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Author: Ananya Dasgupta
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: October 25, 2005
Celebrated Italian author Umberto Eco left many academics and students at Jawaharlal Nehru University squirming with embarrassed ignorance on Monday.
Delivering a lecture on " Rasa and Taste", Eco spoke with great scholarly confidence and even greater scholarly tentativeness about Bharata's Natyashastra, Anandavardhana and Avinavagupta, which he had read in translation but few in his audience seemed to be acquainted with.
As he constantly struggled, with a spirit of genuine inquiry, to understand the rasa theories in relation to Western philosophers - St Augustine, David Hume, Kant and Aristotle - many in Delhi's academia looked as if they were completely at sea.
"You would know, according to Abinavagupta, the ninth rasa is peace and tranquility?" He looked up to find mostly blank faces staring at him in the audience.
Perhaps they should have heard the professor on Sunday at the Alliance Francaise when Eco said, "Research is not about shedding all your background books. It's about throwing away the embarrassing ones. As we try to understand another culture, it is not possible to speak of the unknown without referring to what we already know."
Is that the crisis of the Indian academia? Are we trying to shed the baggage of all our background books without even bothering to read them? Or is it that as a nation we are always already so plural, that there is no one intellectual tradition?
These are some of the questions that have been raised after Eco's expositions at gatherings in Delhi. Talking of interpreting other cultures with the help of one's own cultural learning, he spoke of the great Italian traveller Marco Polo. "Travelling in Asia, the notion of unicorns in exotic lands was firmly rooted in his medieval Italian mind. Somewhere near Java, Marco Polo saw a rhinoceros. So his travelogue mentions unicorns but clarifies that they are not white, but black. They are one-horned but they possess big hooves."
And in such identification and clarification, Eco sees a robust intellectual honesty. Many in the audience on Monday would ask, "Unicorns, what?"You may not know Eco as a professor of semiotics in the University of Bologna. You may not know him as a critic who writes with equal felicity on medieval aesthetics and James Bond. But you definitely know the author of the Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum , The Island of the Day Before and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.
While Delhi spilled over in excitement waiting to catch a glimpse of the Italian novelist and philosopher, both anxious faces and the studiously pale broke into raucous laughter when the pot-bellied philosopher, the grandfather with a thick white beard and infectious energy, came across as a great teller of stories.
"When I first landed in India the first thing that struck me was that the dogs are free to roam the streets unlike in France where they are always on a leash. But then a few days back in Goa, I saw two women walking collared dogs down the beach. That's when I realised that in India, even dogs have caste." No sombre, pontificating wisdom here. Just the plain truth of observation.
As he chaired the round-table of eminent panelists on "Strategies of acquiring mutual knowledge", Eco said, "The relationship between cultures is the relationship between languages - it is basically the problem of translation. But the aim is not to find closed identities but differences. Only though an understanding of differences can we enrich ourselves."
And as every good philosopher must, he addressed the context that defined his audience Sunday evening, "In India, you are privileged. You live in a multicultural society, so an Indian has a spontaneous way of recognising difference. That's difficult for a Westerner."
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