Total Atheism

Secular Activism and the Politics of Difference in South India

Stefan Binder

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789206753
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Atheism

Exploring lived atheism in the South Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, this book offers a unique insight into India's rapidly transforming multi-religious society. It explores the social, cultural, and aesthetic challenges faced by a movement of secular activists in their endeavors to establish atheism as a practical and comprehensive way of life. On the basis of original ethnographic material and engaged conceptual analysis, Total Atheism develops an alternative to Eurocentric accounts of secularity and critically revisits central themes of South Asian scholarship from the hitherto marginalized vantage point of radically secular and explicitly irreligious atheists in India.

Chapter 1

MENTAL REVOLUTION

BECOMING AN ATHEIST IN WORD AND DEED

As soon as I became an atheist, inertia was gone.
Care for life grew. Responsibility for actions grew.
Reflexivity about [what I] am doing at every moment increased.
In turn, idealism [ādarśaṃ] and happiness developed.
In order to acquire such a new consciousness there was no need to study.
There was no need for discipline.
All these changes happened within me as soon as I became an atheist.

—Gora, Nēnu Nāstikuṇṇi: 12

This chapter examines how Atheists in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana debate what it means to become an Atheist and, more precisely, how this becoming ought to manifest in public by gaining perceptibility in words and deeds. As such, it also addresses the boundaries of the Atheist movement. While the above epigraph sounds like a conversion narrative, most of my interlocutors explicitly disavowed the category of conversion, maintaining that conversion is what happens between religions; it is therefore impossible to convert either oneself or others to Atheism. Becoming an Atheist, they argued, requires a more radical and fundamental process that transcends the realm of religious pluralism and is thus external to the logic of conversion as well as its legal regulation within the framework of Indian secularism.¹ My Atheist interlocutors call this process “mental revolution” (bhāvaviplavaṃ). In a commentary on how to analyze narratives of conversion, Talal Asad (1996) has cautioned against confusing the word “conversion” with its concept on the one hand and with actual practices of conversion on the other hand. While it is of course possible to compare actual processes and narrative representations of Atheist and religious “becoming” within a shared conceptual framework of conversion, the aim of this chapter and this study as a whole lies elsewhere; instead of pondering if and how Atheist mental revolution differs from or overlaps with religious forms of conversion—it certainly does both—I am interested in Atheists’ claim to secular difference and their attempts at making it perceptible as a specific quality of difference.

The coherence of the Atheist movement will emerge here less as a function of assent to a specific philosophy, worldview, or body of disbeliefs than a shared moral ideal and conceptual grammar of “practical sincerity” (dvikaraṇasśuddhi), which regulates what may count as an appropriate relationship between words and deeds in the sense of two distinct kinds of public practice. I deliberately speak of coherence because practical sincerity, as a moral ideal, is shared by other secular, progressive (Communist, feminist, Dalit, etc.), or indeed religious movements both in India and elsewhere. Hence, it neither substantially defines the uniqueness of Atheism nor delimits it through unambiguous boundaries. As a conceptual grammar, however, it regulates how my Atheist interlocutors establish a positionality from which they police, redraw, and contest boundaries precisely insofar as these are problematic and porous with regard to their environment, secular and otherwise. I argue that Atheists cohere as a discernable movement not by being in or outside substantially definable boundaries but by the positionality from which they problematize them in relation to the concept of mental revolution and through a reflexive project of (con-)fusing, disentangling, and configuring the shifting disjunctures between the word, concept, and practice of atheism/nāstikatvaṃ. By following chronic disagreements within the movement about the appropriateness of atheism/nāstikatvaṃ as a self-designation, this chapter shows how, through controversies of naming, Atheists identify and delimit different practical sites for enacting Atheism’s boundaries. As such, their debates establish the conceptual and moral grid against which the process of becoming an Atheist may unfold and become publicly perceptible—but also contestable—as a practically sincere form of secular difference.

After a brief outline of the concept of mental revolution as understood by Atheist activists, the following two sections focus on how this concept is entangled with the words “atheism” and “nāstikatvaṃ” as well as the history of their mutual translations. This translation history is what allows my interlocutors to tell a very specific history of Atheism, which in turn grounds the social and affective efficacy of Atheist onomastics. The last section will then turn to the critical discussion about names, focusing particularly on how the contested use of the word “atheism/nāstikatvaṃ” articulates the conceptual framework for my interlocutor’s larger project of practically realizing mental revolution. I draw in this chapter mainly on speeches and writings of more or less eminent leaders or intellectuals, because they tend to press their points in clear-cut and, at times, somewhat polemic terms. This is useful for identifying a general contour of Atheist discourse, but I want to stress that the debates presented here are by no means intellectual arcana; they are very much a quotidian affair, in which most “rank and file” activists have a stake and participate actively; they are an integral and central part of Atheist activism. While I reproduce here the perspective of male interlocutors, I will address the gendered dimensions of this discourse in more detail in Chapters 2 and especially 6.

Mental Revolution: Total Atheism beyond Religious Critique

In order to get a first idea about the concept of mental revolution, I want to quote from a published speech delivered in Telugu by a renowned Atheist leader, B. Ramakrishna (1936–2007), at a public literary event commemorating the beloved Telugu poet Vemana. In the wake of the editing work of British Orientalist C. P. Brown, Vemana, who is dated varyingly between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, saw a renaissance in the nineteenth century and has since advanced to one of the most popular and highly esteemed Telugu poets (Schmitthenner 2001). As his poetry is in colloquial language, he has not been included in the canon of “classical,” Sanskritized Telugu literature and has therefore earned the title “poet of the people” (prajākavi). Vemana’s renaissance as the poet of the people has to be seen in the context of the increasing consolidation of linguistically defined regional identities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Besides grammar, the production of literary histories through canonization in printed anthologies played a crucial role in the formation of the cultural and political identity of Telugus, Tamils, Malayalis, and other linguistic groups (Nagaraju 1995; S. Ramaswamy 1997; Mitchell 2009). In this context, changing language ideologies and poetologies were intricately entwined with ideas about literary and moral propriety, which resulted in a sanitization of anthologies—much that appeared vulgar to the sensibilities of a growing urban, literate middle class was considered a result of historical corruption and thus edited out of the new, “original” texts. While this pertained above all to questions of sexuality, Atheist literary scholars like Ramakrishna have tried to show that religious dissent too had fallen victim to the politics of sanitizing censure and had thus been deliberately written out of Telugu and Indian literary history.

In his speech, Ramakrishna (2011) argued that Vemana was in fact an atheist/nāstika, by which he did not only reclaim Vemana for the Atheist movement but, in a sense, he reclaimed the (literary) essence of Telugu culture and identity itself. As part of his argument, Ramakrishna explained that Atheists are not what they are commonly made out to be. He stressed that they are not just a bunch of morally indifferent nihilists and skeptics who disregard considerations of social responsibility or concern themselves solely with repudiating religious beliefs:

Atheists [nāstikulu] are those who, without tolerating it, have fought back whenever any injustice, any wrongdoing, any irregularity occurred anywhere in society. When on one side religion—on another side society—on yet another side kings … and village elders were oppressing the common people in various ways, atheists were those who attacked them and put an end to them. The cheating of yogis, the secrets of bābās, and the scandals of ammas, the intoxication of superstitious practices, the slavery of women, the difference of rich and poor, social inequalities—what is all that? Atheists are those who without compromise have carried on the fight of attacking and putting an end to all the diseases pervading society. In a word, atheists are those who strive to build an equal society—a new society. (Ramakrishna 2011: 16)

Religion (mataṃ) figures prominently here, but it is, after all, only one item in a longer list of “diseases” (rugmata) afflicting society. All their differences of opinion notwithstanding, my interlocutors usually agree with Ramakrishna that Atheism is other than what it seems and more than disbelief in god. The crux of Ramakrishna’s speech—and the topic of this chapter—concerns the way in which these notions of “other than” and “more than” indicate a concern with labeling and names, as not everything that is named atheism/nāstikatvaṃ is “real” Atheism, whereas someone like Vemana, who is not called and did not call himself an atheist/nāstikuḍu, may very well be an Atheist. This sort of chiasm of anonymity and pseudonymity adumbrates how the negativity of the secular (see Introduction) articulates with practices of naming and a moral discourse of sincerity as a relation between words and deeds. Atheists, so Ramakrishna went on to explain, were distinguished by what they do—namely, put atheism/nāstikatvaṃ into practice as a “philosophical weapon” (tātvikāyudhaṃ) (B. Ramakrishna 2011: 15) in their larger endeavor to change society for the better; this endeavor and its outcome are usually called “bhāvaviplavaṃ,” which I translate as “mental revolution.”

Bhāvaviplavaṃ is a compound that qualifies the word “revolution” (viplavaṃ) as relating to bhāvaṃ, whose polysemy refuses a neat translation into English. My interlocutors mostly use the words “idea” or “opinion” when they speak about bhāvaṃ, but it can also translate into the English words “emotion” and “feeling.”² The organ of bhāvaṃ is manassu, which translates as “mind” as well as “heart.” As the Telugu word for “mental” (mānasika) is derived from it, I chose to translate “bhāvaṃ” as “notion,” its plural “bhāvālu” as “mindset,” and the concept of bhāvaviplavaṃ as “mental revolution.” I want to stress, however, that “mind” and “mental” refer here to more than the intellectual or cognitive processes involved in discarding beliefs or transforming ideas and opinions; mental revolution refers to a comprehensive and total reorientation of a person’s outlook or attitude including affective, behavioral, and social dimensions. The following quote is a concise paraphrase of the concept of mental revolution by Atheist writer Tumma Bhaskar:

There are different mindsets [bhāvālu] and different viewpoints [dṛkpathālu] in society. Among these, some have become institutions and organize people’s way of life. Although they may outwardly appear real and useful, scientifically speaking, they are unreal and in the long run they become harmful. Religion, caste, and superstitions are of that kind. When our mindsets about such [institutions] change according to science, they will without fail disappear and individual and social progress will occur. Man can attain liberation from mental slavery [bhāvadāsyaṃ]. When our mindsets, which have remained fixed and immovable due to several social diseases, begin to change, it is called mental revolution. (2012: 125)

This formulation captures how the ambit of mental revolution is considered to exceed the minds of individuals and to be inextricably entwined with behavior and a collectively established and policed, hence institutional, “way of life” (jīvitavidhānaṃ). Ideas, emotions, and opinions are the mental foundation of social institutions, and one cannot change without the other; but if foundations change, institutions will “without fail” (tappaka) follow suit. Atheists consider change to be both necessary and natural, because they conceive of human civilization as inherently progressive. Civilization is a process of continuous convergence between reality, human mindsets vis-à-vis that reality, and the institutions to which these mindsets give shape. The progress of human civilization falters and degenerates into inequality and injustice when “social diseases” (rather than merely false beliefs) produce or perpetuate asynchronies or mismatches between institutions, mindsets, and scientifically defined reality.

As we will see below and in Chapter 3, the crucial point of Atheist historiography and the social imaginary it underpins is that anachronistic institutions are not seen as spontaneous or natural but as intentionally produced “social evils” (durācārālu) and “diseases” that are strategically maintained by those who profit from them. This evil and immoral agency is mirrored by a failure on the part of its victims to realize this state of affairs. Atheists describe this failure as a condition of “mental slavery” (bhāvadāsyaṃ) or “slave-mind” (bānisabhāvaṃ). Mental revolution is thought to liberate them from this condition and refers thus to the process of extirpating mental slavery not only at the intellectual, emotional, and behavioral levels of individuals but also in its institutional and societal manifestations.

The concept of mental slavery resonates with and is morphologically an inverted form of a term used in the theology of devotional movements (bhakti), namely dāsyabhāvaṃ or dāsyabhakti, which describes a specific quality of the emotional bond between deity and devotee. The latter’s love for the deity is imagined as the devotion of a selfless servant to their master, which is contrasted with other types or moods of devotion modeled on the relationship between parents and children, friends, or spouses (for an overview, see Bailey and Kesarcodi-Watson 1992). According to Atheists, the yogic theology and emotionology behind this concept, which suggests servitude to god as a form of liberation from servitude to the senses and worldly attachments, is a ruse to trick people into a voluntary submission to nonexistent deities and their representatives on earth: Brahmin priests, religious philosophers, gurus, saints, and so on. Here, the concept of mental slavery is furthermore linked to a critique of the caste system as an institution of slavery (Viswanath 2010; Mohan 2015). One of the most famous articulations of this critique is B. R. Ambedkar’s essay “Annihilation of Caste”:

For slavery does not merely mean a legalised form of subjection. It means a state of society in which some men are forced to accept from others the purposes which control their conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is found where, as in the caste system, some persons are compelled to carry on certain prescribed callings which are not of their choice. (Ambedkar 2003: 276)

A third important source for the concept of mental slavery is Communist discourses criticizing Indian feudalism as a form of slavery. Since my interlocutors follow Ambedkar in locating the source of slavery beyond economic relations of production or concrete legal institutions, they also understand their project of mental revolution as being necessarily prior to and more encompassing than Marxist notions of revolution.³ For most of my interlocutors, Theism (āstikatvaṃ) is simultaneously a synonym and a specific historical instantiation of mental slavery. Goparaju Ramachandra Rao (1902–75), commonly known by his acronym Gora and one of the most influential Atheist intellectuals in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, has propagated such an understanding of Theism as mental slavery: “Though the forms of god have varied widely, all the types have one characteristic in common, namely that god is superior to man. … Belief in the existence of god is only an expression of man’s slave-mind. Slave-mind seeks a prop and an easy prop on which the slave-mind rested was a concept of god” (Gora 1975a: 14).

For Gora, slave-mind is the cause of Theist beliefs and the concept of god is merely an archaic survival of our ancestors’ ignorance. He goes on to argue that human evolution is intrinsically progressive and that the development of rational faculties has inevitably proven corrosive to false religious beliefs. Therefore, the fact that those beliefs nonetheless persist proves that they are merely the effect of a more basic condition of mental slavery:

When the foundations of early theism, which were based upon faith in the existence of god, were thus shaken by rationalist thought, people in whom slave-mind dominated, had to go in for props other than god. The new props are government, economic order, social custom, a view of cosmic rhythm, belief in natural order, materialism and the like. Modern man depends on props as slavishly as his forefathers depended upon divine mercy and god’s blessings. … Thus modern man is a godless theist. (Gora 1975a: 14)

Mental slavery is thus the archetype of belief in god, which is just one of its early historical manifestations that found institutional expression in specific religions (matālu). Gora defines theism primarily as the projection of one’s own agency and freedom onto various kinds of “props.” This leads to voluntary subordination to those props and thus causes passivity, stagnation, and the faltering of social progress. While other Atheists might put less emphasis on questions of individual freedom and focus instead on aspects like rationality or intellectual capacities (e.g., Venkatadri 2007a), they do share a concept of mental slavery as an abstract principle that only manifests—among many other things—in religions but does not originate from them. Gora, Ramakrishna, and their followers argue that atheism/nāstikatvaṃ is more than disbelief in god, simply because theism/āstikatvaṃ is more than belief in god. But why speak of theism and atheism if their relation to belief in god seems rather tenuous, and if they are supposed to be so much more than that?

The Excess of Atheism: Translatedness as Productive Incommensurability

It is crucial to bear in mind that although the spoken and written discourse of the Atheist movement in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana is almost exclusively in Telugu, it is conceptually speaking at least bilingual and thus bears the mark of translatedness (see Introduction): I argue t...