Modernity and Public Sphere in Vernacular
Purushottam Agrawal
Leaving aside the objection to public sphere being an etic category and not an emic one, other serious questions could be: did Bhakti really help create a set of social spaces distinct from private ones and autonomous from the state? And did such spaces really communicate the public sentiments to the state apparatus and in some way influenced the same? Exploring these questions does not depend on finding a mirror image of the bourgeoisie public sphere analyzed by Habermas. Even in the context of Europe, Mahmood Mamdani points out, “critics of Habermas have tried to disentangle the analytical from the programmatic strands in his argument by relocating this movement in its historical context.“ Thus disentangled, public sphere can be seen primarily as “the place of voice rather than of authority,“ denoting the “existence of arenas that not only are autonomous from the public order but are also public in the sense that they are accessible to different sectors of society,“ and which tend to develop the dynamics, “which while closely related to that of the political arena, are not co-terminus with it and are not governed by the dynamics of the latter.“14 Any student of Bhakti would testify that Bhakti, in early modernity of India, was from the very outset an arena of contested meanings. This contest manifested itself not only in poetic compositions but in organized activities, institutions and practices as well. The point is that diverse attempts to propagate the conflicting ideas regarding social practices were being conducted in a shared idiom of Bhakti, wherein there was a lot of contest around terms, categories and meanings−the name Ram being the most keenly contested signifier of conflicting notions of social and spiritual ideas.15 This contest is related with the contradiction between normative injunctions and real everyday practices in matters of caste and other things. Due to the rise in commerce and consequent social mobility the theoretical framework of the fourfold Varna order was under constant, ever increasing stress. As a matter of fact, the Varna order has always been just a theoretical framework; not an empirical reality. It is only in the era of Orientalist scholarship and its construction of a highly textual notion of Hindu tradition that the idea of the Varna system being an eternal, empirical reality gained ground. Such an invention of a-historical India naturally distorted the reality. In reality, the self-conscious people were acquiring the status of individual and collective historical actors through their interactions with each other. Raymond Schwab, the French scholar and writer had reminded his readers, way back in 1950, “Unlike a unique model, India had always the same problems but had not approached them in the same way.“16 “Not in the same way“−the difference lies in the dialogic traditions of the argumentative Indian. In early modern India, these traditions were being reinforced and also further articulated in the idiom and public sphere of bhakti. Not only the traditionally available names like Ram were being given a new meaning, but also new, interrogative versions of available Puranic – i.e. historical-mythological – narratives were being created and propagated. The various puranas are usually supposed to have appropriated the subaltern voices into the Brahaminical hegemony, but the “Lakshmi-Purana“ composed by the 16th century Odia poet Balaramdasa is clearly a counter-hegemonic text – as Satya Mohanty’s reading underlines. Similarly, Pipa, a junior contemporary and a great admirer of Kabir gives a counter hegemonic twist to the notion of Kaliyuga when he brackets the four Vedas with the “ways of the world“ and the evil force of Kaliyuga and credits Kabir with saving bhakti from sure destruction.17 Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 |
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Rethinking the Global South
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