I.

“Those of us who live with disabilities are at the forefront of the larger discussion of what constitutes a valued life. What is a life worth living?”

—Kenny Fries, “The Nazis’ First Victims Were the Disabled”

The New York Times, Sept. 13, 2017

Several months ago, I watched an interview with two North Korean refugees about the process of their resettlement in South Korea. They spoke in some detail about their circuitous routes of escape — one through China and Mongolia, another through Vietnam and Laos — as seekers of asylum never fully afforded state protection. I do not know the circumstances behind the video; government-sponsored repatriation is never innocent. But the interviewees spoke openly about their struggles to assimilate into South Korean society: stigmatized for their provincial accents, suspected of espionage and disloyalty, shocked by the sudden transition from pre-industrial to advanced capitalist society — modernity’s most classical narrative.

While describing the difference in values between the two cultures, one of the interviewees revealed that he had attempted suicide in his last years of high school. When pressed, the young man, slender and pale, with a full head of curly black hair, replied that he was driven to despair by having to compete with his fellow students to get ahead in life. Not only was he at an educational disadvantage, he was also chronically ill, he said, since he suffered from hemophilia. When I heard this, my heart sank and my stomach leapt, clashing at the nexus of pity and fear. Hemophilia is a rare genetic blood disorder that affects the clotting process, and requires constant access to expensive medication in order to prevent hemorrhage triggered by small injuries. It’s also one I know well: I have a severe version of the disorder, Type A, Factor VIII deficiency. For this man to have been a stateless refugee with such a condition, whatever the degree of severity, is almost unimaginable. That he mentioned it first in the context of his academic anxiety is, to me, even more troubling. What kind of society transforms disability into desperation? And what kind of political economy structures it?

As an X-linked trait, hemophilia primarily affects men, while women are carriers. The Hindu in me believes that this is karmic retribution for generations of patriarchy. My mother says I was a leech in a past life. Most modern histories of hemophilia highlight its presence in the royal families of Britain and Russia, the Romanovs in particular. For years my only point of reference had been Prince Alexei and his wild starets, Rasputin: the hypnotic healing procedures, the hastening of the end of Tsarist rule, the horrible murders of the royal family. More recently I was surprised to find a hemophiliac in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, a gender-fluid librarian who drives a flashy sports car and offers mysterious advice. But there are other genealogies as well. Sanskrit legends tell of the demon Raktabīja, Bloodseed, who fought with the great goddess Durgā in cosmic battle. She sliced him into pieces, but from every drop of his blood that hit the ground, another Raktabīja sprang up, stronger than ever. The goddess finally defeated him by calling upon the dark, ferocious, bloodthirsty Kālī, who sped about lapping up each drop before it sprouted. In this Age of Discord, perhaps hemophilia is Raktabīja’s return. After all, gods and demons reincarnate too.

Having hemophilia was an intensely private thing for me as a child. Of course, my friends knew, and were caring enough to maintain the line between prankish and protective. What I mean by “private” is the sense that what I had was uniquely my own. I never entertained the idea of attending one of the many summer camps for young people with blood disorders that the local children’s hospital offered. Besides the fact that there was little chance of meeting girls at a hemophilia camp, I did not want to meet anyone who presented a different picture of something that I thought was impenetrably individual. What I had could not become an object of shared experience; it was a silent, concealed badge of difference, yet one by which I refused to be defined. For there was also the fear of being marked forever as physically other. Varieties of this fear have pursued me throughout my life. It is easy to understand the teenage turmoil of feeling unattractive and unwanted. But there are also ethical vulnerabilities. As an adult aspiring to solidarity with grassroots activists, I have had to wonder: How do I put my body on the line, when it is the weakest defense I possess?

If I have never thought to reflect openly on what it means to live with hemophilia, it’s because I’m one of the lucky ones. I am fortunate to have the resources, the privileges, and the support I need to sustain a healthy, happy life. I grew up in a comfortable home, never wanted for daily needs, and was supported financially throughout my education. Apart from a strong reluctance to travel, an indefensible hatred of exercise, and a progressive limp from moderate arthritis, the psychological and physical effects of my condition have been manageable. To maintain this fragile equilibrium, however, involves daily intravenous infusions of a wildly expensive synthetic clotting agent. Over the years, veins tire, scars congeal, and, more metaphorically, nerves fray. Some disabilities are only invisible until they show: in drooping eyes, in punctured skin, in hesitant steps. It is not pleasant to think that one encounters the world deficient, that to become “normal” requires daily, painful artifice. But there is no normal, there are only shades of injury, some genetic, some generational. At the clinic I used to attend in New York City, I was the model patient because I could sit with my legs folded. The waiting room was a portrait of old white men in wheelchairs, arthritic black men with pronounced limps, grizzled Latino men with Medicaid wristbands, humorless Asian men with rickety walkers. Blood is the great leveler; disorders do not discriminate.

Capitalism, on the other hand, does, with spectacular brutality. Two years ago, the homegrown plutocracy called the U.S. Senate tried to strip millions of citizens from access to affordable healthcare. As if it were not enough to try and survive in a society that only values humans for their productive capacity. Freedom is a historically hollow word for many people in this country whose bodies have been chained to the unholy machinery of civilization. As for those bodies unable to serve this all-consuming fire, to what god will they appeal? In the case of one Korean student, the stigma of sickness in a capitalist culture nearly killed him, when statelessness did not.

As a professor, then, I am compelled to foreground the health and welfare of my students above all other considerations. What is a humanities education if it does not resist these inhumanities? The pressure to achieve individual success at the expense of others conditions much of contemporary academic life. My disciplinary training compels me differently. Philology, or in the broadest sense, how to make sense of texts, requires collaboration with the living and the dead; one reads with you, the other reads through you. We do not simply work together, but rely on each other, just like I hold my partner’s hand to walk when my arthritis flares up. For years I believed that my choice of intellectual career was separate from my physical condition. Now I wonder, with J.M. Coetzee: Is the act of slow reading meant for a slow man?^[1]

II.

“It seemed to me that this world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness.”

—Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

When I was a child, my Sanskrit teacher, a four-foot-eleven, sprightly woman, with a Ph.D. and a persistent wheeze, told me a funny cāṭu, or clever verse, attributed to the twelfth-century poet and philosopher Śrīharṣa. As a young boy, Śrīharṣa was so prolific and so unintelligible that his uncle gave him some lentil soup to dull his senses a bit. After a while he asked Śrīharṣa how he was doing, only to receive the following complex alliterative reply meant to resemble chewing, one that I still remember by heart:

aśeṣaśemuṣīmoṣamāṣam aśnāmi mātula

“Uncle, I’m noshing on mash so my mind may be mushed.”

Recently I happened upon this hemistich again in a book on Śrīnātha, the poet who wrote a Telugu version of Śrīharṣa’s intensely learned and beautiful epic poem, the Naiṣadhīyacarita. I suspect that the verse, like my teacher, was of Telugu origin. Only what I always thought she was trying to tell me was not that I was precocious, but that it was okay to nibble on snacks while I studied. The misremembered lesson had its own moral, one quite appropriate to Sanskrit culture: learning and pleasure are equally important, and, ideally, they would become indistinguishable. Her kindness and patience with me, and her delight in my unsteady progress, was its own evidence.

The reason I value philological education is just this: that it is pleasurable. The ethics of that pleasure, that opening up and relishing, is clear to me in a world of dangerously narrowing possibilities, in which pleasure, like labor and resources, is squeezed out of the people and redistributed upward for a predatory few. It was the most insurgent philologist of them all, Malcolm X, who exemplified the potent combination of a love for learning widely and a passion for fighting injustice:

You can believe me that if I had the time right now, I would not be one bit ashamed to go back into any New York City public school and start where I left off at the ninth grade, and go on through a degree. Because I don’t begin to be academically equipped for so many of the interests that I have. For instance, I love languages. I wish I were an accomplished linguist. […] I would just like to study. I mean ranging study, because I have a wide-open mind. I’m interested in almost any subject you can mention.^[2]

Malcolm’s activism on behalf of the poor and disenfranchised was enabled by his already extraordinary skill with language, from reading the dictionary cover-to-cover in prison to debating conservative commentators on television.^[3] And yet he sought academic qualification in the subject, not for prestige, but to satisfy his curiosity. He located his humanity — or his princeliness, to follow Ossie Davis ^[4]— in his ability to take back language and history from their abusers, to give them back to the people. Philology was at once pleasure and power. Could it also be politics?

There is a story that circulates among Sanskritists of an apocryphal meeting between Erich Frauwallner, the Nazi German scholar of Buddhism, and Sylvain Lévi, the French Jewish scholar of Indian religion and literature. The story goes that during the Nazi invasion of Paris, Frauwallner accompanied an SS raid in order to seek out the great Lévi. When he found his residence he instructed everyone to wait outside. After engaging Lévi in a long conversation about Sanskrit philology, he departed, and told the guards that there was no one home and they should go on their way.

The meeting was impossible for even more reasons than the most obvious: that Lévi died in 1935, years before the invasion. But I think the moral is more than simply that respect for learning transcends regimes of hatred and violence. It is that when the world is falling apart around you, or you yourself may be complicit in inflicting unspeakable suffering, one of the most radical methods of resistance is to stop. Philology here is not just about slowing down but actually stopping to think, to turn over different possibilities, to debate options, to explore the intertextual archive, to enter the minds of those who stopped long ago.

The late Srinivas Aravamudan, in his book Guru English, likens the study of the humanities under the threat of nuclear war to the setting of the Bhagavad Gita, the philosophical conversation between Krishna and Arjuna, which takes place in between two armies (senayor ubhayor madhye) arrayed for apocalyptic battle (yoddhukāmān avasthitān). It isn’t clear how long time stops, whether they are simply prolonging the inevitable. Krishna says that everyone present has already been slated to die (mayaivaite nihatāḥ pūrvam eva). But in those hours of poetry and questioning, the reader experiences an eternity, from grand cosmic visions to inner moral psychology, that may revise completely what they think is real and true.

Before returning to complete my thoughts on disability and education, I want to share what Sanskrit philology looks like in practice, or, to paraphrase Harunaga Isaacson, “the task of understanding people’s minds.” A few years ago, a colleague and I teamed up to conjecture a fix for a corrupt line in the Gurunāthaparāmarśa, or Remembering My Teacher, by Madhurāja, who was writing in Madurai, in present-day Tamilnadu, some time after the twelfth century. Madhurāja’s poem was in praise of the tenth century Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta, whose writings made their way to the south of India not long after their composition. Verse 29 in the Kashmir Sanskrit Texts Series (KSTS) edition reads as follows:

madhurā maheśva***-kathā-makaranda-dhunī-

parimala-majjana-dhvani-pavitrita-bhakta-janā |

abhinavagupta-nātha-vadanāmbuja-vāg-bhramarī

śiva śiva gāḍha-mūḍham api māṃ mukharīkurute ||

Even without knowing the rather rare seventeen-syllable meter nardaṭaka (aka kokilaka), it is clear that there are problems in the first quarter of the verse. The compound, comprised of individual words separated by hyphens and linked by many possible relationships of meaning, is obviously missing syllables, which I marked here with asterisks. The splitting of the first word from it disturbs what should otherwise be an elegant, elongated two-line compound meant to agree syntactically with the compound in the third quarter. The meter, a fixed pattern of heavy and light syllables, at least provides a structure within which to emplot the required syllables. But what could they be, and where, and why?

What we want the verse to say, what it wants to tell us, is an extended conceit about the bee that is the speech (vāg-bhramarī) perched on Abhinavagupta’s lotus lips (vadanāmbuja). This bee/speech has the amazing ability to turn even a rank idiot (gāḍha-mūḍham) like me (Madhurāja) into an eloquent speaker, abuzz with words (mukharīkurute). For those who hang around it (bhakta-janā) are purified (pavitrita) by its very sound (dhvani), its contented drone of absorption (majjana) in the fragrance (parimala) emitted by the stream of honey (makaranda-dhunī) that is the discourse (kathā) ** the great Lord (maheś[v]a) ** sweet (madhurā) ** … and suddenly it all breaks down. Madhurāja, though, had proven himself a close reader of Abhinava’s works, and frequently seemed to refer to their content. So when, in the course of a completely unrelated discussion, my colleague showed me verse 5 of Abhinavagupta’s Īśvarapratyabhijñāvivṛtivimarśinī, something stood out to me:

pūrṇavyākaraṇāvagāhanaśuciḥ sattarkamūlonmiṣat-

prajñākalpalatāvivekakusumair abhyarcya hṛddevatām |

pīyūṣāsavasārasundaramahāsāhityasauhityabhāg

viśrāmyāmy aham īśvarādvayakathākāntāsakhaḥ sāmpratam ||

Here Abhinavagupta talks about his education as a kind of progressive (and transgressive) Tantric ritual. First “purified by a full bath in grammar study,” he worships the deity in his heart with “flowers of critical thinking, plucked from the vine of wisdom, blossoming at the root of sound logic.” Then, having drunk to his heart’s content “of beautiful literature, the wine of ambrosia,” he now reposes in the arms of his lover, namely “discourse on the non-duality of the Lord (Śiva).” This last quote is what I have bolded in the compound in the final quarter. If we splice that phrase into Madhurāja’s verse, everything makes sense, metrically and semantically:

madhura-maheśvarādvayakathā-makaranda-dhunī-

parimala…

Now the “honey” (makaranda) is clearly metaphorically identified with discourse on the non-duality of Śiva, a mainstay of Abhinavagupta’s philosophical theology. Moreover, the adjective madhura, sweet, can be safely repositioned at the beginning of the compound. Not only does my conjecture fit the meter, it can also be plausibly explained as another of Madhurāja’s clever allusions.

Before we could congratulate ourselves on a historic accomplishment, however, we realized that V. Raghavan’s 1949 edition of the Gurunāthaparāmarśa had more or less the correct reading the whole time. It was simply not typed in properly in the KSTS edition, which made use of two additional manuscripts but apparently little use of proofreading. Raghavan’s manuscript read madhuramaheśvarakathādvaya-, which he emended, a bit heavy-handed, to madhuramaheśatādvayakathā-. I think ours works better; it corrects the original metathesis and it maintains the reference to Abhinavagupta’s verse in the Īśvarapratyabhijñāvivṛtivimarśinī. But in this instance, the scribal error was a thoroughly modern one. I recently coined a German portmanteau for this exact situation, Traurichtigkeit (traurig + richtigkeit = sad-correct-ness): that feeling when you discover that an emendation you made is corroborated by another textual witness, only to realize that you can no longer display your genius in published writing.

There is still a lesson here somewhere. Maybe it is about paying attention to the misprisions of modernity. Maybe it’s just that Raghavan read everything. For my colleague and I to pause, to step out of time and into Madhurāja’s mind (and, in an unintended way, into Raghavan’s), was to break with what Paul Griffiths would call “consumerist reading.”^[5] Although we did not replace it with religious reading, and allow our heart and mind to be nourished by the source text, that did not lessen the experience. For it was enough to think the way another person thought, to bring them into our gathering, to treat them as a companion: an intellectual exercise, begun in friendship, ending in friendship. Philology, as Victor Klemperer knew well, has unexpected consequences.^[6] It may not save us; nothing will save us; but every act that prises truth from the grips of obfuscation is a noble one in these dark times.

III.

“All you who walk by on the road, look and see, if there is any sorrow like my sorrow.”

—Lamentations 1:12

The image of Christ on the cross puts me in mind of a great many things: the ultimate symbol of universal suffering, the rejection of the infinite desirability of mortal life, the terrible consequence of nonviolent resistance to power. But sometimes, when I see that broken, beautiful body, I think of the hemophiliac. Both, after all, are drenched in blood. For the severe among us, the blood spills out spontaneously, not to wash away the sins of the world but to stain it, to remind it of our presence. The more invisible the disability, the more the desire to be seen. The hemophilologist, then, is a kind of secular witness, offering an account of truth, pain, sensitivity, and care, all at once — a virtue of the most humane scholars I have known.

That I once sought to separate my intellectual and physical lives, and now want to integrate them openly, is neither new nor unique. It is simply the sort of reflection I think is urgent for a society — civil, academic, and otherwise — that is so frayed and fractured, unable to reckon with the violence and sickness of its past and present. It is not enough to have had a stable, safe life, though that is the bare minimum that we must demand for all; life, to be life, has to be a flourishing, for the poor, for the weak, for the disabled. If I, motivated by the recognition of the care I have received, am trying to cultivate the same within my closest relationships, I see no reason not to have the same attitude toward the texts I read, the students I teach, and the writing I never publish.

I was born on the wrong end of a genetic malfunction, a code misread, a link snapped off. By no effort or merit of my own, I have been made to feel whole. So I try, and fail, try again, fail again, and fail better, to direct that sense of fullness to others. Sometimes those others are, like me, corrupted texts. Sometimes they are loved ones. And sometimes, because life is unkind, they are just out for blood. I can help with that.

***

^[1] J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man (Penguin, 2006).

^[2] Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, As Told to Alex Haley (New York: Ballantine, 1965), pp. 387-388.

^[3] “City Desk,” Chicago, 1963: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcjJEgUnsHc.

^[4] “And we will know him then for what he was and is – a Prince – our own black shining Prince! – who didn’t hesitate to die, because he loved us so.” Ossie Davis, “Eulogy.”

^[5] Paul Griffiths, Religious Reading: The Place of Reading in the Practice of Religion (Oxford, 1999).

^[6] Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: A Philologist’s Notebooks (Continuum, 2006).

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Anand Venkatkrishnan is Assistsnt Professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His book in progress, Love in the Time of Scholarship: The Bhāgavata Purāṇa in Indian Intellectual History, examines the relationship of bhakti, religion as lived affect, with philosophy as intellectual practice. It shows how Sanskrit scholars in early modern India allowed personal religious commitments to feature in and reshape their scholastic writing, a genre that was generally impervious to everyday life. His second project, Left-Hand Practice, studies the writings of a set of loosely related religious intellectuals in early 20th C. India who had significant ties with the political left. Anand fills his spare time with sports commentary, pop culture, and translations of Sanskrit poetry at https://apurvaracana.tumblr.com/.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.