by Eva Hoffman
Hamed Abdel-Samad is a writer and thinker who, though born in Giza, Egypt, now lives in Germany where he is a Research Fellow at the Department of Modern History at the University of Munich. Focusing on the mobilization and radicalization of Muslims in Europe in his academic research, he has also written an autobiography, My Departure from Heaven, published in both German and Arabic.
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Culture in Modern India:
The Anxiety and the Promise
Pratap Bhanu Mehta
What I require is a convening of my culture’s criteria, in order to confront them with my words and life as I pursue them and as I may pursue them; and at the same time to confront my words and life as I pursue them with the life my culture’s words may imagine for me: to confront the culture with itself, along the lines it meets in me.
Stanley Cavell
Talking about the ‘inner life of culture’ in India must seem like a presumptuous enterprise indeed. At one level, the culture remains prodigiously inventive in a bewildering variety of ways, across a range of social groups. India embodies deep layers of historical depth and a capacity to deeply internalise the various cross-cultural currents that have left their deep imprint on it. But it is constantly improvising, adapting and creating new cultural forms. One paper could not even begin to describe the cultural ferment in India and I am not going to even try. What I shall do in this paper rather is something less ambitious. I am going to chart some of the anxieties that have marked discourse about culture in India, and I suspect more broadly as well. I shall offer four ‘provocations’. First, that the inner life of culture is in part the association of culture with the ‘inner’, a particular space that is resistant to the rationalising impulses of modernity. Second, I shall argue that Indian pluralism is a negotiated achievement, sustained through politics. In that sense the space for cultural pluralism depends upon that larger negotiation of India’s political identity; a successful political negotiation allows deep forms of pluralism to be sustained. Third, I shall focus on the anxiety over language and its relationship to culture. And finally, I shall argue that globalisation, contrary to what critics had feared, might produce a less anxiety-ridden cultural discourse in India that might defuse radical cultural nationalism. These are more in the nature of ruminations than a settled argument. But I have tried to present them in a way that might lend itself to cross-regional conversation.
From the inner life of culture to culture as inner life
There is an interesting paradox associated with the concept of culture. While ‘a’ culture is thought of as particular, ‘Indian’ or ‘Chinese’ or whatever the appropriate qualifier may be, the concept itself seems to have acquired a universality, roughly at the same historical moment. The genealogy of the concept is complex, and would require a long detour into intellectual history. But elements of that history are necessary for understanding the inner life of culture in India. As Raymond Williams has perceptively noted, the concept of culture itself was a response to a dramatic crisis; we become aware of culture only when culture begins to come into question. Before the nineteenth century culture was associated with a teleology: the idea of natural growth, and by analogy, a process of human training. This use usually referred to a culture of something. But in the nineteenth century we began to speak of culture as such. We began to speak of culture associated in two registers. The first was the register of value. Culture came to be associated with references to conceptions of human perfection. Relatedly, it came to acquire a cluster of associations to do with the general body of arts or the intellectual development of society as a whole. The second register of culture was more anthropological, where it came to refer to a whole way of life in all its historical interconnectedness, where the material, spiritual, intellectual and artistic all meshed into one seamless whole.
This history is important because this understanding of culture became part of the repertoire of the self-understanding of different cultures as well. Just to take the anthropological register first. The anthropological conception of culture generates three questions about cultural identity. First, is simply this: what does it mean to have a cultural identity? What is the quest for an identity about? There is a dizzying variety of ideas that is often condensed into the term identity: identity can operate on a political, cultural, social, psychological or even psychoanalytic plane. At one level the identity of a culture is a question about the relationship between the individual and the larger collectivity. How are the emotional and affective bonds that form the basis of identification composed? How do they motivate people to form a larger social connection in which individuality is renounced or attenuated into a larger group called the nation? How does this identification induce manifest acts of sacrifice, altruism and even violence? Without such emotional identification, the concept of identity remains an abstract idea; it does not structure or motivate political action. The production of such emotional identification is an extremely complex and ill-understood matter, but it is fair to say that the modern Indian nation has produced its fair share of identification with the idea of India. Probably the most central element in this emotional imagination is the idea of territoriality that transcends different nationalist imaginations.
The second aspect of identity is a sense of specificity. Identity is bound to something that makes you different, makes you the being that you are and not someone else. A good deal of the challenge of cultural identity is that we seek an answer to the question: what makes a culture the thing that it is? In short what is its ‘essence’? The challenge of articulating a conception of a culture that can also do the work of being an identity is that it inevitably produces anxieties over essentialism.
The third aspect of forming a cultural identity is the maintenance of boundaries in the process of creating the perilous pronoun ‘we’. What are the patterns of exclusion and inclusion that the process of identity formation entails? Who is the outsider and who is the insider? What are the terms on which citizenship and political standing is defined? This is a question of both legal and political status. Legally at any rate, India has adopted a republican conception of citizenship, where citizenship rights are not tied to any substantial benchmarks of ethnicity or religion. But politically there have been occasional attempts to define the boundaries of exclusion and inclusion based on some substantial notion of what it means to be an ‘authentic’ Indian.
The anthropological conception of culture as essence, specificity and identity was deeply aligned to both colonialism and nationalism. Ideologies of ‘culture’ legitimised forms of colonial rule by simultaneously asserting the superiority of some cultures, at the same time as insisting on their irrevocable distance. Nationalism, in some ways, had to make a similar move: to insist on the specificity of a culture and its unity. This is not the occasion to go into complex arguments about the relationship between nationalism and culture, but nationalism poses two challenges for culture. On the one hand it seeks to mobilise it in a political project, on the other hand it can colonise culture in an insidious way. The most insidious way in which nationalism colonises culture is by reversing an order of priorities. In the nationalism view of culture a compelling reason for certain practices, beliefs or ways of life is that these are mine. They are to be followed because they belong to a group, and make them what that group is. In this view there is an obligation to follow practices because of their origins in the fact of possession, to defend them because they are ours. But while this provides impetus for culture it also destroys it. For now culture is no longer embedded in the space of reason, it is driven by the imperatives of identity. They are defended not because they are good but because they are ours.
Almost all cultures, not just postcolonial ones, have had to combat the pressures of nationalism and its ability to colonise the question of value, and its ability to place identity over reason. The life of culture will crucially depend therefore on the political character of the nationalism in which it is embedded. There have certainly been powerful attempts in
India to align culture with identity. But for the most part these have been politically defeated, and for the most part a liberal democratic space has been preserved. But in any society, genuine culture will be threatened by considerations of identity politics and the precarious politics of self-esteem that goes with it. To put it somewhat crudely, nothing jeopardises culture more than a quest for cultural identity.
While certain strains of Hindu nationalism and Muslim nationalism have on occasion threatened genuine culture in this way, the character of India’s anti-colonial nationalism and its enduring legacy sought to transcend traps of identity politics. In fact, it is often forgotten that Indian nationalism, across a wide range of thinking from Aurobindo to Gandhi, Tagore to Nehru, legitimised itself on the plane of an alternative universality. The legitimacy of the nation was to be grounded not on the fact of its identity but on its ability to remain an exemplar and repository of values. Whatever one may think of the history of modern India, the fact that a strong ideological strain in Indian nationalism resisted the temptations of a suffocating identity politics has a lot to do with the fact that India not only survives as a liberal democracy for the most part, but also creates a context where culture does not always have to bear the weight of identity.
When the claims of culture were being re-legitimised, it was on the grounds that Indian culture was offering a much richer and deeper alternative universality to the claims that were being made on behalf of European modernity. To be sure, much of this moral core had long been buried under unconscionably unjust social forms, but it did exist and can provide an alternative axis for shaping one’s sense of self and society. Gandhi and Tagore were two prominent and best-known examples of this tradition. But it is striking the degree to which this ambition informed so much of the literary production of twentieth-century India. To put it simplistically, in this mode of thinking culture was to be defended not because it was mine, but because it was good. It again sought to place culture in a normative space, where cultural ideals broadly stood within the space of reason. This move had three advantages. It at least sought to reposition culture as the inheritance of all humankind, potentially accessible to all others and contributing to their well being. It provided the space for criticism. For once, culture tried to occupy the realm of the normative: it was at least open to discussion. And third, this view of culture was often an antidote to cultural nationalism. To what extent this location of culture within a realm of reasons succeeded is an open question. But I want to dwell on the challenges this conception of culture faced.
In the register of values, the operative contrast in the nineteenth century was between culture and civilisation, where civilisation referred to the ‘outward’ registers of progress, like material prosperity and political life. Culture, by contrast, was that realm of animating values that often had to be tended against the forces of civilisation. What is striking about Indian reflections on culture is that, from the nineteenth century onwards, they produce roughly the same distinction in several languages. In Hindi, noted writers like Mahadevi Verma and Nirmal Verma made the contrast between sanskriti (culture) and sabhyata (civilisation) central to their reflections on culture. In nineteenth-century Bengal, for example, there is a rich vein of thinking from Bankim to Tagore that deploys a version of this contrast to explain the modern predicament. In this view, the force of civilisation, particularly modern civilisation, was an irrevocable force with two particular features. First, it produced a split. On the one hand there is the realm of ‘objective’ necessity that governs our material life. On the other hand there is a realm of subjective freedom, and the two are in experiential conflict. There are also two modes of experiencing agency. On the one hand we can experience agency as actors on nature or in history. Or we can experience a sense of agency by standing outside of it, as it were. The former was a part of ‘materialism’, the latter of ‘spiritualism’. I am greatly simplifying a complex line of thought, but what is striking is a common, pervasive theme that appears in Indian reflections on culture. The location of culture was in this realm of subjective freedom; it is, if you like, located in the perfection and realisation of the Self. But this realm of culture is very self-consciously pitted against the ‘outer’ realm of necessity and material determination. It is not an accident that ‘spirituality’ in its widest sense came to be seen as the essence of Indian culture. But the creation of this as an essence was to locate culture outside of history, or even against it. It was largely a product of an imagination that thought that the Self could be ordered, even if the world could not. What made the Gandhian project peculiar was that it was the only large ideological attempt to argue that the ordering of the Self would lead to an ordering of the World. It tried to approach the question of historical agency and social transformation through a transformation of the Self. With the historical collapse of that project, the split between the inner and outer, material and spiritual, came to be reinscribed as the essence of culture.
Second, the advance of civilisation tended to fragment human experience. The economy, politics, art, religion, morality: each had their own internal logic and integrity that could not be subsumed under the logic of any other mode of experience. The essence of politics was violence; the essence of the market, commoditisation; the essence of religion, the sacred; the essence of art, a form of non-instrumental creation and so forth. There was no underlying thread that could bring these different modes of experience into one harmonious whole. In modern conditions, we were bound to remain fragmented. Culture in this context became an interstitial concept: it occupied particular spaces. It was an attempt to order the self in a context, where the world could not be rendered into a harmonious whole. To put it somewhat provocatively, it was not so much that culture had an inner life, it was that culture could now be articulated and grasped only in an ‘inner life’. This is an old anxiety about modernity. Bhudev Mukhopadhyaya, the great Bengali poet, enjoined Indians to strenuously hold on to their toilet habits because in the long run this would be the only site at which they could assert a real sense of a different cultural identity. This was a bit indelicate, but not entirely off the mark. If the economy and politics are governed by their own logic and imperatives, and colonise more of the realm of daily existence, where exactly will culture be located?
There is a popular Hindi song, ‘My shoes are Japanese, my pants are English, my red cap is Russian, but my heart is Indian’. What is interesting about this song is the location of ‘Indianness’ in an intangible interior space. No less real or important, but intangible and interior nonetheless. It is not an accident that the most powerful articulations of Indian culture retreat to the realm of the ‘inner’, or are articulated as its ‘Spirit’, signifying the material limitations modernity might place on culture.
Under conditions of modernity, endowing an ongoing way of life with cultural significance is an altogether more abstract gesture. As many observers have noted, cultural identities are no longer connected to participating in distinct cultural practices. In fact, cultures and nations have, for good or for ill, ceded so much space to the modern economy, the modern state, and often the egalitarian aspirations of modernity, that it is more difficult to hold on to a sense of difference that is embodied in a concrete way of life. Or to put it slightly more precisely, much of the realm of public collective action, especially the polity and the economy, is not the site for expressing culture. Rather culture is expressed more in confined spaces – private spaces or in particular spheres of activity that have their confined place: art, music, literature. It is precisely because substantive values and horizons of meaning are shrinking that greater and inordinate weight is placed on markers of difference. As Valentine Daniel put it, ‘nationalism is the horripilation of culture in insecurity and fright’. Finally, in the realm of culture, it is often argued that culture is to be valued because it is constitutive of someone’s identity. This alignment of culture with identity can be misleading in a couple of ways.
First, t
he minute we are talking of identity we are talking of difference rather than diversity. It is possible for individuals or groups who are alike in most respects to have a profound sense of having a different identity, a different sense of who they are. Indeed, as many have argued, we see more and more identity conflicts not because of the objective diversity between people, but because of their increasing likeness. Stress on difference becomes a way of defining identity in the face of narrowing differences in other spheres of life. It is a commonplace experience of the modern world that, contrary to what Arjun Appadurai argues, culture, politics and economy get disembedded from each other. After all, it is not an accident that when defending ‘culture’ very few are defending the right of a society to be governed by a Hindu view of the division of labour, or for the economy to take on board to run on Islamic principles of usury or power to be allocated by Confucian conceptions of elite. While it is true that religion is not simply an add-on to material resources, it is palpably misleading to argue that culture, economy and politics cannot to some degree be disembedded from each other. This is a greater functional differentiation that modern societies produce.1 In this context, it is quite possible that individuals and groups are sharing more and more, and are embedded in similar matrices of political and economic institutions, yet want to assert their sense of difference. In fact, as Michael Ignatieff has argued, following Freud’s insight that conflicts born of the ‘narcissism of small differences are most acute’, identity differences do not by themselves signal greater diversity. Rather, invocation of identity may be a sign that diversity is decreasing. We often want to put ourselves under God’s Yoke the most when we feel his presence the least.
The further challenge to ‘culture’ comes from interrogating culture as a site of power. As egalitarian aspirations spread, a suspicion was cast on culture as the means through which the relationship of subordination and exclusion are perpetuated and maintained. Women, Dalits, and a whole range of hitherto subordinated groups began to make the argument that the very sources of culture were also sources of their subordination. Cultural forms are in part maintained by associations with structures of authority. The very act of authorising culture, of marking realms of value, of trying to assign meaning to particular roles in society, of consecrating rituals, created relationships of power. A shadow begins to be cast upon culture because it is seen as an instrument of domination. This was particularly easy in a society where access to cultural authority was so closely associated with forms of social stratification. But this critique generated several different responses. The first might be described as the detachment of culture from particular social forms. In this view, what culture afforded was a repertoire of value and meaning. It was precisely this repertoire that allowed a society to critique its own social practices. The critique of the ‘injustice’ of culture could come from the resources of the culture itself. While this motivation generated an astonishing burst of creativity – readings of the tradition, literary retellings of classics, and so forth – it had the paradoxical consequence of increasing precisely the distance between culture and social forms that modernity was imposing. For it was saying something like this: do not identify culture with particular social forms. Culture, rather, refers to a realm of value that stands over and above social forms, judging them. In short, it began to turn culture from a social phenomenon into a normative ideal. But the second response is a retreat from the realm of culture into a new political vocabulary of justification. It opens up culture to serious political contestation all the way down. Rather than culture being the product of a normatively secured consensus, it comes to be formed in the context of various political struggles. In that sense, culture becomes not so much a realm of values or claims of perfection but a terrain of political conflict.
Identity and politicisation
The ‘Idea of India’ is the repository of an immense range of contending hopes and fears. For all its antiquity and depth, its sense of geography and territoriality, and its intricate cultural linkages, modern India had to fashion a new identity for itself. The distinctness of this new identity was that politics was going to be at the centre of this process in more than one sense. Although Indians frequently appealed to its traditions, cultures and civilisational values, these had to be interpreted in light of aspects of modernity that were shaping India in equal measure: the presence of the modern state, the rise of democratic politics, the aspirations of egalitarianism and the ambitions of industrialisation. But India’s identity came to be politicised in a deeper sense. The invention of republican citizenship in India was indeed a momentous event, and a rupture with the past. While many had hoped that the new constitution would simply be encased within the supposed historical identity of India, its diverse and complex cultural sympathies, few imagined that the opportunities afforded by republican citizenship would intensely politicise all areas of organised collective existence in India. The resources of history and culture, rather than providing comfort and continuity, would themselves be the first categories to be subject to intense political scrutiny. Whatever anyone may claim about the identity of India, what its historical essence consisted in, what the sources of its unity were, the simple fact was this: whether or not republics had existed in ancient India, whether or not democracy had cultural roots, in 1951 for the first time in Indian history all Indians were declared to be citizens. Henceforth they would themselves, within the arenas and opportunities for struggle provided for by the constitution, define their own collective identities, negotiate and renegotiate the terms of social cooperation, and as republican citizens take charge of their own destiny.
Universal adult suffrage was going to have social implications far beyond its immediate political significance. As one of the most thoughtful commentators of the time, KM Pannikar, put it, ‘many social groups previously unaware of their strength, and barely touched by the political changes that had taken place, suddenly realised that they were in a position to wield power’. The right to participate in choosing one’s electors was the most dramatic way of affirming the equality of all citizens. Although the right to vote is seen by many as a meagre right, whose exercise is a periodic ritual that does little to enhance the well being of those who exercise it, that right itself transforms the meaning of social existence. It is an assertion that all authority is a conditional grant; that suffrage establishes the sufferance, as George Kateb so eloquently put it. Democracy, as its earliest observers were quick to note, represents the dissolution of inherited modes of authority, indeed of the whole concept of authority itself. Democracy, once instituted, is an incitement to politicise all areas of social life; it introduces, over time, a process of critique that questions and subverts all certainties of social life including culture.
The process of democratisation will thus always produce radical uncertainty about authority and identity alike. As the legitimacy of old ways of instituting authority and recognising identities dissolve, without being replaced by new norms and conventions, the experience of democracy will be profoundly confusing. As Tocqueville put it incomparably: ‘Obedience, then, loses moral basis in the eyes of him who obeys; he no longer considers it as a divinely appointed duty; and he does not yet see its purely human aspect; in his eyes it is neither sacred nor just and he submits to it as a degrading though useful fact. There is an unspoken intestinal power between permanently suspicious rival powers. The lines between authority and tyranny, liberty and license, right and might seem so jumbled and confused that no one knows exactly what he is, what he can do and what he should do.’
The experience of democracy has opened up numerous points of dissent, new conflicts of values and identities and a permanent antagonism of meaning and interest that often leaves Indians with a sense that society is flying off in many different directions at once, and the unity of reference points seems to vanish. But it could be argued that new bonds have been created through this politicisation of all aspects of life. It is through the process of intense argument
that a new shared public is being created. The important thing about the experience of modern India is not that Indians always necessarily have a shared conception of identity but that they have agreed to argue about the question. The story of modern India is the story of Indians constantly struggling to articulate, discover and debate what it means to be Indian.
The point of this possibly banal truism is that it always has been and will be very difficult to give an interpretation of Indian identity in what might be called substantialist terms. This is a conception of identity that privileges some substantial trait – religion, race, culture, ethnicity, shared history, common memory – that can be objectively identified and then configures an identity around it. Indeed threats to India often arise from trying to give its identity some substantial meaning in this sense. There is an old joke about India’s identity: it does not occur to most Indians to doubt it until someone begins to give arguments to prove its existence. This joke captures something profound about the way in which Indian identity has been constituted, and also the circumstances under which this identity is put under stress. But the thorough politicisation of identity suggests that Indian identity will not be constituted necessarily through shared attributes or aspirations but through what Khilnani once called ‘interconnected differences’. Does all this mean that India does not have an identity? If this demand implies that there is something we all unequivocally share, the answer is no. But it does not preclude the thought that we all have lots of different reasons and ways in which we define our relationships to each other. There is no ‘unity’ in diversity, rather we are diverse in our unities, and we might identify with connections to India, each in our own way.
It is for this reason that there are grounds to be suspicious of any authoritative narrative of Indian identity, including one that emphasises its pluralism. I think pluralism is the de facto reality of India, and Indian politics has a remarkable capacity to negotiate difference and plurality. Faced with exclusivist cultural nationalism, we often try and imagine other more complex identities. We try to imagine an India where, instead of singularity we emphasise plurality, instead of purity we emphasise the essentially hybrid character of all identity, instead of exclusivism we emphasise syncretism and so on. We thus prefer a different range of adjectives to describe cultural states of being: syncretist, pluralist, hybrid, liminal, incomplete, interdependent, composite, become terms in vogue. The point of these categories is both political and conceptual. Conceptually we try and show that the binary oppositions on which exclusivist identities thrive (say, Hindu–Muslim) are subverted by the complex experience of history. It often becomes meaningless to describe some cultural artefact, like a particular form of music, as exclusively Hindu or Muslim; elements of both converge to produce a new musical form altogether. Some identities are described as liminal, inhabiting that zone where they cannot be described as either/or. We try and construct a shared history around these moments: hybrid cultural forms become more politically respectable than pure ones, and so forth.
Politically, the hope is that subverting the binary oppositions that exist between categories that demarcate people into separate groups will somehow lead people to acknowledge the webs of interdependence that bind people together. It will lead them to recognise that the cultural forms that they inhabit owe a good deal to cultures they are about to stigmatise as inferior, foreign or impure. Once it is shown that different cultures have commingled to produce new cultural forms, we will be relieved of the allure of singular identities. To recognise the many layers that constitute our own selves and our history is to find space for acknowledging all the complex contributions that have made us what we are. This acknowledgement then allows us to open up to difference: it allows us to see that those whom we stigmatise as foreign are also themselves part of our identity. Thus a good deal of weight is placed upon describing India as ‘composite’ or ‘syncretist’ for these are the only terms that can accommodate the true complexity of Indian identity, and can resist the violent abridgement of identities that takes place in the name of more singular conceptions. The locus classicus of such sentiment is Jawaharlal Nehru’s, which celebrates a cultural miscegenation, describing India as:
An ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously.
This is, in so many ways, an attractive conception of Indian identity. It allows for the possibility that the garb of modernity will continue to coexist with the many layers already inscribed on Indian civilisation. It allows Indians to transcend tradition without making it despicable. And it accurately reflects the de facto reality of modern India.
But this conception should not be taken as an authoritatively settled account of Indian identity, or a widely accepted political conception, for a number of reasons. First, de facto pluralism is not the same thing as de jure identification with that pluralism. Whether the reality is accepted as the norm depends upon concrete political choices. While most Indian cultural practice conforms to this Nehruvian vision, this claim can be and is often politically challenged by forces such as Hindu nationalism that regard this pluralism as a source of weakness and regret. It is worth emphasising that this critique of Indian identity will remain a powerful force in Indian politics. It is also part of the million mutinies, the numerous attempts to redefine India’s identity, that still dot the public space.
Second, even an acceptance of pluralism can be made quite incompatible with high degrees of violence and intolerance. The constitution of India into plural groups opens up the possibility of political competition between them that can often result in violence. Indeed, one of the paradoxes of the modern Indian experience is that cultural acceptance of difference is quite compatible with political conflict between groups. Third, this pluralism is also an ‘objectifying’ bird’s eye view of India. It does not pay adequate attention to the fact that a society can look pluralistic, while its various constituents are not. It would be too premature to see India’s conception of its own identity as settled in any way. But the process of churning is itself producing a myriad of interconnections on the basis of which it could be argued that the Indian Union is stronger even if the identity remains contested. The strength of the Union depends upon four key mechanisms. And there is every reason to think that these mechanisms have only grown stronger rather than weaker.
The sinews of union
India is one of the most astonishing political experiments in recorded human history. A billion people, a significant proportion of whom remain unlettered and unpropertied, constituting themselves into a republic; a bewildering variety of languages and religions weaving themselves into the tapestry of a single nation; a society in which political equality and universal suffrage has preceded the introduction of social equality. For the most part India has managed its diversity very well. This diversity has been facilitated by four mechanisms. The first is simply democracy. It can be confidently asserted that India has stayed together as a nation because of democracy. The threat of secessionism or regional conflict is invariably more a product of the authoritarian moments of the state, rather than its democratic tendencies. The threat of secessionism arises usually when the centre tries to impose a single version of Indian national identity or actively subverts democracy. Challenges of regionalism have proved more tractable whenever the Indian State has gone in for democratic incorporation or accommodation. Indeed, secessionist movements have proved to be more intractable in precisely those states – Kashmir and the Northeast – where the Indian Government has found it difficult to break the cycle of authoritarianism and excessive intervention. Even the brutal insurgency in Punjab was brought to an end because the possibility of democratic incorporation always existed. Kashmir is a special case because of its peculiar history. But even here, it could be argued that it is authoritarianism from the Indian State that gave the secessionist movement its political lease of life and provided an
opening for internationally backed militants. Now, when for the first time in more than 15 years there is a semblance of peace in Kashmir and a real political process underway, it is because the Indian Government finally managed to conduct free and fair elections, not just for state assemblies but for civic bodies as well. The political conflicts in Kashmir are far from over, but democratic incorporation affords the best chance of peace.
The second mechanism is simply the size and power of the Indian State. There is some truth to the proposition that it is very difficult to mount collective action against the Indian State. It makes the costs of contemplating taking on the state immensely high. India is large enough to sit on any problem long enough without a real threat of the central state itself imploding. Most nations collapse, not because of social forces, but because of the implosion of central authority. That has never been a serious possibility on India’s horizon. The potential internal power of the state has given solidity to Indian identity.
The third mechanism is an imaginative construal and negotiations over rights. The manner in which linguistic differences were accommodated became a benchmark for a more imaginative conception of the nation. After independence Hindi speakers, the single largest language group in the country, began to press for the adoption of Hindi as a national language, a demand that elicited fierce opposition from states of the South. Nehru engineered a pluralist compromise where a dozen or so languages were given official status with the possibility of adding others to the list; states were demarcated on linguistic lines to give political recognition to the status of some languages; schools were asked to introduce a three-language formula, and English was retained as the language of the state, to be phased out over a long period. The important thing about this compromise was that it refused to anchor Indian identity to any single privileged trait. Indeed, the source of resistance to an Indian identity came from attempts to tie it to a single privileged trait; as soon as the threat of that vanished, so did the resistance. Indeed it is arguable that, by granting political recognition to competing demands, the Indian state defused the force of vernacular nationalism in two ways. First, it accommodated them in a spirit of democracy. Second, over time the linguistic orientation in these states began to be determined by the imperatives of the economy rather than by the requirements of cultural identity. To take an example, two states, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, which had postponed the teaching of English until grade 5 on grounds of cultural nationalism, recently reintroduced English at the primary level to make their students more competitive. India’s linguistic arrangements gave expression to the idea of a layered Indian identity, an accretion of different elements. If one element was politically privileged, or others sought to be abridged, the potential for resistance was great. If the threat of privileging one element was removed, the possibilities for accommodation were profound. Indeed, the way in which actual linguistic practices are now evolving in many parts of India, with languages and vocabularies bleeding into each other, at least at the level of mass culture, is a sign of the possibilities of cultural fusion. Salman Rushdie once described Mumbai street language as HUG ME (Hindu, Urdu, Gujarati, Marathi, English), making the point that, if culture is left free of political superintendence, if the anxieties of identity are not placed upon it, it will evolve in its own merry, impure and messy way.
The fourth mechanism is the actual practices of politics that allow for a good deal of power sharing between the provinces and the centre. While India’s federalism privileges the centre, and the formal powers of the central government have been growing in a vast majority of areas, informal practices of politics allow for considerable power sharing. This is done through two mechanisms. First, the state has very rigidly adhered to an impartially applied mechanical formula in the transfer of resources from the centre to the states. The fact that an independent commission recommends these allocations has probably reduced the bargaining burden on politics between the centre and the states considerably. There is some worry that the palpably growing inequality between clusters of states might put pressure on the Indian Union. Over the last decade and a half the states of Southern and Western India have done considerably better on most measures of economic and social performance than the states of the Hindi Belt and Eastern India. While growing regional inequality is a matter of some concern there is reason to suppose that this will not politically weaken the Indian Union for a number of reasons. The sheer economic interdependence of these states, the actuality of significant and large-scale internal migration (a great leveller) and India’s slow but steady moves towards creating an integrated national market are more than likely to offset the pressures generated by this inequality. India has also made a political compromise to defuse the issue. I do not want to dwell on issues of regional inequality here. The point is simply that creating a context for cultural pluralism requires intelligent political negotiation.
The babble of Babel: identity and language
One distinctive issue in India has been the politics of language. The States Reorganisation Commission Report was a remarkable exercise in political acuity. At one stroke it defused a catastrophic politics of linguistic nationalism by recognising India’s linguistic diversity and giving it some political expression. It also recognised that, to some degree, the language question cannot be resolved by insisting on singular solutions emanating from the centre, and premised on the thought that a nation has to speak a single language.
As Sheldon Pollock has pointed out in his magisterial The Language of Gods in the World of Men, India’s linguistic history is distinctive in many respects. In India, language was historically never harnessed to a political project, religion played little part in the choice of language, there was no concept of mother tongue in pre-modern India and no sense of a language tied to a group identity or a particular ethnos. There was no sin of Babel. Linguistic diversity was considered in some sense natural, not a deviation to be corrected. The important point is that the diversity was meant to flow through individuals (or at least those who had access to education), not just between them. Most political formations in India survived through linguistic eclecticism: the language of commerce, the language of legitimising political power, the language of the sacred, the languages of the literary and imagination and the grammar of emotions could be distinct for the same individuals. Even the much maligned colonial state, while it promoted English, had to simultaneously promote, not just ‘Oriental Languages’ but a whole range of indigenous literary forms as well. Despite linguistic diversity, different languages could share literary forms, a common intellectual culture and through a range of common references even develop in relation to each other.
The States Reorganisation Commission was an inspired response to the challenges posed by this alignment of language and politics. It saved India from that fate of every multilinguistic society that has tried to impose a single language on the country: civil war. To that extent it was remarkably successful. But there is a danger that we might misinterpret the true lesson of the success of 1956. That lesson is not diversity, but freedom.
We are at a new juncture in the politics of language and statehood. First, there is great pressure for so-called linguistic states like Andhra and Maharashtra to be broken down further. Many of the arguments calling for the creation of new states like Telangana and Vidarbha make sense in light of the realities of these regions. But granting them recognition will involve modifying the 1956 vision. Rather than thinking of states along linguistic lines, we will have to commit to the proposition that not even all the South Indian states will bear the hallmark of a linguistic logic. Languages often need political recognition in a state to flourish. Just think of the appalling state of Urdu simply because it fell through the disjuncture between geography and language. But this is not a premise that should forever stand in the way of new political and administrative possibilities.
But the second challenge is more complex. The reorganisation of states along linguistic lines also gave some mo
mentum to identifying language with ethnicity: the issue was no longer simply the preservation of Kannada, or resisting the imposition of Hindi, but the whole political fashioning of a Kannadiga identity; Maharashtra went through a similar process during the 1970s and 1980s. This process can manifest itself in the often meaningless politics of renaming. After all, when a culture begins to bother about so many names, there is a real suspicion that all that might be left to the politics of that language is names. But increasingly, this alignment is restricting the choices of citizens: many states, for instance, require university professors to be proficient in the native language to be eligible for increments, in some states there is a periodic assault on English language schools, and the possibility of Tamil–Kannada tension remains more than remote. This is where it is important that we draw the right lessons from 1956.
The moral imperative behind 1956 was not simply diversity; it was respect for the principle of non-coercion. No language would be imposed upon any state against their will. Diversity and non-coercion are different things. The principle of non-coercion suggests that people should be able to exercise their linguistic choices, logistical constraints apart, in a non-discriminatory way. Whatever diversity that emerges as a result is to be cherished, but choice should not be diminished in the name of diversity. This is a principle that states would do well to remember as the preferences of their own populations get more diverse. The creation of a Kannada state to give expression to Kannada aspirations is one thing. To turn it into a project where other linguistic groups – Tamil or English or Konkani – are disadvantaged or deprived of their choices is quite another.
Another casualty of the 1956 settlement was a remarkable idea of Nehru’s: he thought of genuinely multilingual areas like Hyderabad, Bombay [now Mumbai] and Madras, as something like cosmopolitan zones, a standing riposte to the idea that language, territory and ethnicity should coincide. These would be the zones where languages and identity would seamlessly meld into each other, creating all sorts of new languages and possibilities. The great virtue of modern India is that in some ways what Nehru thought was true of places like Bombay is increasingly coming to define more of India. The lines of different languages run through each one of us rather than between us. A time might come where the alignment of language, territory and identity will seem as ineffectual as attempts by snooty custodians of language to preserve its purity. But, as the rest of India becomes more diverse, it is precisely these cosmopolitan zones that have become hostage to the politics of identity. Perhaps there is an argument to be made, both in linguistic and economic terms, for carving out these dense concentrations of populations as administrative zones in their own right.
The politics of language in India will remain paradoxical for many years. Take Gurgaon, where most geographical markers have names like Hamilton, Regency, Ridgewood, Windsor, Princeton, etc. You cannot help feeling sympathy for those who engage in the politics of renaming. But the inhabitants of these same anglicised buildings are giving their children the most complicated Sanskrit names you can imagine. The growth in vernacular press and the burgeoning demand for English are both realities of modern India: identity and instrumentality will both have to blend. The strongest demand for English now comes from hitherto marginalised groups, like Dalits, who see access to English as a medium of empowerment. There is no question that the demand for English has grown at a phenomenal rate and will remain a dominant cultural force. Sometimes it is all right to wonder whether we confuse the virtues of Babel with the qualities of babble. Linguistic anxiety will haunt us. But the solution is to draw the right lesson from 1956: the Indian project is not about diversity, understood as the need to confine people to their linguistic origins. It is about something deeper. It is about giving each one the freedom to be whomever they wish to be, in whichever language they choose. But one hopes this process takes place imaginatively, to allow citizens to take full advantage of the diversity India has to offer.
Why is there anxiety that there will be new stresses and strains on India’s linguistic imagination? India’s elites, particularly in north India, are no longer bilingual and have no capacity to navigate vernacular materials. The paradox of our times is that there is a sense in which Hindi readership is growing, because more people are becoming literate; English still continues to flourish and the demand for it is increasing. But what we had hoped to achieve in our language policy, the creation of genuinely bilingual modes of being, is now simply an illusion. Thirty years or so ago, our middle-class elite would have still related to vernacular literature, and followed it; now it is incapable of doing so. Even in the 1970s, both the Illustrated Weekly of India and Dharamyug were part of the same social universe in that middle-class homes would read both; the elite could have related to both English and vernacular literary worlds. Magazines with space for the essay format have been totally decimated in both languages. But it is also less likely that Hindi and English publications will now share the same space.
What is happening to bilingualism or trilingualism, which seemed like a genuine possibility three decades or so ago, is this. While nominally the number of bilinguals is rising (or if you count acquaintance with Bollywood Hindi, even trilinguals), the balance between languages is clearly shifting. The vernacular languages are coming to be increasingly confined to particular and narrowing spaces. For instance, while literary production in these languages remains strong, these languages are not participating in the production of ‘knowledge’. One striking example of this is the fact that even vernacular papers are increasingly relying on translations from English, to fill their op-ed spaces on anything that has to do with ‘knowledge’ – economics, political science, international relations history, rather than literary expression.
Judging by what is happening in schools, this trend is likely to worsen. We can speculate on why this is so: the complete unimaginativeness with which Hindi is taught; the obtuseness of the Hindi establishment itself, which prevented the growth of the language by defending a very narrow literary conception of the language; the fact that, unlike in the case of Tamil Nadu, Bengal or Kerala, the self-definition of elites in north India was premised on a distance from the vernacular rather than an identification with it. But this loss of bilingualism is not an unimportant cultural fact of our times and will impact our relation to our own past.
The second disjuncture is within the world of Hindi itself. If market trends are any guide, there is a growing demand for Hindi works and newspapers. The success of the wonderfully readable Hindi translation of Harry Potter speaks of new opportunities. But Hindi had deep discontinuities between its small literary world and the larger reading public. To a certain extent, this is true of all literary traditions, but the discontinuity seems greater in Hindi. The kind of mass readership high literature enjoys in any language is an open question, but at least literary awards seem to be considered a reflection of the possibilities of that language. The Pulitzers and the Bookers have become the object of mass news; but even within the Hindi world, the literary world seems more distant. Just the ways in which prizes in the two languages are covered suggest as much.
The third disjuncture is of course about cultural self-confidence. For all the bluster about the arrival of the postcolonial generation, we still could be said to privilege external modes of validation over our own (consider the ridiculous obsession over winning Oscars, for example). Of course it is the content of the standards that should count, not their provenance. But it is mildly disturbing that despite all the rhetoric of India having arrived, the lack of external validation in some important spheres is still seen as some kind of deficit. This is then compounded by sheer ignorance about the cultural possibilities and ground that we stand on. For instance, one distinction often mapped on to literature is the construction of the vernacular as the parochial and rooted, the English as the cosmopolitan and universal. This identification is bizarre, but widespread. But intellectually nothing could be farther from the truth. As Kunwar Narain, one
of modern India’s greatest poets, himself once wrote, there is a sense in which Hindi writers have had to write with an even deeper sense of self-consciousness about three traditions: what he called Hindu, Indo-Islamic and Western. In that sense, vernacular literature has carved out its freedom through appropriation of a wider world. But we will not be in a position to make those choices if we cling to an avoidable monolingualism, and a set of narrow standards to judge what is truly important. The babble of Babel will continue, producing even new linguistic forms like Hinglish. But the ability of more than one language to become the medium of thought, the mark of genuine bilingualism, is very much in doubt.
Globalisation and a new identity
India’s gradual reintegration into the world economy is a contested process. But on balance, globalisation has brought immense economic benefits to India. India has experienced an acceleration of aggregate GDP growth rates to an average of eight per cent over the last four years. Aggregate manufacturing growth has jumped to more than seven per cent, and the growth rate in the service sector has been even more phenomenal. Indian companies, rather than withering away under competition, are boldly venturing into the global market, acquiring companies all over the world. Since liberalisation in 1991, India has not been subject to a serious economic crisis; its external balance of payments situation is more robust than ever. There has been a secular decline in poverty rates, though albeit at a much slower rate than defenders of globalisation had hoped. India still has unconscionably high rates of poverty, illiteracy, malnourishment and morbidity. But there is a good deal of consensus that India’s lack of achievement in these areas has little to do with globalisation. Rather, the delivery of social services is hostage to a domestic political economy that predates globalisation. If anything, globalisation provides an opportunity to address these pressing concerns. Take an example, just in the financial year 2006. Government revenues experienced a growth of almost 40 per cent, a result of high growth rates. These resources gave the state an opportunity to address these concerns, and the last three years have seen the largest outlays on social sector expenditure in India’s history. However, these outlays are not effective, because less than 20 per cent of these resources reach the intended targets. The obstacle to sharing the gains of growth is not globalisation; it is the fact that the state has not reformed itself enough to fully capitalise on the gains of growth. While India has negotiated its globalisation largely on its own terms, its capacity to translate the gains of globalisation into the well being of all, will depend on the reform of its state.
But these economic trends do not capture the vitality and dynamism globalisation has induced in India. Perhaps most importantly, globalisation has brought about a fundamental transformation in India’s sense of itself. While India’s economics and political aspirations have expanded, arguably the most profound effect of globalisation will be on its sense of identity and its place in the world.
Behind this transformation in identity lies a new and sophisticated understanding of the currency of power in the modern world. India’s approach to the world had for decades been hostage to some fundamental misconceptions. It confused autonomy with autarky, sovereignty with power, and interdependence with a lack of independence. Its insecurities and inhibitions had created a conceptual fog around how power operates in international society. That fog has now been decisively lifted. There is more recognition of the fact that the more India engages with the global economy, the more our power will grow. This is not just because of the obvious fact that an increasing share of world trade and investment will make India important. It is also because the only sure path to peace is to create powerful constituencies in other countries that have a vested interest in supporting your cause. Trade and investment create the lobbies that transform relations between states.
But what is remarkable is a new and sophisticated thinking emerging in certain quarters about the link between foreign policy with pluralism and a new kind of multilateralism. Ask the question: what kinds of societies are, over the long haul, going to be best able to take advantage of globalisation? One element of the answer is going to be pluralism and openness. Japan’s economy is suffering because it has in some senses remained a closed society incapable of accepting immigration as a solution to its demographic woes. Europe is struggling to acknowledge that it has become multicultural, and the sense of identity of some of its nations is so fragile that a headscarf can put it at risk. Even China’s capacity to negotiate pluralism is still an open question. For all its warts, India has the capability of positioning itself as a negotiator between different civilisations and ways of life. Although India can be hostage to intolerance and extremism, India is one of the few societies in the world that is capable of negotiating a deep pluralism. This inheritance is also an asset in a globalising world; it ought to be the cornerstone of our foreign policy.
Finally, both economic globalisation and pluralism have to be linked to what can be described as a multicentric multilateralism. This is not the multilateralism centred on a moribund institution like the UN. It is a multilateralism that enduringly binds nations in webs of interdependence through a series of overlapping institutions. India is now seeking to join almost any multilateral arrangement that will admit it as a member, from APEC to G-8. These arrangements involve sovereignty trade-offs. But the underlying vision is that these sovereignty trade-offs are more than compensated by the real power that accrues from participation in these institutions.
The three elements of this foreign policy reinforce each other: uninhibited economic openness, pluralism and membership of multilateral institutions. Genuine economic openness is not sustainable without an open society and a willingness to participate in regional arrangements signals a commitment to openness and dialogue.
Globalisation opens up two intriguing possibilities for Indian identity. First, by relentlessly pursuing Free Trade Agreements with the rest of Asia, including ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), India is once again striving for connections in its own natural neighbourhood. It has signalled its willingness to integrate economically with the rest of Asia and it is possible that over time this will revolutionise the way in which India conceives of the region. In utopian moments it is possible to imagine India’s border regions culturally and economically relinking with their traditional trading zones: Tamil Nadu with Sri Lanka, the North East with South East Asia. It is now feasible that these regions can establish economic linkages, yet remain firmly wedded politically to India. The idea is that India will need a strong centre, but not necessarily a well-defined circumference. What is striking is the degree to which this vision is being talked about and is likely to be the cornerstone of Indian policy. There is some consensus that by letting India integrate with the rest of Asia (a free trade zone from Kabul to Manila!) India will make it easy for its neighbours to open links with it in the context of wider regional cooperation.
The second intriguing possibility it opens up for Indian identity is this. There is no doubt that greater integration into the world economy, or even the aspiration, transforms an understanding of national identity. Think of two scenarios. In the first instance there is an emerging nationalist party, with significant anti-minority sentiment. But this party has none of the following aspirations. It does not feel obliged to send signals that can attract foreign investors and depositors; its routine engagements with the outside world are episodic rather than spread across a wide range of domains; it sees international rivalries as a zero sum game; it has little potential for learning from the rest of the world and thumbs its nose at international institutions and norms.
In the second scenario, the same nationalist party, with similar anti-minority sentiment, comes to power in a context where it has to recognise that the health of the economy and, by implication, national power, depend upon a certain level of international credibility. It recognises the need to attract investment and have a plausible face to carry in forum after forum. It learns quickly that mutua
l interdependence is a surer path to national power than autarky, that power is not a zero sum game and that the international system can be engaged with only in terms of reciprocity. It learns that a mere declaration of sovereignty cannot be confused with real power, and that there might be something to be learnt from how other nations got to be influential. It does not take much to figure out in which scenario the nationalist party will be forced to tame its belligerence.
It would be complacent and false to believe that integration into the world economy will tame fanatical nationalism by some overdetermined logic. Nationalism and anti-minority sentiment are products of political choices. There is no guarantee against political fanaticism. But it could be argued that globalisation is a contributing factor to that moderation.
India always cared a good deal about what the rest of the world thought of it but it now cares for a more tangible measure of its success: its ability to attract investment and jobs from overseas. It is difficult to think of this as mattering unless India had greater aspirations to integrate into the global economy. In subtle ways, the desire to present India in a certain light has forced the Government to confront questions about India’s credibility. It has nudged it to make sure that India gets the headlines for the right reasons.
Belligerent nationalism feeds on a politics of anxiety. Compared to the early 1980s, the politics of anxiety seems to have diminished in intensity. This is, in no small measure, due to two factors. India has become more confident of its ability to deal with the rest of the world, and it is difficult to imagine this confidence in the absence of the process of globalisation. Rather than producing an identity crisis, globalisation has given an opportunity to India to feel less insecure. In an autarkic world, we had no sense of how we might prove our possibilities. Globalisation, by providing opportunities for international success, has made that anxiety less pressing. If Indians feel that they are ready to take on the world, they might feel less compelled to take it out on each other. If Indians are more confident that this sort of recognition is in their grasp, it might ease their anxieties. This is still only a hope. But freedom and openness suit India’s character more. That is the only identity that can sustain it in the long run.
If we are looking at the inner life of culture, this fact is of some importance. For the first time in modern Indian history, Indians are cutting across different sections of society, beginning to have the sense that the future will be better than the past, and they have the ability to shape their destiny. This aspiration has serious political and economic ramifications, but it can also be the source of a new cultural confidence. What will be the values that shape it remains an open question. But there is some reason to be optimistic that despite the deep stresses of change, a pluralisitic India will endure. When the Indian Constitution was framed, one of its drafters, BN Rau, was asked, ‘This is a great constitution. But we don’t see what is Indian about it. Directive Principles have been borrowed from Ireland, rights from the US, parliamentary system from England and so on.’ Rau is reported to have replied, ‘Before independence we used to worry about these things. What is the point of being free if you cannot take any history and make it your own?’ The inner life of culture depends upon transcending culture without making culture despicable.
