(This review was published in the International Journal on Humanistic Ideology, Vol. 2 No. 2 Autumn – Winter 2009)
1.
Perceptions of culture, history, and
identity are necessarily subjective and selective. There's no impartial
and omniscient chronicler of events, no 'scientific' history. Facts are
one thing, their interpretation another. As in Kurosawa's Rashomon,
there are only particular interpretations of most facts, which may of
course coincide at times. In this stirring book
on the historical perceptions of India, Amartya Sen, noted scholar and
Nobel laureate in economics, acknowledges this upfront with disarming modesty, while also
signaling his attitude to his subject:
India is an immensely diverse
country with many distinct pursuits, vastly disparate convictions, widely
divergent customs and a veritable feast of viewpoints. [Any talk about its
history, culture or politics must] involve considerable selection ... the focus on the argumentative
tradition in this work is also a result of choice. It does not reflect a
belief that this is the only reasonable way of thinking about the history
or culture or politics of India. I am very aware that there are other ways
of proceeding.
Soon enough though, Sen reveals his
impatience with certain "other ways of proceeding". The India Sen presents
to us has a long tradition of heterodoxy, openness, and reasoned
discourse, a capacious India that is inclusive, tolerant, and
multicultural. This contrasts with at least two major perceptions of India
in modern times: (a)
a Western
and (derivatively) an Indian elite's stern view of India as "the land of religions,
the country of uncritical faiths and unquestioned practices", and (b) the Hindutva,
or the Hindu chauvinist's, idea of India.
To votaries of the first, Sen says, "it would be hard to
understand the history of India [without its tradition of scepticism]". To see India "as overwhelmingly religious, or deeply anti-scientific, or
exclusively hierarchical, or fundamentally unsceptical involves
significant oversimplification of India's past and present." To
support his view, Sen marshals evidence from the Vedas, the Upanishads,
the Buddhists and the Carvakas,
the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, Gupta-era science and mathematics,
the intellectual links of the first millennium between India and China, the liberal-plural
regimes of Ashoka and Akbar, the egalitarianism of Hindu Bhakti and Muslim
Sufism, men like Gandhi, Tagore and Ray, etc.
The modern West, contends Sen, emphasized
"the differences—real or imagined—between India and the West," focusing on
India's spiritual heritage at the expense of the rational one, partly
because the West was naturally drawn to what was unique and
different in India.
[Such] slanted emphases has tended
to undermine an adequately pluralist understanding of Indian intellectual
traditions. While India has ... a vast religious literature [with] grand
speculation on transcendental issues ... there is also a huge—and often
pioneering—literature, stretching over two and a half millennia, on
mathematics, logic, epistemology, astronomy, physiology, linguistics,
phonetics, economics, political science and psychology, among other
subjects concerned with the here and now.
And while India might offer "examples
of every conceivable type of attempt at the solution to the religious
problem," Sen submits that they "coexist with deeply sceptical
arguments ... (sometimes within the religious texts themselves)."
Among his examples is the 'song of creation' of the Rig Veda, "the first extensive
composition in any Indo-European language" (Wendy Doniger) and the
radical doubts expressed therein.
Who really knows? Who will here
proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods
came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows whence
it has arisen?Whence this creation has
arisen—perhaps it has formed itself, or perhaps it did not—the one who
looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows—or perhaps he does
not know.
Sen outlines three
types of Western approaches to India: the exoticist, the magisterial, and
the curatorial. He contends that these approaches, reinforcing each other,
exaggerated "the non-material and arcane aspects of Indian traditions
[over its] rationalistic and analytic elements." This, in turn, has
strongly influenced the formation of the modern Indian identity. Sen's
analysis is bracing and instructive, though he would have done well to add
that few Westerners neatly adopt a single approach, most exhibiting a variable and
fluid mix of them.
With incisive wit and logic, Sen also combats the crude, insecure, and bellicose idea of
a Hindu India promoted by the Hindutva movement (a brand of nationalism
which at its peak was supported by less than 30% of all Hindus). He
derides their pathetic attempts at rewriting history and inventing a
glorified Hindu past that never was. He notes Hindutva's special appeal to
many in the Hindu diaspora
who are understandably "keen on taking pride—some self-respect and
dignity—in the culture and traditions of their original
homeland", and how it receives large remittances from them. In
contrast, Sen exults in an India that has also long been home to Jains,
Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Parsees, Muslims, Sikhs, Baha'is, and even atheists.
To Sen, this historical heterogeneity and openness is a far worthier source
of national pride.
Indians of any background should
have reason enough to celebrate their historical and cultural association
with [for example] Nagarjuna's penetrating philosophical arguments,
Harsa's philanthropic leadership, Maitreyi's or Gargi's searching
questions, Carvaka's reasoned scepticism, Aryabhata's astronomical and
mathematical departures, Kalidasa's dazzling poetry, Sudraka's subversive
drama, Abul Fazl's astounding scholarship, Shah Jahan's aesthetic vision,
Ramanujan's mathematics, or Ravi Shankar's and Ali Akbar Khan's music,
without first having to check the religious background of each.
He argues that "the problem with invoking the
Ramayana to propagate a reductionist account of Hindu religiosity lies in
the way the epic is deployed for this purpose—as a document of
supernatural veracity, rather than as a 'marvellous parable' (as Tagore
saw it)." The
Hindutva brigade clearly shares this penchant with religious
fundamentalists from around the world. Sen points out that even in the Ramayana, Rama is not a god but an epic-hero, "with many good qualities and some
weaknesses, including a tendency to harbor suspicions about his wife Sita's faithfulness." In the epic, a pundit called Javali "not only does not treat
Rama as God, he calls his actions 'foolish' ('especially for', as Javali
puts it, 'an intelligent and wise man')". Echoing the beliefs of
the materialistic school of ancient India, Javali even asserts that "there
is no after-world, nor any religious practice for attaining that", and
that "the injunctions about the worship of gods, sacrifice, gifts and
penance have been laid down in the [scriptures] by clever people, just to
rule over [other] people".
Sen highlights a third major
perception of India but does not much discuss it. This is the India of those
keen on
showing the strength of the faith-based and unreasoning culture of India
and the East, in contrast to the 'shallow rationalism' and scientific
priorities of the West. This line of argument may well be inspired by
sympathy, but it [too] can end up suppressing large
parts of India's intellectual heritage. In this pre-selected 'East-West'
contrast, meetings are organized, as it were, between Aristotle and Euclid
on the one hand, and wise and contended Indian peasants on the other. This
...[while not uninteresting] ... is not pre-eminently a better way of
understanding the 'East-West' cultural contrast than by arranging meetings
between, say, Aryabhata and Kautilya on the one hand, and happily
determined Visigoths on the other.
An alluring feature of Sen's writing
is that perennially precious thing: commonsense. His commitment to
civility, clarity, and precision is always evident. Most of the sixteen
essays in this collection brim with
a moral urgency and represent
many of Sen's major
thematic concerns of recent decades; they also reveal his abiding love of
India. Still—exhilarating, insightful,
and reasoned as The Argumentative Indian is—it is not balanced
in much the same way that Edward Said's work isn't (many critics see
strong affinities in their works, even though Said consciously avoided
offering his own representations of Middle Eastern culture and history). At times it feels like
a thinly veiled "self-respect and dignity" project for
cosmopolitan India-lovers, but it also brilliantly achieves its main goal:
to give a sturdy nudge to the leading perceptions of India and challenge
historians and cultural critics to reexamine their assumptions. This is clearly no mean feat.
2.
Unlike Naipaul—another Nobel
laureate and influential interpreter of India—Sen doesn't see India's
Muslim history largely as a wound. "It would be as silly to deny the
barbarities of the invasive history [of the Muslims]," argues Sen, "as it
would be to see this savagery as the main historical feature of the Muslim
presence in India ... Muslim rulers, despite a fiery and brutal entry,
soon developed—with a few prominent exceptions—basically tolerant
attitudes." He cites Akbar, the Pathan kings of Bengal, Dara Shikoh, and
another Akbar: the son of Aurangzeb who didn't share his father's
intolerance and joined other Hindu kings, including the son of Shivaji
(now a demigod to the Hindu chauvinists). There are nightmarish elements
in the Muslim history of India, admits Sen, but "it also includes
conversations and discussions, and extensive joint efforts in literature,
music, painting, architecture, jurisprudence and a great many other
creative activities."
Sen admires Alberuni, the Persian
scholar who, a thousand years ago, had mastered Sanskrit and traveled in
India for 13 years, observing, reading, questioning, before writing his
monumental history of India. Sen contrasts his approach with that of James
Mill—the celebrated colonial historian who never visited India. Mill,
quips Sen, "evidently didn't want to be biased by closeness to his subject matter".
So it seems fitting that Macaulay—who held that "a single shelf of a good
European library was worth the whole native literature of India and
Arabia"—would be the one to discern in Mill's history of India "the greatest historical
work ... since that of Gibbon".
Sen frequently cites "Akbar's defence
of a tolerant, pluralist society [and] his focus on the role of reasoning
in choosing this approach." Akbar held that "reason cannot but be
supreme, since even when disputing reason, we would have to give reason
for that disputation." It may seem ironical that Akbar, a monarch who
also led brutal wars of expansion, should feature so often in Sen's book.
Ditto for Ashoka, whose edicts on public conduct and
morality may well strike the modern reader as patronizing. Yet, situating
them in their historical contexts, Sen makes a persuasive case that these
men were far more enlightened than their global contemporaries.
Sen is also impatient with
"contemporary attacks on modernity (especially on a 'modernity' that is
seen as coming to India from the West)". The attackers consider modernity
a European cultural phenomenon—defined by peculiar notions like
individualism, progress, secularism, and democracy—and they question its
universality or suitability for the non-Western world. While at home with concepts like
"reason" and "heterodoxy", Sen considers the notion of modernity
"befuddling" and "irrelevant as a pointer of merit or demerit in assessing
contemporary priorities". To those who see a problem with importing
modernity in India (including Ashis Nandy), he responds
with characteristic precision:
The point is that there is no escape from
the necessity to scrutinize and assess ideas and proposals no matter
whether they are seen as pro-modern or anti-modern. For example, if we
have to decide what policies to support in education, health care, or
social security, the modernity or non-modernity of any proposal is neither
here nor there. The relevant question is how these policies would affect
the lives of people ...
To those protective of the Indian masses against
the "corruptions" of the
West (Gandhi, for instance), Sen, like Tagore, "cannot bear to see the people eternally
treated as a child." Instead, as Tagore said, it should be that "whatever we
understand and enjoy in human products instantly becomes ours, wherever
they might have their origin." For Sen, "the need to resist colonial
dominance is, of course, important, but it has to be seen as a fight
against submissive compliance, rather than as a plea for segregation and
localism. The so-called 'post-colonial critique' can be significantly
constructive when it is dialectically engaged—and thus strongly
interactive—rather than defensively withdrawn and barriered."
3.
Acknowledging India's "terrible
record of social asymmetry" with respect to gender, class, and caste, Sen
inquires "whether the tradition of [argumentation] has been confined to an
exclusive part of the Indian population", the male elite that is, which
would severely undermine "the social relevance of the argumentative
tradition." He claims the answer here "is much more complex than a simple
generalization can capture", and then proceeds to offer examples of women,
minorities, and other disadvantaged groups registering their argumentative
presence in Indian history and culture. But will these examples convince
those who hold such identities?
The contending words of
Kancha Ilaiah loom large:
"Nowhere in human history has one group—the
upper castes of India—been able to oppress so many for so long."
A vocal champion of democracy and
open markets, Sen has argued elsewhere that "we cannot really take the
high economic growth of Singapore or China as proof that authoritarianism
does better in promoting rapid economic growth—any more than we can draw
the opposite conclusion on the basis of the fact that one of the fastest
growing countries in the world, Botswana [is a democracy]."♣
For Sen, democracy and open markets—combined with rational social
policies—are the ideal means to liberal governance. When instituted from
above, he notes, their success depends on a variety of local factors. He rightly
points out the pivotal role of public reasoning for the success of
democracy and claims that India's long argumentative tradition is strongly
relevant to its own enduring democracy. He then adds:
It is very important to avoid the
twin pitfalls of (1) taking democracy as to be just a gift of the Western
world that India simply accepted ... (2)
assuming that there is something unique in Indian history that makes the
country singularly suited to democracy. The point, rather, is that
democracy is intimately connected with public discussion and interactive
reasoning ... And to the
extent that such a tradition can be drawn on, democracy becomes easier to
institute and also to preserve.
Other conditions Sen considers
important for
the success of democracy include political equality and substantial social and economic
equality.
Political equality came one midnight hour in 1947. Sen believes that
India's argumentative tradition is a powerful ally for advancing the cause
of equality in the other two spheres. But almost sixty years later, the
actual results, concedes Sen, have been mixed at best, even disconcerting,
given the rise of divisive identity politics based on narrow affiliations
of caste and religion, rising economic
disparity (he finds the evidence on this conflicting), and the stubborn
persistence of illiteracy, poverty, corruption, hunger and malnutrition,
as well as caste, class, and gender
based inequities. He maintains though that "what is really needed
is a more vigorous practice of democracy, rather than the absence of it."
But Sen doesn't say how to get
Indians to practice democracy more vigorously. And while plausible, more
evidence is needed for the primacy he assigns in its endurance to
India's argumentative tradition. Another plausible theory assigns this
credit to the famed tolerance of Indians—what Sen perceptively calls swikriti,
or "'acceptance', in particular the acknowledgement that [others] are
entitled to lead their own lives"—but to the underside of this good
tolerance, the side that has long encouraged too many Indians to accept (rather
passively) perhaps too much in life. This includes any inoffensive
political system that came along (such as democracy), and which eventually fell in line
with Indian cultural ways—a far cry from the textbook model
for that system of governance.
Sen also tackles globalization from his unique vantage point as an economist. Some fears
about globalization, he says,
make it sound like an animal—analogous to
the big shark in Jaws—that gobbles up unsuspecting innocents in a dark and
mysterious way ... Globalization is neither new, nor in general a folly.
Through persistent movement of goods, people, techniques and ideas, it has
shaped the history of the world. India has been an integral part of the
world in the most interactive sense. The forces of ideological separatism
may be strong in India at present, as they are elsewhere, but they
militate not just against the global history of the world, but also
against India's own heritage.
He warns us against the temptation
to see globalization as a "one-sided movement that simply reflects an
asymmetry of power which needs to be resisted." Throughout history,
"different regions of the world have [benefited] from progress and
development occurring in other regions." He points out that a millennium
ago this movement occurred in the reverse direction—with "paper and
printing, the crossbow and gunpowder, the wheelbarrow and the rotary fan,
the clock and the iron chain suspension bridge, the kite and the magnetic
compass,"
zero, the
decimal system, and advances in mathematics—but he is conspicuously silent about how
the unprecedented scale of today's globalization, with its pace and engine of change, instant flights of capital, rapid
demographic shifts, and powerful corporations, might differ from that of
an earlier age.
Sen acknowledges that economic
globalization poses risks to the vulnerable and the disadvantaged and his
prescriptions appear close to the neo-liberal line: It's inescapable, so
let's try to make it more humane and just. Rather than isolating itself or
blaming the "shark" of globalization, India should get behind it and,
through smart public policies, tackle specific ills that arise from it, as
well as invest in education, health care, micro-credit, land reforms,
women's education, and infrastructure (like energy, communication,
transportation). He favors safety nets and well conceived social welfare
programs that do less harm than good (who can disagree, but here Sen
betrays no awareness that this old problem is known to ensnare even the
best kind of reasoning). He has used part of his Nobel Prize money to fund development
research in India and Bangladesh. He has persuasively argued that development should be
measured not by GDP but in terms of "real freedoms people can enjoy."
But Sen's analysis is not without
its flaws. He writes: "Global economic interactions bring general benefits,
but they can also create problems for many, because of inadequacies of
global arrangements as well as limitations of appropriate domestic
policies." If (a big if) these were addressed—Sen seems to suggest—economic globalization should create few problems. This is
simplistic at best.
Problems can also come
from a culture's unpredictable response to it. What novel set of beliefs will it provoke? Will they be broadly liberal, rational, and conducive to economic success? Can we say how the dust will settle? The patient may get worse, or trade one
serious illness for another. This recognition, far from turning us against globalization,
makes us more
realistic about its effects. Factoring in culture, Amy Chua, in her
World on Fire,
provides sobering examples that contrast with many of Sen's sanguine
assumptions about "the crooked timber of humanity".
4.
Sen's primary objective in this work
is to highlight the heterodox and rational aspects of India's past and
present. Yet, he doesn't quite distinguish the 'heterodox' from the
'rational': two distinct and incidentally overlapping pursuits. For
instance, the devotional Hindu and Muslim mystics he cites were heterodox
(also syncretistic and egalitarian) but hardly rational—their arguments derived from a personal relationship to God rather than from reason.
The term "Argumentative Indian" subsumes them both, but the question
here is: besides contributing
to diversity (the extent of which in India, Sen notes, had also baffled Churchill), what is heterodoxy worth without the underpinnings of
reason?
Notably, Sen's examples of rational Indians—outside the modern age and with the exception of Akbar's court—come to us from over a millennium ago (early texts,
the epics, the Buddha, Carvaka, Ashoka,
Aryabhata, etc.). This may fortify a rival claim that sometime in the last
millennium, the rational-creative subculture of ancient India waned as Buddhism and
Brahmanism gave way to devotional Hinduism and
Islam, that
mystical and orthodox beliefs fossilized Indian culture, making it appallingly disinterested in "subjects concerned with the here and
now", that the British
found an India without a sense of history, or interest in science, or a
culture of disruptive innovation, that sporadic personal mutinies of this era grew
into a million much more recently.
Indeed, as Sen astutely admits, "there are other
[reasonable] ways of proceeding" on such matters. But henceforth, few of them
will be able to ignore this impassioned and stimulating labor of love. |
