JPS Uberoi: A scholar who lived in a world without borders

JPS’s distinctive capacity was to reveal the entrails of power but also to unravel counter-power as civil society, as sangat (the congregation) and swaraj.

Swaraj is not Swadeshi, Jitendra Pal Singh Uberoi (henceforth JPS, 1934-2023) famously pronounced.

Jitendra Pal Singh Uberoi (WikiCommons)

I came to know this scintillating sociologist when I joined the Delhi School of Economics at Veena Das’ recommendation for an MPhil in Sociology. I was at sea having shifted from science to history and then political science. The degree introduced me to a galactic new world that involved a critique of anthropology and indeed, of the social sciences.

After our early morning class, we would head to the canteen where JPS would hold court. He would discuss an issue in the most roundabout way so that one was on a complicated, dizzying roller coaster. Often there were flashes of brilliance but more often one saw the light only at the end of the tunnel. He left me awestruck but later we would participate in panels and conferences. He had a reputation as a demanding supervisor.

I was working on a community called the Meos that have historically inhabited a zone between Hinduism and Islam. He gestured me to an article jointly authored with Patricia Uberoi, “Towards a New Sociolinguistics”, concerning the bilingualism of street children. It enabled me to conceptualise my argument on bi-religiosity and multi-religiosity.

JPS’s distinctive capacity was to reveal the entrails of power but also to unravel counter-power as civil society, as sangat (the congregation) and swaraj. In some respects, JPS and Ashis Nandy have been in dialogue ever since their first encounter at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Shimla at a time when the dynamic Niharranjan Ray was the director. Both were in agreement about the face of modern science. J Robert Oppenheimer acknowledges as much when he says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” and famously (mis)cites a verse of the Gita. In the film Oppenheimer, President Truman disabuses him quickly. “It is I who have blood on my hands,” he says, claiming all agency for the atomic bomb. After Oppenheimer asked for restraint on nuclear weapons, Truman referred to him as a “crybaby”.

The Emergency brought JPS closer to Rajni Kothari and a group that would gather at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi after 1975. In 1984, as anti-Sikh gangs paraded the streets, Shahid Amin and PS Dwivedi smuggled him out from the back gate of his house. That was the moment of his shift to the black turban that his daughter, Safina Uberoi’s documentary film, My Mother India, so poignantly brings out.

Another scholar he was in dialogue with was philosopher Ramchandra Gandhi as he elaborated on the theme of religion from Christianity through Islam to Sikhism. Later he would join me for a seminar at the IIAS, Shimla, reflecting on the writings of Daya Krishna and Ramchandra Gandhi.

I read JPS more seriously when I started working on Svaraj in Ideas, a special issue of the Indian Philosophical Quarterly. There was no postcolonial conception of truth in his work or anti-foundationalism. Instead a vision of an alternative science, which is deeply philosophical with a return to foundations restoring the connection between the quest for truth and the ethical.

There were many respects in which one can see a project going beyond decolonising knowledge in his work. For one, he was one of the few Indian scholars insistent that it is not just India or other such African-Asian societies that must be the focus of the anthropological gaze. Europe itself must be the subject of ethnography. Delhi University launched under this inspiration a European Studies Centre. His trilogy on Europe included Science and Culture (1978), The Other Mind of Europe: Goethe as a Scientist (1984) and The European Modernity (2022). He was interested in European modernity in both its dominant form as also its subordinate form, the secret reformation.

When I visited the Goethe Museum in Weimar, I sent to JPS via Patricia pictures of Goethe’s home with his study, ceiling, garden and the yellow room that was from his theory of colours.

JPS’s doctoral work was on the Tajiks, which took him to Afghanistan. There were two ideas that reverberated powerfully for me. One was of the frontier and the other a metaphor of the revolving door. The latter brought in Alexander’s Greek army and also Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam. When the Loya Jirga was held in Kabul, JPS returned for fieldwork in Afghanistan.

JPS’s contribution to Svaraj in Ideas, edited by KJ Shah, Ramchandra Gandhi and Probal Dasgupta, strikes a critical note. KC Bhattacharya (KCB) does not even begin to question the European master classification of knowledge, he argues, the division into the arts and sciences, and of knowledge, belief and action in the three realms of science, religion and politics, JPS points out. Neither does KCB look at the set of ideas or truths of God, man and nature in modern European culture and the intersecting dualisms of fact/value and theory/practice. According to JPS, KCB yields the theory of nature to the West and recovers the praxis of man for India without seeing that this is a positivist programme. Hence, he sees KCB’s argument as appealing to the modernist and the fundamentalist alike while Gandhi was the enemy of both in his method.

“Martyrdom in its theology, history and sociology,” is a gem of an essay finally published in Mind and Society, a collection put together thanks to the effort of Khaled Tyabji. It has helped me greatly in thinking of Delhi as a sacred city and the martyrdoms of Dara Shikoh, Sarmad Shahid, Guru Tegh Bahadur and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Guru Tegh Bahadur is killed fighting for the rights of Kashmiri Pandits! On Gandhi’s martyrdom we have sterling scholarship by Ashis Nandy (Godse and Gandhi co-script the theatre of the assassination) and Ramchandra Gandhi (a witness to the truth of non-violence).

Martyrdom, as JPS puts it, “marks at once both the limits of power, especially the state’s power and the limitlessness of self-sacrifice conceived as salvation-in-history-and-society, in which we are all vicariously members of one another.”

Patricia Uberoi sent me pictures of them in their study (Sah Vikas Apartments, East Delhi) just after his 89th birthday and wrote of the professor, increasingly frail but combative! In one of the photographs, he was showing off his Marilyn Munroe T-shirt. JPS was a great student of popular art and cinema but his fascination with Marilyn had puzzled me! We now know about the exchange of letters between President John F Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, both worried about the possibility of nuclear winter for the world and the need to work towards a Noah’s Ark. Jacqueline Rose reveal for us also Marilyn’s predicament and new documentaries leave open for us the question of her critical stance on nuclear weapons. Jim Douglas’ book titled, JFK: Why He Died and Why it Matters throws open the correspondence between the two leaders and the anxieties of the American Deep State that it resulted in, specifically the military establishment.

Shail Mayaram is a former professor at CSDS. The views expressed are personal. For further reflections on JPS see the essay, “Beyond Decolonizing Knowledge: Revisiting the Swaraj in Ideas Debate,” in Politics, Ethics and the Self: Re-reading Gandhi's Hind Swaraj, edited by Rajeev Bhargava (Oxford University Press 2022)