Infinite Variety

by Madhavi Menon

  ‘Amir Khusro’. Miniature from a manuscript of Majlis Al-Usshak by Husayn Bayqarah. Source: Wikimedia Commons

  Vivekananda, in fact, went to Ramakrishna Paramahansa in order to be educated. While studying William Wordsworth’s poem ‘The Excursion’, Vivekananda and his peers at the General Assembly’s Institution in Calcutta were told by Professor William Hastle to visit Ramakrishna at his ashram in Dakshineswar in order to understand the meaning of the ‘trance’ about which Wordsworth writes in his poem. This is exactly what Narendra (as Vivekananda was known at that point) did in 1881. And after that, there was no looking back. In Swami Nikhilananda’s biography of Vivekananda, Ramakrishna is apparently astounded when he first sees his future disciple entering the room, unmindful of body and dress and the outside world in general. Ramakrishna is said to have told Naren that he had been waiting for him: ‘My ears are almost seared listening to...worldly people. Oh, how I have been yearning to unburden my mind to one who will understand my thought.’ Significantly, it is Ramakrishna’s mind that is first caught up in Narendra’s aura. It is this organ that convinces Paramahansa he is in the presence of a soulmate, that his dishevelled disciple has a divinity within him. What follow are five years of an intensely loving partnership, from 1881 until Ramakrishna’s death in 1886.

  ‘Chaitanya Deva Listening to the Bhagabata’, by

  Dinesh Chandra Sen. Source: Wikimedia Commons

  Narendra becomes Vivekananda under Paramahansa’s tutelage, remains celibate (like Socrates in the Symposium), and sets up the Ramakrishna Order after his teacher’s death. So intense is the emotional-pedagogic charge between Vivekananda and his master that the Ramakrishna Order is tasked precisely with setting up educational institutions where male disciples can learn from male masters, recreating the relation between Vivekananda and his teacher. All disciples have to remain monastic; indeed, Vivekananda was as, if not more, critical of sex than Ramakrishna had been. ‘In my first speech in Chicago,’ he said, ‘I addressed the audience as “Sisters and Brothers of America”, and you know that they all rose to their feet. You may wonder what made them do this, you may wonder if I had some strange power. Let me tell you that I did have a power and this is—never once in my life did I allow myself to have even one sexual thought. I trained my mind, my thinking, and the powers that man usually uses along that line I put into a higher channel, and it developed a force so strong that nothing could resist it.’ To this day, guest houses attached to the Ramakrishna Mission have only narrow single beds, even in their double rooms. These beds are attached to the wall so as to be immoveable. ‘No physical sex, please,’ the followers of Vivekananda and Paramahansa seem to be saying, ‘we are lovers of education.’

  For, contrary to what Devsingh’s unnamed friend fears, the intense charge in education is not always, and not only, and not predominantly, genital. The vice against which he would guard is less a matter of two men having sex with one another and more a matter of the desire generated between two men by the fact of education itself. The primary task of Plato’s Symposium, for instance, is to outline the seductions of education rather than the seductions of education. And the seductions of education allow us to think of desire as something far more capacious than genital contact alone. Rather than involving sexual intercourse (though it can), education engages with the organs—eyes, ears, brain—all of which Ramakrishna adduces as nodes of pleasure connected with his pedagogic relation to Vivekananda. For him, his disciple is a sight for sore eyes, a balm for tired ears, a vent for eager minds; Ramakrishna is reportedly swept away by the sound of Narendra’s voice lifted in song. Vivekananda replaces his sexual thoughts with thinking belonging to, in his words, ‘a higher channel’; his erotic investment is in thought rather than the genitalia. Indeed, the name ‘Vivekananda’ itself translates into ‘one who desires, and derives pleasure from, learning’. Learning for these two men, in all its intensity, engages organs that are not genital but that are nonetheless desirous. Which is to say, Devsingh’s friend is correct to assume that educational institutions are the sites of intense desire between men. But he is incorrect to think that this intense desire is genital alone.

  In Plato’s text, Socrates is famously described as an ugly person. But Alcibiades outlines Socrates’s seductive powers as being quite outside the ambit of physical beauty. After comparing him to the satyr Marsyas—ugly to behold but bewitching with his flute—Alcibiades says of Socrates: ‘You have the same effect on people. The only difference is that you do it with words alone, without the aid of any instrument. We can all listen to anyone else talking, and it has virtually no effect on us, no matter what he’s talking about, or how good a speaker he is. But when we listen to you, or to someone else using your arguments, even if he’s a hopeless speaker, we’re overwhelmed and carried away.’ The bewitching words of the master are intoxicating for both their sound and sense.

  This intoxication has historically characterized education in India. After all, why does the Bhagavad Gita describe the world as standing still while Krishna instructs Arjuna? And why does the teaching conclude by advising Arjuna to surrender to Krishna, the master? The relation between teacher and student has a long history of being linked to complete immersion in one another, total surrender. But this dissolving into one another is not necessarily the kama we would identify with genital pleasure. Rather, surrender in the Indian pedagogic tradition is just as strongly to be understood as ravishment experienced by the ear, the eye and the mind such that two people become as one in their enjoyment of the senses.

  In the Sakinat al-Auliya, the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh—heir apparent to Shah Jahan’s throne—describes his orgasmic initiation into the Qadiriyya order: ‘He [his teacher Miyan Mir] exposed my chest, and having pulled the clothing away from his own chest under the left nipple, rubbed it against my nipple on the same side, and declared, “Take that with which I have been entrusted.” And such a multitude of dazzling lights from his blessed chest entered mine that I cried, “Enough!”’ Dara’s sister, Jahan Ara Begum, who too was a committed Sufi, writes of her pir in her mystical memoirs, Risalah-i Sahibiyya (1641): ‘Your passion takes me in embrace and caresses me...Every moment I am anointed by your rapture...Oh Shah! You have finished me with one glance.’ Education is what Socrates’s teacher Diotima describes as philosophical rather than biological reproduction—it is the outcome of a process as intense as sex. But the organ involved is the brain.

  The Panchavargika—the Buddha’s first five disciples—were ravished by sound. At first they refuse to accept the Buddha as their master, but the sound of the Buddha’s voice and the sheer charisma of the Buddha’s speech, to which multiple texts testify, convince them of his brilliance and they become his first disciples. As recorded by the biographies written soon after his death, the Buddha’s charisma as a teacher apparently resided both in the content of his sermons and in the cadences of his voice. This double dynamism also resulted in the conversion of one of his most promising disciples, Udayin, who was swept away by the sound of the Buddha’s words. Not only does Udayin go on to become an arhat or enlightened disciple of the Buddha, but he too is described as a charismatic teacher in the manner of the Buddha and converts several other disciples to his faith. Indeed, the very principle of conversion depends on this notion of charisma, what a dictionary describe as the ‘compelling attractiveness or charm that can inspire devotion in others.’ Charisma makes even wayward difficulty seem like the most pleasurable thing in the world. It makes the out-of-the-way seem like the path to enlightenment.

  This possibility of wayward enlightenment is written into the very idea of education. Etymologically, the word ‘education’ derives from the Latin educare, which signifies the ability to lead forth, lead away and, significantly, lead out of (the tried and tested path). The most common term for education in Sanskrit is ‘vinaya’, which has the same etymological sense of leading away (from ignorance). Education is what leads you astray, and that is its job. To be educated means
surrendering to the intense attractions of thinking and behaving differently. After all, teachers such as Nizamuddin, Ramakrishna, the Buddha, Mirabai, Gandhi compelled their disciples to leave their way of life in order to embrace a different order—of asceticism, enlightenment, religious ecstasy, non-violence.

  Another famous master-disciple couple whose belief system revolved around waywardness is Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and Swami Nityananda from 15th-century Bengal. So intimately are their lives connected that they are even given rhyming nicknames—Chaitanya is Nimai and Nityananda is Nitai—much like Jamali and Kamali. Proponents of a Vaishnavite devotion, their chosen god was Krishna, and their preferred persona Radha. According to Sudhir Kakar—in his essay in Freud Along the Ganges—for Bhakti worshippers like Chaitanya, ‘the adulterous world was symbolic of the sacred, the overwhelming moment that denies world and society, transcending the profanity of everyday convention, as it forges an unconditional (and unruly) relationship with god as the lover’. And Bhakti, he adds, ‘is preeminently feminine’. For Chaitanya, worship involves a route that violates everyday conventions of desire. In the case of Bhakti worshippers, this violation is exemplified by the adulterous dalliance between the married Radha and unmarried Krishna, which becomes emblematic of rebellious devotion.

  After all, if education requires us to move away from the path that we have been given, then another way of describing education is that it requires us to be adulterous. By allowing us to explore options that have not been sanctioned socially, adultery becomes the opposite of fidelity. Radha’s adultery is the metaphor for a desire that moves beyond given notions of the world into an ecstatic realm in which she is united with Krishna. According to the Bhakti poets, we cannot learn how to love Krishna without such a moving away. An education in Krishna worship thus by definition involves adulterous and mobile desires; it is ‘vinaya’ indeed.

  But rather than being the marker of any one particular pedagogical system or any one religion, this rebellious desire forms the basis of all education. Desire that challenges the norm is or should be a fundamental feature of education itself. This is the reason why education has always had the potential to be dangerous. This is also the reason why Socrates was condemned to death by the State on charges of leading his students astray. Across the ages—and certainly until the British in India insisted that education become an acquisition of instrumental knowledge alone—education in India has been respectful of the colourfulness of charismatic conversion that marks the province of the pedagogic. Whether it is in the ecstatic poetic mehfils of Hazrat Nizamuddin, or the philosophically celibate cells of the Ramakrishna Mission; in the seductive sounds of the lute, or the charisma of the Buddha’s words, India has historically not separated education from desire.

  But now we seem to be shutting our brains and eyes and ears to this connection. The historically close relation between desire and education has in present-day India been confined to a strange sub-field of study known as ‘Sex Education’. And even (sex) education in schools does not mention the word ‘sex’. For example, the Central Board for Secondary Education (CBSE) includes a chapter on ‘Reproduction’ in its Class X Biology textbook as the entirety of its offerings on sex. In schools today, desire is considered to be either functional—hence the emphasis on sexual reproduction—or genital—thus the shame attached to it—rather than a wide, all-encompassing ethos that blooms in educational encounters. There is no sense of leading away in such an education, no smell of intellectual novelty, no threat of new desires. These CBSE textbooks belong to the same civilizational soil as the Kamasutra. But the older text discusses desire at great length as something that needs to be taught and learnt, and does not mention reproduction at all. Desire today is not understood as an integral part of education—we are too busy insisting on vocational safety to make room for adulterousness. And were the topic of desire ever to come up, it takes the form of a denuded science that would scarcely be recognizable to someone like Amir Khusro. Where education once meant a comfort with transgression, it now means the safety of the expected. Where education was once inseparable from the vagaries of desire, it now insists on sanitized truths. Where education once pointed to the necessity of leading away, it now subscribes to staying put.

  5

  GRAMMAR

  I am Indian, very brown, born in

  Malabar, I speak three languages, write in

  Two, dream in one. Don’t write in English, they said,

  English is not your mother-tongue. Why not leave

  Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,

  Every one of you! Why not let me speak in

  Any language I like! The language I speak

  Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses

  All mine, mine alone.

  —Kamala Das, ‘An Introduction’

  In I976, when I was five years old, I had a double hernia operation. I remember vividly the many moments of intense discomfort, the multiple trips to the hospital, and the slow and painful recovery after the operation. On one of my early visits to the hospital before the surgery was scheduled, the doctor took my mother aside to express his doubts over my diagnosis. He said it was quite unusual—almost unheard of—for such a young girl to be diagnosed with a double hernia. There was no question that I needed the operation since I had pieces of my inside spilling out on a regular basis and needing to be pushed back in again. But his theory was that rather than having a double or even a single hernia, I had undescended testicles that needed to be removed.

  I did not hear about this counter diagnosis until 35 years later. My mother had been unnerved by the conversation with the doctor in 1976. And she was even more traumatized when a well-meaning nurse told her to make sure that word of my ‘condition’ did not get around for fear that I would be kidnapped by hijras before the operation had taken place, and made one of their own.

  There are only two areas in which gender plays a defining role in our lives. The first is in determining the identity of living beings, both human and animal. And the second is in defining the rules of grammar. Indeed, Sanskrit grammar texts like Panini’s Ashthadhyayi and Patanjali’s Mahabhasya in the Brahminical tradition, and Buddhist and Jain texts written in Pali, all assume that animate and inanimate people, objects and concepts, have gender. These grammar books make clear that the way in which we think of gender in language affects the way in which we think of gender in persons. The same term—napunsaka—is used in these texts to describe the state of being neuter in person as well as the state of being neuter in grammar.

  From at least the 3rd century BCE onwards, the mark connecting biological and grammatical gender in Sanskrit and Pali traditions has been that of the linga, Shiva’s ‘phallus’. Those of us who have suffered through classes in Sanskrit will know that the linga is the category into which different words are placed: stri-linga for feminine words, pu-linga for masculine words, and napunsaka-linga for neuter words. If you put the wrong word in the wrong gendered category, then your sentence construction is, simply, wrong. The linga separates Man and Woman and Neuter in person just as ruthlessly as it separates the masculine, feminine and neuter case in grammar. The dilemma with which my mother grappled in 1976 was both a grammatical and an existential one. She was faced with the possibility of my sliding from the feminine to the neuter case in both body and language. My seemingly female body, she was told, might not belong in the grammatical category of the feminine.

  But even as gendered identity in grammar and life are considered essential to a ‘proper’ state of being, they are not so easy to ascertain. Even the handbooks of grammar find it hard to limit themselves to the three cases of masculine, feminine and neuter. For instance, these three gendered categories were augmented in Jain texts from the 5th century CE with a fourth case that offers two versions of the neuter or napunsaka gender. One is the masculine napunsaka (or purusha-napunsaka) for those men who occupy the penetrative position during intercourse. And the other is the feminine napunsaka
to describe those men who are the receptive partners in sexual intercourse. This fourth gender expands the notion of the neuter by suffusing it with masculine and feminine. Suddenly, the three ‘separate’ genders become less distinguishable from one another. This expansion of the neuter accords also with the taxonomy laid down in the Kamasutra, in which people of ‘the third nature’ are described as being either masculine or feminine. What is interesting about this proliferation of terms attached to the neuter gender is that the neuter is often understood as an absence of characteristics rather than a profusion of them. A lack rather than an excess. But the historical debates about Sanskrit grammar and gender suggest a profusion of content despite seemingly rigid forms.

  What is also interesting about Sanskrit is that it traces its roots not just to the gendered family of languages known as the proto Indo-European that has given rise to German, Italian, Spanish and French (in fact, all Indo-European languages including Sanskrit, Urdu and Hindi, are gendered; almost one-quarter of the world’s languages use gender in their grammatical structure)—but it is also related to the non-gendered family of languages known as the proto Indo-Iranian, such as Farsi (Persian) and Pashto. The primary verb for ‘being’—asth—is common both to Sanskrit and Farsi. Persian is a non-gendered language, while Urdu, Hindustani and Hindi—all derived from confluences between Persian and Sanskrit—are gendered with a vengeance.

  As we remember, though, grammatical gender in Sanskrit and its related languages is rigid while also being expansive. This expansiveness might suggest a ghost memory of Sanskrit’s non-gendered roots in Persian, and is possibly the reason why the seeming strictness of gender in Urdu and Sanskrit is more fluid in reality. For instance, despite being a gendered language, Urdu did not have a vocabulary term for the word ‘unnatural’ until the 20th century (according to Scott Kugle ‘be fitri’ became the ‘ungracefully literal translation of “unnatural”’). And even though almost all current Indian languages owing their descent to Sanskrit—Hindi, Marathi, Assamese, Punjabi—use gender, many of these languages assign gender to nouns in hilarious ways. For instance, in Hindustani—the umbrella language for both Hindi and Urdu—the word for manliness—mardangi—is gendered feminine.