Chapter Three The Cosmotheandric Experience and the ...shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/31668/9/09_chapter 3.pdf · The "Cosmotheandric Experience" and the Ecological Crises

Chapter Three

The "Cosmotheandric Experience" and the Ecological Crises

In this chapter, the theme of materialist theology that I developed earlier using the example of

the Hospital's morgue, is posed to another interface of theology and everyday life as captured

by the theologian Raimon Panikkar under what he calls as the "cosmotheandric experience". 1

I analyze "cosmotheandric experience" with respect to materialist theology through a series

of (re)conceptualizations of private/public, science/religion, universal/particular, west/east,

monotheistic/polytheistic and modernity/post-modernity kind of distinctions. Clearly what is

at stake is not the minimal task of moving beyond the dichotomous character of these

conceptual entities but a revision of the very way in which these concepts provide frames of

references to questions of theology in relation to ecology and vice versa. One of the pivotal

theoretical questions that emerges with respect to the "cosmotheandric experience" and

"materialist theology'' is whether one can think of an aestheticized, humanized, pluralistic

religious discourse of truth as the former concept seems to purport. Or should one seek a

symptomatic juncture of inconsistencies in a particular religion, Hinduism, in this case, that

signifies, a site of true universality and not false plurality? My perspectival enquiry sides with

the materialist theological domain. I substantiate this enquiry through the empirical instance

of Ganga Action Plan, which I consider through two parallel lenses. One is, by locating the

introduction of Ganga Action Plan by the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, suggesting that

his speech in 1986 equates cleaning of Ganga as a metaphor for cleansing of the 'self of the

'Hindu' nation, after the religious violence that followed the assassination of his mother and

Prime minister Indira Gandhi. Second, GAP becomes the key modem signifier through

which I attempt to map the construction of the 'contemporary'. This involves examining the

perspectives of the occupants at the ghats who are part of the river economy, primarily the

doms. Here I locate the pointers that mark the failure of the GAP as against the extolled

virtues of a smaller and seemingly philanthropic enterprise of cleaning the Ganga represented

by the Sankat Mochan Foundation (SMF). Within this paradigmatic context, I also

problematize the couple of Bacteria and virus, symbolized in case of Ganga, with a

supposedly benign strain of Bacteriophage that keeps the water clean, a claim that has some

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scientific validation attached to it. Inversing the method this time and instead of starting from

the sacral to the scientific (Ganga's water and the bacteriophages) I locate a scientific object

- polythene, supposedly a symbolic figure par excellence of pollution -to show how the

sacred can be rethought through the efficacy of this icon of chemical modernity in

postcolonial India.

The Reflexive and the Redefinition of the Private and the Public

Immanuel Kant in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (1934) discerns two parallel

discursive trends. One, he argues, has been invested in describing the "now" and hereafter,

while adding a rejoinder that the "now" is "as old as history itself' (1934: 15). The other, and

supposedly much older counterpart in this pair of now and hereafter is the idea of the event( s)

of radical evil and concomitant descent of mankind through the fall which simultaneously

heralds the "vanishing of happiness, like a dream" (1934: 15). Locating a shift in the

theological frame of representation, he cites the gradual predominance of Shiv in the Hindu

Trinitarian divination of Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh as a paradigmatic confirmation of this

thesis. He says:

In some parts of India the judge and destroyer of the world Rudra (sometimes called as Siwa or Siva), already is worshipped as the reigning God - Vishnu, the sustainer of the world, having some centuries ago grown weary and renounced the supreme authority which he inherited from Brahma, the creator (Kant 1934: 15 ).

His 'some parts' of India could easily be testified by Benares as one of the examples. In

the context ofBenares, within the larger framework of Hinduism, the complexity of it all may

lie in the methodical reoccurrence - in the vein of Freud's return of the repressed principle

-of centrality, allocated to a particular deity (Freud 1939). Accompanying this are the select

theological-eschatological principles and the contestations accrued to them, rather than the

simple acceptance of the one over the other.

Going back to Kant, his view about the antiquarian nature of 'Evil' and the discursive

modes he attaches to the forms of 'evil' could be rephrased in Freudian oeuvre as

'primordial'. Thus according to Kant then the "more modem" trend nurtured by

"philosophers and educationists" from "Seneca to Rousseau" places its' faith in the "natural

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basis of goodness". Fundamentally based on the words of Seneca that "we are sick with

curable diseases, and if we wish to be cured, nature comes to our aid, for we were born to

health" (Italics in the original, Kant 1934: 16), Kant goes on to construct a "middle ground"

using a rationalistic mediation to claim that:

Man as a species is as the other, partly good, and partly bad. We call a man evil, however, not because he performs actions that are evil (contrary to law) but because these actions are of such a nature that we may infer from them the presence in him of evil maxims (Kant 1934: 16).

What is restorative in this argumentation for Kant is that the moral 'propensity' of the

individual has to work in relation to the externalized moral maxim, in order to seek a

congruence that asserts the autonomous nature of reason as a working principle in contexts as

varied or related as religion and crime. This apart, my main interest in evoking this discussion

is to underline a more generalized set of observations. One knows from Max Weber that

another way of reading this debate would be to sum it up simply as an interface of the

orthodox and the heterodox or more specifically within the nineteenth century as the conflict

between the established Catholic Church and the spirit of the reformation (Weber 2001).

Though Weber ascertains the generality of 'Good' and 'Evil' in all ages and their 'positive

content', his discussion should be seen as providing outlines to the idea of the 'constitutive'

realm of 'Good' rather than venturing into the domain of what Kant calls as the 'Radical

evil'. It is this sociological trail that I follow here positing that in fact there is no 'radical evil'.

The notions of Good and Bad are to be primarily understood in the social processes of

religion and politics. This should not be confused with the fact that there is no extreme form

of 'evil' or sociology of 'evil' cannot categorize it in separate realms, the point is rather the

obverse. 'Evil' in itself is 'radical' in its very constitutive sphere, where sociology appears is

by precisely locating its analytical radical nature with respect to the ideal of the very

foundation of a society. If one were to provide a slightly variant reading of Emile Durkhiem's

propositions, one can argue that it is not in the strictly empirical domain of everyday life of

the transient society of Twentieth century Europe that one can tabulate the radical spirit of

evil that threatens what founds the society itself. It is by locating first of all how evil is

radicalized and one of the ways that he seeks to answer the question is by positing religion

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and science on a tense continuum. It is precisely this tense aspect, a register at which both of

these institutions completely fail the society and it is only 'ethics' that redeploys them and

their efficacy in universalistic terms that I seek to explore, to be able to defme at what level

the empirical can be consubstantial to this position. Now, with this contextualization if one

reads the following conclusion to The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1965)

Durkhiem's articulation seems apt:

I have established that the fundamental categories of thought, and thus science itself, have religious origins. The same has been shown to be true of magic, and thus of various techniques derived from magic. Besides, it has long been known that, until a relatively advanced moment in evolution, the rules of morality and law were not distinct from ritual prescriptions. In short, then, we can say that nearly all the great social institutions were born in religion. For the principal features of collective life to have begun as none other than various features of religious life, it is evident that religious life must necessarily have been the eminent form and, as it were, the epitome of collective life. If religion gave birth to all that is essential in society, that is because the idea of society is the soul of religion (Durkheim 1965: 421).

Kant, Weber and Durkheim, as posed above, provide a glimpse of the complexity

involved in locating religion, science, everyday practices (religious and non religious) and

theology within any ethnographic context.3 So, I take gradual steps, replicating the numerous

rounds of climbing-up and down the ghats during my fieldwork. Using the theoretical

exegeses of these writers I fonnulate the problematic of my ethnographic context with

reference to the 'death' of Ganga, religious and non-sacred observances at the Harishchandra

Ghat and the features of science, theology and politics with respect to the issues of

'pollution'.

The first way to locate this relation, to my mind, would be to see how the relation between

religion, science and everyday practices are perceived within the 'collective

representation(s)', to borrow the classic phrase from Durkheim. When I say, 'collective

representation' here, I use it in the methodological vein of 'multi-sited' ethnography. Thus it

involves a resignification of both the 'collective' and the 'representation'. The 'collective'

here is not a 'universal' category as against a 'particular', it is in fact the 'singular' juncture

when the particular stands for the universal-collective. This would become apparent as I

make linkages between various actors and agencies related to the cleansing of Ganga's

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pollution in the chapter. Similarly, representation is not to be understood as an empirical

articulation of the collective, it is in fact to be understood as the complex web of images,

norms and affects that continuously, co-terminally subjectivizes the collective as well as

sustains the collective's alienation. In other words representation is an excess that meets the

excess of the collective under certain conditions and through certain methods limited to the

domain of knowledge, it can be approached in a partiality only. The 'Doms' of

Harishchandra Ghat provide the ground to apply this, in so far the spirit of the Ghat itself is

represented through the maxim of the 'multi-sited' ethnography: 'ghum phir ke sabko yahin

aana hai' (after wandering, everyone has to come here, one way or the other).4 To achieve

that end, it is worthwhile to meditate on the dichotomy of the public and the private because

much like theology and science, this distinction provides a rupture in both the 'collective' and

the 'represented'.

Slavoj Zizek in The Parallax View (2006) quoting Kant on the private and the public

divide, says that according to Kant the:

Private is not individual as opposed to communal ties, but the very communal­institutional order of one's particular identification; while "public'' is the transnational universality of the exercise of one's reason. The paradox is thus that one participates in the universal dimension of the "public" sphere precisely as a singular individual extracted from or even opposed to one's substantial communal identification - one is truly universal only as radically singular, in the interstices of communal identities (Zizek 2006: 1 0).

Thus I take 'caste', the most common and persistent representative category of the

"communal-institutional order of one's particular identification" in Indian sociological

contexts to be essentially 'private' in the Kantian sense. This implies that I am not directly

concerned about locating Doms and others within a caste web, but rather in locating the

'public' mould of how Doms and others as social actors participate in the 'universal'. In other

words, the seams of the institutions could be opened while interpreting social acts, executed

even in isolation as a solitary stance, by locating the universal and the public in it.

Sociologically, Ulrich Beck (1992) and Anthony Giddens (together with Lash Scott in

1994) have tried to argue that the contemporary age or what they call as post-industrial

society is defined by unprecedented reflexivity in the public sphere.5 To a large extent, the

use of 'reflexivity' in their work is synonymous to, what one may call as 'mediatized'

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semblance of democracy and democratization. They argue that the scientific and the secular,

which to a large extent had become the new sacred realm in modernity, are open to

questioning and criticism by the general public in the latest 'reflexive' form of the new

modernity. One may notice that Beck and Giddens' use of public sphere is an antinomian

version of the Kantian notion of the same. They base their observation on the fact that in the

so called reflexive modernity, the risk genres in every habitation and occupation have

individualized people to the limit. They act detached from their communitarian ring and

adjudge the scope and degree of risk vis-a-vis their understanding of the crises ranging from

ecological degradation to sexual perversity.

A close reading of this fmmulation leads us to be suspect of their theories on at least two

counts. One is the notion of the individualized actor and the second is the implicit category of

democratized media, which stands as the bastion of hope, for its ability to disseminate

knowledge and its' critics. The 'individualized' (non)political actor has to be critiqued for

Beck and Giddens' assumption that the person represents a subjective whole that has finally

transcended the quotidian impulses of the communitarian demands. And out of various such

impulses, to quote one example from Durkheim "the idea of society is the soul of religion",

this metonymic link is wished away as having been transcended. That is why this version of

reflexivity can only be seen as a slight consideration of the Kantian division of the private

and the public. Because what Kant is saying is not limited to the individual and the

community in direct correspondence with private and public. It could be interpreted that his

emphases is on the use of reason that precisely refuses to conflate an expression of

'individuality' as 'private'. The Kantian public sphere is about relocating the ways in which

the private manifests itself in the possibly universalizing themes. Also, in his suggestion it is

apparent that the private and the public are in an inherent tension and in every act of

singularity, the embedded universality is spontaneously espoused. The import of his

observation is that the acts of singularity are tied with the notions of Good and the Evil.

The Question of Evil and the Limits of Religion

Let me draw from Alain Badiou's Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (2001) to

substantiate the critique of the nature of democratization as the end in itself in Beck and

Giddens' work. Badiou argues that in the present political milieu, democracy, human rights

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and a political economy of capitalism are seen as the almost perfect and certainly the fmal

form of political Good that could be possibly attained. Indeed, this is precisely the framework

that is used by all the risk theorists, including Beck and Giddens. They believe that the

reflexive modernity structurally positions an individual as an informed and differentiated

person, who 'chooses' his life and its' values. However, what, they do not consider is

whether this 'mould' of 'reflexive modernity' is reflexive to everyone? and to the extent it is

reflexive for few, is that 'reflexive' enough? Thus, in their theorizations there is a latent

acknowledgement that 'reflexive modernity' is the highest ideal in terms of a form of societal

existence, only it has to be maintained, as global crises of ecology and nuclear threats are to

be addressed. To my mind, the methodical rendering of reflexive modernity in Beck and

Giddens' work and that of risk theorists' in general is structurally similar to a mode of

"interruption" of what Badiou calls as 'Truth'- a singular newness as against the genealogy

of repetitive forms of knowledge (Badiou 2001). Beck and Giddens 'interrupt' the truth by

suggesting that the crises of ecology and that of nuclear warfare are catastrophic exceptions

to a world which has everything else in place in its liberal democratic finality. In fact one

could argue that both ecological disasters and nuclear threats do not exist by themselves, the

immensity of the threat that they represent can only be properly understood when the co­

ordinates of inequality, suffering and violence within the liberal democracy of the so called

'reflexive' modernity' is critically interrogated. The same could be said with respect to

Ganga's pollution. The extent of the river's pollution cannot be gauged by the abstract

quantified measures of scientific results of chemical experiments or moral-religious damning

ofthe people. The extant of the pollution can be properly estimated by locating how people's

lives have been failed by liberal democracy in certain domains, water being one major

component of it but not the only one. Badiou similarly, does not consider the liberal

humanitarian capitalistic democracy itself as to be the evil. He argues that what is evil is that

it is posed as the greatest possible Good. He also argues that Evil could only be conveyed

when Good is clearly represented. Thus it would be useful to locate both these idioms in

Badiou's own words. In delineating Good he poses event, fidelity and truth to be the three

registers:

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The event, which brings to pass 'something other' than the situation, opinions, instituted knowledges; the event is a hazardous [hasardeuxj, unpredictable supplement, which vanishes as soon as it appears; the fidelity, which is the name of the process: it amounts to a sustained investigation of the situation, under the imperative of the event itself; it is an immanent and continuing break; the truth as such, that is, the multiple, internal to the situation, that the fidelity constructs, bit by bit; it is what the fidelity gathers together and produces (2001: 67-68).

The Evil, on the other hand according to him is ...

. . . to believe that an event convokes not the void of the earlier situation, but its plenitude, is Evil in the sense of simulacntm, or terror, to fail to live up to a fidelity is Evil in the sense of betrayal, betrayal in oneself of the Immortal that you are; to identify a truth with total power is Evil in the sense of disaster (Badiou 2001: 71 ).

If Beck and Giddens' work is read through this lens, their projection of ecological crises as

an inadvertent effect of industrialized modernity that can be mitigated by people in post­

industrial world renders a disparate link between religion, science, politics on one hand and

irreversible ecological disasters on the other. Thus, instead of this celebration of 'what all we

have got' from modernity in its new reflexive avatar, I am positing the 'event' of 'death' of

Ganga as not only pertinent for the symbolic idiom of a river itself but by seeking ways in

which one can "bit by bit" as Badiou puts it, persist in locating the failure of Hinduism,

modernity and politics within the postcolonial context of India with respect to the

'collectives' that have been lost in the excess of mediatized representations. Thus one can

record that the public sphere in itself has to be cognitively devised at the level at which the

participation of the political actor or the subject is not merely limited to the bureaucratic book

keeping of risks and manoeuvring reflexive hits and misses but to develop and redevelop a

theoretical construct that is strictly based on a universalized possibility of Good, in Badiou's

term. Following these arguments, my thesis will attempt to read the "immortality" of Ganga

or its imminent death in ecological terms with regard to newly established systems of

meanings. These will symbolize a form of mediation between the analyst and the subjects of

study, where in the disciplinary contexts oflate modernity the hierarchy between the observer

and the observed is broken down. As I mentioned earlier, I take Doms of the Harischandra

ghat to be the residents of the ground zero with reference to Ganga as compared to bathers,

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tourist agents and boatmen. But before I embed their accounts in representative analyses, I

discuss and sharpen the theoretical categories involved in the 'event' of Ganga's death

(pravah)- immortality (parvah).6

If Culture is in Crises, What State Should Nature be in?

Following Marcel Mauss and Emile Durkheim's Primitive Classification (1967), Claude

Levi-Strauss (1963a)7 argues that Nature and Culture in their socially constructed forms stand

for reality, rather than the other way round. In other words the 'social' retroactively signifies

nature and culture. We also know from Durkheim, that the construction of this division

between nature and culture has its bases in religious-theological thought, which acts as a

connecting link for the scientific premises as well. In other words the primordiality of nature

in its particular forms, illustrates more of the cultural logic of primordiality than the logic of

'natural' chaos, just as the 'civility' of particular cultures is independent of the biological

individuals. Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology (1997) disentangles the oppositional

principle involved in the two constructs and thus establishes that there are innumerable ways

in which both nature and culture have been privileged in continental philosophical thought

and if one were to insist on a principle of differance between the two, one can show that they

may intersect in contingent possible ways universally (Derrida 1997).

Considering the above arguments, it may be useful to introduce a psychoanalytic reading

of nature by Zizek. His fundamental distinction of nature and civilization is that they are

marked by an "interminable gap" that informs the differance between the two and the first

important concern should be to identify the register at which this differance exists. He says:

Hegel proposed as a possible definition of man a formula that today, in the midst of the ecological crisis, acquires a new dimension: "nature sick unto death." All attempts to regain a new balance between man and nature, to eliminate from human activity its excessive character and to include it in the regular circuit of life, are nothing but a series of subsequent endeavors to suture an original and irredeemable gap. It is in this sense that the classic Freudian thesis on the ultimate discord between reality and the drive potential of man is to be conceived. Freud's claim is that this original, constitutive discord cannot be accounted for by biology. It results from the fact that the "drive potential of man" consists of drives that are already radically denaturalized, derailed by their traumatic attachment to a Thing, to an empty place, that excludes man forever from the circular movement of life and thus opens the immanent possibility of

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radical catastrophe, the "second death." It is here that we should perhaps look for the basic premise of a Freudian theory of culture: all culture is ultimately nothing but a compromise formation, a reaction to some terrifying, radically inhuman dimension proper to the human condition itself (Zizek 1991: 25).

Zizek goes on to argue that nature should not be seen as the beneficent other of the

intrusive scientific man. Which is in sharp contrast to the argument that has been a common

theme within both the critique of enlightenment's rationality and the feminist assertion of

nature as a subject of oppression apropos woman herself. To this, he further argues:

Homologous to the Lacanian proposition "Woman does not exist," we should perhaps assert that Nature does not exist: it does not exist as a periodic, balanced circuit, thrown off its track by man's inadvertence. The very notion of man as an "excess" with respect to nature's balanced circuit has finally to be abandoned. The image of nature as a balanced circuit is nothing but a retroactive projection of man. Herein lies the lesson of recent theories of chaos: "nature" is already, in itself, turbulent, imbalanced; its "rule" is not a well-balanced oscillation around some constant point of attraction, but a chaotic dispersion within the limits of what the theory of chaos calls the "strange attractor," a regularity directing chaos itself (1991: 26).

One must note that even the enlightemnent's projection of nature is that of a chaotic,

uncertain and temperamental woman that has to be controlled and reined through science (see

Keller 1992). The difference in what Zizek is saying must be located in precisely the

Lacanian equation of woman as a category without an essence per se and similarly of Nature,

not as an entity ofbenigness and "intelligent design" but that of a radical contingency.

Interpreted in the context of Ganga, as I have argued in the previous chapters, part of the

reason why no informant seems to articulate that the river must be dead in a socially

recognizable way is because, it leads us to the radical contingent moment of a world, which

at least in terms of the religious imaginary does not exist on record. A moment of surety of

one's ignorance, captured in the Nasad~ya sukta of the Rig Veda for the time of cosmic

creation in this verse:

Who really knows? Who can presume to tell it? Whence was it born? Whence issued this creation? Even the Gods came after its emergence. Then who can tell from whence it came to be?

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That out of which creation has arisen, whether it held it firm or it did not, He who surveys it in the highest heaven, He surely knows- or maybe He does not! (Panikkar 1977: 58).

A rereading of Freud's thesis of return ofthe repressed in Moses and Monotheism (1939),

would enable one to argue that it is not only the originary features of norms and idioms that

constantly get transformed and reappear in later movements of religions, one must also argue

that the originary, moment of chaos also reappears in its most radical form. However this

theme has to be separated from the 'God is punishing us' discourse, simply because the

'nature' as a set creation of God is also a specific theological idea and is not shared as a

universal "Good" in Badiou's terms (see also Zizek 1991: 27).

The empirical instances then of witnessing this death of Ganga has to be traced through

another idiom and that is: what happens when the river's water is a cause of illness and death

instead of being an elixir. While it served as the "cosmic sink" for the pravah (flow) ofthe

burnt, half burnt corpses and post festival idol deities, what if it brings it all back to us, like

the material recall of the samundra manthan. 8 What if the temple, where the goddess lives

become a source of ill omen? In other words, the most threatening continuance of the river's

ecological crises would become metonymic when going to bathe in it would become

inauspicious. These anxieties about the inversion of what Pannikar calls in the Rg Veda as

the "obscure night' should be used as putative links to understand nature itself. It is precisely

in these links that nature could be understood and not by itself as a sexed creature of divine

creation (Pannikar 1977: 60).9 This 'anxiety' also brings forth with an urgency the material

contexts of these relations that are constituted by the seams of theology and science at a level

to which we turn now.

Theology and Science: Contexts and Contextualizations

The theologian Raimon Panikkar in a meditative essay on "A drop of water as a metaphor for

a life" (2005) offers us a stance that I use here to further delineate the positions on the river

Ganga that I have elaborated so far. He says:

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Water symbolizes life. Unlike individual plants or animals or human beings, water does not die. Water is one. Water moves and transforms as one water. The sea has the stasis of a fixed place and the dynamis of constant and seemingly immanent movement, at once always the same and ever-changing. Water is alive, it is the very source of life. "Once upon a time," Ploutarchos tells us, "Man was without fire, but he was never without water." In places where water is scarce or even non-existent, its absence renders the surrounding land barren, a "land of death." Numerous traditions attribute to water the power of purification and regeneration: one is born again into a new and higher life through the waters of baptism or of abhiseka. Water is necessary for purifying oneself- before entering the temple, the mosque, etc. (Panikkar 2005: 568).

The clarity of this stance has the lesson that water and Ganga could structurally be seen as

homologies of life and a specific instance of life. This difference that could be drawn from

Panikkar' s stance could be corroborated from his views on death and life itself. He makes a

distinction between death and non-life and argues that while death could be experienced by

religious-social beings in tenns of loss and suffering, non-life cannot be. He argues:

We must distinguish between death and non-life. We can experience death, but we cannot experience non-life. Non-life is a concept and exists only in a dialectical relationship with the concept of life. They are contradictories. Death, on the other hand, is not simply non-life or the inanimate. To be sure, we could define death as non-life, or vice versa, and this operation would be irrefutably logical, but it would not necessarily reflect reality. We might remark in passing that some religious philosophies see in the fact that we can think about death and life without totally experiencing either one is both an opening of the human being toward an ontological transcendence that goes beyond Man and an affirmation of human contingency (Panikkar 2005: 570).

In other words, I could rephrase my assertion with respect to Ganga to say that Ganga

cannot be strictly understood as an inanimate, "natural" creation of God and thus in

Panikkar's terms it can not be construed as non-life as an entity. However the threat of the

death that looms on her should be separated from the death of the water itself The river in the

allocated kinship with which it exists today, as a supposed mother, with a feminine self that

takes the offering of the abject in herself with the promise of reinvigorating her

undifferentiated10 children of all 'castes' irrespective of their biographical details of sin

(paap ), is simply at a juncture that repeats the last call made in the first verse of Nasdadiya

sukta

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At first was neither Being or Nonbeing. There was not air nor yet sky beyond. What was its wrapping? Where? In whose protection? Was Water there, unfathomable and deep? (Pannikar 1977: 58).

So if the death has to be announced, it would be of this "protective" ring of Hindu

brethren, a rupture of the "wrapping", a contamination that is found to have reached the fmal

depth of the "unfathomable and deep" "Water" of the river Ganga. The theological stance

mentioned above then helps us with a double affirmation. One, the water itself may never die

and two what dies, is mourned and recreated. It's in this act of recreating that science and its

techniques are to be used as fundamentally affirmative and creative act(s). However let us for

the moment turn to the use of 'Contingency' as Panikkar uses it and pursue the hermeneutics

behind it:

The Vedic tradition, as well as many others, would reply that death kills only what can be killed. If this is so, then death cannot kill 'what' we truly are. On the contrary, death discloses our true state. For this reason, the 'death' of an individual who has not burned all of its karma is only an intermediate state, because a person's real death frees her completely from samsara (the cycle of existences). Similarly, we distinguish between death as the splashing of the human drop into the ocean "full of its lifespan" (dirgha-ayus) and an accidental, premature death (akala-mrtyu), which prevents growth and maturity. The former implies the disappearance of the membrane surrounding the drop, while the latter evokes a more or less complete and unexpected evaporation of the water. Death as dirgha-ayus reveals the Brahman or nirvana that we 'are', it preserves everything that Man fundamentally 'is', be that Soul, Nothingness, God, Being ... This does not die: tat tvam asi. 11 You are that which death has fmally unveiled (Panikkar 2005: 575).

It is this contingency which may be "unveiled" by death, laid down in the very basic

constitutive realm of sacral being as a temporal moment that threatens the basis of the regular

everyday life. The recognition of this premise evades the work of Risk theorists. For the Risk

theorists' it is the temporal phase of post-industrial complex that stands synonymous with

risk. This would become more explicit if one locates, contingency vis-a-vis accident. From

Plotinus we know that providence itself works in a contingent mode that bypasses the social

ordination of the Good and the Bad, something that G. Obeseyekere exhibits for the Samanic

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religions as well at a later stage (Plotinus 1917; Obeseyekere 2002)Y Genealogically,

coincidence as a neutral or at most a new age idiom, in the age of network society succeeds

the element of providence. However, the feature that defmes postmodernity is 'accident'.

Octavio Paz in his Conjunctions and Disjunctions (1982) lays down the scenery of what

Kierkegaard otherwise calls as "the present age" (Kierkegaard 1962):

Apart from the individual, everyday accident, there is the universal accident: the bomb. The threat of planetary extinction has no date attached to it: it may be today or tomorrow or never. It is extreme indetermination, even more difficult to predict than the wrath of Jehovah or the fury of siva. The Accident is the imminently probable. Imminent because it can happen today; probable not only because gods, spirit, cosmic harmony and the Buddhist law of plural causality have disappeared from our universe but also because, simultaneously, the confident determinism of the science of the nineteenth century has collapsed. The principle of indetermination in contemporary physics and Godel's proof in logic are the equivalent of the accident in the historical world. I do not mean to say that they are the same: I merely say that in the three cases axiomatic, deterministic systems have lost their consistency and revealed an inherent defect. But it is not really a defect: it is a property of the system, something that belongs to it as a system. The accident is not an exception or a sickness of our political regimes; nor is it a correctable defect of our civilization: it is the natural consequence of our science, our politics, and our morality (Paz 1982: 111-112).

This evocative description notwithstanding, the genealogy of providence, coincidence and

accident in relation to traditional, modem and postmodem has to seen with a constant

variable and that is of contingency. So, today if accident has acquired a metonymic place in

social existence, it has to be also argued that each accident in itself creates a contingency that

offers us political ways in which the 'symbolic' of the being can be reinscribed.

The crucial conclusion from this however is that death is inherently accidental. It is neither

providential or co-incidental. The provisional and the co-incidental nature may be attributed

to the events leading to the death. In this retroactive sense, even though death is accidental,

accident as a category itself, as Paz shows, is not outside the matrix of contingency and

bureaucracy. Later in this chapter, I would use the premise of science to argue that it is this

aspect of death, which is inherently accidental that constitutes the bases of the theories of

evolution. And the obverse of what is stated here is equally true and that is birth itself is a

radically contingent feature. But before that let me tum back to Pannikar's essay "A drop of

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water as a metaphor for a life" cited above. He considers that the "western civilization" or

what he calls as the "Abrahamic cultures" are testimonies to the fact that they treat the Man

-to use a metaphor signifying the individuality of a drop of water- as a drop (2005: 577).

Although he finds an affirmative link between the religious spirit and the secular drive in

so far as the secular drive involves a concern of regeneration of the 'Good' within the society

that exceeds the individual, his characterizations of difference between the Abrahamic and

the Indic, the religious and the anthropological has to be contested with what Zizek has to say

on such constructions. Zizek is of the opinion that "the key problem" in creating a link

between the concerns of different classes or cultures is that they are theoretically obfuscated

by "the New Age notion of the polarity of opposites (yin-yang, and so on)". He further says

that the first critical move should be to "replace this topic of polarity of opposites with the

concept ofthe inherent "tension", gap, noncoincidence of the One with itself' (2006: 7). This

'gap' can be precisely said to exist in the metaphoric representation of Ganga that is hinged

on an immortal kinship between the living and the dead. Today the river stands for a different

manifestation of this gap - it egests all over what once she was religiously expected to

absorb, transcend and nullify as the abject. In such an instance, the affinnative link has to be

precisely sought in science and 'sacrifice' of the workers, reading against Panikkar, and in

doing that, one again has to be careful in demonstrating that science itself works with that

"interminable gap". One may clarify that this does not mean that the terms of discussion may

not involve the primitive or the savage, the Abrahamic and the Indic, the religious and the

anthropological and so on and so forth, but their use has to be based on the ontological

dijfirance and not rhetorical opposition.

This brings us to Pannikar's The Cosmotheandric Experience (1993), which presents a

synoptic assessment of what he considers as the primordial human era, followed by a

historical one to the contemporary trans-historical one. Apart from assuming a universal

register for all three stages, which he concedes he does so because he thinks from the

perspective of cosmos of each religious world-view, he clarifies that the trans-historical era

that beseeches the cosmotheandric experience is not about transcending the historical stage

but going through it, as one can see through in the realms of 'transparency' (Panikkar 1993:

81 ). He also defuses the accusation of structuring a linear frame of time by suggesting that his

view is on how the humanum - the human subject, experiences the world rather than what

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the world actually may be, and he considers it in the sense of kairos- "the non-linear and

especially non-homogeneous aspect of time" in place of the more regular chronos. He further

argues that his interest is in locating the human as the Greek consider zoe to be in distinction

to bios. Here is a quote that illustrates it better. He says:

Zoe should be distinguished from bios, this latter understood as the individual life- exactly contrary to current usage in modem science, but in accord with its use in "biography''. Zoe resounds with "the life of creatures," as Kerenyi puts it in making this fundamental distinction. Now this Life is precisely Time, the Time of Being as the ancient Greeks said, or the "time of the soul" as Plotinus understood it. And God in this sense, if he is a living being, is also a temporal being. Eternal life does not mean atemporal bios, but precisely unlimited, perduring life: aionios zoe as the Gospels used to call it: cosmic life, secular life (Panikkar 1993: 141 ). 13

Panikkar is using the bridge of language, which he calls as the "human meteron par

excellence" the one that "measures the humanum", "crystallizes" the "human experience and

its tradition" with myths, historical records and a speculative "open horizon" of future -

foreseen from the anxious present (1993: 89). Incidentally he defines myth as "the most basic

horizon of intelligibility''. He further says that "myth is what you believe in without believing

that you believe in it" (1993: 15). Quoting from his Myth, Faith and Hermeneutics (1979) he

argues that myth is:

The ultimate reference point, the touchstone of truth by which facts are recognized as truths. Myth, when it is believed and lived from inside, does not ask to be plumbed more deeply, i.e., to be transcended in the search for some ulterior ground; it asks only to be made more and more explicit, for it expresses the very foundation of our conviction of truth (Panikkar 1993: 15). 14

To a large extent, his expression of the cosmotheandric experience is articulated around a

revistation of the efficacy of myth in the present world. Before discussing that in greater

detail, let me first summarize the genealogy of the three kairological human moments that

Panikkar mentions and the relations he develops with the themes of meaning, faith, science

and affirmation of faith through what he calls as the "sacred secular".

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The Three "Kairological" Moments

The first domain of "non historical consciousness" is defmed by primordiality for Pannikar.

He argues that this is the realm where the divide between God and Man has not been

accentuated to establish a 'difference' par excellence. Quoting Vedas, Panikkar prudently

suggests though that this is not the time when God and Man are one: the theological example

would be a christophanic moment when Christ was just Jesus, a man. He mentions:

The world of pre-historical Man, his environment ( circumstantia, Umwelt) is the theocosmos: the divinized universe. It is not a "world of men," but neither is it the "world of Gods" as a separate and superior realm hovering over the human. Man shares the world with the Gods. He still drinks Soma with the Gods. The Gods do not yet form a chin of their own, as they will do when history is about to begin. It is the world of history that views the pre-historical world as "full of Gods". This is a vision from the outside. In the nonhistorical consciousness, it is the world itself that is divinized, or rather divine. The divine permeates the cosmos. The forces of nature are all divine. Nature is "supernatural," so to say. Or rather, Nature is that which is being "natured," born- from or of the divine. Pre-historical Man's home, his background, is a cosmotheological one. Harmony is the supreme principle - which does not mean that it has been achieved. The meaning of life consists both in entering into harmony with nature and m enhancing it (Panikkar 1993: 95-96).

This is further supported by his observations that the shift from non-historical to pre­

historical has to be seen in terms of the coming of the technology of writing and subsequently

that of scriptures. In this context, it is worthwhile to underline that what he calls as "naturing"

the nature is an imperative that one must see in conjunction with his earlier observation of

construing language as a site of human memory. Seen with this perspective, one follows that

the idioms with which scriptural language approaches 'nature' and its elements presents what

Lacan would call as basing the Real of nature onto a new presence. However, as one

remembers from Freud's return of the repressed principle, it could be argued that it is

precisely in the scriptures' tangential articulation that one may also see the traces of a

primordial unsignifiable past. Returning to Panikkar' s tripartite division, one may further add

the qualification that his differentiation of the pre-historical with what he argues should be

called as the non-historical, is a call to establish that pre-historicity is the standpoint of those

who see through the lens of history, while non-historical is a realm in its own right. To

illustrate the same he argues that most of the Asian religions could be considered as

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representatives of non-historical consciOusness rather than a pre-historical one and the

practice of what he calls as iconolatry, "in the positive sense," is a cosmo-graphic example

for him (1993: 49). He argues that within the practice of iconolatry "the theophany is so

perfect that he (the worshipper) can discover no difference between the epiphany and the

theos manifested in it" (1993: 49). While this depiction rests on a certain kind of"innocence"

of the one who worships the icons, the movement to historical is a rush to strip oneself of all

such motifs and that is why while he considers the non-historical consciousness to be pre­

scriptural, the coming of scriptural is also seen as the onset of the historical consciousness.

The historical consciousness for Panikkar is based on the sociological landscape of the

shift from village to the city. He is of the opinion that the "city time is not so much cosmic as

it is historical" (1993: 100). This consciousness according to him is based on a catapulting of

the 'human' from its construed past into a future that establishes a difference and autonomy

to its existence par excellence. The 'human' comes to be demarcated clearly from the divine,

is in "dialectical opposition" to nature and is engaged in transcending time instead of

allowing time to have an immanent control over lives as was the case in the non-historical

consciousness. The move and motive could be captured in his assertion that unlike the

previous realm of the "super natural", the historical consciousness is marked by the

acquisition of the spirit of the ''super human". He further says that, this is now the world of

"anthropocosmos", "the human world, the universe of man", where nature is "demythicized",

"tamed and subjugated". In keeping with the method of his kairological analyses, he argues

that even though the historical consciousness has adopted the aim and ideal of achieving

"justice" over the non-historical consciousnesses' "harmony", there are still parts of the

present world that have not been subsumed under this quest. This argument has a split end

and I must clarify that Panikkar is trying to tie both. While he grants the historical

consciousnesses' tremendous victory in seeking 'justice" from the unquestioned norms of

hierarchy and domination, Panikkar also simultaneously expounds the position that those

who have resisted being adopted by the historical consciousness should be seen as exemplars

of another possibility.

He attempts to show the positive construction of the historical consciousness by pointing

out that "the world of historical Man is not the world of the spirits. Angels, apsaras, devils,

dwarves, elves, devatas, sirens, goblins, seraphim, bhutas and the like have all been, if not

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completely done away with, rendered impotent and subservient to human reason. In any

event, these ghosts have no history, and historical man's life no longer unfolds on such a

stage- despite occasional outbursts of the ghostly, irrational unconscious" (Panikkar 1993:

1 05). His assertion is that the historical consciousness reigned with a structural dominance of

Judaeo-Christian-Islamic dominance, even if "the name for such dominance is science and

technology" (Panikkar 1993: 107). It is interesting, keeping his definition of myth in mind

that while the Judaeo-Christian-lslamic traditions are of course internally contested by the

rise of science and technology, the bases of the latter, according to Panikkar, is perhaps

operational in the vein of "myth is what you believe in without believing that you believe in

it" (Panikkar 1993: 15).

The aforementioned "acme" of history, according to Pannikar has gradually come to crises

that may posit the way for the transhistorical consciousness. The climactic moment of crises

could be understood in the wanton technological advancements, disproportionate

consumption, aggravated inequalities and the commoditization of goods to the extent that the

world is stopping short of eating the "human flesh" (Panikkar 1993: 112). In this evocation,

which to my mind appears as a regular theological response to the world, there is slippery

usage of religion to pose the radical nature of Evil. What may specifically concern us here is

how Panikkar differentiates the radical evil of the historical consciousness in its passage to

the transhistorical consciousness. I am of the view that his elaboration of 'New Age Faith'

sects is his empirical claim to argue for the need and the celebration of a radically different

"open horizon" of intermixed tropes of belief, asceticism and consonance of the individual

with the world that he lives in. On the other hand he also considers that the movement away

from the historical consciousness has to be desired using the empirical situation of the

"ecological predicament," "humanistic crisis," and that of the "incompatibility between the

traditional idea of the divine and the modem understanding of cosmos and Man" (Panikkar

1993: 39).

He proposes his notion of transhistorical consciousness by suggesting that one of the

radical disjunctions that marks the end of the historical consciousness is visible in the fact

that the "western world" is "witnessing the passage from monotheism to trinity, i.e., from a

monotheistic vision to a Trinitarian vision" and the "eastern world" "is overcoming" the

"dualism by advaita" (Panikkar 1993: 56). This assertion is best exemplified in his single

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handed work on the epiphany of Christ in what he calls as Christophany (Panikkar 2004).

Making a departure from Christology, he makes claims for Christophany and offers several

reasons to justify his departure. The one justification that fits this context is as following:

Christology has been, in general, a reflection pursued by Christians who, except in its first period of formation, have virtually ignored the world's other traditions. Christophany, on the other hand, is open to both a dialogue with other religions and an interpretation of that same tradition on the basis of a scenario that embraces the past (including the pre-christian) as well as the present (even what is called the non-christian, including the secular). It is for these reasons that the new name is justified, for Christophany is not only a Christology modernized or adapted to our times. Christophany penetrates into every manifestation of the human spirit, has developed independently of both God- etsi Deus non daetur ("as if God did not exist") and the reality of Christ (Panikkar 2004: 12).

He goes on to develop the Trinitarian epiphany of Jesus the son of God, Christ the savior

and the Holy ghost as three registers which must be seen in conjunction with each other. Part

of the reason that Panikkar undertakes this task is because he considers the anthropologically

heterogeneous and heterodox practice of Christianity in different cultures of the present world

as an inspiration to reweave them into a theology of new Christianity itself. It is this

theoretical logic with which he is hopeful of finding a "sacred secularity'' that surpasses the

temporal reams and is experienced as "tempitemity'' that enables the human to be part of

"cosmotheandrism" - "the experience of the equally irreducible character of the divine, the

human and cosmic (freedom, consciousness and matter), so that reality- being one­

cannot be reduced to a single principle" (Panikkar 1993: 121 ).

This discussion so far, as an illustrative discourse of the new theological premises that are

envisioning a new world resonates with what the Risk theorists like Beck (1994), Giddens

(1994), Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavisky (1982) have argued for. The genealogy of non­

historical, historical and trans historical could be easily converged with the primitive, modem

and postmodem or post industrial or reflexive modernity as the case may be. Sociologically

speaking, Panikkar treads the critically accursed road of conflating the non-historical with the

Village and the iconolatry and the historical with the city and monotheism, just as the risk

theorists assume the pre-modem and the modem to be really there as entities, which are only

salvaged by the oncoming of the reflexive modernization. Another common motif is the

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ecological cnses, both set of writers call for a new world, using the lever of this

"predicament". While for the theological discourses the reason is apparent in so far as most

theologies have considered "nature" to be the most intimate link between human and God,

for the risk theorists the crises is a latent reminder to the globalized community that air, water

and soil once polluted do not stick to national boundaries and thus this should be a call to

"save" the earth, as it were.

Notwithstanding, Panikkar's sociological obscurities, which he qualifies as to be non­

linear, I would argue that his work brings to light at least two shortcomings of the risk

theories. One is of course that of introducing a theological plane to make sense of the present

moment and not just limit the theological to the anthropological which Mary Douglas and

Aaron Wildavisky (1982) do to a large extent. The Second is the more radical departure from

the risk theories in proposing a "reflection" that is not limited to the mediatized 'inter-active'

talk or democratization principles of certain kinds promising an eternally postponed equality

to everyone. This has to be posed against what Panikkar has to say about the complexity of

'interactivity' of the present world. He says that any understanding of the world has to be

mediated through the subject's "profound recesses of reality" which for him represents a

"cosmic dimension of reality'' at the same time (Panikkar 1993: 131).

This common observation and the evocation of a "profound recesses of reality'' cannot be

dismissed on the ground of its' non-empirical nature. However at the same time this has to be

further contrasted with the psychoanalytic notion of the "profound recesses of reality''

represented by the categories of "unconscious" and the "death drive". Both of these

psychoanalytic categories though allude to the "unsignifiable" and "traumatic" character of

the Real, yet at the same time they are also to be seen with the qualification that unconscious

and the death drive do not exist within one self, in fact they are to be located 'outside', in

something as commonplace as 'language' (see Fink 1995; Zizek 2006). Even with this

qualification, one can still read the last quoted paragraph from Panikkar' s work not so much

as a demand for being in touch with the deep inner self but to have an 'ethics' to have any

kind of reflexivity. Further, one can put a psychoanalytic rejoinder to it saying, the 'ethics' of

reflexivity should be based on the cognizance of registers at which reflexivity itself fails or in

other words the social reality is stripped of its Phantasmatic kernel. With these intetjections

let me posit the following discussion as a critique to some ofPanikkar's formulations.

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Critique ofPanikkar's Theological Formulations

The fundamental critique of Panikkar's formulation could be addressed to his belief that he

envisages cultures as coherent wholes that could be reinstated or would be respected in their

theological and anthropological premises and most importantly could be understood through

dialogues. Panikkar writes:

This would be my warning to all movements of"conscentization" in countries on the way to (western) development. Each culture is a whole. Adoption of short­term advantages is a Trojan horse which brings with it the inevitable destruction of traditional structures. On the other hand, isolation is no answer, either, nor are most traditions capable of responding on their own to the needs of contemporary Man (Panikkar 1993: 117).

In fact to make it even clearer, one may argue that the demand for difference is a valid

one, if one concedes that the "coherent" itself is tinkered by its own "interminable gap". Or

in other words, far from cultures representing 'wholes' they are primordially ruptured from a

"cosmic harmony'', thus it is cultural "inconsistency" that strictly defines human condition

(see Zizek 2006). But what is difficult to concede is that the transhistorical consciousness can

be assumed with a possibility ofhybridity of cultures based on mutual understanding. 15 The

political discourses that come closest to this kind of belief are the debates around human

rights, cultural fluidity or the impossibility of it in the theories of hybridity along with the

philosophical discussions on difference by Derrida and Emmanual Levinas that explores the

condition of "living together" under the premise of "love", "respect", or "understanding of

the neighbor" (Derrida 1996; Levinas 1979). I wish to argue that there are two things

involved here. One is that ''understanding" could be a quixotic and even theologically

impermissible notion over which strict difference could be ideologically defended. This

means that one has to think of a theology, radically separated from the one based on only

"understanding". 16 For the plain reason that in this affirmative assumption there is a belief,

not only that the 'one' would understand the 'other', but also that one 'understands' his own

'absolute self. Slavoj Zizek in an essay on ethical violence suggests that the better way to

posit this argument is as following:

The first ethical gesture is thus to abandon the position of absolute self-positing subjectivity and to acknowledge one's exposure/thrown-ness, being

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overwhelmed by Other(ness): far from limiting our humanity, this limitation is its positive condition. This awareness of limitation implies a stance of fundamental forgiveness and a tolerant "live and let live" attitude: I will never be able to account for myself in front of the Other, because I am already nontransparent to myself, and I will never get from the Other a full answer to "who are you?" because the Other is a mystery also for him/herself. To recognize the Other is thus not primarily or ultimately to recognize the Other in a certain well-defined capacity ("I recognize you as ... rational, good, lovable") but to recognize you in the abyss of your very Impenetrability and opacity. This mutual recognition of limitation thus opens up a space of sociality that is the solidarity of the vulnerable (Zizek 2005: 138-139).

Thus if one were to recall what Panikkar says about the disappearance of the "ghosts,

goblins ... apsaras and the sirens", the answer is that they were always spectrally present and

in fact their presence could be read on the face of the neighbour. Because as Zizek in the said

essay points out, the "human" cannot be construed without the construction of the

"inhuman" and I am of the view that Panikkar's critique of technology and western

conscience merely displaces the question of "radical evil". So Zizek' s critique of Levinas is

valid for Panikkar as well:

The limitation of Levinas is not simply that of a Eurocentrist who relies on a too narrow definition of what is human, a defmition that secretly excludes non­Europeans as "not fully human." What Levinas fails to include into the scope of "human" is, rather, the inhuman itself, a dimension which eludes the face-to-face relationship ofhumans (Zizek 2005: 158).

The second disagreement with Panikkar is more to do with the subtle differentiation of

categories that he uses in his work. It is not really out of place within a theological discourse

to abhor technology, consumer culture, sexual excesses and substance abuses. However,

when Panikkar makes a link with Marxism in its supposed humanism and has an explicit

argument to claim that the dominance of technology is structured in the cultures of Juadeo­

Christian-Islamic traditions, one must offer qualifications. This attempt to qualify has to be

based with the awareness of the theological register of moderation between what Panikkar

calls the universal realms of religious tension - "the ex and the sistence, the temporal and

the eternal, the vyavaharika and paramarthika, the samsara and the nirvana, the earthly and

the heavenly, appearance and reality, the phenomenon and the noumenon, the bad and the

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good, the tares and the wheat, the secular and the sacred, etc" (1993: 125). While observing

the nodes of tension between these categories, one may theoretically disagree with the idea

of moderation as an efficacious method in obliterating religious tension.

However, one of the central tenets of Marxism that expounds the role of surplus in

production is tied with dual logic. One is that the surplus could be part of production, the

second is that surplus is utilized in a capitalistic logic to create islands of profits that

systemically stave off the cause and capacity of labour. It is only in the second sense that

Marxism seeks to undo the surplus-profit complex, or in other words Marxism is not

necessarily against surplus that is in control of the state, as it were. It is in this sense that

George Bataille's The Accursed Share (1988) should be read. His hypothesis is that all

cultures participate in a production of surplus and there are excesses attached to the

consumption or destruction of those surpluses. The difference between a potlatch and a

capitalist production is that death and regeneration is the norm of sustenance of the former

while the latter operates with the dread of death and decline. Panikkar, in fact, does mention

this difference while noting that an ordinary villager in India would rather pawn his property

to marry off his daughter in keeping with the tradition of dowry rather than not participate in

a traditional marriage or similarly villagers in modem day Nagaland, still do not sell or buy

rice, but have ways in which they exchange it (Panikkar 1993: 110). For Pannikar then, the

combination of dowry against investment and fmancial prudence, and non-commodification

of rice against the capitalistic spree of commoditization are instances of a surplus that

bypasses the capitalistic logic. All this, notwithstanding the fact that dowry is as much rooted

in capitalistic exchange as any other and to argue that Nagaland's rice is a symbol of

uncommodified realm of capitalism is to borrow the capitalistic logic of "theological

whimsies" to market a product par excellence. It may not be surprising that a commercial for

Nagaland as a tourist centre is precisely developed by representing the state as a land where

"staple" food is still not priced. The point is that instead of nursing taboos on categories of

excess, surplus and commoditization one has to reach out for a theological discourse that is

precisely centred on the universal link of say, religious materiality. This to my mind may

further include categories of excess around which Pannikar's theology remains tight-lipped.

In a variety of religious practises, the use of language through events such as possession,

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exorcism, intoxication etc. has an ambiguous and mixed use of the scriptures. The Aghoris as

followers of Shaivite tradition would bear this as testimony.

This brings us to the links between theology and science. There are many ways in which

the Durkheimian logic of science has to be phylogeneticalli7 related to religion and can be

exemplified. The bloodless tie can be seen to be enacted on two counts. One is that in

postmodernity, as we know from Donna Haraway, science has an universal language with

the implicit challenge to provide "better accounts of the world" (Quoted in Andrew Ross

1991: 29). In this sense, science's relation should not be seen so much with religion as a

institution of lived practises but with that of theology which actually is the institution which

claims to represent both 'knowledge' and 'truth' of religion(s). Second, in their institutional

practises there could be more homological common causes between science and religion

than between science and capitalism, for instance. What captures this kinship most is what

Lacan says about the institutional credo of science i.e., science doesn't believe in deception,

it believes in an "honest, non-deceitful God" (Evans 1996: 178). Thus it makes sense to

complicate the proceedings by continuing in the seam of where we started - the question of

displacing the idea of 'radical evil' with the proposition of discerning Good and Evil, while

adjudging the role plays of science and theology.

Religion to Neuroses and Science to Psychoses

Let me resume the discussion by evoking the Lacanian reading of the practise and the

institution of science. While it is well known that Freud was against the quantifiable character

of science, even when he used concepts of 'biology, medicine and thermodynamics' (Evans

1996), Lacan speculatively brought about a combination between science and psychosis on

the lines of Freud's religion and neuroses. Eric Laurent argues in his essay on

"Psychoanalysis and Science" that "what is lost in psychosis cannot be distinguished from

what returns in that place, Freud emphasizes. Negative phenomena are no longer

anything but a time of productive phenomena" (Laurent: 1994). 18 Thus science unlike

religion looks to future not in eschatological terms but in a redemptive sense, it is fixated with

the idea of substituting the lost object with a new and yet to be found object rather than

tracing the 'original'. The essay further notes that Lacan noticed in Descartes' assertion of

"I am" as a kind of second birth, strictly for the sake of knowledge and it is this split

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subject which makes the scientific institution. Also Laurent notes that a Lacanian reading

of Karl Popper's claim of scientific refutability or falsification, has to be understood in

the sense that since everything is refuted (in principle), science's movement is in its

continuity itself.

This brings me to argue that while theology's fundamental premise is that of Good and

Evil, Science's relation is with Truth, and as Lacan observes, this Truth could only be a

delusion. Delusion here does not mean running after false things but as Dylan Evans cites

from Lacan's oeuvre "TRUTH is not simply the opposite of appearance, but is in fact

continuous with it: truth and appearance are like two sides of a moebius strip, which are

in fact only one side" (Evans 1996: 178 emphases in the original).

The next question should be that while a theological base of belief sustains the religious

existence, what could be the basis of the scientific venture. To this the answer is that it is the

death drive. Let me quote an anecdote from Panikkar' s The Cosmotheandric Experience

(1993) to illustrate this point. Pannikar cites "a candid and revealing testimony of'Wemer

Heisenberg" to argue that the scientist's passionate call to discover is not matched by an

effort to occlude the "translation" of the discoveries into "bombs and genetic engineering"

(Panikkar 1993: 45). The anecdote goes like this:

Heisenberg: I remember a conversation with Enrico Fermi after the War, a short time before the first hydrogen Bomb was to be tested in the Pacific. We discussed this proposal, and I suggested that one should perhaps abstain from such a test considering the biological and political consequences. Fermi replied: 'But it is such a beautiful experiment. .. (Panikkar 1993: 45).

Panikkar further quotes from Oppenheimer's account to substantiate his own claims:

Despite the vision and the far-seeing wisdom of our wartime heads of state, the physicists felt a peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting and in the end, in large measure, for achieving the realization of atomic weapons. Nor can we forget that these weapons, as they were in fact used, dramatized so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modem war. In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge they cannot lose (Panikkar 1993: 45).

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This puts us in a position from where a critique to Pannikar's formulation could be sharply

articulated, even with a risk of moving away from the phenomenology of sin and reduction of

war to a scientist or a soldier. One must pause here to note that science as an institution that is

death-driven in the Freudian sense to endlessly substi~te the 'lost' object, has moments in

the 'complex' when the new found discoveries appear "beautiful" as the testing of the

Hydrogen Bomb did to the physicist Enrico Fermi (cited above) (cf. Visvanathan 1997).

While creating a homology with anthropology as a science is it not equally true that to be

fascinated with the nuclear chain reaction is similar to Renato Rosaldo's (1993) defense of

headhunting as a 'justifiable" ritual amongst the Inuits, and for Beth Conklin (200 1) to

mourn the loss of, what she calls as "compassionate cannibalism" amongst the wari ? And it

is that fascinating "excess of life," as Zizek puts it, the refusal to be satiated at the last agreed

"limit of reason" as Kant calls it, which makes for the death drive of science. So

Oppenheimer is right in saying that "no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite

extinguish, (that) the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge they cannot lose"

(Quoted in Panikkar 1993: 45). The only difference is that this knowledge is not the one on

which science is based, for that one has to tum to theology. Zizek is right in formulating the

combination "Desire: Drive = Truth: Knowledge" in his essay "Umbr(a)" arguing that

"interpretation and construction stand to each other like symptom and fantasy: symptoms

are to be interpreted, the fundamental fantasy is to be (re)constructed" (1997). 19 Thus, the

combination of Knowledge and Death Drive has to be understood at the level of a

realization that it is "refuted" the moment it is said to be realized. Or in other words

science reconstructs a fantasy that can never be fully realized as a site of pleasure

provision. Just as critical human sciences, or what Lacan calls as "conjectural" science as

against the "exact" versions, may never in its paradigmatic essence be a linguistic gadget

of pleasure provision.

Thus the clear answer is that one cannot theoretically subscribe to what Andrew Ross

in Strange Weather ( 1991) - a book that makes a call for a science that is open to the

forms of knowledge available from religious and spiritual bases - calls as the "kinder,

gentler science" of the "New Age" as one would not adhere to the 'superficially deep' or

'deeply superficial' logic of New Age itself. The New Age with its religious and

scientific fixes should be addressed for what they are and not as an answer from beyond

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on our most pressing problems. It is in this sense that Andrew Ross's work represents

another version of reflexive modernity, where anything that is analytically or curatively

'meaningful' is to be bracketed under the metaphysical closure of 'science'. Ross in

Strange Weather, pursues as a relentless amateur, experimental groups as far ranging as

the UFO' s, Kundalini 's energy points, Electro Magnetic rejuvenation to the "boystown"

of Cybernetics and instead of considering these occasions as pleasure points that are

provided by both technology and religion, but not by science and theology, he goes on to

make a case for the New Age fixations as a mode of"personalizing" and "democratizing"

science itself ( 1991 ). This is the idiom of reflexivity that Risk theorists have come to

argue for i.e. all that is "counterculture" has to be seen as resistance to the "legitimate"

structures and thus for that reason the 'legitimate' structures are called forth to

'reflexively' adopt the norms of the 'counterculture' as a method of 'democratization'

(Ross 1991). There is another facet in Ross's work that has to be clarified. He argues that

concurrent to New Age or preceding it, there is a tremendous shift within the scientific

communities in the ways in which they now consider nature to be - "nonlinear,

unstable and stochastic" as compared to the obverse characterization by "Locke, Newton

and Descartes" (Ross 1991: 4 7). In his words:

It (nature) no longer resembles the dependable referee on and against which one can verifiably test empirical propositions. Nor is it a picture of nature as a tyrannical determinant of every final cause of human and social life. Above all, it offers no secure vantage-point for nature's observers, no guarantee of immunity for its ethnographers (Ross 1991: 48).

This translates into saying that this "entropic" world of nature is used as a starting

point by New Age healers who offer to provide an "equilibrium" to the said entropy.

Similarly moving beyond Darwinian notion of "negentropic systems -progressing from

simple to complex", he offers "Illya Priggogine's famous formulation" of"order" coming

"from chaos" (1991: 47). This formulation of order from chaos matches with the earlier

stated cue of equilibrium within entropic systems and so on. Before one engages with this

formulation to offer a critique to this reading of scientific paradigms and New Age

homology, let me substantiate and differentiate his position on evolution, because out of

all other methods of time frame, this has been most extensively used in social sciences.

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However at this juncture, Ross as a theorist of science and counterculture could be

located in the anthropological and the political contexts. It can be said at the outset that

what 'reflexivity' does for the 'risk society', is, that it perfectly maintains the 'risk' so as

to have the world go on. Similarly Ross's suggestion of 'equilibrium' to the 'chaos' or

the 'entropy' serves the same ideological function- a fatalistic reliance on whatever that

may work in a mystic behind the scene. Thus Ross's work has to be seen in homology to

risk theorists and his back to the order-in-chaos nature has to be ideologically posed with

a theory of science that precisely argues the obverse that is, nature is defined by patterns

of chaos which has to be regulated in the light of ecological crises.

Evolution with Respect to Science and Theology

Stephen Jay Gould the paleontobiologist has written on most issues of biology,

"evolution" notwithstanding. In a view from the inside, he argues that the two most

common tropes of "evolution": "natural selection" and "adaptation" which have been a

mainstay for the theory of evolution entail a review. Gould argues that adaptation, which

Darwin and Darwinians believed to be the main feature through which the process of

natural selection could be understood based on the premise of what works is preferred by

nature and it is thus chosen to stay as a trait, others get extinct or run the risk, has to be

delinked from the process of Natural selection (emphases added). To cite an example

from Gould's Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History (1994), where there is a

description of snails as objects of study with respect to their extinction. In other words

almost a century old scientific slugfest- literally- that involves people as diverse as

Darwin, Lamarck, Alfred Russell Wallace, John T. Gulick, Henry Edward Crampton and

Stephen Jay Gould himself who worked on one of the species of the snails in question for

his PhD thesis, would clear the air on the topics of adaptation and natural selection. 20

Gould suggests that there may not be a universal "rationalistic" reign of reason which

could be causing, directly or indirectly, this open cage's entries and extinctions within the

world of so called 'nature'. Evoking Darwin's journey to Tahiti, which corresponds to the

Trobriand Islands in anthropology, Gould shares the hypothesis that oceanic islands are

living laboratories for biologists because little changes and what changes is open to be

seen. In this case the hypothesis is doubly credited because snails cannot fly, run or be

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completely eaten away (because they have shells). However, since they rarely migrate by

themselves, when they get transported through "birds' muddy feet", "natural rafts",

"hurricane" etc. they have an opportunity to continue as the same species or mutate into

new ones as per the environment. Here, the Lamarckian version is that the environment

directly affects change and the suitable change is inherited, while the Darwinian

proposition is that the adaptation to the change happens through natural selection. Gould

notes that John T. Gulick son of an American missionary, "fired the first important

salvos" by arguing that one cannot establish any relationship between the local

environment and the changes in the shells of the snails, the snails inhabiting the same

area have different patterns of shells. The excerpt that Gould quotes from John T.

Gulick's Evolution: Racial and Habitudinal (1905) is worth quoting here for its

evangelical ethos and also as an attestation of Weber's notion of protestant work ethic.

Gulick claims:

If my contention [that different forms arise in identical environments] is in accord with the facts, the assumption which we often meet that change in the organism is controlled in all its details by change in the environment, and that, therefore human progress is ruled by an external fate, is certainly contrary to fact (Quoted in Gould 1994: 29).

Gould who earlier quoted this excerpt in his thesis with derision, appreciates the

stance in the essay while recounting that Alfred Russell Wallace who was a strict

adaptationist argued that what is environment for a snail is out of human cognition? To

translate in Weberian terms of verstehen, Wallace's critique is that to understand the

snail, you would have to get into the snail's shoes, which of course is a little difficult, if

not impossible. Later, Gould informs us that Henry Edward Crampton joined the fray

with respect to Partula -the snail species in question and remained devoted to the study

for next fifty years. Gould observes: "in short, and to summarize a half century of effort

in a sentence, Crampton came down firmly on Gulick's side. He could find evidence that

the forms and colours of Partula could be predicted from surrounding environments.

Identical climactic conditions seemed to evoke different solutions time after time" (1994:

30). Still later, or in present times, there seem to be a mournful loss of the species itself

because of the introduction of another "cannibal" "snail of Florida" - Euglandina - as

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a "biological control" that killed most of the smaller species of snails by feeding on them.

Gould puts it well in the following sentence: "Moorea is no longer a laboratory for

studying active speciation in Partula. It has become a mausoleum" (1994: 35).

This example brings back the categories of accident and contingency that I have

evoked earlier in the chapter, borrowing from Zizek's distinction. In Lacanian terms,

Gould could be rephrased to say that a pure history of evolution of any organism is a

fantasy; it can only be (re)constructed. The (re)construction could be scientifically

assumed while the accidental links are speculated and thus interpreted to have any

contingent relation with the organism's history as a species. In the same vein, in

continuation with what I have shown here from biology, Zizek offers a theoretically

differentiated position that could be mentioned in the backdrop of what I have said of

Ross's observations before. He says:

The traditional opposition between "order" and "chaos" is thus suspended: what appears to be an uncontrollable chaos - from the oscillations on the stock exchange and the development of epidemics to the formation of whirlpools and the arrangement of branches on a tree - follows a certain rule; chaos is regulated by an "attractor." The point is not to "detect order behind chaos" but rather to detect the form, the pattern, of chaos itself, of its irregular dispersion. In opposition to "traditional" science, which is centred on the notion of a uniform law (regular connection of causes and effects, etc.), these theories offer first drafts of a future "science ofthe real" i.e., of a science elaborating rules that generate contingency, tuche, as opposed to symbolic automaton. It is here, rather than in the obscurantist essays of a "synthesis" between particle physics and Eastern mysticism, aiming at the assertion of a new holistic, organic approach alleged to replace the old "mechanistic" worldview, that the real "paradigm shift" in contemporary science is to be sought (Zizek 1991: 26-27).

Clearly it should not be mistaken at the level of "eastern" (read "oriental"), versus

"western" (read "occidental") kind of divide that inherently produce different kinds of

knowledge system because that would mean conflating the difference between science

and technology on one hand and religion and theology on the other. Science unlike

technology, even in its immense differentiation- the way it is practised in Europe as

compared to Asia and Africa - should be seen as an institution of universal labour

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and language, just as theology is in it's effort not restricted to the multiplicity of

practices of a religion but is singularly driven to the newness of truth.

Sociological Concerns with Everyone's Concern for 'Deep' Ecology

Before following the ethnographic dimension of the discussion with relation to Ganga

I briefly evoke the contemporary debates on the ecological crises. The risk theorists'

argue that the alienated and non-politicized social actors may become "active

participants" from "blind citoyens" because ecological crises dooon't have a class or

an ethnic bias, it affects everyone (Beck and Giddens 1992). They are also of the view

that TV as the face of the contemporary mediatized world would offer radical grounds

to extend the cause of awareness and participation. However, in other paragraphs,

Beck is unhesitant to note that TV could also be the cause of befuddlement, because

of specialists' polyphonic and often contradictory chorus. Let me take these concerns

step by step.

First and foremost is the question of believing in the aspect of "crises" within "the

ecological crises" and attached to it is the question of the degree and nature of responses

to that perceived crisis. Stephen Jay Gould argues in the essay "The Golden Rule" (1994)

that it is true that there is an ecological crisis that we may be experiencing today in the

ways in which our lives are being affected but a "proper scale" has to be observed. He

notes that while science has increasingly discovered microscopic lives and the time spans

of their lives, at the same register, one must not forget that there is also the geological

timeframe ("on scales of millions of years"), within which species have come and gone

and all this was before Britain ever heard the whistle of the train or the grinding halt of

the power loom. He writes:

Palaeontologists do discuss the inevitability of extinction for all species - in the long run, and on the broad scale of geological time. We are fond of saying that 99 percent or more of all species that ever lived are now extinct. (My colleague Dave Raup often talks on extinction with a zinging one-liner: "To a first approximation, all species are extinct.") We do therefore identify extinction as the normal fate of species (Gould 1994: 46).

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However, Gould also says in the same breath that if drastic changes, mutations,

extinctions happen within the span of decades, one has to be alarmed to reach out for the

most sensible conservation plan. The above discussion to a large extent captures the

multiple reactions to ecological crises in the contemporary world, which ranges from

cynical indifference to the obsessive enthusiasm to 'save the world'. Zizek in the essay

"Censorship Today: Violence, or Ecology as a New Opium for the Masses" (2007)

considers this as a "fetishist split":

Our attitude here is that of the fetishist split: "I know very well (that the global warming is a threat to the entire humanity), but nonetheless ... (I cannot really believe it). It is enough to look at my environs to which my mind is wired: the green grass and trees, the whistle of the wind, the rising of the sun ... can one really imagine that all this will be disturbed? You talk about the ozone hole - but no matter how much I look into the sky, I don't see it - all I see is the same sky, blue or grey!" Instead "The problem is thus that we can rely neither on scientific mind nor on our common sense - they both mutually reinforce each other's blindness. The scientific mind advocates a cold objective appraisal of dangers and risks involved where no such appraisal is effectively possible, while common sense finds it hard to accept that a catastrophe can really occur. The difficult ethical task is thus to "un-learn" the most basic coordinates of our immersion into our life-world: what usually served as the recourse to Wisdom (the basic trust in the background­coordinates of our world) is now THE source of danger (Zizek 2007: 12 emphasis in the original).

Zizek notes that this involves almost un-learning the basic co-ordinates of one's

culture, when the assurances of everyday life are also to be re learnt. It is in this sense one

must work around the theme of questioning peoples' relationship with Ganga as a river.

Let me further concretize the specific facets involved here and translate them in the

context of my work. Zizek argues that there are at least four different concerns that are

connected to the crises, which may involve ecological crises as the primary one.

Under the heading of Ecology, Zizek argues that the fundamental lesson of the

ecological crisis is that one can no longer rely on the "historical substance" that buffered

all that was done by socio-political actors and ultimately a cultural regularity was

reinstated after every major transgression. Today one exists at the verge of the loss of this

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cushion of 'historical substance' as any single subject could trigger a catastrophic loss

through a nuclear or a chemical initiative. In his own words:

No longer can we rely on the safeguarding role of the limited scope of our acts: it no longer holds that, whatever we do, history will go on. For the first time in human history, the act of a single socio-political agent effectively can alter and even interrupt the global historical process, so that, ironically, it is only today that we can say that the historical process should effectively be conceived "not only as Substance, but also as Subject (Zizek 2007: 2).

In the context of this work, Ganga, or a river in more generic terms, runs as a

testimony to this hypothesis: all the socio-political activities ranging from harmless open

defecation on the banks to floating carcass in the river to tanning animal hides to seasonal

variations are the proverbial bones (with putrid flesh attached) of contention, all of these

together or one of it could be thought as the trigger for the irreversible leap of death for

the river.

The second theme Zizek raises is that of private property. He argues that in the age of

digital property rights, where one individual, say Bill Gates threatens to control the entire

regime of networking offers a glaring example of our communitarian vulnerabilities.

Combine this with the idea of patents, that could be procured surreptitiously by

individuals and nations that have not contributed in the ecological growth, production and

preservation of a particular species of plant or animal. This in the context of the Gangetic

plain evokes the horror of losing not only the most culturally alert agrarian sectors in their

form of reliance on the canal water but the islands of herbs and plants that are used for

their medicinal extracts which find their nourishment on the riverine environment.

The third feature that Zizek mentions in the essay cited above is that' of "New Techno­

Scientific Developments" of which he says:

With the latest biogenetic developments, we are entering a new phase in which it is simply nature itself which melts into air: the main consequence of the scientific breakthroughs in biogenetics is the end of nature. Once we know the rules of its construction, natural organisms are transformed into objects amenable to manipulation. Nature, human and inhuman, is thus "desubstantialized," deprived of its impenetrable density, of what Heidegger called "earth." This compels us to give a new twist to Freud's title Unbehagen

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in der Kultur - discontent, uneasiness, in culture. With the latest developments, the discontent shifts from culture to nature itself: nature is no longer "natural," the reliable "dense" background of our lives; it now appears as a fragile mechanism which, at any point, can explode in a catastrophic direction (Zizek 2007: 4).

By slightly modifying the context in which this observation applies to my work, I use

the bacteria-virus combines or what are called as bacteriophages as an example later in

this chapter.

The fourth issue taken up by Zizek is that of "New Forms of Apartheid". He argues

that as the world in its global capitalistic politics increasingly comes to the conclusion

that democracy is the final form of government, certain inequalities have now become

naturalized. That is, it is obvious that slums would exist in the cities - they do not

represent inequality as much they represent the libertarian and democratic modes of

modem Governments. Similarly it is obvious that as the new world instrumentation, bio­

engineered seeds, weather change etc. become commonplace, the decline and death of a

certain kind of agrarian practise would become a corollary to meteorological alerts in

terms of: you were forewarned. In the context of this work this is one of the most

pressing concerns, because out of many stances of "save Ganga" the latent or manifest

directions trivialize the occupational concerns of the Doms, Dhobis, Mallahs, Tanners

(the latter who are mainly Muslims). Further we cannot ignore the loss of "drinkable

water" which was not a private property and was available to everyone. The irony lies in

the fact that the drinkable water available today in packaged form, on one hands claims to

be tapped from the "virgin" sources say from the Himalayan glaciers in a sense implying

that this should be the quality of drinking water and on another that the river that runs in

the plains is unfit for providing drinking water. And second, the springs that are sources

for saleable water today, are also the sites of most arduous Hindu and Buddhist

pilgrimages. Again, it is the sign of the times that where the pilgrim reaches out for his

grace and salvation is a site sold out for the most regular and mundane commodity of

everyday life - water. Thus, it could be argued that if the "qualitative difference"

between the "excluded and the included" - in this case the doms, mallahs, dhobis as

excluded in one context and similarly on the question of drinking water a whole range of

other people as excluded, who may otherwise be included in the thick of democratic

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access to resources - is not analytically observed then most things could only be seen

through and within the capitalistic enclosures (2007: 7-8).

To illustrate on the lines of his examples, if there is anything that is common today

between bottled drinking water and the one sold in Khadi Ashram for religious purposes

it is the claim that they are bottled from a 'virginal' source. In a way while

acknowledging a dead end, that neither the drinking water nor the water used for bathing

Gods' idols can begotten from most parts of the river, it also offers its own version of

solution which is to rely on the capacity of the market to exhaust the last possible source.

Similarly one has to be careful with the 'save Ganga' campaigns that seek to have a clear

sparkling river without the communitarian practises around the banks. Lewis Mumford in

the classic work Sticks and Stones ( 1955) on the American architecture observes that he

has learnt from the Functionalists' that any community could be understood through the

grid of its "work, people and environment". To that one could add, while work and

people are invariably going to be divided, environment has been to a large extent a thing

in "common" (see also Hardt and Negri 2000; Brara 2006; Baviskar 2007; Visvanathan

2009). Not 'common' in the sense of the same background to everyone, but more in the

sense of' commonness' that exists implicated in the difjerance of social relations.

Ganga in the Theoretical and Ethnographic Context

Let me situate Ganga as a river in terms of its states of pollution and the lack of it.

Needless to say that this 'situating' can only happen through an interpretive gesture by

locating the breaks of tradition, modernity and postmodemity. So the 'traditional'

observation based on the metonymic origin of the river is that it is 'primordially' pure.

Remember that even the obverse argument of 'Ganga' standing as the example of the

'abject', which Ron Barrett calls as the 'cosmic sink' is ultimately a corroboration ofthe

traditional representation of the river (Barrett 2008). Because as I have shown in the last

chapter these are two facets of the same topology of the 'feminine principle' as construed

within Hinduism.

The modernist interpretative break is in the recognition that the river, though it is

mythic in its founding may 'die' like any other physical object if not cared for properly.

This interpretative link may combine both the theological and the scientific in its

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recognition of the 'modem'. This I substantiate by showing Ganga Action Plan

inaugurated by the then Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi as an example of the modernist

rupture to the traditional representation of the river.

How may one then recognize the postmodem interpretative break in the representation

of the 'object' that is Ganga? The answer lies in discerning both the merging as .well as

the rupturing of the traditionalist and the modernist features. So, this is the moment where

the river stands for two extremes at the same time. On the one hand it could be diagnosed

as 'dead' without any chance of restoration while on the other it is seen to have an

intrinsic capacity of immortalizing itself. It is also the 'homely' - easily accessible -

state of the river's being in this moment. Physically accessible to different caste members

to whom it was previously inaccessible because of vernacular notions of purity and

pollution. The mediatized pictures of the river portray another kind of accessibility

through their dissemination in different parts of the world transmitted by "educational"

satellite channels like Discovery and National Geographic. These images bring together a

juxtaposition of beaming Hindu cremation with an offering in a temple just as they

produce close ups of the sewage seamlessly streaming into the 'blue' water of the river.

However it is also the time of emergency, as all social bodies, institutions and actors

ranging from global environment groups to the Indian State to local religious bodies to

school children's groups to daily bathers' doubling up as consciousness raising groups

evoke concern about the river's health and spiritual implications of pollution. My effort

through this work has been to clarify these three interpretive registers and

ethnographically locate the present day Ganga. The 'reality principles' were offered to

my observations by the Doms at the Harishchandra ghat, who are the 'witnesses' from the

mythic days of Kaluram Dom, to the present day when the electric crematorium runs

parallel to the manual cremations.

Translating the three registers in terms of ethnographic objects and 'objections', the

traditionalist interpretive trope could be highlighted by the theological interpretation of

the river as a continuing spiritual epitome of 'purity' and thus spirituality. Raimon

Panikkar's (1993) notion of the 'Cosmotheandric experience' is based on this persistence.

He compares great rivers, including Ganga, to corroborate his reading of Vedas and to

argue that such rivers are metaphors of those "cosmotheandric" spaces which bring the

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'cosmic' and the 'theo' at the level of the religious 'man' (1993). I contextualize this

interpretive link to Ganga and problematize this depiction by two instances in my

ethnographic domain. One is related with the discovery of 'Bacteriophages' in Ganga's

water in late nineteenth century by a British microbiologist - Ernest Hanbury Hankin,

while working on prevention of the spread of cholera in the gangetic plains (1896).

Hankin's speculation, that Ganga's water has some bactericidal property was not

confirmed immediately but was later corroborated by the French Microbiolgist Felix

d'Herelle (1922). Hankin's speculative claims nevertheless originated a discursive

reification that the 'the 'purity' of Ganga could be scientifically prov.ed'. This continued

to remain a privileged signifier in the traditionalist discourse which included people such

as Mark Twain- who in his Following The Equator (1897; 1989) marvelled on this

discovery and wondered how the "Hindoos" knew it all along without science and

technology? - and continues to involve a whole range of specialized and non­

specialized commentators on the subject till date (See Kelly 1994). One logical end of

this debate has been a kind of stalemate amongst scientists .who claim and counterclaim,

depending upon their combination of the spiritual-mystical-scientific quotients- in the

vein of Andrew Ross's discussion raised above- whether the 'bactericidal' property of

the bacteriophages is unique and effective as a 'divine' 'thing' of the river and if it would

guarantee the river's immortality or it would not. The point is that there is a cynical or

perhaps quixotic assumption that the divine 'virus' that eats the bad bacteria is going to

negate all the human polluting activities. This assumption is shared by many bathers and

'believers', who come to the river and bathe daily in a visibly polluted river (see Kelly

1994). On the other hand, a pharmaceutical company 'GangaGen' 21 based in Bangalore

with American firms in its' extant network uses the 'history of the discovery of the

bacteriophages' in Ganga's water as a precedence to market viral products- based on

the technologies with which the Bacteriophages are supposed to work - which can

counter the newly discovered antibiotic resistant bacteria. So at this level, the ordinary

bather and the lab based scientist come together in maintaining the 'fetishist's split' .22

Thus the second feature of the traditionalist representative link is that of the 'believer',

who may be a bather, scientist or an ordinary Hindu who not only claims that the river is

eternally pure but also goes on to insist that 'belief has to be unqualified. This construct

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of tradition within postmodernity has to be theoretically located within a trend. Slavoj

Zizek based on Lac an's distinction of belief and knowledge argues that while true belief '

is based on "groundless" but insistent domain of faith and not a "chain of reasons",

knowledge on the other hand intends to build its "positive content" by endlessly adding

the result of every new discovery in science and it's consequent possibilities available to

rationalize the most traditional customs (Zizek 2006: 117). For instance Zizek notes:

No wonder that religious fundamentalists are among the most passionate digital hackers, and always prone to combine their religion with the latest findings of science. For them, religious statements and scientific statements belong to the same modality of positive knowledge. The occurrence of the term 'science' in the very name of some of the fundamentalist sects (Christian Science, Scientology) is not just an obscene joke, but signals this reduction of belief to positive knowledge (Zizek 2006: 117).

This distinction ironically puts the "fundamentalists" and the zealot "believers" on the

side of rational tacticians who lack "authentic belief'. In such an instance in the context

of Ganga, there are two sets of so called believers, one who believe in the river because it

is Ganga, but for some there is another layer that cushions this belief and that is of

latching on to every new scientific discovery that purportedly affirms the knowledge that

Ganga is 'pure'. The "bacteriophages" as they keep returning as "privileged signifiers" in

the discourse of Ganga's 'purity' are symbols of this knowledge par excellence. Thus

what is involved here is strictly not the question whether Bacteriophages are indeed

capable of predating on the bacteria, the question is rather of belief - what makes

people reiterate their co-ordinates of reality, as it were, saying that some aspect of nature

is self-sustained as part of divine privilege and what makes yet others question this

assumption? Zizek sums this up in suggesting that the lesson that one learns from Lacan

about "the true dangers of rise of religious fundamentalism" is that the "danger" does not

inherently lie "in its threat to secular scientific knowledge, but in its threat to authentic

belief itself' (Zizek 2006: 118).

With this background one can argue that 'tradition' is that which can be retroactively

constructed. The two ways in which the same can be achieved is by the modernist stance

that there are ruptures that can be healed and the polysemic postmodern position that

there are no universal answers, whatever saves the day is applicable, including

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prevarication and procrastination. In terms of the ethnographic instance, the 'historical'

moment of the newly elected Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi inaugurating the Ganga

Action Plan at Dassaswamedh Ghat in Benares in 1986, a year after the assassination of

his mother, also a Prime minister of the country can be equivocally read at two

interrelated levels. One is that of restoring the Hindu Symbolic of a pilgrim centre and

the second is nothing less than seeking to reconstitute the Hindu Symbolic sphere of

religious and cultural self which demands rethinking the notions of the sacred. In his

speech, Ganga becomes metonymic to the civilizational 'symbolic' of Hindus and thus

her restoration, has both an immediate and a perspectival context. In its immediacy, it is

unambiguously communicated that the trauma of a mother's death would be unbearable;

one has to be alert to recognize the internal threats. Thus, through his speech, he manages

to communicate the 'traumatic' possibility of Ganga's death and in relating that to the

larger Hindu Symbolic lays the foundation of a dual pronged approach to 'save' the river.

The perspectival direction, as I would show a little later while analyzing the speech is

towards registering a break in the chaotic industrialization and unplanned Hindu cities to

pointing a sphere of the Hindu Symbolic that is in tune with its horrific 'Real' as the

world changes. However, while the speech introduces the 'trauma' as a meta signifier of

the possibility of Ganga's death, the measures of Ganga Action Plan, in his account are

also about healing the wound as soon as it comes to be noticed. The Ganga Action Plan is

thus about drastic changes that includes provisions of Electric cremation, Heavy

machineries fitted on the Ghats to treat sewage, constitution of a new task force that

would guard the banks and stop people from defecating there or dumping the dead bodies

without cremation and so on. To the extent that the speech metonymically alludes to

restoring the Hindu Symbolic at the level of empirical contingencies, it promises not only

Ganga's water that is fit for bathing but also fit for drinking. The measures of Ganga

Action Plan reveal an introduction of a series of 'scientific' methods with respect to

Hindu religion that are to an extent unprecedented in post independent India.

However, the actual working, efficiency and success of the Ganga Action Plan,

revealed the fissures and difficulty of the realization of such a plan. The Swatcha Ganga

Campagin (SOC) is run by Sankat Mochan Foundation.Z3 The foundation is headed by

the Mahant (chief priest) of Sankat Mochan Temple, who is also a Hydraulics engineer

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along with two other engineers who specialize in chemical and industrial pollution

respectively. It is here that one can see the ways in which the postmodernist break with

which the river is perceived. Veer Bhadra Mishra, the mahant, characteristically

articulates the state of the pollution of the river in a culturally embedded idiom. He is also

of the view that the river is extremely polluted while he himself religiously bathes in the

river every morning. So in a way, the liminal combination that he inhabits of religion and

science is manifest here. The mahant used this liminal position of the one with scientific

knowledge and religious belief in complimentary ways, to make his case. His notion of

emergency, unlike Rajiv Gandhi's construction in his speech, delinks the river from the

people and the place with respect to the 'concrete' plans within which "pollution" had

been located within the modernist paradigm. He observes that the machineries installed at

the ghats do not work, so the only way to 'save' Ganga would be to apply a plan which

runs without electricity.24 In his plan of 'Integrated Wastewater Oxidation Pond System'

based on 'biological control' it is a 'return to the bacteria'. In my interview with him in

June 2009 the Mahant claimed that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has ensured that his

'project' would be taken up. The 'Save Ganga Mission' announced on 5th October 2009

by the Indian Government claims to include SMF in its two billion World Bank funded

initiative (ANI in Express). In this institutional return of the bacteria-virus, or the

biological control method, the government tacitly proposes that by 2020 it would attempt

to bring the river's water to bathing standards.

It is in this 'everything in the open' that everything is found and lost: the access to the

river is democratized; the 'solution' to a national disaster is personalized and in the

process the link between electricity and people on the banks of the river is made

incidental to the extent that the former is not a priority anymore. Similarly while

'drinkable' status of the water is lost for good, 'bathable' water is the new ideal.25 Clearly

then, in these shifts one can locate the postmodernist interpretive register through which

the river can be perceived.

How should one make sense of Ganga transcending these breaks of tradition,

modernity and postmodernity? The answer is in constructing the 'river' in terms of a

'death drive'. Lacan while defining drives in general argues that 'drives' unlike 'desires'

can be termed as 'Good', independent of the immediate context (.Zizek 2006). In making

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a case for the 'death drive' he argues that contrary to this drive pointing to an end in

'death', it points to the unmistakably horrific 'real' of the Human existence and that is the

fact that the 'symbolic' refuses to die. It is 'immortal' as an exception to death, linked as

a basic irony to the fact of death itself. Thus, my observation with regard to Ganga's

death is as following: on one hand as the analyses in my last chapter shows, even if the

river dies off, gets extinct, it would end up spawning Kunds at various places, which may

be metonymically understood as 'cosmic sinks', representing the 'feminine principle' of

Hinduism and standing 'in' for the erstwhile mythic Ganga. In this sense the myth of the

eternal return can be actually concretized. This is what I have come to call as Pravah of

the river that is, come what may, people will die, and rituals would be modified to carry

on with the flow of things. However, though persistent in this sublimated form, one

cannot also deny the physical death of the river. If Lacan is to be considered right in his

assessment, this physical death should also have a metaphor of 'immortality'. My

ethnographic understanding is that the 'polythene' represents this aspect of the

'ridiculous' immortality. The physical death of the river may not match up with the

apocalyptic idea of flood which may still have a possibility of Noah and his ark; nor a

drying up which may force us to pin our hopes on a magic fountain of a virgin spring. It

would be like the polythene- used and discarded till disuse and re-use. To that extent,

one may never claim for a collective representation on behalf of people, whether the river

is already dead, is dying or will die in near or far future (see Kelly on the difficulty of

pronouncing the river's polluted state in ernie terms 1994). This ambiguity retains both

courses of actions. One is the relativistic stance of maintaining that 'lets do anything that

we can to 'save' the river and the other is to put people and places before the river and

associate any mode of ecological effort with respect to their betterment. The key

difference in the second instance may be an admittance of the death of the river before

embarking on ways in which water, sanctity and myths can be reformulated. It is in the

second sense that I construe Parvah (care, 'death drive') as a category; not just an

offhanded patronizing disembodied 'care' but 'care' that is not oblivious to the traumatic

feature of the death of the river.

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The Bacteria and the Virus

I propose to use here the Bacterium as an organism to complicate the theological-scientific

division. If biological science's death driven movement has any feat that makes the 'un­

seeable' in near-immediate environment come true, it is through the discovery of the

microscope. While the 'telescope' shook the literality of theological claims of the 'far and the

heavenly', the microscope did the same for the 'near and the parasitical'. As Diana L. Eck

argues, the Hindu idiom of Darshan is to offer oneself under the gaze of the sacralized and

the hierophantic (1998). While it is common to go on pilgrimages of the 'sacred complexes'

or to go to have 'darshan ' of a deity or a divine persona, it is held that the divine itself may

choose to providentially give 'darshan' to the one who seeks (see Eck 1998). The case of the

discovery of the bacteriophages in late nineteenth century has been discursively posited by

many claimants as the revealed instance of Ganga's purity. That, this purity could be

understood in the context of the combination of bacteria and virus, what Biology also

considers as the 'pathogens', represents the metaphor of Ganga as 'cosmic sink' with its

properties of abjectness and purity in a new light.

Ernest Hanbury Hankin son of a clergyman, who was appointed by the British

Government as microbiologist to research on the spread of cholera in the North Indian plains,

appears as a typical nineteenth century scientist. Constantly displacing his interests from one

to another, in his life-time he manages to provide a hint about the 'mysterious X' property in

Ganga-Jamuna's water. He then goes on to write a paper on the "epidemiology of Plague"

and later abandoning both of these direct scientific pursuits, finds joy in unraveling the

"saracenic" art in the Islamic architecture and having done that, invests most of his life back

in Britain recording "bird flights" and their flying patterns (see Hankin 1896, 1914, 1925). As

a nineteenth century scientist, the common thread in his interests is that religion and science

are two profound expressions and the former could be understood or studied through the

latter. For instance, his location of the 'mysterious X' substance in Ganga-Jamuna's water is

based on his observance of the Hindu piety towards these rivers. Thus when, he finds that

communities that have their residences up stream are less likely to be infected by cholera as

compared to the ones downstream and even here those directly reliant on the river's water

have less instances of cholera. He explains this through the presence of the "mysterious X"

property. He discovers that the water of these rivers has a 'microbe' that perhaps has an

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ability to neutralize the bacteria that may be instrumental in causing cholera. He also notes

that as compared to filtered water that is infected by the Vibrio Cholerae- the bacterium

that cause cholera, which still manages to infect another clean source, the water of Ganga and

Jamuna in the same period manages to clear off the bacterial source of the infection. He

published his findings in a paper at the Pasteur Institute, "L'action bactericide des eaux de

Ia Jumna et du Gange sur le vibrion du cholera" ( 1896), still it took two more decades

for the 'X' to be recognized and given the "proper name" of "Bacteriophages" - the

bacteria eaters, by a French-Canadian microbiologist Felix d' Herelle (1922).

To resume from Hankin's interests in various subjects, his shift from that which could

not be 'seen' as the 'X' substance or the pathogen of the plague virus, to that which could

be seen has an interesting reflexivity that brings the interplay of religion and science to

the fore. He goes on to study the "Saracenic" art in Islam, basically to record the

geometrical patterns of the floral motifs of what he calls as the Arabesque's domes and

spirals. His study that was eventually published by the Archeological Survey of India in

1925 under the heading "The Drawing of Geometric Patterns in Saracenic Art" has

Hankin saying in the introduction that since Islam forbids people to 'see' the divine, their

art is an attempt to match the profundity of the harmony that emerges through

geometrical complexity (1925). Later when he studies the birds' flights, he similarly

seeks to represent in terms of knowledge the complexity of God's creatures par

excellence (Hankin 1914). The relation of the birds with the religious symbolism is well

established in anthropology, for instance, Claude Levi-Strauss suggests in his essay on

'Totemism' that birds are metaphors of the heavenly and the eschatological (Levi-Strauss

1963b). In this triad of Hinduism (Ganga-Jamuna as source of the mysterious 'X'), Islam

(Saracenic art) and Christianity (Birds as metonymic to the angels) Hankin's oeuvre

represents a theoretical space that is of interest to this discussion. One can note that while

the discovery of the 'X' substance for him is generalized and is associated with both

Ganga and Jamuna, that aspect came to be metonymically associated with Ganga as I

would show in the subsequent discussion. Contextualizing Lacan' s notion of death drive,

one can make a distinction between the religious death drive and the scientific death

drive. As we will see the scientific death drive ensures that three separate scientific

interventions with respect to the mysterious 'X' first reported by Hankin, perhaps

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unknown to each other manage to 'extract' the organism. And that strain of the microbe

became a site of further study for the scientific community. There is a multiplicative

manifestation of what was 'unseen' before or 'unexplained' before, and thus with every

new scientific cognizance, there is a new sight of the organism interlinked with a whole

range of other species of organisms like bacteria and organs and organelles of these

organisms. On the other hand the religious death drive could be based on the reiteration

of that which exists but cannot be seen in the scientific sense of the term. Diana L. Eck's

notion of Darshan becomes significant here. In the context of Hinduism, she argues that

'darshan' involves a discursively ritualised 'seeing' of the hierophantic, of being under

the gaze of the divine, which can only be returned to the divine through an offering

(1998). Thus, if one were to locate the Hindu idiom of Darshan of "Ganga Mai" (the

mother goddess), it is this hierophantic association that has to be kept in mind. Alley D.

Kelly in an attempt to similarly locate the disjuncture between the scientific construction

of 'waste' and the religious 'collective representation' of the same argues that for

residents of Benares Pradushan (pollution in the industrial sense) exists as Gandagi

(waste) (Kelly 1994). Thus on one hand she notes that the scientific community uses the

abstract vocabulary of Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD) and Chemical Oxygen

Demand, conductivity, pH and Temperature, the bathers and occupants at the bank of the

river on the other hand evoke the sanctity of river in claiming that whatever you put in the

river is cleaned by the river (Kelly 1994: 134). The 'imaginary' of Ganga, with the

opening of city sewages draining directly into river is part of the Hindu complex of

'darshan '. Starting from the colonial initiative of opening a single drain in 1792 followed

by Fitzjames, the superintending engineer of Allahabad who laid extensive sewer lines, a

century later (Kelly 1994: 132), this network of the sewage is as much a part of the

spectacular domain of postcolonial Darshan. One could argue thus that it is misplaced to

think of the 'visible' pollution of the river in the present times as against an image of

scenic clear water flow in the past that is imputedly etched in the minds of the older

residents of the city. What has in fact changed postcolonially for the residents is not so

much the co-ordinate of the 'imaginary' of the riverscape but rest of their residential lives

set within the paradigmatic discourses of illnesses, diseases, medicines, toilets,

disinfectants, norms of sanitation and as I argued in the last chapter a shift ofthe 'care' of

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the dying Hindu from his home to the Hospital. This then brings us back to the argument

made earlier in the chapter that there is no 'nature' out there, in fact nature today can only

be looked at through the co-ordinates of culture. Any definition of nature is a cultural

signification that is as likely to be questioned as to be believed. It is in this context that

the 'darshan ' of the river for the believer may hold its efficacy even after the physical

death of the river. Though it may be difficult for the believer to concede that indeed the

physical 'death' may happen to the very maternal restorative river who gives life to the

Hindu dead (pravah). Thus the discovery of 'bacteriophages' represent an alibi, a coveted

object which lets a strain of knowledge alive that there is a 'thing' within the river that

ensures its' immortality.

Clearly then, the point is simply not between the 'reductive' scientific pursuit and

'generative' mystically surplus bound religious association of the bacteriophages and the

river. It has to be delineated in terms of the Derridean differance between the two death

drives noted above (Derrida: 1967). Alain Badiou's classification of the Good and the

Evil would become useful here. In the realm of science, every identification is linked

with a possibility of new probing in its everyday sense of the term and in that sense

scientific pursuits represent not ''beyond" "Good and Evil" but beneath it, to the extent

that the "absolute" claim of "totality" becomes antithetical to the institutional claim itself

(Badiou 2001: 71 ). On the other hand if religious discourse uses any such 'discovery' to

make a 'total' "truth" claim, that is pitched above the "Good and the Evil" and thus

unquestionable it is in this sense that such a claim marks the event of a "disaster" and in

fact such event could be considered as the realisation of the "Evil" (Badiou 2001: 71 ).

Using a Lacanian vocabulary, one can paraphrase Badiou to argue that the moment the

religious discourses cover the 'voids' of the Real to make a truth claim that exceeds

representation itself and becomes a signifier for the absolute, it is a movement towards

the "evil" (200 1: 64 ).

Let me now return to the eventual discovery of the Bacteriophages, before one takes

up the discursive signification of Ganga with a divine property. Felix D'Herelle

introduces the Bacteriophages to the world in the form of a book The Bacteriophages: Its

Role in Immunity (1921 ), after various papers that were already published in journals by

him and other microbiologists, including Hankin. D'Herelle mentions Ernest Hanbury

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Hankin in this context and starts by locating his description of the "volatile substance"

that protects those who "ingest" Ganga-Jamuna's water from contracting Cholera but the

substance evaporates through "boiling" (D'Herelle 1921: 16). To D'Herelle's mind this

substance is undoubtedly the 'Bacteriophage'. His affirmation comes from the' fact that

another English microbiologist Frederick Twort who observed in the case of acute

diarrhoea among infants that a certain "ultramicroscopic" "vitreous" substance was

present and a similar object he had also found in the Dog's guts affected by

Hundeseuche. Twort considered the 'vitreous substance' to be an 'enzyme' which

reproduced through the bacteria, survived temperatures less than sixty degrees Celsius

(Twort 1915). D'Herelle goes on to describe other set of incidences, including what was

termed as the event of 'suicide' of bacterial cultures, which mysteriously turned milky in

the labs over few days and then disappeared completely. Again, he affirms, that now one

can clearly argue that this must have happened because of the introduction of the

bacteriophages (1921: 18). The illuminative evidence comes knocking to D'Herelle's

door steps, when the faecal culture of a certain individual hospitalized in Pasteur Institute

for the treatment of dy~entery turns out to have the same lytic activity against the

bacteria. He calls it an "ultramicrobe" that is a "minute living being" but is not sure

which special class it may belong to. He also defends his coinage of the term

'Bacteriophage', which is partly suggested by his wife, to claim that though the term

literally means 'the one which eats bacteria' it should be understood in terms of 'one that

develops at the expense of' the bacteria (1921: 21). Without going into further

technicalities of the subject let me quote D'Herelle himself to mark the paradigmatic shift

in the microbiological sciences that follows the discovery of the Bacteriophages. He

notes:

The difficulties of exposition of the subject will readily be comprehended if we realize that up to the present time Bacteriology has been considered as a "problem of two bodies," bacterium and medium, whether the medium be the organism parasitized or a culture fluid. And this problem of the two bodies has been indeed complex. But it is of necessity much less complicated than the "problem of three bodies" with which we must now be concerned, where we must recognize the interactions between the medium--culture medium or organism parasitized,-the bacterium parasitizing this medium,

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and the ultramicrobial bacteriophage parasitizing the bacterium (D'Herelle 1921: 6).

This is the key expression of the scientific death drive, where one clarification

unravels an unprecedented domain of complexity to be unravelled further. Thus this

paradigmatic shift of the discovery of the phages has to be seen in relation to the

invention of the 'Electron Microscope' by Max Knoll and Ernst Ruska (1931). Just as

the domain of bacteriology prospered with the discovery of the microscope, similarly

the discovery of phages was complicated further using the electron microscopes. One

can use this brief discussion to locate late twentieth century efforts of commercial

scientific agencies like GangaGen which as part of the new paradigm of science are

invested in locating a solution to the bacteria that have become resistant to antibiotics,

using the phage technology. Here one has to be clear that while GangaGen26 uses both

the religious-nationalistic framework of India as a nation that has Ganga as a great

river with a reservoir of bacteriophages and retains the hagiographic description of the

'discovery' of the phages, it is still clear in terms of being within the scientific death

drive as compared to the religious one. Let me then tum to the religious death drive in

this context with respect to Ganga.

Like any other organism, visible or invisible to the naked eyes, Bacteria have also been the

sites of theological traversion of the scientific and vice versa. Stephen J. Gould argues that as

the debates on nuclear winter and apocalyptic catastrophes have become common, so is also

the argument that the Bacteria would survive the religiously imagined catastrophes and the

end of evolution would not be the end of life, just the human beings may die out (Gould

1997). This can only be paralleled by an example from the clinical sensitization in present

world that demands consumers to be suspicious of all that God has created in his "nature".

Thus one must not forget the religious straw fight involved in growing "organic food", in so

far it is considered closer to "nature" than the other crops. The discovery of bacteria in

association with its capacity to be a pathogen led to a credence to scientific endeavors in

creating antibiotics - which in the literal Greek sense means against bios/life itself. In the

annals of scientific understanding of the bacteria, there have been two major paradigmatic

shifts. One is in the context of discerning different strains of Escherichia coli and locating the

strains that do not necessarily harm but are either a help to humanity by decomposing or by

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some symbiotic relationship like that of the gut bacteria which is considered as a commensal

to human beings in digesting food (see Textbook on Biological sciences by Taylor, Green,

Stout and Soper 1997). The second has been in relation to its existence with the self­

perpetuating virus. It is known of the Bacteria that they reproduce after every 20 mins (under

ideal conditions) and the next organism is created by the pre-exiting one's nucleus. Thus,

recalling Obeysekere' s discussion on rebirth, here one could pose Bacterium as an organism

that doesn't have that transient moment of liminality between death and birth. In fact, it

ensures that life replicates itself. It is this principle that is used by the virus, in the form of

what is called as bacteriophages, where the virus, which needs a nuclear base to reproduce

itself, relies on the bacterial reproduction. Were the bacteria, not to reproduce, the virus

would remain latent and search for one that does, but the virus by itself cannot reproduce.

D'Herelle in his exploration of the bacteriophages took various jobs, included in this was

his undertaking that involved quarantining the Muslim pilgrims who came back from Mecca

for the fear that they could be bringing in microbes from Mecca to Europe. In a similar

imagery of chaos and religious fervor he was given the task of preventing the spread of

Cholera in India, mainly amongst those who were exposed to contaminated rivers or wells

(Summers 1999). When in India he inserted the phages as strains that were known to reduce

the number of bacteria that caused cholera into different wells of the villages, reportedly

within the epidemic circle. Subsequently, it is a truism that is oft repeated in defense of the

Ganga's inherently pure water that it manages to kill more bacteria than any other water of a

similar kind. Consider this excerpt from Mark Twain's travelogue Fallowing The Equator

(1897):

A word further concerning the nasty but all purifying Ganges water. When we went to Agra, by and by, we happened there just in time to be in at the birth of a marvel -a memorable scientific discovery- the discovery that in certain ways the foul and derided Ganges water is the most puissant purifier in the world! This curious fact, as I have said, had just been added to the treasury of modem science. It has long been noted as a strange thing that while Benares is often afflicted with the cholera she does not spread it beyond her borders. This could not be accounted but for. Mr. Henkin, the scientist in the employ of the government of Agra, who concluded to examine the water. He went to Benares and made his tests. He got water at the mouths of the sewers where they empty into the river at the bathing ghats; a cubic centimeter of it contained million of germs; at the end of six hours they were all dead. He caught a floating corpse,

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towed it to the shore, and from beside it he dipped up water that was swarming with cholera germs; at the end of six hours they were all dead. He added swarm after swarm of cholera germs to this water; within the six hours they always died, to the last sample. Repeatedly, he took pure well-water which was barren of animal life, and put into it a few cholera germs, they always began to propagate at once, and always within six hours they swarmed - and were numerable by millions upon millions .... . . . . For ages and ages the Hindus have had absolute faith that the water of the Ganges was absolutely pure, could not be defiled by any contact whatsoever, and infallibly made pure and clean whatsoever they touched it. They still believe it, and that is why they bathe in it and drink it, caring nothing for its seeming filthiness and the floating cotpses. The Hindus have been laughed at, these many generations, but the laughter will need to modify itself a little from now on. How did they find out the water's secret in those ancient ages? Had they germ­scientists then? We do not know. We only know that they had a civilization long before we emerged from savagery (Twain 1989 (1897): 499-500).

Here Mark Twain in his ethnographic stance of 'understanding' the 'other' ends up like a

Hindu twice over, but still as the one, who holds on to something 'tangible' rather than the

complex mythopoeia of vulnerability, void and the horrible abject. The point is not to

construe Twain as the naive, beneficent, patronizing nineteenth century American but rather

to emphasize that the most contemporary and well thought out stances of Hindu revivalist's

phantasmic veil of the "intrinsic" property of the river water, are in itself revealed to have

been created by the so called "westerners" themselves.

However, if there are still some justification on the lines of those who argue that nature is

homeostatic and has its own equilibrium, one could move to the next example to reiterate the

point made earlier in the chapter. That nature today does not exist as a self evident category,

any definition of nature has to be interrogated for the mode with which its' representation is

put forward. The adage that nature represents a chaos that has a mystical order has to be seen

through its' obverse that there is no singular hidden order to the chaos but there are patterns

through which chaos itself can be perceived. With this discussion in the background let me

tum to a concrete context of ecological crises management that involves theology and science

in the same mode of differance as outlined here.

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Ganga Action Plan and the Sankat Mochan Foundation

The Ganga Action Plan envisaged in 1984 by Environment Ministry, of the Government of

India and credited to the then Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, is the postcolonial marker of a

paradigmatic shift in the ways in which resources were to be reflexively retrieved or

conserved, which so far were used as a "natural" given?7 The Plan was to operate under the

supervision of Central Ganga Authority [CGA] (February, 1985) which was to observe the

implementation of the schemes through the newly formed Ganga Project Directorate [GPD]

(June, 1985). Later in June 1994, the GPD was extrapolated and rechristened as National

River Conservation Directorate and the CGA similarly is called NRCA- National River

Conservation Authority, after renaming it in September 1995. The politico-bureaucratic

will to institute the procedural mechanism to systematically negate the main cursors of

'pollution' has to be understood by the aims of the project itself. It envisaged, what one

may call as a mode of developmental planning characteristic of postcolonial nations,

'reversing the wrongs' rather than planning to occlude the problems at the first place. It

also politicized through the use of what Michel Foucault calls as 'Bio power' that which

has been called as the ecological "common" (Foucault 1998; Negri 2006) The project

aimed to clean most of the river, its major tributaries and distributaries to make the water

fit for drinking and other basic purposes. It wished to alter the norms of the "pollutant"

and the ways in which they affected people. The introduction of the electric crematoria is

the best example. Also at a latent level, for the first time it sought a network of huge

machineries, technologically driven by the secondary sources of energy like electricity

and processed bio fuel to be integrated into a topography of cultural sites like that of river

fronts - ghats, for instance. If one makes a key distinction between 'Biopower' and

'Biopolitics' as made by Negri (2006) one is certain that any such large scale

'technologies' involved within Ganga Action Plan (GAP) as modes of 'Biopower' would

involve a whole range of 'Biopolitics' -modalities of resistances to GAP. For example

if the GAP introduces electric cremation to regulate the disposal of the Hindu dead, it is

going to be resisted by a whole range of actors, Doms may or may not be the main

protagonists. The same could be said of GAP introducing river police to stop people from

defecating on the banks of the river, washing clothes with detergent, immersing idols,

throwing polythene and discarding cattle carcasses and human corpses. Assa Doron's

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ethnography Caste, Occupation and Politics on the Ganges: Passages of Resistance

(2008) on the boatmen of Benares makes this case illustratively with respect to the

boatmen's community there. He shows that how plying of boats, parking of boats,

permits and registration for motorized boats have all come under immense negative

sanction post Ganga Action Plan, however this has also led the community !o politicize

itself (Doron 2008). Though Doron does not use the theoretical tools of 'biopower' and

'biopolitics', if one were to paraphrase his description then the boatmen in their use of

'biopolitics' could be seen as deploring the modem Indian postcolonial state in so far as it

treats them like the erstwhile colonial state which had branded them as 'criminal types'.

They go on to make a mythopoetic case for themselves as sons of the river

(Gangaputras), the ones who served Lord Rama as the occupants of the religio-aesthetic

task of helping people with the "crossing" of the river (of life) (Doron 2008: 54-55). The

boatmen also cite their participation in the Independence Movement as a testimony of

their 'belonging' to the nation. They evoke the dangerous instances of diving into the

deep of the river to fish out the drowned, climbing down into deep wells to retrieve

official files that are thrown by some miscreants and thus make a case for themselves to

be chosen as "water police" on the basis of their caste related abilities (Doron 2008). In

this resistance to the 'Biopower' of the state there are occasions when the boatmen

participate in excesses like for example preying on the turtles that were released as part of

the Ganga Action Plan to feed on the corpses thrown or immersed in the river (2008: 62-

63). Not to mention, the state's excesses that may involve imprisoning the boatmen over

minor offences or annulling their registration and also a blanket ban on fishing or plying

the motorized boats in an official change of guard (2008: 62-63).

The same accounts can be developed for the washermen, and other resident occupants

of the ghats like the Brahmin priests who officiate rituals or the barber community that

seasonally participates in mass shorning and so on (Ahmed 1990). I discuss the case of

the doms in the same context a little later in the chapter but before that two points need

mention. One is that 'biopower', as technologies of governance, utilized by the state, is

bio-politicized and consequently the question of 'life and death' remains embedded in

this politicized domain. One can further argue that the resistance offered to the

technologies are reflexively integrated by the State in the ways in which it responds to

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political challenges. In that sense, if one were to develop the genealogy of Ganga Action

Plan from its inception to the current review one would find how biopolitics is not

'beyond the pale' of 'biopower'. As Doron shows for the Boatmen, the mallah, similarly

it can be shown for the Doms that there are no exclusive fields of biopower and

biopolitics, the communities arc involved in a reflexive bargain with the state. Although

the onus of resisting, and the latent and manifest results of those resistances are to be

borne mainly by the political actors, yet it is not that the State is completely oblivious of

these shifts. The second point is with respect to the modalities of 'biopolitics' itself. In

response to Ganga Action Plan, communities ofDoms, Dhobis, Mallah, Nai have come to

organize themselves as affected sections, along caste lines, defined through a

mythopoesis. However what cuts across these communities is that the male actors, who

cite themselves as occupants, also become the main players in the politicized field. The

women and the children remain as dependents, who are used through the categories of

families of the men in political rhetoric and discourses (see Ahmed 2008). The

ideological result of this universal exclusivity is that the families or the women and

children as units have come to be represented by NGO's or the State reins them in its'

technologies of 'Biopower' through schemes on housing, family planning, employment

and education. For example while 'occupation' is the central concern of biopolitics that

involves men of various communities at the ghat, drinking water, education of children,

quality of housing and other such idioms are not the privileged sites of struggle. Thus, for

instance, housing is not a "spectral" concern politically as it is in the urban context, like

that of Delhi or Mumbai (Verma 2002; Chatterji 2005). This could be the reason why, the

JNNURM28 (Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission) listing residential

domains of Manikarnika and Harishchandra as slums is not politicized, while the

JNNURM's proposed modes of disposing animal carcasses is politicized (See JNNURM

Varanasi appendix 1: 228-229). This is of crucial concern, as I show a little later in the

chapter that it is not only housing that is in contention here rather with the coming of an

overarching mission like that of JNNURM the 'land holding' and 'ownership' itself are

undergoing a shift. However, this aspect is not captured in the politics of the doms as yet.

In this critical analyses then, one must consider this universal subtext as the register at

which one has to nuance a response to the modes and methods of Biopower and

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Biopolitics. Here, one may also pause to observe the fact that the women appear

tangentially in the exchange of biopower and biopolitics, is a bureaucratic corroboration

of the Hindu idiom of the feminine being treated as the "cosmic sink". This is the

significance of locating theological imperatives involved in something as distant as the

politics of everyday negotiation with the state. In this complex, we find women and

dependent children to be last in the league of political actors, a site where the fallouts of

biopower and biopolitics are felt most strongly. The same claim cannot be made for any

particular caste community in singular totality, for the simple reason that when it comes

to biopolitics, the caste communities are neither homogenously marginal nor are outside

the framework of state's initiatives which invariably implicates them in a politicized

sphere.

In that direction, one needs to create a distinction first between the objects and the

subjects in relation to the politicization of the 'commons'. Slavoj Zizek has the following

to say:

The subject's activity is, at its most fundamental, the activity of submitting oneself to the inevitable, the fundamental mode of the object's passivity, of its passive presence, is that which moves, annoys disturbs, traumatizes us (subjects): at its most radical the object is that which objects, that which disturbs the smooth running of things. Thus the paradox is that the roles are reversed (in terms ofthe standard notion of the active subjects working on the passive object): the subject is defined by a fundamental passivity, it is the object from which movement comes - which does the tickling (Zizek 2006: 17).

Rajiv Gandhi's Speech

The key to illustrate this point has to be through an attempt to understand the speech of

Rajiv Gandhi that he delivered at Dasaswamedh Ghat on 14th of June 1986 (see

appendix). Clearly the speech itself has to be seen as a rhetorical use of language, but in a

strict concrete context of the time in which it was delivered and as the project was

launched, it lays down the symbolic logic, in my perspective, of the frame of signification

of - what is a 'pollutant', who are the 'pollutants' and how 'machines' are to be

integrated into the given symbolic order that in itself is intricately linked with the

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religious imaginary. So to understand the speech, the rhetorical element has to be

classified on two registers, what Lacan calls as the Code and the Language. Dylan Evans

posits that according to Lacan, language is radically ambiguous to the extent that in

language "there is no stable one-to-one correspondence between sign and referent, nor

between signified and signifier. It is this property of language which gives rise to the

inherent ambiguity of all discourse" (Evans 1996: 125). While the Code, for him remains

a kind of indexical, one-to-one referent, later works of Lacan would dissolve this

opposition to a continuous tension. Thus rhetoric could be understood as having a tension

between what Lacan calls as Language and Code. In that case, given that speeches should

be seen as a compressed set of significations that exceed the immediacy of the concrete

context, one should be able to identify two features of the speech, one that is tacitly

meant as a code and the other as language, while they are received in their tense

togetherness. This could be more clearly expressed through the Lacanian version of the

idea of 'transference'. Lacan borrows from Marcel Mauss and Claude Levi-Strauss's

theories of gift exchange to argue that transference is based on the "compulsion" to

repeat, just as exchange as an anthropological category is bound within the logic of

'return' that constitutes the symbolic of different social spheres, be it marriage, kinship,

economy and so on so forth. Lacan says:

In its essence, the efficacious transference which we're considering is quite simply the speech act. Each time a man speaks to another in an authentic and full manner, there is, in the true sense, transference, symbolic transference-something which takes place which changes the nature of the two beings present (Cited in Evans 1996: 214).

So, the hypothesis could be that the political acts, for instance, the rhetorical stances of

Rajiv Gandhi's speech happen within a realm of affectivity that could be separated from

simple norms of political ploys directed to a particular community and could be instead

seen as transferences in the Lacanian sense. Thus, Rajiv Gandhi's speech at the ghat of

Ganga should be seen in the backdrop of the religious violence involving Hindus and

Sikhs that had acquired political legitimacy in his reign after the assassination of Indira

Gandhi by her Sikh guards.

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Rajiv Gandhi in his speech poses Ganga as a metaphor for the purity and unity of the

diverse cultures that inhabit its banks and makes this linkage as metonymic to the Indian

civilization. What is very curious in the rhetorical use of language to connote the

polysemic character of Ganga with respect to her being witness to India's' "victories and

defeats" is the fact that the most common metaphor of "mother" is not used in the speech

(Gandhi 1989: 162). That omission becomes a clue to read the speech as a reference to

that hidden category. Ganga becomes the most used metaphor to allude to the unitary

feature of the Indian nation, the reign of supposed Sarvadharma Sambhav principle and

Benares as the land of Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist and Christian theocratic centre

associated with one great saint or the other (Gandhi 1989: 161-165). It is in fact

surprising that in a speech that is supposed to introduce the technical need for Ganga

Action Plan, only few sentences are invested on emphasizing the need of the plan, rest of

the speech is about seeking an unison that restores the nation from its bruised "spiritual"

self. In other words, what Gandhi is seeking here is a phantasmatic return to the Hindu

idea of feminine that functions as the "cosmic sink", the well functioning of which

ensures that all other traumas are directed therewith. Consider this paragraph from his

speech:

The Ganga binds us together. It imbues a unity amongst our people. It makes us one civilization, one nation. The Ganga is a symbol of our tradition of tolerance, of synthesis, of poise, it is a challenge to the dark forces that undermine our unity and integrity that try to subvert our ethical and traditional values. These forces of violence and separatism, casteism, of petty self-seeking loyalties, parochialisms, and linguistic and other fanaticism are the forces which threaten to tear India apart. Today, we should pledge, from here on the banks of the Ganga, to fight and uphold the unity and integrity of India, not to be cowed down by terrorism, to preserve our traditional values, our civilization (Gandhi 1989: 162).

Clearly, the weight of all of these requirements on the veritable return to a purer

Ganga does not make sense unless one substitutes Ganga as a metaphor different from the

river itself. In this differance between the physical river and the theo-cultural name-of­

the-mother, what is crucial is the burden put on the metaphoric import of the name. This

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symbolic import is to convey nothing less than maternal glory of plenitude and cosmic

disposal of 'national' sorrows.29

Thus as the founding gestures of a project like GAP suggests, one can unequivocally

assert that the implementation of the project would be inevitably tied in an interface

between the scientific and the theological. I would argue that while there is an ideological

interpellation between the two the manifest interface is structurally avoided by not having

a direct contextualization of religio-cultural practises with respect to the technological

interventions. In a project of this kind, if viewed through the brief history of its function,

one finds that both religion and technology exist in mutual exclusion. The best example

to illustrate this would be the Ganga Aartis (a kind of public prayer) that have been

instituted on a few ghats which receive the maximum number of visitors. The said aarti

involves recitations for the river invoking hymns, as well as sloganeering, in order to

emphasize the immortality of the mother river and the motherland. Just as GAP's

machinery- sewage treatment plants, electric crematoria, public toilets - is out of sync

with how things are done locally, similarly the Ganga aartis, make it appear as if

something like GAP cannot be even envisaged, it is the recitation of vedic hymns that

may bring back the river to purity. The functioning of Science, State and religious

observances comes together in a fit that sustains the perpetuation of the things as they are

without any radical rupture to the sensibilities of the pollutants.

While the dead end of religious imagination is apparent in practitioners' refusal to see

the death of the river in a theological context, the same fate reached by the technological

interventions is summed up by the Comptrollers and the Auditor's report in 2000. It

tersely notes that the project has failed to achieve the targets set 15 years ago to bring the

pollution level to bathing limits. It goes on to " conclude and recommend" the following:

There were shortfalls in allocation of resources. Of the total domestic sewage of 5044 mld, in 110 towns selected for pollution abatement along the banks of river Ganga and its tributaries, the GAP addressed itself to process only 2794 mld. The reported achievement of the participating States was 1095.69 mld, i.e. only 39 per cent of truncated target. The assets created in the Scheme suffered impairment and closure because of technical design flaws, inter se mismatch of the schemes and their components, problems in land acquisition, contract mismanagement, lack of adequate maintenance, and in general because of lackadaisical attitude of the States and their implementing

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agencies. Technologies adopted by the NRCD for construction of STPs were often questionable inasmuch as they could not adequately address the problem of reducing bacterial load in the river to the desired level. The NRCD has abandoned the crucial activity of monitoring the water quality on river Ganga since September 1999, reportedly for want of funds, and deprived itself of a key instrument of overall performance monitoring of the GAP. The NRCD could not show to Audit any satisfactory recorded evidence that it discharged its coordinating and monitoring functions properly vis-a-vis the participating States and the implementing agencies. The Ministry of Environment and Forests needs to seriously review the implementation of the entire GAP; evolve a financing arrangement whereby the States and the implementing agencies develop a more involved stake in creation of assets, their maintenance, and their functionality at all times; revive and strengthen technical and administrative monitoring to ensure the value for money of assets created at great public expense; and, not the least, facilitate competent technological support for optimum utilisation of resources (CAG report 2000).

This by itself creates an impression of an administrative and efficiency problematic

that mars the implementation of the project. To locate the stalemate at this register is to

stop at the first level of transference between the rhetoric and the reception. Another

idiom, to which one must turn here, is the link between theology and the realm of

participation. A link exemplified through Sankat Mochan Foundation and it's most

prominent face Mahant Veer Bhadra Mishra. It is here that the combination of science

and theology on one hand and high plans and people's participation on the other come

glued together, offering us a chance to examine the complex of the social context of

Benares with the second level of transference.

The Swatchha Ganga Abhiyan (Clean Ganga Campaign)

Veer Bhadra Mishra, a former hydraulics engineer at BHU, who is also the mahant of the

Sankat Mochan temple has instituted the Sankat Mochan foundation in order to not only

mobilize people but also to offer concrete solutions from his own field of hydraulics. He

considers himself to be a crusader of faith and bathes in the river. He wishes to clean the river

as a response to the moral calling of the mother river Ganga (Maa Ganga) rather than to

herald a modular plan of cleaning rivers. As Alley D. Kelly notes the Swatchha Ganga

Abhiyan (campaign) was the initiative of three engineers from Banaras Hindu University

(BHU) specializing in hydraulics, chemicals and industrial pollution, starting in 1982. Veer

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Bhadra Mishra, the Brahmin hydraulic engineer - claiming descent from the sage-writer­

poet Tulsidas- being the Mahant (chief priest) of Sankat Mochan Temple was considered

the "inspirational centre" of the group (Kelly 1994: 135). Gradually the Swatchha Ganga

Abhiyan (Clean Ganga Campaign) has become synonymous with Mahantiji and his

foundation stands in contrast with the State initiated GAP, which has no public face, as it

were. The actors are lost in the crowd, coming from institutions ranging from the municipal

board (Nagar Nigam), electricity board (Vidyut Vibhag), the water corporation (Jal Nigam)

and the political representatives of the elected Government at the centre and the state ofUttar

Pradesh along with the opposition.

Before locating Mahaniji's place in the scheme of things, there is a point in elucidating the

meaning of the term Sankat Machan. Octavio Paz while trying to relate to the Hanuman he is

visiting installed in Galta, says of an impossible task:

We ought to make our way back upstream against the current, retrace our path, and proceeding from one figurative expression to another, arrive back at the root, the original, primordial word for which all others are metaphors (Paz 1974: 20).

Sankat mochan literally means- the one who takes away the crises. Its metaphoric origin

comes from Hanuman's intervention at the battlefield of Lanka, when Ram's brother,

Lakshman is unconscious because he is fatally hit by Ravana' s brother Meghnath and needs a

specific herb's essence to be revived. The setting of the battlefield is a moment of defeat of

the mightiest Gods, and even the invincible Rama is paralyzed by the emotive stupor at

seeing his brother's proximity to death (see Rajagopalachari: 1962 (for the Valmiki's

version); Atkins: 1956 (for the Tulsidas's version)). In such circumstances, Hanuman is

objectively astute to perform the required action in time. He crosses seas and literally moves

a mountain that has the herb (Sanjivini buti) amongst various other similar herbs and gets it at

the site of battle for the discerning eye of the healer. The key here is not to merely think of

Hanuman as the personification of the Olympian and Apollonian, one must press for a more

nuanced reading of his role and his subject. In fact the dictionary source quoted in Paz's

introduction is worth quoting here for the simple reason that it takes away the dichotomy of

the learned and the soldier, arguing for Hanuman that he epitomized both. Paz quotes John

Dowson to say "Hanuman was a grammarian and the Ramayana says: "The chief of

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monkeys is perfect; no one equals him in sastras, in learning, and in ascertaining the sense of

scriptures (or in moving at will). It is well known that Hanuman was the ninth author of

Grammar"" (cited in Paz 1991: i). Paz uses this grammarian virtue ofHanuman, the monkey

god as a theological contrast to the scientific debate on evolution which pitches the monkey

ancestor as the least cerebral. As shown above, the metaphoric origin of the phrase- Sankat

Machan - is also attached to what is unmistakably an ecological act of violence that

involves "carrying away of the Himalayas" and "seizing" of the "clouds" for a herb (Paz

1974: 1). These etymological traces rather complicate the way in which both Sankat Mochan

Foundation and the Mahant Veer Bhadra Mishra could be understood. It is true that the

"monkey grammarian" exhibits an "overman" spirit of individual vitality of acting in the time

of crises that gets reflected in any charismatic initiative as in the case of Mahanlji as well. It is

also apparent that the conflict between a "solution" and the "grammar of things" is never

easily forthcoming. By diverging a little, one could bring to notice here that both the monkey

grammarian and the Ramayana are woven into another grammar and that is of theology and

caste. Consider Paz in his account of Hanuman's sacrifice for the "low" caste Valmiki, the

sage who vvTote the Ramayana:

Hanuman wrote on the rocky cliffs of a mountain the Mahanataka, based on the same subject as the Ramayana; on reading it, Valrniki feared that it would overshadow his poem and begged Hanuman to keep his drama a secret. The Monkey yielded to the poet's entreaty, uprooted the mountain, and threw the rocks into the sea. Valrniki' s pen and ink on the paper are a metaphor of the bolt of lightening and the rain with which Hanuman wrote his drama on the rocky mountainside. Human writing reflects that of the universe, it is its translation, but also its metaphor: it says something totally different and it says the same thing (Paz 1974: 156).

Thus this sacrifice notwithstanding the impossibility of a 'solution' with the order of

things cannot be better illustrated than by showing that that the grammarian monkey God is

also extremely callous in the time of crises, for his knowledge he could do no better than

uprooting the Himalayas for a herb required for god's brother. In other words the grammar of

a 'solution' to any crisis involves a "groundless" act of faith. In case ofMahanlji, if this were

to be translated, it would be his bathing in the same river that he wishes to argue is extremely

polluted and is detrimental to health. How should one make sense of these two ironical

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stances at the same level? The answer, as I have noted above can only come by defining acts

of religion as to be based on "groundless" domain of faith, that which in the last effect cannot

be substantiated with a "chain of reason" (Zizek 2006: 117). The holy dip in the river that

MahanW took every morning citing his belief in the religious feature of the river becomes a

testimony of his shared being with the regular bathers at different ghats of the river.

However, it is also this register when probed further that opens up the travails of religious

observances. It is an empirical fact that was corroborated in various interviews with the

pandas (priests at the ghats) that most pilgrims from nearby Benares who come for the

seasonal festivities and holy dips are people of non "upper" caste origin.30 This is co­

incidentally a sociological trend that is marked by the non-mixing up of the "upper'' castes

and the "lower'' castes at the ghats for the dip in the river. The Pandas suggested that few

regular bathers from "upper'' castes' come to take their daily dips. Most go back and take

baths and families in general come for the Ganga Aarti in the evening. This sociological trend

was also communicated to me by the Mahan~i in an interview in June 2009. In response to a

question on the constituent pollutants of the river, the Mahant replied that on one hand at the

ghat there are "practitioners" of the Hindu religion who know the importance of a dip and

they come after doing their morning ablutions at home and do not use soap while bathing in

the river. On the other hand there are "occupants" who make money on the banks and they do

not have any interest in keeping the river pure as they are the ones who dirty it by doing their

ablutions there through out the day. Mahan~i further said that while he took daily dips in the

river for most part of his life, he has stopped doing it now and in extending the causes for the

same, he admits ill-health and also concedes that the river is very dirty. One can argue from

this sketch that while Mahanlji's charismatic involvement in cleaning the Ganga was partly

based on his ability to attempt reconciliation between science and religion at different

registers, it seems that in actual practice the shared motif of faith could not encircle those who

deviated from the ideal that Mahan~i sets for the followers. It may or may not be a co­

incidence that Mahantji identifies with the "upper" caste members of the religion whom he

considers as "true practitioners" while the sociological reality is that this is the section of

society that has access to toilets, while the "occupants" of the ghats do not. A whole range of

researchers have critiqued the "upper" caste habitus of the Mahant because ofhis supposedly

elite initiatives of organizing cultural programs with classical music, not being sensitive to the

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occupations of those who survive on the river economy and so on (Ahmed 1990; Kelly 1994

; Doron 2008). I wish to contextualize my argument by pitching my observations through the

Doms of Harishchandra Ghat, whom I consider as the chroniclers of both Ganga Action Plan

and Swatchha Ganga Abhiyan (Clean Ganga Campaign).

The Doms ' as Witnesses and Chroniclers

The Doms' reiterate their own socio-political legitimacy as the keepers of the Ghat and

the river by narrating the Harishchandra' s myth that how Kalu Ram, the Dom, even

during that 'time' (satayug- the era of truthfulness) was clear about his duty to the dead

and labour involving disposal of the dead.31 Since most of the Doms use their proper

names with the surname of Chaudharies, I will use this from here on. The Chaudharies

(Doms) at the Harishchandra Ghat do not speak highly about the mahant and see him as

an indulgent crusader. They argue with some conviction that before the electric

crematorium was constructed and Ganga Action Plan was already announced32, the

Nagar nigam (Municipal Corporation) was more proactive. It had kept huge boxes at the

ghat, close to the river bank, where all the floating corpses were collected and the Daroga

saheb (Inspector) was called in to do panchnama (FIR) of the collection and then the

doms were asked to cremate the carcasses. This was thought to be respectful to the

departed, as well as to the river and the doms were getting their due labour charges. As

the electric crematorium was constructed and was ready to work, initially it was decided

that nagar nigam would ensure that all the floating carcasses, including maddh (animal

carcasses) would get electrically cremated. This perhaps was the case to start with, then

as the critique of governmental inefficiency became shrill Sankat Machan Foundation

stepped efficiently to carry out the duties of Nagar Nigam. It hired local dom boys to

comb the river (close to the ghat(s)) for carcasses and either sink them in the greater

depth of the river or to pull them on the other side of the river (us paar). This continued

for a while, but then the monetary promise broke down. Earlier the boys were promised

Rs 2400 for a month's work but gradually as more than required dom youth joined the

work they reduced the pay and the payment itself became more erratic. One informant

pointed out that this happened because the mahant saheb would never dirty his hand into

these petty things of hiring doms and disbursing money, so this work was given to

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middlemen, who represented neither mahantji's cause nor the labourers'. Gradually the

practise of combing the river for carcasses was stopped by Sankat Machan and the Doms

claim that Mahantji has ever since only become richer and rarely visible. Though this

claim ofDoms' being resentful about the prosperity ofMahantji may appear out of place,

it certainly is not. Given that Mahantji is the priest head of the Sankat Mochan Temple,

the doms pejoratively claim that he receives a 'bounty' (chadahwe ka maal) as offerings

by the believers at the temple. However, to my mind even this may not be the main

structural contrast between Mahantji and the Doms. Mahantji in his propriety not only

heads the Sankat Mochan Temple but also the Tulsi Ghat by claiming descent from the

sage Tulsidas. Thus what we have in effect is that the space of a ghat in which the entire

dom community lives at Harishchandra Ghat is inhabited alone by Mahantji's family all

by itself, including the lab of SMF and the youth hostel. It is this kind of discrepancy that

a mission like JNNURM may just end up legitimizing in terms of land use and that may

be the real contention that may get politicized sooner or later.

The Nagar Nigam in the meantime modified the use of the electric crematorium,

which was earlier being used only for the disposal of animal carcasses and anonymous

corpses. To start with they put a nominal charge for "poor" people to cremate their dead.

Of course the moment the crematorium was being used to cremate the dead brought by

the shavyatris, it could no longer be used to cremate the lawaris shav (unclaimed or

vagrant corpses) and the maddh (animal carcass). The current situation is that the nominal

fee of the crematorium has increased to Rs. 500, which according to the Doms was

increased to buffer the traffic at the crematorium. Earlier when the fees (shulk) was either

not there (nee shulk) or was nominal, there used to be a huge queue of the dead to be

cremated. The crematorium has only one functional furnace out of the two constructed

and that also has limited support of the generator back up. They also pointed out that

there is boat of nagar nigam that goes out looking for the floating carcass (utraya hua

murda) but it no longer brings them to bum. It follows the Sankat Machan method of

sinking them in the deep or pulling them on to the other side of the river (us paar). Sankat

Mochan foundation itself has an international hostel where young people from different

parts of the world come and take up volunteer work.

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Since Veer Bhadra Mishra's interviews and opmwns are available in the public

domain and are well represented in the electronic as well as newsprint media, I resisted

going to him before I repeatedly heard the doms' and the regulars at the ghats about the

SMF. On his part the Mahant who is very articulate and charismatic, was always

available for a meeting and would meet warmly with everyone, even when the family

members would drop in once in a while to remind him to take rest. His office-residence at

' the Sankat Mochan ghat would always have some people listening to him in a religious

affirmation. With all this bonhomie, for me to have a set of questions that brought an

element of antagonism in the setting, I felt some discomfort and heard snide remarks

from him, but it also appeared that the questions were in place. In June 2009, early

afternoon, I met him just as he had finished giving a maths' problem to his grandson,

simultaneously he was talking to three elderly Brahmins - two of whom seemed retired

bureaucrats, were speaking in English and the third appeared to have an agrarian

background.

Mahantji had already been told about me through a common acquaintance, so when I

broached that I have been meeting with Doms, for a while it turned into a monologue

from him, which communicated to me unequivocally that the doms should not be trusted.

I asked him, if it was true that after the Nagar Nigam stopped or stalled fishing for

floating corpses and cremating them, SMF took over?

He answered, "Yes. We did, we hired boats and appointed doms to fish the bodies,

though we limited ourselves to either sinking the bodies in the middle of the river or

taking to the other side and dumping them."

I probed further, saying, it seems like a reasonably good thing to do, why did it stop?

To which he answered that, "There was some fight over payment, all the doms wanted

was to make money and not do anything."

I interjected that from my own record that does not seem to be true, to which he simply

said in a conclusive way that, "we didn't have money, we stopped doing it."

Later, when I interweaved this 'information' into conversations with the Doms, they

spelled out things further. First, they argued that they 'should' be the 'obvious' choice to

do such a thing, but even their work ethos doesn't demand that they 'touch' rotting

corpses floating over the river. In so far they actually did it, it was a 'work of love for the

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river'. So, there was an integrated 'voluntarism' involved here. After that they said, "If

we were not even going to be paid for what we did, there is no question of following it

up."

Veer Bhadra Mishra also reminded me that the 'problem' of the pollution is

essentially a question of handling sewage and industrial discharges and he is motivated

towards finding a solution for that. He said, first of all you have to think in terms of who

uses the river for money and who observes her as a mother. The latter, he argues are

"religious practitioners", "people who have been traditionally bathing, civilized to

understand the ethos of bathing, they brush and defecate at home and come here. They do

not use soap to wash themselves and do not spit in the river". While the second category,

clearly is that of those who use the river to defecate on her banks, bathe with soap, wash

clothes and so on. He also pointed out that for these people, the Sulabh Sauchalya started

at the Harishchandra Ghat, but no one uses it.

Again, when I confirmed this with the Doms at the ghat, they told me, it is 'priced'

and second has a restricted usage. Even the officials at the electric crematoria rued that

they do not have access to a toilet in the complex. However, this is not the key to

understand the modes and meanings of open defecation. Using Nita Kumar' (1988)

description of the 'Bahri alang', I have already shown that how the river's banks are to be

considered in terms of 'maidan' (field) for 'ghumna-phirna' (to have fun (mmif-masti)

and to do the ablutions). Coming back to Veer Bhadra Mishra's account, he further

pointed out that the 'cow' is a pet animal for Hindus and its' disposal in the river should

be respected. In any case, according to him, the Government had failed to operationalize

the Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission (JNURM) which has these provisions. It is

in this respect that JNNURM seems to be doing what GAP did by introducing the electric

cremation. That is, supposedly the disposal of the dead can be taken care of by the

machines. We saw that in case of the electric cremation this is certainly not the case,

disposal of the dead is reliably executed by the doms', in their absence (strike?) even for

a day, the crematorium is unequipped to handle the number of bodies that come for

cremation on a given day. Veer Bhadra Mishra must know this, and when he discounts

this information and purports as if the machination introduced by JNNURM would

execute the disposal of the animal carcasses, he is arguing against the concrete reality of

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the place. However, in his citation of this neat grid of the river for the "religious

practitioners" and the work of disposal for the machines, the caste communities at the

banks do not even figure in his imaginary.

Thus, in conclusion of this discursive construction of the Doms and the SMF, what

car.not be missed is how caste relations define the depth of the 'reflexive' possibilities of

any political event or non-event for that matter in case of Benares. As the river's

patronization becomes more and more contested, the 'abject' would have to be handled

by someone and it appears that in every discourse of 'control' of pollution with respect to

Ganga, the ones who would deal with the abject are reiterated and retained in the caste

'Symbolic'. With the SMF kind of shift to a non-electric viabilities, there is an

unambiguous 'return' to the 'same thing' that what is visibly polluting or has to be

removed would be done by the ones who have handled the 'abject' 'traditionally'. It is

this kind of contextual fragmentation of the local communitarian beliefs and convictions

that has given rise to numerous organizations ranging from one sponsored by RSS to

another led by a group of sadhus to 'save Ganga', with political issues ranging from

asking people to stop tanneries' disposal at the ghats to stopping open defecation at the

ghats.

At this level, perhaps one can provide a theoretical context to the relations between

GAP, SMF and the subaltern caste occupants who inhabit the banks. One of the critiques

of GAP in the CAG report is that it failed to mobilize people at the local levels. If for a

while, one pitches SMF as a representative of the local level, one gets a picture of how

complicated the terrains of religion, culture and science could be. However, this also

perhaps provides a clue to the combination of GAP and SMF. If GAP would have had a

proactive role of participatory ecology, it would not have been very different from the

reliance on the 'traditional' specialization of certain caste communities. In fact as I have

shown above the task of fishing corpses and disposing them was initiated by the

Municipal corporation (Nagar Nigam). Thus, one could ask, if the common critique of

SMF that it is "upper" caste and its' workings operate against the interests of the

traditional occupants at the ghat could be nuanced a bit further. I am of the view that

SMF represents a part of GAP itself. In fact the structural faultline in GAP is not so much

of its implementation and financial irregularities, what fails GAP most is its characteristic

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reliance on the traditional occupants to do things that the machine could not do directly.

In other words, at a paradigmatic level Indian modernity in its heterogeneity could be

located at the common register of relying on the "traditional" occupations on the basis of

caste, at least for the caste communities associated with 'handling' the "abject".

Remember, not that these caste communities may be resisting this position unequivocally,

the doms as they told me, were in fact seeking the 'rightful' employment in the operation

of the electric crematoria. Assa Do ron (2008) shows that the Mallah wish to be part of the

"water police" as a matter of right and so on. Thus, the critique of SMF on the lines that it

fails the subaltern caste communities is just a pointer to the collective failure of GAP and

SMF. The point is that either of these institutions could have been successes by

reiterating and reinstating the so called "traditional" occupants and their occupations at

the ghats. So, theoretically how should one locate this juncture? The answer can be

routed through the image of the 'morgue' that I described in the previous chapter with

respect to the death in the hospital. I argued that the 'body' in the morgue represents a

moment of "materialist theology" in being briefly suspended in an indifference by both

"religion and science", a moment when 'ethics' can be rethought with respect to the

traumatic figure of the dead. In case of Ganga, if one were to reinterpret Panikkar' s

definition of the cosmotheandric experience, one could argue that Ganga's death has to

be foregrounded in a discussion on her pollution at all three levels of the cosmic (by

revising the notion of feminine), the theandric (by realizing the impossibility of Pravah)

and that of man (the visibly polluted river).

Clearly this is not the theological principle in which SMF is entrenched.

Contemporaneously SMF is making a case for 'biological control' which is what the

biologist Stephen J. Gould thinks is a 'pandora's box'. He cites the legend while ruing his

own loss of the 'snails' that he worked on as part of his PhD thesis, exterminated by

another snail introduced as biological control. He says:

Think of the Pandora's box. Think of the old woman who swallowed a fly in the folk song. She then swallowed a spider to catch the fly, a bird to catch the spider, a cat to catch the bird ... and up the size range of the animal kingdom. Each successive verse gets longer as singers run through the full range of ingestations, but the last was stunningly brief: "There was an old lady who swallowed a horse. She died, of course" (Gould 1994: 35).

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Notwithstanding this bleak depiction, let me point out a counter narrative of possibility

signified by the object symbol of polythene.

In order to create that connecting link between the next section and this, one may

create a picture of the abstract 'Real' of the river water. One of the ways that GAP wished to

measure the cleanliness of the river water is by bringing down the bacterial load to "Not

more than 10000 per 100 ml" which Sankat Mochan Foundation claims is running at

6000 times than the stipulated count in Benares. Veer Bhadra Mishra, in an interview to

TIME magazine, after receiving their 'heroes of the planet' award, said "When I talk to

officials, I show them reports on fecal coliform, and when I talk to local people, I show

them there is shit in the holy Ganges" (August 16, 1999). Rightly then, it should be these

bacteria, which stand as the sublime metaphor for shit that should be historicized through

a discussion of scientific analyses. But in light of the earlier discussion in the chapter, the

'return' of the bacteria as part of the biological control project heralded by SMF has to be

brought face-to-face with the non-biodegradability of the polythene.

Let me contemporanize further the initiatives of Swatchha Ganga Abhiyan (Clean Ganga

Campaign) first so that the context of the case of 'biological control' becomes embedded in

the initiatives of the control of environmental pollution. In this regard, Veer Bhadra Mishra's

proposal of 'Advanced Integrated Wastewater Oxidation Pond System' (AIWOPS) that

involves fermenting the water for over a month in a three-tier system with bacteria and

algae instead of relying on electricity to "treat" the sewage finds itself locking horns with

GAP. But before one locates GAP's antagonism to SMF, let me theoretically locate the

AIWOPS. It is clear that this system marks a "return" of the Bacteria, in so far it could be

'symbiotic' and help 'decompose' the sewage. However, this is a case of abandoning the

emergency of 'moving mountains' to resort to locate that specific 'herb' which may help

the wounded. The pond, which does not rely on any electrical 'supplication', is a

'symptom' of the democratic obfuscation of basic amenities. Ganga Action Plan's failure

was a metonymic critique of the post liberalized Indian government's sheer inability to

provide electricity, drinking water, toilet and waste disposal facilities to the most

populous residential domains. The pond is a postmodern metonymy of celebrating failure

with misplaced optimism. Where does this optimism stem from, that the pond which is

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based on the 'Biological control' method would be more efficient than the "rotting"

machineries and the "absent" Home guards within GAP? It is here that the scientific

death drive with regard to the Bacteria has to be brought again into the discussion. As

already stated, first of all the bacteria cannot be seen in isolation, it has to be seen with

the changing contexts of its own hosts and habitations, which means neither its toxicity

nor it reproducibility can be easily constructed. The point is simply this that the way

bio~ical sciences have clung to the specificity of the mutating bacterial growth is in fact

theologically very different from a simple 'return' to the days in which the Ganga's water

perhaps had a self sufficient cleanliness mechanism. It is not a surprise that this simple

'return' as a perspective has latent features embedded in it - like that of rendering

insignificance to mechanical and electrical interventions - of a non-universal model

(SMF says that they are just concerned about Ganga in Benares, rest of the river's

pollution is Government's responsibility) and so on. However, an 'objection' to the entire

Imaginary of SMF comes from a characteristic 'object' of the same modernity that

brought in the machines and electric cremation and that is the polythene.

Polythene and the Non-Biodegradability Principle

Starting from an accidental chemical reaction, the waxy product of which was seen to have

many carbon-hydrogen links, Hans Von Pechmann, the German chemist in 1898 gave way to

a series of similar accidental findings, which finally in 1939 was substantiated with method

and theory by Michael Penin. It took few decades after that to commercially launch it as a

product and make it available to people for their everyday usage. The subsequent innovations

that hinged on discovering better catalysts to improvise the cost of manufacturing and

tensility of the material continue post 1950s and have reached sophisticated levels today, to

the extent that, polythene as a product itself may not disappear, only improvised versions

may appear time and again. As an object it could be seen to offer both an objection to the

social world within which it exists and in certain contexts is in turn objected by the people in

whose relation it exists. The latter with regard to polythene is all too apparent. That most

school projects start their consciousness raising programs on 'save our environment' by

'saying NO to Polythene' only means that it is a common sociological stance. Thus, I am

going to look at the former aspect of polythene and show how it offers us a rare glimpse

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through imputing objections to the social world in which it exists. The most obvious instance

of polythene is that unlike many other objects that are used with discretion, it can be used

with reflexivity matched by very few objects. Of course, the shopping bags that mention

'keep this out of reach of children. Polythene is a not a toy' only emphasize the seriousness of

its character, which is that while polythene itself may never die, it could kill others, directly

or indirectly, particularly the next generation(s). Thus the two central features that polythene

represents are reflexivity of use and immortality.

The reflexivity of use can be attested by the ethnographic examples from the field in the

ways in which polythene inhabits peoples' everyday activities. Its used to get milk that is

offered for suryanamashkar, to get flowers for offeting, to carry gangajal, Prasad (grace),

rakh (ashes), to carry crow feed to the ghat, to get breakfast, to carry tea from the shop, to

carry meat, vegetables, books, fruit juice, clothes, medicines to have it ready as a vessel to

puke in the hospital, or carry abject wastes and so on.

Here it would be useful to examine in greater detail how polythene replaced a set of

cultural norms of carrying certain objects. The two common ethnographic categories that I

came across were that of Aanchal (anchara in Bhojpuri) and Gamchha (angauccha in

Bhojpuri). I was told that the women folk, particularly the married ones carried flowers in

their aanchal and that was offered to the river. The aanchal was also an extension of the

benign notion of a mother or even a woman and even when it didn't carry anything, it could

be used to relay an ashirwad (blessing) to the young and the incumbents. Also, I was told, on

every ritual occasion of oinchan, there was the norm of one woman taking money or grains

out of her aanchal and circumambulating the head of the ritual-initiate, gifting to the aanchal

or the gamchha of another person, who could also be the ritual specialist. The gamchha on

the other hand, is used for more secular pmposes including getting vegetables from the

market or the field, taking lunch and similar various other daily usages. Unlike the aanchal

which stands as an objectified metonym of motherhood and affectivity, the gamchha worn

over men's shoulders serves as the one piece of cloth to bathe and to dry oneself in the river

or while working could be tied over the waist. It is an object of identification rather than of

affective propensity. Clearly, these two practises have been subverted by the ubiquitous use

of the polythene and precisely this is the kind of refle:xTvity that theorists of alternative

modernities argue for. Either to have an object like polythene which blurs the surface

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distinction of objects and their abjectness or the obverse of this position that the polythene

has taken away the pristine modes of distinctions and one must culturally revive those modes

instead of the polythene. I am of the view that one could argue for a position different from

both of these concerns and that could be of looking at polythene as an object which cleaves

open the interminable gap within nature, science and theology. In other words, if the

bacteriophages are seen as the "natural" entities that help maintain the equilibrium in the

river, the polythene represents a world in which the bacteria are already retroactively taken

care of i.e. polythene is resistant to the decomposition by bacteria Thus science's concern

would be to look at this peculiar postmodern culturscape ofbacteria-phages-polythene which

represent in an abstract formulaic way, the crux of the ecological question today. Thus, if

science's death drive is to be upheld, then the immortality of the polythene becomes an

exemplification of the point that death and decomposition are not to be taken as given but are

to be redefined. This is not in the vein of upholding the "natural cycle of life" as it were but

by precisely locating the lack of any such cycle. In other words 'polythene' as a symbol of

ecological catastrophe has to be seen for the important 'function' it seems to serve as an

objection to the Hindu Symbolic. In all of its abstraction, it represents a success that could be

the demand against both GAP and SMF. However, quite like the "carrying away of the

Himalayas" at the time of crises by the monkey grammarian, the polythene also represents

that fundamental lesson of materialist theology. That is to say, what serves the function

beautifully simultaneously carries an immortal trauma and the only way to 'handle' that

trauma could be by developing a theological premise of sacrifice that unsettles the basic co­

ordinates of the Symbolic.

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Endnotes

1 Panikkar defines the "cosmotheandric" as the coming together of God, Man and the world. This he says could be experienced through a 'myth' at a moment or forever. However, he is also of the view that the cosmotheandric is neither a "monism" nor an "atomism" while it equally excludes "deism and anthropomorphism". Similarly he argues that though the 'mandala' may represent the geometric representation of God, Man and the World it does not have a centre (1993: 72-77). The most succinct articulation of what he means by the Cosmotheandric Experience is captured in the following paragraph: "The cosmotheandric principle could be formulated by saying that the divine, human and the earthly­however we may prefer to call them -are the three irreducible dimensions which constitute the real, i.e., any reality inasmuch as it is real. It does not deny that the abstracting capacity of our mind can, for particular and limited purposes, considers parts of reality independently; it does not deny the complexity of the real and its many degrees. But this principle reminds us that the parts are parts and that they are not accidentally juxtaposed, but essentially related to the whole. In other words, the parts are real participations and are to be understood not according to a merely spatial model, as books are part of a library or a carburettor and a differential gear are parts of an automobile, but rather according to an organic unity, as body and soul, or mind and will belong to a human being: they are parts because they are not the whole, but they are not parts which can be "parted" from the whole without thereby ceasing to exist. A soul without a body is mere entelechy; a body without a soul is a corpse; a will without reason is a mere abstraction; and reason without will an artificial construct of the mind, etc. They are constitutive dimensions of the whole, which permeates everything that is and is not reducible to any of its constituents" (1993: 60).

2 One must add that as Gananath Obeyesekere (2002) reminds us within what he calls as the Samanic religions, the element of radical evil and its relation with perspectives of soteriology may not exist in the same form as Judaeo-Christian religions or within Islam and other ethnographically studied religious lives amongst the so called aboriginals and various other religious communities. However, the 'evil' should be seen here within the context of 'reason' and must be read as a cosmography of the Hindu dictum of unspoilt "golden age" before the entry of the dreadful 'abject', which either is supposed to have come from the outside or is unexplainable.

3 Both Weber and Durkhiem 's work is unmistakably about unraveling the transformations within the 'normative' through the shifts from the 'traditional' to 'modem' and the life of the individual, in terms of his limits and possibilities. While Weber's Protestant Ethic And T11e Spirit Of Capitalism (2003) is a commentary on how 'a day in a Christian life' in the increasingly industrialized Europe was never the same as anytime before in terms of observances of 'work' and 'worship'. Durkhiem 's Suicide (1958), after detaching the description of the act from the domain of the 'exceptional' as was the case being made out by psychological studies of his time, noJ1T!alizes it as a feature directly linked to the idea of the society itself and at another register links it with that of the shifting grounds of change in the idea of the 'collective conscience'.

4 As mentioned in previous chapters, 'ghum phir ke sabko yah in a ana hai' is the most common 'sigh' of the shavyatris when they see their dead being cremated. I discussed the phrase in greater detail in the previous chapters. Here I would mention its literal meaning once again. It translates as 'After wandering, everyone, has to come here eventually, one way or the other'. In the last chapter, I delineated the 'event' 111

'eventually'. Here when I say 'collective', I say it in the sense of'sabko', the 'unexplained everyone'.

5 Their use of 'private' and 'public' is the classical distinction that assumes the individual, familial, immediate, and intimate to be on the side of private and the common, communitarian to be of the public. Their use of the 'public sphere' is after Jiirgen Habermas's reconceptualization of the idea, but it is not directly based on it (Habermas 1989).

6 One can consider death and immortality to be part of the same topological layer, in the sense that just as Good is not against Evil but may be found on the same methodological plane. Thus pravalt and parvah should be seen as part of the same topology.

7 The original French publication of The Primitive Classification precedes Levi-Strauss's Totemism.

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8 The reference is to the scriptural anecdote of tussle between the gods (devas) and the demons (asuras) to procure the elixir by stirring the cosmic ocean, which threw up things that could not be 'symbolically' integrated either in the world of gods or that of demons and was then absorbed by Shiva. The absorption of this 'poisonous' element transformed Shiva and he came to be known as Neelkantha (the blue throated one) (see Britannica India 2002: 332).

9 Panikkar while commenting on the 'night', before creation took place, as represented in the Nasadiya Sukta says: "Cosmic ardour gives birth also to that undifferentiated reality which has no better symbol than cosmic night, the night that does not have the day as the counterpart, but envelops everything, though in the darkness ofthe not-yet-manifested" (1977: 60).

10 The empirical and the material contexts of ghats of the river that has provided room to everyone from Tulsidas, Kabir, Ravidas and Meerabai should also be remembered for it being a singular site of accommodating all disposals and excrement ranging from the dead, the uninstalled idols of gods and goddesses and that of animal carcass. This should be further contextualized by observing that the current pilgrims' population at the ghats involve hitherto excluded caste members and in that sense the mere choice of Ganga as water has to be declined because the theological imperative of its water is only now accessible to a majority of the caste members in a more institutionalized manner.

11 He translates it as "That art thou", with an emphases on thou. The 'collective', which exists in its 'representation', but not strictly in a mortal sphere of temporal existence.

12 Gananath Obeyesekere defines 'Samanic' as the new religions that arose in the "Ganges valley in the sixth or fifth century" as against the already existent "Brahmanic" religion based on the "orthodox Vedic tradition" (2006: 88). Obeyesekere prefers to use Samanic as against Karl Jaspers' "Axial age" which Jaspers argues, is based on the origin of religious and philosophic thought in places as far ranging as Greece, Middle east, China and India in late years ofBC (Jaspers 1963).

13 One could further complicate the usage of Zoe by referring to Giorgio Agamben 's use of the same in his discussion in Homo Sacer (1998) but the key distinction of the contexts prevents an easy continuity between the two stances.

14 This has to seen on the lines of Jean Luc Nancy's description of myth in his The Inoperative Community (1991), where he argues that the present world is based on the myth that 'there is no myth'.

15 This critique could be extended to positions such as Homi K. Bhabha takes in The Location Of Culture (1994).

16 To exemplify this one has to make use of fundamentalist religious discourses of most communities. The emphasis is never on you must 'understand' us, the demand is on the lines of 'you may not understand but you must observe'.

17 Phylogeny is the study of evolutionary relatedness between different species. I am using it here with reference to Durkheimian method involved in locating religion as the connecting link to science as an institution.

18 Translated by Richard Klein. This article originally appeared as "Psychanalyse et science: le vide du

sujet et I' exces des objets," in Quarto 56, December 1994.

19 http://www.lacan.com/zizek-desire.htm

20 The reference to these writers is to convey the genealogy of their views on 'snails' as objects of study. Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882), Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-

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1913), John Thomas Gulick (1832-1923), Henry Edward Crampton (1875-1956), Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002).

21 See http://www.gangagen.com/businessframe.htm for a brief genealogy of the discovery of the bacteriophages in pre-independent India to contemporary usage of the bacteriophages. Also see volume 298 of 'Science' dated 25th October 2002 on a report that claims Stalin's Russia to have extensively worked on the medicinal possibilities of Bacteriophages.

22 This is from an earlier discussion in the chapter: Zizek in the essay "Censorship Today: Violence, or Ecology as a New Opium for the Masses" (2007) considers this as a "fetishist split": "Our attitude here is that of the fetishist split: "I know very well (that the global warming is a threat to the entire humanity), but nonetheless ... (I cannot really believe it) ... The difficult ethical task is thus to "un-learn" the most basic coordinates of our immersion into our life-world: what usually served as the recourse to Wisdom (the basic trust in the background-coordinates of our world) is now THE source of danger" (Zizek 2007: 12).

23 Kelly D. Alley (1994) in her genealogy of the institution informs that Swatchha Ganga Abhiyan or Campaign was started in 1982 and went on to have American experts as part of 'Friends of Ganges" and also involved women groups and cultural actors like musicians and theatre artists to promote the idea of cleanliness of the river, emphasizing on a translated vocabulary of science, amenable to the local population.

24 Interview June 2009.

25 The speech of the Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1986 while inaugurating Ganga Action Plan promised 'drinkable' water after the anticipated success of the project, perhaps relying on the rhetorical idea of the water being potable in its 'pure' state.

26 GangaGen is a Bangalore based biotechnological firm started in 2000 by Dr. J Ramchandran. It was in news for having got the "first Indian patent" for a "therapeutic phage" in 2008 (Times of India 9th Dec 2001) also See http://www.gangagen.com/businessframe.htm.

27 See Alley D. Kelly (1994) for the genealogy that she creates of the municipal attempts to create sewage drains in Benares through colonial reign but clearly Ganga Action Plan appears to be the most ambitious and wide ranging project in postcolonial India.

28 JNNURM is divided between two concerns one is that of "infrastructural" upkeep and improvement of the urban contexts and the second is that of "uplifting" the "urban poor". Launched in December 2005 by the Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh, this is one of the key schemes of the UPA government along with the acts of National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) and Right to Information (RTI).

29 The commonly known distinction that he makes in his speech is that of gandagi (asvacch)[filthy] and apavitra (asuddh)[impure; polluted](Gandhi 1986: 163). That the river is sacredly pure is unambiguous but since it is being dirtied, the GAP aims to negate the effect of modes of dirtying the river and gradually reduce the means of polluting the river. He says: "the purity of the Ganga was never in question- but it has been observed of late that we have been letting the purifying waters of the Ganga become polluted" (1986: 163). Now if one translates this argument with reference to the other idiom used in the same speech, the Lacanian notion of transference is exemplified. The other idiom is of course that India is spiritually united, is civilizationally plural and the nation is resilient in its purity. So if one doesn't "cower to terrorism" and successfully challenges the "dark forces", then the primordially united, nation may reappear.

30 Interviews May-June 2007.

31 Interviews were undertaken through the duration of fieldwork and extensive discussion on SMF was held in June 2009.

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32 Probing in the interview did not bring up exact dates. My hypothesis is that the doms are talking of a period when GAP was just announced but was not procedurally implemented. In fact the pro activity of the Nagar Nigam to fish out the bodies must have been a tentative initiative within GAP.

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