ABSTRACT
The lowly traditions of yogic alchemy that became the stock in trade of Nathpanthi lore in the early Middle Ages, and the baroque physiognomy of Kabir’s inner world they went on to inspire had at least this much in common: both involved less the transformation of the world than an elaboration of the soul. What was mystical about these writings was not their otherworldliness but their adumbration of an interior time straining to stand still, their eschatology of a dissembled self-extinction, the dramaturgy of a death at once embraced and thrown aside. This scene of the soul grappling with itself was saturated with the idiom and image-repertoire of high Vaishnavism; but that agon persevered-if only on the sidelines of such texts, silent, unobtrusive, as though in secret trespass on the ostentatious Ways of the panths and sampradayas they would help inaugurate and uphold. It was broached in a gesture of self-transformation that did not reject history so much as choose to return to a kind of prehistory of historical action. We have of late tried to understand the premodern in terms of the emergence of the figure of the state in the languages of the subcontinent at least a few centuries prior to the dawn of Eurocentric historiography in early colonial India (see Subrahmanyam et al. 2002). To the chronicles and local histories that are more typically the subject matter of this school of historical research, I wish to bring into view here texts of a literary and philosophical disposition that do not refer explicitly to historical events but seem instead to be invested in an involuted and interiorized address to a God who “will have come.” Such texts elaborate a momentous “pastness” that describes the coming of God from out of a hidden past into the open. Their proximity to subaltern traditions of pilgrimage and anti-brahmanism makes this corpus of texts an important basis for asking: how do millennial traditions of low-caste “passivity” nonetheless go into the making of more easily recognizable forms of active protest and caste-critique? I want to prepare the ground for a larger question: does the subalternity of low-caste mystic speech precede and supplement from a vanished past our present-day politics of dalit or low-caste empowerment? To establish this precedence or priority, as I hope to begin to do here, is to do away with the distinction between passivity and power, subjectivity and agency, or perhaps even between the religiosity of Bhakti and the politics of
caste. To ask if the past (moral action before ethics or religion) supplements the present by filling in and exceeding its gaps, is to insist that a dalit idea of moral action (a dalit philosophy prior to dalitness) must always, in each and every case, be the basis for a questioning of dalit politics.
