Toward the end of their critique of the Californian Ideology, Barbrook and Cameron remark in passing, “Any attempt to develop hypermedia [innovative forms of knowledge and communications] within Europe will need some of the entrepreneurial zeal and can-do attitude championed by the Californian New Right.” But it seems to me that you cannot get the can-do attitude and zeal without the ideology, without the shimmering dream of California, without the furious continent-conquering energy, the guns, the massacres, without the consequences — good and bad — of belief. Fictions about history are not just distractions; they move individuals and nations into action, and so they change history itself.
5 THE CODE OF BEAUTY: ANANDAVARDHANA
About four years into the writing of my own fiction about history, I traveled to New York over a summer break. I wanted to see friends, to do some computer work for my old scribing company, and also to escape my novel for a few weeks. This was my first book, but by now I had learned that when you are in the middle of a novel, you cannot escape the writing except through distraction. The story buzzes and hums inside you, and any moment of rest gives it an opportunity to scrabble to the surface and claw at your attention. New York was full of diversions. And being away from my papers and books meant that I couldn’t really work, so I could indulge freely.
One evening, a friend told me about a reading by five touring Indian poets at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). We went, and I heard the critic and poet A. K. Ramanujan read his translation of a classical Tamil poem:
What could my mother be
to yours? What kin is my father
to yours anyway? And how
did you and I meet ever?
But in love
our hearts have mingled
like red earth and pouring rain.1
I felt a shiver of recognition. I had been scribbling titles in my notebooks for years, but now I knew. This was what my book would be called. I went to a library the next day and found Ramanujan’s book The Interior Landscape. The poem had been written some time between the first and third centuries CE by a poet known only as Cempulappeyanirar, “The Poet of the Red Earth and Pouring Rain.” It lost none of its simple, evocative vastness when I read it on a page, and I was grateful, but a title was not the only richness that Ramanujan offered me. In his elegant afterword, he led the reader into the intricacies of the Sangam literature of south India, which flourished from about 300 BCE to 30 °CE. “Sangam” is “confluence” in Tamil, and refers to the assemblies of scholars and poets who — according to legend — had met for thousands of years in the south. The Sangam poets divided the world into akam—Ramanujan’s “interior landscape,” suffused with the pleasures and pains of love, sex, and attachment — and puram—the external panorama of politics, heroic striving, social attachment and obligation. In these poems, a complex series of symbolic associations creates mood and meaning; each flower and landscape functions within a convention. So, the desert or drought-ridden land of the palai is where lovers part; the kurinji flower, which blooms only once every twelve years, gives its name to the landscape of the hills, abundant with water and fruit, alive with desire. “In their antiquity and in their contemporaneity, there is not much else in any Indian literature equal to these quiet and dramatic Tamil poems,” Ramanujan wrote. “In their values and stances, they represent a mature classical poetry: passion is balanced by courtesy, transparency by ironies and nuances of design, impersonality by vivid detail, austerity of line by richness of implication.”2
Ramanujan’s explication of this complex aesthetic gave me the beginnings of a vocabulary which I could use to speak about what I was trying to do with my book. I was not writing a Sangam fiction, of course, but I now began to investigate the rich traditions of Indian literary theory. There was a peculiar comfort in reading about the structures and operations of literature as understood by these theorists; in their investigations, they explored what literature was and what it did as a system, as a set of interlocking conventions and assumptions. And as I read Ramanujan and others, I had the curious sensation of recognizing myself, of beginning to know why I was moved by a certain kind of narrative construction, why a particular heightened mode of drama struck me as sublime. The fractures induced by colonialism hadn’t eradicated these aesthetic preferences from within me or my culture; they remained embedded in practice, in the shapes of temples and in Indian movies and spoken languages and my novel. But a certain silencing had happened, so that what was known couldn’t be spoken, so that this longing had no language in which it could be uttered.
I am using the English word “aesthetic” here, but I should emphasize that there is a very strong tendency in the developmental, evolutionary model of history to limit the possibility of aesthetic thinking and theorizing to the modern, the contemporary. According to the literary scholar Geoffrey Galt Harpham:
No concept is more fundamental to modernity than the aesthetic, that radiant globe of material objects and attitudes ideally independent of politics, rationality, economics, desire, religion, or ethics. For as Shaftesbury, Kant, Alexander Baumgarten, Friedrich Schiller, and their successors have elaborated it, the aesthetic gathers into itself and focuses norms and notions crucial to the self-description of an enlightened culture.
Among these philosophers and thinkers, the general consensus — following Kant — is that the aesthetic can flourish
only in a certain kind of culture, a “modern” culture capable of sustaining a “disinterested” attention to things that have no utilitarian function, no necessary connection to meanings or concepts …
The aesthetic is thus … an ideological creation, an attribute posited by modernity of itself.3
The cult of modernity, in order to demonstrate the newness of modernity, needs to always insist on the chasms that separate modernity from the past. The modernity of colonialism insisted on a corresponding un-modernity in the regions it conquered. It had to, in order to justify its own presence in these areas of darkness. Progress demanded that the premodern — usually characterized as primitive, childish, lesser developed, and, most significantly, as feminine — be brought into the light through judicious, disinterested applications of education and force. Guns, trains, and the telegraph were the blessed tools of this righteous, masculine mission. And it is no coincidence that the first classrooms in which the English novel was studied were located in colonial universities in India. The task of turning Indians into proper modern subjects with the right sort of interiority, reflexivity, and individuality demanded that the most sophisticated technology of selfhood be brought into play, and of course this instrument was the modern novel. But many of the protagonists of my novel were premoderns. One of them, Sanjay, was a poet. How did he imagine the self? And Sanjay might have asked, what makes a poem beautiful? I tried to find out, and to do so I had to find my way into the Sanskrit cosmopolis — so named by the Indologist Sheldon Pollock — into the Sanskrit-speaking and writing ecumene which, at its height, sprawled from Afghanistan to Java, across dozens of kingdoms, languages, and cultures.
The earliest available text in Sanskrit is the Rig Veda, dating — according to current scholarly consensus — from around 2000–1700 BCE.4 The Rig Veda, and the other Vedas that followed — the Sama, Yajur, and Atharva Vedas — were considered to be eternal, uncreated, “not of human agency” (apaurseya), and “directly revealed” (shruti) to the seers; these qualities distinguished them from all other religious texts, which were “what is remembered,” smriti. The language that these Vedic wisdom texts were orally transmitted in — not yet called Sanskrit — was therefore also eternal, uncreated, devavani—“the language of the gods.” The truths that the Vedas embodied lay not only in the sense, the verbal meaning, but also in the sounds, the pitch, the tonality, the meter. Therefore it was vitally important to maintain these qualities from generation to generation, to guard against linguistic deterioration and slippage. Among the auxiliary sciences developed as “limbs of the Veda,” vedanga, there were several that ensured faultless reproduction across the years, including phonetics, grammar, etymology, and meter. Accurate preservation of the Vedas earned spiritual merit. Grammar was the “Veda of Vedas,” the science of sciences; it was called vyakarana, simply “analysis,” and was the foundation of all education. The Brahmins, the priestly caste, were trained rigorously in the cultivation of memory and linguistic expression. The effort was successful; the Vedas are chanted today exactly as they were almost four millennia ago, complete with archaic tones and usages present nowhere in the Sanskrit that followed.