Richard W. Lariviere
Ralph B. Thomas Regents Professor
of Asian Studies
University of Texas at Austin
http://asnic.utexas.edu/asnic/subject/gondalecture.html
[This article is reprinted here
with the kind permission of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
It was first published as a part of the 1994 Gonda Lecture, Gonda Foundation,
Netherlands. Please do not post it independently.]
Today I want to look at criticisms
of Sanskrit philology. This seems an appropriate topic for a lecture series
named for Jan Gonda, one of the greatest philologists ever to study the
Indian tradition. I want to look at criticisms of what we are doing when
we engage in the enterprise of studying ancient Indian literature. Specifically,
I want to look at the challenges and criticisms that have been leveled
against philologists who have chosen to study India. I want to look at
three important types of criticism. I will use a sort of short-hand means
of referring to these three types of criticism: I will call these criticisms
the Orientalist criticism, the Essentialist criticism, and the Distortionist
criticism.
The first criticism I will call
the Orientalist criticism. It has its origin in the landmark work of Edward
Said in his book Orientalism, but that book has spawned an entire mini-industry
all its own. I want to talk about the charge that Europeans (and I include
Americans under this rubric) have in some sense "created" the India that
they study. That this "created India" has no basis in reality, and has
been created to serve a constellation of interests all of which benefit
Europeans and are inimical to the Indians, themselves.
The second criticism I will call
the Essentialist criticism. It is articulated, for example, by Ronald Inden
in his book Imagining India.[1] It is the one that says that what we have
done with our knowledge of ancient India is create "essences" of India
and Indian society. In doing so, we have again denied the reality of what
India was and is, and created a manageable but grossly distorted view of
India. In creating these essences we have also denied Indians agency in
their own history. We have denied them the ability to shape their own destiny.
The third criticism that I want
to address is what I call the Distortionist criticism. This is the charge
that ideas found in Indian culture are taken out of their context and used
for nefarious purposes elsewhere. This criticism has been brought by Sheldon
Pollock in an article entitle "Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and
Power Beyond the Raj."
My point today is that each of these
criticisms can be met effectively if we return to the philological techniques
and values that have been exhibited with such consistency in the study
of Greek and Latin classics, and that were once an important part of Sanskrit
philology, but seem, in recent years, to have fallen out of favor.
In 1978 Edward Said published his
book, Orientalism. In this book Said accused the European intellectual
community of creating a basically false knowledge of the Arab world. This
volume focused on the middle east, but its ideas were quickly transferred
to other world areas. It has received during the past sixteen years its
own share of criticism, not least that this book does to orientalists precisely
what it accuses orientalists of doing to those cultures they study--over-generalizing,
over-simplifying, and thus misrepresenting what those scholars were attempting
to do.[2]
In spite of a good deal of criticism,
the core of Said's ideas still finds great currency among scholars of India.
We are told, for example, that orientalists used philology to reaffirm
European cultural and political dominance over Indians.[3] They did this
in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, according to this
view, by discovering an original moment of Indian cultural history--Vedic
India--and using it as a sort of core explanation for all of India's subsequent
history.[4] This criticism is responsible for endowing the term "orientalist"
with all manner of malicious cultural imperialism. The most basic charge
that these critics lay at the feet of the orientalist is that scholars
have effectively denied the Oriental his (let alone her) history. The orientalist
scholar has taken it upon himself to write the history of these peoples,
and then to impose that history on the Orientals. In the case of India,
nineteenth century British historians drew on the early work of philologists
and other scholars and created an Indian history that served the needs
of the colonial state. This history was then taught to the colonial subjects
as well as the colonial masters, and became the "standard" history. The
"real" history of India is only now being written, of course, now that
we are liberated from the fetters of colonialism--by scholars freed of
their mistakes by Said's critique.
In summary of the Orientalist criticism,
I would say that the primary objection is that the history of ancient India
is inadequate. That what we know about India is predicated on an almost
willfully incomplete view of the record of Indian history. Sometimes this
willfully incomplete record was produced to deliberately serve the interests
of colonialism, and in other cases it was not intended to be so used, but
it was nevertheless used for those purposes.
The whole phenomenon of colonialism
strikes us as strange today: semi-private corporations like the Dutch or
British East India Companies raising private armies and boldly taking on
the governance of other peoples half a world away seems odd and anachronistic.
To study how this was done and its effects on colonized people is discomfiting.
We may no longer feel the sense of manifest destiny, of racial or cultural
superiority that is necessary to engage in this kind of colonialism, and
to find evidence that one's (nearly immediate) predecessors believed themselves
to be so superior is alarming. We know that this was wrong, we decry it,
and then we are beset with a terrible anxiety: is there any vestige of
this sense of superiority lingering in ourselves? If so, we tell ourselves,
we must expunge it. We are able to find these vestiges by "critiquing"
our methods of producing and handling knowledge.
This kind of critique is, of course,
a valuable corrective from time to time. It is always helpful to be as
fully aware of what we are doing as we possibly can be. There is a danger,
however, that this sort of self-examination can become an intellectual
industry all its own. It can become pathological. I will come back to this
danger in a moment.
The second major criticism, the
Essentialist criticism, is in some sense a refinement of the Orientalist
criticism. According to this line of criticism, what we have done as Sanskritists
is to take the evidence of Sanskrit texts atemporally and attempt to make
a timeless, uniform system of thought that was immune from the normal vicissitudes
of politics, personality, and human appetites. It became, according to
this line of criticism, possible to describe "an" India, "an" Indian mind,
etc., thus creating an essential India, which when understood and thus
mastered, made it possible to "understand" each and every phenomenon of
India according to these essentialist categories.
This criticism is accompanied by
a further objection that creating and imposing these categories denies
the Indians any say in their own history. Not only does this deny the Indians
a say in the writing of their own history, but it denies the Indians any
significant role in the making of their own history! We think we know what
the essence of Indian thought and culture is from Vedic times onward, and
so, what Indians do during all that and subsequent periods can only be
in conformity with this essence. Anything not in conformity with this essence
is denied to exist.
In this Essentialist criticism,
Sanskrit scholarship is looked upon as particularly culpable since it has
tended to view the entire corpus of Sanskrit literature--all 3500 years
of it--as barely changing in its depiction of religion, political configuration,
and social organization. The Essentialist criticism states that the focus
on religious texts in Sanskrit philology has tended to create the impression
that Indians are "spiritual" and that political and social complexities
are lost in the uniformity that is found in the texts.
The third type of criticism, what
I call the Distortionist criticism, calls Sanskrit philology to task for
taking Indian ideas out of context and using them in ways that they were
never intended. The study of Sanskrit, we are told by these critics, has
been said to be in some measure responsible for the dehumanization of Jews,
gypsies and others in Nazi Germany.[5] This was done by contributing significantly
to the quest for an Aryan identity among Germans. In addition to this fairly
extravagant claim, the Distortionist school of criticism claims that philologists
have tended only to use western categories when studying things like literature.[6]
It is in this category of criticism that I would include discussions of
power.
Power has become for some of these
critics the single issue of focus. Power is the idea: it sets the agenda
and determines the questions that must be asked. It has even been stated
that the fundamental question of the human sciences is not their "truth,"
but their relationship to power.[7] In ancient India, questions of power
focus on the relationships between the classes of society. We are urged
to interpret the texts from ancient India in such a way as to highlight
the disparities of power, to highlight the violence and the abuses that
result from those disparities. This is what is important, we are told,
in the study of ancient India. It is important, because we must provide
this sort of "enabling critique" of the Indian tradition so that we can
demonstrate solidarity with these historically oppressed classes and enable
their contemporary heirs to finally become empowered themselves.
Each of these three types of criticism
has some degree of merit. One might quibble with the extravagance of some
of the criticisms or with the style and self-righteous tone of others,
but in the end they must be taken seriously and answered seriously. In
my view there is a fairly straightforward answer to most of these criticisms
of Sanskrit studies: it is that in most cases where there is merit to the
criticisms, it is due to the fact that we have strayed from the sort of
hard-core, philological work that is necessary to reconstruct what ancient
Indian society must have been like.
The criticisms of Sanskrit philology
apply to work in all genres of literature. In my reply to these criticisms,
however, I want to focus on one area that I know better than any other--the
study of dharmasåstra. I choose this literature not only because
it is the literature I study most, but because it is the literature that
is most central to the social, political, and intellectual issues raised
by the three criticisms outlined previously. Let me get directly to the
point: it is my view that we have for too long been attempting to reconstruct
Indian social history using dharmasåstras without having first examined
these texts properly. That is, without having critically edited the texts,
without having made every effort to determine the history of each text,
we have been trying to use these texts to reconstruct history in classical
India. What is more, we have been ignoring this problem for so long that
we no longer even see it as a problem.
Let me give you an example. There
is no text that is more important for the reconstruction of Indian social
history than that of the Manusmrti. It is the most important of the metrical
smrtis from the standpoint of its wide acceptance geographically and chronologically.
Yet, in spite of the fact that this text was the first one translated into
English (by Sir William Jones in 1794) and that translation not only served
as an important foundation for British jurisprudence, but also had a great
impact on European notions of India, this text has never been properly
edited. Every edition is either based on a single manuscript corrected
at will by an "editor" or a random collection of manuscripts similarly
corrected by an "editor." This text--so carelessly constituted--has been
translated many, many times into French, German, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati,
Marathi, Urdu, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Hungarian, Chinese, Japanese, Polish,
and Russian. Indeed, Manu has been subject to more editions and translations
than any other Sanskrit legal text, and possibly any other Sanskrit text
with the exception of the Bhagavadgita;. Yet none of these translations
has been based on a scientifically constituted edition.
We seem not even to notice that
this might be a problem. In the latest English translation, published by
Penguin (1991), Wendy Doniger, my predecessor in this lecture series states
that she did not attempt to edit the text. She based her translation on
J.H. Dave's "edition." She says that where necessary she has supplemented
this edition with readings from V.N. Mandlik's edition published in 1886.[8]
What is striking is that Doniger does not seem to have noticed that Dave's
edition is largely an unacknowledged reprint of Mandlik's edition, set
in new type, with typographical errors intact.[9] This "new" translation
uncritically relies on a text published more than a century ago. "There
are relatively few seriously disputed readings," claims Doniger, "and where
such do occur, or where there are misreadings or even typographical errors
in Dave, the fact that the many commentaries cite the verses makes it easy
to ascertain the correct reading." (p. lxxii). In fact there are myriad
textual problems in Manu. Whole passages are in dispute.[10]
Until we have a critical edition
of Manu we will be condemned to treating this pivotal text as an "essence."
We are condemned to dealing with it without knowing what we can about its
history, about its transmission, about its career in various regions and
moments in India. We are forced to deal with this text in just the manner
condemned by the Essentialists in their criticisms.
It might be reasonably asked what
one could expect to learn from critically editing such texts as the Manusmrti
or Gautamadharmasutra or any of the many other texts that have never been
edited. First and foremost, it is the only hope we have of ever being able
to establish anything like a reliable chronology of these texts. Chronology
is the first step in giving back to these texts a context. This is essential
if we hope to ever be able to speak of the changes in Indian society over
time.
Let us look at just one issue relating
to the chronology of these texts. P.V. Kane,[11] K.V. Rangaswami Aiyangar,[12]
Johan Jakob Meyer,[13] and many others look to the treatment of ordeals
in the dharmasåstra for help in establishing their chronology. Other
scholars like Shivaji Singh[14] see in the pattern of the administration
of ordeals subtle evidence for sociological shifts and evolution. In short,
ordeals have been important in the rough and uncertain business of trying
to establish chronologies for dharmasåstras. The general argument
goes like this. Texts like the dharmasåstras started out as cursory
summaries of rules and topics of dharma. As the literature develops (and
as society becomes more complex) the general treatments of earlier texts
are elaborated upon and more and more detail is provided. In the case of
ordeals, the earliest texts simply mention the topic by speaking of two
ordeals, namely those of fire and water. Later texts add other ordeals
and more detailed treatment of them. The Manusmrti mentions only two ordeals,
fire and water (8.114-116). The Yåjñavalkyasmrti mentions
five--fire, water, balance, poison, and holy water (2.95-116). Jolly's
Nåradasmrti treats seven ordeals, the previously mentioned five plus
the rice and the hot gold ordeals (1.247-348 in Jolly's edition). This,
it is argued by most writers who have treated the subject of relative chronologies,
is evidence to support the chronology Manu, Yåjñavalkya, Nårada,
the reason being that the greater the detail of treatment of a particular
topic in a text, the later that text must be. In the case of ordeals we
have not only a greater number of ordeals but also more detail about the
administration of each ordeal in each subsequent mulasmrti: Manu has three
verses, Yåjñavalkya has twenty-two verses, and Nårada
has one hundred and two. Yet this conclusion, which is based on Jolly's
edition of Nårada, is not supported by my critical edition of the
text. In the earliest Nåradasmrti--which critical editing discovered--there
were only two ordeals, fire and water, and only five verses on this subject
(1.218-222). This would upset the traditional chronology and change it
to Manu, Nårada, and, last, Yåjñavalkya. This would
be an important step forward in our efforts to contextualize these works
by establishing their relative chronologies. There is one enormous problem
here, however: the only dharmasåstra that has been critically edited
is the Nåradasmrti. Without the careful scrutiny of the surviving
manuscript evidence of all the other dharmasåstras, that is, without
critically editing them, we cannot proceed with this question of relative
chronologies.
Similar problems are encountered
in every area where we attempt to make statements about the evolution of
society and social concerns in classical India. If we look to the texts
for evidence of such evolution, we may find the evidence, but we have no
way of placing it in any kind of context. Evidence without context is nearly
useless and most often misleading.
Now, there are those who would state
that to rely on these texts for evidence of Indian social norms is to buy
into brahminical distortion and deliberate deception. These texts were
written by bråhmanas for themselves and other elites to read. The
intent of these texts is to justify the disproportionate advantages of
the bråhmanas. Their obvious bias in favor of bråhmanas, even
the nature of these texts as texts--written in Sanskrit, transmitted either
orally from elite to elite, or in writing accessible only to the elite--should
eliminate these texts from consideration as reflections of Indian society.
The Distortionist criticism would say that these texts represent the entrenched
interests of an oppressive elite. They would say that the very production
of this literature is a manifestation of power, and the transmission of
the literature by scholars is to contribute to that expression of power.
My response to these criticisms
is that the sort of scientific, detailed philological study necessary to
prepare critical editions is just the sort of work that is required to
find the voice of subalterns, i.e. those elements of society who were not
able to preserve their concerns and values as well as the bråhmanas.
Unfortunately, we do not have from classical India any texts that survive
which would present a view of society from the bottom up instead of the
bråhmana view from the top down. We must scrutinize the data that
we have for traces of the voices and concerns of the subalterns. Admittedly
this isn't the easiest thing to find in many cases, but it is there. Take,
for example, the case of matrimonial remedies available for women trapped
in marriages that are unsatisfactory. Here again, I would turn to the Nåradasmrti
for an instructive example. We find sprinkled throughout Indian literature
references to women called punarbhu--"remarried women". These were women
who were somehow married twice. Now, anyone familiar with women's issues
in India in ancient or modern times knows the problems that the institution
of marriage presents to women. Marriage is an important part of every person's
dharma. Without marriage life's obligations cannot be fulfilled: rituals
cannot be performed, children cannot be born, ancestors cannot be nurtured,
the entire fabric of society is threatened by instability in marriages.
When marriages went wrong, remedies were needed.
Most of the time the matrimonial
remedies mentioned in the Sanskrit literature are remedies made available
for men. Basically, men are allowed to take more than one wife so long
as the first wife is in some way unsatisfactory (this usually means the
failure to give birth to sons in a timely fashion--8, 10, or 11 years depending
on one's caste), and so long as the husband can support both wives. The
sauskåra of marriage is looked upon as permanent and eternal. One
cannot undo a samskåra. One cannot (in classical India) declare a
marriage null and void. It is necessary for a man to fulfill his religious
and social obligations to marry a woman who will bear male children for
him. But what about women? What remedies do they have if the husband turns
out to be unsuitable? After all, women, too, have obligations to fulfill,
namely giving birth to sons. If the husband is not able to engender children
or has one of a number of other disabilities that prevent a woman from
fulfilling her dharma, then it turns out, there are remedies available
to her.
Beginning with the Atharvaveda[15]
and sprinkled throughout Sanskrit literature there are tantalizing references
to "remarried women." Since women are not supposed to be married more than
once according to the dominant tradition, these references are very interesting.
They are finally elucidated in the Nåradasmrti. Here we find that
when a man is found to be impotent in certain ways--and the texts are very
graphic and detailed--then a woman should leave him and marry another man.
In spite of the popularity and prestige of the Nåradasmrti, the particular
passages offering remedies to women in unsatisfactory marriages are never
subsequently quoted in the tradition. They obviously did not meet with
wide approval in the community responsible for the production of smrti
literature. What I think this means is that we have evidence recorded in
the Nåradasmrti of a practice that was not accepted in the orthodox
community, but which was so widespread that the methodically juridical
Nåradasmrti discussed these practices. Here is an almost subterranean
thread of information that clearly meets with disapproval from the bråhmanas
judging from their refusal to elaborate it, but it also tells us something
very valuable: that careful scrutiny of the texts can reveal genuine subaltern
concerns and practices. We know that at some time, in some place, in classical
India women were in the habit of remarrying. This fact is revealed to us
in a text that is authored (in all likelihood) by the very bråhmana
class that frowned upon the practice. In spite of the bias in favor of
this class, in spite of a clear agenda to aggrandize the place and status
of this class in society, nevertheless, for reasons that we can only guess
at, the interests and concerns of a disenfranchised and largely powerless
class, namely women, are addressed--however fleetingly or subtly.
Relying on texts written by elites
may seem an odd way to pursue the history of subalterns. Indeed, my colleague
Gregory Schopen, has taken his fellow Buddhist scholars to task for focusing
almost exclusively on textual sources for the history of Buddhism. He has
called this the "Protestant presupposition."[16] It is a tendency to rely
on textual sources above all others in reconstructing the history of Indian
Buddhism. He chastises them for undervaluing archeology, epigraphy, and
other sources. His important suggestion that Buddhist scholars should not
rely so heavily on textual sources because of their bias in depicting the
sangha, could just as easily be applied to the study of the other traditions
in India. To some extent, we are all guilty of this "Protestant presupposition"
that the written, textual source is the most reliable and the most meaningful
source of information. With regard to reconstructing the social history
of classical India, however, sources other than texts are sparse. The archeological
record for social history is skimpy. The epigraphic record, while voluminous,
is of negligible value for helping determine the shape and practice of
everyday life in classical India. Unlike the history of the Buddhist sangha,
we have no better source for reconstructing Indian social history than
the texts of the bråhmanas. We are, for better or for worse, reduced
to relying on texts almost exclusively for our information about Indian
social history. To be sure, we need to be aware of the biases of the authors
of these texts, of their agenda, and of our own biases and agendas, but
we cannot ignore the largest repository of information on ancient India--Sanskrit
texts.
In connection with the need for
awareness of our own biases and agenda, I want to return to the danger
that I mentioned earlier, the danger of pathological self-examination.
It seems that every academic discipline goes through a period when its
motives and its uses are questioned in a fundamental manner. Anthropology
has just emerged from such a period. Anthropologists were unnerved when
they realized that the old ethnologies that had given birth to the very
discipline of anthropology were not as objective as they thought. Anthropologists
realized that their very presence in the community they were studying was
disruptive. They realized the fundamental dilemma: that their very attempt
to observe and document what others were doing was distorting what others
were doing. This was further compounded by the more pervasive problem of
objectivity: the realization that there is no such thing as pure objectivity.
If one's very presence is distorting, and if it is not possible to write
about others objectively, then what is left to write about? There is really
only one subject left: oneself. And so, anthropology went through a period
of theoretical angst in which the only logical outcome, or so it seemed,
was to report not what happened in the village during your stay, but what
you thought about during your stay in the village. We had a shift from
flawed ethnography to tiresome biography.
I look upon this degree of self-examination
as pathological because it resulted in the deviation from an attempt to
document the life of the village to an attempt to record a single scholar's
response to this task. We were told that an attempt to record the life
of a Trobriand Islander is doomed to be distorting and skewed because it
is being done by someone other than a member of the Trobriand Island culture.
This distance is unbridgeable, we are told, and the only way to get around
this problem is to have the ethnography written by a Trobriand Islander.
But what if no Trobriand Islander is inclined to write such an ethnography?
Am I condemned never to know anything about Trobriand Islanders? I would
rather know something about them--even if it had to come via the imperfect
medium of an anthropologist writing an ethnography.
Our colleagues in literary studies
have progressed even beyond this dilemma, however. We now know, thanks
to the decontructionists, that not only is objectivity impossible, it seems
it is even impossible to convey intended meaning. It seems that there is
an unbridgeable gulf between the writer and the reader as well. No matter
what the writer intends when he writes, the reader will bring his separate
set of experiences and understanding to the writer's text. This is truly
pathological. This means that the very enterprise of writing is unlikely
to convey the meaning intended by the writer. This is a view that I find
truly tiresome (and for those of you who have attempted to read deconstructionist
theory you know, at least, what the word tiresome means. The impenetrability
of the writing about this theory has given rise to much derision on American
campuses--my favorite is the story of the Boss of a Mafia family who decided
he would study deconstructionist theory. As a result, he was eventually
replaced as the Boss because instead of giving orders that no one could
refuse, he found himself giving orders that no one could understand.)
So, how is philology a cure for
these intellectual ailments? It is a cure because it is the fundament of
our science. It is the foundation on which we must build. The texts are
our best source of testimony about classical India. Even though the vast
majority of the surviving literature from classical India was written by
males, by elites, by individuals with vested class interests, nevertheless,
it is in many ways the only window that we have on classical Indian society.
If we wish to know about classical Indian society, we must study these
texts. But we must give these texts every opportunity to speak to us, to
tell as much of their history as they are able to tell. This means that
we must have reliable texts. For this there is no substitute for the tiresome,
tedious, painstaking work of editing texts. It is only through the creation
of edited texts that we can begin to place these texts in their proper
context. But this is tiresome work. Unpleasant and unattractive. It is
much easier and more enticing to begin to theorize, to make conclusions
about classical Indian society without having to do this tedious work of
editing texts.
Those of us who work in traditional
philology may well be accused of distorting the texts we read because of
the fact that we bring a late 20th century perspective to the task. This
is unavoidable. Obviously, we cannot expect Indians of the tenth century
AD to suddenly appear and explain their own work to us--the equivalent
of insisting on the Trobriand Islander's own account. Our Indian colleagues
are no less free of bias. For them, as for us, the past is a foreign country.
All of us who work in the humanities
are engaged in is an endless quest for answers to that most fundamental
question, what does it mean to be human? The ways to ask this question,
the sources of which we can ask this question, and the types of answers
to it are endless. Those of us who find India fascinating choose to ask
these questions of the Indian tradition. Those of us who are philologists
choose to ask this question of long dead, but nevertheless insightful and
still valuable thinkers of the Indian tradition. We are engaged in the
preservation of their wisdom and their thoughts. It is always tempting
to give a quick and impressionistic answer to complex questions, but it
is also risky. The better the data we have the better our answers will
be, and philology provides the data. In order to give the fullest possible
voice to the views of classical Indians--of all social classes--, we must
carefully and thoroughly edit their texts. If we do our job well, then
the work that is done after that--interpreting these texts--will provide
us with better answers to this timeless question. We can debate the meaning
of the texts, we can debate our interpretations of the texts, we can reach
conclusions and revise those conclusions, but through it all we must be
confident that the meaning, interpretation, and conclusions are based on
the best reconstruction of the sources that we can achieve. It is here
that philology renders its contribution. It is on such philology that Indological
studies are built.
