Indians in the last 200 years have different kinds of history
One is puranas which have beenc arried over for atleast 1000 years
Other is the history as written by foriegn invaders
Indians have been living with both of them for several centuries and have not debated on the force of history.
It is the study of History with the intent to find out laws that will enable predictions in the domain of
today's power dynamics. Sadly, this is a far cry from the approach adopted to the teaching of History in India today, where a
Macaulayan education system dumps thousands of irrelevant facts into young minds effectively resulting in mental constipation.
--
THis thread is to study the general perception and the image in the minds of Indians with a std education.
09-29-2003, 04:49 AM
(This post was last modified: 10-04-2003, 11:30 PM by acharya.)
[url="http://www.thescotties.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/primary-3.htm"]http://www.thescotties.pwp.blueyonder.co.u...k/primary-3.htm[/url]
A prime example of such inferiority was asking Mountbatten to stay on as GG, as well as having British Service chiefs for the first 3 years.Now that there is new generation (almost) I trust we will wean ourselves away from such dependence.
[url="http://members.tripod.com/naimisha/photo.htm"]CRISIS IN THE PSYCHE OF INDIA[/url]
Indian intellectuals live in a state of perpetual inferiority and are intolerant of others who do not share the same disability.
David Frawley (Vamadeva Shastri)
Defeatism born of alienation
A defeatist tendency exists in the psyche of many modern Indians that is perhaps unparalleled in any other country today. An inner conflict bordering on a civil war rages in the minds of the countryâs elite. The main effort of many of its cultural leaders appears to be to pull the country and her culture down or at least to remake it in a foreign image. To this end they always support forces that are not only alien, but even hostile to India and her civilization.
The elite of India suffers from a fundamental alienation from the traditions and culture of the land that would not be less poignant had they been born and raised in a hostile country. The ruling elite appears to be little more than a native incarnation of the old colonial rulers and other invaders who sought to destroy the native civilization. This new English-speaking aristocracy prides itself in being disconnected from the very soil and people that gave it birth.
There is probably no other country in the world where it has become a national pastime among its educated class to denigrate its own culture and history, however great. When great archaeological discoveries of Indiaâs past are found, for example, they are not a subject for national pride but are ridiculed, as if they represent only the imagination of backward chauvinistic elements within the culture. one example is that such people who are independent thinkers are called jingos
There is probably no other country where the majority religion, however enlightened, is ridiculed, while minority religions, however fundamentalist, are doted upon. The majority religion is taxed and regulated while minority religions receive tax benefits and have no regulation. While the majority religion is carefully monitored and limited as to what it can teach, minority religions can teach what they want, even if anti-national or backward in nature. Books are banned that offend minority religious sentiments but praised if they cast insults on majority beliefs.
There is probably no other country where regional, caste and family loyalties are more important than the national interest. Political parties exist not to promote a national agenda but to sustain one region or group of people in the country at the expense of a whole. Each group wants as big a piece of the national pie as it can get, not realizing that the advantages it gains means deprivation for other groups. Yet when those who were previously deprived gain power, they too seek the same unequal advantages that causes further inequality and discontent.
Indiaâs affirmative action code is by far the most extreme in the world, trying to raise up certain segments of the population regardless of merit, and prevent others from gaining positions however qualified they may be. In the guise of removing caste, a new casteism has arisen where oneâs caste is more important than oneâs qualifications either in gaining entrance into a school or in finding a job when one Graduates. People view the government not as their own creation but as a welfare state from which to take the maximum personal benefit, regardless of the consequences for the country as a whole. a more appropriate word is draconian
Outside people need not pull Indians down. Indians are already quite busy keeping any of their people and the country as a whole from rising up. They would rather see their neighbors or the nation fail if they are not given the top position. It is only outside of India that Indians succeed, often remarkably well, because their native talents are not stifled by the dominant cultural self-negativity and rabid divisiveness that exists in the country today.
Political paralysis
Political parties in India see gaining power as a means of amassing personal wealth and robbing the nation. Political leaders include gangsters, charlatans and buffoons who would stop short at nothing to gain power for themselves and their coteries. Even so-called modern or liberal parties resemble more the courts of kings, where personal loyalty is more important than any democratic participation. Once they gain power politicians routinely do little but cheat the people for their own advantage. Even honest politicians find that they cannot function without some deference to the more numerous corrupt leaders who often have a stranglehold on the bureaucracy.
Politicians divide the country into warring vote banks and place one community against another. They offer favors to communities like bribes to make sure that they are elected or stay in power. They campaign on slogans that appeal to community fears and suspicions rather than create any national consensus or harmony. They hold power based upon blame and hatred rather than on any positive programs for social change. They inflame the uneducated masses with propaganda rather than work to make people aware of real social problems like overpopulation, poor infrastructure or lack of education.
Should a decent government come to power, the opposition pursues pulling it down as its main goal, so that they can gain power for themselves. The idea of a constructive or supportive opposition is hard to find. The goal is to gain power for oneself and to not allow anyone else to succeed. In short, opposition does not provide criticism or policy options, but plays a destructive role by destabilizing the government and obstructing its functioning. This was clear during the recent budget session of the Parliament when the principal opposition party did not even allow the Parliament to function.
Pandering to foreign interests
To further their ambitions Indian politicians will manipulate the foreign press to denigrate their opponents, even if it means spreading lies and rumors and making the country an anathema in the eyes of the outside world. Petty conflicts in India are blown out of proportion in the foreign media, not by foreign journalists but by Indians themselves seeking to use the media to score points against their own opponents in the country. The Indians who are responsible for the news of India in the foreign press spread venom and distortion about their own country, perhaps better than any foreigner who dislikes the culture ever could.
The killing of one Christian missionary becomes a national media event of anti-Christian attacks while the murder of hundreds of Hindus is taken casually as without any real importance. Even when it was exposed that several Christian organizations were engages in a child kidnapping and selling racket using âadoption as a cover, there was no outrage in the media, in striking contrast to its behavior during real and imagined attacks on Christians. Missionary aggression is extolled as social upliftment, while Hindu efforts at self-defense against the conversion onslaught are portrayed as rabid fundamentalism. One Indian journalist recently lamented that Western armies would not come to India to chastise the political groups he was opposed to, as if he was still looking for the colonial powers to save him! at least we know who the Praful Bidwais are
Quality of leadership
Let us look at the type of leaders that India now has today with its Laloo Prasad Yadav, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Jayalalita or Subrahmanian Swamy to mention but a few. Such individuals are little more than warlords who surround themselves with sychophants. Modern Indian politicians appear more like colonial rulers and their agents looting their own country, following a divide and rule policy, to keep the people so weak that their power cannot be challenged. Corruption exists almost everywhere and bribery is the main way to do business in nearly all fields. India has an entrenched bureaucracy that resists change and stifles development, just out of sheer obstinacy and not wanting to give up any control.
Now the Congress Party, the oldest in this predominantly Hindu nation, has given its leadership to an Italian Catholic woman simply because as the widow of the last Gandhi, she can carry on the family torch, as if family loyalty were still the main basis of political credibility in the country. And such a leader and a party are deemed progressive! And the support to this âleaderâ is coming predominantly from the educated âeliteâ rather than the common people.
Rejecting spirituality
The strange thing is that India is not a banana republic of recent vintage but one of the oldest and most venerable civilizations in the world. Its culture is not trumpeting a militant and fundamentalist religion trying to conquer the world for the one true faith but represents a vaster and more cosmic vision. India has given birth to the main religions that have dominated East Asia historically, the Hindu, Buddhist, Jain and Sikh, which are noted for tolerance and spirituality. It has produced Sanskrit, the worldâs greatest language. It has given us the incredible spiritual systems of Yoga and its great traditions of meditation and Self-realization. As the world looks forward to a more universal model of spirituality, and a world view defined by consciousness rather than by religious dogma, these traditions are perhaps the most important legacy to draw upon for creating a future enlightened civilization.
Yet the irony is that rather than embracing its own great traditions, the modern Indian psyche prefers to slavishly imitate worn out trends in Western intellectual thought like Marxism or even to write apologetics for Christian and Islamic missionary aggression. Though living in India, in proximity to temples, yogis and great festivals, most modern Indian intellectuals are oblivious to the soul of the land. They might as well be living in England or China for all they know of their own country. They are isolated in their own alien ideas as if in a tower of iron. If they choose to rediscover India it is more likely to occur by reading the books of Western travelers visiting the country, than by their own direct experience of the people around them.
The dominant Indian intelligentsia cannot appreciate even the writings of the many great modern Indian sages, like Vivekananda or Aurobindo, who wrote in good English and understood the national psyche and how to revive. It is as if they were so successfully brainwashed against their own culture that they cannot even look at it, even if presented to them clearly in a modern light!
If the enlightened thought of India is going to arise it cannot through the current educated elite of the country. Various spiritual groups in India may be able to promote it, including in foreign lands, but they are fast becoming a minority and denigrated in their own land.
Is there hope?
Given such a twisted and self-negative national psyche, can there be any hope for the country? At the surface the situation looks quite dismal. India appears like a nation without nationalism or at least without any national pride or any real connection to its own history. Self-negativity and even a cultural self-hatred abound. The elite that dominates the universities, the media, the government and the business arenas is the b@st@rd child of foreign interests and is often still controlled by foreign ideas and foreign resources. It cannot resist a bribe and there is much money from overseas to feed it. Indian politicians do not hesitate to sell their country down the river and it does not require a high price.
Signs of revival
Fortunately signs of a new awakening can be found. There is a new interest in the older traditions of the country and many people now visit temples and tirthas. Many young people now want to follow the older heritage of the land and revive it in the modern age. The computer revolution and the new science are reconnecting with the great intelligence of the Indian psyche that produced the unfathomable mantras of the Vedas. Slowly but surely a new intelligentsia is arising and now several important journalists are writing and exposing the hypocrisy of the anti-Hindu Indian elite. Yet only if this trend grows rapidly can there be a counter to the defeatist trend of the country. But it requires great effort, initiative and creativity, not simply lamenting over the past but envisioning a new future in harmony with the deeper aspirations of the region.
One must also not forget that the English-educated elite represents only about three percent of the country, no matter how much power they wield. The remaining population is much more likely to preserve the older traditions of the land. Supposedly illiterate villagers often know more of real Indian culture than do major Indian journalists and writers.
Meanwhile overseas Hindus have become successful, well educated and affluent, not by abandoning their culture but by holding to it. They see Hindu culture not as a weakness but a strength. Free of the Indian nation and its fragmented psyche, they can draw upon their cultural resources in a way that people born in India seldom can. Perhaps they can return to the country and become its new leaders. Let us hope that some at least will heed this call.
However, first this strange alienated elite has to be removed from their positions of power and influence, and they will not give up without a fight. The sad thing is that they would probably rather destroy their own country than have it function apart from their control. The future of India looks as though a new Kurukshetra War is on the horizon that requires a similar miracle for victory, and enlightened leaders like Krishna and Yudhisthira. Such a war will be fought not on some outer battlefield but in the hearts and minds of people, in where they choose to draw their inspiration and find their connection with life.
Yet regardless of outer appearances, the inner soul of the land cannot be put down so easily. It has been nourished by many centuries of tapas by great yogis and sages. This soul of Bharat Mata will rise up again through Kali (destruction) to Durga (strength). The question is how long and difficult the process must be.
An example of the alienated intelligentsia is Ram Puniyani, where he belittles everything Indian with a mixture of half truths and lies. NO wonder the milligazette published this .
[url="http://www.milligazette.com/Archives/01122001/40.htm"]http://www.milligazette.com/Archives/01122001/40.htm[/url]
10-04-2003, 01:13 AM
(This post was last modified: 10-04-2003, 11:32 PM by acharya.)
`Identity crisis is the biggest challenge to Indians'
By Our Special Correspondent
CHENNAI OCT. 3. The biggest challenge to Indians today is a crisis of identity. They lack a proper and deeper understanding of the country's glorious past, according to Tarun Vijay, Editor of the weekly Panchajanya.
A resurgent India, striving to become a world power, should understand that it was once the richest, most endowed and educated nation. ``We have inherited a rich legacy of learning and achievement in arts, sciences, mathematics and medicine.
Its ancient people over hundreds of years ago taught the world concepts of zero, of algebra, trigonometry and calculus at a time when people in the western world lived in ignorance,'' he said.
``This glorious legacy of culture and achievement should be your visiting card to make people outside understand what an Indian is capable of and also proud about,'' Mr. Vijay said, addressing students of the IIT in Chennai on Wednesday.
He said that poverty and illiteracy might confront the nation but these could be overcome only if the people had a grand vision of the goal.
[url="http://www.hindu.com/2003/10/04/stories/2003100400921300.htm"]http://www.hindu.com/2003/10/04/stories/20...00400921300.htm[/url]
Why India Is A Nation by Sankrant Sanu
One of the oft-repeated urban myths that sometimes pops-up in conversation even among many educated, well meaning Indians is that India as a nation is a British creation. The argument goes roughly as follows â India is an artificial entity. There are only a few periods in history when it was unified under the same political entity. It was only the British that created the idea of India as a single nation and unified it into a political state. A related assumption, in our minds, is that the developed Western countries have a comparatively far greater continuity of nationhood, and legitimacy as states, than India.
This urban myth is not accidental. It was deliberately taught in the British established system of education. John Strachey, writing in `India: Its Administration and Progress' in 1888, said âThis is the first and most essential thing to remember about India â that there is not and never was an India, possessing ⦠any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious; no Indian nation.â
To teach this self-serving colonial narrative obviously suited the British policy of divide and rule. That it still inanely survives means that it is worth setting to rest.
In this essay, we establish that Strachey's colonial narrative is demonstrably false. Not only is India a coherent nation but, in fact, there are few countries on the planet that are more legitimate nation-states than India. That some of us don't see this clearly only reflects how we have accepted the colonial myths as well as failed to study the history of the rest of the world.
The Modern States and Their Origins
The concept of nation-states, i.e. that the aspirations of the people that constitute a nation are best served by a common political entity is considered a relatively recent idea in Europe from the 18th century. Nationalism led to the formation of nation-states and modern countries. This development was followed up with a gradual hardening of state boundaries with the passport and visa regime that followed it.
Note that the concept of nationhood is based on the idea shared by a set of people that they constitute a nation. This idea or feeling may be based on common ties of a people based on their culture, common descent, language, religion or other such attributes. The state constitutes a group of people inhabiting a specific territory and living according to a common legal and political authority.
The modern nation-state, as it exists today, is a new development for the entire world, and not just for India. Mediaeval Europe, for instance, was divided politically into many small principalities, the boundaries and sovereignties of which changed frequently. Many of the countries as we know them today got established in the 19th and 20th century, and the boundaries of these changed throughout the 20th century â in the two World Wars, border disputes and the turmoil in Eastern Europe.
The United Kingdom was not really united till the act of Union in 1702 when England (including Wales) and Scotland came together. Even then they retained different laws and (even more crucially in European nationhood) retained separate national Churches. In 1801, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was formed. In 1922, Ireland broke off as an independent country resulting in the present political formation â the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Thus the UK in its present political state, if that is the criteria to be used, is not even a hundred years old.
Across the Atlantic, the picture is even more stark. In 1700, the British colonies were spread barely over the area that comprises the few North Eastern States, less than 10% of the current geographical areas. The diverse Native American tribes that inhabited the area of the present day United States could not be said to have comprised a nation, and even if they did, the current United States neither considers itself as a continuity of the native culture, nor are its people primarily descendents of the natives. Even in 1776, when America declared itself a separate state from the British, its area was a small fraction of the area it has today, mainly constituting the states on the East Coast. Only in 1845 did Texas and California, among its largest states, become part of it as a result of a war with Mexico. Washington State gained statehood in 1889, Hawaii in 1900. Thus the United States in its present political and geographic conception is barely 100 years old as a state and, at the maximum limit, as a political entity is about 250 years, with many annexations and a civil war in between. No state or kingdom existed on its boundaries before that in history.
If you take Mexico, the story is better, but not much. While it has greater continuity from pre-colonial times than the United States because of the Aztec Empire that existed for about a hundred years before the Spanish Conquest, the Aztec never controlled all of present day Mexico. No other conception of nation-hood, such as shared religious beliefs, united the other areas of Mexico with the Aztec ones. Furthermore, while present day Mexicans take pride in their Aztec heritage and use symbols from the Aztec nation on their flag, they have largely lost any direct cultural continuity of either language or religious beliefs from pre-colonial times. Spanish has very nearly wiped out the native languages and 95% of Mexicans are now Christians and described as `Hispanic'. i.e. of the Spanish culture.
Similarly, Africa and South America mostly constitute of state boundaries carved up by colonial rule. The present boundaries of the African states were largely carved out by treaties among the European nations between 1884 and 1899 in meetings held in Europe with no African representation into the process! While there had been some kingdoms like Ghana and Mali in earlier times that were politically united, the boundaries of current African countries rarely map to the territories of historical kingdoms.
In short, if we take the legitimacy of current nation-states on the basis of centuries of common continuous political rule over the same geographical boundary and inhabited by the same people, then practically no country on the planet meets this criteria. Simply put, shifting nature of political kingdoms and their boundaries over the centuries legitimize virtually no country in its present form.
To understand nationhood then as it is supports the modern nation-state, we thus must search the roots of nationhood first and foremost in the conception of nationhood, i.e. did a particular set of people, within a particular geography, imagine of themselves a common socio-cultural geographical heritage that comprised them as a nation?
Understanding Indian Nationhood
Geography
The first element of Indian nationhood draws from its unique geography. India is one of the few countries that can be located on a physical map of the world, even when no political boundaries are drawn. It is worth taking a deep breath and looking at the map below, reflecting on the significance of this geography before we go further.
The Indian peninsula and vast plains are bounded by the ocean on three sides and the land stretches to the highest peaks of the Himalayas in the north. The vast sweep of the land ends in the East with the mountainous border with Burma. In the West, just past the Indus, the mountains come downwards towards the ocean again forming a natural boundary.
Early civilizations all developed on the banks of great river systems â Egypt on the Nile, Mesopotamia on the Tigris and Euphrates, the Chinese on the Yangste Kiang. Thus civilization developed on the great river systems of the Indus and the Gangetic plain â one of the richest river-soil-climate systems in the world; and on the Narmada and Cauvery. And because of the ease of access in this land throughout the ages, there was an enormous interchange of thought and ideas, people and customs, and there developed a culture that is distinctly Indian, and at the same time incredibly diverse.
The culture's distinctive nature evolved precisely because the unique geography facilitated it. The large mountains and bodies of water separated it from surrounding cultures to give it its distinctiveness. The low barriers to movement within this land mass ensured an ease of access to build a coherent whole. This ensured that the exchanges that took place within this large separated petri dish were much deeper and longer lasting than those that took place with those from without. Hence was created a unique and diverse civilization.
Political Unity
Among the earliest political consolidations, even by the dates of present colonial scholarship, was under the Mauryas from the 6th century BC to the 3rd century BC, when most of India was under their rule.
After the Mauryas, there was repeated political consolidation of large parts of India, even when all of it was not under a single rule. The Kanishkas consolidated the north from the Hindu Kush Mountains to Bihar and south to Gujarat and Central India. The Satavahana Empire, considered to be founded by high officials of the Mauryas, consolidated the south and central parts.
The Gupta Empire again politically consolidated the area from Afghanistan to Assam and south to the Narmada, possibly exerting political control even further down south. Samudragupta led an expedition all the way down to Kanchipuram in present Tamil Nadu. While the southern areas were not formally part of the Empire, they were quite likely de-facto vassal states, paying tribute to the Emperor. The only other major comparable empires in the world of this size at the time were the Chinese and the Roman.
Note that it would be a thousand years after the Mauryan Empire was established and even much after the Gupta Empire that the Anglo-Saxons in the 5th century AD would first move into the region that would later be called England. It would be nearly five hundred more years before the territory of England would be consolidated as an independent political entity. Only much later would there be attempts at unity of `Great Britain'. The `United Kingdom' that includes Scotland, Wales and Ireland, as we mentioned earlier, is only a recent political artifact.
After the Gupta Empire, the Chalukya-Chola dynasty consolidated most of India in the south, leading expeditions even up to the north of the Ganges river.
Later on, much of India would be consolidated again under the Mughals, and after the Mughal empire disintegrated, by the British.
So while the British were the last power, before the current state of India, to administratively consolidate its territory (as well as to divide it up as they left), they were by no means the first ones to do so.
Even when multiple kingdoms existed, these kingdoms were not like the countries of today with a passport and visa regime needed to cross and all kinds of regulations on movement of goods and people. A continued exchange of ideas, people, goods and scholarship took place throughout the sub-continent, largely unmindful of the boundaries of kingdoms.
Furthermore, the territorial boundaries of India were largely maintained. There were few, if any, times before the British came when large parts of India were consolidated into kingdoms that were centered outside it. There were no significant long-lasting kingdoms, for instance, that ruled from Persia to the Ganges plain, or from Burma to Bengal, or from China or Tibet to Delhi. There was a separateness and integrity to this land, unlike European countries or even Europe as a whole. For centuries, the Romans consolidated north Africa and southern Europe into one contiguous centrally ruled empire, as did the Ottomans after them. Central Asia became part of one external empire or another.
Even in the case of the British, when all of India became part of a larger empire centered outside it for the first time, it was clear that it was distinct from Burma, for instance, even though they were contiguous land areas ruled by the British. And thus the freedom movements in Burma and India were separate. Burma and India did not become one after their respective independence, nor was there any call by Indian or Burmese nationalists to do so.
Thus there was an idea of India that made it be regarded as a separate and whole, even through political change and shifting boundaries of internal kingdoms.
The Idea of India
This then becomes our second question â is the idea of India as a unit a new idea brought by the British or did it exist long before the British came? Did the people of this vast land recognize that they were linked together? Did they share a common story of their civilization, of their Indian-ness, their Bharatiyata? Remarkably, the idea of India, as Bharatavarsha or Aryavrata, appears to have been alive for thousands of years in our stories, thousands of years before there was an America or a Great Britain or a Mexico or France.
From the Manusmriti, we learn of the land of Aryavrata stretching from the Himalayas and Vindhyas all the way to the eastern and western oceans. Without the idea of Bharata, there could have been no epic called the Maha-Bharata that engaged kings throughout this land of Bharata. The story of Mahabharata shows a remarkable degree of pan-Indian context and inter-relationships, from Gandhari, the wife of Drithrashtra who came from Gandhara, (spelled as Kandahar in present-day Afghanistan), Draupadi from Panchala (present day Jammu and Kashmir), all the way to Arjun meeting and marrying the Naga princess Uloopi on a visit to Manipur in the east (from where he gets the `Mani' or Gem). Interestingly, Arjuna is said to have gone on a pilgrimage to the holy places of the east when this happens, showing the current North-East was very much linked in this. Finally, Krishna himself is from Mathura and Vrindavana (in UP) though his kingdom itself is in Dwarka (Gujarat).
Similarly, the story of Ramayana draws the north-south linkage from Ayodhya all the way down to Rameshwaram, at the tip of which is finally the land of Lanka. Note that it is not, for this particular thesis, important that the stories are historically accurate. What we are interested in rather is whether the idea of India or Bharatavarsha or Aryavrata as a culturally linked entity existed in the minds of the story-tellers and ultimately in the minds of the people to whom these stories were sacred. And these stories were then taken and told and retold in all the languages of the people of this great civilization, till the stories themselves established a linkage among us and to the sacred geography they celebrated. This sacred geography is what makes northerners flock to Tirupati and southerners to the Kumbha Mela.
And the diffusion of these common ideas was certainly not only from the north to south. The great Bhakti movement started in the 6th and 7th centuries AD had its roots in the south in the Tamil and Kannada languages. Even while the boundaries of kingdoms changed, enormous cultural and religious unity continued to take place across India. It started off with the Alvars and the Nayanars (Tamil, 7th to 10th century AD), Kamban (Tamil, 11th century), Basava (Kannada, 12th century) and moved on to Chaitanya Mahaprabu (Bengali, 15th century), Ramananda (15th century, born in Allahabad of south India parentage, guru of Kabir, 15th century), Raskhan (16th century), Surdas (Braj, 16th century), Mirabia (Rajasthan, 16th century), Tulsidas (Avadhi, 16th century), Nanak (Punjabi, 16th century) and Tukaram (Marathi, 17th century), among the many. All these together weaved a garland across the land that spoke again of our common truths, our common cultural heritage.
The Bhakti movement retold our ancient stories in the language of the common people, in Marathi and Bengali, in Avadhi (present day UP) and Bhojpuri (present day Bihar), in Gujarati and Punjabi and in Rajasthani. We can marvel at the cultural unity in India, where while the Bhakti poets initiated the great movement for devotion to Shiva in the south, the erudite philosophy of Kashmir Shaivism was being developed coevally in the north. Or that Kamban in the south was the first poet to take the story of Rama to the major regional languages, and Tulsidas, much closer to Ayodhya, came centuries later. Or that the great Krishna bhakta Chaitanya was celebrating his devotion to the King of Dwarka in Bengal while Tukaram sang praises of Lord Vithal in the west. An immense body of pan-Indian worship revolved around the triad of Vishnu, Shiva and Shakti in their various forms â whether as Rama, Krishna, Sri Venkateshwara, Sri Dakshinamurti, Jagdamba, Durga Mata or Kali. These common stories were told and retold without the mandate of any central church and seeped through the pores of the land of Bharata, forging a shared bond, unlike any other seen on the planet.
It was this idea of civilizational unity and sacred geography of India that inspired Shankaracharya to not only enunciate the mysteries of the Vedanta but to go around setting up mathas circumscribing the land of India in a large diamond shape. While sage Agasthya crossed the Vindhya and came down south, Shankracharya was born in the village of Kalady in Kerala and traveled in the opposite direction for the establishment of dharma. If this land was not linked in philosophical and cultural exchanges, and there was no notion of a unified nation, why then did Shankracharya embark on his countrywide digvijay yatra? What prompted him to establish centers spreading light for the four quadrants of this land â Dwarka in the west (in Gujarat), Puri in the east (in Orissa), Shringeri in the south (Karnataka) and Badrinath (Uttaranchal) in the north? He is then said to have gone to Srinagar (the abode of `Sri' or the Shakti) in Kashmir, which still celebrates this in the name of Shankaracharya Hill. What better demonstration that the idea of the cultural unity of the land was alive more than a thousand years ago?
And yet, these stories are not taught to us in our schools in India. We learn instead, in our colonial schools, that the British created India and gave us a link language, as if we were not talking to each other for thousands of years, traveling, telling and retelling stories before the British came. How else did these ideas travel so rapidly through the landmass of India, and how did Shankracharya circumscribe India, debating, talking and setting up institutions all within his short lifespan of 32 years?
These ideas of our unity have permeated all our diverse darshanas. We have talked about Bhakti and Vedanta and the epics of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. But this idea of unity was not limited to particular schools. They were equally present in the tantric schools that exerted a tremendous influence on popular worship. Thus we have the legend of Shakti, whose body was considered to be cut up by Shiva and landed in 51 places throughout the landmass of India, and which is now the site of the Shakti Peetham temples. The body of Shakti, or so the story goes, fell all the way from Neelayadakshi Kovil in Tamil Nadu to Vaishno Devi in Jammu, from Pavagadh in Gujarat to the Kamakshi temple in Assam and 47 other places.
Why would the story conceive of these pieces of Shakti sanctifying and falling precisely all over the landmass of India, rather than all of them falling in Tamil Nadu or Assam or Himachal (or alternately, Yunan (Greece) or China, or some supposed `Aryan homeland' in Central Asia) unless someone had a conception of the unity of the land and civilization of Bharatavarsha? Whether these stories are actual or symbolic, represent real events or myths, it is clear from them that the idea of India existed in the minds of those that told these stories and those that listened. Together, all these stories wove and bound us together, along with migration, marriages and exchange of ideas into a culture unique in the story of mankind. A nation that was uniquely bound together in myriads of ways, yet not cast into a mono-conceptual homogeneity of language, worship, belief or practice by the diktat of a centralized church, intolerant of diversity.
And this unity as nation has been with us far before the idea of America existed. Far before the Franks had moved into northern France and the Visigoths into Spain, before the Christian Church was established and Islam was born. They have been there before Great Britain existed, before the Saxons had moved into Britannia. They have been there while empires have fallen, from when Rome was a tiny village to when it ruled an empire that rose and collapsed.
Thus the Arabs and Persians already had a conception of Hind far before the Mughal Empire was established. If we suggest that their conception of Hind was derived only from their contact with Sindh in western India, why would the British, when they landed in Bengal, form the East India Company, unless the conception of the land of India (a term derived from the original Hind) was shared by the natives and the British? They used this name much before they had managed to politically hold sway over much of India, and before they educated us that no India existed before their arrival. Why would the Portuguese celebrate the discovery of a sea-route to India when Vasco de Gama had landed in Calicut in the south, if India was a creation of the British Empire?
The answer is obvious. Because the conception of India, a civilization based in the Indian sub-continent, predates the rise and fall of these empires. True, that large parts of India were under unified political rule only during certain periods of time (though these several hundreds of years are still enormous by the scale of existence of most other countries throughout the globe) such as under the Mauryas or the Mughals. But those facts serve to hide rather than reveal the truth till we understand the history of the rest of the world and realize the historic social, political and religious unity of this land. We are not merely a country; we are a civilizational country, among very few other countries on the planet.
Some Other Civilizational Countries
While we occupy the rarefied space of countries that have as much legitimacy and continuity as civilizations, it is worth examining a few others civilizations that have lasted. The country of Greece is one such country. However, Greece as a contemporary state was established in the 19th century, coughed up by the Ottoman Empire as it was breathing its last. Over the centuries, Greece has not existed as an independent political entity, having been absorbed by the Roman Empire and assimilated into the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires. Ironically, the rise of contemporary Greek nationalism can be traced to the late 18th century, when Greek students studying in Europe came to realize that their civilization was actually highly regarded in western Europe. This resurgent pride about the ancient Greek civilization formed the basis of the movement to establish the modern Greek state even though there was no political continuity between the two entities.
If the continuity of political unification is the criteria that is used to define the legitimacy of a country, then Greece is far less legitimate than India, and other countries around the globe are even less so. The boundaries of the contemporary Greek state do not match with the original Greek Empire. Furthermore, even ancient Greece constituted of politically independent city-states, united more by the feeling that they belonged to the same culture, rather than having political unity. So clearly the measure of political unification, even when it did hold true for large parts of India over the ages, is not the relevant criteria, but the idea of a shared culture and civilization.
The only other continuous civilizations that come close to India as legitimate nations are nation-civilizations like Egypt, Iran and China. But Egypt, though old, having been assimilated in various empires and conquered first by Christianity and then by Islam, hardly retains much contact with its ancient traditions, languages or indigenous religion. Similarly Iran, the inheritor of the Persian empire which reached its peak in the 6th century BC, was assimilated into other empires and finally conquered by Islamic Arabs â it retains little of its Zoroastrian roots, though it retains its pre-Islamic language, albeit in Arab script. China is the other civilizational nation that can claim to have a legitimacy and continuity similar to India. However, for most of its history, Chinese civilization developed and concentrated in the western plains. Consolidated rule, either political, social or religious/ideological over the entire vast area that present-day China occupies is relatively recent. Indian Buddhism obviously had a huge influence on China. Interestingly, despite communism and the Cultural Revolution, Chinese intellectuals have sought to link the roots of present day communist ideology with the teachings of Confucius.
So there we have it. India is one of the few nations of the world with a continuity of civilization and an ancient conception of nationhood. In its religious, civilizational, cultural and linguistic continuity, it truly stands alone. This continuity was fostered by its unique geography and its resilient religious traditions. Unlike any other country on the planet, it retained these traditions despite both Islamic and Christian conquest, when most countries lost theirs and were completely converted when losing to even one of these crusading systems. The Persians fell, the civilizations of Mesopotamia and Babylon were lost, the Celtic religion largely vanished, and the mighty Aztecs were vanquished, destroyed and completely Christianized. Yet Bharata stands. It stands in our stories, our languages, our pluralism and our unity. And as long as we remember these stories, keep our languages and worship the sacred land of our ancestors, Bharata will stand. It is only if we forget these truths that Bharata will cease to be. That is precisely why the British tried to hard to make us forget them.
Purva-paksha: the opposing side
Indian scholarly traditions often presented opposing viewpoints with the thesis. Here are some objections that may arise.
Objection #1
What you are calling the Indian civilization is actually the Sanskritic civilization of the Aryans who were invaders.
There are many theories about migrations of people into the Indian sub-continent. Some contend that a tribe of people called the Aryans migrated from somewhere in the Middle East or Central Asia. Others contend that no such migration took place and the Aryans were original inhabitants of the Sindhu (or Sindhu-Sarswati) region. Still others hold that `Aryan' was never an ethnic term but the word `Arya' in Sanskrit basically means a noble person.
In any case, practically all countries that exist today were settled by migrants. The Saxons, the Franks and the Visigoths were all migrants to western European countries such as present day England, France and Spain. North America was recently settled (or more accurately, usurped) by migrants. Even the Native Americans in North and South America are considered to have migrated from Asia 30,000 years ago. At some point in history, it may be that all people came from Africa. Clearly, using this criterion, all nations of today are illegitimate.
So the validity or lack thereof of a particular Aryan migration theory, even assuming such a migration ever actually took place, does not concern us. Suffice to say, that even those that subscribe to the theory of an invasion or migration place the date no later than 1500 BC. By contrast, the Saxon reached present-day England in only the 5th or 6th century AD, about 2000 years after the hypothetical Aryan migration -- yet England is considered an Anglo-Saxon country and no one wastes a whole lot of energy arguing otherwise or creating political factions representing the `pre-Saxon' people. That a hypothetical Aryan invasion 3500 years ago is still relevant to our politics shows the absurd divisions created in our minds by colonial theories, intended to keep us fighting amongst ourselves on artificial boundaries.
So, regardless of whether there were such a people as Aryans or whether they came from the outside, our interest is in the fact that the people who have inhabited India over the last 3000 or more years formed both a conception of Indian nationhood and a distinct civilizational continuity.
Our hymns sing glories of the Himalayas, not of the Caucuses. Our stories talk of the Vindhyachal not a mountain in the Central Asia. We sing of the Ganga and the Cauvery, not the Amu Darya. Thus for thousands of years the people who have lived in India have celebrated its sacred geography. Regardless of their origins in pre-history, our ancestral people made the land of India their home and wove stories around its features.
Objection #2
Isn't India simply like all of Europe, sharing some common history and religious ideas but no more?
Parts of Europe came under the rule of the Roman Empire and later the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires. None of these Empires held sway over all of what is the territory of Europe today. Rather, their areas of control were largely around the Mediterranean Sea â parts of southern Europe, northern Africa and the Middle East. There has also been some uniformity of religion in Europe imposed by the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. But, there has been no empire of Europe. Eastern, western and Scandinavian Europe have had substantially different histories and cultural, linguistic and ethnic origins.
There is a more significant difference. The land of India has been thought of and considered a sacred whole by the people of India in a way that is simply not true of Europe.
As the Shankracharya of Kanchi said recently, for thousands of years, Indians throughout the land have woken up in the morning and sang a hymn celebrating the holy rivers of Ganga, Yamuna, Narmada, Godavari, Sindu, Saraswati and Cauvery as part of nitya kriya, or daily worship.
gange ca yamune caiva, godAvari sarasvati
narmade sindho kAveri, jale'sminn sannidhiM kuru
Thus our hymns and religious stories not only share common themes, heroes and deities, they also uniquely link us to this particular land in a way Christian stories do not link to the land of Europe. There are no hymns that Europeans sang that spoke of the land from the Urals to Scandinavia or from the Arctic Ocean to the Mediterranean as one. No one sang devotional songs listing all the major rivers of Europe, east to west. The idea of Europe is like another continent, like Africa or Americas â with some shared geography and history but no historic conception of the integrated whole as a unity that was recognized among all the common people.
Thus there have been no religious stories of Europe linked to its particular boundaries and capturing the common fealty of the people, unlike the story of Shakti being dispersed over the land of India in peethams that millions of people visit, or the sage who set up mathas in the four quadrants of the land, or who wrote the Mahabharata, or who wrote of the land of Bharatvarsha and Aryavrata. So there is a unity to India, an Indian nationhood that is far greater than any shared similarities between Europe.
Objection #3
If the British hadn't been here, wouldn't we be a bunch of fighting kingdoms?
The British certainly contributed to the political re-unification of the land, just as the Mughals had done before that. But they re-unified politically an existing civilization entity. This entity had existed long before they came, had been politically re-united in the past and will exist long after they have gone.
The British experience is part of who we are today, so they certainly added to our civilization. But the British also divided and partitioned us, not only physically but also mentally. They also impoverished us and planted many seeds of divisive scholarship that cut us from our roots and our sense of nationhood.
There are many entities today who would see us become a bunch of fighting states, all the easier for political, religious and economic conquest. But a division of India is like cutting a human body. We are already bleeding from the cuts inflicted 50 years ago. Eternal vigilance is the price of our freedom. Telling our common stories, the core of our nationhood.
Objection #4
You are excluding Islamic contributions and Indian Muslims from your definition
This essay is about finding the historic roots of the Indian civilization and defining who we are as people and as a nation. We have had many migrants and invaders. While Islam has contributed to the Indian civilization, our roots are much older than when Prophet Mohammad first appeared in Arabia in the 6th century AD, so our civilization cannot be defined by Islam. Alexander the Greek came to our shores, so did the Kushans and Mongols and Persians and Turks. All of them added their contributions to our civilization as we did to theirs. The Mughal Empire helped in our political re-unification. But none of them define who we are.
We had the great Chinese civilization towards the north and the Persian civilization towards our west. Each of them influenced us as we influenced them. But because the Chinese came under Buddhist influence from India does not mean that they cease to be the Chinese civilization, an entity with a distinct cultural flavor and history from India.
Similarly, the Persians and the Turks came in many waves and contributed to Indian culture, even as we did to theirs. This does not mean that our civilization suddenly became Persian or Turkish. Some of these people settled in India, some of them brought a new religion called Islam and converted some of the existing people. All those who ultimately accept India as their homeland are accepted as Indians, for we have been a welcoming land. It would be a strange case indeed if conversion to Islam led people to deny the roots of their civilization. Do the Persians cease to be Persians, now that they are Muslims?
Islam does not define nationhood. If it did, the entire region from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan would be one country. Iran and Iraq would be one large Islamic country, rather than separate entities based on Persian and Babylonian civilizational roots. Indonesia and Malaysia would be one country.
Thus the civilizational roots of India belong to all Indians, Hindus, Muslims and Christians. Indonesian Muslims don't trace their civilizational roots from Arabia, but from the Indonesian culture developed over the centuries. As Saeed Naqvi writes, the Ramayana ballet is performed in Indonesia by â150 namaz-saying Muslims under the shadow of Yog Jakarta's magnificent temples for the past 27 years without a breakâ -- Indonesians can apparently celebrate their civilizational roots without conflict of their being Muslims. There is no reason that Muslim Indians feel any differently unless led by the creation of fear or sustained demagoguery to believe otherwise.
Objection #5
Indian Muslims are Arabs, Persians and Turks, not originally Indian
Some Indian Muslims are descendents of Persian, Turks and others. Many more are descendents of people who have been in India for thousands of years. In the Indian Muslim caste system, the invaders were considered higher castes than the natives and tracing one's `foreign' status often yielded greater prestige, leading more people to identify themselves thus. As late as the early 20th century, some Indian Muslims continued to identify themselves as `Hindu Mussalmans' (as they might have been called) to census takers marking the civilizational, rather than religious (in a separative sense) meaning of the term Hindu.
In either case, it is somewhat irrelevant. Even the Persians and Turks who settled here in numbers came here far before America, for instance, existed as a country. The Indian civilization has assimilated many people into its bosom and there is no reason that the descendents of the Persians or Turks who migrated to India can be considered any less Indian as result.
Objection #6
You say that Islam is not the basis of nationhood, yet Pakistan is founded on the very premise. Your geographical conception of India includes present-day Pakistan and Bangladesh. Do you want to create an 'Akhand Bharat' and re-unite India by force?
Pakistan is an entity with no civilization basis. In an attempt to create one, Pakistani history textbooks teach that Pakistan was established by Babur as `Mughlistan'. However, Babur was a Turk of Mongol descent and the majority of people that live in Pakistan today are certainly not descendents of Turks or Mongols. Pakistan's crisis of identity emerges primarily from the rejection of their ancient civilizational roots in the name of `religion'. Till they can reconcile to their roots, they will remain a rootless nation, preserved per force by the state apparatus as long as it lasts.
The idea of Bharata certainly goes from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and from Sindh to Manipur. However, the idea of re-uniting Pakistan or Bangladesh to India is unviable at this point in history. The best one can hope for is that the people of Pakistan and Bangladesh themselves become aware at some point of their deep civilization roots that have been taken away from them in the name of religion.
Objection #7
India is not a `Hindu rashtra', you are trying to make India into a Hindu rashtra.
The interest of this essay is in establishing what is true, not in any political flavor of the day. In the multi-century big picture, particular political movements or systems of government will come and go, but the history of our civilizational roots still needs to be understood and articulated.
Our reading of history certainly does not support Hindu rashtra as a religious concept that means it is only for those people who are currently called `Hindus' as a religious term. Classically, Hindu has been a civilizational, not a religious term, nor is it exclusive. `Hinduism' is different from Abrahmic religion in this regard.
Surprising enough, even the article in Encarta on nationhood recognizes that:
âIndia is a nation in which the Hindu religion served as the cohesive traditional element in uniting peoples of various races, religions and languages.â
Has Encarta been saffronized? Or is it merely stating the obvious, albeit in a westernized framework? That there is no India without what has been called `Hinduism'. This by no mean implies that all the people have to `convert to a religion' called Hinduism to be Indians. It also doesn't imply that those who worship Allah or Christ as a religious idea are inherently lesser citizens or disloyal. Rather, it is simply recognition of the civilizational heritage that links us together as a nation.
In contemporary times, the civilizational term Hindu has been replaced by the term Indians. The roots of the Indian civilization, when the concept of the land of Bharata or Aryavrata was articulated and absorbed by the people of this land, are thousands of years old. Even though much of what constitutes these roots is now classified as `Hinduism', which is unfortunate and limiting, the wide diversity of our civilizational beliefs and quest for knowledge and understanding cannot be confined to a religious dogma or belief system -- it belongs to all Indians. Furthermore, pluralism is a basic principle of Hindu thought, which leaves plenty of room for other beliefs in the framework of mutual respect â as long as these beliefs are not directed at destroying the roots of the very civilization that holds them.
Certainly, those that are called `Jains' today have stories that refer to Krishna, the `Sikh' Guru Granth Sahib has hundreds of mentions of `Rama' and many Muslims are quite happy to acknowledge their roots in the Indian civilization. Hundreds of Indian Muslim poets have celebrated their civilizational roots â Abdul Rahim Khan-e-khan wrote poems in praise of Rama, in Sanskrit; Justice Ismail of Chennai was the leading authority on Kamban Ramayana; Kazi Nazrul Islam wrote powerful revolutionary poetry in Bengali replete with references to Kali. In recent times, the script for the entire Mahabharta epic was written by Masoom Raza Rahi; and who can ignore the inspiration that our Gita-reading president Abdul Kalam from Rameswaram is providing to the nation.
Similarly, Indian Christians can be both Indian and Christian without denying their cultural roots. Says Fr Michael Rosario, who teaches Indology at St Pius: "As an Indian priest, Indian spirituality is my heritage and culture." Fr Michael Gonsalves goes a step further: "We must substitute the Old Testament of the Bible with Indian history, scriptures and arts. For us, the Holy Land should be India; the sacred river the Ganges; the sacred mountain the Himalayas, the heroes of the past not Moses, or David, but Sri Ram or Krishna."
All these people have had no trouble in reconciling their reverence to Allah or Jesus without denying the civilizational heritage that binds us together.
The converse of this is also true â that the way to break us apart is to systematically deny and denigrate our civilizational roots. This is exactly the tactic the British used.
Thus the evangelical Baptists preaching in the North East have over the last few decades told the Nagas that they don't really belong with the Indian civilization â despite the fact that they have a place in our stories as far back as the Mahabharata, when Arjun goes on a pilgrimage to the holy places of the east and marries the Naga princess Uloopi. Similarly do Manipur, Tripura, Meghalaya, Assam and the other states in the North East.
The situation in Kashmir, spurred on by Pakistan, is a surviving artifact of the two-nation theory even while Kashmir has always been a significant part of the Indian story, its religion and philosophy. The Khalistani separatist movement is also the outcome of decades of colonial scholarship that continues till today to prove that Sikhs are completely different from the `caste-ridden' Hindus and emphasizes the separateness rather than the common roots. While the Khalsa panth was clearly established as a separate path, the teachings of Guru Nanak can be placed very precisely in the Bhakti tradition while keeping to the idea of a Nirguna Brahma. Guru Granth Sahib is liberally saturated in the philosophical and religious streams of Indian dharma, yet contemporary scholars continuing the colonial tradition often fail to educate people about this. The root of all movements to break India are ultimately found in denying the religious and cultural unity of the Indian people â whether it be found in movements inspired by colonial scholarship, communism, pan-Islamism or evangelical Christianity.
Objection #8
I am not religious, but am a patriotic secular Indian. Why is all this relevant today? I am uncomfortable with the idea of religion defining our nation â we are a secular country.
The idea of being `religious' is ultimately a western idea. In the Indian tradition, there were atheistic and materialistic schools of thought, like Charvaka, all of which get lumped under `Hinduism'. Obviously, if we take the Abrahmic idea of religion, atheistic religion is absurd â you can't really be a 'Christian atheist' or a `Muslim atheist' â not so long ago you would be hung for heresy. Hinduism is a colonial term for the rich banquet of the dharmic traditions that cannot be combined under the framework of religion. Indian civilization is a much broader concept than narrow restrictive dogmas that define religions.
A secular state is a system of government. We have embraced secularism precisely because of our long civilizational history of accepting plurality of thought and worship. This is how it must remain. However, secularism does not define nationhood in any way. There are plenty of secular states. What is unique about us is that we are Indians with a history of civilization rooted in our religious and cultural ideas. That is why we are a nation today, not because of secularism. If false notions of secularism prevent us from understanding the roots of our nationhood, we will all be the lesser for it.
But to get back to the question, nations are born, but are also made. If we fail to understand our common civilization, we will ultimately fall prey to those that seek to destroy us â by convincing us that we have none, that India is a British construction and so on. The effect of this will not only be a separation from the Indian state, but from the Indian tradition. To see the devastating effects of this, consider that we are still paying the price of our first partition based on accepting colonial ideas and still struggling with its wounds.
If India gets split up into different countries, we will all lose â there will be more wars, more armies, and all the lines we draw will be artificial and straight across our hearts.
Every child in America in a public school recites an oath of allegiance every morning in front of the American flag. They obviously take their nationhood seriously, even as they are a young nation. While we are old as a civilization, we are young as a country. Our education is based on colonial scholarship. Nationhood is ultimately a feeling of being one people. To strengthen this feeling and being resilient to divisive propaganda, we need to see that every child in India is educated about why we are a nation, lest we forget why we are together.
Everybody please read this.
Take you time and it is a difficult subject
[url="http://www.geocities.com/vnr1995/self.doc"]http://www.geocities.com/vnr1995/self.doc[/url]
â...WE SHALL NOT CEASE FROM EXPLORATION...â
AN INVITATION DISGUISED AS A POSITION PAPER COMPOSED AT THE BEHEST
OF ARENA FOR THE THEME âDECOLONIZING SOCIAL SCIENCESâ
ByBalu1985
Electronic Version: 1.1
We know the West as the West looks at itself. We study the East the way West studies the East. We look at the world the way West looks at it. We do not even know whether the world would look different, if we looked at it our way. Today, we are not in a position even to make sense of the above statement. When Asian anthropologists or sociologists or culturologists do their anthropology, sociology or culturology â the West is really talking to itself.
Western culture, with background assumptions peculiar to it, âproblematizedâ some phenomenon which has taken the status of a fact to us: we prattle on endlessly about the problem of âthe Indian caste systemâ, the amorphous nature of âHinduismâ, the problem of âunderdevelopmentâ, the âquestion of human rights in Asiaâ â¦etc. Idem for our perspectives on the West.
Surely, but surely, there is a problem here? If our culture differs from that of the West and if, perforce, our background theories and assumptions are other than those of the West, we could not possibly either formulate questions or assign weights to them, both about us and the West, in exactly the same way the West does. Yet, we do â invariably and as a matter of fact. How can we make sense out of questions routinely copied from western social research, and then go on to answer them by means of empirical studies? But we do â we act as though these questions do make sense to us.
Be it as that may, this situation prevents us from either defending or attacking the Western social sciences: we cannot say that they are âtrueâ because we do not know any other. We cannot say they are âfalseâ because there are not any theories to compare them with. And that is why you will not find criticisms of Western social sciences in this paper.
Consequently, our task at this stage cannot be one of assessing Western social sciences. Therefore, we cannot âdecolonizeâ them either. But, what we can do is to try and say how the world appears to us. What are the things we take to exist in this world? What are the experiences important to us? If we try to do this by constantly contrasting our answers to the ones formulated by Western social sciences, then perhaps a stage will come when we could begin to talk about assessing Western social sciences. In this process, we shall have begun to construct an alternative (where possible) to Western social sciences.
But this is not what we have in mind when we speak of âdecolonizingâ social sciences. So, what do we have in mind? Let us look at the issue this way. Without the least bit of exaggeration it could be held that the study of societies and cultures is a project initiated by the Western world. Over the centuries, Western intellectuals have studied both themselves and other cultures and, in the process of doing so, they have developed a set of theories and methodologies to understand the human world. What we call âsocial sciencesâ are the result of the gigantic labour performed by brilliant and not-so-brilliant men and women from all over the world over a long period of time.
Let us formulate a hypothetical question in order to express our intuition: would the results have been the same or even approximately similar if, say, the Asians had undertaken such a task instead of the Europeans? Suppose that, in the imaginary world we are talking about, it was the effort of the Asian intellectuals reflecting about the European culture and that of their own, as they saw both, which eventuated in social sciences. Would it have looked like contemporary social sciences?
â¦and an Answer
I put to you that the most natural answer to the question is this: âWe do not knowâ. It is worthwhile reflecting on this answer.
When we confess to being unable to answer the question, it does not arise from an impossibility to answer questions about hypothetical situations: all our scientific laws describe hypothetical situations and we can say what would happen in such situations. (E.g., âwhat would happen if I drop a stone from the top of a building? It would fall downwardsâ¦etc.â) Our claim to ignorance has to do with the specific kind of hypothetical situation which the question picks out, and with the feeling that there is no way to check the veracity of the answers one may give. That is, because we have no model of such an attempt, we have no way of deciding how to go about answering such a question. Worse still, because we have no models where the answers can come out either true or false, we feel that all answers to this question are meaningless and, therefore, that the question itself is meaningless. The question has not violated any syntactic or semantic rule; it has not committed any category mistake and yet we do not know how to make sense of this question.
Consequently, our task at this stage cannot be one of assessing Western social sciences. Therefore, we cannot âdecolonizeâ them either. But, what we can do is to try and say how the world appears to us. What are the things we take to exist in this world? What are the experiences important to us? If we try to do this by constantly contrasting our answers to the ones formulated by Western social sciences, then perhaps a stage will come when we could begin to talk about assessing Western social sciences. In this process, we shall have begun to construct an alternative (where possible) to Western social sciences.
What does it mean though to say or suggest that we try and describe the world as it looks to us? How can this be both rewarding and serious? It is the aim of this paper to answer these questions. For the moment, all we ought to remember from the foregoing is the following: even though we have been looking at the world, the social world that is, for centuries, we do not know how it appears to us!
The Structure
This paper has six sections. In the first, I introduce the notion of world models which I will use during the course of the next five. The second section explicates the model of âselfâ as it obtains in the Western and Asian cultures. The third section looks at one dimension of the relation between human selves and ethical phenomenon. The fourth discusses one aspect of the moral domain viz. the moral nature of human rights. It asks the question whether the differing notions of the ethical, as they obtain between these two cultures, throw doubt on the idea of universal rights. The fifth section carries us into the debates about Nations and ethnicity as they are isomorphic with the differing models of self. The sixth looks into the way human selves learn in these two cultures and at the relation between the nature of selves and learning. It also formulates some hypotheses as a consequence. The paper concludes by reflecting about what has been achieved and proposes some guidelines for assessing it.
The entire paper is organized around one theme viz. the model of âselfâ. The first section, consequently, does not exhaust the theme. It is taken up and elaborated in different ways in the different sections: hopefully, what is said in one will get clarified by what will be said subsequently. Because not only do later sections clarify the earlier ones but also presuppose them, the paper hangs together as a whole: each section illumines the other, each leans upon the other. Therefore, I would suggest that you read through to the end, even when you feel that some thoughts expressed in any one section are not perspicuous enough. If I have succeeded in what I want to, by the end of this paper you should get a glimpse of the pattern I am trying to point out.
In this sense, I would like to believe that this paper is not only governed by a thematic continuity but also by the methodology used. Cultural practices, I believe, should not get âexplainedâ in the first instance as something that arose out of a rational or irrational belief or decision.( M. Harrisâ âexplanationâ of the âorigin of sacred cowâ in India and Frazerâs âexplanationâ of the âmagical practicesâ of peoples represent such attempts.) Because a culture is âa way of life of a peopleâ, to render a culture perspicuous is to show how one practice leans upon the other, how the other illumines the first and how they, in their interconnections, hang together and constitute a âform of lifeâ. Such a âmethodologyâ is the most appropriate one for this domain because it is best able to point out the âpatternsâ in cultural practices.
Self-identity
One of the puzzling and contentious problems in philosophy concerns the nature of personal or self-identity: what is it that makes individual biographies of people into histories of different individuals? What does it mean to trace the career of an organism from birth to death, and claim that it is the history of some specific individual? What appears as a non-question from a common-sense point of view (after all, what is easier than talking about oneself and oneâs past?), upon philosophical reflection, transpires to involve a host of complex and tangled issues: the nature of identity as a logical relation, the criteria for personhood, the discernability of individuals, etc.
Even though a wide variety of solutions has been put forward during the course of the history of philosophy, it would be fair to say that despite all disagreements most, if not all philosophers, are agreed upon the following: what makes human beings into persons is their self-consciousness i.e. as selves they are aware of being selves. This reflexivity, viz., the self is aware of itself as a self, is supposed to typify the uniqueness of human beings. Or it could be said that the Western philosophical thought is agreed upon the fact that self-consciousness is a reflexive relation, and that all human beings (insofar as they are not severely retarded) are self-conscious persons by virtue of being able to take their selves as an object of reflection.
What has been disputed in the history of philosophical thought is the nature of this âselfâ: what kind of an entity/thing/process/construct is this âselfâ? Is it the same kind of a being as the table I am using to write and type these words? Or, is it like Gluon of contemporary Micro-Physics whose existence we infer? Or, is it some thing postulation of whose existence is necessary to build a coherent picture of our selves as human beings and moral agents? Etc.
The Psychology of the Self
Psychological theories â branches of developmental and social psychology, psychoanalysis â partially answer these questions by attempting to specify the processes and mechanisms involved in the construction of self-identity. Even though the relations between philosophical theories of the human self, and psychological and psychoanalytical theorizing about personal identity are far from being smooth or self-evident, I shall presume them to be non-problematic in the rest of what follows. This simplifying and simplified assumption is necessitated by two factors:
(a) It would otherwise be impossible to complete the task that I have set for-myself in a reasonable amount of space.
(<img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/cool.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='B)' /> The intuitive world models in Western culture do not incorporate this empirical division. A personâs âselfâ and his identity do overlap, at least partially. The difference between these two, where it obtains in the Western world models, is itself the result of a conception or model of self which does not make a principled distinction between them. (For a further amplification of this, see the next section.)
Therefore, with advance excuses to the fastidious, I will talk as though the âselfâ and its âpsychological identityâ are merely different ways of talking about one and the same âthingâ. Regrettably, there is simply no space in this paper for necessary nuances, qualifications or subtleties of thought.
Given this, it could be said that psychoanalysis and branches of psychology tackle issues of âselfhoodâ by looking at them as empirical, developmental issues instead of as questions requiring the formulation of necessary and sufficient conditions for identity. In their own special ways, both psychoanalysis and psychology attempt to conceptualize the maturation process of human beings from infancy to adulthood. It is in the course of this attempt, to the extent they do so, they account for the emergence of selfhood and the mechanisms of its constitution.
Despite the very real difference between psychoanalytical theories and the psychological ones (not to mention the differences within each of these domains), it is not difficult to see that they are all agreed upon the goal â to the extent such a goal is posited explicitly or guides the theorizing by being merely implicit â of the psychological maturation process: a âhealthyâ individual is one who has successfully built up an individual identity i.e. has self-identity. This mature individual of, say, psychoanalysis is also the autonomous individual of the Enlightenment thought: a person who relates to other persons in freedom; one whose relationship to the other is founded upon the awareness of the uniqueness and unicity of self. The index of maturity is the extent to which one is not dependent upon the other for oneâs own identity.
Quite obviously, such a normative goal has value components built into it. There is, firstly, the axiological component: oneâs worth as a person is ultimately to be found in oneself. Every person has an intrinsic dignity and an intrinsic value which is independent of the othersâ valuation. Natural Rights theories both ground and express such a sentiment. I shall return to this theme later.
Secondly, equally importantly, there is an ethical component. A moral agent or a moral person is one who follows the dictates of practical reason and of no other authority in performing moral actions. This âpractical reasonâ is the capacity of the person to deliberate over good and bad and act accordingly. In moral questions, there is no actor other than oneâs self: the moral authorship and responsibility is to be localized in oneâs self. I shall return to this later as well.
To the extent these two components are present in a culture, I claim, to that extent are all theories which talk about growth processes of human beings forced to embrace some notion of a mature, autonomous person. I add this, because research into the âself-conceptâ in social psychology denies the presence of built-in normative goal in its enquiry.
From when is the emergence of such a self to be dated? Has a notion of self, that which gives identity to a human organism, been always present in the Western culture? Or is it typical of the Christian tradition? Or is it of more recent origin, say, dating from the development of capitalism? I would have liked to carry on this controversy in footnotes, but, alas, this text has no footnotes! So, let us agree to a minimal claim: the concept of self has been around at least from the time scholars began to enquire into social life with the aim of understanding it.
The âSelfâ in Western Culture
Is there, however, one model of self which we could dub as the model of self in the Western culture? If we take the literature about it as the reference point, the answer will have to be overwhelmingly in the negative. A very great variety of notions of self, few of them mutually exclusive, has been recorded, explicated and argued for in the course of the last two hundred years or more. With just a little bit of exaggeration, one could say that all notions of self, from all cultures and quite a few besides, have been put across some time or the other. How, then, are we to make sense of the title of this paragraph?
There are many ways of solving this problem. Quite apart from the point I made earlier on about the relation between intuitive and intermediate world models, here are three answers as they relate to the theme under investigation. Firstly, I am not indulging in a literature study. Consequently, not everything that has been said or written about the âself-conceptâ is of equal importance to the purposes of this paper. Secondly, more importantly, even if it could be shown that all concepts of self have to be taken into account, it does not make much of a difference to us. Most of the proposals can be dismissed as not belonging to the Western culture, because they would be incompatible with the notion of self as it is presupposed by a diverse set of disciplines and domain-theories: Jurisprudence, sociology, political philosophy, ethics, economic and decision theories, cognitive psychology, etc. What I am after is not just, say, what some social psychologists chose to tell us at any one time on the subject. Rather, it is that notion of self as it underlies a whole segment of a culture which interests me. I will strengthen this argument further. If I succeed in my venture, I will have shown that it does make sense to speak of âthe selfâ in Western culture. Thirdly, and finally, I am interested in the way the self is experienced in the West. That is, I want to explicate the outlines of the model of self as it is present in folk psychology in the West. Such must be the model of self that it allows those who have it to make intuitive sense of the variety of social institutions and practices that obtain today in the West.
These remarks enable me to say that the general model of self as it is typical of Western culture can be perspicuously formulated thus: each individual constructs or elaborates a self for her/himself i.e. constructs an identity for oneâs person. This process begins at infancy and proceeds in interaction with the natural and social environment. A typically mature adult is one who has built up such a construct successfully. The basis on which an adult relates to the world at large is, in fact, such an elaboration. The disturbances that an adult experiences in her/his inter-personal relationships with others in the world is, somehow, crucially and causally dependent upon the identity that s/he has acquired.
The intuitive world models in the West incorporate such an idea â though not so explicitly and certainly not so clearly. Yet, incorporated it remains, both as an experience of oneâs own self and those of others. Oneâs self, to use a spatial metaphor, is that rock-bottom, whose solidity determines the confidence with which one goes about in the world. The folk psychology in the West allows each of us a self : a self waiting to be discovered within each one of us; something which can grow and actualize itself; as that which either realizes its true potential or fails to do so⦠etc. To put it succinctly, one does oneâs damned best to be oneself under all circumstances or be oneâs true self as the case may be.
These ideas are embedded in the elaborate constructs of theories as well. Psychoanalytical theories, for example, have attended to the process of construction of selves â the various real or alleged mechanisms, the phases and stages involved in such an enterprise (In this connection, think of Ericksonâs famous theory of the various cycles of identity. ) Once properly constructed, such a self endures through time.
A self which has itself as its foundation is characterized in the Western culture by the possession of the following two properties:
1. its reflexivity (the property of referring to itself as a self)
2. its privileged epistemic access (it alone knows its thoughts, feelings etc.)
With the development of Cognitive Science, (2) has come under challenge. Therefore, it can be formulated in its weaker version as asserting,
3. its direct epistemic access ( it has direct access to its own experiences)
The Model of Self in Asian Culture
I would like to suggest that neither this experience nor the associated notion is a part of our world. In Asia, even though I conjecture it to be true of African as well as American-Indian Cultures I shall continue to speak only about our part of the world, we experience âselfâ very differently. This is âa difference which makes a differenceâ. Those existing social sciences which have to assume a âreflexive selfâ are incompatible with our folk psychologies, with our world models. Consequently, they could not possibly make much sense.
The âselfâ in Asia, to the extent it makes sense to speak of one at all and as it is embedded in our world models, I submit, is a relational predicate i.e. it is a property which is ascribed to a relationship. Being a rough first approximation, this statement is capable of being explicated by means of an equally rough analogy. For example, consider the relation of biological descent: between any two biological organisms A & B there obtains such a relation, just in case the organism A has the relationship of being-a-parent with the organism B, which has the relation of being-an-offspring. This relationship can be re-described from the perspective of the two relata by saying that A has the âpropertyâ of being-a-parent-of B, and that B has the âpropertyâ of being-an-offspring-of A. âParenthoodâ and âselfhoodâ can thus be seen as being roughly analogous. But even at this juncture, it is important to stress that A does not have the property of being a parent (like, say, it has the property of being dark-skinned) any more than some material object has the property of being âscarceâ. âParentâ, scarcityâ, âself, etc., are properties of relationships, as described from the perspective of one or some of the relata. This would imply that there is no âselfâ outside of such relationships as might obtain.
It is important to bite into this question a little bit deeper. I am not just saying that the âselfâ and the âotherâ distinctionâ, or the âIâ and the âThouâ difference, arises in a relationship. Such a suggestion would almost win a universal consent. What I am saying is that, the roughness of the earlier analogies becomes apparent here, the âselfâ is a way of describing a relationship from the point of view of one of the relata. (Let us assume a dyadic relationship in order to keep the discussion simple.) But, from the perspective of which of the two relata? It is here, I believe, that the fundamental difference between the two cultural conceptions of self begins to emerge.
Let me use two dummy letters âAâ and âBâ as picking out two human organisms so as not to clutter up the discussion. It is important to emphasize that A and B do not create or even enter into a relationship. Rather, it is the case that some relationship has brought A & B together (To express it like this may make it sound counter-intuitive to the Western-educated sensibilities. But if you will try to think in your native languages, and see how absurd it sounds to say, for example, that A & B created the relations of teacher-pupil, doctor-patient, son-father etc., you will realize that the language I am using makes it counter-intuitive to say what I did.) In this relationship, the âselfâ of A is parasitic upon the perspective from which B sees A. To begin with, Aâs âselfâ is constituted by those actions of B which are directed towards A. These structure Aâs representation of its own actions. Actions of B towards A are crucially dependent upon Bâs representation of A. If I may speak only of representations, without considering the relationship between action and its representation, then it can be said that the representation of A that B builds constitutes not so much the raw material out of which A builds his âselfâ, as much as it is a first-order representation of the âselfâ of A. Upon this constitution of Aâs identity by B, there arises another representation constructed this time by A: A constructs what A takes to be Bâs representation of A. This second-order representation, i.e. Aâs representation of Bâs representation of A, constitutes the âselfâ of A. Self-representation is parasitical i.e. it is always a derived representation.
Loosely put, A becomes a âselfâ in a relationship and he becomes that when B constructs him as one. There is nothing complicated about this: you are a son, a pupil etc., when you are recognized as a son, a pupil etc. In a very strict sense, even this second-order representation is not a âselfâ: it is oneâs identity as a son, father, wife etc. i.e., B does not construct Aâs âselfâ ,because there is no âselfâ for A outside of what he is to different people. Ignoring this complication does not vitiate the points I want to make later on, but will only facilitate the discussion. If this complication is not ignored, we will have to nest so many representations within one another that the discussion will become complex without adding anything of importance. So, I will simply say that one is a âselfâ as a pupil, son, father, wife etc., when I talk of Asian cultures.
Is there a difference between what I claim to be implicit in our world models and the views prevalent in the West? Yes, there is. The process is seen differently, or so one is led to believe, whether one takes the world models or theories in the West as the reference point. In the relationship between A & B, A creates/builds up her/his identity, firstly, by distinguishing her/himself from B. Here, the âotherâ is the background against which the self should take form; the distinction between âyouâ and âmeâ is preliminary to sketching out an âIâ. Such an identity is preliminary because, at this stage, one has arrived at oneâs self negatively, i.e., as a âNot-Youâ or as a âNot-Otherâ. The second moment of building up a self involves a positive specification of some suitable properties. Whether this entire conceptualization is itself question-begging, as I think to be the case, or not, it is nevertheless the case that the construction of oneâs self is an active process involving the organism whose identity is being talked about. The âothersâ, insofar as they play a role at all, are secondary to this process and function, where they do, in the same way the ground does with respect to a figure.
This difference may not be evident if one thinks of the way children build up their identity, more so when one thinks of the ideas of Cooley or G.H. Mead. But it must become obvious if we think of adults. For the latter, othersâ representation is not even the raw material using which one sustains oneâs identity. It is used, if at all, in âself-appraisalâ, to use Wylieâs characterization which is not just hers alone. The self of an adult, in the Western culture, is its own foundation.
Self-consciousness and the Conscious âSelfâ
Should what I have said so far be true, then it would be true to say that the experience one has of oneself in Asia is not direct by virtue of it being a second-order representation or a mediated construction. What one is, a âselfâ, is crucially dependent upon what others think and make of oneself. This is not the same as saying, as Western social psychologists are wont to, that othersâ appraisal of our selves is crucial to our self-appraisals, because the very nature of the âappraisalsâ themselves differ in our two cultures, more about which later. This does not imply either passivity in terms of the agent or arbitrariness with respect to othersâ representation of oneself. Both are avoided, the latter by means of constraints of sorts (This is dealt with in the next section).
Such a âselfâ is not only a construction, but also a second-order âentityâ always subordinated to first-order entities. As âothersâ construct my âselfâ, so do I construct othersâ âselvesâ (It is in this sense that there is no passivity.) But how one does so, as I indicated, depends upon the nature of the relationship that brings people together.
âRelationsâ, to be sure, do not float around in the air waiting, so to speak, to bring people together. I do not want to discuss the notion of relations as it obtains in our world models, but two short remarks may still found to be in order. Firstly, at any one time, as one is within networks of arrangements and institutions, these are both logically and temporally prior to oneâs existence as an organism. In our world models, they also have causal efficacy. Secondly, insofar as each âselfâ is a network of relationships (constructed at two levels), the contact between any two or more âselvesâ (at times, even fleeting one) is one of being brought under some relationship or the other. May be, a very ordinary illustration familiar to most of us (I suspect) would make this point more perspicuous.
One of the most common features of non-westernized (which is not the same as non-urbanized) families in India is the structure of their âliving roomsâ, by which I refer to the place where visitors to oneâs abode are received. In most Indian families, this is where the contrast with the Western Culture becomes striking, such a space (be it a room or a corner) is totally bare, completely unstructured. It gets structured when a visitor comes in, and the structuring it gets depends upon the relationship he âbrings with himâ: the kind of seat he gets to sit upon or even whether he gets one; the kind of seat you âchooseâ or even your âchoiceâ to sit on the bare ground; the distance between the two of you; the pitch of the voice; the eye-contacts etc. All of these and many more depend neither upon you nor upon him as individuals. It is entirely dependent upon the relationship, which, described from the point of view of one of the relata, could be: a guest, a friend, a teacher, a âpriestâ, a âpriestâ-as-a-visitor, a âpriestâ-with-a-marriage-proposal for your off-spring, playmate ⦠etc. These are not ârolesâ which a visitor plays; to dub it as such, à la Goffman, is to baptize it with a Christian name while at the same time depriving it of all of its explanatory force. As a âhostâ, you do not structure your living room according to your âtastesâ and indicate that the others adjust themselves to it as is the case in the West and âWesternizedâ Indian families. (It is not the lack of urban trappings like chairs etc., which are responsible for it. It is very common to see chairs being carried away from the living rooms, at times even into the kitchens, while the family prepares to receive the visitor, only to be brought back once the visitor has come into the living room! The embarrassment of being âcivilizedâ, one would say!) Whether or not you are to be a host at all even in your own abode is dependent upon the relation that brings you and someone else together. I know this is not a sufficient explanation of the notion of relations as I have been using it, but it is sufficient to indicate one other thing. It shows how completely futile it is to use Western anthropological methods to study, at least, the Asian culture.
Proxemics, to take the method appropriate to the illustration, is a methodology devised to study the use of cues by people in communicative processes. Individuals use spatial (e.g., a seating arrangement), acoustic (e.g., tone and pitch of the voice), visual (e.g., the nature of eye-contacts), tactile (e.g., touching or holding hands) etc., cues to give structure to their relations-in-communication. The difference between cultures, according to this methodology, would then be expressed in the different ways these cues are used and the different cues as they are used by people living in different cultures. This method has had a wide currency; it has at its disposal the usual, but formidable mathematical apparatus for statistical significance testing of the results arrived at; it is considered by some as a necessary part of any decent anthropologistâs repertoire. Some students of Hall, the father of Proxemics, consider this to be the âscience of human behaviourâ (this is actually the sub-title of a book about proxemics written by a student of Hall), and have gone even further by tracing the biological roots of proxemic behaviour.
âScienceâ or not, obviously, the problem with this methodology is the assumption it embodies: an individual structures a situation and uses these cues to express his relation with others. This is not a fact about human behaviour, appearances notwithstanding, but a model of self which has taken the force of being a fact. It makes a world of a difference whether one sees an individual using cues to establish a relation or a relation structuring the âcuesâ, which includes the individual himself â the difference between our world and that of the West, precisely! But, if we use this method to study our cultures, the questions we ask and the answers we give will be no different from those that the Western anthropologists already have. I hope that this illustrates my sentiment, expressed in the introduction to this paper, about looking at the world the way the West does, etc.
All of this has become a bit of a digression and should have been relegated to the footnotes. ( Ah, the virtue of footnotes! ) So, let me return to the main theme of this paragraph.
The kind of self that I have talked about so far is conscious, to be sure. But its awareness of itself-as-a-self is dependent upon othersâ recognition and construction of it as-a-self. This means to say that it lacks that reflexivity which a âself-consciousnessâ is supposed to have. As a result, the âselfâ has no direct access to its thoughts, feeling, etc. It has no privileged epistemic access to itself either. As far as our intuitive world models are concerned, the motto âKnow Thyselfâ is an empty slogan. To the question âwho knows me better than myself?â there is an answer in our world models: âyour parents, your family, your teachers, your friends, your acquaintances, ⦠etc.â.
In a rather trivial sense, it is of course true that the âselfâ of each individual (in both cultures) is constituted out of the actions and the relations of the individual in question. When put baldly like this, there is not much room for controversy. It is only when the suggestion is made that oneâs self is (this âisâ is one of identity not of composition) oneâs second-order representations of oneâs actions and relationships with the world and nothing more, and that the âselfâ itself be seen as a complex function of representations of actions and relations that controversy can arise. Once put like this, the distance between our notions of âselfâ and other superficially similar notions, like, say, that of a Cooley become evident.
Ironically enough, just why it is an irony will become clear later on, it is Marx who comes closest to suggesting something similar. (Nietzsche, another thinker who may readily come to oneâs mind in this connection, belongs to the West here.) When he suggests that manâs essence (read: âselfhoodâ) is an ensemble of social relations and remarks elsewhere that relations can only be posited, he is almost saying that âselfâ is an ensemble of representations. (More about this later.)
Before going further, a peripheral remark might be of some interest and of some relevance. Not so long ago, the European Economic Commission (EEC) sent an enquiry team to Japan. It came back with a report which said, amongst other things, that the Japanese were âworkaholicsâ and they lived in ârabbit thatchesâ. Also, sometime ago, someone (I forget who) published a book about the Japanese. Where the former report caused furore, there the latter became a best-seller. What is interesting about both of these incidents is the way Europeans perceived them: the European press, for example, thought that it betrayed an obsessive preoccupation of the Japanese with themselves which, they said, is unbecoming of an industrial giant. They found it both incomprehensible and even mildly disgusting that a nation like Japan should make such a bother about how others see it. They felt that Japan has come of age and must put all such adolescent problems behind it, etc. If what I am saying is true or even remotely close to being that, such an action has nothing to do with the obsessive preoccupation of the Japanese with themselves. The identity of the Japanese as a people is what they take others to think of themselves. Contrast this attitude, for example, with that of the Americans: quite independent of what the world thinks of them, they know what they are and, they claim, they are what they are.
This kind of extension and extrapolation should not be read as implying too much. I merely wanted to say that the notion of âselfâ embedded in our intuitive world model does appear to shed some light on some behaviour, or at the least makes it appear less bizarre.
Our âSelvesâ and Their Experience
What would be the corresponding experience in our daily lives? If our intuitive world model embeds the kind of self I talked about, what would our experience of it be like? Introspection should reveal to us, though this is no evidence for my claim, that we cannot answer to ourselves the question, âWho am I?â We should experience hollowness when we try to answer this question. In the process of answering this question, if we take away or abstract from othersâ representation of our actions and relations, we ought to experience ourselves as âemptyâ. To use a metaphor, we would see ourselves as onions stripping whose layers would resemble the bracketing of othersâ representations of actions and relations from our selves. What we are left over in each case is the same: nothing â and that, I put to you, would be our âselvesâ.
In the literal sense of the word we lack a âselfâ to experience which, claims the Western culture, is the absolute foundation of oneâs intercourse with the world. An adult who experiences her/himself as empty or hollow, the learned psychoanalysts tell us, is pathological. Such a condition is âsecondary or pathological narcissismâ, a characteristic trait of a âborderline personalityâ. If we stick to psychoanalytical theories, leaving out confused pronouncements of figures like Marcuse, and generalize it to a culture, it appears to me that we have but three choices:
(a) Asian culture is pathological, narcissistic. This opinion was held by early psychoanalytical studies of Indian culture like, for example, Carstairs and Spratt and by renowned Indologists like Moussaieff Masson. To some extent, this idea still has some currency in the West. Recall, as evidence, the response of the European press to the Japanese.
(<img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/cool.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='B)' /> Psychoanalysis is no science of the human psyche. At best, it is a description/explanation of the Western man.
© Our experiences regarding the absence of self are universal. The Western man is told to experience something which he has not got! The conflict between what they are told to experience and their inability to do so results in the kind of crises endemic to the people in the West. Psychoanalysis and branches of psychology, in that case, stand convicted of being ideological in a pejorative sense of the term.
It appears to me that there are simply no good reasons to accept (a). The choice is really between (<img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/cool.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='B)' /> and ©. Even here, for the moment, we cannot decide upon the alternatives. It is only when we build an alternate theory of psychological development that we can decide one way or another. To attempt to do so is precisely to engage in the task of âdecolonizingâ the social sciences.
In summary: Asian culture has no notion of âselfâ corresponding to the one in its Western counterpart. Our identities as âselvesâ are derived and irreflexive. In the full sense of the term, our âselvesâ are complex functions of secondary representations. To put it a bit nonsensically, in our culture there is no âselfâ.
One last observation before going on to the next section. Models of self not only structure the way we experience ourselves, but, equally importantly, also generate models and thus structure the experiences of the âotherâ. Is there some difference between the way people in the West experience others and the way we do? What kinds of âself-otherâ interaction models obtain within these two cultures? How do these differing models of self structure the way people experience âtheirâ bodies? How, to look in another direction, do these models structure the use of language? To give an example, if the nature or the frequency of the use of personal pronouns in a discourse or communicative situation varies between the two cultures, how might that alter the very structure of âdiscourseâ itself? Are there significant differences in discourse processing and comprehension between these two cultures worth investigating into? The presence of cognitive/ linguistic universals or Whorfian linguistic relativity hypothesis is not at issue here: the question centres upon the pragmatics of language use and comprehension, i.e., does the âself-otherâ interaction model give form to or shape the strategies one uses to comprehend a discourse? Are there culturally specific strategies of language and discourse processing?
These and other questions are crucially tied to an explication of the model of âselfâ as it is embedded in our cultures. I have not been able to tackle these questions, partly due to reasons of space and partly due to absence of clarity on my part. As such, it has impoverished the account of âselfâ I have given. Far from being even the first word on the subject, what I have said so far (and will say later) should be seen as a preliminary to speaking.
10-22-2003, 05:31 AM
(This post was last modified: 10-22-2003, 05:59 AM by acharya.)
Sovereignty Once Again
One notion extremely crucial in political philosophy, philosophy of law and international relations is that of sovereignty. A Nation, it is proclaimed, is a âsovereignâ. One of the aspirations common to ethnic groups, if we were to take contemporary history at its face value, is to seek for themselves the status of a Nation. It is almost an article of faith that âNationsâ have a âright of self-determinationâ, and this is accepted by most people across the entire political spectrum. The âRationality questionâ is hotly debated between groups today, where the heat and the sound are those generated by the use of fire-arms; Singhalese and the Tamil murder each other, while the Christians and the Muslim have been at it in Lebanon for years; the Palestinians need a âhomelandâ; there are ceaseless ruminations about the âAssam questionâ and the âPunjab questionâ. And then, of course, there is any number of âliberation movementsâ: from the Muslim National Liberation Front in the Philippines to the Eritrean National Liberation Movement in Ethiopia.
Sociologists and political scientists have been very busy trying to understand the phenomenon of Nations and Nationalism. One of the results of diligent enquiries has been the suggestion to the effect that Nations should properly be seen in relation to multiple ethnic groups, and that it is impossible for each ethnic group to constitute itself as a Nation.
I would like to add my own two-bit worth to this discussion. Where pandemonium is the rule of the day, there one more voice does not make things worse! I want to draw your attention to one of the undoubtedly many elements that has gone into producing theories or ideologies of nation-states. I will suggest furthermore that the notions of Nations and Nationhood are more unintelligible, to some of us at least, than we think.
Let me enter into the theme by way of the idea we have become familiar with, viz., âsovereigntyâ. We have come to appreciate, hopefully, not just the religious origin of this notion, but its essential dependence upon it as well. Despite the secularization, it remains indissolubly tied to its Christian context.
One of the issues with respect to the Sovereign which kept theologians and philosophers busy was whether He was transcendent or immanent. A sub-question within this issue was whether God needed to create the world or not. Did God depend on the world in some sense, i.e., was there some sense in which it could be said of God that He could not be complete without His creation and, therefore, that this world was part of God? One way of conceptualizing the dependency between God and His creation would be to look at it in terms of the relationship that obtains between the producer (or creator) and his products (or creations), and ask whether God realizes Himself in the process of creating. An affirmative answer to this question gives us the following picture: God is essentially and truly dependent on what He has created, because what He has created is a part of His Self. God is in the world in this manner. All His creations belong to Him because they are parts of His Self and, therefore, God contemplates Himself when He contemplates the world. What I have said is not a âheresyâ, appearances to the contrary not-withstanding, even though it is not as simple as I have just formulated it. I am after a thread in the discussion, and a thread cannot he highlighted in a cloth without making the latter into the ground. Hence the simplification. It is necessary to do so, nevertheless, because this is what will make some of the discussions that ensued appear plausible.
The âAlienâ in Alienation
When the Sovereign gets secularized and becomes many sovereigns, and, consequently, when creation and production can be translated into empirical actions of these many sovereigns, the religious pronouncements about labour (as an atonement for Sin) fall by the wayside. (There are other reasons as well, but we need not bother about them now.)
In these secular versions, it is said that one elaborates oneâs self in the world by creating things, etc. What a human being creates belongs to his self, truly and essentially, because what he creates is part of his self. Man looks at his self when he looks at the world he has created. A secularized theological belief ends up acquiring the status of a psycho-anthropological fact.
As an illustration of this theme, take Marxâs notion of alienation. In his Paris Manuscripts, he identifies four dimensions of alienation, one of them being the following: the producer alienates his self from himself, when his products belong to someone other than himself, i.e., when the product is alienated. This self-alienation, i.e., alienation of oneâs self from oneself, can come about if and only if, what one alienates, viz., the product is a part of oneâs self (or, even, oneâs entire self). In the Marxian anthropology, not only must there be a self with parts, but the objects which one creates must also constitute such a part. Otherwise, alienation of the product, no matter how it comes about, cannot be a dimension in the self-alienation of the worker (or the producer). The idea that production is the objectification of manâs self is retained by Marx in Capital as well, where he compares the âworst of the architects to the best of the beesâ. And yet, this is the irony I spoke of in the section on self, Marx claims that Manâs self is (the âisâ is one of identity) a set of social relations. At first sight, there does not appear anything amiss about it: after all, as Marx claims, social relations in capitalism are mediated by relations between things, or, better still, capitalist social relations are material relations. Consequently, manâs self in capitalism is composed of material things. Thus, the âreificationâ of human self can be attributed exclusively to capitalist social relations, precisely because human self is a set of social relations. This argument squares with the sentiment that Marx expresses else, where (Capital, Vol.3. Harmondsworth: Pelican books, p.911), thus:
âFrom the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men. Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni patres familias (Good heads of the household).â
A âhigher socio-economic formationâ is not necessary to realize this absurdity that Marx refers to; another world-model, a different one, will do just as fine. The American-Indians just could not comprehend that the European settlers would want to buy land from them. âHow could we sell what is not ours to sell, or yours to buy? How do you sell a Cheetah or its speed?â they asked in one of the most moving and memorable documents ever composed (It is called the âSpeech of Seattleâ). The idea is equally absurd to the world models of the Asian Indians as well. The difference between these two Indian communities is their degree of adaptation to the European demands: one adapted and survived; the other did not and was wiped out. One did not understand, but acted as though it did; the other failed to simulate, and paid the price for it.
Be it as that may, let me return to the argument. It appears neat, but it is not. The reason for it is that Marx needs to speak in terms of âobjectificationâ, in order to give sense to âreificationâ; he has to speak of embodiments of labour-as-an-activity in order to get his critique going. If it is not possible for the products to embody the activities that produced them, money could not arise out of the circulation of commodities. This may appear an abstruse point. Besides, there are many thinkers who are also critical of the idea of âembodied labourâ. What is strange about this situation is that those who criticize the idea of âembodied labourâ when it comes to Marxâs theory, and those who would not know the difference between Das Kapital and Mein Kampf continue to talk of embodied labour nevertheless. To see how this could be, we have to widen the scope of the discussion.
All kinds of humanistic psychologies (not just C. Rogersâ version of it), and anthropologies which stress the dynamic nature of human self and speak in such terms as âself-actualizationâ, âself-expressionâ, âunfolding the potentials of the selfâ, etc., are confronted with the following problem: what is the relationship between, say, a painter and his painting, a poet and his poem, and an author and his book? Without exception, they would have to say that the product is an âactualizationâ, or an âexpressionâ, in some way or another, of the person performing such an activity. But in which way precisely? One answer would be to say that in such activities human beings express themselves. A human self, it could be said, grows âricherâ, or âunfolds its potentialâ, etc., accordingly as the activities it performs. (We are familiar with this theme from an earlier section where the self expressed itself in its actions, etc.)
But, this is not a full answer. Suppose we ask, more specifically say, the following question: what is the relationship between Rembrandt and his paintings ? Do his paintings âexpressâ his self (his âfeelingsâ, his âperception of the worldâ, his âthoughtsâ or whatever else you want to use), and continue to do so long after the activity that created them has ceased? From within the ambit of these theories and from the world models of the West, there is only one possible answer one could give: yes. (Because consider the next question that would ineluctably arise, if the answer is in the negative: whose self is being expressed in the paintings, then? Nobodyâs? Such a stance would be flatly incoherent from within the Western model of self for obvious reasons.) How could a material object express your self unless it embodied the action which expressed it initially? It could not.
Look at what has happened as a result of this answer though. A material object, painting in this case, embodies, or expresses your self. That which embodies, expresses, or actualizes your self is, by the very definition, a part of your self. Rembrandtâs paintings belong to Rembrandtâs self (âbelongingâ should not be thought of here as standing for the juridical relations of private property), because they express, actualize, or embody his self.
We have a situation, then, where material objects constitute spatial parts of a self. An action can express a self because such an expression can be objectified. Matter, put differently, traps human actions, human self-expressions. They are the âpractico-inertâ of Sartre, as he made them into an eternal condition of human existence.
I hope that some amongst you are feeling a bit uneasy, because what I have said so far must be seen as flying in the face of âcommonsenseâ. Indeed, it does. There is a problem involved here.
In no culture, including the Western culture of today, does one go around saying, âI am a table, a house, a bench, a painting, etc.â because one has produced them, and still be counted as a sane human being. The charitable might see such talk as being âmetaphoricalâ, while the uncharitable may have such an individual committed. But, theories of anthropology, psychology and philosophy which proclaim precisely this can hardly be considered as being metaphorical. Or, again, it is not as though a fallacy is being committed here, i.e., it is not the case that these theories are talking about the property of the âspeciesâ which is not attributable to the individual members of the species. They are not talking about the âself-identityâ of the species, but of our individual human selves. Everyone who speaks of âself-actualizationâ, etc., is accepting as self-evident what, if put explicitly, would be denied as being true. Why, then, do both ideas not appear paradoxical when taken together?
The answer, I suggest, is in their world models. Both the obscure notion of âobjectificationâ and its mundane counterpart âself-actualizationâ are intuitively familiar ideas. In and of themselves, they appear both plausible and acceptable. But their familiarity and plausibility arise from the religious context where God is âeverywhereâ and where everything is a part of Godâs self. In the process of secularizing the Sovereign into many sovereigns, everyone has carried over the predicates ascribed of the Sovereign as the attributes of the many sovereigns as well. It cannot be any other way, because the predicates that I am talking about explicate the very meaning of the word âsovereignâ itself. The secular version appears intuitively satisfying not because it is so, but because the religious original, whose secular version it is, is satisfying. That is why they would deny the secular version, when confronted explicitly with it (Man is not God, is he?). Nevertheless, the secular version acquires, if you will, the status of a self-evident, banal and commonplace truth (and that is why it goes unexamined).
Religion, it has been said by many, is the essence of Man alienated from himself. The task of criticism of religion is, correspondingly, one of giving Manâs essence back to himself. This is an incomplete thought, and, if I am correct, we can complete it thus: if religion is the alienated essence of man, then by being alienated, it has become an alien essence as well. Giving this essence back to Man is not to give him his original essence back, but to provide him with an alien essence. You may want to say that God is the alienated human essence. But you cannot return this to man without making all men into gods. When men become gods, they cease being the humans they once were!
Neither Marx nor the humanists can be accused of being Christians. But the world models from within which they operate(d) and which, consequently, lend intelligibility to ideas like , âobjectificationâ are profoundly so. And yet, how many of us have not gone around talking about âalienationâ as though it was clear as daylight to any but the perverse?
That a theological belief about the nature of the Sovereign has ended up becoming a psycho-socio-anthropological fact is evidenced and underscored by the discussions about ethnic groups and nationhood â the theme of this section. In the following pages, I will try to provide you with some of my reasons for thinking so. It requires to be stressed, if it is not obvious by now, that the reasons I give are not the same as the justifications that the theorists provide during the course of the discussion. What I am trying to do is to show, to the best of my ability, why they could think that these ideas are plausible enough to require justification. That is, why the idea of âsovereign nationsâ (in its modern day versions) appears intelligible at all.
Ethnicity and Territoriality
I have already suggested that by now it is an article of faith that all nations have a âright of self-determinationâ. The questions are these: from whence this right? Why is it even worth the bother of looking around for justificatory arguments? Why does it not appear as nonsensical as the question, âwhy does hocus-pocus have wings?â These questions should get something resembling a partial answer by the end of this section.
We have seen above that physical objects, material things can become parts of a self, i.e., a self can, and often does, construct an identity for itself by construing physical objects as spatial parts of itself. These objects include not only those produced by human beings, but also those which obtain independently of human intervention (e.g., earth).
We could keep our discussion simple by accepting the proposal that the relation between self (at an individual level) and materiality is not a necessary one, but a possible one. (Strictly speaking though, it is a necessary relation as well. This ânecessityâ is not what we would call a âlogical necessityâ, but the much weaker notion of âtechnical necessityâ. Insofar as human beings are born with bodies, though it is not logically necessary that they be born so, such bodies are necessary, if not sufficient, to becoming selves. That is, body, the physical object, is a necessary spatial part of every human self. As long as we keep this in mind, no harm comes if we continue to speak only in terms of the logically possible. What is technically necessary is also logically possible after all.) But, I believe, what is possible at an individual level is logically necessary when the âidentityâ of several people as a collection is at issue. Because the identity of such a group is supra-individual, it does not suffice that each individual within that group experiences her/himself as a self. Something âmoreâ is required to enable the individual self to incorporate the âidentity of the groupâ as an element of his own identity. He has to, that is, experience himself also as a member of the group (or as a part of it).
Obviously, there are many different kinds of groups and what makes one group different from the other lies in what they utilize in the process of creating a group identity. Groups which choose a part of the surface area of earth (as common territory for the members of the group) to build their identity are called ethnic groups in the literature. Each individual self which augments its identity by incorporating a physical territory as a spatial part of itself, and is able to see the same spatial object as a part of many other selves has built up an identity for itself as a member (or part) of the ethnic group. (I would like to emphasize that all this talk of âspatial parts of selfâ is not some vague or imprecise âmetaphoricalâ use of words. It must be taken utterly literally to make any sense at all.) Because territory and ethnic groups are definitionally so linked, they and ânationhoodâ get linked together as well. Each ethnic group has an aspiration, in situ as it were, to constitute itself as a nation. But whether they succeed or not in realizing their aspiration to become the modern day sovereign nation-states, is something that depends neither on them nor on the theory. A whole number of empirical circumstances, which lie beyond the control of these ethnic groups, intervene. There is many a slip, as they say, between the cup and the lip.
The right of nations to self-determination, I would like to put to you, appears credible because it is structurally isomorphic with the notion of individual sovereignty. In the same way an individual requires a domain to be a sovereign, groups require territories where they are the sovereign. (It is in the nature of things that the individual ceases being a sovereign in anything but name exactly to the extent the group becomes the sovereign. The empirical groups cease being sovereigns in the same ratio as the nation becomes the sovereign. The magic and necromancy surrounding the phrase âThe Nation is a Sovereignâ does not derive from either the metaphysical nature of the âNationâ or its mysterious capacity to âwillâ. âNationâ and its relation to an empirical group existing at any given time can be rendered perspicuous enough. The powers that the âNationâ derives are all secondary: they come from the âsovereignâ. A âNationâ is falsely accused of being a super-natural entity, whereas its guilt is by association, viz., that of being associated with the sovereign. The problem, therefore, is not how the âNationâ could be anything, but that there could be a sovereign at all. Many theorists believe that it is a very difficult question to specify what the âNationâ is, while they take the idea of sovereignty as being non-problematic. If I am right, they are looking in the wrong place and in the wrong direction.) Because to be a sovereign is to have a domain, to have a domain is to be a sovereign. In both cases, that of the individual and the group, the identity that is built up is primary: an individual does not require others to build a self except negatively; the ethnic groups do not require the other to build their identity at all. Both selfhood and ethnicity are autonomous creations and are not derived identities.
âTerritorialityâ, of course, is not sufficient to constitute an ethnic group. But, it is considered necessary. Before any attempt is made to find out what other criteria require to be met in order to become an ethnic group, a word about âterritorialityâ is not out of place. Because territoriality and ethnic groups are definitionally related, the legitimacy of the definition depends upon the acceptability of evidence for it. A brief look, then, at the evidence we have accumulated regarding territorial behaviour.
Ethnologists and socio-biologists have provided incontrovertible evidence for the existence of the phenomenon of territoriality in animal, bird and insect domains. Each member of a species carves out an area for itself and fights off intruders who transgress its hunting, nesting and mating domain. It is important to note that only those seen to belong to the same species are considered âintrudersâ, i.e., territorial behaviour is not inter-species but an intra-species one. There is literally a mountain of literature on this subject, each documenting the case with that loving care and detail characteristic of all good ethnological and entomological studies. Personally, I take the case as settled. The concept of territorial behaviour has also generated some fascinating studies about, e.g., the results of over-crowding on both animal and human behaviour.
Though extension of ethnological studies for an understanding of human behaviour is desirable where possible, we will not be explaining anything by dubbing the notion of self that I have just talked about as an instantiation of human territorial behaviour. We will only have given it another name. To âexplainâ the hostile reaction of an indigenous community to the influx of, say, immigrant workers as an instance of territorial behaviour is to explain nothing. The hostile reaction has been baptized with a name and names as we all know, explain nothing.
To see the point I want to make, consider a situation where a group of people fight a war against another group of people. You could, if you so choose, name this phenomenon as âpatriotismâ or âjihadâ or just âterritorial behaviourâ. None of the three terms render the phenomenon intelligible; they merely baptize it. At times, it does appear as though these terms do explain, because arguments and reasoning are brought in, motivations are adduced, etc. But none of these is explanatory in nature: considerations are provided to classify this event as an instance of that phenomenon; they do not explain why that comes about at all. âPatriotismâ is not the cause/reason for fighting for oneâs country, âfighting for oneâs countryâ is called patriotism.
A Theory of Ethnicity
In order to go deeper into the issue, and draw the contrast between Western views and those of our world models, I will choose a slightly different strategy in this section than the ones I chose before. I would like to take a peek at one theory of ethnic phenomenon. The choice for this theory instead of others was due to its explicit attempt at developing a theory, which is quite rare in this domain of sociology.
Pierre Van Den Berghe, a brilliant if controversial sociologist, goes against the existing orthodoxies in sociology by drawing directly upon socio-biology in order to explain phenomena like âethnicityâ, âracismâ, âcasteâ, etc., in his recent book, The Ethnic Phenomenon (New York and Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1982). He says that,
âEthnic boundaries are created socially by preferential endogamy and physically by territorialityâ (p.24)
Because he sees ethnism (his preferred term) as a way of maximizing fitness through extended nepotism, it becomes essential for his case to specify what he calls âethnic markersâ, i.e., those features that allow one to pick out some individual as belonging to the same/different ethny (again, his term for an ethnic group). One such ethnic marker, used almost universally by people everywhere, he says, is language:
âThe way people speak places them more accurately and reliably than almost any behavioural trait. Language and dialect can be learned, of course, but the ability to learn a foreign tongue without a detectable accent drops sharply around puberty. Therefore speech quality is a reliable (and difficult to fake) test of what group an individual has been raised in. Moreover, acquisition of foreign speech is extremely difficult except through prolonged contact with native speakers, another safety feature of the linguistic testâ (p.33)
Having said this much, be goes on further to make an even stronger case:
âNot surprisinglyâ¦language is inextricably linked with ethnicity. An ethny frequently defines itself, at least in part, as a speech community⦠Language learning is the universal human experience of childhood through which full human sociality is achieved, and through which one gets integrated in a kinship network. It is little wonder, therefore, that language is the supreme test of ethnicityâ (p.34)
A bit further into the argument, he adds:
âOther languages are learned for the sake of instrumental convenience; the mother tongue is spoken for the sheer joy of it. It is probably this fundamental difference in the speaking of first versus second languages that, more than any single factor, makes for the profound qualitative difference between intra-ethnic and inter-ethnic relations. The mother-tongue is the language of kinship. Every other tongue is a mere convenience between strangers.â (p. 34-35)
Where such a situation does frequently occur, the following case is being made: because of the close connection between language as an ethnic marker and the identity of the ethnic group as a speech community, and between these two and ethnic boundaries, there is reason to assume that physical territoriality is intimately bound up with being a speech community. Leaving out the numerous qualifications and nuances present in the argument would give us the following thesis: physical territoriality often, not always, traces linguistic/speech boundaries.
If we look at European history, there is certainly something to be said in favour of this thesis: German, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, English, Polish⦠etc., are all languages and, for the most part, are constituted as nations as well. But if I think of India, even after its colonization, the case loses all its plausibility. My aim is not to criticize Van Den Berghe, but to share with you some of the misgivings I have regarding his thesis.
Let me begin with the following. During their colonization of India, the British created precisely the kind of territories that Van Den Berghe talks about: Cantonments. Though ostensibly so, they were not just military stations of sorts, and that is why they have retained an alien ring in the indigenous culture to this day. In these cantonments, English was not just the lingua franca. Rather, the language or speech community defined the territory. Creation of these or similar territories is not the result of racism or of colonial superiority, but an understandable reflex when viewed from the perspective of Western history. These kinds of territories were not restricted to the cities alone; their creation continued right into the heartland of India.
Why do such areas, even today, retain their alien ring? The British have upped and left a long time ago, so what explains this perception? Here is one reason: within our intuitive world models, language does not play an essential role in constituting an ethnic group, much less that territorial and linguistic boundaries coincide. As a normal course of events, one learned, where necessary, to be equally proficient in oneâs âmother tongueâ and in the lingua franca of the community where one lived.
Obviously, I am not making the absurd claim that every Indian is bi-lingual. But what I am claiming is that the relationship between a speech community and being an ethny did not, does not, hold in India. Should this be the case, the alleged relationship between language and territory does not exist either.
Unfortunately for me though, I can give you no evidence in favour of my claims. All I can call upon are my personal experiences, and personal memories are of dubious value in the best of circumstances. So, I will not even try to mention them. All I am left with, as a result, are some considerations which may, or may not, sow seeds of doubt. But, I shall try nevertheless.
Consider a second generation German in America who does not (almost as a rule) speak German anymore. This appears to support Van Den Bergheâs thesis: the German has become an âAmericanâ or, at least, has ceased being a German. Consider a third generation Tamil living in the north who continues to speak Tamil at home. Does that mean that he continues to identify himself as a member of the Tamil ethny? Prima facie, one might be inclined to answer in the affirmative: why else, it might be asked, does he continue to speak Tamil at home and not, say, Punjabi? Notice though, that this question presupposes as true precisely what being contested: the relationship between ethnicity and language. Consider now an Urdu-speaking peasant, living next door to a Malayali-speaking peasant family in an area where the lingua franca is Kannada or Marathi. If we consider further that they have been there for generations, which is not infrequent in India, we shall have to ask ourselves what kind of an ethnic identity they have. Whatever your answer, which depends on your experiences of village India, it should draw your attention to the following puzzling element in the situation: individual families continue to speak their mother-tongues at home, even while living amidst communities where the lingua franca is different from their mother-tongues. This continues for generations on end. In this sense, what is a pretty normal thing in India is almost non-existent in Europe or America (except in a special form, more about which later). When an individual family migrates to another place where the lingua franca differs from the mother-tongue, within two generations none of the family members have a mother tongue different from the language of the community. Surely, this fact draws our attention to the nature of our cultural history as something which is in all likelihood different from that of the West with respect to language and ethnic identity? Of course, the reorganization of states along linguistic lines in independent India has hopelessly confused issues forever. Our leaders accepted the conventional wisdom of the West, and instead of solving any problem with such a measure, they have merely bequeathed us with problems we could have done without. Is it really so preposterous to suggest that Van Den Bergheâs thesis merely extends European history to other cultures as well? In any case, empirical enquiry is urgently required before this question can be answered.
Caste and Territoriality
I would now like to speculate that one of the results of the Indian âcaste systemâ has been the creation of ethnies cutting across linguistic and territorial differences. A Brahmin is one, irrespective of where he lived or what language he spoke. âTerritorial behaviourâ, it could be said, was minimized by transforming the nature of interethnic relations. It is as though the aggression between such groups resembles not an intra-species aggression, but an inter-species one, i.e., aggression between different âcaste groupsâ took the form of aggression between members of different species.
A Brahmin and a sudra could share the same territory in the same way a dog and a cow can; a basic tolerance (or, if you prefer, indifference) coupled with overt aggressive behaviour every now and then. A very familiar example to all of us in India is the existence of shops and restaurants, all in the same street, catering to different âcaste groupsâ living in the same territory. The extraordinary significance of this will become apparent to those of you who know Europe a bit: Turkish cafes and shops in areas hardly populated by the indigenous people, Indian restaurants and shops in areas where only Indians live, etc. I am aware of the presence of all kinds of eating houses in the big shopping streets of Europe. This post-war phenomenon, which is due to the rise of the opulent middle classes in Europe, does not provide a counter-example to what I am saying. The ghetto formation along ethnic lines is a typical phenomenon of European culture and not, I submit, of Asian culture. It is difficult even in our modern day cities to come across a phenomenon so typical of, say, America: Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, or Hispanics generally, Blacks, Vietnamese, Chinese, etc., all have their own ghettos, territories and turf. I submit that the only thing that resembles such territories in our cultures are the cantonments â a British creation. The separate living quarters of the different âcaste groupsâ are only superficially similar to the kind of territoriality of ethnies that we are talking about.
I do not like to be misunderstood for what I have said so far and what I will be saying soon. I am neither attacking nor defending the ill-understood âcaste systemâ in India. All I am saying is that, in our cultures, ethnies require(d) neither linguistic nor territorial boundaries to be one. Therefore, the idea that Van Den Berghe proposes could turn out to be profoundly alien to our intuitive world models. It is possible that we conceive ethnies differently, socio-biology or no socio-biology.
In the last paragraphs of this section, I would like to elaborate upon the way we could possibly see ethnies and their identity. I believe I am explicating an element from within our intuitive world model. It is for you to judge whether this is indeed the case.
Ethnicity as a Relation
In our world models, ethnic boundaries are conceptual in nature and not territorial at all. Consequently, it can be drawn very sharply, but can also be left vague. It is, in its very nature, fluid. The âotherâ ethnic groups are essential for defining oneâs ethny. Brahmins as a âcasteâ can become a group (this is an ethny) if, and only if, there are other âcaste groupsâ as well. (This would be consistent with our notions of âselfâ.) The point is not that each ethny defines itself in opposition to other ethnies, i.e., negatively. Each ethnyâs identity depends upon its ability to specify the other ethnies as ethnies, and thus outline the relationship of cooperation and collaboration that may or may not obtain between them. It is to this result of the Indian caste system that I want to draw your attention: an ethnic identity is dependent upon being able to elaborate and outline the relations between ethnies. This remarkable aspect, where an âethnyâ becomes one by constructing the identities of other ethnies is what would enable us to build an alternative to the other view, which sees an ethny in terms of self-definition and self-identity purely in relation to itself, i.e., by virtue of endogamy, territoriality, language, etc.
In one view, an ethny is an entity which defines itself by means of certain features common to its parts. Or, each individual member identifies the other as a member of the same ethny if, and only if, each possesses the same âethnic markersâ. Thus, ethny can be seen as a collection of individuals. The group itself is defined intensionally so that it is possible to make out whether or not a given individual belongs to it.
The other view looks at âethnyâ as picking out a relation. The ethnic groups would be the relata of a relationship. This identity is constructed in the relationship, i.e., it is only as relata are they ethnic groups at all. That means to say that each individual (or a collection of them) would have to stand in a definite relationship to all other individuals in order to be part of an ethny. There are at least two relations involved: an ancestral relationship (i.e., a relation of descent), and a part-whole relation (i.e., a mereological relation). This point is not new to Van Den Berghe, because he says:
âEthnicity isâ¦defined in the last analysis by common descent. Descent by itself, however, would leave the ethny unbounded, for, by going back enough, all living things are related to each other.â(p.24)
True, all living things are related to each other; but the ethnic identity depends very much upon what relationship is asserted between all living things.( Not only between them, either.) It would be an impossible job for any one individual to trace her/his relation of descent, from the âbig bangâ through Amoeba to her/his parents. The rich lore of traditions, mythologies, and rituals, etc., preserved in a culture, and transmitted from generation to generation do precisely this, i.e., they put, so to speak, sign-posts all along the way.
We can formulate the differences between these two views in terms of the following thought experiment: suppose that tomorrow the entire humankind disappears with the exception of the French nation. Would they still feel an ethny? They would. Suppose, instead, that only Brahmins survived (in India), while the rest of the humankind disappeared. Would they continue to feel an ethny? They would not; they would lose their identity as an ethny as well.
It is this kind of a heuristic that we have in our culture. It requires to be developed into a theory as it fits our modern day sensibilities. To do so, I submit, is to begin the process of âdecolonizingâ parts of sociology.
10-22-2003, 05:37 AM
(This post was last modified: 10-22-2003, 05:51 AM by acharya.)
It must be obvious by now that a tremendous amount of work needs to be done. A great deal of empirical enquiry is required, if we are to begin taking our task seriously. A great deal of theoretical work is necessary, if others are to make sense of what we might say. There is one question I have not asked: why might we want to undertake such a task? Writing down answers to this question would entail composing another paper, so I will not answer it in this abstract form. I will take another, more personal tack:
What are some of my motivations for writing such a paper or for wanting to undertake the task? They are, not in the order of importance, two fears, a suspicion, a curiosity and a quest.
(a) Fears first. Just as Europe is turning inwards, America is turning towards Asia. One of the consequences of the latter will be the influx of thousands of American scholars, backed by their millions of dollars, into the Asian intellectual scene. Should this happen, which seems likely, we would be drowned by the sheer size, if not the quality, of the outpour of studies on Asia. Within a very short time, they will have succeeded in defining the terms of any social enquiry. Our only chance is to keep a small, insignificant flame lit somewhere. The hope is not that one day it would become the âprairie fireââ there are far too many sophisticated fire-fighting techniques in the world today for that to happen â but that it might come in handy when the batteries go out.
Secondly, there is fear of the future. India, more than any other country in Asia, frightens me. Today, whole groups of people are talking in terms of âtotal exterminationâ of other groups. Such talk is not only hailed by the so-called âradicalâ intelligentsia; it is also encouraged and supported by them and some Western institutions as, heaven forbid, the âliberating ideology of the oppressedâ. Indian Marxists with all their âclass warsâ turn out to be gentle folk when compared with the virulent, vicious and violent ideologists and their ideology supported, how ironic, by sections of the Christian Church in the West. This paper is addressed to those of you who share my fear.
( B ) There is a suspicion that Western social theories are exhausted. Their heuristic has worked itself out. Social sciences are due for a renewal, but they will not come from within. True, there is more bustle in these areas now than at any one time before. True, there is greater formal and methodological sophistication than at any other time previously. But they cover up the vacuity of content: when you have nothing to say, it is best to mathematize it.
If social theories are to say something significant, it will only be if new heuristics are used. Our culture may just be able to do provide precisely that. Even if they do not, the try will have been worth the effort. But all of this is just a suspicion.
© There is, of course, the curiosity: will the world really and truly look different, if we looked at it our way? What might such a venture or its results be like?
(d) There is, then, the quest. For a long time now, this has been the issue facing me and many other friends of mine: at the level of social upheavals, Asia has experienced everything the West has without having had an intellectual upheaval, which even remotely resembles those that have occurred in the West. We have had revolutions, palace coups, dictatorships, capitalisms, democracies and what-have-you. We have even had colonisations and independence movements. But where are our renaissances or our enlightenments? Why not a Vienna Circle or, at least, a Frankfurt School? Surely, our culture has had its share of brilliant men and women. Where, then, are our Marxes, or Webers or Freuds? We could at least produce a Parsons or a Durkheim? We can afford a Popper, surely, if not a Russell or a Wittgenstein? Where are they?
In search of answers to these questions, I have explored every possible hypothesis: from the âmost mechanicalâ to the âsophisticated dialecticalâ; from the âsociologicalâ to the âspiritualâ. All of them have led to so many cul-de-sacs.
In this paper, I am trying out another avenue of exploration: we could not produce the intellectual revolutions because the heuristics that produced social theories in the West do not make sense to us. If what should aid you in the creation of theories becomes just a meaningless set of statements, if using a productive and fertile heuristic is no different from chanting an incomprehensible mantra, how could you possibly build new and exciting theories on that basis? You could not! That is why Asia has not accomplished much at the level of social theories. I do not know whether this avenue is any better than the previous ones, but this is all there is left and I am willing to give it a go. Hence the paper.
I would have preferred to wait for some more time, do some further reading and thinking, before putting things down on paper. But some things do not just wait around till you are ready to begin. It is with great diffidence therefore (âmodestyâ from someone who writes a position paper for decolonizing, no less, the social sciences) that I share this document with you. I want to persuade you to look in the direction I am looking. It is entirely possible that I am looking at the wrong place; I cannot shake off the feeling (not for want of trying, I assure you!) that I am looking at least in the right direction. This is what I have tried to share with you.
Some Hypotheses
A mode of teaching, I said before, forms the way one learns. Stories are paradigmatic examples of our methods of teaching. Therefore, the form our learning actions exhibit is one of mimesis. This suggestion generates some surprising, non-trivial implications. Here are a few of them:
1. If mimetic learning is to succeed, meta-reflections about both what one is learning and how one is learning have to be avoided. In the best of cases, one realizes that one has learned, and that too only long after the learning process is completed. Such meta-reflections can only be avoided, if mimetic learning is the dominant learning scheme in a culture.
Consider what could happen otherwise, i.e., if there were many different learning schemes of equal importance or where, for example, mimetic learning is subordinated to other kinds of learning. The learning subject must have information present somewhere in his system which tells him whether a particular way of learning is appropriate in the given situation. Decision requires to be made both about what one wants to learn, and how one learns. One is forced, as it were, to be reflexive.
Perhaps, an example would prove instructive. Consider the way reading is taught in our cultures. In terms of efficacy, there is little to be said in favour of the superiority of âWesternâ methods as against âourâ methods. Theoretically, the situation is equally bleak: existing pedagogic methods are through and through suspect with respect to psychological theories. In the most used teaching-to-read methods, the pedagogy of reading in the West rests upon what is called âstructural analysisâ. This involves an analysis of the structure of the words, i.e., an analysis of speech structure and word structure, both graphemically and phonemically. That is, one speaks out a word loud and one is taught to break it up into its constituent phonemes, which are then mapped to graphemes. Previously, a child used the word âcatâ and made itself understood. There was nothing mysterious or puzzling about the word; it never occurred to the child that it ought to reflect about that or any other word. As it reaches appropriate levels at school, it is taught that âcatâ is not the same thing as cat; the former is a word composed of phonemes k/a/th and that they correspond to the graphemes c/a/t; and that the word itself refers to the concept of the animal so named which, in turn, picks out an animal, etc. This process is deemed crucial to recognizing novel words.
For our purposes, the point of this example is the following: the way one is taught to read in the Western culture forces a child to think about what it is saying, how it is segmented phonemically, i.e., it is forced to become conscious of what it is doing, and to do consciously what it was doing all along without being aware that it was doing it. In the most used Western teaching-to-read methods, learning to read entails acquiring meta-level knowledge about the knowledge the child already had, viz., of its native language. In other words, it is taught to reflect consciously about its very learning itself. This is not limited to the pedagogy of reading alone.
2. The previous point helps generate the following hypothesis: socializing children by means of stories stands in some direct relation to the growth of reflexive selves. If it is the case that selves are reflexive in Europe, stories can only have entertainment value. The greater the degree a culture encourages the growth of reflexive selves, the less are also its stock of stories (legends, myths, âfairyâ tales, etc.) A culture which stimulates reflexivity in its members cannot sustain stories as models.
3. There is another, albeit related, point to the previous hypothesis. In a culture where âselvesâ are not reflexive at all or are only partially so, but one whose ideal (or âself-imageâ) is governed by that of reflexivity, stories continue to be important but in a transmuted form. They continue to depict events and situations, but are powerless to teach. That is, they retain their instructional nature without being able to instruct. There is such a genre in Western culture: utopian thought. They are instructional in nature without really instructing. (That is exactly what the moral imperatives, the âoughtsâ, are.) They depict events and situations which are not ârealâ, i.e., not the âisâ, but outside of it, viz., in utopia. They depict ânon-realâ situations and events with the explicit claim of doing so. Because of this, they can continue to exist only if they entertain and that depends on the âaestheticâ taste of the population at any given moment. The modern day utopian thought is known well enough to all of us to recognize it as so without doubt: science fiction.
4. If we learn to be moral beings through mimesis, it means that moral and ethical actions must be susceptible to being mimed. Contrast this stance with that of the West: a moral individual (an ideal priest or, say, Jesus Christ) is inimitable in principle. That is, a moral individual is actually a message, which does not say âbe like meâ, but one which proclaims âhopeâ for the humankind, brings âglad tidingsâ so to speak. And the âhopeâ is that the presence of such an inimitable, exceptional individual will âsaveâ humankind. If one is ârighteousâ, it is not only because that is the way to oneâs âsalvationâ, but more importantly, because the salvation of humankind depends upon the ârighteousâ being present amongst them. One is âmoralâ so that other âsinnersâ may be delivered from their âsinsâ. Such figures cannot influence daily life positively, but do so negatively viz., as examples of what we ordinary mortals, cannot be. They are, literally, the embodiments of âoughtâ and, as such, outside the âisâ (Not every human being can be an ideal priest or even, as the examples tell us, ought to be one.)
In Asia, such an âoughtâ is no moral example at all. A moral action must be capable of emulation in daily life and only as such can someone be an âexampleâ. Moral actions are actions that a son, a father, a friend, a teacher, a wife, etc., can perform as a son, a father, a friend, a teacher, a wife, etc. Either moral actions are realizable in this world, and in circumstances we find ourselves in our daily lives or they are not moral actions at all. Therefore, those real or fictitious individuals whose actions we mime and who are, consequently, construed as âexemplaryâ individuals cannot find themselves âoutsideâ our world, but in situations analogous to our own. (Such a view is consistent with our models of âselfâ, for obvious reasons.)
5. This suggests that the role of moral authorities in these two cultures is different. In the West, the moral authorities are rigid principles without mercy or forgiveness. All talk of autonomy notwithstanding, moral âdecisionsâ are totally heteronymous. One has to reflect not only about the principle one has to apply, but also judge whether one has correctly applied it. As a consequence, moral domain becomes one of judgement. The objects of judgement are and can only be conceptual ones, viz., theories. To say that some action is moral is to say whether or not the description of that action satisfies some or other moral principle. We have noticed this already. Moral life gets impoverished by being reduced to a principle (e.g. utilitarianism) or by being at the mercy of anotherâs âjudgementâ (e.g., that of a priest).
In Asia, by contrast, the immediate physically recognizable authority figures (parents, teachers, elders) are also figures of moral authority. Mimesis in moral action requires figures recognized as moral authorities. Consequently, in a culture dominated by mimetic learning, not only do such authorities play an important role in regulating moral conduct, but are also so recognized. That is why, I suggest, parents, teachers, elders, ancestors have such a privileged position in our culture. They are not only familial or socially recognized authorities, but are individually recognized moral authorities also.
6. If socialization involves mimesis, and families are the primary units of socializing a human infant, the success of the socialization process depends very much on what the family exactly models. That is, an individual can be taught to âlive with othersâ if and only if, the family stands for, or represents the significant details of the social environment. The family, in its important details, must be continuous with the moral community at large. And, I submit, it does.
Not only this. In a peculiar way, this sheds some light upon the âsternnessâ, or âharshnessâ considered typical of both family life and teaching situations in Asia. One is being prepared for life, when one is brought up as an offspring and a pupil. Between them, the parents and the teachers must prepare the child to act morally when it goes âoutâ as an adult to meet the world at large. That can only be done if the child faces a wide variety of situations during its growing-up process, and sees the ways in which âothersâ are going to construe its actions. Parents and teachers must, in the full sense of the term, stand for and represent the rest of the community. To allow parental love and indulgence to âinterfereâ in this process is to fail in discharging the moral obligation that one has assumed towards oneâs off-spring, viz., that of socializing the child. Consequently, oneâs family is also oneâs sternest and harshest critic. If one passes this test, the belief is that one can pass any other test. Hence the descriptions of an ideal father or teacher: âharder than the diamond, softer than a flowerâ.
The contrast between family as a ââmoral arenaâ as Asian culture sees it, and family as a âHaven in a heartless worldâ, as Lasch titles his book on family, cannot be sharper. In Western families, one is to experience love, one learns to be oneself. One becomes oneâs true self, and learns to let the others be. The socializing or educative role of the family is secondary, it is derivative. Its primary task is to âprotectâ the child from the âcruel world out thereâ. If it prepares the child to face up to the cold and indifferent world, it does so by providing that âlove and understandingâ which gives the child the courage to âgo and getâ what it wants. It is taught to be âitselfâ in all circumstances. Family is oneâs only oasis in the desert of social life.
In one case, family is the moral community; in the other, it is different from and other than the social world. Mimetic learning sheds light on the how and why of the former, partial and incomplete though it is as an explanation.
7. One other aspect of moral authorities is worthy of mention. Learning by mimesis, as supported by our model of âselfââ, involves that the moral action of others can shame you into performing a moral action yourself, i.e., the actions that others perform/have performed can guide and instruct you in the course of your life.
Contrast this with the attitude in the West. Not only are moral individuals inimitable, but they also âought not to beâ imitated for yet another reason. Because oneâs action expresses oneâs self (in whatever form), and to âbe oneâs selfâ is the guiding value of a life, the actions of such moral individuals are seen as expressions of the âmoral selvesâ of those individuals. In such a case, a specific moral action ceases to have an instructional or pedagogic significance: it is only a psychological curiosity, i.e., it can tell you something about the kind of person that someone is.
While in one culture, a moral action could be seen as raising the question âhow is that an instruction for my actions?â In another culture, it raises the question âwhat kind of a person must he be to do what I would not?â To get a flavour of this difference between our two cultures, I would suggest to those of you who have seen the film âGandhiâ, and in a position to talk to someone from the West who has also seen the film to do so. You would be surprised at what you can learn from such a âcoffee-shopâ talk. Consider, in this regard, what Einstein said of Gandhiâ¦
8. By its very nature, Mimesis is a reproduction of existing actions, i.e., it essentially conserves. A culture dominated by mimetic learning must, perforce, exhibit a very strong pull towards conservatism. Our cultures are essentially conservative. Tradition, the past, etc., must weigh heavily on all those who are members of such cultures. And, I submit, it does so in our case.
9. The other side of the same phenomenon is what happens when our cultures meet with those of the West. There is a partial exchange of authorities, not their total disappearance. The tendency is towards an imitation of these, new, authorities. We could look at the âWesternizationâ of our youth or at the fact that the Japanese have earned the label, often used pejoratively, of being âvery good imitatorsâ. We imitate the West not because there is some âiron law of capitalismâ which compels us, willy-nilly, to be like them but because that is our way of learning. This might shed some light upon why one Indian community survived by adapting itself to the West, whereas another got exterminated by failing to do so.
10. Despite a considerable technological development in Asia much, much earlier, scientific theorizing (as we know of it today) emerged within the Western culture. A hypothesis that can be generated to throw some light on this phenomenon is this: mimetic learning is restricted to performing actions that are perceived as being performed by others. Novel or new actions result primarily by performing a familiar action in novel circumstances and secondarily by transposing actions performed in one domain to another. While mimetic learning is transposable, it remains essentially limited in scope. It is a âschemeâ of âsocial learningâ, if you like. It is relatively inflexible in the sense that it cannot be transposed to learning about the âNatural worldâ, unless in the form of modelling ânatural eventsâ in human artefacts. But this does not suffice for scientific theorizing. Crudely put, there is a kind of rigidity or inflexibility to our learning which is, to some extent, due to the lack of reflexivity in our learning.
There is something more that requires to he said in this regard. As I am not very clear about it myself, I will merely mention it in the passing. Consider this question: what notion of knowledge should we have, if we would want to consider mimesis as learning? Or, what notion of knowledge do we have, if we learn by mimesis?
It cannot be analogous to the interrogative, questioning, probing processes, which are seen as being characteristic to scientific theorizing. One cannot put constraints on Nature, and force it, as Kant put it, to answer our questions. There can be no mimesis in such circumstances. So, if this is not the notion of knowledge that we have, what else could it possibly be? My answer will be very vague, because that is all that comes to my mind. Mimetic learning involves being ready and alert to identify learning situations; such situations do not come with labels attached to their sleeves. Some situation, any situation, can be a learning situation; someone, anyone, can teach you; some action, any action, can be exemplary. Whether or not you learn from such situations, persons and actions depends upon you construing them thus. No person, for instance, performs an action with the sole intention of teaching you; he is performing the obligations he has assumed. Even where his obligation is to teach you, you can but learn if you construe it as a learning situation.
In a world, then, where fleeting actions and events can teach, and where âteachersâ do not come with professorial chairs, there your readiness to learn is crucial, if you are to learn at all. It means that you have to be alert lest a teacher or an action passes you by, and open so that you may âseeâ what is being taught. Because, literally, anyone or any action may teach you, you will have to be fundamentally open to all situations and actions.
Cognitive attitude, thus, appears to involve these dimensions of readiness, alertness and openness to being taught. Though these dimensions and the construing activity are active, they are also âpeculiarly passiveâ. For, consider: if learning is sub-intentional, what is taught depends on that which you construe as being taught, and your construal itself is a function of the dimensions involved in cognitive attitude, then the cognitive attitude itself can only be characterized, if we say that it involves âreadiness, open-ness and alertness toâ¦â You cannot fill the blank with a constant, but can do so with a variable or with âall events, all actions, and all persons at all timesâ. Equally, you may as well leave it open. We do have a word, which captures such an open-ended attitude: receptivity.
Though this word does capture the âpassive dimensionâ involved in such an open-ended cognitive attitude, it does so by stripping it of all its active dimensions. It must be clear from the foregoing that our cognitive attitude is not, cannot be, totally or even fundamentally passive. That is why I said that it is âpeculiarly passiveâ. We could put it this way: cognitive attitude appears to involve openness and readiness to, God I hate this word, being revealed to. Consequently, knowledge seems to require some kind of an action, which happens to you as you go about in the world.
If it sounds mystical, that is because it has something to do with mysticism. But, not quite the way it may appear at first sight. It could be the case, I will come back to this point last, that mimetic learning involves the using of the right-hemisphere of the brain (for right-handed people), which is also the seat of mystical experience.
Be it as this may, one will have to return to explicate the conception of knowledge implicit in our cultures. Though vital and crucial, it will have to wait, perhaps, for that time when there is greater clarity all around.
11. What does it mean to grow up an Asian then? Application of mimetic learning scheme, if it can be called that at all, requires that one develops the ability to discriminate finely. One has to sort out, so to speak, situations and actions in such a way that one is able to distinguish between emulable-in-this-situation from the emulable-in-that-situation. Not all aspects of an event and action is, can or should be emulated. In other words, we grow up to be members of our culture by acquiring finely tuned set of discriminating criteria.
How do we acquire these criteria? Again, the answer cannot be other than to say, by mimesis. It is, if I may nest operations, mimetic schemes within mimetic schemes. Some of the patterns are preserved in our cultures by the multiplicity of cultural institutions: son, friend, pupil, father, wifeâ¦etc. As we slowly grow into maturity, we become some of these, and we learn to become these by taking as models those who went before us, those who are our contemporaries and so on. As these institutions overlap, so do our schemes, meshing and intermeshing with each other, generating and sustaining a culture, which none understand but all admit to being a gestalt of âunformalizable and refined codes of conduct, rituals, ceremonies, etc.â
Events and actions must loose their clarity and simplicity, when multiple and often incompatible models are said to model the same situation. They must become complex and essentially ambiguous. Indeed, I claim, they do. One expression of this situation is the extra-ordinary productivity of our culture with respect to âreligionsâ.
12. Speaking of religions brings me to the last observation that I want to make. Again, it is a hypothesis generated by the preceding points. One of the characteristics of Western culture is the kind of importance it attaches to language. It is believed that everything is knowable, and what is knowable is also sayable, even though various thinkers like Kant, Hayek, etc., have warned against such a presumption. We need not choose sides on this debate for now. But to the extent this is believed, the education of people involves placing a very heavy emphasis on expressing things in language.
We know that human brain consists of two symmetrical hemispheres. Each of these appears to specialize in some kinds of tasks: the left-hemisphere of the right-handed people (or the right-hemisphere for the left-handed), for example, contains the speech area. Linguistic, logical and mathematical abilities or, in short, linguistic and analytical skills are more or less localized in one of the two hemispheres (I shall speak only of the right-handed people from now on and, hence, of the left-hemisphere alone, when I talk of the seat for linguistic, etc., skills.). Because âintelligenceâ refers basically to the development of linguistic and analytical skills, a culture which places great importance on âdeveloping intelligenceâ has to emphasize such activities as its educational focus. It is also the case that one of the supreme ideals of Western culture is that of ârationalityâ (Of course we are all for ârationalityâ; who would want to be irrational in this day and age, except the irrational?) An action or a decision is rational insofar as it instances some or another rational principle. To be ârationalâ, to be âmoralâ, etc., is to act and judge according to some or other principle.
In such a culture, the left-hemisphere must be called into play more often than the right-hemisphere of the brain. The right-hemisphere, for its part, is the seat of emotions and passions, intuition and creativity, etc. In a culture where the ideal is the subordination of passion to reason (people like Hume notwithstanding), there the ideal is the subordination of the right to left hemisphere of the brain. The left hemisphere is, of course, not âstupidâ, i.e., it is not just a boiling sea of âanimal passionsâ. It simply does not have the linguistic ability, speaking figuratively, to âexpress itselfâ.
It appears reasonable to hypothesize that education in our cultures trains us to call the right-hemisphere into play more often than is the case in the West. Consider, for example, the realm of moral education. If stories and not the âprinciplesâ are the how of our moral actions, âunderstandingâ such stories cannot take place without calling in the right-hemisphere of the brain. It must be said at once that âunderstandingâ is not being used here in the sense of being able to answer questions about the stories, after being told one. Many people in the field of Artificial Intelligence are busy writing programs, which, it is claimed, display such ability. Rather, it is being used in the sense of taking it as an instruction for action. (It could be said that this is not an insurmountable problem, but I will come to it soon.) The stories, as I said, depict events and situations from life-situations, or consequences of actions performed by identifiable figures. As stories, they have to be appealing, and possess a definite order and structure. The order cannot be felt, and the appeal would be lost in the absence of the right-hemisphere, even if the left-hemisphere has to be called in to say exactly what the order or even the appeal consists of.
Perhaps it is the case that in the early years of childhood, the infant primarily uses the right-hemisphere of the brain to learn even while its left-hemisphere is being stimulated. That could be the reason why they are open to all situations, while displaying precisely the kind of cognitive attitude that I spoke of earlier. As any number of studies have shown us, the openness and creativity the children normally display fall very sharply within two years of beginning to attend school. The estimates go so high, psychologists speak of a drop of over 98% in the creative capacity of children within the first two years of their schooling, that it seems reasonable to assume that the dominance of the left-hemisphere of the brain over the right leads not merely to development of some skills (in this case, the development of linguistic and analytical skills), but, more importantly, to a different way of learning altogether.
An extreme example might help us appreciate the point better: it is not impossible to think of a computer making moral decisions. That is, it is not impossible to write a computer program which embodies some ethical theory or another, and contains instructions about how actions and events should be analyzed. It would be a mammoth job, and it is also true that one does not know today how such a program would look. But should it be possible to do so, the decision arrived at by the running of such a program on a computer would represent the pinnacle of what would be considered a moral decision. That is so, because moral decisions are the results of possessing an adequate moral theory.
There is no way we could represent our notion of morality in a computer program, unless it be in the form of some complex induction rules. But we are not inducing any rule whatsoever from the stories which depict moral actions or moral orders. We are not reasoning the way it requires to be represented, if written as a program: âA did X in situation Z; my situation is analogous in some relevant details; therefore, provisionally, I ought to do X as well.â. We could not be doing any such thing, if we learn through mimesis. You could, of course, represent our ways of being moral as thought it was an application of an inductive rule or even a set of them. This will tell you what your notion of the moral is, but not what we do when we act morally. (This is one of the reasons why, I believe, our notions of being moral differs both from situational ethics and from casuistry.).
This is not a pro or contra argument regarding whether computers âfeelâ or âthinkâ. It is simply to say that the Western concept of the moral can be simulated on a computer whereas our ideas of the moral cannot, unless as a âweaker versionâ of its Western counterpart. It may turn out that I am wrong; until such time, I will believe that moral actions in our cultures cannot be divorced from the personal, experiential dimension whereas the Western notions can.
Whether this satisfies you or not, I believe that the point I want to make is clear: In the West, one is moral purely on conceptual grounds. On these grounds alone, can one not be moral in Asia, without the affective and the emotional being somehow involved.
There is a second, bolder, hypothesis to be made which I have already hinted at. Mimetic learning involves using the right hemisphere of the brain. There is some plausibility to this hypothesis as well. As I said before, to say or analyze what one is doing when one is miming is not to be able to mime at all. This âsayingâ or âanalyzingâ involves the left-hemisphere of the brain, which is where these skills are localized. Once such a process is initiated, the left-hemisphere assumes dominance. Consequently, the latter becomes more âpassiveâ with the failure to imitate as a result. In this connection, think of the studies about the fall in the creativity of young children when they start attending school. It is in contact with an environment, which places such a premium on developing linguistic and analytical skills that children cease being creative. Creativity, we know, is the capacity of the right-hemisphere.
Now, whether one can localize mimetic learning in the right-hemisphere or whether using stories as models requires using both hemispheres, at least this minimal hypothesis can be reasonably accepted: learning processes in Asian culture involve calling the right hemisphere into play more often than is the case in the West. But, it requires to be said in order to prevent misunderstandings from arising, that does not imply that Asians are not âlogical or analyticalâ or that Europeans do not âfeelâ. We have an extensive history of logical and linguistic analyses, and no one is suggesting that Europeans are born without right-hemispheres, much less that they do not use it. I hope this is clear!
Should this minimal hypothesis be true, it sheds light on another phenomenon characterized as typical of our culture, viz., the phenomenon of mysticism. The seat of mystical experience is the right-hemisphere of the brain. Our culture âtrainsâ its members in the use of this hemisphere more often and more regularly than the West. Consider one of the unintended side-effects of this âtrainingâ: over a period of time, a statistically significant number of people will begin to report to having had the kind of experience we term as being âmysticalâ. This phenomenon will have to show some kind of regularity, i.e., it must happen regularly, over some significant period of time to some of the members of the group. While isolated reports, which come in now and then, can be discounted as being insignificant, it is not possible to do so when the same, or very similar report becomes something of a regular feature in a society. However it may get âexplainedâ, the explanation cannot by-pass the phenomenon. It is experienced as something that always seems to occur, i.e., as something that seems to be a significant experience in its own right, a legitimate or even a very natural experience, which is culturally relevant to the community itself. I put to you that the acceptance of such experiences is preserved in our culture by making the mystical experience the very core of our religions.
By the same token, contrary must be the case in a culture like that of the West. And that is indeed so: âmysticismâ has always been at logger-heads with the established religions. To be sure, this does not explain much. But, it does appear to shed some light on what requires to be explained.
This situation, if remotely true, would explicate the two differing notions of wisdom in our two cultures. In one, wisdom (sophia) is primarily theoretical in nature. In the other, wisdom is primarily practical in nature. In both, they are standards of excellence: someone who knows the truth is the wise one in one culture: in the other, it is someone who performs exactly the right action in the right circumstances. True, neither of these ideals is the exclusive property of either. But it does not take away, I trust, the point about the ideals of human existence as they differ between these two cultures.
[url="http://www.hindunet.org/saraswati/india.pdf"]The Unity of India by Dileep Karanth[/url]
Hello IF friends,
Recently in one of the comments to Sankrant's article on Sulekha one of sulekhites posted the above link. In this article at the bottom it says this
Quote:Acknowledgements: I have learnt much from discussions with Dr. S. Kalyanaraman, Dr. Koenraad Elst and Deshappriya Jayasuriya. I have also drawn heavily from Arvind Sharmaâs article âWhat is Bharata? What is Bharatiyata?â.
In references section it says
Quote:Arvind Sharma, What is Bharata? What is Bharatiyata? In The Perennial Tree: Select
papers of the International Symposium of India Studies (Ed. K. Satchidananda Murty,
Indian Council for Cultural relations, New Delhi & New Age International (P) Limited
Publishers
Has anybody got links to the article by Arvind Sharma ??
Thankyou.
India is probably the only country in the world that has a town named Ghaziabad a town where Ghazis killed infidels. The title Ghazi was given to you only when you killed Kaffirs
[url="http://www.romani.org/rishi/retygajo.html"]Excerpts from Roma by WR Rishi ETYMOLOGY OF THE WORD GAJO[/url]
The word 'Gajo', also pronounced as 'Gazho' (plural-'Gaje' or 'Gazhe') is used by the Roma in a contemptuous sense for a non-Rom (non-Gypsy). Not only this, its use is often made to convey a sense of great hatred as if all the non-Rom are their exploiters and oppressors and no less than enemies. A Rom will never take a Gajo into his confidence. Even the Gypsy life and culture, their marriage customs, death and birth ceremonies observed by Gypsies are "not for a Gajo to know and are not revealed under normal circumstances at all". The immense amount of suffering that Roma have endured at the hands of Gaje in all countries makes this a sad fact. Many of the Gaje have questioned motives for wanting to identify with Roma and in the past the Roma have sometimes suffered as a result. The contempt for the Gajo has gone to the extent that even the utensils in which a meal is served by a Rom to a Gajo are considered to have been polluted and are kept separate.
The meaning of the word as given by Mr. John Sampson in his book "The Dialect of Gypsies of Wales" are "one not of Gypsy Race, Gentile, Stranger, Alien, Filthy". He has traced the root of this word in Sanskrit word 'Garhya' (domestic), in Prakrit-Gajja. This leads us to somewhat faulty conclusion that the word was used for all sedentary people because Roma are a wandering race. But this somehow does not lead us to the answer of the basic issue i.e. why such a sense of contempt should be associated with this word.
Yaska the first etymologist in Sanskrit, whose work is available, says that to find out proper meanings of a word we must look to history and social conditions of the time and area where these words are used. So grammar and derivations are not sufficient enough to tell us why a particular sense has come to be associated with a particular word. Similar is the case of the word 'Gajo'. It is the history which leads us to the right conclusion, where we can find the true meaning of this word.
Roma have originated from the north of India. This has been proved sufficiently by linguistic evidences and many other factors and has now been accepted by scholars all over the world. Roma are Rajputs and Jats of India or men and women of India belonging to warrior classes whose ancestors migrated from India about a thousand years ago. Besides linguistic proofs I have used blood tests and cultural affinities as further evidences. So it is clear that. only the history of India can give us the answer why the word 'Gajo' should convey a sense of hatred and contempt.
The word Gajo or Gaze is the changed form of word Ghazi and with Rajasthani and Braj influence it has changed into Gazho or 'Gajo' where masculine, singular adjectives end in 'o' e.g. kalo (black), baro (big) etc. etc. This was in India that a king named Mahmud Ghazni (Mahniud Ghaznvid) came and attacked India about seventeen times between 1001-1026 A.D. Mahmud Ghazni ruled from Ghazni, a city in Afghanistan. The Kingdom of Ghazni at the time of Mahmud's accession consisted of the country called Afghanistan and Khorason, the eastern province of Persia. The people of this kingdom were also called Ghazis. The famous historian of India Dr. Ishwari Prasad has remarked "to the Mussalman of his day he was a Ghazi who tried to exterminate infidelity in heathen lands". Mahmud Ghaznvi's first attack was in 1001 near Peshawar and he took away with him as many as 500,000 people as slaves. Many more fled from their homes. In his subsequent attack more atrocities and cruelties were laid on Indian people. It is said about him that "he came, burnt, killed, plundered, captured and went".
For Muslims of his day he was Ghazi meaning a Mohammadan warrior, a slayer of infidels. The word Ghazi has become Ghazo or Gajo in the Romani language and is used to denote a non-Rom, non-Gypsy, a stranger as also a bad and dangerous nation (masculine adj. have endings in 'o' in the Romani language, because of Rajasthani influence). In his last attack in 1026 he faced lats from the Panjab. Those were the people who left their homes because of terror of Mahmud and became Gypsies or Roma in foreign lands. They developed a natural hatred for Ghazi, and that is why they called every non-Gypsy a 'Gajo' who had tortured and oppressed them. In fact Mr. A.P. Barannikov in his Romani-Russian Dictionary has given the meaning of the word 'Gazbaiben' as 'theft, stealing or plundering, All this is clearly proved by the above fact.
The following Romani folk-tale from Bulgaria also supports that the Roma left their mother country because of the Moslem invasions and destruction caused by them. The folk tale as related by Ali Chaushev from Shumen in East Bulgaria runs as under : Siyas amen ekh baro thagar-Rom. Ov siyas amaro prins. ov siyas amro padishaxos. O Roma beshenas o zuman savre kidende ekh thaneste, ekh lache vilayscheste. Kale vilayecbesko alav siyas sind......
"We used to have a great king, a Gypsy. He was our prince. He was our king. The Gypsies used to live all together at that time in one place, in one beautiful country. The name of our chief was Mar Amengo Dep. He had two brothers. The name of one was Romano, the name of the other was Singan. That was good, but then there was a big war there. The Moslems caused ' the war. They made ashes and dust of the Gypsy country. All the Gypsies fled together from their own land. They began to wander as poor men in other countries, in other lands. At that time the three brothers took their followers and moved off; they marched along many roads. Some went to Arabia, some went to Byzantium, some went to Armenia.
The story was told to me by my old grandfather. He died but he left this tale behind with us".(1)
The above mentioned theory about the word 'Gajo' gets support from yet another folk story from Hungary. Mr. Lakatos Menyhart from Budapest writes to me in a letter that amongst the Roma of Hungary there is a "Gypsy story of Moslem occupation of North India. According to this story around the year 1100-1200 Moslem armies, which were trying to spread Islamic religion were led by Pasha Machmut. The headquarters of Pasha Machmut were in this city Gadzso in North of India. Each spring Moslem army started a campaign against North India causing a lot of destruction in the area. They did not want to occupy territory but only to convert people. After the campaign the army always moved back to the city of Gadzso. This is the reason why the name Gadzso became so frightening for the people". This Pasha Machmut was none else than Mahmud Ghaznvi and history bears it out very clearly why he was so much hated. Hence the word 'Gajo' or' 'Gazho' is a changed form of word Ghazi and has become associated with a sense which does not become clear if we do not look towards history.
1. Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon-The Destiny of Europe's Gypsies. Sussex University Press 1972.
1.In Europe, English is the âclearing-houseâ for inter-language exchanges. It is NOT the âbanking superstructureâ as it is in India. Let me clarify this.
English is ONLY used â and that too grudgingly and with an air of apology â when, for example, the German knows that his Italian counterpart also knows some English and neither of them know each otherâs language sufficiently well. For the MOST part, the one who has the necessity learns the other language. If I am an Italian sales manager responsible for business in Germany, I will pick up rudimentary German. If I am a German sales manager responsible for business in Italy, I will pick up rudimentary Italian. If I am a French sales manager, though, with responsibility for business in Germany and Italy, I will expect my German and Italian clients to pick up rudimentary French ! ( Please donât take everything I say too literally but try to get the ESSENCE of the situation I am trying to convey ). In Europe, people do not âslip intoâ English as easily and blithely as in India. It is a laboured process and, as I said, most exchanges get done without using the âclearing houseâ on a necessity-based knowledge environment. Do not mistake me. Knowledge of English is considered an asset but it is NOT flaunted as a badge of honour.
In Europe, they have Dutch, German, Swedish, Danish, French, Italian, Spanish, Portugese, Polish etc etc. They trade, tour, drink, quarrel, find jobs, lose jobs, get married, get divorced, write letters to the editor and otherwise get by with very little English. In India, we have Tamil, Malayalam, Gujerati, Hindi, Telugu, Bengali, Kannada, Punjabi, Assamese etc etc. We trade, tour, go to the temple/church/mosque, find jobs, hold onto jobs, get married, have children, write letters to the editor and otherwise get by PRIMARILY with English. Bears some thinking.
2. In Europe, you will find the regional CEO of an English-language multinational trying to sneak her mother-tongue in through the back door. Amparo Moraleda, President of IBM Easpana and IBM Portugal, in the latest issue of âMadrid Plusâ:
"Questioner: Will English continue to dominate in IT and on the Internet?
Ms. Moraleda: The information that we have reveals that the Spanish language is inadequately represented on the Internet. There are almost 400 million Spanish speakers on the planet and it is well-established as the second language of USA, but the percentage of content in Spanish on the Internet is no more than 6%. Ensuring that Spanish has more of a presence on the Internet is as important a challenge as it is difficult to achieve."
The situation is only slightly different from that in India in that the regional CEO of an English-language multinational will probably bring in his mother-tongue through the front door. Depends on what you define as you mother-tongue.
M. S. Chandramouli
On Colonial Experience and the Indian Renaissance: A Prolegomenon to a Project by S. N. Balagangadhara
Published on Sunday, December 1, 2002
One of the striking things about the British colonial rule is its success in developing certain ways of talking about the Indian culture and society. The British criticised the Indian 'religions', the Indian 'caste system', the Indian education system, practices like 'sati' and 'untouchability', and so on and so forth. They redrew the outlines of Indian intellectual history as indigenous responses to some of the ills they saw in the Indian society and culture: for example, 'Buddhism', as it emerged out of their reconstruction, was a revolt against 'Brahmanism' and 'the caste system'[i]. Many Indian intellectuals emphasized British criticism by making 'truths' in the latter their own: the Arya Samaj, the Brahmo Samaj, many Hindu 'reform' movements, and so on exemplify this trend. I say 'truths' and place it in scare quotes because the unbroken line of continuity between the colonial period and the one following the Indian independence raises two kinds of questions. The first is this: would there have been such a line of continuity if there was no 'truth' to the British portrayal of our history, traditions, and culture? This question uses the 'fact' of continuity to suggest that the British descriptions could be 'true'. That is, our current experience of our culture and society appears to lend truth-value to the colonial descriptions of India. The second question transforms our 'current experience' itself into a problem: does such a line of continuity indicate that our experiences themselves are still colonial in nature? This question throws doubts upon the 'facticity' of the British descriptions of India, and suggests that they could be 'untrue'. In the process, it also challenges us to look more closely and investigate our own experiences today. That is, the second question withholds assent to the 'truth' both of the colonial descriptions of India and of some of the claims we make about our experiences of our culture and society today. To some extent, and only to some extent, the so-called 'post-colonial' writings can be seen as attempts to make sense of the second question. Even though I do not fancy the label of being a 'post-colonial' myself, I perceive a shared sense of a quest with them. There is something deeply, deeply wrong with the line of continuity that exists between the colonial period and today's India, and the challenge is to say what it is.
Participants in the Debate
Something more requires to be said about this 'line of continuity' and I will do so by identifying the broad responses to the colonial descriptions of India. Let me begin with the event that colonialism is. To most of us, including the colonizers, this event appears to have taken the status of a historical proof of the cognitive superiority of one culture against the other. That is, for some reason or the other, we look at colonization as though it was a contest between two theories much like, say, the contest between the Aristotelian theory and that of Galileo. Our colonization by the British is seen to express the weakness of our culture and, by the same token, their superiority.
Many explanations of this weakness float around. (a) India was never a nation before the British made us into one; (<img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/cool.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='B)' /> the weakness of the Mogul rule at that stage; © the caste-ridden, divisive society that India was; (d) the absence of a centralized state and the presence of multiple small kingdoms, (e) because of which the policy of the British to 'divide and rule' was successful. There are many more than these five, but this list should suffice. âHow could a few thousand conquer a nation of millions, if we were not weak?â This is how Gandhi formulated the problem, as did the Indian Independence Movement. Our nationalist thought has crystallized around the certainty that colonization expressed our weakness and the British strength (even if the latter was confined to exploiting this 'weakness').
However, the above perception does not emerge from a scientific study of either colonialism or imperialism but from the rhetorical force of another question: âif colonization is not an expression of our weakness, what else is it? An expression of our 'strength'?â Even though every historian can routinely assure us that 'higher' civilizations can be conquered and overrun by 'barbarians', the so-called 'scientific' studies into our history do not appear to have moved away from this rhetorical question. On the contrary. Such studies try to provide 'insights' into our weakness, and tell us what the latter were. Simply put: the consensus (more or less) of all and sundry is that colonialism expressed the 'weaknesses' of the colonized and the 'strengths' of the colonizer. The industrial revolution in the West that antedates colonialism and the origin of the natural sciences that predates colonialism have somehow become telescoped in the popular consciousness into one state of affairs: the scientific, technological and the military might of the western culture. In short, colonialism expresses the civilizational superiority of the West. And, of course, the obverse of this conviction is: in many ways (in all ways?) we are inferior to the western culture. (The 'we' picks out the Indian culture here.) This conviction expresses itself in a variety of forms: from the rigidly nationalistic framework to its diametrically opposed stance. Provocatively put: colonialism is seen as a contest between two theories; one has won out proving the other as false (or passé) thereby.
The above stance (conviction, attitude, call it what you will) generates two antithetical intellectual movements. (It is a kind of a pendulum swing during the course of the last two hundred years we are not rid of yet.) The first is a fiercely 'nationalistic' mode. It claims that the Indian culture had everything: from quantum physics to psychoneuroimmunology, and from the rockets to the nuclear bombs. It further claims that there is nothing wrong either with 'the caste system' or with the Indian 'religions'. The second is its antithesis: it brands any attempt to interrogate the Indian traditions and the Indian culture in order to recover and understand our current experiences as 'obscurantist' if not downright 'fascist'. It believes that the current state of our society clearly shows the need for: 'abolishing' the caste system because it is the cause of social injustice; 'reforming' the Indian 'religions' so that they become more responsive to the needs of the modern day world; 'establishing' more firmly a 'secular state' that guarantees the upholding of the liberal values, etc. Between these two extremes, there are a number of opinions (of various shades) that tell us that we should 'absorb' the best from both cultures. However, these shades have been cognitively uninteresting so far.
There is, however, a third participant in this debate today. Standing outside the spectrum defined by these two antithetical movements, this voice suggests that both the responses are fundamentally colonial in nature. It suggests further that both ways of talking are obfuscating the nature of our experiences. It says that the Indians today have difficulties in accessing their own experiences, and that their learnt ways of talking about their culture and society are responsible for this state of affairs. It tries to argue that one needs to break out of the centuries of descriptive straightjacket that confines our thoughts and distorts our experiences. It is, I believe, a voice of the future which pleads the case for an Indian Renaissance. I hope to make plausible why this voice is believable and is worthy of credence.
The Structure of the Article
On its own, this article cannot realise the hope I have just spoken of. It requires more than even a couple of books to go some way in achieving the objective. Consequently, I will be taking but a step in that direction. And I intend doing it by using an unorthodox literary strategy in a debate that actually involves multiple voices. The strategy is the following: I will deny voice to myself. Or, better put, I will play the ventriloquist: my voice will be lent to one of the strongest opponents in this debate. Who is this opponent and why this strategy?
By way of an answer, let me begin by 'gendering' this voice: it is a he. He is a reasonable person but one who is logically very consistent. He shares the popular perceptions about the two banes of modern India, namely corruption and caste. Being a reasonable man, he wants a transparent government free of corruption and a just society that is rid of the socially unjust caste system. As a consistent person though, he follows his thoughts through to their logical conclusions and talks about the nature of Indian ethics as well. This reasonable and logical person is my opponent to whom I will lend my voice throughout this column and my own, at best, will be heard as interjections.
The readers of this column, I presume, share these popular perceptions as well. Whatever one's sex, my portrayal of the commonsense perception should facilitate the reader in identifying oneself with this reasonable person. How far one goes along with this man depends on how consistent one wishes to be. For my part, I shall strive to make him maximally consistent. Consequently, the challenge the reader faces will be the following: would one like to be consistent and follow my opponent all the way through, or is one willing to interrogate afresh the commonsense perceptions of our society today? This strategy, if you like, is a variant of the famous reductio et absurdum. It is aimed at inducing what once was called 'cognitive dissonance'. The ensuing discussion on the forum will make clear the degree of its success.
The Social Ethics of Corruption
1. According to Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index 2002[ii], India ranks behind Columbia, Argentina, and Honduras and occupies the 73rd place in the list of 'corrupt' countries. In India, the newspapers are full of stories about corruption and everybody knows somebody who is 'on the take'. It is almost axiomatic that every politician is corrupt. The same applies to almost everyone in the government services â from the high-ranking officer to the lowest of the doormen. All state-owned enterprises (from electricity to the telephone) appear to suffer the same fate. Banking and Insurance sectors owned by the state seem to join the queue as well. If we simply add the numbers up, my guess is that we are talking about 80-100 million corrupt people (10% of the Indian population).
Of course, this is what is visible in the media. Very little is written about the business-to-business corruption, where an entire hierarchy demands suitable homage from their suppliers, mostly small-scale businesses themselves. If you include 'greasing palms' to get seats in 'fully booked' theatres, private hospitals, or on trains and private airlines, or gain entry into the educational institutions to this list, we are probably talking about 150 million or more. Should the 'black market' be drawn into the picture as well ⦠it is anybody's guess. (In all probability, we are now talking about 20% or more of the Indian population.) In short, corruption is as ubiquitous as the air we breathe in India and that, in most big cities, is much polluted. The media does not stop clamouring, the citizens do not stop complaining, and there is still no solution in sight. Commissions set up to punish the corrupt end up becoming corrupt themselves.
Because the distance between common sense and scholarship on this issue is virtually zero, let me cite a 'netizen' talking about it.[iii]
âCorruption is destroying the innards of our countryâ (Vinay Sharma)
âCustoms officers raided, 29 lakhs recovered from a single officer!â If you've been reading the newspapers about a month back, this was the hottest news item then. It is downright mind boggling, not in the least because you assumed customs too be a squeaky clean department but by the sheer amount of money a low level government officer can make in the right jobs. According to sources in the customs clearing business, the amount of speed money earned by an appraiser is nothing less than Rs.20,000 a day, and what the Asst. Collector takes home is almost Rs. 30,000 a day. Rs. 30,000 a day adds up to, hold your breath, a cool Rs. 1.2 crore per year, tax free!. No wonder a job as an Assistant Collector of Customs is hotter than a job as a Country Head of a high flying MNC. Not that the Assistant Collector of Customs gets to keep it all, part of it must be shared with equally corrupt seniors and powerbrokers who ensure you get the right job in the first place through their contacts in the Ministry. Nowadays you come across young men whose prime ambition in life is to take up a government job. This desire is not fuelled by an urge to do something for the country and it's people but to fill one's own pockets by harassing common people. These people form the first link in a vicious circle that includes government officials at all levels, powerbrokers, members of the legislature and parliament and even ministers. These are a few cogs turning the wheels of the parallel economy. Add to them the unscrupulous businessmen and the process of defrauding the nation is complete. At this junction let me clarify that there are exceptions to this rule albeit rare. Once in a while you come across a officer who is twiddling his thumbs being given a posting where he can do no harm, no harm to the vested interests of the honourable politicians and their flunkies. As far as the businessmen are concerned there are many who may have resisted succumbing to the unjustified demands of these so called officers and have suffered, their good being held up on flimsy grounds, official clearances not being given, the list is endless. The Indian Government has vested so much power in the officers that they can hold you to ransom and you are absolutely helpless. If you decide to approach the courts, be prepared for a wait of at least a decade or so by which time your business is all but closed and your family is out on the streets. The same story is repeated across all government departments. The government has now established the post of the Chief Vigilance Commissioner, the person responsible for tacking the menace of corruption in the country. The recent raid on the Customs officers in Mumbai is courtesy the CVC. The appointment of the CVC is a step in the right direction but when you see the sheer number of government departments and the number of government employees across India, you realise the enormity of the task. In my opinion much stronger measures are called for to stop the menace of corruption from destroying the innards of the country. These strong measures have to be taken us, the common people of the country. Can we demand for special courts for speedy trial of corruption cases, can we demand for tougher laws against corruption that lead to life imprisonment for corrupt officers and politicians. Of course no politician in his right mind would pass such a law would he? Should we boycott people known to be corrupt and if so are we prepared to bell the cat? Is there any resort for the common people of this country?
The author is a concerned common citizen of India
2. Our 'concerned common citizen', even if he requires an Internet connection to publish his WebPages, tells us exactly what you hear on the streets, at the press club in Delhi, in the villages about the local Tahasildar's office. Amazingly, the way one talks about fighting it is also identical: âPunish the corrupt severely,â but then who should do so? Quis Custodiet ipsos Custodes? âWhat we need is a strong entity (an individual or a government) that threatens, and punishes the errant â and then 'they' will learn.â The 'they', of course, are the 'corrupt' â as I say, about 20% or more of the population.
2.1. What is one saying when one says this? The logic of the word 'corruption' tells us that either something or someone is corrupt â it is either a corruption of norms, or of values, or of principles, or of individuals ⦠If we take our contemporary usage, corruption indicates a 'loss of integrity' â whether of individuals or of your database. The same usage also tells us that 'corruption is rampant in India'; that 'corruption is a social phenomenon'; that 'corruption is wide-spread in India' etc.
2.2. If it is our experience that corruption has known a phenomenal growth since Independence, it can only mean that the social fabric or the social structure enables such a rapid growth. Our soil, so to speak, must be very conducive to the growth of a cancer that âeats into the innards of our countryâ. Indian society hosts this cancer, and its immunological mechanisms must be pretty ineffective in fighting against it. If the people of India constitute the cells of the country and if 'corruption' is the disease, the only possible immunological mechanisms are the social and moral principles, of course. If Indians can so quickly, so easily and so massively be corrupted, what does it say about their morals? They should be pretty well non-existent, I would say. Or such is their morality that it encourages one to be immoral. When is a person a 'fool' not to take bribes? In a situation where everyone else is corrupt. It is a successful social strategy: because everyone else is corrupt, it pays to be corrupt oneself. That is, in today's India, it is rational to be immoral.
2.3. How does one learn to be corrupt? In social groups, of course. If 'being on the take' is a successful social strategy, then it follows that the social group from which an individual learns this must itself embody this strategy. That is, the social group must itself be corrupt. However, because 'corruption' cuts across all empirical groupings in the Indian society, it follows that the 'social group' in question must refer to the society at large. Such must be the nature of this society that the individual learns to be immoral in his going-about with his fellow human beings. In some appropriate sense of the term, the social structure must itself be corrupt.
Caste â the Ethical Corruption
3. If much of the western description makes the caste system synonymous with India, caste also appears as ubiquitous to the Indians as the very air they breathe. From politicians to political pundits, from the pimps to the Prime Minister â all of us seem to belong to the caste system. Most intellectuals, from the extreme right to the extreme left, have firm opinions on the subject. Quite a few theories float around as purported explanations of the caste system. Some see a deformed class-relation in it, others a fossilised coalition of associations. Some see hygienic principles operative in the caste system, yet others some transaction rules. Some call it racial segregation, whereas others see in it the propensity of human beings to maximise fitness through extended nepotism.
Whatever one's thoughts on the subject, most intellectuals appear to agree that the caste system is an obsolete form of social organisation. Its obsolescence is indexed by the hindrance it offers to everything that is desirable: progress, economic development, social equality, and justice ⦠Without exaggeration, it could be said to be the bane of our society and culture. The caste system epitomises everything that is bad and backward.
4. Why does it so stubbornly refuse to disappear? How to eradicate this impediment to progress? The existing answer, in both theory and practice, is surprisingly simple: the caste system persists because of 'prejudice' and that is what one should remove. What kind of prejudice? Let us run through some of them quickly: the prejudice of 'untouchability'; the prejudice that the accident of birth condemns one to servitude; the prejudice that the Brahmins belong to a superior 'caste' because of 'Karma'. ⦠Not only is this a well-known list, so also are the anecdotes that accompany it: horror stories of discrimination against the Harijans by the upper-caste groups, denial of basic human rights to some people, refusal to allow entry into temples or to partake food and water, etc. As this anecdotal discourse progresses, it transpires that the caste system is virtually synonymous with untouchability, moral discrimination, the denial of human rights, and so on. That is, these (and allied) prejudices are instilled in people from their birth, and the caste system is kept alive through practising these prejudices. Very simply put: caste system is a set of immoral practices.
4.1. Let us get some grip on the extent of the immorality of the caste system by comparing it to other large-scale (immoral) phenomena we know. For example, discrimination against the minorities in the US is not a social organisation, even though it is a social phenomenon. The apartheid regime was both the policy of a government and a regime imposed on society, but it was not a social structure. Fascism was a political movement (and a state form) and was unstable. Caste system is, in some sense, all of these but is also much more. It has survived onslaughts from Buddhism, Bhakti movements, colonialism, the Indian reformers, the current Indian legislation, and the western theorists. Clearly, we have a unique, sui generis phenomenon on our hands. It is more evil than colonialism and the concentration camps, more widespread than ethnic discrimination, and has a longer history than slavery.
4.2. However, when we say that the caste system is a set of immoral practices, we are actually saying at least two things: that these practices are immoral and that they are (logically or mathematically) ordered. (Actually we are saying more, but that does not concern us in here.) While one might be willing to grant that the practices (like the ones indicated above) are immoral, it might not be obvious why the caste system becomes an immoral system. The answer is simple: 'caste' is an ordered and structured system. Any social organisation, if anything is a social organisation then the caste system is, is ordered and structured. The immorality of this social organisation consists in the fact that it imposes immoral obligations in an ordered and systematic way. That is to say, caste system is an immoral social order in this double way: not only does the practice of caste discrimination violate certain moral norms but, as a social order, it makes immorality obligatory.
4.3. Let us now shift our attention to those belonging to the system. When is someone, anyone, immoral? Only when one willingly chooses to act in an immoral way. That is, the action has to be voluntary and must be the result of a choice in the presence of relevant alternatives. The caste system might impose immoral obligations, but each individual can choose not to follow them. Buddhism to the Bhakti movements illustrate this. From this, it follows that those who are within the caste system â and remain within it â are immoral (in a systematic way). Under this condition, except for the individual heroes who have opted out, all other Indians become immoral. (After all, there is caste division among the Christians, Harijans, and the schedules of the Indian constitution.)
One could weaken this conclusion by arguing that:
(a) Not all obligations imposed by the caste system are immoral. Quite obviously, it makes no difference whether someone commits one immoral act systematically, or two or three.
(<img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/cool.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='B)' /> The ideology of the caste system 'hides' the immoral nature of its obligations. If you and I see through this cloak, as did the movements from Buddhism through Bhakti, those who do not see through the cloak must be intellectually weak. That is, they are immoral because of their intellectual deficiency.
© The caste system is sold as 'the natural law' (karma, for example) and those who accept it believe in rebirth and its rewards, moksha and such like. From this, it follows that all these doctrines justify immorality and are, therefore, immoral as well. In so far as these doctrines have to do with our 'culture' (or 'religions'), it follows too that our culture and its 'religions' are fundamentally immoral as well.
4.4. I do not want to go into all possible (and encountered) arguments. So, let me sum up. The caste system is the embodiment of ethical corruption. Such a stance requires that Indians are either immoral or cretins, and suggests that Indian 'culture' and 'religions' are immoral as well. The way the 'masses' talk about corruption mimics the way the intelligentsia talks about caste and corruption: Indians are immoral and corrupt. Not merely that. In so far as corruption and caste are successful and rational strategies of social survival, the 'norms' that generate such strategies must themselves be immoral. The conclusion is inescapable: Indian ethics must itself be immoral.
The Corrupt Ethics
5. In this part, I shall leave both the intelligentsia and the masses behind me, and focus instead on the intellectuals. To see what they say about the nature of Indian ethics, I need texts. Instead of picking up the Gita (or some such text), I want to focus on an unlikely candidate: The Kamasutra of Vatsyayana, with fourth century BCE as its likely date of composition. Considered a tract on erotic love, this compendium has a chapter titled, âReflections on Intermediaries who assist the lover in his enterprises.â What kind of enterprises is being talked about? At least one among them includes relating to 'those that belong to another' (p.77). The author(s) want to find out whether there are good 'reasons for sleeping with other men's wives'. Consider some of the good reasons for committing adultery that the Kamasutra gives us. (Actually, Vatsyayana often cites authorities, adds his own comments, etc. I shall ignore all these nuances and speak of 'what the Kamasutra says' from now on.)
1. âIf the woman who loves me has a rich and powerful husband who is in touch with my enemy, she will arrange for her husband to injure himâ (p.78). This is considered as a good reason for committing adultery.
2. âIf I am penniless, without any means of livelihood, and thanks to this woman, I can become rich easily, I will make love to herâ (ibid) is an acceptable reason to seduce another man's wife as well.
What do you think of the two reasons provided in the next paragraph?
3. âIf a girl I desire is a dependent of hers, it is by establishing relations with her that I shall obtain the girlâ or, alternately, âwithout sleeping with her, I shall never manage to obtain the young girl, difficult to approach, rich and beautiful, whom I would like to marry.â (p. 80)
If all of the above constitute good reasons for committing adultery, how about this gem of an argument?
4. âOnce she has fallen in love with me, she may murder her husband and, having taken possession of his goods, we shall live together in luxury.â The author's commentary explains: âunited by the affection born of their relations, they league together to kill her husband, attacking him treacherously with a stick. Having accomplished his, they seize his goods. Either she or I kill the rest of the family. We can then benefit from everything we have been able to seize and live on the proceeds of what we have thus realized, without anything appearing illegal.â (p. 79)
Apparently, the main worry is whether or not their acts 'appear illegal' and not whether such actions are 'moral'.
Be it as that may, reasons such as these are considered 'good' enough to commit adultery. They are good, in the sense that they are serious and not frivolous, and hence, one assumes, morally acceptable. In fact, one is warned: âHowever, unless one has serious reasons for doing so, it is better to avoid taking the risk of seducing other men's wives for mere amorous dalliances.â (P. 80; my emphases.)
5.1. You are British and have been educated in the proper schools. You come to India in the 19th century and encounter this text. How would you react? It makes perfect sense to you that such books are not only written, but are also considered 'classic' texts. Why? Because of what you see around you. And what do you see? Here is a random example:
⦠©ould I transplant my reader ⦠to the purely native circle by which I am surrounded ⦠and could he understand the bold and fluent hindostanee which the Hindoo soldier speaks, he would soon distinguish the sources of oriental licentiousness, and how unprincipled is the Hindoo in conduct and character. In nothing is the general want of principle more evident, than in the total disregard to truth which they show; no rank or order among them can be exempted from the implication. The religious teachers set the example, and they are scrupulously followed by all classes. Perjury and fraud are as common as is a suit of law; with protestations of equal sincerity will a witness stand forth who knows the falsehood of his testimony, and he who is ignorant of what he professes to testify. No oath can secure the truth; the water of the Ganges, as they cannot wash away the filth of lying and deceit, so they cannot preserve the court of law from being the scene of gross and impious contradiction. No task is so difficult as is he who would elicit truth from the mouth of a witness. Venality and corruption are universal; they are remarkable, too, for their ingratitude. (Massie, Vol. 1, 1840: 466-467.)
The modern-day intellectual might feel like protesting: Kamasutra is hardly an authoritative ethical treatise. How many have read it in any case? Besides, one could say, its 'popularity' is more due to the British than to its intrinsic merits. A well-taken objection. Let us redress the situation.
5.2. Enter Richard Shweder. A professor in Chicago, he is out to trace the evolution of morality cross-culturally. In the course of conducting a cross-cultural research into the growth of moral awareness, Shweder and his co-workers (Shweder, et.al., 1987) developed a questionnaire supposed to test the presence of several moral notions among their subjects. The contrasting cultures are the Indian and the American; the interviewees are both children and adults. From the list of the cases that Shweder uses, here are the first five â in order of perceived 'seriousness of breach', as judged by Hindu Brahman eight-year-olds:
1. The day after his father's death, the eldest son had a haircut and ate chicken.
2. One of your family members eats beef regularly.
3. One of your family members eats a dog regularly for dinner.
4. A widow in your community eats fish two or three times a week.
5. Six months after the death of her husband, the widow wore jewellery and bright-colored clothes (Ibid. P.40).
It is important to note that, in India, while there was a consensus between the children and the adults regarding the first two cases (p.63), there was a lack of consensus only among children regarding the last three cases. Keeping in mind that they are ordered in terms of the 'perceived seriousness of the breach', we further come across (ibid., P.40):
8. After defecation (making a bowel movement) a woman did not change her clothes before cooking.
13. In a family, a twenty-five-year-old son addresses his father by his first name.
And, as the fifteenth,
a poor man went to the hospital after being seriously hurt in an accident. At the hospital they refused to treat him because he could not afford to pay (ibid).
5.3. We can, I suppose grant the veracity (or the factual truth) of these statements. We can grant too that many Indians (both children and adults) would probably consider such actions not just as 'paap' but as 'mahapaap'. As the sequence of questions in the interview makes it clear, the respondents were asked to motivate (or clarify) their stance. A fragment from such interviews, applied to a hypothetical Brahmin adult should make the point clear.
â1. Is the widow's behavior wrong? (Yes, Widows should not eat fish â¦)
2. How serious is the violation? (A very serious violationâ¦)
3. Is it a sin? (Yes. It's a âgreatâ sin.) ⦠â (p.43)
Let us consider a similar fragment from a hypothetical American adult.
â1. Is the widow's behavior wrong? (No. She can eat fish if she wants to.)
2. How serious is the violation? (It's not a violation.)
3. Is it a sin? (No.)â ⦠(p.44)
5.4. Needless to say, the America children do not think like their Indian counterparts. They find that what the widow eats and how she dresses do not belong to the ethical domain. Neither do they find anything objectionable to the father being addressed by his first name. And, of course, they find it highly morally objectionable that the treatment in the hospital should be based on the wealth of the person.
5.5. Well, we must be absolute cretins really. I mean, we seem to think that what the widow eats, what she wears, etc., are ethically more important than whether a poor man gets treated in a hospital or not. How did our culture ever manage to survive a couple of thousand years, when governed by such idiotic 'norms'?
As though to rub salt in the wound, Shweder assures us that it is really not all that pathetic. In fact, he says, he could actually provide 'reasoned defence of family life and social practice', albeit in the form of an âidealâ argument structure. How does it look?
âThe body is a temple with a spirit dwelling in it. Therefore the sanctity of the temple must be preserved. Therefore impure things must be kept out of and away from the body.â (pp. 76-77.)
Gee, thanks. You had us worried there for a moment, you know: we really thought that we were a bunch of cretins.
6. Too soon to feel relieved, I think. At least that is how it appears, if we follow Van Den Bossche and Mortier (1997), in their exposé of a Jain text. (The Vajjalaggam, VL for short.) Composed anywhere between 750 and 1337 CE, the author of this text is a Jain poet â a certain Jayavallabha by name. The text itself, Van Den Bossche and Mortier tell us, belongs to the Subhashita literature and thus could be called an 'ethical text' and is a challenge of sorts:
âOne problem with the study of Indian ethics is that the ancient Indians themselves did not make a clear-cut distinction between the 'moral' and other spheres. They did not have a word for our term 'ethics' at all.â (p. 85).
It is important to note that Ancient Greek, for example, introduced not only the word 'ethica'. The same culture also gave us many substantial treatises on that subject, the most well-known of which is Aristotle's Ethica Nicomachea. If the Indian text, composed around 650- 1200 years ago, does not even have a word for that phenomenon called 'ethics', how could it be an ethical tract at all? It cannot. Hence the reason why the authors discover that the
âtext does not contain one single general rule stated in the prescriptive mode. General rule of conduct may easily be derived from various statements, but it is significant that the rules are not formulated as such. ⦠The statements are written in the evaluative rather than the normative modeâ (p.95).
That is to say, in this particular text there are no normative rules to be found. This cannot be construed as a deficiency of this text alone, because, as noted already, the Sanskrit language in which this text is written does not have a word even for the domain, namely, the ethical. Consequently, they study it 'as a socio-ethical document', which gives a âmosaic-like picture of feelings, attitudes and thoughts of different authors of ancient India.â (p. 87, my italics.)
How can one speak about 'ancient' India, when one is talking about a text composed during the 'middle ages'? Here, 'antiquity' does not have a particular time-frame as its reference. Instead, it is civilizational: compared to the 'ancient Greeks' (of about 2500 years ago), the Indian civilization of about 700 years ago is more 'ancient' (i.e. more primitive). Of course, this is not made explicit but it is the only possible interpretation, especially in light of their conclusions.
6.1. Here is their eloquent conclusion about the state of affairs:
âAlthough VL exemplifies reflective ethical thinking, it contains no explicit propositions that argue for or against one type of virtue theory or another and it even sometimes lacks the terms necessary to formulate them. In this respect, the writings of the Greek and Roman virtue theorists are undoubtedly more reflective than what is found in the VL. Yet, this is a difference of degree, not of kind. The writings of the Greeks and the Romans in turn contain little reasoning about ethical language when compared to modern and contemporary moral philosophy.â (Pp.96-97)
6.2. At the risk of emphasising the obvious, some remarks are in order here. Firstly, even though VL embodies ethical thinking, it does not argue for any kind of ethical theory. In fact, it lacks the words necessary to conduct an ethical discussion. This absence of the terminology to talk about ethics differentiates the Indian traditions from the Greek culture. That is to say, there is a difference in kind between the Greek ethics and the Indian ethics: one had the words to talk about it, whereas the other does not. Secondly, this difference has some significance regarding the 'reflective' thinking that VL is supposed to exemplify. How is it possible to reason and think about ethics, when you do not even have the words in which to do so? Obviously, you cannot. That is, there is a second kind of difference too, a consequence of the first: the Indian culture did not have the ability to reason and think about ethics. (That is why VL provides âa mosaic-like picture of feelings, attitudes and thoughtsâ.) Thirdly, if this is the difference that separates Indians from their Greek (or Roman) counterparts, even though coming after the Greeks by almost by a thousand years, the Indian thinkers are at the lower rung of the moral ladder: the Indians (of about a thousand years ago), followed by the Greeks (more than two thousand five hundred years ago), and then the contemporary moral philosophy. There is, however, a degree of difference between the Greeks and the contemporary moral philosophy: the latter is 'more' reflective than the former. The Indians had little ideas about how to think about ethics and how to develop theories and arguments about them. How could they? Not only did the Indian culture not have the terms in which to think about ethics but their intellectuals did not also feel the need to create such terms (as late as the thirteenth or fourteenth century).
This is being written in 1997 in a journal on Asian Philosophy. Any further commentary, I take it, is superfluous.
7. I can now be short, if not sweet. From the point of view of contemporary virtue ethics, we are basically intellectual imbeciles. In the hands of Van Den Bossche and Mortier, a Subhashita text becomes a 'socio-ethical document' that belongs to 'Ancient' India (even if it is composed after 750 CE). Shweder has no clue what 'paap' is or about the practices that embed it, but simply transforms us into moral cretins. If, on the other hand, you are schooled in 'normative ethics', I challenge you not to call the Kamasutra immoral.
Intellectually weak, morally moronic and, therefore, absolutely immoral. As we well know, these have been the Orientalist descriptions of India for the last couple of hundred years. However, they also appear as parts of our daily experience: whether of the caste system or of corruption. When the intellectuals pontificates or the intelligentsia moralizes, it is the voice that changes and not the message: we are cretins, imbeciles and immoral.
Reclaiming my Voice
Let me now cease being the ventriloquist and speak in my own voice. The above three examples suggest what I mean by colonial experience. The criticism of the kind we read in Sulekha and elsewhere, whether on caste or on corruption, are moral in nature. Without exception, they make use of the western normative ethics for their moral criticisms. But to do so necessarily involves making factual claims about the absence of ethical thinking in the Indian traditions. One cannot escape this necessity by any kind of protest because the kind of necessity involved is logical in nature. Anyone who formulates moral criticisms of caste and corruption is logically compelled to deny the presence of 'morality' in the Indian traditions.
This is what the British said about us. This is what we believe to be true. This is how we experience ourselves and our culture.
Let me repeat what I said in my earlier column: colonialism is not merely a process of occupying lands and extracting revenues. It is not a question of encouraging us to ape the western countries in trying to be like them. It is not even about colonising the imaginations of a people by making them dream that they too will become 'modern', developed and sophisticated. It goes deeper than any of these. It is about denying the colonised peoples and cultures their own experiences; of making them aliens to themselves; of actively preventing any description of their own experiences except in terms defined by the colonisers.
The European culture mapped on to itself aspects from the Indian culture so as to understand the latter. These mappings, in the form of explanations, have taken the status of frameworks to us. Liberalism, Marxism, secularism, etc. have become our mantras: we chant these without understanding them in the hope that if we do so long enough and sufficiently loud, the fruits will be ours to enjoy. However, in this process, we have assumed (without quite realising what we are doing) that the European cultural experience is the 'scientific' framework for us to understand our own culture. However, this very assumption prevents us from accessing our own culture and experience. We are busy denying our experiences while futilely busy trying to make alien experiences our own.
The Indian Renaissance
Today, when we read about the lynching of five people in India, we need to ask ourselves what we see, what we experience and how we describe them. Do we see an injustice or even a paapa, or do we see 'the caste system and its injustice'? Do we experience a 'social injustice' when some person is not admitted to a temple? If it is, do we see the 'same' when the same thing happens in a mosque or a synagogue? When we condemn a particular discrimination as 'immoral' using the western ethical terminology, do we understand what it means? Or are we merely assuming we know? When a Pinky and Rajesh commit suicide near the railway tracks, what do we see or experience? And what do we say? Is there a tragedy involving 'svavarna' and 'Harijan', or something analogous to what happened with Romeo and Juliet? Is what we see determined by what is said? Or do we simply not say what we see and not see what we say? It is in the process of answering these kinds of questions that we will pave the way for the Indian Renaissance.
REFERENCES
] See Almond (1988) for the historical contexts of this reconstruction and my 1994 for the more ambitious project of locating it within the context that the western culture is.
[ii] [url="http://www.transparency.org/cpi/2002/cpi2002.en.html"]http://www.transparency.org/cpi/2002/cpi2002.en.html[/url]
[iii]http://www.creativecyberia.com/epinions/e-pinions2.htm. This website seems to have gone defunct in the meanwhile.
~*~
Almond, Philip
1988 The British Discovery of Buddhism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Balagangadhara, S.N.
1994 'The Heathen in His Blindnessâ¦': Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion. Leiden: E.J. Brill.
Massie, J. W.
1840 Continental India, 2 Volumes. Delhi: B. R. Publishing Company, 1985
Shweder, Richard A., Mahapatra, Manamohan, and Miller, Joan, G.
1987 âCulture and Moral Development.â In Jerome Kagan, and Sharon Lamb, (Eds.), The Emergence of Morality in Young Children. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Van Den Bossche, Frank and Mortier, Freddy
1997 âThe Vajjalaggam: a study in virtue theory.â Asian Philosophy, 7(2), 85-108.
Vatsyayana
The Complete Kamasutra. Translated by Alain Daniélou. Vermont: Park Street Press, 1994
[url="http://www.sulekha.com/expressions/column.asp?cid=271421"]http://www.sulekha.com/expressions/column.....asp?cid=271421[/url]
Who is an Aryan?
Nanditha Krishna
The recent ban on sacrifices by the Government of
Tamil Nadu has resulted in a rash of statements by
ill-informed and motivated politicians on the
âAryanisationâ or âBrahminisationâ of Dravidian
culture, in which gods, systems of worship and rituals
have all been divided into one or another camp. The
British created an Aryan-Dravidian divide, which
became a useful tool for Indian politicians. It is
time to separate truth from falsehood.
The conventional belief is that the âDravidiansâ of
the Indus Valley civilisation originally populated
North India. Along came the nomadic Aryan warriors who
killed or enslaved most of the Dravidians, packed off
the remainder to the South, destroyed their cities and
imposed their language, religion and culture. How
simple, how easy!
Firstly, we now know that the cities of the Indus
Valley civilisation were destroyed by the environment
and geological changes, not invasion.
Secondly, nobody moved south: The Indus Valley culture
moved eastwards towards the Ganga, as did the Aryans.
Even Tamil literature does not speak of a north-south
migration. Then, there is absolutely no evidence that
the Aryans came from any place other than modern
Punjab-Sindh. So we must discard forever the theory of
a foreign origin for the Aryans.
The writers of the Vedas called themselves Aryas,
which meant a ânoble personâ and not an ethnic group.
Who were the Dravidians? No such word is ever used in
Vedic literature, and is a very late addition, adopted
by British historians. There are references to Dasa,
which meant enemy (Persian daha = enemy) and later, as
defeated enemies were enslaved, came to mean slave. No
racial differences have been found in any Harappan
archeological site, wiping out theories of different
races.
There is a presumption, created by British historians,
that Aryan and Brahmin are synonymous, and caste was
an Aryan creation. But Aryans included every caste and
jati. There are several non-Aryan Brahmin and
non-Brahmin Aryan castes. There is no mention of caste
in the Rig Veda, the oldest and purest Aryan
literature: its first appearance is as late as the
Purusha Sukta. So, caste must have been non-Vedic - or
non-Aryan - in origin. Further, people changed their
castes as they migrated. In our times, Pattunool
weavers from Saurashtra became Iyengars in Madurai,
Shreshtis (merchants) of ancient India became Sethis
and Seths in northern and western India, Shettys in
Karnataka and Chettys in Tamil Nadu.
All castes and communities who speak Sanskrit-based
languages are presumed to be Aryans, while the
speakers of Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu and Kannada are
considered to be Dravidians. Language is the least
reliable of all ethnic characterisations. I speak and
write English -does that make me English? People
always adopt the language that serves them best, for
language is, after all, a means of communication.
The Saurashtra Pattunool weaving community, the
Marathas of Thanjavur, and the Telugu-speaking
Nayakars are among the many examples of people who
have migrated and adopted the Tamil language. In the
North, scheduled castes and tribes of distinct
non-Aryan origin speak Sanskrit-based languages. India
has a long history of migrants who adopted the local
language and customs, like the Parsees who landed in
Gujarat. While Sanskrit and its descendant languages
belong to the Indo-European group (which includes
Persian), and Southern languages are grammatically
different, speaking a language does not give you an
ethnic identity.
Then there is this fallacy of an indigenous Dravidian
religion and an imposed Aryan religion. The gods of
the Aryans were Indra, Varuna, Mitra, Agni and so on.
With the exception of Agni, the all-consuming and
essential fire, all of them lost their pre-eminent
position to Brahma the Creator, Shiva the Destroyer,
and vishnu the Preserver, none of whom are even
mentioned in the Rig Veda but are now described as the
face of Aryan religion. These gods are both non-Aryan
and Brahmanic.
And what about the vehicles of the Gods? All this
makes the Brahmins the chief promoters of non-Aryan
religion! If Kartikeya or Murugan is now called the
âTamil Godâ, let us not forget that he owes his origin
to the Greek Kshatrapas and Kushanas. The chief God of
the Tamil Silappadikaram is Indran: Does that make the
epic âAryanâ?
Sacrificing animals is, we are told, basic to
Dravidian culture: banning sacrifice is âAryanisationâ
or âBrahminisationâ. Firstly, the earliest instances
of animal sacrifice are recorded in Sanskrit
literature, when the Aryans also sacrificed animals.
In time, as religion and people evolved, Brahmins
stopped sacrificing animals, thanks to the preaching
of the Upanishadic rishis, the Buddha and Mahavira.
The indigenous Bhakti movement that originated in the
Tamil country and slowly spread over the whole of
India, spoke out against killing animals for food or
sacrifice, and took the message of devotion to a
personal God to the common man. One should laud the
religious evolution and abjuring of primitive and
cruel practices that was preached by our saints.
Sacrifice was basic to all ancient religions, a life
for a life, blood for blood. As philosophers and
schools of philosophy developed, the contrast between
good and evil, right and wrong were extended to cover
previously accepted practices. Thus slavery, human
sacrifice and the caste system were condemned as
crimes against people, while vegetarianism and
condemnation of animal sacrifice were regarded as
respect for all life.
Even those who claim that sacrifice is essential to
âDravidianâ religion - whatever that means - will not
eat meat on Saturdays or on the New Moon (Amavasya)
day, nor will they sacrifice an animal in the pooja
rooms of their homes, affirming that non-killing of
animals is the higher goal. The so-called rationalists
support animal sacrifice in the name of âDravidianâ
culture and oppose âBrahminisationâ, understanding
neither and unable to define either, losing in the
process, all rationalism.
Today's Hinduism is an amalgam of every tradition to
be found in this country. The religion has absorbed
and encompassed local traditions and gods. Thus
deities like Kamakshi of Kanchi, Meenakshi of Madurai,
the Ashta Vinayak of Maharashtra, Balaji of Tirumala,
Ranganatha of Srirangam and Vaishno Devi of the
Himalayan foothills may not find themselves in any
Vedic text, but have more devotees than the Vedic
Gods.
Are they Aryan or Dravidian, or even local tribal
gods? Who knows and, more importantly, who cares?
The only pure Aryan ritual left is the presence of
Agni or Fire, who was essential to Vedic religion.
There are several non-Vedic variations to every
ceremony and festival in every community, such as the
mangal sutra or thaali in the wedding ceremony, the
various birth rites and even forms of disposing the
dead - from cremation to burial to cremation-burial.
The religion has evolved and adapted over 5000 years.
The best example is the festival of Ganesha, who was
never a Vedic God. His worship remained localised for
centuries until Lokamanya Tilak decided to utilise
Ganesh Chaturthi to unite Indians to fight for
self-rule. Ganesha came out of the family pooja and
into the public arena, a symbol of resurgent India.
Today the festival is probably the largest pan-Indian
celebration after Deepavali. Yet none of these
developments have scriptural sanction, nor are they
Aryan or Dravidian.
So it is time politicians stop hoodwinking people
about Aryan and Dravidian, and cease to blame
Brahminisation to score points against each other or
cover their own failures. No demarcation is possible
in Hinduism. We should ask ourselves whether a law is
good or bad, and support or oppose it thereafter. And
stop politicians from dividing us over non-existing
Aryan and Dravidian differences.
Cowasjee's article showers praise on the "Hindu historian, Bishambhar Nath Pande" because Pande worked hard all his life to correct the worng history that Indians are learning about the Muslim conquest of the subcontinent...
Hindus and Muslims
[url="http://www.dawn.com/weekly/cowas/cowas.htm"]http://www.dawn.com/weekly/cowas/cowas.htm[/url]
I am afraid I dont subscribe to the premise of Cowasjee's article, though i respect him and a man of honor he may be. Cowasjee falls prey to the common malady of the Paki namely the equal equal 'we are bad but so is India' Needless to say such a premise is irrelevant to the study of history. It is the actual acts committed throughout History that count.
Quote:On the subject of the Muslim conquest and subsequent ruthlessness of the conquerors, one can do no better than turn to Hindu and Brahmin Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru - to his book 'The Discovery of India', and to what he had to say on the expansion of Islam and its arrival in India at the end of the 12th century:
I regard Panditji as a very poor almost an incompetent historian. This is understandable because he wrote the books while in prison and did not have access to have a lot of referential material and had to use his memory for the most part. The fact of the matter is that most of what he wrote is just plain wrong and while lapses of memory are to be expected it was outrageous for him to describe Babar as a 'Prince Charming'.
The history of the Muslim period in Bharatiya Itihaas comes to us not from the Brits but from the Islamic Historians/savants of the period like Farishta,Al Biruni, Barani, Utbi and many others. They speak with great pride of the slaughter that successive sultans wreaked upon India and are emphatic that the Koran approves of such behavior.
Quote:"It is thus wrong and misleading to think of a Moslem invasion of India or of the Moslem period in India, just as it would be wrong to refer to the coming of the British to India as a Christian invasion, or to call the British period in India a Christian period. Islam did not invade India; it had come to India some centuries earlier....
Is it legitimate to call this period the Islamic period in Bharatiya Itihaas. Most certainly it is, because these historians took great pride in the fact that the sultans followed Koranic injunctions to the letter while carrying out thier massacres and while subsequently conferring second class status to the vast majority of Hindus in the country by imposing jizziya and other indignities such as beheading, rape and plunder. There was no question that Tamerlang was emphatic that the land he was conquering was Dar ul Harb and a prime candidate for massacres as a consequence. Islam may not have invaded India but the Islamic hordes certainly did so invoking the Koran and Koranic injuntions.
Further there is an implied assumption that somehow if we sugarcoat the truth , there will be happiness and peace between the Muslim and Hindu in India. Surely this is a false premise and Gandhiji would have been horrified to see the distortion of history that has been attempted in this country since Independence. It is a laudable goal that there should be harmonious relatons between the 2 major communities in India today. But the premise that such harmony is achieved by falsifying history is most certainly a non-sequitor. At best it will only increase the contempt of a section of the Muslim populace for the Hindu.
I am disappointed that Cowasjee, an upholder of truth for the most part, has forgotten the main reason why he is in Karachi in the first place and not in the land of his forefathers. It is not an accident of history that the Parsees are disappearing from the pages of History and they will soon become a distant memory. Read the passage in Naipauls Beyond Belief where a group of Parsee tourists at the tomb of darius in Iran wept uncontrollably at the fate that had befallen their community.
Balbir Punj reviews the movie "Pinjar". And the lessons therein. Sobering read...
Do Skeletons Have A Soul?
[url="http://www.outlookindia.com/"]http://www.outlookindia.com/[/url]
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