Jit Uberoi, professor of sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, died a fortnight ago. This small tribute is for a man who increased the availability of eccentricity for all of us. Jit defined the university as a place that made eccentricity possible. In many ways, he was difficult to describe. I remember when he was head of the department, a senior professor complained that he hadn’t responded to his letters. Jitendra Pal Singh Uberoi or JPS said, “I only reply to the interesting ones.” Yet, JPS cared. I remember, after a cyclone hit the university, Jit worked for weeks making sure that Sikhri, an office manager who had been swept away, was reasonably compensated.
When moved, Jit could cackle like a housewife over a piece of gossip. He had an enormous range of interests—from semiotics and consumption to the city. He would walk around Kamala Nagar providing a discourse on modernity centred on the model Katy Mirza. Sociology, Jit felt, allowed the unexpected in storytelling. As a storyteller, he was unparalleled. His lectures were equally deep.
I remember, one lazy afternoon we were sitting in an empty classroom. There were remnants of the previous lecture on the board, a few dog-eaten triangles. Jit was chewing on it. “This faded triangle,” he said, “captures the power of the enlightenment. It signifies the slogan of the French revolution: liberty, equality and fraternity.” He quickly added, “The West is stronger on the first two. The dog-eared part of western theory is fraternity.” The West was poor on difference and plurality. The farthest it could go was tolerance. And tolerance was a reluctant coexistence with labour. The other really had no place in the theory of plurality. He added: this is where India could add to theory by providing a culture that celebrated difference.
Jit often tried to compare the Bhakti movement and the Enlightenment. The Bhakti movement’s genius laid in its skill of blending the cosmopolitan and the vernacular, of unravelling the magical power of the syncretic. It understood difference. The West devalued difference to create impoverished unities. Its discourses verged on the monolithic and monolingual. This is why Jit felt that the linguistic revolution was as important as the quantum. The encounter with the other was more playful. Jit illustrated it with a relation between Gandhi and Nanak.
Jit argued that Gandhi’s distinction between swadeshi and swaraj was an example. He considered this an act of liberation, a dyad that evoked freedom and trusteeship at a different level. Both had a playful linguistic essence to them. They grabbed at the grim asceticism of dualism. Swadeshi evoked the local, the familiar and the neighbourhood. Yet swadeshi was never a closed circle as we present it today. It spiralled out into swaraj, which encompassed the connections of the world. As Gandhi put it: the poetics of a dew drop emerging into the ocean, encompassing the local and the universal. As ideas, swadeshi and swaraj were life-giving. There was no ranking between them. They were life-giving in a way that the Planning Commission never understood. For Jit, the vernacular was a cornucopia of ideas that needed to be tapped. The Bhakti movement represented this approach at its best.
But Jit’s work is not only a critique of the West. Like Gandhi and Indian national movement, he sought to rescue the West—not through revolution as political economy, but through cognitive playfulness. Play created possibility; revolution, by being obsessive, shut them down. This was the difference between Gandhi and Lenin. Playfulness and nonviolence went hand in hand.
Jit claimed that Gandhi, like Jagadish Chandra Bose, was involved in science. He added that it was inconsequential that Gandhi called his autobiography My Experiments with Truth. Jit argued that life is always an experiment, and the experiment is never on the other. An experiment on the other would be an act of vivisection, like the British vivisected India, indifferent to the power and imagination of the body and the body politic. For Jit, science dealt in three elements—the self as autobiography, where righteous method became pedagogy; the experiment as playfulness, which increased the suppleness of the other; and the ashram as not only a centre for asceticism, but as a site to re-enchant the body.
It is a pity we rarely read our archives. Patrick Geddes, India’s first professor of sociology, claimed that India had set the stage for a post-humanic science. The Germanic science of the time was prone to goose-stepping away from freedom. Both Bose and Gandhi were post-Germanic in vision. It is a pity that we did not read into their vision of Shantiniketan. The journalist Vinod Mehta showed that Gandhi’s ashrams were full of scientific experiments.
Gandhi’s disciple Satish Chandra Mukherjee worked on all kinds of toilets to minimise consumption of water. To the Gandhian, Jit argued, the Western toilet was an example of the conspicuous consumption of science.
But Jit was never only a critic of the West. India, he felt, should work with the defeated West to create other possibilities. This was the basis for an alternative imagination. This was the beginning of a nonviolent science. Jit, like Gandhi, had a tremendous sense of humour. He cited the case of how the car Jamnalal Bajaj donated to the ashram, collapsed after two weeks and was then was pulled around by two oxen. Gandhi wickedly called this contraption his ‘Ox-ford’.
Jit showed his remarkable courage during emergencies. He created a possibility of revolution, beyond the striped communist paradigm.
A lot of Jit is un-researched and untold. He belonged in many ways to the oral tradition, through conversations, adda and coffee houses. I regret that I was never his student for longer than a short stint during my master’s course. I found him difficult to cope with, being easier with Veena Das and Andre Beteille. He called me the Prodigal; I eventually moved farther away. Yet, even the distance smells of gratitude as a celebration of the plurality of academia. Thank you, Jit.
Shiv Visvanathan
Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations.
(Views are personal)