Scholars Extraordinary

Dileep Padgaonkar reviews the book on Dharmanand Kosambi edited by Meera Kosambi.

Scholars Extraordinary - The Times of India

For close to four decades after his death, the name of Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi did not ring a bell outside a small circle of academics engaged in the study of ancient Indian history, society and culture. But interest in his prodigious output revived in India and abroad on the occasion of his birth centenary three years ago. Younger generations of scholars discovered a man of many parts: a polyglot fluent in Sanskrit, Pali, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, German, French, Italian, Portuguese and Russian, not to mention English and Marathi; an internationally-acclaimed mathematician, statistician, Indologist, Sanskritist, archaeologist and expert in numismatics; a creative, if contested, Marxist; a peace activist and, not least, what in today's parlance is known as a 'public intellectual'.

One sad consequence of his towering achievements, however, was the near-eclipse of attention to the achievements of his father, Dharmanand Kosambi, that were, in some respects, even more remarkable. These have now been brought into focus thanks to Meera Kosambi who represents the third generation of this family of scholars extraordinary. She has brought together, for the first time in English, the essential writings of her grandfather prefaced with a succinct account of his fascinating life and career.

Born on October 9, 1876 in a humble Gowd Saraswat Brahmin family in a small village in Portuguese-ruled Goa, Dharmanand, beset with persistent health problems, dropped out of school and was compelled to manage the family's coconut grove. The routine asphyxiated his restless mind. Adding to his despair was his marriage at the age of 14. He sought and found salvation in books in Marathi, particularly books about Maharashtra's saint-poets like Tukaram and about the Buddha. The latter's teachings made such a strong impression on him that he resolved in his early 20s to devote all his energies to the study of Buddhism and to propagate Buddhist philosophy throughout the Marathi-speaking world.

Soon after his father's death in late 1899, Dharmanand left behind his wife and infant daughter in the village and, on borrowed money, headed for Pune, then recognised as one of the foremost educational and cultural hubs in the subcontinent. Here he began to study Sanskrit in earnest and, thanks to Dr R G Bhandarkar, a fellow Saraswat, came in contact with the Prarthana Samaj. Over the next six years, he travelled, penniless and often on foot, to places in India and in neighbouring countries including Nepal, Burma (where he was ordained a monk) and Ceylon to deepen his knowledge of Buddhism.
It is in Calcutta that he got a break to enter the mainstream of academic life. His principal mentors were the linguist Harinath De, Prof Manmohan Ghosh, (brother of Sri Aurobindo Ghosh), Satyendranath Tagore and, above all, Justice Ashutosh Mookerjee. The latter invited him to introduce Pali in the curriculum of the National University and, later, at the University of Calcutta. From here his reputation as a scholar of Buddhism spread wide and far in academic circles.

As a result, Dharmanand launched on the international lecture-cum-research circuit that included four stints at Harvard University (also the alma mater of son Damodar), teaching assignments in Leningrad and, at different intervals, at Pune's Fergusson College and finally at Gandhi's Gujarat Vidyapeeth and the Vernacular Society in Ahmedabad. Along the way, he became more and more drawn into the Mahatma's inner circle, took part in the salt satyagraha, spent time in jail and worked among mill workers in Bombay. He continued to write prolifically on Buddhism and socialism in Marathi periodicals, making sure, as Meera Kosambi notes, to anchor his social and political concerns in spirituality and moral uprightness.

In 1947, much against his son's wishes, Dharmanand chose the Jain manner to end his life he fasted unto death at Gandhiji's ashram at Wardha. A deeply anguished Mahatma paid tribute to him saying that he was a scholar who "preferred to work silently in the background and never blew his own trumpet". It would have embarrassed Dharmanand Kosambi who disdained money and celebrity no end to learn that six decades after his death there is a surge of curiosity about his work on Buddhism, especially among young Ambedkarite scholars; a surge that will now doubtless soar on account of his granddaughter's diligent labours.

Scholar Rebel- Dharmanand Kosambi

From The Telegraph

SCHOLAR REBEL

- A window into a remarkable mind

Dharmanand Kosambi: The essential writings Edited by Meera Kosambi,

Permanent Black, Rs 695

The Kosambi whom historians know well is D.D., the brilliant iconoclastic scholar who brought about a fundamental change in the writing of ancient Indian history and who, ironically, himself acquired an iconic status in Marxist historiography. But this book is about another, less-known Kosambi, D.D.’s father, Dharmanand (1876-1947). And the editor-translator is yet another Kosambi — Meera, eminent sociologist, daughter of D.D. and granddaughter of Dharmanand. Given the fact that Dharmanand was a grandfather whom she did not know, the book no doubt represents an important personal journey for her. For the reader, what lends it importance and interest is the remarkable life of its protagonist, and his amazing life-journey, which took him from a small Goan village to Sri Lanka, Nepal, Burma, Russia, the United States of America and back. Not a bad record for a man who was afraid to travel!

Dharmanand is known as a Buddhist scholar in Maharashtra but is scarcely known elsewhere. This is because, although fluent in English, he chose to write in Marathi. This book introduces the man and his ideas to a wider audience and offers the first English translation of some of his writings. These include his autobiography, Nivedan,and his essays on Ashoka, Buddhism, non-violence, socialism, and the Indian working class. There is also a play (was it ever performed?) titled Bodhisattva, where Dharmanand wove satyagraha, women’s emancipation and his own vision of an ideal conjugal relationship into the story of the life of the Buddha-to-be.

Dharmanand was a school drop-out, his early education interrupted by frequent bouts of ill health. Married at the age of 14, shouldering the responsibility of the family business at 16, he had a strong contemplative and melancholy streak right from his childhood. Being a voracious reader only increased his dissatisfaction with life. The turning point came when he chanced upon a biographical sketch of the Buddha in a Marathi magazine, and later read a Marathi translation of Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia. He resolved to renounce his family and worldly life and to embark on a quest in search of knowledge of Buddhism. The problem was that he didn’t know quite where to look, because in the late 19th century, Buddhism had practically disappeared from India. After a seven-year-long journey, during which he became a monk, Dharmanand returned to the worldly life, determined to spread the Buddha’s message among his fellow Maharashtrians.

It is a gripping story. Dharmanand’s was not the usual search for an academic understanding of Buddhism. He was inspired by an intense, desperate yearning to comprehend the Buddha’s teaching from within the tradition, from practitioners of the faith. And his extraordinary spiritual quest was combined with a grim struggle for survival. He had no money and no wealthy patrons. He lived on the edge of starvation, begging for food and shelter, his body frequently racked with sickness. Concealing his interest in Buddhism, he set out to learn Sanskrit in Kashi, submitting to the Brahmin hierarchy which often left a Saraswat Brahmin like him hungry because he could only eat in the second shift. His pilgrimage to the Buddhist holy places speaks volumes about their sorry state in the early 20th century. His account of his sojourn in Burma is frank about the practical difficulties faced by a vegetarian monk in that country. After his return to the worldly life, Dharmanand travelled to the US, where the Harvard Indologist, Charles Rockwell Lanman, tried to deprive him of credit for translating the Visuddhi Magga — a story recounted with an admirable lack of rancour.

In the Harvard libraries, Dharmanand discovered Marx. His thoughts moved from religion to social and political issues, but he viewed these through a somewhat innocent Buddhist lens. He saw Buddhism as an ancient form of socialism. He talked about the incompatibility of fear and national freedom. National craving was the cause of war and world suffering. He urged capitalists to love their workers. He wrote against child marriage, caste discrimination and untouchability. Dharmanand was also inspired by Mahatma Gandhi. He became the leader of the Maharashtra Satyagraha Mandal and led the salt satyagraha in Shirode village near Goa. But he was not an unquestioning camp follower and criticized both Gandhian ideas and Marxism. He was drawn towardssatyagraha, but thought it dangerous to base a philosophy of non- violence on the Bhagavad Gita. Moved though he was by Marx’s egalitarian message, he was repelled by the conflict and violence that was inherent in that message and in the Bolshevik revolution.

The autobiography is fascinating not only for what it says but also for what it does not talk about. There is remarkably little about his family, even in his account of his life after he gave up monkhood. There is no description of what must have been a very poignant family reunion. Was this reticence due to indifference, or was it too personal or painful a subject? Other relationships that remain hazy include Dharmanand’s relationship with Anagarika Dharmapala, and with Ambedkar and his movement. A very significant point mentioned by Meera Kosambi is that although Ambedkar does not mention any sources in his The Buddha and his Dhamma, he was probably indebted to Dharmanand for his understanding of the life and ideas of Gautama Buddha.

Historians are bound to be very curious about the relationship between Dharmanand and his historian son, Dharmanand Damodar. Did D.D. inherit some of his talents, ideas and methods from his father? Or did he react against his father’s engagement with religion and spirituality that had torn his family apart? In spite of being a great scholar, Dharmanand did not make a major scholarly impact. This was because he was essentially a loner who chose to operate within a Maharashtrian world. Even after renouncing monkhood and engaging directly with the world as a teacher of Pali and Buddhism in various universities, he remained unmoved by the lure of money and ambition. His death was as unusual as his life. Wearied by persistent illness, he decided to end his life through sallekhana, fasting unto death in Gandhi’s ashram near Gorakhpur. Dharmanand died just a few months before India became independent. Do not be misled by the gentle unpretentiousness of his writings. This book is a window into the remarkable life and mind of a rebel who lived by his convictions, who combined scholarly erudition with spirituality, simplicity and social commitment, with no interest in mundane personal gain.

UPINDER SINGH

DDK Festival of Ideas: What it cost the aam aadmi

Kebabs and more! | Goan Observer - Weekly News Portal

The D.D. Kosambi memorial lecture series, which attracted unusually large audiences and were no doubt a very commendable initiative, also cost the aam admi a lot of money. Not on the travel and accommodation of eminent people like Dr. Romila Thapar who were invited to participate in the Festival of Ideas. More money was spent on wining and dining of the bold and the beautiful, the rich and the powerful than on the festival itself. At the inaugural D.D. Kosambi Festival of Ideas in February 2008, the Chief Minister hosted a banquet for the distinguished visiting dignitaries and local culture-vultures which cost the aam admi Rs2.5 lakhs.

When the Ministers from the coastal states and senior officials came to Goa for a junket, under the guise of holding a conference, the Chief Minister hosted a dinner for them aboard the stationary cruise vessel which functions as a restaurant, Noah’s Ark, at a cost of Rs2.20 lakhs. When a conference on information technology and good governance was held in Goa, the Chief Minister picked up the tab of over Rs3 lakhs for dinner for the delegates in a five-star deluxe hotel. Similarly, when a national level meeting was held of town and country planners, probably among the most corrupt and well-to-do officials in the country at least going by the Goan experience, the Chief Minister very generously hosted a dinner costing over Rs3 lakhs.

DDK on The Name Gautama

Jayarava's Raves: Some Additional Notes

2. The Name Gautama

In my essay What Was the Buddha's Name? I drew attention to the quirk of history which left the Buddha, a kṣatriya by tradition but possibly a non-āryan, with an ostentatiously Brahmin gotra-, or clan-name: Gautama (meaning 'descended from Gotama, the one with the most cows go'). However more than half a century ago D.D. Kosambi offered a different take on this subject in a review published in 1953:

D.D. Kosambi. 'Brahmin Clans'. Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 73, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1953), pp. 202-208.

He points to two brief Pāli passages which suggest that Gautama (Pāli: Gotama) is not the Buddha's gotra name. The first is from the Therīgāthā verses of the Buddha's maternal aunt and foster mother. She says (Th 2 162)

Bahūnaṃ vata atthāya, māyā janayi gotamaṃ;

Truly for the many, Māyā gave birth to Gotama

Kosambi's point here is that the names Māyā and Gotama are on the same level - i.e. they are both first names. This is to read the text quite literally, and I'm a bit doubtful about doing that. Compare for instance the case of the Brahmin boy Uppatissa, son of Rūpasārī, better known as Sāriputta 'son of (Rūpa)sārī'.[2] However Kosambi points out that neither does the Buddha's wife become known as Gotamī in any tradition. The fact that Mahāpajāpati, his mother's sister, is called Gotamī also suggests that it is not the Buddha's clan-name since the names pass pass down patrilineally (though I think Kosambi here is thinking in terms of Brahminical social rules which required Brahmins to marry outside their gotra). Kosambi also notes that bhikkhus are sakiyaputta not gotamaputta. He does not attempt to explain why the future Buddha might be named after Vedic sages however, which still strikes me as odd.

Kosambi's other text is the Pabbajjā Sutta [Sn 3.1] in which King Bimbisāra asks the Buddha where he is from. The Buddha replies that he comes from the country of Kosala, and:

Ādiccā nāma gottena, sākiyā nāma jātiyā;
Tamhā kulā pabbajitomhi, na kāme abhipatthayaṃ.

Called Ādiccā by clan, called Sākiya by caste [jāti]
I went forth from that family, not longing for pleasures.

The phrase only occurs once in the canon, but elsewhere the Buddha says that the Sākiya consider rājā okkāka their ancestor [Ambaṭṭha Sutta, DN 3, PTS D i.92-3] and Pāli okkāka is Sanskrit ikṣvāku a king of the ādityā [P. ādiccā] gotra. The suggestion then is that the Buddha's name was in Sanskrit Gautama Ādityā; and Pāli Gotama Ādiccā. The Buddha is also sometimes called Āṅgirasa which according to the Dictionary of Pāli Names was a tribe which included the Gautama gotra. My reading of some of the DOPN references suggests that āṅgirasa was being used as an adjective (e.g. 'shiny like the sun') rather than a name. Against the passage above Kosambi also cites the Mahāpadāna Sutta [Dn 14, PTS ii.3]

Ahaṃ, bhikkhave, etarahi arahaṃ sammāsambuddho gotamo gottena ahosiṃ.

I bhikkhus, now worthy, fully awakened, was of the Gotama gotra. [3]

This phrase occurs 3 times in the suttas, all in the Mahapadāna. Kosambi refers to this as "the first interpretation of Gotama as the Buddha's gotra name... obviously a late formation under Brahmin influence". Indeed it is so obvious that Kosambi provides no evidence for his conjecture, nor does he consider the possibility that both statements about gotra are "late formations". Contrarily we find the name Gotama being used in the last two chapters of the Sutta-nipāta which are generally considered to be the oldest layers of the Pāli Canon.

It is still a puzzle as to why the Buddha even has a gotra name, let alone a Brahmin one (which both Gautama and Ādityā are). He was not a Brahmin. I don't think Kosambi solved the mystery, but he provided an interesting additional view point. One last observation of my own is that though the Buddha meets Brahmins from many other gotra lineages, he never seems to meet a Gautama Brahmin. This is despite the fact that the two ancestors Gotama and Bharadvāja are mentioned together in Bṛhadāranyka Upaniṣad 2.2.4, and Gautama the Buddha meets more than a dozen Brahmins from the Bhāradvāja lineage, who mostly seem to live in Kosala (see e.g. DN 3, 13, 27, 32, but throughout the nikāyas).

Autobiography of Dharmanand Kosambi, in Marathi

The Autobiograpy of Acharya Dharmanand Kosambi, father of DD Kosambi, and a great Buddhist scholar himself, is available in three parts at Arvind Gupta's site. The book is in Marathi and can be downloaded by clicking on the following links:

Part 1 (pages 1- 100) 3 MB file
Part 2 (pages 101-200) 4 MB file
Part 3 (pages 201-330) 5 MB file

Thanks to the indefatigable Arvind Gupta.

A beautiful mind- Dharmanand Kosambi

HindustanTimes-Print

A beautiful mind

How do you become an academic and a scholar? Usually, those who aim to research and teach are privileged with a formal education and spend their lives in academia. This was the path taken, for instance, by historians like Jadunath Sarkar and RG Bhandarkar. Sarkar began life in a village, then studied and taught at Presidency College. Bhandarkar took the regular exams and taught at Elphinstone and Deccan College. Both wrote for English-reading audiences. This made them widely known.

It is virtually impossible to come across a scholar of international stature who had neither access to a regular education nor libraries. Dharmanand Damodar Kosambi (1876-1947), a self-taught man who became a scholar of Pali and Buddhism, is in this sense unique. Obscured by the fame of his historian son D.D. Kosambi (1907-1966), Dharmanand also remains little known outside Maharashtra because he preferred Marathi to English. His local renown will now become widespread because his granddaughter, Meera Kosambi, has recently edited and translated his writings into English (Dharmanand Kosambi, The Essential Writings, Permanent Black, 2010).

What these writings reveal, described so well in her introduction, is a man of phenomenal intellect with a matching capacity for austerity. Kosambi the Elder scripted for himself “a trajectory of intellectual and ideological adventure” that transported him, in his search for knowledge about Buddhism, from an impoverished rural Goa to various places in India, Nepal, Ceylon, Burma, Russia and America.

It has been said that our lives are irrevocably shaped by the cards we are dealt in childhood. The frail and mentally impoverished Dharmanand, a Gaud Sarasvat Brahmin by birth, seemed destined to spend his life tending the family’s coconut grove in village Goa. But his passion for reading, which developed around the time he was married off at age 14, spurred him out of domestic disenchantment into a life filled with an almost incredible severity of self-teaching. Reading material wasn’t readily available. So, every month he travelled to Madgaon to borrow it from friends and relatives. In a Marathi magazine, Bal-Bodh, he first read about the Buddha. Later, travelling to learn Sanskrit in Poona, he read a Marathi translation of Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia (which also influenced Gandhi and Nehru). For Dharmanand, this book on the Buddha became a religious text: “I have still not forgotten how,” he says, “while reading certain portions of it, my throat would constrict and tears would stream down my face.”

Roughly half of Kosambi’s Essential Writings comprises an unusually moving autobiographical narrative: ‘moving’ in both senses, because this is an Indian Pilgrim’s Progress crafted to inspire disadvantaged people to carve out extraordinary paths; and because his self-abnegation in the cause of replicating the Buddha’s suffering for self-enlightenment leaves one close to tears. The almost penniless Dharmanand, after studying Sanskrit in Varanasi, walks virtually barefoot to Nepal in February 1902 because he has been told that knowledge of Buddhism might be acquired in the vicinity of Kathmandu. Reaching the promised land exhausted, he finds only sadhus who tell people’s fortunes by throwing dice.

Filled with sorrow, his search resumes, taking him towards Bodhgaya, and then, by begging for money in the prescribed manner of the true bhikshu, to the doorstep of the Mahabodhi Society in Calcutta. Supplication here results in sponsors who send him to Colombo, where he finally acquires direct knowledge of Buddhism. Now Dharmanand becomes a monk, subsisting daily on begged food, which must be consumed before noon. Through all his trials and tribulations he neither loses his sense of humour nor his aversion for unappetising food: in Kashi the dal was, as he nicely puts it, swimming in Ganga water.

The pilgrim then becomes a missionary. Forsaking the monk’s cowl, Dharmanand repays his debt to Calcutta, introducing Pali into the curriculum of the National College and teaching at the university. The restlessness of the truly zealous overtakes him again: he gives up a bhadralok’s salary to be closer to Marathi-speaking regions where he may spread knowledge of the Buddha. He lectures in Baroda, introduces Pali to Bombay University, and writes copiously in Marathi on Buddhist texts and ahimsa. His itinerant narrative ends at Harvard, where over three spells he helps prepare a critical edition of Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhi-magga.

Paradoxically, the journey to capitalist America opened Dharmanand’s mind to socialism. At Liverpool, a Dutch accountant introduced him to Marx’s thought and bought him books on socialism that he followed up with others in America. In his later writings, Dharmanand consistently sought to trace socialism’s compatibility with ancient Indian thought.

Dharmanand’s writings on Buddhism made him a celebrated figure across Maharashtra: they comprise the second half of his Essential Writings. The most unusual here is a play, Bodhisattva. In it he enlists the past for present social reform. Yashodhara is shown marrying Bodhisattva knowing full well that celibacy for a protracted period is the condition of their marriage.

A critique of child marriage, and the difficulties faced by couples married before their time, is implicit and links with what Gandhi said of his failed attempt to teach Kasturba, whom he married when she was 13: he was anxious to teach her, but lust left him little time, and later public life left him none. Dharmanand worked with the Mahatma and must have known this. Sensing and espousing the connections between Buddhism, socialism, and Gandhianism, it was in Gandhi’s Vardha ashram that he chose to die in 1947 — voluntarily, by giving up food. In his tribute to Dharmanand, Gandhi said: “May God inspire us all to walk in his footsteps.”

Pay and promotions provoke rather more passion among academics now than the disinterested quest that so nobly motivated Dharmanand. In a consumerist world where socialism and Gandhian principles are thoroughly dead, it is difficult even to imagine a life of the kind lived by Dharmanand Kosambi, let alone live it.

India has produced outstanding and committed scholars. And then there is Dharmanand, the only scholar-sage that Indology has known.

Nayanjot Lahiri is a member of the Delhi Urban Art Commission

The views expressed by the author are personal
http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print/577651.aspx
© Copyright 2009 Hindustan Times

Crossing Thresholds: Feminist Essays in Social History by Meera Kosambi

Scholars without Borders

Meera Kosambi is a prominent Indian sociologist. She has done her PhD in sociology from the University of Stockholm and has authored several books and articles on urban sociology and woman's studies in India. She is the youngest daughter of a prominent Marxist historian and mathematician, D. D. Kosambi, and grand-daughter of Acharya Dharmananda Kosambi, prominent Buddhist Scholar and a Pāli language expert.

In her book "Crossing Thresholds: Feminist Essays in Social History" Kosambi states that 'The notion of the threshold, indicating the restricted periphery of the 'woman's place' in family and society, was firmly embedded in the psyche of nineteenth-century women in western India. Yet some remarkable and articulate women (who are the focus of this book) 'transgressed' patriarchal boundaries--crossing thresholds, literally and metaphorically--to make their mark in the public sphere. These Indian women created the 'first ripple feminism' of the region.

Nineteenth-century men also inbabit the book--social reformers and those who helped these women, as well as conservatives who opposed both the reformers and the progressive women. The central objective of Professor Kosambi's book is to interrogate official social history--which posits strong male reformers and passive women recipients--as well as retrieve and assess women's own pioneering contribution to their proto-feminist efforts.

The Introduction presents a conceptual framework of public/private spheres, attempts to retrieve women's subjectivity through their published narratives, and discusses questions of representation and 'voice'.

The ten essays that follow span a variety of topics--the politics of iconizing individual women, women's complex relationships to their homes and their bodies, women's exposure to education and nationalism, the nature of conjugality and 'consent', ideas of motherhood and widowhood.
Uniting all these themes is the effort to amplify women's voices and reconstruct their experiential worlds.

The book straddles the areas of Gender Studies, History, and Asian Studies while underscoring the resonance of these women's lives with those of other women across South Asia and the West. '

The Middle Class in Colonial India- a book review

The Hindu : Book Review : The making of the Indian middle class

THE MIDDLE CLASS IN COLONIAL INDIA: Edited by Sanjay Joshi; Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 795.

This thought-provoking book is a compilation of readings on the making of the Indian middle class from the late 19th century to the early 21st century. There is both a challenge and an advantage in compiling such a volume. The challenge: what to include and how to order it. And the advantage: an enviable opportunity to make a critical appraisal of the essays. On both counts, Sanjay Joshi has performed admirably.

Microscopic minority

What or who constitute the Indian middle class? Since the secular and liberal Western middle class is taken as the norm, its Indian counterpart will often be seen as falling short of the ideal, so to speak. In 1888, according to the outgoing Viceroy, the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, it was a “microscopic minority” that was incapable of representing the interests of the masses.

Even today, the middle class in India does not occupy a median position, and may, more properly, be dubbed an “elite, affluent class,” as Aurobindo Ghosh anticipated in his 1893 essay (“A Cheap Shoddy Import”) and D.D. Kosambi recalled, some 50 years on, in his review of Jawaharlal Nehru's Discovery of India. One of the earliest tributes paid to the Indian middle class is to be found in the 1961 essay by B.B. Misra, where he called it “a product of British benevolence.”

It is not as if such a class did not exist in pre-colonial times. The main change in its status came about in the form of its participation in the public sphere (which C.A. Bayly calls ‘ecumene'), resulting in a kind of universalisation of middle class norms. But this so-called universalisation was tainted owing to the colonial experience.

The post-colonial subject, from Jawaharlal Nehru to the Bollywood scriptwriter (as M. Madhava Prasad argues), was forced to indulge in a paradoxical nationalist discourse, hoping to reconcile the goals of objective Western rationality and subjective Indian antiquity. To this day, there have been an uneasy, troubled coexistence of liberalism and caste endogamous practices in virtually all parts of the country. Nevertheless, the Indian middle class is not a monolith, as suggested by the various ways in which the contributors describe it — the non-fixity of the Western middle class narrative within the Indian context (Dipesh Chakrabarty); the Bengali rentier component giving rise to complex gender politics (Tanika Sarkar); players of cricket in the extended Macaulayan education system (Boria Majumdar); the prudent white-collar Kanara Saraswat community in Bombay (Prashant Kidambi); the family-oriented merchant class (Claude Markovits); the new sharif Islamic class divorced from the nobility and the lower classes (Margrit Pernau); and the educated Tamil Brahmins, who embody a schizophrenic realm of Westernised public and Sanskritised private values (M.S.S. Pandian).

Not demarcated

In reality, the ‘public' and the ‘private' are not very clearly demarcated as the ‘Westernised material sphere' and the ‘native spiritual sphere' respectively, as Partha Chatterjee would have it. According to Chatterjee, there can be no such phenomenon as the Indian middle class in colonial times, simply because the natives were excluded from the public sphere of economics and politics. Since the natives were confined to the private sphere of the household, religious, caste and gender hierarchies flourished in the Indian community during the colonial phase. However, as Sanjay Joshi (‘Re-Publicising Religiosity') points out, the native private sphere did not remain private; it acquired an aggressive public face, as in the case of religious expression, in defiance of the British colonial embargo on native participation in politics.

In a lighter vein, A.R. Venkatachalapathy tells us that even a private pleasure like coffee drinking — initially viewed as a Western vice — acquired a public face in the form of Brahmin-run coffee houses, which before long gave rise to the ‘other', namely the working-class tea houses, all over Tamil Nadu.

The importance of a volume like this lies in that it throws light on the historical evolution of the values of the middle class that are naturalised and taken for granted in the present-day.

Saluting a Genius: Dr K K Kusuman

Saluting a genius

Sabloo Thomas
First Published : 14 Jun 2010 01:38:46 AM IST

When Dr K K Kusuman, former head, Department of History at the University of Kerala died in a road accident in 2007, a group of his friends decided to bring out a volume in his memory. Dr Suresh Jnaneswaran, presently Reader of History at the University, who was then working in SN College, Chempazhanthy, was asked to take up the task of coordinating the work. and he accomplished the feat in time.

During the work, Jnaneswaran realised that there has been no similar work to honour Dr T K Ravindran, former Vice Chancellor of Calicut University and one of the prominent historians of our time.

In fact, Ravindran is among the few historians of his generation who has not been honoured with such a work.

‘‘That was when I decided to initiate a work that would be a tribute to the great scholar,’’ Jnaneswaran told.

Jnaneswaran single-handedly took up the task of bringing out the book. ‘‘The response from historians was very encouraging as most felt the need for such a book,’’ said Jnaneswaran.

‘‘Many, who could not contribute as they were working on other projects, were disappointed with the fact that they could not associate with the work.’’

It was during the course of the work that Jnaneswaran realised that there were other facets to Ravindran’s personality. Ravindran is a poet with over 20,000 poems to his credit. He is also an amateur painter. Historiography was selected as the topic for the festschrift, as it was Ravindran who introduced historiography as a topic for study in universities in Kerala, said Jnaneswaran.

The work ‘Historiography: Structure and Practice,’ a festschrift in honour of the eminent historian and teacher, has turned out to be a scholarly work and a fitting honour to the great man.

Union Minister for State for Home Mullappally Ramachandran released the book at a function at Palakkad on May 16.

‘‘The Minister cancelled all the programmes for the day to attend the book release function. He arrived well before the scheduled time and sat through the entire programme. This clearly showed his reverence for Ravindran who was also his teacher,’’ said Jnaneswaran.

It is a mystery why many consider Ravindran as an anti-Marxist historian, says Jnaneswaran. ‘‘He, in fact, is the one who first introduced the writings of Marxist historians like D D Kosambi and R S Sharma to the students in Kerala,’’ Jnaneswaran said.

Contributors to the festschrift include most of the prominent historians - Aditya Mukherjee, professor of Contemporary History, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University; Dr Sukumar Bhattacharyya, former Professor of History, Viswa Bharati, Shantiniketan; Professor R Mahalakshmi, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University; Professor M G S Narayanan, former Chairman, Indian Council of Historical Research and Prof B Sheik Ali, former Vice-Chancellor, Goa and Mangalore universities.

Some of the themes dealt in the book are ‘Ideas in History and Reflections on the Emergence of Indian Historiography;’ ‘D D Kosambi and Historiography in India’ and ‘The Return of the Colonial in Indian Economic History: The Last Phase of Colonialism in India’.

The book is a vast collection of articles that will add to historical knowledge and will serve as a reference book for teachers, researchers and students.

sabloothomas@expressbuzz.com

DDK- A paper on mathematics

I am not sure what this paper is about, it is too obtuse for me to understand, but there seem to be significant references to DDK's work on mathematics. Download.