The Argumentative Indian

by Amartya Sen

  Or would you rather go back in time – way back to the Epics, where the gods and the demons took sides in the great battle where brother killed brother and Lord Krishna revivified a desolate prince with the words of the Gita? One could do exciting things here, using the great mimetic tradition of the Kathakali, as the Japanese use their Noh and Kabuki.

  Or would you rather stay where you are, right in the present, in the heart of this monstrous, teeming, bewildering city, and try to orchestrate its dizzying contrasts of sight and sound and milieu?

  The celebration of these differences – the ‘dizzying contrasts’ – is far from what can be found in the laboured generalizations about ‘our culture’, and the vigorous pleas, increasingly vocal, to keep ‘our culture’, ‘our modernity’ distinctly unique and immune from the influence of ‘their culture’, ‘their modernity’. In our heterogeneity and in our openness lies our pride, not our disgrace. Satyajit Ray taught us this, and that lesson is profoundly important for India. And for Asia, and for the world.

  7

  Indian Traditions and the Western Imagination*

  The self-images (or ‘internal identities’) of Indians have been much affected by colonialism over the past centuries and are influenced – both collaterally and dialectically – by the impact of outside imagery (what we may call ‘external identity’). However, the direction of the influence of Western images on internal Indian identities is not altogether straightforward. In recent years, separatist resistance to Western cultural hegemony has led to the creation of significant intellectual movements in many post-colonial societies – not least in India. This has particularly drawn attention to the important fact that the self-identity of post-colonial societies is deeply affected by the power of the colonial cultures and their forms of thought and classification. Those who prefer to pursue a more ‘indigenous’ approach often opt for a characterization of Indian culture and society that is rather self-consciously ‘distant’ from Western traditions. There is much interest in ‘recovering’ a distinctly Indian focus in Indian culture.

  I would argue that this stance does not take adequate note of the dialectical aspects of the relationship between India and the West and, in particular, tends to disregard the fact that the external images of India in the West have often tended to emphasize (rather than downplay) the differences – real or imagined – between India and the West. Indeed, I propose that there are reasons why there has been a considerable Western inclination in the direction of ‘distancing’ Indian culture from the mainstream of Western traditions. The contemporary reinterpretations of India (including the specifically ‘Hindu’ renditions) which emphasize Indian particularism join forces in this respect with the ‘external’ imaging of India (in accentuating the distinctiveness of Indian culture). Indeed, it can be argued that there is much in common between James Mill’s imperialist history of India and the Hindu nationalist picturing of India’s past, even though the former image is that of a grotesquely primitive culture whereas the latter representation is dazzlingly glorious.

  The special characteristics of Western approaches to India have encouraged a disposition to focus particularly on the religious and spiritual elements in Indian culture. There has also been a tendency to emphasize the contrast between what is taken to be ‘Western rationality’ and the cultivation of what ‘Westerners’ would see as ‘irrational’ in Indian intellectual traditions. While Western critics may find ‘anti-rationalism’ defective and crude, and Indian cultural separatists may find it cogent and penetrating (and perhaps even ‘rational’ in some deeper sense), they nevertheless agree on the existence of a simple and sharp contrast between the two heritages. The issue that has to be scrutinized is whether such a bipolar contrast is at all present in that form.

  I will discuss these questions and argue that focusing on India’s ‘specialness’ misses, in important ways, crucial aspects of Indian culture and traditions. The deep-seated heterogeneity of Indian traditions is neglected in these homogenized interpretations (even though the interpretations themselves are of different kinds). My focus will be particularly on images of Indian intellectual traditions, rather than on its creative arts and other features of social life. After distinguishing between three of the dominant approaches in Western interpretations of Indian intellectual traditions, I shall consider what may appear to be the overall consequence of these approaches in Western images of India and its impact on both external and internal identities.

  Western Approaches to India: Three Categories

  A dissimilarity of perceptions has been an important characteristic of Western interpretations of India, and several different and competing conceptions of that large and complex culture have been influential in the West. The diverse interpretations of India in the West have tended to work to a considerable extent in the same direction (that of accentuating India’s spirituality) and have reinforced each other in their effects on internal identities of Indians. This is not because the distinct approaches to India are not fundamentally different; they certainly are very disparate. The similarity lies more in their impact – given the special circumstances and the dialectical processes – than in their content.

  The analysis to be pursued here would undoubtedly invite comparison and contrast with Edward Said’s justly famous analysis of ‘Orientalism’. Said analyses the construction of the ‘Orient’ in Western imagination. As he puts it: ‘The Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West.’1 This essay has a much narrower focus than Said’s, but there is clearly an overlap of subject matter since India is a part of the ‘Orient’. The main difference is at the thematic level. Said focuses on uniformity and consistency in a particularly influential Western characterization of the Orient, whereas I shall be dealing with several contrasting and conflicting Western approaches to understanding India.

  Said explains that his work ‘deals principally not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient’.2 I would argue that, unless one chooses to focus on the evolution of a specific conceptual tradition (as Said, in effect, does), ‘internal consistency’ is precisely the thing that is terribly hard to find in the variety of Western conceptions of India. There are several fundamentally contrary ideas and images of India, and they have quite distinct roles in the Western understanding of the country and also in influencing the self-perception of Indians.

  Attempts from outside India to understand and interpret the country’s traditions can be put into at least three distinct categories, which I shall call exoticist approaches, magisterial approaches and curatorial approaches.3 The first (exoticist) category concentrates on the wondrous aspects of India. The focus here is on what is different, what is strange in the country that, as Hegel put it, ‘has existed for millennia in the imagination of the Europeans’.

  The second (magisterial) category strongly relates to the exercise of imperial power and sees India as a subject territory from the point of view of its British governors. This outlook assimilates a sense of superiority and guardianhood needed to deal with a country that James Mill defined as ‘that great scene of British action’. While a great many British observers did not fall into this category (and some non-British ones did), it is hard to dissociate this category from the task of governing the Raj.

  The third (curatorial) category is the most catholic of the three and includes various attempts at noting, classifying and exhibiting diverse aspects of Indian culture. Unlike the exoticist approaches, a curatorial approach does not look only for the strange (even though the ‘different’ must have more ‘exhibit value’), and unlike the magisterial approaches, it is not weighed down by the impact of the ruler’s priorities (even though the magisterial connection would be hard to avoid altogether when the authors are also members of the ruling imperial elite, as they sometimes were). For these reasons, there is more
freedom from preconceptions in this third category. On the other hand, the curatorial approaches have inclinations of their own, with a general interest in seeing the object – in this case, India – as very special and extraordinarily interesting.

  Other categories can be proposed that are not covered by any of the three. Also, the established approaches can be reclassified according to some other organizing principle. I am not claiming any grand definitive status of this way of seeing the more prominent Western approaches to India. However, for the purpose of this essay, I believe this threefold categorization is useful.

  Curiosity, Power and Curatorial Approaches

  I shall begin by considering the curatorial approaches. But first I must deal with a methodological issue; in particular, the prevalent doubts in contemporary social theory about the status of intellectual curiosity as a motivation for knowledge. In particular, there is much scepticism about the possibility of any approach to learning that is innocent of power. That scepticism is justified to some extent since the motivational issues underlying any investigation may well relate to power relations, even when that connection is not immediately visible.

  Yet people seek knowledge for many different reasons, and curiosity about unfamiliar things is certainly among the possible reasons. It need not be seen as a figment of the deluded scientist’s imagination, nor as a tactical excuse for some other, ulterior preoccupation. Nor does the pervasive relevance of different types of motivation have the effect of making all the different observational findings equally arbitrary. There are real lines to be drawn between inferences dominated by rigid preconceptions (for example, in the ‘magisterial’ approaches, to be discussed presently) and those that are not so dominated, despite the possibility that they too may have biases of their own.

  There is an interesting methodological history here. The fact that knowledge is often associated with power is a recognition that had received far too little attention in traditional social theories of knowledge. But in recent social studies, the remedying of that methodological neglect has been so comprehensive that we are now in some danger of ignoring other motivations altogether that may not link directly with the seeking of power. While it is true that any useful knowledge gives its possessor some power in one form or another, this may not be the most remarkable aspect of that knowledge, nor the primary reason for which this knowledge is sought. Indeed, the process of learning can accommodate considerable motivational variations without becoming a functionalist enterprise of some grosser kind. An epistemic methodology that sees the pursuit of knowledge as entirely congruent with the search for power is a great deal more cunning than wise. It can needlessly undermine the value of knowledge in satisfying curiosity and interest; it significantly weakens one of the profound characteristics of human beings.

  The curatorial approach relates to systematic curiosity. People are interested in other cultures and different lands, and investigations of a country and its traditions have been vigorously pursued throughout human history. Indeed, the development of civilization would have been very different had this not been the case. The exact motivation for these investigations can vary, but the enquiries need not be hopelessly bound by some overarching motivational constraint (such as those associated with the exoticist or magisterial approaches). Rather, the pursuit may be driven primarily by intellectual interests and concerns. This is not to deny that the effects of these investigative pursuits may go well beyond the motivating interests and concerns, nor that there could be mixed motivations of various kinds, in which power relations play a collateral role. But to deny the role of curiosity and interest as powerful motivational features in their own right would be to miss something rather important. For the curatorial approaches, that connection is quite central.

  Curatorial Approaches in Early Arabic and European Studies

  A fine example of a curatorial approach to understanding India can be found in Alberuni’s Ta’rikh al-hind (‘The History of India’), written in Arabic in the early eleventh century.4 Alberuni, an Iranian born in Central Asia in 973 CE, first came to India accompanying the marauding troops of Mahmud of Ghazni. He became very involved with India and mastered Sanskrit; studied Indian texts on mathematics, natural sciences, literature, philosophy and religion; conversed with as many experts as he could find; and investigated social conventions and practices. His book on India presents a remarkable account of the intellectual traditions and social customs of early eleventh-century India.

  Even though Alberuni’s was almost certainly the most impressive of these investigations, there are a great many examples of serious Arabic studies of Indian intellectual traditions around that time.5 Brahmagupta’s pioneering Sanskrit treatise on astronomy had first been translated into Arabic in the eighth century (Alberuni retranslated it three centuries later), and several works on medicine, science and philosophy had an Arabic rendering by the ninth century. It was through the Arabs that the Indian decimal system and numerals reached Europe, as did Indian writings in mathematics, science and literature.

  In the concluding chapter of his book on India, Alberuni describes the motivation behind his work thus: ‘We think now that what we have related in this book will be sufficient for any one who wants to converse with [the Indians], and to discuss with them questions of religion, science, or literature, on the very basis of their own civilization.’6 He is particularly aware of the difficulties of achieving an understanding of a foreign land and people, and specifically warns the reader about it:

  In all manners and usages, [the Indians] differ from us to such a degree as to frighten their children with us, with our dress, and our ways and customs, and as to declare us to be devil’s breed, and our doings as the very opposite of all that is good and proper. By the bye, we must confess, in order to be just, that a similar depreciation of foreigners not only prevails among us and [the Indians], but is common to all nations towards each other.7

  While Arab scholarship on India provides plentiful examples of curatorial approaches in the external depiction of India, it is not, of course, unique in this respect. The Chinese travellers Faxian (Fa-Hsien) and Xuanzang (Hiuan-tsang), who spent many years in India in the fifth and seventh centuries CE respectively, provided extensive accounts of what they saw. While they had gone to India for Buddhist studies, their reports cover a variety of Indian subjects, described with much care and interest.

  Quite a few of the early European studies of India must also be put in this general category. A good example is the Italian Jesuit Roberto Nobili, who went to south India in the early seventeenth century, and whose remarkable scholarship in Sanskrit and Tamil permitted him to produce fairly authoritative books on Indian intellectual discussions, in Latin as well as in Tamil. Another Jesuit, Father Pons from France, produced a grammar of Sanskrit in Latin in the early eighteenth century and also sent a collection of original manuscripts to Europe (happily for him, the Bombay customs authorities were not yet in existence).

  However, the real eruption of European interest in India took place a little later, in direct response to British – rather than Italian or French – scholarship on India. A towering figure in this intellectual transmission is the redoubtable William Jones, the legal scholar and officer of the East India Company, who went to India in 1783 and by the following year had established the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal with the active patronage of Warren Hastings. In collaboration with scholars such as Charles Wilkins and Thomas Colebrooke, Jones and the Asiatic Society did a remarkable job in translating a number of Indian classics – religious documents (such as the Gītā) as well as legal treatises (particularly, Manusmriti) and literary works (such as Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā).

  Jones was obsessed with India and declared his ambition ‘to know India better than any other European ever knew it’. His description of his selected fields of study included the following modest list:

  the Laws of the Hindus and the Mohamedans, Modern Politics and Geography of Hindustan, Best Mode of Governi
ng Bengal, Arithmetic and Geometry, and Mixed Sciences of the Asiaticks, Medicine, Chemistry, Surgery, and Anatomy of the Indians, Natural Productions of India, Poetry, Rhetoric, and Morality of Asia, Music of the Eastern Nations, Trade, Manufacture, Agriculture, and Commerce of India.8

  One can find many other examples of dedicated scholarship among British officers in the East India Company, and there can be little doubt that the Western perceptions of India were profoundly influenced by these investigations. Not surprisingly, the focus here is quite often on those things that are distinctive in India. Specialists on India pointed to the uncommon aspects of Indian culture and its intellectual traditions, which were obviously more interesting given the perspective and motivation of the observers.9 As a result, the curatorial approaches could not escape being somewhat slanted in their focus. I shall come back to this issue later.

  The Magisterial Burden

  I turn now to the second category, the magisterial approaches. The task of ruling a foreign country is not an easy one when its subjects are seen as equals. In this context, it is quite remarkable that the early British administrators in India, even the controversial Warren Hastings, were as respectful of the Indian traditions as they clearly were. The empire was still in its infancy and was being gradually acquired, rather tentatively.

  A good example of a magisterial approach to India is the classic book on India written by James Mill, published in 1817, on the strength of which he was appointed as an official of the East India Company. Mill’s The History of British India played a major role in introducing the British governors of India to a particular characterization of the country. Mill disputed and dismissed practically every claim ever made on behalf of Indian culture and its intellectual traditions, concluding that it was totally primitive and rude. This diagnosis went well with Mill’s general attitude, which supported the idea of bringing a rather barbaric nation under the benign and reformist administration of the British Empire. Consistent with his beliefs, Mill was an expansionist in dealing with the remaining independent states in the subcontinent. The obvious policy to pursue, he explained, was ‘to make war on those states and subdue them’.10