Geek Sublime

by Vikram Chandra

  The first generation of successful entrepreneurs—people like Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla—served as visible, vocal, role models and mentors. They also provided seed funding to members of their community.83

  These efforts were successful enough that the denizens of Silicon Valley sometimes refer to these networks, with decidedly mixed admiration and resentment, as the “Indian Mafia.”84

  The resentment curdles and boils over in discussions of outsourcing. Since the nineties, American companies have gained commercial advantage by leveraging the new landscape of instant communication made possible by the internet and the disparities in programmer salaries around the globe. If you can manage employees via e-mail and Skype, it makes economic sense to have your code written in Bangalore rather than next door, and pay a fraction of the salary that a programmer living in San Jose would demand. American programmers have watched with mounting fear and fury as work has been outsourced; meanwhile, in India, the demand for competent programmers has steadily driven wages up. On American websites frequented by programmers, stories about horrible, ugly code written by Indian coders function as reliable linkbait. The ensuing discussions speedily descend into outright racism (’code coolies’) and nationalist chest-thumping (’go look for all the Indian names on the Google corporate masthead’). It is certainly true that Indian consulting companies struggling to keep up with the demand from overseas have hired battalions of Indian Morts, who have written some truly awful code, although I doubt that it’s any worse than code written by American Morts. The corporate imperative toward cost-cutting—on both sides of the globe—results in shoddy products, in programming as in any other industrialized field. And the Indian Einsteins, until fairly recently, have gravitated inevitably toward Silicon Valley, often snapped up directly from Indian campuses by American recruiters. There, they have formed the core of the Indian Mafia.

  So this is another history of success in Silicon Valley that may be placed beside the more familiar narrative of solitary, pioneering heroes who seem to have sprung from an Ayn Rand novel—in this Indian-American version we have a tenacious patience, learned in a country with sparse resources and endless competition, a perseverance trained and honed by a thousand endless queues in government offices; a willingness to work at “shiz” scorned by people conditioned by a less straitened environment; cooperation and mutual help; and a huge, continuing financial investment by a young nation state, despite the paradoxes of unequal development and the flight of intellectual capital. This alternate narrative of technology should remind us that there are always many pasts, some hidden in plain sight.

  The fictions about history that form the Frontier Myth, the stories that the Gunfighter Nation tells itself, typically present women as dauntless housewives or prostitutes (with the requisite hearts of gold). In either case, they are the backdrop, they inhabit the fragile outposts of civilization (the parlor, the schoolhouse, the saloon) on whose behalf the silent hero enacts his all-important rituals of violence out on the mesa. Men do the thinking and planning, women provide—as it were—the clerical support. Much scholarship since the seventies—the New Western History—has unearthed the complex roles women played on the frontier, their essential and irreplaceable contributions to the logistics and politics of the westward expansion. Notwithstanding revisionist historians and filmmakers, the power of the Frontier Myth, its meaning-making about nation and personhood, its celebrations of regeneration through confrontations with savagery and the wilderness—all this remains intact, as one can see on television shows and hear in the speeches of politicians.

  The mythology of computing similarly celebrates the victories of its male protagonists and erases women from the record, and not just programmers. The programmer Jaron Lanier tells us that in the early days of Silicon Valley

  there were … extraordinary female figures who served as the impresarios of social networking before there was an internet. It still seems wrong to name them, because it isn’t clear if I would be talking about their private lives or their public contributions: I don’t know how to draw a line.

  These irresistible creatures would sometimes date alpha nerds, but mostly brought the act of socialising into a society where it probably would not have occurred otherwise. A handful of them had an extraordinary, often unpaid degree of influence over what research was done, which companies came to be, who worked at them and what products were developed.

  That they are usually undescribed in histories of Silicon Valley is just another instance of what a fiction history can be.85

  Silicon Valley may have in reality needed Lanier’s salonnières and the Indian Mafia, but its heroic narrative—from which it draws its ambition, its adventurousness, and its seductiveness—requires lone American cowboys to ride the range.

  Toward the end of their critique of the Californian Ideology, Barbrook and Cameron remark in passing, “Any attempt to develop hypermedia [innovative forms of knowledge and communications] within Europe will need some of the entrepreneurial zeal and can-do attitude championed by the Californian New Right.” But it seems to me that you cannot get the can-do attitude and zeal without the ideology, without the shimmering dream of California, without the furious continent-conquering energy, the guns, the massacres, without the consequences—good and bad—of belief. Fictions about history are not just distractions; they move individuals and nations into action, and so they change history itself.

  5 THE CODE OF BEAUTY: ANANDAVARDHANA

  About four years into the writing of my own fiction about history, I traveled to New York over a summer break. I wanted to see friends, to do some computer work for my old scribing company, and also to escape my novel for a few weeks. This was my first book, but by now I had learned that when you are in the middle of a novel, you cannot escape the writing except through distraction. The story buzzes and hums inside you, and any moment of rest gives it an opportunity to scrabble to the surface and claw at your attention. New York was full of diversions. And being away from my papers and books meant that I couldn’t really work, so I could indulge freely.

  One evening, a friend told me about a reading by five touring Indian poets at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). We went, and I heard the critic and poet A. K. Ramanujan read his translation of a classical Tamil poem:

  What could my mother be

  to yours? What kin is my father

  to yours anyway? And how

  did you and I meet ever?

  But in love

  our hearts have mingled

  like red earth and pouring rain.1

  I felt a shiver of recognition. I had been scribbling titles in my notebooks for years, but now I knew. This was what my book would be called. I went to a library the next day and found Ramanujan’s book The Interior Landscape. The poem had been written some time between the first and third centuries CE by a poet known only as Cempulappeyanirar, “The Poet of the Red Earth and Pouring Rain.” It lost none of its simple, evocative vastness when I read it on a page, and I was grateful, but a title was not the only richness that Ramanujan offered me. In his elegant afterword, he led the reader into the intricacies of the Sangam literature of south India, which flourished from about 300 BCE to 300 CE. “Sangam” is “confluence” in Tamil, and refers to the assemblies of scholars and poets who—according to legend—had met for thousands of years in the south. The Sangam poets divided the world into akam—Ramanujan’s “interior landscape,” suffused with the pleasures and pains of love, sex, and attachment—and puram—the external panorama of politics, heroic striving, social attachment and obligation. In these poems, a complex series of symbolic associations creates mood and meaning; each flower and landscape functions within a convention. So, the desert or drought-ridden land of the palai is where lovers part; the kurinji flower, which blooms only once every twelve years, gives its name to the landscape of the hills, abundant with water and fruit, alive with desire. “In their antiquity and in their contemporaneity, there is not much else in any I
ndian literature equal to these quiet and dramatic Tamil poems,” Ramanujan wrote. “In their values and stances, they represent a mature classical poetry: passion is balanced by courtesy, transparency by ironies and nuances of design, impersonality by vivid detail, austerity of line by richness of implication.”2

  Ramanujan’s explication of this complex aesthetic gave me the beginnings of a vocabulary which I could use to speak about what I was trying to do with my book. I was not writing a Sangam fiction, of course, but I now began to investigate the rich traditions of Indian literary theory. There was a peculiar comfort in reading about the structures and operations of literature as understood by these theorists; in their investigations, they explored what literature was and what it did as a system, as a set of interlocking conventions and assumptions. And as I read Ramanujan and others, I had the curious sensation of recognizing myself, of beginning to know why I was moved by a certain kind of narrative construction, why a particular heightened mode of drama struck me as sublime. The fractures induced by colonialism hadn’t eradicated these aesthetic preferences from within me or my culture; they remained embedded in practice, in the shapes of temples and in Indian movies and spoken languages and my novel. But a certain silencing had happened, so that what was known couldn’t be spoken, so that this longing had no language in which it could be uttered.

  I am using the English word “aesthetic” here, but I should emphasize that there is a very strong tendency in the developmental, evolutionary model of history to limit the possibility of aesthetic thinking and theorizing to the modern, the contemporary. According to the literary scholar Geoffrey Galt Harpham:

  No concept is more fundamental to modernity than the aesthetic, that radiant globe of material objects and attitudes ideally independent of politics, rationality, economics, desire, religion, or ethics. For as Shaftesbury, Kant, Alexander Baumgarten, Friedrich Schiller, and their successors have elaborated it, the aesthetic gathers into itself and focuses norms and notions crucial to the self-description of an enlightened culture.

  Among these philosophers and thinkers, the general consensus—following Kant—is that the aesthetic can flourish

  only in a certain kind of culture, a “modern” culture capable of sustaining a “disinterested” attention to things that have no utilitarian function, no necessary connection to meanings or concepts …

  The aesthetic is thus … an ideological creation, an attribute posited by modernity of itself.3

  The cult of modernity, in order to demonstrate the newness of modernity, needs to always insist on the chasms that separate modernity from the past. The modernity of colonialism insisted on a corresponding un-modernity in the regions it conquered. It had to, in order to justify its own presence in these areas of darkness. Progress demanded that the premodern—usually characterized as primitive, childish, lesser developed, and, most significantly, as feminine—be brought into the light through judicious, disinterested applications of education and force. Guns, trains, and the telegraph were the blessed tools of this righteous, masculine mission. And it is no coincidence that the first classrooms in which the English novel was studied were located in colonial universities in India. The task of turning Indians into proper modern subjects with the right sort of interiority, reflexivity, and individuality demanded that the most sophisticated technology of selfhood be brought into play, and of course this instrument was the modern novel. But many of the protagonists of my novel were premoderns. One of them, Sanjay, was a poet. How did he imagine the self? And Sanjay might have asked, what makes a poem beautiful? I tried to find out, and to do so I had to find my way into the Sanskrit cosmopolis—so named by the Indologist Sheldon Pollock—into the Sanskrit-speaking and writing ecumene which, at its height, sprawled from Afghanistan to Java, across dozens of kingdoms, languages, and cultures.

  The earliest available text in Sanskrit is the Rig Veda, dating—according to current scholarly consensus—from around 2000–1700 BCE.4 The Rig Veda, and the other Vedas that followed—the Sama, Yajur, and Atharva Vedas—were considered to be eternal, uncreated, “not of human agency” (apaurseya), and “directly revealed” (shruti) to the seers; these qualities distinguished them from all other religious texts, which were “what is remembered,” smriti. The language that these Vedic wisdom texts were orally transmitted in—not yet called Sanskrit—was therefore also eternal, uncreated, devavani—“the language of the gods.” The truths that the Vedas embodied lay not only in the sense, the verbal meaning, but also in the sounds, the pitch, the tonality, the meter. Therefore it was vitally important to maintain these qualities from generation to generation, to guard against linguistic deterioration and slippage. Among the auxiliary sciences developed as “limbs of the Veda,” vedanga, there were several that ensured faultless reproduction across the years, including phonetics, grammar, etymology, and meter. Accurate preservation of the Vedas earned spiritual merit. Grammar was the “Veda of Vedas,” the science of sciences; it was called vyakarana, simply “analysis,” and was the foundation of all education. The Brahmins, the priestly caste, were trained rigorously in the cultivation of memory and linguistic expression. The effort was successful; the Vedas are chanted today exactly as they were almost four millennia ago, complete with archaic tones and usages present nowhere in the Sanskrit that followed.

  A single text from about 500 BCE, the Ashtadhyayi (Eight chapters), is usually credited with forming this later “classical Sanskrit”; with this one book, the grammarian Panini created the fields of descriptive and generative linguistics. Drawing on the sophisticated regimes already developed, he attempted to create a “complete, maximally concise, and theoretically consistent analysis of Sanskrit grammatical structure.”5 His objects of study were both the spoken language of his time, and the language of the Vedas, already a thousand years behind him. He systemized both of these variations by formulating 3,976 rules that—over eight chapters—allow the generation of Sanskrit words and sentences from roots, which are in turn derived from phonemes and morphemes.6 In addition to these rules, he provides a list of all Sanskrit phonemes, along with a metalinguistic scheme that allows him to refer to entire classes of phonological segments with just one syllable; a classified lexicon of about two thousand Sanskrit verbal roots along with markers that encode the properties of these roots; and another classified list of lexical items that are idiosyncratically acted upon by certain rules.

  The rules are of four types: (1) rules that function as definitions; (2) metarules—that is, rules that apply to other rules; (3) headings—rules that form the bases for other rules; and (4) operational rules. Some rules are universal while others are context sensitive; the sequence of rule application is clearly defined. Some rules can override others. Rules can call other rules, recursively. The application of one rule to a linguistic form can cause the application of other rules, which may in turn trigger other rules, until no more rules are applicable. The operational rules “carry out four basic types of operations on strings: replacement, affixation, augmentation, and compounding.”7

  In addition to ordered rules, Panini also pioneered the use of linguistic “zero elements” for constituents posited in analysis but omitted in usage, as in the sentence “Women adore him,” in which the determiner “the” is assumed to precede “women.”8 He also created a metalanguage comprising special technical terms and markers which enabled him to speak precisely and unambiguously about the language he was analyzing.9

  In Sanskrit, word order is not important other than for stylistic purposes; the verb can be placed anywhere in a sentence. So the Ashtadhyayi concerns itself mainly with word formation. When it does concern itself with sentence formation

  Panini accounts for sentence structure by a set of grammatical categories which allow syntactic relationship to be represented as identity at the appropriate level of abstraction. The pivotal syntactico-semantic categories which do this are roles assigned to nominal expressions in relation to a verbal root, called karakas. A sentence is s
een as a little drama played out by an Agent and a set of other actors, which may include Goal, Recipient, Instrument, Location, and Source.10

  The rules of the Ashtadhyayi are extremely concise; here are numbers 58 through 77 of the fifth chapter: 11

  Only a few rules are more than two or three words long, so the entire rule set comprises only 32,000 syllables and fits into about forty pages of printed text.12 The economy of Panini’s prose is such that a recent translation into English ran to over 1,300 pages. Panini somehow caught, the saying goes, an ocean in a cow’s hoof print. With this very finite analysis, Panini not only comprehensively described the functioning of his language, he also opened it up to infinity. S. D. Joshi points out:

  The Astadhyayi is not a grammar in [the] general Western sense of the word. It is a device, a derivational word-generating device … It derives an infinite number of correct Sanskrit words, even though we lack the means to check whether the words derived form part of actual usage. As later grammarians put it, we are lakṣaṇaikacakṣuṣka, solely guided by rules. Correctness is guaranteed by the correct application of rules.13

  The systematic, deterministic workings of these rules may remind you of the orderly on-and-off workings of logic gates. The Ashtadhyayi is, of course, an algorithm, a machine that consumes phonemes and morphemes and produces words and sentences. Panini’s machine—which is sometimes compared to the Turing machine—is also the first known instance of the application of algorithmic thinking to a domain outside of logic and mathematics. The influence of the Ashtadhyayi was and remains immense. In the Sanskrit ecumene, later grammarians suggested some additions and modifications, and other grammars were written before and after Panini’s intervention, but all have been overshadowed by this one “tersest and yet most complete grammar of any language.”14