Anthropology, India, and Academic Self: A Disciplinary Journey Between Two Cultures over Four Decades

Abstract

Notes

The writing of this paper was facilitated by the 2008 Sesquicentennial Award of the University of Virginia. My files, along with those of Professor Mary Douglas, on the International Commission on Anthropology of Food and Food Problems were useful to me in composing a segment of this recollection. Since this article, most of all, situates within my academic narrative the inspiring roles and contributions of several distinguished anthropologists from India, US, UK and the Continent, it is dedicated to them, in appreciation.

1. This writing will have an autobiographical social reference frame throughout, but only to the extent necessary and helpful in interconnecting the three main concerns of this exercise: distinct disciplinary turns in anthropology to major relevant changes in contemporary India, and these two to issues in changing academic and personal identity. These three “story lines” will be pursued over the past four decades spent between India and US. The presentation will be selective and suggestive, not exhaustive, offering only necessary explanatory notes and documentary references. The disciplinary conundrums and specialist jargon on India will also be minimized, given the limitations of space and a desire to make the discussion more widely accessible.

2. M. N. Srinivas, Indian Society, through Personal Writings (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. xi.

3. On “global closeness,” see Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (London: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 121.

4. Clifford Geertz, After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 135.

5. Srinivas, Indian Society, p. xi.

6. To get a sense of this Indian anthropological phase, see D. N. Majumdar and T. N. Madan, An Introduction to Social Anthropology (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1956).

7. Given my BSc, I was admitted to Physical Anthropology under the direct supervision of Professor Majumdar. To be in a small class taught by “the professor” was a privilege, allowing us to hear in detail, for instance, about how Bronislaw Malinowski, A. C. Haddon and Raymond Firth had proceeded in their careers in anthropology.

8. Raymond Firth, personal communication, 1959.

9. Benjamin D. Paul, Health, Culture and Community: Case Studies of Public Reactions to Health Programs (New York: Russell Sage, 1955). Though the succeeding literature on this field is vast and varied, for present purposes see also Charles Leslie, Asian Medical Systems (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1998; 1st ed., 1976); Mark Nichter, ed., New Horizons in Medical Anthropology: Essays in Honor of Charles Leslie (London: Routledge, 2002).

10. For the record, my PhD “examiners” were Professors T. N. Madan of Lucknow University, McKim Marriott of University of Chicago and Dr. B. G. Prasad of the King George's Medical College of Lucknow University. Dr. Madan had helped me write the dissertation after my original research guide, Prof. D. N. Majumdar, died suddenly in May 1960.

11. I was simultaneously teaching, during mornings, undergraduate anthropology at Kanya-Kubja Degree College during the period. During the writing, Dr. Rudra Dutt Singh, a sociologist and a collaborator of American anthropologist Oscar Lewis, was of help at the time.

12. The phrase “Indian civilization” or the “civilization of India” was employed at the time for stressing the comparative historical continuities and cultural and religious distinctness of India in the world cultures. This usage was, of course, clearly different than, for instance, the more recent one stressing the clashing civilizational hegemonies. See Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Making of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998).

13. David Schneider was also the chair of the department during 1963–64. I was attracted to his work on American kinship several years later. See David Schneider, American Kinship: A Cultural Account (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968; and on related exercises on an Indian region, R. S. Khare, Normative Culture and Kinship: Essays on Hindu Categories, Processes and Perspectives (Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1983). Clifford Geertz had become an inspiring mentor to me from the 1970s onwards (see below).

14. Geertz, After the Fact, pp. 116, 117.

15. First, President Jack Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963 (and I had come to know about it from a maid cleaning the seventh floor rooms of the International House, where I was staying). Jawaharlal Nehru had died in May 1964 (and Maureen Patterson of the South Asia library collection was my source of this news).

16. From this vast body of publications, see, for instance, the following: M. N. Srinivas, Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952); McKim Marriott, ed., Village India: Studies in the Little Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955); M. N. Srinivas, Social Change in Modern India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968); Louis Dumont, Religion, Politics and History in India (The Hague: Mouton, 1970); F. G. Bailey, Caste and Economic Frontier (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1957); Adrian C. Mayer, Caste and Kinship in Central India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1960); and Nur Yalman, Under the Bo Tree: Studies in Caste, Kinship and Marriage in the interior of Ceylon (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967).

17. See Srinivas, Social Change in Modern India; Milton Singer and Bernard Cohn, eds., Structure and Change in Indian Society (Chicago: Aldine, 1968); R. S. Khare, The Changing Brahmans: Association and Elites among the Kanya-Kubjas of North India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); and Milton Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes: An Anthropological Approach to Indian Civilization (New York: Praeger, 1972).

18. See Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne H. Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).

19. For example, see Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations (New York: Pantheon, 1968).

20. The roots of these, I had thought at the time, lay in my being only “a day student” during the college and university education, and thus missing the “liberating university dorm or hostel social life.” But the reality is usually far more complex.

21. The social environs of a small academic center of the University of Wisconsin were a world away from the University of Chicago. Though not unexpected, this change was nevertheless rough enough to produce another “cultural shock.” My wife and I were abroad for the first time living together, soon after marriage. We both faced daily social challenges in adapting to a small white mid-western American community. My (sari-wearing) wife and I stood out socially. We were vegetarians, teetotalers, and had Indian accented English. Soon, we (with our photograph) were a news story in the local evening paper, in our landlady's words, “to let the community know who the two new faces are and why they are here.”

Both of us were homesick, and we found ourselves suddenly at the social margins, not unlike, as my wife once commented, “the lower castes in India.” Though the town was neat and clean and comfortable, it was nevertheless “so unlike our place.” Even the major American national newspapers carried so little on India that one really felt living in a foreign land. Only air-mail (par avion) letters and an occasional package (by ship) were the ways to remain in touch with home.

22. See R. S. Khare “A Case of Anomalous Values in Indian Civilization: Meat-eating among the Kanya-Kubja Brahmans of Katyayan Gotra,” Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 25, No. 2 (1966), pp. 229–40. Also, Khare, The Changing Brahmans.

23. For wide ranging observations on anthropological knowledge and its pursuit by different major anthropologists, see Geertz, After the Fact, p. 97, also pp. 96–135. See also Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1988).

24. Besides those already cited, see also M. N. Srinivas, “The Indian Village: Myth and Reality,” in J. H. M. Beattie and R. G. Lienhardt, eds., Studies in Social Anthropology: Essays in Memory of E. E. Evans-Pritchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); and M. N. Srinivas, The Remembered Village (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1976).

25. Though I cannot claim any prolonged personal or professional relationship with Professor Srinivas, we had repeatedly met and academically participated on several different occasions at our respective universities in India and in the US. And we had also visited each other's houses more than once, his house in Bangalore, India and mine in Charlottesville.

26. As I had once remarked to Charlottesville-visiting Professor Bernard Cohn during the 1970s, he had been, for me, one of the “Chicago trimurti” or a “troika.”

27. For some of his signature pieces relevant here, see McKim Marriott, “Interactional and Attributional Theories of Caste Ranking,” Man in India Vol. 39, No. 2 (1959), pp. 92–107; McKim Marriott, “Caste Ranking and Food Transactions, A Matrix Analysis,” in Milton Singer and Bernard Cohn, eds., Structure and Change in Indian Society (Chicago: Aldine, 1968); McKim Marriott, “Hindu Transactions: Diversity without Dualism,” in Bruce Kapferer, ed., Transactions and Meanings (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1976); and McKim Marriott, “Constructing an Indian Ethnosociology,” Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s.), Vol. 23 (1989), pp. 1–39.

28. See M. N. Srinivas, “Foreword,” in Singer, ed., When a Great Tradition Modernizes, p. x.

29. In addition to those already cited, see Milton Singer, ed., Traditional India: Structure and Change (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1958); Milton Singer, ed., Krishna: Myths, Rites and Attitudes (Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1966); and Milton Singer, Man's Glassy Essence: Explorations in Semiotic Anthropology (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984).

30. See Khare, The Changing Brahmans; Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes. Professor Singer had written a “Foreword” for my publication and he had acknowledged in his book that our two studies had conceptual affinities. Without any prior knowledge, contact or planning, we had converged in conceptualizing the traditional-modern cultural dynamics of change among the mid-century Brahman urban elites.

31. See R. S. Khare, “Introduction,” in R. S. Khare, ed., The Eternal Food: Gastronomic Ideas and Experiences of Hindus and Buddhists (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 1–25.

32. For a profile of Dumont's life and his works, see R. S. Khare, ed., Caste, Hierarchy and Individualism: Indian Critiques of Louis Dumont's Contributions (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 1–35. I had turned to his work more seriously only in 1964, after my first American trip, and my correspondence with him had started in 1968. I had met Dumont in person in fall 1970 at the University of Chicago.

33. See Khare, “A Case of Anomalous Values.” Though I had found Dumont responsive in correspondence, I was unable to engage him in the specific issues and anomalies the Kanya-Kubja's actual social practices raised.

34. This period had offered me several opportunities to know him better, including how caring and hospitable the Dumonts (i.e. Dumont and his first wife, Jenny) were. Dumont's erudition and total self-immersion in the work has always been an example to me. We had walked and talked together several times on the Paris streets near his flat, discussing broadly his approach to structuralism and to such Indian classical texts as “the Laws of Manu.” In summer 1973, while attending a conference in Paris, several of us had visited his summer cottage outside Paris.

35. See R. S. Khare, “Encompassing and Encompassed: A Deductive Theory of Caste,” (Review Article), Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 30, No. 4 (1971), pp. 559–68; R. S. Khare, “A Theory of ‘Pure’ Hierarchy,” Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s.), No. 5 (1970), pp. 27–33.

36. For a discussion of the Indian critiques, see Khare, Caste, Hierarchy, and Individualism.

37. See Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications, complete revised English edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). See particularly pp. xi–xlix, for Dumont's responses to his critics; and pp. 239–45 for conceptualizing hierarchy independent of any explicit use of the Indian conceptual ideas and categories. To be anthropological, one's “theory” must include conceptions central to the culture explained.

38. See McKim Marriott, “Review of Homo Hierarchicus: Essai sur le system des castes,” American Anthropologist Vol. 71, No. 6 (1969), pp. 1166–75. Marriott's consistent criticism of Dumont's work is a distinct and important subject by itself to study. It shows both the promises and difficulties that an “alternative approach” can face. Unfortunately, both Dumont and Marriott remained turgid and averse to discussing fully their “differences” in the necessary explicated detail and in a sufficiently accessible sociological/anthropological language. For Dumont's final response to Marriott, see Louis Dumont, “Preface to Complete Revised English Edition,” in Homo Hierarchicus, pp. xi–xlix.

39. Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, pp. xxviii–xxx.

40. A way to demonstrate this slant could be to examine the preponderant trend in the published “contents” list of such a journal as Contributions to Indian Sociology, new series, during the 1970s and the early 1980s. For a cluster of similarly inclined scholars at the time, see T. N. Madan, ed., Way of Life: King, Householder, Renouncer: Essays in Honor of Louis Dumont (New Delhi, Vikas Publishing House, 1982).

41. The reference is here to Marriott's “Samasara” game of the 1980s, played by his seminar participants at the University of Chicago. I am not aware of any published text reference to this game.

42. For example, see Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1977). Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). However, a gap did appear in my interest in Dumont's work during the 1980s and it lasted until 1997, when I was to write a review article on three new books on India, framed against “Dumontian sociology and since.” See R. S. Khare, Cultural Diversity and Social Discontent: Anthropological Studies on Contemporary India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1998), pp. 100–119.

43. For example, see Octavio Paz, Claude Levi-Struass: An Introduction (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971).

44. I had spent 1971–73 doing so, including the opportunities given at the time by my move to the University of Virginia in 1971, to the Center for Advanced Studies in Shimla (India) in summer 1972; and to Louis Dumont's École Pratique des Hautes Études in the fall of 1972.

45. The call was unexpected because I had neither applied nor thought of applying to the Institute for a fellowship. I did not know if I qualified. Clifford Geertz's announcement was thus a pleasant surprise and encouragement.

46. For the main ones, see R. S. Khare, The Hindu Hearth and Home (Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1976); Culture and Reality: Essays on the Hindu System of Managing Foods (Simla: Indian Institute for Advanced Study, 1976); Khare, ed., The Eternal Food; and R. S. Khare and M. S. A. Rao, Food, Society and Culture: Aspects in South Asian Food Systems (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1986).

47. See Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famine: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).

48. Initially, the Commission's North American branch was led by Professor Gretel Pelto, the European one by Dr. Igor de Garine, the South Asian one by Prof. M. S. A. Rao of Delhi University, and the Southeast Asian one by Lenore Manderson.

49. Concurrently (from 1976 to 1990), I had also become involved in overlapping multidisciplinary academic activities at the University of Virginia, with the goal to promote and widen the faculty intellectual interactions. The organization was called “Committee on the Study of Individual and Society,” and its activities, meetings and publications were sponsored and funded by Dean Dexter Whitehead, the forward-looking director of the Center for Advanced Study and the Graduate Dean.

50. See Mary Douglas and R. S. Khare “Commission on Anthropology of Food: Statement of its History and Current Objectives,” Social Science Information Vol. 18, No. 6 (1979), pp. 903–13.

51. The main office's Commission's files and records, including those from Mary Douglas, are currently with me at the University of Virginia. These were recently also consulted for writing a review of anthropology of food studies by Ellen Messer of Tufts University.

52. See Khare and Rao, eds., Food, Society and Culture; Khare, ed., The Eternal Food.

53. See Arjun Appadurai, “Is Homo Hierarchicus?,” American Ethnologist Vol. 13, No. 4 (1986), pp. 745–61; on the changing perspective on history of India, see also Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).

54. For a wide discussion of the “moral crux” anthropology thus faced, see, for example, Talal Asad, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (New York: Humanities Press, 1975); Hussein Fahim, Indigenous Anthropology in Non-Western Countries (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1982); James Clifford and George Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1986); George Marcus and M. Fischer, eds., Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); and Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

55. As Geertz had phrased it, “Does it all come down to who writes whom?” See Geertz, After the Fact, pp. 106–7, also 183–4.

56. For another set of discussions, see Richard Fox, ed., Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Seminar Series, 1991).

57. See Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). Also, Christophe Jeffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in Indian Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

58. For a discussion of these questions from the Dalit perspective, see Gail Omvedt, Dalit Visions, Tracts for Times 8 (Hyderabad: Orient Longmans, 1995).

59. See R. S. Khare, The Untouchable as Himself: Ideology, Identity and Pragmatism among the Lucknow Chamars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

60. For my exercises on Dalit women, see R. S. Khare, Cultural Diversity and Social Discontent: Anthropological Studies of Contemporary India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1998).

61. See the forthcoming volume: D. Shyam Babu and R. S. Khare, eds., Caste in Life: Autobiographical Sketches of Inequalities (New Delhi: Pearson Education, 2009).

62. For a very perceptive cultural account of this decade by a journalist, see Mark Tully, No Full Stops in India (New York: Penguin Books, 1991).

63. For reviewing a large body of related literature, see, for example, the “bibliographical essay” of Khilnani. See Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999) pp. 238–41. On the Indian middle class, see Pavan K. Varma, Great Indian Middle Class (New York: Penguin Books, 1998).

64. For the new turns in anthropological discourse, see Veena Das, ed., Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990); Veena Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995)

65. For example, for an early anthropological writing, see Peter van der Veer, “God Must be Liberated: A Hindu Liberation Movement in Ayodhya,” Modern Asian Studies Vol. 21, No. 2 (1987), pp. 283–301. See also Vasudha Dalmia and H von Stietencron, eds., Representing Hinduism: The Construction of Religious Traditions and National Identity (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1995). For a history of the rise of Hindu nationalism, see Jeffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement.

66. See Akhil Gupta, Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

67. This project was mostly written up at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, Germany, during 1996-97. See Khare, Cultural Diversity and Social Discontent.

68. The issue of “balance” relates to scholarly neutrality and ultimately to “objectivity,” a much discussed topic. The recent Indian debates on the “secular” and “anti-secular” have not only been polemical but are reduced to what Allan Megill calls “reduction of agenda.” See Allan Megill, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

69. The recent school “textbook controversy” in California among Indian Americans was such a recent example. The Hindu activists, particularly the Hindu American Foundation, wanted Hinduism to be “correctly” represented in the children's history textbooks. The Jewish, Christian and Muslim groups were also similarly involved for “correctly” depicting the facts of religion to K-12 children. For example, see “New Battleground in Textbook Wars: Religion in History,” The Wall Street Journal, January 25, 2006.

70. Geertz, After the Fact, p. 134.

71. See Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes.

72. For a recent discussion of the East–West from Europe, see Kirsten Shands, ed., Neither East nor West: Postcolonial Essays on Literature, Culture and Religion (Sodortorns: Hogskola, 2008).

73. See Khare, The Eternal Food; Khare, Cultural Diversity and Social Discontent.

74. I adopt here the phrase “Indian practices of modernity” after Dipesh Chakrabarty. For my exercises, see Khare, The Changing Brahmans; Khare, The Untouchable As Himself.

75. On some practices of modernity, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). For wider discussions, see Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004); and Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). For a distinct 30 year earlier anthropological description and evaluation of some Indian modern ways, see Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes.

76. To explore such new configurations under globalizing forces, I am editing an interdisciplinary writing symposium on “India and the West: Globalizing History and Culture.” The collection is under publication as a special number of the New Literary History (2009).

77. Sen, Identity and Violence, pp. 121–48.

78. For such a set of four recent discussions, see Gurcharan Das, C. Raja Mohan, Ashton Carter and Sumit Ganguly, “The Rise of India,” Foreign Affairs Vol. 85, No. 4 (July/August 2006), pp. 2–56. For a couple of other relevant studies by the journalists, see Edward Luce, In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India (New York: Norton, 2007); Robyn Meredith, The Elephant and the Dragon: The Economic Rise of India and China, and What it Means for the Rest of Us (New York: Norton, 2007). For a development studies perspective, see Andrea Goldstein, Nicholas Pinaud, Helmut Reisen and Xiaobao Chen, The Rise of India and China: What is in It for Africa? (London: OECD Publications, 2006)

79. Historically, anthropology was born under colonialism and it had matured and spread by studying the postwar westernization impetus among Third World peoples and cultures. The discipline's first critical self-evaluation during the 1980s had centered on the moral-political crisis in “representing the cultural other” (see note 47). The second one is going on now, addressing squarely the “West–non-West” knowledge differences and their West-weighted discourse politics. The challenge here is, once again, for both sides to think and act outside of the East–West box. See Kirsten Shands, ed. Neither East nor West: Postcolonial Essays.

80. Sen, Identity and Violence, pp. 127–30; see also chapter 5.

81. For a wide-ranging comparative examination of the rise and fall of major empires, with a consistent focus on tolerance, diversity and inclusion for the empires to endure, see Amy Chua, The Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Dominance – and Why they Fall (New York: Doubleday, 2007). But for the US the exercise is difficult, given an American impulse toward imperialism, see Walter Nugent, Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion, (New York: Knopf, 2008).

82. Srinivas, Indian Society through Personal Writings, p. xi.

83. Ralf Dahrendorf, Life Chances: Approaches to Social and Political Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. ix.