CONTEXTUAL UNIVERSALISMS: INDIGENOUS DISCOURSES OF HUMAN RIGHTS AND MODERNITY IN INDIA AND SOUTH AFRICA A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Mukti Lakhi January 2012 © 2012 Mukti Lakhi Contextual Universalisms: Indigenous Discourses of Human Rights and Modernity in India and South Africa Mukti Lakhi, Ph. D. Cornell University 2012 DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Contextual Universalisms investigates the “universal” ideas and values that define Enlightenment humanism-- such as secular rationality, individual freedom, and the capacity for democratic thought—and argues that these notions are also instantiated within colonized cultures relatively independently from European versions of these concepts, in context-specific forms. I explore marginalized articulations of these values, and the discourses of human rights they develop, through Indian and South African literatures. I probe these indigenous manifestations of “universalisms,” or “modern” constructs through which cultures define humanity, by focusing on exemplary literary texts from the Global South that show how theoretical and philosophical notions of universal humanity and “human rights” have been developed. They reveal that these ideas are not colonial imports, or even products of the colonial encounter, and that they become self-evident through context-specific forms of local literary traditions. Furthermore, the subaltern authors of these texts reflect and produce a grassroots populism that defines itself through “indigenous” universalizing notions of rights. They create movements of popular resistance through distinct local and intellectual cultures and institutions very different from those used by colonialists or even by hegemonic nationalist groups in their own societies. The recognition of “modern” humanist values in indigenous texts as both “contextual” and “universalizing” revises previous understandings of colonized societies as “pre-modern” and of modernity as a European import. Instead, these “contextual universalisms” testify that the discourse of European colonial modernity is not the only discourse of modernity through which to view the colonial past, thereby rethinking current ways of reading Anglophone Indian and South African texts. Indeed, these indigenous literatures redefine modernity as a descriptive word for any period of radical rupture and resistance against past orthodoxies, a way of questioning the present that insists on a radical humanism. In doing so, these texts destabilize widely accepted scholarly binaries between “tradition” and “modernity,” and the “religious” and the “secular,” suggesting that modern ideals may well have a more complex history than is often imagined. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Mukti Lakhi was born in Belgium. Before beginning her Ph.D. in English at Cornell University, she obtained a BA in English and History from the University of York, UK, and an M.Phil. in Criticism and Culture from the University of Cambridge, UK. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Satya P. Mohanty for guiding me with his holistic approach to the Ph.D. - you taught me as much about the mindsets of success as about writing and rigorous thinking. Thank you for investing so much time and effort in me. I would also like to thank Elizabeth Anker, who was ever ready with motivating comments, insightful feedback, as well as friendship; I very much appreciate your belief in me as well as your unhesitating willingness to hold my work up to the highest standards. Thanks also to Durba Ghosh for being there with support and encouragement from the very start. I could not have asked for better mentors. Finally, I am thankful to Cornell Peace Studies and the Einaudi International Studies Center for funding my research in South Africa. Thanks also to my friends: Krupa and Gagan, who were active and caring participants in all my mischievous as well as mature endeavors. Tsitsi for being my best friend in Philly. Virginia, Bryan, and Danielle, who refreshed me with their Madeline’s sessions and/or Harlem meetings. And Sreematidi, for being a fantastic friend as well as a fabulous teacher. This dissertation is dedicated to my home, my jaanu, Rahul, whose constant encouragement, wisdom, adventurous spirit, and belief that I can do anything and everything made it all possible. To my loving parents, who supported me on my intellectual journey no matter where it took me. To my sister Nidhi, and brother Prabudh, for the daily Skype interruptions that sustained and invigorated my thinking. To Nirmala aunty, for the constant love and support that provided Rahul and I with a home away from home. And to Goju and Jobi, for being nattus and lighting up my life. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Dissertation Abstract Biographical Sketch Acknowledgments Preface vi Introduction 1 33 Chapter 1: Theorizing Alternative Modernities Differently Through Contextual Universalisms 60 Chapter 2: Radical Religious Rationalities in Colonial Indian Poetry Chapter 3: “A Chief is a Chief Through Other People:” Modern 104 Democratic Ideals in Zulu Poetry Chapter 4: Affective Agencies: Contextualizing Individual Freedom in the 136 Colonial Indian bildungsroman Conclusion 174 Bibliography 185 v Preface In ancient India, the saint poet Vyasa wrote an extensive mythological history called the Mahabharata, now considered one of the founding texts of Hinduism. In it, one of his principal characters stated that the supreme human being should be defined, regardless of their caste, according to their capacity for “truth, charity, forgiveness, good conduct, benevolence, kindness, observance of the rites of his order, and mercy.” 1 Centuries later, in pre-colonial South Africa, Zulu tribes measured the worth of a human according to their generosity and kindness towards others, proclaiming that “a person is a person through other people.”2 And later still, in early twentieth century India, a young anti-colonial revolutionary called Mohandas Gandhi resisted the racist statements of his colonizers with the words: “gentleness, self-sacrifice and generosity are the exclusive possession of no one race or religion.”3 All these statements were uttered in very different times and places by singular personalities whose lives were defined completely independently of colonialism, or wholly through the lens of the colonial encounter. Nevertheless, what unifies them is a conviction that underlying the diversity of human experience it is possible to discern a rational, universal and given human nature possessing qualities such as “kindness, 1 From the conversation between Yudhisthira and Naga Nahusha in Ved Vyasa, The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, trans. Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Calcutta: Bhārata Press, 1894), Book 3 of 18: Vana Parva. 2 This is translated from the popular Zulu maxim umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. 3 Mahatma Gandhi, Young India 10 (August 30th, 1928): 292. vi generosity, freedom, and justice.” And, these diverse thinkers turned to this belief to fuel their popular movements of resistance against those who would deny them “human” status. These statements were all made towards the crafting of ethical social orders, whether to contest the ancient, feudal systems of caste in South Asia, to create communal systems of agriculture in pre-colonial South Africa, or anti-colonial movements against foreign oppressors in the colonized global South. Ironically, in the post-colonial and globalized world, humanisms of any kind have been dismissed precisely because of these universalizing tendencies. Post-colonial critics such as Enrique Dussel have rightly pointed out that universalizing Enlightenment discourses of the human were used against colonized subjects; the European white male embodied the supreme “human” and classified oppressed natives as never quite attaining human status.4 Other scholars, including feminists such as Carol Quillen, have argued that modern universalisms are imperialist; since they arose out of Enlightenment Europe’s liberal humanist ideology, they are incapable of taking into account cultural differences when imposed on to non-Western contexts. 5 Post-modernist thinkers such as Michel Foucault have in turn noted that because power is all encompassing, universalizing ideas of rights are always already implicated in hegemonic ideological systems and the power relations they generate, as Enlightenment humanist discourses were; even when 4 Enrique Dussel, The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor and the Philosophy of Liberation, trans. Eduardo Mendieta, (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996). 5 Citing feminist theorists Marnia Lazreg, Rey Chow, and Uma Narayan as positive examples, Quillen suggests that in writing about “the human self” one must convey a self embedded in human relations and social structures. This means that one should “write about a part of the ‘non-West’ from a perspective that sees a historical connection between Western liberal humanism and European domination.” See Carol Quillen, “Feminist Theory, Justice and the Lure of the Human,” Signs, 21:1 (Fall, 2001), 100. vii universalizing humanisms posit themselves as transcendent, they always vary according to the vested interests within which they are articulated. 6 As I argue in my introduction, the dismissal of modern humanisms because of their supposedly inevitable implication in relations of colonial power ignores the presence of alternative non-imperialist humanisms of the kind outlined