Indian Instincts

by Miniya Chatterji

  ‘In traditional India, “high” castes could demand services from “low” castes because of their superior material and physical resources. This exploitation is explained in Hindu texts as being ordained by the gods,’10 wrote Gupta.

  Today, there are a number of reasons for a large chunk of India’s population to uphold rather than abolish the inequalities in our society.

  First, for an individual to be perceived as ‘higher’ in the social hierarchy, many others must be perceived to be ‘below’ this individual. And so, instead of acquiring social respect through accomplishments, it is easier to gain a high social status by merely allowing the existing system of abject inequality to continue.

  Second, the profitability of businesses in India often depends on accessing cheap labour from the poor, and the high spending power of the wealthy. I will write about this in greater detail in a later essay in this book, but for now, it suffices to point out that business too flourishes in India if inequality continues.11

  Third, inequality works to maintain the family structure in India. As I wrote earlier, typical arranged marriages last in India often because they are based on the principle of inequality. The bride-taker is considered superior to the bride-giver, and so the groom (and his family) can drive the marital relationship mostly unilaterally.12 Once the all-important ceremony of kanyadaan, which literally means ‘donating the bride’, is completed by the father of the bride, the groom and his family can take charge of the couple’s life. Thereafter, a woman is considered to be abounding with ‘good values’ when she unquestioningly subjugates herself to her husband. Why should subjugation to the groom and his family be a sign of good values? This is so firstly because this means that the bride relinquishes her individual beliefs to those of the new family’s—not because of love or influence or habit (she barely knows the groom or his family yet), but because she knows that she is supposed to uphold group values, whatever those may be, over her own. Secondly, subjugation would mean that the bride will not rebel against the groom and his family’s wishes, which is indicative of stability in the marriage.

  Fourth, democracy and elections give the impression of providing a fair representation of people in Parliament and in the government, but both politics and governance here are riddled with nepotism. The poor in urban and rural India have neither the voice nor the will to oppose the drops of patronage coming their way, which, as I mentioned earlier, in the absence of any social security in the country, are a life support to many.

  So, who would want to change the current ethos of inequality in India? For reasons like status, self-esteem, stability, profitability and power, Indians are dependent on those considered socio-economically inferior. Many middle-class and elite Indians therefore have hardly any incentive to dismantle the inequality in relations among people in India today. Our politicians cannot win elections without wielding power over their minions. Businesses need the poor for increasing profits. On the other hand, the absence of social security provided by the government means the poor need to preserve at least the lifeline of their ‘superior’ benefactors. Even the family unit is held up by marriages based on inequality.

  All this has led to a society in India that is riding on the steam of inequality.

  The deep rifts between the various socio-economic strata have created an aggressive environment for all of us to live in. ‘Modern’-looking technologically savvy hospitals treat patients from poor backgrounds contemptuously. Our police forces do not feel the need to speak respectfully to a person from a humble background. Companies invest in the most modern production machines, but ill-treat their employees. In fact, so ingrained is the value of inequality in our society that the current social, economic and political systems cannot do without it.

  This is why I argue that inequality is the most dominant influence on individual beliefs.

  This does not mean that individuals in India do not have their own personal moral compass. In the face of the unequal environment, there are many who squirm with discomfort, in far larger numbers than they did before. But the important question is whether individuals are able to support their own individual values against the force of society’s interest in keeping inequality alive.

  In order for an individual to be ethical, it is important that they have an ethical and just environment around them. Else, there are high chances that an environment that has a general interest in continuing with corrupt practices will bring this individual down. For instance, an entrepreneur needs an ecosystem that allows him to ethically get legal permits, make payments to vendors and so on in an ethical way. If the ecosystem has unsaid rules that bribes must be paid or payments are to be done illegally only, the entrepreneur will find it difficult to get by without submitting to these rules. If a young girl values honesty but lives in a community that would harm her if they discover that she is pursuing an education, a love affair, or a salaried job, she would have two choices: to be dishonest and pursue her ambitions, or to give up on them. In both cases, the environment would have influenced her individual values.

  Some people use communities to get results in their individual favour for financial or political gains. For instance, while some Indians will not marry, or even eat or drink from the same vessel as someone of a lower caste, the same individuals will lend other castes support by forming a political alliance to gain power or money (or both) as a merged group, if they see their own individual benefit in such an alliance. Political alliances, such as the Kshatriya–Harijan–Ahir–Muslim and the Ahir–Jat–Gujar–Rajput13 groups, have been driven by the ambitions of a few to garner political power and win elections. Even as the caste system is slowly dissolving in India, caste identities persist and individuals correlate their caste identity with personal ambitions for political and financial gain.

  With the trickle-down effect—however painfully slow it is at the moment—of a more equitable economic growth pattern in India, there are chances that there will be greater homogeneity in education, spending power, choices and aesthetics among different communities separated by history, culture, prejudice or social and economic factors. In a society where every individual has equal power to understand, procure and implement action from the same set of choices, the political class will not be able to manipulate ignorance or socio-economic differences, because there will hardly be any. The elite will need to rise on their own merit, not by bullying the rest. It will be a somewhat level playing field for everyone to offer more opportunities as much as to gain, and so the mad scramble to win might abate.

  Only equality among individuals can generate empathy among people who do not have any kin, clan or ethnic connections. With empathy, individuals will understand the dilemmas and challenges of the other. They will connect with others on the basis of shared individual values, and not because of the values of a group they were deemed to be part of since birth. Gradually, people will begin to trust those beyond family and community as well.

  If this happens in India, those on an equal footing will come together in new groups based on the shared individual values of their members. They will each still be part of several communities, but these will be communities in which members have not identified with each other only due to affiliations by birth. And there is nothing pre-modern about that.

  References

  Durkheim, Émile. 1893. The Division of Labor in Society (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France).

  Gupta, Dipankar. 2000. Mistaken Modernity: India Between Worlds (Noida: HarperCollins India).

  Indian Express. 2016. Chhattisgarh: 8,582 villages become open defecation free. 16 December.

  Lau, Lisa, and Om Prakash Dwivedi. 2014. Re-Orientalism and Indian Writing in English (New York: Palgrave MacMillan).

  National Sample Survey Report. 2016. Most of rural India still opts for open defecation. The Hindu, 21 April.

  Varma, Pavan K. 2005. Being Indian: The Truth about Why the Twenty-first Century Will be India’s. (New Delhi: Penguin Books India).

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  Nationalism

  There is a large and influential consensus about the timing of the birth of nationalism in India. Almost every nationalist historian in India has said that nationalism here was born at the time of India’s awakening for freedom from the British. Subalternists Sumit Sarkar and Ranajit Guha too have deliberately focused on the period of the freedom struggle, emphasizing the role of the masses instead of the elites in developing India’s nationalism.1 Some historians say that nationalism began precisely in 1885 with the formation of the Indian National Congress.2 And others have largely believed that Indian nationalism was conceived and formed by various other political events in India’s freedom struggle, over the period from the last two decades of the nineteenth century right up to 15 August 1947.

  There has been another consensus—not just among intellectuals in India but also the world over—about the origin of nationalism. They mostly agree that nationalism arrived in the colonies from Europe.3 Starting with the French Revolution, a wave of nationalism or devotion to one’s country, along with the creation of national symbols, national slogans or values, and citizen rights, spread in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Countries such as Germany, Italy and Romania were being formed by uniting regional states under a common national identity, whereas others such as Greece, Switzerland, Poland and Bulgaria emerged after uprisings against the Ottoman Empire and Russia. A European import, this brand of nationalism was supposedly bequeathed by former colonial powers to the lands they had once ruled over. It is often believed that nationalism was one of Europe’s most useful gifts to the rest of the world.

  Not just India, but other erstwhile European colonies such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Algeria struggled to establish their own nationhood. As their people laid down their lives to become free, they stole the limelight from Europe by building various ‘modern’ political and economic institutions in the 1950s and 1960s. Europe was still regarded as the vanguard,4 but gradually, nationalism began to be associated more with these victorious anti-colonial struggles in Asia and Africa.

  Within a few years, many leaders of the African anti-colonial struggles became drunk on their newly acquired power. Leaders of countries such as Libya, Egypt and Tunisia became corrupt and established brutal regimes. In some other countries like Germany, South Africa, and later in Serbia and elsewhere, nationalism became a matter of ethnic politics and the reason for people killing each other. Nationalism started to get a bad name. So much so that by the end of the twentieth century, there was hardly any legacy of nationalism left in the world that would make Europe feel good about it.

  The Irish political scientist and polyglot Benedict Anderson’s views have perhaps been the most influential on ideas about nationalism in contemporary times. He said that nations in Europe, and everywhere else in the world, were in fact ‘imagined’ into existence.5 This, Anderson explained, meant that nations were not the determinate products of given sociological conditions, such as language or race or religion, but instead communities that came together to acquire tangible shape by establishing major institutional forms. He then went on to say that the historical experience of nationalism in western Europe, the Americas and Russia supplied a set of modular institutional forms, and that communities from Asia and Africa had chosen their own forms from that set.

  I have one problem with Anderson’s argument. If, as Anderson posited, the rest of the world has to choose from ‘modular forms’ of nationalism supplied by Europe, America and Russia, how much is left for these communities to ‘imagine’? Is there no indigenous form of nationalism that can be established by people in the rest of the world?

  Building on that same ‘problem’, I would also argue that amid all the thought that has gone into decrypting nationalism, there are at least two important assumptions that I believe might not always hold true. First, that nationalism has a political meaning; two, that there is a gallery of set ‘models’ of nationalism—ethnic nationalism, civic nationalism, religious nationalism and so on—that is doing the rounds internationally and from which countries deploy one model or the other.

  On the first assumption, I concede to Anderson that communities come together on the basis of their imagination of what their country must look like. I would add that as they do so, they collectively feel a range of emotions towards their country—love, pride, a feeling of security or insecurity, inclusivity (or not), rebellion, nostalgia, responsibility—that constitute their nationalism. A country is made by the coming together of ordinary people who experience these or similar emotions towards it, and not only by those who are involved in political activities. Instead, in India, when we talk of the birth of nationalism, we refer to freedom fighters and the words and actions of contemporary politicians. Perhaps we have taken the meaning of nationalism as being political much too literally?

  The second assumption—that we choose from existing models of nationhood—is so deep-seated within us in India that it has led to worrying consequences. In a chicken-and-egg situation, it has eroded our confidence in who we are as a community, and our imagination of the people we collectively and authentically want to be. We are not incapable of thinking about how we authentically and collectively feel about our country, so why have we given up? If a nation is an imagined community, why are we not imagining how our own nationalism could be?

  The challenge faced by India these days is related to both these assumptions. We are losing our grip on the understanding of ourselves as a community that once came together to become India, and are running helter-skelter looking for meaning.

  On the one hand, we are looking at our past in the hope that reviving ancient rituals, languages and decorum will lead us to our authentic selves. On the other hand, we are future-focused in attitude, and eager to align ourselves to the great seat of power that we believe India will surely have in the world. Yes, we realize that we need to find the nation first, in order to chart our own brand of nationalism. But until we are able to actually do so we seem to be lost, some more than others.

  And so, as an easy way out, we have left it to the political folks to determine nationalism for us, following their ad hoc solutions influenced by the West that are useful for them to stay in power. Since the public assumes that nationalism is a political matter, we are following the ridiculous agenda of politicians and of them telling us ‘how to be nationalistic’.

  Let us see how.

  We can recognize two dominant views on nationalism in contemporary India, of which neither is new. Both are led by the political class.

  The first comes from mostly left-leaning thinkers and secularists who propose a secular and culturally neutral stance towards nationalism—a Nehruvian nationalism of sorts—in which every citizen belonging to a diverse group feels like a part of India. The people of Srinagar, on 19 July 1961, applauded Nehru as he remarked:

  Nationalism does not mean Hindu nationalism, Muslim nationalism or Sikh nationalism. As soon as you speak of Hindu, Sikh or Muslim, you do not speak for India. Each person has to ask himself the question: What do I want to make of India—one country, one nation or ten, twenty or twenty-five nations, a fragmented and divided nation without any strength or endurance, ready to break to pieces at the slightest shock?6

  The second view on nationalism emphasizes that the relationship between the people and the nation is based on shared ethnic and territorial roots. This is a puritan view where only those who belong to the original ‘Akhand Bharat’—an entity with an imagined ethnic boundary, not the contemporary political one—must still be part of it, and no one else. This view considers Hindus to be the most ‘authentic’ inhabitants of the land, posits India as a great ancient civilization, and seeks to bring back the ‘authentic’ inhabitants and some of India’s ancient practices and beliefs to contemporary times.

  This second view has a very specific idea of the territory of India. It originates from the beliefs of independence activist Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. An atheist and a staunch rationa
list, ironically, Savarkar had, in the early years of the twentieth century, coined the term ‘Hindutva’. The term, he believed, referred to a collective Hindu identity as an imagined nation. For Savarkar, a Hindu is one who inhabits the land ‘from the Indus to the seas’. India, for him, was the ‘matribhoomi’ or motherland, ‘pitribhoomi’ or fatherland, and also the ‘punyabhoomi’ or Hindu holy land, whose sanctity is established by the rivers and mountains where pilgrims worship their gods. Therein lies Savarkar’s distinction between Hindus on the one hand, and Muslims and Christians on the other: ‘For though Hindustan to them is (pitribhoomi) fatherland as to any other Hindu, yet it is not to them a (punyabhoomi) holy land too. Their holy land is far away.’7 Thus, the notion of nationalism came to be associated with the boundaries of an imagined ancient territory having a homogeneous Hindutva identity.

  The form of nationalism propounded by Savarkar was developed further in free India. The Hindu right-wing organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), took forward Savarkar’s vision of reinstating an imagined nation made up of those whose punyabhoomi it is. The RSS strengthened its presence and established an annual event—to be held on 14 August and called the Akhand Bharat Sankalp Diwas—for the formation of a reunited India. The event brought local people into the folds of their beliefs.8 In 1966, the second RSS chief, M.S. Golwalkar, wrote in his book Bunch of Thoughts:

  Our epics and our Puranas also present us with the same expansive image of our motherland. Afghanistan was our ancient Upaganasthan. The modern Kabul and Kandahar were Gandhar. Even Iran was originally Aryan. Its previous king . . . was guided more by Aryan values than by Islam. The Zend-Avesta, the holy scripture of Parsis, is mostly the Atharva Veda. Coming to the east, Burma is our ancient Brahmadesha. The Mahabharata refers to Iraavat as being involved in that great war . . . In the south, Lanka has had the closest links and was never considered as different from the mainland.9