Over the past few months, Kerala has seen more than its share of public protests: from outright violence to peaceful expressions of solidarity. People have mobilised to reawaken Hindu consciousness on the one end and to protect women’s rights on the other. From afar, seeing these protests, one might conclude that there exists an implacable and nearly unresolvable set of differences between the people on both sides. Yet watching these participants up close, what is striking is how remarkably identical they are in their everyday lives. Whether in their private commitments and public cynicisms, or their aesthetics and admirations, the two sides of this prolonged Sabarimala struggle are nearly indistinguishable from one another to an outsider. In a way, it is the “narcissism of small differences”, as Freud said, that animates the furies of their discontents.
Different vocabularies
There is, however, one critical dimension along which the two sides differ: language. Despite both sides speaking Malayalam, the vocabularies they deploy to describe the situation, and thus implicitly the moral cosmologies in which they situate themselves, are starkly different. Their words bring to full view a slow social rift that, arguably, has been decades in the making. The religiously inspired protesters make appeals to aacharam (ritual), aitihyam (legend), pavitratha (sanctity), samrakshnam (preservation), and parampara (tradition) — words which describe a world ordered by concepts whose legitimacy comes from them being transmitted from one generation to another. It is the time-testedness of specific practices that imbues their vocabulary with a righteousness.
In contrast, the public expressions of non-religiously inspired protests speak in terms of niyamam (law), adhikaram (rights), purushaadhipathyam (patriarchy), viplavam (revolution), and navodhanam (reformation) — vocabularies that have no use for an immemorial past or an inter-generational transmission chain, but rather are brim with the energies of the present and which promise to improve the future, through an application of reason. Where one side believes in the evocative prowess of stories from the past to sustain them through life, the other side relies on theories of social ordering to ostensibly improve their future. Both sides derive their ethical vocabularies from different models of how we ought to think about the present: as a repository of the past or as a springboard for the future. They speak the same language, see the same world around them, but describe it differently.
Context matters
The schisms imposed by the usage of different sets of vocabularies within a same linguistic society is, however, not new in human or Indian history. George Bernard Shaw famously described America and Britain as two nations separated by a common language — on account of frequent misunderstandings and power politics playing between the two. Indian philosophers have known for long that even speaking the same vocabulary within the same language doesn’t preclude one from coming face to face with contradictions when we think about how language, meaning and context interact. Prasastapada, a philosophical commentator from the 6th century, invented a “new semantic category” called ‘ paribhashiki’ to avoid contradictions between extant theories of meanings versus Nyaya philosophies.
Even the same word used in a different socio-historical context — particularly, when translated from one culture to another — reveals how wobbly any language-contingent ethical framework can be. In the great moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s classic, A Short History of Ethics, he talks about a word like ‘ agathos ’ which, in a Homeric world, referred to qualities one must possess to perform one’s role in a hierarchical society. So, a king who rules judiciously — even if through violence — is said to be blessed by ‘ agathos ’. This word is often translated as ‘good’ into English, even if what we mean by ‘good’ in English is a simple descriptor, while in the Greek context, the original blends “fact and appraisals”. A nuanced and context-sensitive word in Greek is rendered into a context independent, adjectival gloss in English.
Between two extremes
The consequence of such inorganic cross pollination is that fullness of meanings under which the original was deployed is at best an etiolated one in the receiving language.
This, of course, is not Kerala’s problem alone but a post-colonial one. Across India, our public discourse waddles between two extremes. We have neither the organised will to invest renewed introspective energies to understand the vocabularies we grant so much power over our mental lives solely on account of them being patrimonial legacies, nor do we have the willingness to recognise the borrowed nature of our progressive vocabularies that speak little to the self-descriptions of our fellow citizens. Thus, we let little understood words run our lives. We have entrusted these sounds with continent sized responsibilities to shoulder the urgencies we intuit but struggle to describe.
Keerthik Sasidharan is a writer and lives in New York City
