Rudolf C Heredia looks beyond collective violence in India

Avijit Pathak

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If this dream of peace is to become a reality, we must divest ourselves of a great deal of the presumptions and pre-options we have been, and still are being, socialised into by exclusive communal identities and religious fundamentalisms, national extremists and radical rationalism.
— Rudolf C Heredia

What distinguishes this book — characterised by the intensity of critical sociological analysis and a politico-spiritual quest for a better world — is its ability to persuade the reader to see the discontents of the age we are living in, understand the pathology of all sorts of narrow and limiting identities, cultivate the art of dialogue, understand plurality and differences, and move towards peace. And this is not an easy task as we find ourselves amid the all-pervading violence — the violence sanctified in the name of militant nationalism, religious fundamentalism and neoliberal global capitalism. Furthermore, in an age that seems to have lost its dreams amid the cult of narcissism, militarism and hyper-masculine nationalism, it is not easy to invoke Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, draw some important lessons for cultivating the nuanced practice of dialogue, and imagine some sort of a ‘healing touch’.

But then, Heredia is not like a soulless academic. His scholarship (a reader would see the comfort with which he walks with, for instance, Ashis Nandy and J Galtung, Martha Nussbaum and Jurgen Habermas, or Pankaj Mishra and Sudhir Kakar) has not robbed him of his dream: his quest for a world that can ‘sow the good seed of meaningful, relevant, liberating, humane, cultural and religious traditions for a hundredfold harvest of a harmonious peace, premised on tolerance and justice, forgiveness and reconciliation’. And his text, despite its rigor, doesn’t alienate the reader; he communicates, makes us reflexive, activates our conscience, and whispers in our ears: ‘Eschew the kind of homogeneity such as projected by cultural nationalism — Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan; one language, one religion, one nation.’

With eight logically coherent chapters, the reader is inspired to undertake a politico-historical journey — the way promises were broken and hopes betrayed, the cultural/psychic/political roots of the ‘spiraling violence’, and the need to understand Gandhi as ‘a new hermeneutic is needed to dialogue with Gandhi’s counter-culture and its basic themes of swaraj, swadeshi and satya’. For a careful reader, it is not impossible to find Heredia as a pedagogue. Yes, he speaks of ‘pedagogy of pluralism’ or ‘culture of tolerance’ and above all, the possibility of ‘hermeneutics of dialogue’. This is like overcoming the walls of separation between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’; this is the ability to expand one’s horizon. In a way, as Heredia says, ‘Dialogue is the most constructive and precious practice of tolerance, the only effective way to really cope with the bewildering diversity that challenges and confounds us, as a precarious legacy and a precarious treasure.’ In fact, the spirit of dialogue generates the possibility of ‘multiple belongings’. Imagine, for instance, Gandhi as a ‘Hindu’, yet a wanderer allowing himself to be nurtured by the ‘Sermon on the Mount’; or Tagore as an ‘Indian’, yet merged with poetic universalism. At this time of collective violence, religious orthodoxy and militant nationalism, it is important to remind ourselves time and again of the therapeutic possibility implicit in what Heredia characterises as diverse ‘domains of dialogue’.

A book of this kind should not be read as yet another ‘academic’ text; it is not about intellectual gymnastics, or egotistic scholarly pride. Instead, it is a quest — a kind of prayer in a noisy, violent world.