The Great Speeches of Modern India

by Rudrangshu Mukherjee

  This is the occasion for us to pay tribute to all those Great Teachers of our Time who are no more with us—Messers. Jack Gibson; Sudhir Khastagir; old Gombar (despite some curious goings-on) and Webb, the New Zealander who taught us English for a while; the ambidextrous S.K. Roy; K.B. Sinha, V.N. Kapur, and O.P. Malhotra; Kunzru and Nair; Ghushti and Gupta of the chemistry class; Viji Hensman; Shirodkar and Deshpande at the Music School; Joshi at Kashmir House; Kishore Lal of the carpentry shop and Mumtaz, I think his name was, the bookbinder; Sister Gibbs at the hospital; Mela Ram, the photographer (‘Ishmile Pliss!’); Darshan Singh in the boxing ring—and those I have already mentioned. As also those other Great Teachers of our Time who are happily still with us—the ‘paanwala gang’, chaired by Dr S.D. Singh for the largest number of paans consumed in a single lifetime; the Hindi litterateur who has made possible a career for me in our gravely Rashtrabhasa-tilted politics—Dr H.D. Bhatt ‘Sailesh’ (some whose short stories I translated as a schoolboy into English and who, in turn, translated my melodramatic adolescent outpourings into Hindi); Rathin Mitra at the Art School, and many, many others; above all, the immortal Gurdial Singh whom I had the honour, as the country’s most unlikely and undeserving Sports Minister ever, to select this year for the Tenzing Norgay Award for lifetime achievement. For Indian mountaineering was born in The Doon School and made possible only because of the tremendous imagination, leadership and grit of the Great Guru.

  When I contrast this Galaxy of Greats with schools that I know where the Principal comes drunk to assembly, the Headmaster turns out to be a serial molester, and the Housemaster a thief, one knows that what makes the Doon School the Doon School is, first and almost last, its Masters and Staff. Thank you all for the great start in life you gave all of us.

  The other great institution that has a left the mark of a lifetime on each one of us and rough hewn the destinies which we have been later left to hone for ourselves is morning Assembly. If secularism is the hallmark of a Doon School education its origins lie in the eclectic collection of non-denominational prayers and songs with which we started every working day, the thanks we were taught to give:

  For hills to climb and hard work to do

  For all skill of hand and eye

  For music that lifts our hearts to heaven

  And for the hand-grasp of a friend

  Remember? And can you hear over the waves of time the deep and sonorous baritone of Headmaster John Arthur King Martyn subtly imbuing us with all that is of the best and the brightest in our tradition and the heritage of humankind? More, I think, than anything we were taught from text-books, it was the profound and eclectic lessons learned through our pores, as it were, in assembly that have lasted longest with us, permeating our thoughts and action with those instinctive values which make us the good and responsible citizens we have, by and large, turned out to be.

  Third, I believe, is the lessons we were taught in the dignity of labour. We all came from extraordinarily privileged families. Few of us were required to look after even ourselves at home. It was an era of servants by the dozen and pampering for the asking.

  The school could easily have degenerated into a haven for neofeudals, as so many sister institutions in India and Pakistan had indeed become. I think it was making our own beds, polishing our own shoes, compulsory labour—‘quota work’ as we then called it—and Tunwala that saved our souls. That—and fending for ourselves in the midst of mindless bullying, petty tyranny and the proud man’s contumely—that gave us the inner strength to face the world outside. It is a tough world outside—and the fact that it was even tougher at school made for a successful launch. I wish there were gentler ways of doing it but I wouldn’t know of any.

  Fourth, a sense of community—a sense of community that is both exclusive and inclusive. The exclusion is the sense of superiority over all those who fall outside the walls of Chandbagh. It gives us Doscos our well-deserved notoriety for snobbery and conceit. It also gives us our inestimable self-confidence, the belief, not unjustified, that the world is ours for the taking. (When I went up to St. Stephen’s, some guy said he couldn’t stand Doscos. When I asked why, he said, ‘You chaps walk around this place as if you own it.’ I replied, ‘We don’t. Neither do you. So, why don’t you walk around as if you own it?!)’ The inclusivity comes from there being perfect equality of treatment and opportunity within these sacred walls. For there were among us, and I daresay still are, ridiculously rich scions of princely families and fattened calves of industrial magnates, children of the powerful, the famous and the merely vainglorious. But because we all received the same pocket-money and had to do for ourselves the same menial tasks and competed with each other on a level playing-field with no favourites and no nepotism, it bred in us, I think, a belief in equality and equity, of justice and fair-play, the enduring conviction that:

  ‘It matters not who won or lost/But how you played the game.’

  It also inured most of us from the temptations of corruption. If success has come to so many Doon School boys—and I think we can claim over the last 72 years to have produced more men (and a few women) of distinction in a wider variety of fields of human endeavour per capita than any other school in the country, I think that has a great deal to do with the rigours of our adolescence and the timeless and universal value system pumped into our blood stream by the best masters the country and our generation had to offer.

  Can any one of us forget Holdy’s injunction to cultivate the ‘bold, inquisitive Greek spirit’ or his astonishment at finding our class, one month before our Senior Cambridge exams, failing to react to his remark,

  ‘Let the punishment fit the crime/The punishment fit the crime.’

  On learning that none of us had heard the verse, he put aside all our books and over the next three days sang for us in his cracked voice the whole of Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera, The Mikado! Or Sahi reading out from some poor unfortunate’s Sunday essay on ‘Water’: ‘Human beings need water to live. So do animals. Without water, we would all die’—and more in the same vein, then throwing the note book back at the author crying, ‘Hai paani! Hai paani!’

  I have but one recommendation to make as the school veers towards its Platinum Jubilee. When I was here, girls were a rumour. The cruellest irony was that Welham Girls started up only in my last term—and I had to wait till the 4x400 girls relay on this Main Field to discover what made them so deliciously different from us. When I eventually founded my family, I had three girls—all of whom went to a co-educational school, inferior in every respect to The Doon School except in that they learned about the opposite sex when they needed to. Our deprivation distorted all of us. I am glad none of my daughters is slated to marry a Doon School boy. For all the Doscos wives here would agree that we are totally mixed up inside! So my final plea to you is: make the school co-educational. I think this complex of Hyderabad and Kashmir House would make for a perfect girls’ hostel—besides the incidental advantage of reducing the number of H-House and K-House boys! (My T-House fellow, the Headmaster, would agree that this would considerably raise the tone of the school! (boos and applause!) When my eldest was born, I wrote to Headmaster Marytn and asked him whether I might expect Doon to become co-ed by the time she reached the age of eleven. He replied to say he hoped it would. Now, three long decades later, the school still remains a unisexual Victorian relic. I hope the Board of Governors will summon up the courage to make the Great Change by the Platinum Jubilee! I urge them to do so.

  I emerged from school a red-hot Marxist (—like Mukul Chhatwal in yesterday’s Hindi play). Others had a more intelligent reaction. I have since moderated my views (again like Mukul Chhatwal in yesterday’s play). So, I am sure, have my classmates. But on one point we are all agreed: it was great to have been here, a miracle to have survived, and a trauma we recall with affection and gratitude.

  ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive

  And to be young was very Heaven!’

  Thank you, School.
And thank you to all who made this possible.

  Jai Hind!

  1. Governor Dhruv Sawhney subsequently told me it was 1955. Grateful thanks for the correction.

  Our culture, their culture (Calcutta, December 1995)

  AMARTYA SEN (1932–)

  Amartya Sen gave the Satyajit Ray Lecture in 1995, a few years before he won the Nobel Prize. Sen is a legendary speaker and there was no standing place in the hall and screens were put up outside for people who couldn’t get a seat. It was perhaps the first time that he was presenting in India, his views on some aspects of Indian history and on the Indo-European encounter. Many of his thoughts on this subject have become better known through his book The Argumentative Indian.

  I feel very deeply honoured to have this opportunity of giving this year’s Satyajit Ray Memorial Lecture. My admiration for him and for his work is altogether boundless. For many of us he has changed the way we think about the world in which we live. Aside from enjoying the narrative, imagery, music and vision, we are invariably moved to address deep and difficult questions to which we are led by him. To see a Ray movie, is to get immersed in reflection for days afterwards, and to remember the issues (as well as the moments of beauty and sensitivity) for the rest of one’s life.

  Satyajitda presented in his films and writings a remarkably insightful understanding of the relation between different cultures, and much of this talk will be devoted to investigating and building on what I interpret this position to be. Ray’s insights remain, I would argue, centrally relevant to the major cultural debates in the contemporary world—not least in India.

  What, then, are these insights? I guess I can give away the main theme of my lecture at the very beginning, since this is not a detective story. In Ray’s films and in his writings (including his books Our Films, Their Films, and My Years with Apu: A Memoir) we see explorations of at least three distinct general themes on cultures and their interrelations: (i) the importance of ‘distinctions’ between different local cultures and their respective individualities, (ii) the necessity to understand the deeply ‘heterogenous’ character of each local culture (even that of an alleged community, not to mention a region or a country) and (iii) the great need for intercultural ‘communication’ while recognizing the barriers that make this a hard task.

  The deepest respect for distinctiveness is combined, in Satyajitda’s vision, with recognition of internal diversity as well as appreciation of genuine communication. While impetuous cosmopolitans have something to learn from Ray’s focus on distinctiveness, the growing army of communitarians and cultural chauvinists—increasingly more fashionable in India as well as elsewhere—must take note of the persistence of heterogeneity at the most local level, and the creative role of intercultural communication and learning.

  In emphasizing the need to respect the individuality of each culture, Ray saw no reason for closing the doors to the outside world. Indeed, not closing the doors of communication with—and learning from—each other were extremely important for Satyajitda. In this respect his attitude contrasts sharply with the increasing tendency to see Indian culture (or cultures) in highly conservative terms—wanting it to be preserved from the ‘pollution’ of Western ideas and thought. He was always willing to enjoy and learn from ideas, art forms, and lifestyles from anywhere—within India or abroad.

  Also, Ray was able to see heterogeneity within allegedly local communities, and this insight contrasts sharply with the tendency of many communitarians—religious and otherwise—who are willing to break up the nation into some communities and then stop dead exactly there: ‘thus far and no further’. Ray’s eagerness to seek the larger unit—ultimately talking to the whole world—combined well with his enthusiasm for understanding the smallest of the small—ultimately even the vibrant individuality of each person. It is this vision from which, I would argue, we have so much to learn—right now.

  There can be little doubt about the importance that Ray attached to the distinctiveness of different cultures. He also discussed the problems these divisions create in the possibility of communication across cultural boundaries. In his book, Our Films, Their Films, he noted the important fact that films acquire ‘colour from all manner of indigenous factors such as habits of speech and behaviour, deep-seated social practices, past traditions, present influences and so on’.

  He went on to ask: ‘How much of this can a foreigner—with no more than a cursory knowledge of the factors involved—feel and respond to?’ He noted that ‘there are certain basic similarities in human behaviour all over the world’ (such as ‘expressions of joy and sorrow, love and hate, anger, surprise and fear’), but ‘even they can exhibit minute local variations which can only puzzle and perturb—and consequently warp the judgment of—the uninitiated foreigner’.

  The presence of such cultural divides raises many interesting concerns. The possibility of communication is only one of them. There is the more basic issue of the individuality of each culture, and questions about whether and how this individuality can be respected and valued even though the world grows steadily smaller and more uniform. We live at a time at which more things are increasingly common, and the possibility that something extremely important is being lost in this process of integration, has aroused understandable concern.

  The individuality of cultures is a big subject now, and the tendency towards homogenization of cultures, particularly in some uniform Western mode, or in the deceptive form of modernity’, has been strongly challenged. Questions of this kind have been taken up in different forms in recent cultural studies, especially in Western intellectual circles (from Paris to San Francisco), not far from the ‘main sources’ of the threats of Westernized modernity (there is perhaps some irony here).

  But the prevalence and influence of these questions can be seen plentifully in contemporary India as well. Often the form it takes is that of ‘anti-modernism’, rejecting what is seen as the tyranny of ‘modern’ society (particularly, a ‘Western’ form of modernization). Sometimes the defiance of Western cultural modes is expressed through enunciations of the unique importance of Indian culture and the traditions of its communities.

  At the broader level of ‘Asia’ rather than India, the separateness of ‘Asian values’ and their distinction from Western norms have often been asserted, particularly in east Asia—from Singapore to China and Japan. The invoking of Asian values has sometimes occurred in rather dubious political circumstances. For example, it has been used to justify authoritarianism (and harsh penalties for alleged transgressions) in some east Asian countries.

  In the Vienna conference, the foreign minister of Singapore argued, citing differences between Asian and European traditions, that ‘universal recognition of the ideal of human rights can be harmful if universalism is used to deny or mask the reality of “diversity”.’ The championing of ‘Asian values’ has typically come from governmental spokesmen rather than from individuals opposed to the established regimes. Still, the general issue is important enough to deserve our attention and scrutiny. In examining the implications of cultural diversity, I must, inter alia, take up this question.

  Even though he emphasized the difficulties of inter-cultural communication, Ray did not, in fact, take cross-cultural comprehension to be impossible. He saw the difficulties as challenges to be encountered, rather than as strict boundaries that could not be breached. His was not a thesis of basic ‘incommunicability’ across cultural boundaries—merely one of the need to recognize the difficulties that may arise. On the larger subject of preserving traditions against foreign influence, Ray was not a cultural conservative. He did not give systematic priority to conserving inherited practices. Indeed, I find no evidence in his work and writings that the fear of being too influenced by outsiders disturbed his inner equilibrium as a decisively ‘Indian’ filmmaker and creative artist. He wanted to take full note of the importance of one’s cultural background without denying what there is to learn from elsewhere. There is, I think, much
wisdom in this ‘critical openness’, including the valuing of a dynamic, adaptable world, rather than one that is constantly ‘policing’ external influences and fearing ‘invasion’ of ideas from elsewhere.

  The difficulties of understanding each other across the boundaries of culture are undoubtedly great. This applies to the cinema, but also to other art forms as well, including literature. For example, the inability of most foreigners—sometimes even other Indians—to see the astonishing beauty of Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry (a failure that we Bengalis find so exasperating) is a good illustration of just such a problem. Indeed, the thought that these non-appreciating foreigners are being wilfully contrary and obdurate (rather than being unable to appreciate across the barrier of languages and translations) is a suspicion that seems to be frequently aired.

  In some ways, the problem is perhaps less extreme in films, insofar as the cinema is less dependent on language, since people can be informed even by gestures and actions. But our day to day experiences generate certain patterns of reaction and non-reaction that can be mystifying for foreign viewers who have not had those experiences. The gestures—and ‘non’-gestures—that are quite standard within the country (and understandable as ‘perfectly ordinary’) may appear altogether remarkable when seen by others.