Book Review

Friendship, Interiority and Mysticism: Essays in Dialogue by Susan Viswanathan

Susan Viswanathan in her collection of essays has brilliantly traced the dialogic culture and depicted its manifestation through friendships, understanding the interiority of faith and the cross cultural understanding of different faiths through dialogue and finally mysticism. In this context of cross cultural understanding and crossing boundaries to understand multi-cultural perspectives Susan Viswanathan has looked at the writings of Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber and Simone Weil. These authors lived in the time where there was an atmosphere of devastation and the legitimization of a lethal ideological thinking existed where these authors strived for humaneness. In Buber’s case the question of multi-nationalism and a creation of a bi-national state both for the Arabs and the Jews as advocated by him even when he believed that the right of Jews to Palestine is indisputable was way ahead of its time. When many argued that Palestine belonged to the Jews, Buber while standing firm in his assertion of the Jews’ right to Palestine also defended his argument that the Arabs should not be alienated from their own homes, which when looked at from the perspective of contemporary politics brings out the opposition that Donald Trump is acing when he says that all the ’immigrants’ need to leave the USA which is essentially a nation built on migration or more closer to home, when the Shiv Sena asks Indians of other states to leave Maharashtra. Simone Weil’s interesting work while speaking about the Resistance and her life among the workers also mentions the bureaucratic structure of the state and how the state becomes a very important stakeholder in the manufacture of certain ideologies and how these ideas are legitimized by the bureaucracy and are fed into the minds of the people to be simply accepted. The one thing common in these three perspectives is the interwoven aspect of dialogue; the engaging with the dominant ideologies and its subsequent questioning in a time where such ideologies were considered the ‘truth’.

Susan Viswanathan says, ’The sharing of three lives-of Andrews, Gandhi and Rudra, and the questions of freedom, country, love-is perhaps one of the most vivid symbols of friendship, interiority and mysticism in our time’. She has elucidated on how the friendship of these three people made it possible for an Indian to be the principal of a missionary college and participate in the nationalist movement while creating an identity which was both Christian and Indian. This pluralism in identities has been part of a shared experience in India specifically as there existed an acceptance and tolerance for diverse ways of life but what made the case of St. Stephens unique was the current state of affairs which led to the appointment of Rudra. The East India Company had for a long time maintained that religion should not enter the colonized country as it is important to let the natives maintain their existing social order so that trade could flourish, they didn’t want a restructuring of society but to maximize profits and more importantly they had seen the decline of the Portuguese due to the inclusion of religion in the administration. However, the British were able to integrate religion and state in such a way that the Portuguese could not. The evangelics and missionaries on their mission to ’civilise the world’ came to India and their effective fusion with the state in terms of commissioning of work and so on led to success to a certain degree. But the kind of hierarchy that existed among the British evangelic and the Indian clergy were called out by many including Andrews himself. Susan Viswanathan has spoken of his nature of indulging in dialogues and fostering a multi-faith understanding, where ‘syncretism is not sought, but rather, the clarity of identity and difference is mediated by conversation’ even if there are opposing views as with the case of Andrews’ dialogue with Gandhi in some instances. The dialogue between Rudra, Gandhi and Andrews on Nationalism and religion emphatically brings out the secular dialogue which harboured a deep love shared between these three people because of which such a dialogue could exist in the form of a conversation rather than being motivated by anything else.

The subsequent contrast she makes between the missionary style of the evangelists and the French Monk Dom Henri Le Saux in India leaves the readers with a clarity in terms of understanding the motives of evangelism in these two cases. In the case of the British missionaries, evangelism was interior to their faith but they did not actually indulge in dialogue rather they sought to civilize the natives while evoking images of the uncultured, savage, familiar beings among the natives. The dialogue of religion that the missionaries indulged in assumed that the two world views could only be understood in opposition while Le Saux experiences conversion to Hinduism from Christianity as a dialogue full of tolerance and tries to exist in both the worlds simultaneously rather than mutually exclusive. The insightful and rupturing experiences of Abhishaktananda captivates the readers’ imagination and the quest of the heart in change of being and the journey it embarks upon is engaging and inspires curiosity. The experience of seeking and revelation in a dialogic manner is definitely a beginning towards understanding the other, and not just as something inferior or which needs to be homogenized according to one’s own beliefs rather as something with which engagement is possible while retaining one’s own identity.

The compilation and the curation of all the essays by Susan Viswanathan published over time has been done to ensure that a flow is maintained. The editing is done consummately so that the thread of importance of dialogue with the ‘other’ is constantly being maintained to build the existing line of thought of the reader. This line of thought further gets established by the various examples Susan Viswanathan gives to inculcate the need for sustenance of dialogicity in the readers’ minds.

Myths as collective representations, consisting of symbolisms and aesthetical imageries have a pull. They represent the relation of human beings with nature and with each other, it is art. And the dialogicity of myth is particularly important to sustain to have a more peaceful existence. Such ideas, as explained by Susan Viswanathan, of differentiation and secularization and a multi cultural existence emphasise a peaceful world order, something to strive for by keeping the dialogicity of myth alive. As myth captures the world view of humans I its various manifestations, it has been capturing war and bloodshed in modern times too. The dialogic culture of engaging with the ‘other’ prevents hostility from gaining lethal and extremely hostile forms and poses as a possible solution to prevent violent civilisational clashes and war. This is also reflective of the view of non-neutral sociology and brings out the role of aetheistic sociology in recognizing that there is no good or evil, but sociological enquiry should be used to sustain the ethical questioning of multiple religions and the ideologies held by the state to provide human and life chances to those harmed by the prevalence of such thoughts. Thus the author ends with a constructive approach and offers a very real solution to prevent conflict in this world which is a rarity in terms of sociological writings.

References:

Viswanathan, Susan. Frienship, Interiority and Mysticism: Essays in Dialogue. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007.