Introduction

During the last decades water has increasingly become a critical issue in global and local governance, raising questions about human and environmental security and about states' and individuals' right to freshwater and to development. Recently, after 15 years of debate, the United Nations assembly agreed to define access to clean water as a human right (UN 2010a).

The challenges in global water governance include a shrinking availability of water per capita due to pollution, population growth, urbanization and industrialization, a problem that is further amplified by the unpredictability of climate change. At the same time there is an urgent need to reduce the proportion of people living without access to safe drinking water. Water issues have increasingly been recognized as a global concern, and a consensus has emerged for a more conservationist approach in water management and for changing our perceptions and handling of water resources. These efforts are developed under the heading ‘Integrated Water Resource Management’ (IWRM) and are set to promote a management of water that is more efficient, equitable and sustainable – values that constitute the core of IWRM.

This chapter aims to discuss global water issues in relation to ‘development’, ‘security’, and the ‘security-development nexus’ and to explore, through a biopolitical lens, how water management in an IWRM regime can be understood as a technique of governing subjects, life and lifestyles. To illuminate this, I will draw on research findings from the eThekwini municipality in South Africa.

En 1993 Robert W. Fogel ganó el Premio en Ciencias Económicas en Memoria de Alfred Nobel “por haber renovado la investigación de la historia económica al aplicar la teoría económica y métodos cuantitativos en función de explicar el cambio económico e institucional”. Clio fue la musa de la historia y Fogel aplicó la nueva “cliometría” a los registros de contabilidad de las transacciones de esclavos. En 1974, él y Stanley Engerman publicaron Tiempo en la cruz: la economía esclavista en los Estados Unidos. El análisis refutaba la narrativa popular que daba a entender algo así:

• El sistema de esclavos estaba económicamente moribundo;

• Soldados de la Unión, animados por la prensa abolicionista, murieron en vano;

• Los esclavos habrían sido liberados pronto de todos modos;

• La creciente ola de sentimiento pro-abolición en el Norte tenía poco que ver con la secesión de los Estados Confederados del Sur.

A pesar de que la refutación de mitologías es saludable para cualquier democracia, este tipo de análisis también puede ser mal interpretado. Por ejemplo, Fogel y Engerman hacen notar que: “la evidencia que comienza a salir a luz sugiere que el ataque a las condiciones materiales de vida de los negros tras la Guerra Civil no sólo era más feroz, pero en cierto modo, más cruel que la que les precedió”. ¿Era la vida de esclavo mejor que la libertad? La pregunta es tendenciosa e invita a una respuesta afirmativa que a la vez resulta fácil y repugnante.

Jainism is paradigmatic of one variant in the Orientalist approach to Indian traditions, whereby that tradition is neglected both as an object of research and in its reception. In addressing the question of why this should be the case with regard to Jainism it might be necessary to extensively analyse the emergence of certain prejudices which mark the lines along which the Jaina tradition has been represented in western Indological discourse, i.e. its ‘dependence on Buddhism’, the ‘rejection of the body’, its ‘hybridity’ and its ‘minority status’ to name a few. One of the most striking examples of the Orientalist perception of Jaina tradition is Louis Renou's famous reference to it as “Buddhism's darker reflection” (Renou 1953: 111). In this conception of 1953 of Renou's, 70 years after Albrecht Weber's account of the literature of the Jainas—epochal in being the first such work of its kind—, we can identify three elements pertaining to the early conceptions of Jainism: its dependence on Buddhism, its extreme asceticism which was perceived negatively and, finally, the view that it was both baffling and meaningless. More modestly, Arthur Llewlleyn Basham in his book about the Ājīvikas, evaluated the significance of research on Jainism, inappropriately as it happens, in terms of the critical reception of Buddhism, saying “The history of Jainism, though it has much of interest to the specialist, is less spectacular than that of Buddhism” (Basham 1951: 261).

The Kāmasūtra (KS), the classical Indian textbook of pleasure, is part of our Orientalist mythology of India, our own fantasy of the otherness of the sexuality of other cultures. Our fantasies are based in large part on the Victorian Orientalist fantasies of Sir Richard Francis Burton, who was the first to translate the Kāmasūtra into English, well over a century ago, in 1883. But the Kāmasūtra has a mythology of its own, a corpus of stories that it invokes to explain and to authenticate its ideas about sex and gender. Let us therefore begin with mythology about the Kāmasūtra and go on to the mythology in the Kāmasūtra.

Mythology about the Kāmasūtra

A man named Vātsyāyana composed the Kāmasūtra in Sanskrit, the literary language of ancient India, sometime in the third century of the common era, in North India. It was already well known in India at a time when the Europeans were still swinging in trees, culturally (and sexually) speaking, but it is known in English almost entirely through the translation by Sir Richard Francis Burton, published in 1883. Most Americans and Europeans today think that the Kāmasūtra is just about sexual positions, the erotic counterpart to the ascetic āsanas of yoga. Palm Pilot has a copyrighted “Pocket Sūtra: The Kāma Sūtra in the palm of your hand”, which offers “lying down positions”, “sitting positions”, “rear-entry positions”, “standing positions”, “role reversal”, and many more.

The closest Sanskrit equivalent to the modern concept of “asceticism” is probably tapas, associated both in etymology and theological discourse with fire and heat, and belonging to a group of terms and concepts, the most significant of which is tejas, that reveals an ancient Indian ontology of individualized power—a source of energy located within an individual, whether it is a god, a warrior, or an ascetic. It is this energy that makes the wrath of a tapasvin, the ascetic in possession of tapas, so potent and so feared. Ascetics as “powerful men” is an image so ingrained in Indian culture and discourse as to require little comment. Recall the story of the Buddha overpowering the fire of the snake with his own, thus dumbfounding and then converting his Brahmin hosts. At a more scholastic level, there is the list of siddhis, the superhuman powers such as levitation, multi-location, and the ability to kill, believed to result from the practice of Yoga.

My paper, however, is not directly concerned with these modes of ascetic power or with the ontologies that underlie them and the technologies that generate them. My concern here is with another type of power—power as a social reality, power that defines and is defined by social relationships.

Ajita Kesakambala (Keśakambalin in Sanskrit), a senior contemporary of the Buddha, is generally recognised as an early (if not the earliest) materialist in India. As with the later Cārvāka/Lokāyata-s, no authentic report of his teachings—not to speak of any work composed by him or his disciple—has come down to us. Whatever little we know of him is derived from Buddhist (Pali) and Jain (Prakrit) sources. Both the sects regarded him as a rival, so their accounts may not be accurate or without prejudice (as Goonasekere admits).

One full statement of Ajita's views is found in the SPhS. He tells king Ajātasattu (Ajātaśatru) of Magadha:

Jayatilleke points out that the view expressed in the last part of the passage does not square with the materialist position:

Most, if not all, intellectual traditions of ancient India were founded on a mūla text the authority of which was—at least nominally—considered unassailable. In the case of vyākaraṇa the cornerstone of the grammatical śāstra was the Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini, together with one of its earliest commentaries, the Mahābhāṣya of Patañjali that incorporates the vārttikas of Kātyāyana.

In time, the hierarchy of authoritativeness among the so-called three munis, the founding fathers, as it were, of Pāṇinian grammar, came to be reversed and greater authority was accorded to the latest author, Patañjali, followed by Kātyāyana and Pāṇini. This reversal, whether justified or not, is itself the manifestation of a sense if not of history, of evolution, the implicit acknowledgment that Pāṇini's grammar was perfectible, and consequently, that his first commentators had the task not simply of explaining it for the sake of men who were less quick-witted, but also of amending and supplementing it. Furthermore, this sense of evolution entails the recognition that the three munis may have and indeed had conflicting views on some issues, although all of them shared the basic principles laid out in the Aṣṭādhyāyī.

As a matter of fact, the Pāṇinian tradition is anything but mono lithic, although this is sometimes disregarded by contemporary scholarship, both ‘traditional’ and ‘Western’. But this impression of its unbroken continuity and general unanimity is, to a large extent, the result of the ways in which it came to represent and reproduce itself over the centuries and, especially, in medieval times.

The Śrīemat Rahasyatrayasāra (‘The Auspicious Essence of the Three Mysteries’) by Vedānta Deśika (or Veṇkaṭanāta, 1268-1369) is a kind of summa theologiae that proceeds largely by exegeting the three holy mysteries or mantras (tirumantra, dvayamantra, and caramaśloka [Bhagavadgītā, 18.66]) cherished by the south Indian Śroevaiṣṇava tradition. The Rahasyatrayasāra is a comprehensive presentation of Śroevaiṣṇava exegesis, philosophy, theology, practice and religious sociology, all woven into a single treatise expressive of what it means to believe and practice the truths and values inscribed in the mantras as read by Śroevaiṣṇavas. The Guruparaṃparāsāra is an additional, introductory chapter prefixed to the Rahasyatrayasāra, of no more than several thousand words.

In this essay I examine the Śroevaiṣṇava understanding of tradition by a close reading of the Guruparaṃparāsāra, attending to the content and style, as well as the sources cited in the text and its commentarial heritage. The Guruparaṃparāsāra offers an intracommunity rationale for the Śroevaiṣṇava choice of founding the tradition in the person of the ācārya, succinctly arguing that the student/reader should mindfully recollect the lineage of Śroevaiṣṇava ācāryas whenever beginning to study the mantras and related religious topics. As an articulate presentation of tradition by an important Indian intellectual, it is also a resource for understanding tradition more widely in India.

For the most part, I read the Guruparaṃparāsāra on its own, even if it can and ultimately should be read also in relation to the Rahasyatrayasāra and to others among Deśika's works, such as the Saṃpradāyapariśuddhi.

The renouncer is depicted in Brahmanical literature as having reached a condition that transcends normal human existence. He is freed from all the duties and obligations, rules and regulations, customs and taboos that dog ordinary mortals. His freedom foreshadows on earth the transcendent freedom (mokṣa) from the birth-death cycle (saṃsāra), a transcendence that is the ultimate aspiration in all Indian religions. It is not surprising, therefore, that renunciation is often termed mokṣa. The VkhDh (1.9), moreover, asserts that for a renouncer “there exists neither dharma nor adharma, neither truth nor falsehood, neither purity nor impurity, nor any such duality.” The Chāndogya Upaniṣad (2.23.1) speaks of three divisions of dharma (dharmaskandhāḥ) which correspond to the first three orders of life (āśrama), viz., perpetual student, householder and forest hermit. It then mentions “the person established in Brahman” (brahmasaṃstha), who attains immortality, while those who follow the three divisions of dharma attain only one of the heavenly abodes. According to the traditional interpretation, brahmasaṃstha is a renouncer, who is thus placed outside the pale of dharma.

One definition of dharma states that it consists essentially of commands. A command refers to what has to be done (kartavya) and demands activity (karman). Dharma, therefore, pertains to the sphere of action (pravṛtti). A renouncer, on the other hand, abandons all actions; he is said to be beyond the scope of positive injunctions. His condition is one of non-action (nivṛtti).

From among the definitions given in dictionaries of the term tradition we must retain the one that specifies that a tradition is a cultural feature (as an attitude, belief, custom, institution) preserved or evolved from the past. This definition reminds us that traditions are handed down from generation to generation, but also that most traditions are accompanied by the claim, often implicit, that they preserve an earlier state of affairs. A tradition is therefore something which exists in the present (any present), but which at the same time makes claims about the past. If we assist at a traditional dance performance, we are not merely entertained; we are at the same time informed about how people danced in the past.

It is this claim about the past which makes it possible to speak about the reliability of a tradition. Traditions can make an implicit claim about the past which is not true. Indeed, traditions can be newly created (Hobsbawm, Ranger 1983). In that case they are strictly speaking no traditions at all, or at best unreliable traditions. Traditions, moreover, normally have a role to play in the present (each present) in which they occur: they may be linked to nationalistic movements, or to the sense of belonging that unites members of a certain group, or indeed they may be expressions of a religious identity. That is to say, traditions are rarely innocent survivals from a distant past, and far more often factors that play a role in the present.

Among the colonial institutions that Singapore inherited with independence on 9 August 1965 was the Raffl es Museum, established in 1849. It moved to its present building with its iconic dome (now a gazetted historic building) in 1887 and became a repository of colonial knowledge of the natural history, ethnography and archaeology of the Malay world especially the peninsula. But the People's Action Party government had other more pressing priorities for Singapore's economic, political and security survival in 1965 than deciding on the future of an old colonial museum. It was only in 1984, with Singapore's survival assured, that the government started to refl ect with confidence on Singapore's past in a major exhibition on 25 years of nationhood since 1959. Concurrently, the old Raffl es Museum, now renamed the National Museum, started installing a new series of exhibits tracing Singapore's journey to nationhood.

A Long-Term Vision for the Museum

In December 1986, then minister for community development Mr Wong Kan Seng appointed a task force to draw up long-term plans for the development of the museum. This task force was chaired by Mr Tay Kheng Soon, a pioneering architect deeply concerned with Singapore's urban heritage and history. The task force's primary recommendation was that the museum should make a radical break from its traditional image of being a treasure house full of butterflies, stuffed animals and strange smells, and especially the whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling.

When sociologists refer to the contemporary crisis of multiculturalism, they are typically talking about how modern states, especially liberal democratic states, respond to the rise of “public religions.” These religious conflicts and uncertainties about appropriate state responses to them have produced a general retreat from multiculturalism – at least in Europe (Joppke, 2004). More specifically, the contemporary problem of politics and religion has been increasingly orchestrated around the global revival of Islam and the emergence of a global Muslim community. However, the particular issues surrounding Muslim minorities in non-Muslim secular societies can be seen as simply one instance of the more general issue of state and religion relationships in modern complex societies. There is growing awareness about the limitations of the Westphalian solution to religious conflicts and hence political theory is undertaking a serious reconsideration of liberalism as the philosophical basis of political strategies to manage conflicting cultural, religious and ethnic interests. In the modern global world where state boundaries have been contested, there is a need to rethink how the competing claims of secular and religious citizens can be articulated and respected within public discourse (Habermas, 2008).

This question – how to manage the public expression of religion in multicultural and therefore multifaith societies – is not simply an issue for conventional liberal societies, because religious revivalism and community conflict raise political issues across a wide spectrum of modern societies.

Introduction

In Southeast Asia, archaeology has only been practiced since the nineteenth century and the discourse of heritage is similarly recent. This does not, of course, mean that prior to the appearance of archaeology and heritage the physical traces of the past were meaningless to people in Southeast Asia. In Thailand, for instance, the practice of venerating the remains of old and ancient Buddhist monuments has a very long lineage (e.g. Wyatt 2001) and we know that Buddhism, on colonizing the landscape of presentday Thailand from the sixth century AD, assimilated itself to much older traditions of venerating spirits of place via what Paul Mus (1975) termed “cadastral cults.” We know that traditions such as these have continued to inform the way many or most people in Southeast Asia relate to old places and things (e.g. Byrne 2009).

Curiously, archaeologists and heritage practitioners working in Southeast Asia tend to be silent about these popular practices despite the fact that they have received considerable attention by anthropologists and historians. My particular focus in this chapter is the way that popular religion in Southeast Asia provides a context for the relationships many people have with the material past in the landscapes of everyday life. The belief people have that old places and things are occupied and animated by spirits and deities, that they have magical-supernatural properties, or that they are sacred within the context of mainstream religions such as Buddhism, is of central interest to me.