Sand and Water: How the Past Speaks to Us
At the time of writing this blog, I have just signed off from a wonderful virtual conversation with our graduate team from IIT Bombay who will be participating in our Cairo workshop in February 2024. The range of expertise in this group has invigorated my passion for research and compelled me to read up on topics from the Odisha Temple to the Eris irrigation system to the philosophy of Abhinavagupta and the Tinai poetics of Tamil literature.
Our meeting was held across a large temporal divide — 8:00 AM in Toronto and 6:30 PM in Mumbai — which was a necessity for overcoming the geographical divide. Still, my interlocuters were coming to this meeting at the end of a long day while I had just woken up. I wonder what we have lost in this virtual talk across time zones that would also not be possible without the use of technology? How this might have affected our “ontological states” as Amarjeet put it. He was of course speaking of a much more somber and complex problem: “a collapse in the structures of what it means to be human,” and nothing less. He elaborated on what he meant through a very concrete example. The use of copper utensils in the past demanded a degree of expertise, a specialty obtained through years of experience. This requirement served to “open up avenues of achieving excellence,” which are now closed off with the use of modern, easy-to-maintain non-stick pots and pans. And we can no longer retrieve or recreate these modes of knowledge because of the “logic of modernity: it’s functional, optimal, and efficient.” Extend this to all aspects of contemporary life and the loss becomes palpable. Amarjeet’s solution to this “levelling of being” is a concept drawn from premodern Persian, Punjabi, and Urdu poetics: “separation” or “firāgh.”
Himanshu also turns to premodern literature — this time Sanskrit — for an understanding of our modern anxiety of absence. In the autobiographical philosophy of Abhinavagupta, a 10th c. Kashmiri philosopher, he searches for “some alternatives to this absence of social theorizing,” some way of making sense of South Asian sociality by “reconstructing things but not rejecting them,” as Abhinavagupta did with the traditions before him.
The intellectual pursuits of all GPRI participants are guided by a belief in the continuity between past and present. Harikrishnan articulated it poignantly by citing Percy B. Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias” and verses from The Purananuru of classical Tamil literature.
Ozymandias
[…] Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
— Percy B. Shelley
Stand in the desert…. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
[…]
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Poem 363
Blissful kings who have protected and ruled over the vast earth encircled by the dark ocean so that not even a speck of land as large as the center of an umbrella thorn leaf belonged to others have gone away to their final home on the ground where corpses burn, more of them than the sand heaped up by the waves. All of them have gone there and have perished as others took their land.
— George L. Hart and Hank Heifetz [1]
Two thousand years apart and writing at two ends of the world, these poets articulate the same notions on time, power, and art. These poems stand as the perfect embodiment of the Global Past Research Initiative, and specifically our upcoming trip to Cairo.
We will see Ozymandias (Ramses II) in all his ruined glory; and yet from half-erased inscriptions and the art and architecture that has survived through the centuries, we will see and read the language of the past — a language that, as Harikrishnan said, “you probably know what it is, but you really don’t know exactly what it is.” Love and war and the divine both do and do not mean the same thing to us as they did to ancient cultures, and it is our goal to get as close to that language as we possibly can.
And we cannot do that without an interdisciplinary approach, which comes with its own pitfalls. Sowmya’s work captures the vitality and the difficulty of conducting research on multiple fronts. How do you study the modern formation of eco-parks, the ancient Tamil water management system of Eris, and the socio-cultural imaginary surrounding bodies of water? How do you navigate the disciplinary division between sociology, history, and Tamil culture to produce a nuanced view of both the past and the present?
She sees the link in “the ecological significance” of these built environments, that civilizations across time and space have grappled with the question of how to use and share their natural resources. Hegemonic, Eurocentric ideas of irrigation structures fail to account for the fact that these systems are also “strangely contextual. They are very dependent on several other factors, like soil, climate, and the society.” And here is why it is crucial to “take a very cultural and local terminology — like Eris — and bring it into a global level.” The interplay between the local and the global is an inherent part of the relationship between the past and the present.
The significance of the regional to the global is a principle that also informs Mutharasu’s archaeological interests. The superstitions surrounding hero stone inscriptions in a small village in Tamil Nadu inspired him to “unravel how ancient civilizations harnessed their environments for purposes such as habitation, burial practices, and the construction of monumental superstructures.” Mythologies and oral histories surrounding surviving monuments of the past in different parts of the world speak not just to the different values of each culture but also to the common human drive to interact with their past and what remains of it.
Hero Stone Inscriptions found in Tamil Nadu. Photographs courtesy of Mutharasu Anbalagan. The erection of memorials to the dead is an ancient custom found all over the world. These memorials took different forms in different countries and times. In Tamil Nadu the custom of erecting memorials was first introduced in the megalithic period.
Rakesh was also called to the study of the past by ancient monuments while writing a piece of journalism on Odisha temples: “I had always been around all kinds of marvelous structures, but that [temple] somehow put into my mind that I need to study archaeology.” Looking at “temples as institutions” with state-forming economy, Rakesh is hoping to nuance his theories about the function of temples in premodern societies by learning about Cairo’s temple history and architecture in our February workshop.
Egypt’s rich landscape of premodern history is a unique opportunity for our participants to explore how other cultures preserve and remember their past, whether through inscriptions, restorations, or oral traditions. However, as Himanshu, coming from a Sanskrit tradition, reminded us, “we only have the minds encapsulated in the text” from the ancient Sanskrit period whereas from premodern Egypt, we have monuments and “tangible things.”
This observation of the different approaches that textuality and visuality may demand is the philosophy behind the three clusters of the GPRI: Art & the Built Environment; Mobility; and Storytelling, Narrative & Textuality. Our scholars apply their own expertise in each of these methodologies to the premodern world, but they also collaborate to learn from one another the other ways that the past can be perceived.
My final question for our IIT team was, “What are the global implications and potentials of your research, and the humanities in general?” And I think Himanshu’s response offers a crucial principal that any study on the global scale needs to follow: “There isn’t and there shouldn’t be any straightforward, one, homogenous global method.”
I am enthusiastically looking forward to the opportunity to meet our fellow-scholars from IIT in person in Cairo and continue these inspiring conversations with them while reading the hieroglyphics on the Pyramids, discussing the architectural genius of the Elevated Church of Fustat, and travelling along the best-known irrigation system of the world: the Nile.
NOTES
[1] Harikrishnan kindly provided me with the original, translation, and citation of this poem after our meeting. Hart, George L., and Hank Heifetz. The Four Hundred Songs of War and Wisdom: An Anthology of Poems from Classical Tamil: The Purananuru. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, pp. 206-207.
Sara Ameri is a PhD Candidate at the Department of English, University of Toronto. Her research examines the function of the Black Death on the visionary and mystical writing of fourteenth and fifteenth century England. She is also interested in the global connections that plague created and destroyed in the premodern world.