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• Subalternity and Religion

This book explores the relationship between mainstream and marginal or

subaltern religious practice in the Indian subcontinent, and its entanglement

with ideas of nationhood, democracy and equality. With detailed readings

of texts from Marathi and Hindi literature and criticism, the book brings

together studies of Hindu devotionalism with issues of religious violence.

Drawing on the arguments of Partha Chatterjee, Martin Heidegger and

Jacques Derrida, the author demonstrates that Jndian democracy, and indeed

postcolonial democracies in general, do no t always adhere to Enlightenment

ideals of freedom and equality, and that reiigion and secular life are inextric-

ably enmeshed in the history of the modern, whether understood from the

perspective of Europe or of countries formerly colonized by Europe, T h e r e ~fore subaltern protest, in its own attempt to lay claim to history, must rely

on an idea of religion that is inextricably intertwined with the deeply i n v i d i ~ous legacy of nation, state, and civilization. The author suggests that the

c o ~ e x j s t c n c e of acts of social altruism and the experience of doubt born from

social strife-"miracle" and "violence"-ought to be a central issue for

ethical debate. Keeping in view the power and reach of genocidal Hinduism,

this book is the first to look at how the religion of marginal communities at

once affirms and turns away from secularized religion.

This important contribution to the study of vernacular cosmopolitanismin South Asia will be of great interest to historians and political theorists, as

well as to scholars of religious studies, South Asian studies an d philosophy,

Milind Waka nkar teaches in the Department of English, SUNY Stony Brook,

USA. He received his PhD in English and Comparative Literature and

Postcolonial Theory from Columbia University. His current work involves a

monograph on Ramchandra Shukla and a critical commentary on the

Dnvaneswari.



Intersections: Colonial and Postcolonial HistoriesEdited by Gyanendra PandeyEmory Vf/iversi!]; VS "

...:ditorilll Advisory Board: Partllo Chatterjee. Columbia University/Calcutta;

Stev('ll Hahn. University of Pennsylvania; David Hardiman, University of

Warwick; Bruce Kf/au/t. Emory University; Rajeswal'i Sunder Rajan, New

York UnivcrsilylB<lngalore: and Ann Stoler. New School of Social Research

This series is conceflled with three kinds of intersections (or conversations):

first, across cultures and regions, an interaction that postcolonial studies have

emphasized in their foregrounding of the multiple sites and multi-directional

tralfic involved in the making of the modern; second, across time, the o n v e r ~sation between a mutually constitutive past and present that (){;Curs in d i t f e r ~ent times and places; and thirdly, between coloniat and postcolonial histories..

which as theoretical positions have very different perspectives on the first

two "intersections" and the questions of intellectual enquiry and e x p r e s ~sion implied in them. These three kinds of conversations are critical to the

making of any present a.nd any history. Thus the new series provides a forumfor extending our understanding of core issues of human society and its

s e l f ~ r c p r e s e n t a t i o n over the centuries.

While focusing on Asia, the series is Opel) to studies of other parts of the

world that are sensitive to c r o s s ~ c u l t u r a l . c r o s s ~ c h r o n o l o g i c a l and c r o s s ~colonial perspectives. The series invites submissions for s i n g l e ~ a u t h o r e d and

edited books by young as welJ as established scholars that challenge the i m i t ~ations or inherited disciplinary, chronological and geographical boundaries..

even when they focus on a single. w e l l ~ b o u n d e d territory or period.

1. Subaltern Citizens and their Histories

Investigations from India and the USA

tailedby Gyanendra Pandey

2. Subalterllity and Religion

The prehistory of Dalit empowerment in South Asia

Mi/ind Wakallk(ll'

r

Subalternity and ReligionThe prehistory of Dalit empowerment

in South Asia

Milind Wakankar

~ ~ o ~ : ~ ~ ~ f i ~LONDON AND NEW YORl<



First published 2010

by Routledge

•

2.,Park Square, Mihon Park, Abingdon, Oxon OXl44RN

Slmultaneously published in rhe USA and C· . d·by Routledge ,11M a

170 Madison Avenue, New York, NY ]0016

R o u : ~ d g e is an imprint of he Taylar & Francis Grout>

an tnJorma business r'

ij 2010 Milind Wakankar

Tyr;esel in Times byR e h n e C ~ t c h Limited, Bungay,Suffolk

Pnnted In the UK by the MPG BooksGroup

All rights reserved. No part of this b<lok be .reprodu:e<l Of utilized in any form or by : ' ; e l e c : ~ ~ t e d ormechanIcal.or other means, now k""w • f •. td · I ' "" nor"ereaterm ~ e n e ,inC tidIng photOCopying and r d' -In/ormation storage or retrieval ecor mg, or In anywriting from the publishers, system, WIthout perrmsslO11 in

British Library Cataloguing ill PubliCa/ion D I

A catalogue. record for this book is availablea afrom the Bntish Library

WLibrary ofG'onf!!ess Catafoging-in-Publicmion Dala

akankar_ M!imd_

Subalternity an d religion' the t' >

South Asia f Milind Wilk1;nkilte

Hstory 01 Dalit empowerment in

r ~ ~ I ~ d ~ / ~ ~ ~ ~ i ~ ; ~ ~ ~ ~ i ~ \ ~ ~ ~ ~ ; : : i ~ ~ J ~ POds.toodlonial histories; 2)IRI"' . "Unmex_

" e 19J.on an d SOCial status--Indiil-Histori ' .Historiography. J. Dalils-S ial d" ography. 2, Dahts-life, L Title. oc con lflOns_ 4. Dalits-,--ReligiOlls

BUOI S.s6W35 201 0

2.00,86'940954--Je22

2009031781

294.5'48693--de22

2009031560

ISBN 10:0-415--77878--6 (hbk)

ISBN 10: 0-2W-85965-0 (ebk)

ISBN U: 978-0-415-77878-7 (hbk)

ISBN 1 : 97&· 0--203 -85965--0 (ebk)

Contents

preface

PART IIntroduction: the question of a prehistory

Subaltemity at the cusp: limits and openings

of the dalit critique

2 Moral rite berore myth and law: death incomparative religion

3 The time of having-found (God): languages

of datit hearsay

PART II

The i c i ~ ' S i t u d e s of hl...torical religion

4 The anomaly of Kabir: historical religion in

Dwivedi's Kabir (1942)

5 The pitfalls of a dalit theology:Dr. Dharmvir's critique of Dwivedi (1997)

6 System and history in Rajwade's "Grammar'"

for the Dnyaneswari (1909)

PART IIIThe prehistory of historical religion

7 The suspension of iconoclasm: myth and

allegory in the time of deities

vii

3

11

25

37

39

75

93

125

127



'"Contents

8 Miracle and violence: the allegorical turn in

Kabir. Dnyaneswara, and Tukaram•

9 Deity and daivat: the antiq uity oflight inTukaram

Noles

Bibliography

Index

147

17l

188

195

201

r

,j

i'

Preface

The analyses in this book arc grounded in my conviction that the origins of

religious experience are worth renewed critical scrutiny. Those origins may

well lie at some remove from the cu rrent unraveling of historical religion the

world over, and especially in South Asia. I am intrigued by the possibility that

older ways of understanding divinity are couched in the everyday idioms of

the subcontin ent's many languages. I have tried here to write a history of the

traditions of daHt (untouchable) sapience, which is to say the mystic traditions that are associated with the poetry of low-caste peoples. In instances

such as the "Kabir" corpus, which has grown over five centuries, it is often thc

case that the line between the work of the original poet and the scribes who

sign their poems in his name is blurred. The scribe and the poet are not the

same individual. It is just that the scribe is often a votary of mainstreamforms of religion such as Vaishnavism, or of low-caste movements that havc

acceded to brahmanism. such as the Kabirpanthi sects. He writes a poemmodeled after the original poet and signed in the lauer's name, but inflccted

with the religious or political needs of the moment. I imagine this scribe as

reaching toward political empowerment. That is to say. that I detect a con

tinuity between these scribes and contemporary empowered dalits who claimKabir as a daHt god. (The task of tracing the itinerary of the scribe is outside

the scope of this book. Scholars of Kahir such as Charlotte Vaudeville, Linda

Hess and David Lorcnzen have made major contributions in this regard.

Sheldon Pollock and others have brilliantly traced such networks across thesubcontinent over vast epochs of time.) The focus here is on the murky histor

ical moment at either end of that movement: which is to say, the poet and theempowered dalit who claims him as his own, he who countersigns the seal of

the poet. I see in the laUer's practice a "reference" to the enabling wisdom

of the original poct. In a sense what I have attempted here is a history of

signature and countcr-signature. I want to describe what happens when thc

same precious seal is vouched for once again, but with a difference. The relay

involved can bc one of stereotype (prejudice); but it could also be one of an

ancient form of generosity and care.

So what I have attempted herc is only minimally difierent from a history of

mainstrcam Inrms of Hindu devotionalism such as bhakti. My point is that



viii Preface

the o w ~ c a s t e forms of mystic speech I describe in these pages are als t f

that larger story deitjes, temples, p i ~ g r i l T I a g e s , religious n a t i o l l a l ~ s ~ ~ rmy concern here IS to see how there IS an ever so sli ht t

mainstream religion in the work of these low-caste T h ~ r n . a w ~ y ~ r o mdeparture from the mainstream is crucial Th h P .' 1 IS ~ ~ f i f l l t e s l l n a lbook rests on it. This is what saves the c . e r ctanca ambition of this

"miraclt;" and "violence") from appc ~ n c e p t s used here (such as "hearsay,"

b h -anng as mere verbal c ", I Ide s eef effrontery to pretend that . ' oncel s. t WOll

For it can only ever be supplement ~ l e ; , t n c l r c ~ m V e l l t the history of bhakti.

this agenda is complicated by the rae t t h . r ~ ~ a hterary-critical point of view.pocts is borrowed from the larger na

t" e ? n c e p t u , a l , v o c a b u l a r y of thesedescribed as the reliance 0 h ' e Ie tlddltlon, ThiS IS a tendency I have

, 11 earsay on the fact of "h ' Icommg of God" The Ian h' aVlllg Icard of ther ' guages t at embrace th' t

( IVerse; they may even be discollt inu ' h IS even are many and

the veillacular and the cosmoporl,ow'hwlt

each other, Between registers of' f ' I an t ey refer us to the 'd "atlOn 0 the holy It IS crucial' b ' ' , gran trallsfigur-h

' 0 cal III nund one fund It e book: that there is nothin I 'd I amenta assumption in

g ou Sl e tI e already com 'd dp r ~ l e m a t i c d o m a i n of historica l religion, promIse an deepb'

, ne cannot but proceed in these investigati ' I 'With regard to emancipatory projects that i n v ~ n s w ~ ~ 1 0 ~ t an l I l , n ~ t e pessimismI am also skeptical of the ex I " ' ' Ive hlstoncal religion or nation.

pan,. 01 y promIse of phi] I I

analyses here address the limits or thI '

osoplY

or t leory; thethe "ethical" problem that is i m p l i c ' t ~ o r y , can see no ?ther purpose behind

decide if the poets here have had to ~ : k : t : : . o r ~ here. It to the reader to

has once again trounced works 'th d'ffi. Y or theory, 11 Western thoughtlet that all critical work on td" a elentprovenance."Thisisthegaunt_R ' 0 lao Iterature has had t '

aJwade and Shukla through to F 'd l I H ' 0 negotiate, fmm

Inspired though it is by those t o w e ~ ~ g Ie ardy and ,Dipesh Chakrabarty,

likely to have many shortcomings I t ' ~ ~ v e m e n t s . tillS book is nonetheless

claim that it has not "let na r 'II os here orealt the more susceptible to theIve lOUg t speak for its If" Th I

essential and productive dilemma of II ' I" e . e atter is theof COlonialism. And so this work, a 'brec

uatlOn marked by the experience

Th ooem races the taint oft h' de stigma of betrayal recurs like th "I ra Ison es clercs,

at the very least productive of e

l

ete,rna return of the same," and is thus

, new va uatlOns of ideas be" 'hmto the gloaming The way 'h . lore ey too recede, e poets appear h "t If '

stake, I do not quote liberally from wh t ,ere IS t se a sign of what is at

of pOems that can be used to a h III any case contested collections

thought of one poem treating :,aYa

anyt lllg a,nd everything; I stay with theh 's potent mcantator 't Th h

t, roughout this book is on the "singular" e x " n :, , , ~ e . m p asisVIolence) of the "saint-poet" d pellence (the selhsh lllstght into

the gathering of devotees Theras

, ~ p o s ~ to collective devotionalism of

presume to speak of the d'alit sC: IS af

so t lh question of whether this book can

k ne rom t e outside I offi th Ito en of my belief in and debt t th ' . '. r ese ana yses as aent in the daHt critique, I am Ofo'h e ~ e ~ t epIstemologIcal possibilities inher-

, , e OpmlOn that the surest , 'bto It IS through persistently criti I way 0 contn ute

ca engagement.

P1

Preface IX

I referred above to the wholly compromised field of religious practice, And

yet something like the positivity of moral rite and moral conduct is indeed

discernible therein, This is because the form of belief I have in mind refers to

an experience of divinity in the past, not in the future, The future has already

been written into the trajectory of nation and historical religion, This book

casts a backw ard glance to that fleeting past, and in this way tries to describe

an allegorical or narratival mindset that "looks back," (I use the term

"narratival" after the later Schelling and Rosenzweig, two thinkers whose

influence on this book is incalculable.) The term "mindset" is not used herecondescendingly: I have in mind ancient systems of memory and recall as

they have been described in the seminal work of Frances Yates (1966), To

make this point, I often use the phrase "mind imprint'· interchangeably with

"mindset." It is worth noting that "looking back" is the inverse of nostalgia:

it is about a finding (of God). not a mode of loss--even ir that finding has

itself receded into t he past. For this reason, the imperative is to grasp what is

a form of transcendental self-exposure at the heginninK, I speak or a back

ward gklnce: it seems to me too that. like the poets I write about. o ne can only

ever east a glance from one 's standpo int in the present. That is to say. from a

religious scene that is nothing if not historical.

It is for this reason that the two terms I usc to describe Kabir's funda

menwl insight. viz . "miracle" and "violence," aref lo l

taken from the ontological lexicon of Kabir himself. The first term is theological. although it

is linked lor me with the critique of theology in Spinoza and Lessing, It

is a reference to the event of the coming or Go d to man; it does not refer to

miracles that guarantee the historical transformation to be wrought by

a particular religion, The second term is taken from the wide array or work

on violence and counter-insurgency. exemplified by the writings of Gyan

Pandey. Both terms enable us to place Kabir in the ruins of the modern, Thi:.

is where we see him practice his peculiar lorm of "living death." I argue that

this form of "living death" is of millennial significance. It harks back to

what ( will describe as the death-rite of the Kapalika, is prefigured in

Dnyaneswara. finds echoes in Tukaram. and helps provide today the ground

before politics ror the dalit subject on the cusp of political society, Kabir's

'-'living death" takes place at the luminous center of an age-old tradition, It i:,

here, at the hollowed ou t core of the social world that Kabir's God.. his

abstract "Ram" dares to rejoin violence with tenderness (kautuka), ardor

(cada), affection (avad) and lightness (sadh)·-··to use Marathi terms irradiated

with the spirit of Dnyaneswara, Namdeva, Kabir. Eknath and Tukaram, The

critical labor of this book works between terms used by the poets themselves

and concepts taken rrom historical religion (such as "miracle" and "vio

lence"), The challenge is to conceive or a "logic" that can account at once for

the philological specificity of the fonner and the historical provenance of the

latter. It seems to me that this is one way or rejuvenating our vernacular

"science," modes of thinking that perdure in marginalized tongues,

All around us there are signs or that one great monument of our modernity.



x Preface

which is rcally the idol, the eidolon of Out . d·ffi .h . , In I ercnce·-we pnde ou 1

on avmg set up an "inner world" ofreli io '. se yesprotect, preserving DUll desires and wills

gf r : : : ' h a ~ can raise barners to and

our very own worlds, with our deities at th wlthm so as to into effectments. From such an indifferent int . . e chenter of these Willed e n v i r o n ~

·11 d enonty t at merely puts' IWI e worlds and proceeds to mak d" . III P ace ourouter, let us try to turn aw e IstmctlOns between the inner and the

body, not just the e m p o w e % ~ ~ ; ~ I ~ e ~ ~ I t ~ r e s of mirac.le that .tell the wholedirectedness (a "non-indifference") It • ow to prachce an Inward other·

away from precisely the "turningi ~ w a r ~ ' ~ ~

seem strange that I seek a turnhaving achieved in the Indo-Isla· .11 we congratulate ourselves on. mle mt enmum before ad' I 'Ism. We think of this as the great tide of 0 ' '" n since co oOlal·the south in the seventh centur and bro: p u l ~ ~ religIOSity that came from

bhaktiwas only a placing of a s t ~ at th e lers of caste and creed. Butthat understood itself in the reg d e ~ e ~ t t l , a t t h e v e r y ~ e a r t o f a H i n d u i s mreligion. Bhakti turned the barrie:: l ? l n ; i ~ ~ Judaism as a historical

a cordon around the inner region of heart aw mwa.rd set them up asas the bhakti religion of the so I that . ' We unthlllkmgly celebrate this

H i n d u ~ s m , rendering it modern ~ l l d e n l i r e £ ~ ; e n a t e d an effete legalistic

severe II I this myth of a Reformation in J - l i ~ d u ~ e d , or at least we like to per

away from this religion in order to turn t o w a r ~ m h T ~ d a y we ~ a v e to !.urn

to a .new comportment in place. It is to th " t e"orm poht.lcs reqUiredas It reSides in our historical me d e f ~ c t (gothl) of his furn awaywills that. I dedicate the following: ; : s .an Continues to operate within our

A verSion of Chapter 2's discussion of the K .explicit reference to issues of " r a " d' ~ p a h ~ a where I make moreQuestion of a Prehistory" in C ce d an mdlgenelty, appeared as "The, . ' Jyanen ra Pandey ed "$ b It C' .

Special Issue of Interventions 10'3 (N b ., u a ern Itlzens,"

presented at the second c o n f e r e n ~ on ~ ~ : ~ a ~ r . 2 0 0 , ~ ) : 285-·302. It was first

ies," at Emory University during December 7_.t;tn Citizens and their I - l i s t o r ~Lal, Gyan Pandey and Laurie Patton for th ' .2007. I am grateful to Ruby

Chapter 6's analysis of Rajwade's "G elr o ~ m e n t s on that occasion.

appeared in essentially the same fo . r ~ m m a r for th : Dnyaneswari has

Aquil eds, History in Ihe V e r n a c l i l a / ~ ~ ~ h i ' a ~ t h a Chatterjee and Raziuddin

read at a con terence at the Centre for S t u d i e e r ~ a ~ e n . t B l a ~ k , 2008). It wasduring December 28-30 '004 1 t t h k

SIII Social SCiences, Kolkata.

, - . wan 0 t an S'b .. B dhengagement with the paper. I aJI an opadhyay for his

A fragment of Chapter 4 appeared as "Th A .and Canonicity in Indian Modernit "i n M se n o m a l ~ of Ka?lr: Cultureand A' a Sk' . y,. . S. PandJan Shall Mayaram

J y an a Subaltern Studies: Volume XII (Delh·' p'2005). I. ennanent Black,

I would like to thank Rajkamal P r aka s h ' . .granted to translate large scctions of Hazari r a : ~ d ~ e r " ; 1 , l s s l o n . gracefully

This is the place to make note of some O l d ~ r d . Wlvedl s K a b l f ~ b o o k .Ganesh Joshi, Mccnakshi MUkhcrJ'e R' r Bebts. R. D. Thakur, Chandra

c, 1m I hattacharya, Ania Loomba,

f

Preface xi

Suvir Kaul, Soumyabrata Choudhury, Shiva Kumar Srinivasan. But also

with gratitude Aamir Mufti, Colleen Lye, Tim Watson, Benedict Robinson

and Janaki Bakhle; Joy Hayton; Dorothea von Miicke, Rob Nixon. Gyan

Prakash, E. Valentine Daniel, Homi Bhabha and John Archer. Ram Bapat

and Gobind Purushottam Deshpande, Maharashtra's most eminent thinkers,

graciously agreed to look at early versions of Chapter 6 and a fragment of

what is now Chapter 9. Meera Kosambi provided early encouragement and

help. Anne Feldhaus, Lee Schlesinger and Eleanor Ze\liot were always

enthusiastic and forthcoming in the early stages of this project. DattatreyaDeshpande helped bring the three·volume set of the Mangalurkar·Kelkar

Dnyandel'i from Mumbai. I am grateful to Gauri Viswanathan for her great

generosity and encouragement. The American Institute for Indian Studies,

Chicago. provided a generous fellowship for a year in Pune in 2004 .5. Peter

Manning made it possible for me to take that year off; he and my other

colleagues at the English department, Stony Brook, and Martha Smith in the

Chair's office, have been untiringly supportive; Nancy Lannack at the ISSO

ensured that my documentation passed muster; the uncomplaining and

always courteous staff at Melville Library's Inter-Library Loan Oll\ce made

available the US's vast holdings of Indian literature. The circle of my uncles

and aunts, Ashok and Jaya Chandorkar, Sumati and Srikant Tambt; Madhu

sudan and Jyoti Wakankar, Neelima Wakankar, Jagdish and Suman

Srikhande, my grandparents Rajaram and Shantabai Wakankar, and my

sister Radhika suspended over this work the veil of their sympathetic magic;

the much lamented Srihari Khanwelkar would have read this with interest

and openness; Sunanda and Satish lIulyalkar, Madhusudan and Virna]

Hulyalkar, Vibha and Vaman "Chandu" Kale, Srinivas Wakankar. Nishith

"Gundya" Dadhich, and Srikant "Kantya" Botre extended friendship and

conversation. Sitaram Wakankar. man of many pseudonyms, remained a

perennial source of inspiration. Sanjay Krishnan's example as a thinker,

writer and friend informs this book in many subtle ways. I want to acknow

ledge here the critical input of Qadri Ismail, Teena Purohit, Sunil Agnani,

Nauman Naqvi. Anupam a Rao, Chenxi Tang, Ravindran Sri ramachan dran,

Rajan Krishnan, Jyotsna Uppal, Nermeen Shaikh. Saurabh Dube, Ishita

Bannerjee·Dube, Sudipto Sen, Rama and Karuna Mantena. Sanjay Reddy,Aditya Behl, Christian Novetzke, Ruby Lal and Ajay Skaria. A reader who

preferred to remain unnamed provided me with the first incisive appraisal of

this work. Dipesh Chakrabarty took the time to read and comment on an

early version of the last chapter: I am in debt to him for his encouragement

and interest at the time. Gil Anidjar read the manuscript with the magnanim·

ity and concern that friends know is characteristic of him. The rigor and

seriousness of Rajeswari Sunder Rajan's work has served as a constant

source of illumination while this book was being written: she has wished this

project well from its inception. Gyan Pandey's wisdom and kindness, and the

rare privilege of his friendship are for me unexampled in academic life. The

philosophical and literary-critical adumbration of "hearsay" as it is



xii P r ~ r a c e

attemp ted here received its first impetus from the work and personal example

of Partha Chatterjee and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: the prescn(."C of these

two eminent thinkers in Atherican and South Asian intellectual life continues

to have worldwide reverberations. This book would not have been possible

without the generosity. love and Support of my parents. Gajan an and Neela

Wakankar. The book is dedicated to them. Asmita. and Nayantara who

arrived lately. continue to remind me of all that connects this work of ten

years to the quiet passage of the hour as much as the many scusons gatheredin its arc.

Part I

Introduction

The question of a prehistory



•

,

,

1 Subalternity at the cusp

Limits and openings of thedalit critique

This book tries to imagine what it means to intercept a mode of thinkingat the CUSp,1 Its subject is the poetry of three medieval saint-pocts from

northern and western India. The work of at least two of these poets,Tukaram (1608-50) and Dnyaneswara (d. 1296) is little known outside India.

and is certainly altogether unfamiliar to South Asians who know very little

about western India. The key figure in this book , the fifteenth century weaver

poet Kabir (d. 1518) who was a convert to Islam, is known both in the

English-speaking and Perso-Arabic world as a mystic poet whose poems arc

often placed alongside those of great Sufi poets such as Rumi. In India, Kabirwas for long seen as a poet who defied caste and religious distinctions in his

impassioned verses; he was taken to be the very embodiment of Indian secu

larism before and after the time of Nehru. Yet the recent history of Kabir, and

by the same token Dnyaneswara and Tukaram, requires me to do more in this

book than introduce the reader to the writings of these extraordinary poets.

For, in the last decade or so a resurgent datit (untouchable) movement has

sought to claim for Kabir the status of a dalit god, or a dalit thinker. "Datif"

or downtrodden, is how empowered untouchables prefer 10 address them

selves. Kabir's dalitness stems from his "loss of caste" as a weaver, a julaha,

but also from his explicit references to caste distinction in his poems.

This resurgence of dalits needs to be understood not just as a major South

Asian phenomenon but as an event which bears great affinity with politicalmovements among migrants and indigenes all over the world. A unique

feature of these movements is what I will call their "insistent immediacy."

Such movements are "insistent" because of their rapid and quite remarkable

entry into the political field. More crucially, they deploy their self-recognition

as social groups whose specific sense of being rests on a notion of divinity

that is "immediately" prior to their historical experience. This experience may

be one of having found (God) but it need not take the form of theology

per sc. In this book, I will adopt the practice of placing the word "God" in

brackets so as to make the point that divinity has receded in the history of

religion. (This point about the pervasive "atheism" of mainstream religion

could have been made by crossing out the word in every instance. placing it

under erasure.) The memory of having-found is for such groups a lesson in a



4 Introduction

kind of primordial generosity, an ancient form of other-directed behavior.

Its effect is to instill in tbem an extra-human notion of tenderness that is

ever solicitous of their fellow human being. This ethical stance precedes their

entry into politics as self-empowered groups, but it nonetheless imbues their

actions with a sense of mutual accountability that cannot easily be ex.plained

by the schemas of myth, religion and archaic belief to which it is usually

ascribed. What is crucial is the anteriority of such an ethical comportment to

their political practice. An important concern in this book is the problem of

how to write a prehistory of political empowcnnent understood in this sense;it entails an attempt to turn to a lorm of historical experience that, because

it involves a conception of the infinite, necessarily resists historiographicalrecovery.

What could be the motivation to envisage such a form of counter-memory

from out of the available historiographical and philological evidence? It

arises from the need to unde rstand the often dub ious ways in which political

e m p o ~ e r m e n t t r a n s p i r ~ s in the electoral arena. One need not necessarily

~ o n c e l v ~ of such a prehistory as a corrective to the sometimes alarming polit-

1cal chOices these groups make. often in defiance of traditional conceptions

?f ideology. The ambition behind the prehistory attempted in these pages is

IOstead to "sup plement " the political agenda of such groups with an account

of what underlies the idea of the social that is at stake for them. It is my

c ? n t e ~ t i o n t h ~ t this primordial groun d refers us to a "pa st" that often escapes

hlstonographlCal or theological gestures among these groups themselves.

What is needed here, it seems to me. is an awareness that their own sense of

c.ommunity and social accountability stems from ancient forms of moral prac

tice that predate the dawn of religion per se. I want to insist that despite the

religious Jeanings of stich groups (whether they turn, as in the case of Indian

indigenes, known in India as ·'tribals" [see Devy 2006]. and dalits to resurgent

Hinduism or Buddhism), their sense of human being in the world is indebted

not to religion but to its prehistory. Rather than rcject the findings of the

History of Religions. this book works through some of its representative

works in order to uncover a prehistory of religious sentiment. The fact that a

prehistory of religion can also be a prehistory of contemporary politics is a

"co-incidence" this book will examine at length. It will be an integral aspectof my attempt to undo the distinction between the religious and the secular.

This book's thcsis is intentionally hyperbolic. For it does not shrink from

claiming that the secularization of religion did not happen merely in the

modern age. It happened at the moment religions themselves were institu ted

at some point in the distant past. Moreover. the problem of secularization

applies not just to the history of Western but also to the history of non

Western religions, greatly attenuating the distinction between thc two. This

explains the persistent attentiveness in this book to the question of antiquity,

which has yielded the peculiar feature of Indian mystic speech that I will

describe in the next chapter as the instinct for "hearsay."

Let us return to the dalit scene once again. The analyses presented in these

Subalternity at the cusp 5

pages are for the most part in sympathy with work of such contemporary

dalit intellectuals as Gopal Guru, Kancha IIhah, Chandrabhan Prasad andAnand Tellumbde who, in a very crucial sense, in habit t he cusp, It is no doubt

a truism to say that at a time when the insertion of Indian society into global

capital through the workings of the free market !s rapidly u ~ ~ e r w . a y , ~ o r eand more hith erto sub altern communities are makmg the tranSitIOn 1 I l ~ 0 hnes

of mobility, as is evident from the growing mobilizations among dailts and

tribals in the electoral scene. "Hith erto s ubaltern " implies that they formerly

had no access to lines of upward mobility; the lack of access to mobility is aminimal description of what it means to be "suba ltern. " What these formerly

subaltern groups now lay claim to is the individuality needed to affinn t.he

ceaseless negotiation between community and state that Partha Challel)ee

(2006) has described as the basis of "political society." Using the break-up

of populations along lines of caste and religion (among other markers of

identity) since the colonial census in the late nineteenth century. these g r o u p ~play the electoral number game with unpredictable, often a l a r m i n g . r e s u l ~ s . II

we look at the murkiness of electoral strategy from thc perspective 01 the

ideals of democratic emancipation since the French and German Enlighten

ment it would seem as though dalit politics exemplifies a "decline" in civic

virtu; common to non-Western democracies. But from the point of view of

these groups themselves democracy is an occasion lor what Chatterjee

describes as the chance to "give to the empirical form of a population group

the moral attributes of a community" (2006: 57). "Insistence" perhaps best

describes this affirmation of a protean political will which wavers. depending

upon the representational or political stake in question, between claiming a

universal or a parti cular pertinence for dalit identity.

It should be borne in mind that the current insertion of low-caste and

tribal communities into empowerment has not etTaced their experience of

centuries of caste oppression. By analogy with the prt.--dicament of the tragic

hero we might say that these communities work between silence (the horr or

of ~ s t e discrimination) and speech (empowerment as caste communities in

electoral stakes).2 In other words, we can point to the persistence in con

temporary low-caste politics, of older forms of community that can now be

invoked cannily in the new political scene. To think at the cusp or of he cuspis to seek to capture the tumult of this individuation: to catch a lonn of

political will on the make. A unique aspect of this movement Of. com

ml.mities across the threshold of disempowerment into empowerment IS that

it inverts our presuppositions with regard to the Indian modern. The cri

tique of the Nehruvian account of modernity, a sllspicion with regard to

technological progress or central planning and of the relation between the

state and the free market, in addition to the recent turn toward vernacular

histories in an effort to reverse the homogenizing of linguistic usage in

globalization-these. in the most basic terms, have been the guiding p . r ~ n -ciples of scholarly Indian debate in thc social scienccs and the humanities

in the last few dccades. The new dalit and tribal intellectuals are not

,,.1.J



6 Introduction

unfamilia r with these criticis L .intransigence and critique h a v ~ a ~ ~ ~ g s ~ a n J m g t r a ~ i ~ i o n s of subalternmodernity What is p ~ u l i a r t y. t, em for a ent.cal encounter with

: ; : ~ ~ e p ~ ~ ~ o ~ ~ : : w : ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ' , ~ ~ ~ ~ i ~ ~ ~ ~ : : ~ , ; ~ ~ ~ ~ : e ; ~ ~ s i ~ ~ a ~ i : ' : ; ~ ~ ~ o ~ e ~to the,emancipatory goals of the Euro c'an En , go , they remain commiUedsometimes endorse the idea of . P hghtenment Not only do they

fan Incessant modernization ( d th r.

re use to take seriously clitiques of the d. an ere oreclaim that colonialism itself was a b e r ~ ) , they can go so far as to

it gave them the economic and P O I ~ ~ : I ~ h ~ : h t \ ~ n 1 nonb*brahrnins, sincebrahmanical dominance. eWI a to reak away from

. Rather than express bemusemcilt at what cansive strain in daHt rhetoric we should I b r appear to be. an oddly regrcsprotest, one that kee s in' ' . .leve, evolve a new Idea of subaltern

idea of the future b ~ t h orin;:. t ~ l e daht Idea of the past as well as the dalit

Here the notion of i m m e d i a ~ turn. ~ r o T u h l l d problem of the present."im-mediacy" be . y cruCIa . e daht present is a condition of

cause Its ground IS the idea of a d I"t .looking at the world, at history th t ' . . a 1 essence. a daht way of

that political momen t when d : a .IS I? a v e ~ y .Important sense "prior" to

to the historic juncture at W h ~ ~ t S t ~ : ~ e c ~ f Y t h ~ l . r Immediate needs. It is prior

enter into the b j e c t i v e game o f n u m b e ~ ;; . IS or t ~ a t mode. solidarity,

pation. (The latter, as we have noted m s at IS e s ~ n t 1 a 1 t.o poittlcal emancisome of the failed ' . . even entail a dehberate espousal of

projects ot modernity) The form 1 t' h 'previous sentences will be easier t d· d u a Ion couc ed m theh 0 un erstan once we break it . t I

: h ~ ~ s ~ ; : s ~ ~ ~ l a : ~ : t C ~ ~ : ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ f da

daHt m ~ d ~ r n i t y . The first ~ : t ~ ~ ; ~ s ~ ~subjectivity, The second axis is that n essence; It the basis of a "pure" dalitized this as th " . of the present. I have already character-

e expelIence 01 the cusp or threshold th h·,movement from ou t of subalternity b, , . h ' e ex I arating'. , u no Wit oui a recognition f h

prevIOus SOCial constraints remain in lace' '. owthird and potentially most troubli .P. h III dispensatIOn. The

ambition into the future. More ~ ; i : ~ I S I ~ prOjection of daHt desire an ?

p r e o o : : u p ~ t i o n with memory, its claim\n t h ~ s e aV:: assume that d ~ h t

~ ~ : ~ ~ ~ ~ : : ~ ~ 0 ~ ~ i ~ : : u n n ~ ; ; c 1 ; ~ c ~ ~ t ~ l ~ n ~ ~ r s t ! ~ ~ ' h ~ ; r o ~ ~ ~ n ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ : ~ ~ ~ Toccurs in the third version of Schell' , "ure, e term counterclallll'(2000 [1815]" 59) mg s Ages of the World" fragmentsreversion f r ~ m th :

s g e g e n ~ r f ! " c ~ u n t e r - t h r o w . " It refers us to a deliberate

~ : ~ e ~ e \ : ; ; ~ ; n ~ ~ ~ £ ~ ~ ; : ~ ~ i ~ ~ S , h h ! I ~ ~ ~ ~ , ~ : f ; t ~ r ~ ~ ~ c : ~ : : ~ : I ~ I ~ ~ o ~ U ~ ~ I ~ a ~ ~ O ~e rea m 0 co-optation pe h f

moral compromise and ineluctabl . . ' ,r ps even 0lect the ethical instances of the ~ a c s ~ n ; . ~ ~ c l t y , bwhere s u b ~ l t e r n g r ~ ) l l p s neg-

~ ~ ~ / ~ ~ I : ~ ~ f s ° ~ ~ ~ ~ : ~ : e ~ ~ i ~ a ; : ~ ~ ; e v ~ : ; ~ ~ f t ~ ~ t ~ ~ ~ ~ : ~ l ~ ~ : ~ ~ : e ! ~ i i ~the popular since the medieval pedod. ( C ~ : p ~ e : i ~ e e s , e n t a t , ' , o n at the heart.of

ow a empts to proVide

Subalte rnit), at the cusp 7

a philosophical and literary argument lor this tall into compromise in the

form of the emergence in this period of a popular allegorical mindset.)

Dalit energies are therefore "insistent" because they represent a remarkable

instance of the process by which communities will themselves into being as

communities. Dalit identity is not an inel1, historically neutral and passive

form of "existence." Let us stop for a moment and look at that last word

more closely. Dalits are thrown ou t of their way of life as existent beings

through the sheer violence of caste: their "existence" is best represented as

"ek-sistence," where the prefix "ek-" has the same character of violent expulsion as it has in the word "ek-static." But in order to avoid the awkwardness

of the phrase, let us stay with the word "insistent," which bears a similar

connotation while also carrying the added sense of force and intervention.

We can attend to this semantic undertow with the help of the following

formulation: dalits are thus thrown OUI of their way of life ("ek-sistence") and

thrown into politics ("in-sistence"). Now dalit energies are "immediate"

because their mode of being is grounded in the immediacy of an absolute, an

absolute ground for subjecthood. Both ground and subject have to be under

stood in terms of their specific features, in separation and in relation. Even as

dalit energies are insistently on its way, ever in process or pull toward a

specific and determinable emancipatory end, dalit subjecthood returns

continually to the immediacy of a pure origin. In this sense dalit subjecthood

shares in the historical comportment of subaltern communities the world

over, in that it dares to inhabit the tumult and tempest at the center, the

maelstrom generated by the movement between the primordial "ground" of

prehistory and the necessarily objectifying embrace of a historical "subject

hood," It is unfortunate that this prehistory is often read as permanently

immured in mysticism, arcana, and occult. What we tend to neglect is this

rapid and heady movement from the ground, which exemplifies the insight

such groups have into the infinite and the eternal, toward the inevitably

limited condition of specific historical subjects. In Chapter 7, I relate this idea

of the center to the Platonic account of the khora, which is something like an

unlocatable origin prior to the origin of the universe.

My reference to the idea of a "pure" daHt subjecthood may give cause for

alarm. We easily assent to the idea that the subject is a locus of action; butone must always proceed to point out that the acting subject works under

specific historical and social constraints. To argue for a "pure" subject would

seem to fly in the face of our current consensus with regard to the limits and

possibilities of human action. The very idea of purity can seem insupport

able, given that subjects act always within certain limits. My point is that the

history of subaltern communities offers a remarkable instance of an

"immediate" grasp of their own historical essence. This recognition is always

prior to the objectifying languages of transcendence in which they will

quickly proceed to couch it; it persists until such time as it withstands the

lure of religion, nation, or ethnic belonging. The recognition is pure because

it is fundamentally transient. It is pure because it is an act of abstraction, a



8 Introduction

glimpse into the abstract, one that will soon be k' . .ways of being in the world Th f fa en up mto more objective

. e memory 0 this abstract i 'dessence is at the heart'bf dalit ex rien '" . pure 1 ea ofby the "insistent" pull toward hpe"ol ' ", ' bU,ft that e.xpenence IS also marked

.> anea se ~ a s s e r t l o n If d r b"has purity as its ground, dalil action as daHl s . '. a It su lecthoodfraught, overdetermined AnOlh f ~ b J e c t h o o d IS already historical,

. erwayo saymgth' . th dr'are fundamentally compromised b th . . . IS at a Its as subjects

but that dalit subjecthood rests y elf insertion mto the realm of politics.accounted for. In short we on a,n essence or,ground that remains to beh ' can no anger remam content 'th .

t c past, for alternative historical accou nts of the sub I Wi turnmg toas we discover to our constern'lti 'f a tern past, for that paststrophic aspects of our d ' IS 0 ten merely a prelude to the c a t a ~

mo enuty Rather t h an ' h f .accounts of the modern in the t' " scarc or alternativeunderstanding of the past that ' , pas, It IS perhaps time we looked for an

Instead, it requires us to develop"n"eOl

,acc,esslblje to historical reconstruction,

d ' , w 00 S an t concepts to gra th' dstan mg III the very immediacy w'th h' h . sp IS unsome point in the past- -hence th It ' w, IC , It ~ r o c e c d e d to ground itself at

h b ' e ascillation III this book 'Ih I h ' d '1 e a sO'act in Kabir wh,'ch prov,'d ' h WI e I ea ot

. es us wit sam th' I'k hof contempo rary protest. e 109 le t e prehistory

This book revolves around Kabir becaus ' . . ,was able to articulate this understa d' hh

ealone among daht thlllkers

dalits, but this was a wisdom that h : 0 a b s t r a c t - - ~ e alone among

and communities adopted Kabi b t th q ~ e a t . e ?nly to dahts, Other castes

of Hindu tolerance within a H:'dU

saw,m him only an ecumenical idea

h' III U ulllversahsm' Kabir wa '

t em to congratulate themselves 101' th . : s an occasion forwere unable to detect the precious I.

el.r

expansive ~ o n s ~ i e n c e . And so they

latter exceeds any s e l f - a g g r a n d i z i n ~ i ~ ~ : I ~ i ~ ( ~ : ~ ) 01, s a p l ~ n c e in Kabir; theare two aspects to this wisdom grant d ' f ance. I,WIII argue that there

an insight into the violence inniclede o ~ n t h ~ n ~ < ~ a b l l ' , to da.lils; it impli.es

a mode ofamrmation a form of b I' fl h ,[ It a one, but It also entails

If • e Ie at embraces the world' 't t dness. the previous comportmenl is one of 'k . . .1Il I S en er-

i ~ s i g h t into the abyssal nature of violence S ~ : t l c l s ~ n ~ n . d : u s p ~ c i o n !i t is an

discovery (it is an insight into divinity) K)\, ' I ~ t ~ . r IS a stance of OY and

lor this reason: this was the luminous hea;t ~ / ~ . a I t . e ~ the c e l ~ t e r precisely

saw and Il'ul!cd "R " I Istoneal expenence that he, am, w 10 was not the Ram of ' , .To p r e ~ e m p t the central thesis of this book' h m a l , n s t ~ e a m Hmdu r.ehgion.pages is that Kabir's wisdom was 'b'l

wat I Will tlY and prove III these

I f access! e to dalits alone bec' hti e Irst to c ~ m p r e h e n d the co-existence 0/ he ex erie ' ' . l ~ s e e wasexpenellce oj f'iolence in dai/r life Brah ' h P nC{ oj dlVlntty and rhe

gled to assert their idea o f G o d " ' - ~ t h e 11:IIIS

ave of course known and strugits cause. And n o n ~ b r a h m i n s (th y y .have martyred themselves for

but lill'll! thc lowest rung o'f t h e o ~ : ~ ~ n ~ : ~ ~ l l I t l e s who are not untouchable

violence. it is the assertion of this book ther; dill? ~ e l J h a ~ e experience?

enced the slIIgular coexistence of mira I u . Its a one. will have expenwas Kabir' s gift to the c e an VIO ellee. ThiS understanding

m,

Slibalternity at the C l l ~ p 9

I should hasten to add that it is a feature of r e s e n t ~ d a y dalit thinking that

it is often negligent. in the very pull of its counterclaim on the future, of the

specific ways in which Kabir inaugurated not just a religion lor dalits but a

new idea of religion, As we will see in Chapter 5, when the dalit critic,

Dr. Dharmvir. denounced in the late 1990s the "brahmanical." high Hindu

account of Kabir elaborated in the modern Hindi l i t e r a r y ~ e r i t i c a l tradition,

he tacitly endorsed the lattcr's deification of the s a i n t ~ p o e t . The rcason this

dalit intervention failed is because it uncritically affirmed, despite itsc1L thc

high Hindu idea of "popular religion" in the work of the llindi thinker,Hazariprasad Dwivedi. There. individual spiritual seeking was lirst elabor

ated in the 1940s as the locus of social protest, providing the ideological

template for the notion of an ecumenical Hinduism capable of embracing

dissent. The power and the danger underlying Dwivedi's argument was in ib

running polemic against Indian Islam. to whose radical social message he

oppost-d Hinduism's freedom to believe, which he argued can o ~ e x i s t with an

affirmation of caste distinctions. Setting aside Kabir's relation to Islam as a

convert. Dwivedi argued tha t the saint*poet should be understood as the very

instance of what Hinduism had to olfcr to the challenge of Islam. The prob

lem is that in taking issue with Dwivedi's idca of a spiritual Hinduism,

Dharmvir ignored thc peculiar way in which l o w ~ c a s t e philosophers such as

Kabir "turned away" from such spiritualism by recognizing the historical

truth of p p e r ~ e a s t c violence. Such a misreading implies a severance between

radical medieval traditio ns and contemporary caste dissent (all too willing. it

would seem. to embrace the dominant Hindu frame) that has alarming impli

cations for the politics of religion, For. the last decade has borne witncss to

the increasing complicity of dalits and tribals in organized u p p e r ~ c a s t eviolence of a genocidal tenor against Indian Muslims.

We need to bear in mind, for this reason, the simultaneity of subaltern

complicity and subaltern emancipation in contemporary Indian p o l i t i c ~ This

is another instance of the dalit counterclaim of historical ambition onto the

future. The severance of the tie between subalternity and emancipation, one

that radical historians as well as radical dalits would need to examine with

renewed critical rigor and skepticism. is a sobering effect of the transform

ations brought into play by political society. For in some sense, subalterncommunities will already have pushed away the insight into the violence at the

heart of the social (they will have "forgotten" the searing. unsettling quality

of what it rcvealed to them over the ccnturies) and moved on, using the

languages of empowerment made available to them by political society. But

because that insight was always close to them. the very mode of their denial

of this insight in actual political practice implies that we can detect a furrow,

a trace, a shadow of that older practical reason in the very moment of the

individuation of their political will.

With this idea of complicity in mind, we can now turn to the new idea

of religion implicit in the poetry of Kabir. What are its origins? What

implications docs it havc for our understanding of the vcry relation between



10 Introduction

philosophy and religion? I f the dalit critique in its moment of counterclaim

does not hesitate to ally itself with all that is darkly ominous about con

temporary religion, how is it that we can nonetheless find in it an instance of

a new.concePtion of religion, one that is prior to historical religion as we

kno,,": It? (We should perhaps retain the word "religion," if only because it

desc.nbes so. well. th : pull toward the future that unbinds social groups from

Idea of mfimty III the past, binding them anew to the darker underpinmngs of popular struggles.) I spoke of Kabir's Ram as our clue into the

prehistory of the popular. I described this insight as the recognition of

the coexistence of miracle and violence. Both those terms of course needsome explanation. By "miracle" I do not mean a specific supernatural event

that can serve as a theological proof for the existence of God. Miracle is

understood in this book as a mark of temporal immediacy: it is the moment

when a poet such as Kabir has an insight into the nature of divinity, into the

t ~ n d e r n e s s with which it is p ~ s s i b l e to embrace the world. Conversely, by

Vlolence I do not mean the kind of agony inflicted on Christian martyrs,

w h ~ r e suffering can itself serve as a mark of insight into the divine. The

notIOn of violence used in this book is indebted to historical studies of

violence visited on subaltern groups. This violence, which is sudden,

unprecedented, devasL:lting- anonymous in origin but singular in its choice

of victim--is therefore also an instance of temporal immediacy. What is

c?mmon to b o t ~ miracle and violence understood in this sense is that theysmgle out a partICular human being, a nesh-and-blood instance of suffering,

who manages to hold in one idea their nearly unthinkable co-incidence This

holding t . o ~ e t ~ e r does not found a new religion, uphold martyrs.. r a ~ i f y a

creed. It IS II I Itself a schema for how to live a life, how to time the time of

o n ~ ' s life.. nasmuch as Kabir is able to hold these two instants together his

philosophical stance can be seen as a schema of time that speaks of two

simultaneous origins in miracle and violence, rendering freedom and

unfreedom, God and death as "equally primordial." rt is a token of Kabir'sinsight into the "equiprimordial" basis of time.

2 Moral rite before myth and law

Death in comparative religion

What then is the dalit idca of the past? And what would be the link between

that dalit past and the task of a daHt historiography? How can one support

the claim that a history of what grounds dalit politics is not recoverable

within historiography? Let us turn here to another instance of such an

insight into time as Kabir's, one which could also suggest for us a new under

standing of religion in its moment of institution. It will provide us with

a picture of dalit antiquity, but a picture severed from any ties with the

merely archaic. Here I have recourse to a relatively recent attempt to write

a prehistory of the popular. The attempt yielded a generative account of

the possible links between Kabir and earlier traditions of heterodoxy andradicalism in the Indic seene such as that of tantra and yoga. I am referring

to the work of David Lorenzen. I want to show how Lorenzen opened up

the very idea of prehistory in ways that can no longer be limited to the

historical bases of caste dissent or protest. The uncovering of these bases

thwugh archival and ethnographic means, exploring the earliest traces of

iow-caste dissent in the past while also inhabiting the life-worlds of the

present-day lollowers of Kabir, the Kabirpanthis, has been the basis of his

wide-ranging oeuvre.

We know from an early and justly celebrated work by Lorenzen that the

basis of Shaivite (Shiva-worshipping) Kapalika belief lies somewhere in the

magico-religious past of lodic antiquity. The Kapalika is of interest because

the visibility of the marks ofmouming he bears has some kinship to "race" asa violent ~ r c h i v a l and textual inscription of the body. This is already very

different from caste, whose markings range from the open body to something

that is locked into hidden mechanisms of habit and character (caritra). To

mark as low-casle is to mark the untouchable not merely as a being that lives

and dies like other beings in the world of karmic cycles. It is to mark him or

her in the abject loneliness of dying itself. It is almost as though the mask of

death had been lifted to reveal the unmasked face overcome with a tragic

yearning to speak and to be born again, to bring to speech an incendiary,silent rage. Keeping apart the histories of slavery and caste, but yet bringing

them together within a kind of infinitesimal proximity, the Kapalika is the

figure of a lonely, horrific dcath that has left no trace. This lonely, vanished



12 Introduction

experience is prior to the politics of "race" and caste: and this priority drawsus again to the question of prehistory.

The Kapalikas are so called because they could be easily recognized asmendicant bearers of the bowl shaped like a kapala (skull), and for the other

signs of death and profanation that they exhibited on a daily basis. They

themselves did not make the historical transition to the ethnographic state

in colonialism, which specialized in the enumeration of marginal practice in

cults.. sects or castes; they do not survive today as a living tradition butnonetheless give us some clue into the vestigial links between the heterodox

and the subaltern. providing evidence of the medieval bases of modern castedissent. But i f (as we will sec) the Kapalikas' origin itself is moot, what can

we say of the later history of caste resistance Lorenzen seeks to uncover here

and in his work on the latter-day Kabir sects? Among the more inscrutablepractices of the Kapalikas recorded in the wide range of texts Lorenzen

surveys staning out from late antiquity. is the Great Vow. the Maha-vrala.

I take the liberty of quoting at length Lorenzen's discussion of this !lmta.

The Maha-vrata penance of the Visnu-smrti and other law books bears

an unmistakable resemblance to the observance of the Kapalikas. These

ascetics lived in the forest, wore loincloths or animal skins. carried a

k h a l ~ ' a n g a [a club made of shards of skulls] and a skull bowl. obtained

their lood by begging, and polluted those with whom they came into contact. Given the pervasive tantric motif of the identity or conjunction of

opposites. the relation betwcen the penance of the law books and the vow

of the Kapalikas is not inexplicable. The Kapalikas, we suggest. adopted

this vow precisely because it was the penance for the most heinous of all

crimes, the killing ofa Brahmin. They were at the same time the holiest of

all ascetics and the lowest of all criminals. As in the case of the [untouch

able] dombi (and the Kapalin) of Kanhapada's songs, that which is lowest

in the realm of appearance becomes a symbOl for the highest in the realm

of the spirit. Furthermore, if the Kapalikas were in reality already guiltless, the performance of this penance would result in an unprecedented

accumulation of religious merit and hence of magical power (siddhi).

The paradoxical identityof

Kapalika saint and [Brahmin-killing] sinner finds its divine archetype in the curious myth of the beheading of the

god Hrahma by Shiva. This also introduces the essential ingredient of

Shaivism which is lacking in the law book penance.

[- --JEvery ritual has a divine model or archetype, and the penance Shiva

performs is the model of the Mahavrata penance for the killing of aBrahmin. [ . .

Although the myth is religiously prior to the legal prescription, the

historical precedence is uncertain. The law books are in general much

older than the [mythic] Puranas, but both classes of works are based

on earlier sources which are now lost. . . . The relative priority of the

Death in comparative religion 13

Shaivitc myth and the Kapal ika ascetics themselves is also uncertain. Did

the Kapalikas invent the myth in order to provide a divine model for their

ascetic observation, or did they model the observance on the myth? The

evidence is inconclusive.(Lorenzen 1991 [1972]: 76,,80)

I place this extended quotation from Lorenzen's book here because it

describes what is to my mind a momentous temporal crossroad (disciplinary.

historical. theological, and political all at once) at which high Hinduism and

the esotericism of tantra branch out, but which is more critic'lily a place

where both law and myth as two possible origins of caste are calIed into

question. Tanlra itself can be understood here as the intuition (widespread in

Indic tradition as a whole but rarely addressed except in tantric moments)

that there is in I ~ " l c t no ethical basis for caste in myth or law. Caste has no

origin but is itself a series of descriptions of the caste subject that base

themselves on the notion of a permanent atonement for an original profan

ation. a tcrrible encroachment of the sacred. And by the same token what we

know as Tantrism is itself the point of absolute incommensurability ·,-which

is paradoxically the point of total commensurability, and the supposed

basis of thc caste-transcending reach of Ilinduism-- ·between the highest of

the high and the lowest of the low. between the "holiest of all ascetics and the

lowest of all criminals." Now this is of course a time-tested formula thatvirtually encapsulates Hindu ecumenicism, which is the idea that Hinduism is

in essence a radical assertion of the will against religious codes and doctrine.

and that for this reason this religion will always have been conscious of the

genuine godliness of those who stand on the lowest rungs of the social ladder.

We will encounter this myth in its most rigorous lormulation in our discus

sion of Hazariprasad Dwivedi's book on Kabir in Chapter 4. Worth noting

there is the strange affinity between Dwivedi's Hindu ecumenicism and those

dalit critics who faulted him lor ignoring Kabir's greater claim for taking

dalit thought outside the frame of Hinduism. In making this point these

critics merely affirmed the old claim for Hinduism as a religion of tolerance,

for they could only repeat what Dwivedi had already stated, that the "lowest

of the low is really the highest of the high." The dissimulation of this fundamental claim of a Hindu universa lism-the tendency to ignore their own debt

to it- i s of course one of the ever present dangers and pitfalls in contemporary

dalit thought. as we will have occasion to note.

A similar perplexity awaits us in our reading of Lorenzen. Our task would

be to understand caste as something whose origins in practice are perhaps

earlier than the ethic ofkarma (wherein one is born into caste,jatl). But let us

postulate some point in the past at which caste will have been instituted. Here

the story of the vow (vrata) is a useful memory aid. We can speculate that it

denotcs a sacrifice which is at once a killing and a penance; the murder is so

unutterably profane that it must be brought quickly back by means of the

penance to the realm of the sacred. But the sacrifice (killing and penance)

-I-e



14 Introduction

itself is a fiction; it exists only in the realm of the mythico-Iegal. It follows

that the bringing together of the sacred and the profane, the high and the

is hardly a ~ a t t e r orrec?nciliation; this bringing together is perpetually

m process, leavmg the c o ~ n l c t between those opposites very much in play.

ThiS would of course reqUIre us to question the very ide;t that religion is the"identity or conjunction of opposites." It could be argued that much of

Eliade's work on religion (which Lorenzen cites at the end of the passage

w: have read), and in particular his work on yoga and tantra, is based on a

mistaken understanding of Nicholas of eusa's idea of the co-incidence of

many vectors of prayer with one locus of divinity that is itself hidden (deCerteau 1987: 11-12). Nicholas referred us not to the reconciliation of these

vectors but to an incessant plurality from within the gaze of the divine, whichis itself hidden.

Lorenzen himself is committed to the recovery of radical tendencies in

modes of popular practice that predate and yet go on to hold up the domin

ant philosophical and ethical understanding of action in the Indic scene.

In the instance of the passage above, he is undecided about the priority

of myth to observance. Understood as a dilemma, Lorenzen 's indecision is

easily attended to by prioritizing either the tale or the custom----- which is to

say, by assimilating it, and by that token the Kapalikas themselves to archaic

S h a i v i . s ~ , or to the archaic understood as originally ordered by Shiva

worship. But a deeper and more momentous crossroad may underlie thistextual forking of ways. We should remember that the passage in Lorenzen is

first about a death and then abou t a penance. It is therefore a passage that

places moral practice at center stage. Now what is moral practice if not the

ar t of dying for another's death, the distinction between one's own life and

another's death, the possibility of an afterlife as a way of expiating for one's

role in another's death? One could argue that moral techniques are fine-tuned

at the threshold of their future incorporation into religion, or prior to their

"ethicization" in religious prescription. The anthropologist and philosopher

of religion, Gananath Obeyesekere, follows Weber in defining "ethicizat ion"

a.s the point at which "a morally right or wrong action becomes a religiously

right or wrong action" (2002: 75). Here is one account of the institution of

religion. This happens when moral art is retroactively rendered as "religious,"overlooking the very relation established in earlier traditions between life aslived toward-death and the act of dying for another.

It is here that the vow of the Kapalika can help us imagine a singulardeath in a radically different way. We could argue that the disquisition on

death implicit in the practice of the Kapalikas is an instance of a low-caste

m i ~ d . s e t .on its from myth to law. opening up a chasm in the path of

ethlclzatlOn. ThiS too is subalternity at the cusp, but one which is at once the

cusp of death and of religion. For, one can wcll imagine that the Kapalikas

embraced death (exile and austerity, the dread visuality of the marks of

death on their bodies) as an atonement for another's death. Like the grief

of the headhunter which we have tended since Montaignc to explain away as

Death in comparath'e religion 15

cannibalism. their manti practicc of atonement for killing another human

being may well have been "ethicized" (written o . u ~ , eclipsed, push.ed away),

which is to say postulated retroactiveJ.}" as the killmg of a brahmm. Wh.ere

once there was mourning for a friend (for the role one plays, the persecution

one imposes on o n e s e l f ~ for his death), thcre was now penance for the death

of an enemy. Where once there will have been desire for the friend, there was

now fear as the basis of caste hierarchy. In a truly violent origination of

'ustice as religion, the aporia of "how to mourn" (dukha) in aboriginal moral

was turned into the dilemma of "how to atone" (prayascita) in myth and

ritual, and was thereby made to serve as an alibi for caste (sec OJivelIe 2?05:

174---6). For, could one not argue that when we render "dukha" as "sufferlng"

following established philosophical tradition in Buddhism and Hinduism, we

push away yet again the prehistory that c o n n e ~ t s "dukha" to m o ~ r n i n g ? It

is this history of an original moral practice ailled not to retnbuttve but to

melancholic justice in vanished cultures of mourning, that has left a trace in

Lorenzen s ~ c c o u n l of the KapaJikas. The point is that that other history

of practice is not available except as an already pos tulated "ethiciz,ation" of

deatb at the intersection of myth and law.What are the lessons that we can derive from this historic superseding of

moral art by a religious ethic? We will first need to shed more light on thenotion of "melancholic justice." Though religious insight is often credited

with an understanding of the nature of human comportment in the face of

death, I would argue that it does not give us a sense of how death n e c e ~ s . i t a t e sa moral. or more strictly speaking a pre-ethical stance of aC\:ountablhty to

other human beings. Religion in its historical form tends to neglect the p e r ~ennial question at the heart of any "ontological" i n q u i r ~ . This · ' o n t . o l o g i c ~ I "question is: what is the relation between the singular history that IS my hfe

and history in general? Without denying the importance of the study of

religion, it is no longer possible for us to avoid the unpleasant fact that

religion itself is often unable to locate itself outside history the general

sense: this means that it continues to ignore the problem of the smgular death

experienced by a particular person. Now, religion is adept at. p r o v i d i n g ~ gloss

on death in general. But when it comes to the unique death It seems cunousl.y

indifferent. There lies the individual on the vergeof

death,but an

we hear ISthe noise of custOill and usage. This is true even if the final end of a custom

such as public burial or cremation is to return the body to the earth, where the

latter is understood as the origin and end of individuality itself, not just an

individual in death. What is lacking in religion in general is therefore a s truc

ture of accountability, which is always more than conscience and good

actions, morc than an ethic. H is from Immanuel Levinas that we have learned

to ask this qucstion of" "responsibility" before and beyond religion, but also

before and beyond philosophy. A believer might well voice a dissenting note

by saying, "My own f(mn of bclicr docs not necessarily adhere to the tenets

of my religion in its larger ex:prcssion." But such a d i s ~ v ? , : " a l in mere terms of

conscicnce cannot outweigh thc shccr onus of responSibility. The latter has all



t6 Introduction

the qualities of a relentless "persecution" by the other to whom I am respon

sible. This persecution i.s not retributive; it is as we noted earlier, entirely

"melancholic." Were responsibility to succeed in casting off any vestige of

complicity for the other's death, mourning would come to an end. Such an

absolution is unthinkable in the very structure of responsibility, which is

interminable and relentless in its haunting. One could well compare it to theeternal return of the self-same traumatic memory.

I am generalizing across cultures here. in large part because the colonial

experience has been definitive. Philosophically and theologically, Hindu

nationalists see Hinduism as a historical religion much in the same way as

Christianity has understood itselfin the aftermath of Hegel. When we respond

as students of Hinduism to their genocidal programs by pointing out that

Hinduism has a history, or when we draw attention to religious amity in the

past, we perhaps weaken our case. For the idea of history has been so thor

oughly internalized in Hindu nationalism since the epoch of anti-colonial

nationalism that to make a historical argument against it is redundant. As a

religious movement. it is nothing ifnot ideological. historical, and committed

to the European idea whereby nations must plot themselves on a scale of

spiritual and material progress. Its impulse is to demand from the West a

recognition of its claim to speak for the Indian nation, a claim it sees as

having been denied in the colonial and postcolonial period bec.:'luse of the

West's inability to understand Hinduism from outside a Western frame, fromwithin Hinduism's own terms. It is with this impressive wherewithal. fullv

conversant with science, Vedanta and the critique of Western Orientalisn;,

that it proceeds to slaughter Indian Muslims under the very eye of the state.

The event of this slaughter always appears retributive (it is always in answer

to a recent occasion where "Hindus" have been killed); but the fact remains

that Hindu nationalism's basic premise is one of restitution. It is a kind of

hidden Zionism which argues that history has already attested to the Hindu's

displacement from his own land in the long period of "foreign" empires in

India. Indian Muslims who chose to remain in India rather than flee to

Pakistan after Partition. must not prevent the rightful restitution of thc

Hindu to India. It is not hard to see how this argument is relentlessly "histor

ical." It would seem as though the idea of religion here is not only thoroughlycomprised by its association with a long historical past marked by collective

misfortune; religion here is taken as the ground for the possibility of a Hindu

resurgence along the lines of technology, modernization and global capital. It

is the strangest of paradoxes that the academic study of Hinduism, which

responds to this specter by arguing for a complicated historical account of

the past, is unablc in its very historicism to take into account this idea of

history implicit in Hindu nationalism. We are unaware that this is what makes

Hinduism a historical religion; we neglect to take into account its historicity.

Now what if we were to take another tack with regard to the problem of

historical religion? What if we tried to argue that religion must give way to

philosophy, must surrcnder its idiom. its intuitions, its inner struggle to the

Death in comparative religion 17

persistence of a secular as oppose.d to e l i g i o u s ~ o ~ e of questioning? What ifwe responded to the Hindu natlonahsts by pomtmg out that they do not

philosophize, that they know philosophy ~ e r e l y as so m a n ~ paraph.raseddoctrines and schools, so that the only genume challenge to Hmdu natIOnal

. m is the cultivation of philosophical rigor? Can we move seamlessly from a

~ i s t o r i c i s m such as that of the Hindu nationalists, in which religion is kept in

place uncritically, to philosophy? I t is with something of a shock that we find

a similar failure in the secular realm of "ontology." We turn to the latter

because it is self-avowedly the most radical attempt we know in p h i l o ~ o p h y to

understand the loneliness of a death. I have in mind the redoubtable m ~ t ~ n c eof a philosophical critique of historicism and b?, the same token reilglon,

which is Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (Heldegger 1996 [1927]). In the

simplest terms this text represents Heidegger's attempt to rea.rient r , : ~ i g i o u snotions of death on the basis of the philosophical understandmg of Impos

sibility" implicit in Aristotle. I need hardly add that the text's extremely ~ n e -grained movement between religious and philosophical concepts m a ~ e s It. an

absolutely essential jXlint of reference for any attempt to go beyond hlstoncal

religion.It is worth recalling that the logical paradox that "one cannot die one's

own death" makes the problem of death a key paradigm in Heidegger's priv

ileging of "ontology" in that text. The problem for us, h?wever, is how

forestall (if only analytically) that momentous reorientatIOn whereby philosophy here reMinscribes the religious vocabulary of death in the interests of

ontological rigor, using religious terms ~ u c h as "anxiety" by ~ e d e f ~ ? i n g . t ~ e min existential terms. I do not mean to Imply that we must save rehgIOus

terms from philosophy. But does the ontological frame, guided by thc. a ~ b i -tion that philosophy in its ontological moment must surpass and aSSImIlate

religion, necessarily yield that insight into the singular exper.ience of death

that we are seeking? What if one were to argue that what IS exceeded by

ontology is not merely religion, but religion in its own. s s i m i l a t i O l ~ at its

inaugural moment of pre-existing traditions of m ~ r a l ~ I t e habit? Thc

point is that a major reversal such as Heidegger's re-mscnbes p h i l ? ~ o p ~ l C a l l ythe religious vocabulary of death but only after the ~ o m e n t of l h l c l z a t l O ~ of

moral practice into religion, only after a moral flte has been pushed mtohistory to become an ethic at the level of a "world religion:: It was Derrida

who told us in the luminous pages of his book, Aporias (Dernda 1993), of the

need to question Heidcgger's distinction betwecn an a u t ~ e n t i c u D ( j e : s t a l ~ d i n gof death along ontological lines and our physically, SOCially and ~ I s t o f l c a l l y(and therefore religiously) attested modes of dying. There, Dernda asked:

what if there is onlv this vulgar, everyday mode of dying which is yet unique

to every individual in her death? . 'rom our point of view, we will need to go a step turther, departmg here

from the account of everyday dying in Heidegger and its critique in Derrida.

I t is not just that Heidegger attempts here (as Derrida shows with u ? e q u ~ l l e dgentleness) to denigrate everyday modes of dying, corrupted as they mvanably



18 Introduction

are by religious custom, by describing them as vulgar, indifferent forms of

action, and then proceed1\. to extol instead the resolutc stance one would

adopt toward an "authentic" dcath. The problem is that the very separation

favored by Heidegger of the ontological understanding or death from the

social history of dying is premised on a prio r assimilation of moral to religious

action, one that presupposes the notion of religion as ethicized rite. This has

the effect of bringing philosophy and theology, Christianity and metaphysics

closer and not apart, dcspite I Ieidegger's own assertions to the contrary.

Reversing the Heideggerian formulation, one might say: it Is not religion that

presupposes and requires philosophy; it is philosophy thai requires and pre

supposes religion as ethicization. With the result that just as there is always

history at the heart of religion, there is always historical religion at the

heart of philosophy. We do not find here, either in lleidegger or Derrida, an

aa;:ount of a singular death prior to history or religion, before historical

religion. Ifmoral rite and habit is lost to religion (reduced to a mere vestige in

it), it is also lost to "ontology" when it seeks to supersede religion. What is

more, in "ontology" we encounter a double loss and a double assimilation

of moral habit prior to religion. (I have been putting "ontology" in quote;,

thus far so as to distinguish the Hcideggerian notion of ontology from the

history of philosophical ontology in general, since his account can be seen to

encompass that tradition and bring it to crisis.)

What then does ethicization entail? Let us follow Obeyesekere, in whose

thought there is a perennial return to the Weberian link betwcen religions

as "theodicies" and notions of death. It would appear that a religion in its

inaugural moment takes the form of a system defined around the limits and

possibilities of human existence, a system seeking in the main to understand

the experience of death. The latter was central to Weber's lifelong research

into the changing history of e b e n ~ f u h r u n g , the deliberative conduct of life (see

Hennis 1988). The theme of suffering (dukha) in "world religions" such as

Buddhism is for this reason recognizable as a foundational religious concept

one that helps "comprehend" death by placing it at the intersection of myth

and law, lodged in practice and precept as the originating point of a new

ethic. If what transpired earlier with the Kapalika was a lived philosophy,

a mode of conducting oneself in the world that followed the pattern of athought, what ensued was its assimilation an d superseding by religion, work

ing from concepts generated by a new religious ethic. In this respect. the

assimilation of the older notion of dukha as mourning by "habit" (both rite

and garb for the Kapalika, as we saw) to dukha as an ethic of suffering-··-·here

religion exceeds philosophy,,--in ou r current aa;:ount of ancient religious

thinking needs to be looked at more closely. fo r this is exactly congruent

(if in reverse) with the more recent attempt exemplified in Heidcgger, to

assimilate the religious idea of "anxiety" as dread to an ontological notion of

"anxiety" as the fundamental possibility unto death of existence itself-here

philosophy surpasses religion. Now what is arguably at stake in Heidegger

himself is an extraordinary reworking of Hcgel's Christology. To take just

r

,

I9

'lil-!iSg

fl,,"'!;j:-1o---"

J)eath ill comparative religion 19

one example among many, witness his recurrent usc or words that are vari

ations on the idea of a "falling" into flesh; except that for Heidegger death

is already presaged in everyday worldly goals in that there is always the

incalculable chance th at th ose goals may rail awry. What inter rupts everyday

life and what comes at the end of life arc both unpredictable; we fall into

the neglect of the ineluctable decay of our world, as we do at the end of our

life. But it is in the falling itself that the meaning of being, as well as the

decisive break from this fall that i n a l l g l l r a t e ~ a new turn in history, it is here

that these central indices of "ontology" (i.e. meaning, decision and history)

disclose themselves.I provide this s ummary here with some impunity. Ther e is no substitute for

a dose and patient reading of Beillg and Time. My point if> to highlight in

what we have seen above an astonishing congruence as though in a camera

obscura. one where Western and non-Western, or "philosophical" and

"religious" modes of analyzing death find themselves reflected unto each

other in our modern epoch. On the one hand , there are the "world religions"

in the way we understand them today. where it is a question of death as such

abstracted from the custom and ritual that frames it, distanced from the

moral rite that originated in the living philosophy of the Kapalika. By this

token, we cannot reduce Hindu or Buddhist notions of death to their legal or

customary frame; we have recourse invariably to Hindu or Buddhist "scrip

ture," which in the case of Ilinduism would imply turnin g, quite correctly, tothe idea of death in the Vedas and the Upanisads. On th e other hand, there is

the Judeo-Christian crux of the "death of Jesus," abst racted as it is in Hegel

(and in f-1eidegger who attempts to surpass Hegel here, but is working

broadly from within the same traditio n) from the very distinction between the

spiritual an d the fleshly typical of theology. More strictly, we might say that it

is abstracted from abstraction itself. For what is common to both regardless

of whether one privileges religion and the other philosophy, is the "transcen

dentalization" of death, severing it from everyday forms of self-conduct. We

can now see how fruitless the attempt has been to adjudicate philosophical

boundaries with the assumption thai "the West has its philosophy, the East its

religion." For death is understood in both through the lived world but also

always above it as the horizon of transcendence-for is not a transcendentalidea of death the goal of abstraction in either case? Whereas what transpires

in the case of the Kapalika is the worldly act of mourning for a death one

may have played a role in. With the Kapalika we are inside the world; we are

pitched into the interior crypt of mourning. For his grief is nothing less than

the inne r kernel of yoga and tantra, their perduring secret. to be subo rned for

all time in the grand schemas of Buddhism and Hinduism. Our p r e s e n t ~ d a ydalit Buddhism and dalit Hinduism in so far as they remain negligent of the

Kapalika, would appear to merely rehearse that ancient foreclosure.

It is almost as though the problem of pre-ethical t m d i t i o n ~ those that

have been pushed away to make room for religious or philosophical o n c e p t ~exceeds the very distinction between Western and non-Western religion,



20 Introduction

Western and non-Western philosophy. There must then be something prior to

the contest of religions aftd philosophical nationalities since the nineteenth

century. fo r one thing, it must work at an angle to what attracts us in "non

Western religions," which is where religion appears to have replaced phil

osophy, promising to heal and save. Conversely, this something prior to the

very divide between our religion and theirs must also resist the claim that

philosophy in the modern age has successfully surpassed religion; it would

not accommodate itself to the Western "ontological" trad ition from Hegel

to Heidegger, according to which religion must make way for philosophy.This something must then always have preceded the supposedly unsurpass

able divide between Jerusalem and Athens, or between the "relig ious" and the

·'philosophical." More crucially, this divide seems increasingly untenable

today if it is taken to mean the basis lor the distinction between the religiousand the secular, or the theological and the political.

At the level of this prehistory we are already at some distance from the

problem of cultural difference in religious studies. Whether the West has

tended to fHlme non-Western religion in a certain way, whether it has been

unable to take into account religious practice from anything other than a

strictly Christian theological standpoint (these arc questions taken up in the

work ofS.N. Balagangadhara (1995] and Tomoko Masuzawa (2005], among

others)-these questions leave unaddressed the fundamental assimilation to

history and to theology of all religions East and West in the age of colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism. To return to our problem of a singular

death: such questions merely restate (tacitly affirm and endorse, despite

themselves) the elective affinity between (Judeo-Christian) theology in its

philosophical apotheosis as "ontology," and non-Western religious thoughtin the modern era.

I would argue that this affinity is not only "ontological" when it is in force.

We can think of "ontology" as fundamentally a mode by which history

in genera!, i.e. the problem of a Eurocentric modernity as is sketched with

the greatest clarity in Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe, and

history in particular, which is the particular instance of personhood with

death as its limit, are both thought together. And if we comprehend "ontol

ogy" as grounded in a theological understanding of history, we can then useHeidegger's somewhat weighty term, "the onto-theological" to describe the

whole pattern of failures by which historical and religious projects have

only exacerbated the loneliness of the lonely de.:1.th. What is a "theological"

account of history? It is the assumption that worldly struggle and strife is the

redemptive ground within which a transformative future would be ushered

into the present; however unpredictable that future, its lineaments would be

clear in advance (its requirements invariably a language, a nation-state, pro

gress), and its work would be in the present. This is the implicitly theological

notion of historical religion I will explore at some length in the next section,

where we will see how philosophical ideas of language and love come

together with a historical idea of JIinduism in the work of he historiographer

Death in comparative religion 21Rajwade and the critic DwivedL Here we should bear in mind that onto

theology is not solely Christian or Judaic. It is the very means by which the

historical self-understanding of Christianity, its basic idea of history, has

been replicated in Hinduism. Islam, Buddhism and so on. In this sense, every

religion today is a historical religion. If we are to detect somewhere in the

dark, benighted domain of historical religion something like a spark of light

that would illumine a face in pain, we would have to turn elsewhere to a time

belore religion. It is therefore not without a presentiment of despair that we

revert to the idea of a prehistory.It is fitting that we began our discussion of religion with a reference to

Nicholas of eusa. I want to emphasize here the difference between the tradi

tions inaugurated by the Kapalika and Cusa's "negative theology." What

Nicholas does is to posit the negativity of God at the end, within an all

encompassing notion of God. This is why this notion of "negative theology"

is often merged seamlessly with that of tantra, yoga, and by association with

Kabir's abstract Ram. I would argue that the analogy with negative theology

is mistaken. FOI; the Kapalika and Kabir teach us first, that the negativity of

God is not at the end but at the beginning; second, they refer us to the

specificity of God when placed next to a specific idea of the world and a

specific idea of man (Le. the coming of God in a violent world, coming down to

the tlesh-and-blood human being) not to some universal idea of the Godhead:

hence the absolute distance of the Kapalika and Kabir from either negativetheology or a universal account of religion (ontotheology). At most, what we

have gained from Nicholas is an account of the mutual mirror within which

historical religions have come to see themselves under the sign of universality.

Our excursus through Lorenzen's account of the Kapalika has yielded in

one figure the event of violcnce and miracle, Violence, because of my

responsibility lor another's death. And miracle, because in seeking to mourn

lor the lost friend I seek to imagine him in the very aspect of divinity. His is

the face Iiong for; his is the forgiveness I seck. In his unique death I find the

culmination of all that is unique in my own end, my own death. The coming

together of miracle and violence generates in the Kapalika. as in Kabir, a

feisty radicalism fighting from the margins, but also an unstinting tenderness.

I remarked earlier that only dalits have or can experience this tenderness inKabiL I have been using the terms "authenti c" and "pure" all too loosely,

making myself open to the charge of exceptionalism, In gencral terms my

point has been that dalit modernity, because it encapsulatcs the limits and

possibilities of the cusp. offers future guidelines not just lor dalits but for the

idea of the social in India. This is why the dalit critique is of paramount

importance and interest for non-dalits (brahmins and non-brahmins) who

take seriously the problem of caste.I laid the ground for a prehistory of dalit emancipation in the previous

chapter by alluding to the work of Kabir. And through Kabir we encountered

the flgme of the Kapalika. Reversing our trajectory, we can say that it is the

Kapalika's extraordinary moral act of absolute penance for the dcath of



22 Inlroduction

a ~ o t h e r tha.t makes him the basis of a whole tradition of expansive otherdlrccted achon. The K a p ~ J i k a ' s is a suprcme worldliness that compels him to

adopt as a garb the death-face which the other (the mourned one) wore on his

death. imposing on himself a terrible exile, virtually inhabiting the realm of

death. Not even the sanctioned ascetic impulse of the Indic renouncer could

brook such a melancholic regimen. This was the worldly life of the self

accursed K ~ p a l i k a tl?at would later be misread as the penance for the killing

of a brahmlO. as a killd of skeptical renunciation of social mores, and so on.

But what it gave to Kabir and to daHts today was the magnanimity they

needed to embrace the world anew; this was a renunciation of renunciation.

We will see .in Chapter 8 precisely how Kabir made sense of this gift. I'or him

and for dahts today the scene of violence is the social world. which can turn

on the <.Ialit woman. the Indian Muslim. singling them out for collective acts

of vengeance. Unlike the Kapalika, this is a violence that Kabir himself has

experienced, as have dalits in generaL The Kapalika sought to mourn because

he thought himself responsible for another's death; Kabir mourned the death

of social w o r l ~ . when kin turn on kin. It is not of course a question of

f<:rglvmg or e ~ c u s m g such violence: it is a matter of how to respond to the

v \ O l e n ~ e t h a ~ IS at the heart of social experience. Kabir responds, as did theKapahka, With tenderness. Again, we should note that the self-inflicted suf

fering of the Kapalika is in effect a rehearsal of the lonely death of the other

person. But what this has produced in the Kapalika and those who comeaft:r him is a ten<.l.erness and care unique in its source, secured as it is only fordahts. and yet available to the world a t large. It is unfortunate that it would be

misinterpreted later as a jealous secret (the lunar necromancy of the rantric.

the gory p e ~ a n c e of the Kapalika: archaic Shaivism). And in the high Hinduaccount of Its own history, this misreading woul<.l provide the grounds for

a r ~ u i n g that the t r a ~ i t i o n s of secrecy must necessarily have given way at some

pomt to the openly JOyous and loving embrace of deities such as Krishna and

Rama. Such claims ignore the fact that in the dalit tradition of mourningthere can no longer be any room for the ecumenical idea of a high Hindu

tolerance for the I ~ e e k . ~ h i s is the key to the daHt "ecumene," the expansive

ness that comes With havmg paid the ultimate price for a violent act one mar

have committed. It is because of the Kapalika's insight into the nature or"asingular death that daUts could do more than protest their own victimage:they were now in a position to take on the world.

What such a conception of daHt ethics-for that is what we can now callit·-implies is a curving line of solidarity that embraces the widest reaches

of the subaltern world. Redounding from those subaltern traditions, dalits

hear the echo of what they have set out to do. In Chapler 8 we will detect

a fundamental affinity between Kabir and the Western Indian saint-poets

~ ~ y a n e s ~ a r a and ~ ' k a r a m . This is why the latter's specific caste backgroundIS In the final analYSIS of secondary importance. We know that Tukaram was

not a daHL He was a non-brahmin, a grocer (vam) by trade; he was not a dalit

but suffered throughout his life both from his own inability to rise above his

Death ill ("omparal il'e r ( ' l i ~ i o n 23

poverty and from the harassment ofbrahmins in his c o n ~ m . u n i t y . D n y a n e s ~ a r awas a brahmin, but he along with his parents and Slbhngs was ostracized

because his father had reverted (on the advice of hisgUfll) to the life of a house

holder after his confirmation as an ascetic at Banares. They had violated the

sanctioned order of life sequences or ashrams (celibate student. to house

holder. to ascetic. and finally renouncer) prescribed in Hindu codes, an<.l hadtherefore corrupted the ashram system, had become ashram-bhrashta. His

parents took the fatal step of ritual suicide by drowning as a mode of atonement leaving DnyaneswMa and his gifted siblings to fend for themselves

(Joshi 1997). Both Dnyaneswara and Tukaram arguably share with Kabir

marginality, but not his dalitness. And yet the curving line?f daJit tenderness

in Kabir irradiated the work of Tukaram. and he and Ius great precursor

Dnyaneswara find an echo in KabiL From this ~ r s p e c ~ i v e . we can r:define

"subalternity" itself as the irradiation of an enttre SOCial expanse With the

tenderness and care implicit in mourning. Subalternity is historically a form

of protest and force, but it is grounded in an unprecedented affectiveness. a

transcendental capacity to be affected. With Kabir and the other poets we see

all of literature dedicated to the task of this melancholic justice. (The latter is

always prior to the mainstream religious traditions, such as Vaishnavism. to

which the work or these poets would later be assimilated.)A singular death, and a singular mode ofmourning for that death. If this is

the essence of a dalit antiquity, it is possible for us to relate this singularexperience in the past to the challenge for dalits of individuality in th : ne;-,

politics. Using the terms of liberal political theory redefined by Hegel 111 hiS

Philosophy of RighI, we might say that this singular experience precedes the

modem individual. Yet, in an important way that experience u l j i L ~ the indi

vidual by grounding the latter in the ethical horizon of the state-the State of

which any actual ly existing monarch or sovereign polity are merely inadequate

instances. It is worth recalling that the terms Hegel uses to underscore the

ethical gap between the particular and. the universal, the individual and. .the

ethical absolute of the State are clearly opposed to each other, at the same lime

as they are placed in a line of progressive abstraction. l.::ar the individual who

brings his win to the contract, Hegel ~ s e s the substantive "der E i n z ~ l n e . : :the ethical horizon of the State he IS careful to use the substantIVe Indll'iduum". Our commonplace notion of "individualism" (Individualitdl) is

implicit in the transition from "de,. Einze!ne" to "Individuum." Wrote HegeL

[I' the state is confused with civil society and its determination is equated

with the security and protection of property and personal freedom. the

interest of individuals [der Einzelnen] as such becomes the ultimate end

for which they are united; it also follows from this that the membership

of the state is an optional matter.···-But the relationship of the state to

the individual [Individuum] is of quite a different kind. Since the state is

the objective spirit, it is only through being a member oftbe state that the

individual [Individuum] himself has objectivity, truth and ethical life.

'IF'1



24 Introduction

U n i o ~ as such i ~ i t . s ~ l f the true content and end, and the destiny[Bestlmmung] of mdlv.lduals [Individuen] is to lead a universal life. . . .

~ o n s i d e r e d the a b s t ~ a c t , r ~ t i o n a l i t y consists in general in the unity and

mterpenetratlon of ul11versahty and individuality [Einzelheit].

(Hegel 1991: 276)

The lndividual (Individuum) as an abstract ideal is by this token the domain

~ h e r e the whole range of ethical presuppositions starting out from the indi

vidual through the family to civil society, and culminating in the ethical life of

the state would come to rest. It would not be entirely inappropriate for us tosay that Hegel points us here to a domain of politics in which this ideal

horizon of the state (as the State) is worked. Politics is in a sense closer to this

horizon than what we have traditionally called "civil society," a realm of

social action occupying a midpoint between the individual and the state. The~ e l d . o f p o l i t i c s , m e s s i e ~ than civil society and yet operating under the regula

t l ~ e I d ~ a . 1 of the s.tate, IS ~ r g u a b l y what Chatterjee calls "political society" in

~ I S . r e v l ~ l o n of this Hegeltan theme. Now if we were to say that the singular

inSight mto a lonely death (as we saw in the Kapalika) "precedes" the inser

tion of dalit individuals into political society, we would have to imagine this

p r e c e ~ e n ~ as not merely ~ h r o n o l o g i c a l but logical. We might say that the

K a ~ a h k ~ form m o ~ r m . n g (relayed to us via Kabir) is always implied in

daht pohttcs. This Implicat10n is perennial, traversing a great span of time.Coming from the antiquity of the Kapalika through the medieval mystic

speech of Kabir to the modern daHt it can almost be thought of as millennia!

an ancient rupture waiting to happen again. Unlike the theological notion of

the milienniaL this is not a violent rupture; it signifies the recurrence of the

epoch ofdalit tenderness. It is the final transfiguration, as though in a kind of

relay through the centuries. of the lonely death of the other person lor which

the Kapalika mourned. In the singularity of that death. in the terrible soli

t u ~ e ?f ~ r d e ~ e d dalits, dalit individuality today finds its eternal ground.ThiS mdlvlduahty can never forget that singular death. Understood in this

sense. the tradition of mourning inaugurated by the Kapalika is a millennialsupplement to political society. [t is the perennially renewed ground of daHt

subjecthood because of the "purity" of that ancient glimpse into the momen

t o u ~ coming together of miracle and violence in an act of mourning. As thepunty of an absolute s e 1 f ~ s u b j e c t i o n . it is prior to the self-subjection of thedevotee before his god. It is a forceful. energetic self-subjection, cognizant of

its own limits. but yielding Lo the world a transfiguration of violence. one thatis essentially radiant, benign and caring.

I3 The time of having-found (God)

Langnages of dalit hearsay

We saw in the previous chapter how contemporary dalit empowerment, while

entirely historical in its bearing. is rooted in a ground that is in a sense priorto history. More strictly. it returns perpetually to a moment when history

itself was instituted (as myth and law. or as caste). How has the daHl tradition

attended to this unique instance of memory, which is the memory of an

insight into divinity? How is daHL thought a pattern of this return 10 the past,

of this perennial recourse to an ancient discovery? This chapter looks closely

at the transmission of that older sapience through daHt speech. The latter is

an 10 0 often mistaken for a kind of mystic delirium. In reality. il refers us to a

form of action closely related to thought and feeling but which nonelhcles5consists of a "mechanical" retention of the past.

Memory here is made up of sediment upon sediment of hearsay. but it is

hearsay taken as true fact. Luise White (2000: 34) provides us with a c o m p e l ~ling account of popular hearsay in her field work in West Africa. where she

explored the popular apprehension in the 1920s that colonial authorities were

really vampires. The word "mindset" does not quite capture this ruse of

reason. "Mind imprint" would perhaps better describe the response of one

informant to White. who explained: "I f I am stealing bananas and they talk

about me, they say I always steal bananas. But can they talk about somebody

they don't know, and say he is stealing? Now I have seen this recording

machine. If I had not seen it. I wouldn't be able to talk about it. but because

I have seen it I can talk about it." By the same token, as more true storiesaccumulate across time and space. speech itself comes under the thrall of

the incremental as words from languages spoken in each other's neighbor

hood now become expansive in meaning, wholly promiscuous. opening them

selves outward. Much like the language(s) of the weaver·poet and convert toIslam, Kabir. that covered the vast swathe of North India in the transition

from Hindavi to Hindi over four centuries and embraced a new. hitherto

unprecedented idea of a God for dalits (untouchables) alone. For hearsay _._-

or doxa. which was for the ancient Greeks a necessary. initial step in the path

to sophia-is formulaic. derivative of what "they say." It is a peculiar feature

of such hearsay that it refers to a self-present. transparent "fact." as thoughthe statement, "they say that so-and-so exists," were enough to serve as a

r



26 Introduction

guarantee of the authentic. The origin of such an authentic "fact" is moot,

betraying no higher truth t,!lan itself. And we are correct to treat with some

suspicion the credentials of a truth that is not something we have verified

ourselves on the basis of our independent exercise of reason, but is rathersomething others have confirmed for us.

We know since Foucault's late writings (2005) that the imperativeto "know

thyself" coexisted in the Greek understanding of practice along with the

incentive to "care for the soul," even if the idea of knowledge implicit in the

former gave rise to the ambitions of philosophy and the notion of self

modulation couched in the more mundane tones of the latter, remained secondary. The imperative to care for the soul has direct links with the Stoic turn

toward the translormation of oneself on the basis of a mechanical adherence

to formulas handed down from the past. Pierre Hadot (1998: 37-8), whose

work is in many respects very dose to the late Foucault, describes thesepractices as "memory exercises" that seek to imprint "dogmas" or topoi on

the body's orientation in the world. The dogmas are as theoretical as the

body's own orientation is pretheoretical: after all, to cite a figure from Kant,

we do not carry about a compass with us to determine what is to our right

and to our left. We have a feel for these directions that is prior to our con

scious grasp of our world. In much the same way the dogmas help Marcus

Aurelius reorient himself within the terms of the historical and social deter

minants of his time. We should also remember that when the caste systemimposes itself as the law in the great br ahmanical treatises, it does so precisely

in this way, not as ideology or unconscious impulse, b ut as an orientati on th at

low castes as well as high castes take for granted in their busy involvement in

the everyday. Marcus tells himself at one point in the Meditations that "The

nature of the good . . . is moral goo<.l (to ka/on); while that of evil is moral evil

(to aischron)." This "condensed form," Hadot remarks, is "sufficient to evoke

the theoretical demonstration of which they were the subject, and it allows

the inner disposition which was a result of his clear view of these principles-··

that is.. the resolution to do good--to be reawakened within his soul" and "to

produce an effect in himself." It is because of this deliberative but internal

transformation that there is a measure of involution implicit in this process,

making it very different from the grand movement of philosophical dialecticupward from the mundane world that we discern in the works of Plato.

And yet, as opposed to the leisurely but regressive movement of the trad

ition of the "care of the soul" there is in the mode of hearsay that we find in

Kabir an affinity to some aspects of the Platonic dialectic, which is to say the

notion of a dramatic "return toward oneself," palama. Except that his avow

edly yogic mode of involution is committed first and foremost to an inner

retention, a regressive and backward return into oneself, and thereafter to a

turn upward to the region where one attempts to perceive the transcendent

essence of things. There is in Kabir a return to a truth taken for granted and

yet rediscovered; this involves a mode of recapitulation that in its joyous sense

of "having found (God)" departs in some measure from the arts of knowing

f/

iI,anguages o/dafit hearsay 27

and of transforming oneself. One could describe this as the a rt of discoveringnot oneself, for that would appear to be virtually inconceivable, but to find

again a certain truth within oneself. We should remember that this is nota "spiritual" process by any means; it involves no concerted effort by the

mind or heart (man) to overcome the body (deh); instead of an intellective,

epistemological notion of overcoming, what transpires here is a form of self

overreaching that overtakes the entirety of the body understood as a locus of

self translormation.

This truth is so radically empirical that it precedes all forms of empirical

perception, retrieves (without necessarily upholding them) some of thedominant currents of Indic philosophical speculation in antiquity, and goes

on to affirm a mode of understanding that is peculiar in its deliberate

·'abstraction" from all available modes of abstraction. And nevertheless all

those languages of speculation find their register in Kabir, almost as though

his form of thought involved a "mechanical" recapitulation of the entire

tradition; in Chapter 5 I will attempt to characterize this as a form of radical

encyclopedism. Ther e is in Kabir an impetus toward a relentless accumula

tion of notions, themes, modes, concepts, metaphors taken from the Indic

tradition and Sufi tradition as a whole. Let us take as an example the Kabir

poem below.

My being's not stay-at-homeIt strays abroad.Ditching home it squats out there

Sad to see one home is two.

At every stop trial, travail

Illness, death in agony redoubled.

Says Kabir, this servant's at your feet

Making home your bliss beyond being.

Man thir hoi na ghar vhai mera

Ihi man ghar jare bahutera.

Ghar taji ban bahan' hyau bas

Ghar ban doun deshaun IIdas.

Jahanjaunla han sog santapJura maran kau adhik vilap.

Kahai kabir caran tohi banda

Ghar mai ghar de parmananda. '(Translation mine)

Here the frantic self-evasion characteristic of life, its concerns in the face of

death, the death one dies for another (the home one has strayed away from

is the home one returns to, but it is now the home of the other, which is the

bliss beyond being) is couched in the everyday idiom of medieval North

India, from which we can derive man, bahutem, dOlin, maran, banda, caran,



28 Introduction

parmananda as so many debased concepHnetaphors, tried and tested frames

in which low-caste practice,.has traditionally elaborated itself:

Now we do not in the normal course of our ethical speculation associate

mechanism with deliberative behavior, with the purposive way of acting in

the everyday world amid speech-acts (IOgOlJ directed to actions and objects.

Nor do we associate such an apparently "unthinking response" with the

modes by which we are accustomed (through hexis. lwbitus) to establish ourselves as speaking beings in the worlds that we bring into being. We would

think of them as instances at best of a debased form of deliberation (phrone-

sis), at some remove from the freedom implicit in decision-making. In theirmechanical grasp of philosophical cliches the poets of hearsay remind us

of what we have traditionally taken to be the hallmark of allegory: a form of

correspondence between word and meaning that is not generative but

involuted. fixed, lacking in symbolic depth, like that of an allegorical wood

cut. But it is precisely this idea of allegory as mechanical retention that we

will have to revise in order to make bett er sense of the recursive nature of thislow-caste mindset. This is the task to which we will turn in Chapter 8.

Still more dubious from the standpoint of practice is the peculiar atrirm

ation in such low-caste imaginings of a God that. while inaugurating the

sensuous. historical religion of the north that we know as blwkti ("participant

devotion"), nonetheless keeps to ibelf, hides. retreats from history, abstracts

itself. This is the peculiarly reticent God chanced upon in their historic"find," which is again no find at all but a return to something that was alwavs

already there. Hearsay doubtless has amliations with the aural g u a r a n t ~ e(sruli. "all that has been heard") at the basis of the high tradition of Indic

thinking since the Vedas; in its insistence on the authenticity of that which

has been revealed in sound. there is undoubtedly a phonocentrism at work in

hearsay too. But what hearsay does is to return to the original empiricism of

the older texts; this implies a recourse not to the latter-day investment in these

texts as sources of the high brahmanical tradition but to an ancient form

of radical empiricism that tries to understand the world from within its con

crete manifestations in language. But here again what Kabir gleans from this

older mindset prior to its installation as tradition is the idea of language as

primarily a language of God (and therefore necessarily "concrete " in its very

abstraction from the very distinction between the abstract and the concrete)

and only secondarily a language of man. Thc low-caste mindset appears to

make a distinction between the plenitude of concrete understanding in God

(which only appears to us as abstract because we look back at it from our

standpoint in the human world) and the language ofman-,·for it is only with

the latter t hat the emergence of the need for communication an d mediation is

keenly felt (see Benjamin 1986: 314-32). We call this a human language because

for the low-caste mindset that we have called "hearsay" it can have none of

the pristine concreteness of the divine language, and because it necessarily

gives rise to the vcry distinction between abstract and concrete thought.

The face of God comes to man in the language of God, but we access it

Languages ofdaHt hearsay 29

only through the language of man, that is to say in the historical religion

of Ram and Krishna worship that has gone into the making of today's

genocidal Hinduism.

Dalit hearsay: the double maneuyer of skepticism

We need not endorse the notion of a "fall" from divine to human language to

gain a sense of the original skepticism implicit in hearsay. For what seems to

us to imply such a fall is really a double gesture that we hope to elaborate at

length in this book. This involves at the outset an affirmation of the originalconcreteness of the world in God's language: but we should remember that

that concreteness is itself from our point of view in huma n language, entirely

abstract. The gesture of affirmation is followed by a movement of negation, a

turn away from that original concreteness toward the world of sensuous

religion of Ram and Krishna worship which. conversely, from thc point of

view of the concrctc language of God, is entirely abstract. If our reading is

accuratc, we will attempt to reverse our conventional understanding of popu

lar religion as it has come to us from the era of nationalism. Instcad of

arguing that the popular religion of the lasl millennium (which we often

describe as the cra ofbhakti, or pa rticipant devotion) is based on a movemcnt

away from Upanisadic abstraction a nd toward a concrete, sensuous interface

with God in Ram and Krishna worship. we will try to highlight a uniquefeature of the 10w-c.1.ste mindset we have alluded to above. F or the "fact"

(gothi) that hearsay is invested in returning to the original concreteness of

the language of God in the older forms of thought prior to the institution of

tradition; more crucially, hearsay only lays claim to the high religion of

suous worship after it has already pointed out the abstract, ideational aspects

of that sensu ous rcligion. [n short what hearsay accomplishes is not a regres

sion from the concrete to the abstract. as though it had some kind of fascin

ation for involuted and secretive forms of thought, but the exact reverse: that

is to say, it too negotiates a traditional movement from the abstractness of he

divine (the "concretc" in divine retrospect) to the concreteness of historical

religion (the "abstract" ill divine retrospect), bu t not without re-marking the

very notionsof

abstract and concrete inversely. Precisely whatit

is that itunderstands as "concrete" in this momentous, primordial and wholly visceral

way, is what we will examine in Chapter 8 as the "secret" of Kabir, his peculiar

insight into how miracle an d violence belo ng together. This is no doubt a "con

crete" beginning but one that is prior to the origin of religion,·-it is precisely

as this origin before origin that Kabir's Ram stands for him as a mark of the

good before being. By this token, the key breakthrough in hearsay is the

understanding of the sensuous religion of bhakti ("participant devotion") as

abstract; it should be said tha t hearsay is quite prepared to turn to the notion

of radical empiricism implicit in the pre-traditional forms of thought in

antiquity in order to make this point· ,but with this poin t it "abstracts" itself

dramatically. momentously from thc high tradition of sensuous worship.:'



30 Introduction

Therein, we might argue, lies the key to the peculiar skepticism of this sub

altern mindset-it affirm§. the tradition in its pre-traditional aspects, but

breaks away from it in its traditionalism. Which is why it would seem to break

away from our inherited notions of the modern altogether, and goes so far as

to uphold a transformative account of antiquity; it redefines antiquity not asthe font of tradition but as the basis of the prehistory of the modern, or the

premodern; in its remarkable contemporaneity with the original philo

sophical vocation of antiquity, it provides us with what is perhaps the only

possibility available today tor a genuine renewal of philosophy, taking us

back to the question of the relation between language, being and God.From a standpoint outside the low-caste mindset, from the perspective of

Hindu nationalism or of brahmanism, we could well see this as its dependence

on the cultural core of the dominant tradition; but from the point of view

of low-caste intransigence this is nothing but an original skepticism that

places the tradition as a whole in a critical embrace (what the Varkaris call

cad, "affection"), making use of its most radical forms of empiricism and (if

only for the moment, before it too affirms sensuous religion) pushing aside

that tradition's conceptual and theoretical ambition; for it seeks to return to

the concrete prior to concept and theory. From this perspective what the new

dalit think ing can glean from hearsay is not a new conceptuality or theory but

an understanding of the limits of theory as well as the libratory possibilities

inherent in radical empiricism. The God of low-caste communities is not a"hidden" God serving as the mere basis of revelation; the low-caste God, of

which Kabir's Ram is the exemplar, is really the concrete God of originary

plenitude, of the wholeness of the whole (aghava). It is secretive or hidden

only from the point of view of sensuous religion. And for this reason we

should define "divinity" itself as an originary skepticism th at seeks to returnto the idea of the divine prior to historical religion,

Orality and type

It is a scandal in our conventional account of ethics and politics (for some

this is a mark of the successful ideological reach of the dominant tradition)

that this low-caste mindset should "hold on" steadily and in a machine-like

way to the idea of "having found God." The road that leads from Tamil

passivity in late antiquity to Dnyaneswara and Namdeva through Tukaram

the kunbi to the bhagat Kabir of the Guru Granth is already strewn with

tidings of a God discovered miraculously in the otherwise carefully enclosed

interiority of the Indie self, a discovery at once indebted to the high tradition

of rigorous philosophical analyses of atman, maya, and vac, and yet prior to

them. The poet Tukaram who was as I have mentioned before a tiller and

grocer by caste, marveled at the fact "That God is-one holds thus to this

becoming."J The news of this becoming-God has traveled along the paths

of hearsay for close to 400 years since Tukaram a nd was current in the time of

Dnyaneswara in the thirteenth century. It moved on through the generations

Languages o/da/it hearsay 31

because it was thought to be true. For what is "thought to be true," what is

talked about a s fact must be true, and if it is true it must be passed on. What

has passed on is the idea of this becoming of God patterned in verse, making

orality not the Home ric relay of oral formulas, but the guarantee, transcen

dental, because it stands outside language, that a particular speech aet is true

to its type,Another way of saying this is that the mechanism of subaltern memory

tries to bring type closer to truth. So that in memory as hearsay, orality is

heterogeneous to itself. The type is what I stamp with my seal and make mine

but it has been there before me and will remain after me, such is its otherncss.It is a matter of shifting the "J" that speaks to a place-the nowhere (khora)

where God has vanished,- -to a locus immediately prior and proximal, in an

irreducible way, to the "1" that knows and sets out to command.

Three turns of plot come together in the speech of the "they say." First,

there is the signing of a verse by the sam, not the saint but he who by signingoff with a "Tukaram says" or a "says Kabir,,4 certifies the "said to be true"

(in witness, sakhi). Second, there is the "type" of speech act (at once verse

and aphorism, poesy and axiom) that preserves the singular mark of the sant

yet paradoxically allows itself to be countersigned by each wandering scribe,

who writes a verse true to the type but countersigns it yet again as "Tuka

manhe" or "kahat Kabir." And third, there is a peculiar co-incidence in each

verse of the singular poet, the uniquely placed scribe (who further certifieswhat has already been certified as true), and the underivable, lost origin of

this saying itself that is God (deva). The following Marathi verse ( A b ~ a . n g a3446) by Tukaram--the name is itself a kind of seal binding in trust ongmal

author and itinerant scribe-reminds us of the power of this triangulated

event between poet, scribe and a divinity that has had to make way for

historical religion.

God marks with His visit his home

Whose being in the world cracks up.

God marks the ruin

Of what is mine, what is yours.

Godmarks the knot, untied,

ofhopeWeave no more the noose, fond attachment.

God marks the knot, untied, of speech

CIiIlg no more to muck, untr uth,

God marks a rent in the web of the seeming

Has th e world wholly in thrall.

See how He alone holds sway on site

Tuka bristles with these signs, the whole which is His.

Devaci ie khun a/ajyacya ghara

Tyacya pade cira manushyapana.

Devaci te khun karaven vatolen



32 Introduction

Apna veg/en koni nahin.

Devaci te khun gunton N.edi asha

Mamtecy a pasha shivon nedi.

Det'aci te khun gunton nedi raca

Lagon asatyaca mala nedi

Deraci Ie khun todi mayajala

Ani hen sakal jag hari.

Paha dfwn Imci halkm'ilen slhala

Tukyape sakal cinhe tyacin.

(Tukaram 1973: 570 [Translation mine))

"Ilis (jvacha) home marked (Ie khun) by God's coming." It is especially dif

ficult to play host if the guest has always already left God's arrival1caves a

mark that is itself a mark: in arriving God. will have departed. Let us not be

too hasty in <lscribing ethical values to this mark in advance. For by then

Tukaram's God will have come: he will have recedcd. retreated. leaving less a

trait than the trait of a trait, a palimpsest. What is crucial then is not the

mark of God but the movement by which the idea of God begins to mark

the world. "Te klulfI" is not a mark or the mark: it is that (Ie) which marks,

or the "that-ness" of the mark. To mark is to "nwnstratc," to show (up) as a

sign. but of what?

The movement of this becoming reaches backward into the prehistoryof thc Indie world. before shaslric (Hindu juridical) doctrine and law, prior

to the landmark philosophical cxpositions of the self and soul, and more

crucially prior to the installation of its central "devotional" themes. Prior,

that is to say. to the inauguration of the entire cultural repertoire of the

Hindu popular-letting theology run its invariable course. in a passiveness

prior to passivity----tul"lling away a\:i did Kabir from that vast edifice of aes

tiletic Of sensuous phenomena and yet in the starkest of ironies holding

0111 for il as did Tukaram. The tradition of becoming-God defines a move

ment of unprecedented "passivity" in the worldly life of a society. For it

draws attention to a moment transformcd by an affect issuing from e 1 s e ~where: unaccommodated. naked, exposed to the order of an agency outside

that of the subject; and exposed in a time within and yet out of time whencultural norms are fetumed to their original moral vocation prior to myth,

law, religion and ethics. theology and 01 the same time reinstalled. verified,

justified, and ratified in those terms in popular practice. This "at the same

time" marks thc peculiar temporality of the "having heard of God;" it seeks

with historical Hinduism the right not to be coeval but anterior: it strives for

becoming-God as a perpetual state of being-prior to Hinduism. Within that

infinitesimal fold in the historical timeline of Hinduism, Ram is not yet the

protector; he merely extends his benefaction toward all creation, and is for

that reason not yet maryadapurushottam, upholder of the high Hindu Way,

Krishna is not yet thc cowherd regaling with "traumatic" Love his ecstatic

milkmaids in the timeless pastoralism of Vrindavan; nor is he the Lord in his

Lt1ngut1ges ofdalil hearsay 33

pedagogic role as the instructo r of Arjuna in the Gita----this Krishna is merely

the sentinel of a creation at peace with itself. The pilgrim in hearsay is much,

much less than the empowered, militant votary (devotee, hhakta) of the gods

and goddesses of the high Hindu pantheon. The bearer of hearsay whose

(jyaca) home is marked (Ie khun) by God's coming, his being in the world

(tyacya manushyapana) irreversibly incised (pade ciro) . . . he whose home is

visited by God, he whose hospitality is surpas sed by the Lord's sllrreptition,

finds his worldliness (manushyapana, lit. "humanity") split open in a radical

dehiscence (pade cim). This child of hearsay who would feed the mangy dog

hungrier than himself. is that singular being whose very abode is re-marked

inwardly by God like a crypt with its secret sprung open and yet secretly

re-inscribed, he it is whose world is rent.

These pages provide some indication of a modc of thinking that is in many

ways indebted to, yet in other ways substantially breaks away from what

we habitually bring together under such terms as theology, mysticism. bhakfi,

dcvotioll. Those who think in this very djjferent way are mostly low-castes

(dalits and non-brahmins), tribals. migrant labor, and transhumant peoples

who follow in the wake of seasons. They are noth ing if not itinerant. In some

traditions such as those of the Varkaris of Marathi-speaking Western India,

what we have come to understand aner Paul Gilroy's work on the Middle

Passage as the markedly diasporic convergence of"routes and roots" is amply

illustrated: instead of a movement toward roots and away, there is whatamounts to a virtual transfiguration of the sacred space of pilgrimage. What

is crucial is not the site of pilgrimage bu t the encircling movement whereby

the site becomes the locus of an annual migration done mostly by fool. The

poetic sagas gathered around the Varkari sants. Dnyaneswara, Namdeva,

Eknalh and Tukaram, provide the songs of the road lor these pilgrims. In

coming from their homes to these distant sites they virtually redraw the map

of marginality that has produced them. Though what lies in wait lor them

at the site is usually a form of mainstream religion (where the god of the

dhangar-shepherds. Vitthaln, has become Krishna), it is nonetheless the song

lines themselves that are crucial. During the cour:.e of this annual migration,

theology is no doubt the horizon--to the extent that all local mindsets of

other-directed ness have been assimilated to the mainstream pantheon of highgods-- but the God in their sights is the God who is not there. Il is a God that

hides, making their wanderings a pattcrn of the becoming (hidden) of that

God, The place of origin of this God is theref(m; a non-place. not renlly a

sllwla, and for this reason the idea of God implicit in this practice is not

a theology at the origin, even if it is ineluct.ably a theology at the end.

Following Plato's Timaeus, we can deHne this "theology at the origin" as a

theosophy; let liS not think of the latter as a ttlrm of mystic communion with

the irrationaL but as a name we give to a movement. a theiology. in which

hearsay comes into play. This movement transp ires :IS the c o m i n g ~ i n t o - b e i n gof God, who is then not some abstract, substantial/licolI, but the mark of a

historical process, t"doll. In this way I want to draw attention to its tentative.



34 /lltroducliol1

fleeting. and gnostic account of the past as a "non-place" where God

been. When we speak of tkis happening of pilgrimage every year, we should

bear in mind two transverse lines of historical force that meet at that "non

place" of a vanished deity. The first is the annulation of the pilgrimswho return to Pandharpur every year starting out in small bands from differ

ent parts of the region. The second is the historical "being raised by the

divine" that has entailed the Vaishnavization of the area's folk deity. This

"installation" with Vitthala at once elevated and annulled (in Erhebung and

Aujhebung), has resulted in his transfiguration into Krishna.If the raising up to the high pantheon evokes the historical mystagogy of

mainstream Hinduism, the annual return of he ring around Pandharpur prac

ticed by the Varkaris is a circular movement throwing in and throwing out the

arc of time. In this circle opening into circle of outwardly expansive religios

ity, we should not lose sight of the poet who is at the core, and the penumbral

marks of the individual scribes who countersign the unsubstitutable signa

ture of the poet. We should remember that even as the scribes wait "outside"

so to speak, to set out on their travels there is yet at the core of the circles of

pilgrimage, sitting with the deity who rules at the center, the poct himself or

herself. It is for this reason that the annual pilgrimage of the Varkaris is also a

movement whereby the effigies (the feet) of TUkaram and Dnyaneswara are

placed finally after a nearly month-long trek in mist and rain from Dehu and

Alandi beside the beloved effigy of Vitthala in Pandharpur. We could not askfor a more telling image of the co-incidence of poet and deity; for the poet

reminds us of the God that has receded and for this reason gains his stature as

a sant;5 the deity prefigures the onset of historical religion (Vaishnavism) of

which the Kabir and Tukaram scribes will be the bearers (the deity is already

Krishna-Vitthala). If the circles of pilgrimage prefigure the opening of

religious influence and power outward in worldly conquest, the circles of

poetic inscdption move in toward the center. There is the inversion of a poetic

saga such as the Gatha of Tukaram or the Granthamli of Kabir toward the

hagiocentric idea of he singular poet-saint with a unique "personality." And

correspondingly, as though in exact reversal, there is historical religion with

its expanding lines of territorial influence, its typically centrifugal impetus.

The movement between the poet at the origin and the deity at the end is ofcourse the warp and woof of the dalil practice of memory, The gift of the

saint-poet to dalits (I have in mind Kabir) is the secret of individuation,

the elaboration of the empowered "I" that will broach a future in political

society. And in a sense the shuttle between poet and deity perfectly describes

the arc of individuation itself It is almost as though the deity is the culmin

ation point of the process; hence the present-day danger inherent in a daHt

embrace of mainstream religion. This is all the more alarming when see how

the traditions of suffering inaugurated by the saint-poets are quickly assimi

lated, often by dalits themselves, to the individual self-surrender of the

devotee before her deity. The ambient passiveness of popular religiosity often

does not allow for any backward reference to those older traditions.

Languages ofdali! hearsay 35

In the three chapters that constitute the "Introduction to the Question of a

Prehistory," we have traversed the fuil range of dalit religiosity. We paid close

attention to the daHt account of the institution of religion (and of myth and

law) as it can be derived from the practice of the Kapalika. We also sought to

underline the peculiar form of "rhetoric as hearsay" characteristic of dalit

poetic expression. At every stage in this analysis, I bave drawn attention

to the extraordinary pull of the dalit tradition toward an ambient Hinduism.

I described this as a form of counterclaimed desire. a necessary feature of

contemporary dalit empowerment. In the following section of this book we

will examine in greater detail the components of what I have called the "his

torical religion" of Hinduism. It is my hope that this wit! provide us with a

clearer picture of the datil projection into the past. and its counterclaim on

the fulure, Chapters 4 and 5 seek to trace the blueprint of historical religion,

its specific truth-claims as well as its fundamental anxieties. I close the section

with an analysis, presented in Chapter 6, that counterpoints at each stage the

relation between historical religion and nationalism on the one hand, and

between the modern and the premodern on the other. The three chapters in

the section focus on the modern critical reception of our two medieval poets.

Kabir and Dnyaneswara.



•

rI Part II

The vicissitudes of

historical religion

~



• 4 The anomaly of Kabir

Historical religion in Dwivedi'sKabir (1942)

It has been remarked that human and divine language differ in one significant

way, in that while God's names apply properly to each individual thing.

human language tcnds to "over-name" things (Benjamin 1986: 330). The

corpus bearing the signature of Kabir is a singular instance of this Adamite

curse, which bears the secret both of creative expression and of the loss of

original meaning. "Kabir" points us to the idiomatic core of a language's

history, where there is a ceaseless struggle between competing claims for

nation in such terms as tradition, history and community. By the same token,

Kahir draws our attention to that recalcitrant strain in language in general

which, by refusing to remain still, helps turn the act of speech and the move-ment of writing into an untimely resource for marginalized groups such as

untouchables, who describe themselves today as dalits ("the downtrodden")

and tribals. Couched in the many ways in which Kabir is sung, his Word(shabd) rises like a vast rumor from the western to the eastern reaches of

north India and garners in this way new signatures, verses and meaning:..

Enough to say there has never been a more adaptable body of work than

Kabir's in the caste-riven society of the north, giving it an afterlife in popular

song and cult very much like that of the ceaselessly transformable epics and

romances of old.

For this reason in the canon of Hindi literature, in the history of medieval

Indian religion, and in the annals of the secular vision of history on which

the Indian state bases its ideaof

what it is to be modern, Kabir's place is apre-eminent one. The pan of obscurity surrounding the historical Kabir has

given way in the modern period to the light of controversy and debate. The

name "Kabir" has today become synonymous with a typically postcolonial

question in India: can there be an indigenous modernity, indebted to but at

the same time different from the idea of Europe? The historical energies thathave since the time of nationalism continued to delve into the past in an

attempt to uncover the hidden bases of the Indian modern. clutch again andagain at the handful of things marked by Kabir· -his simple but powerful

verses. his lowly background and his position as a convert.It is worth our while to try and understand why. Kabir's central place in the

debate over the modern in India should recall us to the nature of Indian

40 Vicissifudes ofhistorical religion -r-./

The aJ10maly of Kabir 41



historical perception itself. History here in the modern era has been the voca

tion of missionaries. colon.ial bureaucrats, Orientalist scholars (indigenous

and European). and bourgeois nationalists, both liberal and Marxist; it

has very rarely been written by those who belong to the vast majority of

~ n t o ~ c h a b l e s . peasants. women. and tribals. The latter appea r instead as subJects II I what can be called the "history of the popular," a whole genre of elite

writing that. beginning in the late nineteenth century, drew both scholar and

dil:uante to. the d ~ n s e archive of popular practice in ritual, religion andbehef extendmg as tar back as antiquity. This archive was available to those

a m o ~ g .thc colonial bureaucracy who practiced a kind of ethnography byclasslfylllg for the purposes of the census the vast array of castes and reli

gions. And it was also of interest to two groups who played a central role in

helping shape colonial policy with regard to language and education in the

late colonial period. These comprised of amateur scholars among colonial

bureaucrats and European Orientalists on the one hand and nationalistwriters. critics and indigenous Orienta lists, on the other . Both sets of scholars

had hegun to lay great store by the idea that a nation's distinctive traits could

be discerned in the lived. everyday practices of the mass, as opposed to the

often more eclectic and esoteric cullural practices of the elite. The notion of

the popular implicit in their work was that of a complex "life-world" com

prised of ritual, custom and practice that could serve as a valuable index of

the deep roots an d extraordinary diversityof

an authentically "Indian" cultu!'e. The word "10k," lor instance, recurred often in debates on the popular in

Hllldl and other north Indian languages, and referred to "the people" as wellas to "the worldly."

Why read the text of h.istory for the popular? The colonial mission, with

;Vhom such allliquarianism was compiicit, was of necessity invested in gain

mg g r ~ a t e r . c o n . t n ~ 1 o v ~ r its subjects with the facility of greater ethnographica n ~ 1 . h l s t o ~ J ( . : a l lIl.slght II1to their varied cultures. For such scholars, complex

religIOUS formatIOns such as the worship of the Hindu god Vishnu. also

known as Vaishnavism and widespread in north India, provided the ground

on which to establish "scientiiically" via philological and historical method a

relation between Hinduism. for them the dominant faith in the land and

Christianity. Kahil', /01' instance. already drawn by European scholar; into

this Vaishnav tradition, seemed to them to be comparable to Luther, while his

verses had the power of the Gospel of John (Vaudeville 1974: 3-36; Dalmia1999: 3 _ ~ 8 - 4 2 4 ) . 1

What drew indigenous scholars and thinkers to the inexhaustible archiveof popular religion was the idea that had begun to establish itself of the

nation as an age-old community of many faiths and creeds. India's heterogeneity of tradition appeared as a great barrier to national unity, and was

lamentoo by reformists from Ram Mohan Roy in the early decades of the

nineteenth century to Dayanand Saraswati. the founder of the rationalist

Arya Samaj in 1875, which strove to return to the original message of theancient scriptures of J-linduism, the Vedas, by debunking popular myth and

I

I

I

idol-worship? By then, a newly emergent bourgeois nationalism, still in the

process of asserting its claim to the nation as a whole, had found in the ideaof "one culture" a convenient bulwark both against the powerful intellectual

legacy of the West introduced in India by colonial rule, and against all those

"fragments" of the imaginary nation (sects, castes, t r i b e ~ localities) that

seemed resistant to the call to unity. The history of the popular was thus the

point from which to seek in the distant past the origins of the greater national

community that was to be reinstituted in the future. when foreign rule would

be brought to an end.

This ecumenical project of Indian nationalism thus had its own goal.which was to derive from the popular in its many practices. precepts and

doctrines. that primitive accord between subaltern and elite, hard to come by

in the present. that would hold Indian society together. The attempt to read

the text of the popular for this ancienl alTlnity was of the greatest moment in

the colonial formation of disciplines. in that it gave rise to a new rJeld in the

cultural projcct of nationalism, which is to say, criticism. Why did criticism

become the central force field in which the ideological strife over the soul of

the nation would come to be waged? The answer has to do with the very

significant fact that the rise of criticism in thc modern Indian languages was

contemporaneous with the growing interest in the history of the popular.

While the role or criticism in the nationalist frame was to discover in the

newly canonized literatureof

the past ami the present the key to a new ideaof community. it was the task of antiquarian research by nationalists (very

much in sync with European Orientalists) to lorge a new dcfinition of

religion.The two projects often came together in the same scholar, so that one can

imagine the great influence exercised in the evolving nationalist public sphere

in the early 1900s by a strange hybrid, a combination of literary critic (or

historian) and historian of religion, whom we can call the "historian of the

popular." This was because the literary canon the former was helping to

construct via commentary and critical edition overlapped to a considerable

degree with the canon of religious texts from the vernacular Middle Ages that

the latter. the historian of religion, was attempting to establish at the core of

Indian religion. In his vision of the modern, this historian remained com

pelled by the pull of the Indian past, seeking by the labor of critical practice

in texts that were at once "literary" and "religious" to transmit the obscure

seed of the popular to the soil of a nascent nationalist project. The lattercould now base on strong areh.ival grounds its claim to speak for the nation

as a whole, which is to say for "the popular" itself shorn of its complex

history. This will to interpretation of nationalist criticism directed itself

toward clearing the space of the popular for an elite public ideal of tradition

and meaning, a process that involved pushing aside the more obscure andopaque aspects of the popular itself, and ignoring its origins in radical low

caste protest and resistance. It is hard to understand the growth of criticism

in the modern Indian languages without the mediating function of this

42 Vicissitudes of historical religion The anomaly ofKabir 43



specific kind of thinker and writer, who brought together moreover theesoteric strains of Orientalist research and the popular local traditions(themselves in the process of construction) of which the emerging indigenousliterary canons seemed natural offshoots.

The Hindi critic Ramchandra Shukla's reading of Kabir in the I 930s is an

illuminating instance of this coincidence of aims.) Whether as a critic of

literature intent on establishing Hindi's claim to the popular north Indian

tradition, or a historian of religion invested in the legacy of Hinduism to the

nation, Shukla invariably had recourse to medieval traditions of bhakti ("par

ticipant devotion") (Schomer and McLeod 1987: 1-·20). Shukla was himselfinstrumental in pulling together the conventional account of this movement.

By this account, this movement had a lasting effect on literary, philosophical

and ethical thinking in various regional languages and cultures. Its influence

extended not just to elite circles of priests and literati, but emerged more

generally from, and revitalized the existing traditions of, low-caste protest.

Bhakti was indebted to many different strands ranging from popular tra

dition of yoga to the materialist and atheist aspects of various schools

of Buddhism, and in the Middle Ages to the influence of Sufi currents

brought to India by its Muslim rulers. It had emerged in the South in the

Tamil-speaking region in the seventh century in protest against rigid caste

rules and the obsession with ritual in a Sanskritic and brahmanical society and

had spread over a wide areaof

North India by the seventeenth century. Bhaktiset aside the clerical prestige of Sanskrit, calling in verses of great power in a

whole range of emerging vernaculars for human dignity and for the appeal to

human community implicit in the idea of divine love. And it had gradually

found its way across southwestern India into the north, bringing together

traditions of the worship of the Hindu gods Shiva (Shaivism, historically

much older, and with stronger popular roots), and Vishnu (Vaishnavism,

which was directed itself toward the avatars of Vishnu, Ram and Krishna, and

went on to constitute the dominant tradition in north India). Its evangelists

were poets and philosophers drawn equally from the upper and the lower

castes. In the north, bhakii came to be associated most closely with the

fifteenth- and sixteenth-century verses ofSurdas, Tulsidas. Mirabai and Kabir.

No more fruitful field of research could have been imagined for the idea of

an "Indian" religion of great antiquity that could also serve as the basisof the historical promise of the nation. But for Shukla the "modernity" of

bhaktt", which is to say its place in nationalism's story of its own hoary ori

gins, lay not in its tone of radical upheaval, but in its elaim to tradition.

Tradition then became the touchstone for what was truly worth preserving in

literature and religion. Responding in an implicit way to the missionary and

Hindu reformist blitz against the so-called "irrational" practices of popular

religion, committed to the rational Enlightenment ideal of social transpar

ency and discipline, and influenced by the European Orientalist attempt to

assimilate bhakti to Christianity, Shukla sought in bhakti the seeds for ancnlightened national idea of devotion to a greater causc.

It was while trying to read into the text of the popular precisely this idea of

tradition that Shukla came up against the problem of Kabir. S h u k l a ~ s pecu

liar interpretation of Kabir is a thread running through the entire range of hisliterary historical and his longer polemical essays. The interpretive ambition

that underlay Shukla's poetics will be easier to comprehend if we take this

concrete, and in fact very representative, instance of his critical discrimin

ation. Shukla's bhakti poets of choice had been Surdas (1478-1) and Tulsidas

(1532-1623), the critical editions of whose works he had begun to prepare inthe 1920s. Representing the tradition of worshipping a god with attributes,

known as sagun ("determinate") bhakti, the late fifteenth-century poetry ofSurdas drew an idyllic picture of he childhood of the Vishnu avatar Krishna,

while the late sixteenth-century poetry of Tulsidas extolled the grace and

valor of the other Vishnu avatar Ram in his relations with his wife and family,

and in his battle against the demon-king of Lanka, Ravana. Both poets drew

their protagonists from the popular epic traditions in ancient Sanskrit (Ram

and Krishna figure prominently in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata).

Their story-lines were the stuff of legend. Their ideals rested in the hollow of

a pan-Indian spirit of love, amity, and courage. And their poetry, written in

the Brajbhasha and Avadhi dialects of modern Hindi, could serve as a com

pelling argument for the long ancestr-y of Hindi traced back to the early

Middle Ages, a time that saw the extraordinary floweringof vernacular litera

tures in India. Here then were two poets who brought Hindi in line with themost widely disseminated traditions of bhakti in north India, and who at

the same time brought Indian religion, exemplified in bhakti, in tune with the

ideal of a rationalized and natural theology directed toward the soul of

the modern nationalist subject. Here too was evidence that modern Hindi's

(or khari-boli's) roots lay in the flourishing dialects of Avadhi and Brajbhasha

in which poetry continued to be composed up until the late nineteenth cen

tury, before the rise of modern Hindi itself. Here, moreover, was proof that

the kind of immediate embrace of a manifest god represented by the still

dominant traditions of Ram- and Krishna-bhakti was far from being what

European Orientalists and missionaries thought was a vulgar and mostly

arcane mode of fetishism, one whose philosophical origins lay in high Hindu

abstraction. It found instead its strongest expression in the popula r legends

and lore from which Surdas and Tulsidas derived their story-lines.And therein. in truth, lay the problem with Kabir. For the religious, lin

guistic and literary idiom of this early fifteenth-century poet of low caste

origins, placed him at a great and seemingly unbridgeable distance from the

later poetry of Surdas and Tulsidas. The latter was closer to the dominant

(mostly upper caste) traditions of north India in terms of literary technique,

religious aspiration and language. Whereas the "crude" unfinished verses

of Kabir, written in a mixed dialect that was straightforwardly neither

Brajbhasha nor Avadhi, and nor Bhojpuri, Punjabi or Rajasthani belonged in

tone and texture to what was known as "Hindavi." The latter was the popular

language spokcn widely in medieval northern India up until modern times,

44 Vicissitudes ofhistorical religion The anomaly ofKabir 45



before colonial bureaucrats and language nationalists in the nineteenth cen

tury began to promote the . dea of two separate languages (with two distinct

scripts), Urdu and Hindi, derived artificially from the common Perso-Arabic

and Sanskritic fund of spoken Hindavi. The conflict between Urdu and Hindi

had by Shukla's time become synonymous with the colonial and nationalist

commonplace that the Urdu-speaking Muslims and the Hindi-speaking

Hindus represented two distinct and incommensurable cultural and national

streams in northern India (see Dalmia 1999: 146 ··221). So that from Shukla's

perspective in the 1930s.. Kabir's idiom, redolent of the cosmopolitan era of

medieval Hindavi when the modern ideaof

a homogenous (Hindu) nationaltradition had not been current, and still bearing traces of ecumenical Sufi

and Islamic influence, seemed suspiciously "mystical" and "foreign" to the

generally accessible, more "Hindu" (and therefore more "Indian") valuesenshrined in the work of Surd as and Tulsidas.

Moreover, Kabir's god was not a determinate (sagun) avatar of Vaishnav

bhakti such as Ram or Krishna, accessible collectively through love and devotion in a narrative and ritual mode, but was an indeterminate (nirgun) god

lacking in attributes.. who could be reached individually by casting aside

doubt (bhmm) and embracing knowledge ([{van). More intolerable for Shukla

was the fact that Kabir was clearly under' the influence of older traditions

of Shiva worship in yoga (especially those practiced by the "Nathpanthi"

sect) and /antra, which in their obscure metaphysics and sexual symbolism

appeared arcane, illicit and other-worldly to the rationalist historian of the

popular. representing marginal currents of belief and ritual that (for Shukla)

had long since been superseded in the north by the dominant traditions of

Ram and Krishna worship. Kabir's modern adherents moreover were low

caste groups.. mostly peasants and tribals.. whereas Tulsidas and Surdas were

the favored saint-poets of the landed proprietor class in his native Northwest

provinces whom Shukla saw as the nation's "warrior-caste" (kshatriva. in

formal caste terms ranking above brahmins) in the fight against the British.

And most significantly, though rarely referred to explicitly by Shukla, there

was the incontrovertible fact that Kabir himself belonged to the weaver

(julaha) caste of COnvelis to Islam, placing him outside the pale both of theidentifiably Hindu and the Muslim world.

Bearing this triple stigma of the foreign, the esoteric, and the subalternityof caste. Kabir's corpus understandably did not fare well in the canonical

stakes of the Hindi enlightenment. Shukla returned 10 the problem of Kabir

in essay after essay, and sought to derive his own highly complex idea of the

popular from the texts of Surdas and Tulsidas, using Kabir very much as acounterfoil. Shukla's polemical attitude toward Kabir informed his reading

and reconstruction of the Hindi "tradition" as a whole. The object of his ire

was always the current of popular enthusiasm and mystery in the past---{)oe

than ran from yogic mysticism ofthe ancient Nathpanthis, of which he foundtelltale echoes in the medieval poetry of Kabir, through to Sufism, and

extending well into his own time in the guise of the Indian romanticism of

Chhayavad ("chiaruscuro"), represented by the poetry of Suryakant Tripathi

Nirala, Sumitranandan Pant, Jayashankar Prasad and Mahadevi Verma

(Singh 1979). For Shukla, Chhayavad was merely a symptom of a pernicious

current in Western thought, that of a kind of aestheticist individualism

(vyakti-vaichitryavad) that he detected in Blake, in the work of the Decadents,

and in Croce's theory of expressionism.

Kabir's resurgence in the history of the popular, and his rehabilitation in

the Hindi canon would have to wait until I-Iazariprasad Dwivedi's Kabil"

(1942), a book that with great passion and sheer force of argument. backed

by an impressive knowledge of the high Hindu as well as the popular tradition, catapulted Kabir to the center of the Hindi canon. Long considered the

finest scholarly monograph in Ilindi, it also established Dwivedi's own repu

tation as the chronicler of an alternative tradition. The latter had the virtue

of being able to link the vast corpus of ancient and medieval lore of popular

thought and practice with the democratic strains underlying much ofthe ne ...

kind of writing in Hindi. The novel, which Premchand had established as a

mode of social critique from the 19 l0s onwards. and the Indian Romanticism

of Chharavad in the 1930s were powerful instances of these new trends. The

Marxist' account in Hindi criticism, which had drawn for at least three dec

ades after Shukla's death in 1941 011 his vision of a radical communilY of

devotee-subjects of bhakfi, working to rid the nation of foreign yoke. now

needed to be revised.Yet the most eloquent and powerful plea for such a fe-thinking of the

Hindi canon, one that used Dwivedi's Kabir as its point of departure. would

come almost forty years later. shortly after Dwivedi's death in 1979. The

renewal of the debate around Kabir was precipitated by the pUblication in

1983 of a seminal work by Namwar Singh. Singh's book (1983), Dusri par

ampara ki khoj ("In Search of the Other Tradition") became a touchstone for

serious attempts to critique the history of canon-formation in Hindi. building

on the history of what Singh referred to as the communitarian ("jatiya")

tradition in the H i n d i ~ s p e a k i n g region of north India. The book undertook

moreover a wide-ranging critique of the Marxist tradition in Hindi criticism,

and sought to revive all those aspects of the Hindi canon that Shukla

had declared limits. More crucially, Singh sought to underscore the

importance of Dwivedi's research into the popular for the Hindi tradition

as a whole.

What precisely was new and strikingly original in Dwivedi's reading orKabir? There had a fter all been signs of awakened interest in Kabir in writerlycircles as far back as 1916 when the poet "Hariaudh" published the firsl

selection of Kabir poems in Hindi. And in 1928, the venerable Hindi aca

demic Babu Shyam Sundar Das had written a long critical introduction to his

edition of the western Indian manuscripts of Kabir, the Kabir Granthavali.

However, a tone of upper-caste disdain and a condescending attitude to the

quality of Kabir's verse considerably marred the critical fallout of these col

lections. Nevertheless, in the climate of increased nationwide violence in the

46 Vicissitudes o /histo rical religion The anomaly o/Kabir 47



1930s between Hindus and Muslims, it was not long before Kabir was

claimed by the left-leaning sections of the Indian National Congress, and by

writers associated with the"Progressive Writers' movement, as a symbol of

"commu nal" amity and peace between the two religious communities, refer

ring the national tradi tion back to its syncretic and tolerant roots in antiquity.Yet Kabir's growing role as a political icon for the Congress's ideal of a

secular nationalism that could speak for the majority Hindu as well as

the minority Muslim community, did not alter the status quo in the centers

of canonical debate in Hindi, Banares and Allahabad, where Surdas and

Tulsidas remained the quintessential saint-poetsof

the dominant northIndian tradition.

Born to a high brahmin family in Ballia, the easternmost of the Northwest

provinces, and educated at the conservative bastion of Hindi studies, the

Banares Hindu University (established in 1916), Dwivedi's alfective and

intellectual roots had also been nourished in this tradition. His first book,

Sur-Sahitya (The Literature 0/Surdas), written in 1936 when he was 29, had

attempted to reinterpret the ethical tradition in bhakti in the Hindi-speaking

north in terms of the message of love (prem) in Surdas which (unlike in

Tulsidas's more conservative account of the social) sought the radical tran

scendence of social barriers (see Dwivedi 1973 [1936]). Reading Kabir's work

very much within the tradition of Surdas.. but finding in the former the qual

ities of abandon, play and social intransigence that were (for Dwivedi) the

essence of the radical popular tradition inaugurated by blwkti in the north,

Dwivedi sought to argue for the idea of Kabir as a romantic rebel. a skeptic

for all seasons, one who like Diogenes could brook no false word, amrm no

false doct rine and could be identified with no given tradit ion, sect or creed.Dwivedi wrote,

Why people should want to think of Kabir as a syncretist (sarva-dharm

samanvayakart) of the Hindu and Muslim religions is hard to fathom.

Kabir's own path was quite clear. He wasn't one to merely bring together

these faiths by paying each a token tribute. He was more like the revo

lutionary who tore through the web of ritualized conduct and custom.Compromise was by no means his path.

(Dwivedi 1993 [1942]: 147)5

Dwivedi's Kabir then stood in an antipodal relation to the notion of secular

toleration for all faiths endorsed by Indian nationalism's vision, formulated

most influentially in the writings of Jawaharlal Nehru, for the independent

secular state of the future. Instead, Kabir (in Dwivedi's estimation) referred

his readers to longstanding subaltern traditions of dissent and resistancc in

Indian society. As a figurchead for this radical undercurrent in the popular,

Dwivedi's Kabir represented rebellion, protest, and the task of a radical

upheaval in moribund social norms. Juxtaposed against the Nehruvian idea

of the modcrn Indian nation as an imagined comity of faiths (so that for

Nchru i l i n d u ~ M u s l i m riots could only be vestiges of pre-modern habits of

mind), Kabir's Word stood instead for a relentless criticism of all tradition

and conduct, and implied a kind of freedom of belief that refused to affirm

anything but its own ideal of an indeterminate (nirgun) god. It should be

said that Dwivedi's own transformed understanding of Kabir and bhakti

as a wholc was indebted to the extraordinary energies being directed

toward rescarch into the history of the popular at Tagore's university at

Shantiniketan (near Calcutta), known as Vishwa Bharati, which Owivedi

joined as a Hindi instructor and scholar-at-Iarge in 1930.6 The e c u ~ e n i ~ a lpan-Indian thrust of research at Shantiniketan, working under the lllSPII'-

ation of Tagore, had already attracted a whole cross-section of European

philologists and historians of religion and art such as Sylvain Levi and Stella

Kramrisch. Tagore's close associate. Kshitimohan Sen had brought out a

rOUl'-volume critical edition in 1910 of Kabir songs taken from the Bengali

oral recension of the Vaishnavism-inflected western Indian tradition of

Kabir. And Tagore himself translated into English a selection from this edi

lion, which remains the most widely available edition of Kabir in the.West,

One Hundred Poems 0/ Kahir (1914), with a critical introduction by Evelyn

Underhill, an authority on Western mysticism. Openly acknowledging his

debt to Tagore, Dwivedi's Kabir often had recourse to the former's poetry

and ideas, and in this way followed Tagore in opening the history of the

popular to marginal and sub-cultural forms of social prote st in the p a s ~ . .

Posited as this principle of radical autonomy in the tradition. OWlvedl's

Kabir could not easily be assimilated to the dominant traditions of protest

and historical action in north India. For where earlier scholars such as Shukla

had looked in the work of Surdas and Tulsidas for the ideal of a national

community in action, Dwivedi pushed Hindi criticism's nationalist invest

ment in socially purposive literature in the direction of the radical individual,

the singular and "dangerous" instance to whose specinc protest the ideal of

national c ommunity would have to respond, inaugurating a new ethics of the

individual in nationalism. In this way, Dwivedi emphasized for the first time

the "personality" (vyaklitwl) of Kabir himself, and argued forcefui1y for both

the power of Kabir's verse (c..'liling him famously a "dictator with language"),

and for Kabir's status less as a Vaishnav devotee like Surdas and Tulsidas,

than a guru in his own right. To cite a well known passage from the conclu

sion to Kabir, for Dwivedi

Kabir was a religious guru [dharmguru]. Which is why the spiritual sap

(ras) of his sayings should alone be savored. Scholars.. however, h a ~ e usedand studied Kabir in various ways. traditionally choosi ng to see him as a

poet, social ref()fmer, preacher of religious s ~ n c r e t i s m [ s a m a n v a ~ ] , arbiter

of Hindu-Muslim unily, upholder of a specllk sect, and as a thmker and

interpreter aftcr the traditions of Indian philosophy th at follow from the

Vedanta . . . [They tend to forget that] there has never been a personality

[ ~ ' y t 1 k l i f V { / ] l i k e Kahil' in the thousand-year history of Ilindi . . . Abandon

48 Vicissitudes of historical religion The anomaly of Kahir 49



[mastiI, a rebellious [phakkarana] spirit and the acuteness tha t comes with

a castigation of all thiQgs, [such qualities] make Kabir the most singular

individual [advitiya vyakttl in Hindi literature. What extends its spell over

the range of his utterances is [the force of] this all-conquering personality

(Kabir, 170)

We will return to the implications of this notion of a "uniq ue individual in the

next section. Here it should suffice for us to note the crucial relation implied

here between the historical project of Hindi and the idea of Kabir's unique

personality ("there has never becn a personality [vyaktitva] like Kabir in thethousand-year history of Hindi"). Which of the two terms serves as a basis

for the other? It is clearly the inexhaustible depth ofthis personality in Kabir.

its potential for interminable interpretation that makes meaningful all of a

sudden the Hindi millennium. That is to say that it is the force of Kabir.

transformativc in its goal and opening up an abyss in time, which makes the

past history of Hindi understandable·-·-understandable, that is, within the

terms of the interruption that Kabir represents. Dwivedi's quest for an insight

into Kabir's "personality" then has the hallmarks of both an interpretative

and a historical agenda.

With Dwivedi the history of popular, which the new discipline of criticism

had arrogated to itself as its chief and only object, can be seen as having

entered a new stage, which we can c.:'lll the stage of "interpretation." InShukla, the popular had been read in terms of its proximity to dominant

longstanding ideas of belief and community; so that whatever eluded the

"discipline" of Shukla's rigor had to bear the brunt of his condescension:

Kabir was one significant casualty of this (Shukla) phase in the history of the

popular. His pioneering and still influential account of the popular had been

"disciptinary" in two senses. First. in the sense of laying the ground for a new

area of knowledge ("criticism") in the colonial contest of disciplines. wherein

nationalism sought to lay claim at once to a universal idea of knowledge and

to objects of knowledge different from that of West. (The idea of an "Indian"

history of the popular as the uniq ue object of criticism takes precedence

here.) And it was disciplinary too, in the sense that certain "decisions" had

had to be made with regard to what could and could not constitute the Hindi

canon, especially since the latter was being forged in close adherence to an

idea of a popular tradition (exemplified in Tulsidas and Surdas) in the

north. To this process whereby the popular came to disciplined, Dwivedi

counterposed another practice, which was to read the popular in terms of

its irreducibility to the mainstream. The divide between elite and subaltern,

dominant and marginal became crucial here, and continues to inspire the

progressive stream of Hindi criticism today. Here Dwivedi would rely on his

romantic account of Kahir to argue that the popular was the locus of a

carefree, uninhibited individuality. This version of "the popular" now con

tained within itself the seed of what was seen to be an age-old Indian idea of

freedom from social and personal restraint: Dwivcdi's challenge was that the

dominant national tradition in the north would have to revise its cultural

assumptions in order to embrace a marginal tradition of transgressive and

rebellious (phakkar) behavior. Only then, argued Dwivedi, would a truly

"national" tradition emerge as the locus of the cherished primitive accord

between subaltern and elite that remained compelling both to Dwivedi's

nationalism and to critics who followed in his wake.This momentous transition from a disciplinary to an interpretive idea

of the popular had its own peculiar repercussions. Now that the popular

had become the locus of an interpretive agenda, and had begun to be read

for its opaque and obscure features, there was always the danger of "overinterpretation." Dwivedi's own investment in the marginal was after allpropelled by an ideal that was strictly nationalist in two specific senses; it

sought to assimilate to the Hindi tradition, and hence to the national trad

ition as a whole to which Hindi was now arrogated, vast areas of popular

practice accessible only to the archivist, t he philologist and to the historian of

religion. Such a project was also nationalist in the sense that it sought to

establish on the basis of the popular the grounds for one single homogeneous

Hindu tradition, which could then serve as the religious core of national

culture. The case of Kabir alone is enough to remind us that such an ambi

tion is reductive in the extreme; for neither in terms of literary form, nor

language, and certainly not in terms of religion, is it easy to write Kabir into

any monolithic idea of "literature" or of "religion." But it was because thepopular had become an archive "for" interpretation that such a conflation

was possible in the first place.It is precisely this tendency to underplay all that is truly inassimilable to the

so-called "religious" tradition, that is to say, aspects of the popular that

represent a serious challenge to the dominant brahmanical tradition, that has

made Dwivedi, and by the same token, the entire tradition of Kabir-criticism,

and of dominant traditions of criticism in Hindi as a whole, the target of a

powerful recent critique by the tlalit scholar, Dr. Dharmvir. 7 For Dharmvir,

not only does Dwivedi assimilate Kabir to the high Hindu tradition that the

latter worked against all his life, but he disregards the l auer's truest achieve

ment, which was to establish "another religion," of which he was both god

and messiah, and which he founded for Dalits alone.There are two highly provocative but related claims here. First, there is the

allegation that Dwivedi remains a high Hindu (brahmanical) scholar wishing

to assimilate dalit thinking to the Hindu fold--this, despite the unfaltering

rigor and astuteness of Dwivedi's analyses, and despite his caution both

against reading Kabir in token secular or syncretic (samam'Oyvadl) terms. So

that where Dwivedi's text on Kabir had seemed to radical left scholarssuch as Namwar Singh to inaugurate and unveil an alternative tradition in

the Hindi-speaking region of the north, it is quite clear to Dharmvir that

Dwivedi remains unmistakably within that dominant high Hindu tradi tion in

which the histories of low-casle peoples rarely receive adequate attention.Dharmvir's second accusation, made against the backdrop of the increased

50 Vicissitudes ofhistorical religion 111C allOmOrl' o fKabir 51



mobilization along religious lines of what was until the mid-19XOs a l a l ' g e l ~ 1secular project for an Indian nationalism. is even more provocative. For toargue in the present political conjuncture in India for an alternative religion

for dalits, with Kabir at its head, is already to say that there is a genuine need

for a "religious" as opposed to a merely literary or literary-critical revivalamong dalits.

We might well join Dharmvir's detractors in Hindi studies and the History

of Religions in putting to him the following set of questions. To begin with, is

this not yet another attempt of Dharmvir' s to read as religious what is really

the secular vocation of a great medieval poet? Kabir did after all work all hislife as a weaver, His poems continue to be sung by low-caste landless peasant

and tribal converts to the Kabirpanthi sect and are still part of the folk

wisdom of agricultural peoples in huge swathes of north India including

Gujarat, Rajasthan. Punjab, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. More so, his quite

apparent aversion to religious bigotry and ritual of any kind establishes him as

a modern and secular "Indian " before his time. Does not Dharmvi r's account

of Kabir's religion derive its central tenets. in however negative and oppos

itional a way, from the very tradition that he seeks to estrange Kabir from?

They will argue further: to detach the figure of Kabir from the dominant.

high Hindu tradition is commendable. but docs not t he move to extricate him

from the tradition as a whole, its dominant and radical tendencies included,

forgo the possibility of a solidarity with marginalized popular traditionswithin the Hin du fold? What would be the shape ofthis radical dalit religion,

which would place itselfat such an absolute and non-negotiable remove from

the social history of the popular? Where then would this "other" tradition

situate itself, this tradition which would have to be understood now (pace

Namwar Singh, who speaks of following Dwivedi in going In Search of the

Other Tradition) as the other of the "other tradition",? And how would one

speak of f om it? What, in sum, is the notion of represent.:'ltion (in the sense

of both speaking of and speaking for the other) implied in Dharmvir's think

ing. and how does it extend the idea of a modern dalit awakening in litera

ture, social science, in the domain of affirmative policies. in employment and

education and in electoral politics--to the domain of the theologico-political?

In order to address these questions. we will need to return to Dwivedi's

Kabir, which apart from being the text on Kabir in the last century (there has

not been a more forceful attempt in any Indian language to argue for Kabir's

place in the national tradition). constitutes Dharmvir 's own point of depart

ure. The latter's method consists of reading Kabir for its relentless assimila

tion of Kabir to the high Hindu tradition. In this respect Dharmvir's is very

much a daHl polemic in the tradition of the dalit leader and constitutionalist

Bhimrao Ambedkar, in that it attempts to recover from the historical and

cultural mainstream of national culture, the wherewithal for an autonomous

daHt tradition, The possibility of the latter rests on the political fiction of

an absolute opposition between the high "brahmanical" and the low caste

"dalit" currents in Indian history. And the strategy of such a dalit critique is

hrst 10 expose the ideological means by which hrahmanical thinking seeks

to elide the reality of caste oppression, and then to provide an alternative

account of the nation's history. one written from the point of view of dalits.

Where Ambedkar had turned t o a philological rereading of the Buddhist and

Hindu traditions (he was later to convert to Buddhism). Dharmvir stays with

a close almo st legalistic reading of the text. on the basis of which he seeks to

indict Dwivedi for his h r a h m a n i ~ m .Nonetheless. Dha rmvir's own Kabir emerges fmally in the likeness of

Dwivedi's. Like Dwivedi's Kabir. he too is a religious (dharm) guru and a

messiah of love (prem): and he too is intransigent to the dominant traditionsof nation and culture in north India. Yet in arguing for a "religion" of Kabir

of which the latter is himself the presiding deity, Dha rmvir can be seen to

have taken the debate in the direction of a new vision of the popular. one that

roots it in a community that is not here in the present (in religion or nation).

Nor is it superseded by the romantic individualism that Dwivedi reads in

Kabir. I lis is in fact a dalit community that "is to come," a community whose

blueprint remains to be drawn. With this the history of the popular will have

reached its third stage. which is to say the point at which it can narrativize

itself. author its own history. and by laying claim to theoretical and philo

sophical method, broach a critique of its own ethical assumptions.

Here we will attempt to read Dwivedi's text in the spirit but not the letter of

Dharmvir's critique. This is because our interest lies in what Dharmvi r makesavailable to us, which is a wholly different reading of the ties between the

nationalist project and the history of criticism. He makes it possible for us to

read this critical tradition for its inability to account for the place of the

Indian Muslim in the nationalist account of the past. and to draw a relation

between this elision of Islam and the traditions of dalit protest. In seeking

to read Kahir as a point of entry into a critique of the idea of community

in nationalist criticism, and in drawing attention to the ways in which he

constantly reminds us of the t:<11I of the marginalized and downtrodden, wehave adopted for heuristic reasons the perspective of the "convert." Now

conversion and dalitness refer in the case of Kabir to the same marginal

status: Kabir, as we will have occasion to see in the next chapter, is indeed at

once a COllllert and a dalil. Yet our own use of the idea of "conversion" is

(Gauri Viswanathan 1(98) akin to a critical device; we seek to read the text of

Kabil' for the subject-position of the convert, one who cann ot assume a given

religious. social or economic identity. and must remain temporally forever"in-between" all ascription of place, location and identity. It is the pathos of

this unfinished aspect of the convert's journey that opens a breach in our

given scripts for the future. olfering us hope for a dilTerent idea of com

munity, one that would argue for the radical autochthony of the Muslim

and the dalit in Indian history. In other words, closely related and yet

distinct (they merge in Kabir), the figure of the convert and the figureof the dalit can be scen to intersect at a point of critical intensity that intro

duces a serious rupture in the idea of the nation. It is from this minimal and

52 Vicissitudes ojhistorical religion The anomaly oj Kabir 53



intermediate space inhabited by the convert that we shall negotiate the read-

ings that follow.

Dwivedi's Kabir: violence of the event

We learned in the previous section that the shifting place of Kabir in Hindi

modernity has something like a relation to the history of the popular. We

defined the popular in a preliminary way as the interpretative frame within

which scholars and antiquarians sought in the late colonial period to draw a

relation between the essential traits of national character and the varied andheterogeneous "life-worlds" of the mass. We made the argument that there

was a crucial link at the turn of the nineteenth century between the rise of

ethnography and the emergence of criticism. The critical and ethnographic

determination of the popular in this period seemed to us to be a crucial node

in the burgeoning domain of culture. What has been missing in our character

izations of the popular so far has been an extended account of the element of

history. For it was the historical project thtlt ultimately served as a foundation

lor both the ethnographic and the critical project in Indian nationalism. The

crucial point is that the whole range of conceptual indices we have used so far

to delimit the popular---life-world. ritual, everyday, mass, etc.-refer in the

final analysis to a transformative idea of history. The notion of history

implicit in the idea of the popular refers to the sense of a transformativemoment in the past that could just as easily serve as an indicator of a possible

transformation in the present. The "history" of the popular then looks at

once to the past and to future; it seeks to find in the past a way of understand

ing and confronting the dilemmas of the present. There is no doubt that

the writing of history always bears within it this reference to the present.

Recognizing that a historian's relation to the past is an "interested" one that

stems from the needs of the historian's own present is after all an essential

aspect of the critique of historiography. Yet in a sense, history has tradition

ally tended to direct its energies to the past; its vision of the future is under

written by a predilection for the past. With the "history of the popular," we

encounter the obverse of this tendency, which is to define the present in terms

of the past. To delimit the present in this way is also to guard the present,

protect it, and translorm it in carefully modulated ways. The history of the

popular therefore has an investment in the idea of historicity, which is the

coming into being of history. It is worth remarking that the potential for a

ceaseless transformation of the present is implicit in this idea of history;

hence the interest and stake in the immediacy of the everyday and its networkof practices.

Dwivedi's Kabir in many ways exemplifies the element of historicity in the

history of the popular. For the figure of Kabir taken up for extended explica

tion in this book is not simply that of a major "saint-poet" (santkal'i) without

whom it would be impossible to write a history of the pre-modern period in

India. Moreover, Dwivedi's interest in Kabir is not historical in the sense of

antiquarian, although his book on Kabir was an early milestone in his life-

long research into obscure cults and practices. Nor is Dwivedi invested as

Shukla was, in counterposing an Indian idea of rational religion to a Western

one, and in striving to prove that it was the West that had fallen from its

own primordial connection with the advent of reason in the human world.

Shukla's project remained in this sense historicist; his aim was the avowedly

nationalist one ofrec1aiming for India a place in the global history of Reason.

For if Europe could have developed its own idea of religion, Shukla seemed

to say, so could we. Dwivedi's book represents what is a radical departure

from such historicism, for its stake lies in inaugurating another idea of history altogether, one that would remain at a distance from Shukla's rational

theology. This new and altogether more generative idea of history has as

its central theme the movement of Love (prem) through history, which is

grounded in the unsettling presence of the deity in this world, and has as its

locus the figure of Kabir.Why Kabir? For it would be in Kabir's call for a radical negation of all

identity and of all prescriptions for seilltood and community that Dwivedi

would discover a principle of absolute transformat ion in history. Let us pause

briefly to complicate our picture of this transformative project. We will

encounter such a transformative vision of history in Chapter 6 in our

discussion of Rajwade. But there the nature of historical enquiry is

directed toward the endof

intervening in the present by meansof

a reorientation of idea of language. Dwivedi's notion of transformation is similarly

attuned to transforming the present; it is for this reason that his work has

been so enabling lor the radical trend in Hindi criticism represented by

Namwar Singh; it is also what makes Dwivedi's quest for an "other" trad

ition in Hindi a "political" one. Yet the ditTerence between Dwivedi and the

earlicr historians of the popular such as Rajwade and Shukla is his

recognition of the need not just for a principle of transformation in the

present but also. more crucially, the necessity lor an alternative account of

historical change.It is for this reason that the accent in Kabir is consistently on the notion of

the "unique personality" of Kabir himself. For Kabir is unique not just

because there is no one in the bhakti tradition like him. He is unique because

he functions as the locus at once of self-translonnation and of historical

translormation. "Historical transformation," or, which is the same thing, the

"transformation of history": the latter phrase should be understood in its

subjective and objective genitive sense. The translormation associated with

Kabir is at once a transformation within history and a tr ansformation of he

idea of history itself. Such a transformation would be "absolute" because it

involved (for Dwivedi) at once a relentless skepticism toward every worldly tie

and an unconditional surrender before an abstract God (Kabir's Ram). As a

mode of being-fragile, this implied laying oneself open to the Love that was

God's, 11 Love that was at once redemptive and excessive. Kabir's mode

of self-transformation was therefore intensely personal and productive of a

54 Vicissitudes o/ hist orica l religion The anomaly a/KaMr 55



multiple range of elfects within Kahir's highly elaborate physiognomy of the

soul; it nonetheless had potential to bring about fundamental shifts in

historical understanding. Dwivedi's "Kabir" thus becomes the irreducible

locus for a mode of historical critique that, by sheer dint of individual will,

redefines the nature of historical understanding itself, and inaugurates an idea

of history based on the necessary recurrence of such self-transformation. But

for such a historically effective transformation to take place, Kabir would

have to be placed on the historical stage. That is to say that his historical

agency would have to be staged in a certain way as being in excess of history.

For the emergence of Kabir in history is for Dwivedi at once a break with anda continuation of the past. "History" itself needed to be staged and undone

in Kabir; Kabir himsclfwas both a historical actor and founder of a new idea

of history. For this re.:1.son, I would argue that the centerpiece of Dwivedi's

book is its historical chapter, called "The Place of Kabir in India's Religious

Quest" (bharafiya dharm-sadhana men kabir ka sthan), which deals with the

advent of Islam in India. Where a great portion of Kabir is dedicated to a

commentary on and explication of Kabir's central concepts by drawing on

the vast archive of premodern practice and thought, the historical chapter

seeks to define in the most authoritative manner the "nature" of Kabir's

historical mission. Who or what was this mission directed against? How did it

succeed in producing a range of shifts at the personal, social and political

level? In what follows we will examine at length the central argumentsof

thishistorical chapter of Kabir. Our method will be to read closely a series of

nearly consecutive passages so as to uncover Dwivedi's idea of history. If my

claim that the historical chapter in Kabir is its centerpiece is borne out by my

a n a l y s e ~ then it should be possible to extend its implications to the varied

and inexhaustible exposition of Kabir's religion that Dwivedi presents in hisbook taken as a whole.

I will begin at the start of the chapter. which quickly sets the stage for the

advent of Kabir in Indian history. Here it becomes apparent that Kabir's

advent is for Dwivedi a response to another prior advent, that of Islam.Dwivedi w r i t e ~

The epoch of the emergence of Kabir was preceded by an unprecedented

event [ahhutpurva gha/na ghati thl1 in the history of India [bharatl'ar.l'h ke

itihas men]. This was the advent of the highly integrated creed [ s u . \ " ( m ~gafhif s a m p r a d a . ~ a ] that was Islam. The event violently shook religious

thought and SOCial arrangements in India. [Is ghatna ne bharativa dharm

mal aur ~ a m a j - I ' y a l ' a s t h a ko burf tarah se jhakjhor dfya.] Its s ~ p p o s e d l yunchangmg caste system was dealt a heavy blow. The sense in India was

one of being beside oneself with anxiety [sankshubdha (hal The scholarly

[pandiljan] response was to look for the causes of this stupefaction [sank

shobh] and to find ways of handling [sambhafne] [this crisis in] Indiansociety and religious thinking [dharma-mat].

(Kabir, 136)

Dwivedi is then a historian hecause he thinks after "the" event. To think artcr

is, first. to come after in a temporal sense, so that one can say, the event has

passed by. By this token, Dwivedi will have located himself in the lateness (the

posteriority) of his own moment having arrived late on the scene of Kabir's

advent. Yet his own late-coming is not enough to disqualify him for the role

of chronicler of the event. For us this ought to give rise to a series of related

questions. How can one demarcate this event, its beginning and it:;:. end'? What

makes it possible for Dwivedi to return to this event? Can he continue to

inhabit the event el'en as it passes before him? Or can such a sense of the event

-'as a whole" require the retroactive gaze that comes with being able to situatconeself in a point in time that is "absolutely" posterior to the event in ques

tion? But to "think after" is also to think the event itself: it is to wonder after

the nature of this event, and "its" own historical emergence. What makes

Dwivedi a historian in this sense, which is to say a philosopher of history, is

his asking here not just for the meaning of the event. but for the non-event

that precedes this event of Islam -- makes this event what it is, cannot be, will

have been. What is this prehistory? Dwivedi himself has a stake in answering

this question.Let US understand how the very next passage in thc historical chapter in

Kabir lays the ground for this prehistory, for an account of the status quo

prior to the disturbance of Islam. The passage is worth quoting at length,

both for its complexityand

because we will have occasion to return toit

in theensuing discussion.

India is not some new country. Great empires have been interred in its

soil, great religious proclamations have resonated in its skies, great civil

izations have arisen and gone to seed in its every corner. and their t r a c e ~[smriti-chinha] still stand i f ( : ~ l e s s , as though the yelping goddess of victory

had been struck by lightning. Innumerable castes (jaliyon], tribes. lin

eages [nasIon] and wandering nomads have come here in packs. For a

while they unsettled [vikshubdha bhi banay a hm1 the mood in the country.

but in the end they could not remain other [paraye] for long. Their gods

would usurp [dakhal) one of the 33 crore thrones [available here to divin

ity], and find themselves revered like the older gods -,- sometimes cam

even greater respect than them. It has been a unique feature of Indian

culture that the internal social order [samaj-I'yavastha] and religious

beliefs (dharm-mat] of these tribes, lineages and castes were never inter

fered with [hastkshep] in any way, and were yet made entirely Indian.

There is a complete list of such tribes in the Bhagvata Purana (2: 4-18)

proving that they became pure after accepting God. This includes the

Kirat, Hun, Andhra, Pulind, Pukkas, Abhir, Shung, Yavan, Khas, Shaka

and many other such tribes [jatiyan] that are not mentioned by the author

of the Bhagm'afe. Indian culture could assimilate these guests (alith(von ko

apna saki thi] because its religious quest has from the beginning been

subjective (vaiyaktik]. Each person has the right to his own kind of

56 Vicissitudes ofhistorical religion The anomaly of Kab;r 57



spiritual seeking. You can come together festively, but not to sing praises

of God, in which case..every person is obliged (jimmedar] to fend for

himself. The most importa nt thing is not the worship of any particular

religious idea [dharm¥matJ or god but purity of conduct and character

[achar-shuddhi aur ca,.itrya]. If a man stands by the faith [dharmJ of his

forefathers, remains pure in character [caritraJ, doesn't care to emulate

another caste or person's conduct but prefers to die for his own creed

[swadharm], and is honest and truthful, he will most certainly have stat¥

ure [shreshtha haiJ, whether he is from the lineage of Abhir or from the

line of Pukkas. To be high-born is a mark of one's previous life, butcharacter (caritryaJ is a sign of deeds done in this life. The gods do not

belong to one tribe [jaii]; they are everyone's and have the right to every

kind of worship. But that the gods may themselves wish that a particular

caste or person should be the medium of their worship was never a

problem for Indian society. The brahmin will pray to Matangi devi, but

through the medium of the Matang. So what if the Matang were the

[untouchable] Chanda!! If the god Rahu makes grants only to Dams, so

be it: all of Indian society will make gifts to the Dom to ward off the

unjust shadow on the eclipsed moon. In this way Indian culture has

assented [swikar kar liya] to the entire gamut of castes, along with their

peculiar features. But up to now no "creed" [mazhab] had come at its

door.It

[Indian culture] did not have the strength to digest this [hajamkar sakne ki shakti nahin rakhta thaI.

(Kabir, 136--7)

What is this event that gives rise to the need for the narrative of a prehistory,

or the fiction of a past? It is the advent, we will recall, of the "creed (susan¥

gathit sampradaya) that was Islam." Placed next to Dwivedi's characteriza

tion of the old MaratvlIrsh as "not new," this helps evoke an idea of India

as loose, undifferentiated, unorganized, the very antithesis of a "highly inte¥

grated" society. The accent that Dwivedi will give to this older vision of India

is that of an extraordinary openness to the new. a quality that for him inheres

in the old. Though the themes evoked in the passage recur often in the litera¥

ture of Indian nationalism since Nehru's Discovery of India, Dwivedi's vision

of this "prehistoric" India is nonetheless sweeping in its embrace.The writing of prehistory therefore begins with the assertion in this passage

that: "India is not some new country:' (Bhar(llI'arsh koi naya desh nahin

haL) India, Maratvarsh, therefore is perennially the "not new," and it cannot,

if it is to remain itself. cast aside the regime commanding the repetition of

the same, to take on all of a sudden the character of something entirely

"unprecedented and new (abhutpurva . . . aur navin)." India as a historical

object would appear to be definable in terms of its persistence as a non¥event,

eternally in and beyond time. This prehistory of India as an eternal instance

orthe "not new" gives us a sense of Dwivedi's stance with respect to the idea

of tradition. The temporal dimension implicit in this idea of tradition derives

after all from the notion of historicity at the basis of his thinking. The impli¥

cation would seem to be that the event that had the temerity (jhakjhor dena

speaks to the folk etymology of "temerity" in Latin, which is "to shake up")

to leave us in a daze, stupefy us, came to us from "some new country." This

vulgar time came from the outside and unsettled our own, turning our more

authentic time inside out. The event was so great that it rendered into a mere

blip what came before. Nonetheless, as a blip (but the entire heritage of India

or bharatvarsh, the immemorial march of eons beyond number, is gathered in

this blip) it is the infinitesimal threshold of historical time, making possible

the chasm that is about to open. A mere blip: it appears (as old bharall'arsh)even as it recedes hurriedly from sight self¥elfacing, but resilient. What lends

Dwivedi's India this labile, this self¥replenishing power? What is the secret of

its spontaneity (sl'abhavikla), which Dwivedi will go on to celebrate in the

following pages as the gift of Kabir to Indian society? What makes the pre¥

Islamic culture of the subcontinent so adaptable, shifting, noma dic· -and yet

so secure?

For Dwivedi it lay in the essence of Indian tradition to assent [swikar

kama] to the new; but for the very first time. it could not assent to this

"intrusion," the trauma of which can be detected everywhere in these lines.

Docs Dwivedi mean to say that India taught itself to "give assent" to the

newness of Islam? The answer is in the negative. The old ecumenical culture

associated with the Hindu/Indian tradition was unable. so Dwivcdi seems to

say, to revise its idea of openness and assent. for the very possibility of

internal critique and reassessment had been put to rest by the traumatic

advent of Islam. It is at this point that Kabir becomes crucial for Dwivedi's

historical argument, providing him at once with a principle of change and of

continuity. For at the very end of this discussion in Kabir. as will be seen, its

eponymous hero will be celebrated for what he gave to Hindu society: accord¥

ing to Dwivedi. this was the courage for a new kind of dissent (aswikar ka

sahas], not assent. Dwivedi writes,

Casting aside with untold courage all external forms of conduct. Kabir

arrived on the scene of [spiritual] seeking. It is not as though mere dissent

is of value here or simply refusing assent. But to refuse to assent to

[religious] barriers for a grcater cause is truly an act of courage. Purposeless protest can entail destruction, but protest driven by a noble end must

ever be the motive of the valiant.(Kabir,146)

The structure of Dwivedi's argument in this later passage (to pre¥empt my

own analysis in what follows) gives us a particularly acute sense of the

link between Dwivedi's notion of an Indian skepticism and his account

of the popular. Kabir, Dwivedi appears to say, refused everything, which

is to say that Kabir debunked both the detritus of ritualized Hindu life

as well as the legalism of Islam. But the great paradox is that Kabir's

58 V i c i s s i t u d e ~ ' ofhistorical religion The anomaly uIKabir 59



skepticism. in Dwivedi's view. only confirms his inextricable link with the

central themes of Indian/Hi.ndu culture. We do not gain any insight here

in Dwivedi's text of the radical skepticism of the daHt Kabir, whose unique

way of saying "no" is understood by Dwivedi historically as Hindu society's

negative response to Islam. Kabir refused everything, Dwivedi would appe ar

to be arguing, and in this way (paradoxically) he enabled Hindu society to say

"no" to Islam. Hi ndu society, by Dwivedi's account, had not known how to

say no until Kabir faced up to Islam! Kabir as this Hin du dissenter now turns

his skeptical gaze to the enemy without. All of a sudden, and again by

Dwivedi's account, there appears to have been a closing of ranks inIIindu society. Kabir's radical critique of caste society would have had to be

shelved. For there was a greater enemy waiting at the gates of India or bharal-

l'arsilu. The birth of Indian/Hindu skepticism, which is to say that singular

coming together of the brazen (akkhar) and the rebellious (phakkar) attitudes

exemplified in the stance of Kabir toward all ritual and norm, coincided

(so [)wivedi seems to say) with the historical "refusal" (nakama) of Islam.

Indian skepticism (aswikar ka sahas) thus came into being for Dwivedi

when ecumenical Indian/Hindu culture ceased to remain open to new

inl1ucnces.

Strangely, Kabir's radical skepticism is in the final analysis (for Dwivedi)

an affirmation of Indian/Hindu tradition. But how can a skeptical stance as

unrelenting and intransigent as Kabir's, turn into an endorsement of trad

ition? The idea of a partial skepticism is after all logically untenable. yet it

would seem to be essential to the notion of historical transformation Dwivedi

aUempts to read into Kabir. There is clearly a need in Dwivedi to modulate

Kabir's skepticism in such as way as to render it amenable to the discourse

of trauma and recovery implicit in his accounl of the encountcr between

Hinduism and [slam. In sum Dwivedi's understa nds Kabir's skepticism. com

ing (It the end of a dark night of doubt and questioning, as one that helps to

transform history along the lines of a personal affirmation of Indian/Hindu

culture in its essential spiritualism. Doubt and then faith, skepticism and then

affirmation: yet what will have been transformed by means of this most rea

sonable skepticism? What is the historical substance t hat is to be subjected to

the arduous labor of allirmation? The notion of skepticism that Dwivedi

attempts to derive from Kabir is labile enough to encompass radical changeand managed continuity. I t is here that the question of the "subjective"

(voiyaktik) conditions of Kabir's skepticism becomes absolutely crucial. For

implicit in Dwivedi's romantic account of Kabir is not just the idea of a

historical transformation but the birth of [ndian subjectivity. The idea of an

"Indian" skepticism identifiable with Kabir serves as the threshold for a

genealogy of "Indian" subjectivity, one that is at once intensely persona l and

innately social. What brings together the personal and thc social into a single

idea of individual atrect? It is Dwivedi's history of trauma, which is also a

theory of trauma, whose roots he begins to uncovcr in the passage we have

been discussing.

Hinduism and radical evil

To examine more closely the language of trauma associated with the advent

of Islam in Dwivedi's text, let us now return to the passage at the start of his

historical chapter, which as we saw painted a picture of an ecumenicism at the

heart oflndian culture. Here Dwivedi's use of the nearly synonymous terms,

sankshobh and vikshobh to describe the nature of this trauma is particularly

significant For the psyche of India appears to Dwivedi to have undergone

two kinds of crises with respect to Islam, closely related in kind, but different

in degree. Dwivedi's initial charaeteriZ<'ltion of India's plight is that of "being

beside oneself with anxiety," for which he uses the adjectival form of sank-shobh. i.e. sankshubdha. This is the pressing situation that India's scholarly

class (presumably the priesthood) sets about trying to "get a handle on"

(sombhalna). Yet clearly this initial description docs not adequately compre

hend the exact nature of the trauma that Dwivedi has in mind, for he then

resorts to the word closely related to sankshobh, which is vikshobh and its

adjectival form, vikshubdha. Now vikshobh refers more alarmingly to theupheaval associated with the very first encounter with the other: it is in fact

the exacerbation of a merely "anxi ous t t e n d i n g ~ t o " (sankshobh). Vikshobh is

a condition much worse, more unsettling, bordering on madness. 8 How is

India to cope with this sudden experience of madness?

Therc have been times before this that the stranger or madman has been in

the house. These lines from the passage quoted above delimit the possibilitiesof assimilation in Indian society:

Innumerable castes (jatiyfanj), tribes, lineages (nas/fen) and wandering

nomads have come here in packs. For a while they unsettled (vikshubdha

bhi banaya hai) the mood in the country, but in the end they could not

remain other [paraye] for long. Their gods would usurp [dakhal] onc of

the 33 crorc thrones [available here to divinity], and find themselves

revered like the older gods--sometimes earn even greater respect than

them . . . [they] were never interfered with (hastkshep] in any way, and

were yet tur ned entirely Indian.(Kabir,136)

But those occasions only serve to further illustrate for Dwivedi the assimila

tive embrace of Indian culture at large: "Indian culture could absorb these

guests (atithiyon ko apna saki thi) bccause its religious quest has from .the

beginning been subjective (vaiyaktik)" (Kabir, 136). Historical I s l a n ~ IS a

threat precisely to this assimilative idea of individuality, one that had m the

past enabled the Indian/Hindu to recover quickly from outside intrusion, and

to work through the trauma (vikshobh) of violation.

The accent on the subjective (vaiyaktik) should remind us of one of the

oldest alibis of modern organized Hinduism, forerunner to today's Hindu

nationalism, that "customary Hindu life" is. despite and in fact because of

60 Vicissitudes ofhistorical religion

the caste system, fundamentally individualistic, whereas Islam is character

The a f l o m a ~ v of Kabir 61

published in 1936, six years before Kabir. More crucially, as Namwar Singh



ized by the enthusiasm of Jhe group. From the revivalist Arya Samaj who

sought to institutionalize a beleaguered Hinduism in the nineteenth centurv

to the great conservative and comparatist student of the caste system, Loui's

Dumont, author of the epoch-making book, Homo Hierarchicus (1966) for

whom as is well known caste constitutes the civilizational divide between

India and the West, this idea has been put to a range of different u s ~ s . The

accent has always been on the problem of individuality in the group. For

Dumont, as Nicholas Dirks points out in his account of the Indological idea

of c a s t ~Indian/Hindu society worked along the lines

of

a fundamentallyhierarchical order, one so innate and deep-rooted that it delled historical

change and transition (Dirks 2001: 58-9). The necessity of caste distinctions

was beyond question. The only available avenue for protest and social critique

lay in a renunciation of society altogether. a form of rebellion whose wide

appeal is evident in proliferation in late antiquity of s ~ c t s practicing a

form of radical asceticism. The great virtue of the lndic order (as laid down

in the Indological a r c h i v ~ ) was to sustain the social division of labor within

the social at the same time as a great premium was placed on the value of the

individual renouncer or rebeL Writing within the line of thinking that pro

ceeds from Dumont, Jan I-Ieesterman sums up thus the Indological (and by

the same token social scientific or anthropological) theme of individuality as

a counterpoint to the social rigidity of the caste system:

Here we touch the inner springs of Indian civilization. Its heart is not

with society and its integrative pressures. It devalorizes society and dis

regards power. The ideal is not hierarchical interdependence but the indi

vidual break with society. The ultimate value is release from the world.

And this cannot be realized in a hierarchic.1.1 way, but only by the abrupt

break of renunciation. . . . Above the Indian world, rejecting and at the

same time informing it, the renouncer slands out as the exemplar of

ultimate value and authority.

(Dirks 2001: 58)

With Kabir, who (as we will note below) belonged to the ostracized caste of

renouncers who had fallen back on their householder status, Dwivedi willhave found the very emblem of the free-spirited renouncer living in a caste

divided world. Such a figure is at once the lowest of the low, always at an

angle to mainstream, and at the same time the exemplary instance of Indianl

society's respect for the place of individual protest (which is always a care

fully defined place) in caste society,

How then, by Dwivedi's account, could Kabir have responded in his highly

individualized (and yet socially conservative) skepticism to Islam's radical

new social message? It is worth noting here that the notion of individuality

that Dwivedi read into Kabir had its origins in the scholar's early studies of

Surdas. which culminated in his book, Sur Saliilya (The Literature o/SlIrdas).

points out in Dusri Parampara ki Khoj.

The [early] search for the origins of Krishna-bhakti [in Surdas1 necessar

ily took Dwivedi in the direction of lantra-inspired practices. One motive

for this detour in tantra may have been formulations about bhakti by

scholars such as Grierson, who wrote that it spread far afield all of a

sLH.klen "like a nash of lightning," and went so far as to ascribe its emer

gence to the advent of Christianity in India. To this Dwivedi's retort was

that this so-called "lightning flash" was preceded by the "hundredsof

years that it took for clouds to build up for it." Moreover, he needed to

show that the notions of evil in Christianity and in the beliefs of the

Hindu bhakls were radically different. In his words, "Surdas and the

other hhakt-poets believed that evil was heteronomous or exogenolls

(bahya ya agan/llk), whereas among Christian bhakls evil lurked within

the interiority {of their souls] as so fundamentally natural to man (i.e.

autonomous) that it was deep-rooted, radical (antar aur svabhavikl." The

crux of [Dwivedi'sj rejoinder is that "Surdas among others did not

ascribe any radical evil to his soul. [Swdas adi apne IIpko sl'abhQlltaha

papalrna nahin sanJqjhle]."

(Singh 1983: 6W

What Namwar Singh provides us with here is an insight into the basic motiv

ation of Dwivedi's researches. For Dwivedi's was clearly a search for the

origins of Indian subjectivity. whose roots he wished to trace to the devo

tional surge of bhakti proper, so as to ensure its historical precedence over the

advent of Christianity in India. (Grierson had tried to show that medieval

bhakti could not but have had C hristian roots and affiliations.)

More crucially, what Dwivedi derives from these earlier practices is the

idea of an interiority that exceeds and in fact renders facile a Christian

hermeneutics of the soul. Given that Dwivedi's theme is Christian moral

ism. radical seems preferable to "natural" or "spontaneous" as a translation

of "svabhavik" in this context. Moreover, by the logic of Dwivedi's phras

ing, "heteronomous" and "exogenous" ("bahya aur agantuk") arc clearly

used here in antithesis to "autonomous" and "radical" (antar aur svabhavik). By the same token, evil (in Dwivedi's reading of Surdas) originates

from a point outside the sovereign consciousness of the devotee; the

devotee's relation to such evil is marked by a skeptical and critical distance.

Here again the basis of IndialHindu skepticism is the ability to stand at a

distance from social norms by embracing a certain marginality (both Surdas

and Kabir were marginal figures in this sense) and to embrace the larger

Hindu ecumene. Indian subjectivity, it follows, is for Dwivedi the external

ization of evil or otherness; evil by this account is always out there. What

does this ou/ (here (bahya) refer to? Presumably, the "out there" can mean

the array of superstitions and false beliefs which provoke the social critique

62 Vicissitudes ofhis orical religion

of the bhakti poet; but it can also mean every entity that threatens to

The anomaly ofKabir 63

individuality. Here Dwivedi reiterates a point made earlier in the book on



disrupt the equanimity of IJldian/Hindu life. The Christian idea of radicalevil generates in Dwivedi the notion of an open-ended skepticism, one that

operates within the limits of Indian/Hindu religion. Where the book on

Surdas had initiated a shift in Dwivedi's thinking toward the historicity of

bhakti, the book on Kabir brings out with astonishing power the message

of love and critique implicit in the bhakti tradition. For Dwivedi Surdas's

message was that of an all-embracing love, whereas in Kabir he could see

the unprecedented coming together of love and a much more skeptical

attitude. The locus of this mediation is Kabir's "unique personality," which

resonates for Dwivedi with all that is spontaneous, authentic, and ultimately

unimpeachable about the Indian/Hindu world-view in its embrace at once

of change and continuity. Contrary to the inwardness of the Christian idea

of radical evil, Dwivedi seems to say, Indian/Hindu culture upheld radical

freedom and individuality in a social and worldly way, endowing it with an

implicit openness that only further strengthened its (India or Hinduism's)historical project.

An earlier moment in nationalist thought (of which the Bengali novelist

Bankimchandra and the Arya Samaj's Dayanand are representative instances)

had witnessed the elaboration of a natural theology for Hinduism by virtue

of its relentless rationalization, drawing a sharp line between the mythic and

the historico-philosophical (or practical) elements in the saga of Krishna or

in the corpus of the Vedas. Dwivedi's own recourse is instead to the popularorigins of bhakti in esoteric doctrine and practice, and to the notion that this

gave rise in the end to bhakti as a religion of the spirit, the essence of India's

spiritual quest, dharm-sadhana. The idea of this religion is couched in the

romantic idiom of protest and personal rebellion, but it is nonetheless the

prolongation of the ideal of the rational, thinking kind of bhakli-rasa that we

sec in Shukla, extended now to the new theme of interiority that Dwivedi

inaugurates with his reading of Surdas.1O The theme of this other kind of

interiority (svabhavikta), posited at a great remove both from the radical evil

of Christian askesis and (as we will discover) from the proscriptive ( v a r j a n a t ~mak) religion of Islam, is endlessly malleable, and lends to Dwivedi's "Indian

culture" the kind of resilience tha t is required for it to emerge unscathed from

the historical encounter, extending back through colonialism and the accompanying proselytizing work by missionaries to the early M ddle A g e ~ with the

Peoples of he Book. Dwivedi suggests the idea ofthis triumph ant suppleness

in the tradition by deploying with the greatest ease and panache the word

"svabhav" (radical, natural, spontaneous, interior, inner, referring also to

behavior and character). Svabhav then works on the register of the individual

as well as the collective, and refers to individuality, spontaneity, openness,

and in the final instance, to the very basis of Indian/Hindu subjectivity. A

passage from Dwivedi's Background to Hindi Literature (1940), which comes

between The Literature of Surclas and Kabir, gives us a better idea of how

spontaneity (svabhav) functions for Dwivcdi as the quintessence of social

Surdas about the authenti c spontaneity of Indian individualism, but extends

it in the direction of the social. Dwivedi states,

The Indian scholarly world had already during the millennium after

Christ begun to lean quite naturally [svabhavtaha] toward the popular

[10k] in the realms of thought, conduct, and language. Even if the exceed

ingly important event that was the eminent growth of Islam had not

taken place, it [the Indian scholarly world] would nonetheless have gone

the way of the popular. It was its inner strength [bhitar ki shakfl1 that

pushed it toward this natural [svabhavik] path. 1l

Clearly, what enables the greater tradition to survive the jolt that is Islam is its

tendency, which had set in place long before the jolt itself, to incorporate the

most radical elements of the popular. Commenting on this passage, Namwar

Singh points out that the use of svabhav (natural) and svabhavtaha (naturally)

both reflect a concern in Dwivedi for that which is essentially, authentically,

and more crucially, spontaneously, the tradition's own. It is the "own" of this

"ownmost" that is at work in the "sva-" of Dwivedi's svabhav[taha]," and is

expressly opposed to the idea of toreign (Islamic) influence. Clearly, as

Namwar Singh notes, "i t is the force of the popular [lokshakit1 that [lor

Dwivedi] impels this tendency in scholasticism [shastraJ toward itself. And it

is moreover quite apparent t hat the 'inner strength' of the popular in its veryforce propels Indian history to evolve in this way" (Singh 1983: 78).

The primordial root of the spontaneity (svabhavikta) that bestirs and pro

pels the tradition as a whole is then undoubtedly the popular. The latter

becomes in Dwivedi's account the locus of a complete social whole, in which

the singular individual and the larger socius appear as elements within the

unity of caste Hindu society. The prehistory of the popular that Dwivedi

attempts is made necessary by that other prehistory of r i s i ~ dovetailing with

a corresponding "post-history" that is to manage the crisis, which is the

prehistory of the Islamic "intrusion" (cklkhaJ). It is the strangest of paradoxes

that the prehistory of the popular (/okdharm, lokshakti) can also be the pre

history of the elite! (Dwivedi makes reference to this elite alternately in terms

of hrahmanical scholasticism, scholars, intellectuals, Indian society, Indianculture [shastra, pandiljan. vidvaljan. bharatiya sarnaj, bharatiya sanskritl]'

etc.) Arguably what saved mainstream India from cultural extinction was the

great inner spontaneity of the popular. This of course begs the question: did

the popular benefit at all from its own incorporation by the elite? Which is to

say, what does the popular stand to gain by giving a helping hand to high

Hindu casteism in its hour of peril? The question clearly troubles Namwar

Singh too, for Dwivedi will himself go on to speak of how bhakti in the

end benefited by its translation into the elite, especially in terms of the

greater reach into the mainstream that the latter lent it. "In this respect,"

Singh writes,


it is worth our while to rethink Dwivedi's notion that it was the prop


(jansamuha), (but how loose can Hinduism can be if it is still, in the final



[sahara) of schoiasticisill [shastra) that helped widely to disseminate the

new creeds. This is something he has said with respect to both Kabirdas

and Surdas. In a similar vein, going so far as to extend his thesis to the

latcr epoch of courtly poetry [riti kavya], Dwivedi writes: "in this specific

period scholastic thinking had begun to assume the forms of popular

thought [shastra chinta '0k chinfa ka rup dharan kame lag thi], and

the old popular poetry. having mingled with classical thought grew

from strength to strength until it became widespread [vishal rup grahan

kar gaw).'·Now even if we were to endorse the idea that shastra [to which bhakti

in its popular form was fundamentally opposed) aided in the spread of

bhakti, it doesn't necessarily follow that the intluence of scholasticism

ilself did not affect adversely the future of the popular [lokdharm]. From

Dwivedi's own sense that the great strength of the nirgun creeds that

worshipped an indeterminate God lay in their eschewal of sIJastra, it is

clear that he was at least aware of the adverse eflt."Cts of such brahmaniza

lion. Yet if we find him somewhat forgetful of this in other contexts, we

can attribute this to the force of the most vital current [pran dhara] of

llindi literature.{Singh 198:l 7 R ) I ~

Spontaneity. or the vital currellt of subjectivity

If we were to think that this "vital current" in Indian culture is opposed

only to the radical evil preached by the Christian missionary in tandem with

certain phases in the project of colonialism, we nced only to return to the

passage in question in Kabir. We discover there that the agitated (I'ikshubdha)

soul of India has very early found a way in the Middle Ages to distinguish

and therefc)re protect itself from the interference of Islam. It is after all only

returning the compliment:

Before the coming of Islam, this vast populace had no name. Now it

was given the appellation, "Hindu." Hindu, that is to say Indian. which is

to say a non-Islamic creed. Clearly within this non-Islamic creed therewere all manner of other creeds, some were followers of Brahma, some

believed in the cycle of karma, some were Shaivile, some Vaishnava,

some Shakla, some Smarta, and who knows what else. Ranging through

a hundred initiatives, and spread out over a thou sand years, the ideas and

traditional beHefs of this populace stood like an expansive jungle.

(Kabir, 138)

Since it was Islam, Dwivedi seems to say, that exercised its nominalistic

regime over us by reducing the heterogeneous body of Hindu beliefs to one

single idea, that of Ilinduism, we the members of this loose populace

analysis, Hinduism?) we too will seek to name Islam. It is in this procedure of

rigorous othering that the ideology of svabhal' is put 10 use.

The elfects of this procedure of contradistinction are dual in that they

affect both the thing named and the subject doing the naming. But the elem

ents of the argument had already been put in place earlier in the passage we

have read, and which begs repetition here.

Indian culture could assimilate these guests (atithiyon ko apna saki thi)

because its religious quest has from the beginning been personal (vaiyaktik). Each person has the right to his own kind spiritual seeking . . . every

person is obliged [jimmedarJ to fend for himself. The most important

thing is not the worship of any particular religious idea [dharm-mat] or

god but purity of conduct and character [achar-shuddhi aur caritrya]. If a

man stands by the faith [dha/'m] of his forefathers. remains pure in char

acter [carifra], doesn't C'ire to emulate another caste or person's conduct

but prefers t o die for his own creed [swadharmJ, and is honest ,1Ild truth

ful, he will most certainly have stature [shreshtha hai1, whether he is from

the lineage of Abhir or from the line of Pukkas. To be high-born is a

mark of one's previous life, but character {carilrya] is a sign of deeds

done in this life.

The whole range of personologieal terms----personal. each person, his own,

fend for himself, purity of conduct, character, a man, pure, own creed,

stature-are opposed here to the powerof he collective, to its ability to cancel

the individuality of the one in favor of the absolute power of the whole. These

are the terms that will soon engender the great personalistic doctrine of bhakti.

But not before Ilind uism as the creed of the singular has been opposed to

Islam as the tymnny of the general. At this point the range of oppositional

terms in Dwivedi's text grows uncontrollably. There is a marked agitation

(vikshobh) in his own text. He continues:

What is a "mazhab"? A mazhab is a well integrateu religiolls creed

[dharm-mat]. A great many people believe in only one god, and adhere to

only one mode of conduct, and when they accept a person from a race,tribe or caste into their integJ'<lted group they do away with the peculiar

characteristics of that person. and insist that he accept only that par

ticular credo {matvad]. Here [in Islam] religious seeking (dharm-sadhllna]

is not individualist [I'yaktigat], but collective [samuhagal]. And religious

{dharmic] and social {samajikJ rules and norms {l'idhillishedhl are con

lounded [gunthe hue lIain]. Indian society was the outcome of the com

mingling of many castes [jatiyan]. A person {I'yakti] from one caste

cannot transfer to another, but a mazhab is the exact opposite of this. A

maz.hab makes the person a part of the group. A caste in Indian society

is the agglomeration of many [distinct] persons, but the persons in a


mazhab are parts of the larger group. In [a caste] the person has a separ

The anomaly 0/Kabir 67

the other. Dr Grierson has said, "like a sudden nash of lightning, there



ate standing [hastl1 bu\. cannot detach himself from his caste; in (the

mazhabJ a person can detach himself from his mazhab, but cannot haveany separate standing.

The Muslim religion [dharm1 is a "mazhab." Within [the general trend

toward] social structuring in India, its own structuration was completely

opposite. Indian society posited the specificity of caste even as it favored

individual [vyaktigal] religious seeking, whereas Islam dissolved the

specificity of caste and preached that religious seeking should be collect

ive [samuhagat). One was centered 011 character [carilrya1, the other onreligious creed [dharm-ma/]. It was an attested fact in Indian society that

whatever might be someone's belief[vishvas], it was a person's character

that lent him stature, no matter if he belonged to a caste [phir chahe vaha

kisijati ka bhi kyon na ho]. In Muslim society [samail on the other hand,

there was a [firm] beJief[l'ishvas] that the person who has given his assent

to the religious creed [dharm-mai] preached by Islam will alone attain

eternal bliss, while he who does not accept this religious creed [dharm

mat] is condemned to eternal damnation. India had no experience of

such a creed [mat]. It found it hard to believe that [Islam] saw its chief

purpose [to lie] in dispelling the unbelief [kufra] of any religion [jati] that

disregarded its own conduct and belief: That this could be someone's

chief duty too, [Indian society] had not known until then. This is whywhen this new religious creed [dharm-mal] pledged to eradicate unbelief

from the world, and employed every means available to do so, India

[bharatl'arsh) was unable to understand this adequately. For some time its

ecumenizing mind [samanvayatmika budd/1I1 went numb. India became

out of oint [llikshubdha-sa]. But the creator could not tolerate this stupe

faction [kunlha] and agitation [vikshobhl for long.

(Kabir, 137)

What precisely bestirs Dwivedi here is the unprecedented need for a new

alliance. We can recall here that in the passage from SUI" Sahitya cited by

Namwar Singh, Dwivedi had sought to respond to the Orientalist scholar

Grierson's characterization of bhakti as an outcrop of the advent of Christi

anity in India. There Dwivedi had made an argument for bhakti's antiquity(the whole of Sur Sahitya is in fact a rejoinder to Grierson in this regard). But

here in Kabir, six years later, why are the words of the Englishman repeated

verbatim without comment, as if in endorsement? The words reappear in a

passage that tries to determine the exact role of bhakti, and especially Kabir's

bhakti, in India/Hinduism's response to [slam. Dwivedi writes, on the verge

of raising the curtain prior to Kabir's entrance, and a mere couple of pagesafter the passage abovc-

It was at this time that there was the advent in the south ofVedanta-inspired

bhakti, which spread from this end of this vast Indian subcontinent to

came upon all this darkness a new idea. .. This new idea was that of

bhakti."

(Kabir, 139)

In the text on Surdas, Dwivedi had been quick to oppose Hinduism's notion

of individuality to the idea of radical evil in Christianity. There (as expressed

in Surdas's text and brought out in Dwivcdi's reading) Hinduism's most

significant quality was to have generated an open, rebellious notion of

individuality that faced challenges in the world at large; this was a secular.worldly individuality, one that asserted the right to criticize, object. pro

test. Where the idea of individuality in Christianity was one given to inten

sive spiritual introspection, Indianlliindu individuality was, by Dwivedi\

account, strictly worldly, heteronomous (bahya) and exogenous (agantuk).

What accounts then for the volte face whereby, by the time of the Kahir book

six years later, Dwivedi quotes in unq ualified approbation the very same

passage from Grierson that he had been quick to object to in the Surdas

book? There Hinduism had been the religion of the spirit where Christianity

had been religion of the souL for the very same reason, Dwivedi had argued

for the relative antiquity of Hinduism when compared to Christianity. But

by the time Kabir was written-one could speculate that Dwivedi was also

respondingto

the increasingly tense communal situation in Bengal--the distinction between Hinduism and Christianity, and the argument for the for

mer's historical precedence had grown to be less crucial than the need to

understand and comprehend the challenge presented by the historical mis

sion of Islam. For when it comes to the encounter with Islam, it is not very

difficult for the radical individualism of the Hindu and the missionary or

Orientalist's Christian hermeneutic of radical evil to march ill step. At this

point. Hindu and Christian subjectivity join ranks (without merging into

each other) in order to stand up to the new order of the subject inaugurated

by Islam. This encounter (staged on the cusp of the premodern in India, as

Islam began its inroads and Kabir rose to IndialHinduism's rescue) is a com

plex and multifaceted one. It is triangulated along the lines of a religion of

the law (Islam), a religion of the soul (Christianity), and a religion of the

spirit (bhaktl). In his book on Surdas, the threat of Christianity seamlesslyproduced its counterpoint in Dwivedi's notion of the secular individuality

implicit in Surdas's bhakti. When it is a matter of an encounter with this

historical Christianity, sueh an antithesis between an inner (radical) evil and

Hinduism's secular worldliness is entirely possible, even natural. But when it

is a matter of the relation to Islam, sueh antinomies collapse into each other

and produce another opposition altogether, this time between Hinduism and

Christianity on the one hand, and Islam on the other. This is because with

Islam the argument is compelled to move from the realm of interiority to the

realm of the sociological. The debate with Christianity is conducted at the

level of the heart; the debate with Islam at the level of the Law. The latter is

68 Vicissitudes of historical religion

the very image for Dwivedi's Hindu of the stern Semitic law that governs the


religious matters but accepting (grahanshil) in social matters, Hindu society



proselytizing tribe. ..

Ifwe return to the passage above in Kabir where Dwivedi first distinguishes

between Hinduism and Islam, we come upon in the first line of the second

paragraph evidence of a momentous decision with regard to Islam. "The

Muslim religion [dharm] is a ·mazhab.'" [n a simple act of translation,

Dwivedi accomplishes a political gesture at once linguistic, philosophical,

religious, and social, which tears "Hindi" away from its shared ancestry with

"Urdu." A basic divergence is implicitly announced here in what was the

hybrid popular language of the medieval north, between the stream thatflowed from Sanskrit into Hindi (reflected in the word, dharm), and that other

stream flowing from Arabic into Urdu (the word, mazhab). This is already a

strange tautology. Dwivedi does not mean to say merely that the Muslim

religion is a religion. After all, he does not say, "Islam bhi ek dharm hat'

("Islam too is a religion"). The implication seems to be on the other h and that

the Muslim religion is less a religion like any other, but is in fact a "religion"

("mazhab") like no other in times past. For it is as though the simple naming

of the Muslim religion as mazhah is not enough. Dwivedi's scare quotes

around mazhab indicate a much more funda mental foreclosure of the Muslim

in our midst. The fact is that for him Islam cannot possess either an appropri

ate notion of the religious or that of the social. Neither one nor the other,

Islam is a religious "creed," a monstrous dharm-mat, whereas Hindu society

religion is bolstered by the existence within itself of that absolute unit of

sociality, which is the individuatedjati, or caste. The latter is always., before

any systematic development or structuring (sanghatan) already social (sama

jik); what has ensured that its religious quest (sadhana) has remained relent

lessly social, has been its good fortune (suyog) to have had its lite-blood eked

from the vast body of the popular. It would seem as though Dwivedi needs to

put ma::hab in quotes because of the peculiar, very sp..x::ific meaning that he

wants to give it. Given that the accent throu ghout this passage is on the idea

that Islam is a dharm-mat (religious creed) and not a dharm (religion), the

weight of this Dwivedean nuance is borne entirely by the word "mat" (creed).

Hinduism and Islam as dharms are like two parallel lines that cross each other

and diverge in the infinite time of history at a point of absolute difference,

which is /1Ult. Beyond that limit of commensurability between societies andbetween cultures, which mat is, lies the death of the personal, the bloodthirsty

(or nirdaya, 138) justice of the group, which is mazhab. Why must Islam

consistently be labeled a creed or mat? So much appears to hang on this little

monosyllabic word! Now the lexical drift of both "creed" and "mat" is in the

direction of a certain systematicity. A creed or mat, as the OED tells us. refers

to a "fundament of faith. a body of words that authoritatively sum up the

beliefof a faith." It is clearly this systematic aspect that seems to Dwivedi to

quite radically distinguish Islam from Hinduism.

Such a basis in doctrine or doxa is for Dwivedi anathema to Hindu society.

For, he goes on to say, where Islamic society "was proscriptive (vmjanshil) in

was on the other hand accepting in religious terms but proscriptive in social

matters" (Kabir, 138). What is the singular quality that makes Islam such a

strong adversary (pratidvandVl)? It is of course the idea, a great problem for

Dwivedi, that Islam was accepting at the level of the social where Hinduism

was not. In the contest for acolytes., it mattered little in the final analysis if

one religion believed in the individual right toward spiritual seeking, and the

other believed in the religious creed of the group. At the level of religious

seeking, the individual could well be opposed to the collective, the individual

spirit opposed to the scornof

the group. Again and again, Dwivedi driveshome the single idea that Hinduism 's great strength lay in its firm belief in the

power of the individual seeker after religion (dharm). The problem of course

is that this is, for him, not enough. Could Hi nduism come up with an idea of

social acceptance or tolerance, as opposed to merely religious tolerance?

Clearly, the answer to this is no. For if it had, its condition before the arrival

of Kabir would not have been one of shock. And it is at the level of the social

that we find Dwivedi's religio-spiritual edifice breaking down.

The irreducibility of caste

For what slips out in the encounter with Islam, in the great ethical project of

other-directedness in hhakti which commences (for Dwivcdi) with the advent

of Kabir, is the problem of caste oppression, the ineradicability of Hindu

social sanction. Dwivedi seeks to read the text of bhakti ethically tor its

response to Islam as historical adversary-Kabir is a monument to this

effort--but what continues to interrupt this movement of Hindu ecumeni

cism is the essential wound (an absolutely difterent chot than the virahagni

[pain of separation] or Rama- or Krishna-Bhakti) at the heart of Dwivedi's

high Hindu society, which is caste. This is because the opposition between

religious quest (dharm-sadhana) and creed (mat), acceptance (grahanshilta)

and proscription (varjanshilta), and individual (vaivaktik) and social (sama

jik) in Dwivedi's text all privilege the ecumenicism of caste, but from within

its closed bound s. The perennial achievement of Hindu society (for Dwivedi)

was that it had subsumed the problem of the social within the principle of

tolerance toward individual spiritual and religious seeking. So that what isfinally being opposed to mat in Dwivedi is really the essential holism of the

Indic metaphysics of caste, which is now the religious agglomeration (sam

mishran) of self-existing monads, all seeking God differently. It is this idea,

involving the elision of the actual conditions of caste, which makes it possible

lor Dwivedi to attempt a prehistory of Hinduism prior to the advent

of Islam.

Ir Islam is a creed for Dwivedi, Hinduism is exemplified by its idea of jati,

caste. Since his emphasis is always the idea of the person in the jati, this has

the effect of leaving a great gap between the individual and the whole. What

mediatcs between the two? Jati, which Dwivedi places in exact antithcsis to

70 Vicissitudes oIhi5toricai religion

mat, contains the key to this originary sociality in Ilinduism: it is the third

111e a n o m a ~ r ofKabir 71that he has been seeking. to discover in the figure of Kabir is one that at once



lerm tha t mediates betweenothe religion of the group and the religious seeking

of the person, between d h a r m ~ m a t and dhannsadhana. The word jari, which

as has often been said with reference to north Indian languages, can range in

meaning from tribe to race, caste, region, and nation, is used polyvalently

here too, The pluraljatiyan is used every time there is a reference to Dwivedi's

cherished ecumene ("Innumerable castes [jatiyonJ, tribes. lineages [naslenJ

and wandering nomads have come here in packs. Indian society was the

outcome of the commingling of many castes [jatiyan]" (Kabir. 176·7). But

even as jati means everything from tribe to caste, referring to a primitivemiscegenation, a vast and primordial hybridity in Indian society, it cannot

but signify what for Dwivedi is in the final analysis the absolute divide

between religion and society. By this schema, the essential reflexivity of

religion (dharm) helps interjects spiritual striving (sadhana) into the conduct

of living (acar). In this way it "translates" seamlessly each into each the

potent anarchy making up the various aspects of "the social." And the latter

must itself remain separate from the domain of concrete social practice.

While the concept of the religious is ceaselessly labile, the idea of the social is

beyond negotiation.

For it was precisely the "violence" with which Islam had shaken India's

"religious and social arrangements," that opened quite unexpectedly theques

tion of the social. "Jati" refers here to the iron laws governing inclusion and

exclusion. Woe betide Hinduism if it were ever to "confound" (gunth[anaJ)

the separate domains of "religious [dharmic] and social [samajik] rules and

norms [vidhinishedhJ." It is of course Islam that has "confounded" these by

insisting that religion be put to work socially as the embrace of the sociallydiverse and the marginal within one single creed. It is in fact for this single

reason that it is a creed, and not a religion. But with Hinduism, you cannot

ever be anything less than a historian of religion. cartographer of the soul!For within that hard borderline that separates caste from caste, there is s o m e ~thing like an ethical life of the spirit that sustains historically the u n s u r p a s s ~able relation between individual and social life, almost as though a modus

vil'endi has been found wherein the idea of caste can mediate without

remainder between the private, familial life of the individual and the iron law

of the State: "In [a caste] the person has a separate standing [hasll1 but cannotdetach himself from his caste; [in a mazhabJ a person can detach himself

from his mazhab, but canno t have any separate standing." It is the guarantee

of this "separate standing" despite social coercion, a surety unavailable or

perhaps even unattractive to the Muslim, that is the gift of caste to the

individual. And it is this that ensures that the personal spiritual quest will not

be overridden by the tyranny of the collective. finally, the problem is one of

deciding which is prior to the other. Is it the individual that overrides the

social, or is it the social that includes the individual without negating his

personhood? The distinction between the two (the social lost, the social

regained) is crucial for Dwivedi, for the secular idea ofthe skeptical individual

denies and affirms caste Hindu society. Dwivedi makes a similar distinction in

the preceding chapter in Kabir dedicated to "The Personality [v.vaktilva] of

Kabir," between on the one hand the extreme brazenness (akkharta) of the

Nathpanthi yogis who openly flouted the excessive ritualism of brahmanical

codification, and the rebelliousness (phakkarta) of Kabir on the other. We

will return to this alleged phakfwrta of Kabir. But it is worth pointing out that

the akkhar Nathpanthi attitude was (according to Dwivedi) inadequate p r e ~cisely because its mode of outright rejection could neither find popular

acceptance nor distinguish itself from the older modes of renunciation thathad been influential since the time of the Buddha (Kabir, 139). Dwivedi

clearly has anothe r (a phakkar) mode of rebellion in mind, one which despite

everything upholds that unsublatable relation between the individual and the

whole through which caste (as a totalized social fact) can continue to exercise

its cryptic sway.

Dwivedi's Kabir thus cancels within himself the distinction between the

social and the religious. He does this not in order to produce another religionat the level of the social as does Islam, and as docs Dharmvir's dalit Kabir

albeit differently, but in order to retain and keep in place the idea of the social

as the very clearing of the Truth (paramsatya) of the social in the religious.

Thus stands Dwivedi's relentless social advaitism. It is a philosophically high

Hindu nondualism transferred to the "social" as the self-presence of the One

(Brahma) in the world. His Kabir renders the social beautiful by irradiating it

with the sharp rays of his soul. This gives us a sense of he aesthetic means by

which Dwivedi writes out the theological and political project of the dalit.

This Kabir replies on behalf of Hinduism to Islam's message of social dissent

and religious assent, but by inverting the equation, making it his life's project

to assert individual spiritual dissent while assenting to the laws of the Hindu

social system. The great paradox in Dwivedi is that his Kabir is rebellious in

spirit, but reactive in social terms.

The question of character

I-Iowever, we have yet to discover the hidden secular substance of this surpass

ing, which is to say that basic "thing," a kind of minimal residue of themateriality of the socius, which gives itself over to this historic w r i t i n g ~ o u t .This rudimentary constituent of the socius, this thing that dissolves, sacrifices

itself" in" caste, erases caste from the foreground, and brings to fore the great

rebellious individual (Dwivedi's Kabir) cannot be what for Dwivedi are the

more general overly codified aspects of Indic sacrifice upholding caste-rules,

rituals, rigid codes of conduct, and certainly not the taboo on miscegenation

(varna-sankar). These are expendable in any case, and their eradication does

not constitute the genuine upheaval within Hinduism that would push it

toward s e l r ~ a n a l y s i s . auto-critique, in its hour of peril. fo r Dwivedi in his

triumphalism reaches beyond these antinomies in the idea of ritual, and


proceeds to the Indic essence of caste, whose image can be seen beyond ritual

The a n o m a ~ v ofKabir 73

north India. In other words, the vital spirit (prandhara) of the tradition



on the far side of the individl!!lal·in·every-Hindu. The answer is already there

in the first of the passages we have read so far:

The most important thing is . . . purity of conduct and character [achar-

shuddhi aur caritrya]. If a man stands by the faith [dharm] of his fore

fathers, remains pure in character (caritra] . . . he will most certainly have

stature [shreshtha hal1, whether he be from the lineage of the Abhir or

from the line of the Pukkas.

This already refers liS to the smallest. essentially fungible unit of caste, also

the minimal unit of the ethical life of the jati, which is "character" (caritra).

R. S. McGregor's Hindi--English dictionary gives us four standard meanings

of this word. caritra: behavior, conduct, manner, ways; an account of a

person's life or biography; character, nature; and a character in a novel

(McGregor [993: 306). The range of meaning that inheres in the word lends

to it in Dwivedi the ~ ' C n s e of a life-world, which is to say, the <-'Ustomary way

of life (implicit in the Sanskrit root car at the basis of caritra) of individuals

(I'yakti) in a seamless social world. Again. "i f a man stands by the faith

(dharm) of his forefathers. remains pure in character . . . prefers to die for his

own creed (swadharm) and is honest and truthful, he will most certainly have

stature (shreshtha hai)." The custom (habitus) sustaining this mode of "liv

ing" rests in its attentiveness to the mona dic individuaL here "indi vidual" or

"person" (vyaktt) and "way of life" are really metaphysical notions taken

from the Indic tradition, and closely allied to the caste system (varnashramd-

harln). Clearly at this level there is something in caste itself that renders caste

distinctions unimptwtant. Abhir or Pukkas, Chamar or Chandal. you are yet

an individual (vyakti). Vour stature (shreshlha) or standing (hasti) has already

been ensured by your unquestionable place in the hierarchy. What you have to

aHirm is the ancient way ofjati, which looks to you as a person, pays hced to

your individual spiritual needs. But you must not question this way of life. lor

to do so would be to confound religion and society. Your task is to work on

your caritra. not on your karma. For "to be high-born is a mark of one'sprevious life, but character is a token of deeds done in this life."

The romanticist phenomenology of svabhav in Dwivedi, the range of Indicpersonological terms here (personal. each person, his own, responsible for

himself. purity of conduct, character. a man, pme, own creed. stature), the

very idea of a tradition that is integral to Hinduism. rests on the idea that

there is fundamentally a personal. individual. unique, and quite singular

mode of living that is the essence of the popular, or of the aura of the

popular. and by the same token of the Makti tradition as a whole. relying as it

does on the popular. But that lived experience of caste oppression, that other

carilra (story, person, life experience, hidden transcript of oppression) that

gave rise to the "dalit religion" of Kabil' is nowhere to be found in lhis

attempt (which is Dwivedi's Kabir) to resllscitale this "other" tradition in

(which is the svabhavikta inherent in popular bhakll) lives on in the subjective

being of caritra, which is also the o nto-phenomenologi cal essence ofjati as a

seamless life-world (ethos) outside history.

In the strife between Islam and Hinduism, between the social (samajik) and

the individual ( v a ~ v a k t i k ) , it would seem as though the latter, caste (jatt). is

now for Dwivedi the only ultimate n,"Course for the histori(;;1.lIy t h ~ a t e n e daura of the individual. Even as the vaiyaklik takes the place now of the

samajik. and surpasses it in jati, the daliCs own concretely wliyaktik experi

ence ofsamajik discrimination is left behind as just another remainder on thehigh spiritual road ofjali. So that the popular (/okdharm) is the emanation of

jaIl in the realm of public culture, whereas jati is the working through of the

spirit of the popular (lokdharm) from within actually existing society, with its

Procrustean requirements intact. This absolute reciprocity beyond history

between the (lntic world of /okdh(lrm and the ontology of/ati preserves the

metaphysics of the vaiyaktik from the gelluine I'aivaktik anger of the dalit.

and ensures that the Indic metaphysics of caste remain firmly in place. In this

way, Dwivedi's notion of the immanence of "character" (caritra) in caste

(jati) lorecioses the experience of the datit in the idea of the I'ail'aklik. The

failing in Dwivedi's Kabir is that we know only of the individual in caste, not

of the individual for whom caste is a terrible enclosure. This latter individuaL

whose interiority is always already social, and of whom the daHt Kabir is a

singular instance, has no plaee in Dwivedi's self-sustaining life-world of the

jati. We are a tong way yet from the radical social protest inherent in the

individual struggle (this is another I'l'(lktivad) of the convert. This latler form

of protest implies not the individual in the "ethos" of the social (which is the

hierarchical web ofjat!), but the individualism in political society of the dalit

and his god. It is a far cry from the failed populism of the radic.,l Hindi

public sphere which Dwivedi exemplifies.

The pragmat ic line of difference cutting throu gh the ideology of caste fromthe other side, cleaves Dwivedi's idea of the individual into two. It opens the

way to a reading of caste and of Kabir from the opening created by this

divergence. Such a way would arguably lie beyond the romanticist individual

ism that Dwivedi reads into Kabir, as well as the self-adaptability of the caste

system in the event of social crisis. This way would lie through an ethicalengagement breaking through the problem of the individual on to the prob

lem of the advent of the singular, that other who is wholly other. Por this

kind of ethical thinking what would be required is to attend to the violent

means by which the individual appropriates the world to himself. just as

Dwivedi's I'yakti, equipped with the ritual status of carifra. proceeds to lay

claim to his individuality by pushing out the dalit from the imagined life of

thejati. In Chapter 8 we will detect in Kabir's "loneliness" the dalit experi

ence of the singular.

With this Dwivedi's staging of historical Islam comes to an end, and he h

now free to tur n to the remarkable new belie f exemplified in Kabir. The stage


is now sct for the advent of this very emblem of the "other" tradition. The



typecasting implied in this ilippage between charact er and person implies atypographic vision. for Dwivedi's Vaishnava scheme of things begins to

appear as the history of the succession of so many avatars (Krishna, Ram)

and their devotees (Kabir, Surdas, Tulsidas), crossing through the history

of the nation. This vision excludes that other history where religion is

experienced in and as protest.

5 The pitfalls of a dalit theology

Dr. Dharmvir's critique of

Dwivedi (1997)

Let us recall the image at the close of the previous chapter of Kabir's arrival

on the scene of a triangulated religious contest in medieval India between

Hinduism and the religions of the Book. What made this representation

possible was the late colonial idea of an ecumenical castc-based Hindu

society, broad enough to embrace the nation as a whole, but narrow enough

to resist social change. Paradoxically, it was when the actual conditions of

caste (jati) were written out of history and experience and raised to the level

of the imagined ideal of a seamless IndianlHindu community--which is to

say, it was only after caste had been dehistoricized-that the historical stage

was set for the arrival of Kabir in medieval times. The idea of history implicit

in Dwivedi was that of the possibility of change at the level of the individualtKabir) and the necessity of a continuum at the level of the collective (Hindu

society, or India as a nation). Kabir's individual spiritual quest, so Dwivedi

seems to argue, provided the ground for the longevity of the Hindu idea of

social. But the effects of such a dramaturgy were debilitating for the modern

legacy of Kabir, given that dalit critics today such as Dr. Dharmvir consider

this fifteenth century low-caste weaver (julaha) and poet of Banares, a convert

to Islam, to be the daJits' own god. Debilitating, because when Kabir arrived

in Dwivedi's Kabir as its eponymous hero, he seemed neither daHt norMuslim, and appeared unmarked by caste or religion; it was instead his

uniquely Hindu and Indian way of being that was proclaimed by Dwivedi as

the great event in Indian history, one that marked the birth of the modern

Hindu subject.We should understand this notion of subjectivity as a significant departure

from previous characterizations of community, love and subjoctivity in bhakti

of which the work of Ramchandra Shukla is a cardinal instance. True, like

the other bhakti poets such as Surdas and Tulsidas who were valorized by

Shukla as exemplars of the Hindi canon, Dwivedi's Kabir too works on

himself by exposing himself to the message of love in the divine. But unlike

these poets, Kabir played yet another quite unique role in the twentieth cen

tury political imagination, one th at entailed producing and disseminating a

new identifiably "Hindu" subjectivity for the nation as a whole. Let me

express this contrast in another way. Modern critical accounts of Tulsidas

76 Vicissitudes o/hi stor ical religion

and the other poets in the Hindi bhakti tradition merely adopted these

saint·poets as symbols of tr41ditional values. Shukla's image ofTulsidas is a

Pitfails 0/a dalit theology 77

history of the weavers (julaha) caste. What is worth noting is that a text

dedicated to the "idea" of caste begins on a note of ethnographic r e a l i s m ~



case in point. But in Dwivedi's account of Kabir we encounter, for the first

time, the production of subjectivity, one that is opposed to tradition, andin fact revitalizes all that is moribund in national culture and tradition.

Does the daHt notion of subjectivity derived from Kabir and reconstructedby Dharmvir then constitute a break with Dwivedi's notion of an Indian!Hindu/Hindi idea of subjectivity?

Shadow of the censusLet us historicize Dwivedi's idea of a flexible but iron law of castc by relating

it to the social and cultural legacy of the successive censuses in colonial India

after 1872. Caste became a key rubric in the census of 1901. and thenceforth

the growth of colonial ethnography furthered the idea of a uniquely flexible

and at the same time fixed "ethos" peculiar to Indian society. The logic

behind including caste as the basis of the census was that this "ethos" inher

ent in caste would guarantee the evolutionary dynamism for Indian society

which was a necessary prerequisite if India was to become the beneficiary of

the liberal reforms (English education. etc.) introduced by the colonial stale.

In discussing the work of Herbert Risley, Census Commissioner for the 1901

Census, and author of The People 0/ India (1908), an influential colonial

document on caste, Nicholas Dirks writes that caste seemed to Risley to be"simultaneously a barrier t o national development and an inevitable realitv

for Indian society in the foreseeable future." For it seemed nonetheless

have the potential to "accommodate and shape a gradually developing class

society, perhaps even softening its potential conflicts and antagonisms." In

doing so, it provided a "model in its (idealized varna version) for the articula

tion of an all·embracing ideology that might work at a general level to con

found and even counteract the fissiparous tendencies of t:.:'lste as a specific

social institution" (Dirks 2001: 51). Thus, what is "all·embracing" about this

modern ideology of caste is precisely its ability to overrun the fundamentally

changing nature of identity with its own putative (and much celebrated)adaptability.

The colonial census therefore furthered not just the rigidityof

class identity; it also promoted both the idea that caste is the very essence of Indian

society and that it is the key to the dynamic processes of conversion and

upward mobility taking place in Indian society. Which is to say that, while

fixing caste identity into specific molds at the level of the individual caste,

colonial governance operating through the census nonetheless emphasized

the living and vital spirit of caste as the historical agent of change and growth

in Indian society. It is precisely this notion of an essential dynamism in caste

that we see reflected in Dwivedi's use of the wordjali as the expression of the

fundamental spontaneity (svabhavikta) of the popular.

Kabir in fact begins with an extended discussion of the contemporary

Dwivedi turns to the census for "evidence." Not surprisingly, he has recourse

here to Risley's The People o/India for extensive documentation of he present

day status of the u l a h a s ~ he concludes that "despite becoming Muslim, this

julaha caste did not give up its previous ethos (purvasanskar), nor did it

manage to raise its social standing" (Knbir, 18). Of these, the second prop

osition implies a disagreement with Risley, who had argued that the motive

behind the conversion to Islam of the julahas had been upward mobility;

Dwivedi stresses instead the lowly status, continuing to this day, of this group

of converts, drawing on Kabir's own attitudes to this caste (his own caste) as

can be extrapolated (in however problematic a way) from his verses, as well

as the range of still prevalent popular attitudes that poured scorn on their

so·called idiocy. The question of a possible "motive" for conversion then

begins to take on for Dwivedi the form of a conundrum: why do low·castes

convert, if they do not sta nd to gain anything by this action? The answer (for

Dwivedi) is of course caste envy: "In Hindu society the lowest of the low

considers himself to be of higher status than a person of a still lower caste"

(Kabir, 18). So conversion takes place not because low·castes (nichijafi ke

log) want to improve their social standing (samajik maryada), but because

they want to compete for prestige:

The strange thing is that it has often been found to be a peculiar featureof weaving castes that they do not like to represent [praslut] themselves as

subsisting at that social level at which they have been placed. They repre

sent their origins and history variously, and extol the superiority of their

own lineage. They even go so far as to call themselves brahmins.(Kabir,19)

The secret of conversion then at the level of the "lowest of the low" (nichi s('

nichi jati) could be construed in terms of what would be called today in

Indian sociology (after M. N. Srinivas), the sanskritizing desire of these castes

for ritual and social mobility by token of brahmin·envy.' Alternatively, con

version could also be explained in the idiom of the political "science" of the

Cambridge school of histOlians of India as the impulse between castesat each level to compete for prestige and for origins in a brahmanism both

lofty and age-old. In either case the modular nature of brahmanism, as the

locus and point of departure for all deviance, tends to be taken for granted.

The problem with both these readings is that they presuppose conversion as

necessarily derivative of the master text of brahmanism.2On the contrary, the

task of the dalit critique is to broach an alternative history of dalit life. one

that takes brahmanism not as its point of arrival but as its point of departure.

Such sociological images of caste ignore what is often the intransigence

of lower castes in their struggle for recognition and autonomy, Por it would

be no exaggeration to say that to sever all ties with Hinduism is the radical


(and often unfulfilled) aim of the modern dalit movement, a goal exemplified

by the tension between the dalit struggle lead by Ambedkar in the 1930s andr Pitfalls ofll daW theology 79

crossroad. Indeed. ii is Hindu society in its entirety. Who would come to its

rescue in its hour of suprcme danger, at a time when the future of the



the Gandhian idea of an ecumenical Hinduism which would heal internally

the wound caused by caste oppression. The complex relationship between

dalit politics today (in electoral contests, in the demand for job quotas,

and special lines of mobility in education) and Hindu nationalism provides

another instance of this tension between low caste protest and the Hindu!

Indian idea of the nation. For brahmanical Hinduism, however, the identity

of the convert who has left the fold can only ever be understood as being

always on its way toward "reconversion." The idea of conversion as an alibi

for "reconversion" was evident earlier in the century amon g revivalist groupssuch as the Arya Samaj. Beginning in the I 890s the Samajis organized a series

of reconversion initiatives to promote what they called sllllddhikaran or the

purification of low--castes who had converted to blam; the aim was to

reintroduce the latter into the Hindu fold. Reconversion is then lor Dwivedithe key to the irreducible problem of Kabir's identity. 1

Reconversion as a response to Islam

The census thus cont ains within itself all the seeds of t potential reconversion

to Hinduism, which would seem to be the only viable religion of Hindustan.

Dwivedi's ethnographic chapter at the beginning of Kabir demonstrates his

effort to seek traces of a (an always already Hindu) Kabir in the colonialarchive of religion. But the more explicit link between Kabir and the threat of

conversion (to Islam) is made in the historical chapter toward the end of

Kabir which stages Kabir's entrance on to the historical scene of medieval

India. We recall that neither the Nathpanthi rejection of scripture, nor the

"expansive way of/ove" of Sufism was able to find a correspondence (saman

ja.<;ya) with a Hinduism newly ritualized (acarpravan) from the encounter with

Islam.4 "For the very first time" in the history of this country, writes Dwivedi,

the "caste order (varnashram-vyavasthaJ had to face a truly difficult situation,

outside the pale of common experience [ananubhutpurva vikat paristhifll "

(Kabir, 139).5 Until now, he goes on to say, "it [this caste system1 had had no

adversary [pratidvandvI]." Those "who defaulted in the [ritualized world of]

conduct (acarbhrashtJ were expelled from society, after which they wouldinstitute a new caste." In this manner, ·'despite the creation of thousands of

castes an d sub--castes, the caste system in some sense continued al ong its way

(Is prakar saikdonjatiyan aur upjatiyan srisht hote rahane par bhi rarnashram

vyavashtha ek prakar se chalti hija rahi thi)." Now ranged belore it was "a

redoubtable adversary (I.e. Islam], a society that was benl on converting

[angikar kama] every person and every caste." Its "only wager was that (this

person or caste] should athrm its [own] specific religious creed [dharm-mat]."

The socially penalized outcaste person was ·'no longer without recourse."

He could easily turn t o the "well-integrated society" which was Islam.

For Dwivedi it is not just Kabir who finds himself at such a dangerous

I

caste system (varnashram vyavastha) hung in balance? Islam could only be

confronted by an entirely new and in fact very modern protagonist, but one

who had to have emanated from within the Hindu fold. He would have to be

a member of that group of marginalized Hindus who, by turning back

upon their own renunciation of the world had "defaulted in . . . conduct"

(acharbhrasht) and had been "expelled from society" (Kabir, 139). fo r this

expulsion had aHorded to them the freedom to "in stitut e a new caste." Many

such castes could be founded without disturbing the movement of karma,

which is to say the cosmogonic sanction for the order ofcas tc. Now Hinduismhad realized much to its alarm that its low-castes had the choice, the only one

available to them, to join the ranks of the Islamic invader. and to affirm his

creed. As Dwivedi notes. "The socially penalized outcaste person was no

longer without recourse. li e could on a whim turn to the well-integrated

society" th at was Islam. What is crucial here is that the hero must arrive from

within the threa tened citade l itself. But this hero must himself have lived at

the margins of the social order, must have attempted to convert to another

order without much success. His ethos (st/flskar), deviant from and yet in

essence very much in line with caste hierarchy, must have remained within the

Hindu social order. From within the margins of the Hindu tradition arrives

therefore the savior of the caste system under the dread specter of forced

conversion to Islam.What are the songs of praise sling at the gates before this savior conducts

his momentous entrance into the inner Jerusalem of the caste Hindu heart?

There is of course the song of Vedanta-inspired bhakti flowing upward from

the South, lauded by Grierson. This manifested itself (alma-prakash kiya) in

two forms:

The worship of a god with attributes (sagun upasna] derived from the

Puranic avatars (i.e. Krishna and Ram], and the love- or prem-bhakti

direcied toward a god without attributes (nirgun], derived from the

absolute God wiihout attributes [nirgun-parabrahma] of the yogis.

This is the point in Kabil" at which one would have to draw attention to thetwo arguments at work in Kabir like the ends of the vice in which the f u g i t i ~ efigure of Kabir is caught and held fast in caste society. At one there. IS

Dwivedi's argument that Kabir is a nirgun bhakl, a devotee of an mdetermm

ate god without attributes. (Dwivedi's counterpointing of nirgun and sagun,

indeterminate and determinate, in the following passage is elaborate as a

filigree; we will therefore leave the two terms un translated in this passage.)

At the other end is iJwivwi's "scientific" argument, indebted to Risley's

meditation s on the census. Let us stack these two arguments side by side.

[Saglln] worship soaked thcarid [ritualized] outer forms [of Hindu society]


with inner love, making those outer forms piquant [rasmaya], whereas[nirgun] seeking did awV' entirely with this aridness. One took the route

Pitfalls ofa daht theology 81

and untutoredness on the other; where there is the way of yoga on the

one hand and the way of bhakti on the other; where there is 'nirgun



of compromise, the other [i.e. nirgun seeking] that of intransigence; one

fell back on the scriptures, the o ther on experience: one relied on faith as

its beacon, the other on knowledge; one adopted asagun god, the other a

nirgun god. But the way of love was common to both; both hated [mere]

arid knowing; mere outer form was anathema to them: both believed in

an inner calling of love; both thought disinterested bhakti feasible; and

the unconditional surrender to god was their commonly adopted means

(of reaching Him]. In all these matters they tended to be similar. But thegreatest difference lay in their attitudes toward [divine] play (fila]. Both

believed in the love-play fprem-lilaJ of god. Both sensed that god kept up

(sambhafe hue] this worldly apparatus for his play. But the basic differ

ence lay in the fact that the devotees who were moved to sing in a sagun

way gleaned their rasa by gazing at him from a distance, whereas those

who were moved to sing in a nirf(un way believed that the god who resided

within themselves [a1'ne 01' men rame] was alone capable of clrect.

(Kabir, 141)

And let us stay close to the second argument thal comes two pages later.

jllst after another celebration of the arduous labor with which sagun Mak'i

elaborated the faith of the Puranas by exploring the fullest possibilities of the

scholastic (shastric) tradition.

But Kabirdas's path was an exactly opposite one. Fortunately the time

was perfectly opportune [unhe saubhagym'ash suyog bhi achha mila thaJ.

Whatever modes of ethos (sanskarJ that could have fallen his way were

closed to him. He was a Muslim without actually being a Muslim.

Hindu without being a Hindu, an ascetic without being an ascetic

(= non-householder [sic]), a Vaishnava without being a Vaishnava, a yogi

without being a yogi. He was sent by god to be different [sabse nyare]

from everything. He was the human counter-image of Vishnu's "man

lion" or Narasimha avatar. Like Narasimha. he appeared at the meeting

point of seemingly impossible conditions. [The demon king] Hiranya

kashyapu had asked for a boon that his own killer would be neither mannor beast; his death would take place at a time neither during the day nor

the night: at a place neither on earth nor in the sky; by a weapon of

neither metal nor stone·-etc. Which is why to kill him was both animpossible and an awe-inspiring thing. And which is why Narasimha

chose a meeting point [a pillar] at the center of these different categories

[kotiyan] [from which to emerge and disembowel Hiranyakashyapu].

For an impossible task, god perhaps required precisely such a mutually

contradictory set of determinants [kotiyan], and Kabirdas stood precisely

at such a meeting-point. Where IIindutva emerges from one side. and

Musalmanatva from the other; and between knowledge on the aile hand

aftectivity here and sagun seeking there; on that supreme crossroad stood

Kabir. He could look in either direction and clearly detect the flaws and

high points on either side. This was a god-given piece of fortune. And he

made good use of it too.(Kabir, 144)

Here, poised at the intersection between Hindutva and Musalmanatva, know

ledge and untutoredness, yoga and bhakti.and

sagun and nirgun, Kabir "couldlook in either direction and could clearly detect the flaws and high points on

either side." The problem is that the great god-given fortune to find himself at

this crossroad cann ot have been the dalit Kabir's. For a dalit, work acts as a

constraint within the social division of labor sanctioned by caste, not as a

mark or the freedom to choose social roles. The freedom to choose and to lay

claim to an Archimedean point outside the social could only have been

that of the Narsimha-Kabir who intervened to save the day for caste Hindu

society. And this too, given the danger at hand, was an "opportune moment"

for such an avatar to incarnate himself, sent down from god to defy every

contradiction. Sent here on a mission to prove that the nirgun god whom

Kabir quests after as a bhakt can as well grant him the gift of "conversion

without qualities," a kind of nirgun mode of conversion. which leaves the

outcaste dalit in a historical vacuum in the midst of caste Hindu society.This is because, since "every kind of ethos [sanskarJ" is "closed to him," it is

clear that Kabir must inhabit for Dwivedi a kind of degree zero of culture, a

point exactly originary to it, which would be the point of essential Hindu-ness,

prior to historical Hinduism (prior to the caste system), at which caste Hindusociety can undertake an auto-regeneration of itself, and face its historical

adversary. It is as though only a dalit shorn of history, of all historical attrib

utes [kofiyan], a truly nirgun Kabir. can stand up to the "creed'· (i.e. I s l a n ~ )that dares to ignore that history and "ask for converts." But for such daht

scholars as Dharmvir, it is not the nirgun saint·poet Kabir of the "history of

religions," but Kabir's own nirgun (indeterminate) god who is crucial for a

dalit "religion." This is a point to which we will soon return.

Dwivedi's anachronistic gesture here is to read the complex history of thepresent in terms of a putative past, and then to read the past back into the

present. so as to imply that "the julahas have always heen like this. lowly and

outcaste." Such a necessary marginality will. as we will see below, be an

essential requirement for Dwivedi's Kabir. This Kabir is always the rebellious(phakkar) "outcaste," never what Kabir is for the dalit critic, which is to say,

precisely, a dalit, out-caste, downtrodden, denied a history. Kabir as a roman

tic rebel transcends caste as part of what caste itself has to offer; Kabir as a

dalil is a victim of caste. and points always to the inequity in caste itself,

against which the dalit has Kabir's religion. One gesture, the brahmin critic's,

writes out caste; the othef, the dalit critic's, brings it to fore. Why accuse

82 Vicissitudes ofhislorim/ religioll

Dhannvir of starting a caste polemic, when it is Dwivedi who has I l l o n u ~mentalized caste? Is it Dham1Vir who "reduces" Hinduism to brahmanism,

P i ~ f a l f s oIa dalit the%gr 83

its traces of a historical religion (in Ram and Krishna worship) removed.

But this also means that Dharmvir in his commitment to the age 'of the



or is it in fact Dwivedi who reduces Hinduism to the idea and not to the

reality of caste? For a marginal Kabir represents a Hinduism bet{)re history

that is at the same time an "archival" Hinduism replete with historical layer

ing. It is at this degree zero of "Hindu' history. at once blank slate and dense

archive ·-truly a reservoir of traits· that Kabir's revolutionary energies will

regenerate Hinduism by facing up to Islam, and thus assist the Hindu social

order in laying claim again t o history and modernity. The question we have to

ask is: do these two passages in Dwivedi about Kabir's inde terminate (Ilirgun)god and his marginality mirror each other? An affirmative answer to this

question would imply that the very idca that indeterminate (nirgun) bhakri is

the obverse of determinate (sagull) bhakli is a product of the idea of caste

within the colonial census. This ni/gun god is not the abstract Ram with the

help of whom the daHt Kabir had his historic insight into the violence at the

heart of the Hindu idea of the social.

The new vernacular of a datit politics

Let us now turn briefly to the notion of a dalit "religion" inherent in

Dharmvir's conception of Kabir. Dhannvir's sllstained engagement with

Dwivedi is clear from the fact that since 1997 he has written four books on

Kabir dedicated almost entirely to examining Dwivedi's assimilation of

Kabir to bhakti in Kabir (1942).6 The key fe<lture of Dharmvir's insurgent

practice is to read Dwivedi's text ngainst the grain and thereby to stake a

territory for Kabir by storming one citadel of modern brahmanism. which

for Dharmvir is the tradition of modern scholarship in Hindi on Kabir.

Since Dwivedi's Kahir is the imposing outwork of this citndel, Dbmmvir

circles it again and aga in.n nd stakes this territory for his daHt Kabir in Kabir

itself. His is therefore a persistent interloping. a kind of circumspection that

critically disassembles Kabir brick by brick. Dharmvir\; mode is to draw from

this Kabir t he stuff for a dalit politics. Why would a dalil thinker pay so much

attention to a literary-critical text when there is clearly so much more work to

be done in the field of politics itself? Clearly, this is not simply something we

could attrib ute to "c ultural politics," as though culture were a specific sectorof politics. Instead we should see Dharmvir's project for what it is, which is to

sayan attempt to develop a new notion of the daHl individual using Kabir as

a figurehead. It is a question therefore of turning the individual access to

prem elaborated in Dwivedi's text toward ajoy ous daHt access to the political.

It is a question, in short, oflurning the idiom of historical religion towa rd the

dalit, and ensuring that that religion speaks in all its ardor and intensity to

the political interests of the dalit. There is a need here for a new alliance

between the individualized romantic Kabir who stands for a self-critical

Hinduism and the individuated dalit who enters into the political process

with all the self-awareness of that Hinduism but at a distance from it. with all

individual in political society is unable to take into account the trace of

prehistory in this empowered Kabir, and to look carefully at the nature of

Kabir's Ram.

For Dharmvir, Kahir is neither a bhakl (a Vaishnava devotee) nor a saint

poet within the bhakti tradition. Kahir is a god who founded a new religion

for dalits. Of Dharmvir's many claims with respect to Kabir. this has met

with the greatest resistnnce among Hindi scholars. For legend has for long

had it that Kabil" had been initiated into the "name" of Ram (the Ram ofthe Ramayana) by the grent Vaishnava sage and philosopher Ramanand

(b. 1299). The story goes that the sage was known to frequent a certain ghat in

Banares. [n nn draft to gnin his blessing at any cost. Kabir lay prone on one

of the steps leading down to the Ganges. Startled upon realizing that he had

stepped on someone, Ramanand exclaimed, "Ram!" This was benediction

enough f{)r the untouchable Kabir, who thenceforth became a devotee of

Ram. the son of King Dashratha, hero of the Ramayana. While the authen

ticity of this story itself has been entirely discredited today (Vaudeville 1974:

110), it continues to exercise a great inlluence in popular accounts of Kabir.

In Kabir however, Dwivedi takes legend for fact. and repeats the story to

emphasize the extent to which Kabir belonged to the Vaishnava tradition of

Ram and Krishna worship. Against Dwivcdi's rehearsal of the Ramanand

legend, Dharmvir's point is to insist that Kabir's Ram is nothi ng less than his

own indeterminate (nirgun) god. one who is both worldly (Iaukik) and

material (Mautik) (Dharmv ir 2000b: 13-27). li e wants to insist that "Kabir's

nirgulJ is not the Ineffable of the Vedanta. If he is indifferent he is absolutely

inditTerent. and if he is non-dual he is absolutely non-dual" (Dharmvir

2000b: 151).J In which case the indeterminate (nirgulI) god of Dhamvir's

Kabir falls within a hyperbolic utterance that is at once within and without

the high Hindu conception of metaphysics. The Word of this Kabir (i.e. the

Word that is Kabir's Ram) refers in this sense to a redoubling, a kind of

secondary negation of the negativity already represented by Dwivedi's b rah

manical (indeterminate) nirgun god. Dwivedi had thought that Kabir's idea

of the indeterminate deity could only help to raise the determinate (sagun)

deity of popular worship to the level of divine play in Love. (-<or Dwivedit.herefore Kabir's Ram exemplified the rational kernel of bhakli. which was

divine reason slaked with Love (prem), a knowing-loving in transcendence.

The indeterminate god of the dalit Kabir is however "in-determinate" in the

extreme. and alfirms the material world in a gesture of love toward every

entity (ghali-ghati Ram).

In this way Dwivedi's idea of Kabir, coming to us via Tagore as a rational

ized kernel of Love, finds in Dharmvir a secondary reversal. The high H indu

theme or Love is negated yet again. leaving us with a question, which is: to

what extent can one speak of an original dalit mode of thought in Kabir?

Clearly, Dharmvir's dalit Kabir is greatly indebted to Dwivedi's Kabir.

84 Vicissitudes o fhistorical religion

For the secular rationality that emerges in Dharmvir as the apotheosis of

Kabirean Love is really an appropriation, after the fact, of what is already a

T Pitfalls o fa dalit theolog y 85

This was one phase in the history of colonial bio-power. With Dharmvir's

Kabir perhaps. a new postcolonial phase has begun. Here, for the first time, is



considerably problematized idea of Love in Dwivedi's Kabir. Dharmvir's

notion of Kabir's historical task is expressed most succinctly in this passage.

Kabir had a connection with that Ram whom Dashrath's son Ram him

self quested after. In another context, Kabir would have been called a

prophet or a messiah. Brahmin thinking has cleverly assimilated the

indeterminate [nirgun] god of the datit to the [brahmanical] sagun god

with attributes and his devotees (bhakts] . . . . The fact is that the gods of

the dalits are absolutely incommensurable [atulniyaJ. They cannot be

measured against anything else-,,·not the least with the devotees [bhakts]

of the brahmanical sagun god with attributes. . . . From this point of

view, how can one possibly compare Tulsi and Kabir? If Kabir had been

born among the twice· born (i.e. brahmins and other upper castes], he

would have had a hundred devotees [bhakts] of the likes of Surdas and

Tulsidas. Which is why it is clear that Kabir has all the qualities that

one associates in India with a god, and elsewhere with a prophet. He did

not go like a devotee [bhakt] in quest of god. but like god came to search

lor himself [apna apa khoj kar gaye hainJ. A god does not speak in a

scriptural language; he comes bearing his own scripture. He curses the

language of scripture [shastra] using the language of the popular classes.

Kabir carried ou t this task with great skill right up to the end. Such a godwill have no truck with any scripture, but ranges himself against the old

and established scriptures. This is what happened with Kabir. It should

be said again that there is no devotee [bhakt] in Kabir's idea of the

indeterminate [nirgunJ, only a god. Kabir's indeterminate [nirgunJ idea is

not tantamount to a determinate [sagun] god with attributes. When

Kabir's indeterminate [nirgun] turns back upon itselt: it pervades every

entity in the world. [Jab kabir ka nirgllfl palat khata hai to sansar ke kan-

kan men phail jata hai.] This god does not call for an embodiment [sharir

dharan] in Dashrath's son Ram or Vasudev's son Krishna.

(Dharmvir 2000c: 110 [Translation mine))

Kabir's gospel is then that of a different, incommensurable god, one whocannot be assimilated to the high Hindu structure of bhakti. True. the lan

guage that Dharmvir uses here. with its relerence to devotees. scripture,

etc . is very much within the idiom of historical religion. Yet, by insisting on

the divinity of Kabir, Dharmvir introduces a significant shift in the modern

history of subjectivity in bhakti. Hitherto, in the dominant traditions stem

ming from the work of Tulsidas and Surdas, the subject of bhakti had been

the devotee who exposed himself to the searing phenomenal manifestation of

the deity. It was within the affective impetus of bhakti that such a subject

would go on to serve as the model for the Hindu nationalist. This masochism

of the devotee (bhakt) had as its flip side the praxis of the nationalist.

a subject who does not restore himself unto himself through the historical

encounter with the deity, but instead gives himself over to the experience of

the indeterminate (nirgun). Dharmvir's Kabir is a god because he leaves him

self open for this experience of the indeterminate. The experience itself is

described in the simple terms of a reversal: "He did not go like a devotee

[bhakt] in quest of god, but like god came to search for himself [aplla apa

khoj kar gaye hain] . . . When Kabir's indeterminate [nirgun] turns back

upon itselC it pervades every entity in the world." Kabir is then a dalit

god because he seeks himself. And in this way the modern reign of the

self-surrendering subject that had flourished in the era of nationalism tinds

itself reversed, albeit minimally, in a new ·'religion." This happens when

the other-dircctedness of the devotee turns into the holy restlessness of the

convert in se.'lrch of a self, a new individuality.

The historical religion of love from a dalit standpoint

We are in a position now to confront Dwivedi's notion of Love with the idea

of Love in Dharmvi r's daHt "religion." The question is: how could Kabir, the

lowest of the low, too lowly to be Hindu and too lowly to be Muslim, become

in Dwivedi's reading the very emblem of the highest of the high? Which is to

say, how was the high tradition of Ram and Krishna worship to make roomfor Kabir's revolutionary idea of divine Love? Dharmvir's confrontation

with Dwivedi in lour closely argued books exposes the hidden transcript of

Dwivedi's narrative of the popular, and in this way unveils in one stroke the

fundamental gaps in the Hindi/Hindu vision of the social. We have seen how

this vision was unable to determine the Indian Muslim or dalit as anything

but an invader or convert reverting back to the fold. For when Dharmvir asks

after a daHt god who is Kabir, he is not about to add a daHt avatar to the

Hindu pantheon. Nor is Dharmvir merely saying that Kabir has founded a

new religion for dalits. Such a reactive idea of religion, derived from the

colonial contes t of identity in census after census, and one th at merely reflects

the dominant religion of caste Hindu society, would only run counter to daHt

politics by implicating it in the old idea of community as the national religionof the Hindus. If Kabir is the new god and Kabir's nirgull the new "religion"

for dalits, Dhannvir must mean that Kabir's imperative opposes itself to

the theme of avatars in determinate (sagun) bhakfi. It opposes itself also

to the romantic theme of individuality in bhakti inaugurated by Dwivedi,

that severs Kabir from his link with the world of the daHt's social struggle.

For Dharmvir, Kabir's imperative must institute a new relation beyond an

idealized vision of the social, which hides the reality of caste, and beyond an

individualized subjectivity, which disregards the liminal position of the con·

vert. It cannot seck to dissolve into each other the "subject" (as individual

consciousness) or the "social." Dharmvir is not invested in forming yet

86 Vicissitudes o/his/orim/ rciigion

another Kabir sect nor does he want 10 celebrate Kabir as the rebellious

individual thai Dwivedi waRts him to be.

T Pi(fulls of a datil theo/OKY 87

warmth with force. But in Dwivedi the reconciliation is really between the old

idea of a Hindull lindi tradition and the problem of Hindu/Hindi modernity.



Dwivedi's chapter on "The place of Kabir India's religious quest" in

his Kabir has served so far as a convenient point of entry into these issues.

The reason for this is clear; it is here in Kahir that Dwivedi's dramaturgy of

"re-conversion" is laid ou t with the greatest rigor. Indeed. the remarkable

tension in his prose in the final chapters of the book has often been remarked

upon-the language is steeped in hyperbole and begins at this point to mime

thc ecstatic. Clearly, more is at stake here than a mere recapitulation of the

history of Vaishnava bhakri. For at this point bhakti is put to work to gener

ate a response at the level of the Hindu idea of the social to the problem of

identity thrown up by the colonial government of identities. What seems

crucial to Dwivedi is to have recourse to two figures of alien ness. There is

the threatening, intractable figure represented by Islam. And there is the

"almost-Hindu" convert to Islam, Kabic. In other words the figure of the

other in Dwivedi has two faces referring two temporal phases in the history

of the caste Hindu subject, one that represents "conversion" (Islam), and

anoth er that represents the "converted" (the dalit who is now Muslim) on the

threshold of reconversion. This is tantamount to a kind of "switch" whereby

the external, historical developments represented by Islam and conversion are

now internalized in the soul of the Hindu subject as a perilous spiritual

crossing from conversion to reconversion. It is this interior timeline of

(re)conversion that begins to determine the caste Hindu unconscious inDwivedi. The urgent question for him is. how can Kahil' be made to respond

to Islam's "gift," which entails a wager of great significance for Dwivedi's

"caste Hindu society," a wager offering social emancipation in return for

absolute submission to Islam? Now Islam bears in its clenched fist an offer

that is difficult for the dalit to disregard. (This gives rise to Dwivedi's anxiety

with regard to census "evidence" of mass conversion to Islam.) Hence the

need for anothe r olfer, another wager, extended to t he o u l d ~ b e convert. the

dalit. This is the wager of reconversion. What does this wager entail?

Such a wager of reconversion involves first the arduous labor of redeeming

Kabir from what Hindi critics prior to Dwivedi had tended to see as the taint

of ecstatic or mystic communication. Disagreeing with this assumption but

continuing nonethcless to adhere to Hindi's investment in a "popular" tradition close to dominant forms of belief and poesy in n0l1h India, Dwivedi·s

entire effort is to demonstrate that Kabir is in fact the very figurehead

of Dwivedi's radicalized version of Hindu modernity--not mystic and other

worldly but rebellious (phakkar) and irrepressible (akkhar) to the core.

This Kabir is at once testy and thoughtful, quick to take offense but equally

ingenuous in his message of love. He is "neither Hindu nor Muslim," but in

fact the epitome of a secular mode of hclief, at once social and personal.

In describing this contradictory set of qualities, Dwivedi's language parallels

that of Shukla in the latter's own descriptions of the classical reconciliation

of opposites in Tulsidas's Ram, juxtaposing softness with harshness, and

It is at this level. within this particular dialectic of the modern. that a wholly

new idea of divine pleasure (ananda) is made to stand in for the place of

suffering in the world. But what is asked of the dalil in return for this radical

Hindu retrieval of dalit intransigence? What is asked is that the daHt return to

the Hindu fold.

The greatest impediment to (re)conversion is the dalit's historical experi

ence of trauma. How to respond to this wound? The historical religion of

Hinduism. in claiming to speak for and represent the daliL would have

to respond precisely to this trauma. acknowledge it, make it fungible, heal it.

and turn it to its own purposes. The question of trauma is taken up at the

point in the text where we left otf earlier, which was the point at which Kabir

enters the historical stage of conversion. We read the two long passages that

frame this entrance: first. the passage that lays out the distinction between the

determinate and indeterminate, the Silgun and nirgun god of blwkfi. Second.

the passage closer to the end of the chapter, which proclaims Kabir as the new

man-lion (Narasimha) avatar, poised at the crossroads of lfinduism. We had

suggested that while the first passage assimilated Kabir to the sagufl-nirgufl

distinction in bhakti which became curr ent in the late nineteenth century, the

second located Kabir at the historical point of reconstruction, the degree

zero, of Hindu society. The two passages therefore imply a crucial link

between issues of bhakli and issues of caste. In other words. Kabir isreconverted en route to this passage between love and reason. between

(Kabir's) nirgun bhakti and his rational (gyanatmak) standpoint, outside

and beyond the Hindu-·Muslim divide. If the Kabir at the beginning is a

Kabir given over to feeling, the Kabir we have at the end is the rational,

thinking Kabir. model for the modern Hindu. !-low did this conversion

(or reconversion) take place? And what of the dalil's trauma of casle?

The wound of love (prcm)

In the intervening passage between the two excerpts we have seen. Dwivedielaborates an idea of love as trauma. At this point. having distinguished

between sagun and nirgun forms of addressing the deity (the one sought thedeity outsid e the self, the o ther within). Dwivedi goes on to invert the critical

commonplace about Kahil', exemplified in Shukla. which was to inveigh

against the esoteric mystical curren t in Kabir's thinking. Unlike Shukla. who

denounce d Kabir's mysticism as otherworldly, exclusive or forgetful of his

tory and social commitment, Dwivedi at this point raises mystery to the

status of the central ethical principle in Kabir. For Dwivedi mystery or mysticism in Kabir is merely a sign that for Kabir, as with the Vedantic tradition,

the world itself is less an illusion than a fiction (maya). And Kabir's mystic

utterance is a response precisely to the " lack " of certitude implicit in a world

made up of a range of competing fictions, those of caste. religion and group.


This lack of certitude leads to suffering, which is really the experience of lack.

Kabir's mystic response to suffering is to "work" with the fictiveness of the

Balm and root are of no use,

What can the poor healer do?

Pitfalls ofa dalil theology 89



world by overwhelming it with the absolute fiction of divine love; Kabir's

mystical utterance is in this sense a rejoinder to the "play" (lila) of the

Lord, which is the original source of the fictive world. Dwivedi redefines

Kabir's mystic message of love within the terms of a transcendental vision of

suffering.

But love [prem] fills in every flaw. A son may have many defects, but

his mother will hold him to her bosom. Because a mother's love fills in

every gap. The lover fills every lack with love . . . hell is after all the

name for these forms of Jack; suffering is merely the lack of wellbeing,

and the divine weapon of love should suffice to ward it off. Poverty,

agony, and lack refer to the same thing, and poets an d thinkers have becn

saying for millennia that the only force capable of dispelling the sway of

lack is love . . .(Kab;r, 141)

Here in Dwivedi it is as though the gap left by the traumatic experience of

lack is "filled in" (Marna) by the community of dcvotees who like Kabir also

experience divine love, which will supplement this lack by both filling it in and

exceeding it, For the excess inherent in divine love leaves a wound (a chot or

trauma) in the heart ohhe lover or devotee, Here is Dwivedi's account of thiswound in the very next passage:

[God] himself spreads out the mesh of his play, because clearly he hun

gers for love [prem]. There is no use in asking what it is that God himself

lacks that He should feel this hunger. For all this comprises his play.

those who experience Ihis become desperate. They hear a desperate call.

This call rends the entire body. As though one's lover teasingly threw oul

[the likes 011 such a call tha t its wound became hard to cop e with, There is

no medicine. no mantra, no herb, no root that can tend to it--what can

the poor healer do? This kind of wound overwhelms him who suffers

from it. God or man, sage or passerby, a pir or an allliya all find it hard

to get a grip on themselves. Kabirdas is witness that the man whois wounded with the color of the Lord becomes steeped in every color,

and yet finds that color [the Lord's] different (nyara] from all the rest.

Kabirdas himself had been colored. He had been wounded by this

inexplicable call of love [prem]. And it was in this desperate state that he

approached the true guru and asked for a way out:

Maharaj, True Guru,

The Lord has sprinkled color [rang] on me.

The wound of the Word

Has pierced my mind.

Gods, men and sages,

Cannot handle it.

Saheb Kabir is steeped in every color,

But this color is different from the rest [sabse nyara].

(Kabir, 141)

Let us try and determine the temporal structure of mystic cpiphany by dint

of which Dwivedi attempts to reorder the contours of modern bhakti along

individualist lines. The first moment in this experience is that of the wound

(cho!) or trauma inherent in worldly suffering. which we can understand

after Dwivedi as itself a symptom, albeit a negative one, of God's play (li/a).

One can understand trauma in Dwivedi as the experience of lack in this

world. The response to this trauma is to repeal it within the experience of

divine love; in the repetition, therc is excess. for God's love has the capacity toproduce, in excess. a "wound" or trau ma (chot). The ecstatic madness of the

mystic is a symptom of this wound. If we turn from the psychic to the social

aspects ohhis wound, we realize that its effect is twofold. The re is on the one

hand a sense in which the trauma of a lack experienced in this world becomes

an aspect of the self-narrative of the devotee. In this way. trauma becomes the

mode of interiorization that privileges, and thereby does not rcally challenge,

the sovereign consciousness of the devotee,But thc wound opened up by the love of the Lord (sain) is likewise at once a

moment in the individual self-narrative of the devotee and an ethical moment

whose import is to open the psychosocial world of the devotee, indeed the

dominant high Hindu tradition of bhakti in north India. to the experience of

the convert. This is a hyperbolic, excessive moment in Dwivedi, and one that

threatens to open the Hindi/Hindu idea of nation and community to the

encounter with another. It is the point at which the voice of the convert leaves

its mark in the interstices of this passage in Dwivedi's text, between his

paraphrase or translation, along the lines of Tagore, of Kabir's bhakti, and

the verses associated with the historical Kabir. This ethical moment in

Dwivedi is a product of a union between a rationalized idea of bllakti and a

romantic structure of feeling.We can then understand Dwivedi's reading of Kabir's notion of divine

Love as an instance of a certain idea of community, one that supplements

social iniquity by infusing it with an ethics of love. The transcendental play

of the divine is reflected in the play of love in love, self in other, coloring in

this way the whole range of human being-together. Grounded in Tagore,

Dwivedi's metaphysical idea of community implies the work of love in love, a

task directed toward absolving all finiteness, and producing in turn the

figure of divine absolution. All finite things, including the world at large find

themselves raised via the community of Love, which is the community of

devotees who have experienced the "wound," or chot, of divine Love. to the

90 Vicissitudes a/ historic al religion

level of the infinite. The "trauma" of Islam, as well as the trauma of

untouchability, which is implij;it in Kabir's Word, is transmuted into the

,

!

Pitfalls 0/a daliltheology 91

has found its own reversal in the systematicity of this nirgull God. With this,

Dharmvir anoints Kabir as the new deity, as if the figure of the living, striv

ing and singular being in Kabir had now found its humanized image in this



perennial wound that is divine Love. Kabir's song, in Dwivedi's account.

inaugurates a community of devotees as tlnite beings transfigured (absolved.translated) into the infinity of a future community of the (caste Hindu)

nation guaranteed by Love.

Yet, which trauma is being gestured at here? That wound that came with

the "intrusion" (dakhaf) of Islam, the wound that suddenly uncovered the

great chasm at the heart of Hindu society, that very trauma of caste has

found a response here in the hydraulic motion by which divine Love fills in a

lack and thereby exceeds it. The movement by which a trauma (that of Islam)is converted into a wound is the selfsame process by which the untouchable

Kabir is made to embody the historical mission of Hinduism. Where there

was a lack (apurnata, truti, kami, abhav). there is now excess. Where there was

agitation (sankshobhlvikshobh) there is now an ecstatic madness (nahi koi

para). It is strange that it has taken an untouchable's word, the song of Kabir,

to cover up the abyss left in Hinduism by caste and uncovered by Islam.

The dalit Kabir before dalit politics

Now there is a sense in which Dharmvir is correct to point out the hidden

wound of caste beneath the trauma of Love (prem). And he is entirely justi

fied in drawing attention to the way Kabir's nirgun "turns back upon itself'and "pervades every entity in the world." But both Dwivedi and Dharmvir,

the "brahmin" an d the "dalit" in this contest for the soul of Kabir, lose sight

of what we will see is Kabir's greatest achievement, which is to have broken

out from within the very impasse between nirgun and sagun. For we have seen

how this distinction is virtually the schema for the institution of historical

religion; it is at the basis of its claim to have united within itself the abstract

and the concrete. So that Hinduism can argue at once for the access of the

dalit to the concrete traditions of Krishna and Ram worship and insist on its

own claim to an abstract and rational understanding of God. Does not

Dharmvir's attempt to claim the nirgun Ram for dalits amount to a simple

legitimation by reversal of the nirgun·sagun opposition? And by the same

token (though it would seem counter-intuitive to imagine it) is this not the

augury of an alliance at the core of Hinduism between brahmin and dalit?

Is this not a coalition at the tempestuous heart of its inner currents, at the

precise center that we have for so long described as the "interio r religion" of

bhakti? The fervent, loving angst of the devotee is here (with troubling impli·

cations) no longe,. answerable to the charge of Brahmanism. For, brahmanical

ccumenicism and dalit intransigence, the two great Ambedkarit e fictions th at

were of such compelling heuristic value for Dharmvir, collapse into each

other to produce the very example of systematicity in the historical religion

of Hinduism, which is now the nirgun God of Kabir. We can find no more

telling sign that the allegory of Kabir's involuted return to the abstract Ram

deity. And Kabir will thus have been assimilated to Hinduism not by means

of a "brahmanical" maneuver, but (herein lies the great paradox of political

society) by a dalit theology! At the "end of history" when Hinduism will

have rediscovered its philosophical vocation in a rational nirgun that is avid.

grasping, theoretical, so tha t it can now find the figure of the good at the very

limits of its movement of self-understanding through history- at the high

point of its most radical self-interrogation when all the figures of its past rush

before it in the grand conflagration unto death of its sensuous life· there willit have installed Kabir's nirgun as the essence of the new Hinduism of polit·

ical society. In a Love or prem that is at once sensuous and abstract, a poten·

tially genocidal Hinduism is discovering (as we sVC<"lk) its worldly task. And

in this way the dalit critique will have entered political society by flattening

the peculiarly resistant aspects of Kabir thought. It will have humanized

Kabir by turning him into an image of the individual. which is to say a new

deity. Is this not what Dwivedi the "brahmin" had been saying all along?

Perhaps we should couch this in the following terms: Kabir is now a god

because he makes it possible for the dalit critique to turn from character

(caritra) to individuality (vyaklitva) and lay claim to the center stage of

political society.

But we will see in Kabir in the following chapters a grasp of the abstract atthe outset, prior to the very distinction between abstract and concrete. sagun

and nirgun. And from the point of view of this concrete grasp of the abstract,

we will see how everything in historical religion seems abstract and fleeting.

though not any less compelling. Love itself now seems to be the very idol

of theory; it is another name for the will of the devotee which brings into

being the willed deity. From the perspective of historical religion. in which

Dharmvir and Dwivedi are grounded albeit in different ways, Kabir's nirgun

Ram is merely the final instance of a desiring and willing that must ground

itself in its rational ground, render reason to itself, so that it is prepared

to ignore its own tie with the living, striving devotee that is Kabir himself.

But that dalit Kabir is prior to dalit politics: he is a devotee of he good before

being, of a Ram who introduces in the world the idea of color, rang. We will

see how the phenomenality of rang is not assimilable to the phenomenal

itself. The prephenomenal impetus of color which precedes the visual field

appears fleetingly before the vast and ambient image-repertoire of historical

Hinduism. In the passage from Kabir we get a sense of this late instance of

color in a line in which Dwivedi quickly ascribes to historical Love: "Kabirdas

himself had been colored. He had been wounded by this inexplicable call of

love (prem)." Now, this col or is elearly in the poem itself entirely othe r (nyara)

to Love as premo It is truly "different from the rest." It is a difference that

anoints this indifferent Love with the tender "touch" of the non·indilferent,

the tender: what is nyara in rang absolves absolutely. for color is not in space


or time. It introduces into the relentlessly changing pattern of the infinite the

mark of a prior good. And it is to the secular, presensuollS world of such"deities" as Kabir and Vitthala that we now turn so as to explore the new

T6 System and history in



humanism of the dalit standi ng outside the Hindu fold. Let us begin our

journey to the South, where the streams of Kabir and the Varkari traditioncommingle.

Rajwade's "Grammar" for theDnyaneswari (1909)

The lowly traditions of yogic alchemy that became the stock in trade of

Nathpanthi lore in the early Middle Ages, and the baroque physiognomy of

Kabir's inner world they went on to inspire had at least this much in com

mon: both involved less the transformation of the world than an elaboration

of the soul. What was mystical abou t these writings was not their otherworld

liness but their adumbration of an interior time straining to stand still. their

eschatology of a dissembled self-extinction, the dramaturgy of a death at

once embraced and thrown asidc. This scene of the soul grappling with itself

was saturated with the idiom and image-reperloire of high Vaishnavism:

but that agon persevered-- if only on the sidelines or such lexts, silent.

unobtrusive, as though in secret trespass on the ostentatious Ways of thepanths and sampradayas they would help inaugurate and uphold. It was

broached in a gesture of self-transformation that did not reject history so

much as choose to return t o a kind of prehistory of historical action. We have

of late tried to understand the premodern in terms of the emergence of the

figure of the state in the languages of the subcontinent at least a few centuries

prior to the dawn of Euroccntric historiography in early colonial India (see

Subrahmanyam ef at. 2(02). To the chronicles and local histories that are

more typically the subject matte r of this school of historical research, 1 wish

to bring into view here texts of a literary and philosophical disposition that

do not refer explicitly to historical events but seem instead to be invested in an

involuted and interiorized address to a God who "will have come." Such texts

elaborate a momentous "pastness" that describes the coming of God fromout of a hidden past into the open. Their proximity to subaltern traditions of

pilgrimage and anti-brahmanism makes this corpus of texts an important

basis for asking: how do millennial tradi tions of low-caste "passivity" none

theless go into the making of more easily recognizable forms of active protest

and caste-critique? I want to prepare the ground for a larger question: does

the subaltcrnity of low-caste mystic speech precede and supplement from a

vanished past our present-day politics of dalit or low-caste empowerment?

To establish this precedence or priority, as I hope to begin to do here, is to do

away with the distinction between passivity and power, subjectivity and

agency, or perhaps even between the religiosity of Bhakti and the politics of

94 Vicissitudes o/his/oricaf religion

caste. To ask if the past (moral action before ethics or religion) supplements

the present by 11lling in and .exceeding its gaps, is to insist that a dalit idea

of moral action (a dalit philosophy prior to dalitness) must always, in each

Rajwade's grammar 95

action and inaction, force and passivity tha t on e finds in resurgent religious

nationalism today is itself based on an earlier, irreducibly an terior passivity,

which is the passivity of death at the heart of the yogic comportment. We



and every case, be the basis for a questioning of dalit politics.

By the same token. I will seek to uncover in these traditions an interiority

that prt.'Cedes the rich "interior lifc" historians of religion associate with the

spiritual quest; nor can it be reduced to the ascetic militancy of a range of

sectarian traditions starting from that of the gosain and the Sikh Panth after

Nanak. The hard pragma of love that holds up such an interiority is equally

hard won; it is staked against the ineluctable tendency of the soul to fortify

itself by turning toward aggression and militarism. The soul that seeks tobecome "fluidly equilibriate" or samarasa with itself seeks to uncover the

sources of eternality in lived time-··it reverses passion and desire netherward,

embracing in this way the specter of immortality; it does so not from the

perspective of human timc but from that of the eternity of miracle. There

is something markedly millennial (a rupture waiting a thousand years to

happen) about this tendency of low-caste thought to undertake a critique of

time at the very heart of the great ecumenical currents of the medieval period,

for there high Hindu thought had already elaborated a historicity of

a ~ a t a r s - · Ram and Krishna were always already transcendentalizations of

secular time; their historical intervention in situations of worldly distress was

designed to raise worldly time to the eternality of kat-whereas low-caste

critique sought in however alchemical a fashion, to understand andtransmut e worldly time itself into the condition for eternity.

Here I have recourse to Dnyaneswara, the poet who wrote in 1290 an epic

verse commentary in Old Marathi on the Gita, known as the Dnyaneswari.

In the Maharashtrian (Western Indian) tradition of pilgrimage, i.e. the trad

ition of the pilgrim Varkaris we encountered in our introductory chapter,

Dnyaneswara is often considered the basis (paya) of a line of four heterodox

sants that ends with Tukaram in the seventeenth century. Tradition h as it that

his place in brahmin society was seriously compromised when his father

turned back from the life of a renunciant to that of a householder, earning

the opprobrium of his upper-castc peers for flouting the regulated order of

stages (varnashrama dharma) in a br ahmin' s psychobiography. The fact of his

being an "outcaste" in this sense, along with his (still unproven) author ship

of scores of verses in honor of the Vitthala/Krishna of Pandharp ur has made

him an object of reverence and even worship among the Varkaris. Where

those verses display some of the caste ecumenicism of the Varkaris, the

Dnyaneswari itself is a text that on first impression re-elaborates (albeit in

glorious verse) the fundamentally caste-conservative vision of the Gita. For

this reason the place of this text in the Varkari tradition today is at once

foundational and ambiguous.

Yet this text is crucial for what I have described thus far as "traditions of

hearsay" (those that celebratc their "having heard" of the coming of God)

because it posits in an inaugural way the idca that the political idiom of

should recall here what a spate of recent research has sough t to establish: that

the Indo-Islamic millennium was marked by the militarization of the entire

sub-continent, a trend that had extraordinary consequences for the evolution

of castes, classes, courtly culture and indeed for the elaboration of forms

of "vernacular" expression (that is to say, literary production under the

shadow of cosmopolitan languages such as Sanskrit and Persian). I t could

even be argued that the traditions of hearsay are themselves indelibly marked

by the experience of migrancy, exile and displacement that followed theopening of a vast military market in the era of successive empires. This was

a time when, as Dirk Kolff (1990) has speculated, the distinction between

active and passive modes of life may have derived from the unpredictability

of livelihood for the vast majority of low-caste peoples, for many of whom

the tillage of a small plot of land, endemic vagrancy, a life of plunder and

s e m i ~ p e r m a n e n t employment in local or regional armies could all make up

the arc of a single lifetime. KoHrs work helps us understand why a political

idiom of activity and passivity continued to be favored by nationalist critics

and thinkers writing in the late nineteenth century, for many of whom the

resurgence of a belligerent Hinduism was necessary if the future nation was

to define itself as Hindu as against Muslim, and as Indian as against British

or European.In the Marathi-speaking region it was not uncommon for such critics to

deride the Varkaris as proponents of a passive accession to God , and to argue

that such later poets as Ramdas in the seventeenth century, traditionally

associated with the legendary warrior-king Shivaji, provided for the lirst time

a whole program for a militant asceticism tied to the project of the Marathi

state against Muslim rule. Ironically, it was one of the leading votaries of

this nationalist school of thought, the historian V. K. Rajwade, who went

on to publish the first critical edition of the Dnyaneswari. What attracted him

to this text was less its content than its ·'Iook." Rajwade claimed to have

discovered the oldest extant manuscript copy of Dnyaneswara's text. The

discovery of the original text, shorn of later sectarian redactions made it

possible for him to argue that the language of the Dnyaneswari established the

continuity of Marathi with ancient Sanskrit. The correspondence between

the two was something he sought to establish by means of a "grammar" of

the Dnyaneswari.

Grammar and history

The notion of grammaticality that Rajwade used to provide the scholarly

scaffolding for his edition of the text was itself based on Panini's monu

mental fourth- to fifth-century B.C.E. grammar, the Ashladhyayi. Here,

witbout going into thc details of Panini's grammar {which has continued to

96 Vicissitudes ojhistoricai religion

fascinate linguists and philosophers in our time for its anticipation of several

key issues of reference and meaning) I wish to underscore the brahmanical

basis of Panini's text, whose ostensible purpose was to bring together the


sectarian (sampradayik) editions. It was as though he was staring at a whole

new world of possibilities for the history of the Marathi language. Rajwade

himself was as electrified (made ''l'ilakshana'') by this discovery as· were



grammar of post-Vedic life and the g ramma r of language into one systematic

arrangement of rules graduating from the sentence to the verb to the verbalroot. The fundamental idea in this and the other grammatical projects that

followed it in late antiquity was that "linguistic units are non-products, hence

eternal, and their relationship with meanings arc eternally given" (Matilal

1990: 36). Now in some sense the rigor and complexity of Panini's master

work enables one to leave aside-- except for explicit references to caste in

some of his examplcs---the political aspects of his work and focus instead on

the philosophical issues involved. A ccr tain fundamentally conscrvative idea

of post-Vedic brahmanieal culture is so basic to this text that drawing atten

tion to it would scem redundant. Yet this is not the case when one takes up

Rajwll{\e's attempt 10 read Paninian rules into Dnyaneswara's thirteenth

century Old Marathi. It is clear that. as I will indicate below, Rajwade's

attempt is to assimilate Dnyaneswara to the history of the Marathi (or

Indian/ilindu) state; to trace Old Marathi back to Sanskrit is in this sense to

argue for the hoary lineage of contemporary Marathi as well as to prepare

the grounds for the retrospective autochthony of Marathi in an uncontamin

ated Hindu antiquity. In short, to read Dnyaneswara as premodern it was

crucial to presuppose Panini as the cultural high point of a pre-medieval.

pre-Muslim past. But in strenuously recasting the premodern as the premedieval (and by this token producing the figure of a redoubled late

antiquity) Rajwade provides us with an insight, despite himself. into what in

Dnyaneswara an d the cultures of hearsay as a whole is not really reducible to

an endorsement ofa culturally o r religiously prescribed way of understanding

the relation between words and life, speaking and living.

Less than a hundred years after the Chris to ogyof Hegel and the co mpara

tive philology of Bopp a new kind of project came to incise the traditional

understanding of texts that had for close to sevcn centuries supported the

low-caste affirmation of a becoming (hidden) of God. One could even argue

that this radically new line of inquiry was of greal moment for history, for the

history of language and the history of the writing of grammars, indeed for

the very origin of he notion of a "historical grammar" in India. Th e essayist,linguist and historian Vishwanath Kashinath Rajwade (1863-1926) who is

known for his massive editions of the sources of Marathi history, had in 1896

begun looking across the length and breadth of Western India for old

Marathi manuscripts and books. The tenacity with which Rajwade con

ducted these searches is now the stuff of legend. In 1903, while visiting the

MukundaraW muth (shrine) of Patangan near the city of Bhid, he stumbled

upon what seemed to him with almost immediate certainty to be the oldest

manuscript yet of the Dnyaneswari, copied soon after Dnyaneswara's death

in 1296, a manuscript older than Eknath's fabled edited version of 1584

which had for so long served as the (now untraceable) basis of a great many

Cortez and his men gazing wild-eyed at their first vision of the Pacific- in

Keats's words, "silent, up on a peak in Darien." What made this manuscript

startlingly unique in Rajwade's eyes was that the Old Marathi inscribed on its

miraculously well-preserved pages harked back to the language that

Dnyaneswara and "the urbane Marathis of (eE. 1290] actually spoke"

(Rajwade CW 6: 55). There was for Rajwade absolutely no doubt that the

language of this Mukundaraji MS was the "unmiscegenated urbane Marathi

language [nirbhei nagar marathi bhashaJ" of that time (CW 6: 55). For the next

decade or so Rajwade would attempt to work through the implicationsof his

find. Soon after he published his edition Rajwade attempted to have this MS

ratified by the Mats at Alandi and Pandharpur; the story goes that these

priests who were understandably inured to the relatively more familiar

Marathi of the latter-day redaction of the text (wbich is to say. the Varkari

sant Eknath's lost edited version), proceeded to rebulThim. In a fit or pique

this temperamental high-Brahmin of markedly anti-Muslim, anti-low-caste

leanings took hold of his remarkable discovery (all 322 of its lovingly

described pages "measuring each a lengthof 9 inches and a breadth of 4 and

three-fourths of an inch . . . with 12 to 14 ot'is on each page") and threw it

into a running stream somewhere in southern Maharashtra. 2

The historian and stcr(,'{)type

What is worth noting is that Rajwade appended to his edition of the

Dnmneswari not just an extensive ··historical" Introduction or Prastm'al/a

(CW 12: 1--86) but also an essay published alongside it as "The Grammar

Wl'akamn] of the J)nyane.nmri's Marathi" (CW I: 153-276).' Now it a

matter of some agreement lhat Rajwade's fame in the Marathi-speaklllg

world is based on the wide-ranging historical and historiographic spe

culations that accompanied his 22-volume Sources of Mar(llha History.

Rajwade's own term lor these lengthy exergues was "Historical Introduc

tions" (Aitihasika Pmstamna; CW 10). We will soon have occasion \0 examine

one instance of these Introductions. which is the one Rajwade wrote toaccompany his edition of the oldest Marathi chronicle or bakhar, the Bakhar

of Mahikavati in the Konkan. But what is intriguing is that the inlrodudiofl

to his 1909 edition of the Dnmneswari does not bear the adjective, "histor

ical;" nor does the title of the accompanying grammar. Yet in both texts can

be found an explicit attem pt to address the need for two kinds ofhislories. the

history of the Marathi language and the possibility of a historical grammar

for Marathi. It could of course be argued that in desisting from using the

descriptive term "historical, ailihasik" for these texts, Rajwade was adhering

to his own personal organon lor historical research. A statement of method

that appears at the start orhis 1924 Introduction to the Bakhar ofMahikavati

98 Vicissilud('s of historical reliKion

should suliice as an indication of his general approach to such issues. Here

he writes, ..


[budne] of kinship [dn),flll1}, dharma and conduct." These words rdlect the

sentiments of one of the bakharkars of this text, Keshavacharya, who wrote a

few decades after 1292 of the state of affairs in the Konkan al the time:



How the quarrels of kings and the rise or fall of kingdoms transpired

and how these events had an impact on the history of North Konkan,

these were not the issues that necessarily preoccupied [the compiler of

this Bakhar, Bhagwan] Datta. Instead, the relative ranking of castes

[jatis] and other such social and religious issues [samajika ani dharmic

bab] were the points of inquiry motivating Datta's project of compiling

the Bakhar. He goes so far as 10 describe his prose preamble to the

Ba khar as a history of lineages . . . Since social and religious issues were

his key focus there is evidently very little confusion in the text with regardto matters of place, time and person nor for the same reason did Datta

succumb to the temptation to generate it. [fhe later compilers of the

Bakhar followed the same agenda] which was religious and social, not

political [rajakiya]. The tide of Muslims [mlechharnava] having led to

the wrecking of ties of kinship [dnyataJ, dharma and conduct [amra]

lin recent memory, it was left to the earlier compilers of the Bakhar]

to undertake a narratival reconstruction [nirupana] of 18 lineages [khuma]

of castes [jatis] along with their caste-identity, dharma and conduct: in

the natural course of things they included in the flow of their nirupana

the political happenings and social transformations of the period of

310 years between Saka 1060 and 1370. [ . . These being thei r objectives,they were careful, fortunately for us, to record unequivocally the names

of persons involved in the political history [rajakiya itihas] of the kingdom

of Mahikavati between Saka 1060 and 1422.

(CW 12: 357-8)

A curious feature of the empiricism implicit here (which is reflected in the

emphasis on the quality of factual evidence) is the fact that the distinction

between social and political history is in the final analysis merely a method

ological fiction. The contributors to the Bakhar at the various stages of its

evolution make no secret of the fact that their focus is neither merely political

nor strictly socio-religious: it is in fact both at once. The opening verse

sections of the Bakhar deal with the history of the ruling lineages of the area:the local history that the Bakhar then proceeds to provide in prose begins

with the founding of the principality of Mahikavati (or Mahim in the

Konkan, not in Mumbai) in 982 but is clearly cued toward the tale of recur

rent violent intrusions that followed after a period of relative prosperity and

peace (occasionally disturbed by internecine local wars) lasting 300 years..

first with the advent of the Turks in the Konkan (1292) and then of the

Portuguese in the ensuing centuries.

Rajwade himself betrays the reason for his fascination with this particular

Bakhar when he calmly ventriloquizes the language of the text in saying above

that "the tidal wave of Muslims [mlechharnava]" had led to the "dissolution

Meanwhile this royal house having fallen

The soldiers, nobles, peasantry

Capitulat ed to the exalted Sheikh Alauddin

A great many foreigners [yavana] came to the [KonkanJ.

The spirit of the state came to naught [rajya abhimana sandIa]

Arms fell by the wayside

Farming became the only recourse[ . . Everywhere there was a falling off from conduct [acarahinajale]

The knowledge of lineage and ancestry declined

Knowing this and intent upon securing [rakshaya] Maharashlra dharma.

The e ~ ' i came to Rajashri Naikorao in a dream.(CW 12: 492)

Rajwade t'entriloquizes Keshavacharya: one could argue that is a kind of arelay between that premodern chronicler and this great historian who never

wrote a history, who remained a "historiographer," a compiler of texts, a

commentator on the state of the archive. This was in a strict sense a historico-

topological relay--understanding that term as the running thread of a tale

that changes hands without significant alteration ---a relay involving thehanding down of a fantastical formula, a sort of IOpos determining the

advent of the foreigner into the region, a prejudicial seal that can be stamped

and re-stamped interminably, opening up the possibility of a future national

ism pledged toward weeding out the stranger. It is implicit in the Bakhar itself

that something like the "spirit of the state" (rajya abhiman) came under threat

with the advent of Alauddin in the Konkan in 1292, and that what was at

stake in the variolls mobilizations against him that followed was the securing

(rakshaya) of"Maharashtradharm a." For Rajwade the "securing, rakshaya"

(rakhane. from the Sanskrit root, raksha) of the state following the mlechha

incursions is no doubt essential, but with the proviso that for him a successful

securing would occur only with the historic compact between Guru Ramdas

and Shivaji in the late sixteenth century, which as legend goes was whenthose heroes actually committed themselves together to the restoration

(punarruchchar) of Maharashtra dharma. In making these leaps across time

with only the shifting fortunes of Maharashtra dharma in view, Rajwade

shows that he is in explicit disagreement with those of his contemporaries

such as Mahadev Govind Ranade and Rajaram Shastri Bhagawat who had

tried to argue for the relation between Maharashtra Dharma and the radical

religious vision of a reformist Bhagwat Dharma (CW 10: 270). What

Rajwade wants to suggest is that the term "dhanna" in the phrase refers

not to a kind of vocation before god (a "devadharma") but to one's duty or

"karfavya" toward Maharashtra.


The transcendental homelessness of the Aryans

The emphasis on duty ( k a ~ t a v y a ) stems from a fundamental distinction

1


lineages, t he various offshoots of their own progeny. The vish became not the

praja but the dnsas of the kings, because dasa meant "those who g a v e , " ' w ~ i c his to say those who paid taxes for the privilege of being protected by kings



Rajwade makes in his Introduction to this Bakhar between two kinds of

altitudes toward historical change, pravrUlti-dharma, a culture of striving or

negotium, and nivrutti-dharma, a culture of leisure or otium. These attitudes

find their expression (for him) in the historic mission of warriors and priests,

kshatriyas and brahmin s since antiquity, which is to look to the establishment

of the state; whereas the historic mission of the lower castes is confined to the

satisfactions implicit in a eudaemonic state of social existence. Th e argument

is made along the following lines:

two kinds of peoples have set about their business in this land since

ancient times. On the one hand, there were an expropriated (bahistha:

"finding their stance or property outside"], pauperized people scroun

ging desperately for food who came to run the machinery of the state,

and on the other hand were those overfed, self-appropriated (antyastha:

"finding their stance or property here inside"] people who charted their

course in history by generating great stores of food grains.(CW 12: 436)

The coming of the Aryans is the key event in the balance of active and inert

lorces in this land. For the Aryans themselves came from Europe, home to

perpetual shortages of food. Europe is for Rajwade the land where citified

Cain wanders the face of the earth in search of the nourishment that evades

him (Le. Europe is the land of exilic questing), while bharatvarsha is the land

of eternal satiety, where a sedentary Abel lives contentedly, never anxious for

the morrow. It is clear to Rajwade that the people who brought the institu

tions of the state to India were the arya brahmins and kshatriyas who came

from Europe. Thc racist and caste-con temptuous myth of an Aryan incursion

into a tribal homeland is greatly enabling lor Rajwade's etiology of the state

in Indian antiquity. For it was this immigrant peripatetic horJe that first gave

a name to India's trading or l'ish castes: "pish refers to people seatcd, or lying

on a spread meant lor husbanding or exercise" (CW 12: 436). The whole of

this excursus on otium and negotium, propertied and unpropertie<.l, warrior

dharma and merchant dharma is organized around the idea that the staterefers to the installation of "securing, " rakhanc. at the heart of the social.

Rajwade's argument here moves smoothly along strictly etymologicallincs,

imputing an arche-paternal origin to the lineage of the state. "Th e institution

of raja (king) and praja (subjects) was brought to India by brahmins and

kshatriyas. Every father is the king of his subjects or progeny. The king is

he who secures (rakshana karnara). The verbal root of the word 'raj' is

·raksha.'" By the same token, Rajwade argues that the originally satiate

inhabitants of India. the vish, were not the original subjects of the Arya

kings-those subjects could only have been the members of their (the kings')

(CW 12: 436); hal f a century later the word "dnsa" would translate as "slave"

or premodern daHt (as it does for such non-brahmin thinkers as Sharad

Pati\)o In Rajwade's theory of the state then there is a fundamental oppos

ition between the masochism of the indigene and the aggression of the tyran

nus (usurper-king) on horseback, between a passive autochthony and an

active, transformative allochthony, between all that is other and self same,

alios and autos, in the travails of historical dharma as the spirit of the

state. For, hunger an d despair lay at the sordid basis of state-formation. Andthe subject races were sedentary peoples who had in an attitude of political

quiescence "turned their face from the state [had become rajaparamukha],

socially non-committal, renunciant and fundamentally Vedantic" in t ~ e i rattitudes (CW 12: 437), Now if we refer back to the passage about the chOices

faced by the writers of the Bakhar of Mahikavati it is dear that tor Rajwade

they could not but have written a history of social and religious e v c l o p m ~ n ~ swhile only secondarily paying attentio n to "poli tical" developments. ThiS IS

because a genuine installation of Maharashtra dharma was yet to take place

at the time. From this point of view the history of Maharashtra prior to

Shivaji and Ramdas was "pre-political." Up until that time it was not. as

though ther e had never been kings or potentates in Maharashtra. The p e r ~ o dbefore the advent of Alauddin had been a time of peace and plenty allowmgtor considerable continuity in political regimes. But that lor Rajwade is pre

cisely the problem. Until such time as blissful satiety pervaded the land there

could not have been any motivation for "securing" the state. Such a task was

best left to those who came from the outside. And so lor him it is almost

inevitable that the state should have been for Maharashtra (in extrapolation

from the Konkan) an eternally heteronomous entity. The idea of the State as

the horizon of the social came from the outside in the destiny of a desperate,

starving people who had had to learn how to be canny under open s k i ~ s .They h ad experienced a primal uncanniness (homelessness, bahisthapana) 10

the hard passage over continental roadsteads. And they introduced that

transcendental homelessness (to borrow a phrase from Lukacs) into these

teeming native hearths, homes that had never seen such resoluteness writ

large in the brute face of the state-for the newcomers quickly channeled

their desperate "scrounging" into the canny requirements of statecraft. They

were now "at home" with their uncanny ways, having translated their skills at

struggle and strife into the ar t of governmentalily. The outsider became the

insider, the "out-standing" was now the "in-standing"-the bahi-stha became

the antva-stha. The outside was installed in the inside, but always as the

0 u t s i d e ~ of the inside. For the state was always in some sense on the horizon,

about to be r e ~ i n s t a l l e d at the heart of sociality itself, at its center. The state

both belonged to the center and remained eternally at its threshold, so that

lor Rajwade it would seem as though Indian history was nothing but a long


wait for the institution of the state. But this long wait was what made the state

paradoxically more native tO'this land t han any ot her institution. It providedthe alibi for the invocation ofMaharashtra dharma in the era of anti-colonial


dark ages following the decline of Sanskrit and Prahit in late antiquity and

the dark times that are soon to follow with the first incursions of Alauddin

Khalji.



nationalism. For Maharashtra dharma was nothing if not this waiting that

placed the future of Maharashtra under the sign of the subjunctive.

One could argue therefore that when Rajwade neglected to place the adjective "historical, aifihasik" in the titles of the introduction and grammar to

his edition of the Dnyaneswari the implicit reason could have been what

seemed to him to be the undoubted historicity of the text itself. This histor

icity did not have to be announc ed in any title or preamble: it was clear for all

to see in the very pages of the Mukundaraji MS. This text was in itself thevery embodimen t of Maharashtra as a historical entity. For if the Marathi

language was the very instance of what it meant to be Maharashtrian, and if

the MlIkllndaraji MS made it possible for the first time for that language to

be accorded a history, there could be no doubt at all that Maharashtra was

itself a "hist01;cal entity." But how could one prove beyond a doubt that the

language of this text, Old Marathi, had descended from Sanskrit on o ne side

and provided the basis for modern Marathi on the other? This would have to

be done via the new science of the historical verification of a language, which

is to say by means of a historical grammar. For the latter would establish once

and for all the essential continuity of a language through time, even if that

continuity was often concealed under a spew of appar ent discrepancies.

It is Rajwade himself who tells us right at the outset in his Grammar(Vyakaran) appended to the Dnyaneswari, that to determine "the ways

(padhati] in which a designated people [I'ivakshita taka1 speak and write

(assuming that they know how to write) a designated language at a designated

place and time" in keeping with a "set of norms [myamsaranine] or shastric

principles" is assuredly to write "the grammar [I'yakaran] of the language of

that place, that time and that people [fatsthalina, fafkalina va tallokiy a I'yaka

ran)" (CW 12: I). The principle of historicity implicit in this formulation resh

on the idea of what we can call a "project," a projection from this people

time-place designated according to "niyamsaranaya or shastric principles" to

that specific p e o p l e - t i m e ~ p l a c e . This is without doubt a theoretical projection

that assumes that historical specificity can and should be determined accord

ing to a setof

carefully defined presuppositions. The theoretical moment.we may surmise, consists in the work of the grammarian, the vyakarankar

himself: he it is after all who "pulls away (I'va) severely (a) to make certain

(verbal root, kri)." It is he who pulls away from historical fact to sustain an

objective standpoint from which to return to reassess that fact. Rajwade is

aware that this projection is essential if one is to generate the "aiiihasik

vyakaran" (historical grammar) of a part icular language. Yet what precisely is

aitihasik about the Old Marathi of the Mukundaraji MS? For him this

"aitihasik-ness" would appear to lie in its supposedly "urbane [nagarikaJ"

quality. Now there would seem to be something fundamentally tragic aboutthis urbanity, since it comes into being (for Rajwade) at a point between the

Language as monument

The Mukundaraji MS is thus in Rajwade's mind a monument to the persist

ence in Maharashtra of the arVG culture of the classical period. Two telltale

signs of this link to an older past establish the preeminence of this MS for

him. There is first the fact that this MS is not written in cursive. modi--as

were so many texts in Marathi after that language came into contact withPersian ate scripts. One central concern for Rajwade is to try and prove that

what was fundamentally Marathi in Western Indian culture remained

unaltered during the period of Muslim rule in the region. There is, second. a

more crucial point, one that has a great deal to do with the immediate visual

impact of the MS, viz. its striking resemblance to Panin ian Sanskrit. It would

take Rajwade six years to make sense of this discovery and to move his

thinking toward the still tentative summation that is the 1909 Grammar. The

path he traveled is clcarly recounted in this passage from an essay written

three years later.

It has been close to twenty years now since I began investigating the

origin [ugama] of the Mar athi language. With every old text I came acrossI would attempt to deduce the differentiating features of the Marathi

unique to th at text. Having returned time and again to these finds I began

to realize that present-day Marathi retained traces of many of the forms

of Old Marathi. It was while I was on to this th at I discovered [in 1903]

the Mukundaraji MS of the Dnyaneswari. After looking at this and other

contemporary texts I found that present-day Marathi does indeed have

its origins in the language of the Mukundaraji Dnyaneswari. From then

on I proceeded on the basis of a working hypothesis [kamachalau sidh

hanta], that present-day Marathi evolved successively [paramparene] from

the Marathi of the Dnyaneswari, Apabhramsha, Maharashtri. Sanskrit

and Vedic [Sanskrit). Very soon I set about putting this working hypoth

esis to the test.It

was while attemptingto

verify this hypothesis thatI found [ could make very good use of the Grammatik der Prakril

Sprachen [that had been published in Strassburg in 1900] by a German

gent called [Richard1 Pischel [1849--1908] .. . If Pischel's work had not

come to my notice I would have had to do on my own what he has

done for us, which is to compile and analytically differentiate [in a

prithhakkarana] the treatises of such Prakrit grammarians as Vararuchi,

Katyayana, Hemchandra etc as well as other available Prakrit texts and

epigraphs. I had already begun to do this when Pischel's Grammatik

appeared. It became to clear to me after reading this text that it provi

ded a most happy link between Old Marathi on the one hand and


Apabrahmsha and Maharashtri on the other. But it also became increas

ingly clear to me that . relying on the forms of Apabhramsha and

Maharashtri most closely resembling Marathi that Pischel had provided


contemporary Western grammars. At its methodological heart is the idea

that "phoda" (declinability) is the basic motor of language change. Declin

ability itself entailed that language could be continuously analyzed from the



would not exhaust all the forms of present-day Marathi. It was then that

I began to compare Marathi with Paninian Sanskrit. And I begin to

realize that each and every [present-day] Marathi word whether shor t or

long has its equivalent in the divine Panini's Ashtadhyayi; it was also

clear that Pischel's Grammatik had many flaws (not the least of which

was] his lack of knowledge of Panini's shastra . . . Which is why when

I wrote my Grammar for the Dnyaneswari in 1909 I continued to turn

toward Prakril. One outcome of this was that I managed to uncovermany subtle issues that underlie the idea of a Marathi vyakaran. But

it is also true that many such issues remained to be unearthed at that

time. The present work [on Moro Krishna Damle's Classical Marathi

Grammar, Shasfriya Marathi Vyakaran (1912)] is finally an attempt to

address precisely those issues by relying entirely on Paninian principles.

leW L 425)

A confirmed votary of Panini toward the end of his life. Rajwade was around

the time of the Grammar for the Dnyaneswari still to go all the way. The

reluctance to do so was not merely personal. Its reasons may well have had

something to do with the very idea ofa historical grammar, aitihasik vyakaran.

What was clearly paradoxical was that a grammar ( ~ ' y a k ( J r a n ) written alongthe lines of Panini could at the same time be historical, aitihasik. This is not

to say that Panini's Ashtadhyayi does not contain the elements of a historical

linguistics covering a range of linguistic changes in Sanskrit since Vedic times.

Bul the fact is that Rajwade's own access to I-'anini was informed by the

growing rise in contemporary indology of the science of phonology.

The scene had therefore already been set for a strictly "phonological" or

(what was the same thing for Rajwadel "phonetic" account of the Marathi

language. using Panini's analysis of swaras and varn(lS to inaugurate a com

prehensive phonological analysis of the Old Marathi of the Mukundaraji

MS. While the analysis of the historical changes in the language since Panini

was conducted in the ambitiously wide-ranging Introduction, the Grammar

was to serve as the setting f(H an attempt to uncover the phonological

ground-rift (Gnmd-riss) or blueprint of the Dnyaneswari. The lack of fit

between the objectives of the two supplements to his edition of the text itself

should be obvious. For strictly speaking phonological principles enabled

an assessment of the structural features of language at "its" moment. The

very order of Rajwade's analyses in the Grammar is telling enough. "Varna

itihasa." phonemic analysis has a preeminent place in terms of procedure, as

does ·'Nama-I'ibhakfi-pratyapa-itihasa." the declension of nouns and "Kriva

vibhakti-prafyaya-itihasa," the declension of verbs. The running c o m p a r i ~ o nwith Panini's text is also a key feature of the Grammar, even if it strays from

the order of analysis in thai text in succumbing to the requirements of

level of the sentence to the word and from the word to the basic phonemic

element. The idea of semantic accretion implicit here is different from that of

the cultures of hearsay such as that of the Varkaris we have discllssed

previously; declinability is tied to the semantic preservation of etymological

origin (though my etymology is usually just as good as yours) whereas in

cultures of semantic accretion Ihere tends to be a movement away from

etymological essence to a wide variety of linguistic interface. We can imagine

that when he caught sight of the Mukundaraji MS Rajwade saw a version of

Old Marathi that seemed to give itself precisely to declinability as one of the

key constituents of a Panini-informed niyamasarani, organon.

Where Dnyaneswara's text (as we will see in the next section) virtually

inaugurates the tradition of becoming-God in Maharashtra, shifting it away

from an affirmation of the simultaneity of caste and state, Rajwade r e a d ~that very text as an instance of Indic and brahmanical resilience in the face

of Islamic imperialism. Where Dnyaneswara's is a grammar of yogic involu

tion postulated at a point just bdore the atllrmation of Vitthala/Krishna,

Rajwade's is an attempt to establish Dnyaneswara (and by that token the

Varkari tradition ibell) as a bulwark for the brahmanism of the Hindul

Marathi state. It is crucial for him to "see" in Dnyaneswara's Old Marathi a

persistent sign posting of etymological roots in the eternality of Sanskrit.Whereas in Dnyaneswara. as we will see, there are no roots, only routes. only

practices: it is for this reason thai the DnyuJ1eswari can be seen to have pro

vided for what in the Varkari tradition was, for the first and perhaps for the

last time (there is no sant after Tukaram) a grammar of hearsay bringing

together elite and subaltern in one field of speech.4 And even though such a

large portion of both the Grammar and the Introduction are taken up with the

varying forms of Marathi through time and over spacc. and although there is

indeed an emphasis in both essays on an analysis of language according 10

historical (aitihasik) requirements, yet in some sense the encounter with the

Mukundaraji MS is mediated by what can be described as a "visual" dimen

sion. There is of course the visual specificity atTorded by a manuscript whose

characters were not drawn in Persian-informed cursive, modi; the physical

appearance of the text was that of it series of discrete (ba/bodh) characters.

But there is also the addition al attract ion t hat the text appea red to "freeze" in

time and even slow down the evolution of Marathi. announcing a direct and

(for Rajwade) unmistakable ancestry with Paninian Sanskrit. Rajwade, who

is in this instance at once grammarian and historian, a vyakarankar and an

itihaskar, "pulls away severely to make cer tain" but only to give greater prior

ity to a "theoretically" grasp, a seeing and objectifying gaze that makes

historical principles give way to structural needs.

To the extent that Rajwade attempts to assimilate Panini to the history of

the Marathi/Hindu nation, we might say that his interest lies in using the


notion of declinability and roots in the Ashtadhyayi to argue for the essential

coming together of a brahlpanical/Hindu way of life and a grammatical

notion of meaning underlying Vedic speech and going back to the pre-Vedic

period. One can fault him for presuming to criticize Panini himself(an d Yaska)

Rajwade's grammar \07

derived not from an older way of speaking that evokes a Vedic or brahman -

eal ethos, but from a systematic priority of God to the World. Which is.to say

that Dnyaneswara's thought cannot be derived from the larger history of

Shiva, Vishnu worship and Nathyogi practice (a staple of Dnyaneswara



for having neglected the lived speech of the pre-Vedic period. And one

could easily disagree with Rajwade when he indicts Panini for his inability

to understand language ·'historically." For. Dnyaneswara's own use of the

words "nagar" and "marhali" show that more was at stake than simply the

developed "pre-medieval" or Paninian urbanity of Old Marathi prior to

Muslim rule. (I t is clear, for instance, that for Dnyaneswara "marhatt' is a

reference to the epistemological work performed by metaphor and idiom inMarathi. to the aesthetic ruse by which the dialogue of God with man in the

Gita can be brought before the listener by the beatific poet.) If there is noth

ing specifically "pre-medieval" or "urbane" in the Dnyaneswari to endow it

with the imprint of the MarathilHindu premodern, and if urbanity is lived.

everyday speech it would by the same token be hard to argue for the elision

of pre-Vedic speech in Panini. Yet this elliptical passage in Rajwade from

the modern (nationalism) to the premodern (Dnyaneswara) and from the

premodern to the pre-medieval (Panini) is worth attending to, despite the

persistent brahmanization of Vedic thought. Rajwade's implicit philosophical

assumption is that the sayings of the Vedic seers are literally "drawn" from

(the idea of a) pre-linguistic. metaphysical essence of the pre-Vedic period

and are therefore in themselves in origin neither metaphor nor concept but

both at the same time; they establish the ontological basis of a certain lived

way of life, inaugurating an understanding of nature and speech that is

radically empirical. That is to say. they refer directly to the practical every

day concerns of the Vedic period, where words like maya could only mean

"an amazing skill or power," and not "illusion" (as it was later ethicized in

Vedanta; see Gonda 1959). That Rajwade should sec in Panini, Dnyaneswara

and in the Marathi of his own time an essential p r e ~ l i n g u i s t i c continuity in

the care of the soul is remarkable, and provides an important insight

perhaps Rajwade's greatest-into the persistence in the heavily compromised

domain of the Indic of older forms of conducting oneself in the world, forms

not reducible to the dominant understanding of knowledge or power in lndic

philosophical exegesis. But that he should see in all this the sign of an original

brahmin/Hindu/Marathi speech restores his text to the age of nationalism.Structurally, the two aspects of his Grammar, which is to say the idea of an

earlier way of life still available as an ideal in language on the one hand, and

his need to argue for Maharashtra Dharma on the other hand----the coming

together in Rajwade of a grammar of life as speech on the one hand, and of

the Law on the other hand as the continuity of caste/nation, can be seen as an

instance of a juridico-grammatical understanding of tradition as Hinduism,

one where all of life is patterned after the Law. But what we see in

Dnyancswara himself is less the self-presence of the brahmanical view of the

world than the idea that all of life (all the dimensions of Man and World) is

scholarship still focused on "religion") but is the celebration of an anterior

speech. Sueh a way of thinking is closer to the thought of a "system" that

presupposes the "derived absoluteness" of God, a God whose origin is

always prior. In this respect his is a system that works with an idea of

God as the principle of negativity at the origin; it is not a philosophical

attempt (such as Hegel's) to explore the ways in which negativity is at

last restored to itself in the state or in the Spirit--this idea of a negativityat the origin brings him closer to eusa. Bruno and the later Schelling,

those thinkers of the "ground without ground" who remain marginal to

the tradition of ethico-historical thought from Kant through Hegel to

Heidegger.

Hearsay in Dnyaneswara

For the unprecedented coming of God (in the form of Vitthala in the verse

collections, and as Krishna in the Dnyancswan) is underst ood in Dnyaneswara

as the coming of God to man, and therefore as the unsurpassab\e trace of

God in man_ The opening lines of the Dnyaneswari work through this theme

from the very first word.

Omnamo adya

Vedapralipadya

fai svasamvedya

Atflwrupa l i l l i 'Bow before the am at the origin

Of which the Vedas lay the groundHail the "I" that knows itself in itself

As the figure of the self.

(Dnyaneswari 1909 1: 1 [Translation mine))

Dnyaneswara begins by deferring all beginning, all origination to a primordial, immemorial past. "Om namo adya," he commences, inscribing a

moment whose tensing is originary, referring to a past before all pasts, and

whose aspect is in the imperative, signaling a commandment prior to all

commands: "Give yourself over (namo)," he seems to say, "to the beginning

of all things (adya) which is am," that is to say to the Onkar, Pranava, the

Word, Shabd. the Saying. In this giving oneself over one obeys an injunction

to institute beginnings. Especially since the Gila itself is a treatise on how to

install oneself at the beginning, how to move the root stha toward the sub

ject's self-installation in Karma as an active (praxis-directed) subject,

108 Vicissitudes o/hist orical religion

sthhithapradnya. Yet the instituting itself, the happeni ng at the origin, what we

might call the adya-sthhapCUila already draws the text back toward to its own

dark o rigination, one greatly removed from the grand cosmogony of Karmic

Sacrifice of which Krishna is the eikon par excellence in the Gila. Instead, here

1

I follow Nivrut ti's Word

In "holding for true."

Raj'A-'(1de's grammar 109

Here again we are given a sense of a form of "systematic" thinking that



at the start of the Dnyaneswari, in the very act of coming into the light,

something has already withdrawn. Something that remains vedapratipadya:

the Vedas. repositories of the already-known (the already-vid) cannot, try as

they might the text seems to say, attain the ground without ground at the

origin. The Vedas are only a ground-laying but one that is always incomplete

tpralipad-ya, a pratipadan ever underway), never quite enough. That which

retreats toward itselr even as it inaugurates the knowable, the sva-sam-vid.nonetheless traces its t()rms in the field of all that is knowable. It imprints itself

in history and then withdraws. What makes knowing possible is this re-traiC

arma-rupa or the am , the Saying at origin and end. From this perspective, we

can render Dnyaneswara's opening verses in this more specific way:

Give yourself over to the always-already-begun-saying (Om)

Never quite worked over by the already-said (Vedas)

But as knowing coming to itself from itself

Tracing in its wake the outline of its self-receding.

In the very next ovi there is the celebration of all becoming as sakaf-artha

mati-prakashu.

Deva tun chi ganeshu

Sakalarthamatiprakashu

Mhane nivruttidasu

Avdharijo.

Lord, you too like Ganesha

All meaningful being bathed in light

Says the follower of Nivruttinath

I take for true.

(Dnyaneswari 1909 I: 2)

Here "sakal " -a word that recurs in Varkari-speak-implies "the whole."being-in-general or Being. "Artha" refers us to the meaning of being.

"Mati" occurs here and elsewhere as the institution of logos (speech we

direct purposively to the objects around us) as vid. And finally "prakashu,"

the lighting or clearing registers the difference (that always recedes or with

draws) between being in general (God) and beings in particular (as singular

beings in themselves), So that we eould re nder this verse in stricter terms as:

You, like Ganesha

The whole gathered in meaning as light.

retreats from the world and attends to a more original becoming in the

recesses of the sou\. The link between this poet and the Varkari tradition of

which he is said to be the founder has something to do with this inaugural

speech in the Dnyaneswari of prayer in praise of a vanished God. It is this

speech that Dnyaneswara olfers to the Vitthala/Krishna of Pandharpur.

Dnyaneswara was a Varkari, one of the pilgrims of the tradition of hearsay

who made periodic varis or pilgrimages to the shrine of Vitthala. For himthe persistent tracing and re-tracing of sakal-artha-mOfi-prakashu (ontico

ontological difference, system and history) leaves behind as a trace the atma

rupa of the adya. a trace that is magical, mysterious. soteriological in promise.

More crucially for him the event of the retracing-retreating of the adya in

atma-rupa (itself departing from itself) signals the advent of Vitthala. This

"event" olfers a s ilhouette (a virtual icon if not an icon itself) of that beloved

deity, Vitthala anns akimbo, standing on a brick in the city ofPandharpur on

the banks of the Chandrabhaga, inaugurating with his stance (his incontro

vertible "ubha"-ness) the Varkari tradition itself. The yearning of that tradition

rests less in ecstatic communion than in joyous welcome, a chorus of praise

ror the ancient mystery that called lor Vitthala to s tand firmly on the brick for

"28 epochs" (atthavis yuga). The utterance of the Varkaris treats ofViuhala's

coming as the love or prem that withdraws. To be sure, Vitthala as prem "is"

this saying am to which the Varkaris have for the past 700 years rejoined a

huge corpus of poems. Vitthala's very coming into being is guaranteed by

the am to which Dnyaneswara gave himself over at the origin, adya. These

together comprise the Varkaris, infinitely loving, ado ring acts of having-said

of V tt hal a-in-praise, their own "vedas."

Now, where Dnyaneswara is thus invested in a turning back to God,

Rajwade's goal lies in the assimilation of this Varkari sanl to the larger

destiny of the state as it can be detected in the history of the Marathi lan

guage. We could well ask why there is this insatiate desire to prove the histor

icity of a language. After all, we do not in our everyday linguistic practice

resort to sueh historical arguments: that we speak a language and use it to

communicate suffices as a motivation for all our metalinguistic explorationsranged around linguistic meaning. But why this need here to prove that the

language one is speaking has its very own antiquity? The answer lies only

secondarily, to my mind, in the realm of linguistic pride and nationalism. It

has much more to do with the attempt to install history itself at the heart

of language, to try to prove that a language and a history are co-terminous. It

is to establish that language, in short, is historicity. And to have a language, to

have language as part of one's having-being, is to be historical. I f the 1924

Introduction to the Bakhar of Mahikavati was to be about installing the state

as the future at the heart of the nation, the introduction and the grammar

110 Vicissitudesofhistorical religion

accompanying the 1909 edition of Dnyaneswara implied the need to insinuate

a history at the heart of a.. language's past. Underlying both aUempts is

the problem of the outside coming in to generate an inside; for there could

not have been a history of Marathi without at the same time a history of

Rajwade's grammar II I

of the state at the heart of the nation and the instalJation of history at the

basis of language rested on a fundamental alienation, for what had been

installed in that inner citadel of nation and language remained in plaGC only

ever as the outside of the inside. Far from being an authentic (authenticated)



Persian (there is arguably at least one Persian word in the Dnyaneswari,

pace Rajwade), of the many local dialects of Marathi, and of loans from

Kannada, Konkani and Telegu. To install history at the heart of Marathi was

to introduce a historical principle essentially alien to a living and vital Marat hi.

The historicization of Marathi entailed the excising of one history ami the

introduction of another.

The history of a language

Marathi had never had, has never needed a history per se. After all, I do not

speak the "history of Marathi" when I speak Marathi: its historical aspects

are part of the "feel" I have for this language; the history of Marathi cannot

be derived from Marathi itself; its history is "underivcd," part of the sets of

reflexes that make my access to that language historical without that histor

icity necessarily having to be thematized. Just as I do not "think about" the

historical being of a hammer as I move it resolutely IowaI'd a nail, I do not

"thematize" a language's historicity. When do I suddenly come face to face

with the sheer fact of the hammer as an object to be gazed at, theorized,

grasped, thematized? This happens when the hammer or the nail becomes

abruptly useless by falling into disrepair. interrupting my unthought activity

by suddenly drawing attention to itself. This may provide some sense of what

may have produced the inclination in Rajwade toward a historical grammar

for Marathi. For that language as it was spoken in the first decades of the

t w e n t i e t h ~ c e n t u r y was nothing if not miscegenate, bearing traces of both the

languages of the North and of the South. This bhasha now needed to be

shorn of its demotic elements and restored to its roots in the original cosmo

politanism of Paninian antiquity. The great effort on Rajwade's pari was to

ensure that his researches helped to uncover a certifiably hieratic (shishta) and

urbane (nagar) language whose history could be written in terms of clear-cut

temporal axes, which is to say its basis in the past of Panini's Sanskrit,

its present in the Marathi of the post-I 296 Mukundaraj i MS and its future

in a comprehensively historicized Marathi that was to serve as a new standard. A pretheoretical, prethematic "feel" for Marathi had to be transformed

into a theorized Marathi "language" uncovered in grammar and objectified

in history.

Two crucial implications should be drawn from Rajwade's analyses here.

First, the heteronomy of he state as it is posited in the historical semantics of

the introduction to the Bakhar of Mahikavati finds its exact counterpoint

in the heteronomy of historical principles implicit ill Rajwade's scholarly

scaffolding for his edition of the Dnyaneswari. One could go even further

and argue that the installation (implicit in the Sanskrit root sthha in sthapana)

inside. that inner core harbored the necessary presence of foreign bodies.

which is to say the presence of the state and of history brought in from the

outside, Botn nation and language rested on this necessary alienation, on a

productive and enabling alienation at their core. If the origins of the state were

violent and the origins of language miscegenate there was a senSe in which

history had a way of throwing them outside themselves even as it restored

themselves to themselves. It is hardly a conundrum that Rajwade should laysuch store by the idea of raklwne (with its root raksha) or "securing" as

the basis of Indian state-formation. For the State as an idea in Rajwade

was nothing but the technology (technics) of securing, grasping, harboring.

placing in storage the potentially translormative energies unleashed by

History understood as transcend ental homelessness. llistory as coming-into

being began with frantic detours across the face of the earth and ended when

the carpetbagger buckled down. promulgating his civility via a state erected

swiftly in situ.

An impasse in the Gita

Where the luxuriant verdure of the Konkan generated in Rajwade's work the

thesis of the lazy indigene, the graphic correspondence of the Mukundaraji

MS with Panini's language brought about the crucial insight that language

needed to be bistoricized if it was to be brought close to the horizon of the

State. Language without a Stale is for Rajwade merely the sign that history is

yet to be inaugurated. History itself "is" violent transformation with Lan

guage and the State as its ethical motors. In short, Rajwadc's nationalism is

based not on a principle of Ilutonomy as is routinely assumed but on the

precisely antithetical notion of a constitutive heteronomy at the heart of the

historical. Ilistory in his work is nothing if not the movement of Language

(itself the logos [speech, uUerance, self-narrative] of a being-together

through-history)--language moving through history and precipitating itself

before the telos of the State, the latter understood always as an end determin

able very much ill advance. Language ItH him refers us to the necessarily

violent and traumalic onto-teleo-fogy of the State thro ugh history.

Paradoxically, the text that Rajwadc used to drive home his thesis with

regard to language was a text (Le. the Dnyaneswari) that, as we will sec. could

have provided the grounds for a wholly different notion of the State. of

Language and History taken as transcendentally regulative entities. But we

should also not target that the !)nyaneswari is after all a verse commentary

(if an extraordinarily "imaginative" one) on the Gita, and that the latter text

is the l o c u , ~ dassicus of the idea of securing, raksha in millennial discourses

on the State. This is in large measure bccause it is dcdic.,tcd to raising historical

112 Vicissitl/des ofhistorical religion

experience to the level of the transcendentaL'; The existential situation of

Aljuna in the Gila itself, is well known, is very quickly written into the

trans-historical schema of universal history, of which Krishna becomes the

awe-inspiring figure in the Eleventh Book. In strictly ontological terms, all

Rajwade's grammar 1\3

these dilemmas and resolutely address the necessary and impending annihila

tion of his clan. As we can no doubt infer from important latter-daY'inter

pretations by nationalist critics such as Tilak, Shukla and Gandhi, the Gila

is the text that inaugurates for the first time in antiquity the idea of the state



historical action (denoted in the text by a range of words derived from the

verbal root in Sanskrit for movement, krt) is subordinated to the eternal path

of the negative (denoted by a range of words such as varIate, anuvartate.

pravarlilam derived from the key verbal root for eternity as a "turning of the

eternal", vrl). By this logic. all phenomenal action within historical being

human is placed under the sign of history as the movement of eternity. a

movement that was first installed by dint of the cosmogonic rite of Karmicsacrifice (vadnya, with its the verbal root ya) indicating gift and coullter-gift

between man and God as part of the eycle of karma or physis; and with

sacrifice installed in turn as the origin of the caste system in the parna division

of labor). As a figure for the movement of Time taken in a transc.:cndental

sense. it is to subsume within it a1i historically specific ac.:tion.

The transcendentalization of the tigure of Krishna in that text as the very

instance of the universe in motion is to serve at the same time as a historical

intimation---to the effect that the Lord will return in epoch after epoch to

install and fe-install dharma (dharma-sthhapana). Arjuna as a phenomenalinstance of creation gradually finds instituted in himself this figure of abso

lute otherness. of which his own bcing is reduced to a mere moiety. But the

stature of that text rests not just on its insistence on the itinerary of Krishnaas an instance of the State but also on its invocation of the self-overreaching

inherent in yogic seeking. Oddly for a text that places so much emphasis on

absolute (cosmic, metaphysical) heteronomy, there co-exists in its pages the

unprecedented counter-balance of a relentless project of self-autonomy. The

tension between the two movements of absolute heteronomy and unrelenting

autonomy lends to the Gila the ambivalence that has made it the focus of a

host of interpretive traditions of which those of Sankara and Ramanuja

are only the most well-known because they are the most influential.

System and history

Another way of saying this is that there is in that text both the "system" that

is yogic self-overreaching and the "history" that is Krishna as Karma. The

injunction to Arjuna in the text is to break through the possible impasse

between the two and broach action (the verbal root kn ) in the world but in aselfless manner. Why an impasse? Because the animal-machine ofTime or ka l

could potentially hurtle onward without in any way affecting history with

transformative potential; especially if the householder-mimansaka were to

adhere to a nearly atheistic self-abnegation in his commitment to the ritual

every day. or if the yogi chose total renunciation. Alternatively, human

mortality may well ensure an irreversible plunge into the temptations (bhoga)

orthe phenomenal world. Arjuna's selfless action is meant to break through

as an originary (historically enabling) instance of transformative violence.

It is the text that announces at the outset of the post-Buddhist world

(i.e. installs for the first time as a potentially genocidal red-thread runningthrough the tradition) the deeply disturbing ethical proposition that violence

is at the heart of any fungible notion of the social.

The paradox is that Rajwade was one of the first critics to provide rigorous

rules for studying the language of the Dnyaneswari. But he was also anunstinting critic of what he described as the "pangu"-ness or sanctioned pusil

lanimity (CW 10: 270) of the Varkari tradition with its n t i ~ p o l i t i c a l emphasis

on passiveness (nivrutti-dharma), the very same Varkari tradition, that is, of

which the Dnyaneswari has historically been considered the foundation

(pava)! Ifactiveness,pravrutti. entailed the drive toward the installation of the

state, nivrulli or passiveness meant a complete repudiation of any relation to

the idea of a transformative history. To use the terms I have been discussing

above. we might say that the tradition of which Rajwade was an advocate was

the Maharashtra dharmi tradition he associated with Ramdas (l608-82), a

tradition that worked toward the institution of the state's violent heteronomy

at the heart of the sociaL Ramdas was not a Varkari (the sampradaya COll-

tinues to deny him a place in their four-pillared pantheon of DnyaneswaraN a m d e v - E k n a t h ~ T u k a r a m ) ; he did not endorse the Varkari way, which

insists on the relentless self-overreaching of the yogi working through the

unprecedented gift of Love that is Vitthala. Rajwade's reading of the chron

icle (Bakhar) of Mahikavati convinced him that the historical reasons for the

quick (:';"l.pitulation before Alauddin of the local raja of Devagiri was precisely

the culture of bhakti-informed devotionalism popular in the Konkan at the

time. Dnyaneswara himself lived in Devagiri (Daulatabad) in this period

and was at least nominally a subject of Ramchandra Yadav (1271-1311), the

Yadava king who was forced to bow before Alauddin. So that whereas in his

introduction to his 1909 edition Rajwade is moved to use Dnyaneswara's text

as an instance of the urbanity and cosmopolitanism inherent in the Marathi

of the period, a qual ity it was to lose quickly with the coming of Alauddin, in

other places in his work he tcndcd to see those very same q ualitics as a sign of

Maharashtra's vulnerability to foreign incursions. What the incipient nation

needed at the time, he argues, was a firm avowal of a warrior ethic, kshalriva

dharma. What transpired instead was that a lotus-eating populace remained

helpless against thc power and reach of the stranger.

The State in millennia) time

I spoke of the millennial discourses of the State; I had in mind the alarming

manner in which the idea of Maharashtra dharma dovetails with the notion

114 Vicissitudes o.(hislOrical religioll

so dear to llindulva and 10 the imperial ambitions of the twentieth-ccntury

United States that the last millennium has seen the perpetual and violenl

renewal of a primal conllict between two opposed entities. On the one hand.

there is a Hinduism retroactively Orientalized during the course of the nine

R({;wade's grammar 115

Indo-Islamic militarism altogether and broach another genealogy of the

conflict at the heart of the Indian social, which is now recognizably a caste

conflict with its own peculiar forms in antiquity. in the era of militarism

and in the epoch of nationalism. For if this conflict between dalits (and



teenth century, a globalized Christianity. and a racist Zionism. On the other

hand. there are the lransnational networks of a resurgent Islam. From the

point of view of Maharashtra dharma this long epoch that began with the

Muslim incursions into the Konkan can only ever end with the expulsion

or complete extel'luination of the Indian Muslim. But thcre perseveres in the

Maharashtrian scene an important aspect of this millennial notion that tends

to undercut the idea, inherent in such a millennia I schema. of a perpetuallyManichean opposition between Hindu and Muslim throughout this historical

period. This potentially oppositional ,lSpect is already evident in Rajwade's

introduction to the Bakhar of Mahikavati. The idea that Maharashtra lacked

the leading role played by kshatriya-dharma in this millennial context enables

us to detect in Rajwade's use of this particular topos of Indian antiquity

a typically modern gesture. There he remarked that the founders of the idea

of the state in Indian antiquity were "brahmins and kshatriyas;" their tax

paying subjects were the dasas. Rajwade is clearly less interested in the origins

of the state in antiquity than in the extent to which caste-identity did or did

not scrve Maharashtra in good stead in medieval Konkan. His work is

classically elite-nationalist in that it uses a caste-argument about the para

doxically normalized "tyranny" of those put.'1tive early usurper-kings, thebrahmins and kshatriyas taken together, to make a point about the need for a

proto-nationalist response to the advent of Islam. As is often the case with

nationalist thinking in this period. there is an attempt at once to evade the

question of caste altogether and to draw attention to the fact that before

everything else the fall of immemorial Hinduism, sanatana-dharma ought to

have fused aU Hindus together regardless of caste and led to the overthrow of

Muslim rule. In the long period of Indo-Islamic militarism (Le. "the struggle

against Muslim rule"), it would seem. caste was merely an indicator of where

in the socius would lie the possible sources of genuine historical transformationfor future nationalist ends.

Now if we were to turn to the work of writers in the non-Brahmin tradition

in and around Rajwade's own time. a very different picture comes to view.

Like Maharashtra dharma lwith its implicit focus on a new warrior ethic.

kshatriya dharma for brahmins) this dalit and non-brahmin tradition too is

often enough centered on the figure of the non-brahmin hero. Shivaji. But

with a very crucial difference: the warrior ethic. kshatriya dharma of the

dalit and non-brahmin movement docs not focus on the conflict between

Hinduism and Islam in the era of Indo-Islamic militarism but trains its sights

on another much older conAict. that between the dalits (untouchables) and

non-brahmins on the one hand and historical brahmanism on the other. With

the phrase "historical brahmanism" (and its political fiction of an absolute

opposition between dalils and brahmins in history) wc leave the topos of

non-brahmins) and brahmanism is to be discerned in the Indo·Islamic era

of so-called militarism. it would have to be seen less as a time of proto

nationalism than as a time when Islam provided a radical critique of caste

society. one that ojfered dalits an unprecedented way out of institutionalized

caste-Hinduism. For the weaver-convert Kabir. for instance. the critique

of the Hindu idea of the social otfcred by Islam opened the very possibility

of his poetry. In sum. where the warrior ethic, kshatriya-dharma in thebrahmanical tradition of Maharashtra refers to the permanent militarization

that nationalists perceived (again, retroactively) in the Indo-Islamic world.

kshatriya-dharma in the dalit (and non-brahmin) tradition of such nineteenth

century activists as Phule refers to the struggle against the effeets of brahmin

Jominanc c since antiquity. The coming together of these seemingly hetero

geneous concepts-a low-caste ethic, a warrior ethic. the ethic of Krishna

Love (shudra-dharma, kshatriya-dharma, bhagwat- dhal'ma )-in the work of

sllch critics of historic.'1l brahman sm as Phule. Rajaram Shastri Bhagwat,

Vitthala Ramji Shinde. Ambedkar, and more recently in Sharad Patil

uncovers an Indo-Islamic millennium that is less about militarism and the

contest between Hindu and Muslim than about the long-running low-caste

movement. going back to ancient times. against the brahmin conception ofthe social.

Is there then some conception of this low-caste intransigence in the

Dn.raneswari itself? The conventional understanding of the so·calJed Bhakti

texts of Ihe medieval period subsists on the belicf that these texts maintain. if

al all, pmclically no connection with the political world. The notion is that

they lend to turn away from worldly affairs and prefer to attend to the task of

singing praises of their particular deity. Bhakti texts, we are told. transcend

religion. caste, and politics; they embrace an ecumenical vision of liberal

tolerance toward all expressions of dissent and difference. This interpretive

tendency is even at its most rigorous merely a symptom of the retroactive

projection that the inAuential bilingual elites of the decades after and before

Partition exercised on the texts of the medieval era. These elites prided them

selves on their urbane and secular approach to issues of identity; they sought

to detect in the traces of the past the threshold for their own liberal tendency

to ignore caste and religion as merely instances of backward forms of socialorganization. The texts of medieval bhakti remained for them instances of a

reformism that was radicaliy opposed to caste and religious prejudice. Such

modernists embraced the contemporary dalit movement in the belief that ithad in point of fact renewed an older "pre-modernist" attack on the effete

and decadent remnants of an older world. For them, the dalit recovery of the

modern would place dir\,,'Ctly on track what mattered most to their sense of

historical change. which was the hope that a secular. caste-free society would


inaugurate in India a genuine modernity. The historical experienceof the last

few decades has considerably_attenuated the already slender link between this

elite modernism and its vanguardist notion of the modern. For one, the

diverse tendencies of the daHt movement did not, as it turned out, foster


Routing and triumphing over the four-flanked army of the

understanding.7

I\ t length they go on to heed through Meditative "Ocus, dhyana

The bugle-cry of the Unsounded Sound, anahafa nada



the abandonment of ideas of caste and religion despite having won through

the years a series of constitutional guarantees for affirmative discrimination

in their favor-to the contrary, they have gone on to further exacerbate

the identitarian climate of our times. Under such conditions it would serve

little purpose to turn to the Dnyaneswari merely t o rehearse th e ecumenical

vision of an Indian modernism that is in many respects out of step with

contemp orary political realities.

Interior scene of the anti-state

There is however a reference to "wa r" in a section of his text. The reference is

couched in an elaborate allegorical device borrowed from a traditional yogic

physiognomy of the soul. The shfoka from the Gila motivating this passage

extols those who "exert themselves with fortitude [yatantascha drid

dhavratha)" in trying to attain the Lord. The reference to working on oneself

ought to alert us to the links between this passage and the persistence of

character (as that which precedes individuality) in late antiquity. Here is the

couplet from the Gita: "Ther e are those who, always yoked to devotion [bhak

lya nityayukta], adore me and glorify me, while exerting themselves withfortitude, and pay homage to me" (§9: 14; van Buitenen 1981: 105). Here is

Dnyaneswara 8 gloss on the nature of this self-disciplining. He writes that this

species of devotee, the yogis in particular

Take great care always t o

Direct the five senses and the mind

Spreading outside like a fence of thorns

The technique of Restraint, yama-niyama.

They set up inside as an enclosure the Adamantin e Posture, vujras(IJIQ

Placing above like catapul ts Modul ations of the Breath, pranayama.

That done the Serpentine Feminine's, the kundalini's, Reversing-power.

ulhata-shakti, lights up

The M i n d - S p i r i t ~ B r e a t h , mana-pavana, moves out and up

Staunching in preparation for the siege

The seeping nectars of the Seventeenth Level of the Pericarp, satrava.

Then the Retraction. pratyahara, comes into its own.

It neutralizes the lure of the phenomenal world [I'ikara]

By lassoing the senses that are like calves insatiate at the udder

Turning them as they forage abroad, into the heart of the citadel

[hrudaya antu).

They lay claim then to Stasis, dharna, by

Turning the earth-water-fire-wind-sky into sky

The passionately shining, circumambient

And inexhaustible Concord, samadhi.

Which in turn endorses

Thc self reaching out to the self,

Regnant in instituting a State of peace [atmanubhava-rajyasukha]

Bringing forth a vision of the coronate [pattabhisheku dekhan]

A t - o n c - w i l h - i t s e l l ~ Fluidly Equilibriate, samarasa.(Dnyaneswari 236: 211--17)

What Dnyaneswara provides us here is the portrayal of an agricultural soci

ety preparing for a siege. One would think that here we have the very picture

of Rajwade's "pangu" (pusillanimous) Konkan world, unable to take up arms

but quick to move into a defensive posture. Yet the nature of this defensive

activity, steeped in the concept-metaphors (for they are both concept and

metaphor at once) of yoga and the school of Sankhya, has very specific aims

and carefully ordered ways of attaining them. The goal of the exercise is to

fortify the powers of the mind in order to attain samadhi (derived from

Sanskrit sam ["bring together"] and the root dha ["to place"]) or "con-cord,"

an aim that is attained when we arriveat

the" A t - o n e ~ w i t h * i t s e l f '

in the finalline. The theme of the placing-inside-of-what-has-strayed-outside contains

only one explicit account of warfare, which occurs when the mind "r outs " the

"five-flanked army of the sankalpas." But in as much as the mind-the cen

tral actor of the entire psychodrama or more strictly, psychomachia-in this

narrative is perpetually at war with itself. we might even say tha t the theme of

the passage is a kind of "crypto-militarism" that internalizes war ami places

it inside itself. This reversal, passing through the stages of this yogic physi*

ognomy of the soul (yamaniyamana-pranayama-ulhatashakti-pratyahara

dhurna-dhyana*samadhi-samarasal, produces the triumphal self-narrative of

the mind trafficking in a certain peace with itself. What we hear throughout

the passage is not a "rumor of a hidden king;" that which is to come is not a

revelation. Since the argument is taking place at the level of the soul it is

highly unlikely that the allegory will make reference to historical events or

persons. Comparisons with Augustine's substitution of the inner conflict

of the soul lor the grand theater of Virgil's epic of Roman empire-building,

or Dante's transposition of the politics of contemporary Florence to an

imagined underworld would both be out of pi ace, for unlike Augustine, Virgil

,llld Dante there is no ligural humanism implicit here, no figurae similar to

those predicting the triumph of Rome or of Christendom. The historical

vectors of Dnyancswara's allegory are pointed resolutely inwards toward h i s ~tory not as ·'violent transformation" but as ethical, other-directed ·'reversal"

(ulhat). flaving passed through the technology of rcvcrsal (a relro-technics of

11 g Vicissitudes q( historical religion

the body). the mind finds itself very much in control of itselC If anything.

the efTort has been to modulate (not destroy) the senses, to undo its

somewhat concupiscent pull toward external objects and to draw the mind

into itself.


concept hut which is the posture or "nct" (asantl: ( ~ v l I ( / m i , \ ' ) thnt nlienates the

soul in the body, bringing to it an experience of otherness.

Neither concept nor m e t a p h o t ~ neither merely symbol nor sign, what then

do we make of the self-overreaching in death of the yogic mind, of which this



The suspicion of allegory

To this cnd. various modes of askesis are employed towar d the "modulation"

(niyamana) of the senses, chief among which is the technique of pratyahara,

which involves "moving toward the sensuous world and then taking oneself

away" (pratyahara is derived from the prefixes prati and a, along with theverbal root hd ["take away"]). After having outlined a series of external

measures from yamaniyamana to pratyahara, the text moves on to more

internal forms of self-modulation, such as dharna and dhyana. At the end of

this procedure, having restored the senses to the inner world and drawn them

from out of the outer world, the mind is enthron ed in the inner citadel, where

mourning (dukha; lit. "suffer ing") has been able to expel the mourned object

it had incorporated (sukha; lit. "peace"), leading to the final State of equi

librium, concord (samarasa, SOIMdhl), Clearly the securing (the root raksha)

mentioned here is different from its use in Rajwade. For what has been

accomplished is "neither the rejection nor the spurning" of the body but

in fact its fortification and its becoming free from d i s e a s e . ~ In "securing"

the body in this way via a process of repeated reversals carried out at variouslevels of the yogic system, the objective is to institute the perpetually renewed

autonomy of the mind against the possibilityof ts own wavering. (I fRajwa de's

is an ontO-ideo-logy of the state in history, Dnyaneswara's is a de-onto-teleo

logy of the mind as the source of self-modulation and as the locus of a

"state" of inward peace.) For the citadel is to be guarded against the influx of

distracting thoughts, and to aid it in this difficult exercise the first thing that

the mind does is to draw in the senses. The passage is thus a classic instance of

allegorical narrative in the dynamic sense, possessing as it does the capacity

for potentially interminable narratival involution. At the same time, what

Dnyaneswara gives us is not a picture that points in the direction of another

reality, as would be the case if its allegorical signs merely corresponded in a

mechanical manner to meanings fixed in advance, In other words, it would be

premature to describe this inner landscape as "symbolic." This is not by any

means a static picture of the soul at work, as in an allegorical woodcut.

Instead what we have here is the concerted "artificial" use of mental pro

cesses, a me mory exercise (taken from t raditi ons of hearsay) dedicated to the

mechanical "retraction" of the soul. War and siege are not "metaphors" used

by Dnyaneswara-they are concepts just like the philosophemes that he

draws from the vocabulary of yoga. The latter is always an allegorization of

death as the "ceasing to be" of he body, the point at which ethicizedlreligious

notions of dying as the transmigration of the soul etc, are preceded by the

passivity of an inner "ab-solute" which we cannot re-solve into metaphor or

entire passage is a portra it? In Rajwade there was the idea that the Slate must

be installed at the inside as the "outside of the inside" ---a perpetual ot herness

or heteronomy that generated history as transtormative violence. The great

models for this violent historiographic state, the state in Hegel (Rajwade was

familiar with his theses on history and nationhood in The Philosophv of

His/ory, but not perhaps with his unraveling of the state in the grealtreatise

on Rightt and in Heidegger (whose indispensable texts are traversed by thediscourses of fascism) come immediately to mind. Indeed there much that is

"llegelian" in this larger sense in Rajwade's idea of the State as the agency

for historical change, and as the horizon of the social. Yet it was Rajwade

who first made it possible for us to read Dnyaneswara text in the way we have

just attempted. These lines arc taken from his edition of that text, still

the most crucial aid to our understanding of the text as an instance of the

Varkari tradition. It is Rajwade's edition that takes us closer to Dnyaneswara

than any other; there have been more than a dozen scholarly editions of that

text in the last century. Yet in that closeness to Dnyaneswara we can detect in

Rajwade a form of interpretive engagement that bears some resemblance to

critics in other languages, such as Shukla and Dwivedi in Hindi. who 10 0

were working on the texts of "medieval bhaktt' (madhyayugin dharmasadhaM) at the time. Rajwade is drawn to this text partiy because ofhs stature as

a perennial monument to a Marathi-s peaking society awaiting its final eman

dpation in the era of Shivaji and Ramdas. As the sign of a society awaiting

the future instal lation oCthe state, the Dnyaneswari is for Rajwade very much

like a sarcophagus housing the precious remains of Old Marathi, pointing

back to "Aryan" antiquity and to a future Maharashtra dharma athwart

Muslim imperialism, In the somewhat emasculated society of medieval

Konkan, a society that was unable to stand up to Alauddin, Rajwade seems

to say. there was nonetheless the extenuating circumstance that Dnyaneswara's

text could preserve for the future a Marathi essentially unadulterated,

"unmiscegenate," We can imagine that with the coming of Shivaji that

sarcophagus would kcep within itself the body of the Marathi state, melding

state and language into one assertive cultural entity,

If the Dnyaneswari is for Rajwade a sarcophagus for language in its rela

tion to a people and a state, this text itself would seem to be dedicated to a

different kind of secretion. What is the "secret" of the Dnyaneswari? What

does it "keep" inside itself? We saw that what it keeps is nothing but the self

overreaching of the yogic mind, In the "simplest" terms (so simple that.1ike

Poe's Purloined Letter, we cannot see what is right in front of us) we might

say that this yogic regimen involves "placing the inside back (palat, ulhata]

in the inside." For the nationalist critic accustomed to think of culturc as the

source of a specular imagc of one's own national identity, this kind of "inside


within an inside" has the aspect of a hall of mirrors. Instead of one's self

assured sense of self there the chance that the mechanical replication of

the self may introduce an element of the abyssal into the unplumbed depths

of this interiority, the region of the "unsounded sound" (anahat nada). Yet

Rajwade's grammar 121analysis the "secret" of Varkari hearsay or for that matter of Ram, the name

for the becoming-God of Kabir, is less what is secreted in these traditions of

silence; it is very much more the origin one ascribes to a text in a necessarily

willful fashion, as the start of a hermeneutic project seeking to bring out if



for the yogi himself this exercise is not abyssal: just as "a-porias" must be

"pored through," that is to say decided in one way or another, the encounter

with the abyss of non-meaning requires the immediate and retroactive institu

tion of meaning; the abyss calls to be crossed over, covered, making abyssality

transient. unsustainable in itself. What is crucial here is that the abyssality

issues from the ungroundedness of the regimen itself. Such a regimen has no

origin or end. I t merely brings about reversals. And this infinite reversibility isendlessly "secretive" in that it involves a momentous involution of the psyche,

drawing it deeper and deeper into its inner recesses. At the same time, this

drawing-in has none of the features of New Age commercial spirituality in

the Western world, because it is prior to religion, prior to the age of religions

in which non-Western religions can only be ethnophilosophical adjuncts to

rationalized life in late capitalism; as part of this "retraction," no inherent

symbolic value can be accorded to mind or soul, to the senses or the body,

all of which remain alterable, dispensable aspects of the technique itself.

It implies the involution of yoga itself toward an ancient oblivion of the rightto mourn.

No wonder then that the nationalist critic detected a mystery, secret or

pusillanimity where there was only this inner journeying. No wonder. moreover, that such critics tended to be deeply suspicious of the allegorical sche

mas in which such journeying would be couched; after all, the philosophical

vocabulary of such texts as the Dnyaneswari, as I have suggested above. has a

semantic range reducible neither to concept nor to metaphor. There is no

name for allegory in Indic criticism-yet this handing down of the selfsame

message is not uniq ue to cultures of hearsay. As Rajwade himself seems to

suggest in his seminal essay on the "fantastic" (adbhut), Sull-inspired allegor

ies such as that of Jayasi and the fascination Dnyaneswara and Kabir display

for the yogic landscape of the soul, are lorms of memory that relay a kind

of preserved stereotype conveying the force and newness with which new

empires were built in South Asia in this period. Allegory is mechanical reten

tion, but its mechanism gives us an insight into the apocalyptic and utopian

dimension of popular memory. For the critic invested in the construction of

a nationally available symbolic image-repertoire from out of the narrative

strategies of medieval texts, this tendency in the Varkari saints, in Kabir and

in Jayasi, toward a potentially endless generation of meaning was troubling.

In contrast, Tulsidas, Surdas, and Ramdas seemed immeasurably more

"democratic" because the exoteric quality of their tableaux of Ram and

Krishna in action was so much easier to ascertain. And yet in some sense

these critics were nonetheless drawn toward what they saw as the "esoteric"

texts of "medieval bhakti." The fascination with such a secretive corpus

became the basis of their productive encounters with these texts. In the final

not the secret itself then most certainly the fascinating, obsessive possibility

of a journey toward that secret in one's critical labors. Nat ionalist exegesis, in

its encounter with "bhaktitexts" bearing evidence of a connection with popu

lar yogic practice (there are strong connections between Nathpanthi practice

and the thinking of both Dnyaneswara and Kabir) is in the final analysis not

about these texts themselves than about the interpretive dilemmas of the

critics that engaged with them. The fascination with popular esoteric practiceas reflected in this sector of the hhakli archive co-exists in the work of these

critics with a certain eilizenly olltrage directed at authors whose secrets none

theless eluded them. In other words, the popular both attracted and repelled

their gaze. That is the secret these texts keep for LIS, who have inherited thoseolder perplexities.

Toward a narratival history

The question remains: do systems make reference to history? The chronicle

(Bakhar) of Mahikavati is historical not just because it contains a narrative of

events whose historical basis can easily be ascertained (as it was by Rajwade)

by turning to other contemporary sources: the Bakhar is "historical" also

because it makes a point about the decline of Maharashtra Dharma. thus

locating i tself (at least in Rajwade's mind) in the still incipient history of the

state in Maharashtra. One could argue for the Bakhar as a historical docu

ment, but is Dnyaneswara's text historical by the same token? A text tha t seeks

to establish its origins in a time without origins. that lays out a complicated

paradigm for the self-overreaching of the soul would seem to have very little

to do with history in the way the Bakhar quite obvi.ously does. Rajwade was

correct to focus on the language of Dnyaneswara, for the latter's use of the

spoken Marathi of the time is arguably the only explicit link his text has with

historical evidence in the conventional sense. Where the Bakhar provides evi

dence of the timing and narration of aetu al historical events, Dnyaneswara's

text offers instances of the state or the Marathi language at the time. of the

ti.ming of the Marathi language in history as it moved from its origins inSanskrit-Prakrit-Maharashtri-Apabhramsha to its transmutation into the

Old Marathi spoken in the Konkan. circa 1290. Still, what are we to make of

that other "timing," the timing oryogi.c overreaching which generates in the

text the endless allegorical expanse of levels, sites, destinations. crossings, the

epic dimensions of an inner life that seems to Ilee from any connection with

history? And yet, interiority is nothing if not a meditation o n the question of

time. Rajwade projected his "Hegelian" framework back into the distant past

and thereby insti.tuted the historiographic episteme in Maharashtra, lodging it

firmly ill the annals of the Maharashtrian state. Dnyaneswara. on the other

122 Vidssitudes ofhistorical religion

hand, appears to eschew historical reference lor a meditation on the question

of temporality, the timing of a life as yogic involution, Is there then any

connection at all between history understood as translormation and time

understood as the work of the soul, between the exteriority of historical


of Hinduism? In embracing hearsay (return, retention, retraction), defiantly

this side of theology or love as eros, such a practical reason would .clearly

have announced its own "hegemony over the social" (Gopal Guru)---a social

attained not merely by laying claim to the state but by addressing the problem

of a past that is older than the time of history even as it makes it possible,



occurrcnce and the interiority of n n e r ~ w o r l d l y time? For, in exteriority the

other of history is the state; in interiority the other of the soul is the phenom

enal world, whose apotheosis (remindful of the eskhaton in an Eleatic register,

and paravac or parakashta in the tones ofShaivit e Medieval Kashmir) is in the

moral act of dying beJore religiously sanctioned death.

The idea of freedom implicit in Rajwadc was that of a freedom secured by

means of the Stale as the final horizon of historical striving. The violenceinherent in the radical heteronomy of the state implied it alone was to be the

motor of historical change in the service of nationalism. The "system" of

freedom in Dnyaneswara on the other hand would appear to be static, m e c h ~anica1. Repetitive-·but in keeping with the great allegorical systems of this

period and later (one thinks again of Kabir and Jayasi) there is a sense in

which reversibility ensures that a new history of the soul will have been

broached. This system presupposes dilference-it addresses at thc outset the

issue of the tendency of the senses to turn toward the sensual world----but it

seeks to reverse this constitutive heteronomy by means of a movement of

translormative autonomy. Moreover where language in Rajwade entailed the

principle of declinability, the necessary "finitude" of words, language in

Dnyaneswara sought to address the "infinitude" inherent in saying: for "Om"

is here the infinitive par excellena, addressing the question of being from a

position of perpetual movement and change.

In conclusion, we can say that two pedagogies of the will have co-existed in

lhe Indo-Islamic millennium, the ineluctable drive toward action and the

desire to welcome the aniconic, non-anthropomorphic figure (daivat) of the

God who will have come. Both forms involve change and trans lorma tion bu t

whereas one form involves inciting action in the subject to change the world,

the other involves action to change oneself; one is a self-subjection oriented

to the world, the other is a self-subjection geared toward itself. Is not the

heteronomy of the self (the idea that oneself is for ano ther) far more enabling

than the heteronomy of the state (the state as the other of the socia])? The

traditions of the becoming-God as they are as inaugurated in Dnyaneswara,

Kabir and Tukar am are precisely about the "mou rning " that or dains this selftransformation; for in self-transformation there is also the import ant recogni

tion that every other persall is unique, irreplaceable and different from me.

The God in him holds me to account, asks me to mourn for him. He is not the

third person (whom I can then proceed to represent and use as an alibi) who

demands justice, violence, dominance, This practice of the "returning" of the

soul olTers an account of practical reason that makes use of terms from the

religious lexicon as various topol (dogma in the pre-ecclesiastical sense) but

only lor mechanical retention. Could this be a threshold for a low-caste prac

tical reason severed from the internal auto-cri tique or ethical soul-searching

a past beatifically mediated via the notion of the "divinity of the divine"

of which the Varkaris" Vitthala and Kabir's demotic Ram are signs taken

for wonder. lO

In the three chapters that constitute this boo k's section on "The Vicissitudes

of Historical Religion," we looked closely at reconstructions of medieval

devotional traditions in the era of anti-colonial nationalism. We also turnedto a recent reappraisal of this critical legacy from the dalit po int of view. The

texts we examined represent what is to my mind a high point in Hindi and

Marathi modernity. The extraordinary power of these analyses nonetheless

reveals a fundamental resistance to the idea of divinity in Kabir and

Dnyaneswara, What they uncover is a foreclosure of daHt hearsay; this is

arguably the case with a dalit critic such as Dharmvir. One response to our

I1ndings could have been to stop here, Wishing to preserve the strangeness, if

not the sanctity of this fund of wisdom from the prcmo dern period, we could

have remained content with the metacritical clTort of these last chapters on

Dwivedi, Dharmvir and Rajwade. Yet, it is incumbent upon us to tread fur

ther; it would not suffice to merely point to an altcrnative mode of thought

and of life, stopping sho rt of embracing that alternative with all the interpre

tive dangers that any intimacy with it would necessarily imply. This book

aims at a prehistory of dalit empowerment. My po int is to show how what

came before contemporary daHt politics was not a time of inertness or

"unfreedom." I have argued in Chapters 1 and 2 that the period we know as

the age of bhakti is also the basis of a dalit ecumene no longer indebted

to Hinduism.

For this reason we are in a sense "accountable" to the premodern, It is a

mark of the boldness and originality of the critics we have discusscd that they

brought ou t these genuine insights into the texts of the bhakti period just

as quickly and surely as they dissembled them. It is in fact prcciscly their

failure to address the specificity of the texts of dalit hearsay (Kahir and

Dnyaneswara in particular) that is also a sure sign of their unimpeachable

stature. Mystic speech called to them, pulled them toward itself, beatifiedtheir own lives. This "pull" helped produce in the very texture, in the subtle

warp and woof of their own texts a grandiose indifference to that originary

calL (J have characterized this avocation as that of the primordial traditions

of melancholic justice), And so they were supremely "non-indifferent"

despite themselves to a tradition that ought to have been seen outside and

beyond any retroactively espoused idea of the "pre-modern," This is their

ambiguous ethical legacy to us in ollr present moment even as we too return

to the texts of the "premodern." Thai ambivalence does not call lor the kind

of hand-wringing that serves only to assuage one's own conscience (mcrcly

124 Vicissitudes a/hi storical religion

lamenting that we no longer have the "right " to read these texts). nor does it

call for a form of complacen,cy (in experiencing our modernity as a necessary

alienation from the premodern). Our "pul!" loward the premodern should

serve instead as the mark of decisions that we must (cannot not) make. There

is no alternative. One must proceed to read th e texts of hearsay themselves.

Part III

The prehistory of historical



religion

l• 7 The suspension of iconoclasm

Myth and allegory in the time



of deities

Despite the weighty rubric, the idea of "allegory" I associate with Kabir and

examine in this chapter is easily characterized. I refer to the constant shuttle

involved here between worldly and ethereal, Ileshly and spiritual. For a l l e ~gory, these are all sites of involuted and repetitive thinking. Yoga and !antra

were rich sources for such imaginings. Allegory necessarily poaches on s y s ~tcrns; it is from the point of view of the popular a mode of intellectual

brigandage. Above all, it is a form of surreptitious speech. It flits effortlessly

between the real and the imagined. In what follows I make the argument that

the installation of deities as loci of emotional yearning in the age of bhakti is

based on this idea of allegory. The deity in bhakti is set up in the interior

region of the soul, but it can as well exist as an object. The "subject" of

bhakti, I want to suggest, is the emotive individual who can practice a

perpetual transience between the deity lodged inside as an imago and the

deity ou t there who can be the object of devotion. I do not make distinctions

between bhakti and the Sufi Way while making this point. It seems to me that

the tendency to establish an object as at once the inner source and the outer

aim of an emotional attachment is widespread in the Indo-Islamic era, tra

versing both high and low forms of culture. I conclude this particular thread

of my argument by discussing the possible effects this allegorical tendency

has had in the realm of politics today. The embrace of deities is not however

the only aspect of allegory. In the next chapter I show how the work of

allegory is two-fold. If it embraces main stream religiosity, it also turns away

from it to affirm involuted modes of interiorization. This refers us to the

inner crypt of allegory.The thought and poetics of the saint-poet Kabir exemplifies this turn

toward and turn away from the popular. Kabir's Ram is not the Ram of the

epic; his is an abstract Ram. But it is nonetheless to be found in the interjor

region of he soul. And for this reason it is complicit with th e regime of deities,

for which there is a continuum between the inner world and the deity installed

ou t there. The most significant claims on Kabir's work prior to the dalit

critique made different uses of this interiority, as we have seen in previous

chapters. Ramcha ndra Shukla castigated Kabir's imaginings as mystical, and

looked to the rcign of deities for an instance of thc popular. Hazariprasad

128 Prehis!ory ojhistorical religion

Dwivedi thought of this interiority as a sign of what is inherently radical

in the Hindu tradition. T1tis was a radicalism prior to deification, but a

I-lin<.lu radicalism nonetheless. Now inasmuch as Kabir embraces this interi·

ority. and speaks of it in a Vaishnava idiom, he is complicit with the reign of

deities. My task here and in the following chapter is to point this out. but

l 'i Suspension oj conoclasm 129

penchant for fantastic tales which continued to draw a wide readership in latc

nineteenth-century Maharashtra.Again, Rajwade's analysis is not exhausted by his brilliantly conceived

geneaology of the tale in world literaturc. What is absolutely essential is his

insight into the popular. For it was clear to him that the popular as a mindset



also to extricate Kabir's idea of interiority from its association (howeverimplicitly) wilh the reign of deities. In Ihis manner, Kahir is the paradigm for

the movement of claim and counterclaim that I have described as the essence

of <.Ialit hearsay an<.l dalit politics. Allegory "is" dalil skepticism par excel-

fence to the extent that it is a double movement toward and away from

llinduism.Let me turn hcre to the question of how allegory puts to work a peculiar

idea of temporality. The historiographer Rajwade. whose work I discussed in

the previolls chapter, was also a literary critic of great perspicuity. His sem

inal 1902 essay (Rajwade 1967: 266--94) on the Ma rathi novel ("Kadambari")

provides us with an importa nt glimpse into the temporal vocation of allegory.

Rajwade's purpose in the essay was to deride the idea of verisimilitude at the

basis of Marathi naturalism, of which the novelist 1·lari Narayan Apte was

then the leading exponent. The essay laments that novelist's lack of attention

to the older Marathi tradition of popular fl'lntastic tales. 1'"01', had Apte

turned to these he would have imhued his own works with the utopian and

fahular energies inherent in the fantastic (adbhuJ). From this local polemic,

Rajwadc proceeds to discern traces of the fantastic in every aspect of the

world, since it is for him an integral part of "the imagining [kalpalla} of God

in religion, of the highest good in ethics, of the Ultimate Good in the Vedas,

of the ideal polity in history. of the zero in math, of the non-happening

that happens in theater, of the beautiful in painting, of right in law" (269).

But more important for our purposes than the ubiquity of the fantastic is

Rajwade's attentivencss to its transience. It was clear to him that whcreas

everyday life tended to follow regulated notions of clock time, the fleeting

quality of the fantastic made it a locus of utopian experience. The p oint was

that the idea of the fantastic couched in the Marathi tradition of the talc had

the potential to provide the key to popular modes of memory and imagin

ation. For what the popular imagination sought to undertake was an implo

sion of the idea of time itself. But since this was not always possible within a

society defined by ils commitment to ritualized and highly regulated modesof life and death, the implosion of time often gave way in the popular mind

set to an involution of experience. For Rl'ljwade, this explained the fabulous

inner vistas of the fantastic tale, with its aUegorical spaces elaborating in an

interminable fashion the temporal trajectory of the tale. He had in mind

medieval das!ans, but also the fable which had its predecessors in the Pancha-

tantra and in Aesop. In general, Rajwade wanted to make the point thai

the novel in Marathi had taken the wrong turn; it had followed the soul

deadcning path of the English, and not the romantic yearnings of the Russian

or French novel; but more alarmingly, it had chosen to ignore the popular

shuttled between the world of the fantastic and world of the everyday.

This was the way in which it conceived of the substitutability of the real and

the imagined. His emphasis on the transience of the fantastic is for this reason

fundamental. The fantastic is everywhere and nowhere, perpetually in transit

between the real and the imaginary, precisely because it contains within

itself the inverted image of utopian time. It is a fleeting window into aworld transmuted. But it is in its efficacy necessarily minimal, supplemental.

Simmel (1997 (1904): 43) once described the function of religion in social life

as that of a "limb and a whole organism at thc same timc--·a part of our

existence, and yet also thl'lt whole existence itself on an elevated spiritual

plane." Religion is a part of every aspect of human activity, but is "yet . . .raised above life." It was here, in describing religion aJ ils limit in the t(lllow

ing sentence that Simmel came closest to Rajwa<.le's notion or the fantastic:

"Therefore, in its moments of greatest intensity, it is raised above itself in

the reconciliation of all the conflicts that it entered as a single clement of

life," It is not, in the final analysis, relevant that Rajwade speaks here of Ihe

fantastic (adbhul) and Simmel of religion. (The congruence is interesting,

though, for the reason that both texts date from the early 1900s.) The facl is

that both thinkers allude to the limit of social life. This is the point at which,

at "its moments of greatest intensity" the social bond is raised above itself:

but also (we might say) thrown out side the circle of social existence. Rajwade

and Simmel both refer us here to an element of popular perception that.

with the hindsight of the last century, we can no longer celebrate as utopian

and emancipatory along the lines or Todorov's work on the fantastic tale.

For, the limit of social life that they point to is also the threshold for violence.

The fantastic is transient in much the same way that religion is. The latter

surfaces in every facet of life too. What both the fantastic and "religion"

(in Simme\'s sense) do is to bring time and experience together. Where that

happens is most often the space of violence. When it happens the world is

experienced within a kind of aceelcrated time. The "thought" produced as a

result, al some point between concept and intuition, is in reality an image.There is a cineml'ltic, or kinetic, element to this image which is evident in the

quote from Rajwade above. It is like the retentive shadow that passes between

the rapidly flipped pages of a picture-book. This image is etfected al the

intersection between history and memory, time and experience, and by the

same token between the real and the imagined. The crucial point is: it is this

image that is "taken lor real." Again, the word "mindset" does not quite

capture the notion of retention implicit here. Something like "mind imprint"

may be more appropriate. Th e mind impl·int or allegory reworks dead ideas

and stereotypes in ways that ean be dangerous or liberating; but il provides

130 Prehistoryofhistorical religion

(in the work of Jayasi and Kabir, lor instance) the surest "register" of the

changing scene of the Indo-1slamic age. We perceived the spectral illumin

ation of allegorical stereotyping in Rajwade's work in the previous chapter.

A key concern in the following pages is to demonstrate the fatal tie between

allegory and violence.

TSuspension (?f iconoclasm 131

who fascinates us today as he did the Neo-Platonists was the worldly being

who saw that the idea of the "good" precedes the human quest for truth,

without nullifying it. Kabir was like Plato a thinker after this priority bf the

good in the human world; he did not believe the good was a thing-like object

that human conduct could fall back on in moments of spiritual crisis.. nor



The "wisdom" of Kabir

Kabir's Ram is, on the face of it, precisely this mental imprint lodged equally

in the region of the world and the region of the spirit. In this sense, his idea

of Ram is a readily available model for the allegorical way of looking atthe world. To take two instances at opposite poles, it is troubling that we

can move without great effort from Kabir to Jayasi (with his allegorical

landscape), or from Kabir to Tulsidas (with his world made concrete in the

epic Ram's actions), In either case it is an imperturbable movement from the

interior to the exterior. Like Jayasi's Padmini, Kabir's Ram is a goal at once

abstract and concrete. Like Tulsidas's Ram, Kabir's Ram serves as a way of

transmuting the world from within an inverted image of exemplary action.

And yet, Kabir's Ram is a break with Jayasi's Padmini and Tulsidas's Ram,

with the world of intellectually or emotionally accessed deities. Thinking that

emotion is of greater value than intellection, Shukla was dismissive of alle

gory when it appeared in Kabir, deriding it as intellective, arid (shushk).

(He was more forgivingof

Jayasi!)' He could not see how Kabir tore awayfrom a mindset common to intellection and emotion, which is the tendency to

set up a deity that one has oneself willed into being. At that level, an intel

lectual and emotional grasp of the deity, is nonetheless "theoretical." I define

"theoretical" here in the sense of Greek word, theorein, which can refer to

the gaze that "looks" longingly at and the subject that "knows" its object.

and in knowing grasps and dominates the world. Theoreticism is inimical

to any response to the death of the other person, to an other-directed ethics.

The shadow of such an avid and grasping theoreticism falls on Kabir too.

Despite my criticisms of Dr. Dharmvir, I am in sympathy with the dalit claim

on that sage. And so I will attempt in this and the following chapter to help

avert this shadow from the weaver of Banares.

I want to argue that Kabir's way of grasping the abstract as such, laying

claim to the absolute at the start, is a paradigmatic instance of dalit hearsay

in its double movement of "turning toward and turning away." This is theessence of his "wisdom," his enabling sapience. One could go so far as to say

that if Kabir partakes of a certain divinity today for dalits it is not because he

is a man of god, a devotee, a guru, or a saint. How does one ascertain thedivinity of a sanf, a saint-poet? [t is essential that we think of him as first and

foremost a "sage" in the sense that that term was used in Greek antiquity,Plato was just such a figure for those who followed the example of Plotinus.ZThere are deeply sensuous images in Plato of a movement away from the lived

world upward into an ethereal and joyous encounter with truth . But the sage

did he think that the "Unseen that has no Blemish" (alakh niranjan) was

merely an ethical ideaL There is an enabling "intransigence" to historical

action in Kabir, a return to a good not beyond but be/ore being. This glimpse

of the good prior to the philosophical quest for truth should remind us of

the problem of the origin before origins (the khora) of the universe in the

Timaeus. Accompanying this recognition of a prehistory of the good is theshared willingness in Kabir to address the paradox that while this origin

before origins is unknown, it can nonetheless be lhouf(hl. Knowing this origill

as dark and unfathomable and yet thinkable does not entail falling into

the abyss of the irrational. Nor does this have very much to do with mystery.

That this "good prior to being" is accessible to Kabir between what can be

thought and what can be known comes to him in something like a "hunch," a

"feel" for thinking that is not thinking itself, which enables him to orient

himself with some degree of freedom from systematic Indic or Indo-Islamic

notions of being in the world-this feel before feeling or knowing is what hecalls "Ram."

When Kabir seeks after the good before truth or being, he appears to dare

to

go back before the originsof

the universe itself The questionof

origin isunderstandably fraught with dread for this untouchable convert to Islam, for

the idea that the universe works according to kartn(l (Physis) provides a

cosmogonic justification for the iniquities of caste. There is a peculiar

"indefiniteness" in the cosmogony of karma that preserves the particular

person in his or her particular social place but only as a particular. This is

what makes it possible for an "ontology" of karma to bring within its reach

all living beings, and to describe itself as the being of all beings. The par ticu

lar being can in karma be just about anyone, but it is always that "anyone" in

his particular place. This is how Krishna in the Gita argues for the particular

ity of each being in karma, To this working "anonymity" of the social, whose

effects we see in political society today where low caste communities fall back

on the security of enumerated notions of caste in order to protect t h e m s e l v e ~against violence, Kahil' counterposes (as we saw in Chapter 5) the idea of abeatific, incalculable anonymity which he calls rang, from within a metaphys

ics of "color." We know the calculable, dominant form of anonymity as the

sensuous religion of Ram and Krishna worship; the name we give it is bhakli

("participant devotion"), involving the particularizing and desiderative link

between devotee and deity. There, too, it is a particular devotee who wills a

parti cular deity into being. But for Kabir this is precisely the anonymity

through which the vocation of rang (color) wanders in the world indefinitely

until it finds the one singular. definite being that is the object ofa look coming

downfrom on high, the look ofKab ir's abstr act Ram (not the Ram of the epic).

132 Prehistoryofhistorical religion

In the timing of rang (within a markedly providential account of anonymity)

there is no longer a k a r m i c ~ i n k between nature and the social world. Here

human existence is not just a particular aspect of the universe. Instead

the human is the center where divinity comes to effect its nearness. The singu

lar human being becomes the link between anyone and the whole world.

Suspension of conoclasm 133

low-caste peasants and landless laborers. They are also chanted in the monas

tic orders of Kabirpanthis set up by the latter-day followers of Kabir.3

The realm of popular memory is by this token one likely place to begin.

Conversely, the labors of generations of scholars have helped verify the

evolution of the manuscripts of the Kabir poems over the last few centuries



But we should note that Kabir's insight lends itself very swiftly to the

sensuous worship of Krishna and Ram. For the abstract ion in Ram is as we

saw (in Chapter 5) incised by the message of rang that is both concretc

and worldly. turning fondly toward the singular visage of the human being

here before me. In its concrete working through of redemptive anonymity it

cannot but have recourse to the languagesof

love already available in thereligion of the North. Following a late nineteenth-century tendency, we mis

take this transition as a movement from abstract to concrete, as a fall of spirit

into language, of indeterminacy (nirgunatva) into determinacy (sagunatm).

But we should not lorget that this Ram is a concrete instant of worldly

experience, an instance grasped in its entirety as concrete, despite its being

abstract, whereas, it is the workaday human world that now seems abstract,

requiring language to make itself concrete. This abstract (calculable and

therefore compromised) anonymity, as it now appears, of the sensuous world

is the necessary worldly stage for the singular address of the loving look of

Ram. This stage can also be the stage of violence, which can often take the

form of the anonymous. as I will explain below.

Here we have an insight into the great paradox of the sensuous world that

Linda Hess (1983: 52) first uncovered in the Kabir poems current among the

Kabirpanthis of eastern India. a poetry of sudden mysterious turnarounds,

the tenebrous yet lucid logic of which is evident is such lines as "Mouse in the

boat, cat at the oars: frog sleeping, snake on guard; bull giving birth. cow

sterile: cal f milked, morning, noon and night: lion forever leaping, to tight the

jackal." Clearly, what happens with Kabir's abstract Ram is that the world is

turned upside down, so that its very concrete sensuality seems abstract when

seen from the point of view of a providential anonymity. For nothing can be

more concrete (Kabir seems to say) than the singular address of the abstract

Ram. This problem of a lived but abstract world has some bearing on the

relation between the two poles of allegory. For allegory is nothing if not this

transient, unpredictable passage between the abstr act and the concrete.

The historical Kabir

What can it mean then to think with Kabir in his divinity? Not to report on

this corpus of poems, theorize thc means by which we access it, 110t (0 make

him speak to us as a contemporary, but to think with him in his present, in its

very immediacy, and in a way that makes us question our understanding of

our own present, our own historicity. We know that the name "Kabir" has

been associated with a proliferating set of songs composed over the past 500

years in north India, sung to this day in gatherings (bhajall-mandalis) of

and the movements of the itinerant scribes who composed them while travel

ing east across the Indian landmass, countersigning each poem with its

trademark "says Kabir" (kahat Kabir). The details about the historical Kabir

himself are understandably sketchy and have been gleaned in contrary ways

from his poems themselves (Lorenzen 1991: 18). Kabir often describes him

self as an untouchable or dalit weaver of Banares, since the Middle Ages thenorth Indian citadel of upper caste Hindu (brahmanical) scholasticism and

caste hierarchy. He belonged to the weaver community of converts to Islam

who still call themselves "Julahas" (Pandey 1992). His dates are uncertain,

but it is probable that he lived, working at his loom and composing his verse

at some point in the fifteenth century. To supplement the record of popular

memory there is therefore the alternative of a thorough philological and

historical examination of the manuscripts themselves. One could add to his

torical inquiry the investigation into the history of forms of religious belief

The implication of the Kabir corpus in a host of religious currents fromShaivism to Vaishnavism, and from Nathyoga to Sufism makes it imperative

that we make use of all the knowledge we have of the practices involved in

these forms of worship, and since so many of these practices impinge on the

realm of the popular, we would also be required to enter into the question of

the relation between the popular and the elite. [n the final analysis, we will

have arrived at some kind of reconciliation of the conflicting claims of mem

ory and history; for we will have used the idea of memory to push the limits

of historical inquiry, and we will have used history to explore the often

obscure reaches of memory. emboldening ourselves to delve into its dark

investment in hate, prejudice and the thirst for vengeance.

Yet there is a sense in which thinking with Kabir brings apart this working

reconciliation of memory and history. For Kabir was a devotee of an abstract

principle that he called "Ram" and that had nothing whatsoever to do with

the epic hero of the same name whose heroic deeds were celebrated in Valmiki

at the close of antiquity and by Tulsidas at a poin t closer to Kabir's own time.

As an abstraction, Kabir's Ram would seem to havc very little to do withmainstream religious currents, although in his celebration of his abstract

Ram, Kabir does fall back on the available sensual means of worshipping a

deity from within the traditions surrounding the figure of Krishna. Again,

inasmuch as he is an abstraction from the social, this Ram does not offer any

insight into the cherished themes of popular memory, especially with regard

to heroic narrative. Kabir did not lead a peasant or tribal revolt, organize an

insurgency from a hideout in the hills, line up a marauding army. Nonethe

less, he represents a style of life, a posture, a way of thinking that popular

struggles have found compelling. The face of pre-modern artisanal culture

134 Prehisforv o f h i ~ t o r i c a l religion

that Kabir presents to us. for which the craf tsman's prehellSile relation 10 tools

is the tenor and the mystic poet's act of speaking the pehicle, encourages LIS to

imagine Kabir time and again as a living personality of enormous charisma

and personal courage. This relation between work and speech is also, as we

shall see. the face of caste oppression and conversion. Yet the idea of Kabir


describe the tradition of speculation (both Western and Indic) with regard to

death as the most rigorous fonn of skepticism. This is important because. by

analogy with race (especially race in apartheid). I believe we should think of

caste as the most rigorously developed aspect of Indic/Hindu thought. II is

not simply an aspect of brahmanical stupidity or folly. It is only when we



that comes to us after centuries of hagiographic accounts. sectarian g l o s s e ~ .modem commentary, and the more recent appropriation within the untouch

able movement, remains a schizoid one.4 The icon of Kabir in currency today

has two dimensions. There is on the one hand the skeptic Kahir who negates

everything, belongs to no one, affirms no identity. On the other hand, there is

Kabir, the god of the dalits, who affirms everything by negating it.And yet there is the Kahir who has experienced something like a miracle.

We gain some sense of this from one of the oldest poems in the Kabir corpus.

of which we will provide here a tentative and quite cursory translation:

The anxiety of life and death at an end

One's being suffused without effort with color

Light manifest, dark dispelled

I-laving found the Ram-jewell move on. [Rest (Refrain)]

In bliss. knowing now to keep off sorrow

To flood one's being with the light of this jewel.

All that transpires is known to you

He who knows this is one with truth.

The dirt inside me washed away

My being keens into the life of the world.

MaranjiJ'an ki sanka nasi

Apun rang; sahaj pargasi

Parga!i joti mitia andhiara

Ram ratanu pain karat vicara. [Rahau]

1aha anandu dukhu duri paiana

Man mafUlku fiv tantu lukana.

10 kichhu hoa su (era bhafUl

10 iu bhuja; su sa d samana.

KalUltu kabiru kilvikh Mae khina

Manu bhaiajagjivanu lina."

Let us take what seems to me to be the key line here. Maran jivan ki sanka

nasi. Here the word "sanka" is crucial. I will translate it variously as anxiety.

doubt, and skepticism. Kabir says: the sanka of dying-living (is now) undone.

Sanka is not simply the fear of life as it hurtles toward death (maran jil'an).

Much more than doubt, anxiety, the experience of nothingness. it is the

sketch in which these moods hang together. the total history of a life in

outline. Death will no doubt complete the outline itself, but at that point the

outline itself would fade away- --for surely I cannot live my dcat h. I will

treat the Indic tradition as fundamentally philosophical in its emphases. onlywhen we see this entire tradition as "complicit" with caste despite its claim to

universality; it is only then that we place ourselves in a position to recognize

the radical ness of Kabir's philosophical intervention as a dalit. For Kahir

broke away not jus t from the explicit caste discrimination practiced by upper

caste society. He broke away from the tradition's hidden complicity withcaste; hc tore through the veil of its humanism. its tolerance for low-castes, its

embrace of the downtrodden. lie engaged not just with the brute face of

upper caste society (in its perpetration of violence) but with its infinite "cun

ning" (in the sense of Phule's "dhurt"). He took it on in its most benign and

supposedly magnanimous aspect. at the point of its greatest self-criticism, at

the summit of its skepticism with regard to itself. at the point where this

skepticism acceded to divine love. Kabir met up with the tradition at its

height: in short. he wrestled with its idea of death, with its allocation of myth

and law. We gained some hint of this in our discussion Lorenzen's Kapalika

in Chapter 2 and of Dwivedi's idea of Love in Chapters 4 and 5. What is

radical in Kabir therefore is the event involving the nas (negation) of the

grandiose sanka (skepticism) at the heart of the lodic tradition. At its limit

this is a skepticism with regard to the question of death. For this reason, this

skepticism opens itself to divine love, the sublime trauma, chot. of which

Dwivedi spoke so eloquently. But fUlS (negation) itself entails death. annihila

tion. ruin. So that Kabir's "Maran jivan ki sanka nasi" could well imply

something like the death of death, an annihilative procedure addressed to

an ineluctable annihilation. It could mean the negation of a negation. the

negativity of yogic self-modulation (askesis) applied to the absolute negativ

ity of the end. a kind of practiced ceasing-to-be, or "de-cease." We have seen

the virtual paradigm for this in the Kapalika's death-habit in Chapter 2.

This is in every respect a "living death" as Charlotte Vaudeville described it

(Vaudeville 1964), but to what end1' By no means is this a sacrifice that would

redeem the world. Nor is it merely a merger of body and mind as though they

were two indifferent entities. And neither can it be understood as a form of

ecstatic communion with some transcenJent object characteriLed ali too

loosely as "the One." By the same token this suspension of an imminent

death in Kabir, his very effectual turning back (palalfUl. which is maghare in

Dnyaneswara) from sanka (skepticism) does not rest on a conscious decision

in favor of an authentic, as opposed to an inauthentic. death. Neither anassimilation into the One nor a heroic, existential leap into some form of

genuine death, neither communion nor suicide, his nas (negation) would have

to be understood in terms of the historical self-understanding it implies.

What is that historic backdrop, and to what extent does Kabir partake of it?

136 Prehistory ofhistorical religion

What are its loci of I:'lscination? How does Kabir endorse this percept

ual world and at the same titne turn away from it? These questions require

a detour through the world awash with the splendor of spiritual and fleshly

idols.

~ \ ' u s p e n s i o n of conoclasm 137

worldly goal of Prince Ratansen and the transcendent soul with which his

secular being seeks to reconcile itself.

It will not suffice for us to understand allegory as simply the correspond

ence between a hidden semantic level and the tangible (phenomenal) aspect

of a symbolic landseape. Allegory is not merely a kind of "key," for instance,



Living death and I n d o ~ I s l a m i c allegory

I-Iere then is one possible description of Indo-Islamic allegory. I present

it here in precisely the mechanical, retentive form that it appeared in such

poets as Kabil'. Let us attend here to the powerful transformation of time

into experience that this allegorical mindset made possible. For we canimagine that the event of Kabir' s "living death" took place at the limits of the

Indo-Islamic world, a world with all its paths so immured in the soil. its lines

of struggle and flight, care and decision so thoroughly enmeshed that the

grand vocation of a secular, worldly "rJealing with God" would seem to have

presided amid equal noise and circumstance over circle upon circle of wan

dering fisherfolk. shepherds, traders, robbers, Sufi divines, yogis, warriors on

hire, religious envoys and saints on a mission to spread their particular Word.

God was "everywhere" (and this is why "bhakti" straddles the period from

the late medieval to the early modern) but in a very specific sense, Suffering in

the world was often acceded to as God-given, within a kind of theodicy.

Conversely there were instances, as in Tukaram. of a struggle and debate with

God. The emergence of this very anthropomorphic intlection of devotee and

devotional object in the languages and techniques of transcendence is per

haps the reason why the saint-poets of the period proved fascinating for the

progressivist romanticism closer to our time. Yet this worldliness in suffering,

and alon g with it the individuation of the devotee as a desiring subjcct was of

earlier origin. In Tamil country since the seventh century there was already

the retroactive aesthetic delineation of thc folk and its landscapes wherein

Ceyon, the prince of the mountain mists, became Mayon of the ambient

pasturcland, giving the rise to the aesthetic and libidinal pleasures or separ

ation (I'iraha) (see Hardy 2001 [1983]). Krishna and Ram werc to come. or

had pcrhaps already arrived. Here the lover's art of yearning for the absent

god and the Sufi preceptors who appear in the dream visions of the rJis

traught Afghan soldier Dattu Sarwani. responding as they do to the dispersal

of the Indo-Muslim world in thc wake of the Mughal conquest, were all of a

piece (Digby 1965).

Where the imagined world and the lived world of the devotee/lover inhabit

the self-same time and place. where "aesthetic" and transcendental issues

are intermeshed. therc is bound to emerge a kind of kinship between meta

physical schemes and allegory. Systematic thinking is no longer merely con

ceptual but has recourse to the narrative involution specific to allegory;

by this logic the system of ascending steps to truth and divinity can be

narrativized along the lines of a romancc, one wherein the Padmini of

Malik Muhammad Jayasi's Avadhi epic, the Padmal'at (1540), is at once the

that would inform us of Ratansen's standing in for the questing soul,

Padmini as the knowledge of God, etc. The question is not merely the indif

ferent bringing together of hidden and apparent meanings, spiritual frame

and narrative involution. bu t refers us to a central epistemological issue: what

does it mean lor a form of thought to retain within itself a certain undecid

ability between symbol and schema? This distinction was important for

Kant, who suggests in the scetion "On Beauty as the Symbol of Morality" in

the Critique o.f'Judgemel1t (1987 [1790]: 228 9), that a schema involves an

anomalous lorm of experience, one where the "concept that the understand

ing has formed," as well as the "intuition" corresponding to it is "given a

priori." For an idea to emerge midway between the {/ priori frames of the

mind (the understanding) and physical experience is rationaL But for both

concept and intuition to emerge from the mind, in total denial of physical

experience, is aberrant. Whereas the order of thc symbol implies "a concept

which only reason can think. and to which no sensible intuition can be

adequate," but to which we supply an "exhibition" (hypOlyposis) or expres

sion in words or signs by virtue 0[' analogy. Kant supplies us with the

following example of the latter: "a monarchy ruled according to its own

constitutional laws would be presented as an animate body, but a monarchyruled by an individual absolute will would be prcsented as a mere machine

(such as a hand mill)." What judgement performs here is the function of

"applying the concept to an object of a sensible intuition" and then applying

the "mere rule by which it reflects on that intuition to an entirely dilTerent

object, of which the former object is only the symbol." The problem with

schemas, Kant explained in a footnote in Religion within the Limits of

Reason Alone (1960 [I 793J: 58-9), is that they mistake a "concept intelligible

to ourselves" for a quality or predicate of the physical object itself. For

Kant this is the abyss which, if overleapt (in metabasis), gives rise to the

anthropomorphization of God.

Now in some sense such an anthropomorphic impetus is indeed a feature

of thc Indo-Islamic age in its insistence on the objective being-presentb e f o r e ~ o n c s e l f of that which one has oneself willed into being. ro r this

reason I n d o ~ P e r s i a n allegory is not simply a privileging of a deep semantic

key as opposed to the sensual emplotmcnt of actions that we see before us in

a talc. Both levels have equal value: both are oddly objective emanations

of the mind. To be able to keep them in hand (both concept and intuited

object) as objectifications is a unique invention of this age, one to which

Kabir himself was greatly indebted. and one that arguably gives rise to the

very possibility of systems (whether Sufi or bhakti. whether late Advaila

Vedanta or Bhedabheda Vedanta) in this period, These systems perform the

138 Prehistory of his o rim I religion

philosophical labor of e ~ a l l o c a t i n g these objects, confoun ded in allegory, to

the mind or the world. ..

It is striking that the "aesthetic" treatises do not prescribe this conflation

of concept and (physically) intuited object. They insist on sustaining a t e m ~poral hiatus between the two, a tension that is all the more pleasurable in its


devotion was anything but "static." Hacker's need to see "the inherence of

acts and intentions in the nature of the person" in Advaita Vedanta made it

difficult for him to trace the emergence of the idea of personhoodc' in the

world that surrounded the proponents of that school in the first millennium

CE., and that left a permanent mark on the allegorical ambitions of the I n d o ~



prolongation. This is the case with the i n t h ~ c e n t u r y aesthetic treatise D h v a n ~yaloka (1990). At stake here is a temporal hiatus between literal and figurative

meaning, for in a sense dhvani "is" this hiatus. When one speaks of the

aesthetic here, the reference is to the poetic achievement of pleasure by (the

poet's) ensuring that the conditions giving rise to rasa do not intrude on

the r a s a ~ e f f e e t as such. But as soon as rasa enters the domain of bhakti it is no

longer a question of a hiatus. Instead what is required is the simultaneity of

artifice and effect, devotee and deity to produce b h a k t i ~ r a s a . Aesthetic time in

its hiatus must give way to devotional experience in its transience. But then

again, one might argue that this simultaneity (as opposed to aesthetic t e m p o ~ralization) is not peculiar to Makti. It is in fact a mark of a widespread

allegorical way of looking at the world. I would argue that it is common to

the pull toward deities in bhakti as well as the elaborate schemes of Sull

allegory (such as in Jayasi). Allegory as the desire for the elaboration of time

between the inner and the outer worlds was lessan individual's whim than it

was a habit (hexis; habitus) peculiar to the mindset of the age. It was akin to

what Erwin Panofsky described as the practical mental frame of the monks

who built the great Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages. I n d o ~ l s l a m i callegory was far from static. This perceptual habit involved the ability torecognize a continuum between interiority and exteriority.

It is significant that there is a register of this tendency in the realm of

philosophy. Here I have in mind the work of Paul Hacker on the schools of

Vedanta in the 1950& Drawing from the thought of Max Scheler, Hacker

attempted to locate an ethical understanding of worldly existence in Sankara,

which is to say some form of distinction between worldly life and the a v o c a ~tion of ethical behavior. He could not find any evidence of this in Sankara

himself and therefore attempted a history of the Vedantic tradition as a

whole to look for openings in the unjustly neglected works of those who came

before and after Sankara. Hacker was aware of Sankara's debt to the school

of yoga, to Vaishnavism and to various Buddhist schools. Yet, when it came

to providing an aecount of Sankara's procedure he could not but repeat whathad been said earlier by Hegel and Rosenzweig with regard to lndic thinking.

Which is, that the absolute division between reality and essence, speakin g in

general terms. in Sankara generates a "static ontology" incapable of heedingthe call of conscience. It is enough for us to note the astonishing c o n ~temporaneity of Sankara, who lived roughly between C.E. 650--750, on the

one hand, and the devotee newly committed to devotion ("devotionalized,"

so to speak) between the seventh and the fourteenth centuries on the other

hand, for us to dispel any doubts on this score; perhaps "monism" is itself a

misnomer. In fact the idea of monism that seeped into the traditions of

Islamic age that followed. That Advaita Vedanta "immersed itself into the

self, saw no "second" reality apart from it. and experienced such awareness as

the ultimate truth [das Wahre des WahrenJ" is itself a sign that a mode of

reaching into oneself and finding an inner absolute had by then been firmly

established (Hacker 1995: 161--4). It was left to the I n d o ~ l s l a m i c millennium

to evolve a relation between the objectivity of this inner absolute and the

world out there. In the final instance, Hacker was unable to see how the idea

of the One (in the popular redaction of Vedanta) and the idea or the deity in

popular devotionalism could c o ~ e x i S I . This is because he could not account

for the possibility that "emotion" (the addictive desire lor the deity) and

"theory" (the supposedly arid monism of popular Vedanta) were in practice

aspects of the same mindset. The devotee's gaze in the age of Makti was

at once loving and grasping, emotional and theoretical, s e l f ~ s u r r e n d e r i n g and

s e l f ~ a g g r a n d i z i n g .The illusion of this objectivity was necessarily diffuse, so that it was often

not possible to decide between the palpable presence of the inner world and

the sheer unreality of the outer. For we know from Hacker's own landmark

essay, Vivarta (Hacker 1953), that the probl em of llusion must be understood

from within the history of the doctrine of errancy (Jrrtumslehre). Which is tosay, that there is a certain continuum between the elaborations of the idea of

truth from the Upanisads to late Advaita Vedanta. since both take seriously

the fact that some form of erroneous perception is an essential aspect of

everyday life. Errancy, or the history of ontological error, ensures that the

distinction between the seeming and seen cannot be rigorously upheld. C e r ~tainly, in the realm of the popular such a distinction represented less a final

limit than a thin line that could be crossed with impunity. But outside and

above the popular too, the situation was not very different. We learn from

Hacker that in the range of thinkers from Bhartrhari to Prakashananda there

was a marked tendency to acknowledge, however grudgingly, the reality of

the phenomenal---even if these very authors affirmed at the same time the

indisputability of a principle of ruth that could serve as a principleor groundof reason. This was the fertile region of ambiguity where Kabir would g e n e r ~ate his own radical grasp of the abstract, as we will see. For he too relied upon

one peculiar effect of this pervasive recognition of necessary error. This was

the productive undecidability between the inner quest of the Vedantin and the

affective pull of the devotee (bhakta) toward his or her deity.

But Hacker's work does more. The fact is that he also showed us how to

arrive at the hcart of the popular mindsct of deification, with its emotional

and theoretical elements (both in reality part of the same mindset) very much

in place. It was Icft to Friedheim Hardy, the author of an important work

138 Prehistory oIhisiori('af religion

philosophical labor of e ~ a l l o c a t i n g these o b j e c t ~ confounded in allegory, to

the mind or the world. •It is striking that the "aesthetic" treatises do not prescribe this conflation

of concept and (physically) intuited object. They insist on sustaining a tem

poral hiatus between the two, a tension that is all the more pleasurable in its

prolongation. This is the case with the ninth-century aesthetic treatise Dhvan


devotion was anything but ·'static." Hacker's need to sec "the inherence of

acts and intentions in the nature of the person" in Advaita Vedanta made it

difticult for him to trace the emergence of the idea of personhood, in the

world that surrounded the proponents of that school in the first millennium

C.E., and that left a permanent mark on the allegorical ambitions of the lndo

Islamic age that followed. That Advaita Vedanta "immersed itself into the



yaloka (1990). At stake here is a temporal hiatus between literal and figurative

meaning, for in a sense dhvani "is" this hiatus. When one speaks of the

aesthetic here, the reference is to the poetic achievement of pleasure by (the

poet's) ensuring that the conditions giving rise to rasa do not intrude on

the rasa-effect as such. But as soon as rasa enters the domain of bhakti it is no

longer a question of a hiatus. Instead what is required is the simultaneity of

artifice and ellect. devotee and deity to produce bhakti-rasa. Aesthetic time in

its hiatus must give way to devotional experience in its transience. But then

again, one might argue that this simultaneity (as opposed to aesthetic tempo

ralization) is not peculiar to bhakti. It is in fact a mark of a widespread

allegorical way of looking at the world. I would argue that it is common to

the pull toward deities in bhakti as well as the elaborate schemes of Sufi

allegory (such as in Jayasi). Allegory as the desire for the elaboration of time

between the inner and the outer worlds was less an individual's whim than it

was a habit (hexis; habitus) peculiar to the mindset of the age. It was akin to

what Erwin Panofsky described as the practical mental frame of thc monks

who built the great Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages. Indo-Islamic

allegory was far from static. This perceptual habit involved the ability torecognize a continuum between interiority and exteriority.

It is significant that there is a register of this tendency in the realm of

philosophy. Here I have in mind the work of Paul Hacker on the schools of

Vedanta in the 1950& Drawing from the thought of Max Scheler, Hacker

attempted to locate an ethical understanding of worldly existence in Sankara,

which is to say some form of distinction between worldly life and the avoca

tion of ethical behavior. He could not find any evidence of this in Sankara

himself and therefore attempted a history of the Vedantic tradition as a

whole to look for openings in the unjustly neglected works of those who came

before and after Sankara. Hacker was aware of Sankara's debt to the school

of yoga, to Vaishnavism and to various Buddhist schools. Yet, when it came

to providing an account ofS anka ra's procedure he could not but repeat whathad been said earlier by Hegel and Rosenzweig with regard to Indie thinking.

Which is, that the absolute division between reality and essence, speaking in

general terms, in Sankara generates a "static ontology" incapable of heeding

the call of conscience. It is enough for us to note the astonishing con

temporaneity of Sankara, who lived roughly between C.E. 650-750, on the

one hand, and the devotee newly committed to devotion ("devotionalized,"

so to speak) between the seventh and the fourteenth centuries on the other

hand, for us to dispel any doubts on this score; perhaps "monism" is itself a

misnomer. In fact the idea of monism that sceped into the traditions of

self, saw no "second" reality apart from it, and experienced such awareness as

the ultimate truth [das Wahre des Wahren)" is itself a sign that a mode of

reaching int.o oneself and finding an inner absolute had by then been firmly

established (Hacker 1995: 161-4). It was left to the Indo-Islamic millennium

to evolve a relation between the objectivity of this inner absolute and the

world Out there. In the final instance, Hacker was unable to see how the idea

of the One (in the popular redaction of Vedanta) and the idea of the deity in

popular devotionalism could co-exist. This is because he could not accountfor the possibility that "emotion" (the addictive desire for the deity) and

"theory" (the supposedly arid monism of popular Vedanta) were in practice

aspects of the same mindset. The devotee's gaze in the age of bhakti was

at once loving and grasping, emotional and theoretical, self-surrendering and

self-aggrandizing.

The i1iusion of this objectivity was necessarily diffuse, so that it was often

not possible to decide between the palpable presence of the inner world and

the sheer unreality of the outer. For we know from Hacker's own landmark

essay, V(varta (Hacker 1953), that the problem of llusion must be understood

from within the history of the doctrine of errancy (lrrtumslehre). Which is tosay, that there is a certain continuum between the elaborations of the idea of

truth from the Upanisads to late Advaita Vedanta, since both take seriously

the fact that some form of erroneous perception is an essential aspect of

everyday life. Errancy, or the history of ontological error, ensures that the

distinction between the seeming and seen cannot be rigorously upheld. Cer

tainly, in the realm of the popular such a distinction represented less a final

limit than a thin line that could be crossed with impunity. But outside and

above the popular too, the situation was not very different. We learn from

Hacker that in the range of thinkers from Bhartrhari to Prakashananda there

was a marked tendency to acknowledge, however grudgingly, the reality of

the phenomenal--even if these very authors affirmed at the same time the

indisputability of a principle of truth that could serve as a principle or groundof reaSOn. This was the fertile region of ambiguity where Kabir would gener

ate his own radical grasp of the abstract, as we will see. he too relied upon

one peculiar effect of this pervasive recognition of necessary error. This was

the productive undecidability between the inner quest of the Vedantin and the

affective pull of the devotee (bhakta) toward his or her deity.

But Hacker's work does more. The fact is that he also showed us how to

arrive at the heart of the popular mindset of deification, with its emotional

and theoretical elements (both in reality par t of the same mindset) very much

in place. It was \cft to Friedheim Hardy, the author of an important work


on early Tamil devotional poetry (2001 [1983), to discern this with great

philosophical acuity. HardY"Pointed out that it was really in his work on the

Prahlada myth of the Bhagwat Purana that Hacker broke out of this

interpretive frame,


case in point. The tension between the intellective and the emotional aspects

of bhakti give rise in the myth to the unprecedented intervention of Vishnu as

m a n ~ l i o n (narsimha). His emergence from out of a pillar in circumvention of

the antinomies of time and space that had so far protected Hiranyakashyapu.

is an event that takes place at the limits of the phenomenaL It is an altogether



The abyssal reaches of the Prahlada myth

In the myth. Vishnu in his m a n ~ l i o n avatar breaks through certain antinomies

of space and time to secure his child-devotee Prahlada against the latter's

unbelieving d e m o n ~ p a r e n t Hiranyakashyapu. The extraordinary feature of

the myth is Prahlada's commitment to an abstract notion of Vishnu---hispronouncements on the ideality of Vishnu are steeped in the language of

Vedanta----despite the fact that the myth'S denouement lies in the Grand

Guignol physicality of Vishnu's disemhoweling (as a m a n ~ l i o n ) of I - l i r a n y a ~kashyapu. Hacker saw how the myth showcd a pronounced clement of

Vcdantic rhetoric. Yet it seemed clear to him that the Vedantic clcment (of

which Prahlada's utterances <,ue the best instance) was not rigorous enough.

Conversely. a pronounced Vedantism would have seriously undercut the

myth's investment in the emotional connection with the dcily. Vishnu. For

this reason. "thc myth's "philosophical teaching agrees with the monistic

Vedanta to a great extent. . . . but although it shows an unmistakable leaning

fOl'lYlrds the philosophy of the Advaila school. yet it docs not appcar to be

simply idenlicalwith any branch of this school." It is clear, he went on to say.

that the pull toward the deity in bhakti does

not allow for a heightening of monism and illusionism up to those

extremes which were customary in the school of Sankara: [for] in the

most radical monism the interest in the v i s ~ a ~ v i s of the soul to God. and

the interest in the emotion of devotion [Emotion der Hingabe1 which is

stressed by the Bhagwat [Puranaj, is lost.

(Hacker 1959: 536; trans. Hardy's)

Hacker at first brings myth and metaphysics within a prox.imal distance of

each other. The figure of Prahlada necessitates this. But there is of course a

limit to this prox.imity, since the searing flame of Prahlada's devotion would

repel the intellective ambition of monism.Yes there is an clement of undecidability in Hacker which has the potential

to lead us to a revaluation of the very category of myth. I want to suggest that

it is possible to read the Prahlada myth as the paradigmatic instance of an

iconological impasse. The fact is that this myth is unable to decide between the

transcendent world of many gods. and the theocent.ric world of the onehumanized deity. We often assume too readily that the world of deities is

merely a token of the anthropomorphic impulse in belief. But the fact

remains that this anthropomorphism (the need to humanize a deity, stamp itwith the imprint of man) encounters its own limits in myth. "Prahlada" is a

anomalous occurrence. If we read the myth from the point of view of

Vaishnava bhakii we would see in it a wondrous sign of Vishnu's divinity.

But from the point of view of Prahlada there is in the coming of Vishnu a

fundamental cacsura bctween Vedantie concept and Vaishnava emotiveness.

And therelnrc to inhabit the center of this myth as did Prahlada is deeply

disturbing, fraught with the danger of falling into a void. The death ofHiranyakashyapu br ings to an end this impasse. I do not mean to imply that

Prahlada himself experienced this dark night of the soul. For. Prahlada does

not doubt that Vishnu is lodged in his heart; he is absolutely certain that

Vishnu will protct:t him in every instance where he is tested by I - l i r a n y a ~kashyapu. who mocks Vishnu's might The point is that it is we. the subjects

committed to organizing a regime of deities around us, avid for the one deity

we can bow hefore. it is we who inhabit the iconological impasse hetwecn

concept and (sensuous) intuition. spirit and flesh. We need the death of the

demon parent to be able to cross the gaping hole underneath us and espouse

devotion. The theological impulse in Vaishnavism would of course want

to see in the myth the destiny of Vishnu (a triumphal ' · m o n o ~ t h e i s m . " so

to speak). I-liranyakashyapu dares to challenge this centrality of Vishnu.

His hubris makes him look as though he belongs to the older world of

deities (to a retreating " p o l y ~ t h e i s m . " so to speak). To put this differcntly,

Hiryanyakashyapu's historical being is quickly rewritten as the prehistory of

Vaishnavism. (I t is for reason that dalits read this myth as the tragedy

of I firanyakashyapu, who is then comparable to Phule's Baliraja. and toRavana.)

The myth would have us think that the movement from Hiranyakashyapu

to Vishnu via Prahlada is inexorable. M o d e r n ~ d a y Hindu nationalists too

read the Ram myth as complete. sealed for good as the history of onc active.

intervening God. And to some extent, given especially the Christological

basis of their very idea of the deity, they are correct. (Hence my deliberate use

of the terms. "monotheism" and "polytheism" which are marked hy a C h r i s ~tian apologetics. No matter how many alternative Ramayanas we present ascounterpoint, the Hindu -nationalists' historical grasp of a monadic Ram

is uncircumventiblc. There is only one Ramayana for them, only one Ram.)But they do not take into account the possibility that the myth can itself be

ambivalent. They want to stamp the myth with the anthropomorphic notion

of one single w o r l d ~ a l t e r i n g deity.

Reading Hacker against the grain of his own concerns, we come to a d i f t e r ~ent conclusion. This is, that the anthropomorphization of Vishnu is in fact

impossible. since he represents within the myth itself the fullest narratival.

which is to say allegoncal, elaboration of Vedanta. In this sense the Hindu

142 Prehistory of historical religion

nationalists inhabit the abyss of idolatry as did Prahlada. Whereas the

older tradition (rendered o(per by virtue of the power of the new) is, or was,

iconoclastic. Iconoclastic, not in the sense o f i m a g e ~ b r e a k i n g , but in the sense

of a suspicion of the human imprint on deities. How long can Hindu n a t i o n ~alists sustain in their idolization of Ram the suspension of this primordial

iconoclasm? The emphasis on the emotiona l tie to the deityin bhakti is based

TI

S u . ~ p e f / s i u n oficonoc/a,l-m 143

basis of her desire to set up a deity. Ihave used the phrasc "the suspension of

iconoclasm" to characterize the desire for the deily. The point is tbat the

devotee's own will is only one part of the drive ]()f deities' The other is the

desire to ensure t hat the deity present itsclf as thoug h its own emergence

was unconditional, as though the devotee had not conditioned it into being.

The suspension of iconoclasm, which resolves the iconological impasseat the



on this suspension. It is only when Iliranyakashyapu dies that it comes into

effect for us. Since the time of Shukla, we have come think less of rasa than of

b h a k t i ~ r a s a . Today, we have reached the limit (much blood has been spilled in

the process) of the suspension oficonoclasill.

Now regardless of whether bhakti here is to be associated with a personal

god or toward the atman that is unified with God (as was argued by critics of

Hacker such as Adalbert Gail), the crucial point is that Friedheim I-Iardy is

intrigued by the possibility of uxtapos ing the two. He is skeptical tha t such a

connection can be assumed, and yet arrives at this important conclusion, full

of mplications for what 1 have described above as the iconological impasseof

bhakti.

We . . . have identified a fundamental motive behind a struggle that

runs right through medieval Hinduism and expresses itself in the many

attempts to formulate "modified" lorms of advaita Vedanta. This motive

would be that, since a particular religious approach (emotionalism) has

revealed "separation" as the basic relationship between man and the

absolute, the totality of being could not simply be subsumcd in oneultimate principle, and that an element of "separation" (philosophic.11ly

"differentiation") had to be assumed as essential to the nature of the

absolute itsell: In this case, the fact that all these forms of "modified" or

"dialectical" advaita postulate a personal absolute who is conceived orin

mythicallorms and assumed to be known solely from revealcJ scripturcs,

could only be regarded as a secondary motive, and the conventional

description between strict and "modified" forms of advaita as a contrast

between "reason/verifiable experience" and "belief/dogma/myth" would

lose much of its usefulness' The primary contrast would be betweendifferent types of human experience[s] .. , ofreality.

(Hardy 2001 [1983]: 546-7; final emphasis is mine)

Hardy gives us here an important hint with regard to the coming together

of Vedantic rationality and a normed emotiveness in one structure of b j e c t ~ification. I want to underscore here this coming togcther of thought and

feeling, theory and affect in one drive, which is the desire f()r a deity that

one has oneself set up. For what we can learn from these gaps in Hacker's

thinking, and from Hardy's own insight, is the extraordinary lorce by which

the new devotee, working here very much like thc Vedantin, sought to ascer

tain the objectivity not of the world as such, but the world that the devotee

herselfhad willed into being in the inner region of the heart, wherein lay thc

heart of Indian myth, refers us to this peculiar "conditioned u n c o n d i t i o n a l ~ity" of the deity.

The deity-effect and the ctcrnality of devotion

We can sec that the enormous popular reach of devotional ism was not merelyon account of its "emotional" response to Ilindu dogma. Far from being the

unstaunched flow of emotion, it was in fact the d i ~ ' c i p l i n i n g of emotion lor the

sake of a grasping, theoretical gaze. (The parallels with the disciplinary work

of psychoanalysis are instructive.) For the passionate, empowered devotee the

idea of an ioner absolute could not but have proved to be greatly enabling.

This devotee strove against the greatest odds to represent her deity (and by

the same token the Vedantin, his or her notion of truth) to herself, and

therefore established at once the thesis that she exists and that herGod (or the

Vedantin's being of beings) does too. In other words, she was the subject of

this representation who in turn brought into clfect the objecthood of the

deity (in the case of the Vedantin, the objt.'Ct which is the self, atman). (More

precisely, the monadic "subject" of this representation of the deity is the"devotee" as the coming together of <l will and the clrect of that will.) This is

never simply a mental act, an intcllectual game. What has happened hereis of

epochal significance since the ellccting of this subject, its subject effect,

implies that where the devotee was a living, striving being prior to discourse,

theory or system, she is now empowered by virtue of her desire to will the

deity, to understand herself as an acting, effecting subject--- in bringing

together the ory and will, she has generated the existent realityof her world.

This is where we can sec how the allegorical mindset characteristic of the

popular found the pull of devotional ism irresistible. All experience had now

been loaded with the expansiveness of a whole range of affective v o c a b u l a r ~ies. Moreover, the allegorical mindsel could now go so far as to seek a glimpse

into the cternalityof

devotional experience. Looking around theoreticallyat

the world she had brought into being, the devotec could, like Mirabai, now

have the joyous sensation of thinking of it as eternal, and of thinking of

herself as immortal (see Spivak 2001). This glimpse into eternity is itself

derived from the fact the devotee's sense of her own being in the world now

seems secure and certain. The "I" of the devotee grounds the "I" of the deity.

To use the Sanskrit root for the s e l l i n g ~ u p or thesis of the subject we

encounter in the (iila, it is the slha of the devotee (her being sthitapradnya,

rectitudinal) that lays the ground for the stha of the deity {the latter's

sthapana, installation}.

144 Prehistory oIhistorical religion

Once the allegorical mindset has established the existence of he objectified

world in this way, it proceeiils to relish this new certainty, this new assurance.

This falling back on the certitude of the objects devotees have brought into

being explains the cult of "single-minded" devotion. It could be the occa

sional insight people have, around which they proceed to cultivate a lifelong

comportment. This insight is that, if one theoretically gazes long enough at

T

I Suspension of conoclasm 145

expansion of the limits to which the reality of the real can be effected (i.c.

electoral contests). In other words, this is a switch from the portrayal of the

system that wills itself into reality to the realm of the effecting of the real by

proxy (see Spivak 1987: 276-7). The movement from deification to political

society is less qualitative than quantitive. What has transpired is a greatly

enhanced investment in the desire to deify (I.e. the suspension of iconoclasm).



an object that one has oneself effected as part of a larger historical will to

bring objects into existence, the sheer persistence of one's gaze may well

"accommodate" itself to the eternity of the changing world. Such an idea of

certainty is similar to the regularity of the seasons that one can take for

granted, and on which the sublime naYvete of such literary genres as the riLU-

chakra and the barahmasa is based. And this is perhaps one reason why

watching the child Krishna at play has for centuries generated from out of

Vrindavan afee! for life that is at once sensuous and planetary. discernible in

the many seasons of the blue-limbed god in miniature painting. With this

insight into eternity achieved and with such a realized reality set in place such

devotees believe they have already run through the entirety of their lives and

so prepare to die well in advance of death, facing this image of the eternal.

Moving and poignant as their courage is, they do not SlOP to think that their

insight has an experiential basis which is historically far in excess of their own

"experience." And it would he a rude shock for them to know that their

address to their humanized divinity, the deity, is nothing if not theoretical. It

is possible to argue that Kabir's Ram too is marked by the eternality that one

ascribes to a willed, objectified deity.

Two meanings of representation

We have so far been exploring one of the two possible axes of allegory in the

long period that I have denoted "the Indo-Islamic millennium." This axis

refers us to the drive to set up deities. In the next chapter, we will examine the

other axis of allegory, which is its involuted tum into itself. We will encounter

there the Kabir who has turned away from the world of deities. But here in

conclusion I want to present a sketch of the Indo-Islamic modern. I wish to

suggest that there is a continuum between the objectification of the world one

associates with deities. and the realm of politics that we have described

(after Partha Chatterjee) as "political society." As I have argued in Chapter I.this is the realm of politics "at the cusp," containing the line of force where

formerly subaltern communities access the political. This new scene is the

domain of a ceaselessly transformative, expansive general will, which is to say

"democracy." It is there that the drive for deities continues to effect itself. no

longer in the field of the devotee's representation of the deity but in the realm

where right is transferred by proxy to elected representatives. Two senses of

"representation" come into play here. This could be understood as a transi

tion from representation as the portrayal of the certainty of one's ability

fo effect the rea! (i.e. allegory) on the one hand, to representation as the

What the modern itself implies here is the unprecedented manipulation of the

technology of desiring deification, with the latter now turned toward political

society.Effectively, this implies a movement from speaking of to speaking for the

real. At the levelof

the world as representation whose systematic basis wehave just detected in the premodern, political society is the space of com

mand and power. This is where both elite and subaltern remain invested in

expanding the limits of a reality to whose effectuation they dedicate a range

of systematic initiatives, working within a freedom whose limits they seek to

trespass. It is the realm where the state is effected, willed, placed before us as

an unimpeachable reality. In the domain of practical reason, we might say, in

that aspect of life where we regulate the conduct of our lives, we see nothing

but a seamless movement from the setting up of deities to the setting up of

the state. It seems to me that this insight into the technology of deification

provides us with a clearer picture of what is at stake in the realm of desire

than the notion of the "secularization of religion." The point is not that

religion has been debased in the modern era by being assimilated to politics;

my key emphasis here is that politics (political society) is merely the prolonga-

tion of the premodern regime of deification. Political society is the apotheosis

or what I have been calling the "suspension of iconoclasm."

Yet our understanding of the relation between allegory and the religion

of deities would be inadequate if we neglected to ask after the factor that

motivates not just their coming together but also their falling apart. Nor are

we any closer to gaining a sense of precisely where Kabir steps away from

Indo-Islamic allegory or precisely where a dalit mode of tbinking veers away

from the installation of the representational frame in South Asia. For, alle

gories are not just foci of energetic striving. They are characteristically

self-referential, involuted. given to an inwardness that we are hard put to

associate with historical reference; from the viewpoint of the era of national

ism they seem curiously "spiritual," if not "mysticaL" The elaborate yogicphysiognomy of the soul of which Gopinath Kaviraj was p e r h a p ~ the last

great explicator and practitioner, is a readily available instance. How can

allegories strive after realizing the world as a reality and yet seem to withdraw

altogether into themselves, as though there were a vertiginous slide into some

deep inner abyss? This, even as the momentum of so much overreaching

in these systems is, at least in terms of the final desired outcome. upwardly

as well as outwardly inclined. I would argue that this double movement is

typical of allegory, and refers us in the final analysis to its redemptive

function.

146 Prehis(orJi ofhistorical rcfigio/1

In describing the volitional origins of the pull IowaI'd the deity, wc spoke of

the dcvotee's willing into bt!ing the deity that is the particular object of her

gaze. Given the work that such a gaLe performs in installing the represen

tational framework within which something like "religion" comes into being,

we wcre perhaps justified in using a vocabulary of agential motivation

(though we did not speak of "motives" or "consciousness"). Devotees will

8 Miracle and violence

The allegorical turn in Kabir,Dnyaneswara, Tukaram



deities into being not because they are always conscious s u ~ i e c t s who alter

history according to their own desires. It is because in this particular area of

social action that involves the raising lip of indigenous deities into the pan

theon they can indeed be seen as active, willing subjects who inaugurate the

existent limitsof

their own world. They are subjectsof

action in (hal worldwhich is theirs alone. And for this reason, the turn away from the systematic

domination of world through deification is itself imaginable only through

the cultivation of a new ethical stance. In the next chapter I follow Kabir's

elaboration of an ethic of tenderness, forged between the experience of

violence and the insight into miracle.

The face of the lord in J)nyan('Swara

I have referred to the affinity between the Varkari tradition and Kabir. One

sure sign of that relation is their shared turn away, if only momentarily, from

the ambient culture of deities. We gained a glimpse of this tendency when

I alluded to Ihc living, striving devotcc prior to religion, the flesh-and-blood

devotee, unsubstitutable with another devotee in communal prayer. Like an

arrowshot i nto the future, there is a figure of this kind in Dnyaneswara, This is

the singular, indefatigably ardent AJjuna who can in the Dnyancswari (C.E,

1290). Dnyaneswara's monumental rejoinder in Old Marathi to the Gira,

engender in the Lord a peculiar dilemma. (I render the verses here in the

order of the originaL) as the logical outcome of my discourse, musesKrishna, Arjuna were to relinquish his particular being (Vipaye ahambhava

veyacajail) and rediscover his singularity in the ground that I am (min fen ci

jari Jw hoiJ), I would be left to face the prospect of an eternal solitude (tari kai

kUail, ckleyall). In which case. where would I find the face I long to set my

eyes on (Dithi I i palla/an niI'Ue), who would I yearn to speak to without

reserve (kan fonda bharuni bol(je), whom would I crave to hold in a tight

embrace (datun khcl'an deUel, who else if not Arjuna (aisen kavana aile)? How

can that which settles into the inner reaches of my being (Apulera mana

baravi), this unconllnable tale told to Arjuna (ie asamai gothijivin), how can

this happy chatter be confided to him (te kal'anensin maga c a v a l a ~ ' i ) were he

and I to merge into my universal nature, become one with each other (iari

aikyajalen)? With such plaintiveness (kakula/i), comments Dnyaneswara. insuch an abject posture did Janardana Krishna contrive within the very terms

of his general homily on the merits of the yogi (in this section of the Gila) to

embrace in speech his own beloved Arju na (bolamajhin ma na manen, alingun

sarlen), himself the exemplary yogi (Dnyaneswari 6: 1 1 6 ~ 1 9 ) . 1Now what is worth noting here is the uncompromising "directness" of this

meditation on the part of Krishna, a rectitude that includes not just the pro

tagonists of the dialogue that is the Gila (Krishna and Arjuna together in

saml1ada) but also Dnyaneswara himself. But this directness is not unaccom

panied by an obliqueness which is equally crucial if the state of rest that the

148 Prehistory o/historical religion

dialogue seeks (what Dnyaneswara calls "samvadasukha") is to be attained.

The obliqueness is reflected-in what Dnyaneswara calls his marhali, his Old

Marathi speech (hol). whose rhetoric contrives (kavatiken) to tear through the

veil between speaking and listening (holad valipa phedije) and win a wager

with nectarine sweetness, surpass in tenderness a resonant note, pierce through

the piquancy of fragrance, let rise in the ear a host of tongues avid for rasa,

Miracfe and violence 149

the space ofa contcst between Old Marathi (marhatl) and Sanskrit for greater

access to the divine, and neither is there any evidence that Dnyaneswara is

motivated hcre by a desire to get across in simple vernacular to g o d ~ f e a r i n ghumble folk the cerebral mysteries of the Gila. There are very specific reasons

why the "vernacular " (as opposed to Sanskrit) worked to bear the freight of

such a detour through the literary, reasons that have very little to do with the



and make the senses swirl with delight at the touch of speech. For where the

fullness of a poetic pada transpires, where its rekha (a word rich in meaning,

which we could tentatively render as "figure," "outline") beguiles the gaze

with its beauty, one's being rushes out in eagerness to embrace (aJingaveya)

thatpada.

Clearlyit

is not only the poet who must contrive to make hisspeech, his poetic utleranee in marhali, convey the freight of Gita doctrine

(which is not to say that the Gila is merely doctrine) as wei! as the p l a i n t i v e ~ness (kakufali) of Krishna's love for Arjuna; Krishna himself is forced to take

this oblique path so as to be able to look adoringly into the adoring face of

Arjuna. For if he (Krishna) were to adopt a strictly philosophical. doctrinal

perspective, he would have to forgo the particular historical being of Arjuna

as it receded into his own universality (into Krishna himself, who as God is

the origin of all singularity). In short, the alingana or embrace that the poet

contrives between being and speech finds its counterpoint in the alil/gana

God himself contrives in his dialogue with Arjuna.

The ruse ofMarhatiWhat are we to make of the link this text makes between the ruse of artifice

which is kavatika and the loving embrace of the singular Arjuna? We can use

the word "loving" here quite freely sincc the doctrinal and metaphysical

ambition of the Dnyaneswari, like the Gila, does indeed involve the unveiling

of a certain kind of "love" (prem), a Bhagwat Dharma between devotee and

deity. But the juxtaposition of ruse and rectitude, metaphor and concept

generates in the idea of divine embrace a certain "un-embraceability," so to

speak, which makes the exactitude of the embrace unattainable in itself.

Krishna himself despairs that such an exact, correct, philosophically rigorous

embrace would entail Arjuna's disappearance as a friend and devotee on the

narrative surface of the text, ensuring his reappearance on that surface as a

"de-humanized" concept supplying merely the idea of human love for thedivine. At this point allegory and system collapse into each other, reminding

us that there are allegorical and systematic impulses in both the "mortal" and

"immortal" aspects of Krishna's address to Arjuna. In this sense the curving

of the direct embrace is necessary and presumably cannot be circumvented,

except perhaps by circumvention! The allegorical (call it metaphorical, r h e t ~orica!) suspension of the doctrinal system is necessary if the specific address

of the divine is to be heeded.

Now the task of allegory here is not simply to embdlish the system; the

Dnyoneswari is not merely an ornamental arch raised above the Gila, nor is it

critic.'ll commonplace that those who wrote in the vernacular intended to

revolt against the brahmanism of Sanskrit elites. Instead, one could argue

that the "vernacular" is the place where the Sanskrit address to alterity

"lives on" as a ruse. Another way of saying this is that Dnyaneswara wrote in

Old Marathi because the addressof

the Lord to At:iuna in theGila,

wherein itwas a question of portraying the coming of God to man, needed to be s u p ~plemented by the "prolongation" of this ruse in Old Marathi, where it was

now a question of depicting the "love" of God for man. The rhetorical

recourse to Old Marathi instead of Sanskrit was a theological supplement to

the older text, miming that text in complex ways. and never really repudiating

its still valid claims. We can state this more explicitly in the following terms:

Old Marathi was not simply the language Dnyaneswara used to make the

Gila acccssible to a vernacular audience; instead, Old Marathi was itself the

new rhetoric. It was the field of play where Sanskrit forms of poetic address

were given the space to circulate, but this time as the very instantiation of

"rhetoric as ruse." In other words, this was an instance of the love of God for

man as the very ground of the secular world, which was now the space of

rhetoric, ruse, narrative, time. This work of time which Old Marathi performsis thus the very instance of allegory understood as ruse; its worldly task is not

very different from what Erich Auerbach (1965: 314, 309) tried to understand

throughout his life as the ground of Dante's poetic vocation. He thought of

allegory as the work of divinity working through the world. It is a mark

of its seclI!<tr voc<ttion; "a way of finding .a place in the divine order for the

historical here and now of human destinies and passions," a way of "project

ing" one's own "experience" and "will into the kingdom of God," and to"represent" one's own will "as God's will."

In much the same way that we cannot directly access nOllS (divinity)

because il is the regul;:tiive ideal for human life. and just as we speak of

Uheoreill) and speak to (legein) objects, addressing things as things, and

thereby try and attain nons through speech (logos) in our everyday life andthrough Ihe varied meanS of practice, deliberation and understanding· in

just the same way the allegorical basis of speech (bol) in Dnyaneswara

upholds a way of working through the world toward nous. Speech is the

means by which we work through the workaday world, willing it into e x i s t ~ence li)r our cnds, with some working notion of eternality in hand as an

object, an objertive nous standing up against us out there. The kinship

between speech (hol) and the notion in Kashmir Shaivism of the ascending

levc/s of rae is worth noting hcre, for both refer to the necessary passage

"through" the secularity of speech (l'aikhari) to the divinity of the divine

150 Prehislory ofhistorical religion

(para\'ac), to the unknown or unknowable (see Padoux 1990). Neither the

Marhati hoI nor Sanskrit \'(7(" allow themselves to be rendered in terms of the

industrious everydayness of the Greek logos (mere speaking to) or Iheorein

(speaking of, seeing as). Yet both are dianoiefic; the prefix "dia- " indicates a

"meaning-laden thoroughfare"; the presence of this prefix in "dia-fogein"

and "dia-noien" reminds us of the necessity of the detour through speech and

Miracle and r'io/cllce 151

other. Conversely. it would seem as though in Dnyancswara the entire weight

of the Vaishnava edifice of the Gila. the worldly vocation of Krishna, 1S made

to ask after the singular Arjuna. This does not entail the detranscendentaliza

tion of Krishn a as much as it implies that Dn yaneswara's text tries to glimpse

in Arjuna himself the markings of that transcendental alterity with which

only he (Arjuna) has the good fortune to enjoy a certain proximity. In this



theory for humans as beings whose being is limited to the worlds they will

inlo existence.

But what hoI as speech does here is to refer us not forward to the worldly

ambitions of deification, to the historical and secular agency of Krishna as

Karma, or Krishna as Arjuna's counselor and so on-it refers us hack to

allegory, metaphor, rhetoric, indeed to an involuted, self-absorbed mode of

communication t hat is nonelheless committed to thought. What is the pivot

around which an epistemology of the concept turns into an aesthesis (we

should hesitate to call this an aesthetics) of rasa? The impossible embrace of

system and allegory, concept and metaphor seems to turn here around the

tale (gothi), referring us to the curving line of oblique speech that crosses

through the rectitude of the Gila's systematic theology of the secular world.

The gothi could also be the pithy moral at the heart of a tale, but why is this

tale unconfinable (asamai) to the innermost being of Krishna? Why must it be

brought out into the light of "dialogic release" (the samvadasukha of which

Aljuna is the unique beneficiary)? What motivates the untied knot of the

gothi in the first place, inaugurating th e sublime address of the Gita, inspiring

the still resonant marhati bolof Dnyaneswara?

Gothi: the narratival origins of the universe

Something in Krishna asks to come into the open as a tale (gothi) but this

opening into the world is not the inaugural moment we associate with Revela

tion, which looks forward to Redemption and looks back at Creation; for the

tale looks back instead to the singularity of the Arjuna, the sole object of

Krishna's gaze. That gaze was different from the theoretical gaze of the

devotee; it was an adoring, affective gaze that sought to find in its object

(Arjuna) a trace of the d.evotee prior to theory; for it sought the flesh-and

blood Aljuna, a beloved friend to tarry and chat with (c(ll'alavO on a great

civilizational crossroad, on the eve of the cataclysm that would envelop theKuruvansha. In the Gila itself this friendliness is subordinated to the terrify

ing glimpse of the unknowable Krishna as the universe itself in the eleventh

book; the text virtually authorizes Arjuna to gaze theoretically at the form of

the divine. so much so that he chides himself for having taken God for a

friend, trespassing the line between mortals and gods. But in Dnyaneswara

there is a noteworthy inversion of perspective: here it is Krishna who yearns

for the singular Arju na before him; his dialogue with Arjun a is in some sense

a "narrative" (gothl) that is itself a procrastination of the time when Arjuna

would be assimilated to himself (Krishna) as singularity itself, as the wholly

way, the Ma rhat i Arju na is no longer, or at least not yet, the self-empowering

devotee of the Sanskrit text. The detranscendentalization of radical alterity

transpires not by the bringing down to earth of Krishna (which in a way

is already an aspect of his work as an avatar with a mission, determined to

preserve caste)! but by the bringing down of Aljuna to the level or the as

yet unaceommodated, subhuman man prior to the historical humanity or

Vaishnava religion. Man does not go up and proceed to conjure the Lord into

being; it is God who comes to man, but to the man who is able to remain

subhuman if only for the moment, lacking in the ability to will the workings

of deification. entirely frail.

But let us remember that even as the tale (go/hI) looks back at this singular

Arjuna in this way. it is nonetheless invested in looking forward to the histor

ical time of deities. By this token, it inaugurates a knowable World willed into

existence, an approachable God as deity, a willing human being or Man ai.

devotee. Were the tale (gothi) not to seek to redeem the world in some way.

it would not be the basis of the sensuous religion that we have alluded to

above. which is in turn a key element in contemporary political society.

The Dnyaneswari, it should be remembered, is the great paya. foundation of

the Varkaris, Bhagwat Dharma. Indeed it is only from the retrospect of

actually existing religion that we are able to appreciate the poignancy of the

singular Ar juna 's liminal status, existing as he docs on the cusp of the histor

ical religion of Krishna that will soon enable the devotee to will its deity into

being. Again, from this concrete. historical perspective the flesh-and-blood

Arjuna can only ever appear as an abstraction; whereas from the point of

view of this f l e s h - a n d ~ b l o o d Arjuna, it is historical religion that appears

abstract. Yet, it is this very Aljuna toward whom the entire allegorical

machine of the Dnyaneswari turns back even as it moves forward to celebrate

the sensuous and systematic cultic religion of Krishna-worship. Allegory

"switches" ba ck and forth between abstract an d concrete, generating a giddy

shift in perspective, and opening a hall of mirrors at the heart of the visualfield.

The two vectors of this allegorical device in its prospective embrace of

system and retrospective positing of the singular Arjuna provide us with

some insight into the mechanics of allegorical involution. It should be clear

from this that the singularity of the other-directed address of Arjuna is

logically prior to the individual other-directedness of the devotee to which he

lays claim as a devotee. The introverted investment in a singular address to

God which introduces the epiphany of the adoring face of Krishna in

Arjuna, of God in man may provide some evidence of what "motivates"

152 Prehistory 0/historical religion

allegorical reference in the first place. For the Arjuna at the origins is not the

Christ at the end of history." Abstract and concrete do not merge in him

absolutely in some speculative Good Friday. Instead, they remain "indiffer

ent" to each other in him: he is not the unity o/abstract and concrete; he is a

unity prior to the very relation between abstract and concrete. nirglln and

sagun. The sensuous, adoring look that Krishna directs at Arjuna is in many

Miracle and violenCl' 153

light before the light of conceptual truth, back to the origins of singular

being in saha). And then comes the final moment: Kabir has found the

Ram-jewel (one surmises that it does not scintillate in the same way as

the light of truth) which is a reflective. introspective, dark ling light, as though

the poem were reflecting on itself(ram ratanu paia). With this, Kabir proceedsto take on the world (karat vicara).



important and crucial ways prior, it would seem to us, to the sensuous

religion of Krishna-worship. This is a token perhaps ofa sensuousness before

sensuousness, a transcendental nudity that breaks through allegorical time

and space and r e t u m ~ if only momentarily, to an ancient epiphany of theface of the adoring Lord.

Allegory is this historical reflection of what was in a sense always already

there, which is the singular flesh-and-bones devotee equi-primordially exposed

to the primordial epiphany of the face in God, Reflection (refiexio) is pre

cisely this turning back on to itself of which the yogic palatna so widespread

in the Kabir corpus is prime instance. For turning back generates a will prior

to the will seeking to deify. And in this sense allegorical self-reflection is the

force, the incalculable force. that turns away from what is an equally powerful

allegorical pull toward the world of deities.

Having found (the Ram-jewel)

Kabir is located very close to this allegorical return to Arjuna. His claim in

the poem we read in the previous chapter was: "maran}ivan ki sanka nasi."Not only did the sanka (skepticism) of dying-living come to a nas (end), it

ended now, at this moment, in a trice. So Kahir Seems to be speaking from a

point in time that is temporally ambiguous: nas-;could have happened today;

it may already have happened, will have happened. or perhaps is yet tohappen. The subjunctive tenor of the "-i" ending reminds us that what Kabir

has seen or has found remains undecidable in terms of its historical present.

What has transpired is in any case the nas of sanka, the negative of the

negative as we surmised above. And following this nas is the epiphany of the

abstract Ram who is not the Ram of the epic. Let us follow the steps leading

up to that moment. There is after the nas of sanka a surge of color into the

"1" which then effortlessly emerges as a clearing bathed in light (apun rang;

saha}i pargasi). Now the coming together of the clear light of truth and thesensuousness of color are significant: clearly, neither light-as-concept nor

color-as-metaphor is wholly adequate in itself. Here again concept and meta

phor must cohabit the same figural space for a cel1ain spontaneity or will to

self-generation (sahaJ) to begin to operate. Once this h a p p e n ~ a light (joti)

prior to the lit-up clearing of light (which was pargas in the previous line)

comes into eRect, introducing for the first time the possibility of manifest

ation (pargatl). The penultimate moment involves the dispelling of darkness

(andhiara) with the onset of manifestation. The whole movement is attuned

to the emergence of light from out of darkness, but it seeks to go back to the

Let us recapitulate the stages in this late discovery: the end of sanka, color

as a kind of light prior to space and time, the threshold of an emergence.

the birth of a light prior to truth, the first glimmer of manifestation amidthe darkness of that emergence, and finally the finding of the Ram-jewel.

That last find is, it would seem. by no means serendipitous. For "-a"

ending in paiu (having found) draws it closer to the temporal indeterminacy

of nasi. One could well suspect that the Ram-jewel was already there, waiting

to be found: so that the entire trajectory we have just charled can be described

in terms of a transformative movement toward having-found-(Ood). The

poem itself occupies the minimal gap between the will-havc-happened of the

cataclysmic nas and the will-have-found of the jubilant paia. The movement

of the having-found leaves behind the phenomenal-sensuous quest for a tran

scendental essence in the realm of sanka. and broaches the possibility of a

truth prior to essence, prior to light. Color (rang) is precisely this phenomenal

threshOld of the non-phenomenal. One can imagine that not finding the

Ram-jewel would have meant the end of the line for the living Kabir, standing

at the limit of his life as a whole. ro r sanka in the Kabir corpus is akin to

bhram. which is really "doubt" writ large as the frantic wandering over theearth that we do with our ceaseless business in mind; it is not an occasional

lack of certitude but describes the tenor of a life taken as a whole. Quixote

was in this sense bhramishta, scurrying over the pages of medieval romance

like a cipher (in the image from Foucault). concerned to the very end about

pushing the very logic of his self-delusion.

ludic thought as a history of skepticism

But then again, neither Kabir nor his Ram is wholly unmarked by the se\f

restoring history of skepticism, skepsis. that is Indic thought. If we under

stand skepsis in its etymological sense of "having-seen." we arrivc at an

understanding of brham that is closely related to the seeing, theorizing,inspecting, watching over the willed world tha t we have described above as the

representational legacy of the Indo-Islamic world. Again, brham is not

just occasional doubt about the existence or otherwise of Ood, to be eclipsed

by some form of ecstatic reunion with the deity; it is the foundational

skepticism. the original rigor, the relentless questioning of the system, of all

systemic attempts to work out an understanding of the existent world and the

place of language, law and myth in it. In other words, brham as skepticism is

the "auto-encyclopedic" movement that brings the tradition in full circle:

for at the end of the circle is the condition of having-seen that brings to

154 Prehistory o/his/urical religion

completion the history of the lorms of consciousness thai is also the history

of Indie thought. In Kabir, .brham or skepsis consummates all Ihe varied

possibilities inheren t in a life of restless questioning, preparing the gr ound for

a death that would embrace the eternity of the changing world. This is very

much like the mimansuka of old who chose a life of everyday ritual sacrifice

as an end in itself, thinking that it would open itself to the sacrificial move

ment of the universe. In this sense, the entirety of the Indic world and all its

1

Miracle and violefu'e 155

mutually replaceable with each other. For, were he to cease to remain anabstraction (if we could, for once, "see" him as a flesh-and-blood devotee

be/ore devotion), our own tendency to insist on the historicity of the religious

vocation would be under threat. Which is to say that, our interest in raising

historical religion to the highest possibility of thought and in turn to return

thought itself to its basis in historical religion·--this essential aspect of our

habit (habitus) in the world belore the deity would be jeopardized.



systematic philosophical ventures finds its consummation, its closure in

Kabir's brham. If this is a skepticism fundamental to the traditi on as a whole,

providing a rigorous, highly rationalized and elaborate argument for caste

with all its horrilk consequences, it is possible for Kabir to understand the

history of ImJian thought as a history of skepticism. Skepticism, it wouldseem to him, is that tradition's claim to tradition, to a historicity that is

capable of grounding and justifying itself and laying claim to a commanding

view over the world. Kabir is plagued with this Skepticism, but the paradox

is that he responds to skepticism with skepticism, almost as though he

wants to displace the rigor of lndic thought with a mode of thinking that is

equally skeptical, but "encyclopedic" of what, garnering the insights of

which counter-tradition?

What it nonetheless produces is the anomalous positivity of Kabir's God.

The latter is not to be mistaken for the cullic religion of Shiva- or Krishna

worship, but locatable at a poinl logically prior to it. What could be so

singular about this Ram given that so much in Kabir is indebted to those very

schools of Indic thought such as Vedanta that in the final analysis upholdthe centrality of caste, or at the very least do not question it explicitly?

The answer may lie in that aspect of Kabir that makes him the mirror image

of Dnyaneswara's Arjuna. We saw how in Dnyaneswara the movement

toward the higher religion ofthe pantheon is preceded by a fleeting backwar d

look toward the devotee pr ior to deification; we remarked upon the abstrac

tion that SHch a devotee repr esents-be cause that devotee is always already

an active participant in historical religion, it is paradoxically his flesh-and

blood nature that is an abstraction: we can never hope to encounter such a

person on the street, but we are nonetheless aware of the "fact" of faith, or

something like the "idea," the fleeting memory of his Infinity in us. Yet the

"fact" of such a devotee's living, striving existence is indeed that singular

origin that scems to provide a kind of guarantee outside the world of deities;

it is what puts to work the manifold ruses (kavatiken) of allegory. There the

Arjuna whom Krishna wants to talk with awhile is a specific, irreplaceable

Arjuna, but he is an abstraction nonetheless, for the system of the Gila is

invested in turning him into an epiphenomenon of the final phenomenal

instance. of the transcendental essence itself, whieh is to say Krishna. Even if

it is Arjuna who is the origin of the desire for Bhagwat Dharma in this

instance, he is an abstraction that we return to only retroactively, from the

backward glance we cast in his direction, grounded as we ourselves are

in historical religion, amenable to the pull of the community of dcvotees

The abstract Ram and the pos.."ibility of violence

What is truly unsettling in this sense is that Kabir attempts to bring about

what is tantamount to an exact inversion of this procedure. This is theminimal difference between him and Dnyaneswara. For he has the temerity to

seize the abstracl at the outset, and only then to work himself back into the

historical religion put in place by Indic thought. What does it mean to "seize

the abstract "? And does this imply a denial in Kabir of the bistorical destiny

of religion? In which case, does this justify our present-day understanding of

Kabir as the emblem of daHt protest? For a Kabir removed from history

could by no means serve as the basis of the historical insight that dalit protest

has into itself. Moreover the remove from history would entail a severance

from the heart of the social. Let us recall that the dialogic releast; the sukha

of the krislmarjuna samvada that is the Gila generates in that text a dynamic

inner core that is also a locus of selfless social action. In general terms, the

latter is a means of breaking through the aporia betwccn ritualism as an endin itself and the many snares of the phenomenal world. But more crucially for

our purp oses is the fact that the eore of he text is social; if one chooses to act

in this way, the text seems to say, one would be in a position to uphold and

protect caste society, working and striving at the center of one's world.

Action here encompasses the entirety of the social act, making meaningful

every social gesture in rite, speech, clothing, exchange, and so on. More cru

cially, this makes the inequities of caste itself meaningful within a kind of

moral economy of gift and counter-gift between the upper and lower castes,

generating by this token Dumont's "englobed" world of which sacl"ifice is the

paradigm for all movement (karma; physis) in the universe.

It is worth noting that the Kabir who utters the phrase "says Kabir"

(kahatu kabir) at the end of our poem is the Kabir who has "of late" in a

temporally indeterminate moment found the abstract Ram. The saying that

is our poem as a whole in a sense finds its guarantee of authorship in

that abstract Ram, a Ram abstracted from the historical religion, with its

resulting social centeredness, of the Indo-Islamic world. At this remove

from the social center, the tumult of the agora, the busy marketplace where

the social world is transacted as an invidious but viable world in the everyday,

we stand wilh the Kabir of the abstra ct Ram a nd experience a peculiar form

of agoraphobia. We stand away from the systemic skepticism of thc verbose

marketplace, lcaving behind every ecumenical attempt 10 impose a system on


the world and make sensc of it. At this nadir of social being, it would be

difficult for us to tum to tbc themcs of secular amity and cocxistence we

have projected back on to the past from our position as modern subjects

committed to secularism. We shall have to severe all ties to Bhagwat love,Sufi

transcendence, and so on. We find ourselves at that location which is from the

point of view of the social center no centcr at all, a place that is neither

sectarian nor n o n ~ s e c t a r i a n , consisting neithcr of Kabir as local rebel among

Miracle and violence 157

seething for generations at its heart, but that had been kept in check by the

very traflsactability of gift and counter-gift, the everyday economy of living

together. At this place that cannot be located in the social as we live i t every

day, at this "locus" where the Kabir of the abstract Ram stands I see how it

is possible for me to kill today the man from the other comm unity with whom

I had friendly businesslike relations for decades. I liked the man because he

was civil, warm. even affable but I always knew that he was not to be trusted.



other rebels nor Kabir as the mystic poet risen above social strife, but is a

threshold for the undoing of the social itself. It is the degrce zero ofthc sociaL

It is a point of such absolute neutrality that it could easily bc mistakcn for

a locus of absolution in some larger frame guaranteed by historical rcligion.

As we saw earlier in this book, from his perspcctivc within the historiCt'l1mission of Hinduism in its response to the challenge of Islam, and at a crucial

point in his 1941 book on Kabir, Ha/.ariprasad Dwivedi came upon precisely

this figure of Kabir at the crossroads. "Where hindulwl emerges from one

side." wrote Dwivcdi.

and mu.mlmanalva from the other: and between knowledge on the one

hand and untutoredncss on the other: wherc there is the way of yoga on

the one hand and the way of bhakti on the other; where there is lIirgun

affectivity here and sagun seeking there, a God without traits here, with

traits there; on that supreme crossroad stood Kahil'.

But what precisely is the nature of this crossroad if it does not allow forphilosophical or theological reconciliation? It is with some reluctance that we

set aside our Romantic fascination with the beatnik Kabir. Better here to

think of him as the wise man in talters with a piercing look in his cyes, whom

urchins harry because they mistake him for a wretch. This arguably has a

truer ring than medieval paintings depicting him in languid rarefaction.

within an idyll of the hut and the loom.

Shahid Amin (2005: 266) has recently suggested that we look carefully at

thc traces of popular memory in our historical account of the Indo-Islamic

millennium. He asks that we turn to the need for "non-sectarian histories of

sectarian strife, conflict and conqu est of the past." This is, it would seem. the

only way for us to remain aware of the lack of fit betwecn the histories that

we write and the nature of popular memory. For the latter appears to retain

prejudicc and stereotype like so much sediment. In this sense to usc our

sectarian standpoint like a plumb line is perhaps justifiable. The running

eddies of historical experiencc would fall on both sides, and we would be

carried into a sense of history more attuned to the anxiety inherent in the

popular. But when we abstract ourselves from the "sectarian" world. \eave

aside its hatred, suspicion, distrust, paran oia with regard to the neighbor, the

stranger, the madman, the other, we find ourselves no longer 011 some secure

non-sectarian platform far above the fray. We discover ourselvcs at a point

where the social unravels itself and generatcs the violence that had been

For, one never knows what "they" might do if they decide to act as a group.

Thercfore today. when we have all comc together let me preempt him. sho,»

him up for the stranger that he is.

It is here. standing with the Kabir who has just spokcn (kahal) of the

abstract Ram that we enter into the unbearable intensity of social strife.almost as though our conceptual and allegorical ediftcc (to which we gave the

name "the Indo-Islamic millennium") has fallcn to the ground: we look dir

(.'Ctly into thc heart of violence and expcricnce thc dizziness that comes with

having no human being 10 hold on 10, no human value for solace, no human

word that could carry the weight of our newfound knowledge of human

cruelty and miscry. And yet we will gain all these momentarily. Mourning will

give rise to melancholia. We will go on to work with our incorporated objects

of loss, moving between the fear of losing thcm and rage at their betrayaL

We will negotiate our represented world in terms of the "love" that we experi

encc for the objects around us. And from the depressive positioning of this

love in our psychic econom y we will live on. We will assist in raising up the

deities that love us. and whom we in turn love (Melanie Klein 1987: 142).But not without remembering that Kabir has afforded us an insight into

the abyssal reaches of violence. For this would seem to be the precious alem

bic of his wisdom. the r eason that for centuries he has remained for subaltern

communities the one singular being who helped them experience viscerally

the "living death" at the heart of the social world. This is the world that

allocated to them their own workable, everyday, and nonetheless unendurable

subalternity. What is this living death? The answer may lie in the ambiguity of

the copula "is."

For what Kabir says after having gained the abstract Ram is: "I am dead:

There is an inherent heterogeneity in this utterance that makes it inimical to

our received account of human reason. Our normal d a y ~ t o - d a y judgments

are in the Kantian sense synthetic as well as a priori. They arc synthetic

because they make some claim to the lived, intuited. sensible world. But they

are also a priori becausc we make sense of our lived world through more

original structures of understanding that precede our sensible expcrience.

So in thc phrase "the table is brown" the copula "is" brings together both the

ideal determinants f " t a b l e ~ n e s s " or brownness (quality, quantity and so on)

and the sensible qualities of this table. In this sense the subject that grasps the

proposition "the table is brown" is anchored in the copula "is." But when

Kabir says "I am dead" the rules of synthetic or analytical logic no longer

hold. For by the rigor of that logic 1cannot experience my death as such: by

158 Prehistory ojhisforical religion

the same token the delimitation of human reason postulates that death is an

unknowable ideal just like Gq.d, Man and World, possessing value only to the

extent that it regulates the ends of my life. As opposed to this account of

reason, the phrase '" am dead" brings together the sensible and the ideal in a

possible and impossible manner. It gives rise to the wholly anomalous notion

(at once abstract and concrete, historical and ahistorical, material and yet

theoretical) or a "lived death." Now this death is unverifiable according to the

Miracle an d violence 159

"almost entirely a priori." Again, this living death is neither material nor

ideal; it is the point at which the social could potentially pivot over into the

non-social, generating the catastrophic violence that lies at its heart. I always

suspected that my neighbor worked against my interests in stealth; but when

I transacted with him in the marketplace I pretended as though he meantwell, partly out of fear and partly in the hope that my fair dealings with him

would in the long run turn his disposition toward me in my favor. But now



criteria of evidcnce-giving rise in the Kabir legends to compelling visions of

the prodigy (aeambhau) that was his disappearance "at" his death. He became

immortal because he left behind no bodily remnant (amar bhayo eMu tyo na

shariru). His disciples found only flowers where there should have been his

corpse (Kabir Paracai, 13: 5; Lorenzen 1991). Nor is this "living death"explicable in terms of the indices that govern speech; for one would assume

that death involves the eclipse of speech. making the utterance "I am dead"

impossible and uncanny. as though one were present at the scene of one's

death and given the privilege to speak of it!

When Kabir says "1 am dead" his proposition is "magical" in the richest

sense of the word. Now, a magician may be the vilest trickster who ever

inveigled his way into our credence. Yet popular belief is known to take

seriously the magical act itself. The folk may question a magician's motives

but it is accepting of his aims. (The folk is never gullible and is quick to detect

a scam). This insight into popular attitudes gave rise to Mauss's (2001

[1902J: 152-·3) classic characterization of magic as "poorly analytical, poorly

experiential and almost entirely a priori." "All over the world." he observed,"magical judgements existed prior to magical experience." But the great

paradox is that "experiences occur only in order to confirm them and almost

never succeed in refuting them." Here. it would seem, lies the key to the

power, the maya (magic) of Kahir. Here then is what Kabir gleaned from his

Ram-jewel; herein lies the secret of that abstract alchemical essence, the

precious distillate of mercurial assimilation, which is to say, the abyss at

the heart of the social world that Kabir experienced in its abstraclion. "or the

Ram-jewel will soon make itself available to the sensuous welcome of Ram in

the weJl known opening verses of the standard corpus of his poems whereKabir becomes the expectant bride welcoming Ram the eternal bridegroom. J

And from there virtuaJly guaranteed is the return to the sensuous religion of

Vaishnavism and the movement of the itinerant Kabir scribes eastwards to

where they would inspire the mystic enunciation of the bau!. The social world

will find him. place him on the path of the sel toward the deity, pitch him into

the political society of the present. He will be restored to the working skepti

cism of sankalbrham, to the runaround of living and dying, anxiety with

regard to death and the involvement in care and concern in the world as a way

of evading death.

But to that eycle of living-dying that can be grasped within the terms of

human reckoning as a "synthetic and a priori" understanding of the world. to

that living and dying he opposes an idca of livcd death that is strangely

these dealings are at an end; his witchcraft must be exposed for what it is;

where his witchcraft was bearable because [ thought I could make it favor me,

I now find his witchcraft unbearable. I must name the witch and kill him.

What is the name that unravels the social in Kabir? It is "Ram," the name that

contains the secret of the "living death" behind the saying (kathan) of Kabir,which is the y-ogic return to the condition that describes itself as "I am dead."

Naming "Ram" allows us to understand how neighbor turns into witch,

unleashing the violence that found its most traumatic expression in recent

times in the Part ition of the subcontinent. Here the history of language plays

a cruel joke on us. For in Hindi "bhakti" (participant devotion) and "vib-

hajan" (Partition) share a common root in the Sanskrit "bhar which entails

partitioning, apportioning, being a part of a whole but remaining a part. It

refers to a kind of accursed remainder inassimilable, at least for the moment,

to the whole. In violence, the social person and witch are (in the words of

James T. Siegel) "pasted together"----but they come apart (bha)) (Siegel 2006:

92).4 This is why we cannot entirely do away with the idea of religion under

stood etymologically as that which "binds" the social world. But we need tounderstand the "bind" as immensely fragile. Violence unveils the element of

fragility in social being: it is less a perduring "bind," than a tenuous "pasting

together."

There's no denying that everyday forms of language and social interaction

have a way of making dilferences "workable," so to speak. Ano ther way of

defining this everyday philosophical work of language is as follows. In the

marketplace where I pedal my wares, I "point toward" them in logos and

theoria. The whole world of hearsay and proverbial talk, the vast cacophon

ous marketplace of medieval North India, is encapsulated in the act of

pointing out things in words. From the argot of the daily hustle, speech

moves quickly to distinctions between the material or intellectual, worldly or

metaphysical. The popular poetry of the Varkaris (especially that of Eknath)

is marked by this rich everydayness (vaikhari). Like some well known poems

in the Kabir corpus, it is replete with references to Hindu and Turk, Shaivite

and Vaishnavite and so on. At the level of rhetoric I may declare that such

distinctions don't matter in the realm of my faith, my willed deity. I could

even make a plea for tolerance. But in the moment of a g o r a ~ p h o b i a , " when

the garrulity of the market reveals its terrible logic, the crowds turn on me.(Agoraphobia is the fear of crowded spaces, but it is also conversely the fear

the crowd has of the lone stranger in its midst. To experience agoraphobia is

to be lonely before the bloodthirsty crowd.)


There is a form of difference that resides within social difference, which

opens differencc out to itself. It is this "indifference" that turns the social

body against me. The social in its "living death " is now opposed to mc. (-<or I

myself may be a witch just as well as the neighbor. Who knows if he whomI named as a witch is not I myself? In Kabir's "I am dead" I become other to

myself; I am myself perhaps the witch. Violence (the fear of phantasmal

strangers, madmen, witches, perpetrated as violence on Indian Muslims, dal

Mirade and l'iolence 161

acter, a term whose terrifying valence we encountered in Dwivedi's brah

manical schema for Kabir (in Chapte r 4), As opposed to the substitutability

of the individual (I'yakti) in community and nation, character (caritro) is a

sign of a disposition of a singular nature-it is the stigma of a lonely dcath. It

is the legible sign of untouchability: violence means that what was under the

surface as enforced habit (servitude) now emerges as a bodily sign of char

acter. For to mark someone with the "character" of untouchable is to mark



its, tribals) in its anonymity always finds the singular being that I am. But this

"am" in "I am dead" is apocalyptically always on the brink, always in oscilla

tion between the social person and the witch, between the "ego" of social

science and the victim addressed in civil inquiries into pogroms (see Pandey

1006). I must pay for my "indilference," my "unsocial " behavior, my "selfishness" with a horrific. visible death. limbs hacked to pieces, a corpse left

burning, my kin similarly marked and dishonored by rape.

At this low point of social existence we perceive the loneliness of the vic-

tim/survivor. not because such suffering is necessarily incommunicable (some

measure of it is indeed conveyed the moment social relations are restored),

but bee<luse he or she is marked in this way by indillerence, unsociality,

selfishness, as though he or she "haJ it coming," as though the victim/sur

vivor descrved this end. And it is this terrible singularity that. it would seem,

should be placed at the origin of the allegorical-systemic impulse that ush

ered in the representational framework of the Indo-Islamic world. In that

teeming and busy world. loneliness is a mark of character (caritra), not

individuality or personality.For individuality was taken care of then by implicating the willing and

desiring person in a host of networks of belonging. The unto uchable too was

in this sense taken up into a "fuzzy" sense of belonging. This is to modify

somewhat a formulation of Sudipta Kaviraj's (1992), for whom this pre

modern fuzziness in belonging, disperscd over locality, region. caste, kinship,

language tends to abate under the enumerative impulse of the modern state.

Instcad. we could say that the modem supervision of whole populations a s so

many biological statistics pitched on the order of the universal (birth, death.

infant mortality, etc.) docs not attenuate but only takes up this fuzziness onto

another level altogether, keeping its basic elements in place. lIere the indi

vidual is now caught up in specific political initiatives taken up by c o m ~munities to promote their individual ends. But since no community is alonethere is always the likelihood of alliance and coalition, of which fission and

discord are themselves only negative signs, The individual (I'yakti) of political

society is in this sense a personality that has evolved from the nature of

subaltern protest in the last century. That individual is never alone. in much

the same way that no dramatic exposure of abject destitution in the privacy of

an apartment takes place in Dostoevsky's St. Petersburg without being swiftly

enveloped by the murmur of large groups of people peeping in, loiterin g ncar

the landing, listening in on the steps, spilling out on to the streets.

Here we must come to terms with the ineluctable nature of caritra, char-

not his or her biological. universal self but a (supposedly) innate. peculiar

disposition (Jaimon). The idea of the interior word in Indian nationalism was

forged on the basis of a perceived continuity, between character and in

dividual, caritra and l'yakti. Dalit thought. on the other ha nd, never lost sight

of the gap-the unsurpassable caesura-·- between the two. It saw carifra as an

enabling -'facL"

The coexistence of miracle and violence

Yet in the momen t whcn we experience with the aid of Kabir's Ram-jewel the

agony of character around which violence seethes like a cauldron, we are

witness nonetheless to a miracle. The irony is that this miracle co-exists with

the violence that unveiled the harsh destiny of character. The "happening" of

the miracle is temporally as hard to determine as the moment of the undoing

of doubt. the nas of sanka. There the inversion of skepticism revealed the

Ram-jewel; at a point exactly contemporary with this inversion there is also

the event of miracle. The fact that it is surrounded by violence only furtherreinforces the possibility of miracle. like the kind visage that helps find our

way out of the benighted forest or from the din of battle. whom we discover

afterwards to have been a spirit from the dead. In our Kabir poem the new

fangled light of the Ram-jewel en<lbles Kabir's bliss to gain a view of sorrow

from a distancc (duri); the gaze of God illumines his being with the light of

the jewel: only the bearer of the gaze can know (Mana) what has happened:

he who has grasped this as truth is himself now truth (saci samalla). This is

what Kabir has to say: with the dross (kift'ikh) of one's liIe washed away. one's

being is now one with the living world (jagjivanu). All the elements of the

"selfish," "indi/Terent," lonely Kabir come together in these lines. From the

"unsocial" perspective of his terrifying vision of the social world. he now sees

the world as suffcring, dukh, and his own condition as one of beatitude,anand. But this is a bliss won from out of sorrow. which nonetheless remains

an aspect of everyday expericnce. He has found a way into the living world,

into the perpetual eourse of living and dying nature, inlo the eternity of this

sorrow. But this insight itsel f comes to him from within the gaze of the Lord.

And with this the poem lurns back to the event of the finding of the Ram

jeweL which is the originating point of his new practical habit with reg<lrd to

the world, his new mindset. a redeflned ethos (vicara).

But crucially what has happ ened here is the unprecedented coming together

of miracle and violence, b oth of which occur at the very moment thilt Kabir

162 Prehistory of historical religion

tinds Ram and proceeds 10 stamp this finding with the seal of charactcr which

is "kahat kabir" (says K a b i r ~ . The stamp. the imprint of character bearing the

singular historical destiny of the living, striving Kabir, helpsform the simul

taneity of miracle and violence. We should not understand this formative"shaping" as merely aesthetic (it is not a form imposed on content, morphe on

hyle). For the forming is more like a relentless stamping, imprinting. indi

vidualizing movement from out which of Kabir discovers a new .\Tstem of

1

I!

M trade and I'io!ence 163

unity of a sanctimonious humanity that can proceed to devotion and prayecand then avidly cultivate a conscience.

It is almost as though Kabir were to say: human beings regardless of

whether they turn to evil (commit violence) or affirm a god are always willing,

desiring beings who tum w i l l i n g ~ v away from the problem of divinity itself.

This willingness to go astray is not reducible to the will of an individual: it is

perhaps more anonymously the work of the "suspension of iconoclasm."



freedom. We could always ask: how can there be a "system" of freedom.

given that we assume freedom is precisely freedom from system, from the

"unfreedom" implicit in system, as though freedom were a bird yearning to

be freed from a cage. But we know from our discussion of allegory and

system that a systematic expansion of the possibilities of freedom has been at

the heart of the epoch of representation. We assume today in political society

that our freedom is an aspect of our will to deify, of the "suspension of

iconoclasm." Unfreedom for us is merely what comes in the way of our

relentless raising up of deities into the pantheon. But in Kabir. there is a

vision not of a commanding freedom that thinks of itself as having neutral

ized "unfreedom." Instead there is the contradictory belonging togethcr of

freedom and "un freedom" within the same historical moment.

Just as the question of the coexistence of good and evil generates in the

ology the problem of freedom for the human being who has a propensity

toward evil, in much the same way the question of the bind between miraclc

and violence brings about a new system of freedom in Kabir's Ram. He begins

to perceive the miracle of this singular Ram in every singular being. coexisting with the violence that all character is subject to. There is an acutely

somber, historically self-aware pantheism implicit here: Kabir does indeed

find God "everywhere," but not in a fatalistic, indifferent sense. TIle fact that

Ram is in every singular being (ghati ghafi ram) is a sign that the dire occult

ation that marks character with miracle and violence, with the stigmata of

untouchability, is itself grounded in Ram. Another way of saying this is

that the system offreedom in Kabir works its way outwards from the finding

(not installing) of Ram in oneself. But the crucial finding. the secret of Ram is

the necessary coexistence of miracle and violence. freedom and "un freedom."This realization is not merely a way of saying: human beings can be evil but

in the end they always affirm God, or that belief and prejudice always hang

together. We would be hard put to understand this as a humanism that understands man as fallen from his God-given height. Nor would it be enough to

affirm that religion, despite its saving mission, will always already have been

secularized and abased, permanently locking belief in prejudice. (This is

what has given rise lately to anti-religious tracts in the wake of Darwin.)What we see in Kabir is a far more unsettling revelation: that the divinity of

Kabir's Ram is the basis not just of the idea of reedvm but also and at the

same time the idea of "un-freedom." There is in the latter a certain pessimism

that is a mark of the long vigil of character over a millennial dalitness. Again.

Ram grounds miracle and violence, but they do not come together in the

which refers us to a pervasive way of looking at the world and framing it.

It refers us to a technology of will and affect, of which the deity (be it Ram or

Krishna) is an end. The origin of individuality, Kabir seems to say. is this

maelstrom where miracle and violence generate the historical "I-hood" that

will rise to the surface to command its world. We detected in the imprint of

"kahat kabir" (says Kabir) precisely this movement toward individuation.

ltinerant Kabir scribes have for five centuries signed their names to the Kabir

poems in this way, but this signing has quite understandably only furthered

the hagiographic and Romanticist fascination for the "personality" or vyak

fitva of Kabir. We can think of these scribes as those who participate in

imprinting the coexistence ofmiracle and violence with the seal of individual

ity, in raising up the deity (bhagwan) Kabir. I am not arguing that the s e r i b e ~and the dalits (and Kabirpanthis) who lay claim to the daHt Kabir can be

reduced to each othec Let us just say that the scribes make the imprint legible.

From there it is a short distance to the contemporary daHt deification of

Kabir (as we saw in Chapter 5. with Dr. Dharmvir). Here then arc the two

sides of the Kabir coin: it has on one side the tragic face of character (dalitness) in Kabir, and at the other end the figure of the feisty charismatic indi

vidual that is also Kabir. The proliferation of Kabir legends and icons is a

feature of precisely those possibilities opened up for the individual in "hold

ing together" in one thought miracle and violence, stamping that thought

with the new "I" that will one day go on to lay claim to a daHt politics. that

will in turn claim Kabir as its new deity (bhagwan).

It should be immediately clear that the imprint of the individual is imposed

on the coexistence of miracle and violence: inasmuch they remain inas

similable to each other prior to this imprint, they help us imagine a form of

belonging together prior to the assimilative impulsc of the scnsuous, domin

ant religion of a hyper-rationalized Hinduism. This is why Kabir's ability

(derived from yogic retcntion) to "hold together" mechanically both miracleand violence has historic jinplications. AI the same time. it provides us with

some insight into precisely what transpires whcn l o w ~ e a s t e s , poor landless

peasants, and tribals move the onus of their own subalternity from one

religious community to another. One very concrete outcome of this is the

predicament of the convert who (as Gauri Viswanathan has shown) is caught

in the neutral ground between two possible allegiances; the pathos and

poignancy of the convert lies in the persistence of his or her subalternity

despite altered conditions. We made use of this idea of conversion when we

discussed the work of Dwivedi in Chapters 4 and 5. I have sought in this and

164 Prehistory o /histo rical religion

the previous chapter to locate Kabir at the cusp of the great process by which

mainstream religion assimilates marginal tradilions t o itself. Kabir's role as a

convert to Islam was central to our underst.anding of his anomalous position

in modern debates centered around the nation. But with the insight into

violence and miracle we have arrived finally in the realm of prehistory. This is

where we are compelled to apply ourselves to the origin of the new freedoms

laid claim to in contemporary political society. My basic point so far has been


world; conversely, Dnyaneswara may have been the paya (foundation) not just

for the Varkari tradition, but also for the idea of the turn to the divinity in

oneself that finds its fruition in Kabir. Instead of tracing these links by draw

ing ideas together in an indifferent juxtaposit ion, let us think historically and

try and imagine the miraculous force or "pull" that drew styles of thought

together like so many individual sites of magnetism. In Tukaram there is clear

evidence that inwardness does not refer to internal consciousness. For one



that contemporary daHt empowerment, in its attempt to shake off decades of

social and economic exploitation, continually falls back on an older insight

into the coming together of freedom and " u n ~ f r e e d o m . " In Kabir, this takes

the form of the coming together of miracle and violence. I am trying to argue

that though p r e s e n t ~ d a y dalit resistance is an attempt to shake off the history of violence and subjection, its older instincts lie not in a history of

"unfreedom" (for that would mean that there is no dalit history until there is

dalit empowerment) but in an insight into how "un-freedom" and freedom

come together in an instant as miracle and violence. DaHt resistance today

may involve violence in deeply disturbin g ways. Not long ago, daHt resistance

was about miracle; it was also ab out tenderness.

Such an unprecedented idea of divinity as Kabir's Ram. which "holds

together" violence and miracle and yet "holds on" to the possibility of mir

acle in God cannot but have found an echo elsewhere. The Indo-Islamic

millennium conceived of the telepathy of ideas in dream visions recounting

visitations by distant men of God, dreams that tended to shift the course of a

life dramatically as though by accident. compelling people to loro rivers, cleartheir way through jungles, take to the physical travails of the pilgrim's way

until they had found the source of the miracle, dedicated their lives to it.

woven around it whole prodigies of prayer. In much the same way we might

imagine some lorm of telepathy between Kabil' and Tukaram; the scribes who

put together these collections of poems were wont to imagine such a link.'

It was foreordained that the question of character should bring them close to

each other but the meeting of minds, if it ever took place, was nonetheless

momentous. Let us recall that Kabil" became a major source of inspiration for

subaltern groups over the centuries because he found an abstract Ram within

himself, a Ram t hat could hold together violence and miracle. His response to

his own find was to "hold on to" the idea of the divinity of Ram. We saw how

the forceof

this sudden clarity was something Kabir experienced in the loneliness of his character; this was in every sense an interiority, but one thai

should not be mistaken for inwardness, inner consciousness, spiritual insight

and so on: we have tried to describe its historical features under thc rubric of

"selfishness." Inwardness is really only a misnomer for the involution of

allegorical reference; this is the reason why yogic involution. with its grcat

images of stasis and death, has such markedly allcgorical features. Some idea

of this non-spiritual inwardness (antari) made its way down to Tukaram; the

conduit could have been the fourteenth-century poet NamdCV<1 (Callcwacrt

and Lath 1989), whose Hindi padas are marked by a turn toward thc inner

cannot "hold on" (dharne) to spiritual insight in the way that one holds on to

the miracle of inwardness (antan). "Spirituality" only ever retains the separ

ation between the mind thinking the insight and the insight itself.

Miracle: birth unto light in Tukararn

Now in Tukaram there is a marked insight into the temporal immediacy

of miracle; but unlike spiritual insight the latter requires that one employ

the entirety of one's being, not a mind indifferently separated from the object

to be thought, in sustaining a handle on the miraculous. There is a vivid

intuition of this in the paJa 111 of Tukaram's Abhangagatha.

Now have my eyes opened

Not to have realized this as yet

Is to lie in the depths of your mother

Like a rock in her womb

The human body is a reserveTo work away at the working through until salvifically worked out

To awaken to the vigil

The sants cross over

The boat is on the bank of the Chandrabhaga

Standing at Pundalika's door

Hands held at the waist

Standing, stooping and calling out

Tuka says., entirely for free

Fall at his feet or hug him

You get up, get raised up

Swiftly to the other shore.

Alan ughadin doleJari adyapi na kale

Tari matedye khole

Dagad ala porasi

Manusyadeha alsa nidha

Sadhili Ie sadhe siddha

Karuni prabodh

Sant par utarle

Nava chandrabhage tirin

166 Prehislory ofhis/o rien! reliKion

Uhhi PUllrialikace dwarin

Kara dharuniyan karin ..

Ubhaubhill palavi

Tuka manhefukasathin

Payin ghatli ya mi/hi

HolO ulthaullhi

L a ~ ' k a r i ca Ulara.

iI


fingers an equal lightness. Together fing.ers and waist produce a redoubled.

salvific lightness (siddha) in the holding on (dha/"uniya). This may provide

some insight into the next phrase, which is about the movement into cognizance (prabodha). We note the unprecedented "lightness" involved in holding

on, dharne, and we recognize the affinities of this light touch to sadha, pra

bodha, and to nidha. Conversely, nidha now appears to be a reservoir of traits..

marks of difference, that have been subjected to this light touch. Images of



(Tukaram 1973: 16)

Here, all of a sudden, is the event whereby one's eyes have opened (alan

ughadin dole). To not know the miracle when one sees it is to emerge stillborn

from the depths of a womb (dagad ala potasi). As opposed to this falseinwardness (khole) there is the interiority of the human body as a whole

(manushyadeha), which is a reservoir (nidha) of traits. Tukaram prepares

us for the miracle that is Vitthala, the deity standing on the banks of the

Chandrabhaga, at the door of his own beloved devotee Pundalika, waiting to

take people across in a boat. A simple but compelling idea of crossing the

river of life is implied here. But much more is at stake in Tukaram's use of

words. The posture ofVitthala is unique, for he stands with his arms akimbo;

more strictly, he holds (dharuniyan) his hands at his waist (kati) and stands

there calling out (palavl) to wayfarers to join him in the journey across the

river. If we wish to speak of the work of Vitthala we should look carefully at

the posture: what is involved is holding on to the body, calling out, pointing

out the right direction to the potentially wayward. More crucially one sees inhim a way of holding on to one's body that practically exemplifies "holding

on" to God. The Sanskrit root for the word "dl!ame" (holding on) is dhri.

And in the poem the line about human interiority understood as manushya

deha (the human body as a whole) shows the poet attempting a kind of rill' on

words ending with the "dh-" sound (manushyadeha aisa nidh, sadhili Ie sadhe

sidha; karuni prabodh, sallt par utarle).

Some crucial notions are re-marked in this way half way between language

and meaning. To begin with, the human body is described as an inexhaustible

reserve (nidha), but of what? The body asks to be touched lightly but in a very

specific manner: one touches I i g h t ~ v the light touch and leaves it n'er so l i g h l ~ l 'touched in its lighllless (sadhili te sadha siddha); in short. a touch that

embraces intimately. in an absolute proximity that is also an absolute distance. this preternatural. pre-phenomenal lightness. We should not hasten

to translate "sadl!" here as "to make perfect," enlighten, save. salvage, purify

or as effort, endeavor. resolute striving, for what is involved here is instead

tender. delicate, fragile, easily thrown by the weight of notions that imply a

too eager absolution. Now what is the touch that is being referred to? It could

only be the posture of Vitthala; there may be somc trace in this posture of a

folk hero who fell while protecting his village's cattle from thieves; but quile

significantly the hands that clasp his waist do not do so in a posture of

defiance. The fingers grasp the sides but lightly, and the body returns to the

purification, washing, cleansing come to mind but "lightening," we should

note, does not quite efface these traces. It would be too easy to call this a

kind of "enlightenment" that places the historical experience of character

(carirra) intellectively above and beyond any idea of difference. Oddly, despite

some minimal reference to "lighting up the dark" implicit in prabodha, theword that gives us our modern-day term for the Enlightenment in Marathi.

prabodhana, there is in "lightening" (sadh) nonetheless an insistence on the

miraculous slightness of touch, which itself occurs somewhere between intel

lection and tactility. Does this light touch preserve or efface these marks of

difference?

At the end of the process the sants ford the river of life (sal/ta para Ularfe).

In the final line, this is the experience that Tukaram seals with the phrase.

"Tukaram says" (tuka manhe): whether you fall at Vitthala's feet or embrace

him you gain (utara) the other shore; you gain it swiftly (/avkari ca) and for

free (fukasathin). One might imagine that reaching the othcr shore is by no

means a matter calling for arduous labor. Swift, free, light--there cannot be

anything more tender than this "holding on" (dharne) that enables thesants to cross over. Now the sants arc figures of the holy because they are

masters of this lightness. working with the allegorical-metaphorical

underpinnings of experience but not under the lure of aesthetic delight, or

for the sake of mastering the allegory in favor of the modern individual.

Unlike saints whose lives arc worth following as example. the sants are notmen and women of exemplary bearing; their lives have been anguished, even

sordid, full of travail; mocked at every step, they steal away from their homes

in the haze of the workaday afternoon to be alone, to be with their deity.

They are figures less of purity and wisdom than of destitution in times of

famine and pestilence. But what characterizes every sant is this lightness

(sadha). Kabir speaks of a "lightening" (sadh) of social differences. In describ

ing the modeof

the sant, Dnyaneswara gives us the immeasurably sensuousimage of the feet of a swan touching ever so briefly the surface of a lakebefore taking to the sky. Yet these are not just "images" that we can glean

from Kabir, Tukaram and Dnyaneswara, and then place next to the image

repertoire of Ram and Krishna in the historical religion that is yet to come.In their "lightness.." their tender grasp they precede a purely phenomeno

logical access to the image, for such an access is nonetheless theoretical; there

is in this tenderness something that cannot be assimilated to the visual field

where we access our gods.

Lightness (sadh) is then neither a "metaphor" for light nor a "concept"

168 Prehistory ofhistorkal religion

generative of a sensuous access to the deity. It nonetheless comprehends

something, if only in an uncempromisingly tender hold, in an apprehension

that is never just graspingly prehensile. There is an ever so slight difference

between grasping and holding; both involve being aware of and laying claim

to the world around us actively and theoretically, but in holding there is a

willingness, a "counter-will" so to speak, to let the held thing (whether it is

god or eternity) resist our hold, if ever ::;0 lightly. There is in that minimal

1Miracle and violence 169

bridging miracle and violence. The tendency of the folk to make much of the

solace one gleans from rivers and ponds is not a figment of its yen for thc

"sacred." Nor arc these really "temples" where the gods have fled, They are

regions of the earth where the gods returned to their unapproachable realm

before man brought them down; they are the anvils where the last fateful tie

was struck between the holy and the huma n, The folk is concerned with how

to preside over the calm center within which the tie between gods and men



resistance of this thing to our hold the merest possibility, but a crucial and

indispensable one, that our theoretical grasp of the world may experience a

temporary reversal, reminding us however uncomfortably of a memory we

have left behind in the zeal to historicize our present and make sense of it.

There may be in this merest reversal of a reversal a new way of "returning" toour being at the end, when the skctch of our lives has come full circle in the

certainty, which is also the uncertainty of death. I spoke of the temporal

indeterminacy that accompanies the nas of sanka, the negation of skepticism.

There I wanted to ensure that we recognize Kabir as breaking not from the

so-called ignorance and superstition of the mainstream tradition; I wanted us

to sec Kabir as departin g from the tradition in its greatest rigor, at the height

of its philosophical astutcness. I described those heights as "skepticism."

When Kabir broke from the tradi tion in its moment of skepticism (not merely

its moment of credulity or prejudice), he laid claim to those philosophical

heights, only to break away from them, only to negate them. The manner

in which Tukar am broke from the tradition is somewhat ditTerenL In th e poem

above there was clearly a sense that one 's eyes had opened at some moment inthe present; this moment coincided, one would imagine, with the vision of

the humanized divinity (daivat), Vitthala, to whom we will return in Chapter 9.

ft is Tukaram who teaches us how to distinguish the dail'al from the deity.

The divinity of the folk

Between the "kahat kabil''' (says Kabir) of the Kabir corpus and the "tuka

manhe" (Tukaram says) of the Tukaram corpus as though in a forge, the

millennial impetus of the act of sealing violence in its coexistence with mir

acle has continued to exercise its sway. This is the tradition of lightness,

tenderness, care which the dalil tradition gave to the world. That tradition

perhaps reaches out to something older. We could well wonder with Jan

Gonda (1970) and after him rricdhc lm Hardy if this coming together, in one

divine name, of miracle and violence has its origins in Vedic and Upanisadic

thinking; it is a tribute to their rigor that they did not seck these antecedents

from out of a trifling curiosity about the birth in lndic antiquity of the

humanized Vishnu or Shiva. Instead they make it possible for us to speculate

further along these lines. Instead of serving as an anthropomorphic, animist

prelude to genuinely conceptual thought, mythic gods may well inhabit the

cusp of a transition from the epiphany of God in man (which gave rise to

the speculative impetus of those early texts) to the imprint of man in God,

endures, before it becomes soulful, inward, devotional and affirms historical

religion. This is why tradition has it that Khiluba, the Dhangar (shepherd)

devotee of Vitthala and Biroba, laid out a blanket on the surface of the river

Chandrabhaga and then, surrounded by his four devotees, "sat in the middle."

He laid claim to this middle point, an unlocatable kho/'a prior to the spatialand temporal certainties of sensuous religion. This place in the gathering

currents was where he became the emhlem of the striving, living devotee prior

to the devotee who wills a deity into being. Having done so, he gave to the

Koli fisherfolk a new way of' orienting themsclves in the world. lie declared:

"my right (man)," and by this token the right of the lowly Ko1is to be taken

across this river for free for their annual pilgrimage,

witl last as long as the sun and the moon rise in the cast and set in the

west. My right should last as long as the Na rbad a and the othe r rivers

take their normal course and flow from above to below. My right should

last as long as the Raval mountain stays in its place, When the moon and

the sun rise in the west and set in the east, then my right should come toan end. When the Narbada and the other rivers flow backward, then my

right should come to an end. When the Raval mountain starts moving,

then should my right come to an end.

(Sontheimer 1989: 75)

This is why we would have to reverse the notion of the tragic inherited

from German Romanticism between H61derlin and Heidegger that has long

obscured this tie. For the future of historical man was thought to be of a

tragic cast lending itself with terrible consequences to the worship of the

sacred home from which the gods have fled, inaugurating a nationalism of the

volk, but his past may well lie in an older "look" coming from on high that

pierced through his tragic silence. The imprint of human command on the

changeability of the world is indeed ancient (we can sec traces of our will

to representation in a text as old as the Gita), but the holding together of

violence and miracle is primordial and perhaps older, as old as what Eliade,

Padoux and Lorenzen call "tantra." coinciding with the retreat of divinity

into the past.

It is no doubt true that miracles have a predictive value. So that we can well

see how the miraculous "lightness" (sadh) of the sanl helps usher in all that is

compelling in the sensuous reach of historical religion, Yet in contrast to its

value as an indication of the triumphal future, there is also in miracle a gothi

•

170 Prehistory o f h i ~ · t o r i c a l religion

(narrative) that speaks of what was already there in the past, which was the

living, striving devotee prior, to historical religion. The prayer of the sanl

reaches backward into the past in this specific sense, making that sant an

empirical historiographer of sorts, transcriber of an ancient and self-present

discovery. The dali t Kabir who detccts in his character (carilra) by means of

the abstract Ram the mingled currents of violellce and miracle, is able to"hold on" to this recognition, savor its sap (ras), reli.eve its ardor with the

9 Deity and daivat

The antiquity of light inTukaram



lightness of his touch. Miracle enables him to draw a cordon around this

violence. He does not hold it in reserve, to be deployed on the eve of some

future calamity afflicting our social bond. Instead, he is able to "lighten" its

effects by returning his being toward an older epiphany of the face of God, to

a miraculous birth before the runaround of birth and death. Then, light ofstep, he ventures out to embrace the world (karat vicara). Kahir was, as we saw, the sage who recorded the happening of an ancient

event. This was the advent of the abstract Ram. The event denoted the

unprecedented coming together of faith and knowledge, God and death-in

the terms I have been using to denote these irreconcilable entities, he experi

enced the unique time of "miracle and violence." The Varkari tradition of

Western India commemorates ano ther advent: this is the event of the coming

of Vitthala prior to his installation as Vitthala-Krishna at Pandharpur. This

tradition produced four outstanding saint-poets who radically altered the

scope of the Mar athi language. These were Dnyaneswara, Namdeva, Eknath,

and Tukaram. The tradition thought of Kabir as the "fifth sant." This is why

it was possible for me to argue that Kabir, Tukaram and Dnyaneswara are in

the neighborhood of each other. They were all masters of daHt hearsay. This

may not make much sense chronologically, but the tradit ion nonetheless sees

them as allied. Tukar am represents the culmination of this line of daHt radicalism. He was the first to see the face of Vitthala in abstraction from its

Vaishnava trappings. With him the world-altering destiny of Varkari poetry

came to an end. It is fitting then that this b ook should conclude its discussion

of the idea of divinity in Dnyaneswara and Kabir with an analysis of the face

of Vitthala in Tukaram. If Kabir's work is about the rang (color) that marks

the person uniquely addressed by God (an abstract Ram that calls for tender

ness), Tukaram's oeuvre is about the luminosity ofVitthala's face. It is about

the comportment that can see in color the origins of light. It is also apt that

this book, which began with a critique of Hindi modernity, should end with a

return to the antiquity of light. Our task is greatly aide d here by the visionary

example of 1. A. B. van Bunenen.Vitthala was for Tukaram and the Varkaris their daivat. What is the dis

tinction between daivat and deity? I will argue in this chapter that the daivat

refers us to the primordial tie with "the folk," Jok. Now the 10k in Marathi has

traditionally referred to the historical experience of the indigenous peoples of

the Deccan; it refers to their being "already-there" but in ways that we will

have to investigate further. By emphasizing sources of moral authority out

side the human but not necessarily in God the folk is at once more and

less than religion. In thc work of the philosopher Dinkar Keshav Bcdckar

172 Prehistory ofhistorical religion(1910-73; see 1977a, 1977b), the dharmapraya ("pre-dharmic"; lit. "para

dharmic") tradition of the folk was often counterposed to a dominantreligious (dharmic) tradition. Moreover, Bedekar's notion of the dharm

apraya has had a very productive resonance in the work of the foremost

contemporary Marathi historian of the folk, Ramchandra Chintaman Dhere

(b. 1930; see Dhere 1998). ReHe{;ting their common debt to the revisionistMarxist, D. D. Kosambi, the corpus of writings on religion associated with

Bedekar and Dhere does not affirm the nationalis t reading of Maharashtrian

1Deityanddaiva/

173

tradition. Crucially, this provides us with an entirely new way of reading the

work of the poets of the Varkari tradition such as Dnyaneswara, Namdeva,

Eknath and Tukaram who wrote between the thil1eenth and the seventeenth

centuries. For bhakti sahitya (literature) can now be seen to have derived its

distinct idiom of literary nuance and social critique from the confluence of

the folk and the dominant in popular traditions--not merely from the indi

vidual seal (mudrika) of poetic genius. The no tion of a samanl'aya t."ln then be

used as a literary-critical tool, to be deployed heuristically as an index or the



cultural history indebted to Bal Gangadhar Tilak and V. K. Rajwade. From

our point of view the centrality of the gesture by which the folk returns to its

own prehistory finds its most fruitful elaboration in Marathi debates on the

problem of deification (daivalikarana).In Dhere's work taken as a whole the question of the prehistory of the 10k.

the enduring fascination with 10k sahifya and 10k parampara (folk literature

and tradition) remains a guiding motive just as it was for Dhere's major

European interlocutors, Gunther- Dietz Sontheimer (1998) and Guy De1eury

(1992). It was their work in the 1960$ and 1970$ that had first established the

case for the Deccan as the historic scene of a gradual Vaishnavbltion of

folk idioms. Between Deleury, who wrote an early inOuential work on the cult

of Vitthala at Pandharpur and Sontheimer, who underscored in a lifelong

ethnographic endeavor the pastoralist origins of the deity, Khandoba. the

tendency was to write the cultural history of Maharashtra in terms of

a transition from the traditions of community among folk peoples to the

dominant cultic emphasis on one "synthetic" deity implicit in mainstream

Maharashtrian bhakti. Both historians gave us a picture of Marathi culture

as an irreversible movement from morality-based customs to religion-based

institutions. Despite their vastly sympathetic understanding of the folk, they

were unable to see the practical ethical reflexes of folk peoples as interacting

with (not just being superseded by) domin ant idioms of Hindu practice.

For Dhere too, it is finally in the traditions of the 10k that mainstream

bhakti finds its basic vocation and original provenance. His work, while in

explicit dialogue with these ethnographers, differs from them in that his

insistence is on the modernity of he folk. In Sri Vitthala: Eka Mahasamanvaya

(1984), his now classic work on the folk origins of the Vitthala of Pandharpur,

Dhere attempts to highlight the simultaneity of folk elements in the Vitthala

Varkari tradition. His aim is not merely to point to the "anteriority" of the

10k-Leo in arguing that Vitthala is a latter-day Vaishnavized form of a dcitybeloved to the Dhangar pastoralists-···but to insist that folk traditions remain

defiantly contemporary. To this end his emphasis is on an idea of samanvaya

less as a syncretic assimilation than what we can describe, after Raymond

Williams (1977: 121-,7) as a tripartite "con-figuration" of dominant, vanish

ing or residual and still emergent forms of culture. From this perspective,

Dhere sees the folk and the dominant idioms of Hindu religiosity at Pand

harpur as both coming together and often intransigently remaining separate

within the cultural present---which is also the modernity--of the Vitthala

shifting social and rhetorical "address" of bhakti poetry.

Dhere's work moreover has the singular merit of reminding LIS that Makti

poets such as Tukaram, though non-Brahmin by caste, often adopted the

"posture" of a dalit. This establishes the case for a relation not just betweenfolk traditions and the literature of bhakti. but also between Makli and the

question of a dalit literature. It is this relation between the folk. bhakti and

dalit tradilions---each singular and irreducible to the other--that gives us a

picture of the vernacular bases of Marathi modernity. Now it is no doubttrue that dalits would arguably be uncomt<.lftable with Dherc's notion or a

mahasamanvaya of folk, bhakti and dalit streams in Maharashtra. Despite

Dhere's insistence on samallvaya not as an indifferent assimilation of diverse

currents but as a particularized "configuration," they would be quite justified

in discerning in such an ecumenieism the traces or a kind of benevolent

crypto-brahmanism. At the same time there can be no question that the

relation between dalit thinking and the '0 k is at the heart of the issue. It

would seem as though the possibility for a dalil re{;onceptualization of the

idea of subalternity lies not inside but outside dalit experience itselr, in the

experience or the 10k. Clearly there is more to the 10k than Dhere's idea of a

Maharashtrian mahasamanvaya would lead us to believe. In what particular

domain of Maharashtrian life would one be able 10 detect the features of a

pe{;uliariy dalit practical reason, but one that is determinedly attuned to the

question of the folk (10k)?

I will argue that it is the tradition of hearsay implicit in the poetry of the

Varkaris which gives us some access to this alternative mode of daHt think

ing. The caste subalternity of some of these poets is not the sole reason for

this. A more crucial fact is the mode of Varkari enunciation, which at every

step mimes a possible dalit conceptuality. I want to insist that this mode of

enunciation is one that consistently indicates the trace of the 10k; I will

go so far as to say that the very possibility of the mystic speech of theVarkaris is guaran teed by the recognition of this t r a c e - t h i ~ ' is what it means

to be accountable to the 10k in its disappearance. The stance or ubha-ness of

Vitthala is not merely the theoretical-practical gesture of "action" that seeks

to bring the world securely within the will of the devotee; Tukaralll and the

poets before him inaugura te a radically new notion of the stance--the stance

is now grounded in the "feet" (paya) ofVitthal a that are the refuge (thdVa) of

the devotee. The latter as the "basis" ofViUhala's "stance" do not refer to the

"thesis," to the Sanskrit root, stha implicit in the idea of the sfhifapradnya

174 PrehislOl:V o/historical religion

(reclitudinal) subject as devotee; the feet of Vitthala as a refuge refer to the

10k because they are a ground without ground, a trace of a stance that will

have been. The feet of Vitthala, planted for "some 28 epochs (yuga)" on the

brick in Pandharpur allude to the ab-origin of the 10k. They do not represent

as truth or establish as thesis. The pull of the poetry of hearsay to these feet

implies a break with the metaphysics of karma. It is a question of attending

to the "trace" of the 10k, the trace that is the 10k. In attending to this trace, we

see the possibility of a new humanism signifying an accountability toward

iOeilyandd{Jil'{J1 175

through in every element of his attire (Tulsi band, Makar earrings, Pitambar

yellow of silk, Kaustubh gem) as it is lovingly caressed in each line of this

poem by Tukaram, the second abhanga of the Gatha:

The beauty of that gaze, the stance (uMe] on the brick

Hands held at the waist.

On his neck a Tulsi band, yellow orthc silk around his middle

Everlasting pull [al'ad] or that tigure [rupal



the {ok.

The work of the last major Varkari poet Tukaram is an exemplary instance

of both this miming of a future dalil practical reason and this "vigilance"

over the trace of the10k.

Tukaram's exemplary st.1.tus can also be gleanedfrom the growing sheaf of recent writings that attend to his work and to his

place in Marathi cultural history. In what follows I will juxtaposc Dhere's

work with that of the two most important recent studies ofTukaram, those

of Dilip Chitre (1990) and Sadanand More (2001). It is worth pointing out

that what unites Dhere, Chitre and More is their fascination with the Varkari

tradition as a whole, and in particular with the possible origins in the {ok of

the chief deity of that tradition, viz, ViUhala. But before entering into thi s set

of writings, let us ascertain the mode of hearsay implicit in the Varkari tradi

tion as a whole. Tukaram, as we have mentioned above, was not strictly

speaking a datit; his occupation was that of a small farmer or kunbi, one who

sometimes described himself as a shudra. The fact that Tukaram was a kllnbi,

a non-Brahmin, is a matter of enormous significance if one bears in mind the

history of the non-Brahmin movement in Maharashtra from Jotiba IlhuJe to

VithaI Ramji Shinde--it was the non-Brahmin movement originating from a

critique of the productive relations stemming r.·om the inequalities of the

agrarian (shetkan) world that lirst sought to unite shudras and atishudras (or

dalits) within one common front (see G. P. Deshpande 2002: 1- 21). Reading

Tukaram as a "dalil" implicitly assumes that the larger focus of dalil mobili

zation ought to be not just the mobilization of untouchable communities but

also other non-Brahmin groups situated at a "higher" level in the structure of

varna-related violence. In the reading of Tukaram olfered here, we follow

Vitthala Ramji Shinde in his epoch-making essay "Bhagwat dharmaca vikas"

in seeking to imagine datit thinking as one that presents the possibility of

inaugurating a new Bhagwat Dharma (Shinde 1963: 1,-62). Such a Bhagwat

Dharma in daHt thinking does not refer us to a new religion or creed but to adalit "practical reason" that is, in a sense, still to come.

Indigeneity: the stance on the brick

A host of different currents come together in this grand conliguration, but we

should recall that the impetus is always the raising up of deities into Krishna

or higher Vaishnavism. The icon of Vitthala itself is shot through with a

profoundly moving and ardently Vaishnava mode of address, and this comcs

Sheen of pendant Makar-fish on his cars

Gem of Kaustubh athwart his neck.

Tuka says, thus is my comfort entire

Thus willi gaze longingly [al'adinen] at his visage incandescent[srimukha].

Sundara te dhyane ubhe vi/evari

Kara katal'ari lhel'uniyan

Tulsihara gala/ase pitambar

Avade nirantara len ci rupa

Makarkundalen tafapli sravanin

Kanthin kaustubhmani I'irajil

Tuka manhe ma)hen hen ci sarva suklw

Pahina srimuk h(/ Ql'adinen.

(TukarambaI'UfU'WI A bhanga nci Gal ha, 1973: I)

As More reminds us, this poem figures at the start of the Varkari's dailyround of prayer (nityapath) in praise of the aUributes of Vitthala-Krishna.

The opening line is particularly significant because it brings us directly to the

question at hand, which is to say: who or what is it that stands on this brick

and generates in the dhyana of those who gat.e upon it the idea or the thought

of the sundara? What it is, this installed Vitlhala, is a being defined by a

certain primordial rectitude, an ubha-ness as it were, whose very being-there is

the unprecedented gift to which the poet offers the counter-gift of hearsay.

The ubha Vitthala is a call for speech; but the poet's speech necessarily falls

short of that originary source of speech, Vitthala himself. If Vitthala refers us

to the eternal present of a having found (God), it is also true that this is a

having-found that asks to be negated. canceled, betrayed, denied in the lan

guage of the poet t hat seeks to adequate it, for that language already accessesiconicity, historical religion, the vast edifice of the sensuous in dominant

Krishna-worship. What is crucial is this necessary betrayal. In stricter terms,

we could say: Varkari dharma is turned toward he.:'tfsay (and turned away, if

only momentarily, from the mains tream Vaishnav dharma) because it yearns

to ask after what has been said (in hearsay) of the having-found (the miracle)

of what was already there (the divinity of the folk). The Vitthala standing on

the brick refers us to the irreeuperable distance between miracle, the height

and uprightness from which the silent Vitthala asks to be responded to, and

176 Prehistory o/histori cal religion

hearsay, which is the response of the poet. Between the miracle and hearsay,

saying and said, there is an..impossible ncgative moment, one that does not

foreclose but in fact welcomes the hyperbolic praise, the joyful prayer of

the poet.

Now the ubha Vitthala is in many respects a classical theme in Marathi

thought. It is worth recalling here that the essayist Durga Bhagwat was the

source of some of the most influential formulations with regard to the folk:

her essay "Pandharica Vitthoba" (1969) in Pais was the point of departure

Deity and daivat 177

of the dhangar as that which imprints the essence of individuality (the essence

of spirit. soul. soulfulness) on the body of Vitthala; in short, the dhangar

helps make the daivat Vitthala a person. We can imagine that what BMlgwat

had experienced in the shrine, the deul of Pandharpur itself had been the

stark materiality of Vitthala, the untested salvific powers of which her family

had been bereft of for three generations due to an ancestral vow. Now all of a

sudden in this dhangar the startling iconicity of Vitthala himself comes to

lore. an iconieity steeped in meaning, teeming with references to the pillar



both for Sontheimer and for Dhcre. Here is a passage that comes toward its

end (Bhagwat 1999 [1970J: 32-43):

We arrived at the limits of the village. A swarthy adult shepherd, his dovidraped over his forchead, was headed toward the village. With him were

his four goats. His color was that of black stone: jet black . . . . His l e g ~were tbick. like those of a pillar, but alive [jeevanta]. Wherever they

stood. they would in all likelihood have taken a stand [TOvali/a]. andwhere they took that stand, they would take root [rujatila]. The patently

humanized gaze [manavi dhyana] of the Vitthala or the Brick was bodied

forth, moving through the world [aihikatuna calla hO/a]. Until then I

could not fathom why Tukaram had descrihed this singularly misshapen

idol in such terms as "the beauty oflhal gaze" [slindara Ie dhyanaJ but J

now began to grasp why [um«;a padle1. For what is vital is what is spon

taneous. and what is spontaneous is truly beautiful: to bring out that

beauty what is needed is a simple and unblemished poetic [mind] such asTukaram's. [10 asa ki sajiva teea svabhavika aste and svabhavika few

khare sundara asle ani te sallndarya umagayala Tuka ramasarkheca sadhe

ani nishpapa kavima na lagta.] . . . The black rock holding dominion over

the black soil had suddenly come alive. It had become an icon of man

[manavamurlill

The anecdote accompanying this account of a momentous pilgrimage is

worth telling again. Before the Vitthala of Pandharpur himself Bhagwat had

felt numb; the surge (umala) of emotions devotees tend to feel on such occa

sions completely escaped her. In this formless (nirakara) state of mind, she

could feel neither sadness nor joy. What was needed was a principlc of vitality

that would bring this moribund Vitthala back to lifc. Everything changed

with the encounter with the returning dhangar-shepherd on the banks of

the Chandrabhaga, who then became for her the very instance of vitality,

spontaneity and beauty (sajivpana, svabhavikpana, sallndarya). The sheer

imperturbable stolidity of the shepherd's legs made them look as though they

had always stood firm and planted themselves in the soil. And for this reason,

the shepherd helped stamp Vitthala himself with the imprint of humanness.

In short, what the shepherd made possible is for Vitthala to become "iconic."

Iconic, that is to say, of a primitive tie between the folk and the mainstream.

Putting this in strictly personological terms, Bhagwat saw the living iconicity

that affords pais, a kind of expansive solace, to the river of sorrow (dukha

kalindl), to the black soil of the Deccan-it is in the dhangar that, in sum, the

fundamental autochthony of the great icon of Vitthala as manavamurti

comes to life. What is murta (manifest) in the murti (the icon that mimes thehistory of this manifestation) is autochthony understood as an emergence

from out of the soil, which is the history of a vanished indigeneity. But this

icon of the black soil, stamped with the impress of an even more original, an

ab-original autochthony nonetheless restores to its vital presence the original

family deity ( k u l a ~ d a i v a l ) of Bhagwat herself: for this is how the essay ends:

"U was as though a new dawn had cast its glow on the inner tie between the

Vitthoba ofPandharpur and my ancestors" (Pandharicya vitthobaca va majhe

pidhyance anlarika n ate navyane ujalle). And that inner tie (nate) between kula

and daival, woven in the likeness of man, anthropomorphizes, indeed autoch

thonizes the block of stone that is Vitthala.Yet, in another sense the search for the prehistory of the popular as the

basis for the elite is very much part of Bhagwat's project; at stake is lessMarathi nationalism than the quest for an archeology of belief, one that is

disposed toward greater and greater belonging, rootedness. staying-in-place,

going to so far as to find that rootedness in the incessantly peripatetic figure

of the dhangar. Hers is a quest lor the originary source of autochthony in

Maharashtra. the single instance of pure. specular self-cognition whereby

Maharashtr a recognizes itself in itself in the face of the mainstream Vitthala

which is at the same time the face of the dhangar, It is the mysterious coeval

ness (an " a t - t h e - s a m e ~ t i m e - n e s s , " so to speak) of the dhangar that guarantees

the act of inscription whereby Vitthala becomes the source for Bhagwat for

what can be called the ab-origin of the nation, a resting-spot or pais where the

ceaselessly turning maelstrom of Maharasthra's various currents appears to

come to rest: at this originary point the icon of Vitthala appears to offer an

absolutely original belong-fogether of folk and elite, personal and familiaL

Man and world

If we turn at this point to More and Chitre. we find that neither of them is

invested in the aulochthony of the iconic Vitthala. More's project in his

Tukaram Darshan is to provide less a history of Vitthala than of what it is

like to live a lije before Vitthala. For this living of a life befilre Vitthala is

precisely what suggests the space of prayer from which emerges the miracle of

178 Prehi.HOr.1' ofllis/ori("o/ religion

having-ti)und (God) in Tukaram. More reminds us that this living of a life

before Vitthala, in the proximity of the gift of Vitthala's unutterable, improb

able being-there. suggests morc than a hio-graphy (the writing of one's s elf as

another) or hagio-graphy (a writing of the holy) of Tukaram. It is also about

the caste subalternity of Tukaram, who was as we have noted before not a

daHt but a kUl/bi, and often described himself as a shudra. For that life lived

before Vitthala was lived with others, Tukaram's wife, brothers. kinsfolk,

admirers, tollowers, detractors in his own time, followed by those who came

1Deity a nd daiva/ 179

gives us a sensc of the character or "personality" of Tukaram in political

society; it is Chitre who helps insert the icon ofTukaram into the "individual

ity" of political society, It would seem as though More and Chitre supple

ment each ()ther (fill in and exceed the gaps in each other's thinking) and

provide us with a composite Tukaram, a man-of-the-world hefore Vitthala in

Chitre's existential-humanist account, a man-in-the-world-with-others before

Vitthala in More's account ofTukaram from within the Varkali sampradaya.

In short, if Chitre gives us a sense of the great trauma underlying the relation



later and were touched by Tukaram, such as the shaira poets of the Peshwa

period. converts to Christianity such as Reverend Tilak, and much laler a

whole range of nationalist scholars and thinkers from Bh andar kar to Vitthala

Ramji Shinde, and down to More himself as a latter-day descendent (vanshaja) of Tukaram. Why is the life of Tukaram also at the same time the

history of Maharashtra'l More would argue that Tukaram's life is of epochal

significance precisely because it was a life defined in a fundamental being

with-others. This being-with-others generated a prodigy of enormolls power

and significance, which is to say, not just the prodigy that is Tukaram's three

thousand or so abhangas but also the scores or abhangas written by members

of his family. More's Tukaram Darshan is then a history of the work of

miracle in the being-together-before-Vitthala of the Varkari sampradaya

itself Sampradaya ought to be under stood not as a "sect," a disciplinary

shibboleth betraying the Weberian heritage of the history of religions.

Instead sampradaya, laken etymologically as sam-pradatla, should be seen a:.

the "gift of speech, or more stlictly the 'pmdana' (from the root pra) of thegathering-together (from the prefix sam) ofspcech as ~ ' a c . " And inasmuch as

this being-together-before-Vitthala is for More the very instance of Marathi

modernity, we can go so far as to say that the Varkari-sampradaya gives

us access to a community of lives lived before Vitthala, a community that

was, that is, and that in some futuraL utopian sense, is also a community t(J

c(Jme. Which is why the Bhagwat Dharma of the Varkaris in More's account

is less that of the samprada.va as s('c/ than of the singular beings to whom

God comes in the anonymity of the Vaishnav address, and who are then

rendered bare and frail as so many flesh and blood devotees exposed in a

tenderness prior to religion. Unlike Chitre, whose intellectual debts lie in the

civil rights movements of the 1960s, More's more typically contemporary

attention to issues of community emanates from his exhaustive analyses of

caste subalternity and dalit community in Marathi life over the last two

centuries.

In sum, More's Tukaram [)arshan is about being before Vitthala as a com

munity of singular beings all comported differently, Only Tukaram can be

Tukaram, just as Tukaram cannot speak for his brother Kanhoba. Now

More's own conviction with regard to Tukaram's uniqueness in this sense

bears obvious debts to Chitre's portrayal in his Punha Tukaram of Tukaram

as the very instance or modern Maharashtrian man in his existentially

fraught essence; much in the manner of Dwivedi's Kabir, it is Cititre who

between man and the world with Villhala as the transcendental guarantee

of this bond, More gives us an account of the relation between the world and

Vitthala where man in community speaks, writes, sings, dances, performs

the ceaseless and endlessly nuanccd task of dhyana, of praise from withinthe space (the being-together) of prayer. Where Chitre gives us a sketch

of Tukaram in the historical religion of Vaishnaivism, More gives us a sense

of what it means to inhabit historical religion from the perspective of the

traditions of dali! hearsay.

Man and the World (manus and prapanca) in Chitre, the World itself and

God (prapt/Ilea and daivat) in More: it is to Dherc that we must turn to gel

a sense of that most deeply unsettling of relations, that of Man before

God (i.e. manus and dail'al). (--or the Vitthala of Dhere's SriVilthala: b'ka

Mahasamalll'a.1'a is not the face-to-face Vitthala of either Chitre or More but

is the being greater than me who is both more and less than god, and more

and less than man. Dhere's Vitthala is less the Vitthala of sundara te dhyana.

in which it is nonetheless invested. than the Vitthala standing on the brick(ubhe vi/evart). It is Dhere who asks the question of the relation between man

and God, the third question as it were, on the far side of the existential

relation between man and the world (as in Chitre), and the communitarian

relation between man and man mediated via God (as in More). Just as it is in

SriVitlhala: Eka MahasamQnvaya that we come to terms with a Vitthala

whose ubha-ness, whose stature is greater than mine, so that I am moved to

ask the question: who is this Vitthala who stan ds before me. and what does he

demand of me? How can I stand before him, stand before his uprightness,

counterpose my will to erect and install my deity to his wilL without establish

ing, installing, arrogating to myself the fundamental cause (the "that he is

there") of his being-as-Vitthala. For this is a Vitthala who does not stand

therefor me. Instead, it is [ who stand here at this time, in this place fo r him. It

is not my being cast astra/in the world. being pitched into it amon g others -

the theme of existential and communitarian trauma in Chitre and More

that is at stake here. It is the fact that I can no longer stamp this daivata with

the imprint of humanness; the fact that I cannot anthropomorphize him; the

fact that I cannot turn him into an icon of autochthony. Dhere's Vitthala is

relentlessly aniconic, scrupulously suhhuman, operating at the level not of the

individual but that of the singular being before God.


The prefiguration (mularupa) of miracle

This insight tinds its most c';mpelling elaboration in the" Vira·gala" or

"Hero-Stones" chapter of Dhere's book. Clearly, the impor t of this chapter is

to prove the failure of the attempt by Reverend Deleury and the philolo-

gist Shankar Gopal Thlpule to tracc Vitthala's pose (his arms akimbo) to

village memorials c ommemorating the heroic death of local cattle-protectors.

Dhere argues that there is in the final instance no such link between folk hero

1!

Deityanddail'at 181

Clearly, what has happened in the case of the hero-stone is that a dail'atika

rana has not taken place. There is in the end. or should we say at the origin or

mula, no primordial link between the culture of he folk and the unprecedented

configuration (mahasamanvaya) of traditions Dhere associates with Vitthala.

Vitthala may well have arrived on the threshold of history as Mah arashtra's

folk deity (lok-daivtll), but the fael remains that the daivG.tikarana of folk

as 10k would appear to be inconclusive. irreducible, unvenfiab1e. Where m the

final analysis is that precious tie with the auto chth onou s that would give this



cultures and Vitthala. We should remember that such a connection would

have given Deleury and Tulpule and by the same token ourselves the where

withal to establish the fundamental iconicity of Vitthala, drawing him in

much the same way as does Durga Bhagwat to the popular tradition asa whole. The tie with the hero figured in a hero-stone would have lent to

Vitthala the humanized figure (or the figural humanity) needed to establish

him as a daivat in both history and prehistory. For unlike a god or deva, a

doivala is the materiality of an icon stamped with the impress of the human

(manvikarana). The historical destiny of such an icon rests on its links with

earlier forms of worship, as well as to the perpetually assimilative, which is to

say the relentlessly anthropomorphic movement of Indo-Islamic allegory. A

d e ~ ' a (god) is for this reason not the same thing as a daivat.

Dhere is himself committed to the raising up of Vitthala toward Krishna;

this commitment is much in evidence in SriVitthala: Eka Mahasamanvaya, in

which he attempts to write a history of Vitthala from within the domain of

the popul ar itself, and not from some neutral, disinterested standpoint. But it

is here in the "Hero-stones" chapter (" Vitthala ani Virgala") that he provides

us, perhaps despite himself, with an important insight into what separates

definitively the daivar from deity, and daivatikarana from deification or

embodiment. He argues that if there is really no tie between the hero-stone

and Viuhala. we cannot establish that an original daivafikarana will have

taken place at all. But what if, we may ask, daivatikarana in itself is always

necessarily a partial failure?

When a particular dah'ata attains the highest standing [uchchatama pra

fishtha], then ifits ur-figure [mularupal is kept in reserve [tikuna raMIe] in

the space set aside to sit in worship [upasanakaksha] before it, every effort

tends to be made to give it a semiotic precedence fpratikatmaka agra

mana] by those who can master the handiwork [dakshata) to raise lip thegod [unnayana sadhnaryana kadu naj. If the hero-stone found opposite

the main do or were the original Vitthala then almo st certainly within the

raised up [llf/nata] Vitthala's order of worship [upasanavyavastheta], it

would have received its semiotic precedence and some story [ka/hal clari

lying that precedence [mana] would have been included [samavishta] with

some shrewdness [caturya] in the Pandllrangamahatmya [the miraculous

history of the deily, PandurangNitthala].

(Dherc 1984: 179-80)

mahasamanl'aya its fundamental connection with the lolk? For there has been

no "semiotic precedence" that would bestow an inexhaustible iconicity on t o

Vitthala, making him the basis of Marathi culture as that culture's m a ~ t e ricon: for something remained prior to this priority, as though the allegoncalhad retained its anteriority to the symbolic. Yet some such connection with

the lolk is nonetheless hinted at in the text of Dhere's characterization of

daivalikarana itself. The key word is UfJn(lyana. especially here in the sentence

that describes the agents of dail'atikarana: "those who can master (sadhne)

the handiwork (dakshafa) to raise up the god (Uflnayana)." Now who are

these agents of daivatikarana but we ourselves as those who will the deity into

being, who set to work the sadh (efTect) in the sadhne (effecting), who can

master the will to bring deities into being? What else is dakshata if not a

reference to the mastering of allegory in the in lerests of system? It is dakshata

after all. that through handiwork brings into being the worlds in which deities

are deified an<.l made handy, in which gods are thrown together with all

the clutterand

designof

a world always ready athand

in command and will.We are the unnaVlIna sad/mare, we who arrogate to ourselves the right to turn

this Vitthala s t ~ n d i n g on a brick into our peTsonalized daivat, we as beings

alone in the world (Chitre), we as beings who live with others in the world

(More). Yel the Word of Vitthala as it echoes in the dhyana of Tukaram is

that of an impersonal, aniconic god, one in whom this unnayana or "uplift

ment" into the iconic has failed, remained incomplete. What then of thc

precious trace of the folk? Is there something more originary (mula) than

the ur-lorm (mularupa) of Vitthala, a mlilarupa of a mularupa, ur-Iorm of an

ur-form?

Trans-figuration, or mahasamanl'Uya

The c1uc 10 the unveritiable tt'ace of the lolk in the movement of Maharash

Irian conllguralion (mahliSainam'l1.va) can be detected in the idiom of Dhere's

Marathi itself: And here if we look closely at the word "unnayana" we see in

its prefix "lid" two somewhat opposed valences: a first movement u P : , ~ r d s ,upon or above, and a second movement "implying separation and diSJunc-

tion" (Monier-Williams 1981: 46) and therefore a turn away from or apart. At

once a dialectical and a diaretical impulse, "ud" is doubly marked as a

transcending-discriminating tcndency in history. With the verbal root "nr' we

encounter a third valence, which is that of an affirmative, "to lead," almost as


though "ullflayano" implied that "one cannot no! raise up and thereby push

away" the gods. This triple structure in the word generates a tension between

deity, daivat and u r ~ f o r m , as though davitikarana were composed of three

distinct and untotalizahle elements, with daiva! as a kind or historical thresh

old between ur-form and deity. Much like the German coneept-metaphor

Au/llebung, we can understand the Marathi unnayana at once as a negation

that raises what has been negated to a higher level, and a negation of anegation, that is to say of a final moment in the unnayana proeess whereby

1IJcify and doh'lIt 183

refers to the succession of words in syntagm: in the order of ~ l m i l i a l succes

sion it directs us to the ethical progression of descendents, to race and lin

eage; in the order or being it alludes to something like physis or karma as

the movement of the world unto infinity (Monier-Williams 1981: 46). The

Sanskrit verbal root "i " implies a vectored movement. which is "t o proceed.

to go" in a certain direction. Samanvaya could in this way be rendered more

rigorously as what it means "t o bring together (sam) the succcssion (anI') of

movements (i)" by which man moves in t.hc world through specch. and



what has been negated. lost and suppressed at the point of its being raised to

something greater than itselr reappears as the trace of something that is yet to

be accounted for: in other words, as a remainder, or the traee or a trace. It is

in this sense that Dhere's daivatikarana refers us to what in Vitthala's uManess, his "stance" cannot be rererred to in terms either of origin or end. arche

or telos, but which continues to elude the daivatikaralla to which it nonethe

less contributes. The folk as the trace or the trace, as something that makes

speech possible but only rrom within the impossible relation between

miracle and hearsay, is at once the ground and the lack of ground for Vitthala

as dail'at. And in this sense, as the ubha Vitthala who makes mc responsive

to the rolk, the essence of the great configuration (mahas(lIttaIH'a)JQ) that

is Maharashtra can be understood to have been not the synthesis but the

grand frans-figuration (the Aujhebung/re/evelunnayana) or the folk. its m a h a ~samam'aya in the text of Vitthala bhakti. 1 Dhere's Vitthala is the Vitthala

before whom we stand accountable, fundamentally and unrecusably, to the

rolk. The folk here would refer not to autochthony, not to the simple objectiveb e i n g ~ t h e r e of the dhangar-shepherd, but to what in language remains as a

trace. as a reminder of that which has always already been written out.

pushed away. It is in this sense that in Dhere the ur-form or mularupa

of Vitthala cannot and for the same reason cannot not be the h e r o ~ s t o n e( v i r a ~ g a l a ) .

The space for the clearing of the holy, the clearing of which he is the genius

loci. makes Vitthala the lord of the field where his Way is conducted under

certain d i r e c t i v e ~ which then come to be known as V a r k a r i ~ d h a r m a , or

Bhagwat Dharma. It is the kshetra orhis dharma, the sole demesne where his

rule, his hegemony is in place. But it is also the surrace for the transfiguration

of Vitthala, of which Dhere himself is but the latest local historian, stha

lapuranakara. This kshetra then is not just the silent focus of the grand

samanvaya involving the "assimilation" of the rolk with the elite: the dhar

makshetra of Vitthala is instead a mark of the continued samanvaya as

" t r a n s ~ f i g u r a t i o n " of the folk between something like the "premodern" on

the one hand, and a modernity which can only ever ensure the disappearance

or the folk, on the other. A disappearance however. which is not at the same

time unmarked by the gift of the rolk which Vitthala. as the object of the

c e n t u r i e s ~ o l d dhyana of the Varkari's tradition of hearsay, retains within

himself as a trace. The word samanvaya, which we often misread as "assimila

tion," rerers fundamentally to the "right way." In the order of the sentence it

in generation and regeneration adequates thc infinite changeability of the

world. And since thc tie between speech and thc infinite world, bctwecn Man

and World, is guaranteed by an idea of divinity (which excecds Man and

World), we might think of samallvaya as marked through and through by thecoming of God to man. In which case. the grand configuring or lI1ahasamall

vaya of the world in Dhcre cannot but be underwritten. from the point of

view of Varkari hearsay. by a t r a n s ~ f i g u r a t i o n a l line of rorce that crosscs

through the successiveness of human worlds, incising all movement (in thc

verbal root "i") that we know as karma and caste, b ut in an exactly backward.

retrospective, entirely rccapitulative gesture. in a maha-stlll1anvaya. The p o ~ -sibility of such a gesture was not unavailable to the Indic tradition in its most

radical strains. Turning for a moment to Kashmir Shaivism and ils legacy to

Dnyaneswara, we could well refer here to its notion of "prafyabhijna" which

Andre Padoux describes as the point at which "consciousness turns back

upon itself, recognizes itself (pratyabhijna). and bccomes not only aware of

itself but also or all that exists paradigmatically in it. . .

[as] the SupremeWord" (Padoux 1990: 176). If we could push this idea or e l f ~ r e c ( ) g n i t i o n to

its origins in a narrative (gothi) of a v i n g ~ r o u n d God. we may well be able to

break out of the epistemological presuppositions implicit in Padoux's notion

of "consciousness" here; this much is enough fiJr us to det<..'ct in pl"atl'ahhijna

itself this transfigurational account of what it means to be human.

Luminosity: the face of Vitthala

With this notion of transfiguration in mind, we could well argue that the folk

(10k) as a trace remains unassimilated to the inevitable, even ineluctable m o v e ~ment or history as deification when understood specifically in its moment of

daivalikarana. And to this extent. it would seem to lie at the farthest remove

rrom the "comparative'" destiny of Au/71ebung as the movcment of the

European "spirit" and wmayana as the movement of a (Orientalized)

Hinduism self-same with the spirit or India. We will need to elaborate in a

more rigorous manner how the folk both makes possible and yet resists AuJ:hebung an d unnayana, reminding us or what is untranslatable and " u n ~transfigured" in history, but yet available to narrative (gothi).

Here is one answer to the problem of comparative religion. If, as we saw in

Chapter 2. religions East and West arc both unablc to account for the loneli

ness or death (the problem or how to mourn the death of another), it is

184Prehistory ofhistorical reLigion

incumbent upon us to attempt a prehistory of religion. One way of doing this

is to inhabit the agonistic realm of translation. It entails working between

Aughebung and unnayana in an attempt to find a form of conducting one'slife that precedes "raising up" itself, prior to deification. Tukaram's c o m ~portment before Vitthala is the virtual enactment of such a prehistory. Nowif we return to these lines in the poem by Tukaram

On his neck a Tulsi band, yellow of the silk around his middle

Deity and daivat185

Vitthala a specific form of desire (avad), eliciting in its luminous visage

(srimukha) an inexhaustible radiance. Almost as though in the eons that make

up a life, a hundred worlds were to send out a diffuse light and only then

bring into being the world willed and commanded as a coruscation of truth.

(fhuman command and will is driven by the light of reason, the light oflight

(Sri) returns us to a moment before the raising up (unnayana) of local deities,

prior to the Aujhebung whereby reason pursues its itinerant course through

history. For in the srimukha which will soon be Krishna there is a death prior



Everlasting pull [avad] of that figure [rupa1

Sheen of pendant Makar-fish on his ears

Gem of Kaustubh athwart his neck.

Tuka says, thus is my comfort entireThus willI gaze longingly [avadinen1 at his visage incandescent

[srimukha1·

we can see how the transfiguration ofVi tthal a unto Krishna is not unaccom

panied by a backward. vanishing movement of what has not yet been trans

tlgured. For the gaze of the devotee-Tukaram scans the icon ofVitthala and

re-marks the marks of Krishna as so many elements of his attire. But Tukaram

is also drawn irrevocably toward Vitthala in avad or avadi, which is a central

concept-metaphor in Varkari speech. To be drawn to something, touch

something tenderly, caress it minimally, nourish and harbor it, all these

aspects are implicit in avad; and in avadne ("to be drawn toward") we find

from Dnyaneswara to Tukaram the implicit sense of "semblance" or "to

shine forth as" (Tulpule and Feldhaus 2001: 71). Now there is the "everlasting

pull" (avad) of the "figure" (rupa). And Tukaram, finding his comfort (sukhal

complete in Vitthala, proceeds to gaze "longingly" (m·t/dine) at "his visage

incandescent" (srimukha). Even belore we can chart the trajectory of this pull

toward the figure ofthedaivat, we are compelled to take seriously what it is in

the figure that is being gazed at. For Tukaram's dhrana is only apparently

theoretical: in its perspectival impulse it asks after something else, which is

the face of the Lord. his srimukha. And although "sri" is commonly used as a

prefix denoting the preeminence or excellence of Vaishnava deities (as in"srikrishna"), its juxtaposition with mukha or face tells us that behind the

humanized face of Vitthala there is something like a reference to divinity. In

his Sanskrit-English lexicon. Monier Monier-Williams seems to suggest that

"sri" is a reference to a light prior t o spirit or idea: it indicates a name mingledin cooking (implicit in the root "sra"), and refers to "burning, flame, diffuse

light" and by the same token to "diffusing light or radiance," to "light, luster,

radiance, splendor, glory, beauty, grace, loveliness," and finally to markers of

wealth and prosperity (Monier-Williams 1991: 1098). Now we have seen how

Kabir turns to the light (pargas) that is prior to the light of reason just as does

Plotinus in his understanding of Plato. This light is a kind of prior good. In

just the same way, and in an exactly antithetical gesture to the theoretical gaze

which by looking wills a deity into being, Tukaram directs to the daivat

to the death of Christ or the penance for a death which is Hindu myth and

law. as we saw in our discussion of the Kapalika. Its future is the dark augury

of spirituality and spirit, but its past is a burning up of worlds not available

to the Arjuna who gazes theoretically at the imploding of all creation inthe universalized Krishna of the eleventh book of the Gita, an image that

reminded Oppenheimer of the terrible force of a nuclear holocaust. Instead.

its past is the origin of the universe in a brief tale (gothi) of diffuse light,

lodged thereafter as the glancing beam of a gaze in the depths of the beauti

ful (sundam te dhvana).

Color and light in van Buitcnen

Whal then is the nature of the transition from color and light on the one

hand, to emotion and will on the other? In his generative work on the early

theory of gUMS (sat/va, rajas and lamas) in Indic antiquity, especially in the

texts of Sankhya. van Buitenen took great care to point out that sattva and

rajas, usually translated in such abstract terms as "being" (Wesen) and "dirt,

clinging to the world. spiritual defilement," were from another perspective

radically empirical in origin. If sattva referred 10 the procedure by which

truth emerges from out of untruth, sat from out of amt, rajas referred to the

"atmosphere" as the threshold of transcendence; it alluded to space as such,

derived as rajas is from " r a j ~ " which means "to stretch, extend." In the case of

rajas in particular, it is worth noting that at some point in antiquity, the

original cosmological significanceof rajas as a kind of ranscendental idea of

space gave way to the psychological notion of "passionate attachment;" rajas

became a raga or fundamental mood, and from here it was possible to attach

to it the color traditionally associated with raga, which was red (just as lanws,

which referred to the "earth," came to be denoted by the color black, imply

ing insensibility. unconsciousness and so on) .Now the crucial point is that the allotment of color is the earliest instance

in the texts (van Buitenen refers here to the Rig Veda, the early Upanisads.

and the Moksadharma of the Mahabharala) of a truly cosmogonic point oforigination. As van Buitenen shows in his reading of the sixth chapter of the

Chandogya Upanisad, this implied that an "original being called sat produces

(ejas, apas and annam, which are the red, white and blaek forms (rupalll) of

the world to be" (van Buitenen 1957: 93, 89). Clearly, the psychological

notion of attachment (raga) was preceded in the early texts by what was really

............... - - - - - - - - - - - ~ Q .-----------186 Prehistory ofhistorical religion

the preeminence of space; a n d ~ s p a c e itself was something that, according

to these texts, could only have evolved out of an originary notion of color.

For this reason we emlnot understand the three gunas solely as "products,

elements, evolulcs or constituents;" they are in fact all of these because they

refer to the movement by which color gave way to emotion or mood, and

cosmology was superseded by psychology. And in this sense, inasmuch as

they refer to modes of individuation, the gUllas afe really monads, bearers of

Deity and ddil'al 187

Now the gaze of Tukaram is as a gaze directed toward the icon drenched in

color and then t o the face steeped in light Avad is a loving gaze, but it is also

an instance of the fundamental empiricity, the "fact" or gorhi, of Vitthala as

a being that stands there prior to the emotional pull of the devotee. In the

empiricity of the icon, of which color is a mark of the prehistory of emotion,

we detect a trace of the divinity that recedes into the past to make possible the

ardent desire of the devotee. Vitthala is a product of that will (he iS800n to be

raised up into Krishna) but he is not any less a reference to all that in the



the "suspension of iconoclasm," the process by which the radically empirical

is rendered abstract and desire, will and command come into being as fun

damental moous of human being in the world. They prefigure with extra

ordinary clarity the humanization of our d r i v e ~ d e s i r c ~ styles of life, of ourcultivation of the care of the soul, which is why Dnyancswant himself returns

to them in the later chapters of his great work.

As the cartographer of this emergence of the will from out of color, van

Buitenen was perhaps the pre-eminent thinker after the anthropomorphic

imprint of man on the world in Indic antiquity, and for the same reason his

speculations on the emergence in antiquity of the Indian modern were as

untimely as thosc of Bernard Cohn for the colonial period. For van Buitenen,

the gunas did not initially refer to some abstract emotion leading to self

absorption, activity, or sloth (as in the sattra, rajas and lamas of the last

cantos of the Gila); sa l lor instance implied not some abstract notion of

"being" but a "concrete, existing thing" (van Buitcnen 1957: 104). For this

reason, we cannot re.:ld Tukaram's poem as merely a description of the

traditional accoutrement of Krishna, as though Vitthala were merely a prelude to Krishna. Tukaram is drawn in avad toward the light prior to light,

which is the face of the Lord (srimukha); in each instance what comes to fore

is something that resists being assimilated in its entirety to the idea of love in

traditional iconology. For amd is not the emotion (bhava) of love; Tukaram's

gaze or dhyana is, as we pointed out above, not a theoretical gaze. This

C<lution is important, for we should remember that from the point of view of

dominant Vaishnavism all emotion is theoretical. What precisely then is the

link between the pull toward the luminosity of the face and the face itself if

not, as Varkari/BhagwatlVaishnav dharma tells us, an emotional, passionate,

loving bond, a bond that readers of Tukaram, Surdas, and the bhakti poetscannot but be moved hy?

A fundamental turn away from the link between emotion and will isrequired here if we are to arrive at the prehistory of our own fascination for

bhakti love and deification, with its implicit afllrmation of willed deities, and

ofthc self-congratulatory, wholly self-aggrandizing passion of the empowered

devotee (bhakt). What is necessary is a rigorous overturning of our invest

ment in interior religion. tor, if we were to approach the problem of emotion

with van Buitenen we discover what can only be the anteriority of color to

emotion. It is almost as though there is in human experience something prior

to the light practical fit between bhava and rasa, an aesthesis prior to aesthet

ics. a universe of Kuna:> (monads) which precedes bhavas (emotional states).

daNal is not available to the will to bring deities into being. For in the lightbefore light ofVitthala's face, Tukaram discovers an element of the v e r l a s t ~

ing (nimntara). At the point at which color (rang) finds its origin in light, bothKabir and Tukara m turn to the peculiar iconicity of "Ram" and Vitthala and

find there the God of an always incomplete daivalikarana, the perpetually

unfinished coming into being of the daivat. They are masters of memory,

sages who worked from the long tradition of dalit hearsay, commemorating

in glorious verse what they had heard of the finding of God in the remote

past. Hearsay is this turn away from the instinctual or psychic apparatus of

emotion from within which the machine of bhakti works its way into history,

even ifhear say cannot but affirm that machine in the end; for the "SUbject" of

hearsay would not be possible without such an affirmation. But we can no

longer assume that the extinction of all desire or emotion can provide any

guarantee of new traditions ofthe care of the soul in the age where deities are

willed into being as part of lived, graspable, manipulable worlds. Only the

priority of all that is radically empirical in the coming of God to man,uncovering as abstrac t and atheistic our very notion of religion, can in a sense

"save us" from the dangerous tie between emotion and will. This much we

can learn, must learn from the traditions of hearsay. This much the dalit

critique itself, in its own attempt to aceess the folk, to lay claim to Tukaram

and Kabir as daHt p o e t ~ dalit g o d ~ must remain accountable to. We continue

to mistake this for the love of man for God, not the adoring look that can

sometimes pierce through the visual field of representation, set aside whole

traditions of aesthetic thoug ht and give rise to an epiphany of light in color

playing about the face of the daivat.

Notes

NOles 189

as the low-caste investment for a njrgwJa God without traits, explains why scholarsof the esoteric and mystical aspects of Hinduism were drawn to such traditions of

hearsay--the tradition of scholarship that studies the ties between the arcane andthe popular has always in some way or another aligned itself with heterodoxy anddissent, as we will see in Chapters 5 and 6 in the work of Hazariprasad Dwivedi.One should not neglect to mention here the pioneering effort of PitambardattaBarthwal (1901--44) (see BarthwaI1978),

3 "Vishwas to deval mlianuni dhariyela bhava;" Abhanga 3500 of Tukaram's Gatha

(Tukaram 1973: 578--9). Tukaram's verse form of choice, the lIbhanga. and[)nyaneswara's ovi's. arc closely relatl.-d modes of popular composition, wide



1 Subalternity at the cusp

Gayatri Spivak (1999: 309) perhaps something like this in mind when sheaddresses the problem of how to enter into the subal1ern mindsct at the momentor cusp of decision, which is also the momenl when history and critical practicefind it retroactively; here. in response to a question raised by feminist critics suchas Abena Busia about whether the subaltern "can speak:' she responds with thefollowing formulation: "All speaking, even seemingly the most immediate, entailsa distanced decipherment by another. which is at best. an interecption_ Thatwhat speaking is."

2 One of the "oldest examples" or such a continuity between speech and silence(Benjamin has in mind the Ore.I'leia and Oedipus Tvrannus\ is the substitution "of

the execution of the victim at the altar, with his escape from the knife of thesacrificial priest: the destined victim thus runs around the ahar. finally seizing it."

So that "the altar becomes a place of refuge. the angry God a merciful God. thevictim a prisoner and servant of God" (Benjamin 1990: \07).

2 Moral rite before myth and law

As Lorenzen proceeds to s a ~ "

The sources in which the myth first appears, the P u n m a ~ , abo mcntionhuman Kapalikas, and there are no references to thc ascctics significantlyearlier than these works. In some respects this question lof priority] is aneedless one. Since both thc penance for the killing of a Brahmana and thcassociation of Shiva, the god of death and destruction, with skulls undoubtedly antedated the Shiva-Kapalin myth, Shaivite ascetics who obscrved theMahavrata might also have antedated it. Whether or not such ascetics existedor whether they themselves invented this myth, it is certain that the later

Kapalikas adopted it as their divine archctype. The ultimate aim of theKapalika observance was a mystical identification or communion with Shiva.Through their imitative repetition of Shiva's performance of the Mahavrata.the ascetics became ritually "homologised" with the god and partook of.or were granted, some of his divine aLtributes. espccially the eight magicalpowers (siddhis) (1991 [1972]: 80).

3 The time of having-found (God)

See pada 62 (S49) in Callcwaert et al. (2000: 183).

2 The nature and emphasis of this "abstraction," which figures in studies of hhakll'

spread in Marathi since the thirteenth century. Dilip Chitre describes the m'i astypically consi sting of "four lincs, of which the first three are rhymed and the lastone is left 'open' or unrhymed with the rest. The number of syllables in the firstthree lines may vary from eight to ten while the last one may vary from four to six"(see Chitrc 11990: 6]). Similarly, the abhanga consists typically of six lines withthree syllables each (see Rajadhyaksha [2002]: 200). allowing for a great number ofvariants. In my forthcoming work on Dnyaneswara I hore to pursue at greaterlength the question of the link between the versatility of the ovi-ahha1lg form andthe force of rhetoric. given especially the tight fit between versification an(1hearsay.

4 When Kabir or Tukaram spcak they embrace longstanding traditions of popularsententiae; holding their own ground at some half-way point between lesson andmystcry, exemplary tale and fabulous narrative. such proverbs arc themselves thethrcshold for a wholly incalculable accretion of meaning --the Marathi and Hindiwords for "proverb" ("malma" and "kahavat" respectively) are implicit in Kabir"s"Kilhat Kahir" and Tukaram's "Tuka man he."

5 Purushottam Aggarwal's work on Kabir (see his forthcoming monograph) is

instructive in its refusal to relinquish the relation between Kabir and the world.

which he tries to bring together under the notion of thc "poetic vocation" (kahirhataur kavi) of Kabir as a poet-saint working creatively through a range of social.existential and aesthetic issues. Aggarwal is quite understandably wary of thoseaspects of the daHt critique (especially in the work of Dharmvir ) that affiliate it tostrains of Hindu nationalism.

4 The anomaly of Kabir

1 This is the place to register my profound debt to Vasudha Dalmia and her sem-inal work on Bharatendu.

2 See Vaudeville (1974: 3-36); Datmia (1999: 338 A24\.3 For the major essays see Shukla (1992; 1970).4 For a fuller account of their poetry, see McGregor (] 984: 76-80; 109--17). Shukla's

introduction. "Goswami Tulsidas," to his edition of the Tulsi Granlhavali waspublished in 1923, the introduction to his Jayasi Granthlll'ali in 1924, both by the

Sabha. fiis edition of Surd as's Bhramar-git Sar was published in 1925.5 Subsequent references to this tcxt will be denoted by its title, "Kabir" and page

number.6 Dwivedi spent the most productive twenty years of his life at Shantiniketan,

moving to Banares Hindu University in J950 for a brief but troubled tenure as theHead of its Hindi department. During his two decades at Shantiniketan, Dwivediedited the Abhmav Bharati Granthmala and the Vishwa Bharali Patrika. fo r theseand other details of Dwivedi's career, see the Sahitya Akademi's biographicalpamphlet, Tiwari (1996: 13).

7 Dr. Dharmvir is a civil servant who has written books on the dalit leaderAmbedkar, the playwright Vishnu Prabhakar. and the saint-poet Raidas, The

190 Noles

b?ok that place? him in the. center of controversy was Kablr ke Alochak (DharmvIr 1997), 1Il wInch Dharmvll' launched an attack on the entirc tradition of criticalwriting in Hindi on Kabir, and accused it of "brahmanizing" Kabil". Apart fromthe key chapter on Dwivedi in Kabir ke Alochak, we now have Dharmvir'sextended three-volume engagement with D w i v e d i ' ~ Kablr, entitled Kabir: Nai SadiMen (Kabir in the New Era). The titles of the three volumes, all published in the

s a ~ e year, are as. follows: Kabir: Doctor Hazariprasad Dwivedi ka PrakshiplChmlan (Dharmvlr 2000a); Kahir aur Ramanand: Kimvadantian (Dharmvir2000b); Kabir: Baj bhi, Kapol bhi. Papiha bhi (Dharmvir 200Oc).

8 Standard .Hindi dictionaries unhelpfully equate sankshohh and vikshobh, despitethe very dilTerent valences of the prefixes "sam-" (placing together) and "vi-" (tak

1Notes 191

5 The pitfalls of a dalit theology

I For "sanskritization," see Srinivas (1962: 42 . 62). Dirks argues, in what is anextremely nuanced account of Srinivas's work, that the latter was unable in thefinal analysis to step outside the normative stranglehold of brahmanism in hissocial thinking. "And yet," Dirks writes, despite his longstanding interest inbackward caste movements, "Stinivas never came to terms with the extent towhich the theory of sanskritization was not merely exemplified by strugglesaround the census but was also in large part produced by them" (Dirks 2001: 252).A similarly universalized "brahmanical" point of view, it could be argued, underpins Dwivedi's sociological pronouncements here.



away). Since Dwivedi's.Hindi diction tends to abound in Sanskrit phrases, andgIven that he was somethmg of a Sanskrit pandit, one could well turn to CarlCappeller's Sanskril-Worterhllch (Cappeller 1955: 465, 402), which glosses sank

shob as "Erschiitterung" (shake severely), and vikshob quite differently as "he/ligeBeweguflg. AIl/regWig. Verwirrung" (broadly speaking, confusion or bewilderment).

9 refere.nce .is to. Sur-Sahity,a ( D w i v e d ~ , 1973 ( l 9 3 ~ ] : 7 The <,:irierson essaywhIch DW1Vedl partIcularly object to was Modern Hmdulsm and Its Debt to the

N ~ s t o r ! a n s , " J o u ~ n a l 0/ Royal ~ i a t i c Society.(1907) 311-35. III her analysis of

thIS. article, Da.lmm e x p l ~ m s that <,:inerson had tne d to argue that the third centurySynan Nestonan Chnstmns had mtroduced the religion of love into Hinduism insouth India, from which poim it had been taken up in the Bhakti movement. Theimpulse behind this move was to insist that Bhakti was analogous to the ProtestantRevolu.tion in that it had rebelled a g a i ~ s t the hegemony of high brahmanism by

p r e ~ c h l l l g a pOl?ular g ~ s p e l of I?ve .Gnerson was one of the main exponents ofthe Idea of a ulllfied Valshnav HlildUlsm that was at the same time "monotheistic"

( D a l ~ i a 1?99: 401.-8); the line that Dwivedi cites from the "Nestor ians' " essay isalso CIted III Dalmla (402). George Abraham Grierson (1851-1941) was trained asa linguist and worked in many middle-level administrative positions in Bihar for anumber or years. Before long, he developed an appreciation of Bhakti literatureand of th.e bhashas in which it was written (i.e. Avadhi and Braj, which he understood as lIltcgral aspects of Hindi). His prolific output of grammars, vocabulariesand studies of dialects culminated in the multi-volume Linguistic Survey of ndi<l,

begun in 1898, of which he was editor-superintendent. But his most importantcontribution was his propagation of a monolithic idea of Bhakti in Orientalistcircles (Dalmia 1999: 139-·40).

10 The extent of Dwivedi's familiarity with Shukla's work is moot, and one canthererore adduce merely a family resemblance in their thinking here. Shukla's lateand most ~ r o d u c t i . v e p h a ~ o v ~ r l a p s w i t ~ Dwi.vedi's early youthful work leadingup ,'0 K a b l ~ , but smce DWlvedl spent thIS penod away from the Hindi-speakingregIOn: .whlCh. texts of Shukla have come to his attention in rarawayShantllllketan IS hard to ascertain (Smgh 1983: 17).

11 Dwivedi, Hindi Sahitya ki Bhwnika (cited in Singh 1983: 77).

12~ a m ~ a r .

Singh himself~ a w s

this discussion to a close with the following suggest l ~ n : . It IS perhal?s for thiS .reason that the assurance with which Dwivedi pursuestlus ~ l l a l current 1Il all. of l I I d i literature does not extend in terms of clarity to theambIvalences undcrlymg ItS undercurrents. Another reason [shayad iska ek /wranyaha bhi 110] may lie with the increased literary value of the later Bhakti textswtitten under classical influence. This too is a strange paradox, that from a socialst.andp.o!nt grc.:ter the ree.ourse to e ~ c 1 u s i v e {/ok-l'Iirmkh] and anti-popular [Iok-

v l f o ~ h . l ] Ideas II I thIS shaslra-mfiected literature, the greater was its rhetorical andstyhstlc finesse. It would be interesting to examine the transition from Kabir toJayasi, Surdas and Tulsidas from this perspective."

2 "''Or a perceptive critique of the Cambridge School, see Dirks. "Coda: The Burdenof the Past: On Colonialism and the Writing of History" (Dirks 2001: 303-16).

3 For an account of these movements, as well a discussion of the myths surround

ing conversion, see the essays collected in Gyanendra Pandey t'ti., Hindus andOthers (Pandey: 1993).

4 The gradual ritualization of medieval Hindu society was for Dwivedi the mixedoutcome of the scholastic project that brought about the compilation of legaltreatises (nibandhagranthas) in this period.

5 The remaining quotes from Kabir in this passage are also from p. 139.6 Apart from the key chapter on Dwivedi in Kahir ke Alochak, we now have

Dharmvi r's extended three-volume engagement with Dwivedi's Kabtr, entitledKabir: Nai Sadi Men (Kabir in the New Era) (see Dharmvir 2000a; 2000b: 2000c).

7 In Hindi, "Vaha ahhed hai 10 pura ahhed hai aur advait hat to pura advall hai."

6 System and history in Rajwade's "Grammar" for the Dnyaneswari(1909)

I Mukundaraja (circa C.lL 1300) was the Shaivite author of the Vivekasindhu. Foran account of the controversies surrounding the dating of Mukundaraja and his

work as well as his relation to the Nathpanthis and to the Mahanubhavas, see Joshi(1977: 251-,60).Rajwade's tantrum nonetheless met with some historical justice, though onlyyears later, and by critics who would doubtless have earned very little gratitudefrom him had they been his contemporaries! If the continuing critical fascinationwith it is anything to go by, it can be said that Rajwade's edition of hisDnyaneswari in 1909 based on that misbegotten MS retains its sheen to this day.The pellucid strokes of the Rajwade-prata (as it is more widely known) make up aghosted palimpsest, like a photograph none the worse for a negative unaccountably lost. Nor has the stature of his edition been necessarily displaced by theoffi?ial (Maharashtra State-sanctioned) corrected edition of his text, publishedamId great fanfare in 1960. In disputing a number of the decisions taken in the1960 edition, the distinguished edition of the Dnyaneswari by Arvind Mangrulakar and Vinayak Moreshwar Kelkar (Dnyandevi 1994), has restored Rajwade'stext to the eminencc that it deserves. My forthcoming translation and commentary

on this text uses Rajwade's edition as its point of departure.3 Refences to Rajwade's Collected Works (Rajwade 1995-8) will be denoted by

"CW" followed by volume and page number.4 I am grateful to the Marathi playwright, Sinologist and Marxist critic G. P. Desh

pande for the suggestion that the Varkari tradition is a unique instance of thiscoming together of elite and subaltern (personal communication).

5 In ,attempting to translate this and other passages from the lJnyaneslVari, I haverehed on the vast archive of secondary material on the text. In the interests of

economy I wil1 defer a discussion of that material here. The edition of the text Ihave used in this paper is Dnyaneswari (1909). References to this text will be

192 Notcsdenoted here by the title of the work, followed by canto an d page number. I shouldadd that my translations teng to emphasize the verbal movemcnt of Dnyaneswara 5

thinking; my scruple is to avoid abstract, substantializing words that merely freezeconcepts. Conventional translations of this text abound in such "metaphysical"terms as "the Universal," "the One," the "All-knowing," etc.

6 The edition I have used here is J. A. B. van Builenen (1981). See especially §3 and§4, pp. 81--9.

7 Sankalpa, which brings together the prefix sam and the verbal root klrp, implics"what one brings together, i.e. mana-buddhi-chitta-ahamkara" so as to determilll.'dly "take-to" the world_

8 lowe this point to Madhukar Vasudev Dhond (1991: 35). For the rendering

TNotes 193

activist of the Nagaripracharini Sabha and the critic Ramehandra Shukla's mentor, collaborator on the first Hindi lexicon, the Sabha's KoslI, and colleague at thefirst Hindi department at Banares Hindu University in the I920s. Das's edition,known as the Kabir Gran/havafi (Oas 1928), has been the canonical text of Kabirin Hindi departments to this day. The standard text for the "Eastern" or KabirPanthi recension, compiled in eastern Uttar Pradesh and lor Bihar in the late nineteenth century is Kabir Bijak, Shukdev Singh ed. (Singh 1972). See the Englishtranslation by Linda Hess, The Bijak ofKabir (Hess! 983). Large sections of these"sectarian" recensions are now considered by philologists to be "spurious" (inauthentically Kabir's). In the second edition of her translation of the Western Recension, after a reappraisal of the original manuscripts, Vaudeville has drastically



of samarasa as "fluidly cquilibriate," I am indebted to David Gordon White(1996: 218).

9 See Rajwade's essay on "Ramdas," published in hisjoufllal, Granthmala, around1906 (the exact date is unavailable), and republished in the RaJwade Lekhasallg

raha (Rajwade 1967: 229 65). The discussion of Hegcl in tllis essay occurs in twoscctions entitled "Hegel's Philosophy of History," 257 <149. and "A Comparisonbelweenllegersand Ramdas's Ideas," 258 -60.

10 Gopal Guru used the phrase "hegemony over the social" in an oral presentationof his paper, "Theoretical Brahmins, Empirical Oalits," at the Southern AsianInstitute, Columbia lIniVl..'fsity. New York in March 2000.

7 The suspension of iconoclasm

In his edition of the Jayasi Granthavali, Shukla admired Jayasi for not "furtheringthe envy and insolcnce which leads an interior caste [nimna Jatl1 to mock andcriticize what is customarily treated with respect" and (the reference again is

clearly to Kabir) "to attempt to found a separate sect [religion, panfhJ." This is to

say, in contrast to Kabir, whose "mystical bent and tendency to seek and find Godinsidc himself cannot cohere with the way in India." Aftcr aI!, "because of theprestige of the idea of avatars, the traditional Indian bhakt seeks his deity asestablished within the world, not in the solitary region of his heart." Now Jayasidoes seem (to Shukla) to possess at least in some measure the qualities of a"beautiful and picturesque nondualist [advaitl mysticism," largely due to hisexplicit embrace of affectivity (bhavukta). The fact is that (for Shukla) the elaboration of nature in Jayasi's poetic craft is much greater than that in Kabir: "Jayasiwas a poet and an Indian poet at that. Indian poets, in comparison to their Persianate counterparts, tend to range more widely in the direction of natural thingsand processes, and to inspect more closely their affecting forms." In this way Jayasiis "able to give us somc sense of that mystical order of things (rahasyamayi salla)

by using scene-signs, narratological billboards [drishya-sanketJ that tcnd to be

'both picturesque and affecting:" Kabir's "pictures [chitra] (imagery)," on theother hand, "lack such a variety of forms [anekruptaJ and such tenderness [mad

hurtal." (All citations from Shukla in this note are taken from Dhannvir (1997:65-72J.)

2 See Pierre Iladol's seminal account of Plotinus (iladot 1993). My understandingof Plato's Tim(lellS is informed by Jacques Oerrida's On the Name (Derrida 1995);and in crucial ways by John Sallis, Chorology (SalliS 1999)_

3 Sec Lorenzen 1981; 1987; 1995; 1996.4 The standard text for the "Western Recension" of Kabir is now Charlotte Vaude

ville's Kabir- Van; (Vaudeville 1982). Vaudeville's text brings together the sectarianrecensions gleaned from the Oadu Panthi (founded by Dadu Dayal (1554-1603])and Niranjani sects in Rajasthan and the Sikh Panth (the Guru Granth) in Punjab.The Rajasthani (exts were first put together by Shyam Sundar Oas, a leading t lindi

reduced the number of poems attributed to Kabir (see Vaudeville (993). For thereading of Kabir attempted here I rely on the excellent collation of thc Kabirmanuscripts put together by Winand M. Callewacrt in collaboration with SwapnaSharma and Dieter Taillieu in The Millenium Kabir J1mi: A Collection of Pad-s(Callewaert 2000). For an informative discussion of the current scholarly COll

sensus with regard to the Kabir corpus., see Vinay Oharwadke r's "Introduction:

Kabir, his Poetry and his World" to his book of Kabir translations, Kabir: TheWeaver's Songs (Dharwadkar 2003: 1-96). Oharwadker's argument has theinestimable merit of having taken into account the recent lindings or scholarsworking on the origins of the central text of the Sikh canon, the Guru Grandi

Sahib. The Kabir poems in the Gramh have been translated by Nirmal Uass asSongs of Kabir from The Adi Gran/II (Oass 1991). Dass's rendition is so astute andprofound that doingjustice to it would require another c hapter in itself

5 Patin 289 in Callewaert et af. (2000), which is Pada 7 in the Govindval POlhis(Mohan Pothi) of 1570--2, and Pada 1349: I in the Ad i Granth of 1604. Any student of this early set of poems will be in debt to Gurinder Singh Mann, The

Govindval Pothis: The Earliest Hxtant Source o f he Sikh Canoll.

6 "The Yogis called the 'living dead' Uivallmukta) the ascetic who had succeeded in'conquering the mind' and thus freeing himself from his empirical self. Kabirborrows this idea of the 'living dead' from them and applies it to the mysticengaged in the Way of Love, who has sacrificed his earthly life. But this "death, is.in reality, the condition for the true 'life' in God; 'I f I burn the house, it is saved, ifI preserve it, it is lost) Behold an astonishing thing: he who is dead triumphs overDeath!! Death after death, the world dies, but no one kuows how to die,/ Kabir, noone knows how to die so that he will no longer die.' The astonishing sYJlthesis of

mch disparate elements shows the originality of Kabir" (200).

8 Miracle and violence

F-or the lines cited in the next para, sce 6: 25-6.2 Although of course the reason lor his wanting to intervene in the world in this Wily

is irreducible either to will or necessity.

3 "Dulhanin gavahu mangalcarl ham ghari ho raja rani l!harlar;" sec Pm/II I Vaudeville, Kabir-vani (Vaudeville 1982: 107).

4 This entire section on violence, and my understanding of Mauss's hook onmagic, bears the mark of the mature and insightful analyses in Naming Ihe Wi/I'h

(Siegel 2006).5 See abhangas 92, 190, 2820, and 4299 in 7i1karambavancyo Ablumganci Gil/lUI

(Tukaram 1973).

194 Notes9 Deity and dahat: fhe antiquity of light in Tukaram

I "Re/eve" is Derrida's renaering of Hegel's "Aufhebung" in French; for Derrida'susage, see the translator's footnote to Derrida's essay, "Differance" (Derrida 1982:

19-20). What is crucial is the asymmetry between the movement of negation andthe movement of conservation implicit in Aufhebung; conventional English renderings of the term as "supercession" or "sublation" do not quite capture the itineraryof the trace of he trace. Unnayana, Aufhebung and reIeI'e all point to that which islost or pushed away and preserved as a trace in the movement of "raising up. ,.

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Index



adbhut. fantllstic 128 -30

AggarwaL P. 189

agoraphobia 159allegorical invo[utioll lSI

anonymity, structure of the providential131

Auerbach. E. 149

Balagangadhara. S. N. 20

Barthwal. P. 189

Bedckar, D. K. 171

Benjamin, W. 28,188

Bhagwat, D. 39, 176Bopp, F. 96

CalleWilcrl, W. e/ at 188, [93

Callewaert, W. and Lath. M 164Cappeller, K, 190

caritm. character II. 71 J (see alsosvahhavik)

Chakrabarty, D. :WChatterjee. P. 5Chitrc. D. 174,177-9coexistence of miracle and violence

160-3counterclaim. gegellwllrf, notion in

Schelling 6

crilicism 41

eliSa, Nicholas of 14.21

CllSp. definition of :5

daht mode of time: immedi,lcy 6:

existence 73; individuality 23:

millennia] supplement 24

Dalmia. V. 40, 44. 189Damlc, M. K. 104

Das, Babu S. S. 45

Dass, Nirmal 193Deleury, G 172.180

Dcrrida.1. 17 18,192.194Dhoud, M. V. 192

Dharmvir.Dr. 9.50 1.8291.189-90

Dllarwadkar. Y. 193

Dhere. R. C. 172 84

Dhvallyaloka 138

Digby. S. 136

Dirks. N. 76.191Dllyancswara 94DnymlCswari 107 9,116 19.147-53.

191

J)umonl, L. 60

Eknatl1 96

cquiprimordiality 10ethicizafion 14-15.106

Foucault. M., notion of care of the soul

26

Gita 112 -13

Gonda.1. 106

gothi x:Guru. G 5,123.192

l - i a c k e r . l ~ \38--43

Hadot. P. 26, 192

Hardy, F. viii. 136 43

Heesterman.1. 60

Hegel. G W. F 23Heidegger. M. 17

liennis, W, 18

Hess, L. vii, 132. 193

Hindu nationalism: ccumcnicism 13:

historicism 16

historian of the popular 41

history of the popular 40

Joshi. "Tarkatheerthu" L. S. 191

102 Index

Kabir: palama in 26; sanka 134; idea of

freedom 162; living death 135,155--RR

Kant, I 137

Kapalika 12

Kaviraj, G. 145

Kaviraj, S. 160Klein, M. [57

KollT, D. 95

Lessing, G. W. ix

Levi nas, I I 5

prehistory 32, 56, 69

prem, wound of divine love R7 -90

"race" II

radical evil 61

Risley, H. 76

Rosenzweig, E ix

sagun-nirguna distinction 79 -80

Sankara 138

seal or the poet 31

Siege[,J. T 159,193A library at your fingertips!



Marcus, A. 26Masuzawa, T. 20

Matilal, B. 96Mauss, M. 193

Monier-Williams, M. 181

More, S. 174,175,177-9

Namdeva 164

Narsimha-avatar 80---1

Obeycsekere, G. 14

Padoux, A. 183

Pandey, G. 133,160,191

Panilli 95

Pischel, R. 103

Plato 130

Plotinus 120poet-saint 34

Pollock, S. 7

Simmel, G. 129

Singh, S 193

skepticism 30,58Sontheirncr, G.-D. 172

Spinoza ix

Subrahmanyam, S. 93

Tagore, R. 47

Tulpule, S. G. 180; with Feldhaus184

Varkaris 33-4, 109

van Buitenen, J. A. B. 185--6,192

Vaudeville,C 135,40,189

Visw<\llathall, G. 51,163

Williams, R. 172

White, Luise 25

Yates, Francis IX

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Milind Wakankar-Subalternity and Religion the Prehistory of Dalit Empowerment in South Asia...

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