Friends,
I do wish to discuss some tenets of postmodernism on this page. However, as the above philosophers have all en masse decried the modern constitution and metanarratives we have to devise alternate smaller narratives.
A well-stocked library is a scholar's delight. I well remember our University Library at the Cambridge University. Here you would check-in first into a locker room where you could deposit your shoulder-bags into lockers that operated with a ten pence coin (returned when you reopened the locker to collect your belongings). The freshen-up, and then proceed up some steps onto the first floor. The mezzanine of the ground-floor had a huge 10ftx10ft painting of (presumably) a past british librarian complete with a napoleonish-hat, and those 18th century boots, and the white-wigs, which the chief-justices of British India once wore, carrying a load of very rare looking manuscripts and books, and a smile to boot.
Up the steps from the mezzanine you entered the catalouge area, where some hundred or so very large bound, and metal-enforced, largeish ledgers, alphabetwize I think, were kept. This is where you could start your hunt for books or browse as to what was on offer. these bound volumes were all uniformally a very deep seaweed green in colour. these held references to such great books as edward shils on the indian education system, b.w. hodder on the tropics and their future, and books that would even tell you everything you would wish to know about papua new guinea.
Once you had a book of your choice located, you would take down the shelf number etc. and then depending on the state of your fitness, you would either take the steps up to the stack areas (some three floors of them) or most conveniently the very demure and small escalator. if the search for the book had already made ou hungry then you would press the G on the escalator and descend to the ground-floor that had an enormous cafeteria ( with smonking and non-smoking) areas.
Up the lifts your were purveyed into a classical dreamworld of rarest and the most modern bibliotheca....with small seats by the window-sides in which to sit and read...you did not need necessarily to issue books. I was a goner for the journals of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and the (later) Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, and some other weird Journalson the Orient, although, I do remember, that I did spare some time to read Vladimir Illich Lenin on the definition of `Peasant' as recommemded by Ennew, Hirst and Keith Tribe in their article on the same issue. Kautsky, Marx,Adorno and Gransci were too dense for me even as a BA student and the condition persists till date. Lenin was a far better writer for archaeologists wondering about peasants in the archaeological record.
The dusty volumes of these elite and scholarly societies held many curious artciles, mostly written by british officers in the employ of the british east india company in the 16th and ninenteenth centuries. needless to say the U.L. held all the volumes that is a complete set of these volumes. discussions in these journals ranged from origin of indic languages, descriptions of curious and newly found temples, to gangetic (as the EIC HQ was at Fort William) flora and fauna. to read curious accounts pertaing to indian forests, geology and the such like we had buchana hamilton and valentine ball. however these two sets of journals made a most interesting reading.
the library of the philosophy department was another of my haunts in Cambridge of the 1980s. Mary B. Hesse - Models and Analogies in Science', Karl Hempel, Karl Popper, Paul K. Feyerabend, Thomas Kuhn `The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" and last but not least Imre Lakatos. The Philosophy Deppt. Library had a night-box system for those either in a hurry to return books or returing them at odd hours. There was a hole in the wall through which you could drop books into the library even in the dead of the night. This was most convenient for people like me.
The university library held some pretty rare manuscripts in its collection including charles darwin's original handwritten copy of the origin of the species (which i then did not read busy as i was with my dissertation work) in which no pens were allowed for the safety of the manuscripts. however, this room, among hundredreds others, did, also contain, some of the 18th century, travelogues of india written by those such as William Hodges (about 1780) which were more than a hundred of years old , and were therefore kept in this rare books and manuscripts room. we were allowed to actually issue the book for reading within the room, but looking at the brittleness of its pages nothing more was allowed. the photocopies of any pages of such books were done by especialist library staff of that room and the photocopies could be collected.
Thus in this most modern building as the Vice-Regal Lodge or the old Mounbatten Residence at Shimla where the library of the Indian Institute of Advanced studies is presently located we may find many a book pertaining to postmodernism. The ones I read were Francis Lyotard's Post Modern Condition and Postmodern Fables; Bruno Latour's We have Never Been Modern, Jean Baudrallard's Simulacra and Simulation and Michel Foucault's The Order of Things. By all accounts Foucault is still easily grandfather to the other three postmodernist thinkers. And there are zillions other authors on this subject who write nothing more than heiroglyphics.
Francis Lyotard is very defining and precise and seems to carry the weight of the whole world on his shoulders as he sets about tearing apart the project of The Modern...he almost makes modernism seem like swine-flu or some other pandemic that the world must be alerted to. Consider the fate of third worlders who are yet to be modern! I have often therefore wondered if french intellectuals as they drink their coffee really come up with do or die sort of ideas.
Latour, on the other hand, was very funny to say the least. He actually made me laugh with sentences like "Nietsczhe said that the big problems in life were like cold water baths you have to get out as fast as you got in." Of course here Latour forgets that there are in the world countries of the third world where in the summers any average citizen would like to have a cold water bath for as long as is possible. However, Let's forgive Latour that.
Of the three, Baudrillard is the most difficult to understand. Reading Baudrillard is like trying to read Schopenhauer or Nietsczhe even though one of our erudite colleagues did deliver a paper on him. Nietszche writing, for a new reader to him,was a bit suspended in a no man's land. a small biography of him somewhere said that he was a very depressed sort of person. Postmodern latitudes, to my mind, however, do not mean that you can become incomprehensible. Then I tried Schopenhauer. There was a picture ofhim on the front cover ofhis book...his hair was very dishevelled, almost frightening...I backtracked and later agreed fully with one of my fellow Associates who said that we would go mad reading these books. However, a book on Gengis Khan published by the British Museum made very interestiung reading. Apart from other things, it seemed, Gengis was the Patron to very exquisite arts and crafts. The book is filled with brilliant pictures of cups, saucers and jewellery all made of solid gold....Apart from reading the books to complete the writing assignment given to us by the Institute, there was time enough to peruse books of our choice. Thus I happened to see a number of books on Rock Art - Neumayer, Mathpal, Chandramouli, Malla, Bahn, Chippindale and Pradhan. A rising concern these days in rock art studies is with identifying gender in rock art. Some specialists, especially western ones, hold that this is not possible. However, Indian Workers as indeed Paul Bahn seemed perfectly at ease identifying this or that figure as male or female. The IIAS Library is remarkably well-endowed with rare, now nearly extinct, and very difficult to find, excavation reports of some fifty of the most well-known archaeological excavations in India. I read FR Allchin's excavation report of the Piklihal Site, published by the Andhra Pradesh Government, in 1968. It is a fscinating read. Amidst all the hullaballoo about revising our archaeological process, reading Allchin's excavation report of the Piklihal Excavations, is both a great delight, and a great eye-opener, for novices like us. He is, in this report, so meticulous, and using fine and expressive language too, to take note of many archaeological features surrounding his site - this includes, in the main, the rock-bruisings, and, engravings, depicting, sheep, goat, deer, antelopes and many pastoral species. thus while FR Allchin, in the main, dedicates, his report, to discussing the excavated remains, stone tools, pottery, burials, sheep bones and bones of other domesticated and wild species of animals obtaining here; he has surely and certainly also taken into account, and discussed, the surface archaeological material occurring, several kilometers distant, but in the periphery of the area excavated. in modern terminology, and recent archaeologists like us are fond of calling this, in a fshionablw way, the context of a site. however, it is interesting to note that FR Allchin was already practicing in the 1960s what we are all profesing in the 21st century as a great theoretical turn and discovery in contemporary archaeology. thus, old wine in new bottles, is, here, presumably, not the fit description, for what we contemporary archaeologists, of the indian neolithic, are doing; but, neither, and by the same measure, is it fit that it is a case of new bottles in old wine! I do not think, here, that Ian Hodder, in his now famous book The Archaeological Process (which is a bible for new fangled archaeologists who call themselves postprocessual),suggests that he disapproves of the old,particularly,the that archaeologicalschool that ragarded history and archaeology as related disciplines. FR Allchin was both an historian of ancient india and an archaeologist and was thus very sensitive to recording all data that circumscribe a site he digs. Ian, and speaking again, of new bottls in oldwine (!), was trying to suggest, through his new mantra of the "context" of archaeological sites and finds, is merely that all archaeological phenomenon are local. That is they are not global in the sense that we may hardly posit a theory that the ancient Egyptians, Chinese and the Indian Civilizations, because they were all equally exotic and grand, were, in any sense guided by the same principles governing their social, cultural or economic behaviour. This is where even the processualists (who were yet again away from the old school, and, therefore, also new bottles (!) in oldwine) were at variance with the old school. However, nothing comes of trashing this school of thought or that, academics, tend to do this, for ease of moving on with newer more trendy paradigms of research. And why not?
Consider, here, in the context of Indian Archaeology, some very important contributions of the "Old School" in terms of Linguistic achievements of decoding brahmi and Kharosthi, the translation of Asokan Inscriptions, the findings of Vikramshila, Nalanda, Takshashila, Mohenjo Daro and Harappa, the coins and inscriptions relating to many ruling dynasties, from Chandragupta Maurya to 1200 AD. The Stupas of Sanchi and Amravati, the Buddhist Caves of Karla and Bhaja, Kanheri, Ajanta, and Bodh Gaya. Last but not least the translation of the extensive corpus of ancient Indian historical and literary texts. Thus, so what, if the "Old School" fell prey to theories of diffusion, migration of culture and such groups, and most despicably characterized Ancient Indians as lacking all or any historical sense!
It is only now, that we know, through the researches of the last and present century, that, every people, and at all times, have their own sense of history, howsoever it is expressed.
