Remembering Professor JPS: The Teacher One Never Had

"...[O]bviously there is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and conjectural."
∼ Jorge Luis Borges, 1952

"[E]veryting swarajist is good for swadeshi, but everything swadeshi is not good for swaraj."
∼ Jit Pal Singh Uberoi, 1974, as indebted to K.J. Shah

Even as I prepare to disengage, formally, from academia, I am always gripped by a deep sense of foreboding, not quite of my own finitude, but necessarily of my teachers (and mentors) passing away. Many have passed in the last few years; and even as I have brooded, I have not let the emotions take over. So, it is somewhat surprising – to me at least – that I should be overwhelmed by the passing away of Professor Jit Pal Singh Uberoi (JPS, for short).

JPS was never quite my formal teacher, nor did I seek out his mentorship; in fact, there were only a few times that our paths crossed, although each moment of that crossing was quite intense and memorable. I have always cherished them, and hopefully this point will come through in this remembrance. Of course, I have been a fervent reader of all that he wrote – and there is, to be sure, a corpus to be absorbed and engaged – and this has been quite formative of my own commitments and preoccupations, scholarly and otherwise. This latter point could go some way in clarifying what I have summarised in my title as ‘Remembering Prof JPS: The Teacher One Never Had’. In many ways, therefore, in accounting for JPS and the fields of his thought, I am also framing for myself the passage of my own thought and practice.

But this is about JPS and not about myself – although, yes, in foregrounding the thoughts that I will, the effort is to communicate a sense of his passing (as much for myself, as for my younger colleagues and students at large). JPS spoke of his research and pedagogy as following a “non-dualist or dialectical semiology”, retraceable to the “Hermetic tradition in modern times, say, from Paracelsus to Goethe”, the ‘non-dualism’ translating “not something like advaita in Sanskrit, but more akin to nirdvandva, non-acceptance of the two principles, for example, of the subject and the object or of self and the world” (JPS, 2019). Forever the ‘complacent disciplinarian’ (I draw this term from Ian Hacking), JPS brought to the discipline of sociology and social anthropology in India a style of thinking that rejected ‘monism and dualism’ and veered towards (in JPS’s own words) “some form of Trinitarian doctrine, such as types of opposition and mediation, or a dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, followed by reflection, elaboration and completion or reproduction, or the set of equality, polarity and progression” (JPS, 2019).

Lest all this seem a mishmash of orientations and even philosophically obscure, I must reiterate that the emergent spheres of JPS’s work were always marked by a precise “interplay of method, theory and data”. Hopefully, the elucidation that follows will substantiate this rendition, even as I go on to complicate the philosophy and sociology on offer.  Given the circumstances, yet, I will have to be brief, often giving the space over to JPS’s own prose, even as a fuller formulation at my own end is on the anvil.

Disciplinary trysts

In many ways, JPS encodes the possibilities summarily reproduced in my lines above from Jorge Luis Borges.  The context of those lines need not absorb us here, but given the salience of questions of form and symbolism that comprises key aspects of JPS’s work, they reproduce in good measure the ‘imagination’ that governs his overall corpus. The anthology of his writings, compiled and edited by Khalid Tyabji, with the title Mind and Society: From Indian Studies to General Sociology (Oxford University Press, 2019) does give us a sense of his work – their shifting tides, the various styles of thinking that JPS arraigned against and the traditions of thought he sought to promote, and the nuanced formalism of his ways, at once non-arbitrary and conjectural in a deep kind of way.

The ‘Preface’ to this compilation recalls summarily, in JPS’s own words, his trajectory through physical science and technology (even graduating from University College London in electrical engineering/telecommunications, 1952-55) and drifting into social science in the sway and friendship of the redoubtable Basil Bernstein (who directed JPS to the University of Manchester and the School of Social Anthropology thereon, 1955-58). Following a teaching stint at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia (1963-66), JPS moved to the Department of Sociology at Delhi School of Economics (DSE) in 1968 and remained therein until his retirement in 1999.

The ‘Preface’ also constructs the three thematic configurations of JPS’s ‘general sociology’: one having to do with (as he puts it) “the eternal political war of imperialism versus nationalism, as it related to the academic pursuit of knowledge in the university and the profession,” the other with “critical reflections on aspects of modern Western mentality, whether academic or theoretical and practical,” and the third laying bare the “original project of a vernacular Indian modernity,” whose “internal ‘principle of motion’ … is located in society rather than the state” (JPS, 2019). As he retrospectively renders the terms of his quest: “The overall idea is to find the ground for a concept of society in the vernacular usage, labour, or language, rather than in the concept of ‘tradition’, as general social science and the Orientalist classicists had hitherto assumed” (2019).

Of course, this last axis also meant a negotiation of the space of religions in India and Sikhism in particular (see his ambitiously mounted, and yet impossibly arcane, mode of analysis in Religion, Civil Society and the State: A Study of Sikhism (OUP, 1996)) and the stunning thought anchoring the same, namely, that the “Indianness of India, from a national, structural or relational view … [would still require] ... the problem of the relation of self and other, or rather of self and the other self … to be addressed” at both the individual and collective levels.  As such, the work was sweeping in its stakes, even mounting a ‘structural’ parallel between Sikhism and “Gandhism” of the early 20th century (1920-25), whilst also insisting that the “problem of religion, politics and history or of their inter-relation is always in the background of the mind of all writers on Sikhism” and that “it was the specific project or ambition of Sikhism to bring the three spheres of religion, the state and society together, face to face” (even as “in medieval India the three were situated back to back, walled off from each other, either for safety’s sake or as a matter of principle”) [JPS, 1996].

Even as his critics have noted that the work cut many historical and methodological corners, there is no denying the mystique of its central thesis working off Sikhism – away from all frameworks of the majority and the minority, the mainstream and the margin, or even homogeneity and heterogeneity – and foregrounding the ‘martyr’ as a figure of victory over the ‘’self’ (as distinct from the figure of the ‘hero’ or the victim as command over the ‘other’).  To be sure, JPS’s claim here that “martyrdom as a creed (shahadat) is more or less equivalent to non-violence as a creed (satyagraha) in the making of Indian modernity from the birth of Sikhism up to Gandhism” needs some unpacking and further contextual commentary.  But that was JPS, flirting paradoxically with the very heroic that he was striving to displace as the central figure of culture and history.

At any rate, my own tryst with JPS’s writings began with his two essays in the Contributions to Indian Sociology (N.S.), both subsumed under the rubric of ‘For a Sociology of India,’ one titled ‘Science and Swaraj’ (1968) and the other titled ‘New Outlines of Structural Sociology, 1945-1970’ (1974). In many ways, the latter essay was building on the impetus of the former – specifically the claim that “the life of mind is a group affair as well as an individual affair, so that our object should be to strengthen the institutional sinews of national intellectual life as well as to improve its quality and relevance” (emphasis added) – even as it sought to forge a “research plan for work on structural sociology” (emphasis in original) based on the “swarajist attitude” (JPS, 1974). The detailing offered in this relatively long essay need not concern us here, but the intent to evaluate the “challenge of structuralism to the social and human sciences of India” must be emphasised. Indeed, working off the conviction that “it will not do borrow, adapt, and apply ideas to India, unless the ideas are effectively reconstructed in the process by us,” JPS actively sought to “present structuralism, less as a set method of universal validity, and more as a family or cognate group of theories in fields considered to be of interest to us” (1974).

In my own spheres of work, traversing the contours of sociological scholarship in India, I found this essay particularly insightful in laying bare the idea of “a truly comparative sociology of India,” one set apart from the extant and pervasive “typological classification of societies, e.g. industrial, agrarian and tribal, or modern and traditional, or capitalist, socialist, and underdeveloped” and instead given over to studying “the forms and functions of the articulating principles of social organization and culture … viewed as complex sets of relations and their transformations” (JPS, 1974, emphasis in original). Even more poignantly – and lending substance to my own youthful urges at building bridges across divisions internal to the social sciences – JPS also spoke about the essential task of “promot[ing] the reconciliation of our two institutional modes of learning, the imported international mode and the inherited national tradition, unhappily segregated for so long to the point of intellectual self-estrangement” (1974).

A sociology of European science and modernity

In many ways, yet, JPS’s fecundity lay elsewhere – in the “sociology of European science and modernity” that he strove to cultivate, which oversaw a “critical trilogy” in the shape of three ‘little’ (sic) books, all published by OUP, namely, Science and Culture (1978), The Other Mind of Europe: Goethe as a Scientist (1984) and The European Modernity: Science, Truth and Method (2002). Interestingly, all the three works – the latter two, even more evidently so – bore a reference to the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), discerning in the latter “an alternative science of nature” against the “official positivist-dualist methodology of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton.”

Over the years, of course, my own engagements with this German figure have evolved; and, even as I felt the rather sweeping flow of JPS’s rendition of Goethe, I have always had to heed the philosophical merits of that treatment, specifically the attempt to extract a “non-standard” conception of scientific method from the baffling prose and aphoristic style of Goethe.  Formulaically rendered as the ‘Goethe spectrum’ – and juxtaposed against what was termed the ‘Newton spectrum’ – JPS pointedly asked (and I am condensing, albeit staying with his flowing words) “as to whether the two different spectra of Goethe and Newton are both only ‘models of reality’, right or wrong, or perhaps also to be classed as models of our knowledge of reality, ‘models of truth’?”; and, furthermore, going on to state: “Or can there be still a third possible solution of mediation positing a non-dualist relation between the truth and the reality as the object of science?” (JPS, 2002). Considering that this was working off “the discourse of nature uttered through man or what we call science,” I must reiterate that I remain devoted to the terms of this quest; my questions, though, and the unfolding structures of my answering have since got complicated with the burgeoning scholarship in the history and philosophy of science (perhaps even about how to think about ‘intelligibility in science’ in the abstract). The latter, specifically, was a conversation I was hoping to have with JPS, but his stroke in 2015 put paid to those plans.

Meanwhile, however, I continued to engage with JPS’s work, and even recall random conversations with him on the question of modernity when he visited our department/university as a fellow in 2011 (or 2012?). Even as I responded to JPS’s gesture of thinking European modernity through ‘science,’ I was not entirely convinced of his schemata of “a vernacular Indian modernity,” reading into it the traces of a ‘nationalist’ form of self-rendition, albeit of the ‘swarajist’ kind. I could not follow-up on this matrix of engagement, even as I made frequent annual visits to the Department of Sociology at DSE (between 2008-2018). Now, even as I strive to make a renewed sense of his ‘sociology of European science and modernity,’ the framing that configures it looms large. As he urged in a precipitate form in ‘The European Modernity’ (2002):

"…[W]e shall have to make up our own minds independently, among other things, as to what had happened and how in the European modernity, which constitutes the chief single source of all our imports in the world of knowledge, power and culture.  One can then begin to decide whether there exist perhaps other non-standard or alternative traditions and underground tendencies which could redefine the official European science or history, politics and economics or ethics handed down to us."

Indeed, this was the thought that anchored the ‘European Studies’ programme that JPS initiated in the Department of Sociology at DSE, a programme instituted not quite as an area studies discipline (or specialisation), but meant to be “a laboratory for new Indian perspectives on Western theories and practices with sociology and social anthropology viewed and understood as a single spectrum” (Khalid Tyabji, 2019). The programme never took off though, notwithstanding the energies generated by JPS’s ‘critical trilogy,’ as enumerated at the start of this section. Perhaps, JPS’s ‘experimentalism’ had to confront its limits, not quite only in institutional terms but also in terms of the disciplinary deficit that defined the sociology and social anthropology in India.

In fact, as I think through this, in this my charged moment, the formal question that has haunted the key spheres of my work returns: about what ‘disciplinarity’ necessarily consists in and about whether a purely disciplinary capacity (that is to say, a grounding in one’s own discipline) could envisage alternative perspectives which, by definition, a disciplinary capacity cannot occupy. In many ways, to me, I now realise, JPS epitomised this possibility, the very coherence of this possibility (even as I continue to strive to address what this might yield about both the genealogy of our disciplines and their historical epistemology).

But there is too another possibility that JPS’s sociology of European science and modernity, as recalled in its precipitate form above, holds for us. JPS’s equally indefatigable contemporary, the redoubtable Ashis Nandy (another reference point for my own work) had toyed with two constructs to address the possibilities of socio-cultural and political criticism in India, what he (Nandy) termed ‘critical traditionalism/traditionality’ and ‘critical modernism’ (Nandy, ‘Cultural Frames for Social Transformation: A Credo,’ 1987). The former (that is, critical traditionalism/traditionality), emblematic of his own stance, marks a criticism of modernity from ‘outside’ modernity, albeit also willing to oppose some traditions vehemently (even to the extent of including within its frame elements of modernity as critical vectors); alternatively, ‘critical modernism’ is taken to represent a criticism of modernity from ‘inside’ modernity, but which is often characterised by an unabashed defence of tradition. [Note, Nandy’s essay fragmentarily illustrates these two positions through the contrasting orientations of Gandhi and Ananda K. Coomaraswamy respectively, but that can pass!] The choice of his own preferred position is clear but, as Nandy demonstrates through the range of his writings, the decision can (or ought to) remain a fraught one.

It seems to me that JPS is confounding the very terms of this troubled choice, so that even as he seems to be inheriting a ‘critical modernism’, the very ‘inside’ of modernity is being torn asunder, dialecticised as it were into its potential ‘outside’ as well. I realise of course – as JPS too does – that any vocabulary of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ is a complicated one, as indeed the question of the frame from within which their distinction is being drawn. Indeed, my pointed allusions in the foregoing section to JPS’s work on the history and semiology of Sikhism were meant to precisely underscore this problem. But where we depart, arguably, is in the very idea of the ‘necessary’ and ‘sufficient’ conditions of (or for) a critique of (Indian) modernity. The tension between ‘history and value’ endemic to all modernity – whether of a European vintage or our own vernacular variants – might yet require to be thematised and re-contextualised.

Be that as it may, I remain in JPS’s debt – the teacher one never had – and it is only right and proper that the last word be with him:

"The advancement of knowledge, I think, depends upon the interplay of method, theory and data in a single mental arena, local or universal, and is always implicitly social.  India must now bid for its competitive place in the assumed universal free world of the intellect, which we must ourselves map and survey (swaraj), and not be satisfied with the mere allotted expression of some fixed nativist quota of Indianness (swadeshi): that is, so to say, my real and true swadharm, or individual conscience, in life and thought" (JPS, 2019, as in original).

Everything swarajist is good for swadeshi, but everything swadeshi is not good for swaraj. Adieu Professor Jit Pal Singh Uberoi (JPS).

Sasheej Hegde teaches sociology at the University of Hyderabad, and is in the final leg of his long and enduring stint there.  He can be contacted at sasheej@gmail.com. The author is also grateful to his colleague, Jyotirmaya Sharma, for commenting on a preliminary draft. His quick nudge in three directions has helped sharpen the overall formulation.

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