The Sword That Cuts Two into One

In returning to reread the work of Srinivas Aravamudan, I can’t stop thinking about the Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī’s unusual (and delightfully perverse) choice of weaponry. Across diverse Buddhist traditions, Mañjuśrī is the Bodhisattva archetype associated with the quality of wisdom, and, in particular, the wisdom of non-duality. In its revelation of binary logics of affirmation and negation as the root of suffering, Mañjuśrī’s wisdom is understood to operate by other means. These means are epitomized and emblematized in iconographic form in the sword Mañjuśrī carries in his right hand in nearly all representations: the sword that cuts two into one.

One need only think about Srinivas’s infamous penchant for portmanteau neologisms—Tropicopolitans, Theosophistries, Levantinization, to name only a few—to see the sword of two-into-oneness at work. Srinivas’s monstrous linguistic creations unite concepts that, when brought and thought together, bring into being “new” paradigms we nonetheless can’t imagine how we ever did without. The tongue may trip but the analytical faculties dance in the face of such shocking and yet weirdly familiar, weirdly necessary additions to our philosophical, historical, cultural, and literary critical vocabularies. It is no coincidence that the habit of breaking and remaking conceptual keywords after running up against the limits of the available lexicon is a persistent feature of the work of other celebrated practitioners of non-dualism, from Dōgen Zenji (1200–1253), the founder of the Sōtō Zen school of Buddhism, to one of Srinivas’s most significant teachers and influences, Jacques Derrida.

Beyond his justly celebrated coinages, though, Srinivas’s method as a whole is consistent and rigorous in its generous expenditure of the currency of the non-dual. This feature of his work does not surprise, given his intellectual trajectory. His schooling exposed him to the ideas of Jiddu Krishnamurti, who taught that liberation could be attained not through established religion, psychological inquiry, or philosophical analysis, but through direct experience of our own consciousness beyond the workings of the conditioned, thinking, and image-making mind. “Total negation is the essence of the positive” is Kirshnamurti’s kōan-like summation of the pathless path to liberation.¹ In subsequent years, Srinivas turned to the study of literature and the practice of rhetorical criticism via the longue durée of the Western non-dual critique of metaphysics that culminates in the work of thinkers like Derrida and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. As Srinivas puts it in Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language, the job of literary and cultural critics is “the study of rhetoric, not just as technique of communication, but as subjective disposition.”²

The particular rhetorical mode under study in Guru English is the voluminous and vague deployment in a vast array of non-Asian cultural contexts, over more than two centuries, of the teachings of South Asian religious and philosophical traditions, teachings disseminated in English in sites as diverse as Walden Pond, the novels of Kipling, the Trinity nuclear site, and the contemporary American self-help and yoga industries. In Srinivas’s characteristic brevity of capture, “Guru English derives its paradoxical power precisely from its referential inadequacy. Unable to refer adequately, it can conjure excessively” (267). This purported capacity to “conjure excessively” without referential exactitude might, and should, remind us of poststructuralist understandings of the workings of language and rhetoric, as well as of definitions of the literary from Plato to Sir Philip Sidney to Georges Bataille. Guru English might thus be seen not as a departure from but as a kind of culmination of Srinivas’s better-known contributions to literary criticism and especially to eighteenth-century studies.

Guru English is probably the least familiar of Srinivas’s works to readers of Eighteenth-Century Studies, yet in it we can see concisely revealed the full wealth of his brilliance, wit, rigor, and playfulness, as well as the depth of his ethical, political, and intellectual commitments. A section on “The Bhagavadgītā and the Bomb” exemplifies this reach, while also giving a hint of the sheer capaciousness of his literary...