A few weeks ago, writing on the library that is Professor Desmond Mallikarachchi, I recounted a conversation that took place more than twenty five years ago at the end of a thesis defence. My last official words to the committee were as follows: ‘I have come to understand that the distinctions between sociology, philosophy and literature are arbitrary and false. I do understand the need for disciplinary boundaries and that you are required to make sure I stay within them.’
The words just came out. Partly as an excuse for incompetence. And in part because I wanted to diffuse a tense situation. Deep down, though, I was speaking the truth of my convictions. The moment returned a couple of days ago.I was revisiting Desmond, as I had promised. We spoke for about five hours. Needless to say it was quite enlightening and stimulating to listen to him. There were some breaks when he had to attend to household matters. I was in one of his working rooms. There was a table with notes, some in files and some not. Piles of them. And a book shelf too. I browsed. I would tell him later that it made me want to visit him more frequently.
Anyway, he spoke about philosophers and sociologists, philosophies and sociologies. He told me he was writing an article about Emil Durkheim for a volume felicitating his colleague Kalinga Tudor De Silva. He spoke about the unwarranted fixation that sociologists have with facts. Or numbers. He spoke of the ideological preferences that may have influenced Durkheim. Many other things which would bore the reader, probably, and even me in a different context.
Anyway.
Anyway, we discussed methodology, quantitative and qualitative. I spoke about research I had conducted more than 25 years ago which I worked into the thesis that was defended and ended as described above. It was about a cluster of villages identified with particular castes. My piece was about the ways in which people located in lower strata of the caste structure negotiated honour and dignity. These, I said, cannot really be quantified or even categorised.
Facts are important. Numbers too. Marx, Desmond said, was all about ‘data.’ He used numbers. He was relentless in gathering information, much of which came as numbers. Quantitative data. But, he pointed out, it was not only about numbers. Value can take other forms, he implied. And he offered a gem of an example.
‘I was once lecturing some sociology students in a masters program. One of the students asked me if I could explain the difference between “quantitative” and “qualitative.” I said “yes.’ I said I can do it in verse. And offered them this line, “menalada puthe kiri dunne mama numbata” (did I, my son, measure the milk before giving it to you?).’
It is the last of a four line verse. The mother visits her son because, she says, she was hungry. The son gives her two measures of rice. She says that love for a child turned her blood into milk (as is commonly said) and observes that measurement was non-existent in her mind when she fed milk to her son when he was an infant.
There. In a nutshell.
Desmond had added, ‘Can you measure the quantum [of sorrow] in a single tear?’
If one person cried his heart out and another’s eye yielded just one tear, would the sorrow of the latter be less? Not all things can be quantified. Quantity does not always tell the whole story.
Is a novel contained in 567 pages or, let’s say, is made of 134,982 words superior somehow to one that is told in, say, 81 pages or has just 21,453 words? Is a novel necessarily a superior literary product than a short story. Is poetry a lower caste genre? Are poets inferior to those who prefer to write prose? That’s another way of illustrating the point.
There is error is ‘reading’. Desmond said, ‘If you send a Buddhist, a Christian and a Marxist to America and ask them to describe it, they will come up with three readings vastly different from each other.’ Subjective, yes. And yet, numbers are not innocent either. They too mislead.
Twins, then? Separate and yet not. Not mutually exclusive, I suggested. He agreed.
Our reading of things and processes is framed by what we have previously read, our outcome preferences and our inevitable limitations. Our writing is influenced by what we ‘read’ and how we’ve read it, both substance and style. So, are we a bunch of half blind or mostly blind dabblers seeing the world in fragment and fervently believing that we’ve seen it all? At times, yes. Even scholars are not immune to such ‘ailments.’ They are tripped by conviction. And they quarrel with one another. Sometimes that’s a good thing. Sometimes not.
Anyway.
Anyway, I left Desmond’s place in Naththarampotha around 5.30 after a brief chit-chat over a cup of tea. Driving back to Colombo I realised that in that moment of milk, blood and tears, I was privileged to inhabit a rare intersection of sociology, philosophy and literature.
And now, three days later, writing this, the dedication I penned at the beginning of the thesis draft I had submitted suddenly came to me:
‘To the silent eloquence with which silence trips the word.’
Again,
cheeky. Flippant. An excuse too, one might say, for incompetence. At
some level though, it is again an intersection of sociology, philosophy
and literature. A Naththarampotha moment anticipated a quarter of a
century before. An end it was and still can be. And yet, a beginning
too.
[This article was published in the Daily News under the weekly column title 'The Recurrent Thursday']
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