So another independence day is upon us. So once again our leaders will remind us of the heroic freedom struggle and urge us to rededicate ourselves to the commonweal. So also once again we shall be told of the perils the nation faces.
The perils are a fact. But so is our capacity to master them. What remains to be seen is whether we shall be able to mobilise our resistance before the hostile forces, internal and
external, overwhelm us. Our past is an assurance, if not a guarantee, that we shall prevail. But what is that past?, you may well ask.
Our quantitative achievements in the field of agriculture, industry, education and communications are there for anyone to see. Of late, it has become fashionable to decry these by comparing them with the larger gains which small countries such as South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore have carved out for themselves. Now the top layers of the government itself have joined in this game of running down India. But whenever has an elephant moved with the speed of a tiger?
Not a Country
We do not, in any case, wish to join the issue with anyone in these terms because we hold that they are inadequate. India is not a country; it is not merely a sub-continent either; it is a civilisation which is trying at once to renew herself in terms of her own essential nature and to change herself so as to bring herself in harmony with the form of the age in which we now live. In plain terms, the ancient Indian spirit is taking on a new form without ceasing to be itself. If India has to be judged at all, she had to be judged in those terms. Figures of production of coal, steel and cement, however essential for measuring economic growth, are a poor yardstick in judging so grand an enterprise.
The other two great non-European civilisations has have been, and are, confronting the same European challenge. The end result is no nearer in their case than in ours; indeed, there can be no end in such encounters; even so it shall not be partisan to say that we have achieved greater success than either the world of Arab-Islam or China in remaining ourselves and in coming to terms with western civilization. It will be wrong to claim that we have achieved anything like a synthesis; we have not; we have at best achieved an uneasy co-existence. But has either China or Arab-Islam achieved even that much?
Not much need be said about the world of Arab-Islam. It is evident enough that it is in a state of deep shock and despair so much so that in its blind fury, it has turned on itself. What is called Islamic fundamentalism involves not only a rejection of the modern west and its allegedly corrupt and corrupting ways but also rejection of Islam’s own great cultural inheritance. Its apparent desire to return to the golden age of the faith is at bottom a desire for self-mutilation, self-castration. The growing mood of helplessness and hopelessness in the secular field vis-à-vis Israel is strengthening the forces of fundamentalism and weakening the prospect of self-discovery. It is not pleasant to visualise the future of Arab-Islam.
China’s Failure
China’s failure is not so obvious but to a discerning observer it should be. Some points may be made in this regard. While on the achievement of independence in 1947, India decided to become a liberal democracy, that is, it accepted as its goal the highest form of humanism the west has achieved, China in 1949 chose the deviant form of westernism in Marxism-Leninism with external military power and not self-renewal as its principal goal and coercion and not participation in its principal instrument. The power drive failed, leading first to the perversion of the doctrine (the so-called, great proletarian revolution and then to its virtual abandonment under Deng Xiaoping since 1976) in search of economic power. As a result China today does not even have a framework in relation to which her progress, or lack of it, can be judged. No one can say that India is similarly handicapped. She remains loyal to the vision of her founding fathers, even if she is finding it difficult to live up to it.
The impression has spread, thanks to the enormous efforts of western scholars and their Indian followers, that ever since the days of Raja Rammohan Roy in the first half of the 19th century, India has sought to recast herself in the western mould, and that, in the result, she has become a caricature – of herself and of the west. There is some merit in this proposition. For the past 150 years India has had a class of “brown Englishmen” (now “brown Americans”) and this class has, on a surface view, been extraordinarily influential. Indeed, it has been the ruling class.
But the deeper reality has been remarkably different from the surface one. Raja Rammohan Roy had a successor in Jawaharlal Nehru half a century later. In between the Indian spirit found its profoundest expression in Swami Ramakrishna Paramhamsa, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Maharshi Ramana and other geniuses who proclaimed the depth and grandeur of India’s spiritual experience. And who truly dominated that 1918-47 period when India’s freedom struggle matured and found fulfillment in independence? Mahatma Gandhi, another symbol of the country’s deep religiosity, and not Jawaharlal Nehru. The Mahatma was the great master who gentle voice revived a people crushed under the British boots. Nehru was at best his pupil.
If we can speak of a dialectical process which has helped reshape modern India, one component has certainly been provided by the great men of religion. Without them India could have been lost. Her inner spaces could have been colonized as her physical ones had been. But that has not been so. India has been reorganising her inner spaces according to her genius. That she has been engaged in such a rearrangement cannot be in question. The decline, indeed the virtual disappearance, of rituals among the educated upper crust is evidence enough. But simultaneously we have seen the rise and growth of interest in yoga which was barely known among the people till the consolidation of the British rule in the latter part of the 19th century.
Natural Religions
India’s religions have all been natural religions. They have grown and prospered naturally. They were not self-aware because they were expressions of the cosmic reality. They did not define themselves. But when the Christian challenge arose, they had to define themselves. They did. Lokamanya’s, Gandhiji’s, and Sri Aurobindo’s commentaries on the Gita were part of that effort at self-definition by Sanatan Dharma popularly known as Hinduism. The Gita and the two epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, now sell in lakhs of copies year after year. This intellectualisation of the life of the spirit, if we may so describe this phenomenon, has deprived it of some of its natural flow but it has also given it a strength which is valuable in our days. By refusing to be similarly creative and flexible in the interpretation of the Koran, the Hadith and the Sunnah, the world of Arab-Islam has denied itself a similar advantage.
On the face of it, it is rather ironical that the grip of the English language and western ways would have become more widespread in the near four decades of independence. But a deeper scrutiny will reveal another picture. Some points may be made in this connection.
First, today’s westernism is far more superficial than that of the pre-independence period, even if it is more aggressive, backed as it is by technological innovations such as television and VCRs. Technology is its god. Western values as such are alien to it; the West itself no longer boasts of its values. Indeed, in view of The holocaust (the liquidation of six million Jews in the heart of Europe), The Gulag Archipelago (the incarceration of over 30 million
Soviet citizens in labour camps where millions of them died of cruelty, harsh living conditions and hard work), and Hiroshima And Nagasaki (senseless atomisation of two Japanese cities by the Americans), discerning westerners have become quite critical of their civilisation and are looking elsewhere, especially India, for comfort and light. The superficial dynamism of the West is covering up the cancer at its heart. But it is there for any careful observer to see.
Secondly, while the number of Indians who speak some kind of English has definitely increased substantially, the number of those who handle it with any felicity has declined sharply. And a majority of even the latter are hardly literate in the sense the word used to be understood not long ago. The English language in India has got divorced from the deeper sources of English (western) thought and emotion. As such it can only distort, it cannot reorient, thinking feeling and behaviour.
Thirdly and most importantly, under the umbrella of the English language, there has taken place an upsurge of the Indian languages which is truly remarkable. All major Indian languages are pulsating with a new vigour, and, in this field, the most remarkable development has been the growth and spread of Sanskrit-based Hindi. As we know, a standard Hindi language did not exist till the late 19th century. In what we now call the Hindi-speaking belt, we had a series of dialect. Some of these, Hari Boli, for instance, were extensively used, most other being limited to a 20-50 sq. mile area. But even in the former there were dialects. Now around 300 million are beginning to speak a standardised form of Hindi which, thanks to the mass media, continues to spread throughout the length and breadth of India. It is not a smaller achievement than the development of Hebrew as modern language.
Languages Issue
We do not wish to speculate on the future relationship between Hindi and the other languages. For one thing, such issues are never settled by official fiats or declamations. For another, the issue is not germane to the present discussion which is intended to underline the point that the upsurge of Indian languages is a guarantee that in her depths India is not being and will not be swamped by the west. A large part of her inner being remains and shall remain inviolable and inaccessible to the outsider. Yet step out of the fashionable parts of the metropolis and you will see that India remains very much herself.
We do not wish to go into the possible consequences of this development in the political realm. But two observations may be made. First, it is only in our ignorance that we can regard this linguistic upsurge a danger to national unity, in reality it is the main guarantee that India remains India. Second, in the final analysis, the cultural realism must prevail in India and shape the political realm according to its requirements.
India’s independence in 1947, it is hardly necessary to recall, was accompanied by partition whereby Muslim-majority north-western and north-eastern parts seceded from the Union. For Gandhiji it represented the undoing of his life’s work so much so that he lost interest in living. Even Sri Aurobindo regarded this vivisection of Mother India as tragic and predicted its annulment. But the British machinations, Mr Jinnah’s enormous tactical skills and other external factors leading to division notwithstanding, it is possible to look at partition as rejection by the Indian spirit of what it could not digest. So, at least, we see the event, however painful and tragic in itself. We see the subsequent upheavals, including the current one in Punjab, in the country in the same light. The external reality is being reshaped to suit the inner being through the familiar process of assimilation and rejection.
Spirit A Unity
We have no idea of how the Indian spirit came into existence; for even the Vedas are an expression of that spirit and not its creators. But it is evident that spirit is a unity and not a conglomeration of diverse units. It does not exclude the world. But it takes up what the world has to offer, or imposes on it, assimilates whatever is kindred material and rejects what is alien and unadaptable. This cannot but be a very turbulent process. An India reviving and renewing herself cannot be at peace with herself.
India enjoyed that Gandhiji called the “peace of the graveyard” under the British. Gandhiji shattered that “peace” and thus opened the floodgates of turbulence. The prophet of non-violence was in reality the prophet of turbulence because his central mission was to give a big push to the regeneration of Mother India; it was not to teach us a new technique of fighting injustice. The technique was no more than an instrument.
The Times of India, 15 August 1986