By Luke McCusker, 07/28/2019. In Bangalore, I met with Professor Sundar Sarukkai. The humanities have been undervalued in contemporary Indian education, sidelined in favor of science and engineering. Professor Sarukkai opened the Manipal Center for the Humanities to remedy this imbalance.
Over tea and buttermilk, Professor Sarukkai described the hopes and challenges of his project. Philosophy is not provincial; ideas have no national allegiance. A problematic notion from the start, Indian philosophy dissolves as a category in Sarukkai’s thought. To be sure, the minds that developed original ideas should be named and recognized, Indian and otherwise. But the project of Shankara is in dialogue with Plato and Husserl as much as Abhinavagupta. Phenomenology has been at the center of South Asian critical thought for centuries. The well-documented German existentialist dismissal of this thought is intellectual laziness at best and nationalistic violence at worst. Now, Professor Sarukkai is working to see South Asian philosophy migrate out of the Sanskrit and religion departments to which it had been relegated and into its proper place in philosophy programs worldwide. And this transition is in full effect at institutions internationally. Unfortunately, it faces some of its greatest opposition at home in India.
In the lands of their origin, philosophical projects like those of Shankara are deeply associated with the violence of the caste system. As the Indian government works to dismantle caste-based discrimination in state run institutions of higher education through a program similar to affirmative action, public universities reduce their humanities departments to the classics of Western literature and a few of the big names of Western philosophy. Hardly a robust curriculum, and one often entirely devoid of original, South Asian thought.
The Manipal Center for the Humanities is a successful model of a full fledged humanities program, one Professor Sarukkai hopes to replicate elsewhere in India. But this model is not without problems of its own. Because it is part of a private institution, the center mostly attracts upper-caste Brahmins from wealthier families. Though the philosophies first articulated in India will continue to be developed in Manipal, the work of overcoming caste division in the world of India’s private philosophy programs is ongoing.
Professor Sarukkai no longer works in Manipal, having passed his efforts there into the faculty he hired. In Manipal, at the Center for Humanities, I met with Dr. Mrinal Kaul. A brilliant master of aesthetics and ontology with a rich knowledge of South Asian thought, Dr. Kaul is also a sharp conversationalist. He anticipates important questions and finds amusement in the clumsiness of the everyday. He characterizes his own stream-of-consciousness philosophizing as meandering and unclear; it is anything but.
In his second floor office, while a ceiling fan and two windows struggled to reduce monsoon humidity, Dr. Kaul handily dismantled popular notions of Shankaran thought. That reality is an illusion is precisely what Shankara is not saying. Rather, he recognizes that whatever can be spoken about is not Brahman, the absolute. He names everything that is not Brahman as a way to identify the absolute in the negative. This reasoning is indeed in dialogue with Heidegger. Dr. Kaul, however, is not deeply interested in Shankara. To him, Shankara’s thought, while potent, has been misinterpreted and perhaps overemphasized by popular religious movements. When it comes to the nonconceptual and aesthetic theory in South Asian thinkers, Abhinavagupta is the name to look for.
Picking up where Shankara left off, Abhinavagupta went on to synthesize and further develop rasa, an aesthetic theory of total contextual immersion, of sensory elevation and transcendence. While rasa has dominated Indian aesthetics for centuries, other theories find more in common with existential notions of nonconceptual poesis. One such theory identifies three layers of meaning in language: the literal, the metaphorical, and the suggestive. Poetry works in this third layer, using mundane language to feature toward what-cannot-be-named. This may be in relationship to a Derridian gesture of poetic signification.
In our dialogues, both Professor Sarukkai and Dr. Kaul worked with both ostensibly Western and ostensibly Indian philosophical notions, moving freely between them. Professor Sarukkai articulated it most clearly: the great risk is misunderstanding a word in translation. To think Brahman and Heidegger’s Earth correspond simply because they can each be translated into english as “absolute,” for example, would be a mistake. But to understand each of these concepts, the ideas upon which each term attempts to stand, allows for rich, deep comparison without risk of reduction or appropriation.
Professor Sarukkai and Dr. Kaul offered textual resources to begin to separate my research into Shankaran and Abhinavaguptan thought from popular religious distillations. Even as I move away from well-intentioned but mistaken summaries, however, I remain compelled by the time-honored relationship between complex philosophical thinking and embodied ritual praxis in India. It is a relationship existentialism lacks, but which I believe to be possible, available, and even quietly at work already in the arts.
I return to Delhi for a brief stay before traveling by rail to the birthplace of Indian modernism, Shantiniketan.
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