Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity

by Pavan K. Varma

  Until the 1960s a strict protocol governed his [Jesus’] depiction and it was considered disrespectful to display his face on the screen. The Last Days of Pompeii (1935), Quo Vadis (1951) and Ben-Hur (1959) show him from afar and feature only his hand and foot. In King of Kings, Jeffrey Hunter who played Jesus had to remove all bodily hair because it detracted from Jesus’ divinity! The Last Temptation of Christ was irreverent but not at all abusive or mocking. As Scorcese himself said: ‘I wanted to show a Christ you could agree with, a real earthy Jesus.’ He went on, ‘It was never my intention to shake anyone’s faith, but rather to ignite faith.’ Yet his film provoked a public outcry unprecedented in the history of religious films. Militant Christians launched a media campaign condemning Universal Pictures, the film’s distributor, staged a mock flagellation of Christ outside the home of Lee Wasserman, chairman of the parent company of Universal Pictures, and so intimidated cinema owners that several movie chains refused to show the film. After initial resistance, Christians came to accept Jesus as a righteous rocker in Jesus Christ Superstar and an innocent clown in Godspell, but they took to the barricades when he was portrayed as a charlatan in The Passover Plot. The film was picketed out of existence after only a few weeks and never heard of again. It would seem that Muslims were only a few years behind Christians in these matters, and the latter were in no position to claim moral superiority or greater religious maturity over them.’5

  Rushdie’s depiction of the Prophet and his family was blasphemous. Why should the West expect the Islamic world to condone him on the grounds of freedom of expression when it is so touchy about any abusive depiction of Christ? More recently, in September 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a dozen cartoons caricaturing Prophet Muhammad; one of the caricatures showed the revered Prophet wearing a bomb-shaped turban. When Muslims, who consider any portrayal of their Prophet as blasphemous, protested, the Danish newspaper defended its decision on the same grounds of freedom of expression, although it was reported that its editor had earlier turned down cartoons of Jesus as too offensive. In spite of the protests in the Islamic world, the caricatures were reproduced in Norway and several other European countries. The EU Justice and Security Commissioner, Franco Frattini, said that his organization may draw up a code that encourages the media to show ‘prudence’ when covering religion; the USA condemned the protests as being too violent and deliberately fanned by Syria and Iran. The rest of the world took home the image of a progressive world defending freedom of speech against a primitive rabble intolerant of any criticism.

  The violent turn the protests took, including damage to some Dutch embassies, cannot be condoned. Nor, of course, can the sentence of death on Rushdie by the fatwa pronounced in Iran. But the general positing of an atavistic Islamic theocracy against the progressive secular values of western and Christian societies is open to serious interrogation. In Britain, for instance, the monarch is the ‘protector of the faith’—not all faiths but the faith. There are elaborate rituals which conjoin the British sovereign with the Church. At the time of the coronation, the sovereign is first anointed in a religious ceremony. Sacred oil of a special formula is poured from the beak of an eagle-shaped ampulla into a spoon in which the Archbishop of Canterbury dips his finger. Then, in the precincts of the Westminster Abbey, the head of the British Church hands over to the sovereign symbolic items denoting regalia: golden spurs for chivalry, a jewelled sword for justice and righteousness, bracelets for sincerity and wisdom, the orb representing the spread of the Christian religion, the ring of kingly dignity and Catholic faith, the sceptres of kingly power and justice, and the rod with the dove depicting equity and mercy. Finally, it is the Archbishop who crowns the sovereign.

  The Church is thus an explicit part of the very symbol of British polity, the monarchy. This, of course, does not ipso facto make the UK a fundamentalist or theocratic state. Conversely, the strict absence of the Church in the rituals of the state may still not obliterate the predominant sensitivity to exclusively Christian concerns. The French president Nicolas Sarkozy actually took up with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, when the latter was on an official visit to France in October 2008, his anguish about the ‘massacre of Christians in India’. Over forty Indians of the Christian faith had been killed when suspected Hindu extremists resorted to violence in the states of Orissa and Karnataka, ostensibly to protest against perceived missionary activism in converting Hindus to Christianity. The reprehensible killings were condemned by every political party, including the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party. Police reinforcements were sent to the disturbed areas; the Centre threatened to intervene directly; the chief ministers of both states, as well as national leaders, personally met with the heads of the Church to reassure them about their safety and that of their flock. Being an intelligent and reasonably well-informed head of state, Sarkozy would have known this. As an educated man interested in the world, he may also have known that India is a secular republic, and that despite some unfortunate, even horrific aberrations, Hindus are rarely hostile to other faiths. Hinduism is not a proselytizing religion, nor did it ever conduct crusades. In ancient times, Hindu kings patronized both their own temples and the Buddhist viharas. The Jews lived peaceably in India before they did anywhere else. Muslim traders from the Arab countries practised their faith undisturbed in Kerala more than a thousand years ago. The Parsis came in the seventh century and the Christians in the fourth, unsupported by armies. In recent times, there have been occasions of religious conflict, especially after the divide-and-rule policy of the British and in the aftermath of the terrible holocaust of Partition. But as a study by two Harvard scholars6 has brought out, communal violence is neither endemic nor chronic in India, and for every such violence there are many more examples of a living syncretism that is the most visible fabric of an essentially plural India. As against this, the wearing of turbans by Sikh children and headscarves by Muslim girls is banned in France because the state does not allow any visible symbol of religious affiliation. However, there is no ban on the wearing of the Christian cross.

  And yet, President Sarkozy, the head of a country that prides itself on keeping religion out of matters of state, took up the question of the ‘massacre of Christians’, referring to violence, not entirely of a religious nature, that was swiftly brought to an end and condemned unequivocally by every Indian authority. Interestingly, neither Sarkozy nor any other western leader has expressed concern at the death of 600,000 Muslims in Iraq since the unjustified American invasion of that country in 2003. If an overwhelmingly Muslim country had invaded an overwhelmingly Christian country, and as a consequence of that as many as 600,000 Christians had died, the world would have talked of no other issue except this ‘massacre’. But the tragedy of Iraq festers on, and discussions in the chancelleries of the west remain focussed on matters of strategy and winnability, and whether to withdraw western troops from Iraq sooner or later or never.

  Religion plays an important role in the lives of all communities. After all, former president George Bush broke the strict US protocol in such matters to receive Pope Benedictine XVI at the airport. I recall watching in a hotel in Madrid on 24 April 2005 the live coverage on CNN of Pope Benedictine’s consecration. Given the global reach of CNN, millions of people across the world watched for several hours every detail of the death of his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, and the subsequent conclave and election and elaborate consecration ceremonies. Christiane Amanpour, the anchor, informed the world how the affection for the new Pope ‘hits you like a tidal wave’. The camera panned repeatedly over the huge mass of people—mostly white, with the rare brown or black face, more earnest, more sincere than the others—and Amanpour emotionally described the sight as ‘truly incredible’. The thought struck me that if people across the globe were to watch for several hours—through an instrumentality as powerful as CNN—the live consecration of a Hindu pontiff or an Islamic mullah, what would be the reaction in the west? Would they worry that obscura
ntist religions were overtaking the secular world? Would they reinvoke the scientific and rational spirit of modern man as a counter to the blind ritualism and hysteria of such devotees? The essential fact is that technology is not neutral; and, in a globalizing world, those who have the means to disseminate their own cultural priorities have an unassailable advantage. Since such powerful communication technologies appear to be neutral, their messages are often internalized as universal, without scrutiny for bias or selectivity. The rest of the world is then expected to passively accept a particular point of view, to the exclusion of all others.

  My sister is married to an Indian Christian, who is the dean of the prestigious St John’s Medical College in Bangalore; he is a very loved and respected member of our family. My daughter is married to an American, and he too has been enthusiastically welcomed into the family. The issue here, therefore, is not about Christianity or America or the west per se, but about the need to be aware of the working of a globalized world. Rushdie has been lionized for his courage and independence, but it may be sobering for him to remember that his usefulness to his western patrons is not eternal. So long as his profound literary ire is directed at targets that are congruent to their interests, he will receive their mainstream acclaim and protection. As long as his writings—both fiction and other pontifications—reinforce the stereotyping of Muslims as fanatics and strengthen the popular mythology that Islam is a religion that only breeds fanaticism, he will be the subject of their adulation. But the very pedestal he has been placed on—for his courage in championing freedom of expression—may become very wobbly if his brave prose is used to criticize the west.

  This is precisely what happened to Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Until he was a useful pawn in the west’s campaign against the former Soviet Union, he had a multitude of admirers. The Nobel Prize and many more accolades were given to him. But the honeymoon began to wane after his usefulness diminished with the end of the Cold War. And when he began to be critical of certain aspects of western civilization, the admiration died. In a speech at Harvard in 1978 he accused the west of being blinded by its own sense of superiority. ‘But the blindness of superiority continues,’ he said in that speech, ‘and upholds the belief that vast regions everywhere on our planet should develop and mature to the level of present-day western systems which in theory are the best and in practice the most attractive. There is this belief that all those other worlds are only being temporarily prevented by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity or incomprehension from taking the way of western pluralistic democracy, and from adopting the western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in this direction. However, it is a conception which developed out of western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, out of the mistake of measuring them all with a western yardstick. The real picture of our planet’s development is quite different.’ These were strong words indeed. The man whom the west had adopted had the nerve to question the assumptions of his benefactors. Not surprisingly, Solzhenitsyn began to fade away from the celebrity radar screens, and when he died in 2008, there was hardly a ripple. It is a lesson that Rushdie would do well to remember. But then, it is hardly likely that Rushdie will behave like Solzhenitsyn.

  A dissenting voice, which seeks to question the dominant ideological bias, is often dealt with by an automatic simplification: if you are critical of Rushdie you are against freedom of speech; if you question the mess in Iraq you lack the resolve to fight terrorism; if you oppose the stereotyping of other societies you are against liberal democracy. Such a viewpoint is projected through a powerful media apparatus: newspapers, influential magazines, television chat shows, seminars and literary festivals. The consequence is that people of other cultures are denied the middle ground, the space to make informed choices in the context of their own historical experience and judgement. In India, for instance, large numbers of the anglicized elite internalized the western lionizing of Rushdie without any independent application of mind. In fact, the westernized upper fringe of India can be most often seen resplendent in ‘secular’ blazer and tie, spouting secular platitudes, almost as a reflex, the moment there is the slightest whiff of religion. For some of its members faith is tantamount to medievalism, and all religious practice the equivalent of ritual and superstition. The pity is that while they are so up on the standard liberal argument, their knowledge of even such basics as the meaning and background of their own religious festivals is primitive, which makes them ineffectual clones of the ‘British Fabian archetype’, and aliens to their own cultural ethos. And then they wring their hands in surprise and dismay when the cultural space is occupied by people with extreme and chauvinistic ideologies.

  Conformity with the west brings plaudits and certificates of approval, but does not break the barriers of essential difference and ensure equal status. Turkey’s attempt at moulding a society and a people according to the western definition of ‘modern civilization’ is an instructive case. Following the proclamation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, Kemal Ataturk adopted almost wholesale the Swiss Civil Code: he gave equal rights to men and women, banned traditional headgear and dress, closed the mausoleums and dervesh lodges, adopted the international calendar, and abolished Muslim personal law. It was a mix of the desirable and the undesirable; the democratic and the undemocratic. Turkey became European. A new documentary released in 2008, where the director, Can Dundar, uses material from diaries and letters till recently locked away in military archives, reveals how determined Ataturk was ‘to subordinate Islam and to force Turks to look and behave as westerners’. In 1914, the thirty-three-year-old Ataturk attended a ball in the Czech spa of Carlsbad with a Turkish diplomat and his wife, who remarked that she could not imagine such a scene—the dancing, the dress—in her home country. Dundar says: ‘In a later entry in his diaries, Ataturk wrote that “it would not be difficult at all. If I [were] given the power, I would do it overnight.”’7 Ever since, Turkey has remained staunchly ‘secular’; the army has stood like an all-pervasive censor against any harking to the past or display of religion; governments led by democratically elected leaders have faced possible dismissal because of some of their members wanting to wear the traditional headscarf. But in spite of having disowned its own religious heritage and traditions in one ‘modernist’ plunge, and doing everything possible to be like the west, Turkey is still knocking on the doors of the European Union for membership. A great many reasons are given by leaders of the EU why membership is difficult. But I suspect the real reason is that Turkey is a Muslim country, and the overwhelmingly Christian EU is uncomfortable with that. That is what one president of an EU country told me candidly, and I believe he was—off the record—speaking a truth shared by his peers.

  The loss of independent judgement that is the consequence of co-option entails a double jeopardy: first, it fosters a mimicry that is at odds with indigenous needs, contexts, culture and history; second, even then, it does not guarantee acceptance. A clone is seen as a clone, albeit a well-behaved one. Many of the values espoused by the west are worthy of emulation. But there cannot be a universal prescription for the content and pace of ‘modernization’. When this important point is ignored, we have the case of countries like Iran, where even today there is a conservative backlash against the mindless pace of westernization unleashed by the last Shah of Iran, at the behest of the UK and America. The fact needs to be recognized that although we live in a world that technology and commerce have reduced to a village, we remain different people, and what makes us different needs to be acknowledged and, wherever possible, respected. The myth that this global village nurtures is that such differences have ceased to exist, or need not exist. Francis Fukuyama, the author of the bestselling The End of History and the Last Man, has argued that a homogeneous future has already arrived with the end of the Cold War and the triumph of western capitalism. But even he concedes in his later, and far more insightful work, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Pro
sperity, that culture makes people and nations different and that no immutable laws can be applied uniformly to all people. Culture, he argues, is a compound of images, habits and social opinions that are a-rational, and ‘incapable of being systemized into universal laws’, and that the functioning of societies is conditioned by ‘certain premodern cultural habits’.8

  Samuel Huntington, in his equally widely discussed The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, has also argued that in the post-Cold War world, the most important distinctions among people are cultural, and not political, economic or ideological. Ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs and institutions are the attributes by which people define themselves. Attacking the ‘universalist pretensions’ of the west, he warns of an impending clash with other civilizations that could pose a grave threat to world peace.9

  Huntington cannot be faulted for highlighting the differences in cultures. He can, as we have discussed earlier, be questioned for believing that these differences will inevitably lead to a clash. There is much within all cultures that can provide the foundation for a global edifice of harmony and dialogue. A clash can be averted, but only if each culture is able to find expression and is not throttled by the homogenizing pressures of globalization. The great myth that in a globalizing world we are all destined to become mirror images of each other has the unstated support of those cultures that have the greater wherewithal to mould people in their own image. Certainly, no culture can today claim to be insulated from outside influences. But it is precisely this greater intrusiveness that creates the illusion of homogeneity. In what appears to be an increasingly similar world, there is the continued miracle of diversity and difference, often impatient to be recognized and respected. Malcolm Imrie, my literary agent in London, once went late at night to pick up food from a restaurant owned by a Turkish man. He bought pitta bread, hummus, and some feta cheese and, by way of conversation, told the proprietor that he was looking forward now to a Turkish dinner at home. To which the Turkish gentleman, pointing at what Malcolm had bought, said: ‘That, sir, is from Turkey, that from Greece, and that is from Cyprus.’ We live in a world that is permanently in danger of being oversimplified to suit someone else’s lack of knowledge or insensitivity to the particularities of an inherently diverse world. In this case the Turk spoke up, but most often people whose cultures are being railroaded into one indiscriminate rubric don’t even make the effort to protest.