* Granta 107

Rana Dasgupta

Capital Gains

It all comes together on the roads.

Delhi is a segregated city; an impenetrable, wary city – a city with a fondness for barbed wire, armed guards and guest lists. Though its population now knocks up against 20 million, India’s capital remains curiously faithful to the spirit of the British administrative enclave with which it began: Delhiites admire social rank, name-dropping and exclusive clubs, and they snub strangers who turn up without a proper introduction. The Delhi newspapers pay tribute every morning to the hairstyles and parties of its rich, and it is they, with their high-walled compounds and tinted car windows, who define the city’s aspirations. Delhi’s millionaires are squeamish about public places, and they don’t like to go out unless there are sufficient valets and guards to make them feel at home, and prices exorbitant enough to keep undesirables out.

But in this segregated city, everyone comes together on the roads. The subway network is still incomplete, there are few local trains (unlike Mumbai), and you can’t take a helicopter to work (unlike São Paulo) – the draconian security regulations prevent that. So the Delhi roads accommodate every kind of citizen and offer a unique exhibition of the city’s social relations.

On the eve of ‘liberalization’ in 1991 – when the then finance minister, Manmohan Singh, opened the economy up to global money flows, so bringing an end to four decades of centralized planning – there were three varieties of car on sale in India. The Hindustan Ambassador and Premier Padmini had both been around for thirty years and it took seven years to acquire one – production was limited to a few thousand a year and ownership restricted, in practice, to bureaucrats and senior businessmen. The compact Maruti 800, by contrast, was a recent arrival that had been conceived as a ‘people’s car’: with a quota of 150,000 a year it had brought the possibility of private car travel within reach, for the first time, of the middle classes.

Nearly twenty years on, those three originals have all but vanished in the flurry of new brands that liberalization ushered in (though the stately Ambassador remains the preferred conveyance for Delhi’s politicians and senior bureaucrats). The new economic regime stimulated more Indian companies, such as Tata, to start building cars, but it also brought in the global giants – Hyundai, then Ford, GM and Toyota, and sooner or later everyone else – and now, with car markets declining around the world, they are looking to India to take up some slack. India’s car consumption is ten times what it was in 1991, and rising rapidly, and the effect in the cities is deadlock. The stricken carriageways are never adequate for the car mania, no matter how many new lanes and flyovers are built – and in Delhi, most cars are stationary much of the time. Hemmed in by the perpetual emergency of roadworks, and governed by traffic lights that can stay red for ten minutes, the situation is unpromising. Delhi drivers, moreover, never confident that any system will produce benefits for all, try to beat the traffic with an opportunistic hustle that often turns to a great honking blockage, smothered in the smoke of so many engines air-conditioning their passengers against the forty-degree heat. The main beneficiaries are foot-bound magazine sellers, who move fast and offer something to while away the time.

Another distraction for unmoving drivers: the endless automobile reveries posted up on hoardings – images of a parallel world where the roads are open, and driving is sexy and carefree.

With so many cars jammed up against each other, each as hobbled as the next, road travel could threaten to undermine the steep gradients of Delhi’s social hierarchies. But here the recent car profusion steps in to solve the very problem it creates. The contemporary array of brands and models supplies a useful code of social status to offset the anonymity of driving, and the vertiginous altitude of Delhi’s class system comes through admirably, even on the horizontal roads. Car brands regulate the relationships between drivers: impatient Mercedes flash Marutis to let them through the throng, and Marutis move aside. BMW limousines are so well insulated that passengers don’t even hear the incessant horn with which chauffeurs disperse everything in their path. Canary-yellow Hummers lumber over the concrete barriers from the heaving jam into the empty bus lanes and accelerate illegally past the masses – and traffic police look away, for what cop is going to risk his life to challenge the entitlement of rich kids? Yes, the privileges of brand rank are enforced by violence if need be: a Hyundai driver gets out of his car to kick in the doors of a Maruti that kept him dawdling behind, while young men in a Mercedes chase after a Tata driver who dared abuse them out of the window, running him down and slapping him as if he were an insubordinate kid.

There is nothing superficial about brands in contemporary Delhi. This is a place where one’s social significance is assumed to be nil unless there are tangible signs to the contrary, so the need for such signs is authentic and fierce. And in these times of stupefying upheaval, when all old meanings are under assault, it is corporate brands that seem to carry the most authority. Brands hold within them the impressive infinity of the new global market. They hold out the promise of dignity and distinction in a harsh city that constantly tries to withhold these things. They even offer clarity in intimate questions: ‘He drives a Honda City,’ a woman says, meaningfully, about a prospective son-in-law. Brands help to stave off the terror of senselessness, and the more you have, the better. Where the old socialist elite was frugal and unkempt, the new Delhi aristocracy is exuberantly consumerist. With big cars and designer accessories, it literally advertises its supremacy, creating waves of adoration and hatred on every side.

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N.Y. Times
Op-Ed Contributor
The Myth of the New India

by Pankaj Mishra
London

INDIA is a roaring capitalist success story.” So says the latest issue of Foreign Affairs; and last week many leading business executives and politicians in India celebrated as Lakshmi Mittal, the fifth richest man in the world, finally succeeded in his hostile takeover of the Luxembourgian steel company Arcelor. India’s leading business newspaper, The Economic Times, summed up the general euphoria over the event in its regular feature, “The Global Indian Takeover”: “For India, it is a harbinger of things to come — economic superstardom.”

This sounds persuasive as long as you don’t know that Mr. Mittal, who lives in Britain, announced his first investment in India only last year. He is as much an Indian success story as Sergey Brin, the Russian-born co-founder of Google, is proof of Russia’s imminent economic superstardom.

In recent weeks, India seemed an unlikely capitalist success story as communist parties decisively won elections to state legislatures, and the stock market, which had enjoyed record growth in the last two years, fell nearly 20 percent in two weeks, wiping out some $2.4 billion in investor wealth in just four days. This week India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, made it clear that only a small minority of Indians will enjoy “Western standards of living and high consumption.”

There is, however, no denying many Indians their conviction that the 21st century will be the Indian Century just as the 20th was American. The exuberant self-confidence of a tiny Indian elite now increasingly infects the news media and foreign policy establishment in the United States.

Encouraged by a powerful lobby of rich Indian-Americans who seek to expand their political influence within both their home and adopted countries, President Bush recently agreed to assist India’s nuclear program, even at the risk of undermining his efforts to check the nuclear ambitions of Iran. As if on cue, special reports and covers hailing the rise of India in Time, Foreign Affairs and The Economist have appeared in the last month.

It was not so long ago that India appeared in the American press as a poor, backward and often violent nation, saddled with an inefficient bureaucracy and, though officially nonaligned, friendly to the Soviet Union. Suddenly the country seems to be not only a “roaring capitalist success story” but also, according to Foreign Affairs, an “emerging strategic partner of the United States.” To what extent is this wishful thinking rather than an accurate estimate of India’s strengths?

Looking for new friends and partners in a rapidly changing world, the Bush administration clearly hopes that India, a fellow democracy, will be a reliable counterweight against China as well as Iran. But trade and cooperation between India and China is growing; and, though grateful for American generosity on the nuclear issue, India is too dependent on Iran for oil (it is also exploring developing a gas pipeline to Iran) to wholeheartedly support the United States in its efforts to prevent the Islamic Republic from acquiring a nuclear weapon. The world, more interdependent now than during the cold war, may no longer be divided up into strategic blocs and alliances.

Nevertheless, there are much better reasons to expect that India will in fact vindicate the twin American ideals of free markets and democracy that neither Latin America nor post-communist countries — nor, indeed, Iraq — have fulfilled.

Since the early 1990′s, when the Indian economy was liberalized, India has emerged as the world leader in information technology and business outsourcing, with an average growth of about 6 percent a year. Growing foreign investment and easy credit have fueled a consumer revolution in urban areas. With their Starbucks-style coffee bars, Blackberry-wielding young professionals, and shopping malls selling luxury brand names, large parts of Indian cities strive to resemble Manhattan.

Indian business tycoons are increasingly trying to control marquee names like Taittinger Champagne and the Carlyle Hotel in New York. “India Everywhere” was the slogan of the Indian business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this year.

But the increasingly common, business-centric view of India suppresses more facts than it reveals. Recent accounts of the alleged rise of India barely mention the fact that the country’s $728 per capita gross domestic product is just slightly higher than that of sub-Saharan Africa and that, as the 2005 United Nations Human Development Report puts it, even if it sustains its current high growth rates, India will not catch up with high-income countries until 2106.

Nor is India rising very fast on the report’s Human Development index, where it ranks 127, just two rungs above Myanmar and more than 70 below Cuba and Mexico. Despite a recent reduction in poverty levels, nearly 380 million Indians still live on less than a dollar a day.

Malnutrition affects half of all children in India, and there is little sign that they are being helped by the country’s market reforms, which have focused on creating private wealth rather than expanding access to health care and education. Despite the country’s growing economy, 2.5 million Indian children die annually, accounting for one out of every five child deaths worldwide; and facilities for primary education have collapsed in large parts of the country (the official literacy rate of 61 percent includes many who can barely write their names). In the countryside, where 70 percent of India’s population lives, the government has reported that about 100,000 farmers committed suicide between 1993 and 2003.

Feeding on the resentment of those left behind by the urban-oriented economic growth, communist insurgencies (unrelated to India’s parliamentary communist parties) have erupted in some of the most populous and poorest parts of north and central India. The Indian government no longer effectively controls many of the districts where communists battle landlords and police, imposing a harsh form of justice on a largely hapless rural population.

The potential for conflict — among castes as well as classes — also grows in urban areas, where India’s cruel social and economic disparities are as evident as its new prosperity. The main reason for this is that India’s economic growth has been largely jobless. Only 1.3 million out of a working population of 400 million are employed in the information technology and business processing industries that make up the so-called new economy.

No labor-intensive manufacturing boom of the kind that powered the economic growth of almost every developed and developing country in the world has yet occurred in India. Unlike China, India still imports more than it exports. This means that as 70 million more people enter the work force in the next five years, most of them without the skills required for the new economy, unemployment and inequality could provoke even more social instability than they have already.

For decades now, India’s underprivileged have used elections to register their protests against joblessness, inequality and corruption. In the 2004 general elections, they voted out a central government that claimed that India was “shining,” bewildering not only most foreign journalists but also those in India who had predicted an easy victory for the ruling coalition.

Among the politicians whom voters rejected was Chandrababu Naidu, the technocratic chief minister of one of India’s poorest states, whose forward-sounding policies, like providing Internet access to villages, prompted Time magazine to declare him “South Asian of The Year” and a “beacon of hope.”

But the anti-India insurgency in Kashmir, which has claimed some 80,000 lives in the last decade and a half, and the strength of violent communist militants across India, hint that regular elections may not be enough to contain the frustration and rage of millions of have-nots, or to shield them from the temptations of religious and ideological extremism.

Many serious problems confront India. They are unlikely to be solved as long as the wealthy, both inside and outside the country, choose to believe their own complacent myths.

Jacques Derrida

Speech versus Writing in Derrida and Bhartrahri

by Harold Coward

A question suggested by Processor T. R. V. Murti in his 1963 Presidential Address to the All India Philosophical Congress focused on the status of the spoken word within language. [1] Murti points out that for Indian thinkers, language was primarily the spoken word or speaking itself (v?k). However, this definition of language does not identify it with the overt sounds produced physiologically or with the written signs which are merely phonetic copies of the spoken sounds. In fact, said Murti, “the distinction between ?abda (Word) and dhvani (Sound) is basic to the Indian philosophy of language. To identify them, to take the physical sound as the word, is a category mistake.” [2] With this contention Jacques Derrida agrees. It is Derrida’s contention that virtually the whole of Western metaphysics from Plato to Rousseau and Levi-Strauss has made the category mistake of identifying language or logos with the spoken word. [3] But whereas for Murti the category mistake was in taking the outer sound instead of the inner word to be the essence of language, Derrida makes the utterly surprising move of seeming to go in the opposite direction — of identifying the essence of language with writing. While Murti was challenging naturalistic schools of philosophy such as the Buddhists, Derrida confronts both the logocentric position (which Murti represents), as well as the Buddhists. For when Derrida describes language as “writing” he not only means that writing is prior to the spoken reflection of the inner logos, but also that language is not merely a sort of external speaking or writing as the Buddhists suggest. What Derrida attempts is a deconstruction or self-analysis of language that exposes the mistake of a reductionism in either direction, inward to the divine logos or outward to the conventional sign. In his desire to escape all philosophical oppositions such as ”inner” versus “outer,” Derrida subtly states his position: “language is not merely a sort of writing ‘but’ a possibility founded on the general possibility of writing.” [4] For Derrida, as we shall see, “writing” characterizes both the “inner” and the “outer” word in dynamic interrelationship, which, at points, bears striking similarity with the Indian philosophy of language put forth by Bhart?hari in his V?kyapad?ya. [5]

Indian philosophy has been even more emphatic than Western thought with regard to the priority of the oral over the written. The tradition in both Hindu and Buddhist philosophy has been to correct the written text with the oral. It is the oral word, carefully memorized, guarded by the discipline of the Pr?ti??khyas, [6] and passed down from teacher to student through succeeding generations that has remained authoritative in India. [7] Thus Derrida’s proposition that writing is prior, not secondary, to speech will seem at first blush to be quite incredible. Even the West, with its greater stress on the written, has generally accepted the historical priority of oral languages to writing and so finds Derrida’s thesis to be outrageous. However, recent research by Andre Leroi-Gourhan on the marks associated with cave paintings, and by Alexander Marshack on the possibility of calendrical markings on prehistoric bone implements, in the discovery of the Tartaria Tablets, raises fundamental questions about our dating of the invention of writing to Sumer, around 3100 B.C. [8] Derrida cites this evidence as an initial reason for why we should take him seriously. But his real point has nothing to do with the historical priority of the written. His proposition that writing is prior to speech is simply part of his N?g?rjuna-like tactic of exposing the weakness of a position by turning its own stratagems against itself. [9] By reversing the usual speech/writing hierarchical opposition, which has obtained in the West since Socrates and throughout Indian thought, Derrida’s ultimate aim is to counter the simple choice of one of the terms over the other — to escape the system of metaphysical opposition that has dominated much Western and Indian philosophy. “Writing” for Derrida is not just the inscription of words on paper or computer program, but includes the neuronal traces in the brain which Freud identifies as memory, [10] and indeed is the active moment of differentiation which is the creative force of all language. [11] Derrida even playfully alludes to DNA as a “writing” or trace present in all living substances. Writing and its originary trace begins to sound like the sa?sk?ras or originary memory traces of traditional karma theory. Derrida’s initial aim in all of this is to deconstruct the traditional priority accorded speech (and its logocentric metaphysics of presence) over writing.

In relating Derrida’s critique to Indian philosophy and, in particular to Bhart?hari, we will examine: (1) Derrida’s deconstruction of the logocentric priority of speech over writing, (2) language as manifested in Derrida and Bhart?hari, and (3) language as a means for spiritual realization.

Derrida’s Deconstruction of the Priority of Speech over Writing

Derrida follows Nietzsche and Heidegger (and perhaps implicitly N?g?rjuna in Indian philosophy) in elaborating a critique or “metaphysics,” by which he means not only the Western philosophical tradition but everyday thought and language as well.

Western thought, says Derrida, has always been structured in terms of dichotomies or polarities: good vs. evil, being vs. nothingness, presence vs. absence, truth vs. error, identity vs. difference, mind vs. matter, man vs. woman, soul vs. body, life vs. death, nature vs. culture, speech vs. writing. [12]

These opposites, however, have not been seen as equal entities. The second term is always put in the position of being a fallen or corrupted version of the first. Thus evil is the lack of good, absence is the lack of presence, error is a distortion of truth, and difference is an obstruction of identity. The two terms are not held in an opposing tension but are placed in a hierarchical order which gives the first term priority both in time and quality. The general result has been the privileging of unity, identity, and temporal and spatial presence over diversity, difference, and deferment in space and time. Thus Western philosophy (and much of Indian philosophy) has answered the question of the nature of being in terms of presence.

Within this broad context, Derrida’s critique of Western metaphysics focuses on the privileging of the spoken over the written word. As we have already noted, this same privileging of speech over writing has characterized Indian thought. Barbara Johnson, one of Derrida’s translators, clearly summarizes his analysis of the privileging of speech as follows:

The spoken word is given a higher value because the speaker and listener are both present to the utterance simultaneously. There is no temporal or spatial distance between speaker, speech, and listener, since the speaker hears himself speak at the same moment as the listener does. This immediacy seems to guarantee the notion that in the spoken word we know what we mean, mean what we say, say what we mean and know what we have said. Whether or not perfect understanding always occurs in fact, this image of perfectly self-present meaning is, according to Derrida, the underlying ideal of Western culture. [13]

Derrida calls this belief in the self-presentation of meaning “Logocentricism,” from the Greek logos (speech, logic, reason, the Word of God). Writing, from the logocentric perspective, is seen as a secondary representation of speech to be used when speaking is impossible. The writer puts thought on paper, distancing it from the immediacy of speech and enabling it to be read by someone far away, even after the writer’s death. All of this is seen as a corruption of the self-presence of meaning, an opening of meaning to forms of corruption which the presence of speech would have prevented. [14] Derrida’s critique is not aimed at reversing this value system, and showing writing to be superior to speech. Rather, his critique attempts to dissect the whole system of metaphysical opposition upon which the speech versus writing debate is grounded. In so doing, Derrida finds that both speech and writing are beginninglessly structured by difference and distance. The very experience of meaning is itself an experience of difference, and this difference is shown by Derrida to inhabit the very heart of what appears to be immediate and present. In his commentary on Freud’s “mystic writing-pad” Derrida shows that difference is present even in the structures of the unconscious. [15] The apparent experience of a unitary self-presence of meaning and consciousness is found to arise from the repression of the differential structures from which they spring. [16] Logocentricism deconstructed is shown to depend on difference, and difference, in both time and space, to be characteristic of speech as well as writing.

Before examining Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentricism in detail, let us see if there are schools of Indian philosophy that fit into the logocentric category and are thus subject to Derrida’s critique. Within the ?stika or Orthodox traditions certainly the S??khya/Yoga, Vedanta, and Ny?ya schools are structured in terms of polarities such as identity versus difference, soul or self versus matter/m?y?, truth versus error, and so forth, in which the second term of the pair is always of a lower status. Ontological Being/Presence/Consciousness is identified with the first term of the pair. All also venerate speech over writing, perhaps even more strongly than is the case with Western philosophy. There is also a valuing of phonetic speech and writing over nonphonetic languages, such as Chinese. P??ini’s A???dhy?y? or Grammar is based on the sound of spoken Sanskrit, [17] and is thus a prime candidate for what Derrida calls “phonocentricism,” which is open to all the criticisms of logocentricism. [18] The negative status given to writing in the West is paralleled and accentuated in the Indian tradition. Scribes in India have had a low status and the texts they write are judged to be very unreliable. The written is valued only as a teaching aid for those too dull to remember. In fact the very act of writing was held to be ritually polluting in a late Vedic text — the Aitareya ?ra?yaka 5.5.3 states that a pupil should not recite the Veda after eating meat, seeing blood or a dead body, having intercourse or engaging in writing. [19] Clearly the ?stika or Orthodox schools of Indian philosophy (with the exception of the Grammarian school, which will be discussed later) largely share the same logocentric biases toward Being and Speech and against writing as those located by Derrida in Western metaphysics. Nor do the n?stika or Heterodox schools escape Derrida’s net. Jainism strongly shares in the soul/matter dialectic and, like Buddhism, agrees that language is merely conventional and cannot touch the real. This complete separation of speech from the real (most extreme in the M?dhyamika negation of speech into silence) is attacked by Derrida as being just as unsatisfactory as the extreme logocentric position, with its identification of speech with the real. It is not just the logocentric view which Derrida criticizes, but any philosophy which privileges one opposite or extreme over the other. Derrida’s net of deconstructive critique would then seem to be as potentially devastating to Indian philosophy as it is to Western philosophy. The one school that may escape Derrida, by having prefigured much of his critique, is the Grammarian school, especially in its formulation by Bhart?hari. Let us now test out this suggestion as we examine Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentricism.

Both Derrida and Bhart?hari agree that since philosophy must be done in language, literary analysis is as important as, and perhaps more important than, logical analysis. As Derrida puts it, philosophers have been able to impose their various conceptual systems only by ignoring or suppressing the disruptive effects of language. [20] Bhart?hari in V?kyapad?ya I:14 describes grammar as the “purifier of all the sciences.” It is through the use of correct forms of language — as identified by the Grammarians — that philosophic or any other kind of knowledge can be obtained. Both Bhart?hari and Derrida break down the barrier between literary criticism and philosophy.

If all knowledge comes through language, is there a source or ground of language which is outside of or beyond language? Does language depend on something else — God, the logos, Brahman? The answer for both Derrida and Bhart?hari is “no.” In Bhart?hari’s V?kyapad?ya the Absolute is the ?abdatattva, the Word-Principle, and therefore is not something apart from or beyond language. Derrida establishes his “no” by deconstructing the point of view that has dominated metaphysics: namely, that a separate Being or Presence is immediately reflected in speech and then given a secondary representation in writing. Derrida deconstructs this argument as it is presented in Plato, Rousseau, and others, by finding writing, when understood as diffèrance, to contain all of spoken language, and all inscribed language. This of course requires an enlarged concept of writing. In his reading of the Phaedrus, Derrida locates the basis for such an enlarged view of writing in Plato’s own text. Whereas Western philosophy has seen writing in the Phaedrus as being an orphan unable to communicate knowledge, Derrida finds evidence for a second kind of writing at 276a of the Phaedrus:

Socrates: But now tell me, is there another sort of discourse that is brother to written speech, but of unquestioned legitimacy? Can we see how it originates, and how much better and more effective it is than the other?
Phaedrus: What sort of discourse have you now in mind, and what is its origin?
Socrates: The sort that goes together with knowledge, and is written in the soul of the learner, that can defend itself, and knows to whom it should speak and to whom it should say nothing.
Phaedrus: Do you mean the discourse of a man who really knows which is living and animate? Would it be fair to call the written discourse only a kind of ghost (eidolon) of it?
Socrates: Precisely… [21]

In this passage Derrida finds evidence for a deconstruction or reversal of the usual Platonic view of writing:

While presenting writing as a false brother — traitor, infidel, and simulacrum — Socrates is for the first time led to envision the brother of this brother, the legitimate one, as another sort of writing: not merely as knowing, living, animate discourse, but as an inscription of truth in the soul. [22] This other sort of writing, written on the soul of the learner, is called the trace [23] or arche-writing [24] by Derrida, and is seen as the dynamic source of both speech and external writing. The necessity of arche-writing or trace being composed of the movement of difference is established in Derrida’s analysis of another dialogue, Philebus (17 a-b). Here Socrates notes that although the sound or cry which we first speak is one, it also possesses an unlimited variety of different sounds. [25] It is only through a limiting and mastering of the differences that understanding is obtained. Difference and relation are irreducible, says Derrida, and are designated as “writing” by Plato. [26] Derrida goes on to observe that all of this wisdom of Socrates, though originally spoken, comes to us only because it is written down after his death.

Derrida also establishes the need for the inner trace or arche-writing by a critique of Saussure’s linguistic theory. For Saussure, the basis of language is found in the natural bond of the signified (concept or sense) to the spoken word of which the written linage is a contamination. [27] But Saussure suggests that language can be best understood by an analogy to both the form and content of writing. Saussure finds that “difference” is the source of linguistic values. [28] It is precisely this general movement of difference, says Derrida, that is the arche-writing or trace which contains within it the possibility for all oral and written language. Speech and writing are expressions of one and the same language. Arche-writing is nothing but dynamic expressive difference. It does not depend on sound or writing, but is the condition for such sound and writing. Although it does not exist, its possibility is anterior to all expressions (signified/signifier, content/expression, and so forth). This intrinsic diffèrance, concludes Derrida, permits the articulation of speech and writing, and founds the metaphysical opposition between signifier and signified. Diffèrance is therefore the formation of form and the being imprinted of the imprint. [29]

Instead of the term arche-writing or trace, Bhart?hari uses the term ?abdatattva or Word-Principle. [30] Brahman, the Word-Principle, is without beginning or end. Although proclaimed to be one, it is divided by the function of its inherent powers. In particular it is through the sequencing power of time (k?la) that the Word-Principle manifests itself in the expressive activity of language, which becomes the model for all other activity. [31] This activity is seen as a real manifestation and not as a merely apparent (?a?kara’s understanding of vivartate) activity. Bhart?hari states:

Knowers of tradition (the Vedas) have declared that all this is the transformation [pari??ma?] of the word. It is from the chandas [hymns of the Vedas] that this universe has evolved. [32]

“Here the term pari??ma? is used to describe the same process which is described in I.1 by vivartate.” [33] Writing at the end of the fifth century A.D. Bhart?hari does not speak in terms of causality such as typify ?a?kara’s later debates, but emphasizes the marvelous activity by which the multiple universe is manifested out of the one Word-Principle or ?abdatattva. [34] For our present purposes the important point is that for Bhart?hari, Brahman, as the Word-Principle, is an intrinsically dynamic and expressive reality, and that language (and all of the universe) is its manifestation through the process of temporal becoming. [35] Like Derrida, Bhart?hari also uses the notion of a beginningless trace which is inherent in consciousness. Unlike Derrida, however, Bhart?hari discusses the trace of speech in relation to previous births.

This residual trace of speech has no beginning and it exists in every one as a seed in the mind. It is not possible that it should be the result of the effort of any person. Movements of the articulatory organs by children are not due to instruction by others but are known through intuition. [36]

Iyer notes that the term pratibh?gamy?? used here stands (1) for the residual traces of language use in previous births, and (2) for the faculty of speech with which the child is born and for the child’s instinct toward activating these traces in human life situations. [37] The next verse makes clear that such instinctual traces are inherently involved in all cognition, for “There is no cognition in the world in which the word does not figure. All knowledge is, as it were, intertwined with the word.” [38]

As was the case for Derrida, Bhart?hari sees the inherent trace consciousness of language as conditioning all psychic experience from deep sleep to dreams, to ordinary awareness and even to mystical states (states in which there is a direct supersensuous perception of the meaning-whole or spho?a). In the dream state, says Bhart?hari, the only difference is that the seeds or traces of language function in a more subtle manner. [39] It seems evident that Derrida’s development of Freud’s thought would be easily accommodated within Bhart?hari. Just as Derrida finds the psychological mechanism behind the Western experience of an unchanging logos, presence, or Self to be the suppression of the experience of difference within the psyche, so Bhart?hari rejects other Indian schools who equate the experience of Self with something external to consciousness and language. “[The Self] exists within in every individual, but appears to be external.” [40] For Bhart?hari, and it would seem for Derrida, the experience of Self is the unobstructed experience of ?abdatattva or arche-writing manifested in the temporal dynamic of language. Obstacles to this experience are identified as the incorrect understanding and use of language forms and the “ego-knots” that such impure usage produces. [41]

Not being part of the Western debate over the opposition between speech and writing as sparked by Socrates in the Phaedrus, Bhart?hari gives only passing reference to the status of writing — and then only to identify texts whose authors are known as opposed to texts considered to be without an author (apauru?ey.). When he does refer to it, as in V?kyapad?ya I:132, Bhart?hari uses the term ?gama. In his review of this verse and others where ?gama is used, Iyer concludes that what is meant is simply a text composed by some writer, in contrast to ?ruti or Vedic texts, which are said to be without authors. The contrast is not between written and spoken — as is the case for Derrida — but between texts whose authors are known and texts that are considered to be without any author. [42] Although the Vedas may be written, they are, like consciousness, eternal and so do not depend on any human author. [43] They are the criterion manifestation of the ?abdatattva and do not depend on being written down by any human author for their preservation. For those who cannot see the meaning of the Vedas, the composing of commentaries, through the use of reason which divides up the unitary meaning of the sentence, is done for teaching purposes or for the benefit of those who can only see superficially. [44] Bhart?hari, however, agrees with Derrida that one benefit of ?gama is that when teachers or authors die, their words continue and serve as the seed basis for the formation of further tradition. [45] Overall, there is no doubt that texts composed by authors, like authorless speech, are a manifestation of the ?abdatattva for Bhart?hari. For both, however, the temporal transformation of the originating source of language through speech and writing is seen to be continuous. If Bhart?hari were here today, and able to understand Derrida’s thought, perhaps he would not find the term arche-writing too far from his ?abdatattva. Certainly both would find common cause against those who locate the absolute outside of language or who maintain that language has no purchase on reality.

Language as Manifested in Derrida and Bhart?hari

For both Derrida and Bhart?hari it is the pure possibility of difference that is manifested as language. It is the intrinsic diffèrance of the arche-trace that permits the articulation of speech and writing. The arche-trace manifests into the opposing forms of inner concept and outer sound-image. Derrida uses the technical term “sign” to refer to the whole, “signified” to refer to the abstract concept, and “signifier” to refer to the spoken and heard sound-image. [46] Bhart?hari’s technical terminology would seem to provide a virtually perfect parallel: “spho?a” [47] to indicate the whole, “artha” to refer to the concept or meaning and “dhvani” to refer to the uttered and heard sound. For both Derrida and Bhart?hari the linguistic whole (the sign or spho?a), has an inherent force toward differentiation that produces the double manifestation of inner meaning (signified, artha) and spoken sound (signifier, dhvani). Although sign and spho?a are irreducible, neither can be experienced as pure presence.

Rooted within language, even in its most holistic form, is the pregnant push towards sequencing, sparing, punctuation — differentiation in time and space. In the V?kyapad?ya, the ?abdatattva, symbolized by the seed sound AUM, [48] is sequenced by the power of time into the various recentions of the Veda and all spoken words. [49] For Derrida the image is one of the sign, as the linguistic whole, being differentiated by spacing (on the page) and interval or pause (in speaking) into articulated meaning and sound-image. It is the actualizing of this inherent force for differentiation that enables language to function. But it is, at the same time, the limit of language. As Derrida puts it, since a sign (the unity of signified and signifier) cannot be produced within the plentitude of absolute presence, there is, therefore, no full speech, no absolute truth or full meaning. [50] In the words of Lao Tzu, “The tao that can be spoken is not the eternal tao” [51] Or as Hegel once put it, “When speaks the soul, alas, the soul no longer speaks.” [52] But whereas Lao Tzu and Hegel are mourning the inability of manifested language to make present the soul or the tao, Derrida and Bhart?hari emphasize the positive contribution of articulated speech. The spho?a and the sign (Derrida’s whole) are manifested, and in the dynamic tension of that manifestation lies truth.

Rather than arriving at a skepticism of language, namely, that it is devoid of any truth content (the conclusion of the Buddhists and many modern skeptical critics of language), truth is seen to be contained in the very dynamics of language itself. Thus Derrida’s thesis that there is no referent outside of the text is not as nihilistic as it at first sounds, and Bhart?hari’s spho?a is not as artificial an entity as much Indian philosophy has assumed.

In V?kyapad?ya I:5, there are two terms which Bhart?hari uses to describe the Veda: it is the pr?ptyup?ya or the means for the attainment of Brahman; and it is the anuk?ra or symbolization of Brahman. For now let us confine our attention to the term anuk?ra, which comes from the root k?, “to do” or “to make” and suggests the dynamic activity of the Word-Principle. The V?tti elucidates the verse by stating that the activity of the Vedic seers in speaking the mantras is the criterion case of word-making activity. The term mantra, notes Aurobindo, signifies a “crossing over” through thought (root man, “to think,” and t?, “to cross over”) from the Absolute or Unmanifested to the human experience of manifested language. [53] As pure Sanskrit language, the mantras are conjunctions of certain powerful seed syllables which induce a particular rhythm or vibration in the psychosomatic structure of consciousness and arouse a corresponding psychic state. Such seed sounds can be differentiated in a great variety of ways producing an immense progeny of language. The evocative power is at its height before the mantras become too locked into particular forms of articulation. Poetry is at its peak before language becomes too fully elaborated. Then it must be deconstructed or evolved backwards to recover its original power for signification. Articulation is necessary, but the further it goes the greater the loss of freedom and power within language.

This also seems to be what Derrida means when he refers to the prose book as a corpse of language which must be exited from or transcended [54] — the delimiting of the multisignificant roots has been pursued to its logical conclusion, and the power of the word has been exhausted. The aim of the project of deconstruction, says Derrida, agreeing with Aurobindo, is to get back to metaphoric, poetic language, where the power for signification has not yet been used up. [55] Bhart?hari also reminds us that as language divides and separates, this necessary process in the end can become a source of confusion. The process of difference, pushed to its logical conclusion, produces such a plethora of speaking accents that communication of knowledge is obstructed. [56] Unlike Derrida and Aurobindo, Bhart?hari’s solution is not to deconstruct or reverse the process of differentiation, but to control it by the imposition of strict grammatical rules (the science of the Grammarians) by which the power of the root mantras to convey knowledge and action will not be obfuscated. [57] Bhart?hari, along with the other Grammarians, claims to have uncovered the pure forms of the correct unfolding of the patterns of differentiation inherent in the ?abdatattva and symbolized (anuk?ra) in criterion form in the initial speaking of the Vedas. [58]

Another aspect of the meaning of anuk?ra, as we find it in V?kyapad?ya I:5, is the notion of resemblance. Carpenter puts it well:

The Veda, as the anuk?ra? of Brahman standing in a position of imitative resemblance to its source, occupies a mediating position between this source and the diverse forms of the world. It presents, within the dynamic framework of the world as a whole, a level of expression and action which is directly related to the unitary ground of that world. It thus presents the established order of dharma? in contrast to the often disorderly world of everyday experience (vyavah?ra?). [59]

The Veda is not a direct description of Brahman, the ?abdatattva. Language functions to mediate action, not ideas. It is the verb not the noun that is basic. Vedic revelation, for Bhart?hari, does not provide us with a representation of the transcendent object, the Word-Principle. What the Veda does do is to mediate the inherent action of the ?abdatattva directly through the dynamic idiom of language. “The Veda is thus the outward linguistic form of the dynamic self-manifesting act of the Word-Principle itself.” [60] To the extent that other language use approximates the Veda, it also shares in the self-manifesting of the Word-Principle. The function of the Grammarians is to help all language use, from whatever science, realize that goal. [61] It seems dear that Derrida would not agree with Bhart?hari’s privileging of scripture in general or of the Veda in particular. He would probably also criticize the notion of the Veda as manifesting the original linguistic form or anuk?ra of arche-writing. The critique Derrida offers of the Bible as a Grammar of Being in accordance with which “the world in all its parts is a cryptogram to be constituted or reconstituted through poetic inscription or deciphering…” [62] has yet to be tested against the Veda — but that is another project. It is clear, however, that Bhart?hari’s emphasis on language as active rather than passive, as necessarily engaging both thought and action, as not representing but mediating the absolute, is largely in agreement with the overall thrust of Derrida’s deconstructive critique.

Language as a Means for Spiritual Realization

If language is experienced as a mediation of arche-writing or ?abdatattva, then it is also a means for spiritual realization. Language is not merely epistemological in function. Over against ?a?kara’s assessment of m?y? (including all language and even the Vedas) as having epistemological but not ontological status, [63] both Derrida and Bhart?hari locate the real in arche-writing or ?abdatattva, which is not separate from manifested language. While for ?a?kara language (and the Vedas) must be transcended for spiritual realization (mok?a), for Bhart?hari it is in language that union with the ?abdatattva is realized.

Before looking at Bhart?hari’s clear conception of v?k or speech as the means for the spiritual realization (pr?ptyup?ya) of ?abdatattva, let us test Derrida’s grammatology to see if, like Bhart?hari’s science of grammar (vy?kara?a) it can also be construed as a means for spiritual realization. In his deconstruction of the Western metaphysics of logos or presence, Derrida takes pains to distance himself from any suggestion of theistic religion. Derrida considers his own notion of arche-writing or prototrace to be an atheistic or, more properly, a nontheistic proposal. Of course the term arche-writing is meant to be confounding. How can a writing or trace precede that writing or trace which is left behind? But, aside from Derrida’s perplexing play of language with regard to the divine, we do find some hints that support our interpretation of arche-writing as being parallel to ?abdatattva. In Of Grammatology [64] Derrida discusses the nature of arche-writing or trace. The manifested trace cannot be thought, without the thinking of the retention of difference, of all manifestation, so that the trace contains all history and all possibility. This history and possibility is not static but contains an inherent force for unmotivated self-manifestation. [65] This self-manifestation is structured according to the diverse possibilities — genetic and structural — of the trace. “This formulation is not theological, as one might believe somewhat hastily,” says Derrida. “The ‘theological’ is a determined moment in the total movement of the trace.” [66] The theological is a historically second dissimulation of the trace. The general structure of the unmotivated trace is that of temporal becoming. The trace is not more natural than cultural, not more biological than spiritual. “It is that starting from which a becoming-unmotivated of the sign, and with it all the ulterior oppositions between physio and its other, is possible.” [67]

Derrida’s writing is purposely not systematic. But he does give a fair hint as to the shape that the becoming of the trace takes:

Representation mingles with what it represents, to the point where one speaks as one writes, one thinks as if the represented were nothing more than the shadow or reaction of the representer… In this play of representation, the point of origin becomes ungraspable. There are things like reflecting pools, and images, an infinite reference from one to the other, but no longer a source, a spring [source]. There is no longer simple origin. For what is reflected is split in itself and not only as an addition to itself of its image. The reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles. The origin of the speculation becomes a difference. What can look at itself is not one; and the law of addition of the origin to its representation, or the thing to its image, is that one plus one makes at least three. [68]

It is the direct experience of this dynamic process of becoming, not as a process of static reflection or metaphysical opposition, that would for Derrida be the realization of the spiritual whole. The sensitive deconstruction of the illusions of permanence, of stasis, or presence (which our ordinary experience and many of our philosophies have superimposed on the becoming of language) is Derrida’s prescription as the means for the realization of the whole. We cannot name this whole “spiritual,” for that is already to engage the vocabulary of metaphysical opposition. But to understand the whole as manifestation of the inherent difference of the trace is for Derrida the goal. To go from the inscribed trace (writing) to the spoken word and the arche-writing which prefigures and predisposes both, only to be thrown back again, in a continual deconstructive reverse, would seem to be Derrida’s use of language as a spiritual discipline. Although this may look like a M?dhyamikan answer, it is not. The deconstructive reverse does not result in the silence (??nya) of language, but rather in the realization that the dynamic tension in the becoming of language is itself the whole. For Derrida, all of this cannot be understood as abstract theorizing. The language we are deconstructing is our own thinking and speaking — our own consciousness. We ourselves are the text we are deconstructing. That is why, for Derrida, there is nothing outside of texts. Deconstruction is the process of becoming self-aware, or self-realization.

Can we say that this Derridean deconstruction of language is a means for spiritual realization? A comparison of Derrida with Bhart?hari helps us to see why we can answer this question in the affirmative. Like Derrida,

Bhart?hari maintains that the analysis of linguistic experience is an examination of the very nature of our consciousness. Just as for Derrida consciousness is nothing but trace or writing, so for Bhart?hari consciousness is nothing but ?abdatattva — the inextricably intertwining of consciousness with the word. [69] But one difference that must be acknowledged immediately is that while Derrida deconstructs all books, all scriptures, privileging none, Bhart?hari explicitly states that the Veda is the means for the realization of Brahman. [70]

Bhart?hari is not simply privileging one book or one scripture over all others. His thought is more complex and subtle than that. On the one hand, as we have seen above, Bhart?hari has said that the Veda is the anuk?ra of the ?abdatattva — that is, the Veda is the normative form of the manifested ?abdatattva. All other language is merely a further elaboration of the criterion manifestation of the ?abdatattva as the Veda. The Veda is not one book among others; it is the true manifestation of the ?abdatattva. That is why Bhart?hari describes it in V?kyapad?ya I:5 as both the anuk?ra and the pr?ptyup?ya or means of realization of Brahman. On the other hand, however, Bhart?hari also describes the science of grammar as the royal path and door to spiritual realization. [71] Grammar is no longer merely an aid to the study of the Veda but is itself a yoga or means to realization. This shift is possible because Bhart?hari sees Veda as the manifestation of the ?abdatattva itself; grammar, as the science of the Veda, is at the same time the science of the ?abdatattva or Word-Principle itself and thus a yoga. A few verses later, Bhart?hari specifically describes a “Yoga preceded by the knowledge and use of the correct forms of words,” namely, the science of grammar. [72] Later on at V?kyapad?ya I:131, Bhart?hari gives more detailed indications as to what this yoga of the word involves. I have given a detailed analysis of this passage elsewhere and will not repeat it here. [73] For our present purpose the important point to note is Bhart?hari’s locus on the individual’s inner experience of language as involving an inner transformation — which parallels Derrida’s emphasis on grammatology as the science of writing before speech and in speech with power to change the individual’s self-awareness. [74]

Bhart?hari’s emphasis on language as an inner transformative experience not only provides promising links with the modern thought of Derrida, but can also be seen as a compromise between the more individualistic Buddhists and Naiy?yikas. Carpenter puts it this way:

This is the case because for Bhart?hari, the Word-Principle is the foundation not only of the Veda and the orthodox traditional world derived from it, but also of the individual’s experience in appropriating that world. This experience is characterized by elements of genuine interiority, yet these elements are grounded in the same Word-Principle which manifests itself as the Veda. [75]

Like Derrida, however, Bhart?hari analyzes the individual’s inner experience not as the static presence of a set of divine words or forms (the logos model), nor as a superimposition of epistemological forms (?a?kara’s m?y?), but as an inner word which is primarily productive of activity and only secondarily productive of knowledge. [76] Bhart?hari’s ?abdatattva, the Word-Principle, is primarily an ontological principle, and only secondarily epistemological.

We have seen how for Derrida the movement of language was a continuous sequencing of the arche-writing or trace into the spoken and written words, only to be thrown back again in a continual deconstructive reverse. The same kind of implosion-explosion cycle can be found in Bhart?hari. Just as the ?abdatattva manifests itself objectively as the cosmos, [77] so the same Word-Principle manifests itself within all individuals in their experience of language. [78] Within the individual, the experience of the sequenced parts (letters and words) is subordinate to the unified whole (the sentence). Understanding of the sentence is only possible because its words taken together evoke a flash of illumination (pratibh? or spho?a) which is in some sense already prefigured (Derrida’s arche-trace?) within consciousness. [79] This is due to the activity of the ?abdatattva. Bhart?hari describes it as follows:

When the meanings (of the individual word) have been understood separately, a flash of understanding takes place which they call the meaning of the sentence, brought about by the meanings of the individual words.

It cannot be explained to others as such and such. It is experienced by everyone within himself and even the subject [of the experience] is not able to render an account of it to himself.

It is something indefinable (avic?rit?) and it brings about a kind of amalgamation of the meanings of individual words, covering the whole sentence as it were, it becomes its object.

No one can avoid in one’s activity that (flash of understanding) produced either through words or through the working of one’s predispositions. [80]

This pratibh? or flash of understanding is insight into the whole meaning and form of the ?abdatattva. Pratibh? precedes and predisposes all human and animal activity. But it is also the culmination of our sequenced language activity as the illumination of the sentence. As such pratibh? is the means for the realization of the ?abdatattva, for they are but two sides of the same coin. Pratibh? is of the nature of one’s inner self (?abdatattva), but requires the words of language for its manifestation and realization. [81] Bhart?hari’s theory of intuition is not separate from his theory of language, but, indeed, is its fulfillment. Pratibh? is the experience in which the twofold manifestation of the ?abdatattva – as language and world, as knower and known — meet. This intuition is neither

a purely subjective event nor an intuition of a thing-in-itself. “It is rather the intrinsic luminosity of the world as a dynamic interrelated whole which is revealed by language.” [82] Language is the enactment of the interrelatedness of the manifested ?abdatattva. As Bhart?hari puts it in V?kyapad?ya III:2:14:

That one Reality is seen as the word, the meaning and their relation. It is the seen, the seeing, the see-er and the fruit of the seeing. [83]

Pratibh? is the intuition of all of this and is described by Bhart?hari as the light which removes ignorance. It is indefinable (avic?rit?) because what it reveals is not some “thing,” “idea,” or “presence,” but rather the dynamic interrelatedness of all things — an insight giving rise to action resulting in spiritual realization.

For both Derrida and Bhart?hari, the science of grammar enables one to experience language as more than purely epistemological in function. As we speak and write it, it “speaks and writes” us impelling us to action (dharma). While it is clear that Bhart?hari’s speaking, writing, and acting of the word is a yoga or means of spiritual realization, Derrida only offers hints in that direction. It is clear that for Derrida the “theological” is a secondary manifestation of the trace, and that its problem and the problem with most Western metaphysics (and religion) is that the theological is a reification resulting from the suppressing or the difference inherent in language — the locus of its power in both spiritual and worldly action. Derrida’s rejection of theology, metaphysics, and much philosophy is rooted in Bhart?hari’s observation that the dynamic interrelatedness of language cannot be described by the agent who experiences it. For both Bhart?hari and Derrida any such description would be a reduction of the “dynamic interrelatedness of all experience” to some “thing” or “idea.” Such a reductionism robs language of its power of action. This loss is simultaneously a loss of linguistic power, and a loss of the power of spiritual realization.

For both Derrida and Bhart?hari the correct understanding and practice of language results in a teleological transformation of experience. This common conclusion arises from remarkably different religious roots: Derrida’s understanding from a prophetic critique of the Jewish and Christian experience of God; Bhart?hari’s from an interpretation of Vedic dharma which took into account the Ny?ya and Buddhist claims for individual spiritual experience.

We cannot say much of Derrida’s religious roots and goal. In his relentless deconstruction of every logocentric theology, and even every negative theology, he keeps his spiritual self well hidden. [84] But perhaps this is the clue. Could it be that his spiritual source and vision are rooted in the Hebrew prophets? Just as Hebrew prophecy ruthlessly criticized every objectification of God which packaged and separated God from the divine demand for ethical action in daily life, [85] so Derrida rigorously deconstructs all theology, philosophy, and ordinary language which objectifies our experience into false Gods and unreal presences. That Derrida’s deconstruction does have a prophetic goal is suggested by his essay “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy.” [86] In this reading of the New Testament “Revelation or Apocalypse to John,” Derrida suggests that the apocalyptic be considered “a transcendental condition of all discourse, of all experience itself, of every mark or every trace.” [87] The Apocalypse of John, he suggests, could be taken as an exemplary revelation of this transcendental structure. And the theme of the Johannine Apocalypse he identifies as the recurrent and imperative “come” of the text (Revelation 22:17-20). “Come” evokes both the imminent coming of the Lord and the imperative that the hearer come quickly. The call beyond being or logos itself comes from beyond being. It cannot come from a voice which is given any personification in our hearing of it — for that would be to “package” it in categories of presence. “Come” is plural in itself, in oneself. Its only content, says Derrida, is its resounding imperative tone [88] that calls forth from us action. The other characteristic of this exemplary book of Apocalypse is indicated in its final words “Do not seal [close] the words of the inspiration of this book…” To seal is to encapsulate or close off the inherent “come” of language and/as religion. The “come” from beyond being and the imperative “come” within oneself never close. The action of coming to the call that never ceases is the end to be realized. All of this fits well with the prophetic impulse of the Hebrew Bible. Its relentless negation of any conceptualization or speaking of the divine (the sin of idolatry), its prophetic hearing of the call to obedience which must always translate into action, and its open-ended future which calls us to become to an end which is always simultaneously a new beginning — all of this seems to justify our rooting of Derrida in the spiritual critique of the Hebrew Prophets, which Derrida has reformulated as a critique of all idolatrous use of language.

Like Derrida, Bhart?hari’s science of grammar is also a call to action, to dharma. Bhart?hari reinterprets Vedic dharma as the dharma of the Word-Principle, the ?abdatattva. This shift means that the dharma that one seeks to realize is no longer outside oneself, one’s language or the Veda, but is the very essence of one’s consciousness just as for Derrida the voice of the prophetic “come” becomes the “come let us go,” the inner voice of language, so also for Bhart?hari, the Vedic dharma as the ?abdatattva becomes the dharma of “correct” language within individual consciousness. The purification of speech, the task of the traditional Vedic discipline of grammar, becomes the means for inner spiritualization.

Conclusion

This initial comparative study of Derrida’s deconstructive grammatology and Indian philosophy has proved stimulating and fruitful. It has identified many points of formal and often substantive contact between Derrida and traditional Indian thought. Further analysis of these areas of contact should prove challenging and invigorating for both Eastern and Western thought. That this will be the case has been exemplified in the more specific comparison offered between Derrida and Bhart?hari. This comparison has demonstrated new insights on both sides. Reading Bhart?hari with Derrida highlights the error of previous interpretations which have read the V?kyapad?ya through decidedly Advaitic eyes. It has also highlighted the remarkably original way in which Bhart?hari accommodated the Buddhist and Ny?ya stress on individual spiritual experience while yet retaining an orthodox grounding in Vedic dharma, now reinterpreted as ?abdatattva. Derrida’s challenge to Bhart?hari would take the form of a thoroughgoing deconstruction of the V?kyapad?ya. The most evident point of challenge here would be directed at Bhart?hari’s Pratibh? doctrine as a case of “mystical perception.” This is of course the very criticism mounted against Bhart?hari by the M?m??sakas. Since Derrida does not believe that anything like “pure” perception — perception free of representation or interpretation — exists, [89] his challenge is a significant one.

From the side of Western thought, the comparison has also been fruitful. It has called into question current suggestions that Derrida can be understood as a M?dhyamikan Buddhist — for this analyst shows him to agree with Bhart?hari on exactly those points which separate Bhart?hari and N?g?rjuna. The comparison with Bhart?hari also suggests that Derrida’s relation to scripture (as evidenced in his reading of Revelation) may well turn out to be functionally parallel to Bhart?hari’s handling of the Veda. Scripture is incorporated into the very structure of language and consciousness, thus becoming an ontological ground rather than a metaphysical object.

But perhaps even more important than what each side can learn about itself from the other are the significant points of common emphasis: that language is beginningless and coextensive with consciousness, that language is grounded in its dynamic sequencing by time rather than in any fixed structural forms, that this sequencing takes the form of the dynamic interrelatedness of the cosmos and carries within it an imperative call for action, that this call is obstructed or suppressed by our egocentric creation of concepts with which we identify ourselves as true presence (the sin of idolatry or the ignorance of avidy?), and that the way to counteract this obstruction is the scientific deconstructing (grammatology) or purifying (Vy?kara?a) of language, which results in some form of “spiritual realization.”

For the practice of philosophy, both Derrida and Bhart?hari would reserve a high place. The task of philosophy is to deconstruct (grammatology) or purity by linguistic criticism (Vy?kara?a) language use in all the sciences. The specific application of this philosophic critique to religion was stated by Professor Murti in a way that Derrida and Bhart?hari would perhaps both accept:

Without philosophical appraisal and critical alertness, religion would be blind, like the proverbial cock which had picked up a diamond but did not know its worth. It would degenerate into Dogma and Fanaticism. [90]

The call of Derrida and Bhart?hari is that philosophy (both Western and Indian) urgently needs to get on with its deconstructive and purging task.

Notes

1. T. R. V. Murti, “The Philosophy of Language in the Indian Context,” in Studies in Indian Thought: The Collected Papers of Professor T. R. V. Murti, ed. by Harold Coward (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1983).

2. Ibid., p. 363.

3. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

4. Ibid., pp. 52 and 14.

5. The V?kyapad?ya of Bhart?hari, trans. by K. A. Subramania Iyer (Poona: Deccan College, 1965). I have also read K. A. Subramania Iyer’s edition of the Sanskrit text with Professor T. R. V. Murti. An English summary of the primary Sanskrit philosophical texts of the Grammarian tradition of India along with a major introductory essay has been edited by myself and K. Kunjunni Raja, Philosophy of the Grammarians Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1991).

6. See Harold Coward, The Spho?a Theory of Language (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1986), pp. 7-9.

7. See Harold Coward, Sacred Word and Sacred Text: Scripture in World Religions (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1988), chaps. 4 and 5.

8. Herbert N. Schneidan, “The Word against the Word: Derrida on Textuality,” Semeia 23 (1982): 10.

9. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 20.

10. Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Writing and Difference, chap. 7. pp. 222 ff.

11. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 51. Grammatology, for Derrida, is the science of writing before speech and in all speech.

12. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. by Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), Translator’s Introduction, p. x.

13. Ibid., p. ix.

14. Ibid.

15. Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” pp. 221 ff.

16. Ibid., p. 197.

17. George Cardona, P??ini: A Survey of Research (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1976), p. 142.

18. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 3. In this regard it should be noted that a recent article by Zhang Longxi shows Derrida’s adoption of the view of Leibniz, Hegel, and others that Chinese and other ideographic (rather than phonetic) languages are mute, and thus free of Western metaphysics, to be wrong. As Zhang puts it, “Chinese poetry is essentially not a script to be deciphered but a song to be chanted, depending for its effect on a highly complicated tonal pattern.” See his article “The Tao and the Logos” Critical inquiry 2 (1985): 390.

19. As quoted by F. St?l, ‘The Concept of Scripture in the Indian Tradition,” in Sikh Studies, ed. by M. Juergensmeyer and Gerald Barrier (Berkeley: Berkeley Religious Studies Series, 1979), pp. 122- 123. See also J. A. B. van Buitenen, “Hindu Sacred Literature,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 3d ed., vol. 8; and C. Mackenzie Brown, “Pur??a as Scripture: From Sound to Image of the Holy Word in the Hindu Tradition,” History of Religious 26, no. 1 (1986): 68-73.

20. Christopher, Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 18.

21. The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 521.

22. Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, p. 149.

23. Ibid., p. 152.

24. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 57.

25. The Collected Dialogues of Plato, “Philebus,” p. 1093.

26. Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Dissemination. p. 163.

27. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 38.

28. Ibid., p. 52.

29. The sentences above summarize pp 57-63, Of Grammatology.

30. V?kyapad?ya I:1.

31. Ibid., I:2.

32. Ibid., I:120.

33. D. Carpenter, “Revelation and Experience in Bhart?hari’s V?kyapad?ya,” Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Sudasiens 29 (1985): 190.

34. Ibid. See also V?kyapad?ya III:3:81, and III:9:17 and 26.

35. Ibid., I:120.

36. Ibid., I:122, V?tti.

37. Iyer’s note 2 on V?kyapad?ya I:122, in The V?kyapad?ya of Bhart?hari, p. 110.

38. V?kyapad?ya I:123.

39. Ibid., I:123, V?tti.

40. Ibid., I:128, V?tti.

41. Ibid., I:130-131 and the V?ttis.

42. See Iyer’s note 1 on V?kyapad?ya I:132, in The V?kyapad?ya of Bhart?hari, p. 119.

43. V?kyapad?ya I:132.

44. Ibid., I:135.

45. Ibid., I:132.

46. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 63.

47. V?kyapad?ya I:81.

48. Ibid., I:9.

49. Ibid., I:5.

50. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 69.

51. As explained by Zhang Longxi, “The Tao and the Logos,” p. 391.

52. As quoted by Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. by Susanne K. Langer (New York: Dover, 1953). p. 7.

53. Aurobindo, The Secret of the Veda (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1971), p. 48 and pp. 203-214.

54. Jacques Derrida, “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book” in Writing and Difference, pp. 75-76.

55. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 272.

56. V?kyapad?ya I:88.

57. Ibid., I:14.

58. For a presentation of the whole Grammarian tradition, see Harold Coward and K. Kunjunni Raja, The Philosophy of the Grammarians (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

59. Carpenter, “Revelation and Experience in Bhart?hari’s V?kyapad?ya” p. 194.

60. Ibid.

61. V?kyapad?ya I:12-14.

62. Derrida, “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book,” p. 76.

63. T. M. P. Mahadevan, The Philosophy of Advaita (Madras: Ganesh & Co., 1969), chap. 8.

64. Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 46 ff.

65. One thinks here of the notion of l?l? or the unmotivated free play of the divine in Indian philosophy — the free phenomenalizing of the divine.

66. Derrida, Of Grammatology. p. 47.

67. Ibid., p. 48.

68. Ibid., p. 36.

69. V?kyapad?ya I:123. See also K. A. S. Iyer, Bhart?hari (Poona: Deccan College, 1969), pp. 61, 68.

70. V?kyapad?ya I:5.

71. Ibid., I:14-16 and 131.

72. Ibid., I:20.

73. Harold Coward, “The Yoga of the Word (?abdap?rvayoga),” The Adyar Library Bulletin 49 (1985): 1-13.

74. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 51.

75. Carpenter, “Revelation and Experience in Bhart?hari’s V?kyapad?ya,” p. 199.

76. V?kyapad?ya I:51. “The energy (kratu) called the word, existing within, as the yolk in the pea-hen’s egg, has an action-like function and assumes the sequence of its parts.”

77. Ibid., III:3:81.

78. Ibid., II:144.

79. Ibid., II:437-438 and II:143-145. For a more detailed discussion, see Harold Coward, The Spho?a Theory of Language (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1986), pp. 119-125.

80. V?kyapad?ya II:143-146. Translation by K. Subramania Iyer (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1977), pp. 60-61.

81. V?kyapad?ya II:146, V?tti.

82. Carpenter, “Revelation and Experience in Bhart?hari’s V?kyapad?ya,” p. 203.

83. V?kyapad?ya III:2:14. Translation by K. Subramania Iyer (Poona: Deccan College, 1971), p. 72.

84. See Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play,” in The Structuralist Controversy ed. R. Macksey and E. Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), pp. 248, 249, 264, 265; Dissemination, pp. 293-294; Of Grammatology, pp. 71-73. etc; and Writing and Difference, pp. 64-78 and 79-153.

85. See the book of Amos in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Habermas also traces Derrida to Hebrew roots; see Jurgen Habermas, Discourse on Modernity.

86. Jacques Derrida, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,” Semeia 23 (1982): 63-97.

87. Ibid., p. 87.

88. Ibid., p. 94.

89. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 54.

90. Murti, “The Philosophy of Language in the Indian Context,” p. 376.

Proselytization In India: An Indian Christian’s Perspective

C. Alex Alexander ~ May 22, 2003

Since colonial times to the present, the impetus for Christian proselytizing work in India has largely emanated from Western Christian Church groups and missions. The latter’s continuing obsession for promoting religious conversions under the aegis of India’s Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom has triggered a raging debate among religious and political leaders of that country. Many Hindus of the Indian Diaspora have also been drawn into it.

Over seventy years ago, Mahatma Gandhi stated that: “proselytizing under the cloak of humanitarian work is unhealthy, to say the least. It is most resented by people here.[1]” The resentment that Gandhi alluded to has increased in India over the years, mostly due to the persistence of religious conversions engineered by Christian evangelists who derive their financial support from foreign sources. Fundamentalist Muslims too have entered the fray in recent years with substantive financial contributions from Muslim countries interested in furthering the spread of Islam in India. Some Hindu groups have resorted to reverse conversions. All these trends are destructive to India’s time-tested culture of religious tolerance.

The muteness of liberal Indian Christians, both in India and overseas, is indeed surprising. The aim of this essay is to rectify that omission at least in part. I hope that liberal Indians of all faiths will debate this issue with their fundamentalist counterparts in a similar vein to prevent inter-religious conflicts in that subcontinent. At the end of this essay, I shall present for your consideration a plan for pre-empting the religious militancy embedded in the fundamentalist varieties of both Christianity and Islam.

Though I have been living in the United States (US) for over forty years, I have maintained my moorings in the Indian culture through periodic visits to that country and close interactions with my Indian friends here regardless of their religious affiliations. The gift that I cherish most from my Indian origin and parental influence is one of unbridled religious tolerance. That Indic tradition of allowing people of diverse faiths to seek their own spiritual centering is now under attack in India at the hands of fundamentalists of all religions.

The divisive and supercilious natures of their arguments have given me the impetus to write this article. I am not a religious scholar. But, I do value and cherish the teachings of Jesus as conveyed to me through my early religious influences in my childhood. Therefore, I am able to empathize with the angst of an adherent of any religion when he or she is confronted by the caricature of one’s personal faith as portrayed by a fundamentalist of another religion. Like all my non-Christian friends, I too am annoyed when a well-meaning Christian fundamentalist knocks on my door and asks me whether I am “born-again” and whether I would like to be saved! I can internalize the frustration of a non-Christian subjected to such an intrusive interrogation.

I am well aware that fundamentalist Christians may condemn my views expressed in this article. If they do, I am certain that I will be able to weather their damnation because of my roots in an ancient Christian tradition whose commitment to the tenets of Jesus is no less than theirs. My faith will allow me to forgive their condemnation. I hope that their beliefs will likewise permit them to forgive my interpretations of Jesus’ teachings if they find them to be at variance with theirs.

My religious tradition has always placed more emphasis on the spiritual dimension of Jesus’ teachings than in the establishment of Bible’s historicity. My reading of the history of early Christianity leads me to believe that the Western churches’ obsession for converting others to Christianity is based more on their historical tradition of using proselytization as an instrument of statecraft for the extension of their political and mercantile influences, than in furthering the spiritual welfare of their flocks.

Early Christianity

The ancient traditions of Christian churches evolved from their native eastern Semitic belief systems. But, most of the currently existing dogmas of Christianity as advanced by the Western churches were molded by the impact of Greco-Roman traditions. To this day, the ancient (often referred to as oriental orthodox) churches of Syria, India (in Kerala), Ethiopia, Egypt, and Armenia have successfully shielded themselves from the dogmas of Western churches. But, that was not easy in India after the arrival of the European colonizers there.

In 1498 CE, the Portuguese tried and failed in a hostile takeover of the ancient Indian Orthodox Church through intimidation[2]. Again, starting from 186 CE, the Indian Orthodox Church was subjected to the machinations of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) of the United Kingdom with the connivance of the British Residents who were assigned to the Kingdom of Travencore to serve as Agents of the British Crown[2a]. Such meddling in the internal affairs of the ancient church resulted in the formation of a proselytizing group called the CMS, which is now part of the Church of South India (CSI). Subsequently in 1889 CE, another split in the original Indian Orthodox Church occurred to create a “reformed” group, with an explicit recognition that evangelism is essential for the growth of Christianity. That reformed orthodox group is known as the Mar Thoma Church. Interestingly, that Church’s conversion activities have remained modest and are mostly undertaken outside of Kerala.

The original Indian Orthodox Church too has been buffeted over the centuries by internal feuds. But, they have all been unrelated to theological issues. In 1912 CE, this ancient and original orthodox church splintered to form two separate churches, one known as the Malankara Indian Orthodox Church totally autocephalous with its own spiritual head in Kottayam, Kerala and another called the Malankara Syrian Orthodox Church subject to Patriarchal oversight from the Syrian Orthodox Patriarch in Damascus, Syria[2c]. That division appears to have been based more on issues of autonomy and nationalism than on canonical differences. The Indian Supreme Court was recently drawn into yet another court fight between these two groups to settle issues concerning property rights of their respective churches. The theological beliefs of the original Indian orthodox churches along with their Egyptian, Armenian, Syrian and Ethiopian counterparts as well as the Greek and Russian orthodox churches (known as the Eastern Orthodox) seem to have survived in tact over a span of over 1600 years. They did not develop the same degree of fixation about proselytization as their Western counterparts did.

Unlike the Western churches, the oriental orthodox churches did not raise armies or promote crusades as the Bishop of Rome (Pope’s title in early Christianity) did in order to spread Christianity. The oriental orthodox churches seek God realization through the mental disciplines of contemplation and prayer in lieu of dependence on Christian eschatology. From the earliest of times, they exercised moderation in the practice of Jesus’ commandment to spread the “good news or evangelion”. They fulfill their obligation to “propagate” their faiths through natural processes such as births, marriages and the inclusion of those who seek conversion brought about by real changes in their religious convictions. That has remained so for nearly two millennia.

Even in today’s post-Communist Russia with its newly established religious freedom, the Russian Orthodox Church does not look upon kindly at proselytization undertaken by any religious sect. In Greece, its Constitution also prohibits proselytization. Whenever it is flouted by a religious sect, the Greek Orthodox Church seeks governmental intervention to suppress it[3]. I am not holding up either Greece or Russia as a model of democracy. Greece is a theocratic state since Greek Orthodox Christianity is its state religion. It restricts the office of its Presidency to citizens of that faith. But, I am merely citing Greece and Russia as examples of two Western nations that do not tolerate proselytization even when they are undertaken by Christian denominations.

The fundamentalist Christians both in India and abroad have been too quick to condemn as draconian the recent anti-conversion legislations enacted by a few Indian states. Proselytization was not a distinctive hallmark of Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Churches of early Christianity. Jesus himself appears to have condemned proselytization when he said, “Woe unto you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more than the child of hell than yourselves.[4]”

I often think of those verses whenever I hear of mass conversions of Dalits and tribals in India. They often seem to become outcasts twice! It is unfortunate that caste prejudice still persists not only among many Hindus but also among many Christians and Muslims as well. Frequently, it comes out of the closet when matrimonial alliances are considered, even when the two families involved in such discussions are of the same faith. Conversion to Christianity does not seem to eradicate caste prejudice in India any more than it eliminates racial discrimination in the US. Despite Jesus’ call for brotherly love, isn’t Sunday the most segregated day in America? If not, how does one explain the need for English-speaking African-Americans and Hispanics of Christian faith to maintain separate places of worship? Many fundamentalist Christian groups in the US still maintain racial separation and frown upon inter-racial dating.

Western Christianity

Christian fundamentalists believe that the prophecies in the Book of Revelation (New Testament) were revealed by the resurrected Jesus to his disciple John when the latter was on the island of Patmos in the Aegean Sea. The religious broadcast media in the United States is a good source for seeing and hearing the vehemence with which the Christian fundamentalists assert that every word in the Bible is true and infallible. A contemporary example of such misguided beliefs is discernible in their views about the military conflicts in Iraq and Palestine. They claim that the establishment of Israel and the war in Iraq are both vindications of the prophecies in the Book of Revelation. During recent months, five verses from that book are frequently cited by biblical literalists as examples of the Bible’s infallibility. Those verses predict the second coming of Jesus after “the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great river of Euphrates and the water thereof dried up (so) that the way of the kings of the east might be prepared.[4a]”

The fact that the verses refer to the “kings of the east” crossing the Euphrates is explained away by fundamentalists as mere allegorical reference to Bush, Blair and Aznar. A few of their troop formations did in fact cross the river from the east! Some even point to the uncanny accuracy of the reference to “kings” because of the behavior of Bush, Blair and Aznar. The latter three leaders of democracies did disregard the wishes of their “subjects” when they decided to wage war! So far, so good! But, how does one interpret without concern a subsequent prophecy in the same book which predicts one thousand years of world misery after the way for the kings are prepared and the river gets dried up?[5] The biblical literalists have an answer for that too. It is just another allegorical measurement of God’s time. It may mean a thousand hours, days, weeks or months!

Bumiller, reporting on President Bush’s stance on Iraq stated that he “sees the world as a biblical struggle of good versus evil[6].” The fundamentalists of all religions seem to believe in the infallibility of their prophets and strive for a historic fulfillment of their prophecies regardless of whether they inflict untold miseries on themselves or their unwitting neighbors. The late Robert K. Merton, one of America’s foremost sociologists eloquently stated that: “a self fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true. The specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error, for the prophet will cite the actual course of events as evidence that he was right from the very beginning.[7]”

Christian fundamentalists holding on to their blind beliefs in the infallibility of every word in the Bible are not affected by facts such as: (i)there are many versions of the Bible, (ii)Jesus spoke Aramaic and not Latin, Greek or English in which most Western Bibles are written, (iii)many oriental orthodox denominations have their own Bibles which are derived from the ancient Aramaic or Syriac translations of the Greek texts, (iv)the Book of Revelation was absent from many early Greek texts of the New Testament, (v)St. Paul’s writings on Christianity are not universally accepted by all Christians, (vi)the Gospels were selectively gathered, (vii)many early versions of the new and old testaments were hand copied with likely human errors of both omissions and commissions, (viii)many original works of Jesus’ associates (Thomas in particular) were discarded by some Christian sects during the first five or six centuries following the death of Jesus, (xi)many such discarded books are still used by other Christian sects, and (x)the first King James version of the English Bible was printed only in 1611 and has been revised seven times so far[8].

Christianity, as practiced by the West, has become insensitive to the emotional violence inflicted on the poorest of the poor when inducements such as free food, medical care, money, and employment are used as baits to engineer religious conversions. It is even worse when intimidations are used to facilitate conversions, as some Islamic nations do. While Christianity and Islam, as practiced by a large majority of their followers, do subscribe to peace, tolerance and non-violence, the daily occurrence of death and destruction based on religious differences in our present-day world highlight the distortions that are perpetrated by militant adherents of these religions. In Saudi Arabia, non-Islamic visitors and guest workers cannot even bring their books of worship or congregate in public places to conduct community worship services. Like their Christian counterparts, Islamic fundamentalists also want to actualize the prophecies in the Koran. Such obsessions to make religious texts serve as passports to heaven are mercifully absent in the non-Abrahamic faiths.

My Christian Faith

Being a liberal Christian and raised in a non-fundamentalist tradition, I am able to perceive little or no contradiction between the tenets of Jesus and many of the seminal concepts of Hinduism and Buddhism. The priceless affirmation in the Hindu scripture which says “eko sat vipra bahudi vedanti” (one truth, but discerned differently by the wise) is somewhat similar to one of Jesus’ sayings, “in my Father’s house, there are many mansions, if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare one for you.[4b]” Another of Jesus’ sayings which affirms that: “I and my Father are one”[4c] is similar to the Hindu Mahavakya, “Aham Brahmasmi” (I am Brahman). The “born again” attribute necessary for a Christian’s salvation as required by Jesus is no different from the concept of “dwija” or twice-born in Brahman (often misconstrued as Brahmin)[4d].

There are also several references in the New Testament indicating that Jesus and his disciples believed in both karma and reincarnation[4e]. It appears that the belief in reincarnation has persisted over the years, as evidenced by the continuing belief of Christian fundamentalists in the second coming of Jesus. The Acts of Thomas, which were excluded from the New Testament, contain concepts prevalent in the advaita of Hinduism[9]. Even the sacrificial nature of Jesus’ assumption of the sins of his followers through his own crucifixion and death is similar to the willingness of adept Hindu Gurus to assume the karmic baggage of their followers. I also find that many of the parables Jesus used in his teachings are strikingly similar to Buddha’s teachings imparted 500 years before Jesus was born[10].

Like the majority of human beings, I too inherited my religion through the faith of my parents. Their Christian roots in India’s Kerala State are very ancient. My family lived very amicably with other religious minorities in a predominantly Hindu environment. I cannot recall even a single instance where I or any of my non-Hindu friends were subjected to any kind of religious discrimination. The Christian faith that I acquired through my parents has been so liberating that I have had no problem in accepting the plurality of worship pursued by others. I was brought up to believe that the practice of one’s faith should be a personal affair and of no concern to others. Jesus himself prescribed it thus: “when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.[4f]”

One of the early explanations regarding the Holy Trinity (Father, Son and the Holy Spirit) that I heard was in the form of characterizing the Father as the eternal truth, the Son as an expression of that truth in human form, and the Holy Spirit as the transformation of the latter as agape or unconditional love. Therefore, I have no difficulty in equating the state of bliss posited in Sat-Chit-Ananda with the transcendent bliss invoked through the Holy Spirit. In my mind they are conceptually well correlated: sat is the eternal truth, chit is the consciousness of that truth, and ananda is the bliss experienced through unattached love.

A Call To Indian Christians

In my opinion, most Christians born and raised in India’s diverse milieu are innately liberal and pluralistic in their outlook. Therefore, they should now raise their voices against the divisive activities of the evangelical Christians, especially those that are bankrolled by the Western churches. Failure to do so is likely to do harm both to the religious freedom of India’s minorities and the territorial integrity of that nation. The peripatetic foreign missionaries certainly have no stake in preserving the territorial integrity of India. But, Indians of all religions do. Besides, separatist movements in Northeast India have been suspected of deriving support from foreign missionary groups. Given the sordid history of Western Christianity, eternal vigilance is indeed prudent.

A page from the recent history of East Timor may be appropriate for Indians to review in order to understand the negative potential of offshore proselytization! The indigenous tribes in that island were first converted to Christianity by Dutch and Portuguese missionaries. Then they were helped by the Western nations to secede from Indonesia. India may run similar risks if it continues to allow foreign missionaries to have unfettered access to its tribal populations.

If India is to maintain its hard-won nationhood and regain its past level of religious tolerance, all Indians of goodwill must do everything possible now to stifle the voices of religious fundamentalists. Muslim and Christian clerics must learn to tone down their assertions of monotheistic superiority as well as refrain from denigrating religions that do not subscribe to their views of salvation. They must come to terms with the fact that the Hindu perception of God in myriad forms is just as sacred and inviolate to them as the monotheistic concept is to the followers of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

The Christian evangelists and the literal Islamists must also realize that they cannot continue to maintain their exclusive monopolies for marketing the road maps to heaven. Likewise, Hindu organizations should not allow their legitimate concerns about insensitive and duplicitous missionary groups to degenerate into generalized bashing of minorities through acts such as indulging in mass distribution of tridents or creating a climate of suspicion against all minorities. Pluralistic Indians of all religious faiths have an urgent need now to close their ranks and drown out the rhetoric of religious fanatics if they truly want to allow India to emerge as an economic and political power. Otherwise, India will remain a weak and soft State much to the glee of the Western nations.

Liberal Christians

Liberal theologians of Christianity seem to have no difficulty in conceding that the ultimate truth can be sought through other equally valid religious traditions. If Christianity is to flourish and thrive anywhere in the new millennium, it needs to heed the calls of its liberal leaders and theologians like Thomas Jefferson, John B. Cobb Jr., James Luther Adams, Paul Tillich, John Shelby Spong et al. If it merely wants to use the faith as a wedge to divide and enslave people as in the past, then it should continue to march to the drumbeats of Christian fundamentalists like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Oral Roberts and Billy Graham.

In 1984, the then Episcopal Bishop of Newark (NJ), John Shelby Spong visited India and wrote the following: “What I learned about Hinduism enhanced my appreciation for this ancient religious tradition. I saw a beauty in it that was enviable, and I found many points where Christians and Hindus are seeking to deal with the same human needs in remarkably similar ways.” He admired the absence of the “spirit of missionary imperialism” in Hinduism and questioned whether or not the “Christian claims to possess infallibility or ultimate truth are not signs of a brittle pettiness that cannot endure.” His writings credited such insights to the dialogue he had with three Hindu scholars at a very old Christian seminary in Kottayam, in India’s Kerala State[11].

While Christian fundamentalists take great pride in establishing the historicity of the Bible, they condemn all scholarly attempts of liberal Christians to study Jesus as a historical figure. They consider all such inquiries to be part of the “devil’s” preoccupation to either misquote or deny Jesus’ teachings. The fundamentalists of Christianity lack the insight to accept the limitations of the human mind to comprehend God. They are quick to condemn all plural definitions of God and ascribe such differences to the ignorance of the “heathens”.

Without any hesitation Christian fundamentalists will concede that Jesus advocated forgiveness of one’s enemies and commanded that an offender be forgiven not “seven times but seventy times seven”[4g]. But, that will not deter them from claiming that their wars are always just because they wage them only to destroy the wicked and the evil! And, God will always call upon them to decide who is evil and who is wicked! The notion that wars are inconsistent to the beliefs inherent in both the Old Testament’s call for the beating of swords into plowshares[4h] and Jesus’ own admonition to his followers not to resist evil has never been of concern to Christian rulers[4i].

Liberal Christians do recognize that during the last 1500 years, the European nations have indeed hijacked and corrupted an eastern mystic’s (Jesus) efforts to replace the then-prevailing Judaic concept of a vengeful God with one of compassion and infinite love. From the early European crusades to the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, Bosnia, Kosovo, and now Iraq, the Judeo-Christian Western nations have not shied away from using violence to resolve political and ethnic conflicts despite Jesus’ commandments to abjure violence and promote peace. The victorious nations always justify death and destructions as unavoidable “collaterals” which are inseparable from their Christian obligation to fight evil, promote freedom, or preserve human dignity! The last millennium’s history is replete with such callous and cynical behavior of Western nations.

From the middle of the mid 10th Century, the Western nations seem to have expended great efforts in converting Jesus, a Semite into an Anglo-Saxon. They just could not tolerate letting him remain an Afro-Asiatic, which he was. Astute visitors to any large museum that houses a collection of medieval icons and church paintings can easily discern for themselves the slow conversion of the images of Jesus, Joseph and Mary from their original Afro-Asiatic appearances to those of Europeans. The Western nations not only expropriated the Middle Eastern persona of Jesus and his tenets to fit their Western traditions but they also confiscated the intellectual properties of ancient cultures without giving the latter any credit for their accomplishments.

Such expropriations of intellectual property from traditional cultures continue to occur even today. It is ironic that the Western nations who now demand universal adherence to the sanctity of patents and copyrights are the very ones who committed such plunders in the past. It is no secret that all colonial powers used Christianity as a useful weapon in their arsenal to expand their imperial domains. As Bishop Desmond Tutu often says, “When the missionaries came, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, ‘let us pray’. We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.[12]”

Independent India And Christianity

Since India’s independence, Hindu nationalists have been complaining about the ulterior motives of many foreign missionaries working in India. In recent years, particularly since the late 1980s, such complaints have become more vigorous, mostly as a result of the brazen calls of many Western evangelists and the Pope to Christianize Asia. While visiting India in 1999, the Pope openly proclaimed his wish to “witness a great harvest of faith” there through the Christianization of the whole country. It is well outlined in the Pope’s promulgation, “Ecclesia in Asia” which was released during his visit.

Predictably, a group of Hindu religious leaders were outraged. Not only did they ask the Pope to retract his proclamation, but also sought an apology from him for the notorious Goan Inquisition of 1560 CE which was carried out under the dictates of one of his predecessors. While the Pope had no hesitation at publicly praying at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem or apologizing for the past persecution of Jews, he was not willing to throw any such sop to the Hindu religious leaders.

Only recently I became aware of the fact that since 1974, the International Congress on World Evangelization (ICWE) has been quietly developing a grand design to evangelize the rest of the non-Christian world which is known among Christian fundamentalist circles as the “10/40 window” or the Joshua Project. It targets for conversion all those living in countries within the 10th and 40th parallels, truncated longitudinally in the west by the western borders of Africa and in the east along the eastern fringes of Japan. I would like to urge interested readers of this article to visit that organization’s website to fully comprehend the potential impact of such a worldwide conversion campaign[13].

The ICWE is supported by the powerful churches of the West. They have enrolled native agents from all countries within the “10/40 window” to implement the Joshua Project. For India, the ICWE has developed a plan which targets for conversion, 150 communities of Hindu, Muslim and Parsee faiths. The Kashmir region is part of that project. On the same website, there is also a revisionist narrative of the history of Indian Christianity authored by Rev. Richard Howell. It is a classic example of the distortions that take place when vested interests reconstruct historical events. For example, though Rev. Howell concedes that Christianity in India is ancient and “two millennia old”, he is silent on the historically verifiable presence of the ancient Indian Orthodox Church as well as the tolerance shown by the then Hindu rulers (Cheraman Perumals) on the southwest coast of India to a new faith in their midst. He fails to grasp that religious peace prevailed there only because of the non-proselytizing nature of the early followers of Christianity.[13]

When conversions to Christianity took place in pre-colonial India, they occurred more as a result of a true change in religious convictions than through an exchange of material benefits. There is also no mention in Rev. Howell’s writings about the intimidation used by Portuguese rulers in the late 16th Century against the oriental orthodox churches in Kerala to make them submit to the Pope’s authority. Through the use of the Portuguese armada in the Arabian Sea, their padres frequently harassed many orthodox priests traveling in dhows to and from Syria and Persia to India’s southwestern ports at Cochin and Cranganore. There is a well-documented report of the kidnapping of an Orthodox Bishop by the Portuguese while the former was headed to India in an Arab dhow[2b]. The Bishop was never seen again! In 1930 CE, the Pope succeeded in enticing several Indian Orthodox Christian priests to switch sides through an offer of immediate elevation to the status of Bishops in the Roman Catholic order.

The British residents in India’s former princely states as well as the Provincial Governors of British India actively assisted Christian missionaries from UK and other Western nations to continue with their quest to Christianize India. They did that without coming into conflict with their Roman Catholic counterparts who had been on that path since the early sixteenth century. Thus, for nearly four hundred years, the entire Indian subcontinent became available to Western nations for Christianization. Even after India’s Independence, the presence and influence of foreign missionaries in India have remained significant, mostly because of the tolerance of the large majority of Hindus who believe in pluralism. In contrast, the activities of all Christian missionaries in Pakistan and Bangladesh have been vastly curtailed due to the intolerance of Islam to the spread of other faiths.

Proselytizing Christians

I am not at all surprised at the emerging rise of Hindu nationalism in India, given the historical experience of the Hindus whose faith had been assaulted first by Muslim invaders and subsequently by European colonizers. Since the citizens of India can now think for themselves, they can demand that they be shielded from intrusive evangelical activities through the use of democratic means.

The Indian electorate has become sophisticated enough to distinguish between acts of selfless service and questionable acts of charity concocted by Christian missionaries involved in conversion activities. Such deceptive behaviors would have been an anathema to Jesus himself because we know that he insisted on not letting even one’s left hand know what the right hand does as charity[4j]. I am also quite perplexed at the silence of liberal Indian Christians when they are confronted by the strident rhetoric of Indian evangelicals like Mr. John Dayal and Archbishop Alan de Lastic of New Delhi. So far, the latter seem to revel more in sowing seeds of discord between Christians and Hindus than in promoting religious amity between Hindus and other religious minorities.

In my opinion, Mr. Dayal showed poor judgment when he appeared before the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) in Washington DC in September 2000 when the Prime Minister of India (Mr. Vajpayee) was here on an official visit. Mr. Dayal should have thought of the possibility that the timing of that invitation extended to him by USCIRF was not an accident. It is quite likely that it was part of the US State Department’s plan to place the visiting Prime Minister on his defensive and thereby weaken India’s efforts to convey to the American public the ravages resulting from cross-border terrorism aided and abetted by Pakistan.

Parenthetically, I would like to express my dismay here at the absence of representation for Hindus on USCIRF. After all, Christian, Jewish, Bahai and Muslim faiths are represented by Americans on the Commission. But nearly a billion Hindus and another billion Buddhists on this planet have no representation on the Commission despite its claim of being a watchdog for “international religious freedom”. Therefore, I believe that fairness demands that both Hindu and Buddhist Americans get representation on the Commission. The term of most of the Commissioners now on the USCIRF is due to expire in May 2003.

While testifying before the USCIRF, Mr. Dayal vigorously argued against according recognition to Vishwa Hindu Parishad as an accredited UN Non-Governmental Organization (NGO)[14]. His objection remained unaffected despite the fact that many religious organizations representing Jewish, Christian and Islamic faiths are currently accredited to the UN as NGOs. Mr. Dayal demanded that the Indian Constitution continue to honor its commitment to citizens to freely “profess, practice and propagate” their faiths. But, he fails to comprehend the distinction between freedom to propagate a religion and the right to coercively convert people to another faith.

It has become clear to me that religious conversions using material enticements are coercive and therefore ought to be forbidden by law. For years, I used to think that the complaints of many Hindus about the use of economic inducements as a means of conversion to Christianity may be exaggerations until I personally came across incidents such as a Catholic school’s offer to defray the marriage expenses of Hindu girls if they agree to wed Christian boys. Anti-conversion laws may be the only civil means available for Indian states to deter such nefarious conversion activities.

Mr. Dayal’s website also contains articles alleging insensitivity on the part of some Hindu nationalists who “mock and blaspheme virgin birth, resurrection etc.[14]” If it is found to be true, it should be condemned just as vehemently as one should in the case of similar allegations made by Hindu organizations against Christian missionaries who ridicule Hindu beliefs.

Mr. Dayal also complains about blanket discrimination by Hindus against all minorities. He implies that discrimination and religious intolerance are the contributing factors to the reduction of the Christian population of India from 2.9% in 1947 to 2.3% in recent years[14]. But, he neglects to consider the probable impact of family planning measures used by the non-Catholic Christians as a more likely contributor for the small decline in population growth. He is silent on the dramatic declines of Hindus both in Pakistan (25% in 1947 to current 1%) and in Bangladesh (35% in 1971 to current 7%) as well as the rise in India’s Muslim population from 8% in 1947 to its present level of 13%[15] [16]. In view of such demographic changes in that subcontinent, Mr. Dayal’s claim of discrimination of religious minorities in India is not credible. It is disappointing that Mr. Dayal’s website does not contain even a single word of Christian concern for the plight of nearly 300,000 Kashmiri Hindus who were displaced from their homes to the refugee camps of New Delhi[14].

Mr. Dayal equates the Hindutva concept of “one nation, one people, one culture” with the “Nazi-fascism of Europe”. Is not India’s entire people one nation, one people and one culture? Isn’t culture a derivative of multiple factors such as language, climate, diet, habits, music, literature, arts and other traditions with religions playing minor roles at best? No religion by itself can imprint a specific culture on an individual. The western Christian culture is quite different from the culture of the Coptic Christians of Egypt, just as it is with the Indian Orthodox Christian communities of Kerala. The culture of Muslims in Bosnia is not identical to the Muslims of India, Bangladesh or Pakistan. For an Indian of any religion to be offended by anyone’s claim that India is one nation, one people and one culture is baffling to me. Precisely because India is one nation and one people, I hope that India’s present government will finally muster the requisite political courage to enact a single civil code for all Indian nationals as well as develop a uniform system for the management of all its religious places of worship and religious schools.

Having read most of Mr. Dayal’s polemical views and his explanations for the worsening of relations between Christians and Hindus in India, I believe that the 25 million Indian Christians who believe in India’s pluralistic tradition would be better off by not allowing Mr. John Dayal to remain as their sole spokesman. Failure to do so will only result in more acrimony and strife among Hindus and Christians.

Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism originated as offshoots of Hinduism. Their founders were neither crucified nor exiled. The ancient history of India attests to the symbiotic existence of multiple religions in that subcontinent. Religious tolerance has been the norm in India for thousands of years. Therefore, the emergence of religious intolerance there needs to be studied seriously in the context of foreign funding of all religious activities in India. Foreign sources of funding derived by all religious and charitable organizations in India deserve close monitoring by its government just as the US has begun to do with regard to similar organizations registered here.

Towards Global Religious Tolerance

Regardless of their religious affiliations, all religious leaders of goodwill can find myriads of theological convergences if they are open to sincere and deep inter-faith explorations. While it is less threatening for the practitioners of non-Abrahamic faiths to undertake such faith-based voyages of discovery, the religious fundamentalists of the monotheistic faiths shun all such excursions.

India and China have a combined population of more than two billions who do not subscribe to Abrahamic faiths. Besides, China is becoming increasingly concerned at the inroads religions are making in that country. Therefore, it may be timely for the two nations to jointly seek an amendment to the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which will explicitly forbid religious conversions attempted through physical coercion or material inducement[17]. Western democracies which advocate a strict separation of church and state should be challenged to lend their support for such a measure, more so because of the emerging menace of Al Qaeda and its philosophical stance steeped in Koranic literalism which argues for the world-wide establishment of ‘sharia’, the law of Islam[18].

Therefore, I would like to propose further that secularists of all religions everywhere mount a vigorous campaign to limit full membership status and voting rights in the United Nations (UN) to countries that are truly secular. Theocratic nations should be encouraged to amend their Constitutions to reflect their secular status if they aspire to become full members of the UN. The US and many other western nations should also find such a proposition to be in tune with Jesus’ advocacy to “give unto God what is God’s and to Cesar what is Cesar’s.[4k]”

The US is particularly well poised to take the lead in such a move since the first amendment to the US Constitution explicitly erected a wall of separation between the church and the state. Thomas Jefferson, a liberal Christian President of the US, recognized very early the deleterious impact of religion on a pluralistic America which was then getting established. Writing about religion, he said that its negative potential “has been severely felt by mankind, and has filled the history of ten or twelve centuries with too many atrocities not to merit a proscription from meddling with government.[19]” He also objected to religious conversions rather strongly when he said that: “Were the Pope, or his allies, to send in mission to us some thousands of Jesuit priests to convert us to their orthodoxy, I suspect that we should deem and treat it as a national aggression on our peace and faith.[20]”

India and many other nations are facing similar challenges today from both fundamentalist Christians and militant Islamists. If liberal Indians of all religions do not speak up and challenge their fundamentalist counterparts, India’s precious tradition of religious tolerance will become a mere footnote to its ancient history. Likewise, if there is no worldwide effort to contain theocracies and ostracize the militants of all religions, the new millennium may indeed witness many clashes of civilizations.

The UN may in fact be the last best hope for mankind to usher in a peaceful world devoid of religious upheavals. The liberal adherents of all religions are now at the crossroads of a crucial choice. They can either remain silent and permit their fundamentalist minorities to fan the flames of religious conflicts, or speak out against them and insist on religious tolerance as the only legitimate road to a peaceful world. As a Christian nurtured by the pluralistic tradition of India, my choice continues to be the latter.

~*~
Acknowledgment: The comments and suggestions of Rajiv Malhotra, Sankrant Sanu, Gopala Rao and Vinu Joyappa were very helpful to me in writing this article. I wish to recognize their valuable assistance.

Notes

[1]Gandhi, Mohandas K: In Young India, April 23, 1931

[2]David, Daniel: The Orthodox Church of India, Printaid, New Delhi., 1986, pp.97-100

[2a]Ibid. p. 153

[2b] Ibid. pp. 110-111

[2c] Ibid. pp. 383-428

[3]Brown, Harold J: Religious liberty: Greeks face prosleytization court test., Christianity Today, Vol.41, No, 11, 1997, p.89.

[4] The Holy Bible: King James Version, Collins, NY, 1952. St. Matthew, 23:15

[4a] Ibid. The Revelation, 16:12-16

[4b] Ibid. St. John, 14:2

[4c] Ibid. St. John, 10:30

[4d] Ibid. St. John, 3:3-7

[4e] Ibid. St. John, 9:1-3, St. Mark, 6:14-16., 8:27-29., 9:11-13., St. Matthew., 11:13-15., 17:10-13

[4f] Ibid. St. Matthew, 6:5-7

[4g] Ibid. St. Matthew, 18:21-23

[4h] Ibid. Isaiah, 2:3-5

[4i] Ibid. St. Matthew, 5:39-40

[4j] Ibid. St. Matthew, 6:2-4

[4k] Ibid. St. Luke, 20:25

[5]Broadway, Bill: Dire predictions for war in Iraq, The Washington Post, March 8, 2003, p. B 9.

[6] Bumiller, Elizabeth: Aides say Bush girds for war in solitude, but not in doubt, The New York Times, March 9, 2003, p.1

[7] Merton, Robert K: Social theory and social structure, Glencoe, IL, Free Press, 1957

[8] Davidson John: The Gospel of Jesus, Element, Rockport, MA, 1995, pp. 47-77

[9] Pagels, Elaine: The Gnostic Gospels, Vintage Books, NY, 1989

[10] Borg Marcus: Jesus and Buddha, Ulysses Press, Berkeley, CA. 1997

[11]Spong, John S: The Bishop’s voice, Crossroads Publishing Company, NY. 1999, pp.143-146

[12] Tutu, Desmond. www.brainyquotes.com

[13] Website, www.Ad2000.org

[14] Dayal, John: website, www.Dalitstan.org/christian/dayal

[15] Gupta, Arun K: Data on Hindu, Muslim Populations of Indian Subcontinent, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. (Go to www.indianetwork.org/res/relig2.html)

[16] Patel, Bipin: www.indiacause.com/OL_091302.htm

[17] Alexander, C.Alex: Gujarat & Hindu nationalism: a rejoinder to Dr. Lancy Lobo, OYSTER, Vol 5, No.3, Feb 2003, pp.5-8., (PO Box 42163, Washington, DC., 20015)

[18] Berman, Paul: The philosopher of Islamic Terror, The New York Times Magazine, March 23, 2003, pp.24-67

[19] Cohen, Adam: What Jefferson would think of Ms. Myles addiction program, The New York Times, Week in Review, Section 4, March 0, 2003, p.23

[20] Jefferson, Thomas: To Michael Megear (1823.ME.15:434), electronic text. Go to (http//etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-jeffquot)

** The author is a naturalized US citizen and a physician executive who recently retired after 35 years of combined service to both the US Department of Veterans Affairs as Chief of Staff, Hospital Director and Regional Chief Medical Officer and the US Army Medical Corps (Colonel).