Sukanta Chaudhuri, the noted humanist scholar, begins his latest book The Metaphysics of the Text with an anecdote from early Buddhist history. Ananda, Buddha's foremost disciple, in his old age, is shocked to hear a young monk recite from the Dhammapada: ‘It is better to live a single day having obtained knowledge of the heron in the water than to live for hundred years without knowledge of the heron in the water.' Ananda admonishes the monk by pointing out that the text should really read udayavyayam – beginning and ending, rather than udakabakam – heron in the water. The embarrassed monk rushes to his elderly teacher who, upon hearing the tale, replies that Ananda was in his dotage, and that the correct reading was indeed ‘the heron in the water.'
This metaphor is pivotal for Chaudhuri, whose endeavour is to get to the bedrock of textual practice (of the bibliographic, the editorial and the theoretical) by means of defining its boundaries and varied trajectories. By doing so, Chaudhuri also throws light on the directions that humanities studies is taking currently, and its positioning vis-à-vis certain branches of social sciences. The heron in the water casts a shadow. It may stand for the notion of stable, persistent work: a substantive mental activity defined through speech and writing. The activity gets reflected in particular material texts or versions – shadows – which could be infinitely manifested in paper and ink, chip or screen, but the formation of a text is always via the materialising of its abstract verbal code and design. Such an embodiment is textualisation for Chaudhuri.
Chaudhuri's book appears at a time when speculation is rampant about the methodological and theoretical directions that disciplines within humanities might take at this point. While we notice a renewed investment in formal aesthetics and conjectures on the ethics of the autobiographical and confessional, the other axis is that of book history: unearthing circuits of textual routes and collaborations as well as developing and keeping records of editorial and collating practices. Why and in what manner does the humanist feel inclined to expand on the latter?
The mind of the humanist
To be fair, Chaudhuri's work is not primarily about interdisciplinarity, but it allows us an interesting entry point into the mind of the humanist embedded in questions of textuality and its ramifications on liberal arts now. Chaudhuri is clearly working with a vast area of textual practice within humanities studies: with philosophy of language, the pragmatics of linguistic process, concerns of bibliography, editing and text processing, with book history and reception studies. But his transdisciplinary and meta-textual concerns are integrative. Theory based on editorial practice must necessarily be, in the wise phrase, grounded. The editor's task is to grapple with the solid details of the text and its material embodiments: proof-reading, for instance. He is not a free-ranging textual theorist or historian of texts. Even as the textual scholar marks variance, cross-insemination and the transmission of texts, his focus remains on the ‘novel' pursuits of book history and reception studies. Semantics and electronic processing help in amalgamation, in deriving mutual support within the bounds of the discipline of textual studies. But the demarcated bounds of the copy-text remain sacrosanct. One can see that this additive and assimilative approach in humanities is classical and concrete, but absolutely risk-averse. Chaudhuri, though richly aware of the shadows, is actually interested in the heron: his chief concern is philological; to underline the ‘metaphysics' of the text.
One of the problems of thinking in terms of the catchphrase, interdisciplinarity, is that it is seen simply as an obverse of what may be disciplinary. It is this central methodological insight that marks Pradip Kumar Datta's recent, important work: Heterogeneities: Identity Formations in Modern India. Datta is a person who lives interdisciplinarity — moving and steering successfully and literally among disciplines. Trained in English Literature and History, he now heads the Department of Political Science at Delhi University: a difficult proposition in the ossified and bureaucratic universe of the Indian academia. So, unlike someone who has worked in constructed interdisciplinary sites like Culture Studies or a Liberal Arts programme, Datta is privy to the rigors and objectives of both disciplinary boundaries and the possibilities of subversion that lie therein.
What worries Datta is that in a diffuse, self-indulgent celebration of the interdisciplinary mode, a two-pronged crisis may emerge, of opportunism (raiding and appropriating material arbitrarily for one's own use) on the one hand, and the threat of a relapse into strict disciplinary identities on the other. He offers the example of English Literary Studies as one which often work in the appropriative mode, at its best reading social and political conditions and networks embedded in literary texts in enriching ways; however, even the best instance of appropriation establishes an instrumental relationship with other disciplines and is always in danger of privileging and protecting the boundaries of the grounding discipline. The transdisciplinary critical mode, in detour, identifies and acknowledges the differences between disciplines, marking common areas and aspiring toward a syncretism in such departments as Cultural, Women's and Postcolonial Studies – all marginalised, additive though influential locations.
The disciplinary commons
Datta's unique contribution to debates on inter/transdisciplinarity is offered in the form of an allegory, that of a ‘disciplinary commons', antics on tracts of land both privately-owned and shared. These are spaces of heterogeneous formations between disciplines, which maintain disciplinary difference, are mutually imbricated and non-integrated. In lieu of raiding and appropriating, he suggests a mode of disciplinary ‘poaching', cognisant of laws of boundary and property, drawing upon a body of shared knowledge which is made accessible to all. The idea of the ‘commons' is a keenness to understand others' areas/disciplines, their specificities of methods. It is deeply invested in studies of inner debates and conversations.
The poaching method, then, is one built upon genteel exchange, a sense of honour and justice, a belief in the equality of all discrete bodies of knowledge that one may deferentially – if analytically, interrogatively – poach upon for mutual enrichment, constructing a temporary and contingent community of knowledge-gatherers-and-sharers. It is evident though that Datta's rejection of integration leads us to another notion of integration by reading commons through the language of rights and justice. Do mutual respect, and the sharing of knowledges between disciplines in a paradisical ‘commons', best serve the intent and purpose of as potentially rich an academic network as interdisciplinarity? Would it not lead to a blunted accord without the disciplinary rigor and ethical purchase of close-readers like Chaudhuri, who, precisely owing to his investment in the hubristic ideal of sprezzatura, will push to attain comprehensiveness in scholarship? What the humanist loses in political sharpness, he recovers in ethical erudition, in painstaking textual spadework and its transmission across disciplines.
We are both excited and disturbed by potential seeds of conflict sown by Chaudhuri and Datta in thinking about interdisciplinarity. We wonder whether accepting one or other mode of praxis, the syncretic humanist versus the knowledge-seeker/sharer, would not finally risk the dilution of the immense possibilities of discovering new disciplines and rediscovering one's own through them? Whether one might not, in fact, rather be able to make significant contributions to those other disciplines too if one questions, argues, and resists their formulations, using comprehensive and sharp textual interpretations as weapons to challenge and interrogate others'? Jacques Ranciere has said that divisions, interruptions and trangressions are what kick into life the partage du sensible, the sharing-out and dividing-up of a sensitive system of sensible evidences. That shatters consensus. So, why not dance into Datta's ‘ commons' armed with our own disciplinary excellences (and possibly Chaudhuri's idea of textual scholarship), making fraught that quiet, just, sensible, shared space? Let us converse, yes, but let us also rage and antagonise, and create another space bristling with new intellectual disturbances and fresh alarms.
Brinda Bose and Prasanta Chakravarty teach in the Department of English, Delhi University. E-mail: >brindabose@gmail.com , >mrsceptic@gmail.com
