How androgyny and ambivalence outdid other methods of resistance in India

One gets the optics of union between the feminine and the masculine very many times throughout India’s cultural history.

Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877–1947). | Photo Credit:  Wikimedia Commons

If one were to think of a single iconic scholar of Indian culture in the last one and a half centuries, the name of Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy easily comes to mind. Born in England to a Ceylonese father and an English mother, he came to India because of the close ties Ceylon (Sri Lanka) had with India during the British era. He chose Buddhism and Hindu philosophy as the areas of his study, and collected a vast amount of information on all forms of Indian art and wrote copiously about them.

He was in conversation with the greatest minds of his time—Tagore and Gandhi—and deeply involved in philosophies of various civilisations and various eras. All this learning reflects in every piece he has written on Indian culture, making him one of the greatest commentators of the essential India. The most widely read among his works is The Dance of Siva. The cover of the book, based on a key essay in it, shows the image of Nateswara (also known popularly as Nataraja or Ardhanari-Nateswara). That pictorial representation of an ancient icon sculpted with amazing precision and grace, combining feminine delicacy and masculine vigour, is a great symbol for what we are and how we have been as a civilisation.

The combination of the feminine and the masculine has fascinated the Indian imagination from time immemorial. In the Mahabharata, the most valorous warrior among the Pandavas, Arjuna, is shown for a short period as Brihannala, a dancing girl. And, indeed, standing in the middle of the warring armies, he tells Krishna that he is assailed by signs of klaibya (“Loss of manliness”)—Sidanti mam gatrani, mukhamchya parishusyatih (“My mouth has gone dry, my limbs are trembling”). Krishna tells him that it is this condition that makes him fit to gain the divya-chakshu (“The divine eye”) enabling Arjuna to understand the essence of life and death. The story of Shikhandi, who manages to cause Bhishma’s death, is well-known.

One gets the optics of union between the feminine and the masculine very many times throughout India’s cultural history. Two outstanding examples are the medieval Kabir and the 19th century saint Ramakrishna Paramahansa. Ashis Nandy, in his brilliant analysis of India’s resistance to colonialism, explains how Mahatma Gandhi combined the feminine and the masculine in his actions and appearance, and emerged in Indian consciousness as an icon of resistance to the British.

The “salt” Satyagraha, seen from a Freudian perspective; mauna (silence); and non-cooperation were, in Nandy’s view, typically feminine methods of resistance. Shyam Benegal’s film The Making of the Mahatma, which depicts Gandhi’s life in South Africa accurately, captures this transformation in Gandhi’s politics between 1910 and 1915.

It is not just in myth, art, and mysticism that the dualities are sought to be dissolved in India. The world view and narratives of material existence, too, show a co-mingling of dualities. Greek mythology in its early phase had stories about gods and humans exchanging sentiments and aspirations, often leading to clashes between the two realms of existence. Later, Greek mythology gave way to physics and philosophy, leading to a rupture between the realms of the human and the superhuman.

Mahatma Gandhi and Kasturba at a reception given by Poet Rabindranath Tagore at Shantiniketan during their visit on February 17, 1940. | Photo Credit: THE HINDU ARCHIVES

The notion of an “idea” or “ideal” as understood by the Greeks was born in the belief, or rather the fear, that the world of ideas and the world of humans cannot be reconciled. Here it must be remembered that for them “idea” did not mean “a concept or a thought” but a kind of a “thing or an existence” that has a perennial and non-diminishing life in the realm of the supernatural. The impossibility of reconciliation between ideas and objects, pushed Greek thinkers towards positioning every branch of knowledge in terms of some fundamental binaries. Their thought forever got caught in antonyms, and the tension arising out of the differences.

Indian traditions of philosophy did not hit that point of disillusionment with dualities. The possibilities of exchange, cross-migration, and the belief that the two realms remain interchangeable became a part of the core of the thought traditions and life objectives in India. Call it a mixed-up theology. One terrible result of this was that the idea of rebirth came to settle in Indian thought and life.

Highlights

• One gets the optics of union between the feminine and the masculine very many times throughout India’s cultural history.
• Two outstanding examples are the medieval Kabir and the 19th century saint Ramakrishna Paramahansa.
• The “salt” Satyagraha, seen from a Freudian perspective; mauna (silence); and non-cooperation were, in Nandy’s view, typically feminine methods of resistance.
• Ashis Nandy has argued that the moral ambivalence and gender mix in the minds of Indians has been a method of resistance in the past. 

Another result of this aspect in social life is the naive belief that “traditions” continue to be accessible even when one has entered deep inside “modernity”. The third major consequence is that people carry out their material and worldly life along one track of beliefs while continuing to hold on to another set of beliefs as “values”, and the two are based on diametrically opposed assumptions.

In a book written by an Englishman in the 1920s—having read it nearly 50 years ago I have forgotten the name of the author and the title—the author expresses a sense of bemusement that professors of physics in Pune’s Fergusson College teach Western science to students in the morning, and go to a Satyanarayan Katha in the evening. Asked if the two do not clash in their thoughts, they were surprised, and responded, “But why? This is how we are.”

Recently, I was having a conversation with a group of biologists in an elite research institution in Bangalore. This was soon after the NCERT decided to throw Darwin out of school textbooks. One of the scientists had even headed a very large science research centre. When I asked them if there was no clash in their minds between Darwin’s idea of evolution and the ancient Indian texts considered “sacred”, they answered in the negative. Some of them had not thought about it. Those who had explained that it was possible for them to keep the two arenas separate in their thought processes without minimising the importance of either.

James Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a classic in Western literature depicting the agonising conflict between Church ethics and artistic freedom. That agony does not assail Indian minds when they confront such profound dualities. Indian novelist Raja Rao, some eight decades ago, wrote a brilliant narrative depicting a Namboodiri Brahmin who had turned to Marxist politics. Titled Comrade Kirillov, the novel’s protagonist is well versed in both Sankaracharya’s Bramha Sutra Bhasya and Marx’s Das Capital. He can comment on both with utmost brilliance and defend every phrase in the two texts.

Ashis Nandy has argued that the moral ambivalence and gender mix in the minds of Indians has been a method of resistance in the past. He mentions other methods of resistance, too, which include Buddhism and Bhakti (as in the Bhakti literature of medieval India). But, he argues, androgyny and ambivalence excel all other methods of resistance in Indian history. I tend to agree with him.

All of this discussion on India’s cultural and philosophical peculiarities is of importance today as never before. The current regime, driven by Savarkar’s understanding of the Indian past and the RSS’ understanding of Indian society, is busy in militarising Hinduism. That was one of the prescriptions suggested by Savarkar in Essentials of Hindutva. The regime, however, has not fully grasped how Indians react to political phenomena. In the Karnataka Assembly election, the chest-thumping masculinity and polarisation of voters did not yet deliver the results the BJP expected.

Similarly, labharthis—a new term popularised by the BJP for “the obliged beneficiaries of government schemes”—have not been as obliging in panchayat elections in most States. The fact that Indians, despite massive job losses and unbearable price hikes, did not do what people in Sri Lanka did after petrol prices there soared sky-high is taken by the regime as an indication of Narendra Modi’s popularity. Quite likely, it is a gross misreading of the apparent silence of the masses. In his book on Siva’s dance, Coomaraswamy describes the mythical Tandava as a dance of wrath arising out of an enigmatic silence. In 2024, we will know if India’s cultural grounding prevails or if the regime has brought about a complete metamorphosis.

Ganesh Devy is Obaid Siddiqi Chair Professor, National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bengaluru.