Preface
Ram Naam Satya Hai
May God us keep,
From single vision and Newtonâs sleep.
Blake to Thomas Butts in 1802
We believe â and I think it is the truth â that God has as many names as there are creatures and, therefore we also say that God is nameless and since God has many forms we also consider Him formless, and since He speaks to us through many tongues, we consider Him to be speechless and so on.
Young India, 31-12-1931, p. 427â28. gandhi, 1969, p. 98
On 30 January 1948, barely six months after India had gained Independence from over 200 years of British colonial rule, Gandhi fell to the bullets of a Hindu fundamentalist with the words âHey Ram!â on his lips.1 Just a few months before, in Noakhali, in the midst of the riot-torn district of East Bengal, when he had a foreboding of his assassination, he had enjoined Manu, his grandniece and partner in the highly controversial celibacy experiments, to bear witness to his unshakeable conviction in Ramanama2 as the foundation of the law of non-violence and Brahmacharya in this world:
Though I have no longer the desire to live for 125 years, as I have said again and again of late, my striving to meet death unafraid with Ramanama on my lips continues. I know my striving is incomplete: your operation is a proof.3 But if I should die of a lingering illness, it would be your duty to proclaim to the whole world that I was not a man of God but an imposter and a fraud. If you fail in that duty, I shall feel unhappy wherever I am. But if I die taking Godâs name with my last breath, it will be a sign that I was what I strove for and claimed to be.
Talk with Manu, cw 95:130
Gandhi affirms here that the name is a mark of truth unique to each person, and through which each strives in their own way to realize the Law of God and Nature, which are one and the same. The name is that which invokes the voice of conscience.
It is the belief of all vernacular readings of Scripture (not only Hindu, but Christian, Islamic and perhaps even the Judaic) that God reveals Himself through name and form in creation and that man alone is capable of/equipped to witness the relation between God and the world through his knowledge of the name. The name is then even more potent than God. It is that through which each may come to know himself, the world and God with his own unique experiments with Truth.
Vernacular traditions believe that the name is that through which God sees/knows Himself in the world, i.e., in the plurality or variety that constitutes the world, and it is that through which man knows the world, and through which knowledge he knows God and himself, and God in himself. The name is proof of Godâs existence, of the existence of this world, and of the possibility of Godâs existence in this world. Thus, the mystic poet-saint Meeraâs joyous song of celebration â âpayoji maine, naam ratan dhan payo.â i.e., âTo you I say, I have received the wealth of the name gemâ Behari (2006).4
Articulated in terms of this mediation of God and the world, the One and the many, unity and variety, the name addresses, fundamentally, the problem of the epistemological and metaphysical foundations of communication as much as it does of pluralism. It is unlike God or the One in that it is the name of something specific, of a person or creature or particular and is therefore finite and limited. It is not of this world in so far as it is not the person or object that it names, but the specific form of its perfection, i.e., the signature of the One or God in them or that in them which is witness to God in the world.5
The Name then is the truth/reality of existence of each being, the possibility of its perfection. Therefore, the true name is realized when being and becoming or essence and existence are identical. Thus, it is said that a personâs identity is constituted by body, soul and name (Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, 1951). It is also a sign of his identity with the macrocosm/the One, and therefore it is the name that exists and survives the cycle of life and death. Ramaâs life is proof of this, where essence and existence are united: Hence, âRam Naam Satya haiâ.
By this postulation, the crux of the matter, it may be argued, is not the reality/unreality of this world or another, or the existence or non-existence of God or of the World; It is the condition for the possibility of communication between them and the truth of the relation between them which is at stake. The name is each individualâs/particularâs window to the truth of the Universe as it reflects and resonates its own truth: The very foundation of the universe, of language, pluralism and non-violent civilization.
Modernity, the Modern Nation-State, and Religion
However, in the conflict between the orthodox and modern points of view, the name âRamaâ must refer either to the historical Rama (factual) or to the transcendental Rama of our faith (ideal/symbolic). The one binds by the hegemony of fact and the other by the hegemony of faith, each fundamentalist in their own way and both, sadly, equidistant from the truth, each equal participant in the foundations of violence in modern civilizations.
The proper name identifies, isolates, and classifies. The orthodox theologian insists on the proper name of God referring to his God alone and none other: God, Allah, and Brahman are seen as distinct, each belonging and possessed by different religions and religious communities; just as Reason is the prime possession of Science in the modern world and the âproper nameâ for the positivist must uniquely âreferâ to, isolate, and identify an individual in the world. Each is a source of discord and destruction rather than of harmony and communication. In ordinary language theory, the proper name is an arbitrary label (indexical) that establishes or fixes identity of the individual as separate and distinct from others. The positivist position is constituted in the contingent reality of the world and unconditional (Absolute) truth of Reason, while the religious orthodoxy focuses on establishing the reality and existence of a transcendent world or Absolute Being as separate from and opposed to the illusory and transient nature of the world constituted by a variety of particulars. The dualism of this world and the other is what both have in common.
This is fundamentally different from the non-dualist vernacular point of view. Thus, when Gandhi is asked whether or not the Rama of his prayers is the historical Rama, son of Dasharatha, Gandhiâs response is clear and simple â âIn Ramadhun âRaja Ramâ, âSita Ramâ are undoubtedly repeated. But more potent than Rama is the Nameâ (Gandhi, 1949, p. 19; cw 91:44). The name here is the principle of individuation of Rama, his very own unique reflection of God or the Unity. It is well established that the worship of the name knows neither high nor low, neither caste nor creed, nor race or gender.
This is the basis of Gandhiâs theory of experiment too. Absolute Truth is an abstraction known best only to God, therefore to nobody. We can know or access it based only on our own experiments with Truth in relation to name and form in the world, i.e., in relation to the principle of individuation and perfection that constitutes a particular in compossibility with other particulars in the universe. This is the true meaning of Brahmacharya â âconduct with respect to the cosmosâ, referring as much to the microcosm as to the macrocosm. The truth arrived at here would necessarily be specific to individual experiments, and yet is true only in so far as the individual reflects the universal, the possible and the compossible. They are relative neither to individuals or to their âexperienceâ,6 nor subject to a Universal âReasonâ or âGodâ, but are only different possible illustrations of the one Absolute Truth unique to specific experiments. These truths do not cancel each other out or conflict with one another since they in principle have to be compossibilities.7 So that he/she determines the specific truth not as a law unto itself but in harmony with all, to be witnessed by each in his/her turn:
The living force which we call God can similarly be found if we know and follow His law leading to the discovery of Him in us. But it is self-evident that to find out Godâs law requires far harder labour. The law may, in one word, be termed brahmacharya. The straight way to cultivate brahmacharya is Ramanama.
Gandhi, 1949, p. 23
The more perfect the experiment, the more the individual truth reflects the whole, or is in harmony with it. Like Leibnizâs unities/entelechies, each of which reflects the whole the closer their knowledge is to the truth. This is different from âautopsiaâ or seeing for oneself, which is crucial to the vivisectionist method of modern science that not only separates subject from object of experiment but also studies, classifies, and names the object in isolation, non-cognizant of its relation and harmony with the macrocosm.
Gandhi would argue that in the final analysis, the experiment is a sacrifice, the part erasing itself for the whole! In fact, the etymology of bhakti or devotion (which is the name given to the vernacular traditions of Hinduism) springs from the term âbhagâ meaning âpartâ or âdivisionâ.
The vernacular then establishes the ground for experiments âwithâ this Truth and constitutes the principle of motion in history and society. It refers not merely to little traditions other than the Classical or Great traditions, not to a regional language in opposition to a cosmopolitan one but to the foundations of a fundamentally different theory of language, truth, meaning, and society â to a grammar of pluralism.
The vernacular continually presents the possibility of a fundamentally different modernity in history â a âvernacular modernityâ, challenging and reforming tradition, on the one hand, and contesting the presuppositions of Enlightenment modernity on the other. It simultaneously threatens the established hegemony â of the priest as knower of Absolute Truth, tradition, and its classical languages, and equally of the modern positivist expert, as knower of unconditional Universal Reason and Truth and its âclassical/idealâ languages, maths, logic, and physics, over the lay person, the defier of tradition, the non-expert, the reader of translations, and the non-violent experimenter with Truth!
Gandhi presents the possibility of a vernacular modernity in recent times. The wheels of history are kept well oiled, with the undeterred and robust critique of the presuppositions of violence underlying monolithic systems and institutions, by the vernacular, while resurrecting and sustaining the âexperiments with Truthâ in science religion and politics that lay the foundation of a language, labour, and liturgy of non-violence, truth, and pluralism in civil society.
On 6 December 1992, barely forty-four years after the bloodbaths of Hindus and Muslims, followed by Gandhiâs assassination and martyrdom in the cause of a non-violent plural nation, slain at the foundation of the creation of the modern nation-states of India and Pakistan, India was shocked out of its complacence with the dastardly destruction of the Babri masjid by Hindu fundamentalists. All seemed in vain â a sign of collective failure not merely religious, political, and national, not merely of the moment, but an epistemological, metaphysical, and civilizational one.
All in the name of Rama, but all in the name of the Name?
It has been a long journey. I have lived with the provocations and questions that led me down this path for over 35 years. The day the Babri masjid fell, or, rather, was felled, I decided that it would be well worth my while to pursue work on a doctoral thesis. I had a problem at hand to research. What are the grounds of religious pluralism? How does each religious tradition confront these questions from within its fold? How does it confront difference within, and without? What are the internal resources of a religious tradition that ennrich pluralism or limit it?
Was the fall of Babri masjid the machination of the community/communities of one religious denomination alone, was it a failure of both the religious communities involved, of religion itself, or was it a collective failure of approach, point of view, not merely political, religious but of an episteme and metaphysics that hold civilizations at ransom?
The study of philosophy and theology as eternal, abstract, and speculative traditions, devoid of historical and cultural impact and context, renders them irrelevant and uneventful, just as much as history is reduced to a string of causally inevitable contingencies, glorified at best by a theory of evolution. The absence of reflection on questions of what is at stake, not merely politically, but epistemologically and metaphysically, in the choices made, and not made, at the juncture of critical transformational events and turns in history, leaves us with empty explanations bereft of the possibility of any âexperiments with Truthâ as Gandhi would have said.
Two principles follow concerning the underlying method and form of this book: Firstly, that epistemological and metaphysical presuppositions move history and the theory and practice of science, religion, and politics, and not the other way around. Much is at stake, though the force of these presuppositions is not overt except at crucial transformative events in history. The foundations of this transformation or, one may call it, change, of course, in the history of civilizations, then, do not rest on anecdotal contingencies that constitute much of social science method but on what moves the life world of a civilization in terms of the grammar that informs its language, labour, and liturgy.
Secondly, that it is in the particular that we must seek the reflection of the universal as well as the obstacles to it since the universal divorced from the particular is hegemonic and introduces a standardization that obfuscates the spirit and life of the particular. On the other hand, if the universal is not reflected in the particular, the anarchy, and parochialism of relativism prevail. So, the book starts at, what my reviewer called âthe deep endâ â with the event of Gandhiâs assassination with the words âHe Ram!â on his lips, as he fell to the bullet that hit him and goes on to discuss the significance of the theory of the name, in history, epistemology, metaphysics, theology, and philosophy of language.
It is this emphasis on the universal in the particular that informs the attempt to consider the debates on pluralism within each religious tradition, the limits and limitations that each tradition confronts to be able to articulate the truth within, that allows the voice of conscience from each to emerge in history transcending the boundaries set by dogma, and pushing the envelope from within.
The book makes a case for the criticality of interrogating and debating the very foundations of the philosophy of language, and of the conditions of truth and pluralism it presupposes. In doing so, the book follows three inter-related theses which bring into focus issues in the philosophy of language:
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It is the erasure of the theory of the true name from the central ritual and liturgy of the Eucharist in the Christian church, in the 13th century, which marks the crucial change that establishes the epistemological and metaphysical presuppositions of the Aristotelian approach as the dominant regime, not only of the Church but also of the culture and philosophy of European modernity and then, of the world at large.
Indeed, it is the consecration of the relation between institutions of language, labour, and liturgy that lies at the heart of the ceremony of the Eucharist. And this is what is at stake in the debate between the approaches of universal grammar and a grammar of pluralism.
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The theory of the true name and the theory of the proper name and propositional truth are the bases for two fundamentally opposed philosophies of language.
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The theory of the true name and the true image form the basis of a grammar of pluralism and are the true mark of the vernacular. This is reiterated in the vernacular traditions, demonstrated here through a discussion of the theory of the Name in the theological traditions of Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. Responding to the dualism, of the One and the many, universalism and relativism, labour and sacrifice, and sound and sense within mainstream theology and philosophy of language, the vernacular poses a conscious and systematic challenge to the epistemological and metaphysical presuppositions and philosophy of language of universal grammar. Thus, it provides a counterpoint, both to the point of view of the religious orthodoxies and to Enlightenment modernity.
Acknowledgments
It was an honour, a great learning and growing up experience to have witnessed the serious debates and difference of points of view that engaged a generation of thinkers who chose to make the Indian University their âkarmabhoomiâ, the workplace of their calling, in post-independence India. So, I have many to thank for my academic grooming and the direction my work took, and did not take: K. J. Shah, my father, and Prof of Philosophy, Dr R. K. Gupta, my teacher at St. Stephenâs College, Dr Dharmendra Kumar, Prof Ramu Gandhi, Prof A. K. Saran, Prof Raghavendra Rao, Prof Amrit Srinivasan, and, finally, Prof, J. P. S. Uberoi whose point of view and method I have been deeply influenced by.
Teaching at the post-graduate Dept. of Philosophy at Delhi University had its share of travails but nothing could take away the rigour and joy of thinking through my lectures with my students in the classroom. For being with me through the last and most exacting yet exciting phase of writing this book, I must thank Mallikarjun, and Hardy who kept my spirit going with their keenness in pursuing their own work, their interest in my work, and their innumerable questions.
To Punam Zutshi and Smriti Srinivas who have kept me company, personal and intellectual, throughout my days in the University and later, my thanks to them for being there for me. And a special salute to Punam for her perspective of the intellectual landscape and her appreciation of the place and contribution, that the work of friends, colleagues, students, and unknown journeymen and women whose works she comes across, make in the culture of thought and the social sciences. Her presence and comments have encouraged many to continue to find meaning in their work, as indeed I did, despite her groans every time I wanted her ear!
My heartfelt gratitude and thanks to Qamar Dagar who graciously accepted my request and contributed her exquisite original rendition of âTajalliâ especially imagined and created for this book.
The Vidyajyoti library at Delhi proved to be a haven for all my theological work and, of course, without Father Gispert, it would not have been half as rewarding and enjoyable. A short research fellowship at Shimlaâs Institute of Advanced studies in 2017 was invigorating. The salubrious surroundings, the magnificent library, conversations with in-house fellows at mealtimes, the weekly seminars formed a heady mix which let me write up the last chapter of my book, only to bring me to the realization that now the argument of the entire book was transfigured and that the structure of the book would have to be re-worked! So, there I was at the brink of finishing when I had to perforce go on for yet another five years.
Only Srinivas and Dhriti could have borne with such waywardness, and made it bearable for me as well, with their unstinting belief in my work. So, I owe them more than I can ever recompense.
Tajalli (2025) by Qamar Dagar, contemporary Indian woman pictorial calligrapher. âTajalliâ is a Sufi term meaning epiphany, an illumination of the heart/being of the devotee with divine presence. Calligraphy and geometric design form the media for the imagery of the Divine, circumventing orthodox Islamâs ban on Its pictorial/iconic representation.
Christ in the House of His Parents: The Carpenterâs Shop (ce 1849â50) by John Everette Millais, member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of Artists who sought to bring realism and attention to resplendent nature back to art. This painting was controversial and considered blasphemous when it was first exhibited. The realism of Christâs depiction in the poor and lay surroundings of a carpenterâs workshop rather than in the grandeur of His Lordâs house was unacceptable to the Victorian mind, it is said. However, it may be argued that the painting re-ignites the more controversial question of the relation between labour of the lay and the sacrifice of Christ which was once sanctified in the Eucharist that brought together language, labour, and liturgy to forge a grammar of pluralism.
Sri Gana-Gauri-Shankara Mahatme (The Glory of the Gauri-Shankara Oil Press; in the tradition of vernacular calendar art) depicts the relation between the lay and the divine, work and worship, in the dialectic of God, man, and nature. At the centre is the oil press (Gana) as subject and object of labour and worship, at the altar of which Gauri, the Goddess representing the feminine aspect in Nature (Prakrti), and Lord Shankara representing the masculine aspect in the Self (Purusa), and man and creature meet. The Sun God (on the top left), the God of Fortune, Saturn (on the top right), and the God of Death (on the bottom left) flank the central deity of the oil press, presiding over the fate and being of the world in production and reproduction, and work and worship.
References
1951 Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, Sri Ramakrishna Math (trans.), Mylapore: Sri Ramakrishna Math Printing Press.
Behari, B., 2006, The Story of Mira Bai, Special Ed., Gorakhpur: Gita Press.
Gandhi, M. K., 1949, Ramanama. Kumarappa, B. (ed.) Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House.
Gandhi, M. K., 1969, Voice of Truth. Narayan, S. (ed.) Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House.
Gandhi, M. K., 1999, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. New Delhi: Publications Division, Government of India.
Leibniz, G. W. 1934, On the Ultimate Origination of Things (1697) in Philosophical Writings, Morris, M., (selected and trans.), London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd.
Kabir, The Weaver
I weave your name on the loom of my mind,To make my garment when you come to me.My loom has ten thousand threadsTo make my garment when you come to me.The sun and moon watch while I weave your name;The sun and moon hear while I count your name.These are the wages I get by day and nightTo deposit in the lotus bank of my heart.I weave your name on the loom of my mindTo clean and soften ten thousand threadsAnd to comb the twists and knots of my thoughts.No more shall I weave a garment of pain.For you have come to me, drawn by my weaving,Ceaselessly weaving your name on the loom of my mind.9
Kabir
So how did the lay masses âparticipate in the sacredâ? It is through the orally transmitted poetry of Sufi masters which the lay people recited while tilling their fields, building furniture, weaving clothes, or cooking that they transformed their vocations into sacred acts of worship. This provides a window into the notion of craft as a sacred path to walÄya (sainthood) and ultimately God.10
Dr Ali Hussain, The Rules of the Craft: Islamic Metaphysics and Sacred Creativity