Abstract
This essay explores possible paths after postcolonial theory, with the after understood not as a negation, but as a form of inheritance and the creation of routes, such that an aftermath need not have a resentful or self-hating relation and nor simply an acceptance of given pictures of ‘western’ thought. The route explored here is neither fully secular nor religious, and nor from a radically alternative ontology, but rather prompted by three enduring concerns within the global humanities, explored in three sections of this paper. The first section ‘Political Theologies as an Alternative to the Dichotomy of Religion and Secularism’, asks what the difference and proximity between theology and theory may be, if we acknowledge the at times less visible theological genealogies of ‘secular’ social and critical theory. Rather than taking such genealogies only to be an effect of Eurocentrism, or as the lasting hegemony of Protestant Christian assumptions, we examine other ways of navigating tentative movements across ontological borders. The second section, ‘Theory as Darsan (Pilgrimage/Path/School)’ suggests that rather than thinking of concepts as anchored entirely to given territories or identities or as tools of ‘generalization’, we might place the word theory in relation to its genealogical kin, theos and theoria/darsan, as the formation of contemplative styles that emerge through forms of recurrent journeying within and across territories, following the tracks of others. As an instance of such journeying, we focus on a particular thinker, Stanley Cavell, whose writing suggests ways of remap** geographies of thought, in ways that could be significant for global thought, across so-called western and non-western territories. How might such journeys be continued? Section 3: ‘A Darsan: the Killing of Birds, Some Centuries Apart’ offers one such journey, three minor coordinates of a world map, located in three poetically enshrined bird killings, in Valmiki’s Ramayana, in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and in Richard Power’s The Echo Maker, each of which incants a curse of unsettlement, and a fault line in relation to being human. This article hopes to contribute to debates on decolonization, currently underway in universities across the world, and seeks to offer a possible alternative to static conceptions of west and non-west.
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Notes
By postcolonial thought, I do not only mean a particular branch of the humanities or literary theory, but rather, a form of dissatisfaction that might be expressed across a range of disciplines. In specifying this dissatisfaction, my interest in this essay is not so much in the important body of work that points to the colonial foundations of the humanities and social science. Rather, my interest is more in postcolonial attempts to find ‘one’s own voice’ without necessarily being ascribed a subject position. To take an instance of this particular form of discomfort from outside of literary theory, in Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (1995), Veena Das expresses a form of what we might call postcolonial dissatisfaction with two major subject positions available to European and ‘native’ anthropologists of India in the late 1970s/1980s: either Louis Dumont’s Eurocentrism (and the implicit negation of ‘modern’ Indian aspirations as inauthentic) or A.K. Saran’s (and others) assumption of a contrasting ‘native’ voice, based on the supposed stability of national or ethnic belonging. As I have argued (Singh, 2018), Critical Events develops a conceptual vocabulary distinct from these two perspectives, by showing the fragility and violence of ‘modern’ forms of belonging, and the extent to which nationalist/ethnic discourse and sentiment builds on ‘older’ ontologies of sacrifice, kinship, and martyrdom.
On the relation between theoreia as pilgrimage and the Indic darsan (a term for ‘seeing’ the divine, but also denoting philosophical routes, or ‘schools’), see Rutherford (2000). My sincere thanks to Nomaan Hasan for pointing me to this reference.
Daniel Smith for instance describes the sharply contrasting trajectories of Derrida’s mode of negative transcendence (différance — an absence that transcends ‘a’ and ‘not a’), as distinct from Gilles Deleuze’s form of affirmative immanence, and difference ‘internal to being’ (2012: 49).
I borrow this evocative phrase, ‘knot of the soul,’ from Stefania Pandolfo (2018).
As Davidson indicates, this question of ‘scheme’ and ‘world’ not being a relation of correspondence has been a central concern within the Anglophone (‘analytic’) tradition of philosophy, as with Quine’s classic paper ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ (1953) that Davidson responds to, in a current of thought further continued in Richard Rorty’s early works as well (1979/2009, 1989), building on Quine and Davidson. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer of this paper for emphasizing the centrality and continuity of this question within the analytic tradition.
With Spinoza, as Jacqueline Lagrée argues, the composite expression theologico-political remains a matter of debate, connoting a range of possible conjunctions including juxtaposition, strict separation, subordination, and interdependence ((De Vries & Sullivan, 2006: 26).
Alongside Agamben’s rereading of Schmitt, the emphasis on political theology (in a monotheistic vein) in recent continental philosophy can be traced to many thinkers, including the later Derrida’s writing on the messianic in Benjamin and Marx (2012), Zizek, Santner, and Reinhard’s argument on the ‘political theology of the neighbor’ (2005), and Badiou’s turn to St. Paul (2003) among others.
The first, concerted attempt that I know of to pluralize the concept of political theology, which has been very helpful within my own scholarly trajectory is Hent de Vries and Lawrence Sullivan’s edited volume Political Theologies (2006).
As distinct from Hobbes’s Leviathan, the mythological figures I was most drawn to for my own conception of sovereignty in conceptual and ethnographic terms are the twin deities Mitra and Varuna, as outlined in Georges Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty (1988).
Weber for instance, I would contend, may be read not as an unknowing Christian, but rather, as a sharper thinker of political theologies than Schmitt, in showing how theological ideas become ‘secularized,’ not as sovereign fiat, but as a lived ethos. With Durkheim, in my earlier work, I strongly differentiate between two ways of reading Durkheim, as a thinker of social structures (where the church, is indeed a theos, or animating image) but also as importantly, as a theorist of ‘currents’ and energies in ways that inhabits and exceeds the idea of a church (Singh, 2012, 2021).
I place atheists in quotes following the Genealogy of Morals, where Nietzsche describes atheism as expressing ‘not so much the remnant as the kernel’ of ascetic ideals, ‘one of the latest phases of its evolution, one of its terminal forms and inner consequences…’ (2006: 160; emphasis in original).
A key figure within a non-European genealogy of doubt would be Al-Ghazali, whom it is speculatively argued that Descartes had read in translation. A series of articles in the journal Philosophy East and West undertake fruitful comparisons, beginning with Sami Najm’s groundbreaking essay, ‘The Place and Function of Doubt in the Philosophies of Descartes and Al-Ghazali’ (1966). Within South Asia, the closest kin (falling somewhere between Descartes and Shakespeare) would be the fifteenth century poet-philosopher Kabir. The word sanka (doubt) recurrently appears in Kabir’s compositions (Wakankar, 2010). In Kabir, sanka is most often related to the fear of one’s own death and ways of putting such fears to rest, in ways quite distinct from skepticism in Cavell’s sense of the term as outlined above.
As Nietzsche writes in 1881: ‘Emerson. I have never felt so much at home in a book, so much in my own house as,—I ought not to praise it, it is too close to me’ (cited in Hummel, 1946: 80).
Among the most memorable essays on these variations remains A.K. Ramanujam’s ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas’ (1991).
The Sahariyas are governmentally classified as a ‘Primitive Tribal Group’ (a sub-group among ‘Scheduled Tribes,’ a British colonial classification inherited by the postcolonial Indian state), although they self-identify as Hindus. I summarize some of the complex debates around the categories and classifications of caste and tribe in Singh (2015a, b: 35).
‘Sanskritization’ is one of the founding theses of Indian sociology, defined by M.N. Srinivas as ‘the process by which a “low” Hindu caste or tribal or other group, changes its customs, ritual, ideology, and way of life in the direction of a high, and frequently “twice-born” caste’ (Srinivas, 1969: 6).
Vaudeville’s references to the Valmiki text and the Balakanda (the segment in which the crane-killing episode appears, sometimes said to be a ‘later’ addition to the text) are from the Baroda edition of the Valmiki Ramayana (Oriental Institute, Baroda, 1963).
My sincere thanks to Vivek Narayanan for many years of conversation on the Ramayana and for sharing segments of his stunning poetic rendering of the epic, and a gift of scholarly essays around the krauncha-vadha episode that allowed me to develop the thoughts I share here.
As Vaudeville clarifies: ‘In Vedic literature, kraunca is a musical term for a note or tone […] When used in reference to birds, kraunca does not apply to a particular species, but to a whole class of aquatic birds endowed with a krunc-like voice, a class which includes, besides the kraunca, the hamsa and sarasa birds. Birds of that class regularly appear in Indian folk-tales as love-messengers […] and the female of those species frequently appears as a symbol of an afflicted wife, mourning in separation.’ (1963: 330).
Hindu ‘tribes’ such as Bhils and Sahariyas in present-day central India often self-identify with the other ‘Nishad’ characters in the Ramayana as well, such as Shabri and Eklavya. In Sanskrit literature, as Vaudeville clarifies, ‘The Nishadas appear in later Samhitas and in the Brahmanas as wild non-Aryan tribes of hunters, fisher- men and robbers. It seems that the word is a general term for non-Aryan tribes, rather than the name of a particular one.’ (1963: 332).
Narayan’s translation (spirit’s soul-scream) is apt in a different register, as the hamsa in nirgun (‘formless’) traditions of bhakti poetry is depicted at times as a metaphor for the atma (‘soul’/spirit).
It is worth quoting Vaudeville’s explanation of the term sloka in full: ‘In the Rg-Veda, sloka means a cry, also the noise of the Soma pressing stones, of chariots. In RV 3. 53, 10, sloka is given as the cry of the hamsa bird and the priests themselves are compared to hamsas […] The Valmikian episode under consideration is another illustration of this association, but it introduces a romantic element, apparently based on popular belief: the cry of those water-birds is caused by sorrow or mourning, soka, so that the sloka sung by kraunca birds is really “born of soka” and expresses pathos, karunam.’ (1963: 331).
Interestingly, the Kashmiri theorists construct their argument on karuna by reinterpreting a key detail, as the hunter having killed the female crane, with the subsequent expression of soka emanating from the male crane. For more on this switch of genders, see Masson (1969).
See for instance Wendy Doniger’s masterful summary of androgyny myths across cultures, and the question of how gender ‘splits’ (Doniger & O'Flaherty, 1982: 276), and what is understood as being prior to that split.
For Das’s discussion of curses (and the effects of passionate words not in the nature of immediate action but over longer horizons of time), traversing Gandhari’s curse on Krishna, and Valmiki’s manisada pratistham, and the echo of this curse in Kalidasa, with the suggestion of Rama as the hunter, and the further resonance of this moment in Anandvardhana and Abhinavagupta’s commentaries on the origin of poetry, see Das (2023).
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Singh, B. What Comes After Postcolonial Theory?. SOPHIA 62, 577–606 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-023-00964-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-023-00964-1