Makers of Modern India

by Ramachandra Guha

  On no account do the high castes comprise more than one-fifth of India’s population. But they keep to themselves almost four-fifths of the nation’s leadership. In respect of the top leadership of the four main departments of national activity—business, army, high civil services and political parties—the high-castes easily comprise four-fifths … When more than four-fifths of a nation’s vital leadership is traditionally selected from among one-fifth of its population, a state of atrophy is bound to ensue. Four-fifths of its population sinks into a state of listlessness and inefficiency. The nation is sick and continually on the point of death. To revitalize such a nation, a designed selection of leadership has to be made. At least half or sixty per cent of the nation’s top leadership must be selected by design from among the lower castes. This need not be done by law. It had better be done through a purposeful understanding … [T]he attempt to revitalize the nation’s leadership in terms of caste must be made again and again until it succeeds …

  The first wordy war on caste, led by the Dwija,4 is evenly matched by the second empty struggle against caste led by select Sudra groups. Among the Sudras, certain castes are numerically powerful, even overwhelming in some areas. The age of adult franchise has placed power in their hands. Some castes like the Reddys and Mudaliars of south India and the Marathas of west India have made use of it. They, and not the Dwija, are the political overlords of their areas, though, even here the high-caste has strengthened his economic grip and is making most clever and deceptive efforts to stage a political comeback. This is possible chiefly because these are empty struggles against caste. They do not change the social order in the sense of making it more just, mobile or active. They do not give power to all the lower castes, but only to the largest single section within them. They do not therefore destroy caste, but merely cause a shift in status and privileges. Some of the trappings of the high-caste belonging to the Brahmin or Vaishya are stripped off them and patched on to the Maratha or the Reddy. This solves no problem. Rather, it disgusts all the other lower castes and enrages the high caste. Caste, with all its debility and some more of its irritations, remains …

  Sectional elevation is dangerous in yet another way. Those among the lower castes who rise to high positions tend to assimilate themselves to the existing high castes. In this process, they inevitably appropriate the baser qualities of the high-caste. Everybody knows how the lower castes, on their rise, tend to segregate their women, which again is a quality not of the top high-caste but of the medium high-caste. Also the lower castes that rise begin to wear the sacred thread of the Dwija, which has so long been denied to them but which the true high caste has begun discarding. All this has an additional result of perpetuating the distinction. Furthermore, such a rise does not cause a general ferment among the lower castes. The risen are alienated from their own groups; instead of fermenting their own original lower groups they seek to become part of the higher castes to whose positions they rise. This process of an extremely sectional and superficial rise gives birth to another misfortune. The lever to the rise is supplied not by the cultivation of good qualities or talent but by the arousing of bitter caste jealousies and the play of intrigues …

  This brings us to the third and true struggle against caste now on the agenda of India’s history. This struggle aims to pitch-fork the five downgraded groups of society—women, Sudras, Harijans, Muslims and Adivasis—into positions of leadership, irrespective of their merit as it stands today. This merit is at present necessarily low. The tests of merit are also such as to favour the high-caste. What long ages of history have done must be undone by a crusade. The inclusion of all women, including Dwija women, which is but right, into the downgraded groups of society raises their proportion to the entire population to 90%. This vast sea of submerged humanity, nine out of every ten of India’s men and women, has drowsed into silence or, at best, some routine noises of seeming life. Economic and political uplift, by itself, may put some fat on their lean limbs. A restoration of self-respect through the abolition of caste, of course, when it goes side by side with economic uplift, can rouse them into the activity of full men and awakened peoples. Let it not be forgotten that the high-castes, Dwija, have also suffered grievously from this atrophy of the people, [for] their education and culture hides, under the veneer of good speech and manners, the deadly poison of the lie and self-advancement through deceit. A crusade to uplift the downgraded groups would revive also the high-caste, would set right frames and values which are all today askew. This crusade must never be confused with the niggardly award of preferential positions to a few scores among the lower castes. This only irritates the high-caste. A howl goes up. It does not at all ferment the lower castes. What matters if a dozen or two of the lower castes are added to the high-caste oligarchy of several thousands in any sphere of life? There is need to add them by the hundred and the thousand. That will turn into a crusade what is today only a vote-catching, quarrel-making and jealousy-inspiring device …

  This policy of uplift of downgraded castes and groups is capable of yielding much poison. In fact, care may only mitigate some of the worst aspects of the poison; it cannot be totally eliminated. A first poison may come out of its immediate effects on men’s minds; it may speedily antagonize the Dwija without as speedily influencing the Sudras. With his undoubted alertness to developments and his capacity to mislead, the Dwija may succeed in heaping direct or indirect discredit on the practitioners of this policy long before the Sudra wakes up to it. Secondly, the colossi among the lower castes like the Chamars and Ahirs may want to appropriate the fruits of this policy without sharing them with the myriad other low castes, with the result that the Brahmin and Chamar change places but caste remains intact. Thirdly, the policy may be misused by selfish men among the lower castes for individual advancement, who may additionally use weapons of intrigue and caste jealousies. This would rend society further apart and subject it to grosser selfishness without bringing it any benefits of weakening and expansion. Fourthly, every single case of election or selection between a Sudra and Dwija may become the occasion for acrimonious exchanges. The baser elements among the downgraded castes would use it as a constant weapon. In their over-weening desire to eliminate the particular Dwija against whom they are ranged, they would in total seek to oust all Dwijas or to fill the air with darker suspicions when they fail …

  Such is the poison that this policy may bring forth. Continual awareness of this poison may check it in great measure. But the fear of the poison should not blind us to the miraculous power of this policy to create and cure. India will know the most invigorating revolution of her history. The people will have become alive as never before. She may also have indicated in the process a lesson or two to mankind. Karl Marx tried to destroy class, without being aware of its amazing capacity to change itself into caste … For the first time, an experiment shall have been made in the simultaneous destruction of class and caste.

  The young high-caste must now rise to his full measure. Instead of seeing in this policy an attack on his interest, he should view it for its capacity to renew the people … The young high-caste must decide to turn himself into manure for the lower castes, so that the people may for once flower into their fully glory. If human nature were capable of infinite sacrifice, we would have the high-caste become advisers, while the executives are all low-caste. If this is not possible everywhere, let it be so in as many places as possible. With faith in the great crucible of the human race and equal faith in the vigour of all the Indian people, let the high-caste choose to mingle tradition with mass. Simultaneously, a great burden rests on the youth of the lower castes. Not the aping of the high-caste in all its traditions and manners, not dislike of manual labour, not individual self-advancement, not bitter jealousy, but the staffing of the nation’s leadership as though it were some sacred work should now be the supreme concern of women, Sudras, Harijans, Muslims, and Adivasis.

  Banish English

  In the 1950s Lohia called for
the formation of, among other things, a ‘Caste Abolition Committee’, a ‘Price Fixation Committee’ and an ‘English Removal Committee’. He saw English as a foreign language, promoted by the Indian elite merely to further their interests. He once timed an English Removal convention to coincide with the visit of the British monarch, Queen Elizabeth the Second, to India. The following excerpts explain why he was opposed to English being used in administration and as a medium of instruction in schools and colleges.5

  In our own country, I often feel—and perhaps you too feel that way—as if we have been evicted from our fields and homes and that some intruder has usurped the lands and we, the real occupants, are thrown out wringing our hands helplessly in despair. One can reconcile to such an ugly situation after having failed to settle one’s land arrears or answer one’s debts. But when such a condition is intrigued and forced upon one through forged documents and book-manoeuvring, it is a grave assault on justice. India today faces such an impossible situation. Sitting tight on the high pedestal of offices the topmen advocate a ‘go-slow’ policy regarding the removal of English. Having been deprived of all our belongings, we have become strangers in our own homes. The ten years of our freedom have committed us to a very paradoxical situation. The real owners of the soil have been estranged and a foreign Fuhrer with all his might and authority lords over us …

  You are an employee in the tramways, you organize your own unions. But what is the language in which you carry on your everyday work and correspondence? Obviously English. But how many among you, 9,000 workmen, know this foreign language? Problems concerning labour are talked from the platform and discussed in the press on behalf of the labour, in a medium which a worker is unable to understand. All Indian languages are outlawed. This has its attendant evil. A leadership is hardly evolved from among the rank and file of the workers themselves. Thus the very roots are cut, not the earth alone on which a common wage-earner stands and aspires to use it as a spring-board to leadership. Company management, trade union and civil service have conspired into a triple alliance. In times of emergency, they unite their forces to thwart the just claims of labour. This triple league is bound to continue its oppression over them as long as English continues.

  If the entire administrative work of the government and its intellectual activities continue to be carried on in the language of the minority then whose interests will such a government defend? On which side will it lean? Out of 40 crores, English has touched a fringe of 40 lakh Indians only. The government has its eyes set on this privileged class of 40 lakhs. Towards the rest it has turned its back. The problems that concern the 40 crore underdogs go neglected, their needs remain unanswered. What matters to the government are the interests of 40 lakhs which alone seem to assume an all India character and, hence, national importance.

  Problems relating to prices of foodgrains and hunger will remain unsolved while English continues to thrive on the Indian soil. The bureaucracy till that date will stand at the beck and call of forty lakhs alone. The dumb masses will never attract its attention and their cries shall ever fall on its deaf ears. At least a crore or a crore-and-a-half inhabitants of this subcontinent take their daily dip in the waters of the Ganga and the Kaveri. Another fifty lakhs depend for their drinking water on their perennial streams. But is not their water polluted by the gutters that drain the cities? And yet there is no one to take up this issue. To the administrative bosses these are but minor problems and of no consequence. Representatives of the forty lakh English-versed aristocracy are enthroned in power. The banishment of English will be their dethronement. For these drowning big-wigs English serves as a last straw. They know well that with the removal of English, the government, the law of the land, the trade unions, public institutions and the leading men will have to take cognizance of the forty crores. This would mean a great revolution. It will shake the very foundation of their feudal empire. Take, for instance, the defence services. What are the necessary merits for an Indian soldier to rise above the rank of a colonel? Undoubtedly, it is not being conversant in the art of warfare, but a thorough proficiency in [the] English language. The ability to dictate notes in English, the adeptness with which one can converse in English at the dining table and the ease with which one can hold the knife and the fork are some of the few decisive factors. Not gallantry, nay, not the knowledge of warfare, but the mere acquaintance of the English language, is the sole criterion …

  Let us now come to the problem of the belly. Who dominate the economic life of the country today? An overwhelming majority of Indians use ‘neem-sticks’ and charcoal powder to clean their teeth. Who are generally the consumers of toothpaste, automobiles, facepowder, cream and other cosmetics? Newspapers overflow with their advertisements. In modern India, the sale of these fashionable articles of use is confined to the forty to fifty lakhs of English-educated people. A section of the rural population in the cities may swell this figure say at the most to a crore or so. It is to meet the needs of these fashionable people that our daily press advertisers display their wares. It is now left to you and your judgment to decide which way the economic life of the nation really moves. Whether in the sphere of production or that of consumption, the economic life of the nation stands tuned to this limited section of forty lakhs. The problems of these few become the problems of all.

  These forty lakhs provide a fertile soil for the growth of leadership of all political opinions. These leaders are at the helm of affairs of all political parties. This explains the reactionary and conservative nature of their leadership. Modernization is the cry of India today, it is a high and laudable ideal. This privileged class of forty lakhs supported by the leadership in various political groups is unanimous in its view and voice—this is an indication of its corrupt and reactionary mind—that the sale of these articles of luxury should not only be maintained but further encouraged simultaneously with the retention and propagation of English. These two trends are heading the nation towards ruination. The forty crores will have to be alert. They must stand firm to their ground and forge ahead towards a revolution …

  Many a ridiculous argument is heard in this respect. One of them is that Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and several other native languages are still undeveloped. They, therefore, cannot give us up-to-date ideas and information. A well-developed Western language thus becomes indispensable. Such a plea is untenable. Compared with French, Indian languages possess a treasure four or five times richer. The vocabulary of Hindi or Bengali is twice as rich as that of English. With the help of Sanskrit these languages yield an inexhaustible mine to coin new words. Admittedly, there is one marked difference. In the last century and a half, Western languages have acquired a precise vocabulary, depicting all specific shades and hues. Indian languages are still wanting in this quality. Their coinage suffers from a lack of stability and precision. It is wrong to say that knowledge cannot be imparted through Indian languages. If the Russian scientists were to learn English obligatorily, perhaps the world would not have heard of the Sputnik …

  An Indian child is driven mad right from the age of five and he suffers this disability throughout his life. Overburdened with the learning of a foreign language, he hardly reaches the core of a subject and attains depth. Our university scholars suffer a similar fate. They have been reduced into beasts of burden. This is clearly shown by a contrast with other peoples. Scientists of Russia and Japan are not burdened with the task of acquiring a foreign language and so their knowledge of subjects becomes deep so that they are enabled to make great discoveries and inventions on the strength of such knowledge. We should understand the difference between the learning of a language and the knowledge of a subject. If the child in India is relieved from this burden of learning a foreign language, his knowledge will be widened and deepened, undoubtedly.

  Rescue the Indian schoolboy, his mind and body, from the inhuman burden of English … English is a compulsory subject in our educational curriculum. A majority of candidates fail in it and their ca
reers are shipwrecked. What a colossal waste of national wealth and time! Launching a nation-wide campaign in July and August you6 must frankly proclaim, ‘Rid our minds of the impediment of English. We want to acquire knowledge in subjects. That is how we can build a strong nation.’ …

  2500 million souls inhabit our planet. 300 million out of these know English. Some people are infatuated by a mirage that English will become the international vehicle of thought and commerce. Such will-of-the-wisp has haunted people in all times. In the 19th century, it was believed that French was an international language. In the atomic age there are some who claim that place for English. In the 8th and 9th centuries world opinion might have attributed similar credit to Arabic. Two thousand years ago Sanskrit would have been the choice. The river has changed its course, rendering the bridge of English useless. Russian language is also making huge strides. The down stream of public opinion is flowing towards it. After some time, Russian language will flaunt the same claim. The clash between English and Russian may lead to a dual race. That English will rise to the level of an international medium is a myth.