The Argumentative Indian

by Amartya Sen

  It is hard to resist the conclusion that, unlike what appears from the table in Whitaker’s Almanack, the Kaliyuga is not a lone forerunner of all the other extant calendars. In fact, it is even possible that among the surviving calendars today, the Buddha Nirvāṇa calendar (with a zero point in 544 BCE) may actually be significantly older than the Kaliyuga calendar. And so, quite possibly, is the Mahāvīra Nirvāṇa calendar of the Jains (with a zero point in 527 BCE). While the first uses of these calendars are hard to identify, there is solid evidence of the use of the Buddha Nirvāṇa calendar in Sri Lanka from the first century BCE – earlier than any that point firmly to the use of the Kaliyuga calendar.

  Since I have been quite critical of the claims of priority of the Kaliyuga calendar as an old Indian calendar, I should make a couple of clarificatory observations, to prevent misunderstandings. First, it is not my purpose to deny that the Kaliyuga calendar may have a very old lineage. There is much evidence that it draws on older Indian calendars, including those discussed in the Vedas. But this ancient Indian inheritance is shared also by the Buddha Nirvāṇa calendar and the Mahāvīra Nirvāṇa calendar. We have to remember that ancient India is not just Hindu India, and there is an ancestry that is shared by several different religions that had their origin or flowering in India. The often-repeated belief that India was a ‘Hindu country’ before Islam arrived is, of course, a pure illusion, and the calendrical story fits well into what we know from other fields of Indian history.

  Second, even though the sensual pleasure of celebrating the completion of the sixth Indian millennium, compared with the ending of the second Gregorian millennium, may be denied to the Indian chauvinist, it is clear that by the time of the origin of Christianity, there were several calendars competing for attention in the subcontinent. What are now known as Christian calendars did not, of course, take that form until much later, but even the Roman calendars on which the Christian calendars (including the Gregorian) draw were going through formative stages over the first millennium BCE, precisely when the inheritance of the old Indian calendars was also getting sorted out. There is indeed much give and take between the older civilizations over this period, and it is difficult to separate out what emerged through an indigenous process in the subcontinent – or anywhere else – from what was learned by one culture from another.

  There is evidence that Indians got quite a few of their ideas from the Greeks (there are several fairly explicit acknowledgements of that in the Siddhāntas), as did the Romans, but then the Greeks too had insisted that they had received a number of ideas from Indian works. As Severus Sebokt, the Syrian bishop, said in 662 CE (in a different country, in a different context): ‘There are also others who know something.’ If the Kaliyuga calendar loses its pre-eminence in critical scrutiny, the temptation of national chauvinism does much worse (while Hindu chauvinism does worse still).

  Variations and Solidarity

  The immense variety of systematic calendars in India brings out an important aspect of the country, in particular its cultural and regional variation. Yet this can scarcely be the whole story, since, despite this high variance, there is a concept of the country as a unit that has survived through history. To be sure, the presence of this concept is exactly what is denied in the often-repeated claim that India was no more than a large territory of small to medium fragments, united together, later on, by the cementing powers of British rule.

  The British often see themselves as having ‘authored’ India, and this claim to imaginative creation fits well into Winston Churchill’s belief (cited earlier) that India had no greater unity than the Equator had. It is, however, of some significance that even those who see no pre-British unity in India have no great difficulty in generalizing about the quality of Indians as a people (even Churchill could not resist articulating his view that Indians were ‘the beastliest people in the world, next to the Germans’). Generalizations about Indians have gone on from the ancient days of Alexander the Great and Apollonius of Tyana (an early ‘India expert’) to the ‘medieval’ days of Arab and Iranian visitors (who wrote so much about the land and the people), to the early modern days of Herder, Schlegel, Schelling and Schopenhauer. It is also worth noting that an ambitious emperor – whether Candragupta Maurya or Ashoka or Alauddin or Akbar – has tended to assume that the empire was not complete until the bulk of the country was under his rule. Obviously, we would not expect to see, historically, a pre-existing ‘Indian nation’, in the modern sense, waiting anxiously to leap into becoming a nation state, but it is difficult to miss the social and cultural links and identities that could serve as the basis of one.

  To this much debated issue, we can ask, what does the calendrical perspective bring? The variety of calendars, divided not only by religious connections but also by regional diversity, seems to be deeply hostile to any view of Indian unity. However, it must be noted in this context that many of these calendars have strong similarities, in terms of months, and also the beginning of the year. For example, the Kaliyuga, the Vikram Saṃvat, the Śaka, the Bengali San and several other Indian calendars begin very close to each other in the middle of April. There is evidence that their respective beginnings were typically fixed at the same point, the vernal equinox, from which they have moved over the long stretch of time in the last two millennia, during which the ‘correction’ for the integer value of the length of the year in terms of days has been slightly inadequate – again in much the same way.

  The fact that the integer value of 365 days to the year is only approximate was, of course, known to the Indian mathematicians who constructed the calendars. To compensate for this, the periodic adjustments standardly used in many of the Indian calendars take the form of adding a leap or intercalary month (called a mala māsa) to bring practice in line with the dictates of computation. But the adequacy of the correction depends on getting the length of the year exactly right, and this was difficult to do with the instruments and understanding at the time the respective calendars were initiated or reformed. Indeed, the sixth-century mathematician Varāhamihira gave 365.25875 days as the true measure of the year, which, while close enough, was still slightly wrong, since the length of the sidereal year is 365.25636 days and the tropical year is 365.24220 days. The errors have moved the different north-Indian calendars away from the intended fixed points, such as the vernal equinox, but they have tended to move together, with considerable solidarity with each other.

  There are, of course, exceptions to this show of unity in slight error, since the south-Indian calendars (such as the Kollam) and the lunar or luni-solar calendars (such as the Buddha Nirvāṇa) follow different rules. Indeed, it would be hard to expect a dominant uniformity in the calendrical – or indeed cultural – variations within India, and what one has to look for is the interest that different users of distinct calendars have tended to have in the practices of each other. I shall argue later that this mutual interest extends also to the calendars used by Indian Muslims after Islam came to India.

  One of the tests of the presence of a united perspective in calendrical terms, already discussed, is the identification of a principal meridian and a reference location (like Greenwich in Britain). It is remarkable how durable has been the position of the ancient city of Ujjayinī (now known as Ujjain), the capital of several Hindu dynasties of India (and the home of many literary and cultural activities through the first millennium CE), as the reference location for many of the main Indian calendars. The Vikram Saṃvat calendar (with a zero point in 57 BCE) apparently originated in this ancient capital city. But it is also the locational base of the Śaka system (zero point in 78 CE) and a great many other Indian calendars. Indeed, even today, Ujjain’s location is used to fix the anchor point of the Indian clock (serving, in this respect, as the Indian Greenwich). The Indian Standard Time that governs our lives still remains a close approximation of Ujjayinī time – five hours and thirty minutes ahead of GMT.

  A contemporary visitor to this very modest and s
leepy town may find it interesting to note that nearly two millennia ago the well-known astronomical work Paulisa Siddhānta, which preceded the definitive Āryabhāṭiya, focused its attention on longitudes at three places in the world: Ujjain, Benares and Alexandria. Ujjain serves as a good reminder of the relation between calendar and culture. We have wonderful descriptions of Ujjayinī in Indian literature, particularly from Kālidāsa in the fifth century, perhaps the greatest poet and dramatist in classical Sanskrit literature.

  The elegance and beauty of Kālidāsa’s Ujjayinī even made E. M. Forster take a trip there in 1914. Forster wanted to reconstruct in his mind what Ujjain looked like in the days that Kālidāsa had so lovingly described. He recollected passages from Kālidāsa, including the stirring account of evenings when ‘women steal to their lovers’ through ‘darkness that a needle might divide’. But he could not get the old ruins there to reveal much, nor manage to get the local people to take the slightest interest in his historical and literary search. Ankle deep in the river Śipra, so romantically described by Kālidāsa, Forster abandoned his search, and accepted the prevailing wisdom: ‘Old buildings are buildings, ruins are ruins.’6 I shall not speculate whether in that abandonment of historical exactness, there is something of a unity (perhaps illustrated even by the already discussed factual uncertainty of the Kaliyuga despite its mathematical exactness). But certainly there is something very striking about the constancy of Ujjain’s dominance in Indian time accounting, even though the focus of political power, and of literary and cultural pre-eminence, shifted from Ujjain itself, a long time ago.

  Interaction and Integration

  One of the contrasts between the different Indian calendars relates to their respective religious associations. This was a matter of particular interest to that original multiculturalist Akbar, as I have already discussed. He was especially concerned with the fact that as a Muslim he was ruling over a country of many different faiths. To that particular concern, I shall presently return, but I would like to clarify that, even before the arrival of Islam in India, India was a quintessentially multicultural and multi-religious country. Indeed, nearly all the major religions of the world (Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism, Judaism) were present in India well before the Muslim conquests occurred. The Indian civilization had not only produced Buddhism and Jainism (and later on, the Sikh religion as well), but India had the benefit of having Jews much longer than Europe, had been host to sizeable Christian communities before Britain had any, and provided a home to the Parsees right from the time when religious persecution began in Iran. In fact, Jews arrived shortly after the fall of Jerusalem, Christians appeared at least as early as the fourth century, and Parsees started arriving by the eighth. The different calendars associated with these religions – Buddhist, Jain, Judaic, Christian, Parsee – were already flourishing in India, along with the Hindu calendars, when the Muslim conquest of the north led to the influence of the Hijri calendar. Islam’s arrival further enriched the religious – and calendrical – diversity of India.

  The pioneering multiculturalism of Akbar included his taking an interest in the religion and culture of each of these groups. In his ‘House of Worship’ (Ibadat Khana), the people from diverse religions who were encouraged to attend included – as Abul Fazl noted – not only the mainstream Hindu and Muslim philosophers (of different denominations), but also Christians, Jews, Parsees, Jains and even members of the atheistic Cārvāka school.

  Akbar’s attempt at introducing a combined calendar paralleled his interest in floating a combined religion, the Din-ilahi. On the calendrical front, Akbar may have begun by just taking note of various calendars (Hindu, Parsee, Jain, Christian and others), but he proceeded then to take the radical step of trying to devise a new synthetic one. In 992 Hijri (1584 CE, Gregorian), just short of the Hijri millennium, he promulgated the brand new calendar, viz. the Tarikh-ilahi, God’s calendar – no less. The zero year of Tarikh-ilahi corresponds to 1556 CE (the year in which Akbar ascended to the throne), but that is not its year of origin, which was 1584. It was devised as a solar calendar (like the Hindu and Iranian/Parsee calendars of the region), but had some features of the Hijri as well, and also bore the mark of a person who knew the calendrical diversity represented by Christian, Jain and other calendars in local use in Akbar’s India. The Tarikh-ilahi became the official calendar, and the decrees of the ruling Moghal emperor of India (the farmans) henceforth carried both the synthetic Tarikh and the Muslim Hijri date, and occasionally only the Tarikh.7

  Even though Tarikh-ilahi was introduced with a grand vision, its acceptance outside the Moghal court was rather limited, and the subcontinent went on using the Hijri as well as the older Indian calendars. While Akbar’s constructive calendar died not long after he himself did, his various synthesizing efforts left a lasting mark on Indian history. But has the calendrical expression, in particular, of Akbar’s synthesizing commitment been lost without trace?

  Not so. There is a surviving calendar, the Bengali San, which was clearly influenced by Tarikh-ilahi, and which still carries evidence of the integrating tendency that is so plentifully present in many other fields of Indian culture and tradition (such as music, painting, architecture, and so on). It is year 1407 now (as I write in 2000 CE) in the Bengali calendar, the San. What does 1407 stand for? Encouraged by Akbar’s Tarikh-ilahi, the Bengali calendar was also ‘adjusted’ as far as the numbering of year goes in the late sixteenth century. In fact, using the zero year of the Tarikh, 1556 CE (corresponding to year 963 in the Hijri calendar), the Bengali solar calendar, which has a procedure of reckoning that is very similar to the solar Śaka system, was ‘adjusted’ to the lunar Hijri number, but not to the lunar counting system. That is, the ‘clock’ of this solar calendar was put back, as it were, from Śaka 1478 to Hijri 963 in the newly devised Bengali San. However, since the Bengali San (like the Śaka era) remained solar, the Hijri has marched ahead of the San, being a lunar calendar (with a mean length of 354 days, 8 hours and 48 minutes per year), and the Bengali San – just turned 1407 – has fallen behind Hijri as well.

  Like the abortive Tarikh-ilahi, the more successful Bengali San too is the result of a daring integrational effort, and its origin is clearly related to the synthetic experiment of the Tarikh-ilahi (and thus, indirectly, to Akbar’s multicultural philosophy). When a Bengali Hindu does religious ceremonies according to the local calendar, he or she may not be quite aware that the dates that are invoked in the calendrical accompaniment of the Hindu practices are attuned to commemorating Muhammad’s journey from Mecca to Medina, albeit in a mixed lunar-solar representation.

  The tradition of multiculturalism in India is particularly worth recollecting at this moment in Indian history, when India’s secularism is being sporadically challenged by new forces of intolerance and by politically cultivated fanaticism of one kind or another. What is under attack is not only some ‘modern’ notion of secularism born and bred in post-Enlightenment Europe, or some quintessentially ‘Western’ idea brought to India by the British, but a long tradition of accommodating and integrating different cultures which had found many articulate expressions in India’s past – partly illustrated by India’s calendrical history as well.

  Caught as we are in India today in conflicting attempts to interpret Indian civilization and society, the calendrical perspective offers, I believe, some insights that are relevant and forceful. The calendars reveal, in fact, a great deal more than just the months and the years.

  16

  The Indian Identity*

  Colonialism and Identity

  I feel greatly honoured by the invitation to give the Dorab Tata Memorial Lectures. I appreciate this opportunity for several different reasons. First and foremost, it is wonderful to have the chance to celebrate the memory of Dorab (or Dorabji) Tata, an outstanding industrial leader, a remarkable philanthropist and a visionary human being. A second reason is that the nature of this event, and more specifically the history of the Tatas’
achievements (given their deep involvement in India’s future, combined with a very wide interest in the world at large), provides an occasion to examine the relationship between India and the world. Closely linked to our reading of that relationship is the difficult subject of the nature of the Indian identity, especially challenging in a rapidly changing world. That is going to be the main focus of my discussion.

  My third reason for welcoming this occasion is rather personal. The development of the Tata industries, particularly iron and steel and cotton textile, is an integral part of the history of modern India, and it is a history that has enticed and fascinated me for quite a long time now.† One of the interesting questions that had to be addressed was the willingness and ability of Indian entrepreneurs, most notably the Tatas, to go into fields, such as iron and steel and cotton textile, that British enterprise largely shunned. I wanted to understand better the influence of values and identities on economic behaviour, over and above the general discipline that is provided by economic feasibility and commercial profitability. I was particularly keen to investigate the part that a vision of the country’s needs and a specifically Indian identity and affiliation played in firing industrial imagination and innovative action. On the other hand, I was also interested in the climate of social anxiety in Britain about economic changes that could be seen as threatening established British interests in India.

  As an economist I do not, I believe, need to be told that profits and commercial viability are important (though I have been lectured on that subject from time to time by friends and well-wishers who have wondered whether I manage to take sufficient note of the hard realities of the world). But within the limits of feasibility and reasonable returns, there are substantial choices to be made, and in these choices one’s visions and identities could matter. There is an interesting issue as to why British investment, which came so plentifully to tea, coffee, railways, mining, mercantile establishments and even to the newly born jute industry, was so hesitant in the fields that were the pillars of British industrial establishment, to wit, cotton textile and iron and steel. There is, in particular, the difficult question about the possible perception that these fields were competitive with – and adverse to the interests of – old-established industries in Britain (in Manchester and elsewhere). There is a good deal of empirical evidence that such thoughts had crossed the minds of many responsible people in Britain, but we still have to ask whether such perceptions constituted a significant economic and social phenomenon, and to what extent they affected the pattern of British investment in India.