MAKING SAHITYA MATTER

The most ingenious way of becoming foolish is by a system.

— Third Earl of Shaftesbury

No biases are more insidious than those leading to the neglect of things everyone knows about in principle.

— Stephen Jay Gould

Rabindranath Tagore (1860–1941), the Indian poet-thinker, describes a delightful experience on the river Padma:

It was a beautiful evening in autumn. The sun had just set: the silence of the sky was full to the brim with ineffable peace and beauty. The vast expanse of water was without a ripple, mirroring all the changing shades of the sunset glow. Miles and miles of a desolate sandbank lay like a huge amphibious reptile of some antediluvian age, with its scales glistening in shining colours. As our boat was silently gliding by the precipitous river-bank, riddled with the nest-holes of a colony of birds, suddenly a big fish leapt up to the surface of the water and then disappeared, displaying on its vanishing figure all the colours of the evening sky. It drew aside for a moment the many-coloured screen behind which there was a silent world full of the joy of life. It came up from the depth of its mysterious dwelling with a beautiful dancing motion and added its own music to the silent symphony of the dying day. I felt as if I had a friendly greeting from an alien world in its own language, and it touched my heart with a flash of gladness. Then suddenly the man at the helm exclaimed with a distinct note of regret, "Ah, what a big fish!" It at once brought before his vision the picture of the fish caught and made ready for his supper. He could only look at the fish through his desire, and thus missed the whole truth.

The poet was disappointed to see this disconnect with nature. For the helmsman, greed and utility eclipsed a glimpse of the other world. What is this other world? Which world had the poet seen that the boatman had missed?

An incident related to one of Chuang-tzu's (an important Chinese philosopher who lived around the fourth century BC) revealing walks echoes Tagore's experience.

Chuang-tzu was walking on a mountain, when he saw a large tree with huge branches and luxuriant foliage. A wood-cutter was resting by its side, but he would not touch it. When he was asked about the reason, he said it was good for nothing. Then Chuang-tzu said: "This tree, because of its uselessness, is able to complete its natural term of existence." Having left the mountain, Chuang-tzu lodged in the house of his friend. The friend was glad and ordered his waiting lad to kill a goose and boil it. The lad said: "One of our geese can cackle, and the other cannot; which of them shall I kill?" The host said: "Kill the one that cannot cackle." Next day, his disciple asked Chuang-tzu , saying: "Yesterday we saw the mountain tree that can complete its natural term of existence because of its uselessness. Now for the same reason, our host's goose died. Which of these positions would you, master, prefer to be in?" Chuang-tzu laughed and said: "I would prefer to be in a position which is between the useful and the useless. This seems to be the right position, but is really not so. Therefore, it would not put me beyond trouble."

There is a uselessness that is celebrated in both the events. The boatman found the fish useless because it could not be caught right then, and the fish could not complete its natural term of existence because it was useful as food. What then do we say of a world that resides in the liminality of the useful and the useless? What does it mean to say, like Chuang-tzu, that succeeding in the useless comes to be of greatest use? This takes us beyond the acquisitive and the rational (events) to choose sahit (connection and communication) with the useless leaping of the fish, the fading beauty of the setting sun on the river, the value of the useless goose, and the nonutility of the luxuriant tree for the woodcutter. These can be termed as nonevents that combine, as I shall argue in the course of this chapter, with events to produce the sacred of sahitya.

In Sanskrit, sahitya is derived from the word sahita, "united together." V. Raghavan argues:

The concept of Sahitya had a grammatical origin. It became a poetic concept even as early as Rajasekhara [an eminent Sanskrit dramatist, poet, critic]; as far as we can see at present, the Kavyamimamsa [880–920 CE] is the earliest work to mention the name Sahitya and Sahitya-vidya as meaning Poetry and Poetics. Even after Rajasekhara, grammatical associations were clinging to the term up to Bhoja's time. Kuntaka [950–1050, Sanskrit poetician and literary theorist], about the time of Bhoja himself, was responsible for divesting Sahitya of grammatical associations and for defining it as a great quality of the relation between Sabda [word] and Artha [meaning] in Poetry. Sometime afterwards, Ruyyaka or Mankhuka wrote a work called Sahitya-mimamsa, which was the first work on Poetics to have the name Sahitya. Afterwards, Sahitya became more common and we have the notable example of the Sahitya-darpana of Visvanatha [a famous Sanskrit poet, scholar, rhetorician writing between 1378 and 1434].

The word sahitya retains its Sanskrit origin but is now commonly understood as literature encompassing poetry, plays, poetics, and other forms of creative writing. Although sahita means "united together," this does not point to fusion or intermelding but connection (the across-momentum), a kind of being-with. By sacred I mean a mystery and a meaning, a substance and a secret. I have used the word sacred in a sense that is completely different from what we commonly understand (holy, consecrated, pertaining to or connected to religion). The sacred of sahitya is the substance that stays withheld, a kind of withdrawal from its readers, a febrile anxiety to see itself exhausted at the hands of its readers. What kind of sahit does sahitya create? How does this sahit matter in helping sahitya matter meaningfully? With what matters does sahitya concern...