by Amartya Sen
Yet the underdevelopment of Indian school systems, especially in socially backward regions of the country and particularly among disadvantaged groups, has been equally extraordinary. This is both deeply inefficient and amazingly unjust. The smart boy or clever girl who is deprived of the opportunity of schooling, or who goes to a school with dismal facilities (not to mention the high incidence of absentee teachers), not only loses the opportunities he or she could have had, but also adds to the massive waste of talent that is a characteristic of the life of our country. If we have not yet been able to seize the economic opportunities for the manufacture of simple products in a way that has happened in Japan, Korea, China and other countries in east Asia, not to mention the West, India’s remarkable neglect of basic education has a decisive role in this handicap.*
Global economic relations have many different aspects and call for different types of policy initiatives, but many of the problems and difficulties associated with a more competitive global economy turn, to a substantial extent, on the limitations of our own domestic public policy, such as basic education, health care, micro-credit, or infrastructural planning. India’s placing in the world is determined just as much within India as abroad.
Global Relations and History
I want to turn now to some foundational issues about the role of global interconnections and human progress. Globalization is a complex phenomenon. Some of the fears expressed about globalization make it sound like an animal – analogous to the big shark in Jaws –that gobbles up unsuspecting innocents in a dark and mysterious way. We must have a good look at this alleged beast, rather than just learn to shun it.
What exactly is globalization? A diverse basket of global interactions are put under this broad heading, varying from the expansion of cultural influences across borders to the enlargement of economic and business relations throughout the world. It is often argued that globalization is a new folly. Is that a plausible diagnosis? I would argue that globalization, in its basic form, is neither particularly new, nor, in general, a folly. It is through global movements of ideas, people, goods and technology that different regions of the world have tended, in general, to benefit from progress and development occurring in other regions. The direction of interregional movements of ideas has varied over history, and these directional variations are important to recognize, since the global movement of ideas is sometimes seen just as ideological imperialism of the West – as a one-sided movement that simply reflects an asymmetry of power which needs to be resisted.
It may, in fact, be instructive to contemplate the nature of the world not at the end of the millennium that we have just ushered out, but at the end of the previous millennium. Around 1000 CE, globalization of science, technology and mathematics was changing the nature of the old world, even though, as it happens, the principal currents of dissemination then were typically in the opposite direction to what we see today.
For example, the high technology in the world of 1000 included paper and printing, the crossbow and gunpowder, the wheelbarrow and the rotary fan, the clock and the iron chain suspension bridge, the kite and the magnetic compass. Every one of these ‘high-tech’ fields of knowledge in the world a millennium ago was well established in China, and at the same time was practically unknown elsewhere. It was globalization that spread them across the world, including Europe.
We can similarly consider the impact of Eastern influence on Western mathematics. The decimal system emerged and became well developed in India between the second and the sixth centuries, and was also used extensively soon thereafter by Arab mathematicians. These procedures reached Europe mainly in the last quarter of the tenth century, and their momentous effects were felt in the early years of the last millennium. Globalization in mathematics as well as in science and engineering played a major part in the revolution of thought and social organization that helped to transform Europe into its modern shape. Europe would have been much poorer had it resisted the globalization of mathematics, science and technology at that time, and to a great extent the same – working in the converse direction – is true today. To identify the phenomenon of the global spread of ideas with an ideological imperialism would be a serious error, somewhat similar to the way any European resistance to Eastern influence would have been at the beginning of the last millennium.
India has been, like many other countries, both an exporter and importer of ideas in our world of continuing global interactions. An inadequate recognition of this two-way process sometimes leads to rather redundant controversies and conflicts. Much, for example, has been written recently about where the concept of zero, which is quite central for mathematics, developed. The claim, often made earlier, that this was an Indian contribution to the world has been strongly challenged in a number of recent publications, giving Babylon priority.* There is, in fact, considerable evidence that the concept of zero, as an idea, emerged in different cultures which may or may not have been linked. But there is evidence also for the belief that the particular symbol for zero that was adopted across the world, including in India, very likely came from Babylon via the Greeks to India, even though the Indian idea of zero in the form of śūnya (or emptiness) predates that arrival. It is, however, also clear that the combination of zero with a decimal place system was a particularly fruitful consolidation, and it is in exploring the nature and implications of this integration – critically important for the use of a decimal system – that Indian mathematicians seemed to have had quite a decisive role in the early and middle parts of the first millennium. We can consider many other such examples of combining give and take, enriching the process of global intellectual interaction.*
Globalization is neither new, nor in general a folly. Through persistent movements of goods, people, techniques and ideas, it has shaped the history of the world. India has been an integral part of the world in the most interactive sense. The forces of ideological separatism may be strong in India at present, as they are elsewhere, but they militate not just against the global history of the world, but also against India’s own heritage.
That acknowledgement does not, of course, undermine the overwhelming need to pay particular attention to the predicament of the vulnerable and the disadvantaged, and this is indeed an important consideration in the determination of good economic policies for the contemporary world. Global economic interactions bring general benefits, but they can also create problems for many, because of inadequacies of global arrangements as well as limitations of appropriate domestic policies. It is important that these issues receive attention. But at the same time we have to be careful that we do not shut ourselves out of the global interactions that have enriched the world over millennia.
Pluralism and Receptivity
The nature of Indian identity raises issues both of external and internal relations. I have so far concentrated on the need to resist external isolation. It is, however, the pull towards internal separation of communities that has presented the strongest challenge in recent years to the integrity of the Indian identity. Political developments in India over the last decade or two have had the effect of forcefully challenging, in several different ways, the broad and absorbing idea of Indian identity that emerged in the days of the independence movement and that helped to define the concept of the Indian nation. If we believe that there is something of value in this inheritance, we need to understand precisely why it is valuable, and also to examine how that recognition can be adequately articulated.
It would be hard to claim that there is some exact, homogeneous concept of Indian identity that emerged during the independence movement as a kind of national consensus, or that there were no differences between the way Indianness was seen by, say, Mahatma Gandhi or Rabindranath Tagore (to consider two leading and somewhat dissimilar voices that helped to teach us what we are). The general idea of a spacious and assimilative Indian identity, which Gandhi and Tagore shared, was interpreted with somewhat different emphases by the two, and there were other differ
ences in the characterization of Indian identity by other theorists and intellectual leaders of the independence movement.
These distinctions were – and remain – important in many contexts, for example in interpreting the respective roles of science, ethics and analytical reasoning in India’s past and in its future.* But these varying interpretations all share an inclusionary reading of Indian identity that tolerates, protects and indeed celebrates diversity within a pluralist India. They also reflect an understanding of India’s past as a joint construction in which members of different communities were involved. Tagore and Gandhi differed substantially, both in their respective cultural predispositions and in their religious beliefs and personal practice. But in interpreting India and the Indian identity, they shared a general refusal to privilege any one narrowly circumscribed perspective (such as an exclusively religious approach, or, more specifically, a Hindu view).
It is the combination of internal pluralism and external receptivity that has been most challenged in recent decades by separatist viewpoints, varying from communitarian exclusion and aggressive parochialism on the one side to cultural alienation and isolationist nationalism on the other. These challenges and their practical manifestations give some urgency to subjecting the idea of Indian identity to critical scrutiny and assessment.
Identities and Decisions
It is useful to recollect Rabindranath Tagore’s remarkable claim, made in a letter to C. F. Andrews in 1921, that the ‘idea of India’ itself militates ‘against the intense consciousness of the separateness of one’s own people from others’ (a visionary statement that was also quoted earlier in this collection of essays).13 Note that there are two distinct implications of this claim. First, internally, it argues against an idea of India as a mixture of separated and alienated cultures and communities, sharply distinguished according to religion, or caste, or class, or gender, or language, or location. Second, externally (that is, in relation to the world), Tagore’s claim argues against an intense sense of the dissociation of Indians from other people elsewhere. It also rejects, as we know from Tagore’s other writings too, the temptation to see Indian culture as frail and fragile, something that will break if touched by other cultures and which has to be protected through isolation from outside influences.
Tagore’s claim involves, therefore, an integrative message – internally as well as externally – and it proposes an inclusionary form for the idea of Indian identity. It is this integrative notion that has recently been challenged, and both its internal and external claims have been chastised. Challenges have come, on the one side, from separatism within India (particularly with the privileging of one community over others and one cultural tradition over others), and on the other side, from separatism vis-à-vis the world (with the rejection of our constructive connections with others on the globe). In assessing these attacks we have to look carefully at the notion of identity in general.
Indeed, it is very important to be clear about the demands of what can be called the discipline of identity.* In particular, we have to resist two unfounded but often implicitly invoked assumptions: (i) the presumption that we must have a single – or at least a principal and dominant – identity; and (2) the supposition that we ‘discover’ our identity, with no room for any choice.
To take up the former question first, even though exclusivity of identity is often presumed (typically implicitly), this claim is in fact preposterous. Each of us invokes identities of various kinds in disparate contexts. The same person can be of Indian origin, a Parsee, a French citizen, a US resident, a woman, a poet, a vegetarian, an anthropologist, a university professor, a Christian, a bird watcher, and an avid believer in extraterrestrial life and of the propensity of alien creatures to ride around the cosmos in multicoloured UFOs. Each of these collectivities, to all of which this person belongs, gives him or her a particular identity. They can all have relevance, depending on the context. There is no conflict here, even though the priorities over these identities must be relative to the issue at hand (for example, the vegetarian identity may be more important when going to a dinner rather than to a Consulate, whereas the French citizenship may be more telling when going to a Consulate rather than attending a dinner).
The second false move – or what I claim is a false move – is to assume that one’s identity is a matter of discovery rather than choice. This is asserted often enough, particularly in communitarian philosophy. As Professor Michael Sandel has explained this claim (among other communitarian claims): ‘community describes not just what they have as fellow citizens but also what they are, not a relationship they choose (as in a voluntary association) but an attachment they discover, not merely an attribute but a constituent of their identity.’14 In this view, identity comes before reasoning and choice.
But that claim is difficult to sustain, since we do have the opportunity to determine the relative weights we would like to attach to our different identities. For example, an Australian citizen of Indian origin would have to decide whether to root for Australia or for India in a test match between the two countries; he cannot, in any obvious sense, simply ‘discover’ the result of his own choice.
Perhaps the confusion in promoting the ‘discovery’ view arises from the fact that the choices we can make are constrained by feasibility, and sometimes the constraints are very exacting. The feasibilities will certainly depend on circumstances. For example, the constraints may be particularly strict when considering the extent to which we can persuade others to take us to be different from what they take us to be. A person of Jewish origin in Nazi Germany may not have been able to alter that identity as he or she wished. Nor could an African-American when faced with a lynch mob, or a low-caste agricultural labourer threatened by a gunman hired by upper-caste activists in, say, North Bihar. Our freedom in choosing our identity, in terms of the way others see us, can sometimes be extraordinarily limited.
Even in general, whether we are considering our identities as we ourselves see them, or as others see us, we choose within particular constraints. But this is not a surprising fact – it is in fact entirely unremarkable. Choices of all kinds are always made within particular constraints, and this is perhaps the most elementary aspect of any choice. For example, as any student of even elementary economics would know, the theory of consumer’s choice does not deny the existence of a budget, which of course is a constraint. The presence of budget constraint does not imply that there is no choice to be made, only that the choice has to be made within the budget. The point at issue is not whether any identity whatever can be chosen (that would be an absurd claim), but whether we have choices over alternative identities or combinations of identities, and perhaps more importantly, whether we have some freedom in deciding what priority to give to the various identities that we may simultaneously have. People’s choices may be constrained by the recognition that they are, say, Jewish or Muslim, but there is still a decision to be made by them regarding what importance they give to that particular identity over others that they may also have (related, for example, to their political beliefs, sense of nationality, humanitarian commitments or professional attachments).
Identity is thus a quintessentially plural concept, with varying relevance of different identities in distinct contexts. And, most importantly, we have choice over what significance to attach to our different identities. There is no escape from reasoning just because the notion of identity has been invoked. Choices over identities do involve constraints and connections, but the choices that exist and have to be made are real, not illusory. In particular, the choice of priorities between different identities, including what relative weights to attach to their respective demands, cannot be only a matter of discovery. They are inescapably decisional, and demand reason – not just recognition.
Religions, Heterodoxy and Reason
The issues of plurality and of choice are immensely relevant to the understanding and analysis of the idea of Indian identity. In arguing for an inclusio
nary form of the Indian identity, Tagore and Gandhi did not deny the presence and contingent importance of other identities. Rather, in terms of political coherence, social living and cultural interactions, both emphasized the fact that the Indian identity could not favour any particular group over others within India.
Tagore was different from Gandhi in having a less conventional view of his Hindu identity, and indeed in The Religion of Man pointed to the fact that his family was a product of ‘a confluence of three cultures, Hindu, Mohammedan and British’.15 Gandhiji’s Hindu identity was more assertive, and he held regular prayer meetings, in a largely Hindu form (even though other religions were also invoked). But Gandhi was just as opposed as Tagore to letting his Hindu identity overwhelm his overarching commitment to an Indian identity in political and social matters. Indeed, Gandhiji gave his life in the cause of secularism and fairness, at the hands of someone with a simpler view of the congruence of Indian and Hindu identities.
Those who argue that the Indian identity has to be in some way derived from a Hindu identity point out not only that the Hindus constitute a large majority of people in India, but also that, historically, Hinduism has been the mainstay of the Indian civilization. These descriptions can, to a considerable extent, be taken to be true. But they do not in any way indicate that the Indian identity has to be basically derivative from the Hindu identity, or that the Indian identity must privilege the Hindu identity over others.*