Freedom Between Order and Chaos: Towards an Indian Theory of Freedom

Any serious study of the Indic ideas of freedom must begin with acknowledging the centrality accorded to order in a polity. This preoccupation is underlined by the supremacy of the `kingly duty-punishment’ (rājadharma-daṇḍanīti) framework. A great deal of violence and cruelty inheres within this framework. The rise of anti-colonial nationalism in the nineteenth century obscured this view. Nationalist self-images made all Indian thought and action hostage to one form or the other of religious thought. If order is the arena for violence and force, it follows that a glimpse of freedom, unshackled from the conventional religious implications can only be had in upholding the desirability of disorder. Once again, nationalist thought disengaged freedom from questions of power, order, force, and violence. Rather, they located freedom in two religious concepts, mokṣa and jivanmukti, and interpolated these onto the Indic idea of freedom as a distinction between `freedom from’ and `freedom to’, significantly retaining the religious source of this derivation. However, it is possible to postulate freedom in ways other than in the religious realm. Hankering after a single set of foundational values or an inevitable normativity, nationalist thought sought to confine the discussion about freedom within the ambit of religion alone. The need to question the privileging of certain texts while denying the availability of other texts assumes an urgency at this juncture. A reading of political satires, then, shows a way out of being confined to the commonly available restrictive nationalistic models. Moreover, it suggests ways in which texts designated as religious could be read as social and political texts.