Karma in the Public Sphere Habermas in Ancient India Marginalia LA Review of Books Review (original) (raw)

The Quotidian Revolution: Vernacularization, Religion, and the Premodern Public Sphere in India

2016

Because of these reactions, I have felt compelled to clearly state my own position, or lack of a position, on several subjects in this book. These statements appear throughout, and they may confound or irritate a reader, particularly a non-Indian reader, who will perhaps see them as irrelevant. But I offer them to clearly mark my sincere desire to avoid causing offense to anyone. If anything I write here were to offend anyone who holds dear the subjects of this study, it would be entirely contrary to my intentions or sentiments, and it would represent a personal failing on my part, and a failing that would be wholly my own responsibility and no one else's.

Religion and the Public Sphere in Premodern India

When in 1962 Habermas formulated his theory of the public sphere as " a society engaged in critical debate " he sought to describe something he felt was unique to the modern liberal democratic Western world. Yet the creation of discursive spheres where people across lines of social difference debate questions of the common good, mutual interest, and forms of equality long predates the modern era and flourished well outside the " Western " world. This essay adapts Habermas' influential concept to highlight the emergence of a nascent public sphere at the earliest layers of Marathi literary creation in 13th century India. At this inaugural stage of a regional language's full shift to writing, we see traces of a debate in the language of everyday life that struggled over the ethics of social difference, a public deliberation that might presage key aspects of Indian modernity and democracy today.

The writerly self: Literacy, discipline and codes of conduct in early modern western India

This article examines Marathi discourses of good writing from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Critical scholarship on literacy has highlighted reading and writing as historically situated practices, with complex interactions with orality. South Asian historiography on early modern scribal practices has also addressed the expansion of state power, regional historical imaginations, literary cultures and the sociology of scribal caste groups. Writing proliferated in seventeenth-century Maharashtra with the establishment of the independent Maratha state, and the spread of various religious movements, and generated diverse norms about ideal literate practices. This article closely reads a collection of accountancy manuals called 'mestak', alongside literate practices idealised by the poet-saint Ramdas in the Dāsabodha. While pointing to divergences across these bureaucratic and devotional contexts, the article teases out common emphases of moral conduct and self-fashioning between them. These overlaps, it suggests, are critical to understand the religio-political horizons of Maratha scribal communities; they also help trace a longer, complex history of language practices, history and community in western India.

Review of Kumkum Chatterje's The Cultures of History in Early Modern India

Kumkum Chatterje"s The Cultures of History in Early Modern India is an extremely important contribution on a range of themes which include historiography and historical traditions, the relationship between an imperial centre and (its) province, as well as, culture and power. It shows these registers to be concretely interconnected, through a detailed study of various genres of (historical/literary) writing in Sanskrit, Persian, Bengali and English, in Bengal, largely focusing on the 16 th , 17 th and 18 th centuries. Chatterjee attempts to synthesize a conceptual claim about the nature of history writing, with a historical one about the ways in which a "provincial" literary tradition (Bengal is the site) carries within it, elements of both Islamo-Persian and Sanskritic-Brahmanical traditions, formulating them in wholly original ways. The second claim is related to the first; that is to say, such genres can be characterized as History because they reflect, as well as reflect upon, the political processes of Empire building, while at the same time carry a regional inflection. In a related vein, linguistic identity (Bengali) as expressed in a literary tradition "documents" cultural crisscrossing (Persian and Sanskritic).