Much of Europe tried to adopt what became a means of survival: an independent and strong national state, the desire for which led to the remaking of Europe along nationalist lines in the nineteenth century and, among other things, forced de Körös to go searching for the origins of the Hungarian people in the vast spaces of Central Asia.
Already in the seventeenth century, with the decline of religion and moral philosophy, politics had emerged as a major human preoccupation in Europe. Individuals, it had begun to seem, could not achieve happiness and virtue without reorganizing their societies – the secular vision that later inspired the western idea of revolution, which contained the promise of building society on entirely new foundations, after destroying the remnants of the past.
Writing in the mid-seventeenth century, in an England ravaged by civil war, Thomas Hobbes set out his alarming vision of individuals ruled by appetites and aversions, pursuing their own interests and locked in perpetual mutual enmity. Hobbes believed that only a ruthless centralized state, which subjugated all other forms of human association, could preserve the peace and save individuals from endless fear and insecurity.
Hobbes spoke on behalf of the then emerging bourgeoisie; his values were drawn from a market society, which was freeing Englishmen from the constraints of tradition and hierarchy, and upholding the ideals of equality and freedom. He couldn’t have been much heard outside Europe, in places where the idea of the individual defined by a desire for free trade and profit was still alien.
In 1616, when Sir Thomas Roe, the first accredited English ambassador to the Mughal Empire, arrived in India, seeking a formal trade treaty, he had been treated with suspicion. The aesthete Mughal emperor Jahangir, who spent his days recording flora and fauna, commissioning miniature paintings, designing gardens in Kashmir and smoking opium, was sceptical about a supposedly great English king who concerned himself with such petty things as trade. But in less than two centuries, the petty traders turned into the conquerors and rulers of much of the known world. Hobbes’s vision of amoral individuals pursuing their self-interest and bound together by the state received its apotheosis in the nineteenth century when the new bourgeoisie of Western Europe established rival empires across the world.
It seemed clear to many educated men in the conquered countries of Asia and Africa that the superior organization of the nation state had helped western nations in amassing their superior resources, inventions and firepower. Forced to consider how their inheritance of ancient tradition had failed to save them from subjection to the modern West, they concluded that it was now up to Asia and Africa to work hard and hope to emulate the success of the West.
Catching up with the West: this was the obsession of many people, even in Russia, which was an empire, not a European colony, and where there was hardly a writer or intellectual in the nineteenth century who did not either favour or oppose strongly westernization. If Alexander Herzen and Ivan Turgenev spoke of the benefits of liberal democracy and the need for reason in human affairs, the Slavophiles – Fyodor Dostoevsky and, later, Leo Tolstoy among them – asserted the moral superiority and instinctual wisdom of the devout Russian soul. In 1868, the new Meiji rulers of Japan started on their own a programme of modernization designed to bring the country level with Western Europe – a programme that eventually led Japan in the early twentieth century into war against Russia and colonial conquests in Asia.
However, it was people in countries conquered by European nations who were most acutely preoccupied by the perceived challenge from the West. They included such Muslim intellectuals as Mohammed Iqbal, the poet advocate of Pakistan, the Egyptians Mohammed Abduh, the intellectual founder of modern radical Islam, and Sayyid Qutb, the fundamentalist activist who inspired Osama bin Laden. These were mostly middle-class men who were educated formally in western-style institutions; their most crucial encounter was with the West, whose history they learnt before they learnt anything else, and whose power they felt daily in their lives.
Travelling to the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they came up against the paradox that the western nations, which were mortal enemies of each other and ruthless exploiters of their colonies, had created admirably liberal civilizations at home. These thinkers remained opposed to the western presence in their countries and aspired for independence. But they were also dazzled by the power and prestige of the West, and they couldn’t but grapple with the complex question of how much space to give to western values of science, reason, secularism and nationalism in the traditional societies they belonged to.8
This question began to haunt Vivekananda when in 1893 he travelled to the West for the first time in his life. Born to a middle-class family in Calcutta, he was studying law, in preparation for a western-style professional career, when he met the mystic Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and renounced the world. As a monk, he travelled all across India and first exposed himself to the misery and degradation most Indians then lived in. When he travelled to the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 as a representative of the Hindu religion, he hoped partly to raise funds for a monastic mission in India and, more vaguely, to find the right technology for alleviating poverty in India.
The World Parliament of Religions was part of a larger celebration of Christopher Columbus’s so-called discovery of America. The organizers planned to ‘display the achievements of western civilization and to benefit American trade’. Vivekananda, who then had a low opinion of western civilization, addressed himself directly to such self-absorption. At Chicago, he spoke eloquently on Hinduism, drawing on his great knowledge of western philosophy. He claimed that it was an Indian achievement to see all religions as equally true, and to set spiritual liberation as the aim of life. Americans received his speech rapturously. He lectured on Hinduism to similarly enthusiastic audiences in other American cities.
The news of Vivekananda’s success flattered insecure middle-class Indians in India who wished to make Hinduism intellectually respectable both to themselves and to westerners.9 But Vivekananda himself, during the next few years spent travelling in America and Europe, was to move away from an uncritical celebration of Indian religion and his hostility towards the West. He came to have a new regard for the West, for the explosion of creative energy, the scientific spirit of curiosity and the ambition that in the nineteenth century had made a small minority the masters of the world. He could barely restrain his admiration in letters home: ‘What strength, what practicality, what manhood!’10 Vivekananda was among the first Indians to see clearly the fact of western dominance over the world, and to attest to the inevitability of the West’s presence, even superiority, in almost all aspects of human life. His own conclusion was that India should regenerate itself with the help of such western techniques as reason, nationalism and science. And he wasn’t alone in his admiration for western masculinity.
Europe is progressive. Her religion is…used for one day in the week and for six days her people are following the dictates of modern science. Sanitation, aesthetic arts, electricity, etc are what made the Europeans and American people great. Asia is full of opium eaters, ganja smokers, degenerating sensualists, superstitious and religious fanatics.
This could be either Vivekananda or Iqbal. It is actually Anagarika Dharampala, one of the greatest figures of modern Buddhism. Born in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1864, Dharampala was just a year younger than Vivekananda. He also went to the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, though as a representative of Buddhism, and was much less prominent than his Indian colleague. Like Vivekananda, Dharampala was influenced by the West, particularly by the Protestant missionaries, who came with British rule over Sri Lanka, and grew to denounce traditional religion in Sri Lanka as corrupt and unmanly. He wished both to modernize Buddhism and to give it a political role. Following these contradictory desires, he became an anti-colonial nationalist; he was the major icon of the Sinhalese nationalism that later brought Sri Lanka to civil war in the 1980s.
Com
pared to such Hindu and Buddhist modernists as Vivekananda and Dharampala, the Muslim intellectuals were more divided in their attitudes towards the West. Some of them, such as the young Turkish intellectuals of the early twentieth century, wished to totally remake their countries along western lines so as to achieve the power and affluence that the West possessed. There were many others who chose the way of suspicion or antipathy. Iqbal stressed the need of Indian Muslims to form their own state where they could follow Islam in its most spiritual form and resist the material ways of the West. Qutb advocated a return to the Koran and preached revolutionary violence against the West and its values, which he saw incarnated in Arab nation states.
But whether choosing nationalism or revolution, almost all of these intellectuals from colonized countries seemed inadvertently to admit that the West had become the best source of ideas about effecting large-scale change and organizing human society. They admitted the need for modernization, even in the sphere of religion, and for cultivating a rational and scientific outlook.
The issue had been settled in India long before independence in 1947. India was obsessed with catching up with the West. In the 1950s, as my father left his village for the city, everything – newspaper editorials about five-year plans, advertisements for family planning, the grand schemes for dams and steel plants coming out of New Delhi – underlined the same shared objective.
These efforts towards western modernity were driven by an almost religious belief in history – history not as something that happened in the past and which is worth remembering and commemorating, as Thucydides and Herodotus, the first great historians, had seen it; history not as a series of unrelated events, but as a rational process, through clearly defined stages, towards a higher state of progress and development, a process which was shown in the West’s movement from the Medieval Age to the Reformation and the Renaissance and on to its many revolutions, the process that people in the rest of the world could duplicate with the right outlook and means.
The guarantee against failure seemed to be the West’s own tremendous success, beginning in the nineteenth century – the time when history acquired its prestige as a guide to understanding the confused tangle of human motives and actions which the past presented to ordinary eyes; when, popularized by intellectuals such as Hegel and Marx, this new teleological interpretation of human life began to help predict, even plan, an otherwise unknowable future, in which things would be even better than they were now.
India was not considered part of this forward movement of reason and humanity, which had achieved its apotheosis in nineteenth-century Europe. For Hegel, Indians had long been sunk in ‘magic somnambulic sleep’. For Marx, India was ‘an unresisting and unchanging society’, marked by an ‘undignified, stagnatory and vegetative life’.
It had fallen to Europeans to bring places like India into the mainstream of human progress. In the course of their conquests of the so-called undeveloped world, they had propelled whole continents, isolated for centuries from the West and from each other, into history – or what Marx called ‘universal history’:
The more the original isolation of the separate nationalities is destroyed by the developed mode of production and intercourse and the division of labour between various nations naturally brought forth by these, the more history becomes world history. Thus, for instance, if in England a machine is invented, which deprives countless workers of bread in India and China, and overturns the whole form of existence of these empires, this invention becomes a world-historical fact.10
Marx deplored the oppression and violence of colonialism. But he could also slot it into his dialectical schema, as a necessary stage in the process of raising India’s consciousness and bringing it into history. This task, which the British colonialists had begun, was deemed no less essential by the rulers of postcolonial India. They sought legitimacy by claiming they were there to fulfil it – to set up, as Nehru had said in his speech on Independence Day, India’s ‘tryst with destiny’.
Growing up in the late 1970s and 80s, I still heard much about the national aspirations for India to achieve its rightful place, level with, if not above, the West. But these aspirations had lost some of their old force. One idea of that West still lay around us, in the schools and universities, the administrative and legal system, the cuisine and the clothes that the British had introduced to India during two hundred years of colonialism.
But these western-style institutions had deteriorated fast in independent India, and no one seemed to know what could renew or even replace them. By the time I got to my undergraduate university in Allahabad, once known as the ‘Oxford of the East’, it had long ceased to be a place for higher learning. It had become a battlefield for rival caste groups, a setting for the primordial struggles for food and shelter, of violence and terror. The grand buildings on the campus – what Vinod called its ‘palaces’ – swarmed with the bemused sons of peasants, but to no one’s benefit.
The general mood was one of disappointment and cynicism. Rebellious ethnic minorities in Punjab, Kashmir and the north-eastern states were threatening India’s nationhood, and were being brutally suppressed. India had joined the march of history, but still appeared to be lagging behind not just Europe and America, but also much of the rest of the world. It was still known as ‘underdeveloped’ despite its big industries, dams, scientific manpower and military strength. It had grown into a more violent place; and a vast majority of its population existed on the verge of destitution. Millions of Indians, lured out of their villages by the promise of jobs, swarmed in the gigantic slums of the main cities and towns, where riots between Hindus and Muslims were commonplace. Only a tiny fraction of India’s population was anywhere near the living standards of the western middle class.
I found it much harder than my father to match the high-sounding words emanating from the politicians and bureaucrats of independent India with the realities of corruption and crime and anarchy I lived with. It was no longer possible to be moved by the nationalist passions of my school textbooks, where colonialism was presented as the last and sorry phase before the eventual victory of the idea of India, the India hallowed by great names and achievements: the discovery of zero, Sanskrit literature, the Mahabharata, the Buddha, Mughal art and architecture, Gandhi, Nehru, non-violence, spirituality, democracy, nuclear bombs and military victories against Pakistan.
These contradictory ideas formed this exalted idea of India – the India we were told we lived in but couldn’t quite recognize because what we lived with was the chaos and conflict of a wretchedly poor country, and what we still sought shelter in were the institutions that an alien people from a dynamic civilization coming into India had created in the process of consolidating and expressing their power: the incomplete projects of colonial modernity – industrialization, education, transport and health systems – that appeared to have given an old country something of a future in the modern world.
We had to work with what we had. And so, in Mashobra, I often became impatient with Mr Sharma when he spoke glowingly of India’s past. Like many Indians of his age, he was full of speculations and grand ideas about this past. Sanskrit for him was the oldest language in the world and the mother of all languages of Europe. The Bhagavadgita contained all that men needed to know to achieve salvation. Modern physics was now discovering what the Upanishads had said all along about the unity of the atman, self, with the brahman, universe. India had once been the fount of wisdom, where the rest of the world slaked its spiritual thirst. But it was now engaged in slavishly imitating Western countries and industrial civilization.
Mr Sharma spoke at length about what I thought couldn’t be my concerns. There was, it seemed to me, no going back to the spiritually whole Indian past for people like me, even if that past existed somewhere, ready to be possessed. I had to look ahead, and, in some ways, my desire to be a writer had clarified my way.
That ambition was inseparable from the modern bourgeois civilization of the West; and
from my earliest days as a reader I had sought, consciously or not, my guides and inspirations in its achievements – in the novels of Flaubert, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Proust; the music of Brahms and Schubert; the self-reckonings of Emerson, Thoreau and Nietzsche, and the polemics of Kierkegaard and Marx.
It was clear from the works of these men that to be a writer was to engage rationally with, rather than retreat from, the world; it was to concern oneself particularly with the fate of the individual in society.
There was relatively little of profit in arcane-seeming ideas in the Upanishads about the self and the universe. Reading about the Buddha I came across fewer such abstractions. But the long discourses with their many repetitions could be wearying. I couldn’t hold my meditative states for long. And I admired rather than followed the Buddha’s briskly practical advice to shun desire in order to avoid suffering.
So when Mr Sharma spoke about the spiritual and moral decline of India and the devastation caused by modern civilization, I didn’t react. I listened, shook my head positively once or twice, and tried to divert the conversation to more mundane matters, thinking slightly resentfully sometimes that a less prejudiced awareness of modern science and hygiene might have helped Mr Sharma in resolving the longstanding problems with my leaking toilet.
It wasn’t that I, waiting to leave Mashobra for the bigger world, failed to see dignity in the simple life Mr Sharma led, or looked down upon his lack of ambition and energy. A part of me envied him for the things that kept him rooted to Mashobra: the apple orchard, the cows, the Sanskrit magazine, his father who foretold the future and performed sacrifice rituals and his mother who sat knitting near the window all afternoon long – he appeared lucky to have preserved the life his ancestors might have lived for centuries, the life that myth and ritual shaped from birth to marriage to death.
An End to Suffering Page 13
