Some ancient wisdom for the modern world

One of the Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell’s best-known and most poignant songs, ‘Both sides now’, muses emotively over just that: having seen things – clouds, love, life – from “both sides now”. Seeing things from both sides – from one’s own, of course, but also from one’s interlocutor’s as well – is not instinctual. It is a capacity that has to be cultivated. Neuroscientists today call it ‘cognitive empathy’, but for over a millennium, Indian philosophers have been referring to it as poorva paksha.

A choice venue for the inculcation of this capacity is the university. Universities are usually walled campuses, designed to keep the lumpen out and to offer a contemplative space within. Out on the quotidian streets, we’ve no time to ponder and reflect; we just react from basic instincts, habits – we hustle, we claw and snap, hoard and retreat. In the competitive world beyond the walls, when we encounter our others, our political or ideological adversaries, it’s usually fight or flight, with words not deployed for dialogue but for insult, too often with fists flying.

On campuses, however, where the birdies chirp, there is time to think things through. An encounter with our ideological rival affords the occasion for debate, for discussion, and thus for humanisation of the other – both sides have the opportunity to demonstrate that they can be rational and reasonable. No need to scream at each other from across a noisy road packed with lathi-wielding police violently separating protesters from counter-protesters. No hate-filled lynch mobs, with minds turned off and testosterone on.

At least, that’s how a campus ought to be.

At JNU a few semesters ago, I was teaching a course in Modern Indian Political Thought and sought to expose the students to the practice of poorva paksha. It is a lovely walled campus after all, the requisite birdies chirp, and I’ve even heard the crooning of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’ emanate from the boys’ hostel. I assigned Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Riddles in Hinduism. On the first day, all hell broke loose. Right-wing students boycotted the course, ABVP goons were sent to block my classroom doorway, and some Dean or other issued me a warning about ‘religious sentiments’. But the tragedy turned quickly into farce when I assigned the next reading: M S Golwalkar’s WE, or Our Nationhood Defined. Those who had previously threatened me were now thirstily packing the front-row seats, and it was the Left-wing student groups blocking access to the classroom and protesting against me.

If outside of the walls there will preponderantly be violence, we have only our time inside such reflective spaces to foster humanisation and understanding.

Although too rare in practice, poorva paksha has long been universally recognised – albeit via diverse nomenclature – as an essential cognitive skill for a social agent. Used strategically, poorva paksha entails fully entering, comprehending, analysing and articulating another’s arguments, ideas, beliefs, ideological positions, and then – having demonstrated total mastery over them – dismantling, deconstructing, discrediting and disproving them. Needless to add, ouch! It hurts to be on the receiving end of that process.

Used reflectively, poorva paksha nurtures self-understanding. It cautions us not to be so foolish as to believe everything that we think! Our craniums are stuffed with fake news, fake views, and getting out of the comfort of our own heads and into those of others helps us learn to spot the fuzz and the rot that resides not only without but within as well.

And used empathically, poorva paksha can help to humanise the other. Political adversaries, ideological opponents, howsoever repugnant, are our compatriots after all. To understand them is not to support them. To comprehend an opposing view is not to condone it. And yet, understanding does breed understanding, and cognitive engagement can foster constructive dialogue – by all accounts preferable to lynching, pogroms, violence. And this is true whether we are the ones dishing it out or, as it seems today, the ones always on the receiving end.