post-colonial_translation

134 Vinay Dharwadker
In pointing out such parallels, towards the end of more than thirty pages
of discussion of the distinctive features of Virasaivism and bhakti in
the Introduction to Speaking of Siva, Ramanujan made several crucial
points at once. The analogies enable uninitiated common readers as
well as professional historians and comparatists of religion to make
sense of the complex relationship between bhakti and brahmanism or
classical Hinduism; to see that, contrary to early and late colonial and
orientalist arguments, ‘India’ and ‘Hinduism’ were neither static nor
uniform, and instead contained their own principles of ‘internal’ change,
renewal and diversification; to understand that, contrary to Christianmissionary
arguments, bhakti movements like Virasaivism were neither
derivations nor failures, but ‘original’ (without precedent) and ‘vital’
(alive, mutable); and especially to discover that the bhakti ‘countercultures’
within Hinduism historically preceded Protestant movements
in Europe by a few hundred years, without the possibility of a Christian
or European influence. Moreover, in choosing on this occasion to render
and interpret Virasaiva discourse against the grain of classical Hinduism
and the so-called Great and Little Traditions of South Asia (SS, 34), in
placing that discussion in a broad comparative perspective, and in subtly
distancing himself from the dogmatism, harshness and intolerance of
the movement, Ramanujan also managed simultaneously to dismantle
late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Indian revivalist
appropriations of bhakti. If this is what Ramanujan’s translations and
commentary set out to do and succeeded in doing twenty years before
Niranjana attacked him, then he can hardly be the composite colonialist,
orientalist, Christian-missionary, Utilitarian, nationalist and nativist
‘collaborator’ that she tries to make him out to be.
Finally, Niranjana’s charges that Ramanujan represents bhakti
in general and Virasaivism in particular as monolithic or
homogeneous phenomena, and that he ‘essentializes Hinduism’
and somehow thereby ‘condones communal violence’ in
contemporary India, derive from the same inconsistency of
scholarly and argumentative procedures that I have pointed out so
far. Niranjana articulates her own totalizing critique on the basis of
a single translated poem in Speaking of Siva and on an arbitrarily
isolated group of Ramanujan’s comments, without taking into
account even the rest of his work in that book as a whole. Her
strategy literal-mindedly imitates Derrida’s standard procedure of
claiming to ruin the entire edifice of Western metaphysics by
supposedly demonstrating how one small part of it falls apart
under his deconstructive gaze. What Niranjana does not realize is