Introduction
This article will attempt to ‘provincialise’ the ‘secular cosmology’ of International Relations (IR) through an examination of the relational cosmology of dharma. By provincialise, we follow Dipesh Chakrabarty in referring to the simultaneous indispensability and inadequacy of categories and concepts that have their origins in the intellectual and even theological traditions of Europe to the study of the ‘various life practices that constitute the political and the historical’ in other cultures and societies. These categories, no doubt, exist in ‘cliched and short-hand forms’ but place limits on our ability to imagine IR.Footnote 1 IR continues to privilege relations between pre-existing, distinct, separate, and stable units that may not accord with the worldviews of many people who live their lives according to relational frameworks. Relationality here refers to the way in which subjects and objects are constituted by relations that precede them. It assumes interconnection as prior to the existence of entities.Footnote 2 We argue that IR would become more pluralistic if it explicitly took into account relational frames of different cosmologies.
A cosmology seeks to explain the origins of the cosmos in which we find ourselves and our place within it. As such, it shares many similarities with ontology and epistemology but differs from both as it has a sacred dimension that is often, though at times erroneously, translated into the concept of ‘religion’. Therefore, it cannot be reduced to ‘ontology’ or ‘epistemology’ without violating its sacred core. In IR, a separation is made between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’, which are often intertwined in practice. Engaging with relational cosmologies may make for a more pluralistic field of study, as currently IR is structured using concepts derived from a specific cosmology: the Judaeo-Christian. Focusing on dharma, we will argue that an engagement with relational cosmologies is welcome in that it will help pluralise the discipline by making it more relevant to the lived experience of perhaps the majority of humankind. Our engagement accordingly is at a metatheoretical level: we are interested in how concepts derived from a textual reading of dharma help us to provincialise a discipline framed by concepts from the Judaeo-Christian cosmological tradition, rather than with their instantiation in social and political practices, since both have historically helped legitimise pervasive exclusionary and discriminatory practices, albeit on different grounds. This merits a separate discussion. We do not argue that one tradition is more open to difference than the other but that drawing on both cosmological traditions will help pluralise our understanding of relationality in IR.
The argument will be made in three parts. The first will introduce the concept of cosmology and examine the nascent ‘cosmological turn’ in IR.Footnote 3 We argue that, despite IR's secular credentials, the main components of Western IR are ‘secularised theological concepts’, which derive from one particular cosmological tradition: the Judeo-Christian. The tradition provides the ontological underpinnings of ‘rationalist’ approaches to IR: the notion of a transcendent, omnipotent deity existing outside of time and space structures the cosmos into distinct, separate units that form the objects of inquiry. These units exist prior to relations between them. Although the ‘relational turn’ has challenged the primacy of ‘unit-based’ analysis, it has not sufficiently interrogated the cosmological underpinnings of modern social science and IR.
The second section will briefly introduce the ancient Indian cosmology of dharma, which provides an alternative episteme of moral, social, and cosmic order. Dharma is not derived from any revelation of God or sacred scriptures but from the conditions of life in all its inherent diversity. It sustains life and holds together the unified existence of all sentient beings and the universe in a cosmic order that does not have a beginning nor an end. We briefly explain the etymology and varied iterations of dharma as it evolved through the centuries before homing on its conceptualisation in The Mahābharāta – an epic, which offers a textual reading of the dharmic tradition. The article recognises the limits of dharma, especially those ensuing from its particular iteration of varna-āsharma-dharma outlined in the dharmashāstras that produced societal inequalities, legitimised through rituals of purity and pollution, which were later codified by colonial law into the category of ‘caste’.
Whereas caste is a characteristic of a particular instantiation of dharma as found in a hegemonic ‘Brahmanical’ reading of Hinduism, it is not intrinsic to the dharmic cosmology articulated in The Mahābharāta, per se.Footnote 4 We wish, instead, to underline the modernity of caste in India as a form of social exclusion: as Nicholas B. Dirks notes, ‘caste is a modern phenomenon … the product of a historical encounter between India and Western colonial rule’. Footnote 5 Neither do we specifically focus on how dharmic traditions engage with other non-dharmic traditions while acknowledging the ‘epistemic privilege’Footnote 6 that a particular instantiation of dharma enjoys within modern India. We are, furthermore, reluctant to reduce the rich, varied, and heterogenous dharmic tradition to the articulation of Hindutva in contemporary India and its politics of exclusion. Hindutva, it has been argued, does not flow from the internal logic of dharmic cosmology but is a form of cultural nationalism that constructs Hindus as a specific ‘nation’ on the basis of an essentialist and racialised reading of the dharmic tradition that owes much to colonial and Orientalist accounts.Footnote 7 As such, it has its origins in the imposition of a Western ‘secular’ cosmological framework on India, rather than in the dharmic cosmological tradition.Footnote 8
The third section will provincialise the ‘core constituents’ of Western rationalist IR: time, the self, order, and the sovereign state. First, we contrast the linear, singular conception of time (chronos) favoured in IR with the notion of time in dharmic cosmology. We argue that time understood as karma and kala in dharmic cosmology lends itself to a ‘heterotemporal’ conception of time that provincialises historical, linear time with its origins in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Second, we distinguish between the concept of the ‘buffered self’Footnote 9 as a constitutive feature of Western modernity with the ‘relational self’ in the dharmic tradition. The ‘self’ in the dharmic tradition is not ‘buffered’ as no distinction can be made with an external ‘other’. Therefore, agency cannot be asserted over but in relation to ‘others’. Third, we account for the contemporary international order and its division into sovereign states with reference to ‘political theology’. Drawing on the work of Carl Schmitt, William Bain, and Thomas Hobbes, we argue that sovereign state is a ‘secularised’ theological concept whereby fear of an omnipotent and just God is transferred to the Leviathan and that the international order is grounded in theological conceptions of ‘imposed’ and ‘immanent’ order, with its roots in Christian nominalist theology.Footnote 10 Dharmic cosmology, in contrast, views the cosmos holistically as comprising relations between humans, gods, spirits, and the other sentient beings held together through samāhita. Consequently, a dharmic perspective would bring into question both the centrality of the sovereign state and fear of anarchy to the maintenance of order. Finally, the article will suggest by way of conclusion that an engagement with dharma and relational cosmologies may help problematise the way difference is articulated in IR.
The ‘secular’ cosmology of IR
The term ‘cosmology’ refers ‘primarily to the beliefs that people, societies, or religions have of the “ordered” nature of the cosmos: how they believe the world to be structured’.Footnote 11 In modern science, cosmology refers to the material origins of the cosmos.Footnote 12 Its aim is to understand the large-scale structure and overall evolution of the universe. However, the scientific origins of the universe cannot be divorced from our perception of it, which is in turn influenced by cultural and religious frameworks that provide ‘webs of significance’Footnote 13 through which we can understand the cosmos and our place in it. Modern science, we argue, does not constitute a ‘secular’ episteme that has displaced ‘religious’ worldviews. Rather, it can be seen as a secularised Western episteme that camouflages the implicit ‘epistemic privilege’ of (Judeo-)Christian thought in the cloak of objectivity and methodological rigour. For, as Walter D. Mignolo points out, ‘it was from a Christian standpoint and perspective (that is, the combination of epistemic principles and political interests) that the world was ordered and classified’. Thus, ‘even when, during the European Enlightenment, a secular epistemology replaced a Christian one and the authority of reason replaced the authority of God, the epistemic privilege was maintained’.Footnote 14 The ‘core constituents of the Judeo-Christian worldview’, therefore, ‘make up the dominant secular cosmology characteristic of much of Western thinking and science today’.Footnote 15 Whereas conventionally the heleocentric revolution is seen as having diminished faith in God, God as creator was still very much present in Newtonian cosmology. As I acknowledge elsewhere, Newton's theories ‘were underpinned by deep theological motivations not only with regard to the role of God as the maker and governor of the celestial system, but also in terms of the kinds of questions that were asked and unasked’.Footnote 16 The cosmos, for Newton, was likened to a ‘giant machine, enacting the regular motions demanded by the divine Creator and both time and space are absolute manifestations of an internal and omnipresent God’.Footnote 17
As Bentley Allan has highlighted, the international order as it developed in Europe from the eighteenth century was premised on this Newtonian cosmology. New ideas about motion and matter in a law-governed universe influenced state behaviour.Footnote 18 Allan cites Morgenthau's description of the balance of power as a ‘gigantic mechanism, a machine or a clockwork, created and kept in motion by the divine watchmaker’.Footnote 19 Although this order was subject to change, particularly with Darwin's theory of evolution that eroded faith in God and was translated into theories of progress, the idea of the cosmos as a machine whose mechanisms could be studied scientifically, survived until the twentieth century. As I note elsewhere, in IR ‘liberalism and realism are particularly wedded to Newtonian imagery of things moving in empty space, with balances of forces and interactions characterizing political life’.Footnote 20
Drawing on the ‘post-secular’ critique of IR,Footnote 21 we argue that some of the ‘core constituents’ of IR are themselves, in Carl Schmitt's terms, ‘secularised theological concepts’.Footnote 22 The concepts of time, the self, order, and the sovereign state are ‘core constituents’ of ‘rationalist’ approaches to (Western) IR. Western rationalist IR privileges relations between pre-existing, distinct, separate, and stable units: territorialised, sovereign states. States are assumed to be motivated by self-interest and collectively constitute an international order characterised by an anarchic system or society of states bound by a set of common values or norms that regulate state interactions. The subjects of these states are seen as reflexive individuals with ‘buffered’ identities, who desire freedom understood as emancipation from coercive structures of violence, whether physical or structural. The dominant understanding of time is represented by that of chronos and implicit in theories of progress and emancipation is the ‘salvation drama’ of Christianity: that is, the saving of human beings from sin and evil enacted throughout history. Although there are many variations within Western rationalist IR, the main approaches are ‘substantialist’, since they are based on the ‘notion that it is substances of some kind (things, beings, essences) that constitute the fundamental units of all analysis’.Footnote 23
In recent years, IR has undergone a ‘relational turn’Footnote 24 that has contested the substantialist hegemony within the discipline. The past quarter century has seen the rise of not only constructivist but also feminist, poststructuralist and decolonial approaches that claim that IR cannot be understood as relations between self-contained units but are constituted by relations which precede them.Footnote 25 Relations, therefore, precede states.Footnote 26 Indeed, relationalism has become a new orthodoxy in constructivist IR.Footnote 27 The ‘new’ constructivism consists of field theory derived from Pierre Bourdieu, network analysis and Actor Network Theory pioneered by Bruno Latour. Although broader than the ‘narrowed’ constructivism represented by the social theory of Alexander Wendt,Footnote 28 the ‘new’ constructivism still focuses on the secularised cosmological concepts of Western IR: the individual, order, and sovereign state. One exception is Actor Network Theory, which rejects not only the substantialism of much of social theory but of the ‘social’ itself, preferring to reconceptualise it as ‘the tracing of associations’.Footnote 29 In its rejection of the distinction between human and non-human, ANT has many affinities with some relational cosmologies, but is still wedded to a secular cosmology that does not chime with the cosmological worldview of perhaps the majority of humankind. Across Asia, for example, the interconnectedness of ‘things’ and fluidity of boundaries between ‘self’ and ‘other’ are emphasised in living cultures and popular religions that incorporate elements drawn from Confucian, Daoist, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religious and cultural traditions.Footnote 30
However, whereas relational cosmology and ANT are articulated in the language of ‘science’, cosmological worldviews outside of the West are marginalised in IR. What is missing from relational IR is an engagement with cosmologies. In the next section, we attempt to remedy this omission through an engagement with the relational cosmology of dharma.
The relational cosmology of dharma
In this section, we engage with a different epistemological model of the cosmos. dharma is constitutive of modern Indian cosmologies along with Islam, and is widely considered to be the ‘root paradigm’ of all the major ancient Indic religious traditions – Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism – in India.Footnote 31 A common, albeit critical, misconception of Indological scholarship, however, has been to identify dharma exclusively with Hinduism and, furthermore, to translate dharma as religion.Footnote 32 This has led to a series of foundational errors, including the equation of the entire Indian cosmological tradition with the term ‘Hindu’. Significantly, the word ‘Hindu’ itself is not to be found in any of the ancient or even medieval Indian texts.Footnote 33 Indeed, postcolonial scholarship has tended to regard Hinduism as a product of European Orientalism, which conceptualised the diverse cosmological practices and beliefs of Indian peoples into ‘an integrated coherent religion called “Hinduism”’.Footnote 34 The correct term to refer to the ancient Indian cosmological tradition, we argue, is therefore dharmic.Footnote 35
The etymology of the word dharma is derived from the root morpheme dhr (dhriyate loko'nena or dharati loka), which denotes the meanings of ‘to hold, to support, to uphold, to sustain, to preserve, to maintain’. A concept of multiple connotations, dharma includes cosmological, ethical, social, and legal principles, which make up the foundation of an ordered universe. It has a precursor in the Rta of the Vedas.Footnote 36 Rta signifies the cosmic order, which rules the regularity of the cosmic processes such as the rising and setting of the sun, the cycle of the seasons, springtime, and harvest, as well as the universe itself. In Vedic cosmogony, the verb principally refers to ‘the supporting (√dhr) of the sky, the holding apart (vi- √dhr) of the earth and sky and cosmos’.Footnote 37
The term dharma is, however, not central to the Rg vedic lexicon and even less so in the later Vedic texts.Footnote 38 In the Atharvaveda Samhitā, dhárman is found as an instrument of a god, understood as a divine law though it also marks the transistion of dhárman to dharma,Footnote 39 as it began to constitute the building blocs of a sociological foundation and, also get identified with kingship in terms of the role of the king in establishing order and exercising jurisprudence.Footnote 40 Dharma does not have a pivotal role in the later vedic texts of older Upaniṣhads either though the foundational meaning of dharma as ‘support’, perseveres.Footnote 41 It acquires a centrality only in the dharamsūtras and later, the dharmashāstras that codified the behaviour of individuals with a detailed characterisation of their social rules, duties, obligations, customs, and laws encapsulated in the idea of varṇa-āsharma-dharma. The rigidity of such social rules, giving rise to practices of social discrimination were, however, strongly challenged by the Jain and Buddhist traditions of dharma, the latter conceptualised as dhamma. Indeed the immense popular appeal of Buddhism was because it offered freedom from the yoke of varṇa and jātī, in that: ‘the true brāhmaṇa, the true ārya, is not someone who is born as such and performs the duties and rites – the dharmas – laid down in the Vedas, the real ariya-puggala or ‘noble person’ is the one who takes up the practices – the dhammas – recommended by the Buddha and roots out greed, hatred and delusion.’Footnote 42 Dhammas are the fundamental qualities, both mental and physical, that in some sense, support and maintain the experience or reality in its entirety. In Jainism too, dharma broadly incorporates both ‘the idea of behaviour that accords with moral rules and virtues (pravṛttidharma) and the idea of behaviour that accords with one's intrinsic nature (nivṛttidharma)’.Footnote 43 By the end of the medieval period, Jainism had also embraced the idea of dharma as a universal or cosmic order, governing all activity in the cosmos.
This article, however, draws upon the idea of dharma as it was developed in The Mahābharāta. The Mahābharāta is an epic poem written in Sanskrit between 400 bce and 400 ad, which may date back to between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries bce, making it one of the oldest recorded texts in the world.Footnote 44 It purports to account for the origins of the ‘Indian’ people in a mythical Bharāta dynasty, which was largely destroyed by a dynastic war of succession and is a treatise on ethics, politics, religion, philosophy, and above all, a comprehensive account of the cosmology of dharma.Footnote 45 As depicted in The Mahābharāta, the cosmos is characterised by successive cycles of creation and destruction, where events unfold according to the ‘law of karma’ (universal causality) and, in this context, there is a role for ethical conduct that is prescribed by the cosmological principle of dharma. In a radical departure from the dharmashāstras, The Mahābharāta discards the narrow and sectarian idea of dharma and retrieves its principal idea: a reality in which everything, all life, is supported, sustained, and enhanced. Dharma, understood such, is a ‘journey from the ritual acts to relationships’.Footnote 46 The fundamental tenet of dharma, as outlined in The Mahābharāta, is:
Prabhavārthāya bhūtānaṃ dharmapravacanaṃ kṛtaṃ
Yaḥ syātprabhavasaṃyuktaḥ sa dharma iti nishcayaḥ.
[All the sayings of dharma are with a view to nurturing, cherishing, providing more amply, endowing more richly, prospering, increasing, enhancing, all living beings; securing their prabhava. Therefore, whatever has the characteristic of bringing that about is dharma. This is certain.]Footnote 47
Dharma binds human beings to each other and to the universe. The main concern of Dharma, according to The Mahābharāta, is with the universal foundations of human life and human relationships because the quality of human life in the personal as well as the social domain depends on the quality of relationships a human has with the self and, of the self with the other. In the dharmic view, the two are not separate. That is because only when one's relationship with the self is ‘right’, can one's relationships with others be considered ‘right’, and it is not until one attains a ‘right’ relationship with others, that one's relationship with the self can be considered ‘right’. The ‘others’, it is important to note though, ‘include not only living human beings, but also ancestors, gods, plants, animals, earth, sky, and so on. The concept is wide enough to include all realms where the “other” happens to be an empirical “other” with whom one can enter into a relationship.’Footnote 48
The central focus, however, remains very much on the relations of the self with the self and not what constitutes the other. The Mahābharāta states:
Damena sadṛśṃ dharmaṃ nānyaṃ lokeṣu śuśruma
damo hi paramo loke praśastaḥ sarvadhrmiṇām.
[There is in this world no dharma greater than the conquest of the self.]Footnote 49
In the social context, dharma is the foundation of the good life that entails a rational pursuit of economic and political goals (artha) as well as pleasure (kama). Karma, which is the application of dharma to individual action, in turn determines the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth (samsara). Dharma does not deny the reality of primary human impulses to seek pleasure, to acquire, and even control others. It affirms, however, the principle that it is important to understand the true place of everything. So, wealth should be earned without doing violence to others and, what is earned should be shared with others. In other words, ‘the happiness of the other is an essential condition of one's own happiness. This is the ultimate foundation of the human order.’Footnote 50 It states:
Sarvabhūtānukampī yaḥ sarvabhūtārjavavrataḥ
sarvabhūtātmabhūtaśca sa vai dharmeṇa yujyate.
[He alone is in unity with dharma who has compassion towards all beings, is open and straightforward in his relations with others, and looks upon all beings as his own.]Footnote 51
No singular set of prescriptions is ordained for the conduct of social life given the varied and complex nature of human beings. Every individual should be able to order one's life according to one's temperament, capacity, and circumstances. Put simply, for every person there is a code of conduct that is most appropriate; it is his or her svadharma, which might also vary given the specific context of his/her situation at any given time. It says:
Sa eva dharmaḥ so'dharmastaṃ taṃ prati naraṃ bhavet
pātrakarmaviśeṣeṇa deśakālāvavekṣya ca.
[The same act is dharma or adharma for different people, depending on ‘time’, ‘place’, and ‘the person concerned’.]Footnote 52
Over time, however, dharma became increasingly identified with vedic rituals and traditional duties that were incumbent upon the social order – both as a member of his specific varna, and as a person in a particular stage of life. This is referred to as the concept of varna-āsharma-dharma, which finds full expression in Manusmriti (1.2) and broadly the entire dharmashastra literature. The vedas and dharmashastras also somehow came to be identified as the only legitimate sources of dharma.Footnote 53 In this usage, dharma refers to the particular duties of each of the four principal varna: Brahmin (priests); Kshtriya (warriors and rulers); Vaisyas (farmers and merchants); and Sudra (servants or those doing menial jobs). It ordained an internally differentiated set of rules that maintained order within the Aryan society. This, however, resulted in dharma becoming enmeshed in a social hierarchy premised on inequality even as the ancient Indian way of life came to be identified with a defence of a social order based on varna-āsharma-dharma.Footnote 54
Although The Mahābharāta does not explicitly engage with varna in the sense that it does not delve deep into the question of inequality engendered by caste, it rejects the chief premise of the dharamshastras, where birth had remained the sole basis of varna. The Mahābharāta conceives of varna as a ‘social function, and not a person’.Footnote 55 Therefore, the position of a brahmin and sudra, for example, was relative to their conduct and not fixed unalterably by virtue of birth. It states:
Brāhmaṇāḥ kshatṛyā vaiśyāh śūdrā varṇāvrāśca ye
tvameva meghsaṁghāśca vidyutstanita garjitaḥ.
[Brāhmaṇa, kshatriya, vaishya, shūdra, and those beyond, are all your forms.]Footnote 56
Yudhishthira, the main protagonist in The Mahābharāta, also clearly says:
Śṛṇu yakṣa kulaṃ tāta na svādhyāyo na ca śrutaṃ
kāraṇaṃ hi dvijatve ca vṛttameva na saṃśayaḥ.
[Brāhmaṇahood is determined by conduct, and not by family, nor by studies, nor by listening to scriptures – of this there is no doubt.]Footnote 57
The Mahābharāta showed that by ‘producing arrogance in the upper castes and resentment in the lower castes, it had turned varna-dharma into the adharma of varna’.Footnote 58 This was partly due to a fundamental error of conflating varna – the division of callings with its corresponding universal professional ethics with the notion of jati-dharma (caste) that became something characteristically Indian and has continued to dominate Indian life and social relationships till date. Despite the rigidity of the caste hierarchy, however, there is an emancipatory dimension to dharma in the form of moksha, liberation from suffering.Footnote 59 Though ideally, one can renounce life by taking saanyasa to seek moksha only after completing the householder's life, dharmic thought, in fact, stresses ‘the importance of overcoming dualistic choices and the possibility of doing so without renouncing, by means of detachment and the overcoming of all passions’.Footnote 60
The aim of dharma, in other words, is to create and sustain individual and social conditions where each individual, in his or her own being, and in relationship with others, is able to explore the potential of his or her life and bring it to fruition in such ways that he or she can. Since conflict cannot altogether be eliminated from the human life, dharma foregrounds ‘the interrelatedness of all human life, and in the interdependence of all social living’.Footnote 61
Provincialising the secular cosmology of IR through a reading of dharma
In this section an attempt will be made to provincialise the conversation on secular cosmology of IR by juxtaposing it with the relational cosmology of dharma. What would a dharmic IR look like? Revisiting the ‘core constitents’ of Western rationalist IR, we will contrast ‘secular’ (that is, secularised Judaeo-Christian) with dharmic conceptions of time, the self, order, and sovereign statehood.
Time
The prevailing version of time in IR, as argued above, rests on Newtonian assumptions; time is seen as ‘linear, infinite succession’, thus permitting its enumeration and quantification through ‘calendars, clocks and timetables’.Footnote 62 It is what Walter Benjamin referred to as ‘homogenous, empty time’.Footnote 63 This conception of time, which Kimberly Hutchings terms chronos, represents the time of nature, a linear, irreversible continuum that moves at a constant pace.Footnote 64 The cosmos, according to the dominant Judeo-Christian cosmology that underpins IR, has a beginning and, theoretically, an end. This makes possible the notion of historical time that also advances in a linear fashion, evident in a human or society's progress.
In Judaic tradition, Yahweh, the creator, manifests himself in historical (that is, finite), not cosmic (that is, eternal), time. Yahweh is both God and King; inhabiting both sacred and profane time.Footnote 65 Time, in this tradition, is not measured as an eternal cycle of events, but as finite culminating in ‘the day of judgement’ viewed as the consummation of God's design in the world. It is, therefore, eschatological; human beings can exercise agency within the constraints imposed by the Eschaton.Footnote 66 Christianity takes this further and sacralises historical time; historical time is considered sacred since God was incarnated and took on, in the form of Jesus, a historically conditioned human existence. Thus, as Mircea Eliade noted, ‘Christianity arrives, not at a philosophy but at a theology of history. For God's interventions in history … have a transhistorical purpose – the salvation of man.’Footnote 67
The key figure in the secularisation of Judeo-Christian conceptions of timeFootnote 68 was Hegel,Footnote 69 who saw in history the manifestation of a ‘world spirit’ (weltgeist), which took different temporal forms (historical moments). Hegel regarded different cultural forms as representative of different stages in world history; human plurality was ‘subsumed under a principle of unity … with a clear hierarchy delineated in which particular places become identified with particular stages of historical development’.Footnote 70 At the apex, were European societies based on a distinction between the state and civil society, the recognition of individual rights through constitutional arrangements, and an economic system based on the institution of private property, production, and exchange. In short, Judaeo-Christian cosmology ordains a single temporality that either subsumes or displaces other cosmological notions of time, including those associated with dharma.
Dharmic cosmology offers radically different interpretations of time (kala) that evolved from its early conceptions in the vedas, upaniṣhads, puranas, and various philosophical schools of Samkhya-yoga, Nyaya-Vaisesika, Mimamsa Vedanta, Jainism, and Buddhism.Footnote 71 In the Atharvaveda, for instance, time is regarded as the ‘Supreme Ontological Being’ or a Cosmic Power, wherein, it is metaphorically considered as creator of the creator.Footnote 72 But this was radically contested in the post-Vedic literature according time a ‘derivative’ status as ‘it cannot be conceived independently of its allied concepts of being and becoming and change and causality’.Footnote 73 While differing in specificities, these do allow a distinction to be made between the transcendental and empirical dimensions of time.Footnote 74
In The Mahābharāta, Vyasa, the narrator, says:
Niścitaṃ kālanānātvamanādinidhanaṃ ca yat
kīrtitaṃ yat purastānme sūte yaccātti ca prajāḥ.
[It is certain that time has neither beginning nor end, and has many expressions, many forms. Time creates all that is living, and Time destroys all that was created.]Footnote 75
In this conception, universe and time are seen as ‘having been going on ‘beginninglessly’ (anadi) as there is ‘no notion of an absolute first creation or beginning to time’. However, within this, ‘there are cycles of creation usually thought of in terms of the seed-plant metaphor’.Footnote 76 Each cycle of creation begins from a seed which sprouts, grows, flowers, withers, and dies, but leaves behind (from the flower) a seed from which the next cycle of creation will arise.Footnote 77 The circularity of time does not necessarily imply its infinite nature. According to Rainmundo Panikkar, time in the dharmic tradition is ‘contingent and limited … hence in order to achieve or reach reality, one must shatter it, transcend it, escape from its grasp, break the cycle’.Footnote 78
This calls for understanding the relationship of Kala with Karma (action), which are considered to be ‘two supreme forces in the universe’ in dharmic cosmology.Footnote 79 Each action produces both karma and, the fruit of karma, which lives on beyond a person's lifetime. As stated in The Mahābharāta:
Acodyamānāni yathā puṣpāṇi ca phalāni ca
svaṃ kālaṃ nātivartante tathā karma purā kṛtam.
[Just as flowers and fruits appear unasked, so do the acts done earlier; they do not transgress the time of their fruition.]Footnote 80
The law of karma ‘governs the retribution of actions and the network of interconnections’ between the karma of beings. This ‘universal causality’, as the law of karma is commonly known, explains virtually all the relations in the universe as ‘karma combines personal elements (the repercussions of each action onto the outermost limits of the cosmos) with the impersonal ones (the element of ‘creatureliness’ that all beings have in common)’ in such a way that makes karma ‘a cosmic link of universal solidarity’.Footnote 81 Karma's relationship with time cannot be understood in terms of a linear historical conception of time (chronos) but pertains to the intrinsic historical character of beings, wherein every single act has repercussions on a continuum of time that has no beginning or end.
Applied to IR, karma and kala lend themselves to a heterotemporal understanding of time. Heterotemporality implies that there is neither one ‘present nor many presents, but a mutual contamination of “nows” that participate in a variety of temporal trajectories, and which do not derive their significance from one meta-narrative about how they all fit together’.Footnote 82 This underlines a fundamental point of departure from the ‘single temporality’ of Judeo-Christian cosmology, which, through its secularisation in Hegel, gave rise to the theory of ‘civilizational development’ whereby all human societies had to progress through several stages of ‘savagism, slavery, barbarism and finally modern civilization’ – a position that only the European society had achieved.Footnote 83 This constructed a meta-theoretical ground wherein dharma and other cosmologies were exiled from history and denied a voice. Indian cosmologies, once depicted as ‘dream-like’, hierarchical, and spiritual by Hegel,Footnote 84 were discounted as a site of knowledge building in IR in common with other cosmological traditions discussed elsewhere in this Special Issue.Footnote 85
We argue that the heterotemporal understanding of time in dharmic cosmology allows us to fundamentally rework the epistemic bases and boundaries of IR. As implied by Chakrabarty, the linear time of political modernity in the Judeo-Christian cosmological tradition (chronos) intersects with older cyclical understandings of time as represented by karma and kala. In Chakrabarty's terminology, it represents ‘History 2’, histories that do not belong to capital's ‘life process’ but ways of being in the world with which capitalist modernity interacts.Footnote 86 History 2, is therefore, ‘better thought of as a category charged with the function of constantly interrupting the totalizing thrusts of History 1’.Footnote 87 Dharmic cosmology in IR will help recognise that there are several cosmologies, several histories that are interconnected, thus ‘opening up to voices and spaces’ that have hitherto stood ‘silenced, repressed, demonized and devaluated by the modern epistemology, politics and economy’.Footnote 88
Self/other
The distinction between ‘self’ and ‘other’ is a ‘core constituent’ of Judeo-Christian cosmology. The basic unit of humanity, and the object of ‘salvation’, is the individual human being who can be differentiated from ‘others’. Christiantity as a ‘salvation religion’ seeks, in its Protestant formulation, to free individuals from ‘original sin’.Footnote 89 Similarly, modern secular ideologies such as Liberalism and Socialism, and critical theories of IR seek to ‘emancipate’ individuals from violence, poverty, and underdevelopment. Emancipation, in Ken Booth's words denotes the ‘freeing of people (as individuals and groups) from the physical and human constraints which stop them carrying out what they would freely choose to do’.Footnote 90 Once freed, individuals become rational, autonomous and self-determining actors able to shape the social and physical environment in which they live. They become, in a sense, ‘saved’; although this narrative of salvation is articulated in the secular language of ‘empowerment’.Footnote 91
In his magnum opus, Charles Taylor traces the development of secular modernity – which he terms the ‘immanent frame’ – within Latin Christendom. Footnote 92 The ‘immanent frame’ consists of a constellation of interlocking impersonal orders in which the ‘buffered identity of the disciplined individual moves in a constructed social space, where instrumental rationality is a key value and time is pervasively secular’.Footnote 93 Individual identity is ‘buffered’ in the sense that there is a firm boundary between ‘self’ and ‘other’ that, as we shall argue, is alien to dharmic cosmology among others. Taylor contrasts this with the ‘porous self’, which is ‘vulnerable, to spirits, demons, cosmic forces’.Footnote 94 The buffered self, in contrast, ‘is the agent who no longer fears demons, spirits, magic forces’.Footnote 95 It feels ‘invulnerable before the world of spirits and magic forces’ since the ‘objectification of the world gives a sense of power, and control’.Footnote 96 This control manifests itself not only over the world but also the body: the ‘buffered’ self is a ‘disciplined’ self. This permits the distinction to be made between the ‘private’ and the ‘public’ sphere, and the development of a market economy and political institutions grounded on the sanctity of individual rights. Consequently, Taylor claims that ‘the ethic of freedom and order has arisen in a culture which puts at its centre a buffered self’.Footnote 97 The rise of ‘buffered identity’ for Taylor is accompanied by a process of ‘interiorisation’,Footnote 98 which accounts for the distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ that is central to IR.Footnote 99 The ‘buffered self’ is placed inside modernity; ‘the ‘porous self’ outside. By extension, those cosmologies where there is no firm distinction between humans, spirits, and demons, such as in dharmic cosmology, are similarly placed outside of modernity, and consequently ‘history’ in a Hegelian sense.Footnote 100
Dharma offers very different ways of understanding the conditions of human existence. Following Chaturvedi Badrinath, three main characteristics may be discerned. First, there are no prior suppositions concerning the human condition. Even the ideas of atman (soul)Footnote 101 and karma (action), that are generally taken to be the most fundamental concepts of the Indian philosophical systems are ‘products of a certain method of inquiry and were not presupposed in that method itself’.Footnote 102 According to Badrinath, the concept of karma is derived from a ‘systematic analysis of the structure of human personality’, in that ‘every act, including thought, for thought is also an act, leaves its corresponding trace in one's self and in those to whom that act is directed. The particularity of psychological traces constitutes the particularity of one's individuality. They make one what one is, and one is constantly in the making’, as one's relationships evolve.Footnote 103
Second, human life, by its very nature, is composed of opposites and neither one of them can be denied, or suppressed, without inviting ‘untruth’ or disorder, first within the individual, and then in society. Dharma acknowledges contradictory needs and desires as part of human nature, which explains its incoherence. But, it then shows that there is an appropriate time for fulfilling the entire range of these desires and, to do so in a manner that these are ‘naturally’ reconciled. There is ‘no self-other division that is permanent, nor any division in one's relationship with the others that is in principle irreconcilable’.Footnote 104
The third characteristic, derived from lived experience, is that meaning lies in a context, and because contexts keep changing, so do meanings. Ideas and opinions are relative to a particular historical context and cannot be universalised and fixed for all times to come.
Consequently, an engagement with dharma leads to a radical restructuring of relations between ‘self’ and ‘other’. The ‘self’ cannot be considered ‘buffered’ as no distinction can be drawn with an external ‘other’. Agency, therefore, cannot be exercised by a rational, autonomous actor, whether an individual or state, and cannot be asserted over but in relation to ‘others’, in common with the relational theories of IR outlined above. ‘Truth’ resides in recognising the interconnected nature of existence that is best expressed through the term samāhita. Variously translated as ‘held togther’, ‘connected’, and ‘united’, samāhita has a normative dimension that is lost in translation: it implies unity ‘for the good of the self and for the good of the other, for their good together’. As stated in The Mahabhharta: ‘Truth is samāhita in every movement of life that sustains and holds together, and enhances the worth of life; and whatever enhances, holds together, and sustains, is samāhita in truth.’Footnote 105
Samāhita challenges the dominant logic of separation characterising the Western rationalist tradition that has given rise to a propensity to think dualistically and posit social knowledge in hierarchical arrangements, which are in turn naturalised. This mode of dualism, which finds it clearest articulation in European Enlightenment thought, has fundamentally structured IR's knowledge categories along binary oppositions such as ‘state and anarchy’, ‘civilised and barbaric’, ‘men and women’, and ‘white and black’.Footnote 106 Over the next five centuries, such practices of ‘othering’ have been reproduced and reinforced on varied grounds of race, class, and gender – all of which are cast in an implicit hierarchy where the ‘self’ or the first category is privileged, devaluing, and delegitimising the ‘other’.Footnote 107 These were then ‘universalised’ through imperialism and colonial modernity. An intrinsic acceptance of the principle of separation has, especially since colonialism, led many in postcolonial societies to think in dualistic terms as a natural normative order of thought; fragmenting human and social identities and pitting one against the other. Invariably, this has turned into the divisive – adharmic – politics of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ at multiple levels. A close engagement with the deeper roots of conflict and violence at the individual, societal, state, and international levels show a link with perceptions and feelings of separation from and in fear and hatred of the other. Dharmic thought shows that if one understands one's own self exclusively with reference to what one is not, then a chain reaction of separation leading from fear to distrust and division to hostility, eventually resulting in violence will invariably follow. Its implications for maintaining social and political order and the role of sovereign state therein is addressed below.
Order and the sovereign state
Modern theories of international order, according to William Bain, owe a ‘profound debt to the biblical conception of God found in Genesis’.Footnote 108 Bain accounts for the formation of modern theories of international order with reference to theology. He argues that English School conceptions of international order as a system and a society of states, most notably put forward by Hedley Bull, are consistent with a theory of ‘imposed order’, which was developed by ‘nominalist’ theologians.Footnote 109 An ‘imposed order’ differs from an ‘immanent order’ in the degree of agency afforded to human beings in the creation of the universe. It is predicated on a doctrine of ‘external relations’; relations between disparate ‘things’ are imposed from outside, either by force or law. This contrasts with an immanent order based on a doctrine of ‘internal relations’ which is an order that arises out of the interaction between things. As Bain puts it, ‘immanent order corresponds with a rational God who thinks the universe into existence and imposed order … with a wilful God who speaks the universe into existence’.Footnote 110 The idea of an ‘imposed order’ is important for our purposes as it corresponds to the dominant form of relationality in IR today. Relations between clearly delineated and territorially defined political units are premised on a self-evident distinction between an ordered, sovereign ‘inside’ and anarchic ‘outside’, This permits the development of concepts such as anarchy, power, security, and institutions such as war, diplomacy, the balance of power and international law.
In clamining that ideas of ‘anarchy and balance of power, system and society, and contractual international law, bear the marks of a theological way of comprehending and explaining the world’,Footnote 111 Bain draws on Carl Schmitt who based his understanding of the state on the founding father of the ‘realist tradition’ in IR: Thomas Hobbes.Footnote 112 Hobbes referred to his Leviathan as a ‘Mortal[l] God, to which we owe under the Immortal God, our peace and defence.’Footnote 113 Hobbes had, however, included an important qualification to the ‘sovereign power’ of the ‘Mortal[l] God’; obedience was to be conditional as long as it was ‘not repugnant to the laws of God’.Footnote 114 Hobbes's ‘commonwealth’ was, thus, explicitly Christian and, IR, the field of study that he helped inspire ‘has always been in some sense theological’.Footnote 115
On the other hand, dharmic cosmology as explained earlier, is independent of any divine revelation. The concept of God was not considered to be necessary for either explaining the creation of the world or human beings’ role in the cosmos or, understanding the fundamentals of human, indeed all, life.Footnote 116 This has significant implications for recasting the meta-theoretical underpinnings of IR's foundational concepts of order and the sovereign state. In the Judeo-Christian cosmology, the idea of order flows from ‘outside-in’, in the sense the starting point lies with the God that is outside time and space and, faith in God with adherence to his commandments and laws is a precondition for establishing social relations and bringing order in the lives of human beings through the state.
The primary question in dharmic cosmology, however, always has been ‘how does one order one's life?’ In other words, the idea of order flows from ‘inside-out’. This does not mean that it neglects the inquiry into the nature of social and political life but only that ordering one's life is a question that is prior to any question of social organisation and the state. Dharmic cosmology views a human as a ‘transcendent being’ who is ‘essentially asocial, or rather, trans-social in nature’, and, that is how ‘the relationship with the other, which is at the heart of sociality, is secondary too’.Footnote 117 Hence, the emphasis on turning ‘inwards’ and, being constantly aware of one's own ethical responsibilities. The reconciliation between transcendence and immanence in dharmic cosmology is not dependent on an external agent, as in the Abrahamic traditions, since each individual being is able to achieve moksha, although not necessarily within their lifetime.
As a logical corollary, dharma focuses attention on the agency of human, and other sentient, beings, liberating them from the constraints imposed by the abstract entities such as nations or states. In a dharmic order, it is the responsibility of the state and the society to create and sustain conditions where all beings in their own selves and in their relationships with others are able to explore the full potential of their lives. The purpose of the state is to create social conditions where every individual could follow his or her svadharma, that is, his or her inner calling, and also achieve the orderly progress and welfare of society as a whole, lokayatra (social living) or lokasamgraha (social wealth). An engagement with dharma would help counter the logic of separation that leads to a very division between humans and their environment, which is at the very heart of our modern episteme, and suggest ways in which an alternate world order that foregrounds the idea of the ethical responsibility of the individual, society, and the state, is possible. The idea here is to recast the very spatial relationship between an individual's inner being and the world since one does not negate the other. As long as they are seen as part of ‘one whole reality’, the need for an ‘imposed order from outside’, as in the Judaeo-Christian cosmological tradition, does not arise.
This also brings into question the Hobbesian account of the origins of conflict as residing in anarchy. Indeed, it might be argued that the structuring principle of the present-day international order is not anarchy but fear; states are socialised not by anarchy as argued by Kenneth Waltz,Footnote 118 but by fear to secure their survival at the expense of other states. This fear proceeds from a logic of separation; if there is no ‘other’, there can be no ‘fear of the other’. Fear of the ‘other’ is not only a precondition for the maintenance of an anarchic international system based on territorialised nation-states but also applies to the making of the states themselves. Hobbes's ‘Mortal[l] God’ was taken from The Book of Job, in which it is depicted as the ‘strongest and most tremendous sea monster’.Footnote 119 However, Hobbes transforms his Leviathan into ‘a fearful dominus, the earthly version of an extreme nominalist God’Footnote 120 made up of a ‘multitude of men’.Footnote 121 We obey the dominus for ‘in the act of our submission, consisteth both our obligation, and our liberty’.Footnote 122 Thus, liberty and security become inextricably linked in the Western IR imaginary, particularly in its realist, liberal, and critical guises. Unlike The Leviathan, which instils fear among its subjects, The Mahābharāta provides a very different foundation for building the social and political order. It states:
Svataṣca paratacaiva parasparabhayādapi
amānuśabhayebhyaṣca svāḥ prajāḥ pālayennṛpaḥ.
[Let the king protect his subjects from their fear of him; from their fear of others; from their fear of each other; and from their fear of things that are not human.]Footnote 123
In dharmic cosmology, the fundamental principle of governance is to ensure people's protection from fear. Indeed, there is no other justification for the king to exist than to protect the people in every way because ‘protection is the first foundation of all social order’ and, it is ‘upon governance that all order is based’.Footnote 124 The Mahābharāta states:
Eṣa eva paro dharmo yad rājā rakṣati prajāḥ
bhūtānaṃ hi yathā dharmo rakṣaṇṃ paramā dayā.
[The protection of the people, this is the highest dharma of the king. Indeed, the protecting of all living beings with kindness towards them is the highest dharma.]Footnote 125
Dharmic cosmology provincialises sovereign statehood and decentres the state from its primary/focal position in IR. To begin with, the sovereign power is not vested in a person (king) or, an entity (state), but in dharma. Unlike the Judaic tradition where Yahweh is both the God and the King, in the dharmic order, neither is the king a source of divine authority nor the state, sovereign. ‘The sovereignty is that of dharma, as the self-governing limits of all powers.’Footnote 126
Dharme tiśṭhanti bhūtāni dharmo rājani tiśṭhati
taṃ rājā sadhu yaḥ ṣāsti sa rājā pṛthivīpatiḥ.
[All living beings have as the foundation of their existence, and dharma exists over and above the king. Only he remains the king, who lives and governs in accordance with dharma.]Footnote 127
In other words, rulers were not allowed to annul or alter dharma, only to administer it. This does not, however, negate the pursuit of power by the kings for maintaining the social and political order. Power is needed for dharma to prevail. At times, The Mahābharāta appears to anticipate a realist world view stating:
Daṇḍaścenna bhavelloke vinaśyeyurimāḥ prajāḥ
jale matsyānivābhakṣayan durbalān balavattarāḥ.
[If there was no danda in the world, the world would not survive; for just as the big fish swallow the small fish, those who are strong would feed on the weak.]Footnote 128
However, what distinguishes it from the modern understanding of the notion of power is that it does not see the pursuit of power as an end in itself. On the contrary, it places great emphasis on the very limits of the exercise of power, warning of cosmic retribution for its abuse. To those who govern, it counsels:
neṣe balasyeti caredadharmam.
[Because you have power, do not do what is unjust, oppressive, full of violence, adharma.]Footnote 129
The Mahābharāta states that while the purpose of the state is to protect the small fish from the big fish but in the process, ‘the state must not turn into the biggest fish of all’ because when that happens, as indeed it has in the olden times and indeed in the contemporary times, there is oppression and terror, the adharma by the state’.Footnote 130 The state, the wielder of power, must in all respects be subject to, and derive legitimacy from dharma.
On the fundamental place of the philosophy of governance, the raja-dharma, The Mahābharāta states:
Sarve dharma rājadharmapradhānāḥ sarve varṇāḥ pālyamānā bhavanti
sarvastyāgo rājadharmeṣu rājaṃstyāgaṃdharmecāhuragrayaṃpurāṇam.
Sarve tyāgā rājadharmeṣu dṛśṭāḥ sarvā dīkṣā rājadharmeśu coktāḥ
Sarvā vidyā rājadharmeṣu yuktāḥ sarve lokā rājadharme praviṣṭāḥ.
[Of all the foundations, the foundation of governance is central; for it is through that all the human beings are cared for. Every human limit is inherent in the foundation of governance; and to observe limits is the deepest foundation of all. All limits can be seen in the foundation of governance, and in the foundation of governance, every initiation. All aspects of knowledge are united in that foundation, and into it enter all worlds.]Footnote 131
In contrast with the Judaeo-Christian cosmological tradition, the sovereignty of states, kings, queens, or even gods is conditional and not absolute. There is no all-powerful creator that exists outside time and space; similarly, there is no all-powerful Leviathan capable of monopolising the use of force within a given territory. This opens up the possibility of conceiving of sovereignty as plural and overlappingFootnote 132 and decentres the state from the drama of IR. A dharmic perspective questions the centrality of the sovereign state to the maintenance of order, peace, and security, preferring to view the cosmos holistically as comprising relations between humans, gods, spirits and the other sentient beings who, through samāhita, all form part of the ‘great chain of being’.Footnote 133
Conclusion
Our discussion of dharma is not intended to demonstrate the superiority of the relational cosmology of dharma over Western modernity but to provincialise the claims of Western rationalist IR by illustrating how the assumptions upon which it is based are particular to a specific cosmological tradition: the Judaeo-Christian. The logic of Dharmic thought, in contrast, is profoundly relational in that it eschews the either/or logic of the Western rationalist tradition since it is incapable of accounting for the diversity and multidimensionality of all life. From a dharmic perspective, one cannot separate a part from its integral unity and then draw conclusions from that fragment since the ‘truth is neither susceptible to the logic of either/or, nor is it unilinear’.Footnote 134
The real import of the dharmic cosmology, therefore, does not lie in offering a specific model or blueprint for the modern problematiques of IR, but in problematising its meta-theoretical assumptions that are embedded in the Judeo-Christian cosmological tradition. Dharmic cosmology, we have argued, offers an alternate mode of understanding four core constituents of Western rationalist IR: time, self-other relations, order, and the sovereign state. By deconstructing and de-essentialising notions of self and other, dharma illustrates how all beings are related to one another in a cosmological order that is governed by a cyclical and heterogenous understanding of time. Dharma places limits on the power of the state to exercise power in a given territory, thus qualifying the principle of state sovereignty that remains the foundation of the Westphalian order and subordinating it to dharma.
Understood in this sense, an engagement with the relational cosmology of dharma raises the question of how difference can be articulated and understood in IR. Notwithstanding the growing interest in non-European cosmological traditions in IR, these cosmological traditions still struggle to be heard because of the following quandary: if any particular cosmology radically differs from the ‘secular cosmology of IR’ then it needs to justify how it speaks to IR. If, on the one hand, it seeks to engage with IR on its own terms, it might not even be heard as IR continues to be articulated in Judaeo-Christian terms. And, if it seeks to draw analogies and identify common ground then it must bear the burden of explaining and justifying ‘what's new?’. As long as the particularities of the foundational logic undergirding Western rationalist IR is not provincialised, ‘difference’ in IR is likely to be understood in a hierarchical sense with the former remaining firmly entrenched at the apex, as a ‘universal’ episteme. The relational cosmology of dharma, we argue, makes a case for understanding difference in a fundamentally non-hierarchical manner, because as Badrinath notes, ‘there are no absolute distinctions, nor boundaries that are unalterable, nor definitions that are beyond change. There is nothing that is wholly separate from the rest, nor is there anything that is wholly one with the rest; physical reality itself is indeterminate; things are separate but interconnected.’Footnote 135 For too long, non-Western cosmologies have been excluded as legitimate sites for IR theorising as they were seen as insufficiently scientific. IR, we argue, instead needs to be understood from different cosmological registers and an engagement with dharmic cosmology along with the other relational traditions discussed in this Special Issue will help not only reconceptualise relationality but the discipline itself.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Dr Martin Coward, the editorial team at the Review of International Studies and the 'Doing IR Differently' collective (in particular David Blaney, Arlene Tickner, and Tamara Trownsell) for their support and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.
