As one reads Manickam Nadarajah’s book, Living Pathways: Meditations on Sustainable Cultures and Cosmologies in Asia, it is self-evident that the book offers closely interlinked twin-narratives simultaneously. At the simplest level, one is textual, which narrates his ideological position and argument for promoting what he sees as ‘sustainable cultures’ while the other is a lush pictorial narrative which places in context some breathtaking examples of the sustainable cultures he has seen and had provided the inspiration for the book.
In my case, as a person with a deep interest in photography, the book’s pictorial narrative captured my immediate attention. It brought to my mind Ron Fricke’s 1992 documentary film Baraka, which captured through images enhanced by music, without uttering a single word, the natural beauty of the planet, the serene music of cultural practice from around the world, and insane capacity for elf-destruction that seem to come so naturally to many humans. The immediate problem for me in reading the book was that its pictorial narrative constantly nudged me away from the text. But in the long term, I realized this was not really a disruption, but a nuanced detour through which the text makes more contextual sense as one settles down to read. As if sensing this attribute of his book, Nadarajah himself suggests that his book can be read in more ways than one: “You could read this tract from the first page to the last, as you would normally do with a narrative account --- The book could also be read visually --- The pictures need to be ‘looked into’, not merely looked at” (17).
Based on field work and conversations in numerous places in Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Japan, the book is not a colorless and objectively detached academic endeavor as one has got used to expect from much of 20th and 21st century mainstream social sciences. Instead, it is the result of a rather long and passionate personal journey which the author wishes to share with those who care (1). Without knowing Nadarajah’s personal and professional trajectory in life and without comprehending his anxieties and intellectual concerns, which he outlines in his meditations in the chapter, ‘In Search of Meaning,’ one cannot really appreciate the nuances of the chapters that would follow. It seems to me that his reflections in the chapters, ‘In Search of Meaning’ and ‘An Issue of Concern for Our Collective Reflection and Meditations’ constitute of his questions and the directions of his quest. Comparatively, the chapter, ‘Meditations’ offers some alternatives for future based on ground conditions in some parts of Asia which may not be immediately visible for the unenlightened eagerly awaiting the roar of the Asian tiger. Nadarajah outlines the trajectories many Asian nation states are taking in the relentless pursuit of ‘development’ and identifies their obvious benefits (19-23). More importantly, he also cautions us against the pitfalls of this kind of development paradigms and practices: “efforts ion this directions, which have become an obsession, are being driven by capitalist growth-oriented development logic, aggressively exhausting resources without regard for the future generations, carelessly polluting our environment and increasingly making the planet unlivable, not only for humans but also for other living beings” (19). Of course as often we hear these days, critics can dismiss Nadarajah’s concerns as the ravings of professional oppositionist fighting non-existing demons. However, these demons are very much right around us, not only in the countries where Nadarajah had journeyed through in search of his answers, but also in many other parts of Asia and the world. What he describes is a fact, an undeniable and unpleasant reality.
Nadarajah’s journey through parts of Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Japan which have become avid subscribers to the kind of devastating development that Nadarajah critiques, is ironically undertaken in search of answers to deal with this very devastation. It appears that despite his tangible despair that comes through the first part of his book, Nadarajah still seems to believe very strongly of the possibility of sanity, wisdom and simplicity in living within these very dolmans of irresponsible and hyper-consumerist development. In affect, through his journey, Nadarajah is attempting to discover marginalized alternative futures that have been eclipsed by the glitter of mainstream discourses of development in Asia. What he offers as alternatives are the visions and anticipations of life he has gathered mostly from ordinary people in faraway places as well as concerned people in some of the metropolises of ‘over developing’ Asia. Nadarajah is convinced that the idea of sustainability is closely linked with indigenous practices and norms of Asia and are of paramount importance in reimagining a sustainable future for the region (79). He also suggests that this kind of sustainability however, is “permeated with notions of spirituality” (79). For him, that sense of spirituality which exists in these kinds of everyday practices is not necessarily religion (79). His anxiety however is that these kinds of local practices “do not fit the UN’s ‘weak’ definition of sustainability, for they do not promote or practice growth-oriented material development” (79). Hence, the eclipse of such practices from the discourses of development of nation states and multilateral agencies beyond de-contextualized rhetoric.
Nadarajah’s overall argument is that the ideas of an Asian cosmology of sustainability that he has outlined in the latter part of his book offers possibilities for growing futures: “it is about the negotiations and dialogue between individuals, communities and generations in order to foster sustainable and spiritual ways for society to move forward, and more importantly, to be” (99).
That is Nadarajah’s dream, the dream of a concerned wanderer and dreamer journeying through the landscapes of Asia experientially and emotionally linked to a less complicated past but existing very much in the present and narrating possibilities for the future. It is the dram of a thinker who has waded across the cruelties and destructiveness of our times, the dream of a dreamer who has seen the devastating that unthinking development can bring. It is a dream sensible people should collectively uphold and make an integral part of their own destiny.
Sasanka Perera Department of Sociology Faculty of Social Sciences South Asian University