The writer who loses to his own argument
Shibu Shanmughom
First Published : 05 Sep 2010 10:45:00 AM ISTLast Updated : 04 Sep
2010 10:32:06 PM IST
Post-Hindu India: A discourse on Dalit-Bahujan socio-spiritual and
scientific revolution by Kancha Ilaiah.
He wore leather jackets and chappals, ate pork and buffalo, and drank
toddy. He clears the path for 'others' to travel. And his lone voice
guides them through the wilderness. A signifier over the margins takes
us into different ethnoscapes or technoscapes. But his framework is
just a beginning, a harbinger of days to come. In sum, that is what
Kancha Ilaiah has in store for you in 'post-Hindu India'.
He starts his detour with a clear-cut deviation against the homogenous
route of dominant Hindu culture, a barefoot counter-journey through
the heterogeneous subways of post-Hindu India. He sets forth to set
the record straight and to deconstruct historiography, definitely on
the lines of Dalitism. As he said, "It is Dalitisation, not
Sanskritisation, that remains the best course for the development of
India in all fields."
Obviously a difficult task since Indian history, state and civil
society have so far been trained to do headstands under the
surveillance of the high priests of the ruling ideology: Hinduism,
alias Brahmanism. That position obliquely views "production as
pollution and consumption as purity, labour as ruggedness and leisure
as dignified." This is an intimidating shirshasana posture,
legitimised over the years as natural and normal.
To give proper names to a shifting sovereignty disguised and
reincarnated in various names and forms is itself a revolutionary act
in an inverted civil society. First, he uses the term Hinduism, and
then specifies it as Brahmanism, again tries to pinpoint it as
spiritual fascism and counters its intellectual goondaism and on the
way he even shows communism its true colour of Brahmanism.
At the end, Kancha Ilaiah predicts the imminent demise of Hinduism
and, in a single breath, proclaims the arrival of spiritual democracy
for Dalits; a promised land where "modes of singing and dancing would
be cut across castes".
Simultaneously, against the metaphysics of hope, he starts a paradigm
shift by politicising the bare life of Dalit-Bahujans, what they do
and the way they do it, the density of everyday life and the physics
of labour. These overlapping and crisscrossing currents of the social
collective run counter to the monolithic and segmentary logic of
Hinduism, nullify the libido of spiritual fascism.
Thus two Kancha Ilaiahs operate in the same realm, entangled and
caught up in each other. One is a spiritual socialist susceptible to
simple conventional models who inadvertently and innocently shares the
luxury accoutrements of the opponent in the same room.
The other is a subaltern ideologue who moves in the opposite
direction, liberates the political from its shackles and restores
thought to its functional continuum. Here he never hesitated to
partake in the ongoing civil war of position and nerves, which is
fought on various fronts in contrasting lines. If you describe this
dilemma in Deleuzean terms it goes like this, "two lovers, one of whom
dies suddenly in the other's room".
Nowadays, Hinduism with its adaptability operates in more subtle ways.
It uses bio-political cultural signs and technologies of self to
expedite its expansion. And its crypto-appearances are more dangerous
than its actual presences. Brahmanism in Dalit clothing is not a
remote reality; it is at your doorstep now. As Gayatri Spivak pointed
out, here starts the unification of homogenous dominant Hindu culture
at the village level and the ST culture in their lack of democratic
training.
At the same time Dalitism does not operate in stereotypical singular
lines, rather it is divided and sub-divided into opposing trends. Like
feminisms, Dalitisms act in multiplicities that are sometimes
contradictory but at other times interpenetrate between mass-lines.
Kanch Ilaiah often tends to think in terms of dichotomy and at times
is an avid follower of rigid binary machinations. He doesn't want to
break the border of black and white and the order of good and evil.
For him, Dalitism and Hinduism are fixed entities, other religious
minorities having their own fixed roles to play. And then, a shadow
war can be easily played out instead of fighting a real one.
This book is an amalgam of everyday and utopia or actual and virtual.
In the grey areas hides a Dalit fundamentalist in spiritual-democratic
clothing. "Effect of the real" is sometimes emancipatory, but for the
"effect", the "real" often have desires for fantasy.
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