The Argumentative Indian

by Amartya Sen

  A second problem concerns the use of this route to arrive at the proposed Hindu view of India. Even if the religious identities were somehow ‘prior’ to the political identity of being an Indian, one could scarcely derive the view of a Hindu India based on that argument alone. The non-Hindu communities – Muslims in particular, but also Christians, Sikhs, Jains, Parsees and others – are scarcely ‘marginal’ even in numerical terms in the country.

  India has well over 140 million Muslims, not many fewer than Pakistan, and rather more than Bangladesh. To see India just as a Hindu country is a fairly bizarre idea in the face of that fact alone, not to mention the intermingling of Hindus and Muslims in the social and cultural life of India (in literature, music, painting and so on). Also, Indian religious plurality extends far beyond the Hindu-Muslim division. There is a large and prominent Sikh population, and a substantial number of Christians, whose settlements go back at least to the fourth century CE. There have also been Jewish settlements in India for nearly two thousand years. Parsees started moving to India twelve hundred years ago, to escape a less tolerant Iran. To this we have to add the millions of Jains, and practitioners of Buddhism, which had been for a long period the official religion of many of the Indian emperors (including the great Ashoka in the third century BCE, who had ruled over the largest empire in the history of the subcontinent).

  Furthermore, large also is the number of Indians who are atheist or agnostic (as Jawaharlal Nehru himself was), and that tradition in India goes well back to the ancient times (to Cārvāka and the Lokāyata, among other atheistic or agnostic schools).* The classificatory conventions of Indian social statistics tend to disestablish the recognition of such heterodox beliefs, since the categories used represent what in India has come to be called ‘community’, without recording actual religious beliefs (for example, an atheist born in a Hindu family is classified as Hindu, reflecting the so-called ‘community background’).

  Those who framed the Indian constitution wanted to give appropriate recognition to the extensive religious pluralism of the Indian people, and did not want to derive the notion of Indianness from any specific religious identity in particular. As Dr Ambedkar, the leader of the Indian Constituent Assembly, put it: ‘if the Muslims in India are a separate nation, then, of course, India is not a nation.’10 Given the heterogeneity of India and of the Indians, there is no real political alternative to ensuring some basic symmetry and an effective separation of the state from each particular religion.11

  The programme of deriving an Indian identity via a Hindu identity thus encounters problems from two different directions. First, it suffers from insufficient discrimination between (1) personal and social religious involvement, and (2) giving political priority to that involvement (against symmetric treatment of different religions). Second, it fails to recognize the implications of India’s immense religious diversity.

  In fact, the issue of religious plurality does not relate only to the relationship between Hindus and followers of other faiths (or none). It also concerns the divergences within Hinduism itself. The divisions do, of course, include those based on caste, and the nature of contemporary Indian politics reflects this at different levels with inescapable force. But the diversities that characterize Hinduism relate not just to caste. They also encompass divergent beliefs, distinct customs and different schools of religious thought.

  Even the ancient classification of ‘six systems of philosophy’ in India had acknowledged deeply diverse beliefs and reasoning. More recently, in the fourteenth century, when the authoritative Hindu scholar Mādhava Ācārya (head of the religious order in Śriṅgeri in Mysore) wrote his famous Sanskrit treatise Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha (‘Collection of All Philosophies’), his discussions brought out sharply the extent of diversity of different systems of Hindu belief.*

  In fact, seeing Hinduism as a unified religion is a comparatively recent development. The term ‘Hindu’ was traditionally used mainly as a signifier of location and country, rather than of any homogeneous religious belief. The word derives from the river Indus or ‘Sindhu’ (the cradle of the Indus valley civilization which flourished from around 3000 BCE) and the name of that river is also the source of the word ‘India’ itself. The Persians and the Greeks saw India as the land around and beyond the Indus, and Hindus were the native people of that land. Muslims from India were at one stage called ‘Hindavi’ Muslims, in Persian as well as Arabic, and there are plenty of references in early British documents to ‘Hindoo Muslims’ and ‘Hindoo Christians’, to distinguish them respectively from Muslims and Christians from outside India.

  A pervasive plurality of religious beliefs and traditions characterizes Hinduism as a religion. The point can be illustrated with the attitude to Rama, in whose name so much of the current Hindu political activism is being invoked (including demolishing the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, claimed to be ‘the birthplace of Rama’). The identification of Rama with divinity is common in the north and west of India, but elsewhere (for example, in my native Bengal), Rama is largely the heroic king of the epic Rāmāyaṇa, rather than God incarnate. The Rāmāyaṇa itself is, of course, widely popular, as an epic, everywhere in India, and has been so outside India as well – in Thailand and Indonesia, for example (even Ayutthaya, the historical capital of Thailand, is a cognate of Ayodhya). But the power and influence of the epic Rāmāyaṇa – a wonderful literary achievement – has to be distinguished from the particular issue of Rama’s divinity.

  A similar observation can be made about the claims to pre-eminent divinity of the other putatively divine characters in one part of India or another. If we must use the analogy of the ‘melting pot’ and the ‘salad bowl’, to which reference was made earlier, the Hindu traditions do not constitute a melting pot in any sense whatever. This need not, of course, prevent Hindus from living together in great harmony and mutual tolerance, but the same goes for a community of Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Parsees, Jews and people without any religion.

  On the ‘Muslim Sectarianism’ Critique

  I turn now to the issue of the alleged Muslim disloyalty to India. Spirited anecdotes abound on this subject, varying from the alleged frequency of Indian Muslims spying for Pakistan, to their tendency, we are told, to cheer the Pakistani cricket team in test matches.12

  There is, in fact, no serious evidence for the hypothesis of the political disloyalty of Indian Muslims. A great many Muslims stayed on in post-partition India (instead of going to Pakistan) as a deliberate decision to remain where they felt they belonged. In the Indian armed forces, diplomatic services and administration, Muslims’ record on loyalty to India is no different from that of Hindus and other Indians. There is no significant empirical evidence to substantiate the critique, and the unfairness of this specious line of reasoning is quite hard to beat.*

  Allegations of Muslim sectarianism are sometimes linked with a certain reading of Indian history (though ‘reading’ may well be the wrong word to use here). Muslim kings were, it is claimed, consistently alienated from their Hindu subjects and treated them badly. Since I have discussed the biased nature of this allegation elsewhere in this book (particularly in Essay 3), I shall not pursue this specific question again here. I will, however, comment on a point of methodology, rather than of empirical history. In the context of defending the importance of secularism in contemporary India, it is not in any way essential to make any claim whatsoever about how Muslim emperors of the past had behaved – whether they were sectarian or assimilative, oppressive or tolerant. There is no intrinsic reason why a defence of India’s secularism must take a position on what, say, the Moghals did or did not do. The ‘guilt’ of Muslim kings, if any, need not be ‘transferred’ to the 140 million Muslims who live in India today. Also, we can scarcely form a view of the political commitments of Muslims in contemporary India, or of their political loyalties, by checking what Muslim kings might or might not have done many centuries ago.

  On the ‘Anti-m
odernist’ Critique

  Turning now to the ‘anti-modernist’ critique of secularism, is it really the case that ‘as India gets modernized, religious violence is increasing’ (as Ashis Nandy says)? There are certainly periods in history in which this is exactly what has happened. For example, the communal riots immediately preceding the partition of British India in 1947 almost certainly took many more lives than any violence between the different communities earlier on in the century. But as the country has moved on from there (presumably not decreasing in ‘modernity’), the general level of violence has fallen from its peak in the 1940s – indeed, the number of incidents have been quite tiny in comparison with what happened half a century ago.

  We must not, however, interpret Ashis Nandy’s statement too literally. The thesis presented deals with a presumed shift in the long run, away from a pre-modern situation in which ‘traditional ways of life’ had, ‘over the centuries, developed internal principles of tolerance’. There is undoubtedly some plausibility in such a diagnosis – there is some evidence that the level of communal violence did indeed increase with colonial rule. On the other hand, even in the pre-colonial past of India there were periods in which violence, especially by sectarian armed forces, had escalated sharply, and then ebbed. Nandy is right to assert that, in general, ‘principles of tolerance’ have tended to develop eventually, as people of different backgrounds have settled down to live next to each other. It is not, I believe, central for Nandy’s thesis to check whether the time trend of communal violence has been consistently upwards, nor particularly interesting to compare the numbers killed in recent years vis-à-vis those in the past (the massive increase in the absolute size of the population would bias those comparisons anyway). The point rather is the thesis that principles of tolerance do develop in multi-community societies, unless they are disrupted by contrary moves, and Nandy sees the development of ‘modernism’ as just such a move.

  But what exactly is ‘modernism’ that could so disrupt the process of tolerance? The concept of modernity is not an easy one to identify, even though many post-modernists seem to share the modernists’ comfortable belief in the easily characterized nature of modernism. We may wish to resist being sent off on an errand to find the ‘true meaning of modernism’, and prefer to concentrate instead on the specific depiction of ‘secularism as modernism’, which is central to Nandy’s thesis. The point of departure would then be the argument forcefully presented by Nandy (as was quoted earlier): ‘To accept the ideology of secularism is to accept the ideologies of progress and modernity as the new justification of domination, and the use of violence to achieve and sustain ideologies as the new opiates of the masses.’ This is quite an articulate – indeed, terrifying – vision, but it would seem to be a rather odd characterization of secularism. The principle of secularism, in the broader interpretation endorsed in India, demands (as was discussed earlier) symmetric treatment of different religious communities in politics and in the affairs of the state. It is not obvious why such symmetric treatment must somehow induce inescapable violence to achieve and sustain ideologies as the new opiates of the masses.

  I am aware that the nation state is under grand attack these days, and I also know that in this attack it is seen as a constant perpetrator of violence. And I am also ready to accept that the state in the modern world has been responsible for many violent things (not necessarily more than in the past, but significant nevertheless). I am also aware that, in a much favoured contemporary theory, a nation state tries to ‘homogenize to hegemonize’. But it seems, at best, intensely abstract to see such violence occurring whenever the state stops favouring one religious community over another.

  It is thus hard to escape the suspicion that something has gone oddly wrong in the cited diagnostics. Nor is it obvious why secular symmetry should be a characteristic only of ‘modernity’. Indeed, even ancient states run by, say, an Ashoka or an Akbar went a long way towards achieving just such a symmetric treatment, but there is no evidence that these historical attempts at secular symmetry increased, rather than lessened, communal violence.

  It is not really helpful to see secularism and modernism in these oddly formulaic terms. Indeed, ‘the principles of tolerance’, on which Nandy relies, are not really so remote from taking a symmetric view of other communities, and it is less than fair to political secularism to be depicted as it is in these indictments. The development of secular attitudes and politics can surely be a part of that mechanism of tolerance, rather than running against it, unless we choose to define secularism in some specially odd way.

  Also, the idea of ‘modernity’ is deeply problematic in general. Was Ashoka or Akbar more or less ‘modern’ than Aurangzeb? Perhaps the question being raised here can be illustrated with another historical example, involving differences between contemporaries. Consider the contrast between the sectarian destruction caused by Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni in the eleventh century, and the reactions of Alberuni, the Arab-Iranian traveller (and distinguished Muslim mathematician), who accompanied Mahmud to India and felt revolted by the violence he saw: ‘Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country, and performed there wonderful exploits, by which Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions.’13 He went on to suggest – perhaps overgeneralizing a little – that the Hindus, as a result, ‘cherish, of course, the most inveterate aversion towards all Muslims’. That ‘aversion’ was, happily, not enough to prevent Alberuni from having a large number of Hindu friends and collaborators, with whose help he mastered Sanskrit and studied the contemporary Indian treatises on mathematics, astronomy, sculpture, philosophy and religion.*

  However, Alberuni did not stop there, but proceeded to provide an analysis of why people of one background tend to be suspicious of those from other backgrounds, and identified the need for a balanced understanding of these problems (as was discussed in Essay 13): a ‘depreciation of foreigners not only prevails among us and the Hindus, but is common to all nations towards each other’.14 Those who like ‘modernism’ would probably prefer to see Alberuni as a ‘modern intellectual’ of some kind (albeit from the eleventh century). But we need not bring in modernism – either in praise or in denunciation – at all, to recognize wisdom when we encounter it.

  On the ‘Cultural’ Critique

  I turn finally to the ‘cultural’ critique, and to the suggestion that India should really be seen as a ‘Hindu country’, in cultural terms. This, it is argued, militates against secularism in India, since secularism denies that allegedly basic recognition.

  There are two questions to be raised here. First, even if it were right to see Indian culture as quintessentially Hindu culture, it would be very odd to alienate, on that ground, the right to equal political and legal treatment of minorities (including the political standing and rights of the 140 million or more Indian Muslims). Why should the cultural dominance of one tradition, even if it exists, reduce the political entitlements and rights of those from other traditions? What should remove their rights as equal citizens?

  The second problem with the thesis is that its reading of Indian history and culture is extremely shallow. The cultural inheritance of contemporary India combines Islamic influences with Hindu and other traditions, and the results of the interaction between members of different religious communities can be seen plentifully in literature, music, painting, architecture and many other fields. The point is not only that so many of the major contributions in these various fields of Indian culture have come from Islamic writers, musicians, painters and so on, but also that their works are thoroughly integrated with those of others.

  Indeed, even the nature of Hindu religious beliefs and practices has been substantially influenced by contact with Islamic ideas and values.* The impact of Islamic Sufi thought is readily recognizable in parts of contemporary Hindu literature. Furthermore, religious poets like Kabir or Dadu were born Muslim but transcended sectional boundaries (one of Kabir’s verses declares: ‘Kabir is the child of Alla
h and of Ram: He is my Guru, He is my Pir’15). They were strongly affected by Hindu devotional poetry and, in turn, profoundly influenced it. There is, in fact, no communal line to be drawn through Indian literature and arts, setting Hindus and Muslims on separate sides.*

  Another serious problem with the narrow reading of ‘Indian culture as Hindu culture’ is the entailed neglect of many major achievements of Indian civilization that have nothing much to do with religious thinking at all. The focus on the distinctly Hindu religious tradition effectively leaves out of the accounting rationalist and non-religious pursuits in India. This is a serious neglect, particularly for a country in which some of the decisive steps in algebra, geometry and astronomy were taken, where the decimal system emerged, where classical philosophy dealt extensively with epistemology and logic along with secular ethics, where people invented games like chess, pioneered sex education and initiated systematic political economy and formal linguistics.

  To be sure, in his famous History of British India, published in 1817, James Mill did elaborate just such a view of India, an India that was intellectually bankrupt but full of religious ideas (not to mention Mill’s pointer to barbarous social customs).† Mill’s ‘history’, written without visiting India or learning any Indian language, may, in some ways, have served well the purpose of training young British officers getting ready to cross the seas and rule a subject nation, but it would scarcely suffice as a basis for understanding the nature of Indian culture.

  There are good reasons to resist the anti-secular enticements that have been so plentifully offered recently. The winter of our discontent might not be giving way at present to a ‘glorious summer’, but the political abandonment of secularism would make India far more wintry than it currently is.