The Argumentative Indian

by Amartya Sen

  Ray’s interest in things from elsewhere had begun a lot earlier. His engagement with Western classical music went back to his youth, but his fascination with films preceded his involvement with music. In his posthumously published book My Years with Apu: A Memoir, Ray recollects:

  I became a film fan while still at school. I avidly read Picturegoer and Photoplay, neglected my studies and gorged myself on Hollywood gossip purveyed by Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. Deanna Durbin became a favourite not only because of her looks and her obvious gifts as an actress, but because of her lovely soprano voice. Also firm favourites were Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, all of whose films I saw several times just to learn the Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern tunes by heart.9

  Ray’s willingness to enjoy and learn from things happening elsewhere is plentifully clear in how he chose to live and what he chose to do.10 When Ray describes what he learned as a student at Santiniketan – the distinguished centre of education started by Rabindranath Tagore where Ray studied fine arts – the elements from home and abroad are well mixed together. He learned a great deal about India’s ‘artistic and musical heritage’ (he got involved in Indian classical music, apart from being trained to paint in traditional Indian ways), but also immersed himself in ‘far-eastern calligraphy’ (and particularly in the use of ‘minimum brush strokes applied with maximum discipline’). When his teacher, Professor Nandalal Bose, a great artist and the leading light of the ‘Bengal school’, taught Ray how to draw a tree (‘Not from the top downwards. A tree grows up, not down. The strokes must be from the base upwards …’), Bose was being at once critical of some Western conventions, while introducing Ray to the styles and traditions in two other countries, China and Japan (who did, among other things, get the tree right, Bose thought).

  Ray did not hesitate to indicate how strongly his Pather Panchali – the profound movie that immediately made him a front-ranking film-maker in the world – was directly influenced by Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. He notes that not only had he seen Bicycle Thieves within three days of arriving in London, but also the following: ‘I knew immediately that if I ever made Pather Panchali – and the idea had been at the back of my mind for some time – I would make it in the same way, using natural locations and unknown actors.’11 Despite this influence, Pather Panchali is a quintessentially Indian film, both in subject matter and in the style of presentation, and yet a major inspiration for its exact organization came directly from an Italian film. The Italian influence did not make Pather Panchali anything other than an Indian film – it simply helped it to become a great Indian film.

  External Sources and Modernity

  The growing tendency in contemporary India to champion the need for an indigenous culture that has ‘resisted’ external influences lacks credibility as well as cogency. It has become quite common to cite the foreign origin of an idea or a tradition as an argument against its use, and this has been linked up with an anti-modernist priority. Even as acute and perceptive a social analyst as Partha Chatterjee finds it possible to dismiss Benedict Anderson’s thesis linking nationalism and ‘imagined communities’, by referring to the Western origin of that ‘modular’ form: ‘I have one central objection to Anderson’s argument. If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain “modular” forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine?’12 The conceptual form of the nation as an ‘imagined community’ which Anderson pursues might or might not have much to commend it (I personally think that it does – but this is a different issue), but the fear that its Western origin would leave us without a model that is our ‘own’ is a peculiarly parochial anxiety.

  Indian culture, as it has evolved, has always been prepared to absorb material and ideas from elsewhere. Satyajit Ray’s heterodoxy is not, in any sense, out of line with our tradition. Even in matters of day-to-day living, the fact that the chili, a basic ingredient of traditional Indian cooking, was brought to India by the Portuguese from the ‘new world’, does not make current Indian cooking any less Indian. Chili has now become an ‘Indian’ spice. Cultural influences are, of course, a two-way process, and India has borrowed from abroad, just as we have also given the world outside the benefits of our cooking traditions. For example, while tandoori came from the Middle East to India, it is from India that tandoori has become a staple British diet. Last summer I heard in London a quintessential Englishwoman being described as being ‘as English as daffodils or chicken tikka massala’.13

  Given the cultural and intellectual interconnections, the question of what is ‘Western’ and what is ‘Eastern’ (or ‘Indian’) is often hard to decide, and the issue can be discussed only in more dialectical terms. The diagnosis of a thought as ‘purely Western’ or ‘purely Indian’ can be very illusory. The origin of ideas is not the kind of thing to which ‘purity’ happens easily.

  Science, History and Modernity

  This issue has some practical importance at the moment, given the political developments of the last decade, including the increase in the strength of political parties focusing on Indian – and particularly Hindu – heritage. There is an important aspect of anti-modernism which tends to question – explicitly or by implication – the emphasis to be placed on what is called ‘Western science’. If and when the challenges from traditional conservatism grow, this can become quite a threat to scientific education in India, affecting what young Indians are encouraged to learn.

  The reasoning behind this anti-foreign attitude is flawed in several distinct ways. First, so-called ‘Western science’ is not the special possession of Europe and America. Certainly, since the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, most of the scientific progress has actually occurred in the West. But these scientific developments drew substantially on earlier work in mathematics and science done by the Arabs, the Chinese, the Indians and others. The term ‘Western science’ is misleading in this respect, and quite misguided in its tendency to establish a distance between non-Western peoples and the pursuit of mathematics and science.

  Second, irrespective of where the discoveries and inventions took place, the methods of reasoning used in science and mathematics give them some independence of local geography and cultural history. There are, of course, important issues of local knowledge and of varying perspectives regarding what is or is not important, but much of substance is still shared in methods of argument, demonstration and the scrutiny of evidence. The term ‘Western science’ is misleading in this respect also.

  Third, our decisions about the future need not be parasitic on the type of past we have experienced. Even if there were no Asian or Indian component in the evolution of contemporary mathematics and science (this is not the case, but even if it had been true), its importance in contemporary India need not be undermined for that reason.

  There is a similar issue, to which I referred earlier, about the role of ‘modernity’ in contemporary India. Contemporary attacks on modernity (especially on a ‘modernity’ that is seen as coming to India from the West) draw greatly on the literature on ‘post-modernism’ and other related approaches, which have been quite influential in Western literary and cultural circles (and later on, somewhat derivatively, in India too). There is perhaps something of interest in this dual role of the West: the colonial metropolis supplying ideas and ammunition to post-colonial intellectuals to attack the influence of the colonial metropolis! But of course there is no contradiction there. What it does suggest, however, is that mere identification of Western connections of an idea could not be enough to damn it.

  The critics of ‘modernism’ often share with the self-conscious advocates of ‘modernism’ the belief that being ‘modern’ is a well-defined concept – the only dividing point being whether you are ‘for’ modernity, or ‘against’ it. But the diagnosis of modernity is not particularly easy, given the historical roots – often very long roots –
of recent – or ‘modern’ – thoughts and intellectual development, and given the mixture of origins in the genesis of ideas and techniques that are typically taken to characterize modernism.

  The point is not at all that modern things must be somehow judged to be good, or that there are no reasons to doubt the wisdom of many developments which are justified in the name of a needed modernity. Rather, the point is that there is no escape from the necessity to scrutinize and assess ideas and proposals no matter whether they are seen as pro-modern or anti-modern. For example, if we have to decide what policies to support in education, health care or social security, the modernity or non-modernity of any proposal is neither here nor there. The relevant question is how these policies would affect the lives of people, and that enquiry is not the same as the investigation of the modernity or non-modernity of the policies in question. Similarly, if, faced with communal tensions in contemporary India, we suggest that there is much to be gained from reading the tolerant poems of Kabir (from the fifteenth century) or studying the political priorities of Akbar (dating from the sixteenth century), in contrast with, say, the intolerant approach of an Aurangzeb (in the seventeenth), that discrimination has to be done in terms of the worth of their respective positions, and not on the basis of some claim that Kabir or Akbar was ‘more modern’ or ‘less modern’ than Aurangzeb. Modernity is not only a befuddling notion, it is also basically irrelevant as a pointer of merit or demerit in assessing contemporary priorities.

  The Elusive ‘Asian Values’

  What about the specialness of ‘Asian values’ on which so much is now being said by the authorities in a number of East Asian countries? These arguments, developed particularly in Singapore, Malaysia and China, appeal to the differences between ‘Asian’ and ‘Western’ values to dispute the importance of civil rights, particularly freedom of expression (including press freedoms) in Asian countries. The resistance to Western hegemony – a perfectly respectable cause in itself – takes the form, under this interpretation, of justifying suppression of journalistic freedoms and the violations of elementary political and civil rights on grounds of the alleged unimportance of these freedoms in the hierarchy of what are claimed to be ‘Asian values’.

  There are two basic problems with this mode of reasoning. First, even if it were shown that freedoms of this kind have been less important in Asian thoughts and traditions than in the West, that would still be an unconvincing way of justifying the violation of these freedoms in Asia. To see the conflict over human rights as a battle between Western liberalism on one side and Asian reluctance on the other is to cast the debate in a form that distracts attention from the central question: what would make sense in contemporary Asia? The history of ideas – in Asia and in the West – cannot settle this issue.

  Second, it is by no means clear that, historically, greater importance has been systematically attached to freedom and tolerance in the West than in Asia. Certainly, individual liberty, in its contemporary form, is a relatively new notion both in Asia and in the West, and while the West did get to these ideas rather earlier (through developments such as the Renaissance, the European Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and so on), the divergence is relatively recent. In answer to the question, ‘at what date, in what circumstances, the notion of individual liberty … first became explicit in the West’, Isaiah Berlin has noted: ‘I have found no convincing evidence of any clear formulation of it in the ancient world.’14

  This view has been disputed by Orlando Patterson.15 Patterson’s historical arguments are indeed interesting. But his thesis of a freedom-centred tradition in the West in contrast with what happened elsewhere seems to depend on attaching significance to particular components of Western thought without looking adequately for similar components in non-Western intellectual traditions; for example, in the fairly extensive literatures on politics and participatory governance in Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, Arabic and other languages.16

  In the reading that sees the Western tradition as the natural habitat of individual freedom and political democracy, there is a substantial tendency to extrapolate backwards from the present. Values that the European Enlightenment and other relatively recent developments have made common and widespread can scarcely be seen as part of the long-term Western heritage – experienced in the West over millennia. There has, of course, been championing of freedom and tolerance in specific contexts in the Western classical tradition, but much the same can be said of many parts of the Asian tradition as well – not least in India, with the articulations associated for example with Ashoka’s inscriptions, Śūdraka’s drama, Akbar’s pronouncements or Dadu’s poetry, to name just a few examples.

  It is true that tolerance has not been advocated by all in the Asian traditions. Nor has that advocacy typically covered everyone (though some, such as Ashoka, in the third century BCE, did indeed insist on completely universal coverage, without any exception). But much the same can be said about Western traditions as well. There is little evidence that Plato or St Augustine were more tolerant and less authoritarian than Confucius. While Aristotle certainly did write on the importance of freedom, women and slaves were excluded from the domain of this concern (an exclusion that, as it happens, Ashoka did not make around roughly the same time). The claim that the basic ideas underlying freedom and tolerance have been central to Western culture over the millennia and are somehow alien to Asia is, I believe, entirely rejectable.

  The allegedly sharp contrast between Western and Asian traditions on the subject of freedom and tolerance is based on very poor history. The authoritarian argument based on the special nature of Asian values is particularly dubious. This supplements the more basic argument, presented earlier, that even if it had been the case that the values championed in Asia’s past have been more authoritarian, this historical point would not be grounds enough to reject the importance of tolerance and liberties in contemporary Asia.

  Over-aggregation and Heterogeneity

  Discussion of Asian values draws attention to an important issue underlying attempts at generalizations about cultural contrasts between the West and the East, or between Europe and India, and so on. There are indeed many differences between Europe and India, but there are sharp differences also within India itself, or within Europe. And there are also great differences between different parts of the Indian intellectual and historical traditions. One of the things that goes deeply wrong with grand contrasts between ‘our culture’ and ‘their culture’ is the tremendous variety within each of these cultures. My old teacher Joan Robinson used to say: ‘Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.’ It is not that cultural differences are of no importance, but the contrasts do not come in the tailor-made form of some immense opposition between, say, the West and India, with relative homogeneity inside each.

  The problem is, of course, even larger when there are attempts at generalization about ‘Asian’ values. Asia is where about 60 per cent of the world’s entire population live. There are no quintessential values that apply to this immensely large and heterogeneous population which separate them out as a group from people in the rest of the world. Those who have written on the importance of cultural divisions have been right to point to them, and yet the attempt to see these divisions in the over-aggregated form of East-West contrasts hides more than it reveals.

  Indeed, generalizations even about an individual religious community within India (such as the Hindus or the Muslims) or about a language group (such as the Bengalis or Gujaratis or Tamils) can be very deeply misleading. Depending on the context, there may be more significant similarity between groups of people in different parts of the country who come from the same class, have the same political convictions, or pursue the same profession or work. Such similarity can hold across national boundaries as well. People can be classified in terms of many different criteria, and the recent tendency to emphasize some contrasts (such as religion or community), while overlooking others, has ignored impor
tant differences even as it has capitalized on others.

  ‘Ours’ and ‘Theirs’

  The difficulties of communication across cultures are real, as are the judgemental issues raised by the importance of cultural differences. But these recognitions do not lead us to accept the standard distinctions between ‘our culture’ and ‘their culture’. Nor do they give us cause to overlook the demands of practical reason and of political and social relevance in contemporary India, in favour of faithfulness to some alleged historical contrasts. I have tried to show that the contrasts are often not quite as they are depicted, and the lessons to be drawn are hardly the ones that the vigorous champions of ‘our culture’ claim them to be.

  There is much to be learned in all this from Satyajit Ray’s appreciation of cultural divides, along with his pursuit of communication across these divides. He never fashioned his creation to cater to what the West may expect from India, but nor did he refuse to enjoy and learn from what Western and other cultures offered. And when it came to the recognition of cultural diversity within India, Ray’s delicate portrayal of the varieties of people that make us what we are as a nation cannot be outmatched. While reflecting on what to focus on in his films, he put the problem beautifully:

  What should you put in your films? What can you leave out? Would you leave the city behind and go to the village where cows graze in the endless fields and the shepherd plays the flute? You can make a film here that would be pure and fresh and have the delicate rhythm of a boatman’s song.