Learning to Converse: Remembering Dayaji and Ramubhai

Learning to Converse

The three of us sweated in the heat and swayed with the rhythms of the crowded suburban train as we talked or shouted, rather, to make ourselves heard, hanging by straps in the crush, two Indians, Probal Dasgupta and Prabodh Parikh, and one Britisher, myself—all roughly of an age, in our late thirties. It was 1985 and Probal and I had travelled down from Pune on the Deccan Express to meet Prabodh in Bombay—and it had also been a chance for me to meet the incomparable M P Rege. The polymath and inexhaustible Probal had been a kind (but challenging) friend, and had gently but firmly introduced me to—opened my eyes to—the real life of India, including the nature, diversity and situation of its intellectual life. Things have changed dramatically since those days, a quarter of a century ago, but the urgent agenda then in the face of what was perceived as a monolithic and engulfing westernisation was humorously summed up in an aside by the distinguished philosopher J P S Uberoi, who talked wryly of wielding his lone Indian fountain pen against the massed typewriters of the West. The typewriters may have had their day but the issue of cultural hegemony and its baleful effect on dialogue has not faded with the emergence of what we now call globalisation.
The situation of Indian philosophy at that time could be seen as an instance of a more general kind: how should the Non-Western, post-colonial world respond to a nevertheless increasingly encroaching, not to say dominant western culture? How, in particular, should Indians respond in the light of their own culture, in the light of their own philosophical traditions? Ideally we are talking here about a meeting of cultures and a reciprocal self-re-examination in the light of the encounter with the other, which is surely the essence of philosophical dialogue. In the case of a hegemonic relationship, however, there is no such meeting, at least for the ‘hegemon’, but rather an incurious estimate of the indigenous (‘native’) culture in the terms of their own ideas. For the other, ‘subaltern’, party, however, there is still a question about the reception of an alien or foreign culture at all—how to receive or respond to its institutions, practices and ideas. One has to assess and reassess one’s own culture and the foreign one, distinguish between truth and error, and between both of these and simple difference of perspective on a shared reality, discerning similarity and difference beneath surface difference and surface similarity of idiom and expression. These are indeed pressing questions, especially when it seems that the foreign ideas distort reality, including one’s own, and that the foreign practices and institutions are at best inappropriate to the conditions and at worst morally pernicious—though one has to add that all of these things are a matter of judgment and discernment and the categories themselves can be used as alibis to justify and protect indigenous forms of injustice.
There is particular critical work to be done by philosophers, at least at the level of ideas. But engagement with the western philosophical tradition is one thing, mutual engagement with western philosophers is another. The incuriousness of the old hegemonic culture lingers on, partly these days in the form of a resentfully tolerated ‘multiculturalism’, but manifests itself also in the entrenched attitudes of philosophers who do not expect to learn anything from other traditions—though they are perfectly happy to recruit others to their own cause. Little has changed in western philosophical attitudes since J N Mohanty[1] and Daya Krishna[2] complained more than a decade ago about the ignorance, and hence the facile terms and false dichotomies, that had characterised comparisons made by western philosophers between Indian and Western philosophy:—it is an obvious truth that one needs to be interior to both traditions before one makes (invidious) comparisons. Genuine engagement, however, on the part of pioneering individuals, is liable to be shunted into a siding called ‘comparative philosophy’.

2
Despite Uberoi’s perception of the massed typewriters, ‘western culture’ is by no means monolithic but is constituted by many strands, tensions and contradictions, as is the receiving, in this case, Indian culture. So there is also resistance within the Western tradition to ideas that seem to distort reality and to practices that seem morally pernicious. To put it in one way, ideology (of the mystificatory kind) is not usually either entirely engulfing or entirely overwhelming and some common ground is available between cultures. Perhaps unfortunately there is more than one kind of common ground, and common reactive mentalities can lead to violent opposition between those who feel threatened and alienated, as well as to alliances between them against a common enemy. The mobilisation of threatened fundamentalisms against each other, the ‘expressive’ bombings of night clubs, the briskly repented collateral damage to wedding parties, have been only one kind of manifestation of alienation and unease in the face of the comprehensive westernisation that has surged in the last decades.
The issue, of course, is hardly restricted to India. Thus in his The Mantle of the Prophet[3] Roy Mottahedeh discusses the Iranian writer Al-e Ahmad’s sense of the cultural illness that he felt had stricken the towns and cities of Iran. Mottahedeh comments:
For this illness Al-e Ahmad seized on a newly coined word, and he made this word a rallying cry for Iranians from the sixties to the present. The word translated literally, piece by piece, is “West-stricken-ness”, but even this clumsy translation fails to convey the sense of the Persian original, gharbzadegi. “I say that gharbzadegi … is like cholera (or) frost-bite. But no. it’s at least as bad as saw-flies in the wheat fields. Have you ever seen how they infest wheat? From within. There’s a healthy skin in places, but it’s only a skin, just like the shell of a cicada on a tree”.
The late J L Mehta[4] once talked of the disruptive forces unleashed by the Western ‘marriage of science with technology’: we are one world now through participation in Heidegger’s ‘world-civilisation’. Mehta was well-known as a commentator on Heidegger—he is not making a naïve complaint about the dominance of a culturally neutral western science and technology, but associating himself, rather, with Heidegger’s critique of the reality-obscuring stance of ‘commanding forth’, the Gestell or ‘enframing’ that has determined the form of that dominance, and the form, therefore, of what remains to be resisted by those who are precisely becoming Heidegger’s ‘standing-reserve’..
Mehta asks whether it isn’t true that ‘Western thought … enters … like a Trojan horse … into the thinking of the Non-Western world’ or like a virus … invisibly altering our perceptions of reality.’ These images, of the Trojan horse or of a virus or an infestation, all carry the sense of an experience of being undermined in one’s identity. The Trojan horse was the great image of stealth, treachery and occupation within the citadel of ideas. The idea of a virus is of something invisible to perception that nevertheless harms, undermines, debilitates, and it is the stealth and the invisibility that finally dismays us in the original sense of loss of power. The idea of an infestation that leaves the exterior skin intact but destroys the centre speaks powerfully of the felt loss of identity as one loses touch with one’s roots by absorbing someone else’s narrative, one in which one’s character has already been assigned, and this by others..
I had already read by the time that Probal and I met Prabodh a notable special issue of Indian Philosophical Quarterly published in 1984 and dedicated to the theme of ‘Svaraj in Ideas’. Self rule or self determination in the political sphere was one thing, precarious as that might have been in geo-political terms, but there was more to be done in dealing with the broken roots of the old colonialism still active in Indian soil. The collection was a set of responses by contemporary Indian thinkers to a percipient discourse to Indian students by Krishna Chandra Bhattacharya delivered in 1929 during British rule. I had found the collection compelling, not least because it further made real to me something of the self-understanding and inherited situation of the philosophers who had contributed to it and in whose midst I now found myself. But it also expressed a set of concerns that echoed my own, concerns which really gave birth to the idea of the Convivium[5] as Prabodh, Probal and I had our loud conversation on the suburban train. What my friends and other philosophers I was now reading were concerned about was the oppressive reality of westernisation and its specific consequences for the work of Indian philosophers and their relationship to their own traditions. I saw and felt some of the same oppressive reality, though I called it by other names, materialism, perhaps, or secularism, or even just a loss of vision in philosophy, an absence of the imagination, of connection with life—and that connection was palpable in the case of Dayaji, Ramubhai and Rege. I wanted to insist that there was nothing monolithic about this ‘westernisation’, but rather that there were counter-currents in the West that mirrored Indian philosophical resources that could be mobilised for resistance; that one had to distinguish between the (super-)imposition of a foreign culture and the specific content of what was aggressively dominant in that culture; and that there was plenty of room for dialogue and a meeting of minds … if the right conditions could be found.
The guest editors of Svaraj (K.J. Shah, Ramachandra Gandhi, Sharad Deshpande and Probal Dasgupta) referred in their introduction to the loss of svaraj in ideas as a form of Indian bondage, and, in so doing, echoed Mehta’s metaphor of invisibility: ‘a bondage more enslaving than political subjugation because of its invisibility and silent, creeping paralysing power, unforgivably persistent even after political independence’.[6] They here followed Bhattacharya himself in his 1929 lecture, who went on to claim that cultural subjection occurs ‘when one’s traditional cast of ideas and sentiments is superseded without comparison or competition by a new cast representing an alien culture which possesses one like a ghost’ (my italics). He thought that the Indian cast of mind, an indigenous culture of a high degree of development, had ‘subsided below the conscious level of culture.’ If an entire system of ideas and sentiments, those of western culture, have indeed been imposed or superimposed in this way, the consequence is that ‘we either accept or repeat the judgments passed on us by western culture, or we impotently resent them but have hardly any estimates of our own, wrung from an inward perception of the realities of our position’. ‘Hardly any estimates of our own’ … but in their place, someone’s else’s narrative, the received and incurious estimate of the imperial power whose ideology is absorbed in such a way that the colonised receive their identity and trajectory from the colonisers, long after they have gone.
I had visited the Philosophy Department at Poona University when I first arrived in the city and had been warmly received there, particularly by K J Shah and Sharad Deshpande. As it happened, I turned up in time to hear the first in a series of lectures by Ramachandra Gandhi on the philosophy of religion. Although it was clear to me at once that he had a brilliant mind, I was also shocked by what he was saying.
When I look back at the scene I realise now that I was ignorant in fact of the cultural context and fully self-conscious stance of his philosophising, as well as of the dialectical and epistemological significance of what philosophers call the ‘subject position’. I had myself fallen into the trap of the incurious colonist, failing to understand the relativity[7] of my own position which—and this is the point—I was hardly aware of as one position among others: the irony of the subject position is its manifest visibility to all but the subject. I was able to pay lip-service to the idea but I had never really been confronted by the reality, and it is confrontation with reality, I think, that reveals real rather than official attitudes. But I need to explain my sense of shock, and it might be best to start by recording a conversation I had with K J Shah, and by citing a passage from one of Daya Krishna’s papers.
Shah had been discussing[8] with me the significance for Indians of people like Ramana Maharshi, and had observed that “It was the presence in India of men of such great spirituality, even in the twentieth century, that made the difference between western and Indian attitudes to religion; the presence of such spirituality was something that Indians were confronted with and had to take some account of’. Now, in an insightful 1961 paper published in his The Art of the Conceptual Day Krishna had remarked that “The capacity for inner freedom, abiding joy, and relevant response to external situations is so pre-eminent and abundant in spiritual persons that compared to them, ordinary, normal persons appear as deficient human beings” (p 120).
It seems clear enough that Dayaji was saying something similar to Shah. Part of the point is that both philosophers effectively set out criteria by which we can distinguish the genuine from the bogus in the case of ‘spiritual persons’. Much to my own liking and much more important, they make the idea of conduct and demeanour as criteria of an inner condition a central feature of the philosophy of religion—rather than the usual, accepted notion of ‘belief’, a notion which purports to be universal but which in fact betrays an unacknowledged, specifically Christian bias. Of course the notion of ‘belief’ is anyway a difficult and contested concept even within the traditions of Christian theology and philosophy, but here it is its assumed centrality for the philosophy of religion as such that is the issue. In terms of our unself-conscious westernisation, it is an assumed universality: all philosophy of religion is really a philosophy of Christian religion, and what appears to diverge from that model is tied down onto a Procrustean bed and hacked into shape. In the same paper Dayaji precisely remarks on the skewing of philosophy of religion that occurs because of an unconscious concentration on Christianity, an unconscious bias that has hardly changed since he made these remarks:
The other great limitation of the discussion, to my mind, was its confinement, perhaps naturally, to Christianity alone. It was as if one were to reflect on aesthetic experience and confine one’s discussion to Greek art or the Renaissance masters only …. That no one challenged this implicit limitation shows once again the difficulty of getting beyond the perspective of the culture one happens to be born in (p 114)

Ramachandra Gandhi himself was deeply affected by the life of Ramana Maharshi and the title of his 1985 book I am Thou[9] is taken from a remark of Ramana. In the lectures I attended Ramubhai sought to develop a philosophical argument in support of the nondualist Advaita claim that he took to be poetically expressed in that remark. But, my sense of shock … I had introduced a new undergraduate course in the philosophy of religion at my own university in the UK several years earlier and had done so despite the scepticism and misgivings of colleagues who were on the whole of a materialist and ‘anti-religious’ persuasion. They thought that ‘religion’ (by which they certainly meant the Christian religion), theology, metaphysics, had been decisively discredited long ago, and that it was a retrograde step to teach such things, though they probably also thought that at least it would provide an opportunity to discuss certain logical issues associated with philosophical theology. But I wasn’t in fact concerned to teach a course on the philosophy of the Christian religion at all, partly because I had moved away from it—or from a certain model of it that had alienated me from approaches to other models—and become a practising Buddhist. Part of my motivation for inaugurating a course in the philosophy of religion lay in the felt need to articulate and give philosophical expression to the nature and implications of meditational experience, and this was giving me reason to reappraise my understanding of how to approach Christianity from a philosophical point of view as well. It also forced me to the view that conduct and demeanour as criteria of spirituality should replace ‘belief’ as the central topic. But I felt that the dialectical situation in British philosophy was a delicate one. I had to try to write about experience in an environment in which the assumed paradigm was a degraded concept of belief. It was refreshing and reassuring, then, several years later, to read Dayaji’s comment on the symposium at which he gave his paper:
the hours devoted to discussion in this symposium seemed characterised by a singular unconcern with religious experience, which is the raison d’être of any inquiry undertaken in this field at all … There was, for example, much discussion of language in religious discourse, but little, if any, attention was paid to the way in which religious concepts arise from, and find their meaning in, religious experience itself. The ‘operationalism’ so obvious in the field of science did not seem quite so necessary in the field of religion to most philosophers assembled there (p 112).

However, I simply took it for granted that my own delicate dialectical situation was a general one, and that this was what one had to do if one was doing philosophy of religion. And here was Professor Gandhi talking about the ultimate unitive reality of BrahmanAtman without, as it seemed, all that epistemological vigilance that seemed to me absolutely necessary, and had cost me so much intellectual effort—except that the epistemological vigilance that seemed to me absolutely necessary was in fact precisely situated and directed towards a particular set of historical and conceptual concerns that did not affect Ramu’s enterprise: the whole Death of God scenario, the relationship between an apparently discredited philosophical theology that sought to prove that there was a God, and the rationality of belief—whereas Ramubhai was concerned with such categories as moksa or liberation and the ultimate nature of Selfhood, to which the discourse of ‘belief; was irrelevant.
It was not that we would not have had philosophical disagreements independently of our different points of departure, about the role of argument in philosophical reflection on claims about the Self by men and women who met the criteria mentioned by Shah and Dayaji, for instance. I think my shock was caused by a failure to realise that there were different points of departure and then to be confronted by one.

3
In the book mentioned earlier, Mohanty remarks that there now exists the possibility, for Indian intellectuals, ‘not merely of studying Indian thought from the point of view of the Western philosophies, but also, by reversing that strategy, of critically studying the Western philosophies from the vantage-points of the typically Indian modes of thinking’ (p 22, my italics). Whether this can be done at all depends on the vitality and intelligence of the new generation who undertake it. But it also depends upon a reciprocating receptivity on the part of westerners prepared properly to inform themselves of the actual nature of the Indian philosophical traditions, and this is a matter of opening up a dialogue that depends essentially on individual conversations. Taking such a dialogue seriously depends upon the shared premise that reality is transcendent of any particular purchase or perception, and that, consequently, there can be more than one form of insight, more than one form of blindness towards being. There typically goes with this kind of blindness to being a corresponding failure to hear the voices of others. It is not an accident that in The Art of the Conceptual Dayaji should have complained precisely about not being heard. This kind of failure, though, is not a deliberate act, but rather an inability to make sense of new material.
If we assume that we can learn from each other, and otherwise we shall have no reason to incline towards dialogue, then the natural context for this to take place in is, as I have said, that of conversation between a pair of interlocutors, possibly in a small group as long as this does not become an audience. But a possible participant of such a dialogue has to be capable of rapid role reversal, capable, that is, of assuming the role of teacher or pupil, in the very same conversation. As Probal Dasgupta has said elsewhere in this volume, the Convivium series, originally of British and Indian philosophers, was a side show in the formation of contemporary Indian philosophy as it was fashioned by thinkers like Daya Krishna, Ramachandra Gandhi and others. Perhaps it is better to think of the series as a case study. Participation of this kind between thinkers from Britain and from India, with their former colonial relationship, and post-colonial and post imperial neuroses and unconscious attitudes, of arrogance and resentment, was a poignant attempt to embody ‘the ideal speech situation’, and required a great deal of awareness and forbearance on both sides. The idea of a ‘dialogue’ between cultures seems a rather general and ambitious enterprise, but there is an upper limit on the numbers who can engage in a conversation at any particular time, and the notion of ‘conversation’ recalls us to the essentially personal aspect of philosophy. The Socratic enterprise of ‘testing’ a view or belief may leave the one in whom that view is undermined with a sense of helplessness, a condition very different from that loss of identity we mentioned earlier, a sense of helplessness which can lead to reactive aggression, a defence of a previously constructed self image. It is interesting, though, that there are superficial similarities here to the angry and violent rejection of an alien culture that is being imposed, though there is in reality a world of difference between the two kinds of case. The elenchus—the testing, the probing, the Socratic interrogation of one’s premises, of the Hintergedanken, the thoughts that underlie action—puts pressure, then, also on our emotional life, upon our sensibility, in a direct and sometimes dramatic, drastic way. To talk of our sensibility is to refer to our motivating thoughts and beliefs: we move, we are moved, in the world as ‘grasped’ by thought. Socratic dialogue is an occasion for ‘un-grasping’, for rendering oneself receptive to the possibility of the world’s showing itself in ways not available to the disclosure-resisting pictures that held us captive. The Socratic dialogue is effective, though, only if the thoughts one puts to the test are genuinely the thoughts that structure the sensibility we are attached to. If these thoughts lead to contradiction or incoherence, lead the person into aporia (a sense of being at a loss) then their world and thus their orientation is dismantled and unmade, and this is the creative condition of new possibilities of thinking and feeling
The emphasis is on conversation and the conditions for conversation, since this is the context for the friendly agon of genuine dialogue. If Mohanty’s implicit ‘challenge’ is to be taken seriously, then such contexts need to be established, in which genuine exponents of both living and interacting traditions are ready both to question and listen. It was such reflections as these, about the parallels between the lived situations of thinkers from both traditions, that led to the initiation of the ‘Convivium’ series of meetings between British and Indian philosophers, at which Dayaji and Ramubhai, as well as Rege, played such a prominent role. But the idea is one about the ideal conditions for doing philosophy at all, and is not specific to participants from different cultures, though in a way philosophers are always from different cultures, and they do not speak to each other as often as they seem to do, or are, indeed, required to do by the very nature of their discipline. Nevertheless, the kinds of conversations initiated by Daya Krishna and Ramachandra Gandhi have opened up the conditions for the possibility of a new and global conversation between philosophers who are able to draw on the concepts and metaphors, the narratives, of more than one tradition, for the possibility of an intercultural canon.
[1] In Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought: an Essay on the Nature of Indian Philosophical Thinking (Clarendon Press, Oxford 1992),
[2] In Indian Philosophy: a Counter Perspective (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1991)
[3] Roy Mottahedeh: The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran 1985 Chatto and Windus 296
[4] In Philosophy and Religion: Essays in Interpretation (Indian Council for Philosophical Research, New Delhi, 1990)
[5] Mentioned elsewhere in this volume by Probal Dasgupta
[6] This theme had earlier been addressed in Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi, Oxford University Press 1983).
[7] This is not of course a relativist claim, a doctrine about truth. It is, rather, a claim about perspective and allows for the possibility of recognising a shared reality and the possibility of a movement from one perspective on it to another. From here this can be seen, but not from over there where that can be seen: we assemble a total picture of the terrain by collating our perspectives, where nevertheless individual perspectives can distort one’s sense of the whole.
[8] See my Transformations of Mind (p 202). CUP 2000
[9] I am Thou: Meditations on the Truth of India IPQ Publications, Pune, 1984