The Argumentative Indian

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by Amartya Sen


  4

  The Diaspora and the World

  An Issue of Identity

  The nature of the Indian identity is significant for those who live in India.* But it is also important for the very large Indian diaspora across the world – estimated to be 20 million or more in number. They see, rightly, no contradiction between being loyal citizens of the country in which they are settled and where they are socially and politically integrated (Britain or the United States or Malaysia or Kenya or wherever), and still retaining a sense of affiliation and companionship with India and Indians. As is frequently the case with emigrants in general, the Indian diaspora is also keen on taking pride – some self-respect and dignity – in the culture and traditions of their original homeland. This frequently takes the form of some kind of ‘national’ or ‘civilizational’ appreciation of being Indian in origin. However, there is often some lack of clarity on the appropriate grounds for dignity: what should the Indian diaspora be proud of?

  This is not a hard question to answer, given the breadth and richness of Indian civilization. Nevertheless, this subject has become something of a battleground in recent years. Indeed, the rather combative line of exclusionary thinking that the Hindutva movement has sponsored and championed has made strong inroads into the perceptions of the Indian diaspora. There has been a systematic effort to encourage non-resident Indians of Hindu background to identify themselves, not primarily as ‘Indians’, but particularly as ‘Hindus’ (or, at least, to see themselves as Indians within a Hinduized conception). The campaign has worked effectively over parts of the diaspora, and the Sangh Parivar – including its more aggressive components – receives large remittances from Indians overseas.

  As it happens, sectarian and fundamentalist ideas of different religions often do get enthusiastic support from emigrants, who aggressively play up the value of what they identify as their ‘own traditions’ as they find themselves engulfed in a dominant foreign culture abroad. This tendency gave strength to Sikh political militancy in North America and Europe that was very powerful in the 1980s. It also continues to add to the vigour of Islamic fundamentalism in the world today. The Hindutva movement, too, has been busy recruiting its foreign legion with much vigour and considerable success.

  Yet many expatriate Indians, irrespective of their religious background, find it hard to see themselves in such divisive terms, and are also worried about the use of brutalities and bloodshed associated with the extremist wing of the Hindutva movement; for example, in the riots in Gujarat in 2002: voices were even raised at the otherwise smooth meeting of ‘Pravasi Bharatiya’ (Indians living abroad), arranged with much fanfare by the government of India in New Delhi in January 2003 (to which 2,000 members of the diaspora came from sixty-three different countries), about the deep shame that many overseas Indians felt about the organized sectarian violence in Gujarat. There is a desire for national or cultural pride, but some uncertainty about what to take pride in.

  Tradition and Pride

  In this context, it is particularly important to look at the traditions of India in all their spaciousness – not artificially narrowed in sectarian lines. Indeed, within the Hindu tradition itself, there is surely much reason for pride in the reach and open-mindedness of the broad and capacious reading of the Hindu perspective, without a confrontational approach to other faiths. That perspective (as discussed in Essay 3) is radically different from the drastically downsized Hinduism that tends to receive the patronage of the Hindutva movement.

  Even though the programme of identifying with a ‘small India’ is vigorously pushed (no Buddha, please, nor Ashoka or Akbar or Kabir or Nanak), there is a ‘large India’ too, available to the diaspora as much as to Indians in India. It is important to appreciate that the historical achievements in India in critical reasoning, public deliberation and analytical scrutiny, as well as in science and mathematics, architecture, medicine, painting and music, are products of Indian society – involving both Hindus and non-Hindus, and including the sceptical as well as the religious. Indians of any background should have reason enough to celebrate their historical or cultural association with (to consider a variety of examples) Nāgārjuna’s penetrating philosophical arguments, Harṣa’s philanthropic leadership, Maitreyī’s or Gārgī’s searching questions, Cārvāka’s reasoned scepticism, Āryabhaṭa’s astronomical and mathematical departures, Kālidāsa’s dazzling poetry, Śūdraka’s subversive drama, Abul Fazl’s astounding scholarship, Shah Jahan’s aesthetic vision, Ramanujan’s mathematics, or Ravi Shankar’s and Ali Akbar Khan’s music, without first having to check the religious background of each.

  In that large tradition, there is indeed much to be proud of, including some ideas for which India gets far less credit than it could plausibly expect. Consider, for example, the tradition of public reasoning. Even though the importance of dialogue and discussion has been emphasized in the history of many countries in the world, the fact that the Indian subcontinent has a particularly strong tradition in recognizing and pursuing a dialogic commitment is certainly worth noting, especially in the darkening world – with violence and terrorism – in which we live. It is indeed good to remember that some of the earliest open public deliberations in the world were hosted in India to discuss different points of views, with a particularly large meeting arranged by Ashoka in the third century BCE. It is good to remember also that Akbar championed – even that was four hundred years ago – the necessity of public dialogues and backed up his conviction by arranging actual dialogues between members of different faiths. The importance of such recollections does not lie merely in the celebration of history, but also in understanding the continuing relevance of these early departures in theory and practice.

  It is at this time rather common in Western political discussions to assume that tolerance and the use of reason are quintessential – possibly unique – features of ‘Occidental values’: for example, Samuel Huntington has insisted that the ‘West was West long before it was modern’ and that the ‘sense of individualism and a tradition of individual rights and liberties’ to be found in the West are ‘unique among civilized societies’.1 Given the fair degree of ubiquity that such perceptions have in the modern West, it is perhaps worth noting that issues of individual rights and liberties have figured in discussions elsewhere as well, not least in the context of emphasizing the importance of the individual’s right of decision-making, for example about one’s religion.

  There has been support as well as denial of such rights in the history of both Europe and India, and it is hard to see that the Western experience in support of these rights is peculiarly ‘unique among civilized societies’. For example, when Akbar was issuing his legal order that ‘no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him’,2 and was busy arranging dialogues between Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jains, Parsees, Jews and even atheists, Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake in Rome for heresy, in the public space of Campo dei Fiori.

  Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Akbar’s defence of a tolerant pluralist society is his focus on the role of reasoning in choosing this approach. Even in deciding on one’s faith, one should be, Akbar argued, guided by ‘the path of reason’ (rahi aql), rather than led by ‘blind faith’. Reason cannot but be supreme, since even when disputing reason, we would have to give reason for that disputation.3 In the first two essays of this book, I have tried to comment on the long history of reasoning – and arguing – in India, and its connection with accomplishments in such fields as science, mathematics, epistemology, public ethics and in the politics of participation and secularism.

  There is, I would argue, much in this tradition that should receive systematic attention from Indians today, including the diaspora, irrespective of whether the leadership comes from Hindus or Muslims or Buddhists or Christians or Sikhs or Parsees or Jains or Jews. Indeed, the importance of fuller knowledge about India’s traditions is hard
to overemphasize at the present time. It is not only relevant for the understanding of the ‘large India’, but also important for appreciating the variations and freedoms that a broad Indian identity allows – indeed, celebrates.

  Colonial Dominance and Self-respect

  One of the reasons for seeking a clearer view of the intellectual accomplishments in India’s past relates to a bias in self-perception that is associated with India’s colonial history. This is not the occasion to try to look at many other features of colonial relations that radically influenced attitudes and perceptions in India, but since I am focusing on something quite specific, I should warn about the slender nature of the programme of investigation here.4

  The colonial experience of India not only had the effect of undermining the intellectual self-confidence of Indians, it has also been especially hard on the type of recognition that Indians may standardly have given to the country’s scientific and critical traditions. The comparative judgement that Macaulay made popular in the early nineteenth century (‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’) was seen to apply particularly to Indian analytical work (as will be more fully discussed in Essay 7).5

  Even though early colonial administrators in the late eighteenth century – Warren Hastings among them – took a very broad interest in India’s intellectual past, the narrowing of the imperial mind was quite rapid once the empire settled in.6 Coercion and dominance demanded the kind of distancing that could sustain the ‘autocracy set up and sustained in the East by the foremost democracy in the Western world’ (as Ranajit Guha has insightfully described colonial India).7 India’s religions and mystical thoughts did not threaten to undermine that imperial intellectual distance. There was no great difficulty in providing encouragement and assistance to those who gathered and translated ‘the sacred books of the east’ (as Max Müller did, with support from the East India Company, commissioned in 1847, resulting in a 50-volume collection).8 But in the standard fields of pure and practical reason, the propensity to see a gigantic intellectual gap between India and the West – stretching far back into history – was certainly quite strong.*

  Let me illustrate. Consider, for example, the originality of Āryabhaṭa’s work, completed in 499 CE, on the diurnal motion of the earth (disputing the earlier understanding of an orbiting sun) and the related proposal that there was a force of gravity which prevented material objects from being thrown away as the earth rotated (described in Essay 1). The most influential colonial historian of British India, James Mill, took these claims to be straightforward fabrication. It was clear to Mill that the Indian ‘pundits had become acquainted with the ideas of European philosophers respecting the system of the universe’, and had then proceeded to claim that ‘those ideas were contained in their own books’.9 Mill’s Indian history, which Macaulay described as ‘on the whole the greatest historical work which has appeared in our language since that of Gibbon’,10 was tremendously influential in the intellectual world of the British Raj.11

  As it happens, however, the scientific ideas in dispute were well reported, not just in Indian books, but also in the accounts of outside observers. In particular, they received careful and detailed description (as did other early Indian works in astronomy and mathematics) from Arab and Iranian mathematicians, who also translated and extensively used (with generous acknowledgement) some of the relevant Sanskrit books.† For example, the Iranian mathematician Alberuni commented specifically on this particular work of Āryabhaṭa (which Mill took to be the result of nineteenth-century fabrication) in an Arabic book on India (Ta’rikh al-hind), written in the early eleventh century:

  Brahmagupta says in another place of the same book: ‘The followers of Āryabhaṭa maintain that the earth is moving and heaven resting. People have tried to refute them by saying that, if such were the case, stones and trees would fall from the earth.’ But Brahmagupta does not agree with them, and says that that would not necessarily follow from their theory, apparently because he thought that all heavy things are attracted towards the centre of the earth.12

  James Mill’s comprehensive denial of Indian intellectual originality evidently sprang from his general belief that Indians had taken only ‘a few of the earliest steps in the progress to civilization’.13 Mill’s conviction that Indian scholars were fabricating things would have received some help from his other general belief: ‘Our ancestors, though rough, were sincere; but under the glosing exterior of the Hindu, lies a general disposition to deceit and perfidy.’14 Mill was quite even-handed in dismissing all other claims of achievement of Indian science and mathematics as well, for example the development and use of the decimal system (Mill offered the enticing view that the Indian decimal notations were ‘really hieroglyphics’).*

  Perhaps I should in fairness note the mitigating circumstance that Mill made a conscious decision to write his history of India without learning any Indian language and without ever visiting India. Mill declared these facts with some apparent pride in the Preface to his book – he evidently did not want to be biased by closeness to the subject matter. Alberuni, the Iranian mathematician, who mastered Sanskrit and roamed around in India for a great many years before writing his own history of India, eight hundred years before Mill, would have been a little puzzled by the research methodology of the leading British historian of India of the nineteenth century. Mill’s work set the tone for many of the discussions on colonial policy of the day, including the educational arrangements instituted in British India, in which Macaulay in particular, citing Mill very often, played a big part.

  Colonial undermining of self-confidence had the effect of driving many Indians to look for sources of dignity and pride in some special achievements in which there was less powerful opposition – and also less competition – from the imperial West, including India’s alleged excellence in spirituality and the outstanding importance of her specific religious practices.15 By creating their ‘own domain of sovereignty’ (as Partha Chatterjee has described it),16 the Indians – like other people dominated by colonialism – have often sought their self-respect in unusual fields and special interests. This has been associated with an extraordinary neglect of Indian works on reasoning, science, mathematics and other so-called ‘Western spheres of success’. There is certainly a need for some emendation here.

  History and Public Reason

  There is a need for a somewhat similar corrective regarding Indian traditions in public reasoning and tolerant communication, and more generally in what can be called the precursors of democratic practice (discussed in Essay 1). Imperial leaders in Britain, such as Winston Churchill, were not only sceptical of the ability of Indians to govern themselves, they found little reason to take an interest in the history of ideas on civil administration or participatory governance or public reasoning in India. In contrast, when India became independent in 1947 the political discussions that led to a fully democratic constitution, making India the largest democracy in the twentieth century, not only included references to Western experiences in democracy, but also recalled its own participatory traditions.

  Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, put particular emphasis on the toleration of heterodoxy and pluralism in Indian history.17 The Chair of the Drafting Committee of the Indian constitution, Dr B. R. Ambedkar, a distinguished scholar and political leader from the community of Dalits (formerly, ‘untouchables’), also went in some detail into the history of local democratic governance in India to assess whether it could fruitfully serve as a model for modern Indian democracy. Ambedkar eventually saw little merit in drawing on local democratic experience, since localism, he argued, generated ‘narrow-mindedness and communalism’ (speaking personally, Ambedkar even asserted that ‘these village republics have been the ruination of India’).18 But Ambedkar also pointed to the general relevance of the history of public reasoning in India, and particularly emphasized the expression of heterodox views.19

  D
espite those early deliberations in independent India, the intellectual agendas related to national politics have tended to move firmly in other directions since then, influenced by, among other factors, the sectarianism of the Hindutva movement and the cultural ignorance of many of the globalizing modernizers. Yet the historical roots of democracy and secularism in India, no less than the reach of its scientific and mathematical heritage, demand serious attention in contemporary India. Indeed, public discussion – in addition to balloting and elections – is part of the very core of democratic arrangements. Just as the tradition of balloting (going back to the practice in Athens in the sixth century BCE) is rightly acclaimed in the history of democracy, there is a similar case for celebrating the development, across the world, of the tradition of open public discussion as an essential aspect of the roots of democracy. If Akbar was well ahead of his time in arranging state-organized inter-faith dialogues (possibly the first in the world), Ashoka must also be regarded as remarkable in his interest and involvement, in the third century BCE, in the rules of discussion and confrontation that should govern arguments between holders of diverse beliefs.

  That connection has global relevance too, since Ashoka was critically important for the spread of Buddhism and its social values in the world beyond India. It is interesting to note that attaching special importance to discussions and dialogue moved with other Buddhist principles, wherever Buddhism went. * For example, in early seventh-century Japan, the influential Buddhist Prince Shotoku, who was regent to his mother, Empress Suiko, introduced a relatively liberal constitution or kempo (known as ‘the constitution of seventeen articles’) in 604 CE, which included the insistence (in the spirit of the Magna Carta to be signed six centuries later, in 1215): ‘Decisions on important matters should not be made by one person alone. They should be discussed with many.’ Shotoku also argued: ‘Nor let us be resentful when others differ from us. For all men have hearts, and each heart has its own leanings. Their right is our wrong, and our right is their wrong.’20 Indeed, some commentators have seen, in this seventh-century Buddhism-inspired constitution, Japan’s ‘first step of gradual development toward democracy’.21

 

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