"Value, Autonomy, The Social and The Natural"—Prof. Akeel Bilgrami

[As part of the Raza Lecture Series, the Raza Foundation organized two Raza Lecture II events on the broader theme, “The Reach of Truth,” consisting of two lectures. This is the full transcript of the first Raza Lecture II on 'Value, Autonomy, The Social and The Natural' delivered by Prof. Akeel Bilgrami at India International Center on 19.01.2026]

I'm very honored to be here. I'm very sorry that I will be speaking on these rather arcane philosophical issues at a time when there are very much more urgent concerns for all of us. Just this morning, I read that the presiding fascist on the world stage has invited our own local fascist to join a board called the Board of Peace to take over, by a signatory's conquest, the territory of Gaza. So, it's very hard to speak about these abstruse issues in a time like this. We live in a time when even just mere sanity seems like a moral achievement. And I'm going to try and speak about the link between truth and morals, and think of truth as a moral achievement in this paper.

A good way to begin is by pointing out that Syed Raza did some paintings in remembrance of Gandhi, and one in particular of the seven paintings was called Satya, and it has six or seven concentric circles of different colors, under which there's the word Satya in Devnagri script, and you (Ashok Vajpeyi) point out that Raza is trying to capture how Gandhi thought that you have to peel off various layers of masking before the truth is revealed. And that's the difficulty of reaching the truth. But my subject is the 'The Reach of Truth,' the wide scope of truth's reach, which I believe has been masked from us by artifices of our own theoretical doctrines. And if you peel off those artifices, it becomes visible how completely natural it is to think of truth as having a wide reach, reaching all the way to the study of society and the study of art and literature. The standard denial or skepticism about truth reaching out that far has to do with long-standing familiar claims about how these regions of thought are normatively or value-laden and therefore out of the reach of inquiry that pursues truth. Now that's the standard view, the standard skepticism, and it's a view taken by doctrines which are opposed to each other in radical ways, but agreed on this one thing, that any inquiry that is into something which is suffused with value can't really be susceptible to having the predicate is true, apply to the propositions we make about it.

Well, I'm not going to traverse that familiar doctrinal ground. What I'm going to try and do instead is to come to the idea of norms and values through the notion, a notion which is very central to the study of society—the notion of freedom. And I want to argue that the standard doctrines of the political liberal enlightenment view the notion of freedom as not having very much to do with truth, but rather having to do with choice, of exercising choice to make our decisions about how to live, about what norms and values to adopt.

And one of the things that you get to read and see immediately if you read Gandhi's book Hind Swaraj, is that for Gandhi you can question this idea that freedom is a matter of exercising your capacity for choice. And when you see right from the first few pages of that work that he's very keen to say (what's driving him in that work), is that you're not free if you rid yourself of a colonial master; you're not free until you have acquired the truth about civil society and norms about society, politics, political economy and so on. You're not free until then, until you get that right. So, for him the truth about society, politics, and political economy is essential to being free. It's not just a matter of exercising choices, rather you have to exercise the capacity for choices to make the right choices before you're free.

So, here's just an elementary puzzle. All the standard doctrines of the political enlightenment tell you that you're free because of your capacity to exercise your choices and if the state and other agencies leave you alone to exercise the choices, that's freedom. And what I want to assume is a quite different thought, which is, until those choices are exercised in the right way, until whatever reason you have for exercising a choice, grasps what is true, you aren't yet free. So, that's the overall theme that I want to pursue. Now there are cliches in this whole region of thought. You have the founder of Christianity has attributed the thought in the Gospel of Saint John that the truth shall set you free. So, this is a truism, a long-standing truism for over 2000 years. But how is it then that there is this chasm between the theories of the liberal political enlightenment and a truism? If something is a truism, it should be a banal and familiar truth. But all the doctrines we've become used to in the political enlightenment, which is that you're free if you exercise, you're permitted to exercise your capacity for choice. So, there's a gap between where the theories stop and the cliché, and if a cliché is familiar, it's a truism; there's a gap between what's supposed to be a truism and your theories. So, that's what I want to explore, and I want to explore it by a look at the whole intellectual history of the political enlightenment where this thing got developed.

Immanuel Kant is a natural place to begin in looking at the liberal genealogy of the notion of freedom. Like Gandhi, he thought the central concept here was swaraj, or autonomy, or self-governance, and he had a very particular angle on it which became central to the liberal political enlightenment. Kant began the groundwork of the metaphysics of morals by saying that we need to understand how to move from empirical psychology to moral psychology. And his idea here was that human beings have natures, empirically they're given, and they consist of a whole range of dispositions and inclinations. What theorists, philosophers later on began to call desires, wants, and when it got slightly formalized, it began to be called subjective utilities. When desires and wants got to be characterized in degrees of strength, it began to be called subjective utilities, and a whole calculus of desires or inclinations was developed. But that was since Kant. Kant's idea was, we're given all these inclinations, it is part of our nature, part of our psychology. And he says autonomy comes from our capacity to ask a question which is: 'Should we be acquiescing in the inclinations we have (of any one or other inclination)? Should we acquiesce in this inclination?' And he said the capacity to ask that question of what's given to you by your psychological nature is the first sign of reason, because essentially the question is, do I have reason to acquiesce in this want or desire or inclination that I have? And even if I say, yes (I do have a reason to do so, even if I do acquiesce, if I ask the question and answer it thereby acquiescing), then I authorize the inclination, and that's what is a sign of our self-governance. If we authorize our inclinations or reject them, we have asserted our autonomy, we are no longer being ruled by what is given to us in our nature, the rule of the passions and so on. We authorize them or deauthorize them, and that is the first onset of what he thought of as reason and the first manifestation of our autonomy. Now, the political enlightenment emerged when this basic autonomy-inducing question or autonomy-reflecting question in Kant was applied not just to our psychological natures but to our social conditioning.

So, my mother and my sister also would sometimes have said to me as they tried to condition me socially: 'Don't do that. Bilgramis don't do that.' Well, that's a kind of social conditioning. And at some stage, I can't remember at what age, I must have been the onset of Kantian reason, I began to ask, what do I have to be doing that the Bilgramis are doing? And really it was a sign of onset of reason because the question is, do I have reason to be doing what my social conditioning would have me do? And it is the reason of a kind that so far as we know, Kant said, and Kantians of political enlightenment say, so far as we know, only human beings can ask that question. Wolves are socially conditioned by their pack but they can't ask that question of their pack. So, the notion of reason that gives rise to autonomy is the idea, the capacity to ask this autonomy-inducing question about not just our inclinations but our social conditioning. And reason of that kind is what makes us, is the heart of the political enlightenment's conception of our notion of freedom and autonomy. And if we just acquiesce in our social conditioning without the exercise of that reason, questions of that kind, we are merely heteronomous, to use Kant's word.

Now, this is not to be confused with a whole range of other ideas. This notion of reason is not the idea of self-interest. What Kant meant by this autonomy-reflecting question is not the question, is it in my self-interest to do what the pack is doing? That's a very specific development of the Kantian notion of reason. It came much after Kant and got elevated into a notion of reason but that's a very thick development. Kant's notion was very thin. His notion was, is it right for me to do what my pack is doing, what my social conditioning is? Not is it in my self-interest or anything very specific or thick like that. It's a very thin notion of reason. And this notion of reason should not be confused with all the much grander notions of reason which have become the critique of a whole range of criticisms of the political enlightenment, such as most famously Foucault's. There's nothing in this very thin notion of reason that I just mentioned in Kant which has some grand telos in it. There's no grand narrative that it's writing nor is it self-congratulatory. Human beings may possess this notion of reason but bees may have far better capacities in all sorts of other ways, social ways. So, it's not self-congratulatory, it's not a thick notion of reason, of self-interest and it's not generating any teleological story either. So, that's the heart, this very simple elementary heart of the idea of freedom of autonomy of the political enlightenment.

And I want to make clear that Kant himself didn't stop there. A number of other political theorists since Kant have stopped there. And you can get a very good, if careless, survey of it in Isaiah Berlin's essay Two Concepts of Liberty. Isaiah Berlin (Russian-British Philosopher) himself was very anxious to stop where I've stopped in my exposition of Kant so far. But Kant himself wasn't. And Kant went on to say, and he therefore built a bridge to take you from truth as the exercise of your capacity to choose the right choices. Kant went on to say that you haven't really, by authorizing the norms you live by, overcome heteronomy. You have to choose, Kant said, according to the moral law. So, Kant had his own universalist insistence that the truth is necessary for freedom, but it was a very circumscribed, universalist account of what that truth would be. And his idea was that it should be a truth which is unconditional and universal in the sense that you cannot legislate as a moral law, as he called it, a moral norm, to put it in a lower profile, anything that can't be adopted by everyone. So, that was his view of universalizability. There has to be a rational consistency about it. And his idea was a rather deep idea, that if I exercise my agency and autonomy in making choices, then consistency requires, this is part of the universalizability, that I recognize that others have this capacity. And therefore, just by rational consistency, it rules out, for instance, that I can be paternalistic towards you. If you have the capacity to choose, then I must recognize that capacity and see you as somebody who sets ends. And so, I have to respect you as a person, is his technical term for it. And so there is a recognition of others' autonomy at all times. And that means to put it in his terms, I can't treat others as a means. I must always see them as ends and as end setters for themselves. That's part of his universalism.

Now, of course, Kant's bringing together truth and freedom goes beyond the limited idea that I was saying is very much part of the political enlightenment. So, Kant had all the ingredients to go beyond the political enlightenment. But he didn't go beyond it, because he insisted that the truth which you authorize in your norms must take this universalist form, which is the other aspect of the political enlightenment, that it takes this universal form. So, Kant provided both the choice aspect of autonomy and the truth aspect of autonomy, but only in this universalist, non-contextual, unconditional conception of what the right choices could and should be.

But the very fact, I think, that he allowed you to get past the limited idea of freedom as the capacity to choose, gives you the possibility of going beyond the universalist strictures of the political enlightenment. And that is the direction in which post-Kantian German philosophy took Kant. So, the modifications that Hegel and, with the help of Rousseau and Marx, made of Kant are crucial to understanding the limits of the political enlightenment. And here I want to give a little sermon. There is a great tendency among the cheerleaders for the political enlightenment to constantly try and assimilate, say somebody like Hegel, Marx, and Rousseau, into the enlightenment. That doesn't work, that's just wrong. They are quite explicitly, in detail, anti-enlightenment or counter-enlightenment figures. That's precisely why somebody like Isaiah Berlin was made very anxious by them. Isaiah Berlin was a very interesting figure. He was fascinated by all of this romantic development of the notion of autonomy. He was fascinated by it to equal proportion that he was made anxious by it. And I think it's absolutely clear that he was honest in saying that this is the counter-enlightenment which was started by Hegel and Rousseau. And I think that is the right way to think about it. You can't just assimilate everything into the enlightenment and bloat it up so that it means nothing in the end, which is what a lot of thinkers have done.

So, what was this term that most Kantian German philosophy took? I think it's very important to understand that it's a modification of Kant, not an overthrow of Kant, even though it's such a radical modification that it doesn't deserve to be thought of as liberal at all. And the first modification, which is due to Hegel, I think, chief pivotal term of Kant was to say, when you ask the question that Kant asks you to pose—Should I be acquiescing? Should I accept the norms of my social conditioning? Hegel says you have to ask a further question, which is, when I ask that Kantian question, what conceptual resources, what values, norms, beliefs, etc., do I have that I can appeal to in order to answer that Kantian question? And Hegel said you have no resources except the resources given to you by your social conditioning. You can't go off to Mars. There's no Archimedean or transcendent place you go off to. You can only appeal to things that are already given to you in your social conditioning. So, for Hegel, you stand in one place in your social conditioning and get a distance and ask of another place—Should I be doing whatever that other place's conditioning requires you to do? So, you never escape the social conditioning in that sense. That's one major modification of Kant that was first introduced by Hegel. The way Hegel put it was, we are in history and history introduces internal contradictions in Geist, in consciousness. So, his was a diachronic way of putting it. I'm just putting it in a synchronic way by asking, well, at any given point, if I ask, should I be acquiescing in this? I can only answer by appealing to things somewhere else in the social conditioning. So, that's my synchronic version of Hegel's point. That's the first modification.

My own understanding of Hegel's view here is that this generates a skepticism about Kant's universalism. Now, somebody might say, no, it doesn't generate a skepticism about Kant's universalism because after all, there may be some moral norms of the sort that Kant had in mind about means and ends, for example, which all social conditioning provides you the resources to answer. So, there's no reason to be skeptical of the universalism. And I don't think that can be right. And why it can't be right will be fully sort of explicit when I, somewhat later, either if there's time in this lecture or the next one, bring in some considerations from Wittgenstein. But let me just put it in a summary way right now.

If you take the universalism to be vacuous, which is like cases must be treated alike, it sounds as if every set of norms that we are socially conditioned into have something like that common sense injunction. But as soon as you start saying in what respect something is like something else, should one be consistent, you immediately will get very different answers depending on which societies you are conditioned in. So, for instance, if you just take Kant's own idea that you should always treat people as ends, well, if you're in a society in which there are utilitarian values, you're not going to agree to that. You're not going to be conditioned into a norm of that kind. There will be no place to accept a norm of that kind, no reason to accept a norm of that kind. What utilitarianism says is that to pursue social aggregate utility, you should do whatever is needed to pursue social aggregate utility. And you very well might treat somebody as a means to pursue the highest social aggregate utility. In fact, it's very interesting. If you read somebody like John Rawls (American political philosopher) in A Theory of Justice, he has a principle called the 'difference principle' in which he says inequality can be allowed (Rawls is by and large egalitarian) if the same allows you to pursue the upliftment of the worst off. So, that's a commitment of the 'difference principle.' (Inequalities can be permitted if the inequalities help you to promote the upliftment of the very worst off in society).

So, let's paint a scenario. Suppose, I think that Mujahid Habibullah is a man of tremendous talent, more than the rest of us. So, I say, let's pay him a whole lot more than the others so that we can incentivize him to exercise his talent and produce innovations which will improve the political economy, the social institutions and so on, and thereby improve the conditions of the worst off in society. Well, that's treating Mujahid Habibullah as a means. You're not treating him as an end. I mean, if you want to particularly reward him, you should do it because he deserves to be rewarded, not because it's going to promote something else. So, you are treating him as a means. And so even in the pursuit of a Kantian project like 'A Theory of Justice,' Rawls slips into something which is everywhere prevalent, that you can't use people as a means if it has good ends. And so, it's not at all obvious that all societies have the conceptual resources and the normative commitments to yield Kant's moral universalism. And so, I think Hegel's term is basically an anti-universalist term when he raises that question about the social site or source for where you get the resources to answer the Kantian question.

There's a second very important term, a modification of Kant, that comes from Rousseau and gets developed by Hegel and Marx. But it's most vividly and brilliantly, original, profoundly there in Rousseau. And that's the idea that it's not just individual human beings who can ask the Kantian question—should I be doing what my social conditioning is doing? By and large, individual human beings constitute society and ask that question. But what Rousseau's work, 'Social Contract,' allows you to see is that whole societies, whole groups of individuals, communities, can ask that Kantian question, not just individual human beings. Of course, the form of the question won't be exactly the same as it is when individuals ask it. When individuals ask it, they say, should I be doing what the pack is doing? But when whole groups ask it, they take the form of saying, 'should one' (I'm using the word one to include not just human individuals but group individuals, if you like), should one be doing what one's tradition has always done? A whole group can ask, should one be following the traditions one has always followed? So, there's no reason to have a methodological individualism of human individuals alone asking the Kantian question. Group individuals can ask that question. And that was the idea of Rousseau's general will. It was the idea of a group. So, it was a singular generality. A group functioning as an individual. That was the idea of a general will. So, if a group can deliberate and function as an individual, then it's not just you and I as human organisms who have the privilege of asking the question. Groups can ask that question, and that was the idea of a general will. And once you admit to that, you have a whole range of possibilities that, of course, Hegel makes much of with the very notion of Geist being a consciousness of a much larger form. And you find it in Kant's, everywhere in Marx, when he begins to ask about whole groups raising issues about the tendencies of formation, for instance, like capital. So, that's another modification. Who gets to ask the Kantian question doesn't have to be an individual human organism. It could be a social group who asks it. And, by the way, this point was made by Condorcet (French philosopher, political economist, politician and mathematician) to show that the nature of voting is irrational, which was then given a beautiful formal theorem to show that voting is irrational by Kenneth Arrow (American economist and mathematician). And that is all in the direction of showing that voting, which is done by individuals, to make a decision need not be the only way. In fact, it's often irrational, as Arrow demonstrated. And the only rational way sometimes may be to do it as a group, which is the notion of consensus. This is really the whole underlying debate about voting versus consensus as a form of decision-making.

I've given you this part of intellectual history to tell you the modification of the political enlightenment central question in the post-enlightenment German philosophical tradition. And I want to just make a couple of points here which I think are really what is of great interest in this direction that was taken. See, this brings me to the heart of the idea of the link between truth and freedom. If you see that Kant himself and Hegel, Marx, and Rousseau give you the link between how truth and freedom are linked, how autonomy is not just the exercise of choice but making the right choice, and you understand that you can't make the right choice except by appealing to resources that are part of your social conditioning, then there are ways to go wrong when you make your choices. So, for instance, suppose I'm raising a question about some aspect of my social conditioning, and in answering it, I appeal to resources that are from some other aspect of my social conditioning, but those aspects of my social conditioning are just a bunch of prejudices of my social conditioning. So, let's say caste is prejudice. I have some casteist prejudices and I deploy them in answering the autonomy question. Well, then I get it wrong. So, the idea is that reason is just a capacity to ask the question. It doesn't mean you get it right. Reason can be exercised wrongly, especially if it's part of your social conditioning, and the part of your social conditioning which you appeal to answer the question is just a prejudice which you have acquiesced in. So, you can have illusions of exercise of reason. That's the important thing. You can really be under the impression that you have exercised your reason, and in fact it's an illusion of having exercised reason. That comes with the idea that truth and freedom are linked.

Click on the image to view at full size and to read the mentioned argument.

So, the question arises, how can you tell? Is there a criterion? Is there a rule which tells you, here you've authorized it, and here you're under the illusion of authorizing it? Here your reason has been correctly applied, here it is an illusion of an exercise of reason. Is there a criterion? And the answer is no. There is no criterion. All you can do is to ask of the place you've gone to, to answer the question and ask the autonomy-inducing question about that place too. There's no rulebook. Outside of a very narrow range of thinking, there is no rulebook. Reason is an extremely loose and broad notion. It's a very, very small part of reason which has rules to tell you how to reason. So, there's no answer to the question, when are you correctly exercising reason and when are you under the illusion of exercising reason. All you can do is to try and get over your illusions by asking the autonomy-inducing question all over again of that part of where you appeal to. And that is what Ashok Vajpeyi was saying about Gandhi's claim that getting to the truth and avoiding illusion is not an easy thing. You've got to go through layers of reason which reflect your autonomy. So, there's a kind of vigilance that comes with the possession of autonomy that you have to exercise. And Sartre understood this in a way, except that Sartre was not willing to call it reason, partly because he thought all social conditioning was a kind of bad faith. But the fact is Sartre did understand that there isn't any getting away from the exercise of autonomy. And I think it's very important, therefore, to understand that what Hegel and Marx bring in for all their insightful enrichment of Kant is not an abandoning of Kant. It's not an abandoning of the idea of the vigilance that reflective reason requires.

So, I want to raise a couple of other things which are close to my heart because these are, for me, the really interesting aspects of the role that reason plays in social understanding. What I want to first point to is there's a deep asymmetry between the cases, when the capacity for reason gets it wrong and when it gets it right. The asymmetry is that when it gets it wrong, (when the reason you appeal to, to make an authorization of a norm is, say, an expression of a prejudice) it's an illusion of exercising reason. When you get it wrong, you need to explain it. Why did this person merely express a prejudice? Why did this person authorize something which is merely an expression of a prejudice? Why did he not see the truth? So, the injunction is always to explain the error. There should be no unexplained error. So, we begin to be very interested in why people go wrong in the exercise of this reason in making this choice. Why did they go wrong? What are the prejudices of society they succumb to, etc.? But the asymmetry is when they get it right, no such explanation is called for. Now I find an extremely fascinating thing about the human, social mind, and social consciousness. You don't need to explain the cases of truth. The truth just transparently gets you to social reality and there's nothing to explain. It's only when you get it wrong that you then ask, why did the person get it wrong? Now, of course, you can take an interest in how people get it right and why they got it right and so on, but that's sort of ancillary further interest you might have, but it's not called for in the way that error is called for. I think this is extremely interesting; for a philosopher it's extremely interesting, you see, because there's something to be done in our cognitive practice if there's an error. But if you got it right, there's nothing to be done. So, there isn't any importance in our cognitive practice for this other thing. It becomes a sort of ancillary interest, which of course historians have. Historians make their living in this sort of thing and you can have an anthropological interest in why things get true, when things are true, but it's not called for when you've got the truth. If you have an explanation, it's a bonus and I'm not even sure it is a bonus because sometimes it can actually be a rather bad thing to be obsessive about explaining everything in that sociological way about choices and getting it right. I don't think you should be rushed to historical explanations all the time. Why? Why should you do that? I mean Foucault is so interesting because he did that sort of thing for pathologies, for regimes of incarceration, for the stigmatization through normalization of mental illness and so on. But he wasn't keen on just doing it for every case, even when there's no pathology and when you've got it right. And I think that's an extremely interesting asymmetry.

Click on the image to view at full size and to read the mentioned argument.

And one of the things that I think is a way to think about why this asymmetry is important is that in a way the truth and the transparency of getting to reality when your reason is exercised without illusion is that it is transparent, as I said, you get to the reality, it is the conceptual default. When I say you have to explain the error, it's a conceptual default that there's truth and transparency and then you have to explain the cases where it doesn't exist. That's something that's called for. And I'm very keen to say it's a conceptual default because it's got nothing to do with statistical frequency or anything like that. It's purely conceptual. You can in fact be pervasively erroneous, illusory and so on. I'm not insisting that this is more common to get it right. Not at all. It's only a conceptual default.

And in fact, I think to bring in the third figure in this audit intellectualist term giving, Marx is precisely wanted to say, that in certain economic formations you get it wholesale wrong. And that's what he meant by ideology, that you get it massively wrong. I mean you can't get it entirely wrong but you get it pretty massively wrong and that's what he meant by ideology. And the overcoming of ideology is to gain transparency. The ideology is the opaque middle intermediary, epistemological intermediary that gets you from the transparent reach to truth. And so, it can be very pervasive. It can be a feature of a whole economic society around an economic formation like capital. And that brings me to one more point, which is that what Hegel and Marx were very keen to get us beyond Kant in was to overcome what they called the subject-object divide. And the subject-object divide for them was – I'm not going to try and spell out the exact epistemological issues of Hegel's critique of Kant, which turns on the idea of a thing in itself, or Ding an sich (it is a German word which means 'thing in itself'), which made Kant, according to Hegel, completely unable to overcome the subject-object divide because he had this notion of Ding an sich, a thing in itself. So, reality is sort of unknowable in that sense. The object is unknowable, the subject is just separated from it, unredeemably. And Hegel criticized him for that. But the idea here in Hegel and Marx and the overcoming of ideology and so on is that you overcome the subject-object divide when you're free of ideology and you get things right and you see through to the transparent reality, the social reality. It's very easy to make this point on the non-social canvas. Take ordinary perception. I see an object in my vicinity and there's nothing to explain. The object is transparently present here when I see it. Now, I sometimes suffer from an illusion. When I suffer from an illusion, you need to posit intermediaries that make things opaque if it's not transparent. You talk about appearances of a bottle, seeming as if there is a bottle there and so on. You only introduce seemings, appearances etc. if you've gone wrong, if there's an illusion. But when there's a veridical perception, you just reach through to it. That's really the same idea. So, the subject-object is not divided; they are integrated in the episode of consciousness and on the social canvas that is what Hegel and Marx sought.

I am giving a little bit of structure to the idea of how the social allows us to grasp transparently the norms of our society, and for that I just want to appeal to a rather beautiful point made in Wittgenstein's discussion of rules, and I'll just put up something on the board which I'd like you to keep in mind. Wittgenstein asks the question, and it's really a very wonderful example because it generates, I think, the right way to think of the relationship between the social and the individual. Wittgenstein asks, what is the nature of our grasping or perceiving rules and norms? And though his eventual interest is in the rules of language or meaning, he starts with an example of a traffic sign (a signpost) which we see, and he says, when all of us see a traffic sign, we immediately see it as turning left, as telling us to turn left. So, you're walking off, and you see the sign, or driving, and he says, how come all of us here, let's say, as soon as we see this, we see it as telling us to turn left? He says, we don't stop and scratch our heads and say, how shall I interpret the sign? We don't do that. We just turn left. He says, how come? How come we're not puzzled? How come we just see meaning? What is this rich phenomenology that you see meaning in the sign? You don't see a wooden board with some mark on it or some paint on it. You don't see that. You just see 'turn left.' You see meaning. It's a direct, rich, phenomenological perception of meaning. 'So how come? How is this possible?' And he says, it's only possible, and he introduces a notion of forms of life, because in our social backgrounds, not in the foreground, we've been brought up in a culture of martial weaponry, of seeing illustrations of arrows being shot, which move in a certain direction. Many of us have read books, comic books of the middle class, families, seen pictures and so on. So, there's a whole rich social background of forms of life, which has nothing to do with signs and rules or anything. It's just part of our culture. It's part of our practices. It's just part of our social history, our social memory, and so on and so forth. And all that background, you know, gives us the rich phenomenology of perceiving meaning, seeing it as 'turn left.' With somebody from another culture, let's say where arrows are used for decorative purposes, and not for martial weaponry. They're not going to go there. And they are going to say, what does this sign, you know? So, you need a certain background of social memories, culture, etc., to be able to so much as perceive what, correctly, what the rules are. And then the question arises, how do illusions arise? How should we deal with those illusions? And there, the real hard issues of the relationship between social and individual will come up. Thank you very much.

Works Cited:

Arrow, K. J. (1951). Social Choice and Individual Values. John Wiley & Sons.

Berlin, I. (1969). Two Concepts of Liberty. In Four essays on liberty. Oxford University Press.

Condorcet, M. J. A. N. C. de. (1795). Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind.

Gandhi, M. K. (1938). Hind Swaraj and other writings. Navajivan Publishing House. (Original work published 1909)

Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press.

Rousseau, J.-J. (1762). The Social Contract (Various editions and translations).

Akeel Bilgrami is a renowned Indian-born philosopher and the Sidney Morgenbesser Chair in Philosophy at Columbia University, New York, with a focus on philosophy of language, mind, and political/moral philosophy. A former Rhodes Scholar, he has authored significant works on secularism, identity, and Mahatma Gandhi's thought, often addressing deep socio-political concerns. 

The transcript is prepared by Rahul Khandelwal who is a PhD Research Scholar in the Department of History and Culture at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.

Book launch event of Gyanendra Pandey's Men at Home: Imagining Liberation in Colonial and Postcolonial Indi

Book launch of 'Men at Home' in New Delhi. From left to right: Gyanendra Pandey, Mallarika Sinha Roy, Projit B. Mukharji, Mridula Garg. (Photo source: The Wire)

[This is the full transcript of book launch event of 'Men at Home' organized by Orient BlackSwan in New Delhi on 12.12.2025]

'Men at Home' is a book about masculinity and conjugality, as well as it is a book about Indian modernity, nationalism, and society, as seen from the location of men inside the home. The author investigates how men across the subcontinent negotiate marriage, intimacy and conjugality, and focuses on the implications of their ambiguous commitment to this critical part of their lives. To discuss this further, we have an extraordinary panel today. Let me introduce them now.

The author of this book is eminent historian, Gyanendra Pandey, who is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. The chair for this evening is Mallarika Sinha Roy, Assistant Professor at the Centre for Women's Studies in Jawahar Lal Nehru University. Her most recent book is 'Feminist Frames: Gender, Space, and Violence in India.' She is also the author of 'Gender and Radical Politics in India, Magic Moments of Naxalbari (1967-1975)' and 'Utpal Dutt and Political Theatre in Postcolonial India.' Ashok Vajpeyi is an award-winning Hindi language poet, essayist, literary cultural critic and translator, apart from being a noted cultural and arts administrator and a former civil servant. He was Chairman, Dalit Kala Academy, Ministry of Culture 2008-2011. He has published over 23 books of poetry, criticism and art and was awarded the Sahitya Academy Award in 1994 for his poetry collection, Kahi Nahi Wahin. Mridula Garg is a distinguished author and has been awarded the Sahitya Academy Award, the Vyas Samman, the Hellman Hammett Grant and the Ram Manohar Lohiya Samman. With a background in economics and literature, she has written 8 novels, 86 stories, a memoir called Ve Nayab Auratein and a collection of essays in Hindi. Her novels are available variously in English, German, Japanese, French, Russian and many Indian languages. Projit B. Mukherjee is Professor of History at Ashoka University, Haryana. Formerly he was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Mukherjee works mainly on the history of science in Modern South Asia. His latest book, 'Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, (1920-66)' won the Pfizer Award.

Mallarika Sinha Roy (Centre for Women's Studies, JNU)

Thank you all. First, I would like to thank you for inviting me to chair this session. And of course, the biggest thank you is to Professor Pandey for writing this book. I enjoyed myself hugely while reading it in the past one month. So, without much ado, what I would like to do is to speak very briefly about what I have learned from reading the book. And then I would invite our panellists to speak for about 10 minutes. And then, you know, if Professor Pandey would like to respond to them, that would be great. And after my introduction, I would like Professor Pandey also to talk a few minutes about the book.

So, Professor Pandey's Men at Home is an extraordinary book about what he calls ordinary life of ordinary people. His dramatis personae, however, lists men and women who have done quite a few amazing things in their lives. The ordinariness that Pandey captures in nearly 200 pages of the book is about how they performed their everyday selves in their autobiographical writings. The prelude sets the tone of the book itself. Unassuming yet deeply insightful, covering a range of issues with care and yet not daunting, especially for someone like me who is not a historian, but has a great deal of interest in gender history and women's studies. And of course, innovative in thinking through a very important aspect of South Asian history yet not making it in your face new. From the creation of the Indian modern through snapshots of family life and domesticity to the architectural speciality of being at home, it grows through the pages as practices of duty, dignity and discipline interlaced with the ways in which 20th century South Asian men thought about inhabiting domesticity, performed it, imagined it and wrote about it.

The way fragments of family is interpreted as men's being at home, both as part of and as an interruption, allows the reader to enter this world of masculinity from an original perspective. Both caste and gender make Pandey's explorations into performing the selfhood of men richly textured. The ideation of home as a sanctuary from complexities of the public is more prevalent in elite aristocratic mansions or modest middle-class homes, while the working class basti or the Dalit huts in villages spilled into neighborhoods in a much more obvious self-evident way.

The distinction between ghar and bahir, the home and the world, the inner sanctum and the outside world, reflect the way the Indian modern evolved through its predecessor, the Indian feudal. And Pandey describes the 20th century modernity as feudal without feudalism. The obstinate residue of feudalism has been roundly criticized. The ideals of equal opportunity, dignity for all, independence and freedom of thought have been cited again and again as the bedrock of modern civilization. And yet, to quote from the book, the old regime lives on in the new or at any rate claims to.

The theoretical reflections are thought-provoking, especially in a time when history and myth are constantly being mixed into creating a specific monolithic tradition. But as a reader, I must admit, I hugely enjoyed myself reading through the performance of intimacies as narrated by Pandey's protagonists and the way he analyses them. Learning about Dhanpatarai Premchand's domestic life as someone who regularly helped at the kitchen, helped with child-rearing, but also kept a secret romantic affair from his beloved second wife is quite incredible. I cannot resist quoting from Premchand's own short description of marrying a baalvidhava, a child-widow, who was fearless, bold, uncompromising, sincere lady, who was also awfully impulsive. And this is what Premchand is writing about her, awfully impulsive. And his rather grandiose declaration of not claiming what she cannot give actually gives us a sketch of the same awfully impulsive lady, Shivrani, who wrote the delightful 'Premchand Ghar Me.' That's the name of the book she wrote.

In the same way, the author of 'Ghumakkar Shastra,' Rahul Sankrityayan, whom I have known since childhood as the author of 'From Volga to Ganga,' admitted publicly in his dedication of his book 'Kanaila ki Katha' to Ram Dulari Devi, whom he had abandoned thoughtlessly, ruining her entire life.

The transformation of ascetic intellectual Bhimrao Ambedkar into an affectionate, loving husband after his second marriage. Harivansh Rai Bachchan's passionate love for Teji, and yet his strange ruminations about Teji's masculine assertiveness as against his own recognition of his feminine sensitivity as a poet, and his sudden desire to see himself in a military uniform, and his estrangement from his perfect young family for a PhD in Cambridge, all took me back to think thoroughly about Bedi Kamble's remarkable epithet, Navarapan, the husbandliness with which Pandey starts his book. And this is something that can open up a whole new way of understanding Indian masculinity and South Asian masculinity.

Gyanendra Pandey (Historian)

I'm a South Asian academic, Western South Asian male academic. It was important for me to think when I began this work. I've been writing for a very long time on histories that have not been written. And here was a history that definitely had not been written. The domestic world is equated with women and children and so on. One of the first things I tried to do is to say, this is a very odd notion. Let's rethink the visual of the domestic. Domestic includes these men (whom I covered) in the most peculiar way; in that space, they're not there much of the time. And when they're there, they're not doing anything or a whole range of things which they do not do. But that absence, presence, is the thing that I was particularly interested in and that was the starting point for me.

I was astonished, I should tell you that there is a huge corpus of Indian writings in Hindi, in Punjabi, in Urdu, in Marathi which refers to the home and it's not being investigated and you just wonder why? And it is because the home is associated with women and children. There's been absolutely phenomenally, really extraordinarily good works on this particular theme but it does not center the man in the home—what the man does, or doesn't do, and why his absence, presence, is acceptable. So that's the first thing.

The second is that it was important for me to have the counterpoint of the Dalits in the book because the people who write most of the time are, of course, reasonably well off. They're people who come to school and college and so on and they've become distinguished people in various ways and they write at length. Rahul Sankrityayan writes a six-volume autobiography—2,000 pages. Bachchan writes four volumes of his autobiography—extraordinary stuff. And they're just pouring it all out but nobody takes the stuff seriously. And as I say, even in Rajendra Prashad's autobiography, there's only two pages or four pages on the home directly because he returns home when he's not well. He returns to the home to recover. Otherwise, he's just too busy. And these are extraordinarily accomplished people. They're great thinkers. They're people who actually did a phenomenal amount of work to transform the society. 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝑰 𝒏𝒐𝒕𝒆𝒅 𝒘𝒂𝒔 𝒏𝒐𝒕 𝒐𝒏𝒍𝒚 𝒋𝒖𝒔𝒕 𝒊𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒈𝒆𝒏𝒆𝒓𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 (𝒊𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒍𝒂𝒕𝒆 19𝒕𝒉 𝒄𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒚 𝒐𝒓 𝒆𝒂𝒓𝒍𝒚 20𝒕𝒉 𝒄𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒚, 𝒕𝒉𝒓𝒐𝒖𝒈𝒉 𝒑𝒂𝒓𝒕𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒊𝒏𝒅𝒆𝒑𝒆𝒏𝒅𝒆𝒏𝒄𝒆) 𝒃𝒖𝒕 𝒂𝒍𝒔𝒐 𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒐 𝒎𝒚 𝒈𝒆𝒏𝒆𝒓𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏, 𝒎𝒚 𝒄𝒐𝒉𝒐𝒓𝒕, 𝒎𝒚 𝒂𝒄𝒕𝒖𝒂𝒍 𝒄𝒐𝒎𝒎𝒖𝒏𝒊𝒕𝒚. 𝑻𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒆 𝒊𝒔 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒔 𝒑𝒆𝒄𝒖𝒍𝒊𝒂𝒓 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒐𝒇 𝒂 𝒑𝒐𝒍𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒄𝒂𝒍 𝒓𝒂𝒅𝒊𝒄𝒂𝒍𝒊𝒔𝒎 (𝒂𝒕 𝒘𝒉𝒊𝒄𝒉 𝒘𝒆 𝒂𝒓𝒆 𝒊𝒎𝒎𝒆𝒏𝒔𝒆𝒍𝒚 𝒈𝒊𝒇𝒕𝒆𝒅 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒕𝒉𝒐𝒖𝒈𝒉𝒕𝒇𝒖𝒍 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒘𝒓𝒊𝒕𝒆 𝒘𝒆𝒍𝒍) 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒂 𝒔𝒐𝒄𝒊𝒂𝒍 𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒔𝒆𝒓𝒗𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒔𝒎 𝒂𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒔𝒂𝒎𝒆 𝒕𝒊𝒎𝒆 𝒘𝒉𝒊𝒄𝒉 𝒘𝒆 𝒅𝒐𝒏'𝒕 𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒌 𝒂𝒃𝒐𝒖𝒕. And so, at the end of the book I even risk talking a little bit about my own initiative but it seems that, I just say that this history has marked us and it's worth thinking about that. It's worth thinking in what ways it might have marked us. And what, therefore, we might still be doing without even recognizing it. So, the counterpoint of the Dalits is important because the other two groups that I write about are the Muslim and the Hindu elite groups—the Ashraf on the one hand, the Bhadralok on the other and they share a lot (for all that, you know, they're supposed to come from different traditions) especially in this respect, right? In the home, they can't manage at all without the woman doing everything. And of course, in the Indian senses, in the upper and middle classes also because servants will do it. There are a lot of poorer people in the home. The home is not a.... it's not the nuclear family.

A detail from the photograph of a wedding photo taken outside a police officer’s family home in northern India, December 1935, which is featured on the cover of the book 'Men at Home'. (Picture source: The Wire)

I want to just say to you that the image which I chose for the cover of the book (20-30 people), that the family sent to me through a friend of mine, was taken after the wedding of a very distinguished educationist. He went to Pakistan, a radical firebrand. At the age of 18, he was already very known for his writing and for his innovativeness in writing. He and his 14 years old bride was married in 1935. This is the photograph celebrating them. It's within a month, less than a month, of the wedding. And I would urge you to look at it and think where the bride and groom are. Who is the bride and groom? Which two young people? The 14-year-old was really spunky. She was a remarkable woman. At that age, she was reading all of this stuff. And she accosted the firebrand and said to him, I've read your book, I've read this article, I want to read more. The photograph just tells you. This is the nuclear family in India. Today, it's a three-generation family, much of the time. It's almost always two generations at least. But it could be more. And there are good institutional reasons for it. Where do you grow up? Where do old people grow? Anyhow, so please think about it (Tell me later if you spot the bride and groom. I have some footnotes in the book explaining that). Anyhow, so that's probably all I need to say.

I'll say one last thing. At the end of the book, the last part, it's in three parts—𝑶𝒏𝒆 𝒊𝒔 𝒄𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒆𝒅 '𝑳𝒆𝒈𝒂𝒄𝒊𝒆𝒔,' 𝒐𝒏𝒆 𝒊𝒔 𝒄𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒆𝒅 '𝑷𝒓𝒂𝒄𝒕𝒊𝒄𝒆𝒔,' 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒐𝒏𝒆 𝒊𝒔 𝒄𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒆𝒅 '𝑯𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒚 𝒊𝒏 𝒂 𝑽𝒊𝒔𝒄𝒆𝒓𝒂𝒍 𝑹𝒆𝒈𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒆𝒓.' 𝑨𝒏𝒅 𝒕𝒉𝒆 '𝑯𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒚 𝒊𝒏 𝒂 𝑽𝒊𝒔𝒄𝒆𝒓𝒂𝒍 𝑹𝒆𝒈𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒆𝒓' 𝒘𝒂𝒔 𝒊𝒎𝒑𝒐𝒓𝒕𝒂𝒏𝒕 𝒕𝒐 𝒎𝒆. 𝑩𝒆𝒄𝒂𝒖𝒔𝒆 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒅𝒐𝒏'𝒕 𝒉𝒂𝒗𝒆 𝒂𝒏 𝒂𝒓𝒄𝒉𝒊𝒗𝒆 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝒘𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒅𝒐. 𝒀𝒐𝒖 𝒅𝒐𝒏'𝒕 𝒉𝒂𝒗𝒆 𝒂𝒏 𝒂𝒓𝒄𝒉𝒊𝒗𝒆 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒔𝒐𝒓𝒕 𝒐𝒇 𝒍𝒊𝒇𝒆 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒗𝒂𝒍𝒖𝒆𝒔 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒂 𝒔𝒆𝒏𝒔𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒕𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒆𝒏𝒕. 𝑭𝒐𝒓 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕, 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒅𝒐 𝒉𝒂𝒗𝒆 𝒈𝒆𝒔𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒆𝒔; 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒊𝒇 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒄𝒐𝒖𝒍𝒅 𝒑𝒂𝒚 𝒂𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝒕𝒐 𝒕𝒉𝒐𝒔𝒆 𝒈𝒆𝒔𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒆𝒔, 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒚 𝒄𝒐𝒖𝒍𝒅 𝒃𝒆 𝒚𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝒂𝒓𝒄𝒉𝒊𝒗𝒆. 𝒀𝒐𝒖 𝒘𝒐𝒖𝒍𝒅 𝒑𝒓𝒐𝒃𝒂𝒃𝒍𝒚 𝒈𝒆𝒕 𝒂 𝒍𝒐𝒕 𝒐𝒇 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒅 𝒐𝒇 𝒉𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒚 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒘𝒆 𝒉𝒂𝒗𝒆 𝒏𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓 𝒘𝒓𝒊𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒏. 𝑨𝒏𝒅 𝒔𝒐, 𝒂𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒆𝒏𝒅 𝒐𝒇 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒃𝒐𝒐𝒌 𝑰 𝒔𝒂𝒚, 𝒍𝒆𝒕'𝒔 𝒋𝒖𝒔𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒌. 𝑴𝒐𝒔𝒕 𝒉𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒚 𝒉𝒂𝒔 𝒃𝒆𝒆𝒏 𝒘𝒓𝒊𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒏 𝒊𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒇𝒐𝒓𝒎 𝒐𝒇 𝒘𝒐𝒓𝒍𝒅 𝒉𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒚- 𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒒𝒖𝒆𝒔𝒕𝒔, 𝒄𝒐𝒍𝒐𝒏𝒊𝒛𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏, 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒎𝒂𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒐𝒇 𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒈𝒔 ('𝒃𝒂𝒅𝒆 𝒍𝒐𝒈'), 𝒊𝒏𝒅𝒖𝒔𝒕𝒓𝒊𝒂𝒍 𝒓𝒆𝒗𝒐𝒍𝒖𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒔, 𝒓𝒆𝒗𝒐𝒍𝒖𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒔 𝒐𝒇 𝒅𝒊𝒇𝒇𝒆𝒓𝒆𝒏𝒕 𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒅𝒔, 𝒂𝒈𝒓𝒊𝒄𝒖𝒍𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒆 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒘𝒉𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓 𝒊𝒕 𝒊𝒔. 𝑻𝒉𝒐𝒔𝒆 𝒔𝒐𝒓𝒕𝒔 𝒐𝒇 𝒅𝒓𝒂𝒎𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒄 𝒄𝒉𝒂𝒏𝒈𝒆𝒔 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒘𝒐𝒓𝒍𝒅 𝒉𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒊𝒄𝒂𝒍 𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒔 𝒂𝒓𝒆 𝒄𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒆𝒅 𝒉𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒚. 𝑾𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒉𝒂𝒑𝒑𝒆𝒏𝒔 𝒊𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒚𝒅𝒂𝒚? 𝑾𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒉𝒂𝒑𝒑𝒆𝒏𝒔 𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒚 𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒈𝒍𝒆 𝒅𝒂𝒚 𝒐𝒇 𝒚𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝒍𝒊𝒇𝒆? 𝑸𝒖𝒊𝒕𝒆 𝒐𝒇𝒕𝒆𝒏 𝒊𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒉𝒐𝒎𝒆 𝒘𝒆 𝒑𝒓𝒆𝒕𝒆𝒏𝒅- 𝒊𝒕'𝒔 𝒏𝒐𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒆. 𝑻𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒊𝒔 𝒏𝒐𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒉𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒚? 𝑨𝒏𝒅 𝒔𝒐, 𝑰 𝒂𝒔𝒌, 𝒘𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒊𝒔 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒏𝒆𝒄𝒆𝒔𝒔𝒂𝒓𝒚 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒘𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒊𝒔 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒏𝒈𝒆𝒏𝒕? 𝑨𝒏𝒅 𝑰 𝒔𝒖𝒈𝒈𝒆𝒔𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒚𝒅𝒂𝒚 𝒊𝒔 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒍 𝒉𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒚 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒊𝒕 𝒊𝒔 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒉𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒚 𝒘𝒆 𝒔𝒉𝒐𝒖𝒍𝒅 𝒃𝒆 𝒕𝒓𝒚𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒕𝒐 𝒘𝒓𝒊𝒕𝒆. And it is going to be extremely difficult to write. I don't suggest I have answered all of those questions. I have only raised questions. And my answer to most of your questions will be more questions.

Ashok Vajpeyi (Poet, critic, essayist, translator)

Thank you for asking the most notoriously unqualified person to talk about history. In some sense, these days we have too much of history we are surrounded with and history seems to have influenced so many people who have no idea of history at all seem to be talking very vociferously, aggressively, etc. In the first place, this too much of history which still means regimes and dynasties and what you have. Here's a book which talks about the everyday mess of life. And that's what he said also. And I think that is an important counterpoint to the historical euphoria that we have in the first place.

Now even in history writing, I am not a student of history. I hope not to be a victim of history either but you never know. Even in the historical writing, such themes have not been addressed or explored. As you were saying, we are too occupied with it. So, the everyday mess of life which constitutes a major element of history is, in a manner of speaking, ignored by history itself, at least by history of writing. So, there is this important intervention in that respect.

We have autobiographies and we have literary studies of autobiographies. Some of the better-known biographies- Bachchan's biography. In fact, at one time, I used to say that Bachchan Ji, in fact, demolished his own poetry by writing the autobiography. Because there are such rich, emotionally potential moments. And it produced, because he quotes his poems, such banal poetry. So, he, in a manner of speaking, as a prose writer, and it's a wonderful prose (He was not known for prose writing, but anyway). Now, the men at home, luckily now we have a reasonable audience. Otherwise, you'd think the men this evening are truly at home, for whatever reasons. But anyway, it includes Ambedkar, Gandhi, Rahul Sankrityayan, Khursheed Mirza, Rajendra Prasad, Premchand, Akhtar Hussain Raipuri, and Om Prakash Vahini, etc. And to weave them all together, and what is surprising is that there is an almost camaraderie across religions, across communities, across social hierarchy of absence. So, actually men are hardly at home and this book tells you. And wherever they are, as he himself has said, I have taken out many stamps, and I think within the time I should finish. The history of men in South Asian homes builds on an abundant, expanding, and still underutilized archive of autobiographies and memoirs, ethnographic accounts and fiction, detailing and commenting on the life in intimate space of family and home. That's what it says. The diverse histories illuminate something of the desired, expected, anticipated. In a word, lived experience of men and women in the modern Indian home and family. They capture something of the feel of marriage, intimacy, and togetherness, including the effects of the humiliating and constant assertion of gender, caste, and class power in domestic interactions. Now, this is something which makes you acknowledge somewhat disturbingly the fact that this is what everyday life means in India, continues to mean that in India. What surfaces once more is the modern middle-class male fantasy of a categorical division between the home and the world, the private realm of the family, and the public realm of world history. I think word history comes with a lot of delusion in the book, which I hugely like. You know, after all your past, they must be said, poetry is art of history. And since I practice the dismal art of verse-making, whenever the history is attacked, I feel happy that I'm part of the other history, not this history.

Then, look at this, what is Rajendra Prasad is saying in his autobiography. Prasad estimated that he and his wife had spent less than 45 months of those 45 years together. Initially, he was away at school and college in the nearby town of Chhapra. Later, he went farther to Calcutta, where he completed his MA in 1908 and then a bachelor's and master's degree in law. Returning to Bihar in 1916, 20 years after their wedding, he practiced law in the newly established Provincial High Court. Even in the early years before the birth of their own new child in 1907, husband and wife got little time together.

So, for the past few days, I have been searching for the poetry of home in Mirza Ghalib. I thought I would write a book on Mirza Ghalib and Kabir. So, I found three relevant sher about home:

wo aaye ghar mein humare, khuda ki qudrat hai

kabhi hum unko kabhi apne ghar ko dekhte hai

ghar mein tha kya, ki tera gam usse gairat karta

ye jo rakhte the hum, ik hasrat-e-taameer so hai

waada aane ka wafa kije, ki kya andaaz hai

tumne kyon saupi hai, mere ghar ki darbani mujhe

So, in other words, what you have is also perhaps is seen as a lament on the side of women. A kind of a lament which is saying: tumne kyon saupi hai, mere ghar ki darbani mujhe. I am going to look after and keep vigil over your own home, to which you hardly ever come. And there are these very interesting... I don't think that we have studied both Bachchan, Premchand and Rahul Sankirtyayan, for instance, in literature. I don't think this aspect of their autobiography was noticed before Gyanendra had done it in the sense that Rahul Sankirtyayaan is almost prescribing, there is a very interesting five-point description- what is to be done and what is not to be done.

    1. An older man should never marry a young woman. 2. He who has not taken on the responsibilities of a householder to the age of 50 should be doubly careful: “Never ever! Never ever!” [This phrase, which appears in Sanskrit, translates literally, “That’s not it! Not it!”] 3. That he has not taken on the responsibilities of a householder all that time means that he was fired by some ideals. Such a person should be even more wary of shackling himself. 4. Anyone who has spent a long life wandering the world should keep far away from marriage. 5. If in addition he is addicted to a quest for knowledge, the prohibition is absolute.

Here's a Mahapandit who got the Sahitya Akademy Award incidentally after the intervention of Jawaharlal Nehru because he was a communist card holder. And he was selected; his book was selected. But the decision was left to the chairman of the Sahitya Akademy and Nehru pointing out that he is a communist party card holder. And Nehru wrote on the file, his book has been selected on merit whatever may be his ideological inclination, that does not come in the way. The same Rahul Sankrityayan saying that if you are in the quest of knowledge- you should be away from home, you should not have a home either. I didn't really know this aspect. Although it is known his Russian wife and all that but this, that he would prescribe such things. Thank you very much for bringing this to my notice. In fact, it makes quite clear that autobiographies can be read as historical archive. Thank you!

Mridula Garg (Distinguished writer)

Just as I was coming, I was caught in a jam for a long time. And it struck me that this book, 'Men at Home,' would as well be titled 'Women at Work.' Because it seems that however gifted a woman might be, however great her talents might be- she might be a policy-maker, she might be the head of an institute. But the main arena of work is the home. And the man stays there like a paying guest. Or, if you want to be less kind, as the man who came to dinner, broke his leg and stayed put for the rest of his life. But the work is all done by women.

This is a very well researched book. Meticulously researched, all documented, presented as history. But all the while that I was reading this book, all the research documents, diaries and notebooks were used for this book. I had this galloping sense of déjà vu because I felt that I've always known this, intuitively and through privately experienced reality. I don't mean my experience; I mean the experience of all those people who happen to be born as women.

You talk about the colonial and the post-colonial period. But the seeds of this were sown in the Mahabharata itself. When Bhishma Pitamah gave an unethical but judicially proper, correct, valid reply to Draupadi's futile or illegitimate wedding. Her question is famous. She asked, did Dharmaraj use her as a wager? Before he waged and lost himself on the gambling board or was it afterwards? According to Iravati Karve in her book Yuganta, she says that it was very foolish of her to ask this question because at that time she should have been begging for mercy rather than indulging in rhetoric. But I don't agree with Iravati. I think the right time to ask questions is when you are not allowed to ask questions, when you are being caused an injury. So anyway, the question that she asked was most certainly not judicially correct because she already knew the legal answer. And that is the answer on which Bhishma Pitamah soothed. And that was, what if he was no longer king? A Dasa or a slave or a servant, whatever you want to call him, has the same property right over his wife. So, wife is property. What I feel is Draupadi should have asked, if I had no value, how could I be used as a wager? No one uses valueless things as wagers. And if I had value, how could it be lost just because my husband was no longer king? Who knows, she might have asked that very question. After all, so much has been eliminated and added to the Mahabharata's text. We don't know what exactly she asked. And this is what suits people to say that this is what she asked. And she was legally arrested by Bhishma Pitamah. Actually, whatever she asked or did not ask, that is the question we are all asking. All of us women are asking that question. Do we have intrinsic value? Or do you have value only as maker or worker in a home? Fortunately, the women in Gyanendraji's book are also asking the same question. And he seems to have full sympathy with the women. That is rare.

For any author, historian, to have empathy for the women is a very, very rare quality. The dark truth is that we have the authority of both the law and cultural behaviour, then and now, to show that however wide and ugly the class and caste differences may be, the gender difference is immutable and common to all. The high and the low, the scholarly and the illiterate, the idealistic poets and the earthy poor poets. Everybody, gender difference will remain. The law may accord you some rights. The women might perform stupendous tasks outside the home in various spheres but both culturally and privately, and this Gyanendraji says himself in his book, she is viewed not only by her male partner, but more ominously (More ominously is my addition to it) by herself, as just an exalted housekeeper. And that's how all the men in their autobiographies refer to the women. Now, one thing I must say, Gyanendraji is very, very empathetic to his women. And I could say that this book is a female book. It's written from a female point of view.

But nobody can escape their destiny. So, though the text of this very true study of patriarchy, he takes a number of men whom he describes as very patriarchal, and he sort of condemns them for it. He himself appears to be quite patriarchal when he chooses his protagonists, or what he calls his remittance personae. He has chosen fourteen people. He has given research and analysed stories of fourteen people are given to us. Thirteen eminent men, with eminent wives, and one lone woman. Just one woman, Kausalya Baisantri, is named and treated as a person in her own right, Baby Kamble also. All other women are wives. And Kausalya Baisantri of course is a Dalit, and a social activist (but what Pandey Ji very graciously says about her which he does not say about Baby Kambe or anybody else), she was forced into the role of middle-class housewife and mother. She was forced. All other women chose it. Or they chose it because patriarchy demanded it. And subconsciously they cast themselves as exalted housekeepers. But the proof of her being forced into middle class motherhood and housewife-hood is her autobiography. In her autobiography she does not talk of her marital goals or of her relationship with her husband. She talks of the struggles of her working-class parents and grandparents around Nagpur where she grew up. This is deep undertones. What better way to express one's separate identity than to recount your birth and the struggles of your parental heritage than of the post-marital situation with its accompanying adversities or disasters or inequalities or whatever.

As I said, there are other eminent women in the book. They not only write autobiographies, but they do other very important work, they were brilliant women. But for none of them, as the author said, they were forced into the role of middle class or upper-class housewives and mothers. So, did they then sacrifice their careers and passions to be prominently housewives and mothers and be acceptable in the canvas of patriarchy of their own choice and free will? Or was it the compulsion to fit into the pattern of that patriarchy where, as I said earlier, she is viewed not only by her male partner but more ominously by herself as just an exalted housekeeper. Now to talk about these other women, there is of course Teji Bachchan, wife of poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan and I totally agree with Ashok Vajpeyi about his prose and poetry. But you know, he was a popular poet and he earned his livelihood through his poetry and I don't think he had bought anything for his autobiography, which he wrote in four volumes. But his wife, Teji Bachchan, his second wife, was a college professor and was a theatre person. but she was totally immersed in the home, as was Premchand's wife, Shivani Devi, who again wrote an autobiography. Now the interesting thing is that all these women, wives of eminent people, I'll take a few names, who wrote voluminous autobiographies, which featured mostly their husbands and their lives with their husbands but the husband was the main motive of the autobiography. Ofcourse, Premchand's wife, Shivrani, was a writer in her own merit, but she also wrote an autobiography about Premchand. Indrani Jagjivan Ram wrote a voluminous autobiography featuring mostly her husband, who was then the defence minister and later the deputy prime minister. It was only Kausalya Baisantri, in whose autobiography her husband played no part at all. All others wrote about their husbands and themselves of course. Hameeda Akhtar Husain Raipuri, wife of radical leftist writer and educationist, who became well known as a writer only after her husband's death. But of course, she wrote a colourful autobiography of their life at home, colouring it with her talent. There is Kamala Sankrityayan, who completed the last two volumes, the fifth and sixth volumes, of the very famous autobiography that Rahul Sankrityayan was writing. Then there was Savita Ambedkar, who wrote an autobiography of herself and her illustrious husband Babasaheb Ambedkar, which provided fascinating information on his life and activities in the home. The most interesting case was that of Khurshid Mirza, an actor, dancer and singer, who was wife of Akbar Mirza, a member of British police service. She also wrote an autobiography which gave a detailed account of her married life. And she also gained prominence as a television star only after her husband's death. So, the one thing that men at home can do is to die.

I want to close, in case Gyanendraji is thinking that I am very carping about his book, by saying that it's a remarkable book, as I said, it's a female book. And for a guest in the house to write a book with the perspective of the hostess is quite remarkable. In the end I want to quote from your book. In the end, he says, "In the end, what the women might have said is: “Educators, educate yourselves— about the people, animals, and lives around you, and most of all about yourselves. For the thing men did not question at all, in their lives and activities in the domestic arena or the wider public domain, was their right to wander at will and thus fulfil their natural talents. They hardly pondered the historically produced self- image of men as necessarily complex, thinking, many- sided, and independent human beings: so self- evident, so natural that it remains pervasive, even though it is widely challenged today. The belief depended, critically, on the assumption that the “self- made man” is beholden to no one outside himself, least of all to wives and other “minor dependents” in an only- occasionally- visible domestic world. To investigate that image might have been a step too far, too risky for men — and for some women, too risky for society as they knew it.

Now the last sentence shows his real empathy for women. Thank you for it, Gyanendra Ji, and I hope you write your other books with equal empathy for the underdog.

Projit B. Mukherjee (Department of History, Ashoka University)

Since I'm the last one, permit me to start at the back of the book. It brought out most clearly for me what I felt throughout much of the book. The various domestic revelations and confessions in the epilogue, some verging on the scandalous, I would say, triggered in me half-remembered memories and rumours of similar skeletons and toxic nostalgias in my own family's cabinet of curiosities. But the dubious pleasures of these childhood memories, be as they are, were also constantly haunted by a feeling that I should not be hearing or reading this, that I'm somehow eavesdropping on something that I'm not supposed to hear. This visceral urge to turn away and look the other way was perhaps part of my own upper-caste, middle-class upbringing that the book wanted to work us through. And to that extent, I call the book a brave one and a successful one. Much more unproblematic was my appreciation of the fulsome use of an archive of Indian language writing, mostly autobiographies, to write this book.

As a historian of modern India, I often feel deeply saddened by the way so much of the recent works on history are based almost completely on English language sources, especially the newer and more exciting fields such as legal history or history of infrastructure, while doing so much to move the historian's gaze past the 1947 watershed seems to completely ignore the vast wealth of material that exists in Indian languages. By marshalling both biographies and fiction, in some cases, such as Atiya Husain's novel, as well as oral reminiscences of other older family members, including Professor Pandey's own, Pandey shows us how much we historians can learn by delving into those ignored treasures, namely things that have not been written in English.

His use of these sources, however, also raises for me as a historian some questions. Generally speaking, pan-Indian histories are easier to write when we write with the archive of the colonial state or the post-colonial state. After all, the state imposes some degree of uniformity across regions and communities and the histories of those impositions have to be written on a non-linear scale. By contrast, when we get into the rough and tumble of everyday life worlds, myriad differences of language, religion, caste and class serve to usually render the historical scale more specific. Thus, histories of gender practices, for instance, unless they deal with the legal instruments that the state uses to regulate and constitute gender, tend to be written at the level of the region. So, there would be histories of Punjab, Bengal, the Tamil-speaking regions, etc. So, what I was wondering about is in this kind of fluid movement from Upper Hindustan to Western India mostly, are all the homes the same? Is a Bengali home exactly the same as a home in the Punjab or a home in Maharashtra? Are there differences? So, what does it mean to downplay such differences and offer us a narrative that seems all India in scope, even though the material mostly comes from UP and Maharashtra and to a much lesser extent Bengal and even lesser extent Southern India. This is not to say that difference is not acknowledged. Indeed, differences of caste and class are often explicitly talked about in the book. But both these registers of difference too, I would venture to suggest, were articulated in ways that did not ground them in the region or the community per se.

So, as the book was being introduced also, we heard that there are three points. The Hindu and Muslim relatively elite point and then there's the counterpoint of the Dalit. But is there, does region matter? Do the communities, does more specific communities matter? These were questions that I was asking as a somewhat boring historian but we tend to think of the scale of how we analyse the sources.

Another such register of difference that I felt was acknowledged definitely but could be further mobilized was that of age. Questions of authority, as Pandey often fully acknowledges in the book, frequently operate at the intersection of gender, age, community, caste, etc. The book repeatedly shows us that even a woman who otherwise is quite disadvantaged as she grows older comes to acquire more power in the household. But the book left me wondering about what exactly is age and how does it actually work to anchor domestic power. My good friend, another Pandey, Ishita Pandey's recent book, "Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age," does a wonderful job in teaching us that age is not a natural category. It is constituted at the intersections of cultural practices, knowledge regimes, and legal instruments.

Reading Gyanendra Pandey's chapters on the history on a visceral register, which are the last two chapters of the book, where he speaks very illuminatingly, for instance, about irritability and ageing, reminded me of the vernacular grammars of ageing in Hindustani. For instance, the phrase sathiya jana, which quite literally means being 60-ish, which comes along with an assumption that such people are more irritable. People say sathiya aya hai, that they're being more irritable. And there is actually even some Ayurvedic theorizing of this, according to which, ageing increases the quantity of the vatadosha in the body, making one quick to take offense, and prone to speaking hurtful words. Of course, these regional or more localized ontologies of the ageing body are also resolutely gendered. And again, like all the dosha lexicon can be brought in there. I'm not saying that they should be. What I'm trying to say is that age is not a natural category, and age matters in how domestic power is organized, who enjoys power, and that changes over time.

And so, I was also wondering about what age are these individuals writing their biographies? We do hear several of the men that we hear about, we're talking of their second marriage. In the case of Rahul Sankrityayan, particularly, his physical frailty is discussed. But how does the actual age at which these are happening matter? And how do we understand age, ageing, and its intersection and its anchoring of domestic power were things that I wanted to know a little more, or I craved a little more of.

Its chronicling of the grammar of everyday life was really remarkable. And it reminded me, actually, of Roland Barthe's lover's discourse in its ambition, of how you take a sort of almost an emotional landscape that seems like it doesn't have history and you insinuate history into it by following its grammar. But its execution, on the other hand, especially the strategy of repeatedly using the same quotes in multiple chapters, such as Atiya Hussain's character, Nandu, speaking back, comes up several times in different chapters; such as Premchand's comments about his wife comes up in different chapters; Ambedkar's comments to his second wife before their marriage about his lack of gaiety and how he was a serious man; there are others, like Bachchan's grandfather's chessboard and chess playing come up. So, there's a repetitive quality in the way the material is used, which was for me very fascinating. This was structurally very innovative. It reminded me of the chakars that mark a good free form performance, where a set of core motifs keep coming back, but always in new form, and time and again, and leave us with a lasting sense of restlessness at the end of the performance. What I wasn't sure was whether that restlessness was Rahul Sankirtan's restlessness to leave the home, or Ambedkar's restlessness with the larger society around it. So, I'll leave it at that, but thank you for giving me the opportunity.

Mallarika Sinha Roy

So, I think we have had really very interesting three set of reflections on this very remarkable book, 'Men at Home.' What I was thinking while listening to all of them, including Professor Pandey's reflections, that archiving the performance of masculinity is one of the ways in which this book probably invites us to think more, that how the performance of the masculine self can be archived through the gestures, whether there is a possibility of archiving gestures, and whether there is a possibility of thinking in terms of the performance of the self, in what Projit was saying, in a repetitive mode, that it's not a kind of horizontal plane, it's rather more circular, it repeats itself, and that's precisely where probably the segmentation of gestures allows us to think about archiving performance in various different ways. And of course, thank you Mridula Garg for wonderfully feisty reference of men at home and women at work. So yes, what they're doing, when men are at home, women are still working. So, thank you for all the reflections. There are several points that have come. Would you like to respond to some of them, Sir Pandey?

Gyanendra Pandey

I want to thank... I think what all the panellists do very well is to indicate that this is a book that asks questions, and it genuinely recognises. I don't have any answers, we do not have answers, but we do have questions, and I would like to state that.

I just want to say about Projit's comments, a couple of things. You do say various things are repeated and repeated and repeated. Actually, many of the things you refer to are repeated once, which is, they appear early, and then when they try to round up things, they come back. Because in a sense, you've got to bring these things together. The more important and difficult questions Projit raises, I think it's great that the ease with which the state becomes the location from where you write, to write in general histories. It's very important to note that, because statist histories are what we have been stuck with forever. And the question is how we write micro-histories and yet recognise that the micro-histories matter. Micro-histories will be specific, there's no question. But you will never be able to write a micro-history or a bunch of micro-histories, as in this case, with all the requirements as it were.

If you're trying to make, the point that came across to me, and it came across to me sharply, was that across caste, across religion, across ages, generations, you still got men living in the sense of an entitled world, which just didn't seem to change. So, it's not that the working class, lower caste, poor parents of Kausalya Baisantri or Baby Kamble, so on and so forth, about whom they write. Or men like Narendra Jadhav, who writes about his parents and grandparents. It's not that those men were not at home. The men worked at home. The men worked outside. The men were working all the time, like the women. Often the women were working more, because that's the addition. But inside and outside the home, these men are at work. They are at home, the home is not cut off, it's not four walls. The home is the pavement, it's a slum. The home is the mohalla, the biradari where your people live. Across all of that, you still get this sense of entitlement, where Narendra Jadhav's mother says, so who used to wake up at five in the morning to clean their bums, while you were snoring? I had to do that all the time. And this is a woman who was not literate, she had not studied very much, they were not given that opportunity. And she says this angrily. She says it to a journalist in Bombay, because the son has become so famous. So, in that, men, in this particular example, the poorest of these communities, the lowest, the most hard-working of these communities, where men and women are working all the time. That's their family, that's their mode of survival. In these sorts of locations, too, men do not wash clothes. They also very rarely cook. They will cut the vegetables but they will not cook, except like Baba Saheb Ambedkar, once in seven years. And then he takes seven hours to prepare a meal and leaves everything dirty in the kitchen. Now, that's just an extraordinary sense of entitlement, of what you do not need to do, and what you are allowed to do. That's all I have to say.

Mridula Garg

When women go out and work, gifted women, prominent jobs, then they have other women working at their houses. So, women not only work in their own homes, they help other women to get entitlements by working in their homes. So that way, you know, home becomes the main arena of work. And however, gifted you are, you're still working at home. You are the one who's responsible for it. You see, if my husband falls ill, I make all the arrangements, take him to the hospital, and the doctor talks to me about how to take care of him. When I fall ill, I find the doctor, I go to him, I get tests done, and if necessary, I get admitted to the hospital, and he turns up. So, it is, I mean, my husband's not demanding it. The doctor's doing it on his own, because he's a man. So, there is a kind of a conclave of, you know, there are more masculinists than feminists. I mean, men bond together much more. There is no sisterhood, but there is a brotherhood.

Orient BlackSwan organized the launch of the book Men at Home: Imagining Liberation in Colonial and Postcolonial India by Gyanendra Pandey. The programme features a discussion with the author, chaired by Mallarika Sinha Roy, with panelists Ashok Vajpeyi, Mridula Garg, and Projit B. Mukharji. It was held on Friday, 12 December at the India International Centre, New Delhi.

The transcript is prepared by Rahul Khandelwal who is a PhD Research Scholar in the Department of History and Culture at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.