"History repeats itself," so goes the famous Marxian saying, "first as tragedy, second as farce." However, it seems that the other more prominent trend has missed analysis, wherein history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as a series of disasters. In this other view of history, we have had a world-shaking event that serves as the "prime mover" or the "original sin" at the beginning and everything thereafter is just a repetition of that primal act.
The trajectory of history, understood and formulated this way, is far removed from any logical procession but rather appears as acts of obsessive-compulsive nature. If we look at the Western historical trajectory, it appears that even after destroying the classical world of gods and goddesses, by burning libraries that stored their memories, the West has not been able to exorcise the impulses that informed the destruction in the first place. Maybe the dead are taking their revenge of ‘unceremonious withdrawal’ from the world by simply refusing to leave and appearing as spectres to haunt the Western civilisation in perpetuity.
Marx was right when he saw the spectres hovering over Europe but misjudged it as that of communism. It was the spectre of a dead civilisation that was killed in the iconoclastic rages of yore, one that ensured that the future generations would constantly live in the throes of painful revolutions and reformations. We are not presenting an animistic version of history but only pointing out an irrefutable fact from history that iconoclastic impulses have prevented some people and certain civilisations from making peace with their own past and with themselves.
The Hegelian 'spirit' of history was nothing but an actual drama of ghosts and spectres possessing the descendants of 'original sinners'. This destruction of the world of antiquity was accomplished in physical terms with a sledgehammer. But the induction of the sledgehammer as a philosophical tool, as Nietzsche characterises it, in the context of later religio-political ideologies, has produced one disaster after another, each more poignant than the previous one. It seems that the West has first destroyed its inheritance and then proceeded further to analyse what, how, and why it has destroyed. This is what the ‘moderns’ and the many belonging to the former colonies of the West have inherited from their history: The philosophical sledgehammer to destroy what had already been destroyed physically and to further carry out the destruction of the constant present. It is this intellectual orientation of yielding the philosophical sledgehammer that informs our academic and ‘woke’ cancel culture — a culture which has taken upon itself the project of making the fully flourished, living present a remnant of an insensitive past, fit for purging.
The more we are moving ahead in time — or, more specifically, the more history we are making — the more ghosts and spectres we are producing on the way. This haunted house of a world is making its inhabitants (both individuals as well as groups) behave like zombies who are, under the spell of their possession by such ghosts, chasing hither and thither to close any opening from which the light of wisdom may burst forth and rescue them from their present reprehensible state of existence. Nothing else can explain our fascination with our own destruction other than ‘possession’ by pernicious ideologies, when we resort to yielding the philosophical sledgehammer upon texts that serve as memories of ancient wisdom and knowledge, the smritis and the shruti.
The unwarranted outcome of this intellectual style of reasoning is that it has thrown open for a largely uninformed public scrutiny and senseless humiliation what once used to be the safe interiors of cultures; interiors that incubated capable individuals, who would in time take up larger roles in the world. The idea of closed interiors is so anathematic to the modern sensibility, which is largely constructed by the West, that it expects everything to conform to the idea of an interior-less transparent existence, as if humans have no other purpose than to conform to the ever-changing, half-baked, and untested politico-legal requirements of ‘appropriate behaviour’.
This politico-legal voyeurism is then anachronistically telescoped back into the readings of the ancient texts and historical personalities by puncturing their interiors and reading them as monolithically literal political texts. The aversion of modern sensibility with closed interiors is largely a transmutation of that original consciousness that wanted to break open the statutes to prove their hollowness and their impotency to the world.
The iconoclasts hardly knew that the supposedly hollow statutes work in an oblique way, by giving themselves readily to sabotage, the statues are paving the way for the self-destruction of the ‘sabotagers’. Peter Sloterdijk argues in his magnum opus Spheres that when one end of the original ‘biune’ (a term coined by Sloterdjik implying an integral entity with two indispensable ends) is destroyed, the fate of the other end ends up being in jeopardy. History bears testimony to the fact that those who have blown the mute statues have ended up blowing themselves as a fine tribute to divine justice.
As a result of this modern (or shall we say postmodern?) practice, our general understanding of the ancient texts of our culture is more often than not coloured by our contemporary political milieu, which tries to retrospectively fit in such notions of human rights as are prevalent in our own times rather than the time-space complex in which our forebears lived, breathed, and reflected.
The current legal-juridical ideas about individuals and societies have sensitised us in such a manner that any contrary arrangement appears controversial. No doubt that all texts are composed for posterity in addition to the era in which they are composed, and therefore they are subject to interpretations and modifications; and yet, the relationship of the present that inherits those texts, with the past that has composed those texts, should not be that of a public prosecutor holding a public trial for the excesses of the past made on modern sensibilities.
These one-sided, asymmetrical trials that we are very adept in conducting every now and then, have ensured that we forever lose access to the wisdom of our past, the amniotic fluid that has nurtured our previous generations. Thus, all we have now is our ‘rights’, and we have lost our ‘vision’.
Therefore, we believe that every attempt has to be made to read the ancient texts carefully, in order to regain this lost vision. In today’s time, the main task of Indian Sanskrit scholars is to move away from the political, ‘Manu-esque’ reading of our ancient texts and to bring out a new perspective for their applicability in modern statecraft, public administration, public leadership, and governance. Whenever we talk about ancient texts like Ramayana or Mahabharata, the sticking point of contemporary discussion always remains the supposed inequality between the characters and the various injustices (albeit perceived through modern sensibilities) meted out to them without ever realising that this hyper-literal mode of reading, which hides more than it reveals about the text, is a very modern phenomenon. We, the moderns, forget that the Itihasa-Purana texts, the Arthashastras and the Dharmashastras do not operate in the limited framework of rights and social justice or even the watertight notions of right and wrong, rather they attempt to solve problems contemporary (but by no means unique) to their era, and are often presented as dramatised interactions between heroes and anti-heroes in a grander world of uncontrollable forces and passions.
This can be achieved through conducting workshops, seminars, and courses on the source texts, smritis, shrutis, and puranas to equip people with the right framework of approaching the texts. In the long journey of reading these texts, what matters is whether we have taken the first steps correctly or not. A short anecdote from the Ramayana can give us glimpses of that important lesson of how to approach something very important and fragile. When Lord Hanuman went to the Himalayas in search of the life-giving sanjeevani herbs for the injured Lakshman, he could not spot any herb on the hill. The guardian of the hill then appeared before him and asked him to pray to the custodian deity of the sanjeevani herb and beseech her good graces. It is said that the divine herbs do not make themselves readily available to just anybody, but have to be invoked with due care and following the proper method.
It is this genuineness and will that should determine our first steps in approaching something which is very fragile yet powerful. As Sri Aurobindo said, at the surface the Vedas appear as nothing more than crude hymns to various forces of nature, composed by people who were fearful of them; however, one needs a vision to see the power and consciousness latent in them.
The enquiring spirit of the scholar and the will to carry out the scholarship on these subjects are necessary to conduct this vital experiment in moulding the public consciousness or, at any rate, redirecting the debate to a fuller reading and understanding of our ancient texts. The purpose is to avoid the myopic vision inherited by many modern Indologists trained in the West and immerse oneself in the pool of wisdom bequeathed to us by our ancestors. Will the new generation of Indian academics rise to this challenge? Only time will tell.
Prashant Kumar Singh is Research Associate at the Centre for Civilisational Studies, Rashtram School of Public Leadership, Rishihood University. Sreejit Datta is Director of Centre for Civilisational Studies and Assistant Professor at the Rashtram School of Public Leadership, Rishihood University. Views expressed are personal.
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