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ABSTRACT
The paper attends to three instances in 19-century Marathi history that point to an older experience of otherness or being-prone. The attempt is to initiate a history of the everyday that does not assume the contours of Enlightenment publicity, but that harks back to an older experience of silence, reticence and withdrawal. Rather than see these as marks of an inner life, the paper traces them back to a crisis of values (primitive nihilism in the context of the modern), one wherein being-prone can be understood in the three instances as the internal fold of a future transformed, language as receptivity and a stance of humility.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK under Grant [Number AH/M003957/1]. Colleagues in this project (entitled ‘Conversion, Translation and the Language of Autobiography,’) Hephzibah Israel and Matthias Frenz gave expert comments and suggestions on previous drafts of this paper. I am especially grateful to the special editor of this issue, Hephzibah Israel, for her patience and encouragement. Generous funds from the AHRC enabled me to access some of the archival material in evidence in this essay. As always, grateful thanks to staff at the BL. The two anonymous readers of the essay made excellent suggestions, for which I am deeply grateful.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Note on contributor
Milind Wakankar is Associate Professor of literature and philosophy at the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi.
Notes
1 Erich Auerbach (Citation1984) and Reinhardt Koselleck (Citation2004), though in different ways, have shown how European ideas of worldliness derived their aspect of modernity from the notion of a future which, in the fullness of time, would redeem the present. All of Auerbach’s work is relevant here, but see especially ‘Figura’ (1938) in Auerbach (Citation1984).
2 See Pollock (Citation2009), to whom Novetzke below is clearly in debt.
3 See ‘The Story of Abou Hassan; or the Sleeper Awakened.’ I have not had a chance to look at the recent more scholarly editions of Nights by among others, Robert Irwin. But now see Horta (Citation2017) on this text in fluent contexts in the modern.
4 Here I continue to go back to the seminal work of Hodgson (Citation1993) on early Islam.
5 My debt to Pines and Strauss (especially on Maimonides) will be evident below, but I also want to recall the superb analysis by Gil Anidjar (Citation1992), really his thesis under Amos Funkenstein.
6 To avoid overloading this footnote (the literature on Rosenzweig is vast) I will mention here the two key translations by Barbara Galli, Rosenzweig (Citation2005) and Rosenzweig (Citation1995); the bibliography to the latter will supply most of the relevant references. We now have the understated and astute work by Hollander (Citation2008), which extends also to Derrida’s engagement with Rosenzweig. Hollander inspires us with the task of going back with and beyond Derrida to these rich texts by Rosenzweig and Cohen among others, and reading them for ourselves.
7 The great twentieth century exemplars of Jewish studies certainly understood him in this way: one thinks of Gershom Scholem, Henry Wolfson, Shlomo Pines, Leo Strauss and so many others; in Walter Benjamin too, in his radical new account of the visual field, the traces of which can be seen in the early Scholem-inspired essay on ‘judgement’ (Ur-teil) as the mystical link between the un-mediate and mediate in language. I have in mind of course the visionary essay ’On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’ (1916) in Benjamin (Citation1996, 62–74). The essay is practically incomprehensible in English since it plays on the word ‘Ur-teil’ or judgement as an originary apportioning.
8 My emphasis here is somewhat different from that of Goetschel (Citation2013). The moving relation between Rosenzweig and Cohen, the great neo-Kantian philosopher and author of the extraordinary work, Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, can be discerned in the essays on Cohen in Rosenzweig (Citation1984).
9 On the Islamic origins of the magisterium, see Makdisi (Citation1990).
10 See the superb edition of Rosenzweig (Citation2000).
11 What I am arguing for here bears some resemblance to Derrida’s reading of Heidegger in the early 1970’s (Derrida Citation2007). But the regressive method I deploy here is indebted almost entirely to Schelling and Rosenzweig.
12 The word becomes crucial for Schelling at some point in his generative period between the Freedom treatise of 1809, the Stuttgart private sessions of 1810, the ‘Ages of the World’ drafts of the mid-teens, and the Erlangen lectures of 1821—again, for reasons of brevity I will refer only to Schelling (Citation2000), which has all the relevant citations. The high point of the ‘positive philosophy’ is to my mind Schelling (Citation1977).
13 ‘Law and Bhava: Notes Toward a Treatise on Freedom’ (Wakankar Citation2015).
14 Heidegger (Citation1973, 31) referring to Hegel’s Logic.
15 Phule (1827-1890) was a polemicist, educator and self-made businessman who wrote powerfully against brahmin prejudice in late nineteenth century Marathi society. See O’Hanlon (Citation1985) for a conventional account of Phule’s life and times. I offer a critique of O’Hanlon in Wakankar (Citation2018).
16 See Tilak ([Citation1934, Citation1936,] Citation1973); the final volumes were co-authored, in part posthumously, by her son Devadatta Tilak; the consolidated (Sampurna) volume was edited by Ashok Devdatta Tilak, her great-grandson, in 1973. Although the span of time between Phule and Lakshmibai Tilak’s work is relatively wide, I nonetheless assume a experiential continuum here between Phule and the Tilaks, both Lakshmibai and (Reverend) Narayan Vaman. This is because the Tilaks refer back to a world that Phule was still active in, which is to say the milieu of the late nineteenth century.
17 See Padmanji (Citation1908); Reverend Tilak’s mazkur, inserted into Tilak (Citation1973, 213–221); Ramabai (Citation1907, 295–324).
18 Translation Mine. Compare Inkster (Citation1950, 120–121). This is not to fault Inkster’s remarkable translation from 1950, which tries with success to bring out the supple simplicity of Lakshmibai’s prose. Today one would only want to restore, in a revised translation, the archival apparatus (in all its artifice) that Inkster left out in her rendering of the text.
19 For an extremely nuanced account of this ineffability, see Blanchot (1993) on Henri Lefebvre.
20 The locus classicus in scholarly debate on domesticity in this period is Armstrong (Citation1990).
21 The title page says that the tract was ‘printed for the use of the Marathi Translations Committee of the Bombay Auxiliary Bible Society.’ A copy of this is available in the British Library. The interlocutors, marked by their initials in the text, are Thomas Candy, John Wilson, JM Mitchell, Narayan Sheshadri, Hari Ramchundra, CW Isenberg and Appajee Bapoojee. Marathi words are in Nagari script in the original.
22 See Wakankar (Citation2018) for a further elaboration of this notion of fluency.
23 The standard account of the Brahmo Samaj is Kopf (Citation1979). For the Prarthana Samaj, see the relevant sections in More (Citation1996); Pawar (Citation2004).
24 See Ranade (Citation2001); this is a reprint of Ranade (1902), with a Preface by RG Bhandarkar; Bhandarkar (Citation1998 [Citation1909]), with a Preface by Narayan Ganesh Chandavarkar; Shinde (Citation1979).
25 Vitthala of Pandharpur was formerly a shepherd deity, bearing some resemblance to the ubiquitous hero-stones dotting village landscapes in the south. The stones commemorate local heroes slain while trying to protect their herds of cattle from thieves. The stance of the deity (its arms uniquely akimbo) and the fact that it stands on a brick are part of the millennial history of the deity and of Vitthala worship, which may have transpired for centuries before Dnyaneswara (circa 1290 CE) inaugurated the great tradition of poetry addressing Vitthala, a tradition that itself culminated in the three other great poets in the period between 1300 and 1700, viz., Namdev, Eknath and Tukaram. The gradual Vaishnavisation (raising the local hero to the ambient pantheon of Krishna-worship) is concomitant with the massive dissemination of the Varkari mode of speech over the millennium. I discuss these issues at length in Wakankar (Citation2010).
26 See the final chapter of Wakankar (Citation2010) for the larger argument about Tukaram in the work of Sadanand More, Dilip Chitre and RC Dhere, of which these few lines are a summary.
27 See ‘Bhagwata Dharma,’ (Ranade Citation2001, 19–114); Shinde, ‘Bhagwata Dharmaca Vikas,’ (Shinde Citation1963, 3–62).
28 For the rest of the poem see Tukaram (Citation1973); (Abhanga 753): ‘Krupavanta kiti/ Deen bahu avadi//Tyanca bhar vahe mathan/ Kari yogakshemacinta//Bhulo nadi vata/ Kari dharuni dyavi neet// Tuka manhe jeeven/ Anusartan eka bhaven.’ The last two lines can be rendered in the following way: ‘Lose yourself on the riverbank, and He holds your hand and leads you on/Tuka says, the whole of my being follows one thought, one concept.’
29 For an important early response to nationalist claims of this kind, see Vitthala Ramji Shinde, ‘Caturmasa, Tukobova ani tyanci Tavali’ (1926), in Shinde (Citation1999).