Kumkum Roy's Lecture and things thereof...

Posted on the Live Journal community that discusses the CCS course.

Dear All,

I had been meaning to write on this discussion forum for a long time now. I now take the opportunity do so, given the context of Kumkum Roy’s Lecture and the discussion that followed.

For many classes now, I have raised a set of questions and have received few precise answers. Dr Rajan Gurukkal devoted quite some time to my questions, but kept treating history and a specific set of categories sacrosanct, even as the class-syllabus was engaged in bringing in speakers who challenged and ‘pushed’ the boundaries of their disciplines.

And yesterday, we again saw that Kumkum Roy refused to state the biases and constraints in her research. Instead it seemed like she took something called “gendered perspectives”, or a “concerns of the 70s” right into the past.

To my questions, Roy asked me “where I was coming from?” What that question was actually asking was: “what is your political stance? What is your ideology? Are you a feminist or not? What is your intention in asking these questions? Who are you?” I am not unfamiliar with such questioning. But what is at issue is why anyone should ask such a question. If someone seeks to know more about the scholar's use of sources or how they justify projecting present concerns into the past, why can't scholars be honest about what process of selection and identification they have used? Why should the process of science be romanticized? Surely, evidence can be presented and things can be made transparent, so that assessment becomes easy? I believe Roy did not do this.

To my question about using jataka tales, she said they are of great variety and complexity. Is that an answer to my question per se? Why do historians use categories that first make things of the Indian past seem homogenous and then get surprised that things are actually heterogeneous? So they spend quite some time telling us, that oh uh we should not be homogenous and then spend some more time telling us that these traditions are actually heterogeneous and therefore complex and not easy to grapple with. Roy did not say ever say that it was difficult to come to conclusions etc; she evaded the actual questions I was asking her. Why cannot genuine questions be voiced? And why must the scientists in the back rows hiss and howl?

I still believe that the speaker did not show to me that she was not being anachronistic. Why ask me if there is an alternative, when the speaker cannot state the biases inherent in her research. Towards the end of the lecture, there was some vague statement about how there is no 'pure innocent' approach. But that’s the question I began with. I said that our categories influence our study and therefore should we not at least be careful that these categories or not Orientalist or of European origin. To say that your research problem shapes your approach is not saying anything new and does not absolve one of the question of categories I had raised. For they can shape your research problem as well, right?

My supervisor for MA at CIEFL, Prof Susie Tharu, is a scholar who actually acknowledges that going to past and taking what we want from it to build the present we desire constitutes violence. She even asks the question, were there really “women” in India’s past, while editing the two volumes: Women Writing in India... Roy did not push the boundaries of her discipline even this much. She did not show an awareness of the problem, or had resolved it conveniently because she thought there were no other alternatives.

Perhaps stating the biases and constraints of one’s research entails that one knows what one is doing, in comparison with other projects or in comparison with the ideal one can see. It seems that no such ideal exists and no other project is valid enough to posit one’s own work against... How could other projects even exist, when everything that differs from what you are saying is dubbed “right wing”? Even scholars like Ashish Nandy are simply ignored. One hears from friends that they cannot ‘go too deep’ because they need to finish their PhDs or that they are not ‘actually scholars’ or that they ‘don’t have the time’…if that is indeed the case, why claim to know or be part of discussions that are meant to be serious?

Roy’s essay on the Manusmriti is not asking what the Manusmriti is about. Her question is not the real question of what this text is all about (its meaning, role, function or more), but about how the so-called right wing uses Manusmriti selectively to project its own concerns. How does saying this allow her to go scot-free on her own ideological leanings? …While the real question to be asked of Manusmriti is left unanswered and unformulated. Are we not weary of left-leaning scholars bashing right-leaning ones? How can this be called scholarship?

During our previous classes as well, many students made loud statements ‘condemning the hindutva’. But I am glad to think that there were others too who asked “how come the mathas read these very texts differently?” or “why are we given a textualized version of India?” or even “how do we know what the vital few and the insignificant many are?”

Why cannot Roy simply tell us honestly that we do not know if Manusmriti was a prescriptive text or a descriptive text or something else... a text whose relationship to reality we don’t know of? Why claim to write the history of India and produce textbooks, which, despite this lack of clarity pretend that there is no lack of clarity? Why write a history of the Indian past based on Ramayana or Mahabharata? How is it that texts and other sources can be used partially? Leaving out all the talk about knowledge, enlightenment and dharma, that these texts are full of, that these texts claims to be their goal, why extract only that which caters to 20th century ideas of the “social” or “woman”? Perhaps before we could get all too excited about ‘reading against the grain’, we could read the texts along the grain?

Should one just take comfort from the fact that, for every person in the back row who stops you from asking questions, ...to ask clarificatory questions such as “What do you think of the Muslim and Christian women or what is your opinion of the dasi?”, there are scholars like Charles Malamoud, who although located in Paris, have the grace to say that all that we have said about the Indian past so far, is the product of speculation?

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