classic case of self-hate
taking the form of mother-hate! That things are changing and are bound to
change is a testimony to the sheer vigour of an intellectual tradition that has
seen, in its attested history of thousands of years, many cycles of recession
and renewal. Arguments against Sanskrit poetics are a part of this larger
political argument against the Indian — and to drop the euphemism — what may be
generally described as the Hindu intellectual traditions. Many arguments have
been put forward against Sanskrit poetics. All these many arguments put forth
so far against Sanskrit poetics “as an applicable system for present-day Indian
criticism” have been painstakingly put together in his review of the 1998 book,
Literary Theory: Indian Conceptual
Framework by Mr. John Oliver Perry, whose sheer enthusiasm for opposing
classical Indian thought is unrivalled. One would normally desist from joining
an argument with what is a statement abounding in so many areas of darkness.
But as this statement, in its consolidation of objections, is an ideal
purva-paksha that makes our task that much easier, we will build our siddhanta,
our arguments for Sanskrit poetics, by offering rejoinders to all the many
objections to Sanskrit literary theory listed/articulated by our kind friend.
In Mr. John Oliver Perry’s otherwise complimentary review, eleven objections to
Sanskrit poetics have been formulated. It is said that Sanskrit poetics:
1. is archaic, “of mainly archaeological
interest”;
2. is ‘unacceptable’, for a variety of
reasons, ‘will not be widely adopted in India or elsewhere’;
3. trivialises literature by holding
‘enjoyment’, ‘tranquil pleasure, ananda’ (and not analysis/meaning) as the goal
of literature;
4. is merely theoretical and has no models
for ‘analytical application’.
5. characteristically unstable terminology,
much more than in ‘western criticism’;
6. lacks an ‘authoritative sastra’;
7. is epistemologically limited, relying
heavily as it does on analogy and authority;
8. is based in a ‘metaphysically based
aesthetics’ which allows little room for ‘unmediated sense of things’;
9. claims comprehensiveness, a
‘universalizing’ belied by the theory itself;
10. makes an untenable ‘historiographical
claim to represent the totality of Indian culture’; and’
11. excludes ‘non-Sanskritic oral
literatures... the visible ethnography... cultural diversity’.
We take up these objections one by one:
1. To say that Indian literary theory is now
only ‘of archaeological interest’ is to commit oneself to a major erroneous
assumption: that there is an attested break in India’s intellectual history and
cultural practices — such as the one that afflicted Europe after the sack of
Rome — making room for a renaissance.
This is just not true of India. There has
been no break in the continuous and cumulative intellectual traditions in
different domains of knowledge. Evidence comes from the ordinary language of
the people. The technical terms of various disciplines continue not only to
exist but have become common words of ordinary use in almost all the languages
of India. Witness for example the first two technical terms of Panini’s
Astadhyayi — vridhi and guna — 7th century B.C. grammatical terms, that are
today words of daily use in a shared sense in all the Indian languages. The
whole terminology of Indian literary theories — rasa, dhvani, alamkara,
vakrokti, etc. — is the living vocabulary of Indian languages. It is not just a
question of continuity of words — it means that the concepts are alive and they
continue to be understood and are, therefore, relevant.
There has been, on the other hand, actual
break in the western intellectual tradition, necessitating a Renaissance. We
have already noted (footnote16) what Gilbert Murray says in his introduction to
Byford’s translation of Aristotle’s Poetics that to understand that text one
has to read it in original Greek as “the first nine nouns have no equivalents
in the modern European languages.” This is a conceptual break requiring
elaborate reconstruction / translation of texts followed by reconstruction of
concepts. In India, the opposite holds true — the technical terms have acquired
through continuous use so many overlaid meanings that the exegete has to remove
these layers to reach the core concept. When people talk of continuity of
Indian civilization, it is this continuity of thought.
Also, there is no break in the cultural
practices. India’s folk and oral art forms attest the same continuity and as
the Indian theoretical frames followed, arose in response to cultural
practices, including, even if not principally, folk/oral forms, they continue
to be adequate explanatory constructs for contemporary practices as well.
And then, the Indian frames continue to be
used to evaluate and explain music and dance compositions and performances. One
has to see art (music, dance) reviews in journals and newspapers (particularly
Indian language newspapers) to see how ‘living’ these constructs are. This
applies to verbal compositions in regional languages as well.
It may be of interest for us to know that
after Pt. Jagannatha (17-18th. Century) there have been almost 200 original
compositions in Sanskrit literary theory coming right down to modern times.
Also, Sanskrit poetics after Panditraja Jagannatha has been assimilated into
the Indian languages. There is evidence of this in Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi,
Bangla and so on.
Thus, this is a questionable assumption, the
assumption of a break or a rupture in the Indian cultural / intellectual
tradition between the ‘Sanskrit’ period and the ‘vernacular’ period, something
that actually does not exist but is postulated on the false analogy of the
western history of ideas. From Vedic Sanskrit to Classical Sanskrit to Pali to
Prakrit to Apabhramshas to the modern Indian languages, it is one story of
linguistic-cultural-intellectual continuity.
There are in fact two ‘Indias’ — the
‘English-knowing India’ and the ‘non-English knowing India’. If one may venture
one may say that the Indian theoretical frameworks are of ‘archaeological
interest’ only for those English educated Indians who are in complete
disjunction with their own culture and thought, suffering from, to adapt
Durkheim’s category, intellectual anomie.
2. The charge — Sanskrit intellectual
frameworks are unacceptable for a variety of reasons: ‘The basic reason is that
it is Brahminical...derives its authority from those castes...elitist cultural
baggage’.
This charge, falling in the paradigm of the
familiar Liberal-Marxist attack on the Hindu traditions, like other charges,
stems from a deep ignorance of things Indian. Only a person who has not read
the primary texts and has only read about the texts can make this kind of
statement. Indian literary theories are structural analyses of how meaning is
constituted in literature. Each theory posits unambiguous categories to exhaustively
analyse and describe its object. The objects examined by different theories
are: lexis for Riti school, suggestion or verbal symbolism for Dhvani theory,
possible states of being (human psychological conditions) for Rasa theory,
deviations in the language of literature for Vakrokti theory and and the whole
range of possible figures of speech for the Alamkara theory. Even
interpretation assumes the possibility of determining from among a range of
possible meanings and sets up a category bound system of interpretation that
explains how a particular meaning gets constituted. The categories are
analytical and descriptive and there is nothing in them that is even remotely
suggestive of or bound by ‘caste’ or an exclusive philosophic system. The onus
is on these critics to show which of the sthayi or sancari bhava or the dhvani
categories or the lexical categories or the figures of speech or the methods of
interpretation are ‘caste-bound’ and in what manner? They are invited to take
for example the 50 sancari bhavas of Bharata and examine them. In the absence
of a concrete demonstration, I am afraid the criticism ceases to be honest and
becomes merely a political gesture treading the familiar paradigm of ‘caste —
elephant — snake charmer — rope trick ’ India. Just as we cannot characterise
Plato’s ontological categories as ‘pagan’, just as we cannot characterise
Derrida’s epistemic categories as ‘Jewish’, we cannot characterise any of the
Indian literary theoretic categories as ‘Brahminical’.
A more fundamental error is probably
responsible for this thinking. The tradition talks of three contending schools
of thought (sampradaya) in almost all domains — the Brahman, the Bauddha and
the Jaina. The ‘Brahman’(often wrongly spelled as ‘Brahmin’) does not stand for
the caste — it denotes ‘the school of thought that upholds the category of
Brahman (of Vedanta)’ as against those, the Buddhists and the Jains, for
example who don’t. This Brahman sampradaya is also known in the tradition as
‘the vaiyakaranas’, the grammarians who are often referred to as ‘the first
among the philosophers’. It is a grave error to confuse this appellation with
the caste name. The intellectual frameworks could not be ‘exclusionary’ as
alleged. A culture that allows thought systems ranging from downright
materialist Carvakas to subjective idealist systems such as Vallabha dualism as
recorded and critiqued by Sri Madhavacarya and attests the continued presence
of a strong popular, vernacular tradition of interpretation besides the
learned, could not be and never was uni-polar. No serious Indian text has ever
argued uni-culturalism. The creed is best summed up by the famous statement,
ekam satya vipra bahudha vadanti’ (‘there is a truth out there and the wise
talk of it in different ways’). Bhartrhari in the first Kanda of his unrivalled
Vakyapadiya expressly describes and supports the principle of nanatva
(multiplicity). The world-view / philosophy of a culture cannot be ignored in
any discussion of an appropriate aesthetic. The Indian world-view therefore has
to be taken into account. The critics of an Indian aesthetics rooted in Indian
philosophy reduce Indian philosophy to simple ‘idealism’ and ignore the
tremendous inner differentiation and range of Indian philosophical thinking
from the Carvaka materialism to the Visista Advaita of Ramanuja or the Dvaita
of Madhava. A reference to the 13th century Sarvadarsanasamgraha of
Madhavacarya is a necessary starting point for this understanding Further, as
the categories are not caste or one-system bound — are in fact properly
‘structural’ — one does not see the point of the statement that they are
“uncongenial to this age”. What is ‘uncongenial’ about them? This must be
articulated. To the best of my knowledge no one has called Plato’s categories
‘uncongenial’. One may critique them for their adequacy, show them to be
inadequate or inappropriate for whatever be their object and that will be a
fruitful exercise but you do not prove any thing by using ungrounded adjectives
such as ‘uncongenial’. Are they ‘uncongenial’ because a person brought up on
the western disciplinary diet has to ‘learn’ them all over from a scratch and
to, in fact, ‘re-programme’ his mind?
3. The charge that Indian poetics trivialises
literature by holding ‘enjoyment’, ‘tranquil joy, ‘ananda’ (and not
analysis/meaning/knowledge) as the goal of literature.
This charge assumes, with respect to literary
experience, an opposition between knowledge and joy. It is understandable why
western and western-minded scholars should hold to this opposition. Plato was
the first to separate emotion and reason and right down to Eliot ‘the
dissociation of sensibility’ and the requirement on art to integrate the two
have been the subjects of serious debate. The opposition is not posited by the
Indian mind. According to the Samkhya panch-kosa theory (theory of the
five-layered knowing self), Ananda or joy is the end product of a
well-recognised process of intellection — annamaya kosa, pranamaya kosa,
manomaya kosa, vijnanamaya kosa, and finally anandamaya kosa. All experience
filters inwards from either the outermost layers of passive and active physical
sensory responses or from the senses of knowledge. It is then
‘judged’/’evaluated’ in terms of how it relates to one’s self and is thus
‘sieved’ through the intellect and imprinted on the ‘recording’ or ‘cognising’
self, the citta of the Indian theory of cognition. It is this imprinted
knowledge which is the source of joy which is extraordinary and not to be
compared with ordinary worldly pleasures as it is produced by a certain
‘elevation’ of the self modified by the experience, the transformed self, a
self liberated from its normal narrow boundaries by the ‘knowledge’ given rise
to by the experience. In the context of literature, Abhinavagupta describes this
experience by the phrase sattva-udreka, ‘the rise of sattva, (knowledge of true
essence)’. Our self is permeated by equanimity born of knowledge and this
equanimity is ananda. This explanation makes complete sense to an average
Indian. A western student has to make effort to comprehend this and in the
process study Indian philosophy as well, just as the Indian student of western
literature has to make extra effort to educate himself in western culture and
philosophy before he can truly ‘enjoy’ western literature. This has reference
to Mr. Perry’s complaint that “ ‘we’ the interpreting community, need to be
imbued with Indian philosophy” to enjoy Indian texts. Ironically, this itself
acknowledges the knowledge base of literary enjoyment.
It must be noted that India has a long and
powerful interpretive tradition, sastra-paddhati. However this tika-parampara
is restricted to sastras/sutra-texts which are composed, in aphoristic,
sutraic, form necessitated by the exigencies of the tradition of mind-internal,
oral maintenance of texts. These commentaries perform the dual function of
re-contextualising the text and of re-integrating it with other, often
competing texts in the same domain of knowledge. However, the absence of
commentaries, tika, on Mahabharata, an epic and not a sastra, does not take
away from the fact that this epic is by common consent a knowledge text, an
encyclopaedic text and is almost always accessed in various modes for the
profound wisdom it offers in almost all spheres of life and thought.
One has to read Bhamaha (6th century) to see
what strict requirements some theorists place on literature as a rational
discourse, how a composer (author) is expected to be a master of the sastras,
of the texts of the tradition of literary practices, and of worldly life
(loka). Again one has to read Mahimabhatta to get an idea of how for some
theorists literature is experienced through a process of reasoning (inference).
Again one has to read Abhinavagupta to know how readers’ epistemology is
closely analysed by three major theorists who preceded him. How can all this
make sense if literature is only for pleasure and involves no intellection. The
conclusion is inescapable that those who argue against Sanskrit poetics do not
in fact know what they are arguing against and their criticism is totally
uninformed criticism.
4. The fourth charge is that Indian poetics
is ‘merely theoretical’ and has no models for ‘analytical application’, that
successive models merely enrich the theory without enabling analysis. One does
not understand this charge. Read the primary texts of any of the seven major
theories (listed in the order of development) — Alamkara, Rasa, Riti,
Guna-Dosa, Dhvani, Vakrokti, Aucitya. Each of them is an analytical theory —
each is a system of structurally organised, well-defined categories (a
hierarchy of inter-, intra-related categories) in terms of which any literary
composition can be analysed. In fact they are very elaborate taxonomies and as
such had come in for some criticism on that count. As such they are descriptive
— analytical models. They do not share the speculative character of
contemporary western theory, which is notorious for not specifying/yielding
categories for actual analysis of texts. Each Indian theory makes a monistic
claim about the principal of literariness, alamkara, dhvani, etc., and then
proceeds to lay down a system of categories that articulates the principal. The
Indian discourse, including technical discourse, conditioned by orality, is
injunctive (sutraic), not expository. The foundational theory is not expounded
— it is asserted and then manifested in a categorial structure that assumes a
theoretical framework. It makes no sense therefore to talk of ‘an applicational
model’ as something separate from ‘theory’. Read any primary text and see for
yourself. Bhamaha (5th-6th century AD) is a good text to start with for (i)
theory of literature, (ii) figurative mode, (iii) language of literature, and
(iv) logical requirements on literature as a discourse of knowledge.
It is also said that progressive elaborations
of theories are instances of ‘means enhancement’ that defer ‘means use’. Thus
this concept from contemporary social sciences is used to turn into a
disadvantage what is in fact a distinct merit of the tradition — its continuity
and cumulativeness.
Where are we looking for the applications? In
English journals only? Let us look also in the Indian language magazines and
newspapers. Let us also hear the teacher teaching an Indian language,
literature classroom in the towns and cities away from the metropolis.
As far as Indian English criticism is
concerned, it is not true that Indian theories are not employed at all — it is
one of the frameworks outnumbered no doubt by the contemporary theories. One
has to look at the journals of English studies produced by various university
departments of English to see that such writing is indeed there. However, the
quality of such criticism leaves much to be desired but then the criticism
using contemporary frameworks does not fare much better either. The required
sophistication will come when the theories are studied seriously in the first
case in the university departments and that goes for western theories as well.
5. The fifth charge must surprise the
scholars of Indian literary theory in particular and Indian thought in general
— that the terminology of Sanskrit theories is ‘characteristically unstable’
more than that of western criticism. Those who know the Sanskrit language know
that that Sanskrit vocabulary is a structured vocabulary derived mostly from
1957 verb roots with fixed meaning so that the meaning of almost any Sanskrit
word can be almost uniquely determined by the etymological method. We have
defined, in our book mentioned above, bhava, a category in Rasa Theory in that
manner as ‘that which brings about a state of being’ derived as bhava is from
the verb root bhu, the first root in Panini’s Dhatupatha which means ‘to be’.
The problem, I think is that all this involves enormous amount of learning, and
is quite daunting for those who are not in touch with this tradition.
Interestingly, these concepts are quite familiar to our young students coming
from all parts of the country and this is something that the sceptics can
verify. Not only that — these concepts/words are widely and frequently used by
the people to express their responses to life experiences, including art
experience. It may be noted that Rasa theory has been universally accepted by
all schools of thought and the term is a very high frequency word.
The western critical vocabulary is relatively
very limited and very amorphous — what are the stable analytical tools of
Deconstruction, for example? Of the three analytical categories of New
Criticism, only metaphor is strictly definable, with irony and paradox yieding themselves
to any number of interpretations. Aristotle’s Poetics is the only comparable
sastra in the western tradition with a rich categorial framework, which may
still be employed, is indeed employed, to analyse and evaluate literary
compositions.
General western teachers and critics of
literature do not have the necessary embedding in Indian thought nor are they
expected to have that. When out of curiosity or desire for novelty, they begin
meddling with Indian literary theories they find its categories ‘indeterminate’
because these categories make sense only to those who have the necessary
background in India’ philosophical systems and linguistic thought.
6. The sixth charge is that Indian literary
theory lacks ‘an authoritative sastra’. This charge, it appears stems from a
misreading of the statement made in the book on poetics mentioned above that
poetics, unlike grammar, is not counted among sastras, i.e. technical
disciplines. This is so because the Indian literary tradition lays down very
rigorous requirements for a discipline to qualify as a sastra, one of them
being the existence of an authoritative primary texts such as Panini’s
Astadhyayi in the discipline of grammar. Such a primary text must be an ideal
text from the point of view of its exhaustiveness, its authenticity, its
retainability in the mind, therefore, its pedagogical value. Above all, it must
be composed in the sutraic style so that it can be effectively stored in the
mind. The absence of such a text in the area of the literary theory perhaps
discounted the possibility of poetics being counted among the sastras. We must
remember that only a part of this study, the part dealing with figurativeness
is recognized as a technical discipline and designated as alamkara sastra. The
rest of the study is considered as vidya, sahitya vidya. This is from within
the tradition but if we compare literary theory texts of the western tradition,
each and every text of the Indian tradition is strictly a technical composition
composed in a very rigorous style and structured to focus on very well defined
issues. Refer, for example, to Bharata’s Natyasastra at the beginning of the
tradition or Bhamah’s Alankarsutra, the 5th/6th-century text with their
well-defined subject matter. Refer also to Mahima Bhatta’s Vyaktiviveka, a text
dealing with the inferential process of auditing a literary composition, or
Kuntaka’s Vakroktvivita (11th century) or Pt. Jagannatha’s Rasgangadhara, the
17th/18th-century text that employs the terminology of navya nyaya to analyse literary
compositions and aesthetic experience. Going by these parameters, Aristotle’s
Poetics is the only sastra in the western tradition. The statement that there
is no sastra in poetics, in the strict sense of the tradition, does not mean
that there is no discipline or that there are no texts or no history of
disputation or that the texts or discussion is trivial.
7. The seventh charge is that Indian literary
theory is epistemologically limited, relying as it does on analogy and
authority. This is difficult to understand whose epistemology are we talking
of? The poet’s, the critic’s or the reader’s? The author’s epistemology is the
epistemology of an experiencer including in its range all the modes from
perception to intuition. However, the critic’s or the reader’s epistemology is
limited to sabda, words on the page, unless a text is performed or enacted in
which case perception becomes a major epistemological mode. Analogy is a very
important mode of both constituting and interpreting knowledge and has been an
important mode in the Indian philosophical as well as other traditions. But as
every student of Indian philosophy knows, analogy is not the dominant
epistemology in any system. Even in literary theory when the poeticians
Sankuka, Bhatta Lolatta, Abhinavagupta are talking of how literary experience
is audited, their analyses range over perception, inference, verbal cognition
and self-realisation (atmasakshatkar). The question of authority similarly has
to be first located. Whose authority and for whom? The authority of the primary
thinkers of a School for the followers of that School or the authority of the
author/composer for the critic/reader or the authority of the critical texts
for lay critics and readers? As the Indian literary theory is marked by a number
of contending Schools and a continuous debate among them, it is difficult to
understand this charge of verbal authority as the only epistemology.
8. The eighth charge is that Indian literary
theory is a ‘metaphysically based Aesthetics … that concept requires language,
that there are no unmediated senses of things’. This is a very confusing
statement. This charge picks up a major strand in Indian philosophy of
language, that of Bhartrhari, who argues that all this jagat, universe, is a
linguistic construct. It is a conception based in the physics of speech as
enunciated in the Upanishads — specifically the claim that vak (speech) is
rooted in prana (breadth) and mana (mind). There are logical gaps in calling
Indian literary theory ‘a metaphysically based aesthetics’ because the literary
theory assumes the truth of this conception of language. First of all the
Upanisadic claims that language is routed in breadth and mind is a statement of
physical, empirical fact and not a metaphysical construct. Second, in the long
tradition of thinking about the nature of language, this concept along with the
Rgvedic statement that ‘language cuts forms in the ocean of reality’ (1-164-45)
serves as the seed thought which is gradually elaborated into a whole
philosophy of linguistic constructivism by Bhartrhari in opposition to the
Buddhist philosophy of non-linguistic/non-determinate cognition. The third
position is that of the Nyayikas who argue that cognition is both determinate
and non-determinate. Thus, powerful systems of thought elaborately argued by
the respective exponents in texts continue to be available. The literary
theorists belong to the tradition of grammarians and subscribe to the view that
language constructs reality including the so-called ‘unmediated senses of
things’. The real experience in life is structured and cognized through the
conceptual framework in the mind, which is not different from the linguistic
framework and what a literary report involves, is an explicit verbalization of
this real experience, including ‘the sense of things’. Finally, the aesthetics
of poeticians such as Bharata, Bhamaha and Mahima Bhatta can by no stretch of
imagination be described as a metaphysically based aesthetics. In the same way
to describe a rasa experience as a metaphysical experience amounts to using
words loosely. There is no agreement among the Indian theorists about the
nature of rasa experience — for Bharata it is an objective experience of the
auditor, of the receiver as a preksaka, i.e. observer. For Mahima Bhatta it is
an intellectual experience gained through reasoning. For Abhinavgupta it is
something that is experienced and attested within one’s owned self, a process
that for Abhinavgupta is not different from direct perception. That all
experience, including literary experience is subjective in a sense does not
render it metaphysical. It is a pity that such substantial issues are discussed
at merely surface levels.
9. There is the ninth charge that Indian
literary theory particularly the rasa theory claims a comprehensiveness,
universalizing that is contradicted by ‘subjective reception and transformation
of selective emotions into modes of self-realization’.
There is no doubt that Bharata’s rasa theory
aims at taxonomy of states of being bhava likely to be encountered by a human
being. Fifty such states of being have been listed and a structure of
causation, nature and effect of each one of them has been rigorously analyzed.
This by itself is an extraordinary achievement. Over more than two thousand
years only one more state of being could be added to this list and that by
another intellectual giant Abhinavgupta of Kashmir who argued from the
foundations of Kashmir’s Saivism and Advaita and posited santa rasa, a state of
equilibrium/tranquility, as the ninth rasa. If its comprehensiveness, which
incidentally has never been claimed by Bharata, is questioned it is open for us
to identify and posit other states of being. If is often argued that the
Absurd, for example, is not accounted for by this theory. There are two
responses to this — one the rasa theory is an open-ended theory and therefore
it is for some critic/thinker to steadily analyze the Absurd and add as the
52nd state of being. If it is perceived as a recurring/immanent experience of
modern times, add it as the 10th rasa. The second response is that it is
possible to show that the theory as it exists can account for the state of the
Absurd provided we apply the rasa — categorical framework with a certain degree
of sophistication.
In any case, a tradition, which has competing
theories and a debate cannot be accused of monism or ‘universalizing’.
10. The tenth charge is that the Indian
literary theory makes an untenable historiographical claim to represent the
totality of Indian cultures and histories. There is politics in this charge.
Every Indian knows that wherever he goes or travels in this vast land, he feels
and thinks that he is in the same desa, country, that even when he does not
share the language of fellow Indians, he shares the outlook, the worldview and
the language of the mind. In the same way there is a pan-Indian ‘culture’ i.e.
a set of codes for language, dance, music, poetry etc. The pan-Indianness does
not at all apply with uniformity or absoluteness. Indians are not monistic
people unlike the members of western Christian civilization whose monism
expresses itself in all domains of knowledge from philosophy to cartography.
Indian thinkers have a model and, what may be best described as, a type
existing in and realised as so many tokens. Brahma existing in everything and
in all but not in any one unit. This is the Advaita model and it is this model
that informs Indian thinking across disciplines. Thus, in literary theory,
Rajasekhara in his familiar legendary mode describes how particular form or
style or theme of composers originate at ‘X’ and then spreads and proliferates
in different parts of this geographic entity called (cakravarti ksetra, a
territory bounded like a wheel but internally differentiated) and takes local
habitation and name, from the local cultures. This is a very valid model of the
combination of the global and the local and this is in fact the defining
characteristic of a good theory.
India’s visible ethnography contradicts the
European one-language-one-nation-one-state model and thus enables west and
western inspired political thinkers to say that India is not a nation but a
combination of nationalities. This theory is negated by Indian experience — you
stand in a queue in any one of the four major dhama, places of pilgrimage on
the four corners of the country — Badrinath, Rameshwaram, Dwarka, Jagannathpuri
— and you find that you are among people who are ethnically different and speak
different languages, who dress themselves differently, who eat different kinds
of food and yet their language of the mind is one and the same. In a text as
old as the Atharva Veda, prthvi sukta, the word rastra is used in a hymn that
reads like this — “O Mother Earth, destroy those who want to subjugate my
rastra by sastra (weapons) or sastra (ideas)”. It may be argued that this
concept excludes the religious minorities. Not at all. If you leave the
political sphere all Indians live and think the Indian culture. Moreover, the
Christian culture and character of western countries, the UK and the USA, for
example, is not supposed to exclude or function to the detriment of their
sizeable minorities. The House of Commons shall always start with a reading
from the Psalms and the President of the US shall always be a Christian. This
rhetoric may be excused — it is inspired by rhetoric.
11. Finally, there is the assertion that
Indian literary theory as enshrined in texts composed in Sanskrit excludes
‘non-Sanskrit oral literatures…’. This is another example of an argument that
is constructed because you have something to prove. Oppositions are set up
because we wish to prove not just diversity but irreconcilable diversity of
various strands in the mosaic of Indian socio-cultural reality. Thus we set up
oppositions such as between Sanskrit as the language of the elite and the
speech of common people of the times, opposition between Sanskrit and modern
Indian languages and opposition between Sanskrit as an expression of the
literate culture and the oral literatures. None of these is tenable. Sanskrit
literary theory, as Professor AK Warder pointed out long time back, is
empirical — it follows widespread practice; it does not prescribe; it
describes. Bharata’s Natyasastra continues to be the text of sravya-preksa
(aural-visual) performances such as yaksa-gana of Karnataka, kathakali of
Kerala, baul performances of Bengal and the folk dances of Punjab, Gujarat and
Rajasthan, etc. To understand the relationship between the learned tradition
and the popular tradition in India, all we have to do is to examine the relationship
between Valmiki’s Ramayana as the archetypal texts and the innumerable Ramlilas
performed in towns and villages of north India. There is the same type — token
relationship that we have talked about in one of the earlier sections — a
construct is articulated and realized in a number of ways but all of them are
recognizable as expressions of the given construct. It is no different from
what happens in speech. Every sound such as ‘P’ that we hear is a realization
of an abstract sound, the abstract ‘P’, a unit in the phonological system. The
actually heard ‘P’ is not the same as the abstract ‘P’ and yet, at the same
time, it is not different from the abstract ‘P’. And all the actually heard
‘P’s’ are different from each other phonetically and yet are individual
realizations of the same abstract ‘P’. All unities are founded on this type of
structure, a structure identifiable in the classical Indian conceptual
framework broadly as Advaita.
At the end, I would like to report what
Professor Namwar Singhji once said in his presidential remarks in an Indian
International Centre seminar. He talked of the global versus the local and of
the need to critically evaluate both our own literary traditions and the
western theories and to find ways of reconciling them. The situation today as
he saw it was much more complex with the English language becoming a global
language and the English texts assuming the status of hyper-canonical texts.
Identities and living traditions enter into an argument with the global and in
this argument we need theories to resist theory. What one has to strive for is
a proper interaction and disputation for the simple reason that the vast Indian
reality particularly non-metropolitan, literary or any other, will continue to
be explicable adequately only in terms of Indian theoretical constructs. That
must be the base and other constructs must come in as modifiers. There is no
disjunction or break in the Indian history of ideas and the effort to set up
the vernacular in opposition to the Sanskrit and other such efforts are good
political acts but intellectually poor, if not dishonest. The tradition of
literary thinking cannot be wished away. Its intellectual strength is
unquestionable. And it lives — it lives in folk practices, popular
compositions, much of vernacular literatures and in the vernacular classrooms.
That it does not live vibrantly in the academic discourse of mainstream
education is a commentary on the education system itself.
To sum up :
As we said elsewhere, a theory is a code of a
cultural community’s expectations from its art forms, rooted as is in the
community’s literary practices. As such it is more sufficient and adequate
explanatory construct for the native responses to literary texts and the
preferred forms such as the verse narratives of love and death. Having
originated in oral compositions, it is very much equipped to handle even folk,
oral literatures. It is culturally determined questions that the western
literary theory quite legitimately asks and that raise the questions of their
validity for us. For example, the focus on interpretation, the determination of
meaning as the goal of theory begs the question of the status of literature as
a discourse of knowledge and of its place in the verbal discourse of the
community. Both the Indian and western traditions began with certain
ambivalence on this question but then with Aristotle, the western tradition
diverged and accorded literature a pre-eminent epistemological status as a
discourse of knowledge. This is also accounted for by the absence of a
continuous and cumulative philosophical tradition in the western history of
ideas which otherwise too is marked by a break with, a rupture from its
classical past during what is known as the Middle Ages. No such thing happened
here as we have argued above — and it is erroneous to conceptualize ‘after
amnesia’ — and continued to make a distinction between sastra and kavya while
according an intermediate status to itihasa-purana. On this count only that
part of poetics is given the status of sastra that deals with rhetoric, the
figural mode. We can not go into the details of the whole debate here and seek
only to note an important stage in its development. As the validity of
literature as a discourse of knowledge is crucially contingent on the fact that
it is a verbal discourse, its epistemic validity depends on how far language is
itself an adequate representational system, on the nature of relationship that
holds between language and reality. And if language is a constructivist system,
as the Indian linguistic tradition — and now Deconstruction — holds, then it is
completely problematic to construct and evaluate social and other forms of
reality from verbal representations. Abhinavagupta in the 11th century
discusses this question, this point of view that literary knowledge is the
knowledge of the non-present, paroksa-jnana, and argues, in the mode of Jain
epistemology, that since pratyaksa, perception, is what is atma-pratyaksa,
present to the inner self, and as sabdika-jnana, verbally evoked knowledge is
also atma-pratyaksa, literary / verbal knowledge has also the same status /
validity as pratyaksa-jnana. This makes the meaning in literature a linguistic
construct.
Those who are familiar with contemporary
theories will accept the relevance and significance of this foundational view
that informs Indian philosophy of language and Indian poetics. As for literary
interpretation, the current obsession, while the epics have been commented upon
and explicated, the purely imaginative compositions have not come in for
interpretation for the strong reasons cited above. But the framework for
interpretation is available in the philosophical tradition and if now we assign
a different value to metropolitan literature and have to interpret it, the
Indian theory is rich enough to be extended to this body of texts as well. What
is often forgotten is that for interpretation one needs a rich theory of
meaning in the absence of which interpretation becomes a whimsical
free-wheeling speculation which is what most of contemporary exercises amount
to. We have a long attested tradition of thinking about meaning — by the
Buddhists, the Jains and the Grammarians (Brahmins) — beginning with the
concept of symbolic meaning in the Sruti texts and culminating in Bhartrhari
that meaning is in application. There are wide ranging theories dealing with
the language of literature, its figural mode, the verbal symbolism, the
markedness of literary discourse, the principle of appropriateness, the
relationship of literature to logic and to life, theories of genre, structure
and types of narratives and the nature of literary experience. Finally, a
theory as rich as Bhartrhari’s in terms of its lexical analysis, its sentential
/ propositional analysis, its analysis of figurativeness, its speech-act and
situational contexts and conditions of use (cf. Vakyapadiya, II 315-316), will
allow a whole range of interpretations from the sociological to the abstract.
Mammata demonstrates its applicability in his 13th century text Kavya Prakasa.
We must also reject the view that Indian
literary theory has a metaphysical goal and is reducible to just rasa-dhvani
principle. Ananda as a characterization of literary experience must be
recognised as a cognitive and not an emotive construct.
The problem with the critics is that they
believe in all their innocence, that what they do not know, or do not care to
know, does not exist!
The tasks that emerge from this statement are
self evident:
A. (i)
we should expound meticulously the different Indian theories by writing
commentaries on them;
(ii)
we should develop applicational models from different theories.( of the kind
developed from Rajashekhara by self and reported in Odyssey. Journal of
Philosophy and Literature, GNDU, Amritsar, 1995);
(iii)
we should promote application of these models to a wide variety of Indian and
western texts, an exercise that will in the process refine the models and may
also extend the theory;
B. (i)
we should build philosophy into literary studies and prepare simple
translations of primary texts of Indian philosophy and write simple
introductions to Indian philosophical systems;
(ii)
we should research the relationship between philosophy and aesthetics and
prepare a contextualised history of Indian aesthetics upto modern times;
(iii)
we should research the rise and development of Indian languages and literatures
— prepare authentic histories to show the continuities.
C. (i)
such histories will undoubtedly show a remarkable continuity of concerns and
thought that is unique to the Indian intellectual traditions and would
establish the invalidity of the ‘rupture’ or ‘amnesia’ hypotheses.
(ii)
we should engage the question whether India is one cultural entity or not and
discuss this not just in the context of Western political cultural parameters
but also, and mainly, in terms of our own attested thinking in this regard;
(iii)
we have to reargue the validity and relevance of the principle of transcendence
for Indian multiple reality;
(iv)
we should research the nature of Indian philosophy specifically in relation to
India’s multilingualism and the so-called multi-culturalism, specifically the
Great Tradition in relation to the Minor Traditions; Finally,
(v)
we should re-investigate ‘nativism’ by asking whether there really is an
opposition or a radical divide between the vernaculars and Sanskrit, whether we
cannot see an unbroken growth or development from the classical period to the
modern period in the history of ideas and in the rise and formation of Indian
languages.
To enable the fulfillment of such an agenda,
systemic changes in the syllabi and course work are of course crucial to
cultivate a generation of young scholars who are familiar with Indian thought.
Relevant Indian thought must be made a part of the syllabi of various
disciplines. However, our effort cannot wait on that and as individuals we can
set our own goals towards a common end.
©
Kapil Kapoor, JNU, New Delhi, 2001