01-18-2006, 08:32 AM
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051205/ali
review | posted November 17, 2005 (December 5, 2005 issue)
Mystic River
Tariq Ali
The sage of Bengal has pronounced. Pluralism, we are informed, has an ancient
pedigree in Indian history. It is embedded in the oldest known texts of Hinduism
and, like a river, has flowed through Indian history (including the Mughal
period, when the country was under Muslim rule) till the arrival of the British
in the eighteenth century. It is this cultural heritage, ignored and
misinterpreted by colonialists and religious fanatics alike, that shapes Indian
culture and goes a long way toward explaining the attachment of all social
classes to modern democracy. The argumentative tradition "has helped to make
heterodoxy the natural state of affairs in India," exerting a profound influence
on the country's politics, democracy and "the emergence of its secular
priorities." This view informs most of the thought-provoking essays in Amartya
Sen's new book, a set of reflections on India written in a very different
register from his other books on moral philosophy and poverty. It is designed
not so much for the academy but as a public intervention in the country of his
birth, to which he remains firmly attached despite the Nobel Prize and his
latest posting at Harvard as a Boston Brahman.
Although the essays in The Argumentative Indian were composed at different
times, they have been successfully welded into a single volume. There is much to
agree with here. Sen's lofty worldview remains staunchly secular and
rationalist, as befits a scholar whose intellectual formation took place in
Nehru's India, a historical time zone under constant attack today from Hindu
nationalists on the one side and some of the more fashionable Indian luminaries
of the US branch of the subaltern school of historians on the other. Unlike
fellow Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, Sen does not see the entry of Islam into
India as a dagger thrust in the heart of Indian civilization. On the contrary,
he argues that the effect of Mughal rule was beneficial. This was undoubtedly
the case on the dietary front: The historian Irfan Habib has shown how the
average Indian peasant ate better and more often in this period than under the
British.
Given the title of Sen's book, it would be churlish to prove him wrong by simply
nodding in approval, as is so often the case in our wonderful subcontinent. What
follows, then, from this argumentative Pakistani is the expression of a few
doubts concerning his central thesis and the odd complaint with regard to some
omissions.
Can the lineages of modern Indian democracy be traced back to the holy texts, as
Sen suggests? And does the affection of ordinary citizens for democracy have any
material (as opposed to mystical) links to the arguments once heard by Buddha or
King Ashoka (273-232 B.C.), let alone the Mughal emperor Akbar (1556-1605)?
It's true that disputes abound in the ancient Sanskrit epics. Their multiple
tales are, as Sen puts it, "engagingly full of dialogues, dilemmas and
alternative perspectives," such as that of Javali, the notorious skeptic of the
Ramayana, who explains in detail how "the injunctions about the worship of gods,
sacrifice, gifts and penance have been laid down in the sastras [scriptures] by
clever people, just to rule over [other] people." In codifying the rules for
debate in the Buddhist councils, Ashoka demanded mutual respect among the
various sects. While the Inquisition was sowing terror in Europe, Akbar, himself
a Muslim, ruled that "anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that
pleases him." The interreligious debates he organized in Agra included Hindus,
Muslims, Christians, Parsees, Jains, Jews and the atheists of the Carvaka
school, who argued that Brahmans had established ceremonies for the dead only
"as a means of livelihood" for themselves. Even the Vedic Song of Creation on
the origins of the universe ends in radical doubt: "Who really knows? Whence
this creation has arisen--perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not--the
one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows--or perhaps he
does not know."
Yet the skepticism voiced by some rulers and reflected in ancient texts was
usually, if not always, confined to the priestly elites. The model for the
debates among scholars from different religions and sects that were organized by
Akbar's court was little different from similar discussions a few centuries
earlier in the camp of Mongol leader Genghis Khan (1162-1227). With this
exception: Mongol soldiers were permitted to both listen and participate in the
arguments. The Mughal courts in India were sealed off from public view: The
courtiers listened and, no doubt, nodded when the emperor smiled appreciatively
as a point was scored, but they did not speak. Only the emperor and a few of his
close advisers posed questions. The tyranny of the few over the many--exercised
through a ritual combination of coercion and religion--was never seriously
challenged in India until the advent of capitalist colonization. Nobody spoke
for the subalterns.
Unlike ancient Greece, there were no city-based institutions where important
issues could be debated, and the overglorified village panchayats, or councils,
were the domain of the privileged where the poor could only appear as
supplicants. Ancient India produced an ugly caste system that led to early
divisions and splits, but neither Brahmanism proper nor its wilder
offshoots--Buddhism and Jainism-- came even close to producing a political
philosophy that could lay the basis for a popular or semipopular assembly like
those in ancient Greece, whose formal decrees always began with the invocation:
"The demos has decided." The assemblies in Athens were barred to slaves, but
they did include peasant proprietors and even some peasants who worked for
others. Hence the debates between rich and poor; hence the fear of the multitude
evinced by the wealthy; hence Solon's New Deal- ish boast: "I stood covering
both [rich and poor] with a strong shield, permitting neither to triumph
unjustly over the other." But even these traditions, while never forgotten,
disappeared completely. The idea of democracy re-emerged in the debates that
followed the English Revolution and found institutional form only after the
American and French revolutions.
Ancient India produced great poets, philosophers and playwrights, along with art
forms, gods and goddesses to match anything on offer in Athens, but it did not
give birth to an Aristotle. And nothing remotely resembling the Assembly in
Athens or the Senate in Rome arose on the subcontinent. Surely this must reflect
some deficiency. Despite arguments within the elite and some wonderful
expressions of skepticism cited by Sen, the demos was kept under strict control
throughout Indian history. Uprisings threatening the status quo were brutally
crushed by Hindu and Muslim ruler alike. Superstition and irrationality were
institutionalized via a network of priestly domination.
The resilience of Brahman traditions lay not in encouraging debate but in the
power of the iniquitous caste system that survives to this day and pervades the
spirit of Indian democracy. One wishes that Sen, a longstanding critic of
economic inequality, had given us his views on whether globalization tends to
weaken or strengthen caste chauvinism in India. When in the third decade of the
past century, the "untouchable" leader Dr. Ambedkar insisted that his caste not
be considered Hindu so that they, like the Muslims, could demand separate
electorates from the British rulers, he was sweetly rebuffed by Mahatma Gandhi,
no doubt for the noblest of reasons. Hard-core confessional elements in the
leadership of the ruling Congress Party were only too aware that without the
"low castes" being counted as Hindus their overall weight in the population
would be drastically reduced.
What of India's Muslims? The Mughal conquest of India created a strong
centralized state, but there was not even an embryonic consciousness of
democracy, even in its most primitive, patrician form. The emperor was supreme.
His subjects could plead for justice in his presence once a week, and if they
were lucky they could be rewarded with a few coins and kind words. Interestingly
enough, while all the existing texts of classical Greece and Rome were
translated into Arabic during the eighth and ninth centuries, and while Islamic
schools of philosophy, mathematics, astronomy and medicine flourished in
Córdoba, Palermo and Baghdad, the one genuine innovation of the Greeks--the idea
of democracy--did not travel. The caliph was both the spiritual and the temporal
ruler, and any notion of an assembly of equals would have been seen as a godless
challenge to Allah's vice regent. The Mughal order in India was based on an
alliance of the wealthy and the creation of a strong central bureaucracy with
rights over large tracts of land.
Sen is correct to stress the tolerance of the Mughals, particularly Akbar,
toward the non-Muslim majority. The reasons for this policy, however, were not
simply altruistic. The Muslim conquerors, like the British after them, knew that
stable rule was dependent on securing the consent of crucial layers of the
indigenous elites. This they did successfully, and even the last of the great
Mughal emperors, the devout and narrow-minded Aurangzeb, presided over an
imperial army led by an equal mix of Hindu and Muslim generals. When the British
East India Company's army secured Bengal as a bridgehead in 1757 and made
Calcutta the first capital of British India, it did so with a very small number
of British officers, European weaponry and local recruits on a monthly wage.
Like its Mughal predecessor, the company was desperate for allies and often
bought them in the marketplace. The Bengali Renaissance that produced Nobel
Prize-winning writer and poet Rabindranath Tagore, filmmaker Satyajit Ray, the
Sens and numerous others was the result of a unique synthesis between local
tradition and imperial modernity, based on a capitalist economy. Without
capitalism there was no Indian modernity. Democracy in British India (as in
Britain itself) came a century and a half later as a result of pressure from
below on the part of a growing middle-class intelligentsia in Calcutta. "What
Bengal thinks today," declared the reformer Ram Mohun Roy, "India thinks
tomorrow."
That is why imperial ideologues as well as colonial apologists like Rudyard
Kipling came to despise Bengal. The Bengalis, in their estimation, were effete
intellectuals ill equipped to fight, unlike the "martial races" of the Punjab
and North-West Frontier. Kipling's fiction is filled with crude stereotypes of
the dark-skinned Bengali babu (clerk) as contrasted with the noble and
fair-skinned Pathan or the Rajput warrior. Better they were kept illiterate lest
they become uppity like the Bengalis.
Even supposing there was a strong "argumentative" tradition in India 3,000 years
ago, was this the frail aqueduct through which the democratic stream finally
moved? Such is the argument of Sen and (in a more fashionable formulation) of
postcolonial scholars who scornfully dismiss the suggestion that the British
presence had anything to do with the spread of democratic ideas and the rise of
Indian democracy. This is, in my view, a form of mysticism. We may not like it,
but there is no denying the impact of 150 years of British rule in India, which
brought capitalism to the country and overwhelmingly determined the nature and
character of Indian institutions. Sen accepts uncritically the historian Partha
Chatterjee's argument that, in Chatterjee's words, the emergence of nationalism
created its own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before its
political battle with the imperial power. It does this by dividing the world of
social institutions and practices into two domains--the material and the
spiritual. The material is the domain of the "outside," of the economy...of
science and technology...where the West has proved its superiority.... The
spiritual, on the other hand, is an "inner" domain bearing the "essential" marks
of cultural identity. The greater one's success in imitating Western skills in
the material domain...the greater the need to preserve the distinctiveness of
one's spiritual culture. Here one discerns a retreat from the secular definition
of nationhood espoused by Nehru and a slide into the murky domain of Hindu
nationalism, albeit in an ultra-civilized fashion. In rejecting the heritage of
Nehruvian socialism for its statism and affiliation with the urban middle class,
"left-wing" postcolonial historians like Chatterjee have eerily converged in
their arguments with right-wing Hindu politicians, who insist that the content
of Indian nationalism has always been spiritual, i.e., religious, thus excluding
India's large Muslim minority from the national community. (When the Hindu
nationalist brigade in the United States mounted a disgraceful campaign two
years ago against the Library of Congress decision to award a research
fellowship to Romila Thapar, one of the most distinguished secular historians of
ancient India, a majority of Indian historians on American campuses remained
silent.) What is "one's spiritual culture" and "cultural identity" if not
religion, even if lightly disguised as the Cow Protection League or the National
Fund to Rebuild Mosques? Was it possible for nationalism to move in a more
cosmopolitan than spiritual direction?
This raises the Gandhi question. Was it necessary for the Mahatma to use
spiritual (Hindu) imagery and language to rouse the majority of the countryside
from their torpor? Nehru and Tagore did not think so and argued heatedly with
the old fox, but on this Gandhi would not budge. It was they who gave up, Tagore
in despair and Nehru in the half-hope that the damage was reparable. But it
wasn't, and it led ultimately to the fatal breach with secular Muslims,
including Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. That there were other
straws in the nationalist breeze was revealed time and time again in the wave of
strikes that paralyzed the country in late 1945 and then again in 1946, when
Muslim, Hindu and Sikh naval ratings united against the British and seized the
ships, raising the banner of revolution. This was the most significant mutiny in
the history of the British Empire. On the advice of Jinnah and Gandhi, the
sailors surrendered "to India not the British."
The attachment to the "distinctiveness of one's spiritual culture" undoubtedly
helped provoke the bloody partition of the subcontinent, but the institutions
that provided the spinal cord of the new states owed little to spiritual
traditions. They were British creations, and Parliament was not the only one. It
certainly helped to unite India, but in neighboring Pakistan it is the army and,
to a lesser extent, the civil service, both creations of the Raj, that have
ruled the country. What happened to the "argumentative" tradition here? Taxila
(near Islamabad) was, after all, the site of one of the world's first large
(Buddhist) universities centuries before the Christian Era. It is not that most
Pakistanis did or do not like democracy. A new imperial power decreed that the
army was the most reliable guarantor of stability and order in the new country.
Here Washington has been consistent. Only this year Condoleezza Rice, on a visit
to Islamabad, praised Gen.Pervez Musharraf and his regime--apparently secular
and autocratic--as the model for the Muslim world. (Including Iraq?)
In India democracy has become embedded as the only acceptable form of rule
largely because of geography. If Pakistan split into two after an eleven-year
military dictatorship from 1958 to '69, what would an attempt to impose a
military regime in India have done to that country? Created a three-way split?
Or even more fragments? The regional elites realized that this would be an
economic disaster, and the unity of India under a democratic umbrella became the
common sense of the country. It is this and mass hostility to autocracy that
explains the longevity of the democratic system, but one should not
underestimate the power of turbo-propelled capitalism to weaken democracy in
India just as it is doing in its heartlands. Indians may want democracy, but it
is hardly a prerequisite for a dynamic capitalism. Europe demonstrated this
during the first 300 years of capitalism; China does so today.
The essay on the giant of Bengali letters, Tagore (1861-1941), who died six
years before India and his beloved Bengal was partitioned, is studded with gems.
Sen knows Tagore's work well, and his grandfather, a distinguished historian of
Hinduism, worked with the great poet in Santiniketan, a progressive educational
academy that provided the inspiration for Dartington Hall in England. Tagore's
standing in the West has been subject to many fluctuations. His mystic-spiritual
side appealed to many Westerners, including Ludwig Wittgenstein, but as Sen
explains, this was only one side of the man. In Bengal and India he was the
voice of reason, a cosmopolitan who encouraged the self-emancipation of the
people and urged them to free themselves from the Brahman and the British and
break the chains of caste and poverty. The dangers he saw for India were
structural, not spiritual. As he wrote in 1939: "It does not need a defeatist to
feel deeply anxious about the future of millions who, with all their innate
culture and their peaceful traditions, are being simultaneously subjected to
hunger, disease, exploitations foreign and indigenous, and the seething
discontents of communalism."
Sen's reflections on Tagore, however, would have benefited from comparison with
another great Indian poet: Muhammad Iqbal
(1877-1938), who wrote in Urdu and Persian. Iqbal, too, was given to mysticism,
but of the Sufi variety. Younger than Tagore, he was greatly influenced by Hegel
and the German philosophical tradition and was a great favorite of both Nehru
and Jinnah. Iqbal, too, died before partition. Tragically, he was immediately
mummified by the new state of Pakistan, his message so distorted that he is seen
by many in that country as a revivalist, which is far from the truth. Like
Tagore, he loathed priest and mullah alike and celebrated reason and knowledge,
as in this verse dividing God from Man: You created Night, I the Lamp You the
earth, I the bowls You created wilderness, mountains and ravines I the flower
beds, gardens and groves I make mirrors from stone I find antidotes in poison.
Both Tagore and Iqbal would have been mortified at the direction taken by the
modern leaders of the old subcontinent. Like Sen, both would have been alarmed
by the nuclear turn and missiles with confessional names targeted by each side
against the other. Even those who disagree with Sen or see him as a tame and
toothless Bengal tiger will be compelled to engage with his arguments. That
alone is sufficient reason to welcome the publication of this book.
review | posted November 17, 2005 (December 5, 2005 issue)
Mystic River
Tariq Ali
The sage of Bengal has pronounced. Pluralism, we are informed, has an ancient
pedigree in Indian history. It is embedded in the oldest known texts of Hinduism
and, like a river, has flowed through Indian history (including the Mughal
period, when the country was under Muslim rule) till the arrival of the British
in the eighteenth century. It is this cultural heritage, ignored and
misinterpreted by colonialists and religious fanatics alike, that shapes Indian
culture and goes a long way toward explaining the attachment of all social
classes to modern democracy. The argumentative tradition "has helped to make
heterodoxy the natural state of affairs in India," exerting a profound influence
on the country's politics, democracy and "the emergence of its secular
priorities." This view informs most of the thought-provoking essays in Amartya
Sen's new book, a set of reflections on India written in a very different
register from his other books on moral philosophy and poverty. It is designed
not so much for the academy but as a public intervention in the country of his
birth, to which he remains firmly attached despite the Nobel Prize and his
latest posting at Harvard as a Boston Brahman.
Although the essays in The Argumentative Indian were composed at different
times, they have been successfully welded into a single volume. There is much to
agree with here. Sen's lofty worldview remains staunchly secular and
rationalist, as befits a scholar whose intellectual formation took place in
Nehru's India, a historical time zone under constant attack today from Hindu
nationalists on the one side and some of the more fashionable Indian luminaries
of the US branch of the subaltern school of historians on the other. Unlike
fellow Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, Sen does not see the entry of Islam into
India as a dagger thrust in the heart of Indian civilization. On the contrary,
he argues that the effect of Mughal rule was beneficial. This was undoubtedly
the case on the dietary front: The historian Irfan Habib has shown how the
average Indian peasant ate better and more often in this period than under the
British.
Given the title of Sen's book, it would be churlish to prove him wrong by simply
nodding in approval, as is so often the case in our wonderful subcontinent. What
follows, then, from this argumentative Pakistani is the expression of a few
doubts concerning his central thesis and the odd complaint with regard to some
omissions.
Can the lineages of modern Indian democracy be traced back to the holy texts, as
Sen suggests? And does the affection of ordinary citizens for democracy have any
material (as opposed to mystical) links to the arguments once heard by Buddha or
King Ashoka (273-232 B.C.), let alone the Mughal emperor Akbar (1556-1605)?
It's true that disputes abound in the ancient Sanskrit epics. Their multiple
tales are, as Sen puts it, "engagingly full of dialogues, dilemmas and
alternative perspectives," such as that of Javali, the notorious skeptic of the
Ramayana, who explains in detail how "the injunctions about the worship of gods,
sacrifice, gifts and penance have been laid down in the sastras [scriptures] by
clever people, just to rule over [other] people." In codifying the rules for
debate in the Buddhist councils, Ashoka demanded mutual respect among the
various sects. While the Inquisition was sowing terror in Europe, Akbar, himself
a Muslim, ruled that "anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that
pleases him." The interreligious debates he organized in Agra included Hindus,
Muslims, Christians, Parsees, Jains, Jews and the atheists of the Carvaka
school, who argued that Brahmans had established ceremonies for the dead only
"as a means of livelihood" for themselves. Even the Vedic Song of Creation on
the origins of the universe ends in radical doubt: "Who really knows? Whence
this creation has arisen--perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not--the
one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows--or perhaps he
does not know."
Yet the skepticism voiced by some rulers and reflected in ancient texts was
usually, if not always, confined to the priestly elites. The model for the
debates among scholars from different religions and sects that were organized by
Akbar's court was little different from similar discussions a few centuries
earlier in the camp of Mongol leader Genghis Khan (1162-1227). With this
exception: Mongol soldiers were permitted to both listen and participate in the
arguments. The Mughal courts in India were sealed off from public view: The
courtiers listened and, no doubt, nodded when the emperor smiled appreciatively
as a point was scored, but they did not speak. Only the emperor and a few of his
close advisers posed questions. The tyranny of the few over the many--exercised
through a ritual combination of coercion and religion--was never seriously
challenged in India until the advent of capitalist colonization. Nobody spoke
for the subalterns.
Unlike ancient Greece, there were no city-based institutions where important
issues could be debated, and the overglorified village panchayats, or councils,
were the domain of the privileged where the poor could only appear as
supplicants. Ancient India produced an ugly caste system that led to early
divisions and splits, but neither Brahmanism proper nor its wilder
offshoots--Buddhism and Jainism-- came even close to producing a political
philosophy that could lay the basis for a popular or semipopular assembly like
those in ancient Greece, whose formal decrees always began with the invocation:
"The demos has decided." The assemblies in Athens were barred to slaves, but
they did include peasant proprietors and even some peasants who worked for
others. Hence the debates between rich and poor; hence the fear of the multitude
evinced by the wealthy; hence Solon's New Deal- ish boast: "I stood covering
both [rich and poor] with a strong shield, permitting neither to triumph
unjustly over the other." But even these traditions, while never forgotten,
disappeared completely. The idea of democracy re-emerged in the debates that
followed the English Revolution and found institutional form only after the
American and French revolutions.
Ancient India produced great poets, philosophers and playwrights, along with art
forms, gods and goddesses to match anything on offer in Athens, but it did not
give birth to an Aristotle. And nothing remotely resembling the Assembly in
Athens or the Senate in Rome arose on the subcontinent. Surely this must reflect
some deficiency. Despite arguments within the elite and some wonderful
expressions of skepticism cited by Sen, the demos was kept under strict control
throughout Indian history. Uprisings threatening the status quo were brutally
crushed by Hindu and Muslim ruler alike. Superstition and irrationality were
institutionalized via a network of priestly domination.
The resilience of Brahman traditions lay not in encouraging debate but in the
power of the iniquitous caste system that survives to this day and pervades the
spirit of Indian democracy. One wishes that Sen, a longstanding critic of
economic inequality, had given us his views on whether globalization tends to
weaken or strengthen caste chauvinism in India. When in the third decade of the
past century, the "untouchable" leader Dr. Ambedkar insisted that his caste not
be considered Hindu so that they, like the Muslims, could demand separate
electorates from the British rulers, he was sweetly rebuffed by Mahatma Gandhi,
no doubt for the noblest of reasons. Hard-core confessional elements in the
leadership of the ruling Congress Party were only too aware that without the
"low castes" being counted as Hindus their overall weight in the population
would be drastically reduced.
What of India's Muslims? The Mughal conquest of India created a strong
centralized state, but there was not even an embryonic consciousness of
democracy, even in its most primitive, patrician form. The emperor was supreme.
His subjects could plead for justice in his presence once a week, and if they
were lucky they could be rewarded with a few coins and kind words. Interestingly
enough, while all the existing texts of classical Greece and Rome were
translated into Arabic during the eighth and ninth centuries, and while Islamic
schools of philosophy, mathematics, astronomy and medicine flourished in
Córdoba, Palermo and Baghdad, the one genuine innovation of the Greeks--the idea
of democracy--did not travel. The caliph was both the spiritual and the temporal
ruler, and any notion of an assembly of equals would have been seen as a godless
challenge to Allah's vice regent. The Mughal order in India was based on an
alliance of the wealthy and the creation of a strong central bureaucracy with
rights over large tracts of land.
Sen is correct to stress the tolerance of the Mughals, particularly Akbar,
toward the non-Muslim majority. The reasons for this policy, however, were not
simply altruistic. The Muslim conquerors, like the British after them, knew that
stable rule was dependent on securing the consent of crucial layers of the
indigenous elites. This they did successfully, and even the last of the great
Mughal emperors, the devout and narrow-minded Aurangzeb, presided over an
imperial army led by an equal mix of Hindu and Muslim generals. When the British
East India Company's army secured Bengal as a bridgehead in 1757 and made
Calcutta the first capital of British India, it did so with a very small number
of British officers, European weaponry and local recruits on a monthly wage.
Like its Mughal predecessor, the company was desperate for allies and often
bought them in the marketplace. The Bengali Renaissance that produced Nobel
Prize-winning writer and poet Rabindranath Tagore, filmmaker Satyajit Ray, the
Sens and numerous others was the result of a unique synthesis between local
tradition and imperial modernity, based on a capitalist economy. Without
capitalism there was no Indian modernity. Democracy in British India (as in
Britain itself) came a century and a half later as a result of pressure from
below on the part of a growing middle-class intelligentsia in Calcutta. "What
Bengal thinks today," declared the reformer Ram Mohun Roy, "India thinks
tomorrow."
That is why imperial ideologues as well as colonial apologists like Rudyard
Kipling came to despise Bengal. The Bengalis, in their estimation, were effete
intellectuals ill equipped to fight, unlike the "martial races" of the Punjab
and North-West Frontier. Kipling's fiction is filled with crude stereotypes of
the dark-skinned Bengali babu (clerk) as contrasted with the noble and
fair-skinned Pathan or the Rajput warrior. Better they were kept illiterate lest
they become uppity like the Bengalis.
Even supposing there was a strong "argumentative" tradition in India 3,000 years
ago, was this the frail aqueduct through which the democratic stream finally
moved? Such is the argument of Sen and (in a more fashionable formulation) of
postcolonial scholars who scornfully dismiss the suggestion that the British
presence had anything to do with the spread of democratic ideas and the rise of
Indian democracy. This is, in my view, a form of mysticism. We may not like it,
but there is no denying the impact of 150 years of British rule in India, which
brought capitalism to the country and overwhelmingly determined the nature and
character of Indian institutions. Sen accepts uncritically the historian Partha
Chatterjee's argument that, in Chatterjee's words, the emergence of nationalism
created its own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before its
political battle with the imperial power. It does this by dividing the world of
social institutions and practices into two domains--the material and the
spiritual. The material is the domain of the "outside," of the economy...of
science and technology...where the West has proved its superiority.... The
spiritual, on the other hand, is an "inner" domain bearing the "essential" marks
of cultural identity. The greater one's success in imitating Western skills in
the material domain...the greater the need to preserve the distinctiveness of
one's spiritual culture. Here one discerns a retreat from the secular definition
of nationhood espoused by Nehru and a slide into the murky domain of Hindu
nationalism, albeit in an ultra-civilized fashion. In rejecting the heritage of
Nehruvian socialism for its statism and affiliation with the urban middle class,
"left-wing" postcolonial historians like Chatterjee have eerily converged in
their arguments with right-wing Hindu politicians, who insist that the content
of Indian nationalism has always been spiritual, i.e., religious, thus excluding
India's large Muslim minority from the national community. (When the Hindu
nationalist brigade in the United States mounted a disgraceful campaign two
years ago against the Library of Congress decision to award a research
fellowship to Romila Thapar, one of the most distinguished secular historians of
ancient India, a majority of Indian historians on American campuses remained
silent.) What is "one's spiritual culture" and "cultural identity" if not
religion, even if lightly disguised as the Cow Protection League or the National
Fund to Rebuild Mosques? Was it possible for nationalism to move in a more
cosmopolitan than spiritual direction?
This raises the Gandhi question. Was it necessary for the Mahatma to use
spiritual (Hindu) imagery and language to rouse the majority of the countryside
from their torpor? Nehru and Tagore did not think so and argued heatedly with
the old fox, but on this Gandhi would not budge. It was they who gave up, Tagore
in despair and Nehru in the half-hope that the damage was reparable. But it
wasn't, and it led ultimately to the fatal breach with secular Muslims,
including Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. That there were other
straws in the nationalist breeze was revealed time and time again in the wave of
strikes that paralyzed the country in late 1945 and then again in 1946, when
Muslim, Hindu and Sikh naval ratings united against the British and seized the
ships, raising the banner of revolution. This was the most significant mutiny in
the history of the British Empire. On the advice of Jinnah and Gandhi, the
sailors surrendered "to India not the British."
The attachment to the "distinctiveness of one's spiritual culture" undoubtedly
helped provoke the bloody partition of the subcontinent, but the institutions
that provided the spinal cord of the new states owed little to spiritual
traditions. They were British creations, and Parliament was not the only one. It
certainly helped to unite India, but in neighboring Pakistan it is the army and,
to a lesser extent, the civil service, both creations of the Raj, that have
ruled the country. What happened to the "argumentative" tradition here? Taxila
(near Islamabad) was, after all, the site of one of the world's first large
(Buddhist) universities centuries before the Christian Era. It is not that most
Pakistanis did or do not like democracy. A new imperial power decreed that the
army was the most reliable guarantor of stability and order in the new country.
Here Washington has been consistent. Only this year Condoleezza Rice, on a visit
to Islamabad, praised Gen.Pervez Musharraf and his regime--apparently secular
and autocratic--as the model for the Muslim world. (Including Iraq?)
In India democracy has become embedded as the only acceptable form of rule
largely because of geography. If Pakistan split into two after an eleven-year
military dictatorship from 1958 to '69, what would an attempt to impose a
military regime in India have done to that country? Created a three-way split?
Or even more fragments? The regional elites realized that this would be an
economic disaster, and the unity of India under a democratic umbrella became the
common sense of the country. It is this and mass hostility to autocracy that
explains the longevity of the democratic system, but one should not
underestimate the power of turbo-propelled capitalism to weaken democracy in
India just as it is doing in its heartlands. Indians may want democracy, but it
is hardly a prerequisite for a dynamic capitalism. Europe demonstrated this
during the first 300 years of capitalism; China does so today.
The essay on the giant of Bengali letters, Tagore (1861-1941), who died six
years before India and his beloved Bengal was partitioned, is studded with gems.
Sen knows Tagore's work well, and his grandfather, a distinguished historian of
Hinduism, worked with the great poet in Santiniketan, a progressive educational
academy that provided the inspiration for Dartington Hall in England. Tagore's
standing in the West has been subject to many fluctuations. His mystic-spiritual
side appealed to many Westerners, including Ludwig Wittgenstein, but as Sen
explains, this was only one side of the man. In Bengal and India he was the
voice of reason, a cosmopolitan who encouraged the self-emancipation of the
people and urged them to free themselves from the Brahman and the British and
break the chains of caste and poverty. The dangers he saw for India were
structural, not spiritual. As he wrote in 1939: "It does not need a defeatist to
feel deeply anxious about the future of millions who, with all their innate
culture and their peaceful traditions, are being simultaneously subjected to
hunger, disease, exploitations foreign and indigenous, and the seething
discontents of communalism."
Sen's reflections on Tagore, however, would have benefited from comparison with
another great Indian poet: Muhammad Iqbal
(1877-1938), who wrote in Urdu and Persian. Iqbal, too, was given to mysticism,
but of the Sufi variety. Younger than Tagore, he was greatly influenced by Hegel
and the German philosophical tradition and was a great favorite of both Nehru
and Jinnah. Iqbal, too, died before partition. Tragically, he was immediately
mummified by the new state of Pakistan, his message so distorted that he is seen
by many in that country as a revivalist, which is far from the truth. Like
Tagore, he loathed priest and mullah alike and celebrated reason and knowledge,
as in this verse dividing God from Man: You created Night, I the Lamp You the
earth, I the bowls You created wilderness, mountains and ravines I the flower
beds, gardens and groves I make mirrors from stone I find antidotes in poison.
Both Tagore and Iqbal would have been mortified at the direction taken by the
modern leaders of the old subcontinent. Like Sen, both would have been alarmed
by the nuclear turn and missiles with confessional names targeted by each side
against the other. Even those who disagree with Sen or see him as a tame and
toothless Bengal tiger will be compelled to engage with his arguments. That
alone is sufficient reason to welcome the publication of this book.