Review: Natural Enmity

The objective of this commentary is not to defend the indefensible but rather to make sense of what is not permitted to be made sensible.

Ashay Naik’s Natural Enmity is a magnificent and lucid exposition of the Pañcatantra, one of the great treasures of the Sanskrit canon. While most readers see the Pañcatantra as simply a collection of charming animal stories, Naik argues that we should take it seriously as what it claims to be: a nīti-śāstra, an instruction in living wisely in the world. By doing so, we can hear what it has to say about politics, violence, and thriving in a hostile world. Its lessons are as vital to us now as they were for its ancient audience.

As Naik writes in his introduction, the world of ancient Indian thought that the Pañcatantra inhabits is “mysterious, seductive, and deeply unsettling,” and it is to his credit that he has made this world sensible. But while making this world sensible is Naik’s primary goal with Natural Enmity, his work began with another goal in mind: to respond to the received view in Western academia that these stories are “politically immoral and socially oppressive in character.” To McComas Taylor, for instance, the Pañcatantra is not only not the nīti-śāstra it claims to be but is, in fact,

… an emanation of brahmanical power, a social manifesto, at once the product and the producer of orthodox tradition, one of whose effects is to perpetuate the privileged position of one section of society to the disadvantage of another. Its effect is to ensure that the cultural world in which it circulates remains ‘permanent, predictable and commonsensical.’

This is not the only view the West has had of the Pañcatantra. (Arthur Ryder, for instance, wrote a century ago that the text “reveals with incomparable wit the sources of lasting happiness.”) But the reasons that the West now sees the Pañcatantra as immoral and oppressive, and the stakes in seeing it differently, serve as a background thread that weaves the disparate parts of Natural Enmity into a captivating whole. Indeed, it soon becomes clear that the Pañcatantra is a threatening work, for it argues that a good society can be built on foundations very different from the ones we find today.

Natural Enmity is an exposition of the first of the Pañcatantra’s five books, called mitra-bhedaḥ or “the separation of friends.” Its subject is nīti, the “wisdom of everyday life” that we might also translate as “street smarts” or “practical intelligence.” But to properly view the text as an instruction in nīti, we must first pierce through certain barriers that obscure such a view. The first of these barriers, perhaps, is our resistance to the idea that a collection with stories like “The Monkey and the Wedge,” where a curious monkey’s nethers are crushed by a log, could say anything on serious matters. But part of taking a text seriously is to see it on its own terms, and there are far more unsettling barriers than this that must be overcome. Such is what Naik asks of us as readers.

Texts and triads

[Nature] is fundamentally oppressive in that beings abide in nature as prey and predator, as food and eater. To live in harmony with nature means to participate in this oppressive structure. That is what ancient Indian thought does and that is why it has received so much abuse from Western scholars over the past two centuries.

Why do we read ancient texts? One motive is to affirm our current values and defend the tradition to a hostile modern world. Another is to condemn ancient values and disgrace the tradition so that modernity can take its place. Naik rightly dismisses these inferior motives and offers a third option: to enter into the world of the text and take it on its own terms. The price is that we grant the text the power to transform us and unsettle our convictions.

Here Naik elaborates. Our global discourse, which is dominated by the terms of the West, builds on a triplet of basic values: social equality, political liberty, and economic independence. Naik calls these the Radical Triad. But the world of the Pañcatantra assumes an opposite triad of social hierarchy, political despotism, and kinship communities, which Naik calls the Conservative Triad. In Naik’s view, academics like Taylor assume that the Pañcatantra is upholding the Conservative Triad as a set of ideals, and in this view it is nothing other than “an emanation of brahmanical power, a social manifesto,” and a threat to the modern order. But in Naik’s view, this reading is a mistake: the Pañcatantra sees its triad not as ideals to be upheld but as the inevitable facts of social reality. And since they are facts, the text neither affirms or denies them. Instead, it accepts them and works within them to find intelligent ways of living well.

That a good society could be built on such terms is, to our modern way of thinking, immoral and highly offensive. Here the Pañcatantra might reply: what you want to be true is different from what is true. To its way of thinking, the Radical Triad is not reality and never will be, and the Conservative Triad is the reality of nature no matter how oppressive we may find it. This is the broader line that Indian thought follows: we are part of nature and can find ways to live well within it rather than seek to undo and overthrow it.

Naik clarifies that his goal here is not to critique the Radical Triad, since it has its own history and tradeoffs. Making a judgment one way or another is a much larger project. But our discourse now is such that the Radical Triad is synonymous with human decency and sets the terms of all discussion. The Conservative Triad is not allowed mention, because to even acknowledge that it has something valuable to say would be to deny the universalist claims the Radical Triad makes about itself. This is part of the threat that the Pañcatantra poses.

nīti and dharma

The first aspect of nīti which will dismay the modern critic is the conspicuous absence of a moral angle in these narratives.

The Pañcatantra cares about nīti first and is not particularly concerned with dharma, by which I mean the moral or ethical sphere of life. The virtues praised in these stories are rarely those of kindness or piety. Indeed, those professing such niceties quickly meet their death. Instead, the Pañcatantra cares about strategy, tactics, quick thinking, boldness, daring, conciliation, deception, collective action, and anything else that can secure a person’s position.

We might then consider if the text is as “politically immoral” as its critics say. Naik explores three responses. The first is that the text’s scope is nīti and hence that dharma is a separate matter. Another is that the text does sincerely praise dharma and good character but that by placing such laudatory words in the mouths of rubes and psychopaths, it cautions the reader against taking such pious professions at face value. (After all, anyone can claim morality as their cause no matter their motivations.) A third is that many of the stories in the text offer tools that the weak can use to fight against the strong. The most charming of these stories is “The Lapwing and the Sea,” in which a tiny bird with guts of steel fights the ocean and wins.

I am most convinced by a fourth reason, however, which Naik has alluded to elsewhere: the ancient mode of education was very different from ours now. The attitude of the ancients was to find worthy students of high character and give them all the knowledge they could. Ancient education systems place high value on understanding a text through expert commentary, and a teacher’s judgment of the student’s capacities and temperament was certainly a factor in how this commentary would unfold. I expect that a teacher would save their most incisive and penetrating insights only for those students who might use them properly. Even texts like the Upanishads, in the traditional model, are revealed and taught only to students who have proved their qualifications to access the text, and this model is still active in India today in a subordinate form.

This model is utterly alien to us now, for we expect that all knowledge should be available to everyone at all times. Here the ancients reply that since knowledge in the wrong hands can be highly damaging, one should first prove to be worthy of it.

Monks and householders

The purpose of the Pañcatantra is to impart the necessary lessons in the sphere of nīti while at the same time deterring its audience from the main threat against masculinity, which is not effeminacy, but quietism and fatalism.

One of the most illuminating discussions that Natural Enmity offers is on the tension between pravṛtti and nivṛtti. Here pravṛtti is the path of worldly happiness, and nivṛtti is the path of ultimate happiness through meditation, introspection, renunciation, and so on. Naik calls this the most important controversy in Indian thought, and I fully agree.

The Pañcatantra expresses what I call “strong pravṛtti” in that it is deeply interested in the world and its affairs and skeptical of anything with the slightest whiff of the otherworldly. To the Pañcatantra, monks and ascetics are “pathetic and pretentious figures” exhibiting all manner of hypocrisy, naivety, and fraud.

The specific problem is that the nivṛtti favored by the monk is totally at odds with surviving in a world beset with lies and violence, meaning that the monk can survive only at the mercy of the householder who is deeply enmeshed in worldly affairs. To the monk, the householder’s commitments to socially necessary violence and family bonds are ignorant and inferior; to the householder, the monk’s opposite commitments to nonviolence and independence are hypocritical and naive.

The Pañcatantra is clearly skeptical of the idealism, fatalism, and quietism often touted by the ascetic. Thus the bull Sanjivaka, who fits the mold of a forest sage, is naive to the ways of the world and gets himself killed; the lion Pingalaka, who admires Sanjivaka and takes on some of his gentle ways, neglects the necessary violence of his role as king and almost causes the collapse of the state; a fatalist fish, who hears of an approaching fisherman and sagely observes that fate will take its course, is the first to get killed; and high-minded sentiments like vasudhaiva kuṭumbakam (“the world is one family”) are placed in the mouths of predatory jackals.

At the same time, the criticism of worldly life that motivates nivṛtti is accurate: the world can never fully satisfy us because it constantly changes and there is no end to our desires. But since the Pañcatantra has nothing to say about nivṛtti, I will end here.

jāti and society

A leader in this world is a svāmin (master) of a household. By means of his success in the world, he brings wealth and glory to his jāti (kinship group) in general and his kula (family) in particular, and serves as a refuge for his bandhu-varga (clan brethren) and bhṛtya-varga (servant class). Such leaders constitute the foundation of society and it is by the exercise of their industry and merit that order is maintained in this world.

The jāti or kinship community is the basic unit of political, social, and economic organization in the world of the Pañcatantra. True to the spirit of the text, the Pañcatantra is not moralistic or sentimental about jāti but simply takes it as given that people will organize themselves according to their instinctual affinity for their own family. The audience of the Pañcatantra aims specifically at the young man who will become a leader in his jāti and prepares him to pursue his jāti’s interests in the public sphere.

The nature of jāti in ancient India is one of the core topics taken up by Natural Enmity and is hard to summarize concisely. But Naik provides various examples to the countervailing narrative that jātis are fixed and exclusive groups with clear hierarchies. The text presents multiple examples of jātis living and working together, friendship between members of different jātis, and perhaps movement between jātis as shown in “The Weaver Disguised as Viṣṇu.” In this world, the members of a jāti have shared tendencies due to their common environment and culture, but these are tendencies and not absolutes.

The major weakness of this discussion is that if jāti is such a natural social formation, we should also understand how it compares to other ancient examples of societies organized around kinship communities. Likewise, I am not sure why jāti as practiced in India is so characterized by endogamy, hierarchies of purity, and so on where other such kinship groups are ostensibly not. Questions like these are likely not in scope for Natural Enmity, which wants to stay tightly focused on a single text. Even so, it would bolster the author’s thesis if jāti could be further established as a natural form of organization with its own trade-offs rather than a peculiarity of Indian history.

Men and women

[We] are not really offended by the derogatory views about gender as such, we are only offended that they are being to women and would find it perfectly acceptable, even amusing, if they were made to be descriptive of men instead.

Many verses in the Pañcatantra describe women as fickle-hearted cheats prone to adultery and to abetting affairs, and the extent of such verses makes apology and condemnation especially tempting reactions. But Naik urges us to avoid the quick reactions that would “defeat the purpose of studying an ancient text” and carefully examine what the text is saying and why.

Here Naik offers two observations. The first is that the kinds of comments that the text makes about women are similar to the kinds of comments that women in our modern discourse make about men without much controversy: that they are animals, that they want only sex, that they’re cheaters, and so on. One objection to this reading is that the propriety of comments between genders depends on the power dynamic at play between them. But this risks reading an alien discourse into a difficult culture, so it is hard to pursue this objection without much more research.

Naik’s second observation is that we should first understand the Pañcatantra’s intended audience. It is men, yes; but specifically the householder man, the leader of the clan and family expected to maintain the family traditions, find marriage partners for their brethren, support the clan financially, and protect the integrity of the household. In this world, “[d]omesticity is the quintessential masculine virtue.” He is a man of maryādā, of customs and restraints both personal and familial, and a wife is an outsider to the family’s customs and therefore a source of danger to the careful order of his family’s world.

Through this lens, it also becomes apparent why women in the Pañcatantra are treated more equally once they become mothers. It is not because woman are inherently maternal or because they are valuable solely as bearers of children, as other scholars have assumed; instead, as Naik puts it,

[motherhood] can be understood as having become a priority in tradition because it gives a woman an instinctive stake in the household which marriage alone does not provide. She can finally be trusted to zealously uphold the kula-maryādā [family customs] because the reputation of her own flesh and blood is on the line now.

Naik offers other opinions as well — for example, that women tend to follow men, whether from wildness into domesticity or from tradition into modernity — but the discussion here is not as rigorous as it should be for a topic as delicate as gender.

rasa and history

It is when we experience this rasa that we will never again endeavour to interfere in affairs that are not our own, not merely as a conscious, rational decision but spontaneously, without even feeling tempted to do so. That is how these stories are supposed to work, how their nīti is to become an integral part of our lives.

Naik closes out the book with last thread: why the Pañcatantra teaches its lessons through animal fables. This thread is of a piece with a larger discussion on the ancient Indian attitude toward history and the apparent lack of historical fidelity in the Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata. The key piece for me is Naik’s observation that rasa, the aesthetic enjoyment we find in a work of art, transports us into the work and effects a vividness and reality that imparts its lessons indelibly onto the audience.

The path of nīti

[F]or these stories to impress their magic upon us, we have to read them very, very slowly and very, very carefully, and ideally in the Sanskrit language itself. The purpose of this commentary has been to facilitate this process, to demonstrate the rich diversity and profound depth of the meanings which reveal themselves if you make these stories your lens for understanding the world rather than adopt some Western theoretical lens for understanding these stories.

How shall we weigh Natural Enmity against the received view in the Western academy? It is the nature of a text that multiple interpretations are always possible. But I find that Natural Enmity provides a model with fewer moving parts that better accounts for the features of the text and harmonizes with how the tradition has received it. It therefore avoids doing violence to the Pañcatantra and the tradition and reveals the text as exactly what it claims to be: a nīti-śāstra, an instruction in living wisely in everyday life.

Natural Enmity has weaknesses, as all books of its scope do. A small number of its interpretations feel more speculative than expository. The text makes certain concessions for the sake of reaching a popular audience, but the consequence is that the argument presented is not as rigorous as it might be in a more scholarly work. (This is felt especially when discussing the Pañcatantra’s views on women.) I am also curious if the author’s lenses would similarly make coherent the other political texts of ancient India. Finally, the verses that the author cites are so charming that I wish there were an index of them for quick reference.

But despite these weaknesses, Natural Enmity is one of the most important books I’ve read on ancient Indian thought. The highest compliment I can give it is that it has struck my heart and forever changed how I go about the world.

For more on Natural Enmity, see this speech the author gave in defense of his view of liberal and conservative triads.