Torn Between Tradition And Modernity

Makarand Paranjape

- May 04, 2017, 4:51 pmIndian modernity is Janus-faced, even schizophrenic.

On the one hand, it looks to the West and to the future, but on the other hand,
it looks to India and its past. Arguably, the single most significant problematic
in recent Indian intellectual history is that of tradition vs modernity. After
nearly 200 years of debate and discussion, it seems fairly clear that India can
have neither pure tradition, nor uncontaminated modernity. Whatever we are
or have become has to be some combination or amalgamation of both. But in
these contestations between tradition and modernity, it is not always clear
what tradition is or what it stands for. In this and the following columns, I
attempt to redress this lack.

It might benefit us to engage with the idea of parampara, which is the Sanskrit
word, also used in many other Indian languages, for what we call tradition in
English. While tradition is not exactly an equivalent, it is also quite resonant.
Methodologically, it is useful to make key concepts across cultures and
meaning universes to converse with each other, rather than subduing or
supplanting each otherin our case, the Western idea superimposing and
superseding ours. There may be some real, not merely cosmetic, advantages
for retaining key Indian concepts which are not so much untranslatable as
lacking in adequate English equivalents. But right at the outset, the question
we may ask is how does parampara influence, even shape individuals and in
what ways do individuals carry it forward, break, or re-shape. More
specifically, I try to explore what happens to Indian traditions in modern times.
Should they survive or die and under what circumstances? I walked bang into
this conundrum in a rather unusual way.

The (Dis)inheritance

I was once offered the Honorary Directorship of an NGO set up to promote

Svarajya in Ideas (not, I might add, in any way connected with the present
magazine). What could have been closer to the heart of a professed svaraj-ist?
But, by a peculiar turn of events, this offer was reserved. I was quite struck by
the reasons for my disqualification, which were disclosed to me in a curious
missive, personally delivered to my door. The letter that I thought would
confirm my directorship actually withdrew it. The trustee who signed the letter
said I was thought unsuitable on account of a novel I had written. Citing
Ananda Coomaraswamy, she said that the function of literature was to tell the
stories of gods and heroes. She found it pointless to write, as I had, about
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those aspects of life which are degrading, disturbing, or debasing. Art should
elevate, inspire, and uplift, which my novel had failed to do. Because I had not
succeeded in fulfilling the higher purpose of art, she concluded that I would
not make a suitable director for her NGO.

Till then I had always believed, after Auden, that literature makes nothing
happen, especially since the incident happened before the fatwa against
Salman Rushdie. I was nonplussed to discover the personal price I had to pay
for something I had written. I rubbed my eyes in disbelief; in which century
was this happening? Was I dealing with a prude or a prophet? The letter
produced a profound unease, forcing me to confront the meaning of art in the
light of the tradition-modernity face-off.

Modern art, as Hegel had predicted, had rejected the sacred as the only or
desirable object of art; in fact, it had gone beyond that to destroy and discard
all grand teleologies. Even T S Eliot, in a rearguard reaffirmation of the sacred,
had done so in a idiom that was distinctly modern.

Most other modernists were not even sympathetic to the sacred; from them we
got the manifesto that art must do away with all false idealisms. The art object
need not shy away from the horrors of war, degradation, sexual abuse,
murder, and so on, all of which are equally a part of our lives, even if they are
unacknowledged or suppressed. Art must try to give tongue to the
unspeakable, like Edvard Munchs Scream of Nature.

Had I inherited an unbroken literary tradition from ancient India, I could no

more have written my kind of novel than a temple sculptor have crafted a
modern nude or a Kathakali artist danced the depiction of urban violence in
India against women. Of course, most of the gods and goddesses the
traditional sculptor carved out of stone would be at least semi-nude, but their
nudity would not be of the modern offensive (according to some) variety that
got M F Husain into trouble. In traditional art, the divine body would be
sacralised, elevated, exalted in a way no modern work of art could succeed in
doing.

Was our real problem as a writer or artist the lack of a parampara, a set of
values and techniques which made up the sum and substance of an artistic
genre, both its form and content, its style and theme, shaping both its
production and interpretation? In India, there was the additional fact of deep
colonisation, which allowed hardly any independent criticism. There was no
culture of criticism or interpretation to support writers, writing, or any sort of
artistic endeavour. Our world was marked, instead, by absences, flights,
departures, ruptures, transgressions, desertions, and violations, where an
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artist, whether poet, painter or dancer, hardly had a symbiotic relationship
with his society.

Tradition and Modernity in Contemporary Indian Arts

It was with such questions in mind that 20 years ago I confronted the eminent
danseuse, Leela Samson, who went on to become the director of Kalakshetra,
Chennai. In a meeting in which both of us were speakers, I asked her if
Bharatanatyam or for that matter any other classical dance form
seemed rather static and repetitive. Samson was not pleased with my question.
I couldnt disagree with you more, she replied. Havent you been observing
all the formal and technical changes that have taken place over the last few
decades, not to speak of this whole century? I myself dont dance the way I
used to 10 or 15 years back. We are constantly changing, constantly
innovating. If you watched how Balasaraswati danced and compare it with the
way I dance today, youll see such a great difference. What we were taught at
Kalakshetra when I was a student is quite different from what is taught there
today or what I teach my students.

Yes, yes, I admitted hastily, but I was not referring to the formal aspects. I
mean the content, the narrativethe stories that you performseem to be
rather typical. They are, moreover, all mythological stories. I have never seen a
Bharatnatyam or Kuchipudi performance on a modern text or even on a
modern situation. Can you, for instance, depict the divorce of a couple or a
murder mystery through a classical dance form?

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

But, usually, dont they do this only by giving a modern interpretation to a

traditional story, like Sarabhais Draupadi, for example?

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

Yes, but cant it do both? I mean, why cant it be contemporary as well as

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

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

Both these anecdotes illustrate the great difficulty, if not impossibility, of

reconciling or harmonising tradition and modernity in Indian creative arts. In
literature, this was especially the case because the break between the two was
most definite and far-reaching. The colonial intervention severed forever our
tenuous ties with the older sacred literature of India as, indeed, it did the
society which supported it. In its place, secular modernity, aided by the
printing press and the invention of prose, gave rise to a new wave of creativity
in what the British called our vernaculars.

The literature written in these new languages was usually modelled on

European works and its content quite different from traditional compositions.
Writing in a purely traditional manner is now impossible; how are we to engage
with contemporary reality in a purely traditional idiom?

Unless a certain form of literary modernism actually attempts precisely such

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

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

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

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

(To be continued)

The author is Professor of English at JNU. His latest publications include The
Death and Afterlife of Mahatma Gandhi (Penguin Random House, 2015),
Cultural Politics in Modern India: Postcolonial Prospects, Colourful
Cosmopolitanism, Global Proximities (Routledge, 2016), and Transit
Passenger/Passageiro em Transito (University of Sao Paolo Press, 2016).

Sruti, Smriti, And The Individual

Makarand Paranjape
- Jul 01, 2017, 3:16 pm

In the first part of this series, Tradition And Modernity (Swarajya, May 2017),
I illustrated the difficulties in reconciling or harmonising tradition and
modernity in Indian creative arts. In literature, this was especially the case,
because the break between the two was most definite and far-reaching.
Perhaps, the colonial intervention severed forever our tenuous ties with the
older sacred literature of India as, indeed, it shattered the society which
supported it. In its place, secular modernity, aided by the printing press and
the invention of prose, gave rise to a new wave of creativity in what the British

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called our vernaculars. The literature written in these new languages was
usually modelled on European works and its content quite different from
traditional compositions. Writing in a purely traditional manner was now
impossible.

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

Immediately, we notice that our answers to such questions depend on how we

view tradition, how we define it.

We are confronted with opposing possibilities: on the one hand, we have a

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

It is only by breaking the oppressive shackles of tradition, say such

modernists, that new creation can take place. Some, like Dr Babasaheb
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, invoke alternate pasts, alternate traditions such as
Buddhism, to oppose what they see as the source of their oppression.

The West influenced, even shaped, Indian literary and cultural modernism.
But a pioneering Anglo-American modernist like TS Eliot exemplifies the
paradox of being the greatest champion of tradition. In his seminal and much-
cited Tradition and Individual Talent, Eliot argued that individual talent was
shaped, informed, even directed by tradition. By tradition, Eliot meant
something timeless, synchronic, even contemporary in its essential genius. It
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is what is living in us that is tradition, not what is dead and gone. He gives us
the image of all the great writers of English sitting together, around a table, in
front of the poet about to write a poem. Yet, when it came to his immediate
predecessors, he certainly rebelled against them, both in the theme and form
of his poetry. Eliot, no doubt, was a modernist poet, but he was also an arch-
conservative. In fact, critics never tire of reminding us how politically
reactionary, elitist, and closed modernism was. In effect, though Eliot longed to
write the kind of poetry that Dante, Shakespeare, Donne wrote, he ended up
totally rejecting his immediate predecessors, the fin-de-sicle poets. For Eliot,
when a good poet wrote or innovated, he had the weight of the entire tradition
behind him, pushing him forward. As opposed to this view, Harold Bloom
advanced his famous neo-Freudian thesis of The Anxiety of Influence in which
every poet had to grapple with the strong predecessor and supplant the latter
before he could really find his own voice.

Apart from an exaltation of tradition or its summary rejection, there is a third,

somewhat intermedial position which looks at tradition merely as what is
handed down from generation to generation, whether it be good, bad, or
indifferent. This, I believe, is one of the obvious, but somewhat superficial,
understandings of parampara. The difficulty with this position is that it does
not offer grounds for judging what is harmful or useful. These grounds must
be derived either from tradition or from modernity themselves, hence are
already compromised. So this apparently neutral position actually leads us to
a critical conundrum to solve where we must question tradition as we do
modernity.

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

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

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

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

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

and smriti, in the broadest sense of both terms. The former supplies the
inspiration, the latter the momentum to carry it forward. In periods when the
former goes underground, the latter offers guidance. Yet, we cannot survive too
long only on memory. That is why a re-injection of sruti is necessary and must
occur to keep a tradition healthy. Indeed, it is impossible to draw a very clear
line of separation between them. Where sruti ends and smriti begins is thus
indeterminate. They slide and merge into one another. At the very moment of
realisation, another faculty of the mind starts recording it, turning it into
memory, for future use. Actually, they are akin, if not identical; the distinction
is only for our convenience. They are both shades, grades, of spirit. The spirit
is alive and well, still with us. It has not vacated our world and gone
elsewhere, abandoning us to our own follies and to an uncertain future. Nor
did it show itself onceand for allin some far away, distant past, never to
seen again. It is right in our midst, in the here and now, should we wish to
acknowledge it. Parampara means the flowing of the spirit in present times.

Obviously then, the real challenge is how to keep smriti in consonance with
sruti. Every now and then, smriti seems to get corrupted and falsified, thus
losing its capacity to guide and direct; it becomes rigid and ossified, an iron
law to grind us and curb the spirit. Then it has to be destroyed. Such
destruction is actually creative. Better if a continuous cleansing process were
possible.

But often, what happens is corruption, fossilisation, paralysis. Then breaking

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

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

(To be continued)

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