FOR many years, in the workshop of my mind, the two concepts ‘freedom’ and ‘truth’ covered the same topography, contained the same features and occupied the same normative space. It would, in fact, be erroneous to say that ‘freedom’ and ‘truth’ were two sides of the same coin. They were actually the same side of the same coin. This self-assuredness which I felt with respect to their meaning was not out of some analytical laziness that had failed to distinguish between the two but was, instead, the result of a deep belief that the pursuit of freedom was the same as the pursuit of truth.

Bapuji is perhaps to blame for this conflation since he persuaded us that svaraj was both ‘self-rule’ and ‘rule over the self’, the latter being desirable because it was in the service of satya. Our choices, both personal and professional, were guided by the ‘truth’ which produced a regime of rules that both suppressed and encouraged desires. Hence we were called upon to become satyagrahis. In the ashram we would learn the protocols.¹

While the easy equation did no harm to my engagement with the world, it kept me from recognizing the conundrums that so often ephemerally present themselves but soon disappear if one is too distracted to take note of them. Like the quark whose presence and signature requires special detection instruments, the distinction between truth and freedom requires special attentiveness. If one is not attentive to the internal constitution of truth, and also of freedom, one would miss the distinctions that fleetingly appear and would, thereby, mistakenly conclude that such differences do not exist.

They do, in fact, exist. To the attentive mind they are present. These differences soon begin to build up a cognitive pressure such that one cannot ignore them any longer and are compelled to think through their contrasting logics as one seeks to spell out the complex relationship between truth and freedom. It is a relationship with many points of contact and many interlinkages. It can best be compared to the relationship between DNA and RNA where the one brings stability and codes to the relationship while the other brings dynamism and actualization of these codes. Yet they are not the same.

 

I would not really worry about this distinction if it had not been for the title given to me, which I willingly accepted, for my submission for this issue of Seminar on the pedagogy of dissent. It is the second word in the title, ‘speak’, attached to freedom, i.e. freedom speak, which has generated the uncertainty. To ‘speak’ entails intention. Thought has to be conveyed. This implies the making of choices, distinguishing between that which is more significant from that which is less, and then acting on that choice through a speech act. And every choice entails a decision to commit and omit: when we decide to say something in a situation we are knowingly deciding not to say some other things which would be equally true and equally known to be true. ‘Freedom speak’ refers to a prior set of thought activities that must be completed before the speaking starts. If we review this process of moving from ascribing significance, to making choices, to acting on those choices, to achieving desired outcomes, we would find in this process exaggeration, under-emphasis, deception, rhetoric, calculation, concealment, and plain speaking, all in the service of truth. In what follows I will discuss five scenarios of ‘freedom speak’ where this relationship of freedom with truth is set out. They show that ‘freedom speak’ is not as straightforward as it superficially appears.

 

The first scenario comes from classical Greek literature, from the plays of Sophocles and Euripides. Foucault in his lectures, Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia,² compares the attitude to truth of the god Apollo, as the oracle of Delphi, in two plays. In Sophocles’ Oedipus the King he seeks to reveal the truth when he discloses the relationship between Jocasta and Oedipus, and in Euripides’ Ion, to conceal the truth as he does when he hides the relationship between him and Creusa. In Ion, Apollo’s attitude to truth is determined by contingency, by his guilt in revealing that he, Apollo, is the father of Ion who he had fathered when he raped Creusa. Truth here gets hidden by the cryptic speech of Apollo. It is not the supreme value trumping all speech acts. Apollo’s truth gets overridden by guilt, causing him, as the oracle of Delphi, to remain silent when asked by humans to reveal who Ion’s parents are.

If contingency then determines the attitude of the oracle to truth, it is not surprising that we humans too often fall victim to the contingent as we try, confronting the vagaries of life, to negotiate our way through, and perhaps around, it. We too rely on the cryptic reply, the answer that is neither full truth nor complete lie. In a lucid passage, Foucault contrasts these two attitudes of the god Apollo:

‘In Oedipus the King, Phoebus Apollo speaks the truth from the very beginning, truthfully foretelling what will happen. And human beings are the ones who continually hide from or avoid seeing the truth, trying to escape the destiny foretold by the god. But in the end through the signs Apollo has given them, Oedipus and Jocasta discover the truth in spite of themselves. In the …play, Ion, human beings are trying to discover the truth: Ion wants to know who he is and where he comes from; Creusa wants to know the fate of her son. Yet, it is Apollo who voluntarily conceals the truth. The Oedipal problem of truth is resolved by showing how mortals, in spite of their own blindness, will see the light of truth which is spoken by the god, and which they do not wish to see. The Ionic problem of truth is resolved by showing how human beings, in spite of the silence of Apollo, will discover the truth they are so eager to know.^’3

 

The cryptic response, and its consequences, is brought out most clearly in the second case. In the great epic The Mahabharata, where it is held every conceivable human conundrum is discussed, Yudhisthira, the eldest of the Pandavas who is regarded as the most virtuous, the exemplar of dharma, the dharmaraja, is confronted with a decisive moment in the battle against the Kauravas. His army is being decimated by Drona, their teacher and master archer, who taught them all they know about archery but is fighting for the opposite side.

The Pandavas, advised by Lord Krishna, decide that the only way to stop Drona is through deceit since he cannot be defeated in battle as he is militarily invincible. Drona loves his son Asvatthaman, who is battling in another sector and wreaking havoc on the Pandava army. The Pandavas believe that if told that Asvatthaman is dead then Drona will lose both heart and purpose and immediately abandon the fight.

 

A rumour is started that ‘Asvatthaman is dead’. Despite being asked not just by the Pandavas, his brothers, but by no less a person than Lord Krishna himself to affirm the truth of the rumour, Yudhisthira hesitates for he is the dharmaraja. He cannot lie. Asvatthaman is not dead. But telling the truth, when asked by Drona to confirm the rumour, would mean the sure defeat of his army and the death of thousands of soldiers. He hesitates. The Pandava brothers engineer that an elephant called Asvatthaman is killed to add credibility to the deceit and give it a veneer of truth. The rumour gains currency. Drona hears it. Suspecting that this could be a rumour, but wondering if it may be true, he resolves to ask the only person he knows who will not lie, the dharmaraja. Here is how the text describes the exchange.

‘Deeply fearful of lying, but longing for victory, …he spoke to Drona. ‘Asvatthaman is slain,’ he said; then, in an undertone, ‘the elephant’. Now previously Yudhisthira’s chariot had always remained four fingers off the ground; but when he spoke these words his horses came down to earth.’⁴

Yudhisthira’s little lie, or as some have described it, half-truth, changes the course of the battle. Drona who does not hear the phrase, ‘the elephant’, gives up the fight, overcome with grief and a loss of purpose at the death of his son. He is subsequently killed. Committed to the virtuous life, dharmaraja’s calculated half-truth could be seen in many ways, that he did what he did either because he did not want to lose the battle, or because he has been urged to lie by Lord Krishna, who cloaks it with the justification that it is the duty of a king to save his kingdom (a utilitarian calculus if there was one), or because he believes that Drona has lost the protection of virtue because he, a Brahmin, is fighting like a Kshatriya. The fact that it was a foul deed is affirmed by the text describing the chariot, which had always been elevated, losing its elevation and descending to earth.

With his little lie the virtuous Yudhisthira, the dharmaraja, has become earthly. He will now have to bear the consequences of this loss of virtue as he does when he is punished at the end of the epic. This second case shows the complex calculus that a truth speaker has to make as he decides between victory or defeat, truth and falsehood, virtue and villany. Freedom speak, in human contexts, is often the choice of the little lie or the half-truth.⁵

 

The third case shows the relationship of truth to power. Here we see domination, resistance, rhetoric, exaggeration, and reason all on display, all attitudes that the truth seeker must experience when confronting the power of power. A good illustration of this relationship comes from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Act 5, Scene 1.

In the well known exchange, Isabella comes to Duke Vincento and seeks his intervention to give her ‘justice, justice, justice justice!’ Isabella is asked by the Duke to tell her story to his friend Agnelo who, abusing the power delegated to him by the Duke, seeks her virginity in exchange for her brother’s freedom. Frustrated, she asks the Duke to hear her himself because speaking to Angelo is to ‘seek redemption of the devil’. As she persists in exposing Angelo, her story, her truth, gets dismissed by Angelo as infirm and the witness of a woman who is not in her senses. Angelo challenges her truth with the charge of insanity. His truth is that she will ‘speak most bitterly and strange’, in other words exaggerate. Isabella replies:

‘It is not truer he is Angelo,

Than this is all as true as it is strange;

Nay, it is ten times true; for truth is truth

To the end of reckoning.’

 

Truth to be recognized for what it is, must now face the gauntlet of power and the charge of madness. And as this fascinating exchange between Isabella and Angelo proceeds, where he alleges her truth to be that of an insane woman, comes this gem from the Duke:

By mine honesty,

If she be mad, as I believe no other,

Her madness hath the oddest frame of sense

Such a dependency of thing on thing,

As e’er I heard in madness.

Here we see truth speaking to power as in Isabella’s petition to the Duke. We also see power speaking to truth as in Angelo’s derision of her claim. We see how power challenges truth by ridiculing it and by undermining its epistemological grounds, in this case using the charge of insanity to dismiss its claims. Power has many subterfuges in its arsenal against truth. Dissimulation and rhetoric are some of them. These must be challenged and exposed. Shakespeare, in Measure for Measure, is committed to doing so. In the play he has truth triumph even over the severe challenge of insanity. The Duke who has listened carefully to Isabella finds that ‘Her madness hath the oddest frame of sense’.⁶

The Bard suggests that through the thicket of rhetoric, deceit, exaggeration and resistance that we experience every day, the ‘frame of sense’ will assert itself. Truth will triumph. If given the chance, freedom speak will serve the cause of truth as ‘her madness hath the oddest frame of sense’. This is the challenge that Dabholkar, Pansare and Kalburgi, three persons on a common mission, have posed to the falsehood that in the present day has begun to envelop and assert itself in this ancient land.

 

The fourth case emphasizes this point about exaggeration, or rather of shrillness, producing shock in the dominant speaking frame which is often deaf and has to be jolted out of its deafness. Shrillness compels the dominant frame to give the truth of the subaltern a hearing. Most often subaltern truths are rendered silent by the elite who, inspite of their love for the Rashomon story, remain deaf to the subaltern perspective. How else can one explain in a country, which has the technological capacity to send a satellite to Mars, the persistence of the practice of carrying of human excreta by millions of dalits? How else can one understand the honouring of Mahasweta Devi, the champion of the adivasis for eight long decades, while ignoring her cause? The corrective to this deafness has to be shrillness.

The Dalit poet Namdeo Dhasal understood this basic truth. He spoke a language that cannot be ignored.

‘…One should hurl grenades; one should drop hydrogen bombs to raze

Literary societies, schools, colleges, hospitals, airports

One should open the manholes of sewers and throw into them

Plato, Einstein, Archimedes, Socrates,

Marx, Ashoka, Hitler, Camus, Sartre, Kafka,

Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Ezra Pound, Hopkins, Goethe,

Dostoevsky, Mayakovsky, Maxim Gorky,

Edison, Madison, Kalidasa, Tukaram, Vyasa, Shakespeare, Jnaneshvar,

And keep them rotting there with all their words…’

 

These are strong sentiments. Throw the icons of a civilization not just anywhere but into the sewer where the Dalit is compelled by an unjust system to go. The words quoted above are the least provocative of the lines in his poem ‘Man, you should explode’, from the collection Golpitha.⁷ One can wager that the sensibilities of all, even the revolutionary class, are taken aback by their shrillness and yet these are words that describe the condition of the Dalit whose humanity is regularly denied. The ruling class shrinks from the jarring language and tries to turn the page to find, in the same poem, more lines that shock. ‘Man, one should tear off all the pages of all the sacred books in the world, and give them to people for wiping shit off their arses when done.’ Dhasal’s poetry was at the heart of the Dalit Panther movement. His shrillness pierced the knowledge hegemony of the ruling class. It created a space for Dalit speak, a version of freedom speak, the most striking of which is the genre of the atmakatha.

The fifth case to be explored concerns examining the process by which the frame for speaking by intellectuals and politicians, and by other padhe likhe aadmi, is constituted. The frame is not neutral for it is permeated through and through by the beliefs and biases of the social and political elite. These give the frame its ability to determine what is more and what is less significant. These give the interpretation offered meaning. These meanings come from the knowledge elite. Camouflaged as it is by knowledge protocols, which present themselves as being interest independent, the frame of speaking masquerades as being value neutral which it definitely is not.

Because it is driven by the resources of the knowledge institutions of the West, as described in detail in the autobiography of Benedict Anderson,⁸ there is an epistemic asymmetry between the speaker and the listener, making the latter feel that he must adopt, both in speech and behaviour, the ways of the dominant class. If the listener is from the non-West then he seeks to abandon the frames of significance of his home culture and adopt those of the imposed culture. Speaking as a man of colour, Franz Fanon writes, ‘When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine’.⁹ This asymmetry produces a colonization of the mind.

 

This argument of the value-slope of a framework has many expressions. Stephen Toulmin describes how even something as benign as a landscaped garden has the values and culture of the landscape architect infused into it, as can be seen in the contrast between an English and a French garden. The gardens differ in their design since the English wish to work with the topography of nature that is given to them while the French seek to modify it by giving it definite geometrical forms.

Susanne Rudolph in her Presidential Address, at the annual meeting of APSA on 2 September 2004, talked about the ‘Imperialism of Categories’ and wondered if it was possible to infiltrate them and thereby adopt, modify and transform them to ensure that they represent more truthfully the ‘world view of the alien other’.¹⁰ Such infiltration is easier said than done because the exercise of infiltration is often done in English and not in categories taken from the bhasas. A namaste in a sola topee is just pretence.

 

The most comprehensive thesis on this issue of the pervasive value slope of a framework of speaking is that of Edward Said who, in his reflections on Orientalism, addressed the challenging issue of how to represent other cultures, societies, histories, of the relationship between power and knowledge and of the methodological questions that have to do with the relationship between different kinds of texts, text and context, and text and history.¹¹ Mapping these relationships throws wide open the field for freedom speak.

Freedom speak has to happen, after all, through speaking, which brings us to the issue of the language of a place. Forgetting that people in all places do not speak the same language and that truth-prone freedom or freedom-fostering truth is not spoken in the same manner in all languages can lead to much communicative falsehood. Though one language may claim to be more global than all others, all languages are local and historically evolved with the community resident in a region of the earth, and serves its cultural and survival needs, including the need to expand, migrate, colonize and live in harmony with the ecosystem. There is a symbiotic relationship between a language and its ecosystem. Learning the local language opens new vistas for the eye to see which English cannot make visible. The Sami people in the Artic, it is claimed, have sixteen words for snow. The Brazilians, according to the Economist of 10 September 2016, quoting a 1976 study done by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, have 134 words to describe themselves based mostly on skin colour. Words such as branca suja (dirty white) are part of the list.

 

In an insightful article titled ‘Expressing the Inexpressible’, Nilanjana Roy narrates: ‘Some years ago, the environmental photographer and journalist Arati Kumar-Rao, travelling in the deep Thar desert in Rajasthan, asked her guide for the local names of clouds. Light formations were called kanThi, she learnt; very dense clouds kaLaan, feathery patterns were named after partridge’s wings, teeter pankhi. She learnt more names: for the scree, for 80 different species of desert plants, for rock and water formations. …all the ‘nothing places on earth turn out to be filled with life.’¹² Words, expressions, colloquialisms, folklore all give form and shade to a world that cannot be captured by English for English excludes even in translation. But we rarely accept this truth. We rarely feel free and expansive to speak about it.

Imagine a girl named ‘Language’ in English. It is not uncommon in India, however, to name a girl Bhasa.

 

Footnotes:

1. I am grateful to my friend Arindam Chakraborty who on reading the article suggested the following: ‘Freedom comes out of: self=auto, rule=nomy side of the svaraj coin – which is quite clear, and how Truth comes out of: rule over the self – the same side of the same coin. What is not however clear, and needs elaboration, is why is ruling over or discipline or control of the self a necessary and sufficient condition of believing/thinking/ stating what really is the case (the plain concept of truth)? Is an unruly self the only source of error and prejudice and other kinds of falsehood? And is Ahimsa the other side of the same coin?’ These are difficult questions which would need me to work out a response which, unfortunately, is still work in progress.

2. Michel Foucault, Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia. Six lectures at the University of California, October-November 1983.

3. Ibid., p. 17.

4. John D. Smith, The Mahabharata (an abridged translation). Penguin Classics, New Delhi, 2009, p. 477.

5. The essay by Arindam Chakrabarti, ‘Just Words: An Ethics of Conversation in the Mahabharata’, has been very illuminating as has the edited book, Mahabharata Now: Narration, Aesthetics, Ethics by Arindam Chakrabarti and Sibaji Bandyopadhyay. Routledge, New Delhi, 2014.

6. Peter Ronald deSouza, ‘Foreword’, in Shormishtha Panja (ed.), Shakespeare and the Art of Lying. Orient Blackswan, New Delhi, 2013.

7. Namdeo Dhasal, Golpitha. Lokvangmaya Griha, 1972.

8. Benedict Anderson, A Life Beyond Boundaries. Verso, London, 2016.

9. Franz Fanon, ‘The Man of Colour and the White Woman’, in Azzedine Haddour (ed.), The Fanon Reader. Pluto Press, London, 2006, p. 46.

10. Susanne H Rudolph, ‘The Imperialism of Categories: Situating Knowledge in a Globalizing World’, Perspectives on Politics 3(1), March 2005.

11. Edward Said, ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’, in Reflections on Exile and other Literary and Cultural Essays. Granta Books, London, 2001.

12. Nilanjana Roy, ‘Expressing the Inexpressible’, FT Weekend, 3 August 2016.