Being Different

All Things Must Pass — so sung George Harrison on a megahit album of the same name. George was consciously echoing Krsna’s words in the Bhagavad-gita, which ring through centuries of proud civilizations that have risen, deemed themselves invincible, and inevitably passed.

What so fascinated George — and thousands of his generation — about Eastern culture and thought has remained an abiding and ever-growing passion in the West. Today literally millions of Westerners, dissatisfied with what they perceive as the parochialism and unnecessary aggressiveness of their own culture, have chosen to adopt diverse manifestations of oriental dharmic traditions, perceiving them as more peaceful, wise, and truly spiritual. The concepts of reincarnation and karma, and the practice of yoga and vegetarianism — all largely or exclusively imported from the East — are now commonplace in the occident.

And internationally, the West’s economic, political, and intellectual hegemony — which arose several centuries ago and until recently seemed invincible — is finally showing signs of passing.

Yet although the distinction between East and West is becoming increasingly blurred (sorry, Kipling), distinctly Western presuppositions and underlying modes of perception and conditioning remain as subtle but powerful influences upon both Western practitioners of dharmic traditions and Eastern people steeped in the myth of inherent Western superiority.

Being Different appears at this cultural crossroads. Without rejecting Western contributions to culture and thought, it pinpoints the dominating, yet often unnoticed or veneered, bias toward Western paradigms. It furthermore challenges those perspectives by interjecting perspectives from the dharma traditions (maintaining that they are at least equally valid) with which to view all aspects of being.

Everything must pass, Krsna teaches, but that which is real will remain (Bhagavad-gita 2.16). In a world clearly in need of a rethink, Being Different challenges the West to stop stereotyping older civilizations as inferior and to examine itself through the lens of a culture that has remained while countless others have fallen. Being Different is so different to any previous work, and so compellingly argued, that it promises to initiate transformational discourse in all areas of intellectual activity.

Many Indian spiritual leaders, lacking a profound knowledge of their own culture, and feeling inferior to the West, try to respond to the Western challenge by showing how Indian and western religions are the same. They chant “sarva-dharma-sama-bhava” (all religions are equal) out of context, causing much confusion. In the midst of this morass arises the ”lotus of Rajiv” (the word rajiv means a lotus in Sanskrit) in the form of his book, Being Different. Rajiv Malhotra’s work is a kind of yajna that reverses the gaze upon the West through the lens of Indian knowledge systems.  This process is traditionally called purva paksha, and in Rajiv’s work it is given a new mission and a new importance.

The book argues that those aspects of India which appears different, strange, problematic and an exotic mishmash  to the Western eye are, indeed, the key to an underlying unity.  Being Different explains that there is a pristine, all-encompassing, Reality, both immanent and transcendent, that expresses itself as all the varieties, dualities and so-called chaos. There is order in chaos, birth in death, creation in destruction, and simplicity in complexity.

Rajiv Malhotra has devised the very interesting metaphor of digestion to pinpoint the destructive effect of what is usually masqueraded as the assimilation, globalization,  melting pot, or postmodern deconstruction of difference. The dharmic traditions have been a target for digestion into the belly of Western culture. Being Different challenges the legitimacy of such attempts with profound logic and examples. Its analysis of Abrahamic religions shows how they are history-centric. This fixation drives them into claims of exclusiveness and gives them anxiety over cultural differences which they seek to resolve through appropriation, assimilation, conversion – all forms of digestion that obliterate whatever seems challenging. The dharmic traditions are not driven by the same anxieties because of their vision of the integral unity of all existence.

Interestingly, the author has followed the traditional purva paksha style, a distinctive feature of exegesis in Sanskrit. The purva paksha accounts of past debates are no longer relevant in a practical sense, and new purva pakshas are needed for this era. Being Different breaks new ground in that direction. The result is a highly original and sincere attempt to compare the basic paradigms of Indian and Western thought. This book will open the eyes of any fair-minded reader regardless of worldview.

Since time immemorial, Indian spiritual exemplars had a strong tradition of studying competing schools of thoughts and debating them vigorously; but the recent leaders have ignored the need to analyze and debate Western religions and philosophical systems using Indian frameworks. This has allowed Western paradigms to dominate the discourse while Indian ones have become marginalized. In some ways, Mahatma Gandhi, Sri Aurobindo and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan did “reverse the gaze” on the West, and this was vital to the formation of Indian identity in the colonial era. Now, for the 21st century, Rajiv Malhotra has launched the renaissance of this old tradition of purva-paksha, and his book Being Different examines the West as the “other” through the lens of dharma. Rather than positioning the dharma schools in tension with one other, its methodology is to contrast dharma from Western systems and thereby identify the signature principles of Indian civilization. This work should become a textbook and it can galvanize a new generation to start a thought revolution (vichar-kranti). I hope spiritual leaders will study Being Different in order to appreciate dharma’s place in the large canvas of inter-civilization debates, and thereby engage today’s intellectual kurukshetra from a position of strength.

In Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism Rajiv Malhotra has set for himself the challenging task of contesting the self-serving universalism that is readily apparent in the ‘grand narrative’ (whether secular or religious) produced by the West in which, argues Malhotra, the West saw itself as the agent or driver of the world’s historical unfolding and set the template for all nations and peoples of the world. Indeed, European colonial expansion to Africa, Asia, and Latin America was rationalized as an expression of divine plan and will that first became apparent (manifest) and inexorable (destiny) in Britain and the rest of Europe in the sixteenth century reaching the United States by the nineteenth century.

Universalism: Western and Christian
The leitmotif of Western universalism was crystallized in the British patriotic song “Rule, Britannia!” which provided a lasting expression of the colonialist conception of Britain and the British Empire that emerged in the eighteenth century. The phrase “The sun never set on the British Empire,” underscored the height of British Imperialism, when Britain had so many colonies under its control that no matter what time it was, somewhere in the Empire the sun was up. The ‘will to power’ and the ‘urge to dominate the world’ received a philosophical grounding in the hands of what I would call the “Gang of 4 Hs” (i.e. four philosophers of German extraction whose last names begin with the letter H: Georg F. W. Hegel, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Paul Hacker).

The hermeneutics of identity (subsuming the world within the orbit of the West and Christianity) that they proposed and practiced relegated Indian and other philosophies, cultures, and religions to some primitive forms that (as Hegel put it) must evolve toward the telos of One (read Western and Christian) philosophy, culture, and religion. European military conquests of Asia, Africa, and Latin America and the subsequent spin-off of socio-cultural and economic domination of the world led to what Husserl called ‘Europeanization of the Earth,’ i.e. ‘Westernization’ of the Earth since the West was construed as the universalistic claim of Europe (Mohanty 1997: 168).

It is to Malhotra’s credit that he has exposed with consummate skill how and why the ‘will to power and to dominate the world’ is inseparable from and inherent in the very nature of European representational, calculating thought. Not surprisingly, Jacques Derrida adamantly and brazenly declared that only Christianity could produce a concept of universality that has been successfully elaborated into the form which today dominates both philosophy and law globally. Only Britain and the USA have had the potential and power to sustain the “World Order” to assure relative and precarious stability globally. When Derrida makes an allowance for the plurality of religions as ‘world religions’ or ‘religions of the world,’ it is only on the basis of the universalizing and “unifying horizon of paternal-fraternal sameness of religions implicit in Christianity (Derrida 2001: 74).

Being Different persuasively argues that contrary to what Western Christian universalists would want us believe, the Western model of modernity, characterized by the development of rationality and an atomistic individualism, is not the sole way of relating to the world and others. It might have gained currency in the West, but Malhotra is at pains to remind us that even in the West this is far from being the only form of sociality. The West can exist only as part of a multipolar world in equable relation to other political, cultural, and social entities such as exist, for instance, in the model grounded in dharma. Malhotra accordingly makes a fervent plea for instituting equilibrium among regional poles where the differing social, cultural, and religious models for promoting development, democracy, and modernity would be welcome.

Indology: hegemony and asymmetry
India’s military conquest by the British led to the emergence of the discipline of Indology wherein Indian society and culture were (and are today) studied using Western epistemology and social sciences rather than the traditional Indian cognitive categories. This is a sure sign of the socio-cultural hegemony of the West, of what Husserl called the ‘Europeanization of the Earth.’ Indology is also cast in asymmetry—for the West is not studied, expounded, and criticized from the point of view of Indian thought.

Though many recognized the asymmetry of the encounter between the West and India and its outcome (deep cognitive dissonance between lived experience of the Indians and the theorizing about it), only a few academics have had the will to explore the actual feasibility of balancing the terms of the encounter and perhaps reverse the asymmetry of the dialogue. There were some feeble and half-hearted attempts in that direction (India through Hindu categories edited by McKim Marriott, 1989 for instance) but nothing much came out of them. Then, Professor Daya Krishna set up a series of meetings between the pundits and the Western trained Indologists on behalf of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research with a similar objective in mind (Krishna et al 1991). The outcome, however, was not very promising because the set up of the meetings was somewhat artificial and remained embedded in a Westernized context in the absence of prior experience of reaching out for Europe or the West, at least in the recent centuries. Historically, Indians simply have not been prepared for encounters of this type.

Commenting on Daya Krishna’s initiative, Wilhelm Halbfass observed that such experiments ought to be encouraged but any significant hermeneutical reversal cannot be expected from them. “For the time being,” he went on to say, “…there seems to be little choice but to continue the (admittedly asymmetrical) dialogue…” (Halbfass 1990: 229). In support, he cited the caution expressed by J. L. Mehta, the noted Indian philosopher, “…there is no other way open to us, in the East, but to go along with this Europeanization and to go through it…”(Wilhelm Halbfass 1990: 442). More recently, Dipesh Chakrabarty set out in search of a different, non-Western modernity but which ended in a ‘politics of despair’ after his realization that such a task was “impossible within the knowledge protocols of academic history, for the globality of academia is not independent of the globality that the European modern has created” (Chakrabarty 2000).

Malhotra regrets that the Indian academia and intelligentsia continue to accept and tolerate this asymmetry and hegemony as a historical contingency over which Indians did not (and as yet do not) hold any sway. Being Different courageously lays out a specific plan to get out of the Western orbit of knowledge protocols which, in the name of the universality of modernity and science, has trapped India (and the non-West in general) inside the cages of Oriental mysticism and the Asiatic mode of production.

Being Different also uncovers and explores major differences between India and the West that exist because of their markedly distinct philosophies and cosmologies. In this well documented, historical, and interpretive study, Malhotra employs the traditional hermeneutical strategy of purva paksha to examine the West from the Indic and dharmic civilizational points of view challenging many hitherto unexamined beliefs that each side holds about the other: the ‘One’ and many and how the two are related, God/s and creation, time and history, mind and world, identity in relation to difference, reality, and phenomenality. In the process he draws attention to the centrality of the fundamental question of metaphysics to all of them: difference.

Chaos and order
I found particularly informative and instructive Malhotra’s discussion of the role that the notion of chaos plays in the Indic and dharmic world whereas the West absolutely abhors chaos. Hegel, for instance manifested a deep-rooted fear of chaos and uncertainty, privileging instead order in Western aesthetics, ethics, religions, society, and politics. He therefore sought to bring the chaotic diversity of (newly discovered) Oriental cultures, religions, and societies into manageable order by classifying them into ‘pantheism,’ ‘monotheism,’ and ‘polytheism’ as ‘world historical categories’ to provide an intuitive (!) comprehension of the meaning value of each culture. He next came up with a detailed scheme to bring different cultures into a system of equivalences in which relative meaning can be assigned to each culture. Hegel thereby fleshed out the contours of the ‘West’ and the ‘Rest,’ providing conceptual tools for epistemic subjugation of the rest of the world in the name of law and order. The dharmic worldview, on the other hand, has always seen chaos as a creative catalyst built into the cosmos to balance out order that could become stultifying, and hence it adopts a more relaxed attitude towards chaos.

In sum, Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism is a meticulously documented piece of work providing an original, constructive, and insightful interpretation of why the West and the rest of the world must recognize and respect the distinct identity of India and its civilization.

References
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2001. “Above All, No Journalists!” In Religion and Media edited by Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
Halbfass, Wilhelm. 1990. India and Europe: an essay in understanding. Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass.
Krishna, Daya et al, eds. 1991. Samvada. Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research, in association with Motilal Banarasidass.
Marriott, McKim, ed. 1989. India through Hindu Categories. New Delhi: Sage Publications.
Mohanty, Jitendra Nath. 1997. “Between Indology and Indian Philosophy.” In Beyond Orientalism: The Work of Wilhelm Halbfass and its Impact on Indian and Cross-Cultural Studies edited by Eli Franco and Karin Preisendanz, 163-170, Amsterdam-Atlanta,GA: Rodopi.

Being Different makes it astoundingly clear that the ‘global’ civilization today is actually nothing of the kind. It is not an integrative fusion of beneficial ideas and perspectives from every civilization across the globe. It is, instead, a swallowing up of all human endeavor and culture for the nourishment of a madly materialistic, ultimately unsustainable, wildly destructive credo of monolithic cultural, political and religious imperialism. Rajiv Malhotra maintains that this is nowhere more clearly manifest than in the case of the centuries-long Western appropriation, re-mapping, and eradication of the sources of the native traditions, sciences, and spiritual practices of India.

Being Different boldly deconstructs the ubiquitously lauded tenet of ‘religious tolerance,’ so widely celebrated by diverse groups, and reminds us that none of us would want to be merely tolerated in any other situation and that mutual respect is what we should be aiming at. But it is made clear that this is a very difficult proposition because mutual respect in the realm of religion entails the affirmation of other faiths and their modes of worship as equally valid spiritual paths. This would mean the complete overturning, at the deepest level, of foundational dogmas of strict exclusivism that underlie historically orthodox Western theologies (an occurrence that liberal theologians would applaud). The volume similarly unpacks the far more insidious dangers of the seemingly innocuous idea of ‘universalism’ and delineates the difference between ‘universalism’ in Dharma-based civilizations and in its Western iteration. It does so by clarifying how ‘universalism,’ from the perspective of Hindu or Buddhist Dharma (through their own respective doctrines), is supported by concepts that acknowledge unity through its manifestation as diversity. In contradistinction, Western concepts of universalism carry critical dangers for non-dominant cultures because it confuses Universalization with Westernization, the expansion of which has involved the digestion of ‘useable’ elements from alternate civilizations. The volume warns that when such a confusion of categories is imbibed by non-Western peoples, it turns them into prey for the ascendant culture. While the book focuses on India and its intellectual and spiritual traditions, the same warning holds for all existentially struggling civilizations.

In Being Different, Rajiv Malhotra unapologetically holds up a mirror to dominant models of Western secular and religious culture and, perhaps most importantly, provokes introspection for those whose spiritual heritage lies —whether by ancestry or adoption—in the vast and diverse civilizational spheres birthed in the pluralistic environment of the Dharma traditions.

What has the insight of a seemingly obscure agglomeration of religions (obscure to us in the West) that reside under the umbrella term known as the ‘dharmic tradition’ got to do with the major problems that haunt world politics today? And what has any of this got to do with us here in the West? Everything.

Just over three decades ago Edward Said’s challenging text, Orientalism, burst onto the scene and delivered a revolutionary impact on much of the social sciences. But what the book did not do is tell us is how the ‘Orient’ thinks. The downside of the legacy of Said’s book is that the Orient appears as a passive region that cannot represent itself. What was missing from that great work was something that could tell us not only something about how the conglomerate known as the Orient thinks, but how its own philosophy and weltanschauungs could tell us new things about the ideational self-conception of the West and of the accompanying conceptions of the world that flow from this. Said’s great lacuna, I believe, has been overcome in magnificent and equally challenging form by Rajiv Malhotra’s epic intellectual journey into the world of dharmic thought. As Malhotra puts it, in exploring the world of dharmic religious thought we can ‘reverse the gaze’ and look deeply into the very structures of thought that define Western civilization. Malhotra also adds a crucial dimension concerning the identity of the West – namely its Christian religion.

This remarkable and highly original book is itself an exercise in being different, insofar as it constitutes not a nihilistic critique of all that is wrong with the West but offers constructive – dare I say ‘healing’ – powers that can offer ways out of the impasse concerning one of the defining features of Western civilization – its self-belief that what is Western is truly and inherently universal. It is this very existential conflation, Malhotra argues, that lies at the heart of the world’s problems today. The solution lies not with the denial or destruction of Western civilization, but rather with the need for it to humbly transcend this great conflation and learn not to ‘tolerate’ other civilizations and cultures but to embrace a mutual respect for them. It could also benefit from a healthy dose of humility by recognising the many debts that the West owes the East in general, and India in particular, concerning various pioneering inventions that found their way across to help nurture the rise of the West (Indian mathematical break-throughs is a case in point).

Being Different is written in a refreshingly direct and highly accessible form that is so often not the case with works located in this genre. Its effectiveness is also marvelously portrayed by ideas that are sometimes so simple that one wonders why many of us had not come up with them before. The example of his fascinating story concerning his critique of the word ‘tolerance’ is a marvelous case in point. His argument here is disarmingly simple but is a product of his poignant analysis of the exclusivist tendencies that lie at the base of Western civilization; tendencies that are not always recognised as such by Westerners given that they are camouflaged in ‘nice-sounding’ but ultimately self-deluding rhetoric. Whether his message is ultimately capable of transcending this exclusivism is, of course, another matter. But the challenge lies surely with those of us in the West who dress such exclusivism up in the ideational garments of human rights, tolerance, and the central notion of making the world a better place through culturally converting Others to Western civilization.

This is a big book on a massive topic that speaks directly to the central concerns of us in the West as well as how we think and act in the world, as much as it does to the many more people who reside outside of the West. All in all, Being Different is a fitting and major response to Samuel Huntington’s position on ‘who are we?’ as the West; one that can perhaps best be provided by someone reversing the gaze on the West through a non-Western lens. This could, and in my view deserves to, be one of the defining books of the age.

Being Different is both a critical exploration of the two  vastly different metaphysical/religious worldviews (the Abrahamic and Dharmic families of spiritual traditions) dominant in the US and India respectively,  and a challenge to what the author finds to be an asymmetric power relationship between them. Malhotra writes with passion from within an avowedly dharmic stance and with the intention of undermining the attempts to domesticate and expropriate the Indian traditions in a process of inter religious dialogue that is ultimately based on a western cosmological framework and religious assumptions. In drawing out the contrast between “tolerance of other religions” and “mutual respect between religions” in chapter one, he brilliantly exposes the pretence in western affirmations of cultural pluralism. He further insightfully suggests that the West – especially the US – suffers from what he calls “difference anxiety” that can only be controlled by producing a worldwide religious homogeneity which effectively contradicts the deceptively overt commitment to having a diversity of cultures. And against those within the Dharmic framework who envy the “riches” of the globalized world (a “difference anxiety” from below compared to that of the West), he shows that accepting western cultural assumptions is not essential to participation in the benefits of the globalization process. This book is essential reading for western scholars engaged in cross-culturalstudies. Malhotra espouses an “audacity of difference” in any such enterprise that defends both the distinctiveness and the spiritual value of Indian thought and that effectively reveals the cultural chauvinism of much western thought in its encounters with other cultures. Entertaining such audacity without assuming that it is simply an apology for Hinduism could well transform the current global multi-cultural dialogue to positive effect.