SacredSecular: Contemplative Cultural Critique 9780415484480, 9780203151952

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Faith Amidst the Destruction of Truth
Walking Meditation
Trash
Nameless Transaction
Visit to the Temple
Time
Globalisation: A Note of Caution
Work
Tradition and the New Spirituality
The Anatomy of Faith
Reckoning with Gujarat, Contemplating Tradition
Karma Reconsidered
Fading Blossoms
Western Advaita
Is a Dewdrop Sacred, or is it Secular?
Confronting Violence: Bridging the Sacred-Secular Divide
Practicing Peace
Justice and the End of Suffering: Secular Activism and Spiritual Practice
2004 AD: Are We Feeling Global Yet?
The Miasma of Globalisation
The Web of Life
Neoliberal Fictions, Neocolonial Facts
Body Politic(s)
Epilogue: The Tantra of Contemplative Cultural Critique
Closing Invocation
Glossary
About the Author

Citation preview

SacredSecular

SacredSecular Contemplative Cultural Critique

Lata Mani

LONDON NEW YORK NEW DELHI

First published 2009 by Routledge 912–915 Tolstoy House, 15–17 Tolstoy Marg, New Delhi 110 001

Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Transferred to Digital Printing 2009

© 2009 Lata Mani

Typeset by Star Compugraphics Private Limited D–156, Second Floor Sector 7, Noida 201 301

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

ISBN

978-0-415-48448-0

to ruth 1957–2007 for twenty-four years plus infinity

Contents Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

Faith Amidst the Destruction of Truth

5

Walking Meditation

14

Trash

23

Nameless Transaction

31

Visit to the Temple

38

Time

42

Globalisation: A Note of Caution

49

Work

60

Tradition and the New Spirituality

67

The Anatomy of Faith

80

Reckoning with Gujarat, Contemplating Tradition

90

Karma Reconsidered

95

Fading Blossoms

100

Western Advaita

106 vii

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viii

Is a Dewdrop Sacred, or is it Secular?

116

Confronting Violence: Bridging the Sacred-Secular Divide

125

Practicing Peace

132

Justice and the End of Suffering: Secular Activism and Spiritual Practice

143

2004 AD: Are We Feeling Global Yet?

152

The Miasma of Globalisation

162

The Web of Life

173

Neoliberal Fictions, Neocolonial Facts

181

Body Politic(s)

195

Epilogue: The Tantra of Contemplative Cultural Critique

210

Closing Invocation

220

Glossary

221

About the Author

223

Acknowledgements

N

o work is ever undertaken in isolation, but is rather in implicit or explicit conversation with all that surrounds its coming into being. In recognition of this fact, I thank all that has supported me in nature and all among my human contemporaries whose words and deeds have inspired or provoked the writing herein gathered. I am also grateful to the many dispiriting events that have provided grist for the mill of my reflections. My gratitude to them is not for their having occurred (for who would wish for violence, discrimination or disharmony), but for the occasion they have provided for confronting some of the core issues of how to live. I owe a special debt to Ruth Frankenberg who was a tireless interlocutor cum copy-editor and read every word as if it were her own. Thanks are also due to Deepa Dhanraj for sharing with me the gift of her perceptive responses to the manuscript. I would also like to thank Nirmala Lakshman at The Hindu Sunday Magazine for enthusiastically publishing early versions of several of these pieces. An early incarnation of ‘Tradition and the New Spirituality’ was published in Humanscape, January 2001. Without Ammu Joseph’s insistence this text would never have found its way onto Omita Goyal’s desk

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at Routledge. Serendipity (ably assisted by S.G. Vasudev) led me to Sumana Chowdhury’s exquisite work and I would like to thank her for permitting me to use one of her paintings on the cover.

x

Introduction

A

s the compound word SacredSecular implies, this collection is about indivisibility. The essays explore the inextricability of the sacred and secular realms of existence, the interconnectedness of the sentient and the apparently non-sentient, and the inseparability of spiritual philosophy from the practice of everyday life. SacredSecular is an extended invitation to contemplate the possibility that the ethical and liberatory dimensions of sacred and secular frameworks can fruitfully invigorate each other and, in turn, strengthen our ability to address the pressing issues of our time. SacredSecular charts a journey at once personal and analytical. As events in my life unexpectedly catapulted me in a spiritual direction and the new forms of cognition it brought in its wake, I was faced with a philosophical and practical question. What was the relationship between this (to me) new wisdom and the secular perspectives which had nourished me and through which I had previously interpreted the world? It was clear to me from the start that cultivating a spiritual practice did not imply retreating from the social world. On the contrary, my journey was leading me to discover an even greater interconnectedness between phenomena than I had previously believed to be true. How was one to articulate this? Could one bring together contemplative insight and sociocultural analysis? This book presents the fruit of such an 1

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experiment by way of considering a range of issues from the quotidian (trash, time, cut flowers) to the explicitly political (Hindu fundamentalism, violence, globalisation). To undertake contemplative cultural critique is to engage in transcoding. For, notwithstanding the theological roots of Western rationality, the language and concepts of sociocultural analysis are, for the most part, thoroughly secular. To bring the insights of spiritual and secular knowledge to bear on current phenomena thus requires one to translate between and across epistemes or ways of knowing. Many tend to see these two forms of knowledge as autonomous and incompatible, and choose to privilege one or the other. However, there is much that is common to the emancipatory streams within both knowledge traditions. I hope these essays will serve to suggest that the two can augment and enrich each other to our collective benefit. A brief clarification of the terms secular and secularism is perhaps in order. In its classic sense, secularism refers to the separation of church and state, of religion from governance. In a second meaning, more in keeping with its sense in the Constitution of India, secularism is the notion that the state shall not ally itself with any single religion but rather treat them all equally and without prejudice. It is in this sense that the Indian Constitution declares India to be a secular state. Third, secularism is the idea that knowledge derived from religion should make way for knowledge based on scientific rationality since the latter is 2

Introduction

deemed inherently superior to religious belief. Fourth, although secular as a concept emerges in opposition to faith, not all secularists are atheists. Many people of faith also at times refer to themselves as secular to underline their conviction that faith should be a personal matter with no place in the public realm. In this book, I will be using the terms most often in the first three senses and it will be clear from context which meaning of secular or secularism is being summoned in a given instance. This work is located within a Hinduism deeply nourished by Buddhism, for it is here that my learning has taken place. Religion cannot be conceived as the space of an innocent faith and devotion, for its history and present are marked equally by conflict, contention and contradiction. Indeed, the dominance of Hindu fundamentalism was a defining context for these essays which were written between 1999 and 2006. Consequently, I have striven to demonstrate the salience of spiritual principles and to clarify my premises and interpretations so that they may be clearly distinguished from regressive religion. Many pieces thus double as meditations on the subject at hand, and as observations on the fissures and strains that constitute religious philosophy and practice. I refrain from defining ‘sacred’ in this introduction, preferring instead to invite the reader to allow its meaning to be unfolded in what follows. The writing in SacredSecular traverses several registers: the personal and the social, the contemplative and the analytical and, for want of a better description, 3

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the cognitive and the extra-cognitive. For despite my efforts to situate and account for my interpretations, truth requires me to bear witness to the mysterious, the spontaneous, and what one might call the noteasily-explicable aspects of the sacred. In keeping with the spirit of exploration and contemplation, SacredSecular interweaves multiple modes of address, including expository prose, prose–poetry, critical commentary and meditations. It also shuttles between the countries in which I have lived during the period of writing, India and the United States of America, and within them, Bangalore, Karnataka, and Oakland, California. The pieces are short by design, and juxtaposed in a way that is intended to reflect the recursive dynamic of spiritual practice in which one repeatedly revisits core issues and themes. This recursive dynamic is also integral to the kind of analysis attempted here. Each return, every example, has the potential to yield its own insight as well as to lend density to a cumulative process. It is hoped that the essays will be read in this way; each piece is an entity distinct unto itself and, at the same time, a distillation of the principles that frame the collection as a whole.

4

Faith Amidst the Destruction of Truth

H

ow does one express belief in the divine in a world in which intolerance and bigotry seek religious sanction? How can one take a stand distinct from the two poles of Right-wing fundamentalism and secular rationality?1 Can one articulate a third space in which a notion of the sacred can infuse the insights of secular knowledge to revivify both? Faith is not the outcome of reasoned argumentation. One cannot convince anyone to have faith in the divine. Faith simply is, although this does not mean that it is natural or beyond social construction. The forms taken by faith are socially and culturally marked. Even so, much of what the person of faith experiences exceeds rationalist conceptualisation. When I say ‘faith simply is’, I refer to its mysterious aspect: the process by which even a sceptical secularist like me can find herself plucked out of the perceptual frames in which she had sought to comprehend the world. What arises in place of what one has hitherto held to be true is shaped by many factors, including one’s social conditioning and one’s political or philosophical orientation. The expressions of faith 5

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and the consequences of belief thus straddle the social and the extra-social, that which is knowable by means of a pre-existing cognitive frame, and that which may be described as exceeding its parameters.

II

Bombay, December 1992. Around me a Right-wing organisation, Shiv Sena, borrowing the name of a deity who represents dynamic stillness, had wreaked death, despair and destruction. Over 2,000 dead and the city would never be the same again. Even as I was unbeknownst to myself hurtling toward spiritual transformation, I was cursing God for what had transpired in the city that I had loved for its plurality and cosmopolitanism. Those whom I had assumed would know better were now championing the cause of Hindu majoritarianism and finding their Muslim neighbhours to be inalienably Other. Secularism was increasingly being revealed as a thin gloss willed into existence by non-communal lawmakers, philosophers and social activists. In the wake of the Ram Janmabhoomi controversy, secularism seemed impossible to posit even as a goal. It had become a dream destroyed by the political Right—Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). These events raised many questions about the nature, genealogy and history of secularism in India. To what extent had the Indian state actually realised its version 6

Faith Amidst the Destruction of Truth

of secularism—the equal treatment of all religions? As a composite philosophy that strives to separate religion from the state (and by extension from public life more broadly), to whom had secularism appealed and why? Could a perspective that privileges scientific rationality and discounts religious belief have a mass base given the sociocultural context of India? Was India’s trajectory properly mapped as an in-progress evolution from religious pluralism to secularism, a progression disrupted by Right-wing forces (whether conceived of as being obscurantist or postmodern)? Or was it more appropriate to describe Indian society as one characterised by religious pluralism, a reality which secularism had failed to dislodge, but which since the late 1980s the political Right was seeking to undermine by means of the aggressive assertion of Hindu majoritarianism?2

III

Awakening to the divine is an inexplicable process. It is impossible to logically account for the shift in one’s consciousness or the transformation of one’s ways of seeing the world. Yet, is it not just like Kali to take someone of my political orientation, that too on the heels of one of the biggest massacres in the city of my youth, and proceed to open me to her wisdom? I had not invited her. She had come to fetch me. Like the dark night studded with stars she would descend upon my consciousness and I could not resist her frequent and potent visitations. 7

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I had not been especially drawn to Kali prior to this, but when she came it was as though a severed connection was being restored. She rarely spoke. But the energy did its work to melt me. Over and over again I witnessed my cognitive framework being dissolved. Wordlessly, she conveyed to me that I could persist in clinging to a view of life that I had somewhat uneasily and incompletely taken to be my own. Or, I could die out of all that I had known myself to be, and be reborn. This invitation to choose between continuing to reincarnate the past or be birthed anew repeatedly arose in my consciousness. Early on it became clear that this experience was unlike anything that I had glimpsed as possible in the sanitised, codified and caste-ridden Hinduism of my youth. Kali’s uncompromising nature, her fierce love and compassion, her embodiment of the tragedy and potentiality of the human journey were uncontainable within any socially sanctified religious system. This was not the ‘goddess as fit consort’ from whom I had instinctively recoiled. I could in no way confuse this experience with what I had earlier rejected, namely, the smug conventionalism and bigotry of a ‘liberal’ Hinduism and the more overt hostility of the conservative and Right-wing variant. I was forced to confront the reality that the divine could not be confused with what religion had made of her/him/it. As layer upon layer of misconception and misperception was peeled away from me, I felt laid upon me the bracing warmth of truth, mercy and love. The 8

Faith Amidst the Destruction of Truth

deeper I journeyed the more the sense of duality— between inside and outside, myself and others, good and bad—was softened, though not into some indistinguishable reality. Rather, I was urged to look within even as I appeared to look without, to ensure that that to which I pointed in others was not also present in me. The process made me far more humble than I had previously imagined myself to be. It is often thought that those on a spiritual path become incapable of critical analysis. It is feared that opening to unconditional love leads one to unconditionally accept everything and everyone ‘as is where is’, as the saying goes. This does not necessarily follow. The cultivation of acceptance is the first step toward clarity. When we resist what is before us, many questions remain unasked and therefore unanswerable. Acceptance frees us to look unflinchingly at the social facts. If properly practiced, spiritual truth will keep us sharp-witted about oneself as well as others. It makes us aware that the qualities we are so tempted to decry in others may also be present in us. The presumption that there is no hatred in our consciousness may prompt us to match hate with hate, rather than meet it with love and truth. The awareness of how fear, greed, attachment and rage can structure our perception of reality makes us recognise that the work of social transformation cannot proceed without revolutionising the consciousness of each individual. As long as fear, greed, attachment and rage exist, various ideologies that seek to narrativise these sentiments in some coherent form will 9

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find adherents, however monstrous their story may be. If the lies of the Right-wing cannot seem to be countered by the facts, it may be partly because the fears capitalised upon by these forces are not being addressed in the response of progressive truth-tellers. And even if such negativity were to be engaged by progressives, so long as individuals or groups cling to fear, greed, attachment and rage, little transformation of consciousness is possible. Spiritual wisdom about the sources of suffering cannot by itself bring about a change of heart. Genuine change depends on each of us being willing to investigate what motivates and grounds the desire to hate, exclude and inflict suffering on fellow beings. More than that, it requires our willingness to renounce such action in thought, word and deed. The spiritual path calls upon us to rethink conventional notions of responsibility and action. One forcefully discovers the inextricable inter-relatedness of everything in the phenomenal world. As chaos theory has demonstrated, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can initiate changes in atmospheric pressure that may eventually influence the path of a tornado, delaying or accelerating or even preventing its occurrence in a particular location. Each one of our thoughts, each one of our actions reverberates to the farthest reaches of the universe and even affects the cycles of nature. Our beingness, our very breath, has an impact on the universe. It is impossible for an individual to have no effect on her or his environment.

10

Faith Amidst the Destruction of Truth

As we begin to grasp the significance of this reality, we develop an increasing awareness of our every thought and action. Simultaneously, one becomes ever more conscious of the complex dance of cause and effect, the layering of individual, community, national, international and planetary action, and the ignorance and multiple investments that can transform dharmic or good intent into adharmic or bad practice. The greater awareness that is the fruit of spiritual practice may not yield a blueprint for action, but it need not lead to a paralysis of will. Certain principles come forward on the basis of which action can be contemplated: non-violence, harmonious coexistence with nature and with other beings, and the renunciation of ego, including its many strategies for self-preservation. The aspirant strives to practice these principles in surrender, and with detachment as to the outcome of her actions. Detachment from the fruits of one’s actions does not, however, mean indifference to the effects of one’s endeavours. Rather, non-attachment is a refusal to be distracted from these principles by one’s hopes, desires and failures. One dedicates oneself to spiritual truth, leaving to that wisdom the task of transforming the hearts and minds of others. Responsibility thus emerges as the ability to respond in congruence with spiritual truth, while action is that which arises from the cultivation of its principles.

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SacredSecular IV

Right-wing fundamentalism and pseudo-religiosity bear little resemblance to genuine spiritual practice. Where the latter encourages the divinisation of humanness and the sacralisation of all activity, the former is explicitly concerned with self-aggrandisement, with fortifying the ego. It is no wonder then that greed, hate, violence and untruth abound in Right-wing rhetoric and action while authentic spiritual qualities of love, compassion and dispassion are conspicuously absent. It is often stated that God is an experience. God cannot be legislated into one’s heart or kept there by fear of persecution. Indeed there are many who are genuinely secular in temperament and inclination. But the converse is true and equally valid: God cannot be driven out of the consciousness of those who feel this primal bond regardless of whatever forms of re-education we may dream up to replace ‘religion’ with ‘science’. Certainly, much of the critique of religion is just. Spiritual truth has been disfigured by many false beliefs. Likewise, much of what has been proven by science is true. However, neither religion nor modern science is free from the distortions of space and time. Both are social constructs and must be evaluated as such.

12

Faith Amidst the Destruction of Truth Notes 1. I use the term fundamentalism, fully aware that those who claim this designation are doing anything but honouring that which is ethical and profound about their tradition, be it Hinduism, Christianity or Islam. Given its wide circulation in current discussions, however, it seems to me to be practical to use the term fundamentalism even while challenging its content and politics. 2. Rajeev Bhargava (ed.), Secularism and its Critics. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. Ashis Nandy has been a crucial and sustained voice in this debate. He diagnoses secularism as a symptom of a violent technocratic modernity which underwrites the project of the nation-state (its postcolonial version included) and which requires the reform, if not eradication, of the faith traditions of the majority of its citizens. An abiding concern for Nandy is how the secular framework occludes comprehension of the relations between religion and politics as they actually exist. See especially, ‘The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance’, in Rajeev Bhargava (ed.), Secularism and its Critics, pp. 321–44; ‘Coping with the Politics of Faiths and Cultures: Between Secular State and Ecumenical Traditions in India’, and ‘A Report on the Present State of Health of Gods and Goddesses in South Asia’, in Ashis Nandy, Time Warps: The Insistent Politics of Silent and Evasive Pasts. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001, pp. 89–128 and pp. 129–56, and ‘An Anti-Secularist Manifesto’, in Ashis Nandy, The Romance of the State and the Fate of Dissent in the Tropics. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 34–60.

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Walking Meditation

Space Place Physical, Psychic, Emotional Geography Air Energy Dancing Molecules Pray, what is the function of history? Marshland gradually dredged becomes a usable plot in the growing expanse of a southern city Water drained becomes a moat around the perimeter of each individual home Breeding ground for bacteria or simply stagnant water, moss green?

A

s I walk through this new development taking shape as the twentieth century draws to a close, I am aware that I have no idea how many centuries this land has been home to birds, insects and wild-flowers, before it became cherished property, prime real estate. Marshland becomes dry land. Dusty footpaths are tarred to make paved roads. How many stories of lives lived, work done, lie pressed into the newly surfaced tarmac? Impermanence is manifest all around us. There is no transformation without concomitant destruction. The question is who bears the brunt? How will those who have sacrificed and

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Walking Meditation

those who have gained each live out the consequences of their actions?

II

I am wandering the narrow lanes of Bangalore’s Koramangala, Block IV. I am struck by the differences in the architecture of homes depending on when, and by whom, they were built. The old south and the new south sit cheek by jowl in an aesthetic scramble. Older homes seem to look inward whereas newer constructions tend to be outward in orientation, like objects on display. Dwellings previously conceived as primarily functional in nature, now seem equally to be making statements about those who reside within them. There is a certain ostentation, even gaudiness, to the new residences. But it is not a confident lavishness. It is as though the owners are unsure about how they wish to be represented in brick, glass and concrete. Hesitant and unclear they opt for a pastiche of old and new, north and south, pointless and artful innovation. In general, bigger seems better. The more one can fit onto one’s plot, the greater the perceived return for one’s investment. Never mind that one’s kitchen overlooks a neighbour’s bedroom or that one’s living area abuts onto another’s television room, separated by a few feet and a low wall. Sounds from one residence flow into the next and the proximity of buildings makes many rooms airless and without access to direct sunlight. One may as well be living in a 15

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high-rise apartment block in an urban conurbation! I am wandering the narrow streets of Koramangala Block IV, wondering what such spatial organisation signifies about how we construe our relationship to our environment. For, the choice to build to the very edge of one’s property suggests that we are not taking our place, so much as staking our claim. The garden city, which mid-twentieth century could boast that its canopy of trees obscured the open sky, now stands denuded beneath it.

III

I walk past a building site. Men and women are carrying huge loads, building brick by brick the walls of a house in which they will never live. The Marxist in me wishes to know how much they are paid, whether they are unionised and what safeguards there might be for their protection. The feminist in me wants to know all this, and also whether women’s wages are equal to those of men, whether pregnant women receive any kind of support and maternity leave, and why there is no crèche, only little babies wrapped in sarees tied to nearby trees. The spiritual aspirant in me wants to know all this and more. Who are these beings? Who are they really? What is it that they have come to teach, what is it that they have come to learn, and what will they have the courage to complete in this lifetime? I can no longer see them only as labourers who deserve a decent wage and appropriate conditions of work. I see them also as 16

Walking Meditation

spiritual beings who are here on a mission, and pray that they will have the support to fulfil their destinies.

IV It is not that the world of matter is of no matter It is not that all of this is some illusion, ego’s delusion It is just that we are all this and so much more Each life is one episode in the drama of a soul’s journey through embodiment The circumstances of one’s life provide the setting for these experiments in the body The soul individuates countless times until its yearning to play with free will is completely met, totally exhausted Not an apology for status-quoism, as we used to call it Simply an invitation to remember that we are all this and so much more And a suggestion that no radical movement that ignores this fundamental truth can realise its full potential V

Friends on the Left ask me to share something about my new sensibility. I understand their question but am unsure what any response I offer will clarify for them. Faith is a black hole to those who are secular in temperament, alien and inexplicable. I desist from rising to the challenge posed by their inquiry. But the issue accompanies me on my peregrinations. The Left in India has not seriously engaged the spiritual and religious heritage of the subcontinent. This 17

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cannot surprise us given the materialist a priori of Marxism. Marxism relates all aspects of life and consciousness to the material conditions of existence. (We will set aside for now the fact that the spiritual is also a material phenomenon.) Marx was writing in a period when the religious establishment was the buttress of the sociopolitical order. A deep antipathy to religion thus characterised his perspective. To Marx, religious belief represented a form of selfestrangement and illusion. The call to give up religion was thus a call to give up the conditions that required illusion; religion was ‘the opium of the people’. Marxism as theory and political practice has had a complex trajectory subsequent to Marx. Many key concepts have undergone revision and refinement to address conditions different from those analysed by Marx and Engels. Marxist theory has also been reworked in the context of the enormous divergence of conditions in which it has been a critical resource and inspiration. But certain ideas seem to have remained sacrosanct, among them those pertaining to religion. Marxism has remained uncomprehending, indifferent, even hostile, to a significant dimension of human life. The reluctance of the Left to reconsider its ideas cannot simply be attributed to religion’s regressive role in human history. The negative history of religion is only one aspect of it. There is also abundant evidence of religion’s capacity to energise human

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Walking Meditation

imagination and action whether we are speaking of art, philosophy, music, or of resistance to domination. Religion has even been crucial to challenging injustices perpetrated in its very name. The emergence of Liberation Theology in the Latin Americas could have opened a space for reflection on the Left. Liberation theology sought to meld Marxist socioeconomic analysis with an interpretation of the Bible from the vantage point of the poor and oppressed. It embraced Jesus not just as a redeemer but as a liberator of the poor, and posited social justice on earth as a core Christian concern. Although liberation theology first emerged in the Roman Catholic Church (which, not surprisingly, quickly disapproved of it), it has had a profound impact on Pro testantism as well. It remains a potent force even today. Liberation theology learned from Marxism but the reverse has not happened. One can only conclude that the categorical dismissal of religion as inevitably suspect is an article of faith within Marxism. What else can explain the refusal to confront all aspects of an enduring social phenomenon by a theory that otherwise compellingly urges us to attend to contradiction? This view of religion places Marxism at a distinct disadvantage. When the bulk of humanity is dismissed as labouring under false consciousness so far as religion is concerned, those with ‘true or scientific consciousness’ are necessarily positioned as separate and inevitably superior.

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The secularism of the Left is in tension with the outlook of the majority of people in the subcontinent who live and act within a framework imbued with religious modes of knowing and being. From a Left perspective those who are not secular are intelligible in terms of their objective conditions but not their subjective formation. The latter remains a mystery. This leaves little room for the Left to do anything other than adopt a reactive stance in matters pertaining to religion or deemed religious. It can protest the infringement of law when it occurs and hold state institutions accountable as necessary. However, its theoretical predispositions have deprived it of the means with which to articulate a more socioculturally attuned lexicon of difference, diversity and inclusion in arguing its vision of justice. Attempts to draw on aspects of religious tradition, such as Sufi poetry or the songs of Kabir, do not convince since their citation is generally intended to locate cultural antecedents for a Left politics and is not a sign of the latter’s transformation. The discursive field is thus abandoned to those who falsely claim to be true torchbearers of ‘tradition’. The abiding commitment to a so-called ‘universalist’ secular discourse is not unique to Indian Marxism. If we contemplate the situation in Europe and the United States we notice that when confronted with the twin forces of religious fundamentalism on the one side and a resurgent Eurocentric liberalism on the other, even the postmodern Left with its erstwhile trenchant critique of liberal humanism was found to

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be taking shelter in a liberal discourse of individual rights, freedom of expression, etc. It is true that Left analysis of the political and economic context for the rise of fundamentalisms (Christian, Islamic or Hindu) has differed from a secular liberal perspective. But the Left has offered little else. Its incapacity in this regard cannot be attributed to practical considerations alone. It is also the consequence of a philosophical failure to rethink its conception of religion. The Marxist premise that religion is a distortion of reality has led to a distorted view of religion. This point may equally well be made vis-a-vis any secularism that adopts a like perspective. Religion is not merely an ill-considered insurance policy bought by the vulnerable to cope with the challenges confronting them, though it can be a salve for the wounded spirit. It is far, far, more than that. Religion is a complex, contradictory, and negotiated sociocultural space with the potential to both enable and inhibit an inclusive consciousness.1 The same may be said about secularism. As long as there is no openness to contemplating religion, an insurmountable divide will be seen to exist between sacred and secular frameworks. Any dialogue across this presumed chasm will perforce be asymmetrical and unproductive. But that is not all. As a human collectivity we will have forfeited the possibility of a creative interweaving of that which is most generative and liberating in both traditions. This is a loss we can ill afford.2

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SacredSecular Notes 1. To take account of this Ashis Nandy proposes a distinction between religion as faith and religion as ideology. See, ‘The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance’, in Rajeev Bhargava (ed.), Secularism and its Critics. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 322. 2. Although we begin at different starting points, my argument here may be productively read alongside Ziauddin Sardar’s critique of the presumed exceptionalism of Western secularism. Sardar documents the history of secularism within Islam and the political context for the resistance to secularism among Muslims today. See for example, ‘Searching for Secular Islam’, New Humanist, September/October 2004; see also his Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim. London: Granta Books, 2005.

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Trash

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rash is ubiquitous in Bangalore, indeed in any Indian city. That which has made possible the reproduction of everyday life, once consumed or used becomes detritus of no particular utility to those whom it had previously sustained. Vegetable peel, tea leaves, dust, non-recyclable plastic, bulbs, used sanitary napkins: these are among what one might encounter if one peers into the three-foot-high concrete cylinders placed on every street corner for the deposit of waste. In most cases, there is no need to crane one’s neck to catch a glimpse of what is in them, for trash is usually overflowing the containers provided for its storage. Frequently, the cylinder is only partially full, but the area around it is littered with the material that has fallen out of the newspaper in which it was loosely wrapped. And amidst this offering are plastic bags, knotted to keep their contents from spilling, swelling under pressure from the heat. In all likelihood the person entrusted with the job of removing waste from the homes of those who generated it, and for whom it had in its earlier form provided, has carelessly tossed this cargo in the general direction of the receptacle. No one, however rich, is protected from the 23

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sight of trash. Even in the most affluent area, overflowing household waste is a regular, if bemoaned, eyesore. Trash is simply matter in a form unpalatable to those who produce it. Every article that is to be found in the trash has, at least in the Indian context, usually performed some useful function, whether it be coffee grains, discarded food, or the newspaper that serves as wrapping. Everything has served an important purpose but is now deemed to be of no particular value, considered ‘trash’. Yet one person’s waste is another person’s wage. Often one sees young boys and girls methodically sorting their way through garbage for bits of paper and the odd plastic bottle cap that can be recycled. Cows, crows and dogs are also regularly seen looking for edible items. However, except for those whose livelihood or nutritional needs require them to come nose to nose with it, most avert their gaze from these mountains of waste rising from virtually every street corner in Bangalore. Most people are alienated from and disgusted with that which has ensured their comfort and well being. Once they have taken from matter what it is that they want or need, they simply throw it away, as though it had nothing whatsoever to do with them. These humble monuments to consumption placed me in a peculiar predicament. On the one hand, I shared this common response of aversion to garbage. As I neared each corner I felt the desire to take 24

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flight. My spirit seemed to retreat upward vacating the feet that connected me to the ground. I found myself holding my breath so I would not smell trash decomposing in the heat. I would turn the street corner and breathe out relieved that for at least another one hundred yards I would not have to shrink from my environment. On the other hand, as one committed to being present to every second of my life, it became clear to me that this aversion to trash must itself become the subject of contemplation. Why this alienation from the very things that have nourished us, made our lives livable, even enjoyable? What sense of entitlement underwrote this narrowly utilitarian relationship to matter? Each pile of waste I encountered posed fundamental existential questions about the nature of matter, its social construction, our collective choices of how to live and their many consequences. As everpresent evidence of our daily actions, trash was an invitation to embrace the cycle of life in its entirety, to contemplate the food chain and our part in it. I began to rank it alongside the many shrines and temples that dot our landscape: like them it was calling out to me to live wisely. Crucial to sustaining this aversion to trash is the widespread cultural disdain for matter, and for the physical body as a particularly potent instance of it. This view may have had its origins in upper caste predilections but is now shared much more broadly. It is only logical that this ambivalence to matter extends to the phenomenal world more generally, 25

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especially the part of it that is not conceived as sacred. Thus homes may be swept scrupulously but the dust simply emptied outside the door or compound wall. Likewise ashrams may be spotless, but their toilets another matter altogether. Human waste and the waste produced by humans is meted the same disrespect. Hardly anyone who can afford to employ someone else cleans their own toilets or takes out their trash. Is it believed that God, sharing our prejudices, is to be found only in certain spaces, in particular kinds of matter?1 It is a short step from rejection of the physical to its desecration in spiritual discourse. The exhortation to transcend body consciousness is a symptom of this perspective. We are urged to overcome the senses, to remember that ‘we are not the body’. Controlling the body — its needs and desires — is said to be a prerequisite to the realisation of spiritual aspirations. From this standpoint, humanness becomes not that which is to be divinised through sadhana (spiritual practice), but rather that which our yoga is intended to eradicate. Thus is made crude that subtle process by which the cultivation of spiritual practice opens the possibility of a gradual transformation of humanness such that it becomes congruent with, not opposed to, divine consciousness. If one followed this oversimplified view to its logical conclusion, there would be no inherent purpose to incarnation or embodiment. We exist only so we may transcend existence. Small wonder then that both the physical body and by extension the environment are treated 26

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with such careless, even callous, disrespect. For their value rests solely in their utility, in what each makes possible. Mercifully, there is another important seam in the cultural ethos of Hinduism: the proposition that all matter is sacred and that everything, whether sentient or apparently non-sentient, is imbued with divine consciousness. In this view, the entire phenomenal world is held to be sacred and the goal of life is to recognise and experience the sacred nature of all things. This fundamental truth is the bedrock of Hindu mystical teachings as also of the earth-based and tribal religions of India. Belief in the inherent sacredness of matter inspires many of the ritual and everyday practices of both philosophical systems. Both the positive and the negative attitudes to matter may be witnessed by observing those upon whom the upper castes and the affluent have conferred the work of waste disposal: the rag pickers and the workers of the Bangalore City Corporation. On the one hand, hatred of matter is reflected in their conditions of work and the social ostracism they face on account of their labour. They earn poor wages, clear broken glass, blades and other sharp objects without any form of protection and live in the shadow of social discrimination. In their attentiveness and dignity, on the other hand, in the joy they often bring to their work, is evidence of an embrace of all the phases of life, of an acceptance of the pilgrimage made by matter as it surrenders naturally, unhesitatingly, out of one form into the next. If we could but open to 27

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the truth that trash is simply matter in motion and, as such, shares the essential quality of all matter in changing form, shape and function, we would be able to honour the waste we produce as well as those who work to tend it. It is time to accept our intimate relationship to trash. It is time to recognise the sacredness of all bodily fluids and substances. It is time to heal our distaste for that which makes our life whole, holy. Either that or we must remain predators of nature with an extractive and deeply profane relationship to Creation. Nature gives unceasingly. Matter must transform its form; that is a law of nature. To the extent that we as humans wish to refuse the full implications of our role in the creation, destruction and transfiguration of matter on a daily basis, we will continue to have an exploitative relationship with the phenomenal world. And this world, by dint of its tendency to continually transform, will portend danger and require ever more vigilance to be kept under control and at bay. Our refusal to live consciously on the material plane alienates us from that which has sustained us, and as part of which we must learn to take our place. Alienation produces distance and disgust, the very opposite of loving recognition, mutuality and gratitude, the only appropriate basis for relating to nature and to the phenomenal world. The overflowing heaps of garbage thus represent the potential for an antidote to the seamlessly invisible violation of nature that is possible in many First World locations, where trash is bagged, bundled into 28

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containers, and hurtled out of sight by men wearing face masks and gloves. Even though the workers are relatively better protected, the relationship between input and output is, in these places, hidden from view. The malady is thus driven underground. Few are aware of the effects of such sanitised efficiency on the consciousness of those who, at least in the short term, seem to benefit from the sanitary conditions in which they live and from the efficiency of waste disposal in their communities. I am not suggesting that there is no need to seek more effective ways of treating trash in cities like Bangalore that have grown so rapidly that the infrastructure has not been able to keep pace. I am simply proposing that we use these bins spilling over with that which we have discarded, to contemplate the following critical issues: our place in nature, the effects of our actions, and our nomination of matter into the acceptable and the unacceptable. If we engaged in such a process, we would discover that it is not really possible to definitively separate that which we call our own from that which we pretend has no relationship to us as we pass it at the end of our very own street. Postscript: Oakland, Spring 2003: I receive a pamphlet through my mail slot titled, ‘Globalisation, Recycling and Your Plastic Bottles’. It is from the local ecology centre. The leaflet details how plastic bottles I recycle in California are exported to India, China and the Philippines where men, women and children are employed to process them in ill-managed and 29

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hazardous facilities. The toxic environment in these units has led to a sharp increase in lung disorders among those who work in them. I am urged to avoid purchasing plastic products and to contact the local Plastic Task Force for information on their campaign regarding the international trade in wastes. The information brings forward another dimension of the issue: the relationship, both business and human, between First World trash and Third World lives. These facts make even more absurd any refusal on our part to attend to the refuse of our own making. We are invited once again to consider the implications of our every action.

Note 1. It was against these cultural prejudices that Gandhi involved the residents of his ashrams in cleaning the toilets. The cleaning of toilets as seva is also to be found in non-Gandhian religious ashrams, thus attesting to the persistence of that strand within the Hindu tradition which embraces all matter as sacred.

30

Nameless Transaction

B

elonging. At-homeness. Identity. Despite their extensive circulation in contemporary discourse, these terms remain elastic, even elusive. To whom or what do we belong, and how are we to be assured of our sense of connection? Belonging is as individual as it is transpersonal and collective. Yet it is not, as is often claimed, dependent on inclusion by others. We do not just belong to, but also in, among, around, about, etcetera. The subtlety of synergy invites us to attend to the nuances of lived experience.

II

In the United States I feel like a salmon swimming upstream. Even though I have lived on its Pacific coast for about twenty years, the sense of outsiderness has persisted. My relationship to the country is tenuous. I feel at all times a little out of step, a little to the side, like an observer much more than a participant. On the surface of things I pass culturally. I am au fait with several vernaculars, mainstream as well as marginal. But despite this fluency in US politics and 31

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culture, I feel as if I live in a foreign medium. Cultural difference shows little sign of softening. First encounters with native-born Americans can be (predictably) unnerving. As my interlocutors seek to make sense of my presence on US soil, I know that I am about to be in trouble. Even if they are friendly, I will, in all likelihood, barely survive their act of inclusion. This angular relationship to my environment is in striking contrast with the deep sense of belonging that I feel in India. Here, I feel that I am swimming in the same direction as the invisible current that flows through all life activity. It is as if the pulse of my heart and that of this energy are synchronous with one another. When my foot touches the earth it is as though its surface rejoices in bearing the weight of my body. The environment seems to appreciate my presence and I thrive in its embrace. Birdsong. The squealing of squirrels. The scratchy sound of a broom. Chants from the mosque and temple loudspeakers. The cries of vendors. The spluttering of auto-rickshaws. I am filled with a joy that is difficult to convey and impossible to explain. Wherever I go, I feel the presence of the divine: in sound, in image, in that velvety feeling within, in that earth-beat that matches and magnifies the rhythm of my own heart. I am deeply at home here even though I have returned to a city I barely know! My knowledge of Bangalore’s history, its cultural, social and political geography is negligible. And yet, the city and I are 32

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involved in a nameless transaction that strengthens and nourishes me. What part of my being is fortified by my presence in India? And how is this mystery to be approached?

III

The bond I feel is elemental, the connection extralinguistic. Neither sociology, nor history, nor even psychology can provide an adequate narrative for comprehending this sense of being aligned with that vibration that is at the very heart of all that is happening in this time-space. My at-homeness here is irrefutable. Yet what is being invoked is not identity in a narrow sense. My affirmation is not coming from humans conferring upon me an insider status in their community. Much of what I have described has been experienced in the context of simply being here. I feel drawn to the literal earth. Not to the constructs of bharat mata or the Indian nation, but to the mud, chalk, sand, rock, vegetation and other life forms from which these categories have been so poorly, so misguidedly, fashioned. It is the earth that seems to yield to my steps. It is the trees that open their arms in protective shelter. It is the birds who appear to celebrate my being here. Nature can assure and enliven one anywhere in the world. Yet, much as I commune inwardly with the 33

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natural world in the US, it is in India that it palpably reaches out to me. It is nature that has rolled out a prayer mat in honour of my return. My goal in each day is no longer to accomplish tasks prioritised according to some pre-existing logic. What spurs me, rather, is the deep intention to be one with this nameless and formless energy that seems to be inviting me to merge with it. What I seek each morning is to cultivate openness to the current that is beckoning me to itself, and seems to remember my true genealogy. And the ‘I’ that is blessed by this benediction is not just this incarnate self but also aspects of beingness not de-limitable in this way. When nature bears witness to an entire lineage every cell in the body dances in remembrance of what was, and could be once more. When I walk down the streets of my Oakland neighbourhood, I inhabit a space in which I am most at home in my interior world. My inward chanting of mantra is punctuated by the sounds of rap music, car alarms and the wheezing of the collapsible doors of transit buses. In India, however, inside and outside are not disjunctive but indelibly linked. The outside extends the inside even while the inside is continuously being re-birthed by the outside. In India too, it must be said, car alarms pierce the air and scooters as well as cars honk their way through narrow urban streets. But the pulse of the earth is stronger than in the entombed environment of Oakland; its vibration is never drowned by the 34

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maelstrom of urban noise that arises but just as quickly falls away. Even in the bustling Indian city, if one allows oneself to fall through the welter of sound, the silence is immediately audible. Consequently, the sound of humans and the effects of their actions are continually placed in proper proportion. The noise of human distress is cradled by a peace that resounds even in streets where the poor barely eke out a living. Hope, aliveness, grace, gratitude and grit are woven into the struggle against disempowerment, stress and poverty. East: spiritual; West: materialistic. East: contentment; West: restlessness. East: happy poor; West: dispirited underclass. What I say may appear to mimic these Orientalist gestures. Yet, much of what I experience and for which I seek language is, prior to, and beyond, that which is given form by these categories. Indeed, the best of cognitive effort cannot begin to express that which yearns for me and welcomes my return migration. The energy that sustains the invisible fabric holding all sound as well as silence within the magic webs of its own making was here before the first human utterance, and will remain after all human effort has been laid to rest. The poetics of divine love do not fit neatly into the grammar of politics, sociology or history. If representation gives shape to reality even while reality constantly exceeds representation, how can we assume that the politics of representation will be sufficient to the task of expressing that which defies representation in the first place? Being has no 35

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referent. Being simply is. Silence has no referent. It simply is. If beingness has silence both as its premise and its gift, what possible words can convey the materiality of a loving energy that can only be experienced, and for which all language is but a poor witness? Yet the experience of love gives rise to the impulse to give form to the formless. Words are uttered in the hope that they will serve as signposts for fellow travellers. In doing so, one draws comfort from the truth that the insufficiency of language is no bar to experiencing the gift of divine presence, which is graciously bestowed upon anyone open to receiving it.

Postscript: Bangalore, Monsoon 2006

All writing is situated in space and time. The bhava (mood) of this piece written in 1999 reflects a moment before Bangalore city’s calamitous collapse in the context of the outsourcing and IT boom. Boom! The word refers not merely to a period of business prosperity and industrial expansion, but also to a deep resonant sound. Earthmovers, trucks, hammers and drills are now integral to the city’s soundscape, the consequence of unchecked and reckless construction. Add to this the relentless din of vehicular traffic and one is led to ask whether the roar of the boom has drowned out the sound of silence eulogised above. No single answer is possible since all cities are heterogeneous spaces. One thing, however, is certain. 36

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There is a direct relationship between the physical and the metaphysical. Our capacity to hear and feel the substratum of silence requires that our senses are not blunted by sound, choked by exhaust, and stupefied by electronic frequencies. Our senses need to breathe. Inspiration literally means in-breath. If we are to live consciously and reciprocally in relation to our environment and fellow beings, it is crucial that matter be allowed to retain its inherently dynamic balance. If not, subtlety of perception and experience will be among the first casualties. To be receptive to spirit we need to be attentive to matter. For the two are as one, as in-breath is to out-breath.

37

Visit to the Temple

I

love to walk: not simply as a way of getting things done, but as a means of finding my bearings in time and space. Walking gives me a perspective on the everyday life of fellow beings different from that glimpsed from moving vehicles. I had awoken this morning eager to start my work; but the sight of breezes lifting the tall skirts of the citronella grasses entices me out of doors. It is, after all, Election Day, 1999. I stroll through the streets with no particular aim. Vast plots of marshy land intersperse smaller holdings on which construction work is proceeding in earnest. But no one is to be seen today. The workers are all, presumably, casting their vote, rolling the dice on India’s political future. Kites circle overhead, keeping vigil over bullocks unhurriedly grazing amidst bulrushes and exuberant weeds. A radio-dispatched city cab, Bangalore’s latest and attempting to be finest, is ambling through the tiny lanes trying to locate the address to which it has been called. The street dogs had taken their usual daytime positions — in driveways, under trees, or lying fully extended on culverts. At night the roads belonged to them. Fierce fights would break out as they howled in

38

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defence of their territory against incursions by dogs from other streets. But during the day they were cool and unflappable, evincing a refined civility that belied such nocturnal dramas. My presence on the street draws momentary attention since middle and upper middle class persons are not usually to be seen walking about, except in the early morning or at dusk when they take their daily exercise. In the intervening hours it is mainly hawkers, servants and service providers who are to be seen on foot. I catch sight of a board with the words ‘Mahaganapathi Trust’ painted on it. I head in its direction. The temple stands at the corner of a quiet street that leads into the heart of the Srinivagilu Tank Bed Layout. From the timings on the board it becomes obvious that I have come a little too late. But there are children squabbling inside the compound and the eldest among them, a girl of about eight, unlocks the gate and invites me in. She has two thick shoulder-length plaits and is dressed in a bright yellow skirt over which she wears a white blouse. In the sanctum sanctorum is the main deity, Ganesh; just outside and facing it is a small Nandi bull. I can hear the children continue their animated conversation. The girl who had ushered me in is instructing the younger ones to hold their tongues and on no account tell their mother what had transpired. She does not spell out the consequences of doing so, but her implied threat hangs tantalisingly in the air. They 39

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begin murmuring among themselves. My attention drifts to the idol and to the temple itself. This is a temple for the poor. The flowers have long lost their lustre and seem to be hanging onto Sri Ganesh out of sheer devotion. A woman in her thirties is circumambulating the shrine and is in deep prayer. I kneel on the dusty floor and chant inwardly. As I stand up to leave, my hostess breaks away from her younger siblings and hurries into the shrine room to bring me the flame. The expression on her face is serious. No traces of erstwhile conspiracies are to be seen. The flame is strong and seems in no danger of being snuffed out by the balmy breezes blowing in from the tank. I accept it and leave, closing the gate behind me. As I reflect on my brief time in the temple, I am struck by the sacrilege represented by religion in our time. That which should heal, unite and bind is like sharp twine embedded with glass. The welcome I have received here may or may not be extended to my hosts in many of the well endowed temples of the city to which upper caste patrons, content with their own godliness, ensure a steady supply of fresh flowers. Many of those who support Hindutva are from this upper caste and class fraction. Though not the BJP’s shock troops, this has been a segment upon which the party has been able to count. It is done much to normalise and make doxa the violent ideas of the Sangh Parivar. A sectarian upper caste Hinduism has come together with an avid materialism to produce 40

Visit to the Temple

a sea change in the consciousness of those who had previously evinced at least a modicum of interest in the wellbeing of their impoverished country men and women. The charitable disposition of a kind liberalism has been revealed as a veneer: an overlay worn down by economic recession, greed made socially acceptable by Americanisation and globalisation, and a misplaced sense of deprivation of what are construed as traditional rights and privileges. The erosion of caste prerogatives is taken personally, and in that process is born support for a fundamentally divisive politics, epitomised by the BJP and its partners, but shared equally by the opportunistic and regressive Congress party. In this fifty-second year of independence, on this Election Day where the BJP appears poised to make gains, though continuing to lead a somewhat unstable coalition, I am glad that I have stumbled upon this neighbourhood temple. For here, in the attitude of welcome, in the prayerfulness of the fellow woman worshipper, I experience that which neither the BJP nor its affiliates have managed to fully eradicate: simple human kindness, a generosity of spirit, and openness to anyone willing to worship with sincerity. This equally ancient legacy is one we must assiduously keep alive in these dire times of selfishness and outrageous fortunes, inconsolable losses and fatal woundings of spirit.

41

Time

O

ne of the paradoxes of time is that we tend to experience it as natural or real even though evidence abounds of its constructed nature. Two examples will suffice to make this point. There is nothing inherent in the location of Greenwich that accounts for the division of the globe into time zones which are relative to the solar time at the Greenwich meridian. Greenwich Mean Time persists as the axis around which time elsewhere on the globe is determined primarily because this arrangement, which signals the dominance of the West, is accepted by all nations. The same is true of the Gregorian calendar by which the world now officially conducts its affairs. The Gregorian calendar is a human attempt to give regularity to the movements of the sun and the earth in relation to each other. Thus it is that every four years we add an additional day to recoup the time lost annually when the approximately 365 and a quarter day cycle is reckoned as 365 days. For the most part, however, we overlook the fact that time is a shared convention, treating it rather as simply a natural phenomenon. We even relocate daybreak and sunset, which one might surmise are logical ways to determine the beginning and end of

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Time

a given day, within the compass of clock-time. Thus newspapers report ‘sunrise today at 6.02 am’, or ‘sunrise tomorrow at 6.10 am’. Daybreak, morning, afternoon, dusk and night vary seasonally, depending on the latitude, the positioning of the earth in relation to the sun, etcetera. Such variations could potentially call our attention to the constructed regularity of the 24-hour-day and to its linear conception of time. But in general they fail to do so. So completely normative is this notion of clock-time that everyone in this busy age seems to be run by it. Our sleeping, waking and working schedules are entirely dictated by the clock. Time becomes measurable, finite. Time cannot be extended except by extending the time when something is due. In other words, two hours remains two hours in clock-time. If we need more time, we need the reprieve of an additional hour to complete our task. Deadlines may be stretched, but not time. It is thus no wonder then that a notional construct by means of which society organises its daily rhythms has become instead a yardstick by which almost everything is measured. Our sense of satisfaction, our feelings about a given day or week, critically revolve around the concept of time — whether there has been enough of it, the nature of that time, the use to which it has been put, the results of our efforts within the time available to us. We constantly evaluate our use of time, deeming ourselves to have either wasted it or put it to good use. Time takes on an objective quality. 43

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Notwithstanding this, however, all of us have experienced the subjective dimension of time. We notice that time flies when we enjoy ourselves, and drags when we are at work on something that we find disagreeable or difficult. If time is constant, it cannot by definition either fly or drag. But our language signals our experience of time as elastic. Thus we speak of time stretched and time foreshortened: minutes that feel like days and days that seem like hours. Clock-time has become tyrannical in this day when the speed of communication has made space and time appear to shrink. The pace at which things can now be accomplished means that the expectation of what can be achieved has exponentially increased. Those able to avail of technological advances routinely expect tasks to be completed swiftly and problems to be solved almost as soon as they arise. There is much in our everyday environment that mercifully serves to undermine the false sense of urgency and expectation that has come to characterise life, especially in the upper echelons of Indian society. The fluctuations of electricity, the overload of internet services are but two factors that constantly frustrate our attempts to stay in the fast lane. Even so, the degree of patience that one was required to cultivate as a matter of course is now, relatively speaking, less essential. We need no longer wait for someone to reach their destination. We know they can be called en route on their cell phone. Likewise the 24-hour availability of the internet at times makes it unnecessary for us to wait until the 44

Time

next working day to pursue a matter further. This is amply illustrated in the case of Indian companies that are primarily servicing foreign multinationals. Where once it was only the blue collar factory employees who worked round-the-clock shifts, it is now middle and high level executives who are expected to be available at all hours. For at any given hour of the day, someone somewhere in the globe is awake, at work, and needing information to be supplied or a problem to be resolved. And given the contemporary international work ethos, they feel entitled to have their requests met as soon as possible. The oppressive aspects of this kind of space–time compression make it important for us to note that despite its dominance, other kinds of time coexist with clock-time. Some obvious examples here are the notions of Indian standard time, rural time and the ritual calendar that is related to the cycles of the moon, not the sun. All three are a counterpoint to clock-time and its double, the Gregorian calendar. But we can go further. We can consciously cultivate practices that bring us in touch with other kinds of temporality. Let us turn first to nature. Why is it that we find sitting in a garden or at the seashore so inherently relaxing? Why does our sense of urgency, stress and frenzy soften and gradually diminish even without much effort on our part? One reason, I would propose, is that nature is always only in the present moment. It exists so completely in, as, and for itself that it naturally exists beyond clock-time. Anyone who has had the opportunity to observe a tree develop from 45

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sapling to full girth will know that although the clock and the calendar can be utilised to keep a record of the tree’s growth, they are inadequate for a proper appreciation of its journey. The mechanical constancy of clock-time means that it is not supple enough for such processes as the gradual extension of the roots under the earth, the slow thickening of the bark and the cycle of leaves falling and new growth appearing. Indeed, it could be argued that one reason why clocktime appears to cease, or at least lose its grip on our consciousness when we are out in nature, is that it is simply insufficient to the rhythms of nature. When we experience time dissolving in this way, it is as though we have stepped through the threshold of objective time and are suspended in the Now. Or to put it another way, we have relinquished clocktime by means of immersion in the present moment. What is the present moment? The present moment is one that is experienced without regard to either past or future, that is to say, a moment experienced in its fullness. Most often, each moment is threaded by us into a chain of moments, those that precede it and those that follow it. Each moment takes shape and meaning relative to all that has gone before it and all that we predict, or expect, or hope, will follow. The present moment is merely a name for a moment so consciously experienced that both past and future dissolve into what is often called the Now. When we are in the Now, time completely collapses. This is not to say that the clock stops ticking. Rather, it is to point out that the continual reincarnation of 46

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time in our minds depends on our inserting each moment of our lives into a temporal narrative, into some story of past and future. This tendency necessarily takes us away from the present. And when this mental activity ceases, even for a few moments, we palpably experience a release from time’s hold upon us. We relax. It is perhaps little surprise, then, that alongside the speed up in the urban workplace one has witnessed an upsurge of interest in meditation. For, one of the purposes of meditation is precisely to cultivate one’s ability to consciously be in the present moment, without taking flight into the future or seeking shelter in the past. As the reference to meditation indicates, it is not only outside of ourselves that we experience a temporality that disrupts the normative status of clock-time. Our own bodies, if we were to attend to them properly, can also serve to illustrate this. We will notice the small and not-so-small punishments that we mete out to our bodies in order to be disciplined by time: our forsaking sleep and proper nutrition, our becoming storehouses of stress, our pushing bodily limits by means of coffee, cigarettes and other stimulants. If, however, we refuse these mechanisms of submission to clock-time and insist that the work-day be organised according to the rhythms of the body, the hours we work and the conditions in which we perform our labour will be radically different. For then, the natural ebb and flow of energy will be integral to the social organisation of work and life. Work, indeed life activity more generally, will appropriately 47

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honour three qualities: activity (rajas), inertia (tamas) and dynamic stillness (sattva). The pace and texture of life will no longer be determined by mechanistic time. Challenging this dominant conception of time will also have the benefit of undermining the negative consequences of space–time compression which, in our day, has served to constrain and diminish our very humanity.

48

Globalisation: A Note of Caution

C

irca 2000: Many commentators have lamented the cultural impact of corporate globalisation: the inundation of the tele-visual media with US programming, the increasing centrality of consumption to one’s sense of self and identity, and the consequent refashioning of the taste and aspirations of middle and upper class urban youth and professionals. Equally invidious, however, is the growing evidence and circulation, within segments of our society, of some of the values implicit in the cultural logic of globalisation, US style. United Statesian conceptions of success and failure are gradually gaining currency in certain circles. And although the unequal encounters of the processes of globalisation will undoubtedly produce, not a replica of the West, but something specifically local (or should one say g/local?), it is important to ponder the potential transformations intimated by these shifts.

II

There is something distinctive about the sense of entitlement now manifested by many in the upper 49

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echelons of Indian society. It is grounded in a sense that the material world should be amenable to one’s control. Where earlier, entitlement implied mutuality, even if only on unequal terms, the idea of privilege is now linked to the rewards one is said to deserve on account of the success of one’s efforts. Aggression, irritability at not receiving what is considered one’s due (whether it is prompt service or a road free of obstacles for one’s travel), a certain unabashed selfcentredness, an unbounded materialism not tempered by ethical considerations: these are some of the disturbing signs of the increasing presence of US culture and ideology. This view of the world is at odds with the resolutely Third World realities of India where the poor vastly outnumber those who are financially secure, and where nothing in the material environment can be taken for granted, be it water, air or electricity. Life in India is fundamentally shaped by the principle of contingency. For most, unpredictability and impermanence are not theoretical concepts; rather, they shape daily experience. In such circumstances, one either develops a sense of humour or else is irremediably miserable. Cultural generalisations can be dangerous. Yet, it is not an exaggeration to note that most people live in dynamic acceptance of the social circumstances of their life, even though many mourn the way things are. Furthermore, in analysing phenomena like bureaucratic corruption it is usually the case that the contextual social facts are taken into consideration. 50

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An abstract moral critique is rarely expressed, and unlike in the US, when such is proffered, it is not likely to be taken seriously. Generosity of spirit, a certain acceptance of the deep and inevitable interconnectedness of all beings, and a recognition that everybody deserves to survive and make a living were sine qua non, at least until now. Rugged individualism of the US variety has rarely found takers. But this may be changing. And although these changes may be currently evident only among particular sections of the upper classes, they do have consequences for society as a whole. What are the potential implications of the ascendancy of materialism and of the seemingly self-evident entitlement of the successful that accompanies it? One way to address this question is to examine the impact of this mode of thinking on one group in US society that from this purview would be deemed to be ‘losers’: the urban underclass. My discussion will proceed by contrasting the fate of this group with that of their counterparts, the urban poor in India. My interest is in exploring the legacy of dominant modes of conceiving such categories as success and failure for those marginal in the two societies. It is an oft-repeated comment by travellers from the geographical Third World that the poor and socially marginal in the United States seem so much more dispirited than their non-First World counterparts. This response to the urban poor in the US is a stereotypical one, but I note it because it contains a clue that is pertinent here. For, despite the rich traditions of 51

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social protest in the US, anger, pessimism, nihilism, abjection and sense of disempowerment among the poor have become serious obstacles to political mobilisation. The hopelessness and worthlessness often felt by the poor is expressed in self-destructive life choices and a tragic indifference to oneself as well as others. Indeed, progressive political organising now frequently addresses these issues as a necessary dimension of community mobilisation. One may cite here two such organizations — BOSS, which organises the homeless and severely impoverished in Berkeley, and Survivors Inc, a welfare rights women’s group in Boston. The sense of apathy and paralysis that characterises the poor in US cities, the frequent inability to transform the material environments in which they are compelled to live, is in direct contrast to the inventiveness, joy, sense of dignity and gratitude for life that one routinely encounters among the disenfranchised in urban India. Those whose material circumstances are often even more dire than their First World comrades manifest a dynamism and sense of self-worth that present a striking contrast. This observation too represents a stereotypical generalisation but like the first, it bears a kernel of truth. I hope the reader will stay with me as I make my argument. The dignity of the poor in India has had as its corollary the sense among the middle and upper classes, of the right of the poor to exist, even if many are unwilling to extend them the civic amenities that are their due. One reason for this is the economic 52

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interdependence between the privileged and those materially disadvantaged. Slums are a hub of economic activity; of people making, breaking, re-making things of necessity to others including the wealthy. Few on the street are idle. This contrasts with the US where large numbers of men and women are unemployed and unemployable. The centralised, privatised, highly structured economy of the US simply has no place where their talents might be nurtured. The Indian economy, on the other hand, is more like a sprawling Third World metropolis in which large corporations coexist with businesses run from pavements and street corners. There is room for everyone to play some part; to make a contribution to society. There is, in short, hope — to a far greater degree than is to be found among the urban poor of the United States. There, the ideology of individual effort, personal responsibility, and a hyperbolic individualism converge in making it seem as though one’s success is entirely a function of one’s enterprising nature and innate intelligence. This means that those unable to succeed in the extremely narrow material way in which success is defined feel a deep sense of shame. They tend to see themselves as society represents them — as failures. This view brings together elements of a distorted form of Christian thought with a dry secularism that leaves one with little hope or alternative redemptive viewpoint. From the former is derived the idea that we are essentially good or bad, and that our life trajectory signals 53

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our innate moral qualities. If life is smooth, it reflects our healthy moral character. Failure, on the other hand, is the result of our inherent shortcomings. And given the particular form of Protestantism that is dominant in the US, the terms moral goodness, personal responsibility and material success are closely interwoven. From secularism comes the idea that we as individuals are responsible for our own destiny. Although in the latter case success and failure are not attributed to essential moral traits, the burden is placed squarely on human shoulders. Human predicaments are to be explained by virtue of human actions alone. The reasons for success and failure are sought in the arrangements of the phenomenal world, with those on the Right and Left of the political spectrum disagreeing on their evaluation of existing policies and programmes. Important differences notwithstanding, secular rationality shares one key feature with the specific cultural appropriation and distortion of Christianity and of Protestantism that predominates in the US. Both advance a utilitarian view of life and a primarily materialistic evaluation of success and failure. Both would concur that humans are morally upstanding to the extent that they develop their potential for selfimprovement, and immoral when they fail to do so or hinder others in their attempts at self-actualisation. Lest I be misunderstood, let me state clearly that my point is not that all Christian individuals and organisations in the US blame the poor for their ills. Christians, Protestants included, are very active in 54

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the arena of social change. My attempt here is rather to sketch in broad strokes the religious and secular lineages of an ideology that privileges materialism and holds the individual as paramount arbiter of his or her destiny. It should come as little surprise then that dignity is not seen to be inherent in the human individual independent of his or her life circumstances, but is rather conceived as a quality to be achieved. It also follows from this view that the attainment of material wellbeing becomes a crucial measure of worth. It is within this cultural frame that material disadvantage spells indignity, shame, self-judgement, dispiritedness and a paralysing pessimism of the will. Needless to say, this perspective shapes not merely the consciousness of the poor, but also that of the wealthy. One simple indicator that the economically privileged also judge themselves in these terms is the well-documented phenomenon in which the loss of one’s job very often leads to a crisis of identity. One may also note the long hours of work and high levels of stress considered acceptable in US corporate culture in the pursuit of material success. And in context of a materialism without end or limit, success can seem to be an ever elusive goal: one can never be successful enough, and no amount of money is too much. III

The Indian context differs greatly from this picture. Its fundamentally spiritual and non-materialistic 55

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culture confers upon material success, and thus poverty, a symbology different from that described for the US. For whatever one’s religious tradition, the material plane is not designated the primary source of meaning and intelligibility. The true significance of life’s events is seen to necessarily exceed human comprehension and the unknowable is a widely accepted a priori. Kaun jane! The myth of mastery — of oneself, one’s world, one’s destiny — has no place in this cultural universe. Human experience is generally understood as the complex effect of social conditions, social arrangements, effort and one’s ‘destiny’, seen as something enabled (if not determined) by the divine. This perspective frees the individual from living under the punitive threat of his or her failures or disabilities. The feeling of connectivity to a force larger than the human is what imbues each life with dignity and significance, whatever the circumstances in which it is lived. It is this that aids in precluding the kind of self-destructive negativity and nihilism evident in urban centres of the United States. I would argue that the capacity to thrive amidst the most challenging of circumstances has everything to do with belief in God as a living presence discernible in all things whether animate or apparently inanimate, whatever the name by which one appeals to this larger force, and whatever the philosophical system within which such a recognition is held. It is important at this juncture to clarify a few things. I have sought to trace in condensed form key elements of the cultural philosophy that unites the many 56

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traditions that coexist in India. This is not to paint a romanticised view of indigenous spiritual or religious forms. It is entirely possible, as we know only too well, to articulate the relations between social conditions, social arrangements, effort and individuals’ destiny in politically regressive ways that justify and normalise caste privilege or gender oppression. My point is simply that the principle that animates this cultural matrix is a non-materialistic one. Most in our society accept the existence of a wider reality, and it is in this context that the meaning of life, success or poverty is interpreted. And to the degree that one is not compelled to seek and find answers from the material plane alone, this leaves open the possibility of being disenfranchised by social arrangements, without such arrangements draining away one’s creative life force or disempowering one’s subjective sense of worth. It is thus, for example, that those oppressed by the centuries-long attempts of upper caste Hindus have not only refused to forsake their sense of dignity, but have continued their own worship of the divine, thereby attesting to the social rather than religious basis of the ill-treatment meted out to them. The centrality of a spiritually based cultural ethos means that in the best of cases, one witnesses a certain humility in understanding the place of individual effort in the unfolding of life. Accordingly, success is not viewed as the achievement of the individual alone, but is often seen as a gift or divine blessing and, if not that, attributed to luck, a term that in turn signifies the unpredictable and the unknowable. In 57

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the worst of cases, this worldview constructs God as a force to be appeased, and religious rationale is sought for all manner of adharmic action and inequitable social arrangements.

IV

How will those who have gained most from globalisation negotiate the existential challenges posed by its celebration of materialism? Will the non-materialistic cultural ethos provide the basis for a countervailing force or perspective? Or will elements of various indigenous traditions be taken out of context and be made to assist the project of material achievement? Examples here include the piecemeal practice of pranayama or vipassana with a view to reducing stress while enhancing one’s mental performance, and the popularity of vastu in safeguarding one’s material fortunes. Or will the successful seek succour in Hindutva, which conjoins economic modernity with religious bigotry with the latter providing a kind of faux moral basis for the former? And what will be the fate of those among the materially advantaged unable to succeed on these new terms, or that of the urban poor whose interests are rarely served by the race for global markets? Will they be treated, like their US counterparts, as social embarrassments in the former case and as the detritus of society in the latter? While only time will tell, one hopes that it is the genuinely majoritarian multi-faith cultural ethos that will provide 58

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the ethical resource and ground for confronting the issues inevitably posed by globalisation US-style, including its narrow and ultimately dehumanising conceptions of success as well as failure.

59

Work

N

o activity stands apart from the sociocultural context in which it takes place. Accordingly, work is not simply the labour expended in physical, mental or emotional activity. The significance attributed to work, both in a personal and social sense, is derived from the time–space in which it is undertaken. Within the context of a global(ising) capitalism, work has come to dominate life in ever increasing ways. This is true not merely in the sense that we seem to live in order that we may work (as against vice versa), but in the ways that the predatory logic of productivism seems to have colonised our relationship to all lifeactivity. This essay takes the work ethic in the contemporary United States as its focus, but the relevance of this discussion for the corporate sector in India will be evident to the reader.

I

To understand work in the US context, it is helpful to begin by considering its cultural opposite, namely pleasure. For the most part pleasure is not seen to inhere in activity, but rather as intrinsically 60

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connected to the outcome of activity. Pleasure has come to be associated with the result of the work that one performs (e.g. the better life made possible by one’s wages), or the effects produced in one’s consciousness by substances one imbibes (e.g. the buzz of caffeine, the relaxation induced by alcohol). Few in the US appear to enjoy the process of work per se. Many claim to tolerate the stress and long hours of work only because it enables them to enjoy in their leisure time the things they most love and desire. This conception of pleasure has a great deal to do with the productivist environment in which people labour in the US. The system fails to honour process, and judges productivity by product alone. This principle extends well beyond the business world to include even the academy where, as the saying goes, one must publish or perish — that too in context of little institutional recognition of research, analysis and writing as processes that require considerable amounts of time. As a result, even those who have chosen a particular line of employment out of love or belief in its inherent value find it difficult to hold on to their sense of its purpose and significance. The logic of productivism overwhelms the creative impulses and generative passions with which individuals might have embarked upon their profession. Over time, they begin to judge themselves as they are judged. Increasingly, for the sake of survival, they align themselves with the logic of the system as a whole. The pleasure of the work in and for itself thus evaporates, remaining merely a dim memory. Even those 61

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who refuse to fully capitulate to the system become driven, hoping that they can periodically create an oasis in which to pursue what they regard as their true love and vocation. Meanwhile the criterion of optimisation makes such oases harder and harder to manifest. And so individuals, whether they accept or resist this principle, find themselves on a treadmill over which they seem to have little control. It is no wonder, then, that non-work time is what most people hunger for. For it is here that their true desires have had to seek refuge. It is this for which they live, and it is this of which they dream even while on the job. But leisure itself has become big business, not something one simply enjoys. Leisure requires one to undertake even more activity, to ensure that leisure is, as it were, being had. So we often find people rushing from the activity of work to the activity of leisure. The pleasure of leisure becomes the outcome of leisure activity, just as the pleasure of work is seen to reside in what is made possible by work. Simply relaxing, chatting, walking with friends: none of these activities in and of themselves seem to carry the sense of pleasures felt, joys experienced. A deep sense of alienation has come to characterise life-activity in the US. Few are content, for the most part, with what they are doing and how things are going. Most are on their way to some unreached, and perhaps unreachable, destination. This desire to escape from things as they are then leads to irritability and distraction on the job. The stress of surviving 62

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in a system that indifferently and continually demands more and more for less and less means that it is nearly impossible to seek and find pleasure in the work that one is given to do, even if one is inclined to do so. Several further consequences flow from this. Alienation from one’s work means alienation from one’s self, in the sense that one is no longer able to be consciously present to all that constitutes one’s experience. Alienation from one’s self and work automatically implies alienation from one’s environment and from others around oneself. A sense of insufficiency and dissatisfaction then runs like a current through all aspects of one’s life, communicating itself to one’s companions and co-workers and pervading all of one’s actions. While it is true that what I have sketched here is a view of things in general, this is, alas, what one most commonly observes. The seemingly inexhaustible drive to overwork, overproduction and overconsumption is fundamentally insane. It is bound to bring insanity in its wake. It comes as no surprise that stress has become a very real impediment to the accomplishment of work. It is thus that yoga and meditation have found a place in the business world as tools to aid relaxation, relieve tension, and build a more congenial atmosphere. Such solutions, like the problems they are designed to address, bear the marks of their sociocultural context. Individualism, competitiveness and hierarchy

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are cardinal features of dominant US culture, indeed deemed by it to be virtues. Although much espoused, the ideology of equality is always subject to modification by a belief in the right of the wealthy and the successful to take over and prevail. Given this, it is not surprising that solutions to workplace problems generally focus on helping individuals (whether singly or as groups) to cope with the system as it currently exists. The logic of the structure as a whole is subject to little inquiry or critique.

II

The problem with this approach is that it cannot really address the root cause of the stress and dissatisfaction. These, as we have seen, are effects of the productivist principle at the heart of a profitdriven market economy. To engage the latter would involve redefining the very terms on which life is lived, work undertaken and pleasure experienced. It would require us to reverse the logic of a system that normalises its escalating demands by urging us to ‘Be more, Get more’. We will have to insist, instead, on ‘Being Less and Getting More’. ‘Being less’ would mean being less at the mercy of the principles that structure the system within which we labour. ‘Getting more’ has to do with being able to fully experience, in a conscious fashion, all of the simple and not-so-simple pleasures that reside in each task that we routinely perform. Every one of 64

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our tasks has the potential to give us immense pleasure if we can embrace it as worthy in and of itself, not worthwhile simply because of what it makes possible. By being totally present to everything we do, however apparently small or large, we can challenge a hierarchical and differential evaluation of tasks. Being present entails attentiveness to process and giving up a fixation on product alone. Consequently, being present may frequently require us to do less. However, doing less means opening ourselves to the possibility of being more. ‘Being’ is not the sum of particular attributes or specific achievements, but rather a state of mind. It is the opposite of a compulsive doing. ‘Being’ is complete presentness, and may involve either activity or apparent inactivity. It is a commitment to opening oneself to receiving the fullness of each moment, a receptivity to the flow of life. For a workplace to be harmonious, the entire approach to work, indeed to all life-activity, needs to be revolutionised, made sacred. Work must not be something that we do in order to prove ourselves or demonstrate some other principle. Work must not be that which affirms our intelligence, brilliance, inventiveness or virtuosity. As long as this is so, it will be fertile ground for ego demonstration and, as we have seen in the previous essay, closely tied to one’s sense of self, success and failure. Rather, work must be that dynamic process wherein our creative potential has 65

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the chance to unfold and express itself. Work must become worship: worship of our creative urges and of that which is seeking to express itself through our agency. In context of unbounded materialism and unfulfillable desires, the idea of sufficiency, of ‘this much is enough’, is a radical one. ‘This much is enough’ opens us to the full possibilities held in every situation and thereby to the joy that is ours to receive through it. It is time for ‘not-enoughness’ to be replaced by the satisfaction and contentment that comes with acceptance of the inherent value of one’s own contribution to society and that of others as well. In turn this brings a generosity of spirit that can provide the foundation for an ethical work culture. For the work environment to be truly peaceful and agreeable, we need much more than the introduction of lunchtime yoga or instruction in basic meditation techniques. Genuine harmony requires a non-exploitative structure of opportunity and remuneration, one based on recognition of the multiple, interdependent and collective efforts essential to accomplishing any endeavour.

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Tradition and the New Spirituality

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he current popularity of spiritual practices among the urban professional classes raises a number of questions. What is it about the contemporary economic and social moment that prompts people in certain social segments to seek spiritual resources? Which particular blend of practices, which elements of tradition, are being taken up, and what does that tell us about the new materialism that has become both a boon and a bane in the lives of many? What new needs are sought to be filled by so-called old traditions? And how are old traditions being revised to meet current challenges?

II

Tradition is a complex and vexing term. Despite the fact that traditions are most often spoken of as if they were timeless, changeless, naturally occurring phenomena, they are historically variable, socially constructed, culturally specific forms. The term is, in truth, the very opposite of what its semantic range usually conveys. Tradition is anything but inert, anything but a given, anything but simply inherited in 67

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whole cloth by successive generations that accept what has been handed down to them. Each generation, each class fraction, each person, has a dynamic relationship with tradition whether or not this is believed to be the case. This is not to say that there are no patterns or regularities, that no continuities of practice are to be found in the way in which a tradition has survived or is received. It is rather to point to the fact that even if particular practices are undertaken in ways identical to their form a century ago, one cannot assume their cultural meaning and significance to have remained unchanged. Relatedly, one cannot expect the meanings for the actor (the subjective experience of those who undertake a given practice) to be constant. A simple example will suffice to make this point. Weavers may have woven cloth in particular ways over several generations, perhaps even centuries. Yet the use of that cloth and the relationship of weavers to their craft have, in all probability, varied across time and space. Tradition is not a neutral term. Its claims cannot therefore be assumed to be legitimate until one has had the chance to contemplate precisely what is being said about what, and to what end. Invocation of tradition is for the most part an authenticating gesture. Naming something as traditional is intended to convey a sense of the credibility, longevity, and the inherently meaningful nature of the activity. It seeks to ensure the symbolic importance of that which is being named as such. The cultural baggage carried 68

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by the term tradition is consequently weighty and its investigation becomes all the more crucial. If by ‘tradition’ we mean particular continuities of belief and practice, or recurring patterns thereof, we are struck by the fact that the term seems mainly to be reserved for cultural and religious phenomena. For example, it is not usually said that it is a ‘tradition’ among the English-speaking urban middle classes to send their children to convent schools. This practice is more likely to be spoken of as a ‘convention’. On the other hand, it might be said that it is a ‘tradition’ among upper caste south Indian families to train daughters in classical Carnatic music. Practices in certain arenas appear to merit the appellation tradition, while others which may equally hold across generations seem to fall outside of its boundaries as currently defined. What then does it mean to ‘return to tradition’? This turn of phrase recurs in print media reporting of the recent spurt of interest in spirituality and the healing arts. In pondering the issue we would do well to explore these inter-related questions: What is the ‘tradition’, and how is it being defined? Whose is the tradition? Who is returning to which tradition, how, and why? And is the mode of their journey that of a return? Put another way, is it a re-encounter? Or is it rather a discovery that vivifies pre-existing traditions? Or is it that people are turning to practices that, despite their roots in pre-existing traditions, are themselves experiments within and against ‘tradition’? 69

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The term ‘return’ would imply that persons who had eschewed traditions are now returning to practice them, having realised the losses involved in a prior decision to walk away. Yet, in examining newspaper reports of this phenomenon of a so-called return, one notices that people interviewed seem to have little familiarity with the practices they are taking up. The language of those interviewed is marked by the excitement of a discovery. There is the conviction of the new practitioner; the emphatic statement of things recently learnt. The following is typical of what is being reported: ‘My days are very, very busy. I have a million things cluttering my mind. Meditating for ten minutes every morning helps to clear my mind so I can act calmly and decisively’. Anyone who has done any sustained meditation will know that not much can really be gained from such a short period of sitting. Meditation embarks one on a journey of increasing intimacy with the workings of the mind. It initiates a process of examination of the complex ways in which our sense of reality is constructed and then repeatedly bolstered by means of the beliefs upon which our actions and perceptions are based. Certainly even a mere ten minutes will bring a period of silence in which the mind may rest, enjoying well-deserved relief from its interminable bustle. However, to say that it serves to produce clarity and uncluttered cognition is perhaps a claim that can only be made by the enthusiastic new practitioner. 70

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If the practitioners seem to have little prior knowledge of the resources to which they are turning, this seems equally true of many journalists. Exoticism frequently frames newspaper reports of ‘the new spirituality’. Journalists often seem puzzled by the phenomenon of students and high tech professionals in their prime seeking peace and solace through prayer, pranayama, meditation, yoga and other spiritual practices. Consequently, reporters can at times sound like ethnocentric Western anthropologists bemused by this ‘unlikely’ mixture of lifestyles.1 Such representations pose the question as to the traditions in which these members of the fourth estate were socialised. One wonders what, in their view, makes these developments so peculiar as to merit this kind of reporting of phenomena that have been part of the Indian cultural landscape for many a century. Is it a kind of literalist faith in modernisation theory, by which it is assumed that the urbanised, Westernised, professional classes will by definition not have any truck with spiritual or religious traditions which are conceived as pre-modern? Or is it the relative youthfulness of the practitioners that makes this a surprising development? Is religion or spirituality thought to be an interest self-evidently germane to one’s older but not younger years? If this latter assumption is what accounts for media reporting of ‘the new spirituality’ as an anomaly, this suggests that reporters are subscribing to yet another tradition: the four-stage view of the Hindu life cycle. This portrayal of ‘the new spirituality’ contrasts with the way these very newspapers report the celebration 71

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of religious festivals, the activities of religious institutions whether legal or illegal, and majoritarian bigotry and violence. These phenomena do not inspire the same wonderment or surprise. They are treated as unremarkable features of Indian society. Indeed they are such a normative part of our social landscape that they are seen to require little to no ‘explanation’. Additionally, many newspapers have regular columns where matters of religion and spirit are discussed and debated. The possibility that the same professionals who are interviewed about their meditation practices in the features section are also likely to read these columns, participate in religious festivals, or even actively support a Rightwing Hindu agenda, is not addressed. Instead, ‘the new spirituality’ is represented as though it were an autonomous phenomenon associated with the lifestyle choices of the elite. Important issues consequently remain unaddressed.

IV

One decidedly new aspect of the present turn to spiritual practice is the desire explicitly stated by many for a solution to workplace related problems. The deeper insertion of India into the fiercely competitive global market has brought particular challenges. Companies are trying to resolve some of these problems by attempting to transform employees (over whom they have leeway) as against seeking changes in the work environment (something shaped by the market, and, 72

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given an unequal international order, mostly beyond their control). Humans have frequently turned to religion or spiritual practice in times of need and suffering. However, many doing so in the present seem motivated to find quick-fix solutions. For example, one manager described a room in his organisation that had been specially designed with a pyramidal roof. According to him, the roof conducted light in such a way that it relieved employees of stress and enhanced their creativity. It is entirely unclear whether practices whose efficacy has been demonstrated in context of sustained serious practice (rather than short-term experimentation) will deliver the goals hoped for by employers, whatever the claims of those who promise techniques to tackle such problems as stress on the job. If we are to believe the corporate gurus in orange, it is possible to seamlessly unite spiritual practice with the science of business management. The implication seems to be that with the right attitude and practices one can overcome the stresses and strains that hinder full realisation of one’s productive potential, and ensure harmony in oneself and in one’s workplace. Little is said about the philosophical and practical difficulties of extracting spiritual practices from the specific constellation of which they are a part, combining them with techniques from other religions, and applying the amalgam to contexts defined by a competing philosophy. For surely the logic of capital and that of spiritual practice are fundamentally incompatible. 73

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It is interesting to note in this regard that the Indian corporate gurus are quite distinct from their US counterparts. While the latter are dubbed gurus because they are deemed wise about corporate matters, the former are actual swamis arguing that it is possible to apply Vedantic and other philosophies to market economics, to the mutual benefit of both. This belief is illustrated in the discourse of management guru and seeker alike. Both emphasise the goal of greater control, and little is heard about surrender or renunciation. In an earlier masculinist tradition, yogis endeavoured to control body and mind in a bid to quell all that would distract from unmediated communion with God or the Self. However, in the current situation, control of the mind is sought in order to improve (rather than transcend) one’s habitual modes of cognition. Spiritual practices are also seen to make the body malleable. It is claimed that health can be enlivened, endurance extended and beauty enhanced. And if that were not sufficiently impressive, the combined result, it is frequently implied, is a greater control of one’s material fortunes! We have by now firmly left behind the yogic tradition (with all its problems) and have entered the enchanted territory of the new materialism with its desire for mastery of both material environment and the incarnate self. At its core, the purpose of spiritual practice is to guide one towards understanding the true meaning

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of human existence, and to cultivate the means by which to live dharmically even in an adharmic world. What are we then to make of spiritual developments that seem to accept the ways of the world rather than instructing seekers in skilful means for negotiating or challenging them? This is not to say that many people are not genuinely benefiting from practices made more available in the current context. Nor is it to rule out the possibility that for many individuals, such exposure and experimentation may be the starting point for an ongoing process and journey. However, questions remain in regard to these broader issues.

V

In concluding, I shall take up one of these issues: how present developments relate to past articulations of the relationship between spirit and matter, religion and worldly life. If one looks at the intermingling of wisdom and social convention that comprises what we now call Hinduism, one notes that its teachings regarding spirit and matter can be distinguished into three strands. It should be clarified that I set them apart here, fully aware that all three interweave to make Hinduism the contradictory and complex form that it is today. In one strand, matter, or the phenomenal world, is seen as having little inherent spiritual value. It is simply

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to be transcended. The adept moves beyond matter, coded as unreal, into an elevated realm of spirit, construed as real. Despite its impracticality, this view would encourage the practitioner to disengage from the material world. As a result it tends not to involve itself in the gritty details of the social realm and its organisation. A second strand makes the material domain a key focus. In it, religion is seen as providing an authoritative moral template for the sociocultural and ritual life of humans, and at times their economic and political affairs also. This perspective regards religion as providing a framework for social regulation, and often privileges its institutional character. This viewpoint assumes the inter-relationship of spirit and matter. For the most part, this perspective has been most closely aligned with the regressive history of Hinduism’s exclusionary practices. The teachings and practices associated with it have frequently conferred falsely derived ‘religious’ legitimacy for adharmic thinking and inequitable social relations. Linked to both, and also evident as an independent sub-tradition within Hinduism, is an egalitarian third strand. In its view, spirit is the sine qua non of all matter and the purpose of spiritual practice is freedom from worldly conditioning. The world of matter is thus held to be integral to the stuff of spiritual practice, its raw material. The goal of unconditioned mind requires the practitioner to embark on a journey of disentangling the intricate web of assumptions that constructs her or his view of the world. 76

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There are points of compatibility between this and the two strands previously named. Like the second, and unlike the first, this view posits spirit and matter as inseparably connected. Like the first, and unlike the second, it emphasises the conditioned nature of human perception. However, there are significant differences. For example, within it, the problem posed by conditioned mind is not that it keeps one bound to the world of matter, but that it precludes one from taking one’s proper place within it. One works with conditioning so that one may realise one’s mutuality and affinity with all things: not in some transcendental realm (as one might in the first strand) but in the cut and thrust of everyday life. The understanding of human knowledge as inevitably conditioned also distinguishes this third strand from the second; for it would consider religion (whether as philosophy, practice or institution) to be equally subject to conditioning. It cannot thus accord religion a special status worthy, by definition, of worship and uncritical reverence. This third perspective is most fully and consistently elaborated in the songs, poetry and teachings of mystics, many of whom were outlaws so far as the religious establishment of their day was concerned. This is not, however, to say that the teachings of mystics are free from conditioning. Human embodiment is by definition limiting, and this truth extends to all beings, saints and avatars included. Working within or against tradition is thus a complex process, requiring discernment and a willingness to accept the inevitable partiality of one’s knowledge and understanding. 77

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Where does one locate ‘the new spirituality’ in this map of the differential relations between spirit and matter? This phenomenon (and I include the corporate swamis here) is explicitly concerned with helping individuals adjust to rapidly changing material circumstances and proposes spiritual resources as suited to this task. However, it does so in a way that fails to interrogate either the premise or promise of the new economic moment and its social and economic effects. The equation between spirit and matter is weighted in favour of the latter. Spiritual resources are deployed in a utilitarian, piecemeal fashion to address problems at the level of the problem, as it were. As a result, the broader questions posed by the existence of such problems are not pursued. Conceiving of spiritual practices as tools that one can introduce with a view to reforming what currently exists, that is to say improving things without taking them apart, leaves untapped the liberatory potential of spirit. In such an approach, spirit is not the essence of matter, its animating principle and transformative potentiality. Rather, spirit is subordinated to matter, and indeed, at its service. The indivisibility of spirit and matter is thus negated. One becomes two, and in this division a great deal more is lost than gained.

Note 1. Since 2000 when this article was written, an entire gamut of spiritual practices including yoga, meditation,vastu, reiki

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Tradition and the New Spirituality and feng shui have come to be regarded as accessories of the so-called global lifestyle of the new elite. The element of surprise or wonder is thus no longer as prominent in representations of these practices. However, things deemed ‘premodern’ continue to evoke a similar response and the broader issues raised here remain pertinent even in 2008.

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The Anatomy of Faith

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ow is a person of faith to relate to the tradition in which their practice is situated? Religion is a social institution. As such it is not outside of history, but formed within its crucible. It is thus that religious institutions have legitimised social inequalities and even been responsible for enforcing them. Likewise, religious philosophy is shaped by the context in which it emerges and cannot claim immunity from sociohistorical determination. The problem of social conditioning is often explicitly woven into accounts of tradition itself. For example, there is a well-known story about Adi Shankara, the eighth century exponent of the Advaita philosophy of non-duality. Shankara is said to have shooed away a chandala woman, only to be reprimanded by Lord Shiva, who had taken her form in order to teach him a lesson. Quoting Shankara’s teachings back to him, Shiva is said to have challenged the philosopher for not practicing what he preached. For every such example, however, there are countless others in which social and cultural biases simply coexist with genuine wisdom. Some have sought to respond to this situation by highlighting, or offering,

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more progressive interpretations of tradition, including its representation of events and characters. One difficulty with this strategy is that it keeps the practitioner bound within the ambit of tradition as it has been (variously) defined. It leaves one without a means to address issues not raised within it. One way to avoid this pitfall is to recognise the fact that religious tradition is no more than a container or vehicle. This permits one to eschew allegiance to form per se. Instead, it focuses one’s attention on learning to distil the core principles of spiritual wisdom. The poems and songs of Rumi, Hafiz, Kabir and Ramprasad, for instance, illustrate this process of a continuous, reflexive practice of discernment. Meditation instructions on how to witness the mind and assess the seemingly incessant flow of thoughts also propose a methodology for distinguishing between habit and insight, convention and wisdom, falsehood and truth. Spiritual practices simultaneously manifest and mirror the dynamics of the aspirant’s journey, a fact related to the importance of process in all religious traditions. The inescapably interpretive dimension of a religious or spiritual vocation makes it similar, in certain respects, to other social or political philosophies. Just as Marxists or Gandhians sift through their respective traditions in seeking to apply its concepts, so too must the spiritual practitioner. It is only by means of such a process that one can be freed from the prisonhouse of misperception, whether about oneself or 81

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society or, indeed, about the tradition in which one practices. If one fails to undertake such a practice one will reproduce the conditioned aspects of one’s tradition in thought and deed alike. We may be convinced that certain truths are universal. Even so, we will have to concede that human perception and expression of them are irremediably situated. And, like it or not, even the radical stream of mystic wisdom is to be found within (not outside) the major religions, although when practiced properly it unsettles many of these religions’ most cherished misconceptions. Is it any wonder that many mystics were considered heretical by the priests and mullahs of their day? Or that some are still dismissed as illegitimate by the conservative orthodoxy in the tradition in which they practiced and to which their lives and teachings mount a challenge? There is one important way in which the process of spiritual knowing is distinguished from secular knowledge acquisition, namely, the place of revelation in its unfolding. We assess the strengths and weaknesses of social or political philosophy by means of a primarily cognitive process — examining its claims in light of its ability to account for social or political phenomena. By contrast, key premises of spiritual philosophy cannot be confirmed in this manner. Take for example the omnipresence of divine love, or the essential oneness of all beings. While we may find these ideas compelling in principle, they will likely remain abstract concepts until we have some direct 82

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experience that dissolves the perceptual frame within which they remain mere concepts. It is such direct experiences that disturb and remake what have been, until then, foundational assumptions about self, world or life. In rare cases, a single experience can be potent enough to inaugurate a complete shift of perception. For most people, however, the process is a gradual one. It is the accumulation, over time, of ‘miracles’, ‘visions’, or ‘spiritual experiences’ that revises, and then altogether transforms the epistemology or way of knowing on the basis of which life has hitherto been lived. Such experiences simultaneously open the heart and soften the mind. And in the best of cases, they give rise to a union of mind and heart such that they move as one. It is to honour the nature of this process that the word ‘unfolding’ is used to describe it. For it is a journey in which mind is used to revolutionise mind as it has been understood, and in which one’s agency is manifest in the willingness to allow oneself to be transformed by the force field of divine love. This energy is beyond being contained by any religion or tradition, although humans turn to the philosophical systems known to them in apprehending it. The converse is equally true: the divine draws on the frameworks familiar to each individual in calling him or her toward itself. Religious tradition is thus merely a medium. God no more belongs to any tradition than the sun belongs to the sky in which it shines to the naked eye. 83

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How then might one describe the relation between spiritual and secular forms of knowing? Spiritual knowledge does not entirely displace secular modes of comprehension. Rather, it refigures their relationship in the practitioner’s mind–heart. For although spiritual philosophy identifies the elements at the root of suffering in the universe — among them, greed, selfishness, rage, hate, pride, the sense of entitlement, the feeling of insufficiency — secular modes of analysis are critical in understanding the sociocultural manifestation of these. Spiritual teaching primarily addresses the individual seeker. But the ethics of practice call upon the practitioner to learn how to take her or his place in the phenomenal world in cognisance of the truths of love, oneness, non-harming and interdependency. Learning to live the practice on these terms means committing to a life-long process of introspection and inquiry in which we contemplate not merely the personal but also the social basis of all that separates us from the world around us. It is this sense of separation that fundamentally underwrites all forms of ignorance, cruelty, prejudice and suffering. And it is here that history, economics, politics, literature and sociology can assist our understanding. These disciplines help to address such questions as the social organisation of greed, the cultural legitimation of hate, or the acceptability of inequality between genders, castes, sexualities and communities. This work requires us (and in turn enables us) to cultivate the subtle art of transcoding between sacred and secular 84

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knowing, such that the former illumines the latter, and the latter brings the former alive in context of everyday life. One can see from all this that a spiritual commitment requires our wholehearted willingness to embark on a radically open-ended process of learning, relearning and unlearning. We undertake this not in homage to convention or tradition, but in service to the principles of a unitive and harmonious existence. Any attempt to foreclose this process violates the very nature and purpose of the spiritual quest. Our vigilance in this regard begins with ourselves and then extends outward. We work with our inner resistance to liberatory transformation. This innermost concentric circle is usually where some of the most challenging work is to be found. We also set aside, as necessary, the misplaced respect for convention that pervades the sphere of religion and spirituality. Finally, we refuse attempts to police the process by fundamentalists seeking to impose authoritarian forms of religion which favour indoctrination over introspection, hate over love and exclusion over inclusion. The divinisation of humanness is dependent on our being freed from the webs of social conditioning. This requires courage and humility on our part. These qualities are enabled and nourished by divine mercy as well as the inner transformations initiated by sincere practice. And should we resist this path of a fearless and loving inquiry we might ask ourselves whether we wish to be devotees of God or of social 85

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convention. For in choosing to worship the latter, we turn away from truth. Worse, we become complicit in extending suffering — not just our own, but that of others also.

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As elsewhere in this collection, I have proposed here that we bring together sacred and secular epistemologies in comprehending the world around us. I make this suggestion in full awareness that the secular arose in contradistinction to the sacred and required its negation as a valid form of knowledge for social or scientific inquiry. In the secular culture of the academy today, the realm of the sacred is acceptable as philosophy and theology, as the subject proper of anthropology, history, sociology, and as the fecund muse of poetry and art. In short, the sacred is deemed a source of inspiration or an object of study. It is not, however, seen as offering a conceptual framework that can contribute to an understanding of things other than itself. Does it need to be this way? The promise of poststructuralist theory and its bequest, interdisciplinarity, was precisely the taking down of boundaries that had hindered our capacity to map phenomena in all their complexity. The interconnected multidimensionality of phenomena routinely exceeded borders erected by academic disciplines and a strong case was made, and accepted in many quarters, for the necessity of an interdisciplinary 86

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approach. Yet there is one border whose crossing has remained illegitimate. Poststructuralist theory and interdisciplinary social science and cultural studies have been unwilling to transgress the sacred–secular divide. The forking of the secular and the sacred was inaugurated by the Enlightenment project at the turn of the eighteenth century. Enlightenment thought extolled reason and science as the best means of improving society and of ending political despotism and the tyranny of ‘blind faith and superstition’. It was a complex intellectual enterprise, internally differentiated and vast in scope. Its central ideas continue to underwrite current conceptions of modernity. Poststructuralist theory developed an important critique of the coercive aspects of Enlightenment thought. However, it has left undisturbed two of its key interlinked tenets: the presumption of the sacred as inevitably superstitious and regressive, and the arrogation to the secular of all that is defensible from a progressive perspective. The failure to rethink the categories of the sacred and the secular and to reconfigure their relationship has meant that poststructuralist theory has remained an antithetical critique unable to propose a new synthesis. The need for such a new synthesis has been underlined by a whole range of events in which religion, or claims about religion, have been crucially significant. We may note here the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in context of The Satanic Verses, the rise of Hindutva, the intensification of anti-Muslim 87

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prejudice, and the assault on civil rights in context of the so-called war on terror after September 11, 2001. In all of these instances no specifically postcolonial or poststructuralist discourse of intervention has developed. Rather, one has witnessed repeated recourse to the discourses of liberal humanism that had earlier been subject to critique. Any new synthesis would depend on disarticulating, and then rearticulating, the meanings conferred by modernity on the terms sacred and secular, as also the relations between them. In order for this to happen, the suspicion, fear and ignorance that currently prevail within secular circles in relation to the sphere of religion and spirituality will have to be confronted and worked through. A process rather like that described above for spiritual aspirants will need to be engaged. This would require the willingness to suspend (if only temporarily) current beliefs about religion and secularism so that their strengths and limits might be contemplated. Investigating the multiple investments individuals might have in their identity as secular would be integral to such introspection. For the strength of feeling on the issue could point to deeper issues of subject formation and knowledge of this may bring greater dispassion to bear on the matter. The idea is to become cognisant of the architecture of one’s mental and emotional formation as a kind of ground clearing that can potentially create a space in which alternatives may be pondered or one’s own framework reconsidered.

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This must be an open-ended process in which outcomes are not presumed. The objective is not conversion to a sacred purview or even to a preordained sense of how sacred and secular knowledges may be interwoven. The intent would be to create the preconditions in which dialogue regarding a new synthesis may be possible. There is no reason why the academy should not welcome such a project since it is, in principle, dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But the current politicisation of education may make academic institutions the least suitable place to begin such a contemplative process. Pressure for change has often emerged from outside its hallowed confines and then carried into its corridors and classrooms. Perhaps that will be the directionality of events in this case. However, prior to all of this we need to agree that such a conversation is, in fact, worth having. And that requires all parties to become conscious of the anatomy of their respective faiths.

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Reckoning with Gujarat, Contemplating Tradition

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or one who begins with the premise that human incarnation is a sacred opportunity to harmonise human with divine will, the post-Godhra carnage of Muslims orchestrated by the Hindu Right in Gujarat raises the question of when we humans will realise the true purpose of life. Each one of us has been blessed with creative potential and endowed with free will. We can use these faculties to tend the planet and all its inhabitants through inclusive social arrangements that ensure a loving sufficiency for all. Or we can, as many of us seem to be intent on doing, violate each other by turning these gifts of creativity and free will into instruments of violence and brutality. If we do the latter we cannot claim God’s blessings for our actions. The blame and responsibility rests squarely upon human shoulders. In countering current communal challenges, the person of faith has no simple or unproblematic recourse to religion. On the contrary, one finds the need to read against the grain, whether one is examining the religious and historical claims of communalists, or considering one’s own received religio-spiritual tradition. Spiritual wisdom is not impervious to human

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distortion and bigotry. Human perception of spiritual truth is, by definition, conditioned and the implications of this are inevitably messy. It is perhaps in recognition of this fact that within Buddhism, and in some strands of Hinduism also, students are urged to confirm the teachings of spiritual texts in context of their own practice of meditation and inquiry. Faith does not, therefore, relieve us of our interpretive responsibilities. Rather, spiritual purification (the process of emptying all to which we have hitherto clung) is undertaken precisely so as to refine our perception, with the proviso that our seeing, though hopefully more clear, can never escape its particularity. The process of refinement is without a terminus. One abandons oneself to its gravitational force. Only in retrospect can one discern some of the logic at work. There is an irreducible mystery to the journey. Individual consciousness is slowly transformed. Existing assumptions are recast, and the interweaving of the social and the extra-social in the making of life is gradually revealed. One learns, too, the liberating potential of aligning oneself with the current that continually seeks to harmonise the universe. Nature amply illustrates this principle in action for nature, unlike humanity, is naturally non-resistant to this force, inherently cooperative with it. Understood properly, then, the spiritual journey is a harmonising of the relationship of humans to the phenomenal world — fellow beings, plants, animals, etc. Contrary to what is frequently concluded, the 91

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world is not discovered as an illusion. Rather, it is non-divinised human perception that is realised to be illusory. This is no mere philosophical quibble, for our ability to craft an authentically spiritual response to Right-wing Hindu fundamentalism (indeed any fundamentalism) depends on embracing the very real material implications of faith. This point was dramatised in reading The Times of India of March 17, 2002. Among reports of premeditated mob violence in the name of religion, and alongside an editorial rebuking the government for its connivance in the killing of Muslims in Gujarat, was an unsettlingly calm column of The Speaking Tree titled, ‘Cessation of Thought Leads to True Self’. In it, Kavita Ramchandani elaborates the classic view that the purpose of sadhana (spiritual practice) is to move beyond body and mind which create the illusion of duality and separation, and to unite with the ever blissful eternal Self, the source of all that is. Her piece, which expresses a common perspective, has nothing to say about the phenomenal world. The latter merely figures as a realm from which one withdraws one’s senses. The contrast (not unique to this daily) between a spiritual column seemingly suspended above space and time and the rest of the paper mired in both, was particularly striking given the circumstances. This example highlights a faultline within received Hindu tradition: the tendency to privilege transcendence over immanence, with its corollary, the marginalisation of matter and form. Although God is supposed to be transcendent as well as immanent, 92

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formless and in all forms, teachings often explicitly prioritise the former, paying mere lip service to the latter. Thus even as we are asked to see all things as having divine potential, we are continually urged to turn away from the phenomenal world lest we be distracted from our path by the perils of engaging with it. Likewise, although non-duality should mean the realisation of our intimate connection to God and to our fellow beings, what is most often stressed about the non-dual experience is the revelation of our unity with God. Such tendencies compromise the unitive potential of the tradition. Worse, by diverting our attention from the everyday world of matter and form they undermine its wisdom as a resource for confronting social challenges. Transcendence and immanence are not opposites. Rather, they intimately imply each other. For how else could God be omnipresent? It is only by embracing immanence that one is opened to the mystery of transcendence. In the absence of such a conscious embrace of the inherently sacred nature of all aspects of the phenomenal world, the pursuit of transcendence necessarily manifests indifference to things around us. Such a path takes us away from making the world the ground of our spiritual practice. In following it, we set aside the real challenge of human embodiment: the cultivation of dharmic free will, compassion and peace. Indifference and violence are predictable consequences of the devaluation of matter. When we defy immanence and uphold transcendence, we take a position structurally akin to those who wreaked 93

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violence in Gujarat with apparently no compunction. We may protest that fundamentalists are not religious but are merely using religion for political ends. But we cannot overlook the fact that they too pursue an abstraction, ‘Hindu rashtra’, while running roughshod over the humanity, that is to say divine immanence, of those who are murdered and terrorised in its realisation. Religious traditions are complex, living inheritances. Hinduism is not homogeneous. Nor are the reactions of Hindus to communal violence. Some Hindus may burn homes and people, others may debate whether such actions were justified or not, still others may feel that these events have little to do with their individual religious practice or path, and a fourth group may go out and address the injustice through serving the affected. What unites the first three regrettably common responses to events like Godhra and its aftermath is the absence of a sense of kinship with those wounded or violated. This feeling of separation, I would submit, is facilitated by the tendency within Hinduism to split the transcendent from the immanent contributing thereby to the negation of matter and form. It is time for those who live and move in faith to be more outspoken in expressing faith-based anticommunalist perspectives. Our words and actions will support secularists in their stand against fundamentalists. They will also serve to contest the latter’s claims to represent ‘our’ religion. For, as we have seen, the danger to Hinduism, if ever there was one, comes not from without but from within. 94

Karma Reconsidered

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f there is one concept that is most misunderstood it is probably that of karma. Karma literally means action. Actions have causes and in turn beget consequences. Thus the law of karma is often described as the law of cause and effect. The premise that all actions have causes that in turn generate effects potentially provides the ground for a complex ethics of action. Yet, given the misinterpretations that are commonplace, karma has mostly come to be associated with passivity, smugness and resignation. What could have been a guide to dharmic action has become instead a justification of the status quo. Every idea exists in a field of related concepts and can only be understood in context of them. Central to a consideration of karma are desire, reincarnation and dependent co-arising. Desire is the root cause of human action; it is that which prompts or propels action. Action here, it must be clarified, is not simply physical but also mental. Thought is a form of action. Accordingly, inaction also implies action. The proposition that all action is initiated by desire need not be taken on faith but can be demonstrated by simply observing the micromovements of mind and body. 95

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Reincarnation is not so easily demonstrable. Although a few may have some recollection of past lives, most would have to accept the idea as an a priori. The relevance of reincarnation to karma rests in the fact that, within a Hindu and Buddhist frame, karma is accumulated and the effects of one’s actions can be dispersed across lifetimes. Likewise, desires not fulfilled in one life give shape to one’s subsequent incarnations. Indeed some argue that the very form of each incarnation is shaped by that which the soul regards as unfinished business or learning yet to take place. If causation is already beginning to emerge as complex, it is made more so by the fact that humans are not monads but rather live in dynamic interdependence with one another and with nature. And here we encounter the concept of dependent co-arising. The actions of each human being affect others even while these actions may themselves be a consequence of the actions of yet others. Similarly, human action impacts nature and nature in turn affects human life. While nature, unlike humanity, is desireless, it has ‘needs’. For example, drought will lead to crop failure and over-tilling to a decline in soil fertility. The use of toxic fertilisers will poison the soil and initiate a sequence of events that will have consequences for the entire food chain. Delineating the layering of cause and effect in the case of a single individual is complex enough. What then of the multiply determined and multiply determining causes and effects of the actions of human collectivities on each other, on nature, and vice versa! 96

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It is here that the concept of dependent co-arising gathers specific force and significance, for it builds in the fact of multiplicity without seeking to locate either cause or effect in any single source. Every cause is both the dependent effect of another cause and generates effects of its own. The only independent principle or causeless cause, at least within a deistic Hindu perspective, is that of the divine herself/himself/itself. Properly understood then, karma cannot be seen, as it most often tends to be, as the burden of individuals alone. Individual karma is intertwined with collective karma — be it familial, caste, gender, regional, national, planetary, to name but a few. Individuals are affected by karma not of their own making. Accordingly the crime and punishment view of karma (in which past bad deeds produce present sufferings) and the just desserts interpretation (whereby present good fortune is attributed to prior good behaviour) are erroneous on several counts. First, these interpretations fail to recognise the interdependent and collective dimensions of human action. Second, and following from this, this view in effect absolves all but particular individuals or groups from any ethical responsibility for the experiences of fellow beings. Finally, the evaluation of karma as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ subscribes to a worldly assessment of these terms. In so doing this mode of reasoning belies its so-called spiritual basis. For surely one does not have to be a person of faith to notice the absurdity of the implication that God rewards with material 97

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riches and punishes with poverty; applauds the rich and healthy and abhors the poor and ill. It is precisely due to such (self-serving?) misconceptions that the theory of karma has failed to assist in providing the ground for ethical conduct. The insight that actions are the effect of desire, that each action both produces, and is itself the result of, a series of dependent causes and effects that reverberate across time and space, could lead individuals and groups to contemplate the linked issues of ethical action and personal and/or collective responsibility. Such an exercise would necessarily require one to revise the principally nineteenth century liberal idea of individual responsibility that prevails today. The latter depends on a unitary notion of subjecthood and a unilinear model of causation, both of which are insufficient to the framework of karma, reincarnation and dependent co-arising outlined here. If one affects, and is affected by, phenomena not just of one’s own making, if the multiplicity of causes and effects are often too complex to trace in any simple or definitive manner, we are faced with the following question: in what or where does responsibility lie? One way to address this conundrum is suggested by splitting up the term ‘responsibility’ into its constitutive parts, ‘response’ and ‘ability’. Responsibility then translates into refining one’s ability to respond. This, in turn, requires one to deepen one’s awareness of the environment in which one lives — social, cultural, economic, political, ecological. This consciousness then provides the basis upon which 98

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one can take one’s place as a fully present member of the earthly community. The relationship between responsibilty and ‘response ability’ is a dialectical one. As one cultivates one’s ‘ability to respond’, one uncovers fresh ‘responsibilities’ that in turn require one to work toward the requisite abilities needed to respond appropriately. We resolve, as it were, to remain on active duty, mindful that although we cannot pretend to omniscient knowledge, we can strive toward richer understanding of our dense particularity and situatedness. Living thus by the principles of karma, reincarnation and dependent co-arising enables us to commit to a present and future that honours the reality of our complex interdependence. More importantly, it opens the way to contemplating the issue of human action and human responsibility in a manner that neither minimises nor aggrandises the true significance and transformative potential of both.1

Note 1. In the period since this article was written (2001) the reality of global warming has created conditions that concretely demonstrate the complexity of cause–effect relations and the collective dimension of karma. It is to be hoped that current misunderstandings of karma will be revised in this context and that the concept becomes a tool in rethinking our choices of how to live and act as a species.

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Fading Blossoms

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right tongues of purple and yellow stand firm and tall in their green jackets. Each petal arches out from the centre. Bold, beautiful irises. Bright tongues of purple and yellow relax into the water and stretch skyward. Bold, beautiful irises, touched by the admiring gaze of all who walk by. Bright tongues of purple begin to curl imperceptibly at the edges, toward the centre from which they have been unfurled by the light. Slowly they move past the high noon of full bloom, the afternoon of their lives signalled in the gradual retraction of each tongue. This inward movement is matched by the subtle fading of purple over several days… to lavender…to lilac…and finally to light blue. The yellow fades by degrees into a kind of cream. Each day its limbs are further withdrawn, narrower in girth. The stems seem to thin before one’s eyes. Walking by, one wonders whether it is time to drain the water and place the flowers with the garden clippings waiting to be hauled away by the city.

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But wait! Life does not merely bloom. It also fades, and in its waning, there is as much, if not more, to behold. I decide to conduct an experiment. I leave the flowers in the vase. Each day the prana or life force contracts even more into some invisible core. The stems pale, and become more and more insubstantial. I wonder how long I shall have the courage to let this scene unfold in full view of visitors who enter the house. For faded flowers represent careless housekeeping. Flowers are to be bought fresh. One is then advised to place them in water after trimming their stems. To ensure long-lasting blooms, one may stir in a teaspoon of sugar or the tiny pouch of crystals sometimes distributed by florists. One is instructed to change the water every two days and to avoid placing the flowers in direct sunlight. For anything in excess of indirect light will lead them to fade faster. Aided by this counsel, one chooses an appropriate vase, arranges the stems, and enjoys them. But time has a way of passing and all things are by their nature subject to change. Soon the blooms begin to look less vigorous and as this happens they are spirited away from view. Why is it that we shy away from fading blossoms? Why do we turn from the second half of the life of cut flowers, seeing their fading as an affront to our sensibilities? Can we imagine an aesthetic framework that would allow for flowers to fade before our eyes, taking whatever shape and form they must as they transform? 101

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Organic flowers at the farmer’s market, the gifts of summer in California. I buy a bunch of pink and white roses. The buds are heavy, each so full of fragrant petals that they are drooping under the weight of their ampleness. Round, robust, fragrant, they bow their heads to all passersby. Their cycle to full fade is different. Where the irises become skeletal by the end, the roses continue to retain their fullness. Their heads simply drop lower and lower. They do not shrink, but stoop, draping themselves over the lip of the vase that holds them. Is the arching but full rose more pleasing than the lean but withering iris across the room? We humans judge shape, form, colour, texture and size without thought to nature, to the cycles of life and death, birth, maturing and fading. Our aesthetics are so narrow that, for the most part, there are only a few moments in the life cycle of a flower that we unhesitatingly embrace. It would seem that the plant has taken birth simply so we can enjoy it in what we would call its prime. But how would we know what there is to notice, contemplate and enjoy if we refuse to allow ourselves to witness its entire journey? Flowers are not merely objects for our consumption or testimony to our notion of beauty. They are also lives to be witnessed, admired, appreciated, just as they are. If they are generous enough to accept being placed by us in all manner of insalubrious

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locations, could we not extend to them the courtesy of witnessing them as they move through their incarnations according to the rhythms of their particular species? We tend to mete this kind of partial appreciation not merely to flowers but to other things as well: our own bodies, those of others, our own lives and those of others. For, like it or not, our dislike of fading blossoms is but a reflection of our distaste for anything that fails to conform to a rather limited conception of health, body, beauty, vigour, life. What does it mean to live so partially that we cannot embrace the multidimensionality of life and death? How does our habitual practice of everyday eugenics shape our view of the world and of Creation? We can learn a great deal by observing the rest of the natural world of which we are a part. Nature simply is. It makes no attempt to stage-manage its appearance, by setting up a contrast, highlighting some aspects or marginalising others. In any single frame of nature that the human eye can encompass, we will see the totality of birth, life and death. Unlike humans, nature privileges neither particular moments of its existence nor certain aspects of itself relative to others. Within the parameters of our limited human perception we may well prefer roses which withdraw with a quiet unobtrusive dignity, to those which drop their petals with abandon and in no particular

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pattern. And perhaps we would rather not mention star-gazer lilies that spill the powdery residue of their stamens onto our clean table-cloths, or the water in the vase that darkens and emits a faintly acrid smell as flowers fade. Can we imagine extending our sensoria and expanding our consciousness to include the dusk of flora? Our notions of order and disorder stand in stark contrast to the dynamic artistry of the integral beauty of things as they are in nature. For nature (unlike humans today) revels in all aspects of creation and destruction, destruction and creation. And until we do the same, we shall forever be trapped within the prisons of our preferences, by our sense that youth, vigour and health represent the prime of life and the acme of desirability. The mirage of perfection. The pursuit of the rigid. Living as though change were not a constant. This is what we will be courting if we persist in the impossible task of living contrary to the laws of the universe. And sorrow as well as disappointment, regret, perhaps even envy, will become our constant companions. In all spiritual traditions, spirit or divinity is said to be immanent as well as transcendent. Indeed it is the immanence and transcendence of the sacred that makes the divine omnipresent. If we seek transcendence without honouring immanence, we naturally take flight from materiality except when matter conforms to some notion of aesthetic 104

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appropriateness shaped by prevailing social convention. Despising matter except when it conforms to our sectarian sense of the beautiful paves the way for violence toward all forms of sentience, toward all that is alive. If life is most desirable when it exhibits youth and/or health, then everything other than what we designate as such automatically becomes a precursor of death. If, on the other hand, we opened out our definition of life to include all phases of existence without favour or prejudice, we could admire existence as bud, as bloom and as fading or faded blossom. For birth and death, creation and destruction are not opposites, but inevitably co-implicated and contemporaneous processes. Life, death, bloom and fade are intimately coupled. It is only by means of a conceptual violence that their separation is effected. To reverse the violence of this severing of one into two, we need to unify aspects of indivisible reality that are currently divorced in our perception. By doing this we heal our consciousness as also our relationship with the phenomenal world. We live in a time when doing with matter as we please has become a principle of life. We would thus do well to ponder our relationship to matter so that we can understand the consequences of how we have rent apart that which has always been and is, by nature, a single whole. Only then will it be possible to reunite what was never separated except in our consciousness, and consequently by our actions.

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Within the past ten years, we have noticed a wave rising….We saw ordinary people like ourselves having extraordinary experiences….[A]wakening, enlightenment, freedom, liberation, self-realization, etc.,…has long been considered something that occurs for only the rarest few. And those rare few have primarily been found in the Eastern world. With this book we are…beginning to document and explore an awakening in human consciousness …wholly unprecedented in Western civilization. ‘Introduction’, Lynne Marie Lumiere and John Lumiere-Wins, The Awakening West: Conversations with Today’s New Western Spiritual Leaders, Fair Winds, 2003, 2nd edition, p.11.

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he 1990s in the United States saw the emergence of a phenomenon that was frequently described as Western Advaita. This term referred to the teachings of individuals of US or European descent like Gangaji, Adyashanti, Neelam, Eckhart Tolle who drew explicitly or implicitly on the non-dual philosophy of Advaita. These teachers were certainly not the first to bring Advaita to the US. It had been an aspect of the teaching of Hinduism in that country ever since

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Swami Vivekananda addressed the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago. In the years that followed, several Indian teachers who visited the US including Swami Chinmayananda, Baba Muktananda and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi taught Advaita in context of their own discourses. What distinguishes the teachers who came to prominence in the 1990s is that they have no links with contemporary gurus or religious institutions in India. Many do not locate themselves within any tradition, let alone any specific lineage. Even when, like Gangaji or Neelam, they acknowledge their connection to an Indian teacher or tradition, their own organisations are not in any way affiliated with them. Many US born spiritual seekers have welcomed these teachers with palpable relief. For, by their existence and in their discourse these teachers promise to heal a split many have sensed between their Western identity and socialisation, and the Eastern origin and form of their practice. A shared cultural vernacular and, at times, a common generational experience have made for a greater synchrony between teacher and student. In this context many state that the teachings have come alive for them in a way hitherto rarely experienced. It is not difficult to comprehend why teaching Advaita with examples drawn from the contemporary United States speaks more pointedly to audiences there than stories of forest hermits in a bygone era, or Hindu gods and demons battling each other in earthly and heavenly realms. The language of any teaching 107

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inevitably reflects sociocultural conventions and symbols. Teachers as well as students of Western Advaita are acutely aware of this fact as it relates to Eastern philosophy and Eastern teachers. When it comes to their own discourse, however, they assume a transparency and are remarkably unconscious of its situatedness. They see themselves as improvers who are pruning away ‘distracting particulars’ and ‘culturally grounded conceptions’ in pursuit of the ‘universal’ aspects of the teaching which are, in their view, demonstrable by experience and not contingent on belief. These claims are, however, belied by examining Western Advaita. Investigation suggests that this development is advisedly described as Western, but not for the reasons generally advanced.

II

Western Advaita principally refers to techniques for witnessing the mind. It teaches one how to disidentify from one’s thoughts and mental processes. Practitioners are led to notice that they are not identical with their thoughts and that there is a Self that witnesses mental processes. This witnessing Self is peaceful and unperturbed, unlike the mind which is interminably active and most often restless. Students are urged to become conversant with the mind and its stratagems, and to learn to reside in the peace of the witnessing Self. This Self notes everything but is itself unaffected by all that it sees. The Self is eternal 108

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and unchanging unlike the dramas of the mind which are perpetually evolving and as such impermanent. The structure of satsangs (meetings in which the teachings are delivered) is traditional. The teacher gives a brief discourse which may be preceded or followed by a short meditation period. Then the floor is opened for questions. Individuals raise issues of concern and are directed as to how to approach them. This process is an interactive one. The initial question is often followed by a counter-question from the teacher that is intended to take the practitioner deeper. Why has the question arisen? In what assumptions about incarnate self is it grounded? Who is the ‘I’ that is asking the question? The questioner is asked to turn inward and report back on his or her discoveries. A silent tranquillity usually pervades the atmosphere. Respect for both teacher and fellow practitioners is palpable. As one listens in on the exchanges between teacher and questioner, one witnesses initial questions dissolving or being recast, insights being revealed and wounds being tended. This process is not merely cognitive in the scientific rationalist sense of that term. One experiences and witnesses shifts in energy and perception that are beyond the grasp of such an explanatory framework. It would seem that one should celebrate Western Advaita’s capacity to offer wisdom as an antidote to suffering. Yet, there is something troubling about this development and it is this that I shall address. 109

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Context crucially shapes the meaning that accrues to teachings. Western Advaita addresses the individual and his or her mind. Whatever the question, the individual is asked to look inward and seek the source of the inquiry. Introspection may lead the individual to uncover the question’s origin in social convention and in the level of self most entangled with the human journey. At times the individual may even glimpse the witness aspect or Self, that part not so enmeshed in humanness. Although there is no judgement of the individual’s process, there is a definite directionality to the proposed journey. Disquiet is seen as an effect of entanglement with the ever-changing and the impermanent. One relinquishes it in favour of abiding in the never-changing and eternal. This is believed to ensure the transformation of suffering into peace: thus the repeated inquiry into the source and nature of the question. This technique of witnessing the mind and controlling it by means of disidentifying with it dovetails neatly with some of the most cherished notions of US culture: rugged individualism, the belief that the individual is his or her greatest resource, the idea that suffering is the result of personal failure and joy the consequence of individual effort, the control of mind as necessary for directing one’s destiny. Additionally, there is in US culture a deep suspicion of knowledge and its purveyors. This concern is allayed by the experience-it-for-yourself-now pedagogy in which the teacher assumes the role of facilitator and not the much dreaded guru. Add to 110

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this the repeated invitation ‘to call off the search and look within’ and you have what seems to many to be a democratic movement for individual selfempowerment, one which, moreover, holds out the promise of immediate results. For, part of calling off the search is also giving up the idea that legitimate joy is in direct proportion to one’s suffering and the outcome of relentless effort. This idea which is to be found in the austere dimensions of many religions is a significant Puritan bequest to US culture and society.1 The enabling aspects of these teachings must also be acknowledged. In addition to those noted earlier, one may add the following. To learn to witness mind is in and of itself healing in a culture that privileges mind above all else. To be encouraged to take seriously what lies within is not trivial in a culture that lauds the inner but only as a resource for what it makes possible in the external world. To be asked to forsake effort is to offer an important counterpoint in an environment where one’s moral measure is tied to the quantum of one’s effort. At the same time, by wresting a technique from the broader tradition of which it is a part and offering it as a practice sufficient unto itself, Western Advaita bolsters as many American myths as it unsettles.

III

The problems with Western Advaita are the effect of a partial appropriation. Advaita does not stand 111

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alone within Hinduism. Rather, it is embedded in a fundamentally deistic philosophical framework in which the dvaitic and advaitic merrily coexist. Certainly, there has been a tendency to conceive formlessness as superior to form and the eternal as preferable to the impermanent, thus giving rise to the anti-matter strain within the tradition. But the matter cannot not taken to extremes. When seen as a whole, Hinduism does not claim that knowledge of oneness (of non-duality) is superior to knowledge of the diversity that comprises the phenomenal world (although taken in isolation some statements of Hindu teachers do seem to take this position). Rather, knowledge of oneness is a pointer to the unifying substratum underlying diversity. In their totality the teachings guide us toward honouring both. It is only in this context that we can make sense of such classic and otherwise contradictory statements as, ‘this world is an illusion’ and ‘having taken a body, one should fulfil one’s karmas’. It is also thus that the non-dual strain has thrived alongside that which is arguably Hinduism’s most remarked upon feature: the extraordinary range of divine forms and the many modes of their adoration and worship. This point is well illustrated by the example of Sri Ramana Maharishi whose technique of self-inquiry is much drawn upon by these teachers (often without citation). Sri Ramana was an ardent lover of Shiva to whom he wrote copious devotional poetry. He saw self-inquiry as a method that could aid some practitioners. However, he set equal store by the 112

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devotional practices and rituals that characterise Hinduism, which is what accounts for the traditional character of the daily regimen in his ashram in Tiruvanamalai. He did not claim he was offering a science of mind that would be a path unto itself. Removed from the specific context of Hinduism, witnessing as taught in Western Advaita becomes a technique for watching the mind. The result is a subtle, if unintended, bolstering of individual mind. The logic of this partial appropriation may be sought in the fact that it makes Advaita congruent with a rationalist culture. Western Advaita does not require one to believe in a force or principle greater than the human. It invites us to understand the nature of mind. The mind is a much-valourised rationalist instrument. But it is also the seat of much suffering. Western Advaita offers its students a means of getting some distance from mind so that they are not as subject to its dominion. The extracting of elements of non-dual philosophy from their location in a broader Hindu framework and their rearticulation within the dominant sociocultural context of the US has produced a set of teachings that, in effect, offer antithesis as synthesis. Prior conceptions are simply turned on their heads. No-self is privileged over self, silence over sound, no-thought over thought, no effort over effort and formlessness over form. While these inversions frequently inspire in listeners a measure of release from the tyranny of mind and an oppressive notion of individual will, 113

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these teachings are structured by dualisms that must themselves be taken apart. Can the incarnate self simply be set aside by practicing refuge in non-self, whether named as ‘awareness’ or ‘the Now’? What happens to the self that is by such means renounced? Does it dissolve into ‘awareness’ without a trace? Or does it remain a ghostly presence discernible in the irreducible particularity of the teacher and the teachings, and all the more troubling for its being unacknowledged? And what of the dialectic of effort and grace that structures the spiritual path and over time recasts the meaning of both terms? Teachings grounded in antithesis invariably simplify processes that are, in fact, complex. My concerns about Western Advaita are not that it is inauthentic in some way. Teaching as well as learning invariably involves some degree of reinterpretation and selective appropriation. What I draw attention to here are the consequences of the choices we make in this regard, both for our understanding of the philosophy, and its potential as a resource for living wisely. The spiritual path requires us to be scrupulously aware of our own sociocultural formation, not merely that of others. To neglect this work is to open the door to collusion between one’s practice and those very mental and material structures which, in the best of circumstances, spiritual practice should help one to recognise and dismantle.

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The failure to undertake this kind of work is evident in the claim of iconoclasm made on behalf of Western Advaita. It may have weeded out certain cultural particulars from the practice’s initial location within Hinduism. But its enunciation has introduced Americanisms of which it remains unaware. The pioneering spirit that takes without acknowledgement and then claims to have improved what it supposedly never took is a regrettable United Statesian tradition with robust European roots. The promise of instant gratification made possible by the method on offer echoes a consumerist discourse in which solutions are not process oriented but technology driven. The method of returning every question to sender fortifies individualism and forecloses difficult issues about how to live in the world, the usual domain of religious and spiritual instruction. The combined effect of all of this is to remake the spiritual journey as the quest for an improved quality of life. Prevailing ideology is by such means accommodated. We can hardly be surprised if, as a consequence, non-dual truth in these teachings is seen to heal one’s alienation from witnessing mind and not, as in the original formulation, from one’s felt separation from God.

Note 1. It is in this broader context that the argument advanced here holds even when, as with Eckhart Tolle, teachings address both mind and body.

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Is a Dewdrop Sacred, or is it Secular?

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rom a spiritual standpoint every particle in the phenomenal world is of inherent value. Not only that, every particle is as sacred as every other. Whatever systems of meaning might be elaborated to make sense of infinity in any of its myriad dimensions, these axioms remain constant: the inherent worth and the equality of all aspects of the material world. It is in this sense that a unity is said to underlie the seeming diversity of the universe. Both the unity and the diversity are, however, equally important. Spiritual teachings often stress that our perception of diversity distracts us from the underlying unity. This may be so. But the opposite can be just as problematic. The emphasis on the underlying unity can lead us to treat as incidental, and of no particular relevance, the multiplicity of life forms and human expression on this planet. In doing so, we overlook the stunning diversity that bears eloquent testimony to the extraordinary creative consciousness that has begotten it all. Any framework that seeks to interpret the phenomenal world from a spiritual perspective must take account

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of these three principles: the inherent and equal value of all aspects of infinity, and the importance of both the unity and the diversity of life forms. In our day, botanists and ecologists have done much to raise our awareness of the importance of biodiversity. They have demonstrated what is portended if we seek to undermine the exquisitely dynamic equilibrium of nature. Unity and diversity. Fragility and the capacity to endure. Extraordinary fecundity. Everything equally endowed with awareness. Any explanatory system that departs from these premises in seeking to make sense of the natural or social world runs the risk of flattening the intricate complexity of the principles that undergird the universe and its functioning. This is as true of religious frameworks as it is of secular ones. Religion as a social system corrals infinity in order to produce a grid by means of which to address existential questions and everyday practices. Secular philosophies similarly posit their own frameworks, each with their premises, in order to make sense of some of the very phenomena for which religion claims to offer answers. But the vast and untamable character of infinity means that neither religious nor secular philosophies can offer us a total or exhaustive interpretation. Thus it is that although religions claim universality, much of what is claimed to be universal is discovered to bear the impress of culture, society and history. Similarly, despite the endeavour of secular philosophies 117

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to fully account for social phenomena, there is much that slips through the conceptual net. The point here is that given the nature of that which is sought to be explained, any attempt (whether religious or secular) to achieve analytic omnipotence is doomed from the very start. All philosophies have identifiable points of emergence and work with specific assumptions to address particular phenomena. With these cautionary statements in mind, we can consider whether, from a spiritual point of view, it is possible to argue for a distinction between the sacred and secular realms of life. Three positions have emerged in the debate on secularism that has been unfolding in the past decade or so. First, there are secularists who argue for the importance of keeping religion out of the political arena. This separation is seen to be crucial to ensuring democracy. Then there are the Hindutva ideologues. They have insisted on the centrality of religious identity as they define it and have deployed it to advance the cause of Hindu majoritarianism. Religion, in their view, distinguishes one set of citizen adherents from another and anyone not of the majority Hindu religion is deemed to be ‘other’, lesser, and less deserving. They are even seen to be outside the protection of the law. Muslims and Christians are singled out for hate and the former are especially held responsible for the imagined ills of the majority. A third perspective has taken issue with the secularist position. Its proponents have argued that the 118

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separation of the religious and the secular runs counter to the organic nature of Indian society. Although critical of the Sangh Parivar, this view expresses particular concern with the secularist position for holding to a perspective that is believed to flout the sociocultural realities of the subcontinent. Where does someone who begins with the premises laid out at the beginning of this essay fit into this scenario?

II

One morning in meditation a thought arose in my consciousness: ‘Is a dewdrop sacred, or is it secular?’ The source of the inquiry was mysterious, for the mind was unusually silent at the time. The force with which the question presented itself shook me. In my journey of opening to the divine, I have found my perception undergoing a subtle transformation. Living as I do in a cool climate, I often awaken to find my windows moist with dew. As the sun rises in the sky, its warmth dries the dew and restores the view of the oleander and honeysuckle bordering my bedroom. In my secular days I paid no attention to the precipitation on my window. I mostly ignored it. In recent years, however, I have become deeply appreciative of morning dew. It serves as a tangible and daily reminder of the cycles of nature, of the fact of interdependency. I often wonder which body of water had contributed atmospheric moisture, which cloud blown by which breeze, cooled by which clime, 119

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had deposited dew upon my window pane, only so that it may give itself up into the warm embrace of the rising sun. Dew now represents surrender, selflessness, an egoless abandon to the rhythms of nature, and the realities of manifestation, death and resurrection. Each morning the dew inspires in me the desire to become even less resistant to the laws of the universe. To me the dew is sacred. It prompts me toward truth. Lest I be misunderstood, let me clarify that I do not wish to set up a society for the protection of dew or pass laws penalising those who simply wipe off the moisture on the windshields of their auto-rickshaws or cars without a second thought. Nor do I wish to find scriptural references as to its sacred significance. My point is a simple one. It is that for one with a spiritual outlook there is no line, either conceptual or experiential, that definitively demarcates the sacred from the secular. There is, as yet, no place in the current debate for such a perspective.

III

Several challenges confront one who seeks to elaborate this point of view. For one thing, it is not possible to simply defend religion, whether as a supposedly timeless and inviolable inheritance or as an irrefutable sociocultural reality. Religion is a social institution and as such is characterised by all of the conflicts that have marked the history of our society. 120

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Much of what passes for religion itself violates the principles of unity, diversity and the radical equality and inherent worth of all aspects of infinity. There is no question, then, of taking shelter in something unproblematic called ‘religion’; likewise the notion of sanathana dharma or ‘immemorial tradition’, for this stream is not discontinuous from institutionalised religion. The same reasons make it impossible to hold up particular texts as infallible repositories of truth. At the same time, much of what I have been persuaded by, and much of what my consciousness has been healed by, is to be found precisely in that contentious tradition which today bears the name, Hinduism. Some of what I say is also to be found in the equally contentious traditions of Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. In each religion we discover the interweaving of the sublime and the ridiculous, the liberatory and the oppressive, the radical and the conventional. The extrication of truth from error is a vital part of the journey toward greater discernment. My own learning has taken place at the fertile conjunction of Hinduism and Buddhism, although my deistic inclination firmly locates me in the former tradition. The universality of which I feel confident, however, is the essential oneness that underlies the diversity of life forms, and the equality and inherent worth of all dimensions of infinity. To my mind, if these principles are violated by any philosophy, whether religious or secular, then that framework is 121

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untenable, and, I would argue, infringes the essence both of democracy and of all wisdom traditions. One can see that there need not be a conflict between a spiritual perspective so defined, and a genuinely democratic one. In principle, at least, democracy is committed to the equality of all individuals. Given its coming of age in the nineteenth century, this tradition has tended to elevate humans over nature and accorded an exalted place to human consciousness. However, this view has increasingly come under pressure from ecology, animal rights and Fourth World movements. As a result, the notion of the common good has been gradually expanded to include non-human parts of the natural world. The idea of according consciousness to all things may for now seem to many like a foreign idea. But it is likely that as we understand more and more about the interdependence of all aspects of the phenomenal world, this too will become increasingly acceptable and, as scientific evidence mounts, part of secular common sense. It seems to me that there is no necessary reason why we need to excise the sacred from the sociopolitical realm in order to safeguard life, ensure justice and stand on the side of radical oneness and equality. Properly understood, the unitive principle can be in a dynamic and fruitful dialogue with those concerns that animate the hearts and minds of so many secular minded individuals intent on healing the social, political and economic divisions that threaten our peaceful coexistence. 122

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The problem with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal is not that they are religious. The problem with these organisations is that they are fascist. Religion is no more inherently conservative or fascist than secular philosophy is, by definition, liberatory. Many contemporary forms of organised violence and discrimination have a secular basis. 1 If we wish to move the discussion on secularism forward, we might consider allowing ourselves to entertain new questions, or reconsider those that we may have pushed to the margins. An aggressive minority should not be permitted to narrow the discursive and political space or to constrain our vision. Is a dewdrop sacred, or is it secular? Charged times require calm contemplation. The greater the din made by the forces of hate, the deeper the need for poetry, song, philosophy, for pursuing those questions that disturb the assumptions to which we cleave. The outpouring on the internet and in the media in the aftermath of the post-Godhra massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 is the uprising of precisely such a desire to think, rethink and speak out, again and again, in the name of our humanity or, to draw on spiritual vernacular, our divine potential. Death can and must provoke us to see clearly and live fully. Even in the deadliest hour truth can reveal itself. Let us remember the words of an older Muslim woman in a refugee camp in Gujarat who, shocked at the inhumane violence meted to her fellow beings, exclaimed the sublime truth, ‘I am humanity!’ Let us 123

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honour her. Let us honour the dew. Let us honour all the questions that are seeking our collective and patient attention.

Note 1. Ashis Nandy has consistently made this point. Indeed Nandy locates Hindutva within and not outside the project of modern state building, arguing that it is a secular phenomenon with a religious veneer. See, for example, ‘An Anti-Secularist Manifesto’, in Nandy, The Romance of the State and the Fate of Dissent in the Tropics. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 34–60.

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Confronting Violence: Bridging the Sacred–Secular Divide

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iolence is any diminishment or violation of isness. Isness names the quality of beingness that is intrinsic to all that is alive. Isness embraces form as well as essence, surface as well as depth, matter as well as spirit. All living things whether deemed animate like humans and animals, or regarded as inanimate like stones or rocks, manifest their own specific isness. Violence whether upon oneself or another signals the dishonouring of isness. Violence can be physical, mental, emotional or some combination of all three. Depending on context, both action and inaction can be forms of violence. Three key ideas may be said to be at the core of all mystical traditions. I restate them here even at the risk of repetition because we live in a time when we cannot assume a shared frame of reference. My language reflects a Hinduism cross-fertilised by Buddhism. But these ideas are also in accord with Sufism, mystical Christianity and nature-based religions. The first premise is that every aspect of the universe is infinitely alive and endowed with divine 125

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consciousness. The second is that all aspects of the universe are equal to one another, with each aspect as sacred as the rest. The third a priori is that all aspects of the universe and all beings within it are intricately interdependent. Every thought, action, feeling or experience reverberates through the universe and, in doing so, sets in motion effects that give birth to causes, that give birth to effects, that give birth to causes, etcetera. This process is one that existing models of causation are poorly equipped to comprehend and explain. Any thought, word or deed that infringes these three principles violates the essence of true spirituality. One hardly needs to argue that Hindutva from the beginning, and in every way, stands opposed to all spiritual ideals. One may also note that, by this definition, almost all insitutionalised religions will be found, at least in part, to be in serious breach of fundamental spiritual principles. I say ‘in part’ because each tradition has also bequeathed to us its radical dimensions. The contradictory legacy of religion or spirituality should not surprise us. As a social institution religion is inevitably shaped by the conflicts and particularities of the history of its emergence and subsequent development. It is up to us to cultivate discernment, and distinguish between that which is essential and that which is simply the contingent effect of social and cultural mores. Regardless of what many claim, spiritual traditions do not come down to us in some pure form untouched by politics or 126

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human interpretation. Spiritual practice thus involves an inescapably interpretive aspect. It requires us to embark on an unfolding and ongoing process of contemplation, interpretation and application. There may be truths that are universal but human comprehension is inevitably particular, situated. The collective Hindu response to the abuse of religious name and form by the Right wing has not, however, adequately confronted this point. On the one side, in keeping with its beliefs, the secular intelligentsia has repeatedly called for a strict separation of the religious from the secular. On the other side there has been a passive to conservative to retrograde Hindu religious establishment. This has either kept aloof, or else it has dubbed Hindutva as ‘political, not religious’, and spoken of compassion and tolerance as central Hindu tenets. This position ignores the problematic history of Hinduism. It also shares with the secularist view the assumption that religion can and should be kept apart from something called politics. Thirdly, there are those in the religious establishment who have joined in the mayhem of the Sangh Parivar, either as its foot soldiers or else as brokers volunteering to effect a compromise between the Parivar and its adversaries. Finally, there has been a small, faith-based progressive Hindu voice within and outside of the religious establishment which has sought to challenge the credibility and authenticity of Hindutva. Its strategy has been to unravel the lies of Hindutva while stressing the essential teachings of love, peace, unity and dharmic 127

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living that are inherent in Hinduism as in all other wisdom traditions. In trying to address religion and politics simultaneously, this last position has refused both their conflation and their division. In doing the former it diverges from the Right wing, for which religion is politics by other means. The progressive religious perspective also departs from the secular position which insists on the separation of religion and politics for fear that their intermingling in the public sphere will undermine the cause of social justice. Understandable though it may be, there is a problem with the secular insistence that religion be kept out of civic life. It is simply not practical. Religious philosophy addresses existential questions, seeking to offer a guide to living. As such, for better and for worse, it is threaded into the consciousness of its practitioners and is integral to our/their life practices. It cannot be wished away, legislated out of existence, or easily contained in something called ‘the private sphere’. Those of us who have been active in work for social change know only too well how the private and the public spheres continually shape and mould each other. How could it be otherwise in the case of religion or spirituality? Like other cultural practices, religion must be met and challenged in the very places in which it is lived, in the realm of the everyday. The Right wing understands this well and is rearticulating religion to regressive ends. Progressive forces need to do the same. We need to contemplate religion with 128

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equanimity. It merits neither a special awe nor a unique horror. The latter is nothing more than the former in another guise. The voices of people of faith in support of peace and social justice have not been prominent in shaping the current debate. We need to stand up, speak out, and be counted. There is work to be done in bridging the seeming gulf between the secular and non-secular sections of our society. Without a coalition of secular and faith-based forces, the challenge to Hindutva will likely remain partial and without a popular base. A coalition of spiritual and secular forces would necessarily have to open out the language of opposition to Hindutva. Secularism could no longer act as the definitive sign of an anti-fascist, anti-fundamentalist commitment. Rather, peace, justice, harmony and inclusivity would be the shared platform around which such a movement could be mobilised. Such a coalition would take patience, work, and everyone’s willingness to forsake philosophical or ideological one-upmanship. But coming together is crucial if we are to broaden and deepen the interventions we hope to make in our increasingly divided and explosive society. Although distressing times call for greater openness and dialogue, one often witnesses a narrowing of debate. Issues that are not necessarily linked become conflated with one another. To offer one example, acknowledging the place of the sacred in one’s life is assumed to mean support for personal law based on religion. This does not necessarily follow. Part of the work of a peace and justice coalition 129

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would be to clarify and recast the issues in relation to its own inclusive platform and vision. The question of violence cannot, however, be deemed as merely ‘other people’s problem’. A spiritual stance requires us to pose every question in relation to ourselves. What areas of distaste, prejudice and hate lie unexamined within our own consciousness? Even as we reject Hindu majoritarianism, do we wish that certain of our fellow beings simply did not exist? Are there aspects of our own selves of which we are ashamed, and toward which we are, in small and not so small ways, violent? Do we honour the isness of all that is? It is often thought that this form of self-inquiry is an indulgent luxury and a diversion from the struggle. But if we accept the three premises laid out at the start of this presentation — namely, the sacredness, radical equality and interdependence of all aspects of the universe and of all beings within it — then we are led on a journey in which we discover that the division between inner and outer, self and other is impossible to maintain. Even something as apparently individual and personal as a thought travels through the universe and, if negative, does so as disturbance. Although we may not be aware of it we deeply affect, and are in turn affected by, everything each of us thinks, says or does, whether or not we are in the same room or even in the same country. We need not take this on faith for we have all had occasion 130

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to experience it. For example, when a thousand women from across Gujarat met in Ahmedabad a few days before the December 2002 assembly elections and wept for each other’s suffering, they were experiencing palpably the indivisibility in the ultimate analysis of one being from another. Whenever we feel deeply the unaddressed grievances of our fellow beings, we too are experiencing the fact that we are all threads in a single tapestry. Spiritual philosophy can inspire one to move beyond fear to the wellspring of courage and wisdom. These latter qualities are often smothered by social convention and cultural prejudice which converge to constrain us from realising our full potential. Whether secular or spiritual in persuasion peaceloving individuals share much in common. It is hoped that the horror of the present times will impel us to bridge the sacred–secular divide in challenging the mirage of otherness that threatens to undermine our commonality and shared destiny.1

Note 1. Presented at panel on ‘Violence and Spiritual Life: Workshop on Ending Atrocities’, Hyderabad, January 7, 2003.

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ar, domination, looting, violence and rape. Corruption, suffering, bigotry, lies and subjugation. How is one to be a conscious and compassionate citizen alive to all that is happening around one, without being buried under an avalanche of distress? How does one cultivate alertness without despair, or awareness without fear? How does one keep one’s heart open in the hell that is the world today? The contemporary world has placed humanity in a unique position. Transnational media, satellite communication, telephones and the internet mean that wherever we may be, we are far more aware of events both local and global. Unlike in earlier periods when people were primarily conscious of the challenges of their village, region or at times their country, we encounter on a daily basis the traumas of citizens and nations in locations distant from where we each live. We are also painfully aware of the role of our own governments in perpetuating the suffering of fellow beings near and far. The sheer volume of disturbing information has the potential to turn us away from the scenes of crises and criminality brought to us by the various media to which we are 132

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exposed. How are we to remain present in troubled times like these? The complexity of a spiritual perspective cannot be reduced to a set of replicable practices with the promise of specific rewards. In this regard it is important to note that a geometric representation of the spiritual journey such as the shree yantra fundamentally maps process, not outcome. Dense overlapping triangles radiate out from the bindu, the fecund centre that is itself beyond representation. The yantra charts a nonlinear process with multiple points of entry. Whatever the doorway, the practitioner is led in the direction of an increasing awareness of interconnectivity, held in the embrace of an unrepresentable centre-point that is both root cause and the infinity of effects. The process is beyond the control of the individual aspirant whose own agency is manifest in his or her engagement in a set of practices. The individual leads by practicing, and then follows where the practice leads. It is important to preface my discussion with these comments, since I seek to share some of what I have found helpful in my own struggle to be present to the world as it is. What I offer is not, however, a recipe for action so much as some techniques that may serve others on their own journeys toward compassionate, conscious citizenship. II

As always in spiritual life, we begin with ourselves, specifically with our minds. The mind absorbs the 133

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potent emotions that pervade public spaces and private dreams alike. These agitate and disturb its innate peace and compromise its clarity. The mind thus needs the opportunity to be still. One way to still the mind is to empty it of all that it is carrying: fear, rage, grief, despair, and so on. Meditation is crucial to this process. The aim is to create a clearing in which it might be possible to bring some equanimity to our contemplation of the situation at hand. Such poise is important if we are to resist the continuous attempts of the powerful to colonise us by normalising or justifying violence and negativity. Even if we oppose the dominant point of view, we may be so impacted by its insistent repetition, whether by the mass media or others in our environment, that we unwittingly become entangled in its logic. Even truths of which we are certain can become difficult to hold on to. Transfixed by the horror of events and our impotence to do anything about them, we may remain glued to the television, radio or newspaper, searching for some sign of hope and likely not finding it. Or we may find ourselves drawn like moths to a flame into pointless arguments with those taking an opposing stance, seeking tenuous comfort in the sense that we are putting up resistance. At some point the hopelessness engendered by the situation may prompt us to stop watching, listening or engaging with it altogether. Stepping outside the circular, self-authenticating logic of violence is thus key. In this regard, I have found the following practice to be very helpful. The details 134

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are drawn from my experience of the 2003 AngloAmerican invasion of Iraq, but they can be altered as needed. Several times daily I contemplated in my mind the question of just who was at war. This meditation, which first came to me during the 2001 US war on Afghanistan, goes something like this: I remind myself that nature, a substantial part of the world, is not at war. All over the planet, trees are breathing in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen. The trees are not engaged in hostilities. Most of the world’s surface is covered by water, and the oceans are not at war either. Be they choppy or calm, the oceans are not involved in combat. Nor are the deserts over which the conflict is taking place, and into whose sands the arsenals of the US and the UK are being emptied. Though disrupted and poisoned by war, the sands themselves are at peace. I then move on to insects, birds and animals and to mineral life, none of which is participating in the conflict. I conclude by remembering that even humanity, in a remarkably unusual show of unity and good sense, has explicitly voiced its opposition to this war.

One benefit of this practice has been to help me to particularise that which has felt ‘global’ and thus unbearable. As this happens, the mindstate of overwhelmedness relaxes enough to admit the possibility of other presents, and alternate futures. The 135

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practice also reminds me that we share the world with other species whose lives are equally sacred. Such an exercise may seem trivial: an attempt to calm ourselves by recalling a few positive things. So what, we might ask, if nature, animals and most humans are not at war? Surely, what matters is defeating those who are, even if they only represent a minority. But the purpose here is to widen the frame of perception so that we can place current events in proper perspective. The propagandists of war would seek to keep us disproportionately focused on their words and deeds so that we will see things from their purview. Remembering who is and is not at war helps to break down such barriers to clear perception. Considering facts previously deemed irrelevant or marginal recasts the issues. Things invariably appear in a different light. What we seek is to be present to the multidimensional complexity of all that is. This requires us go beyond a mere ‘balance sheet mentality’, in which we add up the good news until it outweighs the bad, and then take evasive refuge in the result. Instead, we strive to cultivate a consciousness capacious enough to simultaneously hold the destructive and the generative, the lifeextinguishing and the life-sustaining, the misery and the joy. It is no easy task to practice equal vision in this manner. The contemplation described above is one tool that can help to loosen the chokehold of negativity, and help us maintain a more accurate and holistic perspective. 136

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Negativity frequently secures itself by means of fear. Fear brings lack of clarity, leads to despair and disempowerment, and results in inertia and passivity. It thus excels as a weapon of social control. Breath work can be helpful in gaining some distance from heavy states of mind like fear, rage, or despair. Taking slow, long breaths, we inhale peace and exhale the particular mindstate that bears down upon us. Breathing in peace, breathing out fear…. Breathing in peace, breathing out fear…Breathing in peace, breathing out fear.

The physical act of conscious, unhurried breathing gradually stills the mind. But there is an additional advantage. Naming the mindstate enables our recognition that we are, in truth, separate from it. In other words, we realise that fear or despair as a state of mind arises within us, but is not coextensive with our awareness. We know this clearly with physical sensations: we do not for example say, ‘I am hunger’, but rather, ‘I am hungry’. However, we tend to think otherwise about emotional and mental states. We are more likely to believe that we are one with fear or rage, as opposed to fear or rage being one of several states of mind cycling through our consciousness. Breathing in peace, breathing out rage… Breathing in peace, breathing out rage… Breathing in peace, breathing out rage. 137

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Conscious breathing can assist in bringing spaciousness into what has felt like a cramped, airless and imprisoned mind, dispiritedly projecting the present into the future and finding it all depressing. (It is usually at this juncture that we either shut down or take flight from what is before us.) As we bring our attention to our breath, we literally oxygenate our awareness, allowing it to relax. As this happens, the mindstate begins to lose its grip. This is so because part of what has enabled the state of mind to feel so solid and unshakeable is that we have reached out and embraced it, finding it, for whatever reason, persuasive and legitimate as a response to the present. Consequently, what might have been one among several responses becomes instead the dominant and persistent one. We may turn to our biography, understood in light of psychology, history and sociology, in order to comprehend why we tend to respond in one way rather than another. But so long as we naturalise our states of mind, they will needlessly dictate our lives and limit our capacity to creatively confront life’s many challenges. The world is not something we only experience outside of ourselves. It is first encountered within, in the realm of perception. It is thus that there is a link between knowing oneself and acting wisely. IV

When we are in a position, as we are today, to simultaneously witness suffering in so many places, 138

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we are immediately confronted by the irreducible situatedness of our lives, and the limits of the action we can take. Our role may be circumscribed in some instances but broader in others. Where action is our responsibility, we might seek to cultivate the requisite ‘response-ability’. Accepting what we cannot do and opening further to what we can do maximises our readiness to be present for what we must do. Reality does not always accommodate our desire to intercede in certain matters, nor our wish to avoid others. Humility and acceptance thus emerge as essential to liberating our energies for flexible application. Needless to say, hate, arrogance and the willful misuse of power often call forth rage within us. Righteous rage can be energising. But it does not by itself bring wisdom. Although rage may jumpstart our motivation, unless it is handled with care and discernment, it can enervate our imagination and undermine our staying power. Injustice exists. It is an incontrovertible reality. Accepting this fact is a first step in considering what our role might be in serving the cause of justice. When I find myself agitated and paralysed by events beyond my control, I undertake acceptance as an affirmative practice. During the bombing of Iraq, for example, I began each morning with the following, repeating it as needed during the day: I accept that I cannot stop the bombs falling on Iraq. I accept that I cannot stop the war in this moment. I vow to practice peace in whatever way I can. I pray that everyone will do the same. May all the beings 139

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I know that I could not have borne listening to the tragic news of the bombardment and its consequences, had I not striven to embrace acceptance as an integral dimension of practicing peace. Too often our distress prompts us into action that is neither wise nor sufficient. Being self-aware prevents us from acting in ways that primarily express our need to do something, anything, rather than what the situation might actually call for. A bumper sticker I once saw expressed this succinctly. It read, ‘Don’t just do something, sit there!’ The car on which it was pasted was a veritable bulletin board for ongoing social and political struggles. The context made it clear that the statement was not a summons to passivity but a call for considered action. Whether secular or spiritual in orientation each of us is sustained by some vision of peace and justice. This ideal supports our walk on this earth and inspires our actions. From a spiritual perspective it is a law that the universe is continuously being propelled toward harmony. This does not mean that harmony prevails at present. Neither does it by itself explain why disharmony is to be found. It does, however, express the truth that injustice cannot ultimately triumph, but rather always brings with it the seeds of its own destruction. Harmonious action, by contrast, carries with it the seeds of its own replication, requiring, as we have seen in countless instances, deliberate 140

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and concerted action in order to be undermined or destroyed. The tendential lines of force lead toward harmonization: as such they support those dedicated to peace and justice. Perhaps this is the reason why those who resist adharma have prevailed against insuperable odds. All beings on this planet are far more interconnected than we, for the most part, recognise. Technology did not initiate our linked-ness but has greatly intensified it. Telecommunications and mass media connect us not merely informationally, but also energetically and psychically. As a consequence, we can now instantaneously and exponentially multiply one another’s agitation. In an era when sorrow and disquiet so frequently overload global communication grids, those who cultivate equanimity and stillness can act as circuit breakers. Practicing peace in this way is one contribution toward ensuring that our contact with each other serves to cool and not inflame our individual and collective mindstates. Clear perception is essential if we are to be led toward right action. Knowing what we cannot do frees us to discover what we can do. Giving up our preferences liberates us to be even more available. Honouring our place, however seemingly insignificant, enables us to play our particular role in the vast scheme of life on this planet. Remembering that hegemony is never total, that injustice always bears the means of its own demise, helps us to cultivate the patience needed to go on. And knowing that the principle of 141

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harmonisation is ever at work nourishes our capacity to do what we are given to do: to hold in our loving embrace, the painful, the hopeful and everything in between.

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hilosophy, whether sociopolitical or religious, can tend toward the centrifugal or the centripetal. That is to say it can facilitate either separation or connection. In the former case, philosophy focuses on that which distinguishes and divides. In the latter instance, a substratum of shared characteristics is seen to underlie the diversity that defines our social existence. Such diversity is not, however, believed to detract from the presumption of a fundamental commonality. Indeed, it may even be said to illustrate agency and creativity, whether of humans, the divine, or both. Fascism and religious or racial supremacism would be instances of a divisive centrifugal philosophy, while grassroots democracy and radical mysticism are examples of a centripetal or unifying force. Contemporary discussions all too often pose the secular and the spiritual as diametrically opposed perspectives with little in common, either in substance or objectives. In this brief essay, I question this assumption by examining alongside one another 143

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the beliefs that ground progressive secular activism with those that shape the spiritual journey. As we shall see, the two share a great deal, suggesting that the dividing line is not between sacred and secular frameworks so much as between philosophies that seek to tear asunder and separate, versus those that attempt to heal and unite. The basis of progressive secular action may be summarised as follows. All individuals are inherently equal. However, society makes false hierarchies and distinctions between individuals and groups along such lines as caste, class, gender, race, sexuality, religion and community. Sociopolitical institutions and cultural forms manifest these inequalities and divisions. The goal of social justice activism is to ensure that such inequities are challenged and eradicated. This involves a variety of strategies, including the reform, as needed, of economic, political, legislative and judicial institutions, and a continuous monitoring of them to ensure their functioning in a non-discriminatory manner. The intent is to enable individuals and groups to freely exercise and enjoy all the rights and privileges accorded to them as equal constituents of society. This objective requires not merely the transformation of institutions, but also of the consciousness of each person in society and of the culture as a whole. Cultural work is thus integral to social activism. Where progressive secular philosophy begins with the recognition of social inequality, centripetal mystical traditions begin with the recognition of suffering. 144

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In Hindu–Buddhist terms this perspective may be expressed in the following way. Everything in the phenomenal world is essentially one and inherently divine. (The first description would be more amenable to non-deistic Buddhism, while deistic Hinduism would accommodate both.) However, because of our delusory, ego-based view of the world, we feel not oneness, but rather a sense of separation from one another and from the world. This state is sometimes described as that of ‘I-me-mine-ness’. This affliction of separateness, this inability to recognise the radical equality, divine essence and oneness of all that is, manifests as pride, greed, selfishness, and gives rise to discontent. As a result we rarely experience peace, but are caught in an interminable cycle of desires, large and small. Seized with a general dissatisfaction, we shuttle between the sense of ‘too much’ and ‘too little’, self-aggrandisement and selfdeprecation. From a spiritual purview, the root of suffering, whether of individuals or collectivities, lies in this tendency of the ego to see itself as separate from the larger, mutually interdependent collectivity of which each of us is an equal, and equally sacred, part. The spiritual quest, then, is about emancipating oneself from the stranglehold of egoic thinking and action. Spiritual practices such as prayer, meditation, chanting and worship are intended to focus and still our minds, in order that we may understand how our notion of ‘I’ comes into being. The purpose is to transform our relationship to it. This process 145

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necessarily engages the social context out of which one’s sense of self and world are crafted. Except when it is undertaken from the standpoint of distaste for the phenomenal world (a regrettably prominent strain within Hinduism), contemplative work is not separable from the realm of the social. For although the focus is on the practitioner, through reflection the individual discovers herself/himself as one terminus in a complex social formation. Contemplation, then, includes undertaking the work to which the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci drew our attention when he noted that knowing oneself entails coming to grips with history ‘which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory’.1 It is this ‘infinity of traces’ upon one’s consciousness that the practitioner learns to name, comprehend and be freed from, as necessary. And while Gramsci is most interested in political and cultural hegemony, the spiritual practitioner attends equally to the hegemony of ego. Both contemplative practice and progressive secular activism have the potential to radically transform one’s consciousness. However, if the revolutionary possibilities of each are to be realised, practitioners need to pursue the process without fear of what might have to be learned or unlearned. The beliefs of the individual activist or spiritual practitioner and the subculture in which the work takes place also shape the nature of the experience and the fruits of the practice. For example, if escape from the world is posited as a virtue, as indeed it is by some spiritual teachers, then the dense webbing of the social and 146

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the personal, the individual and the collective, is not likely to be discovered in context of meditation, chanting or worship. The invitation to see oneself as part of a broader collectivity cannot thus be honoured, and spiritual practice remains trapped in the restricted ambit of the personal. Likewise, if the secular activist considers the liberation of others as paramount and somehow unrelated to the re-examination of self (as is the case in many progressive circles), then his or her critical energies will be focused outward. The resulting neglect of the inner life then facilitates the possibility of egoic tendencies prevailing unchecked. Egoism in any form undermines sustained democratic and collective functioning. The full promise of activism is thus forfeited. Mercifully, however, individual inclination and cultural context do not alone determine the outcome of these processes. The practices themselves (spiritual and/or activist) exert their own pressure. As spiritual aspirants experience the mystery of the mantra or zikr dissolving our consciousness, as the wisdom works to strain and recast our perceptual frames, we find ourselves entering unfamiliar, and until that time unknowable, cognitive territory. Time and again we are invited to see the co-implication of our lives with one another and with every aspect of the phenomenal and extra-phenomenal world. Such gifts are blessed intimations of transformative possibilities. It remains to us to accept or refuse their implications. 147

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Activism as practice likewise offers us myriad opportunities to think anew. The experience of collective struggle poses the expected issues about systems of domination and modes of resistance to them. But in addition, one continually confronts broader existential questions — about human ingenuity and capacity to endure, the inspiration, joy and courage that enable so many to live, not merely survive in the face of challenge, and so on. Such questions, if consciously and fully embraced, move us beyond consideration of the socioeconomic dimension alone. Not only that, they cut across the boundary, where such exists, between those designated as subjects of domination and those nominated as activists, pointing to the commonality that exists alongside the inequalities. Equality, inclusivity, interdependence: all three are central to both progressive secular activism and centripetal spiritual philosophy. While they may diverge in their analyses of the root causes that prevent any collectivity from living by these tenets, there is common ground so far as these principles are concerned. The directionality of each, however, differs. Secular activism begins by moving outward, even though the importance of changing social consciousness requires the work to return to the inner landscapes of our individual and collective minds. Spiritual practice, on the other hand, begins with the inner. However, the very force that takes us within gradually reveals separateness as a delusion. The tangibility of interconnectedness dissolves the line between inner and outer and gradually collectivises 148

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our sense of self. As practitioners we can in either instance derail the process: in the former case by refusing the opportunity for self-examination and, in the latter, by failing to see and act upon the reality of our mutuality. It is important to note that when we disrupt the process in this way, the dynamic of a connective centripetalism gives way to that of a divisive centrifugalism. One way that secular and spiritual beliefs diverge is in the means by which each seeks to ensure compliance with law or dharma. Progressive secular activism generally responds to the violation of justice by whatever means it has at its disposal, calling for the prosecution of the guilty, undertaking civil disobedience, demanding legal reform, etc. It also has recourse to moral discourses, challenging individuals and groups to live by all that is noble and ethical. This is most often phrased as an appeal to the ‘humanity’ of those being addressed. This idea underlines its recognition of a loving essence in human consciousness, one that can, through reason, be awakened into just action. Centripetal wisdom traditions tend to work by a different route. Hindu–Buddhist teachings, for example, guide by pointing to the negative consequences that inevitably flow from action that creates or sustains suffering, within and/or without. This, it is hoped, will lead individuals away from it. This negative incentive works in conjunction with a positive one: increasing awareness of the loving spaciousness of one’s true nature. Spiritual practices enable us to 149

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directly experience the reality of this core nature. However, such practices also give us the opportunity to experience the sense of painful constriction that inevitably flows from egoic thought and action. We learn, first hand, that access to our true nature depends on our thinking and acting dharmically. The spiritual idea that our true nature is expansive and loving parallels the secular notion of one’s ‘humanity’. However, where secular activism combines persuasion with the threat of punishment under law, the spiritual way is to rely solely on the former and allow the principle of karma to take its course. This principle does, of course, include the operation of the rule of law. The two approaches thus emerge as complementary. Centripetal secular and spiritual philosophies are not autonomous streams, but rather ones that crisscross. More importantly, they spring from a common source, the desire to end suffering and bring harmony to human existence. Both posit a positive essence to humans — ‘humanity’, ‘loving spaciousness’ — and each seeks to address this core by means of its own specific rationality. Secular activism focuses primarily on changing unjust social arrangements. It does so in part by educating us about the suffering of fellow beings and appealing to our compassion for one another. Spiritual philosophy, by contrast, articulates a framework that explains what prevents such fellow feeling from being manifest in us. It also outlines how and why we experience this sense of 150

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separation, and offers us practices to dissolve this perceptual delusion. Both philosophies view suffering as unnecessary and preventable. One tends to accent the outer world, the other the inner dimension. But both, if practiced without fear or prejudice, will require the transformation of inner as well as outer realms. After all, dharmic living requires social justice. No being is an island and as the saying goes, ‘no one is free until we are all free’. Ultimately, it is as a collectivity that we will sink or swim. Conversely, to strive for social justice without working for inner peace would be to attempt an unfinished revolution, one that would, moreover, be vulnerable to collapse from within. For it is not the outer circumstances alone that determine our inner state of mind and heart. Our inclinations and inner tendencies also shape our experience of outer reality. It is only when both aspects are simultaneously addressed that we will begin to glimpse what true harmony might really mean. Centripetal forms of secular and spiritual philosophy are not contradictory inheritances. They are, rather, linked legacies. Each has a vital contribution to make in addressing our troubled times.

Note 1. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (eds. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith). New York: International Publishers, 1971, p. 324.

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t is an analytical axiom that any social formation is characterised by contradiction and that this is especially true in a period of accelerated change. It is also the case that the economic and social elite, typically a minority class fraction, tends to dominate public debate, seeking principally via the media to project a perspective in keeping with its own interests. But neither elites nor public discourse are homogeneous for here, as elsewhere, the principle of contradiction is in play. One context in which this is strikingly evident is in current discussions and representations of the impact of globalisation on work. Those in favour of globalisation hold the view that India is now global because foreign goods are freely available for sale in our market place and our citizens can work for multinational corporations. This, they argue, has appropriately required the government to dismantle obstacles to the free flow of foreign goods and capital, a process yet to be completed. The elimination of ‘protectionist’ legislation is held to be part of the removal of such barriers.

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Proponents of globalisation have a particular view of protectionism. Measures intended to shelter citizens from foreign insurance, pharmaceutical, banking and other industries seeking new sources of profit are considered protectionist and thus retrograde and not ultimately in the national interest. On the other hand, refusing to tax foreign direct investments or the IT industry is regarded not as protectionist, but as spurring economic growth. In the realm of employment, the pro-globalising view would posit that India’s global status is illustrated in its collaboration with, and servicing of, non-indigenous clients. Here our willingness to be global is held to be affirmed in our implementing of new business protocols. These would include 24×7 work schedules and an openness to submitting ourselves, as needed, to identity switches and ‘accent neutralisation’. Such changes in work culture, it is argued, must simply be accepted as an inevitable aspect of our belated integration into a global economy. It seems to me that less than sixty years after the end of colonial rule we are jettisoning the very economic and political independence that we had struggled to achieve. Concurrently, we have narrowed nationalism to some of its least desirable features, religious chauvinism and pride in the accomplishments of particular individuals and groups. These elements have been conjoined with a militaristic notion of national security which scapegoats groups within and without our borders and offers ruling parties a ready alibi for meeting political crises by means of 153

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violence and repression. Meanwhile the operation of Indian businesses outside of Indian borders and that of foreign companies within India is deemed by many to attest to our ‘globality’ and somehow point to a level playing field, if not now, then certainly in some promised future. Globalisation ho! II

All too often globalisation is invoked as though it were a rallying cry with the potential to inspire national economic growth, consumer aspiration and new forms of lifestyle, with the accent on the style. However, globalisation is no virtual phenomenon. It is a set of concrete processes with real-time effects on our lives. And it is precisely in this tension between the idea of globalisation as representing an onward and upward march toward economic prosperity and the material implications of globalisation as lived experience that we observe the contradictions of the present moment even for those regarded as key beneficiaries, namely, those in Information Technology and Business Process Outsourcing. While I am mindful of the differences within as well as across the IT and BPO segment, I consider the two as a whole here, since my interest is in certain problems that cut across the industry. Alongside the print media’s glorification of the lifestyle of those in IT/BPO (often treated as if it were a distinct social category of hard workers and big spenders) there have been increasing reports of 154

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employee dissatisfaction with conditions of work. These include the deleterious consequences of long working hours, constant deadlines, night shifts, and the shrinking of social and leisure time. Quality of life issues seem to outweigh the question of the much envied and remarked upon high levels of remuneration. A working environment geared to ‘delivering, no matter what’, has led to complaints that even leave to attend to family emergencies has required negotiation or struggle. Additionally, those in customer care face the hostility of the very persons for whose comfort accents are altered, false identities are created, and most Indian holidays are forgone. There are several indications that these problems are evident enough to be of concern to employers. For one thing, the problem of attrition is widely acknowledged by industry analysts. In IT the attrition is primarily in a lateral direction as employees seek better prospects in other companies. In the case of call centres, however, employees frequently leave in order to return to earlier plans for higher education or professional training. To the chagrin of their BPO employers, many do not regard these as career jobs, no matter how impressive their salary or designation (‘customer care officer’, ‘call centre executive’). Second, a three-day BPO job fair held in Mysore at the end of December 2004 attracted merely 400-odd persons and not the thousands that were expected. (Indeed the opening had to be postponed by a day since it met stiff competition from the police department which was also hiring.) Asked to respond 155

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to the poor turnout, one of the organisers argued that lack of awareness about the career potential of these jobs was chiefly responsible, as also the impression that these jobs were stressful and involved night shifts. We will return later to the issue of such reconstruction of fact as misimpression. Third, the consequences of working in the highpressure environments of the IT/BPO industry have been the substance of a number of newspaper stories. Even The Times of India, which tends to be ardent in its support of globalisation, has recently carried several items on such issues as entry-level software employees describing sweatshop-like conditions, burnout among young professionals, and employees’ worries about the cumulative effects on their health of their relentless schedules. Human relations personnel in the industry have, at times, dismissed such stories as the complaints of a minority. However, it is clear from reading employment supplements that this is not the case. For here too one finds an increasing number of articles addressing various dimensions of stress, overwork and the negative impact on productivity of a lack of balance between work, rest, leisure and family life. It would appear that the very conditions imposed on people in the industry are yielding diminishing returns for employers. Many of these articles offer advice on how to survive the challenge of this kind of high-pressure work environment. Typically the counsel is addressed to 156

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individuals while the system itself is left unexamined. For the most part one cannot quarrel with the advice they contain: ‘take deep breaths’, ‘stretch’, ‘think about something other than the project’, ‘exercise’, and ‘get enough sleep’. But it all sounds more apposite as tips for getting through short-term crises than as strategies by means of which to survive a system geared to constantly cutting costs while increasing speed of delivery. In this regard it is interesting to take note of recent statements in the business pages about Bangalore becoming too expensive an outsourcing location on account of high salaries and rising real estate prices. The very changes brought about in part by the outsourcing boom now make Bangalore an undesirable outsourcing destination. Are we moving into a phase where even the high salaries that are supposed to compensate for long hours and stress are likely to be trimmed?

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Further testimony that these are industry issues, not merely the grumblings of an unmotivated minority, may be found in job advertisements for the IT/BPO sector. What is fascinating is how the very themes noted above figure in many advertisements in oblique and not-so-oblique ways. For instance, a hoarding for a UK-based retail company shows a smiling female employee stating she dreams of retail during the day and sleeps soundly at night. The copy (which I am paraphrasing here) cleverly condenses several 157

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inter-related elements into a single sentence in the effort to distinguish this employment opportunity from others in this segment. To begin with there is the obvious reference to companies that require one to service customers in time zones more challenging to one’s body, mind and sleep habits. Further, in setting up a contrast between dreaming on the job and sleeping soundly at night, the copy implicitly refers to several problems endemic to this sector, even as it claims their irrelevance in this case. First, there is the ubiquitous problem of overwork and sleep deprivation. Second, there is the challenge of work that follows one home and even pervades one’s sleep. This is a poignant issue for those required to take on a separate identity and accent at work, many of whom speak of identity confusion on and off jobs and recurrent nightmares. Finally, dreaming on the job implies an unhurried pace of work. This is again something that conditions often preclude. In the case of IT there are ever present deadlines. In call centres one is required to be on the phone continuously and there may even be such benchmarks as the optimum number of minutes per call. ‘Anything but relaxed’ is probably a more accurate description. Night shifts are obviously unpopular, for jobs requiring them bury this thorny fact deep in the body of the advertising copy. The advertisements invoke an abstract notion of ‘career’, one that is frequently inversely related to the skills required by the job. Thus, one company requiring only fluency in English 158

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and a Bachelors degree from its applicants has its model saying she wishes to start ‘at the top’. ‘At the top’, it turns out, refers not to her but to the multinational companies serviced by this employer. In marked contrast with other industries, advertisements for call centres rarely describe the actual work to be performed. (Could this be a way of side-stepping the often repetitive nature of the job?) They focus instead on the client list of the company in question, presumably implying that the reputations and financial earnings of clients somehow imply a like future for those who undertake technical support or customer assistance for them. In another inversion of things as they really are, jobs for IT/BPO are at times advertised as though they are principally about fun, glamour and a global lifestyle. These ideas take up as much space in the layouts of advertisements as the details of jobs available or qualifications required. It is as though each company is selling an idea as much as it is recruiting personnel for specific positions. Examples here would include a retailer leading off a job advertisement with its recreational facilities and an IT company featuring a woman relaxing on a pier with a keyboard on her lap framed by copy promising ‘java, clear skies and fresh air’. It is as though in the face of a ‘work, work, work’ ethic, companies in this sector have decided to accent its opposite, the idea of leisure, pleasure and fun-filled challenge as integral to life in IT and BPO. It is important to note that the credibility of my analysis does not depend on the avowed intention of the 159

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copywriter or the company executives responsible for advertising vacancies. Advertisements do not merely create images but also rely on the interpretive competence of their primary target audience. In so doing, they offer us a window on the issues and concerns businesses consider important to address. Clearly quality of life and conditions of work are real issues. Reading advertisements against the business and city pages of newspapers illustrates how the former frequently reframes facts reported in the latter in marketing an image that is at odds with reality. Outsourcing may have come to stay, but the conditions in which it is undertaken are surely amenable to change. We might wish to consider questions about the future to which IT/BPO employees are being invited to commit themselves. Is it worth expending one’s youth and/or health in this way? How long can one’s work routines distort the organic balance between mind and body, sleeping and waking, focusing and relaxing before we trigger a psychological or physiological collapse? It should be noted that I have not addressed here the consequences for the rest of the city of the 24×7 schedule and of the outsourcing boom. That is a story equally in need of narration. It is also worth pondering how much of the work in the outsourcing sector is truly cutting edge and how much clerical in nature or maintenance in function. The point is not that the latter kinds of work are undignified, but whether service or tedious work is being falsely represented as executive in nature and 160

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whether the conditions of work befit the inherent dignity of employees. The answers to such questions lie in the material conditions of work. By this I do not mean the air conditioning, landscaping, gyms and other facilities (the lifestyle indices, as it were), but the minutiae of the organisation of work: workload, expectations of hours put in, business culture, etc. The former cannot compensate for the latter except in the idealised world of advertising or in the abstract promises of the cheerleaders of globalisation.

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ateline — Bangalore, September 2005. The city is imploding in the wake of the Information Technology boom. Traffic, pollution, overflowing drains, improper garbage and sewage disposal, stripped road surfaces, scarcity of water and electricity: these are merely some of the results of the unchecked development of the past decade or so. On the ground, signs abound of a city infrastructure having collapsed under the unbearable weight of a reckless and rapid expansion. But in the illusory world of image making impossible futures continue to be spun. Buildings on busy ring roads named Tranquil, Serenity, Lake View. Invented words for invented realities: Enrica Veracious, Vanshee El Dorado. There is even a ‘10 Downing’ complete with the promise of round-the-clock security and a several-year warranty against leaks and cracks. One wonders what will happen if the drains back up as they did in the recent rains and flow into the plush interiors of these dream homes. Meanwhile, even as the narrow streets outside these gated communities are clogged with traffic, the market for large luxury cars remains insatiable. There seems to be a will in some quarters to live in defiance of material reality. 162

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A miasma is an atmosphere that obscures and vitiates. It seems to me that it is no exaggeration to observe that we are living in miasmic times. For example, if we were to believe the government and mass media it would seem that the defining feature of the city of Bangalore is its status as the IT and IT Enabled Services (ITES) capital of India. This sector employs approximately 250,000 people, about 3.5 per cent of Bangalore’s population of 7 million. It has, however, come to symbolise the city. Given that a large number of persons employed in this sector have recently relocated from elsewhere to take up these jobs, the branding of Bangalore as an IT city has served to marginalise the bulk of its populace. The lifestyles and problems of this sector also tend to be disproportionately covered by the media, leading to growing unease, even discontent, on the part of many who wonder whether the contribution of this tax exempt industry is worth the destruction of a once green and quiet city. To be fair to the IT/ITES sector, the celebration of its workers and clients is a phenomenon that must be located within a broader context in which money, commerce and consumption have come to be valorised in post-liberalisation India. Facts require us to be even more specific, for not everyone with money, not everyone in business and certainly not every consumer receives the kind of admiration which seems to be especially reserved for those in the private sector. Even more than previously, the corporate sector dominated by the urbanised, English-speaking middle and upper classes is seen as the segment that 163

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represents the nation’s future and global trajectory. The IT/ITES companies, in particular, are viewed as uniquely positioned in this regard since they service primarily First World clients. For example, foreign companies account for 95 per cent of Infosys’ clients. As a rule, the private sector is perceived as the domain of creativity, inventiveness and individual merit; it is held to be in marked contrast to the public sector, which is seen as overly fettered and inherently corrupt. The deification of economic success and private enterprise, the disdain for government and the public sector, the elevation of consumption and its attendant desires: these developments are neither incidental nor accidental. Even though the first two of these beliefs were evident prior to liberalisation, these ideas have come to assume a particular significance in this period. Indeed this trinity of inter-related and mutually supporting beliefs is an explicit consequence of capitalist globalisation. It is in this context that we may understand the transformation of the Indian media in the last decade. What was once a kind of mirror and conscience of the nation has now become the purveyor of a random assortment of hard news, sports and entertainment, lifestyle features, and consumer advice, with the lines between these categories often blurred or indistinguishable. Media analysts Edward Herman and Robert McChesney have observed that in context of capitalist globalisation, mass media tends to address

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individuals less and less as citizens and more and more as consumers.1 I would add to this that the media, especially in a Third World context, increasingly takes upon itself the work of educating its constituents about the emergent economy and the promise it holds for a new ‘global’ lifestyle. Given that the veritable explosion of available goods and services has been indexical of this transformation, the media has busied itself with preparing the ground for new forms of consumption. Thus it is that in the print media, for example, we encounter articles that are virtual advertisements for furnishings, toiletries, cosmetics, or body-altering procedures in context of features on new ‘clinics’ and fitness centres, or else in context of interviews with ‘experts’ (interior designers, trichologists, cosmetic surgeons), all of whom have something to sell. The supplements of the newspapers, such as those dealing with property or employment, also take up this task of re-socialisation. In the first case, they proffer readers the latest information on the many aspects of the property market and how best one might take advantage of it. In the latter, advice is tendered on all facets of corporate culture and etiquette: how to talk, what to say, what distance to keep between oneself and one’s colleagues, how to deal with group dynamics, ask for a raise, request a vacation, handle criticism, etc. These pieces on communication, posture, grooming, interior design are themselves islands in a sea of advertising.

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As midwife for the new expanded market, it is hardly surprising if the media tends to focus disproportionately on those with the most disposable incomes. It is thus that the English-language press lavishes so much attention on the trials, tribulations and triumphs of those in the IT world and the corporate sector more broadly. They, along with those in sports and in the entertainment industry, epitomise the new elite of big-spending, hard-working, risktaking, adventurous individuals. Implicitly and often explicitly, this ‘forward looking can-do segment’ is seen as entirely unlike the government sector which is alternately berated for doing too little and trying to do too much. While the government is hardly above reproach, such a priori suspicion of it — as opposed to critique on particular demonstrable grounds — is a hallmark of the neo-liberal ideology that is at the core of capitalist globalisation.

II

A miasma is frequently likened to a mist or fog that distorts perception. For my purposes here, the concept of miasma has several advantages. First, it points to the fact of things being obscured. Second, it suggests vision as being inhibited by something that acts as a kind of screen. Third, the screen it connotes is smoky or gauze-like. A miasma brings to mind something suspended in the air, alternately shrouding and clouding one’s perception. One can see through it, but only once one is conscious that 166

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it exists. As long as it remains a filter through which we perceive the world, much remains in soft focus or simply in the shadows. We may turn to the very print media that we have been analysing to see how this works. For despite the pick n’ mix approach to news noted above, newspapers have continued to carry the more traditional hard news items, editorials and analyses. They have also held the government accountable for its crucial role in a socioeconomic context such as that of India. That said, however, the force of a particular view of globalisation as a kind of economic second coming has tended to prevail undiminished. An entire class fraction has been enlisted into its seductive and consuming logic (the double entendre is fully intended). A whole generation within this class has little else as a reference point. The disjunction between the fantasy of what the boom has supposedly done for Bangalore and the reality of what it has done to it grows daily. For the most part, the two only seem to collide when traffic congestion seriously impedes a smooth passage to work. The miasmic dimensions of capitalist globalisation are most easily discernible in what it is believed to signify for our present and future economy and in the transnational senses of self, belonging and desires that it supposedly generates. Let us begin some ground clearing in this regard by considering the following facts: A country cannot be catapulted out of poverty by relying on the service sector alone. Manufacturing and 167

SacredSecular agriculture are the backbone of a strong, self-reliant economy. The intellectual capital of an English-speaking bourgeoisie trained at national expense, eagerly exploited by a marauding capitalism ever hungry to increase its profit margin but unwilling to bear the social costs of reproducing its own domestic labour force, may benefit large numbers of individuals. However, it cannot a nation uplift. Techies cannot become the economic jawans who will secure India’s sovereignty. Penetration of cell phones and broadband are of no consequence when that of drinking water, sanitation and healthcare is abysmal. Virtual connectivity has limited utility. News Channels CNN and BBC and the internet may give us access to a variety of news sources but they do not equip us to interpret what we see or read. Information explosion does not signal a deepening of knowledge, the more so when the information is parcelled out, as it generally is, in bite-sized morsels, SMS-style. Readers and viewers merely interpret events in terms of nationally or regionally inflected frameworks, stereotypes and prejudices. How else can we understand the fact that it was only in India other than Israel (a US ally) that media surveys found support for the US war on Iraq? To many the war on Iraq became a kind of stand in for the India–Pakistan conflict, displacing the actualities of the case. To trust the dogmas of the free market and to pretend that the capitalist dream has been realised in the First World is to remain willfully ignorant of the facts. We need only look at the ground realities in the US and the 168

The Miasma of Globalisation devastating impact of neoliberal economics on Latin America and Africa to be cured of this fantasy.

III

Miasma connotes something that hovers above ground. Any discourse about globalisation and its presumed benefits that remains disconnected from material facts does the same. There is an uncanny way in which adharma or injustice always seems to pave the way for its own destruction. Interestingly, the challenge to a continued expansion of Bangalore along the lines of the past decade is coming from the world of matter: precisely that which the prevailing miasma would like to pretend is irrelevant, innocently contingent, or transformable at will. Rain, heat, sewage, garbage, concrete debris, tree roots, mud, potholes: the very newspapers that reproduce a triumphalist discourse on globalisation are filled with stories about the rains, the drains, the floods, the sewage, the traffic, the potholes and the rising temperatures. Meanwhile, within the industry that most epitomises this moment, bodies, hearts and minds are exhibiting signs of strain brought on by overwork. Burnout and stress related ailments are beginning to demonstrate the diminishing returns of relentless space–time compression in the pursuit of profit. In the ideal world of neoliberal globalisers, the ‘local’ represents market opportunity and a pliant labour 169

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force able and willing to serve metropolitan capital. Diversity is admitted, but primarily in the realm of tastes, colours, texts and sounds that can extend or else supplement prevailing aesthetics. Ideally, diversity should add to, not disrupt, the logic of capital. In Bangalore, however, the local has erupted in a manner most inopportune for expansion. The boom industries have not generated wealth, except for a small class segment. This, together with the insularity, exclusiveness and even outsiderness of many in this field, has generated ambivalence towards it, not merely among some sections of the population but more importantly, within the local political machinery and state government as well. The modest degree of political participation by this class also means that there is no fear of losing votes in the next election. This ambivalence is reflected in the way in which consecutive state governments have tended to respond only partially to the demands of this lobby for better infrastructure. Inaction has been the order of the day. Even though it frequently touts the notion of Brand Bangalore and claims satisfaction at the socalled international status of the city, at a practical level the state government has offered little other than promises of development in the long term. In a peculiar way, the compulsions of a democratic polity appear to have put the brakes on continued growth, even though the impulse to slow down the show has little to do with genuine concern for the mass of citizens, who suffer even more as a result 170

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of government lassitude and realpolitik calculations. Only time will tell whether and how the electorate will punish the government for pursuing inaction as a seemingly deliberate strategy. This is not, then, a moral fable about good government and bad corporations. It is rather an attempt to analyse the miasmic aspects of what is frequently and revealingly called ‘the Bangalore story’. For story it is and remains. No amount of repetition can make its fictional aspects come true. We live in a surreal time when the language of commerce seems to have been allowed to fashion far too many aspects of our social existence. Cities are not brands. They are living entities: ecosystems in relation to which humans have evolved modes of living which in turn have accumulated history. Neither history nor geography is incidental. Neither can be wished away. We can try to re-image the world as though what already exists were of no consequence, but it cannot work. Sooner or later the nitty gritty of matter will disrupt our diurnal dreaming. The rains, the drains, the floods, the sewage, the traffic, the potholes and the rising temperatures. The headaches, the exhaustion, the burn-out, the breakdown of bodies battered by the logic of profit.

Note 1. Edward S. Herman and Robert W. McChesney,The Global Media: The Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism. London:

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The Web of Life1

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e do not live life as isolated entities disconnected from everyone and everything around us. On the contrary, each of us is situated in a complex web of relationships with each other and with every aspect of the phenomenal or material world. Whether we are aware of it or not we are but one node in an infinitude of relationships. Any occurrence in one part of the universe (thought included) reverberates throughout the whole, giving lie to the idea of borders, controlled experiments and other fictions of separation or containment. Given the scale and complexity of the interdependence and of our multiply determined mutuality, it is not surprising that we, for the most part, are privy only to a fragment of this totality. We thus find ourselves in a curious situation. We live life primarily on the basis of how we evaluate what is perceptible to us, and on the grounds that humans are the primary actors. However, in actual fact, every aspect of our life and environment is the effect of dynamic and complex interchanges between all aspects of the universe. And that is not all. In addition to that which is perceptible through our five senses, there is the reality of that which lies beyond it. Those 173

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who recognise this realm immediately confront the conundrum that the phenomenal world is but one dimension of that which shapes existence. Naming this greater reality brings us face to face with a conceptual problem. We could call it ‘the extra-material realm’. But given how the term ‘material’ is defined, we would then be implying that this realm is not apprehended by means of the five senses. However, this is not the case. Extra-material experiences involve seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and even touching. Visions are beheld. Cosmic sounds are heard. Energies are felt and fragrances like rose petals or vibuthi are smelled. Touch, though less often reported, is by no means unheard of. Furthermore, such experiences have material effects. Countless persons have written of the effects in perceptible time–space of such extra-material experiences: healing, shifts in consciousness, the manifestation of physical objects, and so on. Our language inevitably bears the marks of our rationalist age. We thus use it, aware of its poverty for describing that which rationalism seeks to excise, albeit unsuccessfully. If the extra-material is for the most part, and for most of us, beyond access, how are we to live in full cognisance of the ‘don’t know’, of that which lies beyond our perceptual frame but nonetheless constructs our reality? Paradoxically, the a priori acceptance of unknowing leads us to become even more attentive to that of which we are already aware. It inspires mindfulness in everyday life. At the same 174

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time, it prompts us to cultivate practices by means of which we can gradually be opened to that of which we are not as conscious or, at best, intermittently so: the dance between the relatively known particular, and the relatively unknown infinite. It is for this reason that mindfulness is fundamental to a spiritual approach to work, indeed to any life activity. Take for instance everyday tasks like cooking, cleaning and gardening which are the staple of spiritual disciplines in a monastic setting. In practicing them, one strives to cultivate awareness, focus and love. One seeks to heighten one’s consciousness of one’s body, of the setting of the activity, of its relationship to that which enables it and is, in turn, enabled by it, of the changing landscapes of one’s mind. Conscious breathing is an indispensable aid in this regard as is mantra japa (chanting). It is by means of entering in full awareness into each endeavour that we begin to experience the inextricability of particularity and infinity. Loving attention and concentration initiate one into a gradual recognition that infinity can be discovered everywhere and in all things. It is the manner in which we pursue our chores that transforms them from a sum of physical actions undertaken for an ostensibly delimitable purpose, into a process that opens us to infinity as the substratum of the everyday. Such experiences, repeated over time, dissolve the distinction between that which is conceived as the ‘material’ realm and that which is assumed to exceed it. 175

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If infinity is at the core of the particular, at the heart of the everyday, what is it that keeps us bound to the world of perceptible objects, matter as the mind has been schooled to think of it? Some would say that in a predominantly rationalist epoch, we are only taught to cultivate awareness of the physical world. Additionally, it may be said that we are encouraged only to trust data apprehended by our five senses. But, as we have seen, it is precisely by cultivating greater awareness of the physical world, of what we can perceive by means of our senses, that we realise the concreteness of infinity and of its imprint on all that exists. Once again we encounter the inadequacy of language. Glimpses of infinity are not reserved for some special few. Rather, they are available to anyone open to giving up certain habits that keep us trapped in a self-limiting cognitive universe. We have already noted the need to cultivate mindfulness and love. However, we also need to relinquish our productivist approach to life and, linked to it, the tendency to rank objects and activities. When everything we do is regarded merely as a means to some desired end, we hurry to get it done. The same is true when we believe certain activities to be inherently inferior to others. In both cases, our perspective prevents us from bringing to the task the kind of alertness and love that are essential if it is to become a portal into the nature of life. Humans are accustomed to measuring our worth in terms of the impact we believe ourselves to be making 176

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on the phenomenal world. However, our utilitarian assessments are based on an extremely narrow understanding of value and worth. This view of life activity also leads us away from a radical confrontation with the reality of our interdependence. Focusing on the end (in the double sense of the completion of a task and the meeting of a goal) accentuates our sense of individual doership. It precludes our seeing ourselves, and what we do, as part of a broader and interconnected whole. We become alienated from ourselves and from the world around us. All life forms have their own reasons for coming into being, reasons that are independent of our desire of them or beliefs about them. We can accept this fact, or else we can treat trees, snails, rocks, individuals, our lives even, as simply having the significance we accord to them. When we insist on our narrative, we deny not just the ‘isness’ of each life form, but also the interdependent nature of Creation in which we are all equally sacred, equally significant, particles. Is a scientist more important than a snail? Are cooking and sweeping of lesser value than reading and writing? Every gesture of life is meaningful, be it a baby breathing, a snowflake falling to earth, an earthworm turning over the soil, a man bathing, a woman pushing a handcart, a doctor performing surgery. Many of us believe that humans are superior to the rest of the natural world, and apart from it. Given this, the proposal that our actions are as meaningful as a wave crashing on a beach could seem shocking. 177

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But the jolt to our consciousness only registers our hierarchical evaluation of life forms and life activity. We have convinced ourselves that human intelligence places us above everything else in the natural world. Our capacity to cogitate is assumed to confer on our existence an especially noble purpose. We have forgotten how important is each wave, how integral it is to the ocean, how inseparable from it. If one contemplates the ways of nature, however, one discovers that the elevation of humanity is misplaced. The conscious cooperative coexistence of nature and its infinitely wise and interdependent functioning suggest that nature lives on a basis that humans have yet to achieve. Every element has a particular and sacred place in the infinite and interlocking scheme of things. The circle of interdependence means that some plants and animals do sacrifice their lives so that others may survive. Giving and receiving are evident in equal measure. Rivers do not withhold their waters. Animals do not overeat. Plants warn each other of potential infestations. One discovers an awesome symmetry. If the general picture presented by humanity is not as inspiring it is because we seem, on the whole, to believe that we are entitled to take from each other and from nature as we please. We live in a brazen denial of the interdependence that makes it possible for us to live at all. In actuality, our capacity to survive and thrive is a function of our willingness to take

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our local place in a collectivity that includes every last human and all of the natural world. As long as we defy these realities, we will continue to treat the world as a playground for our enjoyment, and those over whom we can exert power as existing merely to service our needs. The resulting indifference and violence will augment the needless suffering already borne by the earth and all the life forms it supports. And given the nature of interdependence, each moment of carelessness, every act of casual and notso-casual violence will simply return to haunt us. If we are to cultivate an ethics of everyday life we would be wise to honour our true and specifiably local place in this universe by practicing mindfulness in thought, word and deed. Otherwise we will persist in the illusion of our separateness. We will seek individual recognition, individual peace of mind, individual security and individual happiness, doing our best to ward off individual grief, individual disappointment and individual failure. And we will wonder why it is that we hardly ever succeed in meeting our goals. Threaded into our restlessness and suffering will be our bemusement at such mysteries as why birds always seem to greet the dawn with unalloyed joy and why waves never tire of advancing and retreating onto shores the world over. Perhaps we can learn from the birds and the ocean about the web of life: interdependence, humility, cooperation and the precious intimacy of the particular with the infinite.

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SacredSecular Note 1. When I wrote this essay I had been unaware that the title I gave it was also that of a well known work by Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. New York: Anchor Books, 1996. I have since experimented with alternative titles but none of these have worked as well. I trust that this acknowledgement as well as the fact that the idea of life as a web pre-existed the publication of Capra’s book shall protect me from the charge of using what properly belongs to someone else.

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Neoliberal Fictions, Neocolonial Facts

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egardless of political orientation, most would agree that the post-1993 liberalisation of the economy has led to a significant expansion of economic activity in India, although opinions diverge on how many have benefited from this development. Those unequivocally in favour would point to what they would deem as its positive multiplier effects on society as a whole. Those not persuaded by the facts of the case would highlight the widening chasm between the minority who are its chief beneficiaries and the rest of the population. Even as foreign investments have poured in, the indicators of majority wellbeing have continued to slide precipitously. For alongside the rise in its GDP in this period, India has witnessed a deepening agrarian crisis, increased hunger, poverty, malnutrition, etc. The reduction of per capita expenditure and investment in rural areas in context of such immiseration illustrates not so much a failure of political will as a commitment across party lines to neoliberal economic policy. If one were to characterise the phenomenon of economic liberalisation in broad strokes one would put it in the following way: in order to maximise its 181

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profits and sustain the fundamentally unsustainable way of life to which its societies have become accustomed, First World capital has been on a mission to extend its geopolitical reach in search of resources, markets and cheap labour. This has required it to persuade, pressurise and otherwise lure governments such as our own to allow it to invest in Third World economies, and to import as well as export goods, services and capital. This goal requires the dismantling of all barriers to the unfettered functioning of capital whether political, economic, legal or cultural. The advantage of liberalisation for impoverished Third World societies such as India is supposedly job creation, an expansion of the market for consumer goods and, as a result, a wider tax base for funding its social programmes. Matters, however, are not quite this simple. For one thing this is no even playing field. The interests of First World capital are represented by international bodies in which the national governments of the advanced economies predominate. As a result, such negotiations are undertaken between parties that are essentially unequal. The current inequities in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and its functioning amply illustrate this point. Thus it is that we see the US and Europe insisting on protectionism for their own economies even while demanding free trade from others. Second, the national interests of First World governments and those of Third World states do not converge. Indeed, they are frequently opposed. This is not to say that there is an identity of interests between First World capital, First World 182

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nation-states and their populations. If there were, the anti-globalisation movement would not be such a potent presence or galvanising force in the First World. Nor would the deleterious effects of outsourcing on First World economies be such a contentious political issue. The inter-relationship between the economic and political domains of international relations means that the consequences of liberalisation are wideranging. Free market ideology is fundamentally at odds with the path followed by post-independence India, namely, a planned economy with a pivotal role for the public sector. This sector does not function in accordance with the logic of profit but is, rather, required by a democratic mandate to meet the basic needs of its citizens. Ideally, the democratic state endeavours to meet the greatest good of the greatest number of people. In doing so it takes on functions and responsibilities that no profit-oriented entity would envisage. Neoliberal ideology (the dominant philosophy at the World Bank, International Monetary Fund [IMF] and WTO) is fundamentally opposed to a strong public sector, even though the role of the state was critical to the rise and maturation of the US and European economies. The growth of First World economies was crucially assisted by governmental protection of trade, regulation of markets, and public sector provision of such essentials as infrastructure, healthcare and public education. While some of these benefits were gains won by social movements, others 183

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were the result of capital’s need for social order and for a healthy and appropriately trained labour force. It is also important to note that access to the wealth of its colonies greatly underwrote the rise of First World economies. In the current climate, however, these facts of history are cast aside in favour of a framework that disdains the public sector as inherently inefficient, corrupt and meddlesome, while lauding private enterprise and free market logic as delivering efficiency, eliminating graft and ensuring to the individual a liberty of choice. The very policies that boosted economic growth and development in the First World are held to be responsible for Third World stagnation. The rationale for neoliberal economics in the First World parallels that advanced in the Third. The public sector or welfare state is seen as having become overweening and, as a result, thwarting economic growth. Efficiency, transparency and choice become the grounds for the neoliberal assault on the public sector, a critique that is generally articulated as its reform. Reforms are sought to enable the entry of private players in arenas previously dominated or monopolised by the state, be they manufacturing, financial or service delivery. Concomitant to this process is the demand for a privatisation of water and power. National resources (traditional knowledges included) are sought to be turned into commodities that can be owned, bought and sold. This philosophy privileges profit over distributive justice, the right of ownership over that of use, and the ability to pay 184

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over the necessity of access. It is for this reason that critics of neoliberalism perceive it as a bid to extend the reach of the market by providing, on a for-profit basis, services that were previously provided by the state on a not-for-profit principle.

II

There are a number of problems with the claims of neoliberalism. For one thing, the free market is hardly free. If it were, there would be no need for First World business interests to have their governments lobby on their behalf via the IMF, World Bank and WTO using aid, arms sales and other forms of economic and political pressure to leverage their business deals. Likewise, if market functioning was truly free there would be no necessity for the lobbying industry which dominates US politics today. Second, some public sector undertakings may be poorly managed but the sector cannot be categorically deemed to be inefficient. Certainly, there is scope for debate on the economic arenas in which a government should legitimately be involved. However, there are several areas of vital importance to human security where monetary profit cannot be the operating logic. If it were, key social needs would remain unserved. We need only turn to the US today to assess the grim long-term consequences of neoliberal policy. The cumulative effects of cuts in taxes and US government spending post-1980 has seen increased hunger and 185

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poverty, decreased access to basic healthcare, urban and rural blight, and an infrastructure in dangerous disrepair. Cuts in public spending were directly responsible for the poor condition of the levees which breached and flooded New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The insufficiency of emergency services was attributable to the same root cause. The US government’s lack of preparedness for, and poor response to, the Katrina disaster illustrated to the rest of the world a situation known to be dire to those living within its borders. Indeed, if one were to analyse the socioeconomic effects of neoliberal policy in the US one would be forced to conclude that it is a form of banditry. The ascendancy of neoliberalism has involved among other things a rolling back of labour movement gains (from wages to hours and conditions of employment), a de-funding of welfare programmes under the guise of balancing the budget and cutting the deficit, the weakening of legislation requiring government oversight of business and industry in matters ranging from accounting to environmental pollution, and the effort (hitherto unsuccessful) to open up government coffers (pension funds, social security, etc.) to speculative investing. The situation is characterised by tax cuts, astronomical salaries, and flamboyant lifestyles at the top, and wage squeeze, indebtedness and ill-health at the bottom, with the poor in the US increasingly seen as pathologically criminal and lazy. In between the two poles is an eroding middle class which can barely afford the symbols of its class belonging, such 186

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as home ownership, college fees and the savings to meet an unplanned economic or health crisis. Within the United States this development is described as the rise of ‘neoconservatism’ not neoliberalism. Its ideologues have been far Right and ultra-conservative Republicans. They are Christian in a parochial, oftentimes supremacist, sense and advocate conservatism in social and religious matters, being strongly against abortion, sex education in schools or the advocacy of condom use and safe sex in AIDS prevention. The only liberalism they propose is in the economic realm, in the dismantling of barriers to the free functioning of capital. While the religious and social agenda of Republicans has not become part of the political platform of the Democratic Party (indeed it is rejected by the majority of United Statesians), the latter has embraced the economic vision of neoconservatives. As a result, US politics since the presidency of Ronald Reagan has been defined by the neoconservative agenda. Not merely that, the global dominance of the US together with the rise of like developments in Europe, Thatcherism in the UK for instance, has globalised this phenomenon. In certain respects, the rhetoric of neoliberalism in India contrasts with that in the US. Among globalisers in India, the language of conservatism is reserved primarily for fiscal not social matters. Conservatism connotes prudence and caution but in a narrow sense. In a context in which neoliberalism is deemed a policy imperative by international agencies and 187

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enthusiastically accepted as such by our government, fiscal prudence is merely about deficit reduction (as though government were primarily a profit-making enterprise) and not about exercising care in the harnessing of national resources and their equitable distribution. Even as the government willingly binds its own hands, it commits itself to freeing the private sector to do as it pleases. In the social realm, however, neoliberalism in the Indian context represents itself as heralding greater and greater permissiveness. It actively celebrates the breakdown of existing social mores and the degree to which individual and familial lives come to reflect what is considered to be the norm in the West. Neoliberalism’s implicit, and at times explicit, disdain for prevailing social conventions has provoked unease among many, even as it has inspired authoritarian groups to take matters into their hands in seeking to impose their own code of acceptable conduct. Such developments have not deterred the media from its near-obsessive concern with how people with money are living and what they are buying. Media fascination with consumption is a key aspect of the sociocultural work necessary to widen the market for consumer goods. Consumption increasingly becomes a dimension of identity. This fertile and uneasy nexus feeds the needs of the market. To be sure, this mania to own, use, consume, enjoy and display is most forcefully manifest among the urban middle and upper classes. However, it is equally the case that the mass 188

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culture it has spawned means that the desire to consume is a cross-class phenomenon: while the rich may wish for a flat screen television, the less wealthy may long for a two-wheeler scooter and the poorer still for sachets of shampoo. For the most part the self-anointed moral police are not against technology or consumption per se. Their quarrel is with how these become symbolically yoked to lifestyles they believe to undermine existing patriarchal norms of gender, family and sexuality. In this they are like their Christian conservative counterparts in the US, thoroughly modern traditionalists.

III

The economic and legal reforms required by India’s pursuit of a neoliberal path are usually justified by reference to what are described as ‘global norms and standards’. Whether it is a slash in interest rates, an increase in working hours, weakening of labour laws or the privatisation of public utilities, this notion of the global is drawn upon as if it were self-evidently reasonable, as though India is simply abiding by some international law. It would seem as if these changes were inevitable, the next stage of national evolution. There are several ways in which such a view distorts the facts of the case. For example, many of the demands imposed upon workplaces in India have little to do with current practices in the US or in 189

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Europe. The most obvious example is the 24×7 BPO industry which services people who themselves would not submit to such working hours. Likewise, where in the West 24-hour banking usually refers to online services, some public sector Indian banks have required selected branches to be open round the clock on grounds of ‘global competitiveness’. This is irrespective of the reality that the volume of transactions does not merit the costs of keeping the branch open at all times, not to mention the toll on its staff! Further distortions are evident in how service provision by the IT/ITES sector is deemed a ‘knowledge industry’, how small research and development teams are seen to make a city an ‘R&D hub’, how working at all hours is perceived as a ‘freedom’ and a ‘right’, how the sensex is treated as a trusty barometer of India’s economic health. Such exaggeration and misperception reached new heights in the wake of the attack at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, in December 2005. Newspapers shuddered at the prospect of attacks on IT campuses which they described as vital economic installations. Presumably the analogy was with nuclear plants, that other, equally dubious, symbol of national sovereignty. Within neoliberal discourse the term ‘global’ is simply a way of naming what would have been previously described as ‘in the interest of capital’. For its vision of globalisation is propelled by its commitment to increasing profit and decreasing cost, even if this means socioeconomic devastation both at home and 190

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abroad. This market fundamentalism is often framed in nationalist terms, even though capital’s allegiance is supra-national to the principle of profit. In the First World, globalisation is seen as imperative to retaining economic advantage. The negative effects of job loss and wage cuts are argued to be offset by the availability (through importation) of cheaper consumer goods and services. It is argued that lower production costs, favourable trade terms and weak to non-existing labour and environmental regulation in offshore locations ensure greater profits and cheaper goods. The fact that only few will access corporate profit, and that the many may not be able to afford even these goods, is conveniently set aside. By contrast, in India globalisation is represented as enabling economic advancement. Increased foreign investment, job creation and a bigger market for consumer goods are presumed to more than compensate for the deleterious effects of deregulation, privatisation, and the restructuring of economic priorities in accordance with First World market needs. Clearly, if the avowed intent is to retain First World economic advantage, then, by definition, India’s rise under such a policy regime can only be a limited one. As in the First World, a minority will benefit even while paying international prices for high-end consumer goods, while the majority will suffer neoliberalism’s adverse multiplier effects as the fragile safety net of public subsidy is picked apart. 191

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The disjunction between the sweeping claims of neoliberal globalisation and its actuality for the majority, whether in the First or Third Worlds, most likely accounts for the hyperbole that characterises the discourse of those who advocate its necessity. For, in truth, the only ‘imperative’ at work here is that of capital. It is the avarice for greater profit and the need to create new markets to this end that requires natural and human resources to be cannibalised in the name of globalisation. Whether phrased as threat or as promise, neoliberalism seeks to disarticulate the real relations between its practices and their consequences. The result is a miasmic, internally contradictory and surreal discourse in which greed is disguised as necessity and the monetary gain of a few is proclaimed to be in the national interest. We are, of course, free if we so desire to embrace neocolonial economic and political relationships as national triumphs. However, if we are going to espouse a fundamentalist view of profit as justifying and legitimising business practice and government policy, we must contemplate the possibility that in the future the post-1993 years in India will be regarded as a hit-and-run period. This will likely be seen as a time in which a small segment got rich while the national treasury was laid bare to foreign capital, natural resources were used but not renewed, work consumed life across the class spectrum, consumption practices intensified pollution, the majority eked out a living, rural indebtedness led many to suicide, and stress in globalised workplaces gave rise to an 192

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unprecedented incidence among young people of such illnesses as diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. If there is a mystery in the way these processes have unfolded, it is the following: in an era when global communications have made the world more intimate than it has ever been, how is it still possible to make false claims about the benefits of neoliberal economic policies and have them believed as credible? How is it that some abstract notion of Western-style development is held up as a goal to which India can realistically aspire, without any reference to the historical circumstances that made such growth feasible for First World economies? Why is it that, for the most part, the debate on neoliberal globalisation proceeds primarily along ideological lines, when the actual experience of Latin American countries could serve to illustrate its perils? How can we welcome, even celebrate the flight of jobs from elsewhere to India without a thought for those whose loss is our gain, acting as if it may not also happen to us as capital finds yet other, even cheaper, climes? Is greed the main factor here? Or is it misrecognition also? And what of the barely concealed arrogant belief in our intellectual superiority over other Third World nations, evident in the way that India is seen to provide the brain and others the brawn? Many may have no quarrel with the currently popular representation of the Indian middle and upper classes as inexpensive surrogates of their Western counterparts. They may take comfort, even feel 193

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pleased, that despite their comparably lower wages, a cheap domestic service economy means that they can nonetheless live glamourously. But history alerts us to the fact that there is always a price to be paid for disharmonious development; when the policies that spur growth in one segment wreak destruction in another. Such structural upheavals cannot be addressed by individual or institutional gestures of charity. They require us to reconsider the policy itself. In the current, money driven context, the word ‘speculation’ has been narrowed to its economic dimension. But it has a broader meaning. It includes the idea of contemplation, reflection and cogitation. The social, economic, cultural and existential questions posed by these neoliberal times demand that we engage in this broader kind of inquiry. Or else, we would have fallen prey to the public relations machine of neoliberal philosophy, its management consultancies, civil society organisations, business leaders, and the media that showcase them. From their perspective, the major signs of instability are uncertainties in regard to such things as infrastructure, foreign investments, sectoral reform and employable graduates. However, there is a whole lot else that is in dynamic disequilibrium and flux, and much of it does not augur well for our future as a collectivity.

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I

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he human body is a key site in the battle for new markets. It is the body that is fed (fast foods, colas, chips). It is the body that is clothed (pants, shirts, jeans, sarees, footwear, haute couture). It is the body that is in need of shelter and protection (homes, home loans, security systems, and medical, life and other insurance). It is the body that is adorned (wrist watches, jewellery, spectacles). It is also the body that is enlisted into regimes of perpetual enhancement, whether through exercise (gyms, jogging, sports), specified diets (for weight loss or healthy eating), or the seemingly infinite modes of beautification and rejuvenation (cosmetics, hair care, skin care, massages, yoga, naturopathy). Within this symbolic and material economy the body can never just be. It is constructed as subject to a continual and shifting sense of lack, one that a range of products and procedures claim they can, and will, satisfy. That, however, is only part of the story of our neoliberal present. For the body is not merely subject to desire. It is also the object of desire. Indeed the body is desire incarnate. In consuming that which 195

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it desires, the body is held to enhance its own desirability. Such desirability is most often coded in sexual terms. This is so because qualities such as power, aesthetics, strength and success are increasingly articulated around the axis of sexuality. It is thus that sexually explicit advertising has become ubiquitous. Wherever we turn, we are beckoned by pouting lips, smouldering eyes and virtually naked male and female bodies. In a way not to be seen even in the West that we are supposedly emulating, our public spaces are festooned by advertising that is frequently nothing other than soft porn.

II

An advertisement for Brand Equity, a weekly supplement of The Economic Times, deliberately mismatches image and copy, intending to first shock and then amuse the reader. The image is of an impoverished older man in well-worn clothes; the thought reads, ‘This summer I wouldn’t be caught dead without my Tea Tree Oil mattifying gel’. ‘You’ll agree’, the copy continues feigning coyness, ‘that the gentleman in the picture above and metrosexual tastes don’t exactly, well, go together. Now, we don’t mean to be disrespectful to anyone. This is a mere reminder to marketers that a focus on customers with stronger potential does help.’ Reading on we are informed that the Brand Equity supplement delivers precisely such readers 196

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with ‘stronger potential’: those in marketing and advertising who ‘propagate emerging lifestyles’ and the products that signify them — high fashion, consumer electronics, luxury cars. The poor man with the kind eyes and broad smile is chosen to perform a negative function. Advertisers are assured that he will not be reading Brand Equity for, it is implied, he embodies the very opposite of everything that the supplement represents. In many ways, the advertisement is a sign of our times. It brazenly deploys the binaries of rich and poor, luxury and necessity, potential and impotent-ial (to coin a word). It is assumed that readers will concur that the former terms — rich, luxury, potential — are inherently superior and naturally flow from one another. As for the latter, notwithstanding the fact that the copy dubs as ‘gentleman’ the person whose photograph it uses, it is clear that the poor and those whose lives revolve around necessities are irrelevant to the supplement and its project. They seem to exist merely to confirm the superiority of the supplement’s corporate readership. In keeping with these money-crazy times, the ‘equity’ in Brand Equity refers to stock value and not to any notion of equality of treatment, the other, virtually eclipsed, sense of the word. Worse, the advertisement invites readers to find humour in the distance between themselves and the man whose photograph it uses to make its point. It takes it for granted that its target audience will, like it, treat as a sign of success the economic and social chasm that separates their worlds. 197

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Neoliberalism cherishes the consuming subject. Its economics depend on it. The preoccupation with consumption is accordingly deemed a freedom and a right. Within its logic, desire and consumption dovetail neatly as freedom is seen to consist in having the ability to proliferate desire and then to actualise it. The production of subjects who subscribe to this view is thus a priority. This is the context in which we must locate the rise of the ‘Page 3 culture’ and the near obsession with the lives, earnings and possessions of the glamourous wealthy. Nothing quite like it prevailed before the early 1990s. These developments are part of the effort to create a public ready to consume, and be consumed by, the products that have heralded the new economy. The idea of nationalism has had to be recast in this process. The post-independence notion that sovereignty is signalled by economic self-sufficiency and political nonalignment has been set aside as outmoded. The health of the economy is now measured in terms of market capitalisation and the penetration of goods and services. That these do not include essential goods like food and critical services like water, sanitation, power or health are indicated by our abysmal progress in these sectors. Meanwhile political sovereignty is measured in terms of India’s ability to procure arms and uranium and in the invitation to be a subordinate aide to the world’s sole and fast declining superpower. 198

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Increasingly, the nation itself comes to be viewed in terms of its potential as a market with commerce as its primary lingua franca. Its citizens become economic actors first and foremost: individuals and groups who buy, sell, produce and consume. Within this fantasy, culture and history are ‘branding devices’. They aid tourism, generate niche markets, and bring the relief of diversity to the homogenising tendency in globalisation. This representation of the nation is not at odds with the emotive hyper-nationalism that also characterises the present moment. It is true that narratives of Hindu–Muslim animosity interweave contemporary political discourse across party lines whether couched in the language of religious bigotry and/or national security. It is also the case that the repressive response of the government to the many conflicts within and around its borders reflects its commitment to a particular national geography. However, these facts do not contradict the argument being advanced here. The absence of determination, on the part of successive governments, to actually solve these problems gives a clue to the ideological function of hyper-nationalism. Hyper-nationalism is a relatively autonomous discourse. Whatever its rhetoric, it does not simply emerge from the complexity of contemporary sociomaterial conditions and is not merely a means of addressing them. Rather, hyper-nationalism draws together historical and cultural elements to generate a narrative that naturalises a particular idea of the 199

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nation. This view then provides the rationale for domestic as well as foreign policy. Hyper-nationalism is premised on an insular and circular reasoning. It prevails because of its alliance with power and its deployment of historical prejudices. This nexus serves to keep such prejudices in active circulation. This is the context in which facts often seem to lack efficacy in challenging its myths. Hyper-nationalism is not incompatible with the logic of capital. It generates its own forms of consumption, its own rituals, its own markets for goods and services. Although there are genuine conflicts between the sovereignty of nations and that of international or domestic capital, hyper-nationalism can itself mediate these in a way that serves both. Thus, for example, both the Indian and Pakistani governments can legitimise their military budgets citing each other as the primary reason. Both can do so on nationalist grounds and in both cases US and European arms manufacturers can be certain of a sustained market for their products, given ongoing political strife in the region. Hyper-nationalism is not, however, invincible. It exists in tension with all that it excludes or marginalises in defining itself and these, in time, come to haunt it. For example, political corruption, army excesses, caste and communal conflicts intrude to reveal as hollow oft-repeated claims about India as the largest democracy in the world. Hunger, malnutrition, farmer suicides, and the continuing decline in the female to male sex ratio render trivial 200

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the economic benefits of the outsourcing boom. Fantasy must, sooner or later, engage with reality, abstractions with the concrete. However we may choose to imagine it, the body politic cannot avoid confronting the body physical, for without the latter the former cannot exist.

IV

Citizens, consumers, patriots, farmers, men, women, mothers, fathers, children, grandparents, scientists, engineers, soldiers, students: whatever we may call ourselves, we have one thing in common. We are, each of us, embodied. Our bodies cannot be wished away. Our lives quite literally depend on having one. Yet, it would seem as though this were a truth of no consequence. For indifference to the inherent integrity of the body is widespread. To be fair, neoliberalism did not inaugurate this phenomenon. Rather, its ideology enters a social context in which the dominant have viewed the body in a number of connected yet contradictory ways. On the one hand the body has been seen as a mere container for the soul or the mind, and lesser than both. On the other hand, this lowly container has been the object of suspicion; its unruly demands held to be capable of tarnishing the soul and disturbing the mind. Alongside this, and overriding it in terms of its consequences for social organisation, are notions of the intrinsic purity and impurity of different bodies. 201

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Caste and class divisions have turned crucially on such presumptions, and the bodies of countless individuals have been violently punished for transgressing the rules of inter-caste and inter-community intimacy and conduct. Philosophically, neoliberalism is not directly concerned with the social divisions that have traditionally structured Indian society. Even so, its Indian articulations and policy effects are inescapably mediated by, and can even fortify, deeply entrenched faultlines: thus the man in the advertisement for the Brand Equity supplement represents ‘the Other’ not just in class but also in caste terms. For its part neoliberalism introduces its own symbolic economy. It represents the body as a malleable, transformable, entity. According to it, the body can be sculpted in accordance with the desires of the mind, and re-disciplined in line with the new demands of the market. Where prevailing dominant ideology has depended on ideas about innate differences between bodies, neoliberalism distinguishes between bodies based on their capacity to engage in regimes of continual transformation. It constructs its hierarchy on the basis of individuals’ access to disposable income. The promise of what money can buy has, however, been tempered by what has amounted to a veritable assault on the body. The body has become a billboard, its surface branded by the insignia of companies who profit from the new practices of consumption. The issue, however, does not end 202

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there. The very shape and size of bodies is treated as a matter of choice. Accordingly, bodies are invited to shed weight in order ‘to take the load of shame off the mind’, lips proffered injections to generate temporary pouts, thighs assured slimness through liposuction. The marketing of aesthetic treatments as preventive medicine in the service of good health is also a common ploy. The body has become a mass to be shaped and reshaped at whim. The eagerness with which a certain class fraction has taken up these offers of enhancement and reduction may be seen by their growing acceptability and popularity. Designating these procedures as ‘cosmetic’ does not make them any less invasive or dangerous. This view of the body as infinitely adaptable also implicitly underwrites labour practices in segments iconic of the new economy. Call centres and software companies have required bodies to adjust to routines that scramble day and night, work and leisure. In this context, the image of the body as machine supersedes that of the body as clay. It is as though the body can be made to run without a hitch. Maintenance required for reproducing the individual’s capacity to labour is understood primarily in terms of food, drink, sleep, exercise and entertainment (an analogue to a machine requiring oiling, cleaning, rest and ventilation). These activities are seen to take place in a vacuum. It would seem that one can just as easily see films during the day, sleep in the evening, and work all night. No particular value or necessity is attributed to crucial aspects of individual health and wellbeing such as fresh air, 203

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exposure to sunlight, family life or a sociality outside of the workplace. Even serious medical procedures are described as if they are a routine change of components. An advertisement for keyhole surgery technology cavalierly promises a prompt return to a 24×7 lifestyle even for those undergoing brain surgery, with the added plus of no concern about stitches or scars! It should come as no surprise, then, that it is precisely issues directly pertaining to bodily needs that are acknowledged to be responsible for the high attrition rates and burn-out in call centres. Even those in the industry accept that after 12 to 18 months, employees find it difficult to continue with a work-at night-and-sleep-during-the-day routine. Reasons given include disrupted biorhythms, gastrointestinal disorders, insomnia, psychological problems, and the rupture of familial and social networks. The complex of symptoms even has a name, BOSS, or burn-out stress syndrome. There is an irony to the acronym given the degree of employee surveillance that is routine in this industry. Physicians are also increasingly calling attention to the medical impact of chronic stress and long working hours on employees in the software industry. The need to develop facility with other cultures adds an additional burden for those in sectors that service clients around the globe. The issue here is not merely that of language and accent. It also includes the notso-subtle pressure to demonstrate by means of one’s 204

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clothing, posture, lifestyle and knowledge, a certain degree of fluency in a ‘global’ (read, Euro-American) corporate and popular culture. In gesture, attire, speech and practice, bodies are required to emulate a script frequently alien to their upbringing and early socialisation. Estrangement from self has become an occupational hazard.1 The anxiety and alienation it provokes keeps individuals on the treadmill of a continual process of self-improvement, so called. This phenomenon in turn supports a consumer economy that thrives on the multiplication of needs and desires, and the seemingly inexhaustible means for their fulfilment.

V

Cultural analysis can at times engender despair. In the matter at hand, however, there is reason for hope. Even as the projections for jobs likely to be outsourced to India have been rising steadily, analysts acknowledge that there is already a literal shortage of bodies equipped to fill current requirements, a problem that can only get worse. This accounts for the assertion increasingly expressed, that coding is not rocket science; that anyone with a basic college degree and strong analytical skills can be trained to fill the rapidly increasing number of software jobs. Major IT companies are already undertaking this strategy. This move is facilitated by the deskilling consequent on the standardisation and vertical integration of 205

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work processes in the industry. Is the high tech sector with its much-touted brain power making way for low-end jobs in coding factories? The rush to catapult ourselves into a future for which we as a nation are poorly prepared is already hitting major obstacles. Whether it is the sorry state of our public education or our material infrastructure (roads, power, water, waste management), our past neglect of our environment and indifference toward each other is serving to put a brake on a runaway neoliberal fantasy that India can be made to instantaneously provide what took other nations almost a century of social development to achieve. Technology is said to make rapid change feasible. This claim is a fiction. Change that is sustainable calls for planning processes that are designed to include, not exclude, the majority. This requires engaging with the complexities of history, geography and culture, all of which takes time and collective cooperation. Technology’s ability to successfully compress space and time in undertaking certain operations cannot be generalised as a principle of economic growth or social development. Yet with each passing year, the chorus of voices deeming rapid growth an imperative has grown more voluble. Not surprisingly, social and economic disequilibrium has followed. The neoliberal consensus is not unopposed. Alternative proposals for inclusive and ecologically considerate social and economic development, naxal movements, tribal, rural and urban opposition to forced displacement, rural resistance to multinational 206

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depletion of natural resources, unrest among the urban underclass, non-cooperation of those excluded from the spoils of the emerging system: these are all signs that the battle has only just begun. To this one may add the fifth column, as it were, of the diminishing returns of greed and speed-up in the IT sector which threaten to unravel the system from within. In addition to exhaustion, illness and burnout, one can note here how the rapidity and scale of hiring has led to corruption in recruitment, such as falsification of CVs, and the splitting of commissions between recruitment agencies and HR managers in return for preferential treatment. An industry that prides itself on international certification and ‘best practices’ is made vulnerable by its own undisciplined pursuit of lucre. Curiously, even as culture has become a contested zone, the resistance to neoliberalism in this domain has been at best limited. The most visible, annually recurring, challenge has come from the Right Wing (the Bajrang Dal and Shiv Sena) which has seized on the increasing popularity of Valentine’s Day to register its outrage over what it regards as the polluting influence of foreign culture on Indian society. Every year, shops selling roses and Valentine’s Day cards are ritually vandalised and couples threatened for daring to publicly express their romantic association. Making a target of February 14 is hardly surprising given the centrality to consumer culture of sexuality and romantic love. For, according to it, it is to attract the object of one’s desire that one desires to be attractive. 207

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The response of the liberal and progressive minded to these acts of aggression and violence has, however, been less than satisfactory. The critique of Right Wing excesses has honoured love chosen over love arranged, viewing the former as selfevidently preferable. Young heterosexual lovers have emerged as symbols of resistance to family, caste and community as disciplinary forces. However, this stirring defence has failed to analyse romantic love as itself a social construct, not to mention the present context of its valorisation. When critique of tradition does not proceed in tandem with analysis of the coercive aspects of contemporary culture, it runs the risk of discursively aligning itself with the neoliberal glorification of free will and individual choice. Worse, it sets aside an opportunity to address the existential and ethical questions posed by the onslaught on mind and body of a neoliberal consumer culture and the complex dislocations it has detonated. A vigorous public debate on these broader sociocultural issues is sorely overdue. Such debate must navigate skilfully between the coordinates of false nationalism, phony globalism, legitimate or obscurantist regionalisms, and religious and caste chauvinisms. It must also be committed to critically examining the content of such constructs as freedom, liberty, individuality, pleasure and choice, as also what constitutes ‘Indian culture’ and ‘tradition’. Critique of the illiberal values and aesthetics of neoliberalism must supplement opposition to its politics and economics. Failure to do so leaves a cultural vacuum; neither old fashioned religion nor new age self-help can fill 208

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this gap, hard though they might try. Given their respective histories, this should come as no surprise. The alienations, discomforts and contradictions of the present call for an individual and collective practice which conceives of body, mind, heart, nature, matter and spirit as equals. Their close collaboration is the sine qua non of any inclusive and sustainable future. Anything less will simply demonstrate our illiberality, that is to say, our narrow-mindedness, intolerance, lack of generosity and resistance to change.

Note 1. For a fascinating window into the work culture of the IT/ITES industry, see the series of three films by Gautam Sonti in collaboration with Carol Upadhya, ‘Coding Culture: Bangalore’s Software Industry’. Bangalore: National Institute of Advanced Studies, 2006. The films supplement a sociological and ethnographic study of the industry directed by A.R. Vasavi and Carol Upadhya ‘Indian IT Professionals in India and Europe: Work, Culture and Transnationalism’. See Carol Upadhya, ‘Culture Incorporated: Control over Work and Workers in the Indian Software Outsourcing Industry’, Paper presented at the International Conference on New Global Workforces and Virtual Workplaces: Connections, Culture, and Control, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, August 12–13, 2005.

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Epilogue: The Tantra of Contemplative Cultural Critique

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antra is arguably the most misunderstood term in the spiritual lexicon of Hinduism. It may therefore seem curious that it is being introduced in the essay that brings this volume to a close. Yet, it is precisely its contentious status that has led me to refrain from naming its relevance to this project until the synthetic vision and goals of a tantric orientation have been demonstrated in the range of subjects here explored.1 If my intention in undertaking this work has succeeded to any degree, it will have become clear to readers that no aspect of the social world can be deemed to be outside of the proper purview of a contemplative analysis. Equally, it is hoped that I have illustrated in some measure the value to social inquiry of a contemplative framework — the questions that it draws to our attention, the answers that it refuses to foreclose, and the tools it provides us in our analysis. A key aspect of tantra is that it fundamentally honours embodiment and the potential of humans to live harmoniously with each other and with nature. The realm of matter is thus of intrinsic interest to it. Nothing is so profane and nothing so sacred that it 210

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precludes critical inquiry from a tantric standpoint. Within tantra, knowledge of the potential of humanness is counter-balanced with awareness of the actuality of the human condition and of the many means by which human potential is thwarted or nourished, whether by individuals themselves or by the contexts in which they live. As a consequence, the sociocultural, the economic, the political and the behavioural are squarely within its compass. They are that which must be understood if one is to live consciously and skilfully. Conflict, frictionality, contradiction and misperception are as much a part of the raw material of tantric knowing and being as the yearning to cultivate stillness, compassion, dharmic wisdom and non-duality. Tantra calls upon one to witness and be present to the fullness of all that one encounters within and without. One witnesses knowing that one’s view is inevitably partial and that no overview of infinity is possible. This realisation inspires modesty, not so much as a virtue but as a natural consequence.

II

All this makes for a close affinity between tantra and the project of progressive, secular cultural criticism. Both take the phenomenal world as inherently worthy of attention. Both are interested in the relationships between people and the social worlds that they inhabit, inherit, imagine and/or create. Both pay attention to the positive as well as the negative, 211

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the affirmative as well as the conflictual. For both, culture is not just generative of the meaning systems that make existence intelligible, but also of the semiotic grid that gives rise to misperception and illusion. Both are passionate in their engagement of the world: neither pretends to a distanced objectivity. Each has its own vocabulary and conceptual tools. But there are differences. Although the phenomenal world is a central concern for both, progressive, secular cultural critique brackets everything outside of a narrowly conceived notion of materiality. Indeed, secular criticism assumes that nothing other than matter exists. By contrast, tantra sees the material and the so-called non-material as existing and unfolding by means of a complex dance of mutual determination. In the tantric view, spirit is integral to matter. But even more, it is the very cause of matter, its creator. It thus follows that the tantric posture toward matter is that of an attentive, loving, adoration. Notwithstanding popular misconceptions, however, tantric adoration is not unqualified or hedonistic in nature. It is, rather, disciplined by the sense that the purpose of life is to discover one’s inevitably local place in the cosmic scheme of things, and then learn how to occupy that place in a manner congruent with karma, dharma, and the reality of interbeing within and across species, within and across planets. By this point, our secular comrades may be seen to be receding, so to speak, in the tantric rear-view mirror. And from a secular standpoint, erstwhile tantric 212

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colleagues are fast disappearing into a vortex of what to the former appear to be undemonstrable claims. While I have not sought to deny the points beyond which a tantrically based spiritual wisdom forcefully parts company from a progressive secular perspective, I have striven to indicate the substantial ground shared by both. This seems to me to be crucial for at least two reasons. First, we live in a time when public debate on matters pertaining to religion frequently seems to consist of duelling abstractions which obscure more than they reveal. Inflated by little more than hot air and the tragic history of bigotry, such discussions often exclude a vast ‘middle ground’ (at times better described as ‘other ground’) of lives lived outside the plot lines of miasmic narratives of nation, religion, race and civilisation, with their myths of purity, separation, hierarchy and injury. Challenges to such abstractions need to be anchored in the dense complexity of lived relations, and on this point both secular critics and tantric philosophy would agree. However, a further step needs to be taken. A philosophical ecumenicism toward religion per se is necessary. Even though not everyone is drawn to a religious or spiritual perspective or way of life, those secular in inclination must embrace the fact that the sacred is a vital resource for most of humanity. This is a reality to be reckoned with, not merely a concession to be granted. Indeed, the facts being what they are, it is secularism, not religion, which is in need of explaining itself. Accepting the importance 213

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of religion does not, however, disarm critique of its regressive aspects. Rather, it renders such challenges all the more convincing to those, usually in the majority, who despite their religious practice or affiliation, nonetheless frequently disagree with the discourse of the conservative minority that claims to speak for and about them. One secular strategy for dealing with religion has been to insist that it is a personal affair that should be kept out of the public domain and in particular that of the state. This position is neither theoretically viable nor even practical. Religion is inescapably part of the public domain. Religious rituals and celebrations span public as well as private spaces. Religious institutions are active in society. At a very minimum, then, the regulation of religion is a law and order issue for the state. However, the problem with taking the stance that religion is personal is even greater than this. For, philosophy, music, dance, art and myriad aspects of everyday cultural practice in India derive from its religious traditions. Where is one to draw the line? Finally, this position is theoretically unsustainable. As secular cultural critics will readily agree, there is no such thing as a personal space that is beyond social determination. Seeking to limit religion to the private sphere, especially when so many other dimensions of personal conduct are routinely regulated by the state, merely evades the problem of ensuring that religious practice conforms to law, and that all religions and all practitioners are deemed equal before the 214

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law. Unless the irreducibly social character of religion is fully recognised, one fails to grasp how it is interwoven in almost every aspect of the life of its practitioners. Worse, one leaves the door open for a special claims argument about religion, in which it is erroneously held to be outside of history and above critical assessment by humans.

III

Many people of faith also claim religion to be a personal matter. In taking this view, they too fail to confront the important interpretive and practical issues just noted. However, there is an additional concern. Such a position also evades profound questions of a spiritual nature. Who are we as individuals? Who are we as a human collectivity? What is our relationship to each other, to the rest of nature? What is interconnectedness and how are we to experience it and cultivate it? What is dharma in our time/ space? How are we to apply it to every facet of our existence, breath by conscious breath? Unless we are willing to enter into this kind of active process with the traditions in which we practice, we will be treating them as if they were dead relics, not live inheritances. We will accept as given, assumptions and practices that manifest or have sedimented into them past and/or present prejudices. We will, in effect, be evincing fear of our potential as humans to learn as well as err, to be kind as well 215

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as cruel. Such an orientation makes us averse to the reality of life as a complex, not always controllable, process. The desire for a measure of protection against the unpredictable generates discomfort with the ambiguous, the messy, the contingent, the everchanging. All of this can lead us toward a rigidity of religious or philosophical perspective. As a consequence, we can create conceptual fortresses, arming ourselves with circular logics intended to repel all theoretical incursions. We can, in short, shirk our ethical and interpretive responsibilities as humans by taking cover in what we claim to be the eternal certitudes of our faith. Tantra precludes this option. It does this by requiring us to take as the very stuff of our practice, that which a fearful or rigid framework would rather dismiss. It urges us to attend to matter in all its aspects, and to embodiment in all its dimensions. This is the context in which the essays gathered here address subjects not usually considered in the same text: neoliberal globalisation, the web of life, fundamentalism, Western Advaita, trash, the anatomy of faith. The tantric refusal to countenance a clear division between the sacred and secular realms has required one to draw on the analytical resources of both, although, depending on the topic, concepts from one or other knowledge tradition have predominated. Given the breadth of a tantric orientation, an exclusivist approach makes no sense. And while neither sacred nor secular knowledge can by itself be deemed sufficient, together their insights deepen and extend our analysis. 216

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The tantric embrace of the concrete is especially significant in a period when dominant discourses manifest utter disdain for facts. Whether it is the dubious economic promise of globalisation for the majority of people, the representation as ‘a global elite’ of a professional class essentially subordinated to the logic of First World capital, or the plundering of yoga and meditation in order to extend the body’s capacity to work longer and faster, fantasy seems to prevail over reality. It is as if desire and will can together confidently order, ‘let it be so’, and make good their proclamation. But, as common sense, history and tantric wisdom teach us, disharmonious action generates disharmonious consequences. Over time, fantasy when unchecked can mutate into psychosis. When elemental facts are thus ignored, the repercussions cannot but be in proportion to our adharma. Short-cuts beget adharma. When, as in Bangalore, we fill tank beds and generate high value real estate with no concern about where the rainwater will drain, we create the conditions whereby in time we will be flooded out of our homes. Indifference to process and consequences leads to adharma. When we celebrate urban growth without planning for the increased need for sewage disposal, we invite our toilets to overflow. And if we then simply pump untreated sewage into local lakes we create health hazards for us all. Privileging profit over human needs valorises adharma. And when the slaughter of tens of thousands of poultry in context of something called ‘avian flu’, brings more attention to restaurant menus 217

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than to the affected birds and poultry farmers, we witness the normalisation of adharma. Matter matters. Process is critical. Karma rules. Adoration of Creation, compassion toward self and all others, and living by the actuality of our interconnectedness are the way of wisdom. These are not mere claims but actual principles whose functioning can be observed in our lives as also in that of the world around us. While the language used here borrows from the sacred, these ideas are congruent with some of the deepest aspirations of a progressive secular vision. Regardless of where we begin any inquiry into our predicament as a species at this time in history, we will probably all agree that there is much that is out of balance in the way we as a collectivity are living and acting. We seem to be careening our way into the future either unconsciously or wantonly indifferent to the consequences of our actions. Mercifully, consequences have a way of catching up with us. With each passing day, evidence mounts of the deleterious effects of our irreverence and disregard, whether for the environment, for each other, or for our potential as humans. Such estrangement sustains the sense of duality. Awakening ourselves out of the delusion of separation, shaking off alienation, becomes an urgent necessity. Tantra charts a way forward. It proposes a coherent means of uncovering duality as a deadly misperception, and offers practices that assist us in our journey toward embracing self, other, Creator and Creation.2 218

Epilogue Notes 1. The place of tantra within the Hindu tradition is a contradictory one. While on the one hand it is recognised as an integral dimension of Hindu philosophy, it has also falsely come to be associated with black magic and occult sexual and ritual practices. 2. For a sustained exposition of tantra as philosophy, practice and vital wisdom for humanity, see the teachings compiled by Ruth Frankenberg and Lata Mani in www. thetantrachronicles.com

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Closing Invocation

In the name of God the compassionate the merciful May all beings be filled with loving kindness be peaceful and at ease be joyful be well Om Shanthi Amen In the spirit of our pluralistic religious heritage, this invocation is composed of sounds sacred to Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity. May we awaken from the dream of separation to the reality of our true intimacy with one another and with all things in this universe.

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Glossary

Advaita:

philosophical framework; proposes that there is an essential identity between humans and the divine but that this is obscured by human misrecognition and compounded by human entanglement with the world of objects and phenomena; realisation of non-duality, so conceived, is held to be the goal of spiritual practice; given Advaita’s non-deistic inclination, it signifies this oneness by means of the term ‘Self’, reserving the lower case ‘self’ to refer to the incarnate individual.

dharma/adharma: dharma is usually translated as law, duty, truth, right conduct, also within Buddhism as the teachings of the Buddha; however, since the content of these categories has frequently been conditioned, this text works with a definition that prioritises 221

method in determining dharma. dharma: living and acting on the basis that all aspects of the universe are equal to one another, with each aspect as sacred as the rest, and that all aspects of the universe and all beings within it are intricately interdependent parts of a single complex whole Adharma: living and acting on a contrary basis to that just named. Kali:

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the dark warrior goddess and wisdom aspect of the Divine Mother who presides over spiritual transformation; often represented as wearing on her person the heads/egos of devotees that she has severed with her many weapons.

About the Author Lata Mani did her undergraduate work in Delhi University and graduate study at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she received a Ph.D. in History of Consciousness in 1989. She has published in the areas of Modern Indian History, feminism, spiritual philosophy, and contemporary politics and culture.

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