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Magazine
Enlightened scholar
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T.G. Vaidyanathan represented traits that have become suspect in today's intellectual culture — a total disregard for contemporary fashions and trends, a pride in one's simplicity and cultivated poverty and the tendency to give priority to a life of the mind over demands of career, fame, media exposure and, even, public acceptance. ASHIS and UMA NANDY write.
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THE death of T.G. Vaidyanathan, better known as TGV, marks the beginning of the end of a particular style of scholarship. The style may survive, but it will do so in small isolated pockets among classical scholars and musicians, vernacular writers, and traditional healers, for instance. It is unlikely to survive in mainstream academe. For TGV represented traits that have become suspect in today's intellectual culture. Among them, a total disregard for contemporary fashions and trends; a Brahminic pride in one's simplicity and cultivated poverty; and the tendency to give priority to a life of the mind over demands of career, fame, media exposure and, even, public acceptance.
I met TGV some 20 years ago, somewhat late in my life. He himself was then nearing retirement, though he looked remarkably young and alert. I had accidentally discovered some of his writings and was particularly impressed by his commentary on Satyajit Ray and his interventions in the debate on science and society then raging in Indian periodicals and newspapers. I was even more impressed when someone told me that that he was a professor of English literature. When he visited us at Delhi, I was immediately charmed by his grace, civility and intellectual sensitivity. But I could also see that he was not an easy person and could be quite scathing in his comments and interventions. But two of his qualities stood out: his willingness to help young scholars and his ability to see the intellectual work as an adventure and to transmit that sense of adventure to others.
I soon found out that TGV had a galaxy of former students and admirers who felt that the flowering of their creativity owed much to him. I also found out that most of these students and admirers disagreed with virtually everything that TGV held dear. They ranged from a Marxist philosopher deeply impressed by French radical thought to a literary theorist known for his brilliant work on Dalits to a budding postmodernist and a photographer. Their ideological postures did not affect TGV's at all. He was proud of them all and in constant touch with not only their work but also their lives.
However, he did have his likes and dislikes. He had a soft corner for what Clifford Geertz calls thick description and he was convinced that a rich narrative by itself conveyed one's position on larger issues; self-conscious theorisation was not necessary. Over the years, I found out that such theorisation meant for him the intrusion of politics. TGV hated politics, especially any politics that looked transient and trivial. Strangely, in his own writings one can often find highly sensitive forays into the politics of knowledge. But then, he did not acknowledge that as politics; they were part of his idea of thick description.
This dislike of politics had a touch of both the Brahminic idea of purity and a certain pride in one's vocation. Indeed, TGV was one of the last self-confident Southern Brahmins in the world of social knowledge at a time when Brahmins are usually on the defensive always eager to show how non-Brahminic they are and how much they hate Brahminism. He lived the life of an austere Brahminic scholar and, like all true modern Brahmins, was convinced that the Enlightenment vision of a good society was perfectly compatible with Indian traditions and could accommodate the best in our culture. He never knew that he actually belonged to another tradition, which sought to fit the Enlightenment values within the framework of Brahminic norms in the hope that they would make a different kind of sense in the hot and humid tropics.
Some, when they go, leave you impoverished and empty. Others, when they go, make you aware that they have taken a slice of your world with them. TGV belonged to the second category. At one time, I used to meet a lot of scholars of his kind among my school and college teachers, vernacular writers, young idealistic poets, and, believe it or not, young politicians. They are becoming rarer, intellectual work, too, is getting steadily professionalised and the days of grand amateurs and rounded Renaissance figures seem to be over. This obituary, I suspect, may turn out to be an epitaph on a culture of knowledge and scholarship.
Ashis Nandy is a political psychologist, cultural critic and futurist. He is the author of pathbreaking and influential books, including The Savage Freud and The Intimate Enemy.
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