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Literature and the Moral Imaginations of Modernity

Although modernity is currently a widely discussed theme, its moral dimension is relatively neglected. This is surprising, because the moral dimension is quite crucial to the historical triumph of modern culture. Modernity’s challenge to traditional societies never succeeds historically until it is able to advance a moral argument for its superiority.

I want to exaggerate Weber’s claim in the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The standard reading of Weber’s work is that he demonstrates that Protestantism fashioned an ethical doctrine that provided the activity of capitalist accumulation with a new moral legitimacy. In traditional moral systems, the activity of amassing wealth was associated with the lowly dispositions of greed, selfishness, and a pitiless passion for money. It required a fundamental transvaluation to view diverse forms of self-regarding activity as intrinsically valuable. I read Weber as saying that until Protestantism advanced a powerful moral argument in its favour, the civilizational project of modernity was fatally incomplete.

As nineteenth-century Bengali discussions saw it, modernity as a new civilization could be justified by three different arguments. The first is the argument of comfort or—‘commodious living’ in Hobbes’s lapidary phrase—the idea that capitalist modernity leads to a revolutionary expansion of productivity which makes a more satisfactory and comfortable material life possible for all. It is wrong to underestimate the power of the enchantment of material prosperity. This was usually supplemented and framed by a wider rationalist argument that the modern world is based on the expansion of scientific reasoning and social rationalization in Weber’s sense. It is also an immensely powerful ideal, particularly for intellectual tastes. But it must be recognized that, in the moral context of traditional societies, neither of these two arguments is incontrovertible.

In the Hindu and Buddhist traditions of India, it is possible to make the counterargument that it is not a life of acquisitive excess but one of restraint of desire that is truly morally worthy. These religious traditions had well-rehearsed arguments which stressed that the desire for material goods was eventually illimitable; the constant movement towards prosperity produced discontent. Material things also gave diminishing pleasure.

The expansion of knowledge can similarly be seen as a morally neutral or indifferent achievement. Being knowledgeable is not the same as being good or being happy. Traditional religious beliefs also warned against the tendency of knowledge to produce unjustified arrogance. What traditional cultures find far more unsettling is the idea that modernity is not a proposal for living without morals, but by more stringent ethical rules, and that living by rationalistic rules gives human beings greater dignity that living by religious ones.¹ This deeply Kantian theme constantly reappears in the religious and ethical debates in early Indian modernity and is very clear in the discourses of early modern Bengal from the late nineteenth century.

To understand moral change, at least in the Indian context, we require a historical phenomenology of morals. The question of explaining or even making sense of moral change is exceedingly difficult, and the present studies appear to miss some crucial questions. It is widely recognized that moral systems are different between societies, and between historical periods in the same society. Durkheimian sociology would treat these distinct moral systems as self-contained wholes, so we see clearly that the moral system of traditional Hindu society is fundamentally different from that of the modern West or even modern India. But precisely because these are systems of ‘conscience collective’—collective consciousness about matters of conscience—the question is how they ever change at all. What are the processes, the mechanisms that effect this baffling transformation of those rules of conduct in a society that are not merely universally respected, but taken for granted?

In Indian social science there has been much discussion about the historical transition to modernity, and in trying to understand this change historians have paid increasing attention to the peculiar persuasiveness of literature rather than the standard analysis of philosophical and theological disputation.² In the first stages of the transition, modernity is typically supported by arguments of scientific rationality and commercial prosperity. Yet as greater self-confidence is gained, its advocates are able to claim that modernity is not just rationally and economically superior to traditional forms, but that it offers, crucially, a superior ideal of the ethical life.

In studying the moral transition to modernity, why should we study literature of all things—why not philosophy? Answers to this question must be given twice: one specific to India, and another more general. A puzzling feature of Indian intellectual history is that although India has a great philosophical tradition dating back to classical antiquity, historically this tradition evinced little interest in questions of the justifiability of social relations.

At this moment I can only report this fact, not explain it. Contesting schools of classical Indian philosophy developed and carried on long disputes in the fields of ontology, epistemology, logic, and aesthetics, in addition to producing powerful theological doctrines interpreting the religious significance of Hindu beliefs. Strangely, Indian thinking did not develop a specialized field of social philosophy. Consequently, classical philosophic schools debated question like whether the world really exists or not: whether in their mundane existence human beings can really be happy; whether reliable knowledge is at all possible; or whether inferential knowledge is trustworthy; but not questions like whether the caste system is justified. This peculiarity of the classical tradition lends a peculiar twist to the modes of reflection on modernity in India. Literary reflections rather than social theory settle civilizational judgements about whether modernity offers an overall better way of existence than earlier forms, about what Hans Blumenberg called ‘the legitimacy of the modern age’.

Questions—about the rationalization of society; the alterations in fundamental religious beliefs; the decline of traditional authority of the king in the political world, of Brahmins in social life, and of the father inside the family; the immense changes in habits of intimacy between the sexes—asked and answered by social theory in the West, are all analysed and answered through literary writing. They are found in the discourses internal to literary forms like the novelistic narrative, lyrical poetry, and autobiographic writing.

Charles Taylor has suggested that in the modern world human beings have no recourse but to live theoretically. I take this to mean that social theories provide modern people with large-scale moral and cognitive maps in living their social lives. Equally, in their small-scale but individually-taken decisions about their personal lives, these theoretical structures enable them to ground their decisions and ways of acting in the world. If that is true, in the case of modern Indians this ineluctable theoretical function is performed by texts of modern vernacular literature rather than by reading the texts of Kant and Mill.

A widespread supposition is that modernity implies an unprecedented transformation of society’s moral imagination. This way of being morally in the world needs to be outlined in its main principles, filled out in detail, ethically justified by close reasoning, and finally disseminated across society. Philosophical and theoretical debates of great intensity—which also happen in modern India—are normally restricted to circles of intellectuals, and cannot spread very far to reconstitute the moral ‘common sense’ of society. Literature, I wish to suggest, plays a fundamental role as the primary vehicle for the dissemination, popularization, and eventually the normalization of these ideas about moral conduct.

The triumph of modern life requires the conversion of ordinary people to modernity’s moral imagination, and turning these new moral precepts into the constituents of a Gramscian ‘common sense’. This is what literature accomplishes historically. In the nineteenth century some ordinary Indians began an immense transformation of their moral universe. They began to conceive of God in a new way, they fell in love and related to women in their lives in a new manner, they became thoughtful about their own moral life in an unprecedented fashion, and they subjected themselves to new and stringently exacting moral standards. The cumulative effect of this led to a new conception of the moral life.

God is conceived not as unpredictable, vengeful, or manifesting himself in all objects of the external world; instead, God sits subtly inside the individual’s heart and whispers his moral promptings in a distinctly Rousseauian way. People are persuaded to do this, to introduce such incalculable changes in their moral lives, I suggest, not by directly reading Rousseau and Kant, whom few could understand at that time.³ Rather, this process is executed through reading the literary works of writers like Bankimchandra Chatterjee and Rabindranath Tagore, who persuaded their audience through the work of literary enchantment. Something as large and as fundamental as conversion to a different morality can happen only through a discourse that is constant, not intermittent—a discourse that is insistent, intimate, subtle, ubiquitous, intertwined with people’s very existence. This is a discourse which speaks to us through the splendour and insidious persuasion of our own language and its indefinable wonders.

To understand the intellectual history of Indian modernity, it seems essential to move beyond a conventional sociology of literature which specializes in examining how literature reflected social change. I wish to suggest that we need to widen the scope of this sociology of literature and turn the explanatory point in the reverse direction: to view how literary discourse forms the directions and contours of our emotions, structures moral intentionality, and shapes the moral personality of ordinary individuals by celebrating the modern way of being in the world as both intellectually admirable and socially possible. Ethics and emotions are in any case closely, inextricably linked, as I shall try to show by analysing the socially radical consequences of narratives of romantic love.⁴

I shall now use some examples from standard modern forms of literature to show how literature first suggests and then justifies a modern conception of the self, around which eventually a whole structure of modern moral sensibility takes shape. First, let us turn to the modern novel. Like all great civilizations, the Indian was rich in narrative conventions. And there is a long and powerful cultural tradition which argued that moral life—what it means to act well in situations of moral complexity or puzzlement—can be examined through narrative devices.⁵ The Hindu epics, like the Mahabharata, do not offer their readers a simplistic sense of moral order and security by telling a tale of the final eradication of evil. Rather, they constantly place narrative figures in situations that are morally puzzling or transgressive, and prove that in actual human lives it is difficult to follow ethical rules—because although the rules are clear, human lives are not. Moral excellence—living a good life—is a matter of improvisation and adventure.⁶

In traditional Hindu society the greatest ethical challenge is breaking the moulds of typical life-patterns determined by caste laws. Traditional narrative conventions, unsurprisingly, reflected and reinforced the moral sensibility of caste by the narrative depiction and celebration of these types. In conventional stories, Ksatriya princes led lives of bravery, the Brahmins lives of intellectual excitement.⁷ Comparably, in Buddhist tales, merchants often showed their own caste virtues.⁸ In terms of literary theory and narratology, these traditional characters fall generally into the pattern described by Bakhtin in his illuminating essay on the difference between the formation of characters in the epic and the novel.⁹ As Bakhtin suggests in his essay about European classical literature, the characters in the Indian epics also come narratively fully formed.

Usually the events of the narrative arrange severe tests for the attributes of the heroic character, but the figure is already entirely formed when the narrative begins, even if this is in his childhood. He already has inside him those qualities which make him both typical and extraordinary. A character is ‘typical’ in the sense that he can have only those dispositions which are peculiar and distinctive to his occupation or social class—moral courage, sharp intelligence, independence of spirit, defiance of earthly powers if he is a Brahmin, and correspondingly, bravery, military skills, an irrepressible sense of justice, strength of character, and fortitude if he is a Ksatriya. But heroic characters of traditional stories would have to possess these ‘typical’, i.e. caste-specific, virtues to an extraordinary extent in order to qualify as the subject of celebration through a narrative. In ordinary circumstances, he is a Durkheimian hero in the sense that he demonstrates in an exemplarily intensified way the caste ethic of a particular social group. He is extraordinary not because his behaviour is idiosyncratic or deviant, or because his thinking is distinctively individual, unlike that of any other person; in fact, it is an emphatic lack of ‘distinctiveness’ in the modern sense which makes him a hero.

Since the society’s sociological structure requires a finite number of social types, and each of these groups has a clearly determined trajectory through life, the narrative economy of the society is also correspondingly limited. It is, in fact, interesting to see not merely the restriction of types of characters, but also how traditional societies make do with a relatively small number of foundational stories and read them repetitively. The hunger for the narratives of a modern society is satisfied by writing ever new stories; in traditional societies, by telling the same stories over and over again. In the case of the stories of the epics or even the puranas in India, readers do not come to the narrative with the question typical of the modern reader—‘what happens next?’ Most readers hear the basic outline of the story early in their childhood; and thus, when they read the story or hear it repeatedly later, the central question among the readership is not ‘what happens next?’ but ‘what is the meaning of things happening this way?’

Such a narrative economy is radically transformed by the coming of the novel. First, the aesthetic idea of the novel itself is shatteringly new in the context of caste society and its ordering of individual lives. The novel, in contrast with the epics, is always a celebration of ordinariness, Ordinariness, however, means several things in the aesthetics of the modern novel. Different aspects of this modern aesthetic of ordinariness have to be distinguished and explored because the meaning of ordinariness and its counterpoint to traditional narrative ideals vary in specific cultural contexts. In terms of traditional narrative aesthetics, the very idea of a narrative celebration of an ordinary, unexemplary individual’s life, or a passage of experience in the life of an otherwise undistinugished person is almost a contradiction in terms. How can a person deserve to be a hero, deserve to be the subject of narrative celebration because he is ordinary, because his life is not spectacular?

In Indian society, the ideals of caste provide an added piquancy to the idea of the ordinariness of narratable lives. To conceive of an individual life as ‘ordinary’, in the sense that it could happen to any man irrespective of caste, is itself a radical departure from the segmented trajectories and routines of lives. Second, as is well known, there is a deep connection between the ordinariness of the hero of modern narratives and the central theme of character development in the bildungsroman—which becomes the dominant genre in Bengali and later Indian novel writing. Over a period of about fifty years, the accepted structure of narratological conventions is completely recast in favour of the modern novel. By the middle of the nineteenth century, writing in the epic or the puranic style becomes formalistically impossible.

There is a second, associated meaning to ordinariness in the aesthetics of the novel. From the point of view of the older combination of ethics and aesthetics, a most unsettling thing about the novel is the celebration of moral ordinariness that lies at its heart. This goes against the logic of the traditional caste order in several interconnected ways. First, the novelistic story of the slow, experiential ‘making’ of a human character simply assumes as its setting the modern world in which human fate is indeterminate, not a trajectory predetermined by birth into a particular occupational caste. In traditional Hindu social order, individuals could be ordinary representatives of a particular caste which fixed their occupation, aspirations, and range of possible trials they would face in their social lives. Despite its settledness, a Ksatriya’s life is not entirely free from surprises; the life of a warrior is necessarily beset with risks. But these surprises themselves were segmentary—risks of a particular type specific to a life of that kind.

By contrast, the modern novel decided to tell the stories of lives which were ordinary by a new definition. Because the plots of the novels routinely followed the fates of modern individuals in the quintessentially modern spaces of the city, they tracked the experiences of not an ordinary Brahmin or Ksatriya, but of a human being without any exemplary instantiation of brahminical or heroic virtuous in caste terms, and who thus lived a more open-ended and confusing life. Often these people were not virtuous in a more straightforward sense: the novel form showed a distinct partiality for depicting lives of individuals who were often confused, usually imperfect, unable to live up to the principles they believed in, morally flawed and vulnerable. The response they elicited was not a distanciating admiration, but of identifying pity. Readers were not meant to deify these characters, and consider the exploits of heroes to be beyond the capacities of people like themselves. Rather, the imperfection and fallibility of these heroes made them similar to ordinary people, and their internal monologues on moral problems could directly throw light on an average person’s own daily mundane struggle with the demands of goodness.

By conventional aesthetics, the literary celebration of the morally imperfect character was impossible. This was a travesty or literary values and of aesthetic principles. For modern writers, this was precisely the point of literary reflection on the place of the moral in human life—to depict human beings in their imperfection and vulnerability, in their difficult but unavoidable search for their own selves—a self that was not given to them by caste, but fashioned by experience and self-reflection. The novelistic character constantly reflects and assesses the whole of the life he has already lived. He extracts principles, and modifies, or at least attempts to modify the rest of his life, and give it more deliberate shape. Thus, the novel form was the primary vehicle for familiarizing people with living life in a casteless way. The narrative celebration of the ordinary itself signalled a declaration of moral change.

Gradually, modern writers perfected a more complete moral argument for the new kind of narrative they were writing. The function of older narratives, it was claimed, was not merely to demonstrate the virtue of a particular kind of life—usually of the prince and the warrior—but clearly, by showing the adventures of their lives and the inevitable fact that, at times, even these exemplary characters failed to rise to the ideals of their vocation. Literary narratives taught its ordinary readers/listeners lessons of kindness (karuna). In response to this, modern novelists began to assert that—precisely by showing the incompleteness of the realization of moral ideals and the vulnerability of characters in a world in which life trajectories were no longer predetermined and where individuals are constantly surprised by the changeability of conditions—the novel also trained its reader, the ordinary individual, to treat others with understanding, if not kindness. It is for this reason that the novel has to follow its strangely paradoxical principle of a fictional truthfulness, in place of traditional literature which often entertained by presenting the fantastic.¹⁰ The characters in these novels were of course imaginary and fictive, but their life trajectories, the events which constituted their narrative, and, most fundamentally, the social world through which they picked their way, had to be entirely credible. Otherwise, the moral pedagogy of the novel would fail.

In early modern India, as indeed in the West, the two literary forms of the novel and lyric poetry discursively complemented each other. They contributed in distinctive and mutually supportive ways to the great transformative shaping of emotions that the historical transition to modernity required. At the centre of modern narrative conventions lay the moral normalization of romantic love—the narrative development of an elective relation of affection between two individuals.

In an abstract, general sense, elective love was not a new idea: in the traditional literatures of India there were famous figures like the divine couple, Radha and Krishna, who transcended all social restrictions to realize their transgressive love for each other. It was a resplendent ideal of romantic attachment, much admired for obvious reasons by modern writers; but it was generally assumed that this ideal of love, between two socially unaccredited lovers, was not a socially practicable ideal in actual human lives. At times, this ideal was interpreted in an entirely metaphysical, metaphorical key. The shatteringly radical characteristic of the new kind of romantic love was its social availability and normalcy in ordinary daily life.

The novel bore a double relation with social reality: it partly reflected social practice, partly presented an ideal for social practice to follow. While the novel pretended, in the face of social facts, that this kind of elective affection was both morally preferable and sociologically common (which in nineteenth-century Bengal it definitely was not), the task of exploring the subtle states of mind that accompanied this kind of romantic longing was left to romantic poetry. Again, this represented a great departure in the aesthetic conventions that governed poetry. Conventionally, poetry was primarily devoted to two master subjects—narrative (telling epic or historical tales) or devotional. With modernity, poetry slowly but decisively moved away from these traditional themes. The subject of new poetry was rarely devotional, and almost never narrative in the classic sense, since the primary vehicle of the narrative, which had much greater analytical aspiration, had become a new kind of literary prose. The narratives of modern novels aspired to provide to their readers something close to an enjoyable epistemology of social relations. This was increasingly difficult to accomplish in the restrictive structures of verse making. In fact, the telling of tales in prose instead of verse is itself a radical literary transformation.

As the task of literature became more analysis than celebration of the lives of protagonists, prose became the proper vehicle of such analytical and reflexive storytelling. Prose narratives did not merely describe the social world, they also analysed and criticized it. They focused often on the sufferings of an individual maladjusted to his social world in various ways.¹¹ Analysis and criticism could not be properly executed in the charged, highly emotional, declamatory styles of traditional verse. Prose was the natural language of calculation, sobriety, and rational analysis, and therefore best suited to the predominantly cognitive purposes of the modern novel.

With modernity, the displacements in poetics were no less startling. In conventional love poetry in Sanskrit, and in early vernaculars (for instance, in Bengali and neighbouring Hindi) from the twelfth century, there existed a rich tradition of writing on love, but its endlessly repetitive and luxuriating subject was feminine beauty. Consequently, it is poetry dedicated overwhelmingly to the figure of the extraordinarily beautiful woman. Correspondingly, the aesthetics of this love is one of physical eroticism conceptually crystallized into the aesthetic category of srngara.

In nineteenth-century Bengali poetry a startling transformation of this poetic aesthetics, centred on the concept of srngara, takes place. In the modern reflection on love that romantic poetry slowly develops, beauty of that entirely physical nature is increasingly viewed with deep suspicion. The resplendent beauty of traditional heroines is seen, in one type of modern novel, as destructive of the intimate, emotional companionate relationship between the sexes, a new context in which the woman at the centre of the narrative is not the object of universal desire, but an individual who only falls in love with another specific person. All her qualities, including her physical beauty, are meant for that intimate special relationship, not an object of indiscriminate, universal adoration. Lovers choose this individuated feminine heroine, not because of a beauty which would be desired by everyone, but for an emotional singularity which can be understood only by another individual.¹² Thus the individuals are perfectly ordinary, but irreplaceably special only to themselves. And clearly such aesthetic ideals bear a strong connection with the sphere of modern ethics, as such relationships produce the ideal family of companionate marriage.

I wish to make two rather general points about this kind of poetic elaboration of subjectivity. First, the displacement of attention from physical beauty leads slowly to the elaboration of a new conception of the beauty of emotions, an idea deeply informed by the new moral ideals of restraint, innerness, and refinement of sensitivity; the primary vehicle of this form of ideal is a new figure of the individualized woman. In Tagore’s novels, for instance, the writer often explicitly comments on the women’s physical ordinariness.¹³ Women are emotionally individuated through the events of the narratives, leading to a new ideal of refinement and sensitivity which makes a woman noticeable in real life and narratively interesting in the novel. Against this under-emphasis of their beauty—sometimes simple under-determination of their physical appearance—stands the constant emphasis and elaboration of their emotional and increasingly ethical character: their perceptions, feelings, states of mind, their development into a distinct personhood through the staple of the bildungsroman—meetings, misunderstandings, and final resolution or reconciliation. They are formed into individuals who cannot be mistaken for anyone else, or interchangeable with others, unlike the repetitive splendour of physically beautiful feminine figures. Nothing is more unevolving than physical beauty, and thus more unsuitable for narratives of the search for self.

The moral relation between genders is intriguingly affected by this transformation. In traditional literature, the refinement or idealization of the two genders differed significantly. Sexual ideals were divided between the literary and social ones of a courageous and upright male and a beautiful and playful woman. The transactions between these two types were often narratively arresting, but men and women did not aspire to a common pattern of emotional cultivation. In the romantic ideal, these patterns were equalized—patterns of refinement were identical for men and women, with suitable adaptation to their socially designated roles. A common refinement contributes to an ideal of moral equality.

Besides novels and poetry, autobiography can be seen as a form that epitomizes the reflexivity of the modern self by a constant recursive moral revaluation of lives. Autobiographies and other para-autobiographic forms—like letters or diaries related to real lives, or imaginary autobiographical novels—help individuals find new and periodic moral totalizations of their life experience. Assessing the moral meaning of a life is not done collectively, measuring each individual life against an ideal of fulfilment common to all those that belong to a caste. It is done individually—each person opening himself to unrepeatable experiences and finding moral fulfilment in his own personal way. Also, finding the moral meaning of one’s life is not done once and forever; it is constantly renewed because, despite one’s efforts, the realization of moral ideals in real lives always remains imperfect. Unlike narratives which elaborated and stated the moral ideals of the past, in which there was a constant expounding and elaboration but no real surprise, the new moral narrative is full of surprises because individuals are weak, sinful, irresolute, and tragic, ennobled only by their often failing search for the ideal.

In Bengali culture, as elsewhere, there was a strong connection between this emerging literary aesthetics and a new ethics of individuality and domesticity. Here I can only offer a very brief sketch. In nineteenth-century Bengal, something like a vernacular version of the discussion between Kant and Hegel on the nature of ethics is played out on a large scale. This new ethics is, of course, initially read in Western texts, then imagined, and then adventurously practised in actual personal conduct by a minority within the modern elite. However, these examples of unconventional, personal conduct remained, initially at least, heroic examples of individual experimentation in a society which looked with sullen disapproval at these ‘outlandish’ ways of a privileged and imitative minority.

We must remember that in the colonial context, with the early traces of nationalist resentfulness against Western ways, it was easy to condemn such behaviour as an apish flattery of the Englishman. Often such behaviour was condemned by both traditionalists and nationalists as being driven by a desire to gain the approval of the British, ungrounded in any serious independent moral reflection. As long as such conduct was confined to a tiny minority among the elite, and the majority of people calmly carried on arranged marriages, this mode was merely individual and extraordinary. It could be said to have deserved honour due to its moral heroism—the main point in Hegel’s critique of Kant—but it could not be called an ‘ethical life’ because it simply did not bear the effortless, taken-for-granted quality of real, embedded ethical rules.

The literary idealization of this model of conduct in fact contributed to its becoming sittlich in several ways. First, it produced a powerful intellectual argument through the narratives themselves, not merely allegedly reporting events of love, but in doing so also exhibiting how fulfilling such ways of behaving and experiencing emotions could be. Second, they tended to create an impression of a commonplaceness of such actions and behaviour, lending them a misleading aura of ordinariness. Such things happened all the time in the novels, within a society in which they could (in principle) happen only rarely. Fictional characters became, in a sense, shadow people in this social universe, performing, despite their ‘irreality’, the immensely imaginatively powerful function of setting examples, making arguments, and providing advice to real individuals on the point of falling in love. It is hardly surprising that these novels have an intrinsically discursive quality: characters do not merely fall in love: they appear more intent on an intellectual elaboration of what falling in love means.

All this produces a new sensibility in which romantic love becomes a highly influential literary, aesthetic, and idealized norm. Couples actually married by solid familial negotiations would go devotedly to watch romantic films, and would either exult in the fulfilment such love gave to marriages, or condole its tragic failure and the unfulfilled lives of cinematic heroes. But through this aesthetic experience their own relationships would be transformed in small, imperfect, and partial ways. Often, couples who did not enjoy sufficient sovereignty over their own lives and so could not enter into romantic marriages would try, retrospectively, to transmute their mundane relationships with love’s miraculous touch. Tagore’s work in particular shows the definite emergence of a new ideal of love in Bengali society—an ideal in this dual sense. It is both an aesthetic ideal replacing the srngara ideals of the past as much as an ideal of the ethical life.

The three forms of modern literary composition—the novel, lyric poetry, and autobiography—all contribute towards two crucial imaginative processes in a modern culture. They present an aesthetic representation of what a modern life is, usually in an idealized form. And they help constitute a moral ideal, contributing to people’s conversion to that ideal almost surreptitiously through the silent persuasion of aesthetic enjoyment.

It is possible to argue for the moral significance of these narratives for another reason. Familiarity with Western modernity introduces new modern ethical ideals to Indian social groups. But their actual pursuit in real lives requires a crucial element of ‘translation’ or ‘transfer’. The abstract elaboration of moral ideals through philosophical discourse tends to treat the ideals singly, and in a decontextualized form. People face their moral dilemmas in real life in complex and untidy contexts. Narratives situate fictive individuals in situations of great complexity, particularly through the complex opposition of locally valid moral orders. The principle of the moral autonomy of individuals might be elaborated to great lengths in an abstract form in discussions of Kantian ethics. Yet, when individuals actually propose following a course of individuality in their real lives, they have to deal with the specific principle of filial duty to parents, articulated in the peculiar Hindu caste doctrines. In narratives, this dilemma is worked out in a vernacular context of moral life. In the moral persuasion of people towards a modern ethics, literature plays a crucial role, supplementing more abstract philosophical discourse. This kind of narrative contextualization of ethical principles leads to processes of cultural adaptation which link up our arguments with theories of multiple modernities.¹⁴

Finally, the coming of modernity in all societies has two moments—the disruptive and the constructive. Some older practices cease working and new ones are installed in their place. It is at the constructive moment that modernity in non-European societies starts becoming different from European precedents. There is a very simple reason for this. The processes of modernity initially involve only small cities that are strategically placed in the social structure. But as modernity gathers strength, it affects wider sections of the population until it comes to affect all through its economic, political, and cultural transformations.

European precedents and European ideals dominated the cultural formation of the early modern elites in colonial Bengal. These elites were fluent in English, erudite in European history, and revered European modernity—or at least its idealized pedagogic versions. With the expansion of the modernist project to other areas of society, the availability of Europe as an imaginative structure becomes progressively weaker. Neither their education nor their life experience gave common Indians a rich sense of Europe’s modern past. Less educated people, drawn from the poorer classes, always have to improvise when inserted into modern structures and its imaginative compulsions.

We, as intellectuals, while reporting on modernity, tend to exaggerate the imaginative availability of Europe—the constant presence of the modern West as the universal ideal of modern civilization. This has been an image created by modern Europe about itself which is selective and deeply misleading. In this picture, modernity is a one-dimensionally positive achievement without alienation, without wars, without the looming presence of the state which often crosses over from discipline into totalitarianism. This ideological image of Europe offers individualism without loneliness, power without destruction, discipline without domination. But this imaginary Europe—which the real Europe needed in order to pursue its historical purposes—is, in fact, much less available to people who live in the universe of vernaculars. Ordinary people, when helped by democracy and social change to exercise greater sovereignty over their collective history, do not replicate the intellectual’s tendency to repeat Europe’s mistakes in order to repeat its triumphs. In the modernity being shaped in the multiple universes of vernaculars, and in the experience of the dispossessed, the imaginative power of the European precedent is greatly reduced. When these groups engage in the business of creating a new world, they are more likely than are the elites to create a world which is more deeply original.

References

Bakhtin, M. 1998. Epic and Novel. In The Dialogical Imagination. Austin: The University of Texas Press.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Chatterjee, Partha. 1994. The Nation and Its Fragments. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Eisenstadt, S.N. Ed. 2000. Multiple Modernities. Daedalus, Winter.

Kant, Immanuel. 1785/1948. Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. H.J. Paton, Routledge, London.

Kaviraj, Sudipta. 1995. The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Indian Nationalist Discourse in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Luckas, Georg. 1978. Theory of the Novel. London: Merlin Press.

Orsini, Francesca. Ed. 2006. Love in South Asia: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

This essay was first published in The Moral Fabric in Contemporary Societies, edited by Grazyna Skapska and Annamaria Orla-Bukowska, Brill, Leiden, 2003.

¹ The classic statement of this position is, of course, Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (Kant 1785).

² Two most interesting works in this direction are Chatterjee 1994 and Chakrabarty 2000. These themes are however also explored in works by Arjun Appadurai, Homi Bhabha, Gyan Prakash, and many others.

³ This is due to two separate difficulties. First, Indians would have to overcome the difficulty of reading intricate theoretical arguments in a foreign language; and second, both the form and the content of such arguments were vastly different from conventional traditional ideas and ideals of life in India.

⁴ I have tried to show this in greater detail in the case of Tagore’s poetry in ‘Tagore and the Ideals of Love’, in Orsini ed. 2006.

⁵ In the Hindu religious tradition, narratives are given pride of place in moral instruction. This is because of an implicit theory that the simple stating of moral principles is not always helpful in assisting individuals through situations of moral conflict in real life. Precepts stand splendidly alone, and unilluminated; in real life, moral situations are often difficult to judge precisely because individuals have to decide between moral principles. Narratives, by placing characters in complex situations, offer us guidance about real moral choice.

⁶ I have suggested that this kind of narrative reflection on morals is continued by the modern narrativistic traditions with great success—for example, in the novels of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay. See Kaviraj 1995: ch. 1.

⁷ Ksatriya was the second caste in the varna hierarchy to which rulers and warriors belonged.

⁸ Not surprisingly, in the epics but also in classical stories, the heroic characters usually come from the two upper castes—the Brahmins and the Ksatriyas. Interestingly, while the female figures conform to types, they are much less determined by caste roles. In Buddhist stories a striking difference is the use of sresthis (big merchants) in crucial and celebratory roles—something conspicuously absent from the Hindu narrative traditions.

⁹ Bakhtin 1998.

¹⁰ Indeed, according to one of the most important classical texts of Indian literary aesthetics, the first distinguishing feature of kavya (literature) is said to be that it is a field in which the laws of nature are suspended (niyatikrtaniyamarahitam—in the very first verse of Mammata’s Kavyaprakasa).

¹¹ This line of argument is classically developed in the works of Georg Luckas. See especially Lukacs 1978.

¹² In modern Bengali literature this transformation in the ideal of love is clearly discernible in the novels or Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and Rabindranath Tagore.

¹³ In the famous novel Gora, for example, the first time the heroine makes an entry the narrator makes a comment about her pleasing but ordinary looks.

¹⁴ For a number of papers collectively arguing in favour of a perspective of multiple modernities, see Eisenstadt, ed. 2000.