03-29-2008, 09:34 AM
http://medhajournal.com/content/view/104/80/1/9/
Western Identity -- Ours and Theirs...Part I
ABSTRACT
The attempt here is to discuss the Westernized Identity over multiple articles. In the beginning we discuss the relevance of this for the Non-Westerner, specifically the Indian. Then we discuss external, i.e. Geographical Sociopolitical & Military aspects of it. The idea of âThe Westâ is so implicit in any discussion, that we forget there is a simple and well-documented history behind the construction of âWesternâ identity. Much of this series of articles will try to look at a broad overview of this history, i.e. the history of the interaction of âThe Westâ with âThe Restâ.
Though the primary interest here is of the interaction of India with the West, it is necessary to place this in the context of the Westâs own worldview, i.e. its idea of how it (The West) has interacted with Russia, the âIslamic Worldâ the âFar Eastâ, and itâs own claimed Graeco-Judaic heritage. On this subject, I have found the lectures of British historian Arnold J Tonybee to be invaluable in their conciseness and clarity, and will be using them as a sort of âSkeletonâ to frame the discussion. The 1952 vintage lectures do miss out the last fifty years or so, but the broad framework he lays out has not changed enough to affect his historical points.
Also, his views, expressed when the dominance of the West was still uncontested, reflect the confident and explicit assertions typical of even the most well meaning Westerner when he talks of the Rest, and they are free of the âpolitically correctâ obfuscations by Westerners in todayâs environment. An example could be the West of today calling itself the âInternational Communityâ when it attempts to enforce its will.
In later parts of the article, his views, basically the standard Western views, are contrasted for balance with important non-Western perspectives, for example those of Native American leaders, and of course ideas from Indian History & Culture.
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1. INTRODUCTION
In the previous article on Identities (Identities and labels, how far should one go with them? ), we focussed somewhat at the Indian aspect of the Indian identity. Here we will try to address the Western aspect of the Indian identity. My assertion is that most of us (the English educated intelligentsia) have a dominant Western identity in us that arrogates to itself the power to make most of our practical decisions, since we are convinced that it is âmost Rationalâ, âmost modernâ etc. While this is not in itself a bad thing, one may want to wonder at whatâs happening to the Indian (or other non-Western) side of our identities, weighed down & atrophying under the burden. Perhaps it needs breathing room, & we can place our Western identity side-by-side with our Indian one for a while? Since this Western side of ours is not more than a century or two old, we should at least be able to take ownership of our Identity. We could then look at it with clarity, perhaps analyze it so we think critically of what is and isnât working for us, and what needs to be retained, & what needs to be thrown away?
But before this âdethroningâ of our Western identity to put it on par with our Indian one, we need to know a bit about the West, and about Westernization.
Hereâs an attempt to know the West, starting with itâs own conception of itself, via words of renowned historian Arnold J Tonybee.
2. TONYBEE
We will refer to his handy book âThe world and the Westâ, all of 99 pages. This appears to be a brilliantly condensed version of his âmagnum opusâ â âA Study of Historyâ in four large Volumes (See Ref#4 for detail).
Let us now get familiar with our reference, A.J. Tonybee, and his âThe world and the Westâ. Why this book is so interesting is explained by the Quotes from the book jacket:
"Universally acknowledged as one of the greatest living historians of his time." His book "A study of history" is considered a classic. âThe world and the Westâ represents the Reith Lectures for 1952 over the BBC.â
â...he invites us to look through impartial eyes at what this world has experienced in its contact with the West during the last five hundred years....â
The book is summarized as below-
[AJT QUOTE #1]
âFor the worlds experience at our (Western) hands has been by no means as salutary as our wishful thinking would have us believe.
The most important single factor in this encounter between the world and the West is that our Western technical achievements, our "bag of tools", have taken the world by storm while our way of life has been assimilated only partly and imperfectly.
Nor is this a mere accident; experience shows that in all encounters between civilizations, a part of an alien culture is more readily accepted than the whole. But in today's world distances have been annihilated and man finds himself face to face not only with other men's tools but also with their ideas.
Our Western way of life is locked in deadly struggle with Russia's way of life and must compete with it for the allegiance of all mankind. It seems, therefore, that the present round of the collision between the world and the West will have to be fought out on the spiritual plane, with the weapons of the mind and the spirit.â
These words of his above still ring true today, except for some minor updates, i.e. substitute â Islamic Fundamentalismâ for âRussiaâ, factor in the recently acknowledged ârise of Asiaâ and it is up to date. It appears that the identity of most people is locked in the struggle to figure out how much one is of the âRestâ and how much of the âWestâ, with a marked preference assumed for the latter. One can note his sense of what are tasks still incomplete & imperfectly done. The sense of âMission of the Westâ canât be missed in the above tone. Also the sense of Western values & values of Christianity being inextricably tied to one another, though not apparent in above quote, is confidently present throughout his words.
This may also be a good place to say that the word âhinduâ is being used in this article in the cultural sense, i.e. indigenous Indian thought & traditions, still followed by the vast majority of Indians that havenât âconvertedâ to exclusivist foreign ideologies like Abrahamism (Euro Christianity & Euro inspired Communism, etc ). The word Indic (hindu, buddhist, jain, tribal etc, i.e the various Dharmic thought systems) fits the bill much better sometimes.
Hereâs how the book is laid out. From âBook Contentsâ:
CONTENTS
I. Russia and the West
II. Islam and the West
III. India and the West
IV. The Far East and the West
V. The psychology of the encounters
VI. The World and the Greeks and the Romans
We will start with bringing in elements from Chapter III, this being of most relevance to us, and then more on to the broader Global issues via chapters I, II, IV, etc later, in parts 2, 3 etc of this article.
There will be plenty of direct quotes from the book in the main body of the article, in italics etc, prefaced by [AJT QUOTE # ] to distinguish them from my words; and a few in the REFERENCES section.
So without further ado, letâs move on to the Indian scene.
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3. WESTERNIZATION OF INDIA
Let us start with a simple relevant example. Let us take the case of a child growing up in India, going through the schooling system, becoming useful to society, getting a job, & achieving socioeconomic success. This could well describe most of us reading articles like this, basically middle/upper middle class Indians in general. Hopefully this example makes sense also to the occasional reader not of Indian heritage.
In going through all these stages of life, the really relevant "Education & development" has been entirely in the Western side of our personalities. How well we are educated in our "Indiannessâ (hindu or non hindu) is largely irrelevant to the system where our Westernized education is the primary asset that allows us to interact in the Westernized Industrial structure, bureaucracy, etc. Hence The Westernized Indian is the standard by which power & success is achieved for the majority, irrespective of the Indian side of their background (linguistic, geographical, etc..). Westernization is the norm.
Moving over to the other side, for the child growing up in US, it is pretty much the same, education & public affirmation of the Western norm is all that is promoted in the system, be it education in Western mores & methods, or later deployment of the same in professional life. The non-Western aspects of the non-Western heritage, if any, is largely irrelevant to society as a whole.
From the Indian-American perspective, it is easy to see that this Westernized side is indeed the main key of our success in the US, and the only relevant side of us to most Americans (& I daresay this is similar for other Indian diaspora in the West elsewhere). The Indian identity is largely irrelevant, sometimes even a liability if the field of endeavour is not based on objectively measurable skills like Technology, medicine, etc.
So, in summary, the common factor in both societies is Westernized behavior.
Regarding this pervasive Westernization in India, one of the basic points to note is that the Westernized behaviour is pretty much the PRIVILEGED BEHAVIOUR in the Indian social & Economic world, and not just IN ADDITION TO the existing Indian behavioral attributes which come from various local sources, like parents, extended family, & society.
This in itself need not be criticized as a bad thing, and most Indians donât. But we do need to be aware that regardless of where the Indian-ness of the Indian is coming from (Indic-hindu/buddhist/jain/sikh/etc, or Parsee, muslim, christian, etc..); if (s)he doesn't posses this vital component of Westernization (at least in basic terms, i.e. of being able to get by in the Westernized landscape); his/her social and economic future is highly limited.
Criticism, if any, is about the privileged position of Westernized behavior, over and above notions of Indian-ness.
Our simple example of the pragmatic Indian parents "voting with their feet" in educating their kids in Westernized (mostly English medium) school systems illustrates this. I wonder which pragmatic parent will disagree in their pragmatic actions with above, no matter how wedded they are to their own alternative worldviews (hindu, muslim, or anything else non-Western). They will send their child to a school where he learns to deal with the Westernized world, since that is the one the child will face, either in India or US. Hindu thought, norms, etc don't have any place in all this (how many Indic ideas are kids being taught in school in India?) Most of our parents are testimony of that overwhelming fact.
We also recognize that India is not alone in this privileging of Westernized behavior. Most of the world is at various stages of acceptance and/or negotiation with this paradigm.
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4. HISTORY SUMMARIZED
From a historical perspective, here are some more clarifications.
Historically speaking, the only really "non local" or "incoming cultures" that have left tangible traces on Indian life are the post 10th century Islamic, & the post 17th century Western (mostly British) Colonization.
Regardless of what other minor cultural interactions have happened, and not even attempting to refute unproven theories of "invasions" or "migrations" of the remote past; once you go prior to the influence of these two foreign sources (with variations inside of themselves), what you get is the home grown culture of India.
Of these two, for the purposes of this discussion, I'm not including Islamic rule/influence as "Western" for obvious reasons, based on my usage of "West" above.
But, one could say, we hear that after Indian independence there is a renewal or revival of Indic thought, and some of us may optimistically even believe this. I'd like to believe that too, but currently, I'm of the opinion that we are far from any "rehabilitation" of any form of Indic identity in the Indian Public behavior. As a simple bellwether to track, it will be interesting to follow what kind of curriculum is to be taught at the attempted "revival" of the universally respected & ancient Nalanda University with what appears to be a massive amount of Public & foreign funds. Will "Nalanda" just be a convenient "Brand name" to be used to market the predilections of the "modern" Indian intelligentsia, which mostly run to the "Secular" subjects ? (i.e. dominantly Western, since most Indic Philosophy & Experiential Science is wrongly lumped & then dumped with "hindu religion" & this banned from the "secular" Public sphere.) With luminiaries like Amartya Sen who seems unable to say Hindu without reflexively saying "fundamentalism" (see my "Identities and labels, how far should one go with them?" article for more on Amartya Sen) and his cohorts like Sugata Bose at the helm, I wouldn't bet on much Indic thought being considered fit to teach there. (For more angst on Nalanda, see my poem "What's in a name, Oh Nalanda, and What of Rama Setu?" ) Hopefully, I'll be proven wrong.
While Indic identity might have been normative in pre Islamic India, and maybe somewhat significant in Islamic dominated India, we are now in a world post the interactions with Islam+West. Even Hindu-ness wherever it exists, has no real power of normativeness in people's Public behavior (Political, Social, Economic). It just continues as a received habit, while Westernization is actively pursued.
And the "hindu-ness", in as much as any privileging identification goes, is limited to the sidelines, in the homes of individuals, & inside powerless "traditional" institutions. Sure, Political parties may be attempting to tap into this angst, but with sporadic success, One major reason being that easy definitions of "hinduism" are so difficult, thus not easily amenable to political manipulation.
In the broader picture, when I try to define Indic identity, or Indian ness, I'm not limiting the definition, or deriving it from religion. I'm talking of all the aspects that are not derived from Indian's interaction from the West. It is not too difficult to show the commonness in the "Non-Westernness" of both hindu & muslim Indians in this regard, no matter what the differences elsewhere. Of course language & other regional etc. attributes are part of this Indian-ness. What is common here is the Non-Western ness of all these attributes of the Indian.
Related to this is the point that Westernization is much more pervasive than knowing how to speak in English. It is the transactions (law, education subjects, commerce, etc) that are all pervasively Western. A person from Hindi medium also has to do the same transactions.
Defining my terminology in more, here is some clarification.
My usage of these terms West / Westernization, etc are in the sense of the West in how it influenced the Rest via its policies of Colonization & the still ongoing post-colonial dominance. This view is quite similar to Tonybee's, so there's no conflict there. As generally understood, the overt (& acknowledged) influence of the West has been rather one-way, with the West affecting the Rest (eg. Asia, Africa, America North & South) and remaining relatively unchanged in its own norms, ruling power structures, etc. Hence the Westernization of the Rest is the key (each of the "Rest" may have responded differently, but all responding to the same "force" of Westernization).
The West being geographically, Western Europe/US & other outposts dominated by people of European background; the West value-wise being a society with strong underpinnings of Judeo-Christian values -updated via a few centuries of Enlightenment thought; and the West people-wise being explorers/industrialists/colonizers using the muscle initially of the Euro-Industrial Revolution, and later using the whole Military Commercial infrastructure of the above countries. (In this scenario, newcomers like "Post Meiji" Japan occasionally in the "West", occasionally out, depending on how they agree / differ from the norms.)
Hence the definition I'm attempting is a broad one, since the onslaught / effect is rather broad & global too.
This view of the West as "Force/ Agent of Change" and the Rest as "recipients of the change" is shared as received wisdom by the proponents of Westernization, which is pretty much the conventional establishment "intelligentsia" of the World.
A quick summary, with "poetic license" can be found at my poem "THE CRASH OF CIVILIZATIONS ". (Serious readers are warned to go there only at risk to their sensibilities & humour!)
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5. IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION
While the modern Westernized world laughs at the âJohnny come latelyâ attempts by the âRestâ to formulate a coherent self-description (Indic, Confucian, etc) in âmodernâ or even âpost-modernâ terminology, it is no secret among scholars that the supposed âcoherenceâ of Western identity is also one that can be held up & examined for its many inconsistencies & leaps of logic. See Ronald Indenâs âImagining Indiaâ (Ref#2 ) which show how much energy was invested in the construction of Western Identity, while it was simultaneously denied that the âRestâ like India were capable of âagencyâ, i.e. of Rational behavior as dynamic cultures & societies. See also Ref #3 on the Gupta Age in India, to see convincing evidence of how, for example the celebrated French Renaissance finds a worthy âprequelâ in the Gupta period of Indian History, which achieved a cultural Golden Age of at least equal scope, and fully one thousand years before it.
With the above in view, let us see what Tonybee has to say on behalf of the âWestâ.
Following excerpt gives a clear idea of his worldview, which consistently finds expression, and explanation, in the book.
[AJT QUOTE #2]
In fact, if, looking at the contemporary world as a whole, one were to try to make the broadest and simplest analysis of the main cultural divisions in it, one would find oneself grouping the Muslims, the ex-Eastern Orthodox Christians and the ex-Western Christians together as members of a single great society which one could distinguish from both the Indian world and the Far Eastern world by giving this society, like each of those, an overall label of its own.
Since the Spiritual possession that all we Christians and Muslims have in common with one another is a pair of common heritages-one from the Jews and another from the Greeks-we could label our Christian-Muslim society the Graeco-Judaic, to distinguish it both from a Hindu Society in India and from a Confucian-Buddhist Society in the Far East.
From this bird's-eye view that takes in the whole of mankind, the divers Muslim and Christian variations on a common Graeco-Judaic way of life fade almost out of view. They look quite insignificant by comparison witht he characteristics that are common to all of us Muslim and Christian members of our Graeco-Judaic cultural family.
When we contrast our Muslim-Christian way of life as a whole with the Hindu way or with the Far Eastern, the differences, inside our Muslim-Christian family, between Eastern Orthodox Christendom and Western Christendom and Islam, almost cease to be visible.
Comments on above are as follows. One can appreciate that Tonybeeâs worldview is much more convincing & encompassing than the simplistic âClash of Civilizationsâ view championed by Americans Bernard Lewis & Samuel Huntington, where by some convenient contortions, Islam is presumed as another distinct Civilization, instead of being acknowledged as the estranged âAbrahamic brotherâ it is. This probably is to suit the current political climate of âIslam vs Westâ. One could assert that past Islamic Imperialism & Western Imperialism, both past & present are very similar in their grand views of themselves.
Tonybee, much to his credit, does try to inform his Western reader, early on, to get some perspective on what his/her sense of âWesternâ is, and how it could affect their thinking. See the quote below, which is a sort of introductory preface.
[AJT QUOTE #3 from Chapter I]
...Isn't the West just another name for as much of the world as has any importance for practical purposes today?....This title( )was chosen deliberately( )to make two points( )first( )the West has never been all of the world that matters( )even a the peak of the West's power (and this peak has perhaps now already been passed)( )second( )in the encounter( )going on for( )five hundred years, the world, not the west, is the party that, upto now, has had the significant experience. It has not been the West that has been hit by the world; it is the world that has been hit-and hit hard-by the West.
A Westerner who wants to grapple with this subject, must try ( ) to slip out of his native Western skin and look at the encounter( )through the eyes of the great non-Western majority of mankind. Different though the people may be from one another ( ) he will hear them all giving the same answer )The West, they will tell him, has been the arch aggressor of modern times, and each will have their own experience of Western aggression to bring up against him.
The Russians will remind him that their country has been invaded by Western armies overland in 1941,1915,1812,1709, and 1610; the peoples of Africa and Asia will remind him that, within the same period, the Westerners have occupied the lion's share of the world's vacant lands in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and South and East Africa. The Africans will remind him that they were enslaved and deported across the Atlantic in order to serve the European colonizers of the Americas as living tools to minister to their Western masters' greed for wealth. The descendants of the aboriginal population of North America will remind him that their ancestors were swept aside to make room for West European intruders and for their African slaves.
....What, then, has been the world's experience of the West?
And with that introduction, we can jump right in.
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6. A DETAILED LOOK AT Chapter III of âThe World and the Westâ
(Chapter III. India and the West)
Below are direct sequential quotes from book (italics/box), with each paragraph followed by my comments. The idea is to capture the authorâs flow (and learn a broad overview of Colonial History), while attempting to put perspective where the need is felt. As a reminder, Chapter I & II (not discussed much in this article) have discussed Russia & Islamâs encounters with the West. These encounters happened much before Indiaâs did, and have a longer history. More on these in part 2 of this article.
[AJT QUOTE #4 split into many paragraphs for comments]
In India's encounter with the West there has been one experience that has not been shared with India by any other society in the world. India is a whole world by herself; she is a society of the same magnitude as our Western society; and she is the one great non Western society that has been, not merely attacked and hit, but overrun and conquered outright by Western arms, and not merely conquered by Western arms, but ruled, after that, by Western administrators. In Bengal this Western rule lasted for nearly 2 hundred years, and in the Punjab for nearly a hundred. India's experience of the West has thus been more painful and more humiliating than China's and Turkey's, and much more so than Russia's or Japan's; but , just for this reason, it has been also much more intimate. Personal contacts between Indians and Westerners have been more numerous, and our Western iron has probably entered deeper into India's soul.
My Comments on above are: In Chapters I & II, the subjects were the Westâs encounters with Russia & with Islam. The idea of âWestern Ironâ entering âIndiaâs soulâ appears like fanciful hyperbole, but it sits well with his âGrand Narrativeâ style, and the general Western construction of its ideas & technologies being hard, & irresistibly âmasculineâ.
Perhaps India would not have been conquered by Western arms if she hadn't been conquered by Muslim arms first....The last wave of Muslim conquerors of India overland arrived in India not many years after the first landing in India, in 1498, of the Portuguese wave of Western mariners. These Mughal Muslims forestalled the British Westerners in bringing almost the whole of India under a single government. The Mughal peace in India may not have been so effective as the subsequent British peace was to be at its zenith; but the Mughal peace lasted as long as the British peace was to last, and, when, in the 18th century it fell to pieces, it left legacoes that made it not so difficult for the Mughals' British successors to reassemble the fragments of he Mughal Empire.
My Comments on above are: Throughout all British writings on India (both fiction & non fiction) it can be observed that the prevailing sentiment of Britons was that they themselves were very similar to their âglamourous Mughal predecessorsâ in what they were upto in India. The Brits were, of course, just better at it, by their own reckoning. One can then see why it was good to have around a conveniently âscholarlyâ Aryan Invasion Theory. The moment this theory/conjecture started making the rounds, the Colonialists jumped & appropriated it, for that explained that there were merely the last on a long line of Conquerors. âSee, we are just a newer branch of Phoren Aryan cousins that have ruled you all the timeâ¦â
One legacy was an Imperial land-revenue organization which ran on by its own momentum during the 18th century bout of anarchy in India. It ran on because it had become an Indian habit, and the condition of Indian hearts and minds to acquiesce, by force of habit, in an empire imposed on India by alien conquerors was the second of the Mughal legacies from which the Mughals' British successors profited.
My Comments on above are: Same theme of âforever conquered, docile, lacking in initiativeâ stereotypical of Colonial reading of India. (See Ref#3 Inden). The British were certainly more efficient in exploitation of land, both of minerals to fuel their industrial revolution, and of taxing the cultivators, where the ruthlessly efficient system sucked out wealth and destroyed the delicately linked & locally compatible economies, especially after the arrival of the âIndianâ Railways. Also the British censuses (still in use in India today, after 60+ years of Independence) contributed in no small measure to the further rigidization of fluid divisions in Indian society on âCasteâ & Religionâ lines.
The British successors of the Mughal rulers of India condemned their own revival of the Mughal Raj to come to an end when, in the 1830s they deliberately set out to change the habits that their Mughal predecessors had implanted in Indian minds. In the 1830s the British rulers of India opened a window to the West for Indian minds by substituting a Western for an Islamic and a Hindu higher education in India and thereby introducing the Indians to their British rulers' own Western ideas of liberty, parliamentary constitutional government, and Nationalism. The Indians took this Western political education to heart. It moved them to demand for India, the self-government that Great Britain enjoys; and today the Hindu successors of the British Raj in the Indian Union, and the Muslim successors of the British Raj in Pakistan, are dedicated to the enterprise of ruling their shares of the sub-continent on the lines on which their British predecessors in the government of India have been conducting the government of Great Britain since 1688.
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My Comments on above are: Again, an example of confident use of the âIndian mindâ being âimplantedâ with a foreign habit. Of course the Macaulayite substitution of Western education methods for existing Indian education methods is a major tool of Westernization still in use by the Indian intelligentsia. In getting Western political education, Tte colonized merely recognized the need to talk back in the Colonizerâs language.
Also the conflation of India as âhindu Indiaâ which is still prevalent today, tells how well Indiaâs âsecular republicâ is understood by outsiders. Theocratic Pakistan (& Bangladesh) are considered the same class as Indiaâs âminorityâ worshipping establishment.
It is perhaps particularly noteworthy that the present Hindu rulers of the greater part of the Indian sub-continent should have chosen, as they have, to carry on the Government on Western lines originally laid down by alien conquerors. In the territories included in the Indian Union, the Hindus are now masters in their own house for the first time since the beginning of the Muslim conquest of India eight or nine hundred years ago. In the eighteenth century, when the Mughal Muslim raj was breaking up, there were moments when it looked as if it was going to be followed immediately by the establishment of Hindu successor states. In the 18th century scramble for the Mughal' heritage, a Maratha Hindu Power seemed for a time to be well on the way to winning the lion's share of the spoils. This 18th century attempt to transform the Mughal raj into a Maratha Hindu Raj was foiled by the intervention of a more powerful Western hand.
Quick & easy summary, same problems of easy categorization.
But the establishment of a British Raj instead of a Maratha Raj did not bring to a halt the resurgence of the Hindus in their own homeland. When the military lines taken by the Hindu renaissance in the 18th century ended in military failure, the gathering stream of Hindu energy was merely diverted into a different channel. Under the British Raj in the 19th and 20th centuries, as during the interregnum in the 18th century, the Hindus continued steadily to gain power in India, but under the British regime they gained it, not by force of arms, but by force of mastering a Western system of education, administration and law which were so many keys to power in a Westernizing world.
A pat given on âHinduâ backs for being law abiding even as their civilization was being dismantled & âRe-Engineeredâ. Fairly accurate description, though.
The Hindus were quicker than the Indian Muslims to see and seize the opportunity that, in a Western age of Indian history, was open to Indians who effectively cultivated the Western arts of peace. Unlike the Indian Muslims, the Hindus had no enervating memories of recently lost power and glory to keep them brooding ineffectively over a dead past instead of reaching out into the future; and so a balance of power which had begun to incline against the Muslims in an anarchic 18th century continued to go against them in the 19th and 20th centuries under a British peace which set a premium on intellectual ability, in place of military prowess, as the qualification for advancement in the continuing competition between Hindus and Indian Muslims who were now alike subjects of a Western crown. The Indian muslims did, of course, follow their fellow hindu Indians' example. They too set themselves to master the arts of our Western civilization. Yet, when the voluntary liquidation of the British Raj in India came within sight, the Indian Muslims insisted that the retransfer of Govt. of India from British to Indian hands must be accompanied by a partition of Indian between a Hindu and a Muslim successor state; and this insistence on separation was, in effect, a recognition of the truth that, since the day of 'the Great Moghuls', there had been a reversal of the balance of power between the Muslims and Hindus in India to the Muslims' disadvantage. In a joint Hindu-Muslim state including the whole sub-continent, the Indian Muslims feared that they would now be swamped by a Hindu majority of the population.
Here he makes a bland presumption of âhindu muslim competitionâ as if there were two clearly warring groups. âDivide et Emperaâ or Divide & Rule implicit in this thinking. The muslim masses were (if I get it right) held back by their Clergy based leadership until charismatic muslim aristocrats (who were many) like Sir Syed & friends convinced the islamic clergy to agree to have them jump into the English school system.
So it was Voluntary liquidation by the Brits. And Indians thought theyâd âwonâ a Freedom Struggle! Oh the delusions of âGandhianâ grandeurâ¦.
Though in 1947 a predominantly Muslim Pakistan thus parted company with a Predominantly Hindu Indian Union, the objective of the British Indian Empire's two successor states has so far been the same. In this first chapter of their histories, the power in both states has been in the hands of the element in their population that has had a Western education and that has been inspired by this with Western ideals. If this element remains in power in India and Pakistan, as well as in Ceylon, we may look forward to seeing the statesmen of these Asian countries use their influence over their countrymen to persuade them to remain members of our "free world". No doubt these same Asian statesmen will continue to demand that, in a "free world" that is to be a common home of Western and Asian peoples, there shall be no unfair and invidious discrimination against the Asian members of the family, and we Western members are bound to give satisfaction to our Asian fellow members on this point if, in calling our world "free", we are sincere. Unless we Western members of "the free world" fail to live upto our professed liberal principles, we may hope to see the present Western-trained and Western-minded rulers of India, Pakistan, and Ceylon continue in partnership with us.
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Our intelligentsia takes pride in above characterization, but is loath to admit this when challenged as to why this junior âpartnershipâ is good for the common Indian and the future of Indian society. Tonybee shows impressive anticipation about the geopolitical currents today. Western overtures to ârising powersâ like India are in overdrive right now. Get the rulers, and the population is automatically yours.
It is one of the vital interests of the Western peoples that this partnership of ours with the peoples of the Indian sub-continent should be preserved; for these people together constitute one of the two Asian quarters of the human race; and only two years after Great Britain had made a move for reconciliation of Asia with the West by completing the liquidation of British rule...., the Chinese, who constitute the second of the two quarters of the human race, went over fron the Western camp to the Russian. If after losing the friendship of the Chinese sub-continent, our Western world was to lose the friendship of the Indian sub-continent as well, the West would have lost to Russia most of the Old World, except for a pair of Bridgeheads in Western Europe and Africa; and this might well be a decisive event in the struggle for power betwen the "free world" and Communism. The Indian Union, the successor state of the British Empire which covers most of the Indian sub-continent, and the state in which the Hindus are predominant- occupies a commanding position in the divided world of today, in which the United States and her associates are competing for world power with the Soviet union and her associates. In which direction is the hindu fifth of the human race going to incline? Let us look a t some of the considerations telling for and against the likelihood of the Hindus continuing to go our Western way.
The Superpower rivalry, the âGreat Gameâ described well even in the 50s. The choices laid out for the âhindu fifth of humanityâ havenât changed much. Symbolic independence and local autonomy is better than the alternative, one guesses. Take it or leave it
Let us take a promising part first. It looks as if today, personal relations between Indians and Westerners are more friendly than they ever have been. Many citizens of the United Kingdom will certainly have had the experience-which the writer has a number of times since 1947-of being surprised and touched by the friendliness that the Indians have been going our of their way to show the British people. This has happened to the writer several times in foreign countries, where local observers were on the lookout to see what the relations between the Indians and the British really were now; and he found Indians in conspicuous positions abroad going out of their way to show that the former unhappy estrangement between them and the British was now dead and buried as far as they were concerned. When Great Britain did completely fulfil her promise to liquidate her rule in India, the Indians were, it seems, taken aback. They had perhaps never fully believed that the British intended ever to fulfil their promise to India; and so, when the British did keep their word, there was a revulsion on the Indian side from hostility to friendliness. It is handsome of the Indians make their new friendliness towards the British apparent; and this happy change in the relations of the Indians and the British with another is assuredly something gained for our "free world" as a whole.
Glib sincerity is on display here in the âletâs just be friends, ok?â attitudes, and this is something for Indians to chew on. Our âconspicuous leadersâ are understood by Westerners to a Tee! (âYouâre a better man than I, Gunga Din!â) A pat on the back now & then, warm handshakes, grand âfriendlyâ gestures, and they are so easily manageable, in contrast to the Chineseâ¦who would rather play hardball.
The estrangement between India and a Western world which, for India, has been represented by Great Britain goes back to the beginning of the Indian movement for independence in the 1890s, and behind the tragic conflict in 1857. It goes back to the reforms in the British administration in India that were started in the 1780s. This birth of estrangement from in relations between Indians and British people is one of the ironies of history; and yet there is a genuine inner connexion between the two events.
In the 18th century the newly installed British rulers of India were free and easy with the newly acquired subjects in two senses. They were unscrupulous in using their political power to fleece and oppress them, and at the same time they were uninhibited in their social relations with them. They hob-nobbed with their Indian subjects off duty, besides meeting them at work on less agreeable terms. The more intellectual British residents in India in the 18th century enjoyed the game of capping Persian verses with Indian colleagues; the more lively Indians enjoyed being initiated into English sports.....in 1786...Indians and Englishmen could be hail-fellow-well-met with one another. The British rulers of India in the first generation behaved, in fact, very much as their Hindu and Muslim predecessors had behaved. Humanly corrupt, and therefore not inhumanely aloof; and the British reformers of British rule, who were rightly determined to stamp out the corruption and who were notably successful in this difficult undertaking, deliberately stamped out the familiarity as well, because they held that the British could not be induced to be superhumanly upright and just in their dealings with their Indian subjects without being made to feel and behave as if they were tin gods set on pedestals high and dry above those Indian humans down below.
Some perceptive observations above. Their fascination with âCourtly Islamâ finds detailed mention in books like EM Forsterâs âPassage To Indiaâ, and other âRajâ fiction & non-fiction, a book genre by itself. There are interesting observations that the British âColonial Townsâ in India were built so that wives of Administrators & Soldiers could join them. The presence of wives & kids ended the give & take with Indians on human terms, & thus started off the aloof British Ruler living in his separate world, who would enforce rigidly the unfeeling regulations crafted by people in London who had no understanding of the ground realities in India.
-----------------------------------------
Today, when the Indians are once more governing themselves, so that Lord Cornwallis' problem of finding how to make Western administrators in India behave decently no longer arises, there is nothing to prevent the relations between Indians and Westerners from being intimate and decent at the same time, and this is a promising change for the better as far as it goes. But just how far does it go? After all, so few thousands out of India's 450 millions ever did or do meet a Westerner-or even meet a member of that Western-minded minority of the Indian people that is now governing India in the former Western rulers' place. And what is the future of this new governing class? Will it be able to maintain its present leadership? And will the Western outlook and ideals, that have been implanted in the souls of this minority by their education, be able to hold their own, even here, against the Hindu tradition?
All good observations, & pertinent questions are raised here.
It is remarkable that even a minority in the great Hindu world should have gone so far as this now ruling minority has gone in assimilating Western ideas and ideals, considering how alien the Western and Hindu outlooks on life are from one another....(when) we were concerned with Russia's and Islam's relations with the West, we were dealing with two cases in which the non Western party with whom the West had collided had something in common with the West which Hinduism does not possess. Though our Russian contemporaries are not the children of Western Christians, they are the children of Eastern Orthodox Christians; and so both the Christian religion and also the Graeco Roman Civilization-which the Christian Church has taken over and preserved and handed down-are parts of the Russian spiritual background, as they are parts of ours in the West. Our Muslim contemporaries, again, are adherents of a religion which, like Communism, can be described as a Christian Heresy; and the philosophy and science of the Greeks are parts of the Muslims' spiritual background, as they are of ours.
Author, a typical Westerner, looks at India through the (Western construction of the) âhinduâ lens; and more importantly, the West looks at itself through the Christian lens. Also, interestingly, Islam is described as a Christian Heresy. Some clues as to why Islamic ideologues like Communism often?
========= QUOTED earlier in article ========
In fact, if, looking at the contemporary world as a whole, one were to try to make the broadest and simplest analysis of the main cultural divisions in it, one would find oneself grouping the Muslims, the ex-Eastern Orthodox Christians and the ex-Western Christians together as members of a single great society which one could distinguish from both the Indian world and the Far Eastern world by giving this society, like each of those, an overall label of its own.
Since the Spiritual possession that all we Christians and Muslims have in common with one another is a pair of common heritages-one from the Jews and another from the Greeks-we could label our Christian-Muslim society the Graeco-Judaic, to distinguish it both from a Hindu Society in India and from a Confucian-Buddhist Society in the Far East.
From this bird's-eye view that takes in the whole of mankind, the diverse Muslim and Christian variations on a common Graeco-Judaic way of life fade almost out of view. They look quite insignificant by comparison with the characteristics that are common to all of us Muslim and Christian members of our Graeco-Judaic cultural family.
When we contrast our Muslim-Christian way of life as a whole with the Hindu way or with the Far Eastern, the differences, inside our Muslim-Christian family, between Eastern Orthodox Christendom and Western Christendom and Islam, almost cease to be visible.
=========END QUOTED earlier in article ================
And yet we know that these relatively small cultural differences can produce violent spiritual disturbances in the souls of the children of these Graeco-Judaic sister-civilizations of our when these souls are played upon by the spiritual radiation of one of the other civilizations in our family.
His usage of this âWestern spiritual radiationâ is similar to the âWestern iron entering Indiaâs soulâ usage earlier. He generally treats âWesternâ thought & technologies are inevitable âprogressâ and unstoppable. He is also not alone in drawing a complete blank on possible key âNon Westernâ inputs that went into making of âWesternâ. [See the many excellent articles on this at www.infinityfoundation.com ]
A notable example is the effect produced on Russian souls by the impact on them by the Western civilization since the time of Peter the Great. The two parties to this encounter were, both of them, members of the same Graeco-Judaic family; yet the disturbance produced in Russian Graeco-Judaic souls by the strangeness of the intruding Western variety of the same Graeco-Judaic spirit has been very great. We can measure the severity of this disturbance psychologically by the tormented and tormenting vein in a 19th century Russian literature which expresses, and gives vent to, the distress suffered by a soul when it is required to live in two different spiritual universes at once- even when the two claimants on the same soul's spiritual allegiance are rather closely akin to one another. We can also measure the severity of the Western stress and strain upon Russian souls politically by the explosiveness of the revolution in which this spiritual tension discharged itself in 1917.
Now the disturbance, produced by the impact of the West on Russian souls, which has come to the surface in these sensational manifestations, is presumably a good real milder than the latent disturbance produced in Indian souls by the same alien Western spiritual force, for the disturbance in Russian souls, violent though it has been, must have been mitigated by the presence, in Russia's cultural heritage, of Jewish and Greek elements that were also present in the heritage of the intruding Western civilization, whereas in the Indian heritage there have been no Greek and Jewish elements, or at any rate none to speak of, to break the force of the shock administered by the impact of the West here.
Here he is contrasting the Westâs India experience with its Russia & Islam experiences. This is related to Chapters I & II of the book, and will be discussed more in part 2 of article.
What then, in India, is going to be the resolution of this presumably far sharper tension between a native and an alien spiritual force? On the surface, those Hindus who have adopted our, to them, extremely alien Western culture on the planes of Technology and science, language and literature, administration and law, appear to have been more successful than the Russians in harmonizing with their native way of life a Western way that is intrinsically more alien to them than it is to the Russians. Yet the tension in Hindu souls must be extreme, and sooner or later it must find some means of discharging itself.
Whatever may be the relief that Hindu souls are going to find for themselves eventually, it seems clear that, for them, there can be no relief from the impact of our Western civilization by opening themselves to the influence of Communism- a Western heresy adopted by an ex-Orthodox Christian Russia-is just as much part and parcel of the Graeco-Judaic heritage as the Western way of life is, and the whole of this cultural tradition is alien to the Hindu spirit.
There is, however, one factor in the economic and social situation in India today which might give Communism an opening-exotic though Communism may be in the Hindu environment- and this subversive factor is the rising pressure of population in India on the means of subsistence.
Economically speaking, Leftist violence, Maoist & otherwise, seems to be consistent with this.
âSpirituallyâ speaking, of course, the slumbering âhindu soulâ is yet to fully awake, notwithstanding Nehruâs grandstanding âFreedom at Midnightâ speech about âa slumbering people awake..struggle of a nationâs soul finds utterance..â etc.
This is an important point, because the same factor is at work today in China Japan, Indo-China, Indonesia, and Egypt. In all these non Western countries, the impact of the West has brought a progressive increase in the food supply through irrigation, through the introduction of new crops, and through the improvement in the methods of agriculture under Western inspiration; and in all of them, at every stage so far, this increase in food supply has been spent, not on raising the standard of living of a stationary or gradually growing population, but on maintaining the largest possible population on the old level, which was and is only just above starvation point. Since progressive improvements in productivity must sooner or later bring in diminishing returns, the standard of this swollen population seems bound to decline, and there is no margin between the present standard and sheer disaster on the grand scale.
Some strong assertions. Perhaps contestable, perhaps not.
In some such economically desperate situation as this, Communism might win a foothold in India and in other Asian countries in which Communism is just as foreign as our western way of life. For Communism has a program of wholesale compulsory collectivization and mechanization to offer as a specious remedy for the plight of a depressed Asian peasantry, whereas, to people in this plight, it would be a mockery to advise them to solve their problem in the American way. This population problem, and its bearing on the competition between Russia and the West, will confront us again when we come to the Far East, which is the subject of the next chapter.
Communism may be hard to write off. It is after all, Capitalismâs âotherâ.
---------------------------------------------
7. REFERENCES
[Note: All the matter from the Tonybee book has been keyed in by me, & typos & errors are regretted. Sentences, paragraphs, etc. that are irrelevant to our discussion have been replaced with ââ¦..â ]
REF#1 :
The World and the West; Arnold Tonybee
(From his BBC Reith Lectures) 99 pages.
Published: 1953; Oxford Univ Press;
library of congress catalog card # 53-5911
Chapter III (INDIA AND THE WEST) is quoted extensively in the main body of article, as [AJT QUOTE #4, in italics, split into many paragraphs]
REF#2:
Imagining India; Ronald Inden
Originally Published by Blackwell, Cambridge, MA; Republished in paperback by Indiana University Press
ISBN 0-253-33689-9 (Hardcover); ISBN 0-253-33689-9 (Paperback)
(See excerpt in Ref 3 below)
REF#3:
http://www.infinityfoundation.com/indic_co.../paper_gray.pdf
Blinded By The Light Of "World History"
Re-Centering India In The Mandala Of Eurasian Civilizations
By David B. Gray
Rice University
I. Introduction: The Blindness of World History
Much has been written over the past decade on the subject of Indian historiography and the inadequacy of past historiographic paradigms. It is probably not necessary to review these in length, as most of the participants in this seminar are likely to be familiar with them.1 To succinctly characterize the thrust of Colonial era historiography, it hinges, somewhat amazingly, on the claim that India, properly speaking, lacks history. This claim was made explicitly by Hegel, who wrote:
If we had formerly the satisfaction of believing in the antiquity of the Indian wisdom and holding it in respect, we now have ascertained through being acquainted with the great astronomical works of the Indians, the inaccuracy of all figures quoted.
Nothing can be more confused, nothing more imperfect than the chronology of the Indians; no people which attained to culture in astronomy, mathematics, &c., is as incapable for history; in it they have neither stability nor coherence.
It was believed that such was to be had at the time of Wikramaditya, who was supposed to have lived about 50 B.C., and under whose reign the poet Kalidasa, author of Sakontala, lived. But further research discovered half a dozen Wikramadityas and careful investigation has placed this epoch in our eleventh century.
The Indians have lines of kings and an enormous quantity of names, but everything is vague. 2
A more reflective scholar might have considered that such vagueness was an attribute of his own understanding, rather than of the object of study itself. Hegel, however, saw the flawed state of European understanding of the colonized Other as a sign of the Otherâs flaw, and hence the inferiority of the colonized to the colonizers. This allowed him to concoct his theory of âWorld-History,â which was based upon a notion of the âprogress of history,â metaphorically described as the march of the âSpiritâ from East to West. Historical agency thence became an attribute of the modern West, leaving India and the âFar Eastâ in a state of perpetual infancy and cultural dependence.
There is no need to dwell on the fact that this historiography was ideological, implicitly justifying the otherwise unjustifiable violent exploitation of one civilization by another.
Indeed, as Ranajit Guha has noted, Hegelâs project was âto legitimate existing reality by conceiving it philosophically.â3 This âWorld Historyâ paradigm not only fails to promote a sound understanding of the colonized Other,4 but also fails to even provide an adequate account of Europeâs rise to prominence in the early modern era, insofar as it is unable to articulate Europeâs dependence upon the Colonial Other.5
The lynchpin of this historiographic portrayal is the negation of Indiaâs cultural and historical agency. As Ronald Inden wrote,
To have represented the kingdoms of India as relatively autonomous agents, as complex, inter-related polities that could unite through pacts as well as âforceâ within a single imperial formation and create new centres not determined by a fixed military topography, would have undermined this whole orientalist project. (1990:188)
The inaccuracy of the claim that India lacks history has been demonstrated both by Inden as well as by Michael Witzel, who shows that the Indian historiographic tradition has been largely, but not entirely effaced by centuries of invasions and neglect.6 Excellent progress has in fact been made recently in the recovery of indigenous Indian historical narrative traditions.7
In this paper I will seek to complement such initiatives in an attempt to contribute to the efforts to restore Indiaâs historical and cultural agency. I will do so by arguing that Europe was not unique in its development of a sophisticated and influential civilization, and that India, during the first millennium of the common era, achieved without violence an influence in Asia at least as great as that achieved by Europeans through violence during the colonial era. Specifically, in section two, drawing upon the work of Norbert Elias, I will argue that India underwent a âcivilizing processâ during the last half of the first millenium BCE, analogous to that experienced in Europe over a thousand years later. In section three, I will conclude by arguing that India, in turn, provided a powerful and influential model that was selectively adopted and adapted by other Asian polities as they embarked in state formation.
REF#3:
David Derrickâs webpage:
http://davidderrick.wordpress.com/ [âThe Tonybee convectorâ. Rich content, and with well structured and easily negotiable references.]
Many well written articles with details on Tonybee's "A Study of History" of world (his motivations in writing it) and Babur's invasion, and Turkey issues..
See some relevant details for this article at-
http://davidderrick.wordpress.com/tag/in...continent/
http://davidderrick.wordpress.com/tag/hinduism/
http://davidderrick.wordpress.com/cv/
Western Identity -- Ours and Theirs...Part I
ABSTRACT
The attempt here is to discuss the Westernized Identity over multiple articles. In the beginning we discuss the relevance of this for the Non-Westerner, specifically the Indian. Then we discuss external, i.e. Geographical Sociopolitical & Military aspects of it. The idea of âThe Westâ is so implicit in any discussion, that we forget there is a simple and well-documented history behind the construction of âWesternâ identity. Much of this series of articles will try to look at a broad overview of this history, i.e. the history of the interaction of âThe Westâ with âThe Restâ.
Though the primary interest here is of the interaction of India with the West, it is necessary to place this in the context of the Westâs own worldview, i.e. its idea of how it (The West) has interacted with Russia, the âIslamic Worldâ the âFar Eastâ, and itâs own claimed Graeco-Judaic heritage. On this subject, I have found the lectures of British historian Arnold J Tonybee to be invaluable in their conciseness and clarity, and will be using them as a sort of âSkeletonâ to frame the discussion. The 1952 vintage lectures do miss out the last fifty years or so, but the broad framework he lays out has not changed enough to affect his historical points.
Also, his views, expressed when the dominance of the West was still uncontested, reflect the confident and explicit assertions typical of even the most well meaning Westerner when he talks of the Rest, and they are free of the âpolitically correctâ obfuscations by Westerners in todayâs environment. An example could be the West of today calling itself the âInternational Communityâ when it attempts to enforce its will.
In later parts of the article, his views, basically the standard Western views, are contrasted for balance with important non-Western perspectives, for example those of Native American leaders, and of course ideas from Indian History & Culture.
----------------------------
1. INTRODUCTION
In the previous article on Identities (Identities and labels, how far should one go with them? ), we focussed somewhat at the Indian aspect of the Indian identity. Here we will try to address the Western aspect of the Indian identity. My assertion is that most of us (the English educated intelligentsia) have a dominant Western identity in us that arrogates to itself the power to make most of our practical decisions, since we are convinced that it is âmost Rationalâ, âmost modernâ etc. While this is not in itself a bad thing, one may want to wonder at whatâs happening to the Indian (or other non-Western) side of our identities, weighed down & atrophying under the burden. Perhaps it needs breathing room, & we can place our Western identity side-by-side with our Indian one for a while? Since this Western side of ours is not more than a century or two old, we should at least be able to take ownership of our Identity. We could then look at it with clarity, perhaps analyze it so we think critically of what is and isnât working for us, and what needs to be retained, & what needs to be thrown away?
But before this âdethroningâ of our Western identity to put it on par with our Indian one, we need to know a bit about the West, and about Westernization.
Hereâs an attempt to know the West, starting with itâs own conception of itself, via words of renowned historian Arnold J Tonybee.
2. TONYBEE
We will refer to his handy book âThe world and the Westâ, all of 99 pages. This appears to be a brilliantly condensed version of his âmagnum opusâ â âA Study of Historyâ in four large Volumes (See Ref#4 for detail).
Let us now get familiar with our reference, A.J. Tonybee, and his âThe world and the Westâ. Why this book is so interesting is explained by the Quotes from the book jacket:
"Universally acknowledged as one of the greatest living historians of his time." His book "A study of history" is considered a classic. âThe world and the Westâ represents the Reith Lectures for 1952 over the BBC.â
â...he invites us to look through impartial eyes at what this world has experienced in its contact with the West during the last five hundred years....â
The book is summarized as below-
[AJT QUOTE #1]
âFor the worlds experience at our (Western) hands has been by no means as salutary as our wishful thinking would have us believe.
The most important single factor in this encounter between the world and the West is that our Western technical achievements, our "bag of tools", have taken the world by storm while our way of life has been assimilated only partly and imperfectly.
Nor is this a mere accident; experience shows that in all encounters between civilizations, a part of an alien culture is more readily accepted than the whole. But in today's world distances have been annihilated and man finds himself face to face not only with other men's tools but also with their ideas.
Our Western way of life is locked in deadly struggle with Russia's way of life and must compete with it for the allegiance of all mankind. It seems, therefore, that the present round of the collision between the world and the West will have to be fought out on the spiritual plane, with the weapons of the mind and the spirit.â
These words of his above still ring true today, except for some minor updates, i.e. substitute â Islamic Fundamentalismâ for âRussiaâ, factor in the recently acknowledged ârise of Asiaâ and it is up to date. It appears that the identity of most people is locked in the struggle to figure out how much one is of the âRestâ and how much of the âWestâ, with a marked preference assumed for the latter. One can note his sense of what are tasks still incomplete & imperfectly done. The sense of âMission of the Westâ canât be missed in the above tone. Also the sense of Western values & values of Christianity being inextricably tied to one another, though not apparent in above quote, is confidently present throughout his words.
This may also be a good place to say that the word âhinduâ is being used in this article in the cultural sense, i.e. indigenous Indian thought & traditions, still followed by the vast majority of Indians that havenât âconvertedâ to exclusivist foreign ideologies like Abrahamism (Euro Christianity & Euro inspired Communism, etc ). The word Indic (hindu, buddhist, jain, tribal etc, i.e the various Dharmic thought systems) fits the bill much better sometimes.
Hereâs how the book is laid out. From âBook Contentsâ:
CONTENTS
I. Russia and the West
II. Islam and the West
III. India and the West
IV. The Far East and the West
V. The psychology of the encounters
VI. The World and the Greeks and the Romans
We will start with bringing in elements from Chapter III, this being of most relevance to us, and then more on to the broader Global issues via chapters I, II, IV, etc later, in parts 2, 3 etc of this article.
There will be plenty of direct quotes from the book in the main body of the article, in italics etc, prefaced by [AJT QUOTE # ] to distinguish them from my words; and a few in the REFERENCES section.
So without further ado, letâs move on to the Indian scene.
--------------
3. WESTERNIZATION OF INDIA
Let us start with a simple relevant example. Let us take the case of a child growing up in India, going through the schooling system, becoming useful to society, getting a job, & achieving socioeconomic success. This could well describe most of us reading articles like this, basically middle/upper middle class Indians in general. Hopefully this example makes sense also to the occasional reader not of Indian heritage.
In going through all these stages of life, the really relevant "Education & development" has been entirely in the Western side of our personalities. How well we are educated in our "Indiannessâ (hindu or non hindu) is largely irrelevant to the system where our Westernized education is the primary asset that allows us to interact in the Westernized Industrial structure, bureaucracy, etc. Hence The Westernized Indian is the standard by which power & success is achieved for the majority, irrespective of the Indian side of their background (linguistic, geographical, etc..). Westernization is the norm.
Moving over to the other side, for the child growing up in US, it is pretty much the same, education & public affirmation of the Western norm is all that is promoted in the system, be it education in Western mores & methods, or later deployment of the same in professional life. The non-Western aspects of the non-Western heritage, if any, is largely irrelevant to society as a whole.
From the Indian-American perspective, it is easy to see that this Westernized side is indeed the main key of our success in the US, and the only relevant side of us to most Americans (& I daresay this is similar for other Indian diaspora in the West elsewhere). The Indian identity is largely irrelevant, sometimes even a liability if the field of endeavour is not based on objectively measurable skills like Technology, medicine, etc.
So, in summary, the common factor in both societies is Westernized behavior.
Regarding this pervasive Westernization in India, one of the basic points to note is that the Westernized behaviour is pretty much the PRIVILEGED BEHAVIOUR in the Indian social & Economic world, and not just IN ADDITION TO the existing Indian behavioral attributes which come from various local sources, like parents, extended family, & society.
This in itself need not be criticized as a bad thing, and most Indians donât. But we do need to be aware that regardless of where the Indian-ness of the Indian is coming from (Indic-hindu/buddhist/jain/sikh/etc, or Parsee, muslim, christian, etc..); if (s)he doesn't posses this vital component of Westernization (at least in basic terms, i.e. of being able to get by in the Westernized landscape); his/her social and economic future is highly limited.
Criticism, if any, is about the privileged position of Westernized behavior, over and above notions of Indian-ness.
Our simple example of the pragmatic Indian parents "voting with their feet" in educating their kids in Westernized (mostly English medium) school systems illustrates this. I wonder which pragmatic parent will disagree in their pragmatic actions with above, no matter how wedded they are to their own alternative worldviews (hindu, muslim, or anything else non-Western). They will send their child to a school where he learns to deal with the Westernized world, since that is the one the child will face, either in India or US. Hindu thought, norms, etc don't have any place in all this (how many Indic ideas are kids being taught in school in India?) Most of our parents are testimony of that overwhelming fact.
We also recognize that India is not alone in this privileging of Westernized behavior. Most of the world is at various stages of acceptance and/or negotiation with this paradigm.
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4. HISTORY SUMMARIZED
From a historical perspective, here are some more clarifications.
Historically speaking, the only really "non local" or "incoming cultures" that have left tangible traces on Indian life are the post 10th century Islamic, & the post 17th century Western (mostly British) Colonization.
Regardless of what other minor cultural interactions have happened, and not even attempting to refute unproven theories of "invasions" or "migrations" of the remote past; once you go prior to the influence of these two foreign sources (with variations inside of themselves), what you get is the home grown culture of India.
Of these two, for the purposes of this discussion, I'm not including Islamic rule/influence as "Western" for obvious reasons, based on my usage of "West" above.
But, one could say, we hear that after Indian independence there is a renewal or revival of Indic thought, and some of us may optimistically even believe this. I'd like to believe that too, but currently, I'm of the opinion that we are far from any "rehabilitation" of any form of Indic identity in the Indian Public behavior. As a simple bellwether to track, it will be interesting to follow what kind of curriculum is to be taught at the attempted "revival" of the universally respected & ancient Nalanda University with what appears to be a massive amount of Public & foreign funds. Will "Nalanda" just be a convenient "Brand name" to be used to market the predilections of the "modern" Indian intelligentsia, which mostly run to the "Secular" subjects ? (i.e. dominantly Western, since most Indic Philosophy & Experiential Science is wrongly lumped & then dumped with "hindu religion" & this banned from the "secular" Public sphere.) With luminiaries like Amartya Sen who seems unable to say Hindu without reflexively saying "fundamentalism" (see my "Identities and labels, how far should one go with them?" article for more on Amartya Sen) and his cohorts like Sugata Bose at the helm, I wouldn't bet on much Indic thought being considered fit to teach there. (For more angst on Nalanda, see my poem "What's in a name, Oh Nalanda, and What of Rama Setu?" ) Hopefully, I'll be proven wrong.
While Indic identity might have been normative in pre Islamic India, and maybe somewhat significant in Islamic dominated India, we are now in a world post the interactions with Islam+West. Even Hindu-ness wherever it exists, has no real power of normativeness in people's Public behavior (Political, Social, Economic). It just continues as a received habit, while Westernization is actively pursued.
And the "hindu-ness", in as much as any privileging identification goes, is limited to the sidelines, in the homes of individuals, & inside powerless "traditional" institutions. Sure, Political parties may be attempting to tap into this angst, but with sporadic success, One major reason being that easy definitions of "hinduism" are so difficult, thus not easily amenable to political manipulation.
In the broader picture, when I try to define Indic identity, or Indian ness, I'm not limiting the definition, or deriving it from religion. I'm talking of all the aspects that are not derived from Indian's interaction from the West. It is not too difficult to show the commonness in the "Non-Westernness" of both hindu & muslim Indians in this regard, no matter what the differences elsewhere. Of course language & other regional etc. attributes are part of this Indian-ness. What is common here is the Non-Western ness of all these attributes of the Indian.
Related to this is the point that Westernization is much more pervasive than knowing how to speak in English. It is the transactions (law, education subjects, commerce, etc) that are all pervasively Western. A person from Hindi medium also has to do the same transactions.
Defining my terminology in more, here is some clarification.
My usage of these terms West / Westernization, etc are in the sense of the West in how it influenced the Rest via its policies of Colonization & the still ongoing post-colonial dominance. This view is quite similar to Tonybee's, so there's no conflict there. As generally understood, the overt (& acknowledged) influence of the West has been rather one-way, with the West affecting the Rest (eg. Asia, Africa, America North & South) and remaining relatively unchanged in its own norms, ruling power structures, etc. Hence the Westernization of the Rest is the key (each of the "Rest" may have responded differently, but all responding to the same "force" of Westernization).
The West being geographically, Western Europe/US & other outposts dominated by people of European background; the West value-wise being a society with strong underpinnings of Judeo-Christian values -updated via a few centuries of Enlightenment thought; and the West people-wise being explorers/industrialists/colonizers using the muscle initially of the Euro-Industrial Revolution, and later using the whole Military Commercial infrastructure of the above countries. (In this scenario, newcomers like "Post Meiji" Japan occasionally in the "West", occasionally out, depending on how they agree / differ from the norms.)
Hence the definition I'm attempting is a broad one, since the onslaught / effect is rather broad & global too.
This view of the West as "Force/ Agent of Change" and the Rest as "recipients of the change" is shared as received wisdom by the proponents of Westernization, which is pretty much the conventional establishment "intelligentsia" of the World.
A quick summary, with "poetic license" can be found at my poem "THE CRASH OF CIVILIZATIONS ". (Serious readers are warned to go there only at risk to their sensibilities & humour!)
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5. IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION
While the modern Westernized world laughs at the âJohnny come latelyâ attempts by the âRestâ to formulate a coherent self-description (Indic, Confucian, etc) in âmodernâ or even âpost-modernâ terminology, it is no secret among scholars that the supposed âcoherenceâ of Western identity is also one that can be held up & examined for its many inconsistencies & leaps of logic. See Ronald Indenâs âImagining Indiaâ (Ref#2 ) which show how much energy was invested in the construction of Western Identity, while it was simultaneously denied that the âRestâ like India were capable of âagencyâ, i.e. of Rational behavior as dynamic cultures & societies. See also Ref #3 on the Gupta Age in India, to see convincing evidence of how, for example the celebrated French Renaissance finds a worthy âprequelâ in the Gupta period of Indian History, which achieved a cultural Golden Age of at least equal scope, and fully one thousand years before it.
With the above in view, let us see what Tonybee has to say on behalf of the âWestâ.
Following excerpt gives a clear idea of his worldview, which consistently finds expression, and explanation, in the book.
[AJT QUOTE #2]
In fact, if, looking at the contemporary world as a whole, one were to try to make the broadest and simplest analysis of the main cultural divisions in it, one would find oneself grouping the Muslims, the ex-Eastern Orthodox Christians and the ex-Western Christians together as members of a single great society which one could distinguish from both the Indian world and the Far Eastern world by giving this society, like each of those, an overall label of its own.
Since the Spiritual possession that all we Christians and Muslims have in common with one another is a pair of common heritages-one from the Jews and another from the Greeks-we could label our Christian-Muslim society the Graeco-Judaic, to distinguish it both from a Hindu Society in India and from a Confucian-Buddhist Society in the Far East.
From this bird's-eye view that takes in the whole of mankind, the divers Muslim and Christian variations on a common Graeco-Judaic way of life fade almost out of view. They look quite insignificant by comparison witht he characteristics that are common to all of us Muslim and Christian members of our Graeco-Judaic cultural family.
When we contrast our Muslim-Christian way of life as a whole with the Hindu way or with the Far Eastern, the differences, inside our Muslim-Christian family, between Eastern Orthodox Christendom and Western Christendom and Islam, almost cease to be visible.
Comments on above are as follows. One can appreciate that Tonybeeâs worldview is much more convincing & encompassing than the simplistic âClash of Civilizationsâ view championed by Americans Bernard Lewis & Samuel Huntington, where by some convenient contortions, Islam is presumed as another distinct Civilization, instead of being acknowledged as the estranged âAbrahamic brotherâ it is. This probably is to suit the current political climate of âIslam vs Westâ. One could assert that past Islamic Imperialism & Western Imperialism, both past & present are very similar in their grand views of themselves.
Tonybee, much to his credit, does try to inform his Western reader, early on, to get some perspective on what his/her sense of âWesternâ is, and how it could affect their thinking. See the quote below, which is a sort of introductory preface.
[AJT QUOTE #3 from Chapter I]
...Isn't the West just another name for as much of the world as has any importance for practical purposes today?....This title( )was chosen deliberately( )to make two points( )first( )the West has never been all of the world that matters( )even a the peak of the West's power (and this peak has perhaps now already been passed)( )second( )in the encounter( )going on for( )five hundred years, the world, not the west, is the party that, upto now, has had the significant experience. It has not been the West that has been hit by the world; it is the world that has been hit-and hit hard-by the West.
A Westerner who wants to grapple with this subject, must try ( ) to slip out of his native Western skin and look at the encounter( )through the eyes of the great non-Western majority of mankind. Different though the people may be from one another ( ) he will hear them all giving the same answer )The West, they will tell him, has been the arch aggressor of modern times, and each will have their own experience of Western aggression to bring up against him.
The Russians will remind him that their country has been invaded by Western armies overland in 1941,1915,1812,1709, and 1610; the peoples of Africa and Asia will remind him that, within the same period, the Westerners have occupied the lion's share of the world's vacant lands in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and South and East Africa. The Africans will remind him that they were enslaved and deported across the Atlantic in order to serve the European colonizers of the Americas as living tools to minister to their Western masters' greed for wealth. The descendants of the aboriginal population of North America will remind him that their ancestors were swept aside to make room for West European intruders and for their African slaves.
....What, then, has been the world's experience of the West?
And with that introduction, we can jump right in.
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6. A DETAILED LOOK AT Chapter III of âThe World and the Westâ
(Chapter III. India and the West)
Below are direct sequential quotes from book (italics/box), with each paragraph followed by my comments. The idea is to capture the authorâs flow (and learn a broad overview of Colonial History), while attempting to put perspective where the need is felt. As a reminder, Chapter I & II (not discussed much in this article) have discussed Russia & Islamâs encounters with the West. These encounters happened much before Indiaâs did, and have a longer history. More on these in part 2 of this article.
[AJT QUOTE #4 split into many paragraphs for comments]
In India's encounter with the West there has been one experience that has not been shared with India by any other society in the world. India is a whole world by herself; she is a society of the same magnitude as our Western society; and she is the one great non Western society that has been, not merely attacked and hit, but overrun and conquered outright by Western arms, and not merely conquered by Western arms, but ruled, after that, by Western administrators. In Bengal this Western rule lasted for nearly 2 hundred years, and in the Punjab for nearly a hundred. India's experience of the West has thus been more painful and more humiliating than China's and Turkey's, and much more so than Russia's or Japan's; but , just for this reason, it has been also much more intimate. Personal contacts between Indians and Westerners have been more numerous, and our Western iron has probably entered deeper into India's soul.
My Comments on above are: In Chapters I & II, the subjects were the Westâs encounters with Russia & with Islam. The idea of âWestern Ironâ entering âIndiaâs soulâ appears like fanciful hyperbole, but it sits well with his âGrand Narrativeâ style, and the general Western construction of its ideas & technologies being hard, & irresistibly âmasculineâ.
Perhaps India would not have been conquered by Western arms if she hadn't been conquered by Muslim arms first....The last wave of Muslim conquerors of India overland arrived in India not many years after the first landing in India, in 1498, of the Portuguese wave of Western mariners. These Mughal Muslims forestalled the British Westerners in bringing almost the whole of India under a single government. The Mughal peace in India may not have been so effective as the subsequent British peace was to be at its zenith; but the Mughal peace lasted as long as the British peace was to last, and, when, in the 18th century it fell to pieces, it left legacoes that made it not so difficult for the Mughals' British successors to reassemble the fragments of he Mughal Empire.
My Comments on above are: Throughout all British writings on India (both fiction & non fiction) it can be observed that the prevailing sentiment of Britons was that they themselves were very similar to their âglamourous Mughal predecessorsâ in what they were upto in India. The Brits were, of course, just better at it, by their own reckoning. One can then see why it was good to have around a conveniently âscholarlyâ Aryan Invasion Theory. The moment this theory/conjecture started making the rounds, the Colonialists jumped & appropriated it, for that explained that there were merely the last on a long line of Conquerors. âSee, we are just a newer branch of Phoren Aryan cousins that have ruled you all the timeâ¦â
One legacy was an Imperial land-revenue organization which ran on by its own momentum during the 18th century bout of anarchy in India. It ran on because it had become an Indian habit, and the condition of Indian hearts and minds to acquiesce, by force of habit, in an empire imposed on India by alien conquerors was the second of the Mughal legacies from which the Mughals' British successors profited.
My Comments on above are: Same theme of âforever conquered, docile, lacking in initiativeâ stereotypical of Colonial reading of India. (See Ref#3 Inden). The British were certainly more efficient in exploitation of land, both of minerals to fuel their industrial revolution, and of taxing the cultivators, where the ruthlessly efficient system sucked out wealth and destroyed the delicately linked & locally compatible economies, especially after the arrival of the âIndianâ Railways. Also the British censuses (still in use in India today, after 60+ years of Independence) contributed in no small measure to the further rigidization of fluid divisions in Indian society on âCasteâ & Religionâ lines.
The British successors of the Mughal rulers of India condemned their own revival of the Mughal Raj to come to an end when, in the 1830s they deliberately set out to change the habits that their Mughal predecessors had implanted in Indian minds. In the 1830s the British rulers of India opened a window to the West for Indian minds by substituting a Western for an Islamic and a Hindu higher education in India and thereby introducing the Indians to their British rulers' own Western ideas of liberty, parliamentary constitutional government, and Nationalism. The Indians took this Western political education to heart. It moved them to demand for India, the self-government that Great Britain enjoys; and today the Hindu successors of the British Raj in the Indian Union, and the Muslim successors of the British Raj in Pakistan, are dedicated to the enterprise of ruling their shares of the sub-continent on the lines on which their British predecessors in the government of India have been conducting the government of Great Britain since 1688.
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My Comments on above are: Again, an example of confident use of the âIndian mindâ being âimplantedâ with a foreign habit. Of course the Macaulayite substitution of Western education methods for existing Indian education methods is a major tool of Westernization still in use by the Indian intelligentsia. In getting Western political education, Tte colonized merely recognized the need to talk back in the Colonizerâs language.
Also the conflation of India as âhindu Indiaâ which is still prevalent today, tells how well Indiaâs âsecular republicâ is understood by outsiders. Theocratic Pakistan (& Bangladesh) are considered the same class as Indiaâs âminorityâ worshipping establishment.
It is perhaps particularly noteworthy that the present Hindu rulers of the greater part of the Indian sub-continent should have chosen, as they have, to carry on the Government on Western lines originally laid down by alien conquerors. In the territories included in the Indian Union, the Hindus are now masters in their own house for the first time since the beginning of the Muslim conquest of India eight or nine hundred years ago. In the eighteenth century, when the Mughal Muslim raj was breaking up, there were moments when it looked as if it was going to be followed immediately by the establishment of Hindu successor states. In the 18th century scramble for the Mughal' heritage, a Maratha Hindu Power seemed for a time to be well on the way to winning the lion's share of the spoils. This 18th century attempt to transform the Mughal raj into a Maratha Hindu Raj was foiled by the intervention of a more powerful Western hand.
Quick & easy summary, same problems of easy categorization.
But the establishment of a British Raj instead of a Maratha Raj did not bring to a halt the resurgence of the Hindus in their own homeland. When the military lines taken by the Hindu renaissance in the 18th century ended in military failure, the gathering stream of Hindu energy was merely diverted into a different channel. Under the British Raj in the 19th and 20th centuries, as during the interregnum in the 18th century, the Hindus continued steadily to gain power in India, but under the British regime they gained it, not by force of arms, but by force of mastering a Western system of education, administration and law which were so many keys to power in a Westernizing world.
A pat given on âHinduâ backs for being law abiding even as their civilization was being dismantled & âRe-Engineeredâ. Fairly accurate description, though.
The Hindus were quicker than the Indian Muslims to see and seize the opportunity that, in a Western age of Indian history, was open to Indians who effectively cultivated the Western arts of peace. Unlike the Indian Muslims, the Hindus had no enervating memories of recently lost power and glory to keep them brooding ineffectively over a dead past instead of reaching out into the future; and so a balance of power which had begun to incline against the Muslims in an anarchic 18th century continued to go against them in the 19th and 20th centuries under a British peace which set a premium on intellectual ability, in place of military prowess, as the qualification for advancement in the continuing competition between Hindus and Indian Muslims who were now alike subjects of a Western crown. The Indian muslims did, of course, follow their fellow hindu Indians' example. They too set themselves to master the arts of our Western civilization. Yet, when the voluntary liquidation of the British Raj in India came within sight, the Indian Muslims insisted that the retransfer of Govt. of India from British to Indian hands must be accompanied by a partition of Indian between a Hindu and a Muslim successor state; and this insistence on separation was, in effect, a recognition of the truth that, since the day of 'the Great Moghuls', there had been a reversal of the balance of power between the Muslims and Hindus in India to the Muslims' disadvantage. In a joint Hindu-Muslim state including the whole sub-continent, the Indian Muslims feared that they would now be swamped by a Hindu majority of the population.
Here he makes a bland presumption of âhindu muslim competitionâ as if there were two clearly warring groups. âDivide et Emperaâ or Divide & Rule implicit in this thinking. The muslim masses were (if I get it right) held back by their Clergy based leadership until charismatic muslim aristocrats (who were many) like Sir Syed & friends convinced the islamic clergy to agree to have them jump into the English school system.
So it was Voluntary liquidation by the Brits. And Indians thought theyâd âwonâ a Freedom Struggle! Oh the delusions of âGandhianâ grandeurâ¦.
Though in 1947 a predominantly Muslim Pakistan thus parted company with a Predominantly Hindu Indian Union, the objective of the British Indian Empire's two successor states has so far been the same. In this first chapter of their histories, the power in both states has been in the hands of the element in their population that has had a Western education and that has been inspired by this with Western ideals. If this element remains in power in India and Pakistan, as well as in Ceylon, we may look forward to seeing the statesmen of these Asian countries use their influence over their countrymen to persuade them to remain members of our "free world". No doubt these same Asian statesmen will continue to demand that, in a "free world" that is to be a common home of Western and Asian peoples, there shall be no unfair and invidious discrimination against the Asian members of the family, and we Western members are bound to give satisfaction to our Asian fellow members on this point if, in calling our world "free", we are sincere. Unless we Western members of "the free world" fail to live upto our professed liberal principles, we may hope to see the present Western-trained and Western-minded rulers of India, Pakistan, and Ceylon continue in partnership with us.
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Our intelligentsia takes pride in above characterization, but is loath to admit this when challenged as to why this junior âpartnershipâ is good for the common Indian and the future of Indian society. Tonybee shows impressive anticipation about the geopolitical currents today. Western overtures to ârising powersâ like India are in overdrive right now. Get the rulers, and the population is automatically yours.
It is one of the vital interests of the Western peoples that this partnership of ours with the peoples of the Indian sub-continent should be preserved; for these people together constitute one of the two Asian quarters of the human race; and only two years after Great Britain had made a move for reconciliation of Asia with the West by completing the liquidation of British rule...., the Chinese, who constitute the second of the two quarters of the human race, went over fron the Western camp to the Russian. If after losing the friendship of the Chinese sub-continent, our Western world was to lose the friendship of the Indian sub-continent as well, the West would have lost to Russia most of the Old World, except for a pair of Bridgeheads in Western Europe and Africa; and this might well be a decisive event in the struggle for power betwen the "free world" and Communism. The Indian Union, the successor state of the British Empire which covers most of the Indian sub-continent, and the state in which the Hindus are predominant- occupies a commanding position in the divided world of today, in which the United States and her associates are competing for world power with the Soviet union and her associates. In which direction is the hindu fifth of the human race going to incline? Let us look a t some of the considerations telling for and against the likelihood of the Hindus continuing to go our Western way.
The Superpower rivalry, the âGreat Gameâ described well even in the 50s. The choices laid out for the âhindu fifth of humanityâ havenât changed much. Symbolic independence and local autonomy is better than the alternative, one guesses. Take it or leave it
Let us take a promising part first. It looks as if today, personal relations between Indians and Westerners are more friendly than they ever have been. Many citizens of the United Kingdom will certainly have had the experience-which the writer has a number of times since 1947-of being surprised and touched by the friendliness that the Indians have been going our of their way to show the British people. This has happened to the writer several times in foreign countries, where local observers were on the lookout to see what the relations between the Indians and the British really were now; and he found Indians in conspicuous positions abroad going out of their way to show that the former unhappy estrangement between them and the British was now dead and buried as far as they were concerned. When Great Britain did completely fulfil her promise to liquidate her rule in India, the Indians were, it seems, taken aback. They had perhaps never fully believed that the British intended ever to fulfil their promise to India; and so, when the British did keep their word, there was a revulsion on the Indian side from hostility to friendliness. It is handsome of the Indians make their new friendliness towards the British apparent; and this happy change in the relations of the Indians and the British with another is assuredly something gained for our "free world" as a whole.
Glib sincerity is on display here in the âletâs just be friends, ok?â attitudes, and this is something for Indians to chew on. Our âconspicuous leadersâ are understood by Westerners to a Tee! (âYouâre a better man than I, Gunga Din!â) A pat on the back now & then, warm handshakes, grand âfriendlyâ gestures, and they are so easily manageable, in contrast to the Chineseâ¦who would rather play hardball.
The estrangement between India and a Western world which, for India, has been represented by Great Britain goes back to the beginning of the Indian movement for independence in the 1890s, and behind the tragic conflict in 1857. It goes back to the reforms in the British administration in India that were started in the 1780s. This birth of estrangement from in relations between Indians and British people is one of the ironies of history; and yet there is a genuine inner connexion between the two events.
In the 18th century the newly installed British rulers of India were free and easy with the newly acquired subjects in two senses. They were unscrupulous in using their political power to fleece and oppress them, and at the same time they were uninhibited in their social relations with them. They hob-nobbed with their Indian subjects off duty, besides meeting them at work on less agreeable terms. The more intellectual British residents in India in the 18th century enjoyed the game of capping Persian verses with Indian colleagues; the more lively Indians enjoyed being initiated into English sports.....in 1786...Indians and Englishmen could be hail-fellow-well-met with one another. The British rulers of India in the first generation behaved, in fact, very much as their Hindu and Muslim predecessors had behaved. Humanly corrupt, and therefore not inhumanely aloof; and the British reformers of British rule, who were rightly determined to stamp out the corruption and who were notably successful in this difficult undertaking, deliberately stamped out the familiarity as well, because they held that the British could not be induced to be superhumanly upright and just in their dealings with their Indian subjects without being made to feel and behave as if they were tin gods set on pedestals high and dry above those Indian humans down below.
Some perceptive observations above. Their fascination with âCourtly Islamâ finds detailed mention in books like EM Forsterâs âPassage To Indiaâ, and other âRajâ fiction & non-fiction, a book genre by itself. There are interesting observations that the British âColonial Townsâ in India were built so that wives of Administrators & Soldiers could join them. The presence of wives & kids ended the give & take with Indians on human terms, & thus started off the aloof British Ruler living in his separate world, who would enforce rigidly the unfeeling regulations crafted by people in London who had no understanding of the ground realities in India.
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Today, when the Indians are once more governing themselves, so that Lord Cornwallis' problem of finding how to make Western administrators in India behave decently no longer arises, there is nothing to prevent the relations between Indians and Westerners from being intimate and decent at the same time, and this is a promising change for the better as far as it goes. But just how far does it go? After all, so few thousands out of India's 450 millions ever did or do meet a Westerner-or even meet a member of that Western-minded minority of the Indian people that is now governing India in the former Western rulers' place. And what is the future of this new governing class? Will it be able to maintain its present leadership? And will the Western outlook and ideals, that have been implanted in the souls of this minority by their education, be able to hold their own, even here, against the Hindu tradition?
All good observations, & pertinent questions are raised here.
It is remarkable that even a minority in the great Hindu world should have gone so far as this now ruling minority has gone in assimilating Western ideas and ideals, considering how alien the Western and Hindu outlooks on life are from one another....(when) we were concerned with Russia's and Islam's relations with the West, we were dealing with two cases in which the non Western party with whom the West had collided had something in common with the West which Hinduism does not possess. Though our Russian contemporaries are not the children of Western Christians, they are the children of Eastern Orthodox Christians; and so both the Christian religion and also the Graeco Roman Civilization-which the Christian Church has taken over and preserved and handed down-are parts of the Russian spiritual background, as they are parts of ours in the West. Our Muslim contemporaries, again, are adherents of a religion which, like Communism, can be described as a Christian Heresy; and the philosophy and science of the Greeks are parts of the Muslims' spiritual background, as they are of ours.
Author, a typical Westerner, looks at India through the (Western construction of the) âhinduâ lens; and more importantly, the West looks at itself through the Christian lens. Also, interestingly, Islam is described as a Christian Heresy. Some clues as to why Islamic ideologues like Communism often?
========= QUOTED earlier in article ========
In fact, if, looking at the contemporary world as a whole, one were to try to make the broadest and simplest analysis of the main cultural divisions in it, one would find oneself grouping the Muslims, the ex-Eastern Orthodox Christians and the ex-Western Christians together as members of a single great society which one could distinguish from both the Indian world and the Far Eastern world by giving this society, like each of those, an overall label of its own.
Since the Spiritual possession that all we Christians and Muslims have in common with one another is a pair of common heritages-one from the Jews and another from the Greeks-we could label our Christian-Muslim society the Graeco-Judaic, to distinguish it both from a Hindu Society in India and from a Confucian-Buddhist Society in the Far East.
From this bird's-eye view that takes in the whole of mankind, the diverse Muslim and Christian variations on a common Graeco-Judaic way of life fade almost out of view. They look quite insignificant by comparison with the characteristics that are common to all of us Muslim and Christian members of our Graeco-Judaic cultural family.
When we contrast our Muslim-Christian way of life as a whole with the Hindu way or with the Far Eastern, the differences, inside our Muslim-Christian family, between Eastern Orthodox Christendom and Western Christendom and Islam, almost cease to be visible.
=========END QUOTED earlier in article ================
And yet we know that these relatively small cultural differences can produce violent spiritual disturbances in the souls of the children of these Graeco-Judaic sister-civilizations of our when these souls are played upon by the spiritual radiation of one of the other civilizations in our family.
His usage of this âWestern spiritual radiationâ is similar to the âWestern iron entering Indiaâs soulâ usage earlier. He generally treats âWesternâ thought & technologies are inevitable âprogressâ and unstoppable. He is also not alone in drawing a complete blank on possible key âNon Westernâ inputs that went into making of âWesternâ. [See the many excellent articles on this at www.infinityfoundation.com ]
A notable example is the effect produced on Russian souls by the impact on them by the Western civilization since the time of Peter the Great. The two parties to this encounter were, both of them, members of the same Graeco-Judaic family; yet the disturbance produced in Russian Graeco-Judaic souls by the strangeness of the intruding Western variety of the same Graeco-Judaic spirit has been very great. We can measure the severity of this disturbance psychologically by the tormented and tormenting vein in a 19th century Russian literature which expresses, and gives vent to, the distress suffered by a soul when it is required to live in two different spiritual universes at once- even when the two claimants on the same soul's spiritual allegiance are rather closely akin to one another. We can also measure the severity of the Western stress and strain upon Russian souls politically by the explosiveness of the revolution in which this spiritual tension discharged itself in 1917.
Now the disturbance, produced by the impact of the West on Russian souls, which has come to the surface in these sensational manifestations, is presumably a good real milder than the latent disturbance produced in Indian souls by the same alien Western spiritual force, for the disturbance in Russian souls, violent though it has been, must have been mitigated by the presence, in Russia's cultural heritage, of Jewish and Greek elements that were also present in the heritage of the intruding Western civilization, whereas in the Indian heritage there have been no Greek and Jewish elements, or at any rate none to speak of, to break the force of the shock administered by the impact of the West here.
Here he is contrasting the Westâs India experience with its Russia & Islam experiences. This is related to Chapters I & II of the book, and will be discussed more in part 2 of article.
What then, in India, is going to be the resolution of this presumably far sharper tension between a native and an alien spiritual force? On the surface, those Hindus who have adopted our, to them, extremely alien Western culture on the planes of Technology and science, language and literature, administration and law, appear to have been more successful than the Russians in harmonizing with their native way of life a Western way that is intrinsically more alien to them than it is to the Russians. Yet the tension in Hindu souls must be extreme, and sooner or later it must find some means of discharging itself.
Whatever may be the relief that Hindu souls are going to find for themselves eventually, it seems clear that, for them, there can be no relief from the impact of our Western civilization by opening themselves to the influence of Communism- a Western heresy adopted by an ex-Orthodox Christian Russia-is just as much part and parcel of the Graeco-Judaic heritage as the Western way of life is, and the whole of this cultural tradition is alien to the Hindu spirit.
There is, however, one factor in the economic and social situation in India today which might give Communism an opening-exotic though Communism may be in the Hindu environment- and this subversive factor is the rising pressure of population in India on the means of subsistence.
Economically speaking, Leftist violence, Maoist & otherwise, seems to be consistent with this.
âSpirituallyâ speaking, of course, the slumbering âhindu soulâ is yet to fully awake, notwithstanding Nehruâs grandstanding âFreedom at Midnightâ speech about âa slumbering people awake..struggle of a nationâs soul finds utterance..â etc.
This is an important point, because the same factor is at work today in China Japan, Indo-China, Indonesia, and Egypt. In all these non Western countries, the impact of the West has brought a progressive increase in the food supply through irrigation, through the introduction of new crops, and through the improvement in the methods of agriculture under Western inspiration; and in all of them, at every stage so far, this increase in food supply has been spent, not on raising the standard of living of a stationary or gradually growing population, but on maintaining the largest possible population on the old level, which was and is only just above starvation point. Since progressive improvements in productivity must sooner or later bring in diminishing returns, the standard of this swollen population seems bound to decline, and there is no margin between the present standard and sheer disaster on the grand scale.
Some strong assertions. Perhaps contestable, perhaps not.
In some such economically desperate situation as this, Communism might win a foothold in India and in other Asian countries in which Communism is just as foreign as our western way of life. For Communism has a program of wholesale compulsory collectivization and mechanization to offer as a specious remedy for the plight of a depressed Asian peasantry, whereas, to people in this plight, it would be a mockery to advise them to solve their problem in the American way. This population problem, and its bearing on the competition between Russia and the West, will confront us again when we come to the Far East, which is the subject of the next chapter.
Communism may be hard to write off. It is after all, Capitalismâs âotherâ.
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7. REFERENCES
[Note: All the matter from the Tonybee book has been keyed in by me, & typos & errors are regretted. Sentences, paragraphs, etc. that are irrelevant to our discussion have been replaced with ââ¦..â ]
REF#1 :
The World and the West; Arnold Tonybee
(From his BBC Reith Lectures) 99 pages.
Published: 1953; Oxford Univ Press;
library of congress catalog card # 53-5911
Chapter III (INDIA AND THE WEST) is quoted extensively in the main body of article, as [AJT QUOTE #4, in italics, split into many paragraphs]
REF#2:
Imagining India; Ronald Inden
Originally Published by Blackwell, Cambridge, MA; Republished in paperback by Indiana University Press
ISBN 0-253-33689-9 (Hardcover); ISBN 0-253-33689-9 (Paperback)
(See excerpt in Ref 3 below)
REF#3:
http://www.infinityfoundation.com/indic_co.../paper_gray.pdf
Blinded By The Light Of "World History"
Re-Centering India In The Mandala Of Eurasian Civilizations
By David B. Gray
Rice University
I. Introduction: The Blindness of World History
Much has been written over the past decade on the subject of Indian historiography and the inadequacy of past historiographic paradigms. It is probably not necessary to review these in length, as most of the participants in this seminar are likely to be familiar with them.1 To succinctly characterize the thrust of Colonial era historiography, it hinges, somewhat amazingly, on the claim that India, properly speaking, lacks history. This claim was made explicitly by Hegel, who wrote:
If we had formerly the satisfaction of believing in the antiquity of the Indian wisdom and holding it in respect, we now have ascertained through being acquainted with the great astronomical works of the Indians, the inaccuracy of all figures quoted.
Nothing can be more confused, nothing more imperfect than the chronology of the Indians; no people which attained to culture in astronomy, mathematics, &c., is as incapable for history; in it they have neither stability nor coherence.
It was believed that such was to be had at the time of Wikramaditya, who was supposed to have lived about 50 B.C., and under whose reign the poet Kalidasa, author of Sakontala, lived. But further research discovered half a dozen Wikramadityas and careful investigation has placed this epoch in our eleventh century.
The Indians have lines of kings and an enormous quantity of names, but everything is vague. 2
A more reflective scholar might have considered that such vagueness was an attribute of his own understanding, rather than of the object of study itself. Hegel, however, saw the flawed state of European understanding of the colonized Other as a sign of the Otherâs flaw, and hence the inferiority of the colonized to the colonizers. This allowed him to concoct his theory of âWorld-History,â which was based upon a notion of the âprogress of history,â metaphorically described as the march of the âSpiritâ from East to West. Historical agency thence became an attribute of the modern West, leaving India and the âFar Eastâ in a state of perpetual infancy and cultural dependence.
There is no need to dwell on the fact that this historiography was ideological, implicitly justifying the otherwise unjustifiable violent exploitation of one civilization by another.
Indeed, as Ranajit Guha has noted, Hegelâs project was âto legitimate existing reality by conceiving it philosophically.â3 This âWorld Historyâ paradigm not only fails to promote a sound understanding of the colonized Other,4 but also fails to even provide an adequate account of Europeâs rise to prominence in the early modern era, insofar as it is unable to articulate Europeâs dependence upon the Colonial Other.5
The lynchpin of this historiographic portrayal is the negation of Indiaâs cultural and historical agency. As Ronald Inden wrote,
To have represented the kingdoms of India as relatively autonomous agents, as complex, inter-related polities that could unite through pacts as well as âforceâ within a single imperial formation and create new centres not determined by a fixed military topography, would have undermined this whole orientalist project. (1990:188)
The inaccuracy of the claim that India lacks history has been demonstrated both by Inden as well as by Michael Witzel, who shows that the Indian historiographic tradition has been largely, but not entirely effaced by centuries of invasions and neglect.6 Excellent progress has in fact been made recently in the recovery of indigenous Indian historical narrative traditions.7
In this paper I will seek to complement such initiatives in an attempt to contribute to the efforts to restore Indiaâs historical and cultural agency. I will do so by arguing that Europe was not unique in its development of a sophisticated and influential civilization, and that India, during the first millennium of the common era, achieved without violence an influence in Asia at least as great as that achieved by Europeans through violence during the colonial era. Specifically, in section two, drawing upon the work of Norbert Elias, I will argue that India underwent a âcivilizing processâ during the last half of the first millenium BCE, analogous to that experienced in Europe over a thousand years later. In section three, I will conclude by arguing that India, in turn, provided a powerful and influential model that was selectively adopted and adapted by other Asian polities as they embarked in state formation.
REF#3:
David Derrickâs webpage:
http://davidderrick.wordpress.com/ [âThe Tonybee convectorâ. Rich content, and with well structured and easily negotiable references.]
Many well written articles with details on Tonybee's "A Study of History" of world (his motivations in writing it) and Babur's invasion, and Turkey issues..
See some relevant details for this article at-
http://davidderrick.wordpress.com/tag/in...continent/
http://davidderrick.wordpress.com/tag/hinduism/
http://davidderrick.wordpress.com/cv/